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Tesla Will Triple Its Supercharger Coverage Area, Enabling Cross-Country Road Trips, CEO Elon Musk Says
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the D11 Conference today that the company will be tripling its supercharger coverage throughout the country. By the end of this year, Musk expects that it will cover most of the metropolitan cities, allowing electric car owners to drive coast to coast. The technology was developed because traditional charging happens too slowly, so they made something that was quick to charge, Musk said. The chargers are available in California and on the East Coast today, but the company plans to heavily expand coverage by the end of the year. Musk was planning on announcing the expansion of the network on Thursday, but gave those at the conference a bit of a sneak peek a day in advance. A map of the new superchargers should be available at the announcement, but it should give increased coverage in existing metropolitan markets, as well as coverage throughout the country. That will enable electric car owners to drive cross-country, from Los Angeles to New York City, Musk said. Not just that, but updates to Tesla cars will enable drivers to have instant access to see where superchargers are located nearby. They’ll be able to enter their final destination and, along with GPS, to show superchargers along the way. That should help get more people interested in electric cars, since they won’t feel worried about running out of power.
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Drupal.org Hacked, User Details Exposed And Reset
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Another day, another big site hacked. 2013 really just hasn’t been a good year for web security. This time around, the site writing the email that noone wants to write is Drupal.org, home of the popular content management platform, Drupal. Though no exact number was shared, it appears that nearly one million user accounts are affected. Also affected are the user accounts of groups.drupal.org, a sub-site meant to help Drupal users establish meetup groups in the real world. Word of the break-in went out this evening, when Drupal began to email affected users. In on their site, Drupal says that they currently have no idea who might be behind the attack. So far, it seems like the hackers had access to usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords. As is par for the course at this point, Drupal has immediately reset the passwords for every user in the system. If you’re one of the million-or-so users on Drupal.org, you’ll need to confirm your email and pick a new password before regaining access. While you’re at it, you’ll probably want to change your password on any sites where you’ve used a password similar to the one you might’ve used on Drupal.org. While Drupal seems to have done a pretty good job of ensuring that passwords were stored safely (most were both and given multiple passes through a ), it’s just good practice. You’d be surprised at how has become. It’s important to note that this hack affects Drupal.org, the website itself, and is not the result of a vulnerability in Drupal, the CMS. In other words: if you’ve got a Drupal-powered site, don’t freak out. According to Drupal Executive Director Holly Ross, the hackers gained access through an exploit in an unnamed third-party tool that Drupal.org was running on their server. Also important to note: Drupal says they store no credit card details on their servers, but they’re still making sure there wasn’t any malicious code put in place to quietly intercept’em without them noticing. They’re recommending that anyone who’s made a transaction on Drupal.org keeps an eye on their statements, just in case.
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Motorola Mobility Confirms Upcoming Hero Device, The Moto X, Will Be Built In The U.S.
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Motorola has a new device coming out, which it thinks will change the game. In a discussion at the D11 Conference, Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside said the new mobile phone, called the Moto X, will be built in the United States in a factory outside Fort Worth. The facility that the new Moto X will be built in was once used to build Nokia phones. The new Moto phone, which is expected to have strong battery life, will also have a number of sensors and such that will provide the phone with new ways of interacting with users, such as telling them if they’re traveling faster than 60 miles an hour. A hypothetical application for the sensors, Woodside said, could be preventing you from texting while driving. While Motorola has a long history of mobile innovation, Woodside acknowledged that the company has a way to go to bring the company back to its former glory. And so it’s looking to hire a number of new employees from other major manufacturers to build a new generation of mobile phones. “We like to be the challenger,” Woodside said. “So we’re filling the company with people who want to transform the company into a winner.” Motorola Mobility is owned by Google, but Woodside said that the company has no preferential treatment from its parent corp. When employees move over from Google to Motorola, they get new badges and are no longer part of the mothership. And while Woodside said Google CEO Larry Page has seen the upcoming Moto X device, he’s also seen new devices from many of Motorola Mobility’s competitors.
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Yves Behar’s August Smart Lock Lets Users Open Doors With A Mobile App
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
The smart home has grown in importance over the years, with new technologies being used to connect users with what used to be dumb objects. Products like the show how wireless technology and mobile apps to better manage the temperature of your home. Now similar technology is being deployed by a startup called , which provides a $199 keyless lock system powered by a mobile app. August was founded by tech entrepreneur Jason Johnson and industrial designer Yves Behar. They were searching for a new way to give users access to their homes. The result is a keyless lock system that hooks onto your existing dead bolt and lets you unlock doors through mobile applications. For homeowners, the hardware will enable easy access to a house for themselves, as well as other approved visitors. Johnson believes that the solution is perfect for users who want to give conditional, temporary access to people who might be coming by their house to clean or fix it while the owner isn’t home. It’s also a way for users to let friends, family or Airbnb guests to enter the house with a complete log of whomever has come in at any given time. That will allow users to see who’s entered and when. In addition to the ability to turn on and off access to the home through an app, users will be able to send invitations to friends or family that have been connected on Facebook or on their mobile contact lists. Johnson gave the example of a dinner party where visitors could be invited and let themselves in without having to ring the doorbell. The August smart lock is powered by Bluetooth low energy (BLE) technology, which will enable it to work without connecting to a Wi-Fi network. The team claims that the smart lock is the smallest electronic door lock on the market, and they say that it only takes 10 minutes to install. While the hardware costs $199, the service will remain free once the device has been purchased. While Behar is well-known for industrial design work he’s done on products like the Jawbone Up, OUYA game console, and other devices, this is the first time he’s been a co-founder on one of those projects. Johnson, meanwhile, has been the CEO and co-founder of AirCover, as well as co-founder of BookShout. August has raised $2 million in seed funding from a bunch of angels, including Jay Adelson, Matt Mullenweg, Rick Marini, Zack Bogue, Matt Ocko, Aileen Lee, Mike Marquez, David Spector, Jeff Clavier, Tony Conrad and Nicholas Negroponte, among others.
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Husband And Wife Architects Create The Sugar Lab, A Foundry For 3D Printed Sweets
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Kyle and Liz von Hasseln aren’t your typical designers. Initially focused on architecture, the pair stumbled upon an interesting business idea when they wanted to make a special cake for a friend’s birthday: the . “It was our friend Chelsea’s birthday, and we didn’t have an oven to bake her a cake, so we decided to try to 3D print a cake for her, instead. It took some trial and error, but eventually (and unfortunately months past her actual birthday) we managed to print a simple cupcake topper that spelled out ‘Chelsea’ in cursive sugar,” said Liz von Hasseln. “Chelsea loved it so much that we started seriously considering how interested other people might be in 3D printed sugar. When we graduated, we decided to start a mini design firm for 3D printing custom sugar.” These aren’t your normal cake toppers. The Echo Park, California company specializes in unique shapes and designs that they print in stark white sugar. The end product looks more than Willy Wonka. “The design process begins from scratch, when we hear from you,” said Liz. “Tell us your idea/theme/vibe. Give us a swatch of lace from your gown/a Polaroid of the wrought iron gate at your venue/a postcard of your hometown skyline.” The couple has been running the Lab for two years but has really ramped up the business in the past six months. In fact, it’s almost become a viable career. “We are certainly optimistic that designing and 3D printing sugar is a viable career option for us–it’s a great design space, and we love the challenge of negotiating structural, material and aesthetic considerations to produce sculptural form in sugar.” The Lab is currently working on a huge, four-layer cake with a 3D-printed cake stand and sugar columns. They are collaborating with “some seriously talented cake artists at a well-known bakery in Hollywood” on this and other projects. While they’re not going to put Hershey’s out of business any time soon, this is a great intersection of design, manufacturing, and sweetness that makes me want to be able to squirt a chocolate bar through my one day.
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500 Startups Raises $10M ‘500 Durians’ Micro Fund, Hires Khailee Ng As Venture Partner To Invest In SE Asia
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Dave McClure’s is no stranger to investing in international startups, with about 20 percent of its portfolio of companies hailing from outside the U.S. But it’s now looking to make a bigger bet, specifically in Southeast Asia, with a $10 million micro fund devoted to the region, as well as the hiring of Malaysia-based entrepreneur Khailee Ng as its newest venture partner. The $10 million micro fund, which was filed with the SEC under the name “ ,” will help the firm to start making investments in the region. The fund follows previous region-specific funds that the firm has raised — such as “500 Luchadores” for Mexico or “500 StartupWallah” for India. Along with the new fund for Southeast Asia, 500 Startups has hired Ng as venture partner to oversee investments in the region. Ng co-founded group-buying site GroupsMore.com, which he grew into the largest company in its segment in Malaysia, before selling to Groupon. He also co-founded Southeast Asian social news company SAYS.com, which recently merged with Catcha Media Berhad. He’s no stranger to the 500 Startups family, having been on its Geeks On A Plane trip through . He also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence and mentor with the fifth batch of the 500 Startups Accelerator. With the addition of Ng, 500 Startups is looking to corner one of the few parts of the world where it doesn’t already have a presence. In addition to Southeast Asia, the firm now has folks making investments in the U.S., Japan, China, India, Mexico and Latin America. That international expansion began with the last spring to head up Japan and Latin America, respectively. Later, it and brought on . And earlier this year, to oversee its investments in China. The news of the new fund and venture partner comes just before 500 Startups founding partner and Sith Lord Dave McClure begins touring Southeast Asia with Ng, partner Christen O’Brien, and a motley crew of entrepreneurs and investors as part of its latest trip. That trip will have the group traveling through Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and Bangkok over the next few weeks.
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Windows 8.1 To Get A Start Button Because Windows Is Dumb Without One
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Good news! Microsoft super blogger Paul Thurrott the return of the Start Button and the figurative demise of the Metro/smart tile/Start Page thing with Windows 8.1’s ability to boot right to Desktop, sidestepping the worst part of Windows 8. Best of all, as previously reported, Microsoft isn’t charging for these fixes. There’s nothing better than the classics.
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Google Apps Admins Finally Get An Android App To Manage Their Users, Services And Devices On The Go
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Google has made its for IT professionals who manage large Google Apps for Business, Education and Government deployments . But one thing it never offered these administrators was a mobile app to manage at least a subset of the Admin console’s features. Today, however, Google finally its first official Android app, which allows admins to perform many common tasks right on their phones and tablets. For the most part, the new focuses on handling user accounts. Admins can add users, reset passwords, manage groups, upload profile pictures and suspend users. Beyond user management, the app also allows them to contact support, view domain setting changes and review audit logs. Today’s announcement comes just a few weeks after Google its completely revamped Admin console and two weeks after Google made its new available to developers who want to customize their own tools for their organizations. Getting started with the app is , but admins have to remember to for their organizations. Google recommends that Google Apps for Business users also enable Device Policies for their domains, but this is not mandatory. One other thing to note is that only “super administrators” will be able to log in to the app.
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Ben Silbermann On How Pinterest Will Translate User Aspiration Into Making Money
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann says that the startup isn’t making any money currently. However, he said the company is looking for ways to give marketers tools to help them understand what’s happening on the platform — and maybe, just maybe, make some money from them. Pinterest has a ton of employees — about 130, Silbermann said — and the company has a valuation of $2.5 billion. Yet, when asked if the company makes any money, he acknowledged that it doesn’t. Of course, in a place like Silicon Valley, where companies like Facebook and Twitter had similar paths early on, that’s probably not so surprising. So how’s Pinterest looking to change that? The company is currently working on tools to help brands to understand what users are pinning and why. But as the team thinks about what it’s going to work on next, it’s thoughtful about how it will manage features that will help it make money, while also balancing the user experience. “We’re trying to do something so that when the average person uses Pinterest, it has to make the service better,” Silbermann said. As a result, the company spends a lot of time reviewing feedback and understanding the unintended consequences of what it’s released. At the same time, while Pinterest launched on the web, its users have become increasingly multiplatform. That means that Pinterest has to manage multiple form factors as it goes forward. That means providing users the right experience for viewing while sitting on the couch, while reading on a mobile phone, or even a tablet. The good news for Pinterest is that it arrived at just the right time — Silbermann admits that the company has benefitted from Facebook and Twitter coming before it and getting users familiar with sharing things on those social networks. Now it’s able to provide a way for them to share things they’d like to do or have — making sharing aspirational.
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Enterprise Collaboration Startup Bloomfire Takes On An Additional $2 Million From Silver Creek Ventures
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
, the Austin, Texas-based startup that makes cloud-based content-sharing software for enterprises, has taken on an additional $2 million from as an add-on to its $8 million Series A funding round . This brings the into Bloomfire, which was founded in 2010, to $20 million. In addition to Silver Creek, Bloomfire’s investors include Austin Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The funding was disclosed today in a with the SEC, and confirmed by a Bloomfire spokesperson who provided the following statement:
“The $2 million is additional funding, incremental to the $8 million raise in March. This is a proactive investment from Silver Creek who liked our team, the market space and progress to date and wanted to participate in our growth. We are pleased to be working with Michael Segrest and the rest of the team at Silver Creek Ventures.” Enterprise in general is of course a hot space of late, and Bloomfire itself has had a year of solid growth. The company now has more than 65,000 active users and more than 250 paying customers including the likes of Etsy and Bechtel, my colleague Rip Empson reported back in March. Of course, the competitive landscape is as crowded as ever, so these new infusions of funding could help Bloomfire work to keep an edge and foster even more growth in the months ahead.
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Google Admits It Spams The Hell Out Of You In New Gmail Commercial
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Got so many Google+, YouTube, Google Offers, and Zagat emails you want to scream? Google’s got you covered. No, it’s not sending you less spam. It’s organizing your spam into tabs! Google’s blatant attempt to cross-promote its bevy of services in the video for the quite possibly awesome leaves it seeming like a sketchy foreigner who just needs $200 to wire you your lottery winnings. Yes, of course you can configure all your , but that’s the cheater’s way to inbox zero. Google could have used some generic stand-ins for the emails that would get filtered into Gmail’s new social and promotions tabs, but instead it went with its own products. Maybe Gmail’s new tabs can’t recognize the unnecessary alerts Facebook and other social networks send as “social”, but showing an inbox with 10 straight alerts from Google+ and YouTube isn’t very flattering. It’s a curious choice considering the general, about the tech giant using its girth of products to promote [or unfairly favor] its other properties. in Google Search results was bad enough. Now I want to be clear, these criticisms come from a place of love. Your staff deserves to have their work honored by videos that make it shine, for the new . [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFf7dlewJus] What stuns me is that after whole teams of engineers and designers spend months carefully crafting a product, it can get carelessly marred or misrepresented when the company tries to make a commercial out of it. Facebook’s make it look like it will endlessly interrupt your time with your family. Spotify’s first appears to show someone crowdsurfing across of a sea of zombies in the post apocalypse. I know secrecy is sooo important when it comes to big product launches like the , but it seems to me that tech companies could stand to do a bit more private field testing before they show their videos and commercials to the world. Otherwise, you end up with “And that’s why .” [ ]
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Barry Diller Says Aereo Isn’t About Charging For Something That’s Free, But About Moving TV To IP
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Aereo investor Barry Diller says that the company isn’t about taking free, over-the-air signals and charging for them, but is instead about moving TV from a closed system to IP. At the D11 Conference today, Diller defended the company’s plans to build a more open video distribution platform. Diller said that what Aereo charges for isn’t that different from going to your local Radio Shack and buying an antenna to receive free, over-the-air TV signals. But just because Aereo charges for something that is available on an over-the-air signal, doesn’t mean that he wants to take revenues from broadcasters — Diller says that they will still make money from advertisers. “I don’t want to beat up broadcasters… I want to move from closed systems to Internet systems,” Diller said. “The more you can get video to IP, the better it will be.” When asked if that has the potential to break up the cable bundle, Diller said that he expects the current system to bust on its own. That’s a result of a system where he says about 90 percent of households end up paying so that 10 percent can watch ESPN. “The idea of you paying thousands of dollars a year for a package of cable channels that you don’t watch, it doesn’t make any sense,” Diller said. (ESPN later issued a rebuttal to those numbers, claiming that 88 percent of households receiving ESPN networks tuned in to one or more of those networks in the fourth quarter.) Aereo still doesn’t have that many subscribers, Diller acknowledged, but he says the company just getting started. “We have very few [customers] because we just started marketing,” Diller said. But soon the company will be spreading out to 22 cities in the next 6-8 months. More than that, it hopes to begin offering non-broadcast content through its service as well. That could include its own original content, if it gets to enough homes passed. At the same time that Diller is backing his own innovative video startup, he says there’s a lot of excitement happening thanks to streaming services like Netflix and new distribution platforms like Microsoft’s Xbox. “I think it’s exciting that there’s going to be some creative disruption,” Diller said. “For the first time, you could seamlessly hook up a large screen to the Internet and get these [streaming] services.”
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As Software Trumps Hardware In The World Of Payments, VeriFone Partners With CardSpring For Card-Linked Services
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
The world of payments is being turned over by the likes of Square, PayPal, Stripe and others, which are tackling the idea of payments based on hardware terminals, and new services that focus on innovations in smartphones and tablets with functionality coming by way of software iterations. Not to be outdone, incumbents like point-of-sale device maker VeriFone are also cutting their own deals to keep up in the game. The latest is a deal with , a payments startup , which will allow thousands of merchants to enable loyalty programs, point-of-sale discounts, and more using customers’ existing debit and credit cards. Unlike card-linked competitors and , CardSpring is not a merchant-facing platform itself. It’s infrastructure – like what Twilio is to voice, or Stripe is to e-commerce, for example. And now, , retailers and other third-party developers, like , will be able to build card-linked services for point-of-sale systems and VeriFone devices, without requiring any change to shoppers’ current purchase experience or a store’s existing hardware setup. These card-linked applications can include things like loyalty programs, discounts, gift cards, coupons, and more, and are triggered by the payment event itself. On this front, CardSpring is agnostic – payments can be traditional card swipes, NFC-based “taps,” or even Square’s “say your name at checkout” feature, for example. Foursquare had previously partnered with CardSpring and First Data on , which offers Visa and MasterCard cardholders discounts and other deals when they use Foursquare to check in at particular venues, after first adding their card to the Foursquare app. That move was made possible by , which debuted last summer alongside a round of strategic investment from a number of high-profile individuals like Cloudera Chief Scientist , LinkedIn CEO , Ignition Partners’ , and former Intuit CEO . Going forward, Foursquare, and as well as other publishers and retailers, can connect their online promotions to transactions at point-of-sale which are registered with VeriFone’s PAYware Connect (PWC) gateway. “VeriFone wants to enhance the consumer experience at the point-of-sale and add value for merchants by delivering solutions that support in-demand features such as loyalty, rewards, offers, and coupons,” says Harry Hargens, Director of PAYware Business Development, about why his company is now working with CardSpring. “Also, we want to make it easier for merchants to implement these services, and relieve them of dealing with the technical complexity.” It goes without saying that the addition will also help VeriFone better compete with newcomers like , by offering merchants loyalty and marketing services to those who continue to use its products. “We’re trying to make the Point of Sale system smart,” says CardSpring CEO . Eckart, like co-founder , was an early employee at Netscape. “We come from a world with open standards, so when we started working in the payment industry, as developers we wanted to provide standard APIs to get access to payment systems,” he says. “We do believe that you’ll get more value by creating APIs just like Stripe and Braintree have done, making it easy to accept payments online. We’d like to come in and make it simple to add functionality to payments at POS. That’s what this company was founded on.” Today, CardSpring has around 400 developers using its APIs, and takes an undisclosed cut on each transaction, the terms varying depending on the size of the partner. “We are similar to how other transactions are priced on the internet,” Eckart tells us. “Some are flat and some are per transaction. There might even be a free version at some point in time.” Though the VeriFone deal is a big one – it powers about half the retailers in the U.S. – Eckart says that another deal with a payments company will be announced soon.
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Roku Wants To Be Part Of Your Next Smart TV, Raises $60 Million To Do It
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
These days, just about any cheapo Blu-ray player or game console can stream video from Netflix or Hulu, so what’s a company that makes a slew of low-cost video streaming boxes to do to stand out from the pack? Well, if you’re Roku, the answer is you raise a ton of money and set your sights on software too. reports that Roku has just raised another $60 million in funding in a round led by Fidelity, and ATD’s Peter Kafka goes on to note that Roku is looking to use that infusion of capital to bolster its software partnerships with television manufacturers. In addition to pushing out cutesy streaming video boxes, Roku wants its software to be baked directly into a new generation of smart televisions — an especially savvy move given just how ferociously players like Microsoft are attempting to take over people’s living rooms. After all, the promise of streaming content from services like Netflix, Hulu, and Crackle is one that’s been fulfilled nearly every major game console, not to mention by number of Roku’s rivals. A cheap streamer box like the ones Roku makes only hold so much appeal when compared to a truly multi-purpose device like the Xbox 360 (to say nothing of the seemingly media-centric Xbox One) or a hot-seller like the Apple TV (which has outsold Roku’s boxes ), so Roku’s attempt to move up the stack directly into televisions could give the company a leg-up as the amount of hardware competition continues to grow. For what it’s worth, Roku has already spent time wooing OEMs for its “Roku Ready” partner program — the company announced back at CES 2013 that a full were committed to support Roku’s then-new streaming video dongle. So far the list includes Coby Electronics (yes, really), Harman Kardon, Hisense Electric, and Westinghouse Digital just to name a few. Granted, some of these names aren’t the most prominent, but it’s a nifty little stable of companies that have already expressed interest in offering Roku’s media service in one form or another. While Samsung and Sony may have the know-how and the wherewithal to cobble together their own media ecosystems, these little guys probably don’t, and Roku is apparently aiming to bridge that gap while still churning out its own hardware.
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Etece, A Spanish TaskRabbit, Raises €450K Series A To Expand To Four More Local Cities
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
, a Spanish TaskRabbit style startup offering an online platform for people who need a job doing but don’t have the time to do it themselves, has just closed a €450,000 Series A funding round, with investment from , and . The company, which was founded in Madrid six months ago, had previously raised €500,000 from three European entrepreneurs: Jesús Encinar (idealista.com), Carlos Muñoz (Vueling) and François Derbaix (Toprural) — bringing its total funding to date to just under €1 million. Etece said it plans to use the new funding to expand its coverage area, pushing out from the three Spanish cities it currently serves — namely Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia — to add four more “in the coming weeks”, namely: Seville, Malaga, Bilbao and Zaragoza. It has recruited 400 self-employed “problem solvers” to support its task-solving platform so far — with typical tasks including dog walking, cleaning, cooking and IKEA furniture pick ups. It’s clearly going to need to ramp that number up as it scales up to more cities but that process will likely be helped by tough times in the Spanish economy and especially high unemployment. It says it’s aiming to have 1,000 “problem solvers” supporting the business, by the end of the year. Etece’s platform competes with traditional high street professional services providers by having its problem solvers compete with each other to win the business. It reckons this leads to an average 35% discount for the person wanting the task done. Its problem solvers take 81% of that money — with its cut being just shy of a fifth (19%). “We control all the transaction. We charge the customer on its credit card, and pay the solutionner by wire transfer. Also, we guarantee that if client is insolvent, the solutionner still gets paid, and that if the client is not happy he/she will not pay (money back guarantee),” CEO Ramon Blanco tells TechCrunch. There’s no shortage of TaskRabbit style startups springing up, but a local focus often makes sense for this sort of business which typically requires the task doer to attend the home of the task requirer. Another example would be Brazil’s , or and in the U.S. Blanco says Etece’s focus is fully on Spain for now but does reckon there is potential to expand elsewhere in Europe if it gets enough traction. “If we are able to successfully roll out nationally, our next target will be cities over 4 million people in Europe (London and Paris firsts of the list). But as we say in Spain, there is a lot of meat to be cut yet,” he says.
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Meet Rhett, The Reason You Should Donate Money To Charity To Hang Out With A VC [TCTV]
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
How much is a dinner with SV Angel co-founder and managing partner David Lee worth? When you put it into the context of where the money will be going, the answer should be “it’s almost priceless.” Today, I got to sit down with Lee and a special new friend of TechCrunch’s that I’ll introduce in a moment. Lee is participating in the 4th annual “ ,” a program put together by , which benefits the . It’s a fundraiser to build awareness and raise money for a very important cause — fighting blood cancers. VCs like David Lee, Keith Rabois, Megan Quinn, Tim Draper and Shervin Pishevar are for a private lunch or dinner to benefit the cause. To date, the “Master’s Lunch Series” has raised over $200,000, and they’re hoping for another big return this year. Back to our new friend, Rhett Krawitt, who’s battling a form of blood cancer. The five-year-old Leukemia & Lymphoma Society “Boy of the Year,” and big-time Giants fan, is inspiring. He’s the reason you’d want to donate your money to spend time with the folks that I mentioned above. What makes this even more special is that Lee has battled cancer himself, so this is a very personal mission. I spoke with both of them today, and I have to say that it was an honor. I think even Lee will agree that the true honor was getting to know Rhett, though. As Rhett puts it, it’s time to get rid of the “bad guys,” so there’s your reason . Even if you can’t donate the money, there are other ways to get involved with the . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvKCuPqTlQ8&feature=youtu.be I give a damn, too. How about you? I feel like every startup in the world should have someone as brave as Rhett come in and wake everyone up to what’s really important in life. It would definitely give them a new perspective on things. Rhett had chemo last night, but didn’t complain once. He’s my hero.
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Sina Narrows Its 1Q Loss As It Counts On Weibo-Alibaba Deal To Bolster Ad Revenue
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
Despite rising costs and increasing competition from rivals like Tencent, Chinese Internet giant Sina narrowed its first-quarter net loss to $13.2 million from $13.7 million a year earlier, the company today. Sina’s net revenue increased 19 percent year-over-year to $126 million, strengthened by stronger-than-expected non-advertising revenue. The company’s Sina Weibo is China’s largest microblogging service, with over 46 million daily users. Last month, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group , a deal that valued the site at over $3 billion. Sina hopes that the Alibaba deal will allow it to strengthen advertising revenue despite the slowdown in ad sales that has hit all major Chinese Internet companies, including Baidu and Tencent. Sina’s ad sales dropped 15 percent in the first quarter from the previous quarter to $94.3 million. Adjusted non-advertising revenue, which includes revenue share from Web games and membership fees on Sina Weibo, increased 17 percent to $27 million, more than the range of $21 million to $23 million range forecast by the company. “As we start 2013, we are making good progress in transitioning from a PC-centric to a mobile-centric Internet company with new product launches and improved monetization,” said Sina chairman and CEO Charles Chao in the earnings release. “In April, we formed a strategic alliance with Alibaba Group to catapult us into social commerce. By partnering with Alibaba, Weibo is well positioned to play a key role in the future of e-commerce, particularly in mobile commerce as we explore ways to search, share and buy the goods and services of the millions of merchants on Taobao and Tmall.”
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Yahoo Wants To Buy Everyone, Tumblr Edition
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
The first rule of being cool is not telling people you want to be cool. Yahoo , with its M&A team in full pray-and-spray acquisition mode post- hire, hitting on everything that walks, or at least has traction. I’ve heard rumors that Yahoo was trying to get into the following deals over the past couple of months: Foursquare (at an $800 million asking price). Path (at a $2 billion asking price). Pinterest. Hulu. Zynga. Daily Motion. And at a smaller scale: Gdgt. Wavii. Media Ocean (?). A spate of others. And now Tumblr. “Literally they talk to everyone,” said one person familiar with the matter on the matter. There was a kid in my high school who used to buy the popular kids lunch so he could sit with them. Yahoo has become that kid. At Tumblr would be a pricey picnic, about Yahoo has on hand. But it could work if it goes through, which A Tumblr buy fixes the issue of , particularly amongst us wild, mobile-addicted youth. Yahoo, which wants to be a “key part of everyday life,” is limited by the fact that young people don’t want to use it at all, let alone every day. Tumblr , hitting the sweet spot of mobile, social communications, messaging and viral distribution — Even bringing in some coin in the process. Just to heap another dollop of speculation on top of this already absurdly speculative post: It wouldn’t be surprising if Google was also courting , as Mayer, a former Googler, still thinks like she’s in Google M&A, “Hey, a critical mass of people are using it … Let’s buy it and stick ads on it!.” Imagine what the social blogging platform could do to revive Google+ engagement and content creation … And how much more it would be worth to Google? And it certainly makes sense for Yahoo to explore this strategy as well, in its larger, non-acquihire deals. But perhaps it should try being less promiscuous about it.
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Life-Tracking App Expereal Is Your Personal Weapon Against Cognitive Biases
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
Emotions play tricks on our memories, making our recollections of events much happier or heart-wrenching than they actually were. Smartphone app seeks to cut through those cognitive traps by allowing you to rate your day on a 10-point scale and organizing that data into easy-to-read charts. The iOS app (Android and Web-based versions are planned) is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based digital strategist Jonathan Cohen, who was inspired by psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Kahneham argues that our memories are often distorted by cognitive biases. For example, one bad day can completely spoil someone’s memory of an otherwise pleasurable two-week vacation. When designing Expereal, Cohen decided to stick to a 10-point scale to help users keep their ratings objective. “I could have potentially asked people to pick a word to describe their mood, but what I like about numbers is that in order to get the full breadth and benefit you also have to enter tags and give meaning to it,” says Cohen. Expereal’s first screen allows you to rate your day (or part of the day, depending on how often you use the app). Then you can note your location and the people you are with, add tags and snap a photo. A drop-down menu takes you to a set of charts that visualize your ratings by day, week or month, and compares your numbers to all of Expereal’s users or your Facebook friends who also use the app (data is aggregated anonymously). The “Expereotype” option is an album of your in-app photos with embedded ratings, tags and locations. Cohen says Expereal fills the gap left by journaling apps and life-tracking wearable tech products like Jawbone UP and Nike Fuelband. “None of these services in my mind really address the fundamental question–‘how is my life going and how is it trending over time?’ I thought that by having a better understanding of this over time, it would be an interesting way to look back in order to move forward,” says Cohen. Of course, Expereal is only as useful as the data you enter into it. The app’s notifications can be set to remind you to use it 1-5 times per day. While testing the app out, I found I was more likely to enter a rating if I was having a bad day because adding tags allowed me to vent. If my day was going okay, however, it was tempting to ignore Expereal’s prompt on my iPhone. “It’s not immediately sticky,” Cohen admits. “But for many of us who are relatively happy in our lives, I think there is value in those moments of self-reflection.” He adds that Expereal is meant to “counterbalance to the immediate promises of contemporary best-selling self-help books and programs.” I committed to using the app five times a day for two weeks and was surprised by my data charts. A couple days I had written off in my memory as a total waste of time (because of a headache or a task left undone) were actually rated quite high, and I realized I’m much more pessimistic than I thought I was. I already use as a scrapbook and to keep track of my daily activities, but I like Expereal’s focus on mood tracking because it’s already motivated me to stop being so negative. Cohen tells me he is continually working on the app’s data analysis so that the aggregate numbers aren’t skewed toward any particular part of the day or people who log onto the app more consistently than other users. He declined to give me specific numbers, but says Expereal currently has several thousand users. Aside from being a handy life-tracking tool, Expereal is also beautiful, with minimalist graphics inspired by mid-century California design, graphic designer Reid Miles and Monocle magazine. The app was bootstrapped by Cohen, who is currently looking for investors and investigating several revenue models. Cohen envisions Expereal as part of a larger ecosystem that will eventually include books, seminars and other tools that tap into people’s desires to improve their lives. “If you look at the world of self-help, that segment of the marketplace, there are all of these amazing books by behavioral psychologists out there,” says Cohen. “If Expereal can capture a piece of that marketplace, I think the potential is huge.”
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MessageMe Raises A $10M Series A Led By Greylock As It Gears Up For Money And Premium Services In Its Rich Messaging App
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
MessageMe — a messaging app that with a little Facebook thrown in — has raised another $10 million, according to an earlier today. The Series A round was led by Greylock Partners; and as part of it, John Lilly, the ex-CEO of Mozilla who is now a partner at Greylock, will be joining the board of LittleInc Labs, makers of MessageMe. TechCrunch understands that others participating in this round are the same investors from LittleInc Labs’ $1.9 million seed round, including True Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, and Social+Capital Partnership. The company’s angels also include Airbnb’s Brian Pokorny, Hiten Shah, Eric Wu and TinyCo CEO Suleman Ali. Although the seed round was announced in , just weeks after the launch of the app, it actually closed last year and went towards the company’s launch. This newest round will be used to help MessageMe keep up with growth in the future, as it faces up to an of competitors. They include biggies like and , both of which are popular across a number of regions; those that have built up strong followings in local markets, such as in South Korea and in Japan; and newer contenders like the new app from Google. Amidst (or perhaps despite) all the competition, MessageMe continues to grow fast. Two months ago, the app was seeing 500 notifications per second among 1 million users — despite the fact that Facebook one week after it launched. The reason for that appeared to be the same as for other apps that faced the same fate: they are not allowed to use “Find Friends” features to seek out Facebook contacts on third-party apps, when those third-party apps are deemed to be competitive to/replicating core Facebook services. Today the sent rate is apparently significantly higher, as are user numbers. We understand that the company will be sharing more specific numbers next week when it also will be announcing details for how LittleInc Labs plans to make money from its ad-free, free-to-download app. On that front, there have already been some fairly obvious clues as to what those plans might entail: In addition to multimedia options in the app to send messages as pictures, doodles, video, voice, location and music, there are also tabs for stickers and money. Conversely, although the two co-founders, Arjun Sethi and Justin Rosenthal, have had extensive experience with social gaming in past roles, including long periods for both at LOLapps, it’s noticeable that there is no games tab on that dashboard. Stickers, of course, have been a very popular value-added service for other apps like Line, which makes millions each month from stickers; and other messaging apps like are now adopting them, too. Money is a newer area in messaging but one that is also being chased by more than one party: Google just yesterday that Google Wallet would be integrated with Gmail, letting users send money as attachments. Peer-to-peer money transfers via mobile, meanwhile, have been a much-used service particularly in developing markets, where users may not have bank accounts. MessageMe could play on both of these concepts, depending on who it partners with to provide the service. : MessageMe has now confirmed the details of the funding round as well as some usage numbers. .
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CrowdOptic Raises Another $1M To Build Experiences Based On Where Your Phone Is Pointing
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
, a startup with technology for identifying where people are pointing their smartphone cameras, has raised another $1 million in funding. When I’ve spoken to the team in the past, they’ve emphasized the ways this could be used to create new types of social interactions — if people are attending a live event and pointing their cameras at the same thing, they can start chatting and sharing content. However, the company’s website a number of use cases, including “focus-aware” advertising, analytics, news reporting, social TV (live attendees can provide content to people watching at home), and security. CEO and co-founder Jon Fisher said that customers include Australia- and New Zealand-based ticketing company (CrowdOptic built app for finding your Facebook friends in a stadium, which you can see in the screenshot above) and (which used CrowdOptic to share authenticated, eyewitness content from the presidential debates). The new funding comes from CrowdOptic’s existing investors, including Silicon Valley Bank, tech legend , and Fisher himself. Fisher also said that CrowdOptic recently celebrated its second quarter of profitability. The company has now raised a total of $3.5 million. By the way, Fisher was previously CEO of Bharosa, NetClerk, and AutoReach, but he isn’t the only team member with an impressive résumé — COO Jim Kovach has worked at other startups, he has a medical degree and a law degree, and he was a linebacker for the New Orleans Saints and San Francisco 49ers.
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NVIDIA’s Shield Mobile Gaming System Feels Like The Way Android Games Should Be Played
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
NVIDIA brought its new handheld gaming system to Google I/O this year and showed off a near-production device. The Shield made its debut at CES this year, surprising most since it’s a consumer handheld device from a company that generally makes internal components. But it has some neat tricks up its sleeve, including a Tegra 4 chipset, 2GB of RAM, a 5-inch 720p display and 16GB of internal storage. The Shield units available at I/O this week were all running Android and showing off Android games with hardware controller support, and none were demoing the PC game streaming that NVIDIA said would be coming to . My experience with the NVIDIA was limited to just a few games, including the Epic Citadel demo that always gets trotted out to demonstrate amazing graphics capabilities on mobile devices. There were also a couple of playable cart racers in action, and all of the above performed well and really showed that the hardware is capable of rendering high-quality video smoothly and without any apparent effort. For a device that’s essentially a smartphone without the actual phone powers, but with more physical buttons for $349, that’s an important achievement to be able to claim.[gallery columns="4" ids="818663,818664,818665,818666,818667,818668,818669,818670,818671,818672,818673"] Shield does its Android job well, and the hardware feels great to these gamers’ hands. Buttons are slightly clicky and the ergonomics are solid, and the thing doesn’t take up too much more space than an Xbox controller when the screen is folded down and it’s in travel mode. There’s mini-HDMI, which was outputting gameplay to a small HD television, and a micro-USB slot for charging. The onboard screen boasts “retinal” quality 294 PPI pixel density, which means video and games look silky smooth. Maybe the best part is that NVIDIA has gone for a pretty near stock Android Jelly Bean experience, which a rep from the company told me was a conscious choice they made after first trying a more involved widget overlay that ended up making for a much less pleasant experience. Navigating the stock Android with hardware controls (you can also always use the touchscreen) is also surprisingly intuitive. All that said, this is a strange device with a market that’s probably going to be pretty niche. Really, it almost seems like a reference device designed to show off the power of Tegra, but NVIDIA is actually shipping the thing, so those of us like me who actually have a hankering for this kind of hardware will really be able to buy it even if it doesn’t become a runaway success.
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Experience A Google Maps Free Fall With Instrument’s Maps Dive At Google I/O
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
One of the most interesting product demos on display at Google I/O this year was a virtual sky diving simulation built using eight separate computers running Chrome, along with a Kinect-like motion sensor made by ASUS called the Xtion Pro. The Maps Dive experiment was created by Portland-based independent digital agency . Developer Ben Purdy explained that they built the impressive tech demo to show what’s now possible with Chrome and how it can be used to create an amazingly rendered multi-display experience that looks like you’d expect it to be powered by current-gen gaming hardware instead of just a loose assortment of lightweight Linux-based computers running the kind of code that web developers are already comfortable with. Maps Dive provided an experience that seemed at least as accurate and sensitive as your typical Kinect game. Purdy said that it’s really just an early example of things that could be built with the computers we already have, as well as mobile devices. Considering how far Chrome already reaches, imagining this type of experience running on even low-cost Chromebooks and Android tablets does open up a lot of possibilities.
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Now With More Than 1.5B Page Views A Month, Secret Sharing App Whisper Launches On Android
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
Secret sharing app has seen tremendous growth since launching last fall. But until recently, it’s only been available on iOS. With a launch on store this week, Whisper is going to be available to a whole bunch of new users, particularly in its key demographic of young adults aged 18-24. Whisper, in case you don’t know, is an . It’s like PostSecret for mobile phones, allowing users to upload or search for images online and then add text messages on top of them. Whispers are shared with all users of the app, and the most popular are surfaced based on the number of hearts or responses received from other users. In addition to public responses, Whisper users can also privately message each other, as long as they’re willing to pay for the feature. That not only keeps the amount of marketing down, but it also provides a way for users to connect with other users that they wouldn’t have otherwise known. The app continues to grow phenomenally fast. When we checked in with Whisper, there were about a billion page views on the app per month. That’s up to about 1.5 billion per month now, according to co-founder Michael Heyward. Messaging on the app, which makes up the bulk of Whisper’s revenues, is growing even faster. Heyward said there’s essentially zero churn among users who sign up — and pay — for messaging. “Any time there’s a new person that enlists in that feature, we grow it at a more exponential rate,” he told me. As a result, there are more than millions of messages being passed around privately among users. While Whisper has seen pretty fantastic growth over the last several weeks, being on iOS limited the app’s addressable market. That’s especially true since Whisper’s most important user base — those between the ages of 18 and 24 — tend to overindex on Android devices. As a result, Heyward believes that its iOS app could only access approximately 40 percent of its most important audience. With that in mind, the team worked around the clock to get its Android app released. It initially started work on the app about six weeks ago, looking to replicate all the features and functionality of its popular iOS app. The Android app first hit Google Play earlier this week and received about 50,000 downloads in the first 48 hours — all without any real promotion from the company. More importantly, the engagement levels with early Android users have been on par with or better than iOS usage. For instance, about 40 percent of initial Android users have created Whispers already. Whisper has led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from investors like Trinity Ventures, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, and Flixster’s Joe Greenstein. The company now has 14 employees, but Heyward says they’re looking to add a few more hires over the coming weeks.
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For Real, Ex-Groupon CEO Andrew Mason Is Releasing An Album Of Motivational Music
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
Andrew Mason must be some kind of spirit animal of optimism. We assumed he was kidding when had recorded “a seven song album of motivational business music”. Just three months ago the founder and CEO got . But we’ve just confirmed with him that his album “Hardly Workin'” is for real. Hold on to your ear holes, startup people. Mason gave the world an update on what he’s been up to since he cashed in his voucher for an escort to the guillotine from Groupon. He’s been galavanting around the world, losing weight, will become a , and plans to start a company with the best of his bottled-up ideas from the last seven years. But none of that is nearly important as his initiative to inspire the youth of America. He writes (with two spaces after each period [dude, no!]), that: So release an ebook series? Go on a campus speaking tour? Nope. He hit the music studio to create what we could only imagine sounds like Bob Dylan meets Tony Robbins meets Metallica. We’ve spoken directly to Mason and he says the album is real, not a stunt like quite a few things past. For instance, when he said he was voluntarily leaving Groupon to . Andrew did major in music at Northwestern, after all. I’ll be camped outside of iTunes waiting for the release if we can’t get a review copy first. In the meantime I’ve made him some mock-up album covers. Whenever we do get our hands on Hardly Workin’, expect a listening party at the TechCrunch San Francisco office. I’ll even livestream it if Mason will let me. I’ve said before that inventors are the new rockstars. This is absolutely what I meant.
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Why CrunchGov Is Endorsing Eric Garcetti For Mayor Of LA
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
“Los Angeles is an underachieving city,” wrote the in its . “The candidate with the most potential to rise to the occasion and lead Los Angeles out of its current malaise and into a more sustainable and confident future is Eric Garcetti.” An overwhelming number of startup founders seem to agree that Garcetti is the best candidate to bring out the best in Silicon Valley’s sister city to the south. “Eric is by far the best candidate for Los Angeles, and has demonstrated a clear plan to grow jobs & our local economy. The proof is in his record, he spearheaded an innovative partnership with our company to provide LA business owners/operators the simplest way to get business licenses,” Jason Nazar, founder and CEO of Docstoc, told us in an email. “He has the overwhelming endorsement of our tech community, and he’s someone I know will work tirelessly to make this the best city for every small business.” Given the strong desire by L.A.’s startup community to see Garcetti in office, and his as a city councilman, I’m compelled to endorse his candidacy and urge Angelenos to elect him as its next mayor on . Government’s have an undeniable impact on technology entrepreneurs: burdensome taxes and regulations can strangle innovation in the cradle, while funding for education and research are foundational to emerging stars. Mayors can be powerful allies if they care enough about startups. If San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee hadn’t gone out to petition for , it might never have passed and saved nascent startups thousands in payroll costs. Most importantly, we likely won’t know the biggest challenges of the industry in the near future. A few years ago, the sharing economy barely existed, let alone faced the . In Garcetti’s (hopefully) eight years as L.A. mayor, the only thing we have to go on in whether he will prioritize startups on unknown issues against established interests is how he has treated startups in the past. Nearly every startup we spoke to not only knew of Garcetti, but knew him . We cannot think of a policymaker in L.A. who has dedicated more of his time to our readers. But don’t take it from me, take it from the flood of endorsements we received on his behalf (below). with TechCrunch’s policy channel, , is to keep our readers informed about laws and policymakers that affect your ability to build amazing things. As mayor, Garcetti will no doubt help you all do that.
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Google Says All 2,000 Glass Explorers Have Been Invited To Pick Up Their Device
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
Today, Steve Lee of the Google X and Glass Team, announced that as of last week, all 2,000 developers who signed up for the Glass Explorer program at last year’s I/O conference have now from Google’s offices in Mountain View, New York City or Los Angeles. Of course, not everyone has to actually pay the $1,500 to get them if they don’t want to, but it’s safe to say that most of these developers will be picking them up and dropping down the cash. Lee also noted that the 8,000 #ifihadglass “winners” who still have to pay their way will start getting theirs soon. The importance of having the device in the hands of those who will be building apps, the only way that we’ll ever know what the device is capable of, was not an easy thing to do. You can’t really seed a device that sits on your face quietly, thus the need for an Explorer program . Lee said: “This isn’t something that we could have worked on in some secret lab; it had to be out in the real world.” Lee also noted that Glass will receive monthly software updates with bug fixes and new features, which means that we can expect another one to come sometime in early June, similar to . The experience wasn’t completely overhauled with the last update; the introduction of a “long press” for search was handy. As we’ve walked around the I/O conference, it’s been commonplace to find someone stopping to take a picture or slide through the timeline in front of their place. There are still a lot of questions to be answered as to whether this is a device that will catch on for consumers, but watching its evolution in the earliest days is fun. Something that’s interesting to note is that Google executives, like Larry Page and Vic Gundotra, haven’t been sporting their Glass, specifically on stage yesterday for the keynote. Some feel like this was a way to tone down the hype about the product, letting developers take over the “spokesperson” role for Glass.
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Leap Motion Talks New Beta, We Go Hands On With Motion-Controlled Google Earth
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
Leap Motion was showing off its still for computers at Google I/O 2013. The demo unit allowed you to use the controller to navigate Google Earth, and the functionality felt ready for prime time to me, as this was the first time I’d ever used the Leap Motion. The controls seemed intuitive, and within a few minutes I was flying around the globe pretty handily, though I did have some trouble finding San Francisco. I asked about in order to further beta test Leap, and as you can see in the video the company is keen to note that the hardware is solid, but there’s a need for more testing around the consumer experience. Leap seems very confident they can deliver by their new anticipated ship date of late July, however. The tech is impressive regardless of whether it hits a little later than anticipated, but it’ll be interesting to see if the extended beta has an effect on how it’s eventually received by consumers.
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How Google Took Street View For A Dive
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
Google’s underwater last September, but Google’s program actually began six years ago, when one of the founders of Keyhole (which, after being acquired by Google, later became Google Earth), was inspired to also look into mapping the ocean. For several years now Google has been mapping the oceans, but bringing Street View underwater is still very challenging. “Our goal is to really make all of our maps data more comprehensive by adding more ocean data. We want to take you from your home to the turtle’s home,” Google’s Jennifer Austin Foulkes said. So far, Google has launched this for six locations, including Oahu, Maui and locations around the Great Barrier Reef. Because there is a strong scientific component to this project, the team set up a strict protocol for taking this imagery. Richard Vevers, director of the – Google’s partner in this project – said that the cameras his team uses for this project are very different from those used by Google’s other Street View vehicles. The team had to use wider-angle lenses, for example. Google’s underwater Street View camera has three cameras on its front and takes images every three seconds. One of the cameras points downward, because that’s how images during reef surveys have traditionally been taken. The back of the scooter features a tablet that can control the cameras. During a typical dive, the divers cover about 2km and take 3,000 to 4,000 images per camera, and the team does three dives per day, each of which lasts about an hour. In total, the team has taken about 150,000 images so far, and Vevers expects this number to grow exponentially over the next few months. In the long run, the team hopes to create diver-less systems that can stay underwater for 12 hours or more. The technology is already available, but it needs to be adapted to the kind of camera system needed for Street View. In addition to the usual cameras, the team is also testing stereo cameras to create 3D imagery and has recently experimented with doing underwater Hangouts and using Photo Spheres to engage the public. Every camera system costs about $50,000, and four of them are currently in existence, though two of them haven’t been in the water yet. To get this underwater data into Street View, Vevers used Google’s standard Business Photos tool. The actual location of the images, by the way, is triangulated. The images, it’s worth noting, are also freely available for scientists. The team is focusing on the Americas right now, but plans to bring underwater Street View to all of the world’s oceans over the next three years (that’s obviously just a few locations – not all of the oceans…). Another focus for the team is getting more developers involved – both for crowdsourcing data and for developing better reef-recognition algorithms. The existing algorithms can only interpret images from a downward-facing camera, but the team is hoping to create tools for working with all of the data the cameras generate. Given the threats to the ocean, there is obviously a serious side to this project, something Vevers noted during his talk. Street View, he argues, is an important tool to inform the public about the threats that the ocean’s face today. “People don’t want to protect anything they can’t see,” he said. Most people don’t dive, but there’s no reason why we can’t take them diving virtually. There is no point in doing science, Vevers argues, if it doesn’t get out to the public and policy makers.
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Here Are The Commands You Need To Gain Root Access To Your Google Glass
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
There has been a lot of talk about rooting your Glass device, or if it’s even possible. Well, it is. During a Hacking Google Glass session today, the team shared the steps to go through to gain root access for your Glass device. Only the Fastboot tool for UNIX works, but there have been issues with using the OS X one. An official native dev kit will be available, too, which was announced earlier. If you can’t wait for an SDK to port your apps from Android to Glass, then get your root on. : The entire process seems to take about 10-15 minutes, giving you warning messages along the way: After you’ve run through all of that, bam, you get access to the entire data partition. You’re rooted and your device is worth nothing: One developer has run Ubuntu on Glass, something that only a handful of geeks will try, but fun nonetheless: “This isn’t the recommended Glass team way of building apps,” said the team, but hacking is worth it, right? When you root the device, Google’s support team will no longer help you if you get stuck. If you’re worried about voiding your warranty, the Glass team also discussed the device’s debug mode, which is much safer.
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 | null |
Check Out Facebook’s Nerdy Library Of Its Research Papers
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
If subjects like “XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data” get you all worked up, you’ll dig the , which collects scientific papers written by Facebook employees and researchers. Ranging from hardcore engineering to the sociology of social networks, the library puts Facebook’s open-sourced knowledge all in one place. Now, for a site designed to show how smart Mark Zuckerberg’s crew is, I’m dumbfounded that it only offers each research paper in downloadable PDF. Perhaps it wanted to preserve the sanctity of the information. And by that I mean leave the documents in their eye-straining JSTOR academic journal format. Facebook could improve the little library by offering the abstracts upfront so you know what you’re getting into like , and highlighting different articles like . Still, between categories like , and , there is plenty to read. While Facebook can sometimes be a bit aggressive from both spammers and competitors, it’s quite generous with its tech advancements. It’s given away green data center schematics and energy-efficient server designs through its . As for this , a few articles I’m excited to dig into include: — even though I know it’s not going to be about A Tribe Called Quest.
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Y Combinator Adds Four Part-Time Partners, Including Groupon’s Andrew Mason (Who’s Also Starting A New Company)
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
Y Combinator’s Paul Graham revealed a bunch of personnel news in . Let’s see if I’ve got everything: The incubator has added one full-time partner (Wufoo’s Kevin Hale) and four part-time partners (Socialcam’s Michel Seibel, Hipmunk’s Steve Huffman, imeem and App.net’s Dalton Caldwell and Groupon’s Andrew Mason). Current partner Harj Taggar, meanwhile, is leaving “to start a new startup (in the long term) and travel the world (in the short),” but Graham writes that Taggar will stay on as a part-time partner. YC first began two years ago — it now has 10 partners, plus eight part-time partners. As with the other, previously announced part-timers, these additions are mostly YC alums — the exceptions are Caldwell (who I’ve seen speak at numerous YC events) and Mason, who was recently . The obvious significance here is that YC has basically doubled the team of part-time partners. Graham also notes that with the addition of Hale, two of the incubator’s partners are designers, “which partly reflects the increasing importance of design in startups, but frankly mostly reflects the fact that they’re really good.” Mason also has announcing that he’s joining YC, but also stating that he’s starting a new company, moving to San Francisco, and releasing an album of “motivational business music.” On the company front, he doesn’t say much: I feel very lucky to be alive at a time when someone like me can have a simple idea like Groupon that ends up impacting millions of people. If there’s a silver lining to leaving Groupon, it’s the opportunity to start something new. I’ve accumulated a backlog of ideas over the last several years, my favorite of which I’ll be turning into a new company this fall.
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Jen Lamere, The 18-Year-Old Developer Trying To Save Us From TV Spoilers On Twitter, Scores An Internship There
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
Participating in hackathons is nothing new in certain parts of the world, especially Silicon Valley. Once in a blue moon, a small team of people creates something exciting that generates buzz, potentially . One developer took on 80 competitors at a hackathon called “ ” and won with a solution to save you from reading spoilers on Twitter with an app called Twivo. The developer has nabbed an internship at the company she built the hack on top of — Twitter. This particular developer’s story took on , not just because the app was really cool (I often don’t pay attention to my feed during Saturday Night Live, because all of the people on the other coast ruin it for me), but because Jen Lamere is a female developer who was up against an all-male group of hackers. She was 17 at the time. An attendee , explaining: “the only other females in attendance, that I saw anyway, were an organizer, two camerawomen, a caterer, three judges, and a participant’s wife.” The news of Lamere’s summer internship, which looks like it will be with specifically, came via Twitter, naturally: Super excited to intern at this summer! — Jen Lamere (@imjen) There’s no word on what she’ll be doing, but the experience that she’ll get will be incredibly useful. Whether you want to take this news as a win for female developers, teenagers or technology as a whole, the story is a great one. At its very core, you have someone who is fascinated enough with tech to take the step and build something without a team, present it publicly at a hackathon and then take it to the next level by pursuing an internship…and that’s inspiring. While not every hackathon project will lead to some type of fundraising or exit, or even an actual startup, this is a nice lesson to learn that the networking and experience gained at an event like this can go a long way. It’s also nice to see Twitter, a company that is preparing for an eventual IPO, give chances to younger coders. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya told the audience at Disrupt NYC that “ ” and this story is a perfect example of that line of thinking. Imagine if, instead of a spelling bee in junior high, you had entered a hacking competition? How different the world would be.
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PSA: The Original Karateka Is Now Available For iOS And Android
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
I remember waking up 6am, going downstairs, and firing up my Atari 800XL. The disk labeled inserted, the drive would grunt a few dozen times and the screen would flash. Suddenly, with barely any warning, the opening titles would appear and then the music would start – six notes to signal a game that was menacing in its simplicity. The story was simply told. Characters stood in darkened rooms. The Shogun aimed a finger at a door and the princess was forced into bondage. You were the Karateka, the hero, your pixelated motion was as fluid as any humans. I marveled at the realism. The whiffed punches sounded like a fist smacking a ham hock. The fight music, the little fanfare of victory, was all I needed for those few hours before school. Karateka was a marvel in an era of cheap gaming. In a world populated by Pac Men, Karateka foretold the future. begat and the creator of both, , went on to become one of the greats in the gaming industry. Luckily, he and his clan of programmers haven’t been resting on their laurels. They have just re-released Karateka in its original glory on or , allowing us oldsters a brief moment of nostalgia and ensuring the younger generation understands the magic of a game that sparks the imagination. but I suspect most of us will want to experience the pixelated splendor of Mechner’s virtual world instead of the modern, cartoony style so popular with mobile gaming recently. Pro tip: watch out for the freaking eagle. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmkvTuJMI-M]
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Here’s A Weekend Project For First-Time Tinkerers: Turn Your Converse Into A DIY Light Show
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 |
The weekend isn’t upon us just yet, but here’s a little project to tuck away for when the Sunday doldrums set in — the New York-based tinkerers/part suppliers at Adafruit Industries have worked up a way to give your old pair of Chuck Taylors a . The process is pretty straightforward — with about $21 in specialized parts like a small sheet of electroluminescent material and a pint-sized power inverter (I suspect there’s a fair chance you’ve got AAA batteries, sewing needles, and glue nestled in a drawer somewhere) you too can have a pair of Converse that light up in the dark. Adafruit’s Becky Stern says that once everything is put together your shoes will stay aglow for about an hour before starting to dim if you’ve opted to use the slightly smaller CR2032-powered inverter, though you can eke out extra juice by playing with smaller EL panel sizes or using an inverter that runs on AAA batteries instead. If nothing else, it’s a neat little crash course in cobbling together components and the end result is a pair of sneakers that are sure to catch some attention — just make sure not to get them too wet. First-time makers may not be completely comfortable with the concept of lashing together a gadget with an Arduino and some shields, but a lightweight hack for some light-up shoes may be enough to get them ready for more ambitious hacks to come. As always, there’s nothing to stop you from peeking at the project tutorial and looking for somewhere else to buy your components. After all, when Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried chatted onstage with our own John Biggs at Disrupt NY 2013, she said the company isn’t so much a parts vendor as it is an educational tutorial company “with a gift shop at the end”.
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Amazon Reportedly Sets June 7 Launch For Kindle Devices In China
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
After , Amazon Kindle e-readers and tablets will reportedly be available for sale in China on June 7. E-readers like the Paperwhite and Kindle Fire tablets will be sold on Amazon China’s website, as well as Tesco stores operated by retail conglomerate Suning. Amazon Kindle kiosks have already been spotted in a Beijing Tesco, (link via Google Translate). The price of the Kindle Paperwhite Wi-Fi has reportedly been set at 849 RMB (about $138), while the Kindle Fire HD will sell for about 1,400 to 1,500 RMB ($228 to $244). Amazon has gradually rolled out its Kindle platform in China. Documentation appeared late last year showing that the Kindle had . In December, Amazon’s China site and made Kindle app downloads available. The company also , promising that they would soon have access to customers in 200 countries. Despite its slow and steady approach, Amazon has faced several obstacles, including regulatory challenges for its e-book business from the General Administration of Press and Publication, China’s state censorship organization. Amazon China does not have a license to publish e-books and instead partnered with domestic e-publisher ChineseAll.com to launch Kindle book downloads last December. In response, the General Administration of Press and Publication into the partnership last December, stating that borrowing a license is against the law. It’s also unclear if Amazon will be able to reap any profit from tapping into . In the U.S., Amazon , relying instead on sales of books, apps and movies for profit. In China, however, Amazon not only has to deal with scrutiny, but also with domestic competitors, including media conglomerate Hanvon, Dangdang and Shanda, who have already gained a solid foothold on the e-publishing market, as well as pirated versions of popular titles. The wide availability of e-books, as well as cheap Android tablets, may mean Amazon will have to make significant adjustments to its revenue model in China.
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Trulia Adds New Maps To Visualize U.S. Rental Prices, Earthquake And Flood Risks
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
For a while, it looked like , the online marketplace for homebuyers, sellers, renters and real estate professionals, was going to cede much of its ground to Zillow, Redfin and other newcomers. Lately, however, the company has been making a bit of a comeback, with a , and . The company also recently finalized a follow-on offering for acquisitions and mergers. Today, the company launched yet another addition to its product: of current per-bedroom rental prices in cities across the U.S., as well as new maps for tracking the risk of earthquake and flood risks in a given neighborhood. In red-hot markets like San Francisco (where the company is headquartered and the earthquake risk is pretty much a given), the rental map is obviously the most interesting. In other markets, knowing earthquake and flood risks can also help prospective buyers make their purchasing decisions. “After considerable damage in recent years, many consumers likely feel as if the frequency and severity of natural disasters is increasing across the United States, but up until now the risk of these events has traditionally been hard for homebuyers, sellers, and renters to find,” Lee Clancy, Trulia’s VP of Consumer Products, noted in today’s announcement. “Now house hunters can use our maps to see flood zones and understand where earthquakes are more common in order to make informed decisions about where to move.” Trulia uses USGS and California Geologic Survey data to show these seismic hazards and to visualize flood risks. The service already offers visualizations for , , school rankings and . These maps, as well as the newly announced visualizations, are available on the company’s website and through its .
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Dear Andy Dunn
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
What? You thought that groups of people didn’t open you up to some criticism yourself? You know what they say about people who (even when one of them is ostensibly .) Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s healthy to criticize those with unchecked power. A handful of technology venture capitalists are indeed in a relatively small industry with an press corps that’s apt to turn a blind eye to what’s become . So, your straightforward posts about the bad actions of certain and have done a great service in many ways. Indeed, throwing stones at prominent but dysfunctional folks is often welcome at first blush. People are downright for it. It’s lauded and shared and re-shared. But then, after times, these kinds of things start to seem formulaic. . Because it’s really not as easy as you say it is, this business of delineating between “nontrepreneurs” and real founders, between “smart” VCs and “dumb” VCs. 98 percent versus 2 percent is an awfully pessimistic figure — and, as others have pointed out, . The world here just isn’t this black and white. And, after a short while, all this mud-slinging just makes other people ask: “Why is this person judging business, and whether it’s worth a billion dollars or not? Who is he, Bill Gates?” It’s just like people asked what was so special about those ladies . These are nasty and negative questions, and it’s a bad way of evaluating other human beings — a level of criticism that hardly any of us can measure up to. But to be fair, you dished it out first. These black and white delineations about who is “smart” and who is “dumb” are almost reminiscent of those old fashioned style tenets that still get bandied about in women’s magazines and chick lit today: Are you ? Are you a or a or an ? It’s alluring in its simplicity, which is why it continues to sell. But ultimately it’s a false way of looking at the world.
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Insight Venture Partners Raises A Whopping $2.57 Billion For Next Fund
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
, a New York-based growth fund that’s backed Tumblr and Twitter, just raised $2.57 billion in what is likely one of the largest raises for a venture fund ever. This is their eighth fund since managing director Jeff Horing co-founded the firm out of business school in 1995. In their most recent fund before this, they had raised $1.5 billion for a fund plus a $500 million co-investment vehicle. To date, they’ve raised a collective $7.6 billion — a large uptake considering that Horing’s first fund was $16 million more than 15 years ago. The sheer size of the new fund will let Insight write checks that are up to $300 million in size. To be clear, Insight is a little bit different than other late-stage firms; they behave in some ways like a private equity firm as well “We are tech focused and are definitely one of the larger tech funds around,” Horing said. “But we have a hybrid strategy, which includes some buyout and growth equity.” They’ve also done some more unconventional deals like one to invest in Zumba, the Latin dance fitness program. They also invested in the last round for Tumblr, which sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion. Some recent IPOs out of the portfolio include Shutterstock and Solarwinds. Insight’s big fund comes as the venture industry is splitting into a sea of haves and have-nots. The very best-known firms like Andreessen Horowitz have been able to pull progressively larger rounds. Andreessen Horowitz while Horing, of course, isn’t daunted by the prospect of returning a more than $2.5 billion fund. He clearly raised that money for a reason. “This fund is not that much bigger than prior funds. It’s 20 percent or so larger than the last time,” he said. “We can’t make seed investing work, but we’ll selectively do it if it’s really an outlier.” Insight has more than 50 people with nine general partners. They reach and track about 30,000 companies per year and Horing says that Insight’s value-add beyond sheer capital is in operations. “We have a lot of ex-McKinsey type consultants and operating executives who have worked in technology in sales and marketing. As opposed to CEO-level board advice, we have people who can work on projects from growth opportunities to sales optimization,” he said. While about 40 percent of their investments are overseas, the firm has a one-office culture: everyone is based in New York. They do send people out to cover the European and South American markets regularly though. “Walls are coming down every day for being able to start a company from anywhere,” he said.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook Advocates For Tax Reform, Even Though It Might Pay A Little Bit More
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Apple CEO Tim Cook says he wants comprehensive reform of the corporate tax code in the U.S., even if it means that the company would pay a little bit more in the process. Today in a keynote conversation at the , Cook talked about his testimony before Congress and his suggestions for dealing with certain tax issues. Last week, over claims that the company had avoided $13.8 billion in taxes. (Also, .) Apple took that as an opportunity to propose changes to the tax code, changes that Cook believes are necessary. Cook said that the company’s effective tax rate in the U.S. is 30.5 percent, and that it pays $6.5 billion — more than anyone else. More importantly, though, the tax return it files is huge — 2 feet tall, according to Cook. That’s because the code itself is more than 7,500 pages long and impossible to understand. As a result, Cook suggested it was time to gut the current tax code. With that in mind, Cook went before the Senate subcommittee to provide a proposal for comprehensive tax reform. “The subcommittee was coming to certain conclusions and we felt strongly that we looked at those very differently. We thought it was very important to tell our story and view it as an opportunity instead of a pain in the ass… and get people to understand what we believe the issues really were,” Cook said. With the proposal put forward, Cook said the company wouldn’t pay any less in taxes, and might actually pay a little bit more. But that would be worth it, because it would be able to re-invest funds from other markets back in the U.S. without having to pay taxes on those funds.
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CEO Tim Cook Says Apple Has More Game-Changing Products Ahead
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the company will continue to innovate and has more game-changing products ahead. Today in a keynote conversation at the , Cook said the same people who brought you the iPhone, iPad, iPod, and maybe even the Mac will have new products coming soon. Two weeks ahead of Apple’s own , speculation has grown about new hardware that could be released at the conference, as well as updates to Apple’s mobile and tablet developer platform with the upcoming release of iOS 7. “Many people now say that innovation means a new category,” Tim Cook said. “Yes, we’re still a company that’s going to do that… We have some incredible plans that we’ve been working on for a while.” When pressed on the future of TV, Cook declined to talk about any future products, but he said that there’s a big opportunity to offer a more compelling experience there. Apple has now sold more than 13 million Apple TV devices, about half of which during the past year. But there’s still more that can be done, according to Cook. “When you look at the TV experience, it’s not an experience that people love,” Cook said. “It’s not an experience that’s been brought up to date for this decade.” What about wearables? Cook said he thinks it’s going to be difficult for something like Google Glass to take off. He also said that, while he wears a Nike FuelBand, there’s nothing really out there that is compelling from a wearable perspective that does more than one thing well. “I would say that the [wearable devices] that are doing more than one thing, there’s nothing great out there,” Cook said. And as a result, “There’s nothing that’s convinced a kid that doesn’t wear glasses, or a band, or a watch, to do so… It’s an area that’s ripe for exploration.” At the same time, there are questions about whether or not Apple has lost its mojo, especially as competition from companies like Samsung is growing. Cook defended Apple’s place in the world, saying that the company has always faced formidable competition, but tries to make the best products in each category. He said that the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, consistently have the highest customer satisfaction rating in all of those categories. It might not sell the most in each device category, but it always has the devices that people use the most, he said. He gave examples both in the amount of web traffic that comes from iOS devices, as well as the amount of commerce that happens on its platforms. “For us, winning has never been about making the most” of a product, Cook said. “What the numbers suggest is that people are using our products more.”
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Heading To Yahoo! And No! I Can’t Do Anything About The Exclamation Mark!
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Today, I have to say goodbye to my current home, TechCrunch. I’ve not only gotten the opportunity to work with this amazing team as a writer and Community Director, but I’ve been able to enjoy it as a reader . I’ll continue to be a reader. Thus, with every goodbye comes a hello. I’m proud to announce that in the next few weeks I’ll be going to a company that I’m really excited about, Yahoo! There is a lot happening there, and the opportunity to work with Marissa Mayer and the corporate communications team was too good to pass up. I believe that there are things, yes, purple things, coming out of Sunnyvale that will excite people in every corner of the world. Writing about technology has always been a happy accident for me. I’ve been obsessed with technology since I was twelve years old, never focusing on one specific area. I tried being a programmer, but I was too overly protective of my work to ever ship a line of code. Therefore, I’ve done just about everything else but that. The goodbye part is difficult, but I feel like I’m leaving at the top of my game. Never in a million years did I think that I’d be publishing my thoughts on one of the top tech blogs on the Internet, TechCrunch. Every single time that I hit the publish button, I got butterflies in my stomach, because I knew that I was bringing you interesting news and facts about companies that you, the readers, follow. I was able to be a part of a team that wants to help advance technology by informing all of you on what’s hot. To me, reading about a company on TechCrunch has always felt like hearing a new band on the radio. You knew that behind the scenes there were people who heard everything about every company known to man, but the news that got to the front page of the site was special. Being a part of that process will be something that I miss. Now I get to be back “behind the music,” seeing everything as it happens and making sure that everyone knows about it…this time, I get to focus on Yahoo! It won’t be boring, I promise you that. Without getting ridiculously mushy, I’d like to thank the entire team at TechCrunch, especially our amazing co-editors Alexia Tsotsis and Eric Eldon. When I came to TechCrunch, a lot of people asked me “Why would you do that?” I imagine that I’ll get a similar response from the same people with this move to Yahoo, but I’ll answer it the same way: “You’ll see.” In TechCrunch’s case, they saw. . Since it wouldn’t be TechCrunch without some type of conflicts, perceived or real, it’s safe to say that this serves as my disclosure. I’ll keep disclosing in posts where I’m conflicted over the next two weeks, because yeah, I’m going into PR at Yahoo. I’ll see what I can do about . Thank you TechCrunch readers and commenters, you’ve always made everything more interesting. There go those butterflies again.
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Nostalgia, Activate! Earthworm Jim’s Creator Turns To Kickstarter For His Gaming Comeback
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Between Disney axing and Monkey Island’s creator waxing on about the sequel , the last few months have been a pretty big kick to the gaming crowd’s feels. Here’s some feel-good medicine: the creator of 90’s nostalgia-factory is getting back into gaming, and he’s turning to Kickstarter to make his new game happen. While series creator Doug TenNapel lent his hand to at least eight games throughout the 90s, he’s best known for two: the aforementioned (and the resulting animated TV series, comic books, etc.), and the ill-selling but much-loved claymation point-and-click adventure game, . After his gaming company, The Neverhood, Inc, closed its doors in 1999, TenNapel shifted his focus to writing and inking graphic novels. But he’s back! Or, at least, he’s probably back, assuming fans throw money at him.
TenNapel has teamed up with Pencil Test Studios, a new development studio lead by the animators behind both of TenNapel’s aforementioned games. Together, to help them put together something new, having already put around $100,000 of their own funds into the project. Called , the new game is a sort of “spiritual successor” (read: a sequel that isn’t really a sequel… but is about as close as they can get before things get sticky, legally.) to . Much like The Neverhood, it’s a point-and-click adventure. Also like The Neverhood, all of its animations are arduously handcrafted, frame-by-frame, through good ol’ fashion claymation. And they’ve pulled in some pretty crazy voice talent, just for good measure: they’ve got Michael J. Nelson, of RiffTrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000! And Jon Heder, of Napoleon Dynamite and Blades Of Glory! And Rob Paulsen, the voice of Pinky (of Pinky And The Brain) and Yakko! And Veronica Belmont, of Tekzilla and… the Internet! While details of the plot are being kept pretty hush for now, here’s what they’ve shared so far: Armikrog follows the adventures of a space explorer named Tommynaut and his blind alien, talking dog named Beak-Beak. They crash land on a weird planet and end up locked in a mysterious fortress called Armikrog. Then…the adventure begins! Is it a bit risky to pursue a game so similar to , given that the original… didn’t really sell all that well? Sure! But remember: it’s been over 15 years. That’s in the land of game development. They’ve got indie-friendly game engines to build on now, like the Unity3D engine they’re using here. They’ve got Steam to distribute on, rather than hoping that a point-and-click game would sell at retail. They no longer have to try to compress a mountain of rich animation and textures down to a 750mb CD. Most importantly, they’ve got the advantage of the modern, wide-spread Internet to bring their fanbase together, spread the word, and to make something like this possible. The page has been up for just over 12 hours now, and it’s already raised $70k of its $900k goal.
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Former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar And CTO Richard Tom Re-Emerge To Build A Stealth Startup In L.A.
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and CTO Richard Tom are working on a new stealth startup, according to sources. While details of their plans are still a little fuzzy, the two have secured office space in Los Angeles and are actively hiring engineers for their new startup. Kilar, of course, spent the last several years building and running Hulu, the “premiere spot for watching all your favorite broadcast TV shows on the web.” Joining early in the company’s lifespan, Kilar took the streaming rights from Fox, NBC and eventually ABC, and built the wildly popular TV catchup service. Prior to that, Kilar was an executive at Amazon, where he helped build the e-commerce giant’s online media business. Richard Tom was also a long-running exec at Hulu, joining the company in 2007, as well. After former CTO Eric Feng left in 2011, Tom took over that role and helped expand the company’s Hulu Plus service, which allows viewers to watch shows on a wide range of mobile phones, tablets and connected-TV devices. Both execs cashed out after Hulu parents News Corp, Disney, and NBC Universal bought out the 10-percent stake in Hulu that had been owned by private equity firm Providence Equity Partners last fall. That triggered a liquidity event that for his years of service. Not surprisingly, both left Hulu at the beginning of the year, leaving interim chief Andy Forsell in charge while . Now the two are teaming up again, with plans to launch a startup of their own, without having to worry about all the rights issues and corporate politics that they were subject to as part of Hulu. While there, Kilar took a couple of stands against corporate parents, including a blog post in which he . He and Tom will maybe get a chance to build an app or video service of their own. While we’ve heard that the two are still in whiteboarding mode, rumor has it that they are interested in working on a service that will be focused on the living room. That could mean building a company that complements today’s traditional TV or streaming media services, although people we’ve talked to say it’s unlikely that whatever they’re creating will involve licensing content directly. While they’re currently based in L.A. and are hiring there, that doesn’t mean they’ll stay in Southern California exclusively. We’ve heard whisperings that Kilar could also consider opening an office in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.
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Despite Strong Early Numbers, Netflix Stock Drops After “Arrested Development” Debut; Parents Also Angry Over Lost Kids Shows
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Maybe Netflix’s original content isn’t quite ready yet, after all. Today, a spate of bad news for the streaming service: its “Arrested Development” reboot failed to impress TV critics, and shares fell 5 percent as a result this morning. Meanwhile, angry parents are giving Netflix hell for its decision to drop popular kids’ shows like “Dora the Explorer” and “SpongeBob Squarepants” from its network – a result of the company’s decision to end its licensing deal with Viacom, as announced. For starters, you’ve been living under a rock if you hadn’t heard that Netflix was bringing back the one-time fan favorite and critical darling “Arrested Development” this month. The company had been promoting “Arrested” in every which way possible, with a series of goofy marketing stunts ranging from to and even a , among other . The buzz was palpable. In the week ahead of the big May 26 debut, from April 26 on, 77 percent of which were positive, compared with just 51,045 (68 percent positive) for its Kevin Spacey-backed original show “House of Cards.” Given that the “Arrested” relaunch fell over a holiday weekend here in the U.S., the new show should have been a runaway hit. People had plenty of free time to Season 4, and many of them did just that. According to from network intelligence company Procera Networks, about 10 percent of viewers made it to episode 15. The show, by the streaming numbers, was a hit. One of Procera’s DSL network clients saw 36 percent of devices watching Netflix on Sunday make it through at least part of one episode – three times the number it saw when “House of Cards” debuted (11 percent). Another cable network saw a jump in Netflix traffic peak at volumes of 10 percent on Sunday compared with the Sunday prior, corresponding with an 8 percent jump in the number of subscribers accessing Netflix overall. Even though it was a holiday weekend, and a traffic jump could be expected, a large portion of that was due to the show’s debut, Procera says. On one university’s network in the U.S., “Arrested Development” accounted for 10 percent of Netflix’s traffic. File-sharing activity around the show also increased, despite the show only appearing on a streaming-only, DRM’ed connection. Peak usage for “Arrested Development” on Netflix on Sunday was twice that traffic seen on Monday, with a range of 2-7 percent of total Netflix traffic on various networks being directly attributable to “Arrested Development.” But tuning in for a stream and actually enjoying the final product are two different things. The closest analogy to what may be happening here is having a much-anticipated new show with big stars debut to strong premiere numbers on traditional TV, but then taper off in following weeks. It’s harder to tell whether the new “Arrested” is an immediate flop, however, because the initial streaming figures are good and all episodes are available at once. But anecdotally, we’ve been hearing the show was just OK at best. Critics – the group who once lauded the program’s originality and humor – found the new season lacking. The Wall St. Journal , “At its worst, the new/old Arrested Development is reduced to doing a shaky imitation of itself: the characters and themes are there but the beats are slightly off, as is the tone.” , saying, “Chalk one up for the Internet: It has killed ‘Arrested Development,'” and “it’s hard to imagine being anything but disappointed with this new rendition.” Variety Netflix shares fell 5 percent as a result on Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, another storm is brewing on Netflix’s . Parents are losing their minds, as their iPad babysitter fails to deliver the shows their kids are demanding to watch, including big-name children’s brands like “Dora the Explorer,” “Go Diego Go,” “Blue’s Clues” and “SpongeBob Squarepants,” for example. For those of you without young children, let me paint a picture of what it feels like to suddenly discover these shows are missing. You’re trying to write an email/make a phone call/compose a thought/visit the toilet alone/read something/have a conversation with another grown-up/drink/etc., but all you hear is: Now imagine hours on end just like that. Close to a meltdown, you grab your iPad, type “D-I-E-G-O” in the Netflix search box, and see a message that reads, “your search did not have any results.” And then you start to cry. Got it? Apparently buoyed by the success of “House of Cards,” Netflix announced it would let its Viacom deal expire this month, as it attempts to negotiate licenses to select Viacom programs à la carte. (Likely this includes the missing shows causing parents’ ire, but the two companies are playing hardball here). In the meantime, Amazon Prime has the missing Viacom fare, and in a post about the enraged comments its earlier reporting saw, several of these shows are now in the top 10 most popular shows streaming on Prime today. Whether viewers will drop Netflix in favor of Amazon Instant Video, is of course, still unknown. But if “Arrested Development” isn’t worth the viewing, the kids are all watching Amazon, the latest releases are in the Redbox kiosk, and the quality TV is on HBO, Netflix is taking a big risk in dropping some of its most in-demand content as a negotiating tactic. It squandered user goodwill once with “ ,” then fought its way back. As one parent , “I am really tired of Netflix and all of its shenanigans over the years. Don’t you people care what the customers what?” The same thing might be said by the former “Arrested Development” fans out there.
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Google+ App For iOS Updated With New Automatic Photo Features, Hashtags And In-Stream Google Offer Posts
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Google unleashed a slew of updates to its Google+ social networking service at I/O earlier this month, and now a bunch of those new features are making it to the . The update follows , which arrived last week, and brings tons of new things to the version on Apple mobile devices, including , hashtags that curate related content on posts in your stream, and new interactive Google Offers that will pop up in the mobile stream and that can be instantly redeemed. The new photo features will probably be especially useful to mobile photographers, as they really do greatly improve the process of sharing online photos by automatically selecting your best pics using surprisingly accurate automated algorithms, and then applying various techniques to really make those photos pop. That could involve adding a slight vignette, enhancing contrast or correcting exposure, but it’s all done automatically using Google’s massive cloud computational power. In my experience with the desktop version at least, it does a job that’s remarkably similar to what the average enthusiast photographer might accomplish manually in something like Lightroom or Photoshop. The other new stuff should help with content discovery, thanks to the introduction of Google’s smart hashtags, which are automatically assigned to posts based on both term recognition from the words used, and using image recognition to identify landmarks and other items in pictures. With that feature, Google seems to want Google+ to be more of an interconnected web than a place where friends share discretely with their circles and don’t venture much further afield. There are a number of other features, such as the ability to edit comments and copy a post’s permalink to your device’s clipboard. But the Google Offer in-stream delivery is probably the most noteworthy in terms of how the average user’s experience will change. This essentially amounts to in-stream advertising, albeit of a kind that’s intended to give users instant access to offers relevant to their interests. The experience overall should be better, but it will still be interesting to see how people react to the arrival of Offers on the mobile browsing experience.
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Quora Grew More Than 3X Across All Metrics In The Past Year
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
famously doesn’t share its growth numbers. Due to this furtiveness, many people speculate that it is not growing. On Quora even: is a Quora question that smacked me in the face right as I opened the site to research this article. The first answer to the question brings up Quora investor refutation of such short-term thinking and asks, “The more pertinent question is if Quora’s growth rate is accelerating, holding steady, or significantly decelerating over time?” And, of course, for that, as well: “The answer appears to be ‘no,’ if we believe , and we probably shouldn’t dismiss it.” Well today, because of the startup itself has released on its blog, we know that that growth is accelerating, with all user numbers up at least 3x from where they were last May, including DAUs, MAUs, users registered, questions answered and questions voted on. The startup is hockey-sticking, according to founder Adam D’Angelo who, no matter how much I beg him, won’t show me where the y-axis of any of their growth graphs was a year ago. “Why are you choosing (and do you always choose) not to reveal actual numbers? Despite your users ,” I asked D’Angelo, because, while 3x in a year isn’t to be scoffed at, 3x of 10K DAUs is significantly less impressive. “We don’t see a good reason to,” he responded. “Usage numbers don’t reflect quality and user experience, which are what’s important to us.” “What do you say who bring up as evidence of your traffic decline?” I also asked, because when a company is clandestine like this, people look for external cues of success. “Since I have our real metrics, I look at those and not external ones,” D’Angelo says. He does reveal that this growth spans beyond Silicon Valley, disputing the perception that Quora is singularly Valley-focused. “All of California is less than 10 percent of usage. New York City is the biggest city.” In the question linked above, Thiel insists that focusing on hyper growth for consumer startups is an outdated and too-superficial heuristic. “The focus, particularly in companies with exploding growth, is on next month’s, quarters, or, less frequently, years. That is too short a timeline. Old Economy mode works in the Old Economy. It does not work for thinking about tech and high growth businesses. Yet startup culture today pointedly ignores, and even resists, 10-15 year thinking.” Thus I asked D’Angelo what the 10-15 year plan was for Quora: “You say you’re not planning on ever selling it in the video. What big opportunity will eventually justify the $61 million put in by investors 10-15 years from now?” “Our mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge,” he says. “We believe that if we can deliver on that mission at scale, we will create a lot of value for everyone.” He brings up this about the International Space Station as an example of that value. There are countless others like , , and especially . As the video intentionally highlights, Quora is hiring aggressively to fulfill this mission “through whatever it takes” and looking to fill product-development positions in engineering, product management, data science and design. If you’re interested, you can find its Careers page .
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Fandalism’s Philip Kaplan Launches DistroKid, An Affordable Way To Upload Music To Stores Like iTunes
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Earlier this year, Philip Kaplan expanded , his social network for musicians, , which allows musicians to bring their songs and albums to iTunes and elsewhere. Today he’s spinning out the distribution service as a separate site, which he’s calling . Kaplan, who previously founded or co-founded the blog FuckedCompany, the ad network AdBrite, and social-shopping startup Blippy, said he wants DistroKid to change the way people think about distributing their music. In the same way that Gmail taught people that they didn’t have to delete their email, Kaplan said DistroKid should convince musicians that they can always bring their music to online stores such as iTunes: “You shouldn’t have to think about it.” Tools like GarageBand have made it easy for users (including many who wouldn’t consider themselves musicians) to produce their own music. However, Kaplan said it’s still “a big decision if you’re going to upload your album,” because other services can charge around $40 per upload (TuneCore, for example, charges $29.99 per album for the first year, and $49.99 per album per year thereafter) — maybe not an enormous cost if you’re a professional musician, but enough to give you pause if you’re a hobbyist who just created something for fun. As a result, a lot of music ends up sitting on hard drives. With DistroKid, users just pay an annual fee of $19.99 and they get unlimited uploads. You can upload one song for free before you even enter any credit card information. The service includes uploading to iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play, with plans to add Amazon soon. Kaplan said it’s also much faster than competing services, which normally take three days to upload an album. With DistroKid, an album should be on iTunes within two to four hours, and users get emails updating them throughout the process. When Kaplan discussed the service with me back in January, he described it as a way to drive users to Fandalism, rather than a major business on its own. Until today, he’s been running it as an invite-only service, and users have already uploaded more than 1,100 albums. However, Kaplan told me that his view on how people will use Fandalism Distro/DistroKid has evolved, as he saw that some users were only interested in the distribution, not the social network. “I just sort of bit the bullet and said, ‘If I want this to be truly the best system in the world for uploading music to stores, it should be its own thing,'” Kaplan said. Hence the launch of DistroKid as a standalone site — Kaplan is demonstrating the service today at . That does mean Kaplan is now working alone to build and maintain two separate services — Fandalism and DistroKid. He said he still doesn’t plan to hire anyone else: “I have been building these companies that can be run by one person.” The key to making that approach work? “I’ve automated absolutely everything,” Kaplan said. “Every now and then there will be a problem, and rather than just fixing a problem, I have to build a system to fix the problem.”
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Photo Editing Platform Aviary, Now With 50M Monthly Active Users, Goes Global With New Japan Office
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
, the that has become a developer darling through its straightforward ability to integrate into iOS, Android, Windows Phone and HTML5 apps, has crossed a major milestone — and is aiming for even more growth. Today the company is announcing that more than 50 million people used Aviary in the past month, giving it an effective monthly active user (MAU) base of 50 million across its own app, as well as in the implementations of Aviary partners . Aviary is also gearing up for its first international presence, with an office in Japan slated to open next month. According to a blog post published today by Aviary’s CEO , that MAU figure represents 100 percent growth over the past six months alone. In all, he says, the Aviary platform has been used to edit more than 4 billion photos to date (up by a third from .) The upcoming opening of the New York City-based Aviary’s first international office in Tokyo, Japan, next month shows that the company isn’t content to rest on its laurels just yet. According to Peggs, Aviary has seen strong demand from the Asia region in general, so this will act as a foothold to grow further there. I’m told that Peggs himself will be heading out to Tokyo next month to work on staffing up the outpost. In his blog post, he said: “This year, we’ve seen huge demand from users and partners right across Asia. Partners are taking advantage of our localized SDK for photos and stickers, and are also working with us to create custom content for their users. We already have fantastic partnerships with companies like Mixi, one of the biggest social networks in Japan, so it makes perfect sense for Aviary to put feet on the street in Tokyo and start serving the region from there.” For all the talk in recent years about photo sharing “fatigue” in the tech space, it’s clear that creating images and sharing them with other people is one of the activities that human beings gravitate towards throughout history. And it seems like technologies that help us do that in a smart and intuitive way will never go out of style — and likely continue to grow in value. Aviary will certainly be one to watch as it looks to expand its platform worldwide.
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 16 | null |
Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With General Atlantic’s Brett Rochkind
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
On this week’s Ask a VC show, we have General Atlantic 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. Rochkind leads General Atlantic’s Palo Alto office, where he is co-head of the firm’s global Internet & Technology sector. He also recently returned from GA’s Hong Kong office, where he focused on investment opportunities in Greater China and the Asia-Pacific region, including the firm’s investments in Alibaba Group, Renren, Soufun and Lenovo. Rochkind has worked closely with many of GA’s portfolio companies in technology, including Box, Appirio and Bazaarvoice in the United States; Decolar, MercadoLibre and Grupo Linx in Brazil and Latin America; and PowerDsine in Israel. Considering his experience investing in the technology sector in both Silicon Valley and Asia, we’re curious what companies Rochkind is bullish on in China and the surrounding countries. Please send us your or put them in the comments below!
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The Zortrax Is A 3D Printer From The Polish Motherland
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Zortrax! Drukarko moja! Ty jesteś jak zdrowie. The Zortrax (yeah, really) M200 is a $1,899 3D printer made in Poland that will be shipped internationally by a team of crack Polish engineers and designers. It has a 7×8 inch build plate and can print objects of up to 488 cubic inches. It prints ABS and Nylon and has a specially treated plate so you don’t need to lay Kapton tape down before you build. The best thing? As the creators note, it comes in a “slick, aluminum” case “that just works.” “It really ties your office space together,” they write. Finally: a 3D-printer company that is thinking about the Feng Shui of your crib. Best of all, this guy makes it for you: All kidding aside, it’s interesting to see this sort of crowdfunding project coming out of Europe, let alone Poland. The company that created the is called and has headquarters in Poland and Hong Kong. They seem to have a great deal of experience in RepRap kits and the like, and this is their first foray into a fully functional 3D printer for less than $2,000. That they’re taking a chance on the world stage – and that they’re nearly funded – is a testament to the power of crowdfunding sites. Should you consider the badassedly-named Zortrax vs. something local like Makerbot? I’m not certain. However, if you want a bit of a deal, want to support the Polish motherland, and like your 3D printers to smell like kabanos, this might be the model for you. You can check out the here.
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Google Play Still Missing Top App Titles From iOS, Many Of Which Are Games
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Many of today’s tech companies and startups are . The problem stems from a lack of in-house talent, fewer Android-owning beta testers, technical hurdles, fragmentation issues, potential for revenue and more. And yet, there’s this general perception that when it comes to the size and scope of the two competing app stores, Google Play and Apple’s iTunes App Store are neck-and-neck. This is not the case. Leaving the critical metric of revenue aside ( ), Google Play is still lacking a large number of the “top” applications, both free and paid. During the first 20 days in May 2013, only 32 of the top 50 free iOS applications were available in the Google Play store, and only 29 of the top 50 paid applications were available in the U.S. The data comes from Canalys, which last week offered illustrating how both Windows Phone and Blackberry’s app marketplaces were missing top iOS and Android applications. Of the top 50 free and top 50 paid apps featured in the Apple App Store and Google Play in the United States (during the same time frame), the analysts found that only 34 percent were featured in either the Windows Phone store or BlackBerry World. So one has to wonder what hope either BlackBerry or Windows Phone has, when even a platform as massive as Android struggles to keep up. “The results show that Google still has some work to do itself to ensure that top iOS titles are making it into the Google Play store,” says Tim Shepherd, Canalys senior analyst, of the new findings. In terms of the missing iOS apps on Android, he says, some are services — like Twitter’s Vine app or Twitter Music, for example — while others are utilities like flashlights or “emoji” apps, where the functionality is more important than the app’s name itself. Others still, like “Find My Phone,” are Apple ecosystem-specific. In other words, you can try to make the argument that this data alone can’t paint a complete picture about the discrepancies between the two stores. But drilling down further where brands and titles do matter, Google Play still came up short in a number of key areas. The standout category where Google Play is missing top iOS titles is games — 9 of the missing 18 apps in the top 50 free iOS titles were games, and 12 of the missing 21 paid iOS titles were also games. Included in this group were Draw Something 2, Robot Unicorn Attack 2, and Sonic Dash on the free side of things, and Kick the Buddy: No Mercy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run, among the paid apps. This seems to indicate that, as studios continue to build out their lineups, they too are often going iOS-first. Meanwhile, other notable missing apps Canalys spotted include Wood Camera and Camera+ (though there’s an impostor for the latter benefitting from the gap, as is far too common an occurrence, I’ve found). Also missing, as noted above, are Twitter’s latest expansions to video and music, plus several popular utilities. Though Canalys was focused on the top of the charts, the problem extends much further down into the long tail, which makes the cost of switching from iPhone to Android more difficult for established users. (Having attempted the full switch myself for ages, I speak from experience. My SIM card today is in a Nexus 4, but my apps are on my iPhone 5.) For example, some apps which early adopters — like TechCrunch readers — may miss when moving to Android include the following: Social address books and ; LinkedIn’s ; Facebook’s and ; family messengers and ; smart assistants and calendaring apps like , , and ; Tumblr’s ; photo and social apps like , , , and ; photo print and card apps , , and ; video apps like , , , and YouTube’s ; Instagram ecosystem apps , , and ; TV brands Bravo, ABC Family, A&E, USA, Lifetime, and TLC; betaworks’ new game ; hot email app ; shopping apps like , , eBay-owned Svpply’s ; activity finders , , and ; news apps , , and ; and more. This is from a cursory glance at my own device, mind you. If you have favorite utility, business tool, kid’s games, or something even more narrowly focused – like AngelList-scouring apps or , for example — you’ll generally have better luck on iOS. Younger companies have limited resources for app-building, so they have to choose somewhere to start. And until tell them there’s more money to be made on Android, they’ll make the choice that has the most potential to impact their bottom line. It’s an unfortunate situation, to say the least, because on many fronts — cloud, like Google Now, plus a willingness to experiment and push forward with innovations like NFC-based mobile payments or , for instance — Android (and its OEM partners like Samsung) lead. Today, Android’s footprint is growing, and Samsung is . There’s a hunger out there for something new, but still, those missing apps matter whether they’re at the top of the charts or just those important to you. So for now, the answer to the question about which is the better platform — iOS or Android? — is “both of them.”
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Keen On … Antitrust: Why Startup Entrepreneurs Should Fear Google
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Andrew Keen
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Nobody can accuse , the Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer, of being intrinsically anti-Google. After all, it was Reback, back in the 90s, who spearheaded the U.S. government’s efforts to sue Google’s nemesis Microsoft – an enormously consequental event for the tech industry that made it possible for start-up entrepreneurs like Larry Page and Sergey Brin to successfully take on the Redmond leviathan. But now, Reback says, Google has, in a sense, become Microsoft, not only by abusing its dominance of the market but also by crushing all opposition to its products and services. “Keep clear of Google,” Reback thus advises any startup entrepreneur with an innovative idea in search. But Google hasn’t completely become Microsoft, Reback explains. What Google has learned from the Microsoft case, he says, is the importance of playing the political game – a game that Microsoft, at the height of its economic power, couldn’t or wouldn’t play. Thus Google has invested such vast sums in lobbying the U.S. government that, Reback argues, the FTC dropped their case against them because it was “too scared” to go after a company with many powerful friends in the Obama administration. Reback, however, urges government – both in Europe and in the U.S. – to be more resolute in their antitrust case against Google. If EU Competition Commissioner Almunia want to leave a meaningful historical legacy, Reback suggests, he should aggressively confront what he describes as Google’s “eminently provable” violations of European law. While in the US, Reback advises Edith Ramirez, the new FTC chairperson, to cede the Google antitrust case to the more powerful Justice Department. So who really cares what happens in some complicated and seemingly never-ending legal case in faraway Brussels or Washington DC, some of you might be saying. But, as everyone from to have realized, politics is critical if we are to enable genuine economic innovation. And just imagine if Gary Reback hasn’t spearheaded that antitrust case against Microsoft back in the 90s? Not only would Google probably not exist, but our thriving Silicon Valley ecosystem would be a pale imitation of what it is today. That’s why Reback may well be prescient in warning that the real loser, if Google isn’t reined in, are startup entrepreneurs, the Larry Pages and Sergey Brins of today, seeking to disrupt well-entrenched monopolies.
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Adobe Acqui-hires Creative Consultancy Ideacodes, Names Co-Founders As Creative Directors Of Creative Cloud
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 |
Adobe just that it has acqui-hired , a San Francisco-based creative consultancy that specializes in “the design and user experience of smart application, digital product and networked communities.” Ideacodes’ co-founders Emily Chang and Max Kielser will join Adobe as creative directors of Creative Cloud. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Ideacodes worked on products like the (now just like TechCrunch), ‘s new website (home to an of our own Alexia Tsotsis) and numerous other online properties. “For the last nine years we’ve worked to re-envision the design of digital products and create the ultimate user experience for their customers,” said Emily Chang and Max Kiesler, co-founders of Ideacodes. “We’re thrilled to join Adobe at a time when Creative Cloud is beginning to take form, the potential to harness the power of connected networks is being realized, and the influence of good design on experience is being appreciated and expected from people worldwide.” According to Adobe’s Jeff Veen, “The Ideacodes team will help us realize our goal of making Creative Cloud indispensable for creatives worldwide.” Today’s announcement comes just days after Adobe also . That acquisition, too, was mostly an acqui-hire, as Adobe also noted in its announcement today.
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Tumblr May Reject Yahoo’s $1.1B Acquisition Offer For Being “Too Low”
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Tumblr employees feel that Yahoo’s $1.1 billion offer is “too low” and view it as “only a first offer,” according to sources close to acquisition talks. Yahoo may have to increase the offer to close the deal. An acquisition by some tech giant is likely in the cards for Tumblr, though, as sources say the company only has a few months of cash runway left. The news comes after reported Yahoo was in advanced talks to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion cash, and the portal’s board of directors are set to meet on Sunday night to discuss the potential deal. reports that Facebook and Microsoft have also expressed interest in acquiring Tumblr. However, Forbes says that Yahoo has lock-up agreement arranged with Tumblr that prevents the blogging platform from holding a “bake-off” or bidding war for the right to buy it. If Yahoo comes to the table with an insufficient offer, which our sources say $1.1 billion may qualify as, Tumblr could reject it and shop itself around some more. A frothy M&A market could give it plenty of options. Others might not offer as much as Yahoo, but could offer a more appealing working environment. Take a chance turning Yahoo around? Or go somewhere more stable and relevant? A few months ago Tumblr let several companies know it was interested in possibly being acquired. Yahoo was the first to come to the table with a firm number, says one of our sources. They say Tumblr is apprehensive about accepting the $1.1 billion cash offer, though. Considering the much smaller, younger Instagram’s acquisition price was supposed to be $1 billion (in cash and stock, though, which would eventually make it worth less), it seems reasonable that Tumblr would view $1.1 billion cash as a lowball. Tumblr employees have been told that the company only has enough funds to operate for a few more months, as its costs far exceed the limited revenue it earns. Tumblr pulled in $13 million in 2012, but has accelerated its advertising offering in hopes of hitting $100 million in revenue this year. The money’s not coming in fast enough to support its expenses though. Employees were recently told not to be concerned, though, because the company is expecting to be bought. Of course, Yahoo might be able to push the deal through for $1.1 billion or just a little more depending on how the acquisition is structured. If it promises Tumblr’s CEO David Karp he can retain control of the company, provides the right retention bonuses, or won’t force Tumblr to shoehorn in integrations with Yahoo’s other properties, Tumblr may be more receptive. In the end it will be Tumblr’a execs and board who make the decision who to sell to and for how much. They could certainly ignore grumbling from employees. If the deal goes through, it might not be so popular with Tumblr’s users, who range from young hipsters to diehard Internet aficionados. Many thought Instagram’s user base would balk at its acquisition by Facebook, but the photo sharing service has continued to grow, offering some hope to Yahoo and Tumblr if their deal closes. If Yahoo successfully buys the startup, it could inject some much-needed “cool,” youthful energy, and design sense into the aging tech giant. That’s why Tumblr may not necessarily be worth more than $1.1 billion, but it’s worth more than that to Yahoo. The giant desperately needs to bring in as much talent as possible to replace or at least reinvigorate the ranks of uninspired employees. But if Yahoo pays more and Tumblr doesn’t help turn things around, it could be disastrous. Unfortunately, dialysis doesn’t come cheap.
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Grubless? Online Takeout Giants GrubHub And Seamless In Talks To Merge [Confirmed]
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems. As interest in food tech balloons, already appears to be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we’ve been hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that “arch rivals” and are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of course, any potential deal could fall through. [The GrubHub-Seamless merger was officially this morning, confirming most of what we’d been hearing in advance. For more details, .] Furthermore, it’s not yet clear what kind of synergies would take place, how management of the new entity would be structured or even what the new business will be called. The two companies would not confirm on the record on any of the above. But as far as the name goes, we’re hoping for Grubless. Or Hubless GrubSeam. But they have a nice ring to them, don’t they? If these rumors are true, the merger comes at a good time for the arch rivals, who have been seeing mounting competition of late from a laundry list of new startups entering the space, including increasingly popular alternatives like , , (meals from local chefs), , or the , like Delivery Hero and Just-Eat. If the online food-ordering and delivery market is roughly where daily deals were three-plus years ago, then the deal essentially creates food delivery. And like the daily deals market, food ordering has traditionally had a fairly low barrier to entry, which helps explain why we seem to see a new startup pop up in this space every week. Plus, the business model isn’t particularly complicated, which makes it replicable. That being said, the food industry has been slow to innovate and adopt new technologies over the years, leaving plenty of room for disruption. Especially in mobile. For any business, scaling is an expensive proposition (requiring tons of investment), and often becomes a profit-busting necessity as a result. However, once the online food ordering business model scales, it has the potential to generate a lot of cash (from taking a fixed slice of every transaction). So, if the merger between GrubHub and Seamless is about growth rather than cutting costs (or corners), then scale helps explain it. Together, the companies will be in over 500 cities, and that definitely counts as scale. The high margins at scale (in certain verticals within the industry, mind) are part of the reason why the “food tech” market has been so hot lately. Just ask venture capitalists, into food startups over the last year. (Compared to 2008, when investment in food was less than $50 million.) Plus, when you get right down to it: People need to eat. And, as it turns out, people are pretty busy. Uh, and lazy. Of course, for those who remember the spectacular failure of online food companies like Webvan, Kozmo and HomeRuns, this whole “tech in your kitchen” and online ordering jibber-jabber probably sounds familiar — and not in a good way. But this time it’s different. recently found, for example, that over 40 percent of adults in the U.S. have ordered food online, and 10 percent of restaurant orders now originate online — and these numbers continue to head north. GrubHub and Seamless have built successful businesses on this very concept. As to the motivation for the merger, while both companies have been around for some time — the New York City-based Seamless was founded in 1999, while the Chicago-based GrubHub got its start in 2004 — historically they have catered to two different markets geographically. GrubHub developed a firm foothold in the Midwest, while Seamless focused its early attention on NYC, before moving into cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, for example. From that perspective, a merger would make sense, allowing the new, consolidated entity to gain entry into markets where they lacked a major presence through the other. Writ large, while having some fundamental differences, the companies do seem to have a lot of synergies on paper — at least “nominally,” depending on who you ask — likely why they’ve seen increasing overlap in their businesses over recent years. Both companies are of fairly comparable size, as GrubHub has more than 20,000 restaurant partners across more than 500 cities, while Seamless has over 12,000 restaurants and serves nearly 5,000 businesses and more than 2 million users. was on track to generate more than $100 million in revenue this year, as it expands into new cities and focuses more aggressively on mobile. The company reportedly generated $85 million in revenue last year, growing its consumer business by 60 percent year-over-year and “will soon be processing $1 billion worth of food orders a year,” Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky at the time. For the majority of its history, the company focused primarily on New York, but launched a major expansion effort last year, bringing its service to 10 new cities. According to the report, Seamless saw its transaction volume quadruple in Los Angeles during 2012, with transactions tripling in San Francisco. Another interesting point to note: GrubHub was reported to be considering an IPO last fall. The company denied the rumors at the time, and if this merger is true, then they’ve been given the proper perspective. Certainly, it would seem that this wouldn’t take a potential IPO off the table, instead, likely making an opening price that much higher. The IPO rumors for GrubHub came at a time when the company was reportedly doing about $60 million in revenue (this was in 2012) — a little less than half that of Seamless. Furthermore, that GrubHub’s revenue has been doubling every year and, as the company reported $30 million in revenue in 2011, that revenue estimate would make sense and put the company on the path to crossing $100 million well before the end of this year. That is all to say that, although the terms of the potential deal are unclear, these are two sizable businesses that are growing relatively fast, so any potential valuation has got to be fairly high. After all: The two companies were fairly comparably capitalized and staffed, with GrubHub growing to over 350 employees and Seamless over 300, while GrubHub raised about $84.1 million from a mix of venture and growth equity firms (including Benchmark, Origin and Amicus) and Seamless raised $51 million, $50 million of which came from private equity firm Spectrum Equity. While both companies have made a couple of acquisitions, this would be the second big M&A deal for Seamless, as the company was acquired by food services giant, ARAMARK, in 2006. Five years later, Spectrum bought a minority stake in Seamless from ARAMARK, and about a year later, the food services company spun-off in Seamless to its shareholders. Free from its corporate ownership, Seamless proceeded to go out and buy MenuPages for $15 million, showing up GrubHub, which MenuPages had initially targeted as its acquirer. When GrubHub and MenuPages couldn’t agree to a deal, and it seems that GrubHub was instead in the process of buying Dotmenu/Allmenus, Seamless swooped in — . So, as you can see, the companies have a long history of jostling. While GrubHub had been out acquiring restaurant partners fast and furiously, Seamless stagnated a bit under ARAMARK, but since becoming an independent company (again) and with a new board/investors, the company seems to have been compounding its growth. Together, that growth could be exponentially higher. Finally, if this deal is in fact a go, it’s worth looking at this quote from GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney from back in 2011. In it, he shares his opinion on GrubHub’s top competitor, a little company called Seamless. : I typically don’t talk this much about Seamless because we don’t view them as incredibly strong competition for what we’re doing … Seamless fundamentally is a corporate catering business. They were founded years and years and years ago to do just that. And they’re still best in the business for corporate. They recently got into the consumer and residential pick-up and delivery. And they do it well in New York, but they really have zero business anywhere else. We don’t even consider them competition anywhere other than Manhattan specifically. So, there you go. A match potentially made in heaven, and one that’s sure to shake up online and mobile food ordering if it happens. Find and
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Google Now Introduces Mark Up Tools For Select Partners To Flag Flights, Hotel Stays And Reservations In Emails
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Google made a regarding how it’s pushing the developer ecosystem forward around Google Now, its intelligent personal assistant for Android devices. The company has begun extending mark up tools for emails from select partners, which help highlight flight schedules, hotel bookings and various types of reservations, to make sure that Gmail can spot that information and use it to auto-generate helpful reminders in Google Now. The extension of the platform tools available to Now partners was announced by Google’s Baris Gultekin, who was one of the creators of Google Now, which sprung out of a project he came up with in his so-called “20 percent time.” He spoke with Google’s Louis Gray on the Developer Live video stream which ran throughout the I/O conference this year. Gultekin was talking about ways in which Google is working to improve the quality and relevancy of the recommendations and data it surfaces. The project sounds like it’s fairly limited for now, but asking for help from the input sources of data seems like a smart way to supplement Google’s own data detection algorithms that are working to flag interesting data for Now’s use on their own data center side. Doing all the heavy lifting themselves might be more impressive, but if reaching out to partners can help improve user experience, then there’s no reason not to extend that hand. No word yet on whether Google will eventually make those mark up tools available for different types of data or open them up for public use, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where that happens, allowing developers and startups to provide the option of delivering all kinds of relevant information to users from their apps and services on Android. Then again, that has the potential to become overwhelming for users, so we might see a more metered, gradual approach. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5tFon4U0ok?feature=player_embedded]
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HTC Pledges To Pump Up ‘One’ Production While Samsung’s New Flagship Ships Like Crazy
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change. reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the company’s North Asia president, noted that this month’s production capacity for the flagship device is twice that of April, and that surge will only continue into June. Sounds pretty yawn-worthy, right? Normally I would spend too much time dwelling on the finer points of production capacity, but here’s a device that was launched to widespread praise by an underdog smartphone company , and HTC has basically been getting screwed thanks to and a brief injunction due to the . It’s like a perfect storm of headaches for a company that really, really doesn’t need it — and it’s clear that HTC needed this launch to go as smoothly as possible. It didn’t. For what it’s worth, HTC hasn’t disclosed how many Ones it’s shipped since it launched earlier this year. Meanwhile, rival Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has become the Korean electronics giant’s fastest moving smartphone — , and it hopes to cross the 10 million unit threshold by the end of this month. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that that runs a version of Android that’s unfettered by the software bloat that many a reviewer took umbrage at. Company representatives were careful not to call it a Nexus — even though it seems to harbor many of the advantages inherent to the Nexus line like a clean Android build and access to frequent software updates. As I noted towards the end of my HTC One review, the wireless industry isn’t a meritocracy — the well-executed device doesn’t always wind up saving the day. Hopefully now that some of these production woes have been ironed out we’ll see HTC live to fight another day, but that’s still far from a given.
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Uber Prepares For Another Fight With DC Regulators
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Just about six months ago, Uber won a big battle with D.C. regulators to have its on-demand car service approved for operation within the nation’s capital. But could severely hamper the company’s ability to offer low-cost services in the district. Last December, the D.C. City Council voted to approve a legal framework that legitimized mobile e-hail applications there, . It defined a new class of for-hire vehicles (taxis and sedans) that could use mobile apps as a way to connect drivers and passengers. The followed a year of negotiations with local regulators to get its services approved for usage within the district. (The very public fight even included a in which he took an Uber and then handed over a variety of fines to the driver.) Still, after a whole lot of back-and-forth, it seemed like Uber was finally in the clear. New regulations approved by the D.C. Taxi Commission last week could be a setback in the progress that Uber has made there, however. Among other things, those regulations would require mobile e-hail applications to integrate with the payment processor that is used within local taxicabs. That’s a non-starter for Uber, which currently has its own payment processor for in-app payments, and it could mean the end of UberTAXI in the city. Another set of rules, which is being considered now, would ban cars that weighed less than 3,200 pounds. That would keep Uber from offering fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, which would affect its ability to offer its lower-cost UberX service there. With the possibility of UberTAXI and UberX being shut down, the company would only have its legacy black car and SUV businesses in the city. Other regulations that Uber disagrees with would require Uber and other e-hail providers to hand over data related to rides that were booked using mobile applications. According to Uber, another rule could give the Taxi Commission the ability to choose whether or not apps are approved for usage in the city, and unilaterally keep Uber and other services from operating there. For its part, Uber has tried to once again mobilize its users to reach out to D.C. officials and petition the local government. It’s asked users to email and tweet at Mayor Vincent C. Gray, and has . That petition has already received more than 2,500 signatures, with 5,000 needed.
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Zynga Tells CupidWithFriends To Stop Using ‘With Friends’
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Zynga has apparently told the makers of the dating website that they need to change the site’s name, because it allegedly infringes on Zynga’s trademarks. CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7 (which also released the dating apps and ). The site , allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their friends. Apartment 7 co-founder Jared Tame just forwarded me a copy of the letter from Zynga’s lawyers. I’ve pasted the full letter at the end of this post, but the gist is that users are likely to think that CupidWithFriends is associated in some way with Zynga (which mobile gaming franchise, a franchise that ). So the social gaming company is demanding that CupidWithFriends change its name by May 24. Tame said he has “no plans to change the name of the product,” adding,”At the end of the day, we’re busy trying to innovate in the dating space and dealing with Zynga would be a major distraction to us. I think they should be more focused on innovating rather than targeting month-old startups like us.” I emailed Zynga for confirmation and details, but a spokesperson declined to comment. When I ran a search on (direct links to specific filings don’t seem to be working for me), I did find a trademark filing for “With Friends” in relation to computer game software and entertainment services. Tame isn’t the only one building an app named using a “with friends” name. There’s also (which has other problems, as it was ) — I asked the company whether it has received a similar letter from Zynga, but it declined to comment. Here’s the full letter to CupidWithFriends: Dear Sir or Madam: We serve as intellectual property counsel to Zynga Inc. (“Zynga”). Among other things, Zynga publishes and owns intellectual property rights in the ‘WITH FRIENDS™ family of social games, which includes Words With Friends®, Chess With Friends®, Scramble With Friends®, Hanging With Friends™, Matching With Friends™, Gems With Friends™ and Games With Friends®, as well as other ‘WITH FRIENDS games in various stages of development (collectively the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks). Each of Zynga’s games using the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks is published and played by millions of users on various social networking portals, including Facebook, Android and iPhone. Zynga has consistently used and promoted the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks together as a family and, as a result of Zynga’s extensive marketing efforts and commercial success, the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks is strongly identified by consumers with Zynga’s reputation for quality. It has come to our attention that CupidWithFriends has developed and launched an application called “Cupid With Friends”. CupidWithFriends’ use of the name “Cupid With Friends” for an online application is confusingly similar to the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks owned by Zynga, and users are likely to believe, erroneously, that CupidWithFriends’ application is published, sponsored, endorsed by or associated with Zynga. CupidWithFriends’ use of “Cupid With Friends” also dilutes the distinctiveness of Zynga’s famous ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks. Zynga has invested substantial time and resources in developing and promoting the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks, and it vigorously protects its rights in its marks, both collectively and individually. Zynga hereby demands that CupidWithFriends immediately cease use of the name “Cupid With Friends” in connection with its online application, and refrain from further exploitation of the goodwill that Zynga has developed in its ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks. We anticipate that you will accede to this demand, and ask that CupidWithFriends confirm by Friday, May 24, 2013 that it has ceased use of the name “Cupid With Friends” in connection with its online application. Nothing contained in this letter constitutes an express or implied waiver of any rights, remedies, or defenses of Zynga, all of which are expressly reserved.
Very truly yours,
/s/ Dennis L. Wilson
Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP
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Firefox 23 Lands In Aurora Channel: Kills Blink Element, Introduces Slew Of New Dev Tools
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
today bumped up , the pre-beta release channel of the popular browser, to version 23. With this, it is introducing a number of new tools for developers that will now slowly make their way into the stable release channel over the next few months. Sadly (or maybe not), this is also the first version of Firefox that does away with the good old element, a former staple of the horrid GeoCities websites of the 90s. On the user-facing side of things, this Aurora release also includes support for Firefox’s , which should keep users a bit safer when sites contain both HTTP and HTTPs resources. For Mac users, it includes new animations for swipe navigations and — finally — support for OSX 10.7’s new scrollbar style. The focus of this release is clearly on developers, though. Firefox Aurora now features a new network monitor that provides a standard waterfall timeline view of network activity on any given page. This data has always been available, but only through the Web Console, which wasn’t very easy to interpret. Also new in this version is a Remote Style Editor, which allows developers to test their web apps over a remote protocol in real time. Mozilla says the Editor should be compatible with Firefox for Android 23, which is also coming to the Aurora channel soon, and the team is working on incorporating some aspects of this technology into the Firefox OS simulator. Other new tools include a new preference menu dedicated to the developer tools, as well as a first implementation of SourceMap Support and changes to the Object Inspector. You can find a full list of changes .
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Gmail And The Stock Android Email App Combined Have Over 100M Mobile Users
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Google’s Vikram Aggarwal, a software engineer working on the Android platform, revealed today that Gmail and Email, the native Android client that still ships on Android devices as well, now has a combined user base of more than 100 million across the Android install base. It’s an interesting stat, because although Gmail and Email only represent two of a multitude of email clients available on Android, it’s likely that those two represent the email clients of choice for a wide swath of Android users. This means that a 100-million-strong active user base for those two combined is probably a pretty good reflection of the total active user base of Android itself, give or take a few million users. That’s a good figure to get, since we usually see more about total activations, which is a far less accurate measure of how many people are currently using devices. Activations occur whenever there is a full device reset, for instance, and people often upgrade to new phones, meaning their previous activation is no longer an active one. Google has passed , the company revealed at the I/O keynote earlier this week. Put in context of a 100-million-strong active user base for the core email apps operating on the platform, however, we get a picture of Android users which is much more down to earth. Estimates of active Apple devices have to take into account the . Updated to that version or being sold with it installed indicates there’s a good chance a lot of those are still in active use. Divining the total number of active users on either platform is one part magic and one part science, and the 100 million is likely shy of the actual total of active Android devices out there, but it’s still another piece of the puzzle.
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Apple Boots Bang With Friends From The App Store
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Uh oh. Less than ten days after on the iOS App Store, Apple has seemingly changed its mind and given it the boot. As I noted in the post at the time, I was actually a bit surprised to see Apple green light this one to begin with. The guys behind the app tried to chaste things up a bit for Apple, changing the name for the iOS version of their app to the slightly more inconspicuous “BWF” (The Android app, meanwhile, is still just “Bang With Friends”. Google don’t give no damns.) Alas, it seems that wasn’t enough for an extended stay. Apple has reportedly pulled the app without notice or explanation, with requests for the app in iTunes being met with the error below:
So what happened here? Did someone higher up at Apple get word of the app and decide to drop the ban hammer? Or could it be… something else? Note, for example, that Zynga just went after dating site CupidWithFriends for using their “With Friends” trademark, requesting that the name be changed. We’re looking into what happened. So is the Bang With Friends team, it would seem; a page put up by the team says they’re “working with Apple to get BWF back in the App Store shortly”.
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Ask A VC: Accel Partners’ Rich Wong On Whether You Can Build A Great Tech Company Outside Silicon Valley
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
This week, we hosted Accel Partners’ in the studio for our Ask A VC show. Wong, who has invested in Angry Birds (Rovio), Dealer.com, Mobilespaces, Atlassian, MoPub, talked about where he sees the next wave of disruption in mobile technologies. He believes mobile security is a huge opportunity mobile, especially at the enterprise level. We also chatted about whether entrepreneurs can build a great tech company outside of Silicon Valley. Wong has some interesting perspective on this considering that Atlassian’s headquarters are in Sydney, Australia and Rovio is based in Finland. Tune in above to hear what Wong’s favorite Rovio game is and more.
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Facebook’s Growth Since IPO In 12 Big Numbers
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
$FB is still stuck at $26.25, way down from its $38 IPO price, but it’s made important progress since going public a year ago. Daily users up 26%, mobile monthly users up 56%, and revenue up 38% are some highlights. It’s running out of people to sign up in the developed world, but with this growth and no serious competitor in sight, it’s survived its hardest year yet. [Stats and images provided by Facebook] Likes and sharing are growing faster than Facebook’s user count, indicating strong engagement. This contradicts rumors that people are tuning out of Facebook. , the CEO’s Moore’s Law-style theory, states that people will share twice as much every year. Facebook almost made good on Mark’s claim. It’s important that Facebook keeps that number growing as it’s Facebook and seeing its ads. To do that, Facebook is working on the more immersive mobile experience for its small number of active users. More time spent could lead to more sharing. This year it of its massively popular iOS and Android by switching them from HTML5 to native architecture, which lead to longer session times. It added to boost browsing, and to pull additional value out its data and get people to contribute more. It’s also been for iOS and Android to make it easier for apps to share content to Facebook. That’s a big reason Facebook cares about helping its developers grow — they’re scratching each other’s backs.
Facebook is still signing up people pretty quickly, but . While it earned $3.50 per user in the U.S. and Canada in Q1 2013, it only made $0.50 per user in much of the developing world including India and Brazil. Those emerging markets are where Facebook is getting most of its growth, meaning each subsequent 100 million users added is worth less than the last. Growth in mobile has a similar issue. Facebook can show as many as seven ads per page on desktop whereas it has to be more careful not to overwhelm the small screen on mobile. So as Facebook’s users shift their access medium to mobile, it may earn less on each of them. Facebook is hoping that getting developers to pay for mobile news feed ads to get their apps discovered could counteract this, and that market is poised to grow as more businesses launch apps and the developing world switches to smartphones. Overall, though, Facebook is still growing strong nine years after launch. should not be underestimated. Dislodging Facebook as the premier general purpose social network will require something that’s not just better, but much, much better. Competitors might pick away at certain use cases, but are unlikely to replace it as the core identity provider for the web. Considering Facebook’s willingness to buy out threats like Instagram (which is still growing quickly in the first world), could stave off disruption and let it reign for years to come. There’s no doubt about it. Going public made Facebook focus more on making money. It went from nearly zero revenue on mobile to $375 million a quarter, or about . That in large part came thanks to the it launched late last year. These let developers promote their apps in the Facebook news feed with ads that link straight to download pages in the Apple App Store and Google Play. These stores are getting more and more clogged with apps, inspiring developers to pay Facebook to get found. Facebook also made big headway with , its retargeted ads that use people’s browser histories to show them highly relevant ads. FBX is absorbing advertiser budgets set aside for retargeting. Less successful has been Facebook Gifts, its entrance into direct e-commerce. to produce meaningful revenue and may need to be overhauled to get more users purchasing real-life presents for their friends. Growth in payments revenue has been relatively slow too, as more game developers move from Facebook’s web canvas where it earns 30% to mobile, where Apple and Google get that cut. One opportunity that should excite investors is that Facebook started . While they use the standard Facebook targeting now, they’re expected to incorporate keyword targeting, which could make them a more direct competitor to Google’s wildly lucrative AdWords business. The increasing technological could be a boon to Facebook in the future. Right now few of them actively buy social ads, but expect revenue to shift towards Facebook and away from less targeted print and telephone book ads in the future. Still, Facebook isn’t trying to make as much money as it could. Another year went by without TV commercial-style (though they’re rumored to be getting closer to this), and it even . If Facebook built out these streams it might piss some people off or make them feel like they data is being exploited, but it could definitely produce a huge boost in revenue. Off-site and off-app ad networks could let Facebook leverage its enormous wealth of personal data to power ads elsewhere so it can earn money . That potential more than any is an argument for why Facebook is undervalued. Most importantly of all, Facebook’s efforts to earn more money have not significantly impeded its mission of connecting the world. There are definitely more ads on Facebook, especially on mobile, but the data shows that to reduce their engagement. Facebook has grown up. It’s no longer the red-hot startup that could double its user count every year. And it’s not the mature corporation churning out amazing profits by squeezing every last dime out of its data and usage. But Facebook has weathered the storm of going public without letting it destroy its regard for the user experience. It’s now a fundamental utility for most of the world. If it can keep from getting too greedy and stay focused on the long-term health of its community, it will have plenty of time to figure out how to turn the world’s life story into serious business.
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Don’t Let Your Company’s Scale Tip Your Bathroom Scale
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Any programmer or blogger knows that when you work on the Internet, on a computer, it’s easy to gain weight. Tech office pantries are stocked with Red Bull, candy, chips and even things you wouldn’t think were too unhealthy, like protein bars. Protein bars are basically injections of sugar. That’s why they taste like a Snickers. But what no one talks about is that the “Startup 15” is avoidable if you put in the effort, not to diet, but to be healthy. Because she is constantly around tech geeks and herself works online, blogger , who is both my friend and the wife of Google Ventures Partner , is acutely aware of this pain and has a solution: , a way to stay healthy without going crazy dieting. Reading a couple of weeks ago, I came across a passage that struck me as truth. In “Instagram, A Parable,” Instagram co-founder described a breaking point in his work/life balance as he tried to build the company. If you’re shoving down burritos in between database sharding, you probably can relate: “We never ate healthy at the release,” recalled Systrom. “At least in the beginning, we’d be so into our work that crafting a salad out of arugula and radicchio just wasn’t going to happen midday.” Instead, they’d opt for the local food trucks or burritos near the office. Without their even realizing it, weight started to creep on. “We were looking at old pictures from Instagram, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, you look so young,’ and I was like, ‘What does that mean? Do I have gray hair? That was like six months ago,’” Systrom explained. “After that I kept telling myself, ‘I’ve got to get healthy again.” Systrom had gained 25 pounds between in October of 2010 and its first 10 million users. “I bought a scale one day and realized my weight was up to 235,” he writes in Foodist. “And I had never been this heavy in my life. I used to be 210, and I was like, ‘That’s not okay.’ But I knew I was not going to pull a sorority girl and just eat salad, because I love food. I can eat less, but I’m not going to stop eating food I like just to lose weight. That would make me unhappy.” How did he do it? Exercise, by waking up earlier, making sure healthy food options were available in the Instagram office, the buddy system and saving indulgences for the real deal. He also packed a gym bag before bed, like a true hacker of life. “I knew that if I didn’t pack my gym bag with the clothes I was going to wear the next day, I wouldn’t make it to the gym. I also needed to lay out my workout clothes. I’d wake up in the morning and just make myself a deal: ‘Listen Kevin, all you need to do is put on those clothes and you’ll wake up on the drive to work and you’ll be fine.” Instagram ended up getting acquired for at the time. And Systrom (and Instagram developer Shayne Sweeney who was his partner in crime) ended up losing all the startup-induced weight: “We can tuck our shirts in finally. Seriously, I can fit into a large now and not the bulky extra large, and that felt really good.”
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Postach.io Turns An Evernote Notebook Into A Blog
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
One of the more interesting projects to emerge from hackathon is called , a new blogging platform that turns your Evernote notebook into a content management system. Input Logic, the Vancouver-based company behind the now just four-week-old service, has already caught the attention of local investors, as well as Evernote, who met with the team to discuss possible monetization ideas. was founded two years ago by UI designer Shawn Adrian and programmer Gavin Vickery, with the intention of becoming a software development firm. The company bootstrapped its first app, proposal writing aid , and has sustained itself with contract work over the past couple of years. The five-person team (three full-time) has worked for clients, including Nest, Michael Kors, ski resort Mt. Washington, and others, doing everything from coding to design. This year, the company stopped doing client work to focus on Postach.io instead. Adrian says that, initially, neither he nor Vickery were Evernote users, having “not drank the Kool-Aid,” so to speak. But at the urging of Lance Tracey, partner (now investor, who just funded the company with $200K), they decided to take another look. “We started playing with it, got into it, and said ‘hey, this thing has really come a long way,'” Adrian explains. “And Gavin especially just got fully addicted to it,” he adds. Later on, when the co-founders were collaborating on documentation for a newly redesigned QuoteRobot using Evernote, a thought occurred to them: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could just publish it instead?” Vickery, too, wanted that same functionality for his own blog – he writes all his blog posts in Evernote anyway, why not just publish directly from there? So they decided to build a service that did just that. Having worked on CMSes in the past, the team built to include nearly everything you would expect from a lightweight blogging system: customizable themes, RSS (Atom) feeds, built-in Disqus commenting, support for multimedia, and more. In fact, anything you can store in Evernote – images, audio, video/YouTube, etc. – will work on Postach.io, too. Currently, are reminiscent of sites like or , favoring clean, minimalistic design and rounded icons. Now the plan is to extend Postach.io’s feature set even further, with special themes designed for Evernote Food and Hello app users, as well as support for social sharing, wikis, and community features designed to help new bloggers have their content found. To use Postach.io yourself, after setting up an account and authorizing the service with Evernote, it’s only a matter of tagging posts in a pre-determined notebook with the tag “publish” to make them go live on your blog. You can also use Evernote’s date field to schedule posts for a later time. Blogs are given their own subdomains like .postach.io, for example, but you can have them work with your own URL instead, if you choose. In the future, the service might monetize by charging for premium features or converting users to Evernote Premium, while doing a rev share with Evernote. But those ideas are still in the works. Today, the focus is on growing the product and user base, which today includes 1,500 bloggers who signed up since the April debut. Blogging platforms, of course, are numerous – from the big guys like Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger to newcomers like Medium, Svbtle, and . But the team behind Postach.io see the value in building on top of a successful platform instead of creating a destination site of their own. (And they’re not the only ones with the same idea: see also or maybe .) “One of the big things with Evernote is that you own your content – it’s actually on your own computer,” Adrian explains. “Even if our servers are struck by lighting and everything falls apart, everyone will have their blog posts.” Interested users can . [vimeo 63611746 w=400 h=300]
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This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: All Google I/O, All The Time
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Google’s major developer conference, , went down this week. Was it a bit of a letdown? Probably. Did cool stuff still come out of the event? Eh? Maybe? We discuss these topics and more this week on the TC Gadgets podcast. In fact, we even had Frederic Lardinois join as a guest, along with John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook (that’s me!), Romain Dillet, and Darrell Etherington as Bob McKenzie. Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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Amidst Tumblr Acquisition Rumors, Yahoo To Hold Product Event With Marissa Mayer On Monday
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Yahoo has been on an acquisition tear of late, snapping up apps and mobile startups like they’re going out of style. Summly, Astrid, GoPollGo, MileWise, Loki Studios have all been acquired in the last month-and-a-half, while Yahoo simultaneously made a play . With that falling through, rumors have begun to swirl that Yahoo is making a bid for Tumblr, . Is this desperation or genius? Everyone has an opinion, which to Mayer’s credit is not something one has been able to say about Yahoo for a long time. On Monday, it seems that we may get a better sense of what Yahoo plans to do with all these new acquisitions, as that Yahoo will be holding a “product-related” news event on Monday in New York City. Marissa Mayer will reportedly be speaking at the press conference, but that’s all we know about the contents of the event at this point. Yet again, Yahoo’s CEO shows that she understands how to leverage the press to get the company back into the conversation. This has already led to speculation over what Yahoo will announce, if anything, at the event. Amidst the rumors of its potential billion-dollar bid for Tumblr, some are saying that Yahoo might use the stage to announce yet another acquisition. Even if a blockbuster acquisition isn’t the focus of the press conference, people will still be talking about Yahoo. At the very least, let’s hope Yahoo begins to explain the strategy behind its acquire-and-shut-down approach and what its “big” plans are for mobile — doesn’t quite do it. [tweet 335470093876207616 align=’center’]
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 28 | null |
Google+ App For Android Quietly Switched To WebP Image Format A Month And A Half Ago, Saves 50% Bandwidth
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
About a month and a half ago, Google switched to its own in its , the company revealed at its in San Francisco today. This, Stephen Konig, a Google product manager who focuses on WebP and Chrome Remote desktop, and Make the Web Fast team member and Chrome developer advocate Ilya Grigorik said in today’s presentation, is saving Google – and its users – about 50% in bandwidth. Google+ App For Android Quietly Switched To WebP Image Format A Month And A Half Ago, Saves 50% Bandwidth Google+ is obviously a very image-heavy service and given that Android can display WebP natively since the introduction of version 4.0, this was a pretty logical move for the team. The team, however, also said that the plan is to introduce WebP to virtually every other Google product, too – and possibly within the next year. The slide the team showed during the session including the logos of YouTube, Google Image Search and virtually every other Google product (and sadly I didn’t catch it in time). The company made this switch very quietly, just like it did with the Chrome Web Store . In the Store, the team reiterated today, using WebP resulted in image sizes that were about 30% smaller than using PNGs. The current problem for WebP – which can save developers a good amount of bandwidth thanks to its improved compression ratio – is that it’s only natively supported in Android, Chrome and Opera. For other platforms, developers still have to service traditional JPEG or PNG images or use other tricks to display WebP. The WebP team, however, also said that it believes Firefox will within the next year, too, and seems pretty optimistic about the format’s future (but then, of course, they would say that…).
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Google Play In-App Purchase Revenue Growth Jumps 7X In One Year, Subscription Revenue Growing 2X Each Quarter
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Google held a session today at about how to make money on Android, and in the initial few minutes it shared some updated stats around Google Play revenues and how those are progressing. Not surprisingly, the big growth is coming with in-app purchases, though Google’s recently launched subscription model is also making headway. Google said that its in-app revenues through Play are up 700 percent since the same time last year, which is reflected in the top apps as listed by highest grossing titles in the Play rankings. Subscriptions, which just launched around 12 months ago, is also making headway, doubling inbound revenue each quarter according to Google. Some apps which use subscription as their exclusive revenue model are now cracking the top grossing list, like Pandora. The momentum is still clearly behind in-app purchase, and as a result Google suggested that there’s good reason to consider that as a revenue model when building apps. Session host and Google Play Product Manger for Commerce and Monetization Ibrahim Elbouchikhi said that while the team likes to play a game called “Where’s Minecraft?” where they spot the world simulation sim from Notch, which continues to sit high on the charts despite being a one-time purchase paid app, the trend is overwhelmingly favoring freemium experiences. Other key trends identified include a higher propensity to buy things on tablets vs. phones. Google framed this in light of its attempts to get developers to build tablet-optimized experience, saying that there’s a 1.7x higher purchase rate on tablets than on phones for apps. Also, updated versions of apps that take advantage of recent platform additions like the new capabilities unveiled at I/O this year have a 2.2x advantage at monetization vs. older versions, on average. For Google, spelling that out is a way of it being able to show devs that it makes financial sense to invest the resources and efforts needed to convert apps to tablet versions, or to make them available with as many new features as possible that show off Android’s system improvements. And it does look to be having an effect on Google’s efforts to improve Android user monetization; Elbouchikhi said that average revenue per user (ARPU) among the Android install base is up 2.5x versus the same time last year.
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Behind The Scenes Of The Big Google Maps Redesign And Its Technical Challenges
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
Google unveiled its completely on the web at I/O 2013, and at a panel dedicated to the new Maps experience, Maps User Experience Design Lead Jonah Jones and Engineering Director for Maps on the web Yatin Chawathe took us through what went into creating Maps and the engineering effort behind the considerable change seems prodigious. Specifically, Jones and Chawathe took us much deeper into two of the main driving concepts behind the redesign of Maps, including “Building A Map For Every Place” and “Explore The World.” The former has to do with customizing maps every time a user clicks on a new location, in real-time and with more contextually relevant information, and the latter involves providing beautiful imagery including via Earth integration directly into maps, and with 3D virtual photo tours. In making a Maps product that is extremely adaptive to both a user’s personal input sources and to specific locales, Google had to rethink its approach to maps, and it looked to the way we casually share directions as a marker of a good system for surfacing relevant information. When you draw a map on a napkin, you are automatically filtering out the most important information, and doing it with your specific audience in mind. The result is a simplified map, that involves maybe a few major routes, as well as smaller roads, and a prioritization that doesn’t necessarily reflect how important a road is to the general population.
“A map draw for you is great because it highlights aspects and things personal to you,” Jones explained, adding that there’s also nostalgic value in something like a hand drawn map. Google wanted to be able to replicate both of these, and so it took an engineering approach to automate a process that’s normally human-powered. Google didn’t want to exactly replicate the hand-drawn map, however, since it leaves out a lot of information that you want to still be present in a modern, digital, interactive map. But it did want to subtly highlight and downplay certain map elements, bring to the fore aspects that are useful and fading back others that aren’t as important. To do that, it took a big data analytics approach. First, for a specific location the new Maps algorithm will analyze the entire set of people looking for directions in that area, and then highlight the routes that come up most often. Then from that subset they’ll focus in even further and weigh more vs. less important routes, based again on aggregated user data. They can see which roads are more popular, and then pop those out vs. the less important ones. Finally the less important ones are cut away, and you’re left with something resembling the hand-written map. Once those are flagged, however, you could still be missing info on the ground regarding very small routes important to a specific place. Those are then targeted via a hyper local re-labeling algorithm that addresses just the immediate surroundings, adding labels to key routes and taking them away from other locations to decrease clutter and subtly change the focus. That then informs the UI rendering of the Map itself, which still retains the street markers for all surrounding routes. Lines along routes important to getting there are made bold and lines on less important streets are thinned out, but not removed in case some users still require that information. It’s about drawing attention and changing perspective, not eliminating something altogether.
All of the above takes advantage of the immense processing power in Google’s data center to do the whole thing in real-time every single second, for every single one of Map’ millions of users. Yet the impact on a user’s computing requirements is minimal; Google sends even less data than it did with the previous version of Maps, keeping bandwidth requirements low. Google’s other big addition to the new Maps experience has to do with bringing beautiful imagery to the web, in the form of both Google Earth 3D flyovers and the new virtual tours that provide an up-close-and-personal view of some prime spots. Those virtual tours also represent a massive engineering effort, one which Chawathe explained in broad strokes on stage. The virtual tours are a crowdsourced effort, which users may not even realize they’re actively contributing to. The images are drawn from pictures uploaded to Google+, Panoramio and other sources within the Google photo sharing ecosystem. To get from that group of photos to an actual 3D tour requires a lot more than just aggregating photos, however. Google says it can map not only where every photo in its database was taken, but can also tie each individual pixel in every image to a very specific location using its algorithm, making it much easier to stitch sets together. Once that process is complete, it’s left with a point cloud that can flesh out a region, but that’s a brute force approach, and some art is required to make it look good. That involves filtering the photos, picking ones that show the landmark in context with its surroundings, ones that show the landmark clearly from visually pleasing angles, pics that capture architectural detail, interesting picturesque scenes in various lighting conditions and more. It picks these photos based on visual recognition tech and their popularity and ratings on Google properties; so an image that gets a lot of +1s on Google+ will be rated over one that’s got none, for example. Once it has a set of top-quality pictures, it determines an order in which they should appear that makes the most sense. Even then it wouldn’t be smooth as a finished product, however, since there gaps and the transition between angles would involve a lot of bizarre warping and image artifacts that would taint the overall experience. So finally, Google’s algorithm goes back to the larger set of images and picks ones that fit nicely in the gaps. These don’t need to be the best quality, since they’re just filling out the animation. Jones said that what they’ve built is impressive, but still pales in comparison to what a human artist could achieve manually stitching together their own photo tour. He hopes to bring up Google’s automated process to the point where it’s impressive regardless of the source, and comparable with what humans are capable of working on their own. In response to a question from the audience, Chawathe also said that Google could in the future look for a way to make its 3D guided tour feature a consumer tool. It sounds like it’s not something Google is currently developing, but putting that power in the hands of Google+ users for instance might make it more of a draw for photography enthusiasts. Google already showed that it’s making efforts in that direction with the new auto-enhance and auto-awesome features it introduced for G+ at I/O. These efforts show how Google is making use of its immense computer processing power to deliver experiences via Maps that reflect a continually changing world. It sounds like this is just the beginning for both of the projects, too, and as with every major change, we’ll probably see more refinement of these approaches as users come on board and provide more feedback.
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Google Introduces Portable Native Client, Makes It Easier For Developers To Add C And C++ Code To Their Web Apps
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
– a technology that allows developers to run native compiled C and C++ code as part of their web apps – has long been a part of Google Chrome. Even though other browser vendors haven’t adopted it yet, Google is clearly putting quite a few resources behind this technology and at I/O this year, it announced (or PNaCl, which Google says we should pronounce as “pinnacle”). PNaCl is now in developer preview in Chrome 29 and will slowly find its way into the stable version over the coming months. PNaCl, the company , will allow developers to write web applications “that are truly architecture-independent.” It’s essentially an architecture-independent version Native Client, so unlike now, developers can write their apps and know that they will run on ARM and X86 (both 32-bit and 64-bit). PNaCl, the team says, uses an infrastructure with a “compile -> link -> translate” workflow that creates an intermediary bitcode, which is then translated locally for the specific infrastructure. That’s some pretty complicated stuff, but essentially it will allow developers to write high-performance apps that offer near-native speeds for today’s existing platforms and they can be sure that these apps will also run on new architectures as they become available without having to rebuild their apps (assuming, of course, that Google will continue to support this product). Other browser vendors, of course, are also trying to speed up web apps. Most recently, for example, Mozilla the project, which ports C and C++ code to asm.ja – a subset of JavaScript. This scheme, Mozilla says, allows JavaScript code to run at speeds within 2x of native performance. That’s not quite what Native Client can achieve, but the advantage of Mozilla’s approach is that the JavaScript code that the system generates will run in any browser – just slower than on Firefox.
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With $1.5M Led By Winklevoss Capital, BitInstant Aims To Be The Go-To Site To Buy And Sell Bitcoins
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 |
and , the twin Harvard graduates who famously sparred with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and are now working as tech investors through , are part of the who have taken a . Last month, it was revealed that they personally , a stake worth the equivalent of some $11 million. And now, the Winklevosses tell TechCrunch they have invested in Bitcoin in another meaningful way — by leading a funding round for a startup in the space. , a New York City based startup that operates an online platform for buying and selling Bitcoins, has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Winklevoss Capital with the participation of other strategic investors including money services veteran . The investment was closed this past fall, but the Winklevosses are just now publicly announcing it in the lead-up to the 2013 Conference . BitInstant, which has a full-time staff of 16 led by CEO , has emerged as a key player in the nascent Bitcoin market: The company already processes approximately 30 percent of the money going into and out of Bitcoin, and last month alone facilitated 30,000 transactions, the Winklevosses said in a phone call this week. The funding is meant to allow the company to further scale up its staff and product as it angles to become the go-to site for Bitcoin transfers. The Winklevosses say they were attracted to invest in BitInstant in large part because of its leadership. CEO Shrem is the vice chairman of the , and CIO previously worked with the core developers on the original . “Charlie has been in the space for a very long time, and he has an impeccable reputation among Bitcoiners. He knows everyone in the space and everyone in the space knows him,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “One of the most exciting things about people who are into Bitcoin is that they’re a really passionate community, and Charlie is a passionate entrepreneur. He would be in that category of someone who lives, breathes, and sleeps Bitcoin.” Speaking of that community, the world of Bitcoiners does indeed have to it: There’s an underground vibe that seems like it would contrast with the more traditional East Coast prep style of the Winklevosses. In our phone call, Cameron and Tyler said that they’re intrigued by the current feel of the Bitcoin space — and its potential for becoming a bit more structured in the coming years. “We’re definitely pretty fascinated by it. The classic issue with Bitcoin is that it’s very early days,” Tyler said. “The entrepreneurs in the space are very impressive, but it takes really two areas of expertise: One is technology, and the second is understanding money services and regulation and all those things that are important for sustainability. Most entrepreneurs and companies we see in the space have the tech down, and they’re super strong there, but in terms of being buttoned up and looking like an average bank, it’s hard to couple both of them together. We think that BitInstant and Charlie do a fantastic job of doing both.” This marks the third big-name funding news for Bitcoin startups in just a few days. Earlier this week Adam Draper announced that half of the companies in will be focused on bitcoin, and yesterday Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund . It will be interesting to see how the Bitcoin space in general evolves as even more buttoned-up types and traditional money managers get involved.
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Mystery Motorola Phone Passes Through The FCC, Looks Just Like Early X Phone Leaks
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
Here’s a little noodle-scratcher for you fellow mobile hardware nerds to ponder this evening. This little Motorola Mobility beauty, brandishing the model number XT1058, recently and left the customary paper trail in its wake. All right, maybe calling it a beauty is a bit of a stretch, but here’s the kicker: The rudimentary sketch included with the listing bears a striking resemblance to a slew of earlier leaked images that purportedly showed off Motorola’s . Consider the alignment of those three circular elements on the back — those bits match up rather nicely with the camera, LED flash, and Motorola logo/button as seen in images of an unreleased smartphone originally circulated by the team at Even the seemingly curved section along the top edge where the device’s headphone jack lives and the placement of what appears to be the sleep/wake button are spot-on when compared to those leaked photos. Having a hard time visualizing all that? Here’s a side by side view to give you a sense of the similarities: Of course, this doesn’t bring us any closer to figuring out what the device is actually capable of — all the FCC’s listing reveals is that this thing sports radios for Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac and NFC. It could be that this is the first regulatory appearance of the so-called XFON, a device that noted gadget leaker . After all, the XT1058 has been found to support AT&T’s particular LTE bands, and the XFON’s IMEI label clearly calls it out as an AT&T device. At this point no one (save for the lucky chump who snapped those photos in the first place) can definitively say whether or not the XFON and this curious AT&T device are the same, but it’s distinctly possible. There are a few cosmetic similarities between the two — namely the Motorola logo stamped on the top-left corner, the shape of the speaker grille, and the placement of the indicator LED and the front-facing camera. Don’t pay too much attention to the chunky chassis though, as it’s not uncommon for non-final hardware to undergo testing clad in patently ugly shells. You may recall that BlackBerry’s Dev Alpha and Beta devices lived in similarly unflattering boxes before the innards were officially unveiled at a series of simultaneous launch events back in January. For all of the things that Google is expected to show off next week at its annual I/O developer conference (the refreshed Nexus 7, a unified chat system, redesigned Google Maps, etc.), a brand-new smartphone wasn’t expected to be one of them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the X Phone (or XFON, whatever) make an appearance in San Francisco. But there has been a distinct lack of chatter that leads me to think that such a smartphone isn’t on the agenda. After all, Google’s been downright lousy at keeping things under wraps lately.
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Norway’s Crown Prince And Princess Talk Startups And Try Out The Oculus Rift
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and his wife Princess Mette-Marit were in Silicon Valley this week, and I asked them about their hopes to bring more startups and innovation to their home country. I interviewed Haakon and Mette-Marit at Norway’s , a co-working space in Palo Alto for Norwegian startups looking to enter the US market. The couple saw demos from several startups — the prince even tried on some — it was part of ‘s demo of its technology for capturing and exploring 360-degree video footage. (He said it was “pretty awesome.”) Haakon actually lived in the Bay Area a decade ago, when he was attending UC Berkeley. He told me that he also attended the opening of the Innovation House 18 months earlier — since then, it has been used by more than 25 companies. Norway is “constantly trying to foster a culture of innovation,” he said. When I asked what kind of relationship they would like to see between Norway and Silicon Valley, Mette-Marit said: I think it’s important that we have this house as a starting point. But obviously, we also have examples of companies that have been doing very good here before this house came … I think that’s important that you have some companies that have done well and are willing to take on a sort of mentoring role for the other companies coming after. I didn’t get a chance to go into too much depth with the couple, but I thought it was interesting to see them discussing these issues at all. The video concludes with a short interview and demo of technology from , one of the companies at the Innovation House. It’s developing gesture-based controls, sort of like Leap Motion, but designed to integrate with tablets and smartphones. By the way, you might notice that I usually refer to the crown prince and princess in the third person. That’s because I was told that’s the polite way to address royalty, though I suspect I still messed it up somehow.
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QFPay, The Square of China, Is Processing Close To $400M Per Year
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
‘s card reader admittedly looks a bit clunkier than its U.S. or European equivalents Square or iZettle. It looks like a wonky, old calculator. But that’s because Chinese consumers don’t trust merchants easily and a basic phonejack reader without a keypad makes them nervous, says COO Tim Lee. He says consumers are worried that their PINs will get stolen by unscrupulous merchants. “Aesthetically, it’s not that beautiful,” he said. “Square is very Apple-like and we’d want to have good design, but we are practical for two reasons. We must have a PIN pad in China and secondly, we have limited money so we’d want to build a minimum viable product and then keep on improving.” Because of these more practical modifications, QFPay is seeing traction that has it processing close to $400 million per year on an annualized basis. They have 30,000 merchants all over China and recently picked up funding from Sequoia China, although the size of the round is still undisclosed. Among their clients are better-known names like Groupon-like 55Tuan, which uses QFPay to collect fees from merchants all across China. QFPay’s model is slightly different from Square’s. For one, they don’t give away their readers for free. They charge 899 renminbi or just under $150 for each one. Competitors like Lakala also charge for their readers at about 199 renminbi a pop. QFPay’s transaction fees also legally have to be a lot lower than what U.S. and European companies can charge. They don’t charge more than 0.78 percent per transaction, which is one-third of the 2.75 percent that Square charges. That cuts the company’s margins on every swipe, although Lee says that R&D costs are substantially lower in China. QFPay also recently released an API that lets third-party developers create payment experiences. (Square does not currently offer an API.) It’s still early so there just 100 developers on the platform. The Chinese market has myriad challenges, which could also be good opportunities for QFPay. For one, penetration for point-of-sale terminals is still quite low. Lee says only about 5 million merchants out of China’s estimated 100 million have proper point-of-sale machines, so QFPay has to do a lot of education on why its products are valuable. The country is also heterogeneous with different provinces having different business cultures. “In the north, merchants just have a leisure life. They open the shop and go home at 5 of 6 p.m.,” he said. “But in the Southern provinces, they will stay open until midnight.” The Western provinces are also far less developed than the coasts, with many Chinese merchants still carrying feature phones. Lee said they started working on the company about six months after Square launched. The company’s management team has experience working for PayPal, MasterCard, HSBC and Western Union; that breadth of experience spans the entire history of digital payments in the country. They face internal competitors like Lakala and iBoxPay, but Lee says those are consumer-facing solutions. He says they basically target reader sales at consumers that want to pay for utilities and other services through their phones. But QFPay is aimed at merchants and the company is working on all sorts of software tools to handle CRM, analytics and loyalty products.
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Sina Weibo Will Monetize Through E-Commerce, Not Ads, Alibaba CTO Jian Says
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
One interesting thing to watch is how social networking platforms mature divergently as businesses around the world. Sina Weibo, the public microblogging platform that has had a huge impact on online discourse in China, is veering down a path toward e-commerce and transactions after Alibaba took a stake worth $586 million in it last month. The platform is one of the two more influential social networks in China today, with the other being Tencent’s messaging app WeChat. But unlike WeChat, Sina Weibo’s growth has slowed over the last year and its parent company Sina has had visible issues in monetizing the platform. (It feels a little bit like the heat Twitter had a few years ago for taking longer to bring in revenue-making products like promoted tweets and in-stream ads.) “Weibo is pretty mature right now,” said Alibaba CTO Wang Jian in an interview. “It’s not in a fast growth period.” In the Sina’s last earnings report, the company said Weibo made just under $50 million in revenue, or about 12 percent of overall advertising revenue. But investments in the company contributed to an $8.5 million operating loss for Sina last year. Now with Alibaba’s investment, it looks like Weibo will take a different money-making path than its Western counterparts, which are more dependent on sponsored stories or in-stream ads. “I think the best way to monetize Weibo is through e-commerce, not by ads,” Jian said. “That’s what I believe. That’s my personal thought. Weibo has a very good chance to integrate with the Alibaba business.” It’s a win-win deal. Alibaba, which is veering toward an IPO, is China’s dominant e-commerce company and has an extremely data-driven culture. But it hasn’t been as successful with its own homegrown social networking efforts. At the same time, Sina isn’t widely considered to have the same caliber of technical talent as China’s other flagship Internet companies. While Jian didn’t give a lot of detail on how they would integrate the two platforms, one could imagine that users could get targeted offers on goods and services related to things they’ve posted status updates about. “We just need time to find out how to have a synergy of data between the two companies,” Jian said. “Weibo just gave us a new challenge for that.” As for Aliyun, the smartphone OS that Jian is overseeing, Jian says that he doesn’t think the platform will fit Weibo — which is sort of hard to believe considering that Weibo is a mobile-centric product. “I don’t think Aliyun really fits the Weibo deal,” he said. While Tencent’s WeChat, which has surged to 190 million monthly active users over the past year, isn’t a direct competitor, Jian says it is in terms of other metrics. “If you’re thinking about time that people spend on their devices, then you can say it’s a direct competitor. If you look at it from just a media perspective, I don’t think it’s direct competition. Two years ago, everyone spent time on Weibo, and now Weixin (WeChat) is becoming that app. It’s really a time spending problem.”
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Lobby Unravelling As Musk And Sacks Leave
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
The technology industry’s newest high-powered political lobby, FWD.us, is unraveling just a month after it launched, as two of its biggest partners, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Yammer’s David Sacks, . Begun with a reported $20 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s own money, and rare op-ed by the politically shy Facebook founder, FWD.us has faced a torrent of criticism over funding advertisements that praise Republicans who support the controversial Keystone pipeline (below). [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Iih8K0U27k&feature=player_embedded] and circulated a boycott of FWD.us that had, ironically, than FWD.us’s call to action. The Sierra Club, Progressives United and MoveOn.org were among a littany of progressive groups that are now boycotting Facebook advertisements. “Immigration reform – fine. Oil expansion and pipelines? NOT fine. Where’s the transparency here, rich dudes? Or does FWD actually stand for Fine With Drilling?,” wrote one angry commenter on the FWD.us Facebook page. Elon Musk, as founder of Tesla Motors, prides himself on a sterling environmental record, so it’s easy to see why he couldn’t tolerate being associated with a group indirectly funding pro-Keystone pipeline ads. But, David Sacks doesn’t have as much to lose publically as Musk, which means that Musk is likely hooking more high-level partners with his departure. Nor is this the group’s first PR disaster. Even before the group began, FWD.us director and Zuckerberg’s old Harvard roommate, Joe Green, had to issue a for a leaked perspectus. “Given the status of our funders and quality of our team, we will drive national and local narratives to properly frame our agenda,” read the brash strategy note. As we’ve written about before, FWD.us on their funding and tactics. We do know that FWD.us splits its organization into Democratic and Republican teams, offering quid pro quo cash in exchange for support of its key initiative — immigration. This kind of back-door compromising may work in D.C., but it’s evidently not as well tolerated in the Valley. In my own off-the-record conversations with supporters, with FWD.us right now. It’s going to become a political landmine to stay on board, let alone join the group. FWD.us is unraveling, and we predict it won’t be around much longer unless it becomes a lot more transparent and ditches the D.C. tactics. Stay tuned for more.
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Through The Looking Glass: What You’ll See Through Google’s Lens
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
I’ve spent a little over three weeks with Google Glass, and I’ve noted that the utility aspect of the device is strong, but the fun isn’t there yet. It , before it had the App Store. In this video, we discuss some of the quick assumptions about Glass, warranted or otherwise, and give you a look through the eyes of the device in action. Stepping outside, pulling up an address, replying to an email and listening to the is a pretty seamless experience. Google calls the technology “calm,” since it doesn’t require you to pull a device out of your pocket, unlock a screen or tap any buttons. The power of Glass will be unleashed once developers start building apps that consumers will love. Until then, have a look at some of the things I’ve been doing since I got the device. For those following along, I hope to have my recipe app available soon. It’s been a fun learning experience for me.
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Formlabs Prepares To Ship The Super Sexy Form One 3D Printer
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/65413433] The boy geniuses of Formlabs, David Cranor, Maxim Lobovsky, and Natan Linder have posted a video detailing their Form One 3D printer, one of the most well-put-together 3D printing devices we’ve seen in a while. The Form One uses a form of stereolithography that prints the objects “upside down” by activating polymers with laser light. The resulting objects come out of a bath of plastic looking like Neo tumbling out of his oozing cocoon in . The team at Formlabs is and will begin shipping their devices to Kickstarter supporters over the next few weeks. They’ve also launched a for beginning users, a must-have for such a nascent technology. Beta users are testing the Form One as we speak and the team is gathering test data. The company launched a successful Kickstarter campaign and they’ve been showing prototypes of the high-tech Form One for a few months now. It looks like the system is finally coming to fruition.
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Twilio Is Raising A Series D Of Around $50M
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
I’d been hearing whispers as of late that Twilio is meeting with VCs to raise another round, and I just got the good word from a very, very solid source. I’m told that Twilio is in the process of raising a Series D, with a goal of raising around $50 million. The talks are still rather early on. In fact, when I first got wind of the round last week, the first folks I asked were shocked that we’d already heard about it. At this point, it sounds like Twilio is aiming to close the round within the next 2 to 3 weeks. The total amount raised might change by then, but $50M is the current target. ( We’re now hearing that the company has surpassed their original goal of $50M, instead raising closer to $65-70M.) Wondering what the heck a Twilio is? Twilio lets developers easily build things that require phone functionality. Want to build a customer service line with menus narrated by Morgan Freeman? Sure (note: bring your own Morgan Freeman. Also, someone please do this. I’ll totally write about it.) Want to build a tool that’ll text you the second Netflix’s Arrested Development revival season goes live? . If you need to programmatically do something that goes down over the phone — be it SMS, voice calls, or VoIP — Twilio can probably do most of the leg work with just a few lines of code.
Twilio is actually one of my favorite companies in the valley right now, for at least two reasons: they make a damned cool product that in turn enables other damned cool products to be made, and very few people seem to realize how well they’re doing. While their CEO Jeff Lawson seems to prefer keeping their financials hush, every whisper I hear about the company suggests that they’re quietly kicking ass. Amongst other good signs: the company is hiring like mad, to the point that they just (as in, this week) had to move into a much bigger office. They actually couldn’t find a ready-to-go office in SOMA with enough space for their growing team, so they spent the better part of the last year retrofitting a spot on Harrison Street that once served as a paper/textile factory. Twilio has , having most at the end of 2011. If they successfully raise $50M, it’d be an injection roughly 1.5x larger than they’ve raised so far. When I first started digging around this story, no one I spoke to could seem to agree on which VC firms were involved. Turns out, Twilio is just talking to a of firms. Two names that seem quite certain to be in talks at this point are Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners — which makes sense, as USV has been re-upping with Twilio since their Series A, and Bessemer has supported them since their Series B. Keep an eye on these guys, if you’re not already. If things keep going as they are, I’d bet on them going public within the next year.
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Yahoo’s Acqui-Hire Spree Continues With Mobile Gaming Startup Loki Studios
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
Yahoo has just been gobbling up startups. In the last week or so, it has announced the acquisition of , , and . In fact, , Yahoo said that it has “added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team,” thanks to the three aforementioned companies — plus a mobile gaming startup called . I’ve reached out to both Yahoo and Loki Studios for details about the deal, but the news seems to be confirmed on the Loki website, where the front page currently announces that the team is joining Yahoo: It has been a difficult but immensely rewarding journey. We collaborated closely with an incredibly supportive community to continuously iterate and improve upon [Loki Sutdios’ game] Geomon. We were fortunate to have been advised by some of the best mentors in the industry and befriended many of our peers along the way. We surmounted immense obstacles, formed tightknit bonds, and worked through a few too many sunrises. Now, our journey continues. We are thrilled to be joining the exceptional folks at Yahoo!. We believe fully in their commitment to creating outstanding mobile products. We are excited to learn from, work with, and contribute to one of the most well-known pioneers of the tech industry. The note is signed by seven Loki team members, so it sounds like they’re all joining Yahoo. The startup had from DCM’s Android-focused fund and it was also part of the inaugural class at the StartX incubator for the Stanford community. It’s not clear whether Yahoo will actually be doing anything with Loki’s technology, but in case you’re curious, the company it was working on location-based games, starting with its title Geomon. The idea is to incorporate data about the user’s location — “including the weather, temperature, time of day, season, and geographic region” — into the game: “Therefore, playing our game on the beach on a warm, sunny day provides a different game experience from playing at home in the city on a cold, winter’s night.” Yahoo just sent me a statement announcing the deal. Today we welcomed Loki Studios to the Yahoo! mobile team. Their experience in community and location-based mobile services is impressive and we’re excited to have them on the team. The company said that it’s not disclosing the terms of the deal, and that Geomon will be shut down.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: DAS KEYBOARD! DAS AMAZON PHONE! DAS SNAPCHAT!
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
This week on the we talk about Snapchat, DAS Keyboard, and the wild Amazon phone. This time we’re joined by Matt Burns, Darrell Etherington, Greg Kumparak, and Jordan Crook as Michelle Tanner. Enjoy! These are the and Jordan was talking about during the podcast.
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz & Others Put $1.8M Into Aviate, An Intelligent Homescreen For Android
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
Facebook is not the only company to invest in development of products that take better advantage of the Android homescreen. South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk also to release a rival Android launcher. And now, , and others have invested $1.8 million into , an ex-Googler backed intelligent homescreen for Android devices. The round also included participation from , , and other angels, most notably , Facebook VP of Business Development and Monetization, and . The company actually closed on the funding in December, but is only announcing now. The funds will be used to grow the team quickly, and further develop the product. The company behind Aviate, Palo Alto-based ThumbsUp Labs, was founded in November 2011 by a team with backgrounds in computer science, search and OS development. Co-founder majored in Cognitive Science at the University of California, and previously founded , an image based Q&A app, where he also focused on the problem of bringing relevant information to smartphone users when it was most useful. Meanwhile, Stanford grad worked for Google on its front-end search team; and , also a Stanford grad, worked as a Product Manager for the Android Marketplace (now Google Play), and had previously . Each founder had his own take on how to make mobile phones more effective – Daiss having seen the app discovery and engagement challenges firsthand; Montoy-Wilson with insight into the Android ecosystem itself; and Choi coming at the problem from the search perspective – he wanted to rebuild mobile search from the ground up. With the , the goal is to help mobile users de-clutter their Android homescreens, and instead view relevant information adapted to their surroundings, rather than a grid of apps. Where Facebook Home has taken over the Android environment as something of an “apperating system,” to use the term (referring to something in between an app and operating system), the team at Aviate believes there’s more that can be done with such technology, beyond simply optimizing your social networking experiences. Users today have a number of mobile applications on their devices which they access regularly, and that serve a wide variety of functions. It may not make much sense to give over complete control to just one, such as is the case with Facebook Home. ( , ranking and reviewing the new app poorly.) Other means to view app information comes in the form of push notifications and homescreen widgets – neither of which tend to be personalized or contextually aware, outside of location-aware weather widgets, perhaps. In addition, app notifications these days are borderline spam, as developers feel increased pressure to get their app’s users to return and re-engage. Aviate wants to be different by working with your favorite applications to pull in information and surface it when you need it. (The app is not yet available for testing, so we can only speak of the company’s intentions here, rather than the real-world results.) What we do know – and the team is being cagey so far – is that the app will be downloadable from Google Play, and after installation, it will integrate deeply with the phone to upgrade the overall experience. Like Facebook Home, it’s more than an Android launcher. Aviate will organize all your applications for you, and then based on context (time, location, etc.), it will begin to adapt to you individually as it learns what apps you need, when and where. For example, Aviate will know that when you’re at work, you may need one subset of apps, but when you’re at the gym, you might use another. It also learns what information you need at your fingertips, and surfaces that more proactively, and in a more personalized manner over time. Details on that aspect are still sparse. Frankly, it sounds a lot like , but applied to the broader world of mobile applications. Already, it seems like something Google would want to snap up for itself, but it remains to be seen how well it all really works. The company is in the process of filing several patents around the technology now, however, and if granted, those could make the company more valuable in time. Though obviously Android is where such innovation can take place, Aviate says it has plans for an iOS version in the future. The app will launch into private beta in the next couple of months. .
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Facebook Is Getting Serious About Original Programming With “Facebook Live”
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
“House Of Cards” proved that great, exclusive content can create loyal customers. While Facebook isn’t about to produce TV shows, it tells me that it plans to ramp up production of its original programming starting with a today at 5:15 p.m. PST. Comedian Andy Samberg will interview film director JJ Abrams and classic cast member and social media maven George Takei. Randi Zuckerberg, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, started Facebook Live in 2010. A website and Facebook app powered by Livestream, Facebook Live streams talks and offers an archive of past video clips. Users can discuss the videos in real time with other users and ask questions. Facebook Live moderators then pick from submitted questions, name-check the people who ask them, and pose them to the celebrities. It featured Randi’s interviews with celebrities, as well as instructional talks on Facebook’s products and marketing tools. Later it would host Facebook’s election coverage, including Barack Obama’s town hall talk at Facebook headquarters in 2011. Over the years, Oprah Winfrey, Vin Diesel, Madonna, astronaut Ron Garan, and Israeli President Shimon Peres all came on the air. For the last six months, though, Facebook Live has been pretty quiet. Since Bravo’s Andy Cohen interviewed Rihanna in November, the only video it’s added was from the Facebook Home launch event. While fascinating to tech insiders, there wasn’t much wide appeal. But now, the social network is putting Facebook Live back in gear. A Facebook spokesperson for the project tells me “Facebook Live is something we’ll be utilizing more.” While more shoots haven’t been lined up, they should come at a brisker pace. Why invest in original programming? “The purpose of Facebook Live is to give fans an opportunity to interact with public figures and give the public figures a global platform to present how they are using Facebook [or are engaged in conversations happening on Facebook] in an authentic way,” is the rather dry answer I got from the spokesperson. But digging a bit deeper, Facebook Live accomplishes several strategic goals for the team at 1 Hacker Way. First, it can turn fans of the stars that Live brings on air into more frequent Facebook users. On the flip side, it can turn celebrities into more hard-core Facebook content creators. Facebook wants to be the place where people follow their favorite public figures, but it needs them posting frequently. Most importantly, though, it demonstrates Facebook’s potential as a live events discussion platform. Becoming the second screen to important global events can generate tons of time-on-site and engagement. This has historically been Twitter’s domain thanks to its unfiltered, real-time feed, but Facebook wants a piece of the pie. If you have a great time chatting , maybe you’ll choose Facebook to discuss the next Star Trek TV show premiere rather than on its 140-character competitor. With the potential to promote them to a billion people, Facebook shouldn’t have much trouble getting the world’s VIPs into the revamped Facebook Live studio.
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Mobile Gaming Backend OpenKit Now Available To All Developers
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
, an open-source social platform for mobile games, is now open to all developers, according to co-founder Peter Relan. The service, first , has been in private beta since earlier this year. There are apparently 1,500 developers already testing the service. that he started OpenKit in response to the shutdown of OpenFeint, the GREE-acquired social platform for mobile games that he co-founded. Developers still need something like this, Relan said, and he wants to build it in a way that’s both “good business and developer friendly.” OpenKit’s current features include cloud storage (allowing a player to save their game on one device and load it on another), leaderboards and achievements, user authentication (for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter), and plug-ins that connect games with the Unity engine. Plus, it works on both iOS and Android, and it’s being developed as an open-source project, so developers can always take their data elsewhere or use the code to build their own backend service. OpenKit isn’t live for players yet. Relan told me today that that’s coming in a couple of months. There are more social features planned, but he said he’s specifically waiting to integrate with for the Google I/O conference next week.
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Microsoft: Google Docs Is Not Worth The Gamble, Makes You Less Productive
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
After Bing and its campaign, Microsoft is now taking aim at Google Docs. Jake Zborowski, Microsoft’s senior product manager for Office, actually published blog posts today: one homes in on document fidelity, and the other, which includes a number of user testimonials, argues that Google Docs isn’t quite . If it took me a little while to get , the director of product marketing for , to actually say “Google” in my chat with him about Microsoft’s productivity tools , Zborowski doesn’t beat around the bush for even a second. “Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble,” he . “Why take the gamble on converting your Office files to Google Docs when you can use Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Web Apps to create, share and edit your Office files with your content intact?” That, Microsoft says, is true on the web, but also on the tablet, where Google’s Quickoffice usually does a pretty good job at converting documents (though not in Microsoft’s example, of course). So what about the new ? Also too much of a gamble for Zborowski: “The last gamble with Google is how the company helps you view Microsoft Office documents using their file viewers. Even this is a gamble that may be too risky to take.” There is, of course, also a video that accompanies the post, which reminds folks that they could lose their promotion if they decide to switch to Docs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qK2T3GVJafM In his second post (“Office is a team player”), Zborowski also argues that Google Docs is missing too many features, though in this case, a number of Microsoft customers make the argument for him. Here is an example: As we continue to improve Office, we look for changes big and small that help people do more with less effort. Some improvements are small, like the new we introduced in Office 2010. Other features reduce the amount of time it takes to accomplish a task like and in Excel. The breadth of capabilities Office can lead to significant gains in what people can accomplish. With Google Docs, on the other hand, people have to find ways to overcome feature gaps by working harder, spending their time finding workarounds, or potentially using third-party tools to overcome the gaps. To back all of this up, Microsoft also launched whymicrosoft.com, which includes more testimonials, screenshots and other resources for those who haven’t been scared straight yet and are still considering the switch to Google Docs. And here is the video that goes with that post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qrQp-DE-V8c All of this anti-Google Docs/Drive rhetoric just before Google I/O probably isn’t accidental. With Quickoffice, Google now has the basis to offer a pretty compelling alternative to the Microsoft Web Apps (which, and Microsoft has a point there, are generally more fully-featured than Google’s tools) and I would expect the company to launch more Quickoffice-based products next Wednesday.
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Google Brings Its Cloud Messaging Push Notification Service To Chrome
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
At last year’s I/O, Google its Cloud Messaging push notification service . This week, it extended this service , which, Google says, allows Chrome apps and extension developers to wake up their apps remotely and/or send alerts to users. While mobile app developers have long been familiar with the concept of push notifications, this is a pretty novel service for web developers. Unless a Chrome app or extension is running in the background and pulling down information from the service, after all, users can’t usually receive alerts like news updates or stock ticker notifications from the developers’ servers. Google product manager Mark Scott writes that “event pages keep apps and extensions efficient by allowing them to respond to a variety of events, such as timers or navigation to a particular site, without having to remain running persistently.” This works, but it does consume bandwidth and reduce battery life if you are on a laptop or Chromebook. Cloud Messaging for Chrome, on the other hand, allows developers to push messages directly to signed-in users. As long as the user is signed in and on a machine where the app or extension is installed, the alerts should automatically start appearing. To get developers started with this service, the Chrome team has published a couple of , as well as a pretty .
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gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 17 | null |
Bing Now Allows Users To Like And Comment On Facebook Entries Right From Its Social Sidebar
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got . You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too. This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before. It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon. Personally, I’ve never found these social search results all that useful. Microsoft, however, clearly believes that this, in combination with what they are doing , will allow it to continue to compete with Google, which seems to have de-emphasized social search over the last few months. With its campaign and “ ” challenge, Microsoft has obviously been taking a far more aggressive stance against Google in recent months and it’s slowly adding new users. , Google has a market share of about 67 percent in the U.S., and Bing is close to reaching 17 percent. There have been some recent , however, that Yahoo is looking to drop Bing as its search provider (Yahoo currently commands just under 12 percent of the U.S. search market with its Bing-powered search), but given the long-term deal between the two companies, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
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3 Graphs Explain Why There Is A Tech-Talent Shortage And Immigrants Are Needed
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
Yes, we do need high-skilled immigrants because we don’t have enough qualified workers. Contrary to a widely publicized report claiming that a tech-talent shortage is a myth, study confirms that there is a shortage and businesses need immigrants to fill the innovation vacuum. “This report matters because accurate facts about h1B and STEM shortage is important as congressional debate moves forward about increasing the number of h1B visa and allowing more foreign STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] workers to stay in the US,” author Neil Ruiz tells me in an email, which is a not-so-subtle jab at the controversial Economic Policy Institute report claiming the opposite. Conclusions bolded for your scanning convenience. Earlier this month, the Economic Policy Institute made national headlines for a study claiming that there was no technology talent shortage, and the foreign worker visa program (H1-B) was largely a ruse to exploit cheap immigrants at the cost of natives. They argued: Because of the EPI’s famously anti-H1-B stance and the fact they didn’t use common statistical techniques to control for worker demographics (like age), a lot of experts in the field wigged out. Now, a Brookings Institute study aims to quantify the wigging outage, for ammo against EPI and in support of the technology community, which has cried for a long time that the U.S. needs more foreign talent. As our , we know there’s a shortage in qualified STEM workers because positions can go months unfulfilled. 43% of jobs in areas that commonly seek H1-B employees are unfilled after at least a month. Rothwell and Ruiz find that H1-B workers earn, on average, 20% more than their native counterparts, which jives with comparing immigrants by age, education level, and English-proficiency. In part, this finding still exposes a dark side of high-skilled immigrants: they inject a fresh pool of young applicants who are willing to work for less pay than their older, mid-career counterparts. Contrary to the Economic Policy Institute’s conclusions, the researchers find that wages in STEM fields are growing, adjusted for inflation ( 8% vs. 0% for all workers, from 2000 to 2012). At our request, they looked at data from the Department of Labor’s Current Population Survey, finding “In the three major STEM categories (Computer and Math Occupations; Architecture and Engineering; and Life, Physical, and Social Sciences), inflation adjusted median wage growth was both positive and higher than all workers 16 and over,” Rothwell tells me in an email. (Since this was data they shared with me in an email, I’ve included , for you wonks out there). When economists debate over numbers, it’s hardly fun for the American public, since they don’t have the mathematical chops to evaluate the facts for themselves. Here’s why I’m gung-ho about the Brookings piece (aside from the fact that I think it’s methodologically superior): you’d have to quite a conspiracy theorist to believe that hundreds of technology leaders could effectively coordinate a lie about immigration reform. They’re not lying about the fact that they can’t fill positions. Now, before our critical readers freak out, yes, the H1-B system is rotten with abuse and exploitation. Also, yes, we should be doing a better job of educating Americans. It’s an important debate to have, but let’s get the facts straight first.
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Elevatr Is A Mobile-First Tool For Startup Business Plan Creation
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
Serial entrepreneur with too many ideas rattling around in your head? Then you’re going to like this one: a new mobile app called will help you keep track of your inspirations, as well as develop a business model, in order to turn your passing thoughts into plans actually worth pursuing some day. The beautifully designed app was dreamt up by New York-based David Spiro, a recent college of engineering and business school grad from the University of Michigan. He had spent time working with the standard tools for business model development, including the and , while in school. “It became very clear that entrepreneurship – and people inspired by the startup revolution – is more than those actually entrepreneurship,” Spiro explains. “I was really inspired to take those tools that I was taught to use, and create a mobile-first product that could apply to more than just those people who were in my classes,” he says. Having shelved the startup idea he had been working on in college, Spiro finally decided to commit himself to the creation of Elevatr full-time, after first doing some consulting for a local angel following graduation in spring 2012. By the end of the year, he had an MVP ready to go after contracting with , a mobile app development agency in Soho that had previously built apps for JackThreads and Urban Daddy. Spiro now works out of Fueled’s offices, and has hired a small team (with help from AngelList), including CTO Rafael Amorim. The product itself is simple. is essentially a note-taking app that takes the structure of a traditional business plan and makes it more accessible to design and develop on the smaller screen of mobile devices. After tapping the button to add your idea, the app prompts you to describe the idea in 140 characters or fewer, just like Twitter. That’s actually a challenge for some entrepreneurs, who can’t seem to condense their business’ idea to a single sentence, , much less 140 characters. But Spiro thinks it’s a good first step, noting “if you can’t explain it in less than 140 characters, you probably don’t know what you’re doing.” On the following screens, you’re walked through the other standard pieces to business-model creation, filling out details as to the target market, market size, competition, differentiation, features and uses, and so on. There’s also plenty of room for free-form note making in Elevatr, so you can really flesh out your ideas and plans. At launch, the app is designed for personal use, but the team already has the intention to expand its capabilities in the near future. Next week, an option to export your ideas to a responsive website will be introduced, essentially turning your notes into a more fully developed online deck of sorts that you can share with others in order to get feedback. In addition, collaboration will be built into the app, which will allow you to invite others to view or comment on the content, given their permission levels. Another idea for future expansion is to partner with other companies – agencies like Fueled, for example – giving them access to an administrative interface that would allow them to leverage the service to sort through a larger group of startup ideas, like those submitted as part of a contest, for instance. That, and some other advanced features, may be paid options in the future, but currently the app itself is a . Elevatr has a small amount of friends and family funding, but is now raising an angel round upwards of $500,000.
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Video Discovery Startup Boxfish Launches Android App, Opens Up API For Third-Party Developers
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
Video discovery startup wants to help people find out what’s new and trending on TV, by scouring broadcast and cable networks to find out what people are talking about. After making its second-screen discovery application available for iOS, the startup has just released an Android version, and is opening up to allow other developers to take advantage of the technology it’s built. To recap: Boxfish works by scanning network satellite signals for captions and figuring out which words or topics or phrases are being talked about across a wide number of TV programs. It started with a real-time TV search engine, letting its users say where and when certain topics are being mentioned. But it’s expanded to enable users to see which topics are most popular. The result was an providing a “Live Video Guide” to what’s new and important on TV. That app, not surprisingly, was also designed with the idea of connecting to users’ set-top boxes or TVs and allowing them to control the TV and switch the channel to things that they find interesting on the app. With the launch on Android, Boxfish will be available to even more phones and tablets and users, bringing all the same trending and favorites options that iPad users had. One big new feature that it added with Android, though, was the ability to use Google’s voice recognition technology to talk to the app and search for shows or whatever without having to type them out. But Boxfish isn’t looking to just be another consumer-facing app. It’s realized that the data it collects could also be useful to third parties. So it’s making its real-time TV API available to some partners and allowing them to use it in their own apps. That includes big consumer electronics manufacturers which may seek to provide a real-time data or trending layer on top of their existing TV guides. The data is also being made available to universities — like the University of California, Berkeley or Columbia University — for their media schools to better understand the topics that are being discussed on 24-hour news networks, for instance. Other applications include real-time fact checking and sentiment analysis. Boxfish was founded in 2011, and has raised $3 million in funding led by T-Venture, the Venture Capital arm of Deutsche Telekom.
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Falling iPad Mini Demand Claims Show Why Watching Suppliers For Apple Success Misses The Point
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 10 |
This week, a number of headlines with reports that iPad mini demand was failing based on supplier Pegatron’s earnings numbers as revealed at an investor conference. Those claims were later refuted by Pegatron CEO Jason Cheng, who argued that Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan had misquoted him to reach his conclusion about iPad mini numbers. The problem here is one that comes up repeatedly for Apple watchers, namely that of trying to divine from scattered sources what the future holds for the iPhone maker. Reports of slowdowns, layoffs or weak fiscal results from any number of supplier companies, including Pegatron, Foxconn and Sharp have bloggers feverishly pounding keys, predicting dire straits for Apple to come. The problem is, these have never been a very strong indicator of what’s actually going on with Cupertino and its products, and for good reason. As Fortune’s , Pegatron has a wide customer base and never breaks out how each of those are affecting its bottom line or its quarterly financial outlook. Pegatron has its fingers in all kinds of pies, including home video game consoles and e-readers, both of which are currently suffering badly in terms of consumer sales. Here’s a look back at some equally dire reports from recent memory that also turned out not to have any relation whatsoever to anything Apple was doing, performance-wise. In the best of cases, supply chain reports offers some vague insight into the larger picture of Apple’s inventory channels, but when looked to for solid indicators of performance, they’re about as dependable as using a magic 8 ball. The iPad mini, by all reasonable accounts, looks to be a very strong performer for Apple, and it’s very likely we’ll see that trend continue.
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Singapore’s MediaCorp Invests $40M In Luxury Online Retailer Reebonz
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 19 |
, one of Singapore’s two largest media companies, has poured $40 million into in a deal that values the designer brand flash-sales site at about $200 million. This is the first time that MediaCorp has invested in an online retailer, according to (a site that is also owned by MediaCorp). The media conglomerate hopes that Reebonz will help it tap into the Asia-Pacific region’s booming e-commerce market, which will make $1.3 trillion in 2013, leading the world in B2C online sales. “We see great alignment between what Reebonz does and what MediaCorp has–audiences, content targeted at the luxury market and our star power. We are confident that by collaborating closely with Reebonz, we’ll see even more breakthroughs from the retailer,” MediaCorp CEO Shaun Seow said. Reebonz was founded in 2009 and has raised a total of about $79.7 million from investors including Vertex Asia Investments, GGV Capital, Intel Capital, Matrix Partners China and Infocomm Investments. MediaCorp’s investment in Reebonz is notable because it follows its main rival , in restaurant booking site Chope. Both companies are much better known for operating newspapers, magazines and other traditional media outlets than investing in startups.
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Pinterest Launches Pins With More Info And A New Button For Mobile Apps
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 19 |
Pinterest today that will help make the site more attractive to potential advertisers. The first is pins embedded with additional information about products, recipes and movies. The second is a Pin It button that is now available on nine mobile apps. The company says that its new features are a “first step toward making pins more useful.” The move, however, won’t just benefit users. It will also make the site potentially more appealing to advertising partners as Pinterest, which currently does not make revenue, hashes out its monetization model. Sites Pinterest has partnered with on its “more useful” pin initiative include retailers and publications popular among Pinterest’s users, such as e-commerce sites , , and ; magazines like Martha Stewart Living and Real Simple; and entertainment sites , and Rotten Tomatoes. The first crop of mobile apps to get Pinterest’s new Pin It button are , , , , , , , TED, The North Face and . The new pins are only available in . The new version of Pinterest was designed to increase user engagement, which in turn will help the company decide how much to charge for services like analytics and marketing opportunities.
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