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Creator Of The X-Plane Flight Simulator Seeks Help Fighting A Patent Troll
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
Austin Meyer, creator of the popular and ultra-realistic flight sim is facing a potentially destructive lawsuit by an East Texas patent troll, . Meyer, who has worked on the simulator since 1995, isn’t dealing with a claim against his simulator or the game mechanics within. Instead, he’s being sued for using a found in almost all Android programs. You can read , but last September Meyer received word that he was being sued for failing to license a patent for “code for verifying the license data stored on the licensing medium by communicating with a registration authority having verification data.” Writes Meyer: Speaking for Laminar Research, we used only the technology that was provided to us by Google for copy protection in our Android App ‘X-Plane’… we used exactly the copy protection Google gave us! And, of course, this is what Google provides to everyone else that is making a game for Android! received a similar complaint from Uniloc for using a central licensing server in Minecraft. Meyer claims that Google, for their part, . Thus far Meyer has on Whitehouse.gov and is working on fighting the suit. He said he will not settle. to cover court costs. The creator of the original patent, , wrote regarding the Minecraft lawsuit: And yet, the technology in question is a system that stops people from pirating their software and helps them make money. Well if you think it’s so unfair, don’t use the tech. Do something else. No one is forcing you to use the technology. It amazes me that people complain about paying a royalty for a technology that stops up to a third of a software companies sales from being lost to piracy. What are you saying? “Its all right to steal from Uniloc as long as it helps stop pirates stealing from me?” Richardson claims to no longer be a principal at the company and is only a non-majority shareholder. It’s painfully obvious that anyone using even the most basic of certificate-based copy protection may deal with Uniloc in the future. Whatever you think about patent trolls and their manifold evils, it will be a hard road for Meyer and his fellow litigants in fighting down this claim.
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Google Reportedly In Talks With Warby Parker To Design Stylish Google Glass Frames
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Google is reportedly in talks with to make glasses that look less like Geordi La Forge’s eyewear and more like something a style-conscious person in the early 21st century would be happy to put on his or her face. A cites unnamed sources who say that Google is negotiating with the NYC-based e-commerce startup to help it create fashionable frames (both companies declined to confirm the report). Google Glass is slowly but steadily moving towards the nasal bridges of consumers. On Wednesday, Google began for the first small batch of people who will be able to buy an early version of Google Glass, and there have been more sightings of the smart glasses (and not just on ). If Google and Warby Parker do indeed ink a partnership, that could mean that Google Glass will become a lot more attractive to people who had been shrugging off the new tech because wearing a pair would make them look like an extra from “Back To The Future.” Since launching in February 2010, Warby Parker has raised a total of $50.3 million in funding and gained a following of four-eyed hipsters with its stylish but reasonably priced prescription lenses and frames.
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BillPin Wants To Save Friendships By Making Social Expense Sharing Quick And Easy
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Out of all the problems that friends run into, money is one of the stickiest. There’s nothing that can degrade a relationship in quite the same way as an argument over rent, a restaurant bill, or even who owes how much for a pack of toilet paper. , a new app that launches today, wants to make it easy to split social expenses–its slogan is even “keep friendships squabble free.” It is available , and for and devices. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcgRWZXEvPw] “We believe the real value is in helping users keep track of money socially, and our design philosophy is very much centered around how to help users easily and quickly keep a tab with their friends whom they have frequent shared expenses with,” co-founder Darius Cheung told me. The app sets itself apart with its clean, intuitive interface and a keep-it-simple mentality. “For example, through user interviews and data analysis, we figured out that 90 percent of the bills that any user would ‘pin’ is with one of his top 10 friends. As a result, instead of making a user search though his phone book or Facebook for the friend to add to a bill, we have designed in a quick-add feature so the user can simply click on a friend’s profile and add a bill, reducing the time and effort required dramatically,” Cheung said. To use the app, you can sign up using email or Facebook, and find your buddies through your contacts. One of you pins an expense and chooses how to split it. The app will then keep each person informed by email of the amount as it is paid off. BillPin includes several features designed to keep the process of sharing expenses conflict free–for example, if a bill does not divide evenly (for example, $10 split among three friends), it will randomly assign the leftover amount to one person. Bills can be voided if there is an error or disagreement, but they cannot be deleted entirely, so there is always a record of past expenses in the app. The app’s founders–Cheung, Saurabh Mandar, Aileen Sim, Ruiwen Chua, and Anuj Bheda–met each other in the National University of Singapore Overseas College program. Cheung and co-founder Mandar worked together at tenCube, a mobile security company that was acquired by McAfee in 2010; Sim ran FirstMeta, a virtual currency exchange company; and Chua was founder of educational app startup SquareCrumbs. BillPin is currently mostly self-funded, though the team has received funding from the program.
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Don’t Mess With The GOOG
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
A couple of years ago I in this space: “A spectre is haunting Mountain View. No, not bed bugs: bit rot. Google is in serious decline.” Well, credit where it’s due. These days Google has put its problems behind it and is soaring from strength to strength. Contenders keep coming and trying to claim its crown–and failing. I give you Apple Maps and Facebook’s Graph Search as an example. I happen to personally know, from mine own checkered history as a software engineer, a couple of the engineers on the Apple Maps team, and let me assure you: those guys are . Some of the finest that I’ve ever worked with. But it turns out that maps are actually a fractally hard problem, and that even the most brilliant engineers can’t do much to turn the sow’s ear of wonky data into a silk purse. Google, though, has spent the last decade or so amassing not just perhaps the greatest collection of software-engineering talent ever assembled, but a gargantuan treasure trove of data. The only company whose data hoard rivals it is perhaps Facebook. Alas, thus far Graph Search is like Facebook’s contextual ads: better than nothing, but still painfully crude. Its problem isn’t just “ “: it’s that it doesn’t (yet) understand context and semantics. Let me give you an example. From my years living in the UK I’m a big fan of the English soccer team . (Brits, and fellow Gooners: don’t hate me for saying “soccer.”) Some time ago I mentioned this to Facebook. So what did it show me in my News Feed last week? Word match, yes: concept match, no. Barely better than a query, really.
Now compare that to this Google search: Context. Nuance. Semantics. Google gets them: Facebook doesn’t. (Yet.) Of course, not everything they do is pre-eminent. Facebook is better at social. Apple is better at design. But Google has gotten and at . I can’t say I’m surprised by Android’s : I predicted that “most of the phones of the future will be Androids, not Apples.” But I am surprised by how slick it’s gotten. Google seems to have finally learned, albeit the hard way, the value of design. Do I sound like a blind fan of all things Google? Let me remind you of that “Google is in serious decline” article. To an extent, though, I suppose I am biased in their favor. But not because I think Android is better than iOS (I think it’s slightly inferior) or because its search engine is so much better than its competitors (although it is; try the search above on Bing.) I don’t really care about those things. What I care about is that Google has become a machine that turns advertising dollars into like Google Glass and self-driving cars. They’re not just trying to make money: they’re trying to use that money on far-fetched projects with the chance to be genuinely revolutionary. I admire that. If only Apple would use some of its to do the same. If rumours are true, their next big push will be . How…excruciatingly dull and small-minded. Here’s hoping that one day Cupertino takes a page out of Mountain View’s playbook, and starts to think a little bigger.
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Coursera Adds 29 Schools, 90 Courses And 3 New Languages To Its Online Learning Platform
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
It’s almost as if there’s an arms race in online education. Which MOOC platform can expand the fastest? Place your bets now. that it will be expanding internationally with the addition of six new schools (bringing its total to 12), is doing some addition of its own. Today, the massive online course platform announced that 29 universities from around the globe have agreed to bring their courses online (for free) via Coursera. The new members will join the 33 institutions already on board, bringing Coursera’s grand total to 62. And, of course, just as edX was kicking back to celebrate its five new handpicked international members, Coursera announces that its updated roster just so happens to include 16 international institutions itself. The international expansion of both Coursera and edX is a big win for international students, who (at least in Coursera’s case) now have access to courses in multiple languages, including French, Spanish, Chinese and Italian. Of course, international expansion is also an important part of the roadmap for edX and Coursera (and online learning sites like Lynda.com as well) and could be a boon for both, exposing a whole new audience of potential MOOC adopters to courses from some of the most reputed schools in the world. While edX is a not-for-profit organization, Coursera is decidedly for-profit and, though it has , will need to continue scaling if it hopes to become a sustainable business over the long-term. To do that, as part of the introduction of 29 new schools to its platform, Coursera is also expanding its course offerings by subject, adding 90 new courses to bring its total to 313 courses in all. “With the addition of so many new courses across a wide range of disciplines, languages and academic approaches, we are now able to meet the needs of a more diverse student body, and give students more academic options to explore,” Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng said as part of the announcement. Since launching in April 2012, Coursera has registered 2.8 million students and is now seeing around 1.4 million course enrollments each month. Lately, Coursera has been taking some pronounced steps to begin monetizing its growing user base as well, launching Career Services in December — an opt-in recruiting program that matches students with employers — and in January to allow students to verify the work they complete on Coursera for a fee. Verified Certificates marked the startup’s first steps into credentialing, a move that it has since continued. Initially, Coursera was not able to offer degrees or credits, and its courses lacked context without being able to offer them as part of a degree program. But, earlier this month, five of its courses for “credit equivalency,” meaning that students who complete those classes are now able to “receive college transfer credit at institutions that accept ACE recommendations,” . Going forward, Coursera will be working with ACE to add credit equivalency for more of its courses. With the addition of more universities, languages and courses, combined with certificates and transfer credit, Coursera is beginning to look and feel like a real, global online university. The only question will be whether or not this expansion dilutes the overall experience and whether or not it can maintain quality as its roster grows. From the beginning, Coursera has vowed to work only with the most renowned and well-respected universities. That’s kind of a fuzzy standard to set and there are many ways to qualify an “elite” institution. On the one hand, the more content and the more options it can provide, the better the experience for students — or so the thinking goes. But it will be interesting to see where Coursera eventually decides to draw the line — if and when it decides to do so. Offering the same Economics course from five different universities doesn’t necessarily improve the experience for students, but picking the best and most popular Economics courses from universities that specialize in different areas within a particular subject certainly does. But that’s a hard balance to maintain. Below is the list of the 29 new institutions joining Coursera today. California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
Case Western Reserve University
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Curtis Institute of Music
École Polytechnique, France
IE Business School
Leiden University, Netherlands
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat München
National Taiwan University
National University of Singapore
Northwestern University
Penn State University
Rutgers University
Sapienza Università di Roma
Technische Universität München (TUM)
Technical University of Denmark
Tecnológico de Monterrey
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
The University of Tokyo
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Universidad TecVirtual del Sistema Tecnológico de Monterrey
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
University of California, San Diego
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of Colorado Boulder
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
University of Geneva, Switzerland
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of Rochester
University of Wisconsin-Madison The headline originally read that Coursera had added four new languages. In fact, it has previously offered one course in French. With its new partners, it plans to add significantly to that number.
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By Helping Big Pharma Better Understand Your Local Doctor, Medikly May Just Be Tapping Into A Goldmine
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
, a startup that aims to help pharmaceutical companies reach and better understand physicians, announced today that it has raised $1.2 million in series A financing from Easton Capital. A recent graduate of the in New York City, Medikly has developed an enterprise-grade platform that provides Big Pharma with a multi-channel marketing solution, combining content, Big Data analytics and social in an effort to help them reduce campaign spend and get better insight into your local physician. Founded in 2009 and launched in early 2011, Medikly’s SaaS platform seeks to help marketers better understand physicians behavior and preferences through its so-called “Preference Discovery Engine,” which identifies patterns of behavior, relationships and qualities across multiple touchpoints. In turn, Medikly has built a personalization engine on top of its preference discovery tools, which leverages those preference and behavioral insights to allow marketers to send more targeted and relevant information to physicians in the way that physicians actually want to receive that content. Medikly then rounds out its marketing suite with an analytics engine that enables agencies to identify gaps and opportunities, predict campaign attrition and optimize their approach in realtime. While there are thousands of healthcare IT startups — many of which probably sound far more exciting, at least on the surface — Medikly founder Venkat Gullapalli contends that not a single one is actually addressing this $30 billion dollar/year problem. In fact, it’s a $30 billion problem because all pharmaceutical marketers wrestle with it: How to engage healthcare providers on an individual basis, while “being able to measure performance and drive business value.” After graduating from medical school at the ripe old age of 23, Gullapalli went to work at a small agency and later founded a consulting company, where he helped design marketing campaigns for pharmaceutical agencies. As both a physician and a healthcare marketer, Gullapalli got an in-depth, first-hand look at how challenging it can be for Big Pharma to get doctors to pay attention to their marketing messages — even when educational. If pharma is able to more effectively distribute content and knowledge to physicians, the founder tells us, it can actually affect real change on doctors’ behaviors as it relates to how they practice medicine. Doing so creates potential value on both sides of the table, but doctors (like everyone else) are only receptive to the message if it’s presented in the right way, particularly one that’s not invasive and is actually relevant to their career and their practice. When Gullapalli founded Medikly in 2011, he saw that the medical education market (particularly the print side) was beginning to die out and pharmaceutical companies were beginning to reduce their spend as a result. Although pharma marketing may seem like (and is) a niche segment, what most don’t realize is that pharmaceutical companies spend roughly $60 billion on physician marketing each year. But they’ve been slow to adapt technologies that actually measure (and produce) the effectiveness of that marketing and ROI, leading to reduced investment in medical education. What’s more, Gullapalli says that nearly 95 percent of doctors consume some sort of digital content to stay up to date on their field (and the industry), whether by way of journals, social networking research databases, etc. With the rise of the Web, there’s been a 139 percent increase in the number of physicians going online to look for medical education materials. Of course, as their content consumption behaviors change, so do their expectations of marketing and content distribution. The needs of each doctor are very specific based on their area of specialty, and marketers have to be able to recognize those individual needs, while listening to and absorbing physician activity and conversation online, reacting to the changing expectations of physicians accordingly. The problem, the Medikly co-founder says, is that pharma has no idea how to do that. If an agency wants to run a campaign (or distribute educational materials) on diabetes, they want to know where the doctors are that specialize in diabetes treatment, what they’re talking about and what problems they’re experiencing. Medikly developed a sentiment engine (or a preference discovery engine) so that marketers can search for a keyword like “diabetes” and get visibility into what doctors are talking about, what types of conversations they’re having about a particular drug or pharma company and so on. In scouring the Web for this kind of medical sentiment data, the founder says, the team has discovered some interesting things about physician behavior. For one? There is an enormous physician population, he says, that uses SoundCloud(!), because doctors will go to meetings, record the information they hear and upload it to SoundCloud for playback and to be able to share it. “Physicians were talking about certain pharmaceutical companies’ drugs within these sound bites,” Gullapalli tells me, “but those companies had no ways of knowing that.” Some of their insights also happen to run contrary to public data and commonly-accepted ideas about physician behavior. For example, current data suggests that about 66 percent of healthcare providers use Facebook to communicate professionally. But that’s not exactly the case, Gullapalli says. In fact, it totally depends on the field; while cardiologists and primary care physicians love talking online and tend to be digitally savvy, Oncologists aren’t talking online as much in the same way, even if they do consume digital content. The point being: It’s much more nuanced than most recognize — and far more so than pharmaceutical companies have been aware of up to this point. Again, while it may seem niche, pharmaceutical companies are practically drooling to get access to this kind of knowledge. Case in point: Medikly spent most of 2012 building its platform and pivoting and didn’t make any sales through November 2012. But once they opened up the platform after Blueprint’s Demo Day, Medikly closed $960K in bookings just in December. In February, the startup has already seen $900K. That means that Medikly is on track to hit $5.6 million in sales for the quarter, the founder says. What best encapsulates the opportunity Gullapalli thinks Medikly is tapping into? They did all that without making a single phone call. It’s all been organic, word-of-mouth growth so far. SaaS-based medical marketing may be niche and boring to some, but in the case of Medikly, one person’s snores are another person’s goldmine. For more, check out
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Online Learning Platform, edX, Goes International With The Addition Of Six New Schools
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
When it comes to online education and massive open online courses (a.k.a. “MOOCs”), and stolen most of the attention. But they aren’t the only two choices for voracious distance learners out there; in fact, the number of options . Last May, to launch — their own, high-profile response to Coursera, Udacity and the MOOC-y wave sweeping higher education. Backed by $60 million, the non-profit partnership made courses from both schools available to the public for free via a learning experience designed specifically for interactive study on the Web. In addition to making the MIT and Harvard learning experience available at scale to learners around the world, edX has been built on top of the open-source MITx platform in effort to allow other institutions to take advantage of its technology and make their courses available through edX. In the big picture, the organization wants universities to be able to use its platform to research the efficacy of online learning and better understand how technology can transform education both in and out of the classroom. To date, edX has attracted over 675,000 students and edX President Anant Agarwal says that the platform is on track to educate one million students in its first year — the first step in its ambitious goal of educating one billion over the next decade. While MOOCs have traditionally focused on providing students with a variety of online courses for free online, he says that edX’s vision is “much larger.” Through MITx, the goal is to build an open source educational platform and network of the world’s top universities to help improve education both online and on-campus. In doing so, edX announced today that it is officially expanding its reach from North America to Europe and Asia by doubling the number of its member institutions and will be adding a handful of new courses to its roster. The platform’s international expansion adds six new institutions to the organization’s so-called “X University Consortium,” including Australian National University, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, McGill University and the University of Toronto in Canada and Rice University in the U.S. The expansion will enable edX “to better achieve its mission of providing a world-class education for everyone, everywhere,” Agarwal said, and is a natural evolution as the organization looks to beef up support for its increasingly international student body. The institutions will each offer courses in their respective areas of expertise, as Delft University (the oldest technical institution in the Netherlands) will feature “Introduction to Aerospace Engineering” and “Water Treatment Engineering” and the University of Toronto will offer a number of engineering, biology and businesses courses, for example. “Each of these schools was carefully selected for the distinct expertise and regional influence they bring to the platform,” the edX President said, and their courses will “provide the same rigor” students would find in their classrooms. The difference, of course, is that the classes are designed to leverage the benefits of online learning environments by offering game-ified experiences, cutting-edge laboratories and instant feedback. The six new members of edX join Harvard and MIT, as well as a handful of other institutions that have joined its ranks since last summer, including University of California at Berkeley, the University of Texas, Wellesley College and Georgetown University. The new members will begin offering courses on edX beginning in the fall of 2013. For more info, find
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Sumpto Wants To Be The Klout For College Students
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Like a growing number of students, Ben Kosinski attended multiple universities over the course of his collegiate career. Although these schools differed wildly in culture and the makeup of their student bodies, the one thing that seems to remain true at any school, he says, is the level of influence online social identities have come to play in the daily life of college students. Yet, in spite of this, the world’s biggest brands still struggle to reach college students — the most coveted demographic — instead, throwing money at the problem through ineffective advertising methods. Seeing the amount of peer-to-peer influence at play on college campuses, Kosinksi saw an opportunity: What if brands could inject their products into that conversation and tap into those student influencers? After graduating from the University of Miami in 2011, Kosinksi decided to address this untapped opportunity, launching a year later. While it doesn’t have the most appealing name, Sumpto’s mission is bound to have some appeal: To become the Klout for college students. Granted, around those who actually know what one is, the words “Klout score” tend to induce a significant amount of eye-rolling. In fact, I’m rolling my eyes as I write this. However, Kosinski assures us that Sumpto isn’t just looking to replicate Klout for the college demographic, although the two companies admittedly share similar goals. Simply put, Sumpto aims to measure the social influence college students have among their peers and reward them for “being themselves,” while in turn allowing brands to sneak their products into the collegiate conversation organically. In essence, the platform seeks to help brands identify influential college students, rewarding them with prizes and exclusive access if and when they choose to talk about those brands and their products. And, yes, Sumpto gives students a score to help students and brands measure the degree of their influence. “Everyone loves, cough, hates hearing about Klout,” the Sumpto founder says, “so we want to differentiate our model from Klout and so far it’s been working.” On Klout, Kosinski continues, people are measured by the same algorithm regardless of whether you’re a 27-year-old engineer, a 35-year-old on Twitter or a 60-year-old blacksmith on LinkedIn. Unlike Klout, Sumpto only allows college students to register and is thus able to incorporate metrics that are unique to college students, like what type of school students attend, their Greek affiliation and the percentage of out-of-state students, for example. That segmentation is built into Sumpto’s algorithms, he says, which in turn gives brands access to more targeted marketing. Furthermore, Klout gives “perks” based on topics of influence, your score and your location, whereas Sumpto offers its influencers rewards based not only on topics of influence, their Sumpto score and location, but private and public school, Greek affiliation, the size of the school, their year in school and in-state versus out of state as well. While the presence of brands in and/or around online conversations and forced interaction is likely far from appealing for college students, Kosinksi says that the platform in no way requires students to say anything about brands if and when they receive rewards. Instead, the idea is to allow conversation to happen around products organically — something that he says college students are likely to do anyway, as they’re being rewarded for something they normally do: Interact with friends and fellow students online. For brands, students represent over $300 billion/year in spending power and over $70 billion/year in discretionary spending. In turn, they also represent the beginning of brand loyalty, the beginning of independent purchasing decisions and tend to be heavily influenced by their peers. (Sorry, college students, it’s true — for myself included.) So the idea, Kosinski says, is to allow students to talk about brands more naturally, which, by definition, has the potential to be far more effective, social (and influential) than the methods traditionally used by brands to target this demographic. Using Sumpto, brands can identify college students who are males at private universities, affiliated with Greek life and have a Sumpto Score above 35, for example. The startup’s algorithm automatically identifies the students who fit those criteria, allowing brands to dole out free products and exclusive access. Sumpto then charges brands for this access. For example, Sumpto just completed an “Influencer Campaign” with LittleBlackBag, in which it generated $1,700 in less than a month by charging the brands a premium to run this targeted campaign. In addition, Sumpto also charges a percentage of revenue generated through its “Rewards Program,” in which varying degrees of discounts are given to students based on their Sumpto Scores. The higher their score, the higher the discount. Sumpto then charges a percentage of revenue generated from the program, which Kosinski says has generated over $30K in revenue for brands and students have claimed over 11,500 rewards to date. So far, Sumpto has worked with four of Klout’s previous clients — like TopFloor, ScoreBig, EBoost and LittleBlackBag — and is currently in conversations with a few more. Since launch, Sumpto has seen 10,000 students register on its platform, a user base which has come purely through organic growth, Kosinski says, thanks to the fact that 81 percent of its users return to the site once a week and 54 percent of its traffic is derived from social referrals. The startup raised $90K from a few angel investors early on, and, based on its continuing growth, has just opened up a $500K seed round to help grow its team and to help it begin spreading the word. Traditional advertising is ignored by college students — as it is by most everyone — so rather than traditional, broad approaches that get little traction, brands need a credible and trustworthy introduction. Sumpto wants to be the one that provides that introduction. So far, college students seem to be buying in, but it remains to be seen whether there’s enough ROI implicit in this model to win over the big brands. The initial pieces are in place, but now comes the hard part: Scale. For more on Sumpto,
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White House Anti-IP Theft Strategy Comes Out Swinging Against China
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
The White House released a high-level strategy paper on combating international intellectual property theft and pointed a not-so-subtle finger at China. The report promises increased criminal sanctions against thieves, diplomatic pressure on egregious state actors, and public-awareness campaigns. While the administration carefully tiptoes around naming China specifically, six of the seven high-profile theft cases that the report highlights involved China. “This is what you have to do to get the Chinese to behave differently,” James Lewis, a cybersecurity specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former top official at the State Department. The strategy document dovetails a damning new which details over 100 attacks from an alleged covert hacker unit inside the Chinese military. The report promises to leverage new counter-espionage laws, such as the The Foreign and Economic Espionage Penalty Enhancement Act of 2012, which increased penalties for economic espionage and corporate trade-secret theft. On the public-awareness front, the report points to government website stopfakes.gov, a consumer-information portal for spotting counterfeit products and learning about ongoing anti-theft initiatives. The message of the report is a between-the-lines dig at China. The document highlights espionage case studies in shaded blue squares of block text. The first six are all related to China. For example: “Hong Meng was a research chemist for DuPont. He was involved in researching Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED). DuPont’s OLED research efforts resulted in the development of a breakthrough and proprietary chemical process for OLED displays. Mr. Meng stole trade secret compounds and passed them to a Chinese university. He was caught by the FBI and prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware and was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison. DuPont valued the loss of the trade secrets at $400 million dollars.” While the president has been careful not to directly blame any countries, the White House essentially did point fingers at China in the report. And the report, of course, is only the beginning. by
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ZTE Aims To Launch The First Tegra 4 Smartphones In China By The End Of 1H 2013
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
When NVIDIA officially pulled back the curtains on its new it had no shortage of praise for the thing — the company referred to it as “the world’s fastest mobile processor” — but there was something missing from the announcement. Who would be using be using it? Sure, Vizio revealed a 10.1-inch, just a day later, but there was nary a phone partnership in sight until tonight. NVIDIA has just announced it is working with the folks at ZTE to launch the first Tegra 4-powered smartphones in China during the first half of this year. Here’s a quick refresher on the Tegra 4 in case you haven’t been keeping up with the wild and woolly world of mobile systems-on-chips. This particular SoC sports 72 GPU cores, as well a quad-core processor that feature’s ARM Cortex A15 core, and by way of NVIDIA’s Icera acquisition. NVIDIA’s deal with ZTE honestly seems like a mixed bag. Don’t get me wrong — the Chinese company is capable of crafting some nice hardware (and we’re sure to see some of it at Mobile World Congress next week), but one can’t help but wonder if NVIDIA would’ve preferred a higher-profile partner to help usher in the age of Tegra. That’s not to say that NVIDIA isn’t getting anything out of this deal though. Far from it, actually — continued buy-in from a notable Chinese OEM will only help NVIDIA strengthen its position in a fast-growing mobile market. For now, there’s no word on exactly what ZTE devices the Tegra 4 will find itself in, but NVIDIA is awfully fond of throwing the term “superphone” around, so I’d expect something with at least a little bit of wow factor. Meanwhile, some of rival Qualcomm’s recently revamped chipsets have appeared in high-end hardware — HTC’s new One has a Snapdragon 600 ticking away inside of it, and it may not be alone. Rumor has it that Samsung is having some heat management problems with its newer in-house Exynos chipsets, and to a Qualcomm SoC for its flagship Galaxy S IV. Couple that with the high-end 800 we saw at CES and the Snapdragon 200 and 400 chipsets that just officially got the nod and NVIDIA’s certainly got a fight on its hands.
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Pinterest Confirms Massive New $200 Million Series D Funding Round And $2.5 Billion Valuation
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
, the content discovery website that has achieved by letting people clip and share their favorite photos and videos online with virtual “pinboards,” is making it very clear that it is much more than just a pretty face — it’s a big business. Pinterest confirmed today that it has secured approximately $200 million in a new funding round led by new investor Also participating in the round, which serves as Pinterest’s Series D, were Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital. The news was first reported ; Pinterest subsequently confirmed the funding round and valuation in an email to TechCrunch. We’ve heard from two sources that the Walt Disney Co. had also been expressing interest in taking part in this latest round, which has been buzzed about . But it now seems as if those talks did not end up leading to an investment in the end. The new funding was raised at a valuation of $2.5 billion, a Pinterest representative said via email. The money will be put toward the typical growth-oriented initiatives: Hiring, new product and technology development, better infrastructure, international growth, and M&A. Pinterest, which is based in San Francisco, currently has a staff of about 100. The company has also issued the following quotation by CEO Ben Silbermann: “Our focus is on helping millions of people discover things they love and get inspiration to go do those things in their life. This investment gives us more resources to help realize that vision.”
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In Exchange For Help Juicing Sales, Twitter And LinkedIn’s Ads APIs Share The Wealth
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Tech companies try to stay lean. They don’t want to hire too many sales people, and they can’t build the perfect advertising tool for every buyer. So following in Google and Facebook’s footsteps, today and in November launched ads APIs. They set up a powerful value exchange: “Help us sell more ads, and we’ll give you a cut.” If you’ve ever bought online ads with a self-serve interface, you know it basically doesn’t work. I did it on Facebook at my first job out of college. ‘Twas hell. Maybe if you’re a small business trying to spend $50 with no regard for optimization it will “work.” But if you want to spend any serious money on an ad campaign without throwing handfuls of cash into a bonfire, you need a programmatic interface. Every business wants a different interface, though. Some want a standalone buying tool for a specific ad platform or social network. Some want it built into the same system running their search ads so they can shift spend across the channels to get the biggest bang for their buck on any given day. Some want to control all the targeting, others want artificial intelligence to hunt for the best-performing creatives and audiences, and still others want their websites automatically packaged into ads. Trying to build all these different options in-house would be impossible for most ad platforms. Meanwhile, there’s the job of actually selling the ads to all these different types of businesses. A platform’s biggest clients often get full-service hand-holding, while their smallest have to fight through the self-serve tool. In the middle there’s a thicket of businesses across verticals and international borders. Hiring and training an in-house sales team to machete their way into these company’s pockets can be a huge up-front cost and lead to a bloated head count. What Google and Facebook found, and and are now exploring, is that by offering programmatic access to their ads inventory, third parties solve the problems for them. In exchange, the platforms allow providers of full-service advertising or ad tool licenses to earn a margin. Typically that comes in the form of a 10 percent to 20 percent cut of total spend by clients that typically goes down the more they spend. Otherwise the margin comes by charging a “cost per action” where clients pay a certain amount per click, download, or certain level of downstream engagement, and the provider keeps the difference between what they paid and what they charged. Sometimes there’s a monthly fee, too. Twitter refused to specify whether there were any restrictions for businesses built on its new ads API, saying “We’re not commenting on partnership terms.” Regardless, the idea is for the platforms to share the wealth, and thereby align their goals with the ad tool and service providers. This way they both can make a fortune when the third parties evangelize the channel. And my oh my can ads APIs bring in the dough. Big providers taking advantage of ads APIs can pull in hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and earn enough profit to build sizable teams, as well as invest in algorithm development and rapid adaptation to the latest API features. The money pouring out of the Facebook Ads API in particular has led many providers on that platform to be purchased. Adobe bought for $400 million, Experian scooped up , Adknowledge bought , and Buddy Media acquired to rear itself for acquisition by Salesforce. Facebook’s social ads API is a very different beast than Google AdWords and AdSense, so it birthed a bunch of entirely new companies. Twitter and LinkedIn are similar enough to Facebook that I bet we’ll see established adtech players scrambling to get on board. LinkedIn’s could kick off some new recruiter-specific ad tools and services, and a few interest graph and public sentiment analysis-focused providers might pop up around the Twitter ads API that . But of Twitter’s five initial partners, Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, SHIFT, and TBG Digital, only HootSuite doesn’t offer Facebook ad buying, too.
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PS4 Is Sony’s Last Stand, And It’s Wasting It On A Tired Strategy That Ignores How The Gamer Is Changing
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Sony’s PlayStation 4 made its grand debut today in a presentation with all the theatrical flair to be expected from an electronics company that’s also a media company that’s also a producer and publisher of blockbuster video games. But the pomp hides a hurting heart: Sony’s FY 2012 financial results saw it swallow a $5.74 billion loss, with versus the previous year. And Microsoft is playing the home media center card to perfection, hedging bets against a future where a dedicated gaming console isn’t the draw it once was. Sony did more than unveil a next-gen gaming platform today: it answered the question of how it would adapt to this changing world. And the answer might not be what you were expecting: Sony made a point of saying it was moving away from the living room, and putting the gamer at the center of the new platform. The company then went on to talk for at least 10 minutes about hardware and specs, and after a brief interlude to discuss cloud gaming, launched into a series of gaming demos. Which, if you’ve ever seen gaming demo videos, delivered exactly what you’d expect. And that was not excitement. There was another Killzone, which looked pretty much like the others with better graphics. There was a racing simulator that was supposedly about some innovative team play, but whose developer focused on showing suede textures more than anything else. Then there was Sucker Punch’s Infamous spinoff game about mutant, which is actually decently cool since I really liked the first two Infamous titles. There were some indie games, which were more interesting than the AAA titles if only because they offered a little variety. Then there were a bunch more games from usual suspects like Square Enix and Ubisoft, Blizzard with a Diablo III port, and Bungie’s latest. But overall the message was clear: Sony’s PS4 is an evolution, not an about-face, or a realization that being a game console might not mean what it used to mean. Here’s a typical reaction to what Sony was showing off during the bulk of its presentation, in case you think I’m only expressing my own opinion: All these games just look like tech demos for particle rendering. Are we sure it’s not called ParticleStation 4? — Eric Leamen (@ericleamen) it’s so stark how different nintendo and sony prioritize. nintendo sees the game mechanics themselves, sony sees GRAPHIX — Ellis Hamburger (@hamburger) Later they brought out the Move controller. That’s crazy, Sony. You’re crazy if you think the Move controller will be saved by the PS4 when across the aisle is the Kinect with its hands-free, truly innovative full body movie tracking. If you think people will build 3D sculptures with a wand with a ball on the end you’ve absolutely lost your mind. There’s something to be said for trying something different, but these are things that are already better done by existing tools, or by competitors. Cutting their losses would’ve been a better strategy with the Move. What was missing from Sony was a discussion of anything that could’ve made it a more broadly appealing device. Sony needed the introduction of streaming media partners; cable and satellite providers willing to use it for IPTV delivery; integration that would make connections with mobile devices more than just a way to have a tiny screen for select, old games and some leftover social functions; at a bare minimum it needed a physical device, and a date beyond “Holiday 2013.” It (and we, as potential customers) needed way more than a falling back on graphics, eye candy and tech demos, which may have served the gaming industry well in the past, but which have done nothing to stem the rising tide of mobile platforms like iOS and Android.
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Gaikai Cloud Gaming In PlayStation 4 Brings Easy Free Trials Of Games, Sharing, Spectating And Remote Play
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Gaikai’s Dave Perry took the stage at the PS4 event today to describe how Gaikai would be adding cloud gaming elements to the PS4, which will make it possible to jump in and try games in the PlayStation store, make sharing with your friends a snap, and also invite spectators and get friends to help you by remotely taking over your game. The PS Vita will also finally get a lot more useful, thanks to Remote Play. Perry said that the team has dramatically reduced transmission times, turning the PS4 into a server and the Vita into a client allowing for remote play of titles run on the PS4 direct to the Vita. It’s exactly like the Wii U, but with a controller you can walk away with and use as a standalone mobile console. The ability to easily jump right into PS4 games and try out titles via streamed gaming is a huge addition for Sony, which had more limited demo capability in the PS3 PlayStation store which required sizeable downloads when it was even available (which wasn’t for every title). Inviting players to join and watch your game also includes the ability for spectators to chim with with on-screen comments as you play, and the ability to take over your controller to help you out if you run into trouble. It’s a much more social version of Nintendo’s handholding modes in recent releases. Will gamers opt to call a friend, so to speak, instead of jumping on GameFAQs? That’s a good question, but clearly the company is doing everything it can to try and build a real social network, instead of the loosely affiliated group of often crude, sometimes racist anonymized gamers that made up the PlayStation Network of the past.
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Twitter And Yahoo Vet Kevin Cheng On How Companies Can Use Comics To Convey Big Ideas [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
In his new book released last week called “ ” Cheng makes the case for taking comics outside of their typical realm and using them to convey complex ideas in the corporate and technology worlds. The idea, he says, is that “just as vividly as they convey the feats of superheroes, comics tell stories of your users and your products.” It’s a unique pitch and a very cool book, so we invited Cheng to come by TechCrunch TV and discuss the subject in person. Watch the video embedded above to hear Cheng’s case for the comic format, how industries beyond tech are using the medium in big ways, how non-artists can leverage the power of comics to tell their stories (stick figures are OK!), and more.
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Maker’s Row Grows As A Matchmaker Between Fashion Designers & Domestic Manufacturers
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Emily Goligoski
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Barriers to international manufacturing and high fuel costs have long made overseas production painful for small businesses. Now, an economic trend towards American manufacturing has created a timely entrance to the market for . The startup, a finalist in last week’s , says it wants to become a go-to resource to create, well, anything. Co-founders Matthew Burnett and Tanya Menendez launched Maker’s Row in November to act as a sort of with -like profiles for factories and facilities. The site enables recognized designers and amateurs alike to partner with manufactures that are searchable on the site by state to create a range of items, from handbags to sportswear. It charges manufacturers a subscription fee to post. By commissioning their work to be made stateside, brands can then more closely guide processes and prevent their orders from being stuck in transit abroad or in customs, Burnett says. Facilities are using the platform to communicate with one another and find materials, interactions that have surprised even the co-founders. Maker’s Row sees a sweet spot in getting orders placed by small to mid-size businesses — “people who are serious about making things” — and has raised $75K to date. It is looking to raise $1.25 million to hire backend developers and create more tools to track connections. Burnett said that cultural and language barriers complicated his work with overseas manufacturers when he was a watch designer for the likes of Marc Jacobs and Izod. “I felt like I was taking a gamble every time I worked with a new manufacturer,” said Burnett. He then started his own collection of domestically made accessories, . That is when he met Menendez, who started working on the brand with him when she wasn’t at her day job at Goldman Sachs working on automation projects. The combination of Menendez’s experience with trying to replace legacy processes and the difficulty the duo faced when searching for strong production partners led to the idea for Maker’s Row. Scott Weiner helped launch the company as tech lead, and the concept for making sourcing more accessible led its three co-founders to the to build the first version of their product. does similar work in China, but connecting designers with domestic sources seems to be a space that Maker’s Row owns. The DUMBO-based company has visually broken out the steps involved in physical goods production, including ideation, pattern-making, and tooling. For manufacturers, this comes with the hope of qualified leads (read: people who want to make things and actually know what they need). What’s the output so far for Maker’s Row? A “hackathon hoodie” is coming soon from , which was started by a pair of entrepreneur friends who are commissioning the work of a manufacturer in San Francisco (likely launching the first “slim-fit performance” gear intended for an audience of weekend hackers). Jasmine Aarons’ has moved production from Chile to NYC thanks to a connection made through the site. And a may help the startup begin production with Maker’s Row suppliers and contractors in their goal to help revive American textile manufacturing. Maker’s Row will be riding a wave of word-of-mouth recommendations among designers in the hopes of making 750K new connections over the next 12 months. Parsons The New School for Design recently tweeted, unasked, that its students should post their work to the site. The company has since started collaborating with design schools whose faculty and students want to develop their concepts into professionally-crafted products. School of Visual Arts, California College of the Arts, and Rhode Island School of Design are among its current partners. “When I went to design school [for industrial design at Pratt, now a partner] I left being employable by others but not myself,” Burnett said. “We want to help students launch their own ideas.”
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The New, New PlayStation: Watch The 2013 Sony PlayStation Meeting Live At 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Join us live at the 2013 PlayStation Meeting where Sony will hopefully unveil what’s next for their iconic gaming console. The event runs from 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific and I’ll be posting images and commentary in our liveblog below. You can also watch it live right here thanks to . [ustream id=443086 live=1 hwaccel=0 width=608 height=368]
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Sony Officially Unveils The PlayStation 4: X86 CPU And 8GB Memory, But About Experiences, Not Specs
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Sony had an event today and as expected, it introduced the PlayStation 4. The next-gen platform is designed to shift focus from the living room to the gamer, Sony said, and overall, PlayStation’s approach is meant to make it possible for gamers to play wherever they want, whenever they want. PS4 lead system architect Mark Cerny talked about how the evolution of the PS4 came about, saying it began five years ago, earlier on in the life of the PS3. The PS3 was a first step, which was designed to connect to a variety of services, but it was limited because of how early it launched in that world, Cerny said. “Much less value is found today in blast processing or a system-on-a-chip,” Cerny said. He suggested tech could interfere with design innovation. The tech remains important, he stressed, but the idea was to create a platform that was all about experience. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s a tune Apple and Steve Jobs started playing years ago when they realized the spec race was a nonstarter in the mobile phone world. “By game creators, for game creators. It is a powerful and accessible system,” Cerny said on stage, suggesting that this time around there was a strong emphasis on ease of development, hence the use of a standard x86 PC CPU. The GPU is designed for use with “practical tasks,” he said, with the overall goal of making development a painless experience. Essentially, the PS4 is an advanced, x86-based personal computer, which means that it should be easy for developers to build. All of this is clearly an answer to a major complaint from studios about the previous generation, which was infamously tricky to master from a software perspective. Sony also unveiled a redesigned DualShock 4 controller, which has the Vita-style touchpad depicted in rumors, ad works with a 3D “stereo” camera accessory to track its movements in a loose approximation of what’s possible with Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect. The hardware is clearly also borrowing some tricks from mobile games. It has save states that allow users to quickly freeze and resume gameplay, without having to save just by switching on and off the console. There’s also background downloading, which allows digital titles to be played before they’re even completely on your local drive. Social is another key tentpole for the PS4, according to Cerny. He described a new function that allows you to quickly pause and upload gameplay videos as easily as you might have done with static screenshots in the past. There’s also spectator functionality for watching “celebrities” gaming, something which seems to have been borrowed from Twitter’s success with famous members. Networking will also be based around real names and profile pictures, instead of strictly on gamer tags and avatars, too, and all of this will plug into mobile apps to help gamers stay in touch.
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Mobile Commerce App PayDragon Launches A Redesign To Make One-Click Shopping Even Easier
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Mobile commerce startup wants to simplify the process of purchasing various grocery staples via your mobile phone. The company already has one-click purchasing and two-day shipping for products that can be ordered on its mobile apps. Now it’s redesigned its app to provide easier browsing of its inventory. PayDragon has always been focused on making mobile commerce easy. Coming out of Y Combinator-backed QR code company PaperLinks, PayDragon launched last year to provide a way for customers to and other local food vendors. Then the company pivoted a bit last September, announcing a new that would allow users to purchase regular household items and have them shipped to their homes with just one click. PayDragon is making its Checkout functionality even easier with the latest relaunch of its app, which makes products searchable by category, as well as the most popular items and daily and weekly deals. The app still has individual item pages, which provides users with one-click purchasing. But whereas previous versions of the app were dependent on scanning QR and UPC bar codes or search to add items, the new version simplifies the process. By redesigning the app around different popular product categories, users can more easily find the stuff that they want, even if they don’t have an object to scan or forget the name of the product. And it also has a few sections for deals, where customers can purchase discounted products. As was the case in earlier versions of its app, there’s no shopping cart or payment confirmation page — once a customer has entered billing and shipping information, items they choose will be automatically billed for and shipped once the purchase button is hit. In addition to the new design, PayDragon has also improved its service on the back end. The company is now working with a fulfillment company to handle assembling items and shipping them to customers. While each purchase is billed individually, many users will purchase many items at once, or at least during the same day. PayDragon’s fulfillment center works to bundle items and ship them together. It also means that PayDragon gets better margins for its service. PayDragon has in seed funding from Rustic Canyon Partners, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, and Mark Schwartz.
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Introducing ‘Boatbound’, The Airbnb For Boats
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 |
Average boat owners only use their vessel 14 days a year. That’s why is brilliant. It’s a peer-to-peer boat-renting startup that lets you book everything from kayaks to catamarans to yachts for a day at a time with a $1 million Lloyd’s insurance plan. In his first interview about Boatbound, founder Aaron Hall lays out his plan to make boating more accessible to everyone. Ahoy! “The two best days of a boat owner’s life are buying and selling their boat because of all the fees in-between. It’s a big capital cost,” Hall tells me. But if Boatbound can connect owners with just a few renters a month, it could offset that cost while allowing people to share on-water experiences. “We think the third best day is renting your boat on Boatbound. You get peace of mind that your boat isn’t just eating you up financially. Hall, who grew up boating and spent six years in a boat club, gave me the superhero origin story of . “The idea came about when I was in Texas with family out on a lake and was trying to rent a boat. The Marina said it had four or five boats to rent but they were all booked, but there were hundreds of boats sitting around. I thought ‘there must be an Airbnb for boats,’ but there wasn’t.” (Normally we’d stay away from the , but Boatbound embraces it.) So Hall and his designer / co-founder Matt Johnston decided to pivot their previous venture, the 500 Startups-accelerated wedding e-commerce company Tailored. That company’s wedding-focused co-founder departed, and five remaining Tailored team members formed Boatbound. After working for almost eight months and hiring Airbnb’s first employee Nick Grandy as an advisor, Boatbound is to a highly oversubscribed funding round. That makes sense considering everyone wants to exclaim without having to buy one. Boatbound plans to launch later this year, but you can . Here’s how it works. There are about 13 million registered boats in the U.S., and 95 percent of the time they’re unused. Boatbound offers a marketplace website where boat owners list their vessels for rent. Anyone from novices to experienced captains can browse boats and book one for a day. You can search by ship type and location, sort results by price and other factors, see descriptions of the boats, read reviews of the owner or message them, and book through a calendar widget. Typically, a 20-foot boat that would cost $10,000-$50,000 to buy and $800 a day to rent at a marina could be available on Boatbound for $200 to $400 a day. You’ll be able to slide into kayak for just $20 to $50, or put together $15,000 to $20,000 for a yacht. Boatbound keeps a percentage of the rental price, which helps pay for the $1 million in Lloyd’s liability insurance every boat comes with. This way both parties don’t have to be terrified of a scrape or even serious crash. If something unfortunate happens, you can call a 24-hour claims hotline just like with a car, a claims adjuster comes out, and the boat gets fixed as quickly as possible. Hall explains, “That’s the linchpin, making the boat owners feel comfortable.” To make sure you’re capable of steering the ship, renters have to go through an identification check and outline their boating history. The less experienced are pushed to state-approved study guides. Completing an on-site course earns renters a badge on their profiles or even credit to spend. When you meet up with the owner, who Hall calls “the last line of defense,” they’ll vet you to make sure you’re ready, and it’s ultimately their decision whether to hand over the keys. Once you’re good to go, the owner gives you a brief tour of the boat to note where the lifejackets are and any tricks or other critical info. If necessary, Hall says, “there’s an option for renters to charge an extra $50 or $100 to do a quick on-boat training, so the owner can show you exactly how to drive it.” “Our focus is to keep this as safe as possible,” Hall stresses. Luckily, common sense usually disuades people from booking boats that are out of their league, the same way you wouldn’t rent a stick-shift Porsche you didn’t know how to drive on “carBnB” service . “We have a code of conduct,” Hall tells me, that includes a two-way review system to make sure boats come back clean, gassed up and unharmed. Accidents happen, but “if we find out a renter is out there terrorizing the water, we have no problem suspending them.” Hall hopes to open the waters to a whole new class of boaters. “People either think it’s too expensive or they don’t know how to boat, but we want to lower the barriers and get it on the short list of things to do on the weekend. Right now it’s a rich white man’s sport. We want to make boating kind of non-elite…by tapping a younger, more diverse demographic.” Boatbound is trying to forge an “Ahoy Culture” in part by taking hints from Lyft’s pink mustaches and fist-bumps. “When you rent, everyone gets caps with the Boatbound logo. It’s about saying ‘Ahoy!’ and waving, telling the story of the boat and how it was named.” By making it fun and accessible, Hall believes people will come back to rent again and again. If owners can form relationships and get two or three people steadily renting their boat once a month, they could completely offset the cost. A few companies, including Fun2Rent and Incrediblue, have already dipped their toes in the space, and since Boatbound joined last month, Hall says clones are already popping up. What sets Boatbound apart, though, is what Hall calls a “first-of-its-kind product with Lloyd’s.” He implies boats listed elsewhere wouldn’t be as well-protected. Typically a boat owner’s insurance is void if they take money for a rental. “We had to put together a program that would act as the primary insurer of boats.” Hall mentioned it took the rise of Airbnb and some pushing by some high-influence individuals (maybe some of its investors), to get Lloyd’s to agree to the plan. While different boats and renters would cost more or less to insure, at least at first Boatbound is just absorbing the fees. Convincing boaters to put their ‘babies’ in a stranger’s hands could be a tough sell. Some just won’t think its worth the money to have to worry about their ship, which could cause shortages on the supply side. Boatbound will have to do everything in its possible to avoid an with a sunk boat and injured passengers. There are 75 million boaters in the U.S. each year. I think there’s about to be a whole lot more. Since I spoke with Hall, whenever I’d mention the company to people, their eyes would light up. They either wanted to invest, or set sail immediately. Renting a car or a place to sleep is standard. Renting a private jet is just too pricey. But Boatbound brings giddy decadence to the average joe through collaborate consumption. Something so fun shouldn’t be reserved as a status symbol for the wealthy. You deserve a day on the water, surrounded by friends with the sea spray in your face, and Boatbound is going to give it to you.
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Milk Virtual Goats For Womens’ Rights In This New Facebook Game
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
Instead of spending to grow virtual crops faster, Facebook gamers can turn those purchases into donations for cattle donations and fistula operations in the developing world. A in a few weeks is all about women’s rights. Based on about women, it’s called and it is the fruit of a collaboration between a non-profit Games For Change and Canada’s Frima Studios, which is one of the bigger independent developers in the country. While there have been a few early projects in gaming for social causes like Darfur is Dying and social entrepreneurship game Urgent Evoke, it’s still a pretty new genre. Games For Change’s co-president Asi Burak says that non-profits often turn to dinners and galas to raise money and awareness of humanitarian issues. And yet, games can have a much farther reach with millions of players. Games For Change put out a $1 million request for proposal and invited different game developers to suggest concepts. They raised the funds from institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation, Intel, United Nations Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Frima’s bid won. “Our vision has always been to think about games not only as entertainment, but as a way to modify behavior or teach things,” said Frima’s CEO Steve Couture. In their game, a young woman named Radhika has to go through the everyday struggles that women in the developing world confront. She realizes her daughter is very sick, but her husband doesn’t have money to take her to a doctor. Radhika has to find a way to make the money for medical treatment. “There’s a range of stories. Every time, she becomes more successful and more independent,” Burak says. She buys a virtual goat, starts to sell the milk and through that, starts her own small business. Eventually, that brings her on a journey around the world through India, Kenya, Vietnam, Afghanistan and the U.S. “The real worlds and virtual worlds are intertwined,” Burak says. For example, when Radhika buys a goat, a player can make a donation to Heifer International. Or when she gets her daughter treated, the player can make a vaccine donation to the UN. Bigger partners like Pearson and Johnson & Johnson have offered to do book or surgical operation donations if enough players trigger them. Zynga has also offered to chip in. They did a game review with Frima’s team and have pledged to help distribute it with their nearly 298 million monthly active users. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Ahpocmjs0&w=560&h=315]
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Hangout With The A-List During Google’s Asian Pop Star Week
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
Google announced today that it is kicking off A-Pop Star Week on March 8. The event will include Google+ Hangouts with C-, J-, and K-Pop singers (if you haven’t guessed already, the letters stand for Chinese, Japanese and Korean) including , , , and , all of whom are now taking questions on their linked YouTube promotional videos. An event calendar is up on YouTube’s new , which collects top 20 music videos and new releases. Questions can also be submitted on Google+ using hashtags that will be revealed closer to the event date. If there is a particular performer you are just dying to virtually meet, each participating star will be selecting five participants for their Hangout. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEQCFifF_J4] This is the latest in a with celebrities and public figures that Google is hosting as it seeks to promote Google+ Hangouts as an alternative to Skype and other online video chat services. Last week, President Obama in a 40-minute group interview with several bloggers on Google+ following the State of the Union, while Vice President Biden’s in January was laced with quotes that were almost as good, if not quite as juicy, as the delivered by . On the entertainment side, Hangout participants have included , as well as the arguably more influential duo of . Here is A-Pop Star Week’s roster: 3/9 (C-Pop) 3/10 (K-Pop) 3/11 (J-Pop) 3/12 (J-Pop) 3/13 (K-Pop) 3/14 (C-Pop)
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PayPal Stops Personal Payments In Singapore
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
PayPal will stop allowing personal payments in Singapore on February 20. It said in an email to members that this was due to “regulatory instructions”. People will still be able to make commercial payments for goods and services with their accounts, such as at online merchants, or receive funds, but we can expect that fund transfers between personal accounts will be halted. They’re not clear on exactly what sort of fund transfers will be stopped, but this seems in line with what happened in other countries. According to reports, PayPal Japan’s personal account holders stopped being able to receive or send money to individuals in 2010, and now have to pay a business fee for transactions. The same year, users in Taiwan and Brazil reported that they stopped being able to send personal payments. PayPal’s wording seems to suggest that users will still be able to receive payments from “sales and trading”, so this shouldn’t hurt individuals selling on eBay (which owns PayPal). However, many of the smaller blogshops in the region are run by individuals, and those transfers are to personal accounts. Blogging platform, LiveJournal, has said it has a global pool of over 50,000 blogshops. It said that the transaction volume of Singapore blogshops was $80 million in that year alone. PayPal responded to say that personal payments such as cash gifts or living allowances won’t be allowed. Underlying goods and services will be permitted, and this extends to commercial payments made and received by Singapore users covering personal, “premier” or business accounts. Users can also still receive funds from PayPal users outside of Singapore, and that is dependent on whether personal payments are allowed in the sender’s country. Blogshops, you can rest easy.
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Kaifu Lee Still Upbeat On China’s Social Media Despite Sina And Tencent Weibo Suspension
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
Despite after criticizing state-run , former Google China head Kaifu Lee remains optimistic about social media in China. Lee posted on how he believes social media can help ordinary citizens in that country: Many people followed the news, and sent me their condolences about my recent predicament. With news like this, most of my American friends assumed that social media in China cannot thrive, due to tighter controls. While the controls are tighter, one must realize that social media is infinitely more open than other media in China, and Sina has built a solid product integrating images, video, structured dialog, and longer tweets. As a result, Sina Weibo has become the media of choice that people flock to find or share information, and to voice or hear opinion. Since announcing his Weibo suspension, Lee has collected a few more followers on and now has about one million on the U.S.-based site. Still, it’s a tiny fraction compared to Lee’s audience on his Chinese microblogging accounts. Lee has 30 million “fans” on and 24 million “listeners” on . As he noted in his LinkedIn blog post, Lee has been outspoken on his Weibo accounts about a variety of contentious topics, including the , the Taiwanese presidential election, and . Lee made his comments about Jike followed a report on that the search engine had sent an internal announcement before last week’s Chinese New Year holiday that about five to 10 percent of its approximately 500 employees would be laid off following a performance-based evaluation. The report attributed Jike’s failure to thrive to several factors, including former table tennis star president Deng Yaping’s lack of search engine experience and the fact that 80 percent of its work force is made up of engineers, meaning that the company does not have enough marketing, product development or client services staff. Huxiu was forced to take down the report, but blog and a cached version is still available . The Web site has also gotten around Chinese censors by outlining the timeline that led to the deletion of on Tumblr. Jointly funded by the state-run People’s Daily and People’s Daily Online, Jike was by the Chinese government as part of its bid to move into the commercial Internet space. (Its name is supposed to be a homophone for “geek” in Chinese, not rhyme with “like.”) Deng was chosen because of her strong name recognition in China, but after the layoff rumors began, Lee questioned her ability to lead Jike in an on February 17 that has also since been deleted, comparing the decision to the Democratic Party in the U.S. appointing Michael Phelps to be CEO of Google. Soon after those comments were published, Lee made his Twitter posting announcing that he’d been booted of Sina and Tencent Weibo for three days. Both Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo also began censoring searches for “Deng Yaping Doesn’t Get Search” on the same day, around the same time the Global Times, another state-sponsored publication, published with quotes from a Jike spokesperson refuting the layoff reports. that not only is it not planning to fire employees, but it in fact has plans to recruit another 40 college graduates in March. But it will be difficult for Jike to make an appreciable dent in a marketplace that is . According to CNZZ, Jike doesn’t even make the list of top 10 search engines in China: Baidu currently holds about 71.2% of the market in China, followed by Qihoo So.com with 10.4% and Sogou.com with 7.9%. Google and Tencent Soso.com making up the rest of the top 5. Furthermore, Jike’s skewing of search results is obvious to even the most casual user, as , making it an even less attractive alternative to its competitors.
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Ogio Renegade RSS Backpack Makes For A Solid Hackathon Carry-All
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Jay Donovan
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
The arrived in the mail last week — perfect timing for a business day trip I needed to make and a great test of this backpack’s capability. The bag soft launched in 2012, but they are just now getting review units out because, apparently, consumer demand has been quite high for this backpack. How did it work for me? Great. I love it. But why?
The backpack has so many compartments, that you can realistically put every device you carry into a different place. This means that you can easily separate devices from each other (as well as device cords) so that when you want one specific device, you can access it without all the rest tumbling onto the floor — great for air travel.
Speaking of air travel, I put it to the test last week and the bag mostly fits under an airline seat (within regulation anyway). The very top could get stepped on by the person sitting next to you, but it didn’t happen to me. The pack easily fit through security scanners.
The bag can have a slim profile on your back if it is not completely packed, but still has the ability to stretch out a bit too when you need maximum space. You could easily fit all your gadgets plus a change of clothes or two for short trips, which is nice.
It also has two crush-proof compartments (one large and one small) for laptop and sunglasses, respectively. The laptop sleeve is easily accessible and fits up to a 17” laptop and is actually suspended from the bottom of the bag so it never touches the ground when you set your bag down — hence the name RSS (Reactive Suspension System).
Ogio thoughtfully labeled each compartment with an icon representing what they recommend goes into it. You can, of course, put anything you want in any compartment, but it’s a nice touch to do some of the thinking for you.
I thought the backpack was pretty comfortable. It’s an electronics backpack so I wasn’t about to thru-hike with it.
It can have a slim profile, however for a smaller guy like me, it is still a full size backpack and can look a tad large — almost parachute-like. . But seriously, it’s just a trade off. If you really need to carry a bunch of stuff, this pack is perfect for it. If you are trying to have a minimalist setup, you might not need this much space.
The bag is $150. That’s a lot of money. What is different about it to justify the expense? Besides the previously mentioned crush-proof, suspended containers (which seem to be the main differentiator) you are getting some pretty good customer service from Ogio. Their website and chat window were helpful. The representative I chatted with was quite knowledgeable about the products and was eager to help me understand the features and differences. It was a good experience, casual and helpful for decision making. I also learned that, apparently, the review unit sent is not the 2013 model as that version will be out in a month or so and is not black but rather is more of a grey color.
Straight from the product page at Ogio’s website. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_okPDRVYJA&feature=player_embedded] As you can see from above, there are more good things about this pack than bad. Translation: this is an excellent full-sized backpack. Comfortable and appropriate for the person who has to tote a multitude of gadgets with them, for daily travel. Thumbs up! More info at
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Microsoft Takes Outlook.com Out Of Preview, Starts Migrating Hotmail Users And Launches “Massive” New Marketing Campaign
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
Six months after its initial launch, the preview of , Microsoft’s free webmail service that is meant to replace the aging Hotmail brand and design, now has over 60 million active users according to the company’s own data. Today, Microsoft is officially taking and will start prompting its 360 million Hotmail users to switch to the new service (while keeping their old email addresses). Microsoft expects to switch all Hotmail users to the new interface and platform by the summer. Now that Outlook.com is out of preview, Microsoft is also launching a massive new marketing campaign for the service in the U.S., and the company tells me this will be the “largest ever” for a free webmail service. This campaign, which will include TV ads and a number of digital-only videos, will have a very upbeat tone and will not be based on the recent campaign. Instead, the new ads focus on Outlook.com’s features and how it plays well with the rest of Microsoft’s suite of online tools, including, for example, SkyDrive. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Xk4kbm0cs] As Microsoft’s senior director of product management, Dharmesh Mehta told me earlier this week, his team spent the last six months working on scaling the service and preparing it for this transition. Similar to what Microsoft is doing with its migration from , the transition will be optional at first and become mandatory later on. Unlike the Messenger/Skype switch, Microsoft isn’t staggering the upgrade by geographic location, though. Hotmail users can switch at any time over the next few months. At some point in the future, this switch will become mandatory, but the timing for this remains up in the air. Microsoft, it is worth noting, always gave Hotmail users the option to move to the new Outlook.com, but it will now actively prompt users to do so and also email them to remind them that they can switch. Mehta acknowledged that email is “historically a very slow-moving category.” People don’t generally switch between email services very often and are even less likely to abandon their addresses in favor of a new service. Outlook.com, he stressed, lets you if you want to switch (over one-third of Outlook.com’s 60 million active users, Microsoft says, switched from Gmail) and current Hotmail users will obviously be able to keep their old @hotmail.com, @msn.com and @live.com addresses. According to Mehta, Microsoft believes that it now has a very competitive webmail client with features that are on par with Gmail, the service that stole Hotmail’s crown as the most popular free email service. Now that Gmail is becoming more and more complicated, he told me, is a “good opportunity to push people out of their complacency” and get them to try something new. Microsoft is clearly not shying away from the Gmail comparison. In its press materials for today’s announcement, for example, the company argues that it’s been nine years since Gmail disrupted the email space “and did something basic and offered 1 GB mailboxes. “Things are different today than they were in 2004,” Microsoft writes. “We use new communication services, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and we have a much greater appreciation for well-designed and well-connected systems.” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRsojCj4Vws&w=560&h=315] Hotmail was obviously a pioneer in the webmail businesses, but over time, @hotmail.com addresses lost their luster as it was eclipsed by its competitors like Gmail. Outlook.com, on the other hand, is a very modern webmail client with numerous smart features like sweep (to quickly clean up your inbox) and active views (to track packages, etc.). Some Hotmail users will obviously dislike the change to the modern, flat interface. Overall, however, this is clearly a major upgrade to Hotmail and may just allow Microsoft to once again compete in this space.
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Y Combinator-Backed Zenefits Gives Small Businesses A One-Stop Shop For Finding And Managing Employee Benefits
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
For startups and small businesses, providing and managing employee insurance and benefits can be a huge headache. In the early stages of business development, this responsibility generally falls into the hands of founders, who have to contact insurance brokers and manage the whole enrollment process themselves. It’s tedious and distracting, yes, but it’s also a critical part of running a business — and ensuring that your employees are happy, healthy and productive. After experiencing this painful process twice (as a co-founder of Wikinvest and, again, at SigFig), Parker Conrad decided founders had been subjected to enough pain and set out to build a solution — “the product I wish had been available the first two times around,” he says. After recruiting Laks Srini, who had been a fellow software engineer , the two co-founded to help startups and small businesses find insurance quotes and manage employee benefits in one place. A member of Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 class, Zenefits is officially launching today with a platform that aims to help SMBs more quickly and painlessly set up health insurance and ancillary benefits for their employees, whether it be medical, dental, vision or their 401(k) plans. The process often takes weeks, requiring co-founders or unlucky staffers to contact brokers for quotes and manage the tedious enrollment process themselves, which usually involves dozens of trips to a fax machine (a what?!) and sorting through stacks of paper forms for each employee. Instead of having to print PDFs, fill them out, sign them and fax them back each time that something changes within an individual employee’s plan, Zenefits wants to turn that multi-week, paper-filled process into one that can happen in just a few minutes from the comfort of your local browser — even the actual signing of those forms.
To help bring benefit enrollment and management online, Zenefits allows companies that use ADP, Intuit or Zen Payroll to log in with their existing online credentials and use its system to import relevant employee data, email relevant forms and applications to all of their employees and even send them reminders. From that point on, employees can manage their benefits through Zenefits directly, without having to sign in to 17 different systems. By choosing to sync their payroll system with the Zenefits platform (which, by the way, is optional, not required), companies can automatically import insurance and benefits information so that the system can set up employee deductions in the payroll system when someone enrolls in or changes their plan and monitor for arriving (and departing) employees so that Zenefits can work directly with them to get them enrolled (or dis-enrolled). In the big picture, Zenefits is out to disrupt alternative to traditional insurance brokers, who generally force their clients to use PDFs and fax machines to manage their health insurance benefits and less-than-stellar administrative services. Not only that, but many startups opt to use HR outsourcing firms like TriNet for benefits administration, but these services tend to charge thousands of dollars per employee (per year), something Zenefits offers for free. So Zenefits wants to present a better alternative to outsourcing firms as well. Conrad also sees a big market opportunity thanks to some of the new provisions inherent to the recently-passed Obamacare. Traditionally, health insurance brokers make 7 percent of health insurance premiums (in California, for example), which averages out to about $10,500/employee. However, these commissions will likely come down in 2014 due to the minimum loss ration provisions in Obamacare and brokers are saying that they will stop working with smaller companies or, at the very least, begin charging for what used to be a free service, Conrad says. “Even if commissions come down,” the co-founder continues, “we think brokers still make too much money, so we want to offer a wide range of supplementary services for free to justify and earn our commission.” This means that, going forward, Zenefits will look to round offer an increasing number of ancillary services, like transportation benefits and 401(k) management, for free. While there are in fact other pre-tax benefit companies out there, as players like sell commuter benefits at $5/employee/month, for example, Zenefits is in the process of adding the same functionality for free, making its money instead on health insurance commissions. Currently, Zenefits offers support for 401(k) management and plans to add transportation and cell phone benefit management in the near future. At launch, Zenefits’ platform includes plans from every major carrier in California (hundreds in total) and is in the process of adding more. It also offers instant quotes once a user signs up, which should be welcome news to those using insurance brokers, which tend to take at least a few business days to get that information from the insurance carrier. Of course, while this kind of idea has a lot of appeal, Zenefits also happens to be working in a space that’s already occupied by startups like and , which are both trying to make it easy for companies to manage and understand health care expenses (and reduce costs). But, by offering instant quotes, payroll integration and ancillary services for free, the Zenefits co-founders think that they have a leg up on the competition. More on Zenefits or in their intro video below: http://youtu.be/4cIR86F_210
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Fujitsu Finally Enters Europe’s Smartphone Market With A Senior-Focused Android Device With France Telecom, Starting In June
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
It was that news began to surface of Fujitsu’s intention to come to Europe with its Android-based smartphones. Now the Japanese company is finally coming good on those reports: on Tuesday, Fujitsu is launching its first device in Europe, marking its first “extensive foray into the smartphone market outside Japan.” But it’s not the company’s high-end Arrow Android phones that will be leading the charge. Instead, it is the Stylistic S-01, a senior-focused, Android 4.0 device with big icons, enhanced audio and a de-sensitized touchscreen aimed at elderly users. The device will sell first in France, starting in June and in partnership with France Telecom/Orange. The first devices will be shown at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona next week. While targeting elderly users first may seem like a strange tactic for a smartphone market debut, it actually makes sense for a number of reasons. According to , there are already countries in Europe where smartphone penetration has passed the 50 percent mark (the UK is 61 percent). France is not quite one of them yet, but it is close at 46 percent. That means that in a world where Samsung and Apple are , competition is getting tight to sell to mass market, younger demographics and some more specific targeting is needed. Smartphone penetration among seniors in France is only around 20 percent, but some 75 percent of mobile users in the senior age bracket plan to buy a smartphone in the next year, according to one survey. France Telecom tells me that it has more phones in the pipeline for seniors. “We’d like to see what the appetite for this device is but we recognise the senior user segment as a new market for us to target, so we will be considering other devices for these users in the future,” a spokesperson says. Indeed, Orange is also bucking the ageist trend that assumes smartphone technology is only for young people. “The senior customers within our customer base are just as hungry for smartphone technology and mobile internet services as anyone else,” noted Yves Maitre, SVP of device and mobile multimedia, France Telecom-Orange. Fujitsu says that it has sold some 20 million phones in its Raku-Raku senior phone line since its launch in 2001 in Japan, where it is sold exclusively by NTT Docomo. Fujitsu’s only other foray outside of Japan has been for a trial of smartphones in China. The Stylistic S-01 has several features that make it more friendly to the older user. Among them, the homepage icons that appear on the four-inch screen have been simplified and cast in a larger typeface to make them easier to see. The touchscreen, meanwhile, has been made less sensitive, with users required to push extra hard, as they would on a keypad, in order to tap through a command or number. While this might be annoying to the average smartphone user, Fujitsu says this reduces the amount of accidental touches that an older person might make on the device. Other features include a personal security alarm and audio technology that slows down fast talkers, and adjusts the frequency of voice callers relative to a person’s age, and water resistance. A France Telecom spokesperson says that for now there are no plans announced for further country rollouts, nor has it specified how it will be priced. It will depend on what Orange France decides to roll into the tariff and what services it ultimately bundles with the device. But it looks like Fujitsu, at least, has plans for this to be the first stage in a wider international plan. “As Fujitsu’s first extensive entry into the smartphone market outside Japan, we are delighted that Orange – a company that holds a strong position in the European market – will be offering our phone, which features Fujitsu-exclusive human-centric technologies,” said Nobuo Otani, Corporate SVP, Fujitsu Limited, in a statement. “We are committed to the success of this partnership as we strive to expand our smartphone business overseas, while advancing the promotion of Japanese technology worldwide.” Full release with more device specs below. Intuitive, feature-rich STYLISTIC S01 smartphone to debut June 2013 in France Tokyo and Paris, February 19, 2013 – Fujitsu Limited and France Telecom-Orange today announced a new partnership to offer mobile phones and services in Europe. The partnership marks Fujitsu’s first extensive foray into the smartphone market outside Japan. The initial offering will be the STYLISTIC S01, a smartphone designed especially for senior users, and will be available through Orange in France in June 2013. As the senior population in Europe continues to grow rapidly, smartphone usage in this demographic is expected to rise. With the release of the STYLISTIC S01, Fujitsu and Orange plan on offering users in this market segment an innovative smartphone that provides outstanding usability. The STYLISTIC S01 will include services like Orange Cineday (*1) and Orange et Moi (*2), which are unique to Orange. Based around the human-centric technologies that Fujitsu has cultivated for over a decade, the STYLISTIC S01 also offers a variety of original, convenient functions designed to reduce barriers to smartphone adoption by maximizing ease of use. One of these barriers is conventional touchscreens, which do not offer the tactile sensation of pressing a physical button. The STYLISTIC S01, however, employs a unique screen technology that requires users to apply the same level of pressure to on-screen icons as they would to buttons on a keypad. This helps users avoid inadvertent touches, preventing unintended operations and improving input accuracy. Furthermore, the intuitive graphic user interface features extra-large icons and a simplified layout to ensure straightforward navigation for easier operation. The STYLISTIC S01 is also equipped with a loud personal security alarm that can be used to alert people in the surrounding area in emergency situations. The handset incorporates audio technology that optimizes the frequency range based on a user’s age, making it easier to hear the voice of the person on the other end of the call. Another user-friendly audio function slows down the speech of callers who speak rapidly without lowering the pitch of their voice or changing the length of the conversation. These and other innovative features are currently in use in the Fujitsu Raku-Raku Phone series for seniors, which has been offered by NTT DOCOMO since 2001 in Japan where it has sold over 20 million units. “The senior customers within our customer base are just as hungry for smartphone technology and mobile internet services as anyone else. We are thrilled to be working together with Fujitsu to leverage our combined strengths to provide products for an emerging smartphone market segment in Europe,” said Yves Maitre, Senior Vice President of Device & Mobile Multimedia, France Telecom-Orange. “As Fujitsu’s first extensive entry into the smartphone market outside Japan, we are delighted that Orange – a company that holds a strong position in the European market – will be offering our phone, which features Fujitsu-exclusive human-centric technologies,” said Nobuo Otani, Corporate Senior Vice President, Fujitsu Limited. “We are committed to the success of this partnership as we strive to expand our smartphone business overseas, while advancing the promotion of Japanese technology worldwide.” The STYLISTIC S01 will be on display at the Fujitsu stand (Hall 5 Stand 5E120) and can also be viewed upon request at the Orange stand (Hall 5 Stand 5H110) during Mobile World Congress 2013, to be held in Barcelona, Spain starting February 25, 2013. STYLISTIC S01 Product Specifications · 130 x 64 x 10.9 mm
· 4-inch WVGA (800×480) touchscreen with unique tactile feedback technology
· Camera: back 8.1 MP; front: 0.3 MP
· Connectivity: GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSPA, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, GPS
· Memory: 4 GB + microSD
· OS version: Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0
· Chipset: Qualcomm MSM8255 1.4 GHz
· Battery: 1800 mAh
· Water- and dust-resistant (IPX5/8, IP5X) Glossary and Notes
1. Orange Cineday
Allows Orange customers to take a friend to see a movie every Tuesday for free. 2. Orange et Moi
A free application enabling Orange customers to understand and manage all their account details directly from their mobile in an efficient and easy manner. Customers can track their consumption, top up their account, take out options, find out about special offers, access Orange help, and also discover all the applications published by Orange with just one click.
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Singapore Fashion Retailer Inverted Edge Takes $1.6M Funding
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
A Singaporean fashion retail site has secured $1.6 million (S$2 million) in funding from a government-backed group of VCs. When it launches next month, the e-tailer, called , will carry a consignment of goods from 36 Asia-Pacific designers, according to CEO, Debra Langley. The funding it received was from the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF), Incuvest, Accel-X and four other undisclosed private investors. Incuvest is a government-appointed VC under its (TIS), which offers 85 percent of a decided sum from the NRF if Incuvest comes up with the remaining 15 percent. The online is seeing a surge in retail startups mushrooming against a backdrop of larger global players like Asos.com. In Asia, the market is further split with massive marketplaces like Taobao’s and . Langley said that Inverted Edge doesn’t plan to compete with the likes of Asos, but hopes to differentiate by focusing on shoppers outside of Asia keen to buy from designers in the region. She said that Inverted Edge will stick to a more high-fashion branding, and has secured some exclusive designs that it will bring on launch day. The company has a new warehouse space in the country’s Lavender district, and is in the process of stocking it. The company has a staff of 10 in Singapore. Inverted Edge sounds like the obvious offspring of Langley’s career: Prior to this, she was the Asia-Pacific president for Brussels-headquartered freight forwarder Borderlinx, and before, the president of DKNY Jeans’ international operations. Here’s a preview of what to expect, ahead of its launch in March.
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TC Cribs: Lit Motors, Where Sleek Electric Cars (And More) Are Built From Scratch
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
We’re back with a brand new , the TechCrunch TV series where we go inside the gates of the hottest tech companies and get a grand tour of what the day-to-day work life is like — warts, perks, and all. In this episode, we headed to an industrial stretch of San Francisco’s Folsom Street that’s generally as a home for greasy car mechanic shops than for geeky web startups. But that’s fitting, because the company we were visiting is a unique combo of both worlds: , the startup that made it to the finals at the most recent with the , the sleek that is so plugged into the latest digital tech that it purports to function like a “rolling smart phone.” We were able to have some hands-on time with the C-1, which really does make you feel like a real-life character when you climb inside, as well as the , which is aimed at the developing world. But what’s really fun about Lit Motors’ office is the genuine spirit that permeates everything founder and his team do, from vehicles, to furniture, surfboards, guitars, and more. That environment leads to some interesting (and exhilarating) moments for visitors — climbing up a fully homemade staircase was a personal first, for example. But all’s well that ends well, and we had a of fun with this Cribs. Check it all out in the video embedded above.
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How To Sell A Car To The Mobile-First Generation
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
I’m shopping for a car right now. Just something that can handle a little city driving and frequent trips to the cottage in the warmer months, with the ability to haul a decent amount of cargo. I’m weighing factors like size, fuel economy, engine power, cargo space and FWD vs. AWD, but for my purposes most of those points are relatively moot; I really just need something to get me from A to B. But I find myself more concerned with the in-car entertainment system, and how it works with my mobile device of choice. I’m far from a car buff, so my priorities might not line up with those of actual automotive enthusiasts, but my smartphone is no less important to me on the road as off. In fact, in many ways it’s more important in a vehicle I’ll be using mostly for long highway drives and the occasional commute caught in traffic. From experience with Zipcar and rentals, I know that the difference between a car that plays nice with my iPhone versus one that doesn’t can mean the difference between a pleasant trip that leaves me feeling rested and relaxed, and a frustrating journey that just ends up fraying my nerves. Here’s what I want from an in-car entertainment system in terms of how it handles a smartphone connection, in both an incarnation that should be fully possible given today’s technology, and one that’s maybe less realistic but more ideal: (via ) Car makers are taking steps in the latter direction, with Siri integration coming to cars from a number of manufacturers including . But this is still taking the form of integrations with existing systems like Chevy’s MyLink, which in my opinion are about as friendly and necessary as overwrought manufacturer skins plopped unceremoniously on top of stock Android. Cars that run Android were among the , but companies have been demoing in-vehicle Android for a while now. The problem is that you often won’t recognize it. What car manufacturers need to realize is that mobile tech has answered a lot of the same problems they have when it comes to navigation apps, in-car entertainments and utility software in ways that don’t require much rethinking or translation. Taking steps to minimize driver distraction is obviously one thing, but from my experience with SYNC and the rest, that hardly ends up being a core focus on most car-focused interface-design choices, so it’s a thin argument for sticking with the existing direction most are headed in. A user’s mobile device affects more and more of their lifestyle choices, resulting in the rich ecosystems we see out there today for accessories and appliances that are compatible with iOS and Android. Car makers need to realize this isn’t just a nice-to-have for consumers going forward, but an actual top-tier priority. In other words, the first person to build me a car that (as a standard, factory-installed option) wins.
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Turtle Beach’s New Seven Series Headphones Are A Gamer’s Audio Dream
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
If you’re a hard-core gamer, the name most certainly means something to you. We met with the tournament-grade headset maker to discuss their new Seven series of headsets, originally debuted at CES. There are three different models in the line, the (meant for all consoles, PC, and mobile), the Z Seven (meant for PC and mobile) and the M Seven (mobile only). Both the XP Seven and the Z Seven come with a special Audio Control Unit (or ACU) that lets you adjust even the most minute details of the audio. For example, you can set the speakers to be loudest toward the rear, letting you catch on to anyone who might be sneaking up behind you. You can also adjust the headset so that footsteps and gunshots can be louder, while the actual game sounds are much lower. There are eight different pre-set configurations you can build on your own, making it quick and easy to switch from one game to the next and still enjoy the best possible audio for each. Users also have the ability to mix in music from their phone, answer calls, and chat with other players using the XP Seven. You can even remove the microphone and just use these bad boys as your main headphones. Plus, the plates on the ear cups are removable, so you can buy various colors to customize your headset. At $279, the XP Seven is on the expensive side, but with the extra advantages they bring it’s well worth it if you game every day. The Z Seven model has all the same functionality, but is meant for PC and mobile only, while the M Seven doesn’t come with an ACU but does bring console-quality sound to mobile gaming. All three models are available now, so click if you’re interested in learning more.
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A Multi-Perspective Look At The Ambitious Pebble Smartwatch
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
The Pebble has one huge advantage over other smart watches right out of the box: aesthetics. This is a watch that lets your geek flag fly without being ass-ugly. The watch face options aren’t necessarily all that awesome, but set it to the text face that comes pre-installed and don’t worry about the rest. Also, black was the right choice, even if it was the only choice if you wanted one of the first shipping devices. Black watch on black strap in the Pebble looks fantastic on most any wrist. The screen is legible enough, but in some light the glue becomes visible to the point of annoyance, which is a rookie mistake and should not make it into production units, if the Pebble team is worth its salt. It affects all the Kickstarter units I’ve come across so far, however, so that’s not a good sign. I don’t think the Pebble is quite as handsome as Darrell does — it’s not looking, but it’s hardly a fashion-forward timepiece. Still, some of the promises that Pebble has made to its backers have positively influenced the watch’s look — rather than including something like a standard microUSB port for instance, the Pebble sports a magnetic charger so as to keep the whole shebang waterproof. The included rubber strap is plenty comfortable too, if a bit on the drab side. That’s easily remedied though — the Pebble apparently works fine with any 22mm watch band though, so the sky’s the limit as far as customization goes. While we’re talking about design, the Pebble’s iOS and Android companion apps are both intuitively laid out (which is critical since the Pebble would be largely useless without them). The sync process is very brief, and once that’s done you’re quickly guided into setting up notifications — the whole process can be knocked out in just a minute or two. And of course a tiny vibration motor whirrs whenever you get a notification, though the wrong kind of aftermarket watchband may make it harder to feel. Compared to the MetaWatch, using the Pebble is like a breath of fresh air. It’s almost the difference between proving that a smart watch as a concept is a good idea vs. something no one needs. From display, to overall look, to usefulness and dependability of features, the Pebble just blows the MetaWatch out of the water. Some might miss features like weather, stocks, and more that you get with the MetaWatch, whereas the Strata struck me as a novelty that quickly lost its charm, the Pebble already seems like something I’d have to at least adjust to living without. Unlike Darrell, the Pebble is my first foray into this whole crazy smartwatch thing, and my time spent with the thing has generally been very positive For the past few days I’ve been switching between linking the Pebble with my iPhone and my Droid DNA, and it wasn’t long before I began to prefer the experience on the latter just because of the extra granularity Android affords me. Under Android, I’m able to pass along notifications from Facebook and Google Voice (!) in addition to more standard fare like calendar entries and text messages. Thankfully, the four-button navigation scheme used to handle all these notifications and menus is incredibly straightforward. The top and bottom buttons on the right side allow you to (what else) scroll up and down through menus, while the two remaining buttons take you forward and back. Hardly a flashy way to get things done (especially when some smartwatch rivals lean on touchscreens for operation) but it mostly works like a charm. There are still issues with the Pebble. Email notifications cut out when using it on iOS when it drops the Bluetooth connection and reconnects, for instance. Caller ID and message notifications work consistently, however, so this isn’t a huge issue. The menu system could also use work; it’d be nice to be able to rearrange items in the list to make frequently-needed ones easier to access. Adding watch faces from the app just puts them at the bottom, and that’s going to become a bigger issue once you have third-party apps to manage from the Pebble. The backlight is also immensely inconsistent; don’t even bother with the automatic ambient light sensor, just turn it on at night and off during the day, or keep it on all the time if you’re not that concerned with eking out as much battery life as possible. On iOS, despite the fact that limitations are limited, the ones that it does provide work well. I actually prefer it to Android, since the limited support (only iMessage/SMS, email, phone and calendar notifications come through) means you won’t face a constantly buzzing wrist. I’ll agree that notifications work, but the way they’re implemented leaves plenty to be desired. Let’s say you get more than one message within a short period of time — the Pebble will only ever display the most recent one, so you’re going to have to go digging for your phone anyway. Now, I never expected the Pebble to replace my phone(s) for these sorts of tasks, but I was looking for something that would at least help me triage the constant flow of messages and updates and the Pebble isn’t quite there yet. I haven’t had much luck with the ambient light sensor, but that really hasn’t been an issue for me. I’ve been leaving the backlight setting on pretty much all the time and haven’t seen a huge loss in terms of battery life — I can get about 5-6 days out of it with everything turned on, and the backlight is off most of the time anyway. Since we’re talking about inconsistency though, what about these screens? They’re not always the prettiest things to look at while in direct sunlight, mine in particular — it’s not as notable when the Pebble is just displaying a clock face, but there are some cloudy patches of coloration visible when I navigate the menu outdoors. Apparently it’s just , but it’s still sort of unpleasant to see every day. The Pebble is still a little rough around the edges (visible glue at some angles under the display, which isn’t a problem limited to a few isolated units), but it’s much closer to the vision I had in my mind of a wrist-mounted, smartphone connected computer than anything else I’ve used so far. It still feels like a first-gen device, but it doesn’t feel like a prototype. But now that rumors of an Apple smart watch are swirling, most users who don’t feel a pressing need for this kind of device would do best to take a wait-and-see approach, especially if they’re already using an iPhone. I’m frankly a little torn when it comes to the Pebble — it’s very limited in some key ways, but as a whole it’s a portent of very exciting things to come. People who haven’t already bought into all this smart watch hype probably won’t find anything particularly revelatory or earth-shaking here, though I can’t say I feel like I’ve wasted $150. If anything, I think of it more as investment in what the Pebble platform can actually become as it matures and garners more developer support. [gallery ids="760275,760274,760273,760201,760194,760192" exclude="760268, 760261"]
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 20 | null |
Pulling From More Than 400M Listings, eBay’s Pinterest-Like, New Personalized Home Page Experience Rolls Out Tomorrow
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
Last October, eBay a completely new homepage experience and redesign, marking the company’s biggest homepage in the marketplace’s history. eBay’s feed experience has been in pilot phase for several months, only tested with less than 10 percent of users, and tomorrow eBay is unveiling to new experience to all customers in the U.S. You can access the new homepage eBay’s new homepage is essentially all about you. The homepage now includes a highly visual, personalized feed of products based on your interests, and the brands and trends that match their passions and preferences. For the feed, you can add your favorite interests (i.e. golf), brands and even trends. Using this data, eBay will show you new items, recent searches, and more. eBay is pulling from more than 400 million listings. Tom Pinckney, head of the eBay NYC office and one of the co-founders of personalization startup Hunch, explains that the new homepage is not just about search, but also discovery and serendipity. “We are introducing a different type of shopping and inventing a new way to shop with product discovery,” he explains. “We have a huge map of date around discovery and serendipity and are trying to find ways to take this data and tap into collective intelligence.” Another component of the new technology is real-time updates on product listings and changes. eBay will serve customers new items in their feed every time they visit the home page – and update them continually during their eBay sessions. Based on results from the few test users since October, customers are responding positively, says Pinckney. Another are where eBay sees huge potential in data mining and product is helping users share knowledge about products and listings. In the future, we’ll see the feed come to eBay’s mobile experience, but Pinckney says the newest development to come will be international rollout in the near future. As we mentioned back in october, the feed has a striking similarity to Pinterest. But it’s not surprising that eBay is diving deep on providing a sleeker, more streamlined and visual experience. And with the enormous amount of data eBay has accumulated over the years, the company is delving into personalization and curation in a big way. We know this is the future of ecommerce, so it’s a wise bet. But how this affects the company’s top line remains to be seen. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erczDO3qf9Y]
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Meet Tickengo, The Ride-Sharing Service That’s Already Available Throughout The US
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
Ride-sharing is becoming increasingly popular and more widely available, as San Francisco-based startups Lyft and SideCar have both begun . But what if I told you there’s a ride-sharing company that already operates in all the cities that those companies are just now starting to enter? The company is called , and it claims thousands of drivers signed up in more than 900 cities. Tickengo was incorporated in 2011 to reduce the friction between drivers and passengers who are going to the same place. But the company differentiates itself from other ride-sharing providers that have sprung up over the last year by providing a more open marketplace between drivers and passengers. Unlike Lyft and SideCar, Tickengo hasn’t been recruiting and training drivers to work shifts driving around town. Instead, it allows users to sign up and accept rides at their convenience, without the friction of a middle man managing their routes. In that way, the company sees itself as more of a pure peer-to-peer marketplace like Airbnb. In contrast, CEO Geoff Mathieux says the other so-called ride-sharing companies that are amassing fleets of drivers in various cities, providing background checks, and training them are just operating cheap taxi services. With Tickengo, there’s little barrier to entry if you want to be a driver — you simply need to create an account and list a car in good working condition. For a better chance of getting ride requests, drivers can verify various other pieces of information, like phone number, driver license and insurance info. Tickengo isn’t doing background checks on its drivers like some other services, and that’s by design. The idea is that the more it steps in to manage the driving force, the less it operates like a pure “ride share” service, and the more susceptible it is to regulatory scrutiny. “From the moment we start managing the drivers, we’ve gone past the threshold of allowing people to connect with each other,” Mathieux said. “We don’t discriminate against drivers. People voluntarily choose to sign up, and the best we can do is verify their info.” Because Tickengo lets anyone sign up, Mathieux says there’s little difference between it and , which allows users to request a list of carpool or rideshare partners. And because it’s an open marketplace, he says Tickengo is a lot more like Airbnb than competing ride-share services that are managing fleets of drivers. “We’re closer to Airbnb than Lyft and SideCar. What they’re doing is not a peer-to-peer experience, it’s just hiring a cheap cab,” Mathieux said. But like Airbnb in the early days, there are plenty of people who have signed up but haven’t actually used the service. This can make its stats a little misleading. While it claims more than 350 drivers in San Francisco, for instance, a very small number are actually verified or have given rides. Only 22 have given rides and just 18 are verified. Just five drivers are listed under both categories. The same is true for other cities. That means if you’re a Lyft or SideCar rider, you probably won’t get the same kind of instant pickup that you’d expect from those services. There are no roving fleets of drivers, just those who choose to take a ride in their spare time. In that respect, Tickengo is probably best suited for pre-planned travel — like booking a ride to the airport ahead of time — as opposed to trying to find a driver to take you to that meeting in 10 minutes. But if you’re willing to wait, Tickengo rides can be priced at about half what they would be for a normal taxi ride. Passengers set their own prices for rides, but Tickengo provides a suggested fare. The first driver to accept basically gets the offered amount, and Tickengo takes a 15 percent service fee from their cut. Tickengo has raised $270,000, including a . The company has five employees, and has former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown Jr. as its lawyer and an advisor.
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Mycestro Is A 3D Mouse For Your Fingertips That You’ll Look Funny Using, But Who Cares?
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
We all go through phases where we feel like we’ve seen that we’d ever want. And then and reminds us that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a 3D mouse that you strap to one of your fingers and it looks like it could become a huge asset for multi-tasking. If you think about how you use your computer, be it a desktop or laptop, you know that your hands move from the keyboard to the trackpad or mouse constantly, over and over again. It’s wasted movement for the most part, especially when you see the possibilities that Mycestro unlocks. The only thing left is for it to get funded, because it looks like all of the prototypes work perfectly. Its founder and creator, Nick Mastandrea, has been tinkering on this project for quite a while, , but it looks like it’s ready for primetime. You’ll be able to pick one up for a $79 pledge in white, or $99 with your choice of color. The estimated shipping date is sometime in October of this year, if all goes well. Have a look at some of its features, which include touch buttons that allow you to navigate your computer without the need for moving your entire hand to a dedicated area on a computer, thanks to 3D technology and space recognition:
Here are the specs for the 3D Mouse: – Size of a wireless earpiece.
– Light, weighing next to nothing.
– Internal battery can be charged via USB.
– Battery life is estimated to be eight hours depending on usage.
– Two different replaceable clip sizes. This isn’t a completely perfect situation though, as you’ll have to re-learn how to use a mouse. The other thing is that if you’re in a coffee shop or somewhere in public, people are going to look at you like you have some issues. The thing is called the Mycestro for a reason; it looks like you’re conducting your own private orchestra. In other words, you’re going to look weird. If you’re okay with that, then the benefits outweigh the public shame and looks you might receive. The device works from 30 feet away from your computer, thanks to Bluetooth, so you could use this for presentations at work. The touch technology it has reminds me of Google’s Project Glass, which allows you to tap a panel on the side of the wearable device to make things happen, like a mouse or trackpad. The other plus is that it’ll work with any iPad or iPhone, with Android support coming by the end of the year. This could be a nice way to have a lean-back experience with a tablet, or do the driving while someone else holds it. Check out this demo using it with an Internet-enabled TV: It reminds me of the Xbox Kinect a little bit, but it’s in your hand and requires no setup. With 38 days left to go on its Kickstarter campaign, Nick Mastandrea and his team has . I think if people can look past the Mycestro as a curious oddity and understand how this could make them more efficient on the computer, this thing will get funded, and then some. The team says that a version for lefties will come a bit after the original model. Personally, I use the trackpad and mouse with my right hand, even though I’m a lefty. So who cares if people think you’re making hand gestures into thin air to nobody in particular. Aren’t people who use Bluetooth headsets already weird? Exactly.
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Ivy League Students Get A Behind-The-Scenes Look At Dropbox, Cue, Romotive, And More
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
and the student-run Princeton publication held their first conference this weekend, where more than 100 students (largely, but not entirely, from Ivy League schools) were recruited to join the startup world. At least that’s the broad outline that Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier and Dropbox vice president Sujay Jaswa (Jaswa is the one speaking in the photo above) gave me when . The event itself (I was around for the first of the two days) turned out to be more varied — yes, it was partly a recruiting drive, but it was also an opportunity for startup founders to tell their stories, and for students to ask pretty much anything they wanted. Schreier and Jaswa kicked things off, giving back-to-back talks in the basement of Princeton’s Frist Campus Center — Schreier described it as “the nicest basement you could possibly envision.” His talk covered a lot of the same ground as our earlier discussion, making the argument that too many Ivy League graduates end up going to work for investment banks and other large companies because that seems like the natural thing to do, when they could advance their careers more quickly if they went to a startup. Schreier went into more detail about his personal experiences going from Morgan Stanley to Google to Sequoia. He said it was probably too harsh to call going to a Morgan Stanley after college a “mistake,” but he showed off a chart with the “deceleration and acceleration points” in his career, and indeed, his years in the financial industry were pretty static, at least from a job title perspective. Things picked up quickly when he joined Google. Schreier also offered a little more context around the rather eye-opening statistic that 41 percent of Stanford’s computer science graduates go to work for a startup after graduation, while the number is only 13 percent at Harvard. Turns out he cited Harvard specifically because it has the lowest number of the top-tier East Coast schools, with most Ivys hovering around 20 percent. (The numbers were based on LinkedIn profiles, he said.) One obvious concern with going to work at a startup is the fact that the vast majority of them will fail. Schreier said that Sequoia’s portfolio companies, on the other hand, are successful more than 50 percent of the time, so he suggested the students can use the Sequoia website as a “cheat sheet” for which companies to work for. And anyway, he noted that the unemployment rate for software engineers is currently 2.3 percent, compared to the current U.S. unemployment rate of 8 percent (and the theoretical “natural” rate of 5.5 percent), so even if you join a startup that goes out of business, not only will you learn a lot, but “you’re so damn employable you don’t have anything to worry about.” Jaswa made similar points, saying that working at a startup allows you to work with “the most brilliant people” in the world and to solve difficult problems in creative ways, because there’s no one else around to solve them: “If you’re the kind of person that wants to be challenged, that wants to be pushed, if you want to play the game, you have to go to a company that’s growing really fast.” For me, the best part of the event was the opportunity to hear about the very early days of a few companies — these were mostly stories that had been told before, but the founders told them in a particularly relaxed and candid way. (The fact that I was the only reporter at the event, and that some of the speakers didn’t know I was there until I introduced myself, probably had something to do with it.) For example, Keller Rinaudo, CEO and founder of iPhone-powered robot-maker , talked about how the team stayed up for days in order to put together the company’s first batch of robots. At one point they sent Jen McCabe (who’s officially in charge of customer development, but, hey, startups!) on a late-night run to Walmart to pick up a sewing machine in order to attach one of the needed parts. (Afterwards, McCabe told me that the sewing method didn’t work out.) Rinaudo also recalled some of the things that the company learned from its early customers. He said he was shocked when many of them didn’t realize that they had to turn their robots on before they would work — Apple has trained us to expect always-on devices, so Rinaudo realized that Romotive had to do more to highlight the on-off switch for customers. As Romotive works through its early kinks, Rinaudo said, “We got away with a lot because we’re a team of young people that people wanted to believe in.” McCabe added that until you have an awesome product that people love (and she said Romotive still isn’t quite there yet), “Your company is the product you’re selling.” Daniel Gross, co-founder and CEO of smart calendar startup , had a scary-but-impressive story about joining Y Combinator and working for several months on one project, only to have it fall apart after Amazon changed its terms of service in a way that basically made his product illegal. With only 72 hours until Demo Day, Gross met with YC’s Paul Graham, who told him that he had three options — demo the old product without mentioning the TOS change until later, go home and maybe try again later, or whip up something new in the intervening time and hope that no one figured out it had been put together in a couple of days. Gross went with the third option, and he seemed to pull it off, creating what was then called Greplin. Gross quickly recounted the company’s progress since then (something he also attributed to his co-founder Robby Walker), and he said the big takeaway was the fact that at a big company, you have to deal with a lot of “process” that can stand in the way of the work itself, while at a startup, “You get to be the owner of your own success and your own failure.” Gross didn’t just rely on his own experience to make that point. He also offered a long list of engineers whose talent was squandered until they joined a startup (though of course many of those companies are now way beyond the startup stage). For example, he talked about Jeff Dean, who worked at Digital Equipment Corporation but didn’t achieve his real potential until he moved to Google, where he became “arguably one of the most important engineers in the 20th and 21st centuries” by developing the BigTable, MapReduce, and Google File System technologies. In addition to sitting in on some keynotes and panels, I also had a chance to talk to some of the students. Several of them were knowledgeable about and eager to join the startup world. In fact, the attendee from what may have been the most far-flung location, Oxford’s Christopher Pruijsen, has already worked for two startups — Letsgopublic.com (now ) and — and part of the reason he attended was to meet potential partners for his own . So he’s not exactly someone who has to be convinced to work for a startup, but he did say he enjoyed the content and the opportunity to be a “fly on the wall” for other conversations. Similarly, Columbia student Kaushik Tiwari told me that he’s already a part of , Columbia’s residential entrepeurship initiative. He said the weekend was “empowering”: “It was a wonderful initiative to ensure that talented people are not sucked into the vortex of big money but rather focus on the important things in life.” Not that everything this weekend was an instance of preaching to the choir. The students certainly asked some skeptical and tough questions. (My favorite example: Rinaudo talked about how people had scoffed at Romotive and said that no one would be interested, and how Steve Wozniak had recounted hearing similar criticisms in the early days of Apple. Then one of the students pointed out that everyone remembers when the skeptics are wrong, but in fact they’re usually right.) But there’s clearly some startup love on these campuses, and with help, it will grow. [ ]
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The Agony Of The Fanboy
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
Every few months I’m reminded of the intensity of feeling some technologies – be they physical objects (they usually are) or web services – engender in a certain subset of the human population. It’s a well-documented effect: The object of desire is courted for months before launch, then at launch it is defended to the death, and then, when it is obvious that said object is a success or failure, they react with righteous jubilation or, barring that, a muted boosterism seen in people who play the same numbers in the lotto day after day. The is the latest in this ongoing war of logic vs. reality and is still being fought by who are driving the route a New York Times reporter drove a few weeks ago to prove, unequivocally, that their cars will survive the trek. Obvious bias aside, it’s a noble goal to defend Tesla. I would say that this fanboyism is important simply because it defends the reality of the electric car. Is Tesla going to be the car-maker of the 21st century? I’m not certain. Even though it’s running circles around the incumbents, there are still far too many unknowns to let the matter of the everyman’s electric vehicle rest in their hands. But I do think they are proving to the world that they can make an electric car that looks great, runs well, and, barring a few glitches, won’t strand you in Scranton? Absolutely. But a lot of what you people defend isn’t the future of fossil-free transportation. Most of it is Wii U vs. PS3, console vs. PC, and Android vs. iOS. And it’s pretty ridiculous to watch battles rage with such intensity when people are still dying of malaria. I’d like to address the best way to love something unequivocally without looking like a freak. To be clear, I write this same post almost every year and, not unlike tears in the rain, the wisdom within is lost in the great morass of the blogosphere. But whatever, it’s a holiday weekend and here you go: The Rules Of Online Discourse. 1. . Understand this when you attack someone for what they’ve written: maybe they’re right. I’ll use a very basic example that I’m sure you will find horribly biased but here we go: I see a lot of things. I know what works and what doesn’t. As Raymond Carver once wrote: My friend John Biggs was talking. John Biggs is a blogger, and sometimes that gives him the right. So I saw this thing called the Notion Ink Adam. It was an Android tablet that came out just before the iPad and was supposed to be the best thing since dry cleaning. There was a vocal group of supporters who absolutely loved the thing and I thought they were deluding themselves. I : The result? The device launched, a few other devices were promised, the device failed, and now the . People defended it for months and months. The message boards were a blur of vociferous justification. New blog posts were hailed as messages from the ether. Then, slowly but surely, the creator stopped talking to the faithful. Messages like “I still love Notion Ink but where are the updates?” and “My Notion Ink is better than anything else but it’s broken now” appeared, where before “PEOPLE WHO BUY ANYTHING BUT A NOTION INK ADAM SUCK” reigned. The justification for their purchases grew increasingly vague, and no one will bet on a horse that died in the stable the night before the race except the insane and/or overly optimistic. I was right; the fanboys were wrong. I’m not happy that happened, but it’s the truth. 2. People online don’t care what you think about Android. They just don’t. Your best bet is to stay inside the forums and websites dedicated to your obsession and to talk about those obsessions there and not in public. Getting into a Twitter fight with is pointless because he makes more than you simply by linking and writing one pithy line. He’s got Apple on lock, he’s not paid off, but it’s his business to write intelligently about his favorite thing. Don’t like his opinions? Either open yourself to conflicting ideas or don’t read him. As Wilhelm Stekel wrote, “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” 3. Human beings contain multitudes. No one cares about the things you care about as much as you do and vice versa. Claiming bias is stupid. It suggests that you are biased in the other direction or suggests you’re free of bias, which is also wrong. You’ll argue with me on this point but you’ll be wrong. 4. When WebOS died, fanboys were forced to concede to the fact that their favorite thing in the world was a dud. A group of fans rallied around the open-source version of WebOS and are still futzing around with it, but like a legion of Betamax fanatics, they’re worshipping at the feet of a dead god. Move on. Be nimble and mentally malleable. Learn something new. Still defending PHP to your dying breath? Go learn Python. Think iOS is a blast? Swap your iPad mini for a Nexus 7. I do this quite often and it’s very refreshing. I learned that I loved Windows 8, for example, and that the is great. I learned these things because I’m in a very special position, but you (meaning MG), too, can at least go into the Microsoft store with an open mind and come out potentially changed. 5. There’s beer to drink. There are people to woo and befriend. There are songs to be sung and board games to play. There are things to be smoked, pets to be stroked, and a sun to cavort under or snow to fort into. To those who insist on massing on points of order on the Internet with a horde-like intensity, I say to you: I know high school is hard, but it’s only four years and your time is better spent on lomography or woodworking than defending a technology that will be irrelevant in two years. “We are all prisoners here, of our own device,” said a very wise man once. Let’s all try to get along if only to keep the number of shivvings down. [ ]
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The Science Behind Why The Harlem Shake Is So Popular
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 |
A five-minute video? Not to watch one, or to make one. But dance videos are capped at 30 seconds. That’s why we’re so willing to watch just one more incarnation, and why it’s easy to recruit friends to make them. The result is one of the most pervasive gags in history. A “Symbiotic Meme,” the Harlem Shake has a lesson to teach all content creators.
Give people a formula, and they’ll substitute in their own variables. Most people just aren’t all that creative. They’re not going to come up with some entertaining meme on their own. With a little structure, though, our minds fill in the blanks. To break it down, the Harlem Shake meme is: [14T x (A1 + V1)] => Δ => [14T x (A2 + V2)] => [2T x (A3+V3)] Or [14 seconds of (build-up music) played as (one person passively dances while others linger around them motionless)] then an instant video cut to [14 seconds of (bombastic dance music) played as (many people dance aggressively)] then [2 seconds of (a slurring sound) and (slow-motion video of the aggressive dancing)] Or in , for example: [14 seconds of (the build-up of ) played as (one person in a helmet nods and thrusts while others sit at desks or work on computers)] then an instant video cut to [14 seconds of (the climax of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake”) played as (people shadow box, do hand stands, ride bicycles, and punch stuffed giraffes)] Anyone can sub their own variables into this equation, and practically everyone has. The formula is very easy to replicate with little video production skill, and it’s not asking a lot for people to stand around and then dance for a total of 30 seconds. Stick a camera somewhere, film part one, get everyone riled up, film part two, cut them together, add the slow motion effect. The end product is remarkably snackable. When you see someone share a Harlem Shake to Facebook or Twitter, there’s very little risk to clicking the link. Worst-case scenario, you burned 30 seconds. Best case, you get a nice surprise and a laugh. No one wants to sit through several minutes of home-made content where the payoff is uncertain. It’s part of the reason why Twitter’s 6-second video sharing app is succeeding where un-capped video sharing apps have failed. So why is this a “Symbiotic Meme”? It’s the term I coined five years ago when I wrote my final Stanford about the phenomenon. When content creators serve up a meme with an equation full of variables, people remix the variables, and share the product to their own networks. The audience becomes curious about what the source content was. This floods traffic back to the original or flagship version of the meme. That’s why the original standalone version of the Harlem Shake meme (broken out from a Dizasta ) has over 10 million views, and the flagship version, which crystallized the formula, has over 8 million views. All the versions of the Harlem Shake meme popping up around the world build on these, and in return increase their popularity. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Content creators, and especially “viral marketers,” would do well to structure their products around a remixable formula when possible. Give us a coloring book and we’ll give you some pretty pictures and a whole lot of attention.
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New Zealand Accelerator Lightning Lab Launches Its First Intake Of Nine Startups
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
Wellington-based , which bills itself as “the southern-most digital accelerator program on the globe,” just announced its first intake of nine startups from across New Zealand and Australia, who will work with over 100 mentors. Aside from being New Zealand’s capital city, Wellington is the center of the country’s tech industry. It was one of (Peter Jackson’s was established there in 1993) and the movie industry serves as a spring-board for much of New Zealand’s entrepreneurial talent. Indeed, one of companies in Lightning Lab’s current intake, , is a platform that seeks to “bridge the feedback gap” between filmmakers and clients. The other startups are: Questo! (tools to assist teachers, motivate students and bring parents into the educational loop); (metrics-based skill training for sports teams); KidGoMobile (facilitating independence, and staged digital device interactivity for children of all ages); Expander (digital mass encryption packaging solutions for global products); (collaborative media through crowdsourcing); (combining location sensitive devices, individual choice and relevant time dependent products, and promotion); (enabling deep, one-on-one educational engagement for homes, study groups, and homework sessions); and (building profile and peer-recognition for academic contributions and publications). The nine teams will receive $18,000 NZD in startup capital from New Zealand angel investors and funds to fuel their three months in Lightning Lab as they gear up for the Lab’s Demo Day on May 15, which program director Dan Khan says will be the largest ever assembly of New Zealand and Australian angel investors and venture capitalists. These companies hope to join the ranks of , and (the latter two had U.S.-based exits) as New Zealand startup success stories. The accelerator looks for “founding teams with working history and domain experience in the field they are targeting. We want to see vision and inspiration coupled with scalable growth markets,” says Nick Churchouse of , Lightning Lab’s founder. Churchouse tells me that most Kiwi startups look to the U.S. as their target market. “Domestic markets are only ever going to be a beta puddle for New Zealand startups, and Australia holds more promise but still a limited market with significant challenges despite its proximity,” he says. “Primarily New Zealand startups have looked to the U.S. and that’s where we see a lot of the trade sales happening. But other western markets are just as viable and popping up more and more, such as the U.K. and Europe. Landing pads and market centers in Asia are becoming more and more established, with anecdotal evidence of more startups getting traction in China and Southeast Asia.” Though Wellington (and indeed, New Zealand’s population) is tiny, Lightning Lab views the country’s small size as an asset that will allow its emerging startup ecosystem to have a “collaborative culture” that will help outweigh challenges. “There’s no denying the available capital for startups here is less than in the States and most larger markets,” says Churchouse. “The ecosystem here is emerging and we have a great number of motivated investors, the founding investors behind the Lab being a great example. Part of the goals of the Lab are to drive more success stories in the tech startup space to build more energy and momentum in this space, which will bring more investors into the fold.” One of Lightning Lab’s mentors is Phil McCaw from venture capital fund Movac, who was an early investor at TradeMe, which sold to Fairfax for $700 million in 2006. A full list of mentors can be found .
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Travelmob Continues Push Into Asian ‘Airbnb’ Market
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
Singapore-based short term home rental marketplace, is pushing steadily into the space with new features on its site. Today, it released a way for home owners to list last-minute discounts to travelers. This follows an earlier feature released last year which allowed travelers to find listings by descriptive tags. The company is yet another in the quickly crowding Airbnb-style space, which tries to match home renters with couch surfers or travelers looking for a quick stay. Lately, more of these sites have been trying to differentiate by varying a little from the budget crowd and offering unique locales. Travelmob, for example, has a listing for a and an which comes with a chef and butler. Last September, the company secured $1 million in seed funding in a round raised by Singapore VC, . And in November, it teamed up with Wego.com to provide its listings to the flight search aggregator. It wouldn’t say how many listings there are on Travelmob right now, but it had about 2,300 properties in the Asia-Pacific region at time of launch. And since then, those have multiplied by five times, it said. One of the startup’s co-founders, Turochas Fuad, was most recently managing director for Skype Asia, and the head of Yahoo’s Southeast Asian mobile business prior to that.
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Viddy Updates Its Mobile Video App With 30-Second Videos, New Filters, And Discovery Tools
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
Mobile video startup * is launching a new iOS app, which it hopes will help users create and discover more interesting videos. To do so, it’s doubling the length that videos can be, and giving users more tools to spruce them up. It’s also providing users with more tools to find relevant videos based on their interests and location. The new version of Viddy’s iPhone and iPad app has a number of enhancements designed to help users improve the videos that they produce. For one thing, it’s extended video length from 15 seconds to 30 seconds, giving more time for creators to actually, um, do stuff. The startup has also added the Vine-like ability to stitch together multiple clips as part of a video project. “A big part of movie creation and storytelling is motion within a video,” Viddy president J.J. Aguhob told me. “Instead of a flat linear clip, there’s the ability to stitch together the passage of time… It allows people to be creative and tell a better story through video.” In addition, the app has added 15 new video filters and eight new licensed audio tracks to choose from. And it has a mock stop-motion functionality, allowing users to adjust the frame rate to make freaky GIF-like videos. While helping its users make better videos, it also wants to help them discover better videos. Or at least videos that are more relevant to them. That includes suggesting videos based on their interests and affinities, as well as those which were shot nearby. It’s also overhauled its Explore section, with curated and trending videos, and added better ability to search hashtags and @ mentions. The update comes in the wake of a re-org, as Viddy is putting more emphasis on product and community. The company previously bet on celebrities to help bring in users, giving up some equity in exchange for getting them on the platform. But Justin Bieber’s naked chest might not have helped boost its user numbers as much as it hoped, and the company seems to be taking a step back from its celeb focus. In fact, Aguhob told me that only 15 percent of video views come from verified brands and celebs like, say, Justin Bieber. The other 85 percent of views come from the broader community. So it’s probably no big surprise that earlier this week, the company laid off more than a third of its staff, with cuts coming mostly out of its marketing and operations department. While engineering continues to crank out updates, the whole celeb-biz dev thing seems to be kaput. Viddy isn’t the only social mobile video app going through an upgrade — rival , improving video quality on its iPhone app to 720p and enabling users to take advantage of video HDR capabilities. ==
* The press release accompanying this announcement calls Viddy “the connecting people through ,” which is just silly.
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China’s Largest Search Engine Baidu Launches English Site For Developers
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
, the search behemoth often referred to as “China’s Google,” today. While the site is still in its infancy–right now there are just a few intros up and no documentation–it promises to grow into a valuable resource for developers who want to take a crack at the Chinese market. Kaiser Kuo, Baidu’s head of international communications, says that the company can help developers who aren’t fluent in Chinese by making their apps discoverable through search on Baidu’s . “As for monetization, no models are off the table,” Kuo tells me. “Subscriptions, freemium, in-app ads and just about any other revenue model is up for discussion, and depends on what works best for the type of app in question.” According to Chinese Internet stats company CNZZ, Baidu held a 72.1 percent market share in January, with Qihoo 360’s trailing behind at 10.5 percent. Of course, getting more developers on board also helps Baidu shore up its mobile assets, which are a key part of its . The company said yesterday in its quarterly mobile report that it from the start of 2010 to December 2012. While the company does not have a specific public number for the total amount of domestic developers who have already created apps, it’s in the tens of thousands. Kuo says that the company doesn’t have a clear timeline for the rollout of documentation yet, but that they will be available within a few months. The tools have been available in Chinese since they were launched at back in September.
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Can The Wild West Of Music Discovery Be Tamed By One Startup?
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
Twenty years ago, you discovered music on the FM dial. End of story. Now there’s an uncharted frontier of outlaw torrents, renegade bloggers, on-demand gold miners, and fur-trapping radios. The zeitgeist has splintered, and there’s no piecing it back together. And I think we’re doing just fine without the robber barons of old. Just ask rock band The Silversun Pickups. I did (below). Best known for the low-fi, garage blur and piercing crescendo of their first hit single , The Silversun Pickups say right now they have to be best friends with the music tech companies. And while they did perform that night at the Slacker party, they truly believe there’s no clear front-runner yet worth tying their horse to. Until recently, the three pillars of music discovery — on-demand, automated radio, and human curation — were fragmented across different services. There was Napster and then iTunes and then Spotify. There was Pandora. There were blogs. But now we’re seeing companies like Slacker and Spotify attempting to unify these into a single service. highlighted this convergence, making it easy to swap between searching for specific songs, radio that evolves to your preferences, and hand-picked music selections from actual DJs. Spotify went from being strictly on-demand to adding radio, and now is starting to roll out a to help you get recommendations from real people. Slacker’s far behind in traction, leaving Spotify the most likely company to bring order to the music discovery space and make us comfortable settling down. In some ways that might not be a good thing. Without a single company in control, competition forces innovation and low prices. Decentralized and self-determined music discovery liberates us. We can chase what uniquely resonates with us rather than surrender our tastes to mass media. It may not be civilized and easy, but true music fans like life with a little edge.
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With $1.8M From Andreessen, Chris Sacca & More, Rental Marketplace Getable Digs Into The $32B Construction Market
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
When we last caught up with , the startup formerly known as , it was announcing that Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph was joining Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro and OpenTable founder Chuck Templeton on its board of directors. Behind a board familiar with the online rental and reservations business, Getable moved away from its initial mission, which was, essentially, to become the Amazon for the entire rental industry, helping to bring thousands of brick-and-mortar, mom-and-pop rental shops online — from ski shops and construction equipment businesses to those renting bouncy houses. The startup approached the market with a P2P, consumer model, allowing people to easily search, compare, and rent anything and everything online. Then, early last year, it became Getable and began to more actively follow the OpenTable playbook, shifting more in the direction of a B2B services provider (while maintaining its consumer directory and booking tool) by offering an in-store rental management solution for small businesses. The part software, part hardware solution aimed to help merchants and small business owners manage their reservations, organize inventory and so on. But that didn’t quite stick either. Today, Getable is shifting directions yet again, moving to a pure B2B model, abandoning its P2P, consumer approach, while going mobile-first. Not only that, but Getable is significantly narrowing its focus within the rental market to what Getable founder and CEO Tim Hyer tells us is the largest segment of the rental industry: tools and equipment. In fact, the startup’s new service is exclusively geared to general contractors and to those who rent their construction equipment. This means, of course, that Getable’s addressable market has shrunk significantly. Sure, there are over 10 million general contractors in the U.S., and the tool and equipment category represents a $32 billion market and one that’s projected to reach $46 billion by 2016. However, while that’s still a sizable market, it’s a fraction of the $85 billion rental industry that Getable was initially targeting when it launched as Rentcycle back in 2009. Well, the lesson here is that you have to keep moving until you find peak demand and product-market fit, even if that market is smaller than you’d originally hoped. Hyer tells us that, over the last year, the tool and equipment industry has far and away been its most active and loyal category, so Getable is now moving in what he sees as a different, but related direction: Solving the inefficiencies in the tool and equipment rental space with a dose of mobile technology. Granted, when a startup pivots multiple times in the course of its first couple of years, it’s bound to make investors, customers, writers and the company itself a little nervous. Traditionally, pivots, although often trumpeted by the media as brilliant, positive strategic moves, are, of course, inherently a sign that the startup was ill-positioned from the start, isn’t finding much traction and may even be on its way to the deadpool. On the other hand, generalizing is a dangerous sport, and each case is unique: Oftentimes, changes in direction or pivots (to go with the over-used buzzword du jour), are just what a stagnating company or product needs to jumpstart its business and rejuvenate its team. Many entrepreneurs will tell you that pivoting or tweaking until a startup finds product-market fit is not just advisable, but the best course of action — depending on the concept, the team and the market itself, of course. But, pivoting, like acq-hires, do have a tendency to be overplayed as “wins” for the startup in question, when in reality, an acqui-hire or a pivot inherently represents “settling” or “failing” — seemingly harsh even for the world of startups, where 90 percent of the game is failure. In Getable’s case, Hyer says that he is relieved, as he believes that the startup has finally found a problem their solution can address effectively, and pent-up demand that scalable mobile technology can uncork (potentially with high margins to boot). The founder also tells us that, over the last several months, Getable has received a couple of acquisition offers, which, if he and the team didn’t believe had gold at the end of the tunnel, might have provided the impetus to sell and try again. It also helps that the startup’s investors are on board and willing to back its new direction. Getable quietly announced today that it has closed its second round of financing — a bridge-style seed round of $1.8 million — which brings the startup’s total funding to $3.2 million. Investors in the round included Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, Promus Ventures and Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital — who has also backed companies like Uber and StyleSeat. The startup will use its new capital to beef up its engineering team and build out its mobile product for contractors. The new construction rental product is currently in alpha mode, as it works with a few strategic partners on product development, Hyer tells us. The iPhone app will be designed exclusively for contractors to help them complete equipment management both on and off the job site, including the creation of new reservations, requesting service and maintenance, pick-up and drop-off scheduling and visibility into what’s happening on the job site in realtime. The idea is to build a realtime connection between rental merchants and their customers, the founder says, in much the same way Uber connects its drivers with those in need of a lift. To help jumpstart its new direction, Getable has hired Mikael Rogers as its new CTO. Rogers was most recently at Yammer, where he was the company’s Developer Advocate. Prior to that, he held positions at OSAF, Mozilla and CouchOne and founded his own startup in Gather, along with being an active supporter of the node.js community and helping to organize and launch the annual NodeConf. Of course, while the startup is looking forward to getting new blood in the mix, it also means that Getable co-founder (and previously its CTO), Ludo Goarin, will be leaving the company. Pivots and exits aside, both present and departed co-founders think that Getable is in the process of positioning itself much more effectively and now has the chance to actually build a sustainable, revenue-generating business. Going the B2B route is key — and an underutilized strategic route. Everyone wants to build the $10 billion consumer business, a la Dropbox or Instagram. “It’s funny, because construction truly represents the original mobile workforce, so it’s hard to believe that contractors and construction workers lack access to great mobile products that help them manage such key components of their jobs,” Rogers says of Getable’s new direction. For more,
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No Hot SXSW App This Year? Here’s Why
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
is a week away and we were having an internal pow-wow about whether there would be any breakouts this year. A collective “Meh” arose. No one could think of anything. HIGHLIGHT? GOOGLE GLASS? Are we jaded? Is SXSW too crowded to anyone to stand out? I don’t know. I think there are actually a lot of other factors at work. (But please prove me wrong and send us your pitch!) Smartphones had yet to reach more than half the U.S. mobile subscriber market. SXSWi represented a unique once-a-year testbed for new apps. It was a critical mass of people from all over the country, who worked in different fields like tech, film and music, were early adopters, and most importantly owned smartphones (unlike everyone else). But today, more than half of U.S. mobile subscribers have smartphones. SXSW isn’t all that necessary anymore to get a concentration of early adopters. An Apple featured placement can get an app developer tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of users to at least try out a product. This doesn’t mean they’ll stick, but at least they’re around to look at it once.
One of the first questions I like to ask any app developer is how they plan to market their work. If they’re not a game developer, they usually haven’t thought about it in depth. “Blog posts, PR,” is the common answer. PR and media are actually not that great for mobile products as a growth strategy. I hate to say it but a good relationship with the kingmakers at Apple or Google Play is more important for an initial app launch. Why? Closing the conversion loop for a mobile app after someone has heard about it on the web is a horrible experience. As one of the Origami co-founders wrote in a : “You have an entirely different onboarding story on the web. You can test easily, cheaply, and fast enough to make a difference on the web. You can fix a critical bug that crashes your app on load 15 minutes after discovery (See Circa). You can show 10 different landing pages and decide in real-time which one is working the best for a particular user. You can also close a viral loop: A user can click an email and immediately be using your app with you. You can’t put parameters on a download link and people don’t download apps from their computer to their phone. Without the barrier of a download + opening the app to try your product, you can prove value to the user immediately upon their first impression, as is with Google. In addition, the experience of signing up for a service is superior in every way. Typing is easier. Sign-up with OAuth is faster. Tab to the next field. Provide marketing alongside sign-up as encouragement. Auto-fill information is a feature in every browser. The open eco-system of the web and 20 years of innovation has solved many of the most difficult parts of onboarding. With mobile, that kind of innovation is lagging significantly behind because we create apps at the leisure of two companies, neither of which have a great incentive to help free app makers succeed.” At the same time, virality on mobile platforms is poor. Two companies, Apple and Google, which haven’t historically been good at building social networking products are controlling distribution for hundreds of thousands of other companies. A system that prizes top rankings and human curation is slowly giving way to a more SEO-driven approach. But virality for mobile apps is still largely driven by plain old word of mouth. Facebook is making some in-roads with a deeper integration into the Apple app store. But anecdotal feedback from the biggest developers I’ve talked to suggests that it’s still highly variable as a marketing channel because Facebook is constantly tweaking the mobile news feed. Performance marketing is improving, but it isn’t nearly as mature as it is on the web. It’s fairly standard now for the largest mobile game developers to spend a few million dollars per month on marketing between 30 to 40 different channels — all of which are rigorously data tested for lifetime value (LTV) of the various users they send a developer’s way. Everyone else that hasn’t figured out a revenue model and therefore can’t pay to acquire users is basically competing for visibility against the budgets of game developers and big e-commerce apps like Groupon. You either pay for growth, or if you’re pre-revenue, you hope to be that one app a year (out of several hundred thousand) that breaks out like a Snapchat (2011) or an Instagram (2010) or a Foursquare (2009). The odds are always going to tough for entrepreneurs, but they’re particularly terrible for pre-revenue consumer mobile apps. That’s why VCs like Fred Wilson and why a host of seed-funded, pre-revenue mobile apps are hitting a wall right now.
Fine, so monetization isn’t there yet. But if you look at the social networking category, it’s dominated by companies like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Skype in terms of both downloads and active usage. Facebook said in its last earnings call that it had more daily active users on mobile than on the web last quarter. In fact, Facebook’s mobile users are more engaged than web-only ones, not less. As someone said to me at dinner last night, “Facebook doesn’t have an engagement and retention problem. But everyone else has a Facebook problem.” I hear about a similar dynamic among Chinese entrepreneurs as well. The high-growth, social networking and communication apps out of Asia are coming from publicly-traded incumbents like Tencent with WeChat, Sina with Sina Weibo and NHN with Line. Not startups.
It’s become common to say that the heat has shifted toward enterprise and away from consumer, after mixed performances from Facebook, Groupon and Zynga on the public markets. But the reality is a bit more complex. From Facebook’s beginnings up until the IPO last year, the most hyped consumer startups like Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr a) tapped into people’s vanity or need for self-expression and b) leaned toward advertising. The apps that I’ve stuck to in the last year like Zimride’s Lyft, Uber, etc. a) actually rely on users paying for goods or services (not advertising!) b) match supply and demand in two-sided markets in real-time and c) can pay for growth once they nail their lifetime value. The key with these models is highly controlled growth. Startups like Lyft and Sidecar are limited by the number of quality drivers they can hire. Exec is only expanding to cities out of SF now that the company feels confident that it can maintain the user experience while scaling the supply-side remotely. These companies grow carefully, city by city and country by country. Not by betting the farm on one big splashy SXSW launch.
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This Could Be The World’s First 3D-Printed Car
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
With 3D printing on the verge of going mainstream, you can manufacture . You can now add a 3D-printed car to that list. The is a three-wheeled hybrid assembled entirely from parts spat out of 3D printers, reports . Just as and have changed the way we perceive manufacturing, Urbee is seeking to change the way we build cars. Urbee is the brainchild of Jim Kor and his team at Kor Ecologic, a company solely dedicated to the future of 3D vehicle manufacturing. Their website expands upon their grand vision for the future of the automobile. Kor’s aim is to make the cars of the future light, energy-efficient and easy to manufacture. The manufacturing process of the Urbee takes place entirely inside , a 3D-printing facility that was also used to produce the . Kor says one of the virtues of 3D printing is the added flexibility that’s impossible to produce with sheet metal. Instead of producing a multitude of parts that would be assembled later, the 3D printers can spit out a single, unibody part that makes manufacturing simpler. Kor simply uploads the models for each part into the printers, and 2,500 hours later, Kor has all the plastic parts he needs to assemble his car. Kor has assurances that the Urbee will be perfectly safe to drive out on in the road. “We’re calling it race car safety,” Kor tells Wired. “We want the car to pass the tech inspection required at Le Mans.” And the car isn’t entirely made of plastic. The engine and the base chassis, of course, will be made of steel. Good luck, Urbee. You may look like an oversized computer mouse, but you’ve come a long way from the days when you looked like .
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Y Combinator-Backed SimplyInsured Wants To Help Small Businesses Take The Pain Out Of Health Insurance
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
For small businesses, buying and managing health insurance is a “pain in the buns,” to quote . Not only are its complicated terms, lack of transparency, slow quoting and on-boarding process and paper trail a pain in your buns, but health insurance can be a massive pain in your wallet, to boot. Hidden costs are everywhere. Y Combinator-backed is launching today with a solution. Founders Vivek Shah and George Huo, who were also both early employees at YC startup Cardpool ( ), have built a simple, online health insurance manager and quote engine for small businesses, which aims to explain in plain English what is or isn’t working about your current plan and help you identify hidden costs and cost-savings. SimplyInsured analyzes thousands of insurance policies in an attempt to find small business owners the best coverage, price and value for their unique needs, in turn, handling all the forms and paperwork automatically and paperlessly that help you get a new plan up and running quickly. Of course, if the concept behind SimplyInsured sounds at all familiar, that’s because the startup shares a similar mission with another recently-launched Y Combinator company, Zenefits, . Sure, that makes for a potentially awkward situation for Y Combinator and for both startups, and, honestly, it’s surprising that this doesn’t happen more often. YC founder Paul Graham says of the situation: We’ve had this happen before, though not to this degree in the same batch. Companies evolve, so unless you dictate their ideas to them there is always some chance that two companies you fund will compete. E.g. Google and Apple have become competitors, and few would have expected that. But while this is an awkward situation, we have procedures for dealing with it, and we know from office hours that they ended up in the same spot by evolution and not because one copied the other. While there is most definitely overlap, both startups have taken it in stride thus far, welcome the competition and the opportunity to learn from the success (or slip-ups) of the other, as they set out to build differentiated health insurance managers. When asked to describe how SimplyInsured is looking to set itself apart from its fellow Y Combinator startup, Huo and Shah say that they’ve opted to approach health insurance from the consumer’s perspective — in other words, the driving questions they want to help small businesses answer are, for example, what medical issues are you worried about and how much will they cost? Rather than offering a one-stop shop for managing a wide range of employee benefits (as Zenefits has sought out to do), the startup’s software estimates the cost of having a baby or going to the emergency room, the particular procedures and scenarios, which the founders believe are ignored by the majority of health insurance brokers. By providing deep comparisons — not just premiums and maximums — SimplyInsured wants to eliminate the fear (and FUD) around the hidden costs inherent to health insurance purchasing, while actively guiding companies to the best, personalized coverage and plan(s). Of course, Zenefits and SimplyInsured are not the only startups tackling this long-standing problem, nor are they the only ones looking to bring the process online. Both Cake Health and Simplee share similar mission statements (to a degree), but the SimplyInsured co-founders are of the mindset that Cake Health and Simplee are targeting the latter half of the problem. That is to say: The startups help individuals and small businesses save money once they’re already struggling with bloated, cost-heavy plans. While downstream cost-savings is a valuable service in and of itself — and one that SimplyInsured offers at launch — the company is also looking to help its customers save money during the purchasing process, Shah tells us, which he believes will lead to a larger net savings (and lower bills) down the line. Differentiation aside, how does SimplyInsured work, you ask? Essentially, the startup’s service works in three steps. First, SimplyInsured helps small businesses find and identify the plan that best fits their particular needs. Traditionally, this process requires business owners or founders to set up in-person meetings or calls with insurance brokers and, while this provides the security blanket of being able to talk to intermediaries face-to-face, it’s inefficient and takes time. Instead, SimplyInsured has opted to bring this online and automate the process, developing algorithms that surface relevant information based on a company’s needs, while offering a greater degree of price transparency — or at least that’s the idea. Essentially, it’s similar to the difference one experiences in booking flights by calling a travel agent versus using Hipmunk or Kayak. Next, once the right plan is identified, the service automates the on-boarding process (like Zenefits) to help streamline how companies sign up and activate each of their employees. Usually, this involves a lot of paperwork, faxing and brokers driving to your offices with a stack of forms to sign. Again, like Zenefits, the startup is making this process completely paper-free, allowing businesses to complete the process online in 10 minutes, rather than two weeks. Lastly, SimplyInsured attempts to simplify the ongoing administration of the plan through a one-click on-boarding process and by making it easy for companies or employees to switch plans at any point in the future. Once Obamacare (or the PPACA) goes fully into effect in 2014, there is an expectation that the new state health insurance exchanges will create increased competition among insurers for the average small business customer. The Act requires insurers to offer an online product and also reduces the overall commission brokers can claim from small business clients. Under previous legislature, these commissions were already reduced to seven percent, and while this means increased competition for fewer dollars, the co-founders expect that many traditional, offline brokers will struggle to make the transition and may not survive. In the post-Obamacare world, Shah says, only the low-cost providers will be able to survive, which means there could be a big reduction in the number of agents in the U.S., which now number around 400K. Built in the new era of the 7-percent-commissions mandate and with a process that is online from the get-go, SimplyInsured (and Zenefits as well) believe they’ll be well-positioned to weather the changes, even if commissions are reduced further. For an online business like SimplyInsured, the margins work in their favor. The founders tell us that early users of the platform (they currently have several dozen clients) have found they’ve been able to make savings in the range of $500-$1,000 per person on their health insurance, which, if they’re able to maintain an average on the higher end of that spectrum, will put them in a good place. And it will be a boon for small businesses in particular, who tend to be the ones hit hardest by health insurance costs. SimplyInsured is already integrated with payroll services (something Zenefits does as well) so that it can further automate the process of employee deductions for insurance. Going forward, the founders believe that, in focusing on individuals, they can help business owners root out the specific issues they have with their plans (or will need coverage for), and can help them find increased savings. In building their algorithms, the team found that there are tons of hidden costs in the terms of each specific injury, and, because hospitals don’t share the prices for treatment, this requires them to essentially go through the whole plan step by step. The startup has written its algorithms to automate this process, reading insurance plans one-by-one and step-by-step to tell users what they will be paying if, say they break their leg, under the terms of each plan, allowing them to easily compare the candidates. (You can see the results/examples of that comparative analysis in the images embedded above.) This is really the key and the biggest value-add that SimplyInsured provides over its competitors; the ability to drill down into each part of a potential plan and compare them to others adds a whole new level of transparency to the process. And, in the end, because there really isn’t a primary, go-to online insurance platform today that’s well known and widely used, both Zenefits and SimplyInsured stand to benefit handsomely from this dearth of transparency if they play their cards right. Plus, this is a big enough problem that affects enough businesses, that there is plenty of room for both to build sustainable businesses. Of course, that’s easier said than done. For more on SimplyInsured,
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Law Would Force Patent Trolls To Pay For Failed Lawsuits Against Innovators
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
America’s esteemed lawmakers want heavy penalties for those who abuse the patent system. A bipartisan bill to force so-called patent trolls, those who hoard patents for the sole purpose of suing innovators, to pay the legal costs if their frivolous patent lawsuits fail in court. The Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act has been widely praised by and acronym enthusiasts. “Patent trolls add no economic benefit to our nation,” said co-sponsor Representative Jason Chaffetz ( : A). Indeed, one study found that trolling activity . Penalties for patent trolls have support from two influential people in the government: President Obama and the new chair of the House Judiciary Committee. During a Google+ hangout earlier this month, Obama said, “They don’t actually produce anything themselves. They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack someone else’s idea to see if they can extort some money out of them.” Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte ( : C), who helps set the congressional technology agenda, said he wants “to focus on reforms to discourage frivolous patent litigation and keep U.S. patent laws up to date.” In a refutation for The Hill, CEO of General Patent Corporation, Alexander Poltorak, argued that supporters of the SHIELD Act overestimate the number of frivolous lawsuits against software patent holders and claimed it was designed to “intimidate patent owners whose IP rights are routinely infringed by corporate bullies.” The updated version of the SHIELD Act will expand the provisions from tech firms to all industries.
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This Is Why You Can’t Have Nice Things, Yahoos
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
has succeeded. In getting people to have about Yahoo again. While many are skewering Mayer for not being progressive with her people who are more familiar with what exactly is going on are quietly singing her praises. Mayer will be putting the official smackdown on remote workers . People with a work-from-home agreement will have to report to a local office in the region by then, or else. People who have an agreement to work one or two days from home are strongly encouraged to spend those days in the office — a more subtle “ban” that will affect their performance ratings. “I have been at Yahoo for four years and let’s just say the house needed and still needs a lot of cleaning up. Marissa is doing just that,” an anonymous Yahoo employee on Quora. “People will use the argument that look at Google and how it allows employees to work from home … We are fighting to stay relevant. So getting your ass into the office and working on projects is not too much to ask.” A non-tragic ending for Yahoo may justify Mayer’s means. As Chris Dixon and others , discouraging working from home at Yahoo and discouraging workers from working from home at other, more on-track tech companies like Google are two different things. There was and is rampant abuse of the Yahoo work-from-home policy — it was a joke. “Working at [Yahoo] HQ was like paying taxes in Greece,” said Twitter’s Patrick Ewing, who who cheated the system. The fact that the Yahoo parking lot is relatively empty (compared to, oh, Facebook’s) at 5pm is why you can’t have nice things. We also spoke to a couple of former and current employees, and while some are sniping at the inconvenience, the move was clearly necessary. According to one source, Mayer explained the rationale at Yahoo’s “Friday FYI,” its equivalent of Google’s TGIF. “We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the VPN…” she apparently said. First world problems: Your boss requires that you actually show up at work. — Fake Alexia (@alexia_tsotsis) So it’s not that Mayer doesn’t get all the studies on workplace productivity, mobile workforce, etc. It’s not that she doesn’t get that going into the office can be a major distraction. She does. It’s not that there aren’t legitimately productive work-from-homers, like the new mom who spends all day at the computer but needs to check in on her kid from time to time. It’s that the bunch of slackers that claimed to be working from home without actually doing any work ruined it for everyone. In the last four years, Yahoo has gone through five CEOs — An easy environment for people to hide and get lost under the rug. People get away with not working on a single project. And managers are just as guilty as their employees of cheating the system: One VP was given a 100% retention bonus after Scott Thompson laid off everyone… And ended up playing tennis and going to the gym most of the time. “They simply hired the wrong people over the years and had no metrics to track performance/etc,” one former employee told me. There’s been some internal speculation that the ban will allow the company to lay employees off without paying severance packages, or just get more people to quit in general. “This really is a necessary part of cutting out the cancer that is Yahoo’s current performance,” the same person emphasized. “And while it’s a horrible mess, it’s sadly necessary.”
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COO Artie Minson Could Exit Aol, Patch Issues To Blame?
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
Aol Chief Operating Officer Arthur “Artie” Minson could be departing the company soon, we’re hearing, possibly over how the company has been handling hyperlocal news site Patch. A spokesperson declined to comment for this story, Minson hasn’t returned my call, and our sources say that it’s not a done deal. , only because they hit publish a little before us. Minson was to the COO job in June of last year as part of a larger reorganization, moving over from his three-year stint as CFO. is basically a big list of positions that he’s held at either Aol or Time Warner (hey, remember Aol-Time Warner?) going back to 2004. In his current position, he’s been responsible for leading the company’s three business units — the membership group, the brand group (which TechCrunch is a part of) and Aol Networks. One explanation we’ve heard for Minson’s departure is that Aol is trying to boost the numbers for Patch by lumping in traffic and revenue from the Huffington Post’s local sites. Patch is still unprofitable and . Minson was supposedly unwilling to go along with that plan, which is why he’s leaving. None of this has been officially confirmed. The from Aol back in 2011. The letter also mentioned the departure of Michael Arrington and Heather Harde from TechCrunch. Then exactly one year ago, it , including CTO Alex Gounares. Whatever happens with Minson, other exec changes are also happening. Aol is also looking to bring in a new CEO for the content brands division, according to out today. In my initial post, I didn’t include in any discussion of Patch’s actual traffic. To remedy that, I asked for its most recent data. The company says that the Patch Network as a whole (which includes HuffPo Local, Aol Weather, and Aol Yellowpages) grew 17.8 percent between January 2012 and the same month in 2013, from 17.4 million unique visitors to 20.5 million. If you look at Patch.com specifically, uniques were up 29 percent, from 10.5 million to 13.5 million. Put another way: Patch.com is actually growing more quickly than the network as a whole, though obviously the network’s total reach is larger.
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Tinyview Debuts New iOS App To Be Your One Stop Shop For All Mobile Shopping
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
, a startup that wants to be the “mobile browser” for product search and shopping, is expanding its functionality. Today the company has updated its iPhone app and adding a web presence for users. Tinyview is the brainchild of Raj Lalwani, who earlier this year his startup birthday and holiday reminders Facebook app, Social Calendar, to Walmart. The iOS app aims to solve the pain point of mobile purchasing via search. The startup, which originally launched last August, allows you to pre-load all of your checkout information, including addresses, email, payments and more. Within the app, you can search for a product or item, and Tinyview will show results from retailers like Amazon, Nordstrom, Zappos, Fandango and others. If you find an item you’d like to purchase on Nordstrom, the app can automatically auto-fill all the information into the checkout process. Users can now create lists of products they want, and friends can comment, like products or suggest new products. You can also share lists on Facebook, email, etc. And TinyView now shows products that are trending and being saved to lists by others. There’s also a built-in barcode scanner and QR code reader to find products in stores in the app. Lalwani adds that the startup will add game mechanics to the app, allowing users to earn points for certain user actions. He explains that he wants to do for e-commerce what Shopkick is doing for brick-and-mortar stores when it comes to discovery and viral sharing.
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App Discovery Startup AppHero Hits Version 2.0, Shares Details On What Makes Their Recommendations Tick
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
Toronto-based startup launched of its service today, with a brand new interface and big behind-the-scenes changes to how it offers up recommendations to users. AppHero is on a roll, and a spot on NBC this morning, but the app discovery space is a crowded one, and competitors like have more international experience and are aggressively targeting the North American market. But AppHero founder and CEO Jordan Satok thinks that his company is offering up one of the most comprehensive app recommendation engines available for iPhone and iPad owners inundated with a flood of new apps every day. In an email exchange, the young founder was kind enough to share a lot of behind-the-scenes information about how AppHero determines which titles to recommend with which users. As such, we’re able to share with you a very detailed synopsis of the recipe for AppHero 2.0’s secret sauce. Surprisingly, much of the final process of determining which apps are and aren’t worthy of inclusion in AppHero’s recommendation still falls to human hands: Satok’s specifically. He says he “personally looks” at the crop of apps that remains after AppHero’s sophisticated, automated “app review” process tackles the 772,177 current (as of this writing) active apps in the App Store. “We’ve built some algorithms that based on around 50 different factors (such as what people are saying about an app, how frequently it’s been updated, and what the other apps the developer has are like), is able to automatically filter out all the junk,” Satok says. “Think about this like a spam filter for apps.” Once Satok has run a fine-tooth comb through the results spit out by its collection of filtering algorithms, the startup begins the task of making personalized recommendations. While Apple doesn’t allow third-party developers to see which apps are already on a user’s phone, AppHero (with a user’s consent, and in ways that sidestep Apple’s lack of direct access APIs without running afoul of their rules) is able to determine “with a high degree of accuracy” what apps they already have. That’s crucial to the process, since it prevents duplicate recommendations, and provides data that can be used to draw conclusions around general categories of interest (i.e., if a user has a recipe app and a kitchen timer, they’re probably fans of cooking). AppHero has built tech around natural language processing techniques to help it automatically understand when apps offer similar functions. The engine can determine the general function of a particular app (i.e. Real Racing is a car racing game) and then group that with other similar titles (like Need for Speed Shift, for instance). Satok says grouping apps in this way proves much more accurate and useful in formulating useful recommendations than sticking to Apple’s own App Store category and sub-category divisions. The core of the recommendation magic comes around its ability to analyze tweets, Likes and other aspects of a user’s social graph, which they volunteer when they sign in to their social network profiles on AppHero. “I can’t go too deep into how we do this, because it’s very core to our business,” Satok explained, “But it’s unique tech because most other recommendation engines (Netflix, Amazon, etc.), are only able to do product based recommendations (i.e., you watched Lord of the Rings so you’ll like the Hobbit), but we’re able to do recommendations across different media types (i.e., you’ll like the TechCrunch app because you’ve liked an article from on Facebook).” Other key ingredients of the AppHero 2.0 recipe include improving the text descriptions that appear for each app, by taking not just the top-most content from App Store summaries, but instead finding the meatiest content in the hopes of better articulating to a user what an app actually does. The startup is also geo-tagging apps in its database where appropriate, so that titles relevant to a person’s location will bubble up, and they’re making sure to disambiguate between similarly named spots, so you won’t get recos for apps appropriate to London, England when you live in London, Ontario. Satok says there are a lot of other projects in the works at AppHero to try and continuously improve the quality of its recommendations. There’s plenty of room for more than one solution in the app discovery space, but users will go back to the service that gives them the best recommendations out of the starting gate, and the underlying tech is the key to winning that race.
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 18 | null |
Enigma.io Raises $1.1 Million To Structure The World Of Big Data
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
So the concept of big data sounds like a great idea — there are vast stores of information out there just waiting to be used, and we just need something to process it all. But unless you know exactly where to look, it’s difficult to actually find actionable information. More importantly, it’s damn near impossible to cross-reference information from multiple data sets without pulling it and analyzing it yourself. New York City-based is trying to help users make sense of it all. And it’s raised $1.1 million in seed funding to get it started. The company, which is still in beta, looks at publicly available and proprietary data sets across multiple providers, including government, real estate and finance records. So for instance you can do trend analysis across government databases to check out patterns in defense spending, and see who’s winning all the big contracts. Or you can check out how different real estate markets are performing relative to local job numbers, or you can even figure out something as banal as how many bagels are sold in New York versus other markets. That’s because Enigma has started tracking more than 100,000 different data sets and begun to structure them in a way that makes searching them not only do-able, but useful. And all of it is available in the Enigma dashboard, decoupling the data from obscure sources that it comes from. The company’s relational database makes searching and comparing data sets a breeze. Now that it’s collected all that data, the company is looking to grow its user base pretty significantly. Since it has such a broad amount of data, the number of applicable use cases is near infinite: It’s looking to pitch companies in media, finance, consulting, legal, and academic industries. The funding from TriplePoint Capital, Crosslink Capital, early YouTuber Brent Hurley, Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, and Colbeck Capital partner Matthew Glass will help in that pursuit.
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Pandora Resurrects Its 40-Hour (Monthly) Limit On Free Music, But This Time It’s Capping Mobile Usage
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
As it struggles to deal with , streaming radio service is bringing back an old idea by capping free mobile usage at 40 hours per month. The company previously limited free monthly desktop usage to 40 hours, but it . CEO Joe Kennedy suggested that Pandora’s mobile business is in a similar position to its desktop business a few years ago — it needs to make more money. At the same time, Kennedy said his goal is still to offer free music to everyone. “When you have a per-track royalty structure … there’s an inherent conflict between what radio has always been [namely, free] and what’s pragmatically reasonable,” Kennedy said. “We’re trying to balance the two. We’re certainly not backing down from the vision that we’re the future of radio. As mobile monetization improves over time, we’ll lift this.” He also noted that there’s a big difference between mobile and desktop usage patterns — there are desktop users who basically listen to Pandora all day while they’re at work, so a larger percentage of them that exceeded the monthly limit. On mobile, however, the cap should only affect 4 percent of users. That may not be much consolation if you’re in that 4 percent. Kennedy said the company is also trying to make the system as straightforward as possible. You’ll get an alert when you reach 85 percent of the limit, and when you hit the cap, there are a couple of pricing options: You can pay a one-time fee of 99 cents to get unlimited listening for the rest of the month, or you can sign up for a Pandora One subscription, which includes unlimited, advertising-free songs. Or you can decide that you don’t want to pay and just listen on your desktop/laptop computer for the rest of the month. And if you’re thinking about getting around the limit by just creating a second account, Pandora says that won’t work, because it’s applying the cap at both an account and a device level. As stated earlier, Kennedy is placing much of the blame on the rising cost of music — he said that per-track royalty rates have increased 25 percent in the past three years, with an additional 16 percent increase expected over the next two years. In , Pandora reported growing revenue and a tiny profit, but its forecast was much lower than expected. The cap will take effect starting in March. You can .
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Groupon Reports $638.3M In Q4 Revenue, Shares Drop More Than 20 Percent Due To Worse-Than-Expected Loss
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
Groupon has just put out . It has reported quarterly revenue of $638.8 million with an operating loss of $12.9 million and a loss per per share of 12 cents, falling short of on the EPS front — they had predicted $638.41 million in revenue and EPS of $0.03. Those numbers show 30 percent revenue growth and a slightly smaller ($12.9 million versus $15 million) operating loss compared to the same period last year. (Those Q4 results needed to be about a month after reporting because Groupon had higher-than-expected refunds, due to selling more expensive products and having customers make more returns of those goods.) As of 4:31pm Eastern, Groupon shares had fallen 22.44 percent (to $4.64) in after-hours trading. The earnings release emphasizes gross billings, which grew 24 percent year-over-year to $1.52 billion. “Record billings growth this quarter is a clear signal that customers love Groupons,” CEO Andrew Mason said in the release. “We will continue to invest in growth through 2013 as we see new opportunities to give our customers what they want.” For the year as a whole, Groupon is reporting revenue of $2.33 billion (up 35 percent) and operating income of $98.7 million (compared to a loss of $233.4 million in 2011). There were some bright spots for the company this past quarter due to holiday season shopping, particularly in the area of mobile commerce, one of the services that it wants to expand as part of its plan to expand beyond daily deals to provide more services to local businesses. It year on year, with four times as many mobile purchases as on a normal Friday morning; mobile drove over 40 percent of Groupon’s overall transactions during that period as well as over half of Groupon Goods’ transactions. The earnings release says that nearly 40 percent of transactions were completed on mobile in January, up 44 percent from the previous year. Focusing on international, Groupon reported gross billings of $802 million (up 6.2 percent) and revenue of $263 million (down 15.9 percent). Groupon’s international business, which covers 47 countries outside of the U.S., with the U.K. being the biggest market, is still based around the company’s legacy business of daily deals. This is largely because Groupon’s growth has been inorganic and acquisition-based, and so each country has its own back-end system, which makes it a challenge to integrate into what the U.S. is doing. It’s about a year behind but apparently integration of some of the mobile commerce services is on the agenda, so we may see services like Breadcrumb point of sale solution coming to international waters soon. The results are coming in ahead of a Groupon board meeting tomorrow.
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The CAT B15 Android Smartphone Has A Weird Name But The Brawn To Back It Up
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
Just as some people are put on this earth to create things, others are prone to destroy everything they touch. Those people should probably spend some time with the Caterpillar-branded CAT B15, an aluminum-and-rubber-clad Android smartphone that (inadvertently) encouraged people to work on their stress issues here at MWC. Naturally, Caterpillar isn’t actually making the phones — it’s a very far cry from the engines and bulldozers that the company is better known for. The device itself is made by a licensee called Bullitt Mobile, a U.K.-based company whose sole reason for existing seems to be churning out these sorts of rugged handsets. In fact, It’s actually rather hard to get a firm idea of how tough this thing actually is. Sure, it’s completely dust-proof (assuming all the ports are properly closed) and the 4-inch display is swathed in second generation Gorilla Glass, but it’s all sort of abstract until you hold the thing in your hand the feel the urge to heave it somewhere. In spite of its considerable chubbiness, the B15 is actually lighter than you’d expect, though it’s still going to elicit some stares should you shove the thing into your pocket. In a classic case of brawn vs. brains, the B15 isn’t the snappiest thing you’ll ever see with its dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm processor and but it’s still got enough horsepower to handle most daily tasks. If anything, performance is aided by the fact that the particular build of Android loaded up on the B15 is totally stock — no garish, cumbersome UI to be found here. And perhaps best of all, the 4-inch display recognizes touch input even when it’s wet — mostly. After a booth representative shot down my attempt to hurl the thing like baseball (not a huge loss, my fastball is pretty lousy), I settled for dunking the B15 in some water a few times. For the first few instances, things worked fine, but at some point you’ll eventually have to wipe the thing down for it to start behaving properly again. Hardly a big deal, but those of you looking for an Android-powered diving buddy will have to look elsewhere (especially because it’s only waterproof until you go deeper than 1 meter). In the event that your current smartphone is just too puny to keep up with your lifestyle, the CAT B15 will be available in March for €395 — try not to hurt yourself until then. [slideshow include=”766988,766989,766990,766991,766992″]
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Samsung Puts NFC Stickers In Coffee Bean In Singapore
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Samsung and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf have placed Samsung-branded NFC stickers in all 51 outlets in Singapore. Their marketing campaign runs from 8 February to 7 March, and will reward users with an upsized drink for tapping the poster and Liking Coffee Bean’s Facebook page after it pops up. Right now, that means the Galaxy S3 or Note 2 devices, and you still have to Like the page to complete the deal. I don’t see this one going too far in terms of helping the adoption of NFC stickers or even raising the number of Likes for Coffee Bean here, especially since the promotion only runs for a month. It’s interesting, though, to see NFC continue to be used in different ways by large vendors, although each brand not working with each other to move NFC forward is a huge bump in the road for the technology. Samsung claims that other NFC-enabled, Mifare-compliant Android phones should be able to work with its TecTile NFC stickers. The NFC ecosystem in Singapore is one which the government is also enthusiastically backing, with mixed results. The government recently launched its late last year, after years of to get them to put in contactless payment terminals. (Incidentally, the S3 was the chosen flagship device for the national payment system, and was used to demonstrate the application to the press.) All of this is backed on a national technology standard for contactless payment called Cepas ( ), that was set up in 2009. Anecdotally, in spite of all the infrastructure built up around NFC payments, take-up hasn’t been great here, because of the many other ways to pay. Most who take public transport already carry a contactless card similar to the London Oyster card or the Hong Kong Octopus card. The EZ-Link card is based on that aforementioned Cepas standard. Furthermore, the iPhone’s lack of NFC capability isn’t helping the contactless situation, either.
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Bipper App Lands Hollywood Investment, Courtesy Of Actress Jada Pinkett Smith
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 |
The bSafe ‘panic alarm’ app and service on and by the startup called launched into the U.S. . It’s been successful in Europe and has been positioned for a big push in the U.S. But an unexpected turn of events has lead to an investment by a Hollywood star in the form of a new undisclosed investment by actress Jada Pinkett Smith. She actually discovered the app after her daughter Willow began using it fall of 2012 and realised it might dovetail with her work as an advocate for the rights of human trafficking victims, given that bSafe is all about personal safety. Bipper founder Silje Vallestad, who moved to the U.S. last year, received an out-of-the-blue call from Hollywood and the deal was sealed at the Smith family residence at a lunch event with First Lady, Michelle Obama. Every day stuff really… Initially Smith was to promote the launch of Bipper’s safety products, bSafe and MobileKids, in the U.S., but ended up investing as well. In a statement Pinkett Smith said: “”bSafe is a safety service that can easily be used by anyone… I chose it because I saw the potential to solve real problems for kids, parents, and anyone looking to increase their overall safety. I have great confidence in Silje and her team and look forward to working closely with them to increase the reach and impact of an already fantastic security tool.” bSafe has competition in the form of , an app which sounds an alarm, will SMS a contact, start recording video and track your location. But it’s expensive ($6 a month), and hasn’t had the growth of bSafe. The service (has both a free version, and a premium version which costs $2 per month or $20 yearly) alerts your friends or family when you hit the panic button on the app, but also secures evidence and broadcasts a time-stamped video recording to them and sends them a map with your location. It additionally allows you friends to follow you home with live GPS tracking, broadcast just one location, and a ‘Fake Call’ feature makes the phone ring like a real phone call to help the user get out of an uncomfortable situation. Founder Silje Vallestad has now moved to the U.S. to fund-raise a Series A round to take the service global.
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How The Nuke From N. Korea’s Test Could Damage SF, Via Google Maps
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
North Korea tonight. For perspective, could potentially deliver a bomb capable of taking out downtown San Francisco. After measuring a 4.9 magnitude seismic event tonight, South Korea’s defence ministry confirmed that it was caused by an underground nuclear test. North Korea’s nuclear capability is estimated to be about 2 kilotons. Of course, I immediately wanted to know what kind of damage this could do to San Francisco and found one (for the paranoid) that allows users to see just how much of their hometown could be destroyed in a nuclear blast, overlaid on a Google Map (image above). According to the website, nearly all of downtown South of Market (the home of TechCrunch’s San Francisco office) would be taken out, and parts of Lower Haight and the Mission would suffer extraordinary damage. Nearly all of San Francisco and parts of Oakland (not shown above) are within glass-shattering range. We pasted the explanation for what each concentric circle represents: There is a big caveat: North Korea has an embarrassingly bad missile program. Last year, one of their . So, while there are long-range missiles that could potentially reach the West Coast, I’m not buying a bunker anytime soon. Indeed, many seem to be far less concerned than we might imagine. As of this writing, CNN’s readers appeared to be more concerned about the porn on their smartphones than the threat of nuclear annihilation (at least for a few hours after the news was announced). Below is an actual photo of the relative traffic for their most popular stories. I’m not sure which is more scary: the fact that we still live in an age when the world can be blown to bits, or that the masses care more about porn on their phones.
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Snapchat Brings Video To Android In A Private Beta
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Snapchat has been on a roll lately, scooping up a from Benchmark last week, toying around with , and becoming the world’s favorite mobile app. But today the train keeps on chugging, as Snapchat a beta build of its Android app that includes the ability to send self-destructing video messages along with the usual picture messages. But be forewarned, loyal Snapchatters, as the expires at 2am PST. To be perfectly clear, this is a pre-release beta build. Snapchat is still working out a few kinks before launching the official Android update, but a few lucky users will have the chance to hop on the beta tonight. Snapchat launched its new video feature of last year. Just in case you decided to take a year off from , Snapchat is one of the fastest rising startups of 2012. It lets users send self-destructing selfies (photos of oneself), complete with the ability to add doodles and text. The idea is that Snapchat users, many of whom have grown up using social networks since they were ‘tweens, are yearning for a place where they can stop worrying about keeping up virtual appearances. Since Snapchat photos self-destruct, users are able share a real moment, even if they’re Snapping with someone thousands of miles away. “Video is really important to our service because it allows Snapchatters to share a broad range of experiences and emotions,” said Evan Spiegel. “The Snapchat community is all about living in the moment and video brings those moments to life.” Many members of the media concluded that such a service was only useful , but Snapchat’s growth to now sending over 60 million snaps per day puts those rumors to rest. In total, users have now sent over 5 billion snaps in a little over a year.
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Kabbage Brings Data-Focused Online Merchant Lending To The UK
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
which provides working capital to online merchants, is expanding to the UK, the company’s first market outside the United States. The Atlanta-based company enables online merchants and sellers on marketplaces like eBay, Etsy, and Amazon to get capital they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for at a bank. Many small businesses and online merchants can’t receive financing from traditional banks and don’t want to risk using personal assets like a house to qualify for business loans. Kabbage is disrupting this space by providing a painless way to help these sellers access cash quickly and easily. Kabbage uses dozens of data sources, including sales and credit history, customer traffic and reviews, and prices and inventory compared to competitors to determine seller business performance, and it provides funding to businesses in fewer than seven minutes. Kabbage, which faces competition from On Deck and Capital Access Network, has raised $56 million from Thomvest, UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, Mohr Davidow Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, SV Angel and others. With the UK being one of the largest sources of e-commerce spending in Europe, the expansion of merchant lending in the country could provide real value for small businesses that are selling on marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. And Kabbage has to move fast in terms of expansion, as Amazon could be .
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Dish Chairman Ergen Doesn’t Want To Kill Ads, He Wants To Make Them Better
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen is no stranger to controversy, so it should be no surprise that he has a controversial plan for the future of advertising. At the D: Dive Into Media conference today, the outspoken pay TV executive said he didn’t want to kill advertising, but wanted to make those ads more relevant to consumers. Dish’s campaign against ads began last year, when Dish released its Hopper DVR to its subscribers. Some of its key features include the ability to record a week’s worth of primetime content, and also to skip commercials. That rankled a lot of the broadcasters whose content it distributes. Then at CES, Dish announced the , which not only allows users to skip commercials, but also lets them stream live and pre-recorded content to mobile phones, tablets and other devices. And today, . But according to Ergen, the end goal is not to kill TV ads on broadcasters, but to get TV partners to serve up more relevant ads. “I don’t think as a consumer that I want to see advertising that’s not relevant,” Ergen said. “With the hopper we have technology that allows us to target ads.” Ergen also said that the pay TV world will eventually go a la carte, either because one of the big cable or satellite providers will break the model, or because the industry will be shaken up by outside providers like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon. “Today, a lot of customers could live with Netflix and an over-the-air antenna and YouTube and they could be happy,” he said. Seeing that writing on the wall, Ergen said Dish needed to embrace change and be a leader rather than follow. “You have two choices: You can fight change or you can embrace change,” Ergen said. “It’s less risky long term to embrace change. You can either lead and make the rules, or be a fast follower, or you can be a slow follower and pay more.”
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Dish’s Charlie Ergen: Netflix Is Going To Change The Paradigm For How People Watch TV
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen had a few kind words for Netflix at the D: Dive Into Media conference today, saying that the streaming video provider would most likely be successful. More than that, though, he said that the company was already changing the way people are watching TV. When asked what happened with Dish’s purchase of Blockbuster and the company’s plans to roll out its own Netflix competitor, Ergen said, “We were too late for the Netflix side of the business.” Part of the reason for that is that Netflix already reached critical mass and can now afford to license whatever content they want. For that reason, Ergen said he thought Netflix would continue to be successful despite rising costs of content licenses. “They got to 30, 35, 40 million subscribers, and people have to sell to them,” Ergen said. On the flip side, he said Dish “didn’t have the guts” to go after the content licenses it needed to launch a successful streaming service. But according to Ergen, Netflix’s impact is not just in providing a sustainable model for streaming TV. It’s also fundamentally changing user behavior. “I think they’re going to change the paradigm and change the way people watch TV,” Ergen said. For one thing, they show movies without commercials — and they’re not getting sued the way Dish is. Ergen called Netflix’s venture into original programming with House of Cards “brilliant” and said he wished he had thought of it. But since he hadn’t, Dish will pursue other businesses. Like, uh, , for instance.
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UPDATED: Robotics Lab Willow Garage, Maker Of PR2, Not Shutting Down, But ‘Changes Are Afoot’
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
UPDATED: According to Willow Garage’s , the company will not shut down, but change its funding model: Willow Garage has decided to enter the world of commercial opportunities with an eye to becoming a self-sustaining company. This is an important change to our funding model. The success of the PR2 personal robot and of ROS will continue. There are close to 50 PR2 robots in the world and Willow Garage support of the platform will not diminish. And of course, ROS, as an open source platform, will continue independent of our business model choices. In addition to Willow Garage, its supporters include the Open Source Robotics Foundation and all the other contributors in the ROS community (academic, industrial and individual) who have made it the platform of choice for Robotics. , the robotics maker that created the , will likely shut down within the next few months, , citing multiple sources within the company. The decision to close down Willow Garage was announced last Friday, according to the report. Though the Menlo Park-based lab has not yet confirmed the news, IEEE Spectrum notes that much of the income generated by Willow Garage products is actually made by Willow spin-offs, like the Open Source Robotics Foundation, Industrial Perception, hiDOF, and Suitable Technologies. If Willow Garage does indeed shut down for good, it’ll be a big loss for the personal robotics field. In December, the San Jose Mercury two of the lab’s research scientists, Kaijen Hsiao and Matei Ciocarlie, about their project Robots for Humanity, which seeks to improve the lives of severely disabled people. Achievements included working with a quadriplegic man to control a PR2 and have it perform simple tasks in his home. The , another one of Willow Garage’s creations, is a low-cost, personal robotics kit with open-source software that was designed for educational and research purposes. Willow Garage has been emailed for comment.
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Simulmedia Raises Another $5 Million From Existing Investors To Help Make TV Ads More Like Web Ads
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Media marketing firm has in funding in an inside round from existing investors, the company confirmed today. The money comes from Time Warner Investments, Avalon Ventures, and Union Square Ventures, which together have put a total of about $32 million into the company since it was founded in 2009. Simulmedia has built a platform that is designed to bring Internet-like targeting to the TV ad market. The company uses set-top box and other viewing data to determine which shows advertisers should run their TV spots against. Rather than having its clients spend huge amounts of money buying ads seen by large audiences watching highly rated shows, Simulmedia helps its customers identify programming that will come more cheaply but have the same demographic user profile. In particular, Simulmedia can help TV content producers themselves find similar audiences to market their shows against. Or it can tell agencies how to position their ad spots to most efficiently reach a target demographic of viewers. The New York City-based startup was founded by ad veteran Dave Morgan, who had previously had success with Tacoda, which was sold to AOL in 2007, and Real Media. The company has seen tremendous growth over the past year, with revenue up 10x and the team doubling during that time. This is the fifth bit of financing that Simulmedia has raised over the years, with none of those rounds bringing in more than $9 million. In fact, since its third round, the amount the company has taken on in subsequent deals has decreased. Morgan said that he prefers to raise small inside rounds as the company continues to grow, instead of doing a large mezzanine round. According to Morgan, doing so makes it easier to price the round and gives the company more options as it decides on future courses of action.
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Pope Steps Back From Day-To-Day Role To “Do His Own Thing”
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Today, we’ve learned that , sovereign of the Vatican and leader of the Catholic Church, will be stepping down from those roles. Benedict, voted one of the by did not give many details as to what he would be doing after the papacy. Sources tell us that he has some “things in the works” and will share them in the coming weeks. It is rumored that Benedict XVI, having spent eight years in the role of Pope since his on April 19, 2005, was considering various Pope In Residence programs but eschewed them in order to “do his own thing.” He is still listed as “Pope” on the Catholic Church’s He told the press : “Thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I ask pardon for all my defects. And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff. With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.” While the Pope isn’t commenting more specifically on his departure or the formality of the prayer project, sources claiming direct knowledge of the situation tell TechCrunch that the departing head of the Catholic Church’s shares in the Vatican may have recently vested, which could be one of many explanations for his eagerness to leave. The Catholic Church still claims to be the largest spiritual organization in the world, with over a billion members. But some think those numbers are inflated by one-time visitors. “If you look at the number who actually return weekly, or monthly, it shows slowing growth in most regions,” a source, who wished to remain unnamed, told TechCrunch. Finally, there are many who believe that he’s simply been stuck in the shadow of his predecessor. “Every week you hear at least one person say, ‘This never would have happened if John Paul were still with us,'” one insider told us. The Pope also suggested that his mysterious next step was a “natural transition” from his previous role, and he was still planning to remain involved in the Church, possibly in an advisor position. “I would have liked to stay longer, but I just saw a big opportunity that I couldn’t pass up,” people familiar with the matter recounted him saying. While a Pope stepping back is not an everyday occurrence, leaders like the Catholic Church, as they scale or reach a new life stage. Sometimes there is a difference in vision. Sometimes people burn out. And now it’s happened at the Vatican. We’ll update as we hear more.
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Microsoft Has Built An Interactive Video Production Studio In LA, With More Than 150 Employees
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Today at the D: Dive Into Media conference, representatives from Microsoft provided more details on its new video production studio, which will provide a whole new level of interactivity for viewers. Nancy Tellem, Corporate VP of Microsoft’s L.A. Studios, said that the company has already hired 150 employees in its Santa Monica studio in L.A. That’s a huge commitment to creating a whole new type of content for its Xbox game console. Tellem to head up its new content efforts. In addition to the usual broadcast-like TV content, Tellem said that the company will be investing heavily in interactive content, as it can leverage products like Xbox Kinect to allow users to provide new ways for viewers to play with stuff on the screen. “We’re in a unique position to produce content with a much higher level of interactivity,” Tellem said. Yusuf Mehdi, SVP of Interactive Entertainment at Microsoft, said the company has sold well over 75 million consoles worldwide, and Xbox Live has more than 46 million subscribers. Users spend an average of 87 hours on the Xbox per month, with the majority of that being non-game content. While the user base is still primarily male, Mehdi said 38 percent of its users are women, and 51 percent are people with kids. Tellem sees that type of content being particularly attractive to younger viewers using the console. “Everyone is very different, particularly when you look at the younger demo,” Tellem said. “Interactivity is a natural extension of what they do.” While the company plans to make its content available through its Xbox Live service, it will also look to monetize that content through ads. One thing that Microsoft is not interested in doing is becoming a cable competitor by building bundles of content. Part of that is about being friendly to content companies and distributors that deliver video over its devices. Part of it is also not feeling like it can provide real value by being a virtual cable provider. The news comes as rumors have swirled around the next-generation Xbox, which is expected to be called the Xbox 720. Those include the belief that the , which will destroy the used-game market. Also, the revelation that the next-gen game console will . But Mehdi wouldn’t comment on the company’s plans for the next-gen box.
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The TC New York Meetup + Disrupt Pitch-Off Is Tomorrow So RSVP Now
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
The is tomorrow evening, so get ready for a wild night of pitch-offs, pizza and beer. While we’re , we’re introducing a new ingredient into the mix in the form of a 60-second pitchoff, where founders can pitch their products to be a part of Disrupt NY in April. Applications are currently closed for the event, but we have 20 awesome teams lined up ready to pitch their entrepreneurial hearts out. The winner gets free tickets to Disrupt and a spot in Startup Alley, and the runner up gets two free tickets to Disrupt NY, which is going down April 27 – May 1. If you’d like to attend , please register on Plancast . And whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, dreamer or tech enthusiast, we want to see you at the event, so we can give you free beer and hear your thoughts. Come one, come all. It’s sure to be a night to remember. A huge thanks to our awesome sponsors, , , and .
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This Augmented-Reality Robot Is The Closest Thing You Can Get To A Real-Life Hologram
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=s-hg4qCaR74] Ready to have your brain blasted to bits? U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi is a “virtual assistant” that is actually a green-clad humanoid robot. Users look at her using virtual reality goggles and instead of seeing a mildly creepy, ninja-like blog they see an actual face and body. You can reach out, touch the body, and even shake hands with your robotic pal. Made by a Japanese company called Different Dimension Inc., the robot uses a program called MMDAgent to interact with users. An initial prototype looked like a ‘tween in footie pajamas and a full-face hood. The newest version consists of half of a body and a much smaller profile. The pre-order price will be about $5,000. Unfortunately the system still requires a VR headset and some solid computing power. However, because the entire package is so compact, you could imagine approaching a little green figure while wearing smaller VR glasses and interacting without much fuss. Interacting with a tiny green figure is obviously quite creepy – especially if passers-by don’t know what’s up – but what did Clarke say about technology and magic?
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Twitter Study Shows Its Mobile-First Users Are Younger, More Engaged And Easier To Market To
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Twitter released the details of a about its “primary mobile users,” or those who engage with Twitter more on mobile devices and on the mobile web than on the desktop. The study, commissioned by Twitter from Kantar Media’s Compete, revealed that Twitter’s mobile-first users are more engaged than mobile users in more ways than one, skew younger, and tend to be more receptive to branded content than their desktop counterparts. Primary mobile users are 57 percent less likely to log into Twitter on the desktop than the average Twitter user, but they check the service much more frequently than most; they’re around 86 percent more likely to be active on Twitter several times a day than the average user. They’re mostly coming in by way of smartphone apps, but a considerable 15 percent of those who are primarily mobile users access by tablet first and foremost. Users who are mobile-first end up being younger than the average Twitter user, too, the study found. Users in the 18-34 range are 52 percent more likely to log in primarily via a mobile device than other age groups. They’re also more likely to check in with the service as a means of book-ending their day, being 157 percent more likely than average to open Twitter when waking up, and 129 percent more likely to do so when going to sleep for the night. They’re also 160 percent more likely to use Twitter at school or at work, 169 percent more likely to use the service while shopping, and three times as likely to use it when commuting or before or after seeing a movie. Twitter members who do mobile more than other methods are also 57 percent more likely to create original tweets, 63 percent more likely to click links, 78 percent more likely to retweet and 85 percent more likely to favorite tweets. In general, they’re more willing to engage with the content of others and of brands, since users who are mostly mobile are 96 percent more likely to follow 11 or more brands, and 58 percent more likely ro recall seeing a Twitter ad, according to the data from Compete. Here’s the uptake: Twitter is clearly looking at increasing its mobile advertising juice, and these numbers provide it with some great ammunition to help with that goal. They basically indicate that in sum, users who prefer to access Twitter mostly on mobile are the perfect demographic for targeted campaigns, since they’re more motivated than most to see and take note of content, to create their own content (user-generated content is a key component of Twitter’s value proposition for advertisers, after all), and just generally prone to having their eyes on tweets whenever they may be posted.
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Netflix’s ‘House Of Cards’ Is Internet TV-Funded Original Programming But Don’t Kid Yourself It’s Ad-Free (Spoiler Alert)
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
When Netflix bid on and won the rights to back in 2011 – buying the show before it was shot and committing to two full seasons – it . And with good reason: Funding such a high-profile slice of original programming – with David Fincher and Kevin Spacey on board — cast Netflix in a role typically occupied by HBO. Rumours of a price tag for HoC were bandied around. An source suggested a minimum of $3 million per episode – putting the total cost at $78 million at least. Netflix has not publicly confirmed how much it’s spending on the show, although a source “familiar with Netflix’s plans” claimed the cost would likely be far less than $100 million. Whatever the final figure, Netflix has rolled out a red carpet of grand claims regarding what the show means for Internet TV. “We believe that February 1st [the date the first season of HoC was put on Netflix] will be a defining moment in the development of Internet TV,” it proclaimed on an earnings call last month. “For viewers, Internet TV is a better experience because of the freedom and flexibility it provides, and in the case of Netflix, the lack of commercials,” it added. Of course it’s Netflix’s job to talk up Internet TV since that’s its business. But beyond the ability to watch a new show at your own pace, without being tied to a linear multi-week episode release schedule, is HoC really so revolutionary? Having watched the entire show I am struck by one thing: HoC is chock full of commercial content — far more than I can recall seeing in any recent, or not-so-recent, TV show. For Netflix to claim that Internet TV lacks commercials is, when it comes to this particular slice of original programming, disingenuous at best. Products are not just incidentally and occasionally in the background of HoC, they are a constant frame around the action and a deflecting focus for the director’s lens. And worse: At times brand interests clearly hijack portions of the plot, character arcs, scripting — the works. Apple products dominate the show but it’s not the only brand in play, with BlackBerry, Canon, Dell and Sony also getting a slice of air time (to name just the brands I immediately noticed). Some of these product appearances are fleeting. Many are not. At various points the show feels so saturated with commercial content that describing the occurrence as ‘product placement’ feels inaccurate. It’s more like product co-production. And that is very interesting indeed. It suggests that Internet TV-funded original programming, at least on this grand scale, may not be quite so revolutionary after all. Not in a commercial-free sense, in any case. Netflix does not have the resources of Time Warner-owned HBO. In its last month, Netflix reported revenue of $945 million for the quarter versus $3.7 billion for Time Warner’s networks business alone in its Q4. Funding original programming of this calibre is new ground for Netflix, and new ground it is having to to break. “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, earlier this month. As ’s Peter Kafka noted at the time Netflix was negotiating the rights to House of Cards, the company can afford to make the show — but it can’t afford to make “many” such shows. Not “unless [CEO Reed] Hastings has figured out a way to lay off some of the costs with a partner, or work some kind of production magic.” Well, one way to lay off some of those costs might be to cut considerably more product-placement deals. It effectively means partnering with brands to give them advertising-style, product-showcasing opportunities that involve the main characters and are smuggled into the plot to act as embedded, concealed commercials. When I asked about product placement in HoC, Netflix declined to comment. Nor would it discuss how involved it was in producing the show. The names above the show’s door are the indie studio production house and director David Fincher. But there’s no hiding all the brands’ starring roles. Or the fact that Netflix bought the show before it was shot — giving it the opportunity to have input in its production. (There’s a fascinating study waiting to be conducted that details the amount of air time the Apple logo alone gets in HoC or deconstructs scene composition and camera angle when the various brands are onscreen.) As Internet TV — and DVRs — let more viewers edit out commercials, they may well also be driving more commercial content inside the frame where viewers can’t avoid it. A story from last year, on Hollywood’s love affair with Apple products, cited research from Nielsen showing how Apple product placements have risen in recent years. Cupertino’s gadgets were discussed or shown 891 times on TV in 2011, according to Nielsen, which is up from 613 in 2009. HoC alone will surely help ramp that figure up considerably in 2013. Apple has said for placements. Rather it apparently supplies its kit to producers for free in exchange for the free marketing — in other words, a barter deal. Money or no money, Apple evidently takes product placement very seriously. During last year’s big U.S. Apple v. Samsung patent trial, Cupertino’s marketing chief the company has an employee who works closely with Hollywood to ensure its gadgets get on the big screen. (Apple did not respond to my questions about its product placement T&Cs.) So, while it’s unclear whether Netflix can book actual revenue from product placements inside HoC (Apple may refuse to get out its checkbook when producers come calling, but other brands with less to offer may have to pay) it can use product placement to reduce overall production and marketing costs. Indeed, that’s exactly what Netflix appears to be doing. It also looks like there’s some cross-business back-scratching going on, too — Sony’s PS3 and PS Vita, which both feature in the show, can stream Netflix content (as can Apple products) so there are certainly mutual interests (“business synergies”) in play. But being under more pressure to keep costs down than its traditional rivals, Netflix appears less able to prevent commercial interests from leaving their fingerprints all over its content. In other words: not so revolutionary now. For readers who don’t mind a few plot spoilers, I’m detailing several examples of the commercial content embedded within House of Cards below (with screen grabs) to illustrate how not all product placements in the show are equal. And to shine a light on the very worst example (see: ‘The Ugly’). Lots of folks use smartphones in their daily lives. Plenty of them even use iPhones, especially in the U.S. So although it’s a little creepy that almost everyone in House of Cards uses an iPhone – and some characters even have his ‘n’ hers black ‘n’ white matching iPhones – this is just about tolerable. At least the show includes an alternative: BlackBerrys, which are typically used as work phones by the politicians. So far, so kinda fair. That said, I couldn’t spot one Android phone in use. So it’s definitely a skewed view of the smartphone market. Interestingly a generic-looking phone (below) appears in a key scene in the first episode – along with graphical overlays to depict SMS back and forth (later episodes default to iOS text screens) – but perhaps these scenes were shot before the product-placement deals had been hammered out. As mentioned earlier, Apple products are by far the most dominant brand on the show, with the full spectrum of iDevices represented — from iPhones, to iPads, to iMacs, to Macbooks and even Apple’s distinctive white earbuds getting screen time. Elsewhere Dell gets to sneak in a couple of PCs and Sony gets in on the gaming side, but this show feels like it was made on location at 1 Infinite Loop. The cumulative impact undermines the atmosphere of the show, giving it the feel of an Apple lifestyle advert and creating a credibility barrier between the content and the viewer. In addition to surreal brand homogeneity, in many instances the branded products do not just crop up casually. Often the writers appear to have gone out of their way to create appearance/citation opportunities – whether it’s using a branded product in place of a generic one or scripting the show to deliberately draw more attention to the product and its functionality. For example, characters use their iPhones as torches, and more than once there’s a mention of how so-and-so doesn’t need a wake-up call, as their phone doubles as their alarm. In another scene, a character is shown trying to learn origami by watching a video on an iPad. In another especially naked product spot, a character arrives in another’s flat and points out a device lying on the table with the comment: “Is that a PS Vita?” He then asks what games it has (“Everything,” says the other character), before going on to talk about how he already owns a PS3 and ending the sequence with “I gotta get me one of those [PS Vita] for the car.” And thus ends the embedded PS Vita ad. Sure, people use gadgets IRL but people do lots of things. House of Cards doesn’t spend any time showing characters clipping their toenails, but it does spend a lot of time lingering on electronica — with scene composition, camera angle/movement deliberately chosen to frame and showcase the branded goods. Whole plot points also often hinge on technology – in a way that makes you suspect a portion of the action is being dictated by the commercial interests of the brands in play. Sometimes the tech elements of the plot fit with the characters in question; other times they definitely don’t. A middle-aged congressman is shown more than once letting off steam by blasting some bad guys on his PS3. To my eye that example is borderline plausible — and at least serves to illustrate his inner aggression. Likewise, in another scene a journalist whips out her iPhone to post to social media that she’s just been sacked – which in turn leads to her boss getting the boot (what an advert for an iPhone!). She also uses her iPhone to take notes for a story and to interact with a potential source. These instances, while still clearly product placement, at least seem true to her character – as a young, digitally switched-on tech user and journalist. But in another scene a grieving mother from a town in the deep south of the U.S. who has just lost her daughter in a driving accident is depicted using an iPhone to show photos of her (now dead) daughter. Here, the iPhone sticks out a mile — perhaps because grief is such an odd context for an advert. The most gratuitous example of product placement in House of Cards is actually better termed “character placement.” The character in question – and a chain of key scenes in his plot line – are entirely dictated by product. Of course I can’t prove this – Netflix declined to comment – so I’m speculating based on my experience of viewing the show. But so naked is the commercial agenda at this point that I would argue all it takes is a pair of eyes to deconstruct the interests driving the script. Firstly the character’s profession – a photographer – could well have been chosen purely to showcase two key products (made by Canon): a camera and a photo printer. It’s not especially important to the overall plot that he’s a photographer – lots of other professions would do. But it’s vitally important to Canon that he is since he is their brand evangelist. This character lives the kind of aspirational lifestyle advertisers love to depict, complete with an open-plan New York loft apartment-cum-studio that looks like it was lifted straight off the pages of a magazine. He’s also the sort of fun-loving, free-living free spirit who can fill a room with attractive singleton friends on cue the moment he feels like having a party. These anonymous friends are the kind of tasteful hedonists you routinely see laughing and dancing in alcohol commercials — i.e. never getting too drunk, never making a scene, never saying anything. They are not characters, they are window-dressing for his aspirational lifestyle. The most gratuitous sequence in this character’s plot line involves an apparently spontaneous morning-after walk in the park between the photographer and his love interest. The scene itself feels awkward enough, since it’s impossible to feel any emotional attachment to a walking advertisement, but to make matters worse he’s brought along his gigantic DSLR Canon camera. The female love interest then takes the camera off him, zooming in on a woman sitting on a bench in the distance and taking a perfectly crisp shot despite being a total camera amateur. This sequence is an undiluted Canon commercial. But there’s more. Back at the apartment, the pair are shown printing out (from a Canon photo printer) the last page of a gigantic photo-mosaic of the girl they pointlessly took a picture of in the park – a woman who has zero relevance to their life — and laying it out on the floor. Look, it’s saying, look at the PRODUCTS. The long and short of all this is that people don’t do that. Adverts do. This entire sequence is so nakedly commercialized it’s an insult to the intelligence of the viewer. And since it lacks any emotional impact (these are adverts, not characters, so we can’t feel anything for them) — its narrative purpose is also derailed at what should be a key plot point in the show. We learn nothing about the female character — who is central to the overall plot, and has left her husband to be with this man — because we’re too busy being told about how great Canon’s camera is and how rad its line of photo printers is. The sequence is a commercial cul-du-sac where the products are allowed to switch places with the stars and the integrity of the show comes tumbling down. There is only one word for this — and it’s definitely not “revolutionary.” Take it away, David Lynch: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4wh_mc8hRE]
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Facebook Counted 43M Grammy-Related Likes, Comments — Oh, And 26M Related To Super Bowl Ads Last Week
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
After this year’s Super Bowl, there were that Twitter had “won” the event thanks to the general explosion in usage, as well as the prominent use of hashtags in many of the TV ads. But today Facebook is sharing some numbers of its own — and yes, it’s still an enormous source of conversation around big events. The most recent data is around the Grammy Awards last night. Facebook says that there were a total of 43 million likes and comments made around Grammy-related content. That’s supposed to represent the reach that Facebook can offer: It’s not measuring how many posts mentioned the Grammys, but instead the ripple effects of those initial mentions as people’s friends and followers engaged with them. (If you want an incredibly detailed breakdown of what people were actually talking about, . And while I don’t really see a way to directly compare the numbers, you can .) More interesting from an advertising perspective are the numbers from the Super Bowl. that half of the national ads included hashtags, and that those hashtags were mentioned 300,000 times on the day of the game. Well, Facebook says it took that list of 26 hashtagged advertisers and found that they were mentioned in 2 million Facebook posts from game day. Were all of those mentions spurred by the Super Bowl? Maybe not, but the number was 12 times more than the day before, so it’s probably safe to assume that the ads made a big difference. And those posts, in turn, drove a total of 26 million comments and likes. (Just to be clear — the Super Bowl number is lower than the one from the Grammys because it’s limited to a specific group of brands.) None of that changes the fact that the game served as an impressive demonstration of Twitter’s inroads with brands and advertisers. It does, however, suggest that the conversation hardly stopped there.
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Microsoft’s Next-Gen Xbox May Require You To Use A Kinect
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
The war for your living room rages on, and has no intention of yielding any hard-fought ground to its gaming rivals. Rumors of a new Xbox have been flying around for months now, but has put together the mother of all next-gen Xbox (a.k.a. Xbox 720, a.k.a. Durango) posts thanks to a secretive-but-chatty source known as SuperDaE — if the moniker sounds familiar, he’s the guy who tried selling what he claimed was a while back. First up, the hardware — Kotaku claims that the final, retail-ready Durango console will sport a eight-core processor clocked at 1.6GHz, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and a “800mhz DirectX 11.x graphics processor unit.” Other reported components include a 500GB internal hard drive (mostly for installing games, which is now said to be required upon a game’s first launch), as well as a Blu-ray drive. That info matches up rather nicely with about the Durango’s internals, so it’s becoming very clear that whatever Microsoft has up its sleeves should have no trouble pushing pixels over the months and years to come. And for better or worse, there will be more Kinect in your future. Apparently, its days as a pricey peripheral of questionable value are over — an updated version is said to be included with every new Xbox going forward. To top it all off, it’s being reported that the new Xbox simply won’t function correctly unless the Kinect is connected and has been set up. The Kinect’s appearance at CES and Kotaku’s new report illustrate that Microsoft strongly believes in the promise of motion and gesture control that the Kinect brings to the table — even if some gamers just don’t see the value. Surely I can’t be the only one who has trouble calibrating a Kinect to work well in tiny rooms. While the new Kinect has been updated considerably (it can apparently track more discrete points on more people’s bodies), that certainly doesn’t mean that the Xbox will suddenly go without a traditional controller. While Kotaku wasn’t able to figure out exactly what the thing will look like, the new model is expected to be “a natural evolution” of the design used for the 360’s controller, albeit with a new and largely unexplained way of connecting wirelessly to the console itself.
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WordPress For iOS Adds Push Notifications And Comment Moderation
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Automattic, the company behind the WordPress CMS and blogging platform, have today for the WordPress iOS app which introduces push notifications for comments, followers, likes, posts and more. The update makes it easier for WordPress users and authors to reply to and approve comments from their mobile devices, the company says, as well as keep track of what’s trending on their blogs. Previously, the app supported notifications – but only for comments. Available in version 3.4 of WordPress for iOS, out now, the mobile notifications section is available in the left-side navigation. For WordPress.com blogs, this supports all the same notifications that the WordPress.com toolbar does, including likes, followers, reblogs, badges and stats. The notifications can also be customized via Settings, so you’re only interrupted by the metrics and updates you care about tracking. Because the app supports multiple blogs, these muting options can apply to entire blogs you don’t want to hear from, too. Also new in today’s release is support for blog comment moderation, which lets users view, moderate and reply to comments from a single screen, independent of the blog itself. The features are supported on WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted blogs which use the Jetpack plugin, according to the description in iTunes. While these additions are a big step forward in managing WordPress on mobile, the app continues to lack some important features – like the ability to search through old posts, for example. Also, according to some reviews on iTunes, the update has been causing app crashes and has affected the ability to view stats for some users. Your mileage may vary, of course, but be warned. (The app is crashing for me after the update, for what it’s worth, but I’m on a jailbroken device now, so it’s not always clear what the culprit is when these things happen.) You can grab the new app from .
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Apple Updates iPhone 4S To iOS 6.1.1 After European Carriers Advise Against Updating To 6.1
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
Apple has just issued iOS 6.1.1, a bug-fixing update aimed at the iPhone 4S specifically to address issues around cellular issues on 3G connections for some European carriers, per the release notes. The update had been in beta for only five days, which is a much shorter cycle than Apple usually goes through for new iOS updates. The new release is a different one from that already in testing, according to Apple, which addressed Maps fixes for users in Japan. not to update their iPhone 4S to iOS 6.1 via text messages sent out to subscribers, advising that it prompted 3G connection issues including an inability to make or receive calls or texts. iOS 6.1 also caused issues for AOL corporate employees, creating errors around meeting management. Those errors, as well as ones that users are reporting around battery drain and device overheating, aren’t specifically mentioned in the release notes for this update. Those problems also extend beyond the iPhone 4S, so it’s likely they’ll get zapped in another, less urgent bug-fixing update aimed at all the hardware to be released later.
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Bill Gates, Ever The Company Man, Does A Reddit AMA, Claims “Bing Is The Better Product At This Point”
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 |
, co-founder of Microsoft and now co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has held his very first . He’s surprisingly good at it, answering over 30 questions and verifying his identity in a number of cute ways (photo at left, video below). For the record, Gates’ preferred computer is the Microsoft Surface Pro, which he just got a week ago. He also believes that Windows 8 is better than Windows 7: “higher is better.” “I am using a Perceptive Pixel display right now — huge Windows 8 touch whiteboard,” he wrote. “These will come down in price over time and be pervasive.” Shockingly, the Microsoft founder also believes that Bing is “the better product at this point, seriously.” Concerning the future, Gates believes that “robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at ‘computers’. Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways,” he wrote. As can be expected, a Redditor questioned him about his relationship with Steve Jobs, and he had this to say: He and I respected each other. Our biggest joint project was the Mac where Microsoft had more people on the project than Apple did as we wrote a lot of applications. I saw Steve regularly over the years including spending an afternoon with him a few months before he tragically passed away. The software genius mentioned that he doesn’t code as much as he’d like to. “I write some C, C# and some Basic,” he wrote. “I am surprised new languages have not made more progress in simplifying programming. It would be great if most high school kids were exposed to programming.” Surprisingly, the product Gates was most excited about at Microsoft, but which never made it to release, was . In essence, WinFS is a smart cloud storage system (a relational database) that would organize files automatically based on various attributes inferred by the system. WinFS was originally meant to ship with Vista, but according to Gates, it was “ahead of its time.” Gates was also quizzed on his thoughts regarding an open Internet: There are two things this could reference. One is the free/pay for software mix. The Internet has benefited from having lots of free stuff and lots of commercial software. It has been interesting see people inventing hybrid models. Even stuff that is pretty commercial often has free versions for some audiences. Even the most open stuff often have services people choose to pay for. The second thing is the anonymous versus identified tension. This is another one where both will probably thrive since you want anonymity for some things and full identity for others. I am surprised how little progress has been made in the identity space but it will improve. He said that the cheapest things give him pleasure now that he’s insanely wealthy. His fave things include cheeseburgers, helping kids, and taking Open Course Ware courses. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv_F-oKvlKU&w=640&h=360] You can catch the whole thing right .
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 27 | null |
Facebook’s Never Had A Big User Data Breach, But May Never Recover When It Does
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 16 |
It’s not but . Between crooks, hackers and foreign governments, Facebook probably can’t avoid a serious user data breach forever. When it happens, Facebook may never be able to quiet fears that “personal data isn’t safe there.” That could cause a chilling effect on sharing, jeopardize its future in commerce, and cut short its lifetime. This isn’t to say Facebook’s not doing everything in its power to prevent this. It has a of top talent, infiltrates hacker rings to , and offers to white hats who identify bugs or holes. Yesterday, though, Facebook something very unsettling. A “sophisticated attack” uploaded malware onto the computers of several Facebook engineers when they visited a hacked mobile developer site. Facebook quickly quarantined and scrubbed the devices, called the police, and kicked off an investigation. So far, there’s been no evidence that any user data had been compromised. Perhaps the attackers were after Facebook’s trade secrets or information about partners. Regardless, it was a very close call. To date, Facebook has managed to keep what is possibly the world’s largest repository of private information from falling into the wrong hands. Its fellow social networks haven’t been as successful. saw 250,000 accounts accessed by hackers, and last year the passwords for 6.5 million LinkedIn accounts and published online. But there’s a huge difference between those social networks getting hacked, and someone getting into your Facebook account. Most data on Twitter and LinkedIn is public by default. Sure there are direct messages, or the few misguided souls who keep their profiles locked down. On Facebook, though, privacy is the default. That means Facebook has a lot more to lose from getting hacked. The absolute damage of an eventual breach might not be too severe. Perhaps some photos and messages will be stolen, or at worst some credit card information. Facebook would likely respond quickly by quarantining affected accounts until users changed their passwords and reclaimed control. It’s the psychological damage to Facebook’s brand that will be the real killer. The world’s news outlets would be all over a breach. Though it looks like no user data was accessed, yesterday’s announcement brought from the New York Times, BBC, ABC News, The Guardian, and just about every tech news blog. The world will know, and the fear will sweep across the news feed. Quick to jump to the worst conclusions and re-share sensational stories, Facebook will be filled with people advising friends to cease sharing, pull out all their data, and shut down their accounts. Most won’t go that far, but the looming worry that nothing is safe on Facebook will permeate the world population and slam its stock price. Facebook already struggles to fight a perception that it creeps on people’s data, and that its privacy controls are so confusing that people accidentally expose their own information. The emergence of vulnerability to outside attack will compound these issues. Together, they could derail — the theory that the amount of content we share doubles every year. Facebook’s business model is a value exchange. It offers a free, powerful, unified communication tool, and to access it, users trade in their data and allow Facebook to monetize it through advertising and other methods. But that exchange requires that we trust Facebook to keep our private data safe. If that trust is shaken, adding your most private thoughts, media, contact info, and financial data becomes more of a conscious decision about risk. Injecting that hesitation into the sharing process could be the biggest threat to Facebook’s long-term success outside of a rising social network that refuses to be acquired. In other words, no matter how well Facebook plays the security game, the odds are stacked against it, and the stakes have never been higher.
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Palantir Acqhires Team Behind YC Voice Email Startup Voicegem
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 16 |
just scooped up some fresh minds to aid its mission of analyzing the world’s information. Today Y Combinator Summer 2012 startup its team is joining Palantir, and it will shut down its voice email service in mid-March. Voicegem had delivered over 1 million seconds of voice recordings, but now its makers are moving to a team that’s “truly changing the world.” and came up with the idea for while working on computer science master’s degrees at Stanford. They wanted to intimately communicate with their families back in Turkey and Germany, but the time difference made phone calls tough. So they built where you could enter an email address, record a voice message, and have Voicegem send the recipient a link to the web-hosted audio message. The product got some traction with senior citizens who aren’t as familiar with typing as they are old-fashioned talking. Then Voicegem writes “It became the alternative to a phone call for thousands of people of all ages. Folks ranging from families to language students, aspiring singers to podcasters and universities to businesses.” But as Hacker News commenter points out, a million seconds of audio recordings cut up into 30-second voice messages meant Voicegem was averaging only 138 recordings per day over its six-month lifespan. That might not have been promising enough to push forward as a full-fledged business, and Voicegem never announced it had raised any beyond Y Combinator. The voice-messaging space has also seen some big new competitors emerge. Facebook recently added , and last April raised a massive $30 million round to back its walkie-talkie app. Also, the macro trend points towards seniors growing more computer literate, so they might have had less need for Voicegem over time. But that didn’t mean Kara and Blessing’s skills in the voice space should go to waste. Private companies and governments transmit enormous amounts of audio but don’t do much to make sense of it. Palantir’s purpose is to “radically change how groups analyze information,” so it has to know how to crunch voice data. We’re awaiting comment from the Voicegem and Palantir teams, but we bet the startup’s team will be helping Palantir turn audio into insight. We do know that the Voicegem team will be leaving its Palo Alto headquarters and moving to Palantir’s New York office to join its engineering team. Palantir isn’t picking up Voicegem’s product or data, though, so it’s stopped accepting new users and will shut down entirely on March 15th. The acqhire is another example of how top-tier accelerators are becoming talent feeders for big tech companies. The exhaustive process of building a startup gives young entrepreneurs valuable skills that are attractive even if their first companies don’t pan out. Eventually, you have to decide if you want to ride out your own focused business idea, or play a small part in something bigger. It seems Voicegem chose impact over control.
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The Rise Of Company Builders
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 16 |
Entrepreneur-turned-investor is a classic story arc in Silicon Valley but recently the plot has earned a twist. Certain operators are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC to instead create a studio-like holding operation. By doing so, they remain engaged with the grit and grassroots challenges of building a startup. They remain company builders. John Borthwick and his New York City-based technology studio, , was one of the recent pioneers of what Borthwick calls a “new asset class” in the VC world. And Bill Gross started this in the nineties with But we’ve seen many others follow. Twitter co-founders Ev Williams And Biz Stone launched the ; Mike Jones and Peter Pham run the LA-based studio Science; Max Levchin ; Snapfish founder and Mayfield partner Raj Kapoor is in the process of launching his studio ; Michael Birch has ; Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, along with partner Paul Lee, are incubating ideas and startups at Lightbank; Kevin Ryan operates AlleyCorp; and most recently we entrepreneur and Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar is creating is own startup-creation venture, Sherpa. Even VC giant Andreessen Horowitz is building an army of marketers, business development execs, recruiters and more to help aid in the creation of startups. Each model differs slightly. Some take bigger chunks of equity than others. Some of the studio creators take co-founder titles on certain startups. Many studios not only create and incubate ideas in-house, but also make seed-stage investments in startups outside of the company. But at the heart of what each of these studios is doing is using entrepreneurial expertise and in-house resources to help generate ideas and build companies at scale. As this trend takes off, it raises the question why? Lee, who has helped Lightbank incubate a number of ideas including loyalty startup , explains that because it is so easy to build startups these days, that there is a need for models that allow companies to leverage certain functions like sales and marketing, hiring, legal and more. It’s important to note that this is probably one of the biggest differentiators between studios and accelerators. If the studio has some of these functions built in-house, then startups can actually leverage these repeatable services and scale more quickly with less capital. In Lightbank’s case, the firm has built and scaled sales teams across a number of industries and companies and can help startups quickly manage this area. Borthwick echoes Lee’s thoughts on the value of a shared platform of data, analytics and monetization tools. Betaworks has a layer of tools that its companies, which include Chartbeat, Bitly and others, all use. He compares this to the movie studio model, where companies like Disney and Universal create individual movies but have a layer of services in-house that promote films, and provide other functions across these various content plays. LA-based Science has a to Betaworks and has built a number of B2B companies that can provide its other consumer-facing startups with marketing technologies. TripleThread, which launched in November and powers personalization for styling and clothing companies, supports another Science company, Fourth and Grand, which offers a personalized styling service for men. Andreessen Horowitz has been building its layer of services for startups by hiring an army of talent to help portfolio startups. The firm’s partner, Margit Wennmachers, explains that Andreessen sees entrepreneurs as the epicenter to an idea, and works on helping with everything else that the entrepreneur doesn’t have time to do. So if an entrepreneur is a coding genius, Andreessen will work on helping with go-to market strategies, marketing, recruiting, and more. The firm has developed a network of talent in-house to help with this. Andreessen j and While these services help startups get their products built, shipped and marketed in a speedy fashion; speed also has its benefits when things don’t go so well in development of an idea. The ability to quickly scale ideas can also be advantageous when an idea doesn’t work and you need to shut it down. Borthwick explained to us that part of what makes this studio model work is that there’s the opportunity for rapid experimentation and company development. “Failure is part of the model. The traditional VC model is predicated on the fact that failure happens in the marketplace. But our model is a more flexible platform for innovation. If things don’t look like they will work out, we can easily pivot because there hasn’t been as much capital and investment put in,” he says. “Death and breakage is part of the system.” Ev Williams refers to this (which is a communications product that is ) thread from last year, as “parallel entrepreneurship.” In a lot of ways, this seems like an accurate description of these company building studios. Stone and Williams, Kapoor, Borthwick, Pishevar, Jones, Levchin and others have all had experience being able to build and grow startups. They can all work in tandem with talent in-house, and help this new generation of entrepreneurs turn ideas into actual businesses. The benefit for the company builder is that they can scale their experience across a number of startups and ideas, take a hands-on approach to helping in product and engineering and take equity stakes in each. The new, young entrepreneur gets to learn how to build a company from someone who has had success and can scale more quickly. As Pham puts it, “collective knowledge is always better than singular knowledge.” Kapoor, who his departure from Mayfield to create his own startup studio, explains that an experienced entrepreneur can give founders an advantage by being able to short-circuit lessons that the entrepreneur learned when he or she founded a company previously. Kapoor co-founded and was the CEO of Snapfish, which was sold to HP for $300 million. His model at Cofounder.co centralizes around co-founding startups and helping in all areas of the company including financing, recruiting, strategy, product development and mentoring the CEO. While he hasn’t yet officially launched, he explained that he found the traditional VC model doesn’t allow VCs to go as in-depth in the trenches with entrepreneurs as with the studio model. His view is that entrepreneurs are looking for help as much as money, especially at an early stage. “Entrepreneurs are open to and expecting help that goes beyond just investing. In the traditional VC world, it’s done it through mentors and advisors,” he says. “But it is very difficult for someone who isn’t really close to the company to add value on a regular basis.” Lee adds that for a young entrepreneur who may not have a lot of work and technology experience, it is still extremely hard to build a company on your own, even in a traditional accelerator or incubator. He feels that the company-building model fills a gap in the market. He also points out that there will always be a class of entrepreneurs who don’t need to participate in the studio model. “There are some entrepreneurs who don’t need to strongly lean on the learnings of those who have succeeded previously, but there are some founders where it makes more sense to have a stronger network surround them,” he says. In his experience, Borthwick notes that there are certain types of entrepreneurs that the studio model scales well for, and this sort of partnership isn’t for everybody. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all model for the entrepreneur.” Another area where the studio model can differ from traditional VC investment or even accelerators is in the equity handout. Science takes mid-to-high, double-digit equity in their startups (compared to Y Combinator’s 7 percent). All models are different in terms of how they are breaking down equity allotments, but it can be daunting to give away that amount of equity and it begs the question of whether this is entrepreneur-friendly. But clearly as more and more entrepreneurs flock to Betaworks, Science, Obvious Corp. and similar companies, it’s clear that some entrepreneurs see that there is a tradeoff in equity versus the value that people like Williams, Jones, Stone, Borthwick, Pham and others provide. Lee says that this exchange may make more sense for younger entrepreneurs who see value in the experience of working under these leaders and founders. However, it’s still early days and too soon to determine the longevity of the companies that emerge from these studios, as well as how the entrepreneurs that these studios are nurturing will perform in the greater technology market. The other question is whether this new model will produce the sort of iconic VC firms like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. This will largely depend on whether the bets that these studios and company builders make turn into the next Googles, Microsofts or Facebooks of our world. Borthwick is confident that this model is succeeding in the seed-stage investment world. He notes in his yearly letter to shareholders. “Our approach allows us to achieve a velocity that other parts of the seed and VC stacks find hard to achieve…betaworks has played a part in the emergence of this larger, more diverse, more independent, and loosely-coupled seed financing marketplace; we believe its existence and growth tends to validate the betaworks model and its emergence as a new asset class.” In a way, company building allows the experienced entrepreneur to keep playing the game. It’s like when Apollo Creed retired from professional boxing, but then decided to coach Rocky Balboa against Clubber Lang. As Pham explains, for some founders this is the best of both worlds. They get to raise a fund and invest in people they believe in, but also keep their hands dirty in the nit and grit of startup creation. It’s the classic story of an entrepreneur who has been through her own roller coaster ride and now wants to invest in others who have an appetite to do the same — only now, she wants a seat on the ride.
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Disrupt Darlings GTar Talk About What Happens After You Succeed On Stage, Raise $350K, And Have To Ship Product
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 16 |
Last May, Incident Tech launched the gTar, a guitar with real strings that connected to a smartphone for some amazing sound processing. In the last few months, the founder, Idan Beck and his team have been busy preparing the 800 guitars he pre-sold on for shipment. Theirs is a story of creativity, cool, and the next generation in music technology. I spoke with Idan briefly about his Disrupt experience and how it felt to go from zero to shipping in less than a year. Idan: Things have been extremely busy and going well! Shortly after disrupt we shifted our primary focus on getting the gTar into mass production out in China. While we had already been going out there for nearly a year at that point, we spent the next 6 months hammering out every issue imaginable in production and learning about how much goes into making a thousand of something. Now we’re starting to get units out of China in batches and fulfill them out to our amazingly supportive and patient Kickstarter backers. As a result of the last 6 months the product has really improved as well, with the end result and build quality far exceeding our expectations, since as a result of production we had to make certain changes to the design and architecture of the product, allowing us to make some significant improvements to the technology, along with the direct ability to upgrade the product in the future through iPhone delivered updates as well as hardware upgrades that our customers can install themselves. Idan: Before Disrupt the gTar was still a relatively secret project being worked on in a closet-sized office in the flatland of Santa Clara. Before that I had originally started building the product in my garage in Cupertino and after that we were bouncing around for a while (even working for a month or so on an Icelandic ferry docked in the SF bay), but once we knew we were going to Disrupt everything sort of got official. Driven by the pressure to get things right, our team pulled together a really professional looking video and presentation in a matter of weeks while gearing up for what we felt was going to be a make it or break it point for the product.
Idan: It’s definitely exciting and almost foreboding to get up on the stage, especially considering that you have such a short amount of time and it’s not really possible to leave much to chance. You’re somehow stuffing three years of work into such a short little moment, and hope that people understand implicitly what had to go on under the hood to make all of that happen. It definitely has this sort of epic feel to it and we were definitely nervous as all hell. We spent every waking moment practicing and rehearsing every word and sentence we were going to say. Also, our dependence on our early stage prototype hardware was always something we were worried about. For example, the night before our presentation, Josh had to run out to get a Dremel tool that he somehow managed to find at the only open hardware store in Manhattan, so that I could make some internal tweaks for us to re-route some wires through the prototype to avoid any potential battery issues or audio problems that might pop up on stage. That prototype is in a case now, and we’re planning to hang it up as a piece of art. It was very much a super early prototype (and the only fully functional gTar in existence at that point) and we easily had disassembled and reassembled it at least 10-20 times over those few days. In fact, we did it so much that we were ruining the screws holding on the pick guard and by the last day we only had 3 left!
Idan: We launched the project around 2PM or something and we hit our $100K Kickstarter goal in just over 11 hours so by the end of the day we had pre-sold north of 200 gTars. The project ended up raising over $350k with about 850 people pledging to get a gTar.
To be honest I think we could have chosen a better set of songs for our demos, but we were also playing it a little safe as well since we wanted to choose a song that I could play well enough knowing that I’d probably freeze up on stage. I think you can probably see my leg shaking if you look carefully enough in the video of the first presentation. We actually got a lot of feedback on that demo, so for the second presentation we did change up the songs around, which definitely was a good move.
Idan: We’re still working hard to get a gTar into the hands of everyone that backed us on Kickstarter, and are making solid progress and getting some great positive initial feedback. We’re eagerly awaiting another large shipment that’s on its way and on the ocean as we speak. We’ll be putting some serious effort into an Android dock and app, as well as Web browser based compatibility. We have done some light conceptualizations of how other instruments would work within our platform, but are mainly focused on the gTar for the moment. We’re working hard to continuously make the gTar a better product, and as a result of some the design changes that went into effect during production, the units we are sending out today will also have the capability to benefit from those improvements as we roll them out. This includes continued improvement to our own app, such as a deeper exploration and development of the social aspects of the product. A few weeks ago we launched an that is already generating pre-orders for the spring, and we’re developing retail distribution channels for the summer and holiday seasons. We’re also looking to expand our team over the next year as well! Idan: I would think that the comparison is much more likened to a . It’s a short, intense, and immensely rewarding experience that ends up surprisingly thrilling for everyone involved. At the end you might not end up being number one, but the experience will change you for the better.
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Gillmor Gang: House of Bacon
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 2 | 16 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — pondered the debatable relationship between Netflix’ House of Cards and the tech community. From HBO’s Jeff Bewkes calling the Kevin Spacey series “pretty good” to Comcast buying the rest of NBC/Universal from GE, the economics of streaming TV took a big leap forward. Not so much email, which @scobleizer defended with filters, smart labels, and Sane Boxes. We heard about smart calendars and DM suckage and Apple spoilage, but no matter: it’s all about finding more time to devote to binge viewing and meteor dodging. More bacon please. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Get Ready To Lose Your Job
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 2 | 16 |
“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” and Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is… . Meanwhile, “profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down,” Paul Krugman. Walter Russell Mead : “The old industrial middle class…has been hollowed out, and no comparable source of stable high income employment has emerged.” Recent supports that: “Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of (American) earners during the economic recovery, but barely at all for everybody else … Median household income is about 9 percent lower than it was in 1999.” Coincidence? Nope. The great tech revolution of the last 30 years is finally beginning to metastasize into every other human domain–in other words, , endangering almost every job there is. I argued a few weeks ago that this means . Let me now unpack that a bit. For 50 years now has been (to oversimplify) doubling computing power every two years. People like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge look at that astonishing history of nonstop exponential growth and predict a within our lifetimes. Me, I’m pretty skeptical. Kurzweil that whenever technology hits a limit, “a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.” That’s not much more than a convenient article of faith. As Peter Thiel , “technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds … reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003.” On the other end of the spectrum from Kurzweil and Vinge, there are people who think that nothing new is going on: witness Megan McCardle’s dismissal of the economic troubles faced by America’s middle class as “a slight expected income downshift during the Great Recession” in . The reality seems to be somewhere in between. Moore’s Law has finally escaped the confines of the tech sector; as a result, our world is no longer changing linearly, and what’s more its rate of change is increasing; but Kurzweil’s would-be exponential growth is still damped down by the enormous technological barriers outside of the relatively simple world of semiconductors, by regulatory restrictions, and by simple human unwillingness to change that fast. So I see no mystical Singularity on the horizon. Instead I see decades of drastic nonlinear changes, upheaval, transformation, and mass unemployment. Which, remember, is . But not in the short term. That’s all pretty abstract. Let’s take a specific example: Google’s self-driving cars. What happens when they finally make their way onto American highways en masse? (Which, to be fair, Kurzweil back in 1999.) What happens if and when it turns out that they’re much safer than human drivers? Insurance costs will make human driving very expensive, and fewer vehicles will be sold–partly because cars will last longer, partly because fractional ownership of a pool of self-driving vehicles will make more economic sense than having your own. Improved safety, lower insurance overheads, more efficiency–that’s all great, right? Sure! Of course it is! …Unless you’re one of the more than 2 million and drivers out of work. Self-driving cars are a striking example of software eating jobs, but far from the only one. Almost every job, in every field, probably including yours, will increasingly be threatened by obsolescence and/or automation. That’s a simple and inevitable corollary of software eating the world and the concomitant increasing rate of change. As that rate accelerates, technology will soon start destroying jobs faster than it creates them…if it isn’t already. Think it can’t happen to you? Already “many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of technology isn’t limited to menial workers,” Krugman. . Krugman goes on to add: “Still, can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries.” Mead argues in that the information revolution is like the industrial revolution, and will lead to “empowering ordinary people.” Which, again, is true– . Whether you believe that new and better jobs will be created, or whether you’re willing to and imagine that we’ve finally begun the slow evolution towards a post-scarcity society built around reputation economies rather than “jobs” as we understand them, almost all of these new disruptive technologies will ultimately be good for everyone. I’m no Luddite. But in the interim, until we retool our societies around these new technologies and new economic realities, the next few decades will be extremely difficult for many people who have grown accustomed to thinking of themselves as middle class. Not everyone can become a , , or startup CEO; a whole lot of Mead’s “ordinary people” will be stripped of their jobs and left behind in debt, poverty, and despair. No wonder the rich and skilled are doing their level best to at the top of our soon-to-be-rapidly-narrowing economic pyramid. I’ve tried to make a point here by citing sources across America’s traditional and tedious left/right divide. This is bigger than that. (To the rest of the world: I’m sorry for fixating on the USA here. I’m not even American myself. But it’s almost certainly going to happen here first. Watch carefully.) If left-versus-right is the only lens through which you can view the world, then you really need to start thinking outside the box in which you have jailed yourself. Because everything will soon be changing, faster and faster, and I assure you that the future will be weirder than we imagine now–and you’ll need a flexible mind if you hope to prosper and thrive.
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FCC To Investigate Cell Phone Unlocking Ban
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
Following an over a law banning the unlocking of cell phones, the Federal Communications Commission will investigate whether the ban is harmful to economic competitiveness and if the executive branch has any authority to change the law. The “ban raises competition concerns; it raises innovation concerns,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told me last night at a TechCrunch event at our San Francisco headquarters. Until earlier this year, consumers were free to “unlock” their smartphones, which permitted them to switch carriers. For six years, the Library of Congress cell phone unlocks from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans “circumvention” of copy protection schemes. The decision was reversed during the last round of triennial reviews. Now users who dare to modify software on the devices they own are subject to legal penalties. Genachowski isn’t sure what authority he has, but if he finds any, given the tone of the conversation, it’s likely he will exert his influence to reverse the decision. “It’s something that we will look at at the FCC to see if we can and should enable consumers to use unlocked phones.” If the FCC does discover some latent authority to give users more freedom over their choice in carriers, it will mean another big victory for grassroots Internet activism. After the ban went into effect, netizens quickly rushed to , sending over 100,000 signatures on the WeThePeople petition platform, which mandates that the Obama administration offer an official explanation. In a previous WeThePeople petition related to open information, the White House unexpectedly pledged $100M to promote freely accessible , which would otherwise be guarded behind expensive private academic journals. The cell phone petition squarely pits users vs. the telecommunications lobby, who enjoy the lucrative contracts that tether smartphone users to their carriers. Depending on the FCC’s and White House’s looming response, this new form of digital activism may very well demonstrate the power of civic consumers.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 11 | null |
After Recruiting Founding StubHub CTO, Buzzmob Overhauls Its Social Events App To Help Brands Connect With Fans
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
If you’ve been to a live event recently, like a football game or a, you’ve probably noticed that the majority of people around you spent most of their time huddled over their smartphone. It’s true of life now, too, as people now interface with the world through Instagram rather than their eyeballs, but this even more true for live events. launched in 2011 to capitalize on our mobile obsession with a location-based fan engagement app, designed to help facilitate and channel the social chatter at live events. The app aims to create a more engaging experience at live events by offering a focused, virtual community message board, which allows users to tap into a realtime community feed of images, tips and status updates from fellow event-goers. From the beginning, Buzzmob’s experience has largely been focused on individual users, on allowing fans to create these targeted virtual message boards (or “Mobs” as Buzzmob calls them) around certain locations. But today, the startup is extending that capability to event organizers, brands and sports teams themselves in what the founders tell us is the app’s biggest update yet. With Buzzmob v2.0, the startup wants to beef up its capabilities for venues and other high-traffic destinations by allowing them to quickly create their own virtual communities around their live events — which, as the case has always been, are focused around location and shared interests. Through its new mobile platform, Buzzmob essentially allows brands and event organizers to curate these realtime conversation feeds, video streams, exclusive music, movies and event photos, while leveraging that stream to distribute offers, trivia and promotional giveaways. Naturally, the idea is to give brands a better way to connect with their customers, rewarding loyal fans with swag and presumably giving them a better shot at creating lasting relationships with actual people, not just “a fan base” segmented generally by demographics. The idea is to be one part social/mobile CRM, one part mobile content distribution and loyalty platform, and one part event utility. In terms of the latter, Buzzmob provides an ideal medium through which venues could share floor plans, a music festival could share directions to First Aid or bathrooms, tell fans where they can find a band’s music or merchandise after a show, and so on. To that end, Buzzmob now allows event organizers and brands to acces realtime analytics and administrative tools through an events dashboard so that they can manage their fan base and see how much value they’re getting out of particular deals or pieces of content. For businesses, in the big picture, this means being able to curate and control attendee submissions to their own feeds, which is naturally something brands are eager to have — and something that few other apps or platforms offer. By offering this new form of mobile advertising (and engagement) for live events, Buzzmob has attracted brands and events like the AFI Film Fest, Stan Lee’s Comikaze, USC Alumni Association, Global Green, the Kairos Society, and others. “Our new mobile experience and partner toolset in the latest version of BuzzMob has allowed us to begin working with a number of venues, stadiums, sports teams and high-traffic locations,” CEO Jeff Jackel says, although he declined to share more names for legal reasons. To help it develop the brand and event side of its mobile engagement platform and to help oversee the development of its new app, Buzzmob recently announced that it has recruited Shawn Kernes, a co-founder of ticketing platform StubHub, who joins as its new CTO. Starting in January, Buzzmob has been leveraging Kernes’ veteran knowledge of the events (and retail) spaces to help it secure partnerships with venues, brands and event organizers. Kernes was the co-founding CTO of StubHub and helped lead the company to its acquisition by eBay in 2007, where he then spent a year as a senior director of product development, before going on to become the COO of Cash4Gold and the CTO of Beyond The Rack. Its new app and CTO aside, Buzzmob is hardly alone in the social, location-based space, thanks to startups like Banjo, Mixer and Glassmap — and many more. What’s more, Yobongo was scooped up and social activity service Hot Potato was acquired by Facebook (and then shut down). Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter have also been making strategic moves into this space. However, the startup believes it has a leg up on the competition — and realtime community forums like event hashtags on Twitter — by focusing on filtering out the noise and allowing users to exclusively tap into the content and conversations they care about as they watch an event. From the outset, Buzzmob has been focused on sports events and concerts, which has helped give direction and focus to its event-centric model and will help it compete against the bigs like Twitter. “The real focus for us,” Kernes tells us, “is solving the content consumption and engagement problem at live events. Only a small portion of social media content is actually consumed by anyone, there’s just a lot of noise, so we’re focused not on random content creation, but content that’s actually focused on the needs and interests of the community.” By doing so, he says, fans get more value out of the content, because it’s actually relevant to them (or at least that’s the idea) and brands know that their content is reaching a loyal fan base and people who actually care about (and will get use out of) that content. Buzzmob has raised $2.6 million to date from Craig Cogut of Pegasus Capital Advisors and a flock of angel investors. Buzzmob
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Google Launches Zopfli To Compress Data More Densely And Make Web Pages Load Faster
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
Google just , a new open source compression algorithm that can compress web content about 3 to eight 8 (PDF) than the standard library. Because Zopfli is compatible with the decompression algorithms that are already part of all modern web browsers, using Google’s new algorithm and library on a server could lead to faster data transmission speeds and lower web page latencies, which would ultimately make the web . The new algorithm, which Zurich-based Google engineer Lode Vandevenne created as a 20 percent project, is an implementation of the Deflate algorithms – the same algorithm that’s also used for the ZIP and gzip file formats and PNG image format. Zopfli’s output is compatible with zlib, but uses a different and more effective algorithm to compress data. As Vandevenne writes in the announcement today, “the exhaustive method is based on iterating entropy modeling and a shortest path search algorithm to find a low bit cost path through the graph of all possible deflate representations.” There is, however, a price that needs to be paid for this: it takes significantly longer to compress files with Zopfli (decompression times are virtually the same, though). Indeed, as Vandevenne notes, “due to the amount of CPU time required — two to three orders of magnitude more than zlib at maximum quality — Zopfli is best suited for applications where data is compressed once and sent over a network many times, for example, static content for the web.”
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Bradley Manning Pleads Guilty For Supplying WikiLeaks, Says Newspapers Ignored Calls
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
Private First Class Bradley Manning to leaking classified government documents to WikiLeaks. Reading from a 35-page statement, Manning said he leaked diplomatic cables to “spark a domestic debate as to the role of the military and foreign policy in general,” but denies aiding the enemy. Perhaps most revealing, Manning said that he first attempted to go to media outlets, such as and , but his calls were to voicemail. The soldier, who has been held in detention for over 1,000 days, has become an icon of open information and civil liberties. Manning after being widely credited for helping to spark the Arab Spring of 2010. Leaked documents corroborated long-held suspicions of Tunisia’s corrupt government, inciting the citizens to overthrow their leader and inspire similar revolutions throughout the Middle East. While Manning’s lengthy detainment and bouts of solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day have been harshly criticized, a court found that he “has not been denied a speedy trial despite his lengthy pretrial confinement.” President Obama himself once that “he broke the law” in an implicit agreement with Manning’s treatment. Manning, who pleaded guilty to 10 lesser charges of misusing classified information, faces a maximum of 20 years in prison.
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Hardware Startup Outex Takes To Kickstarter To Fund Its Go-Anywhere SLR Camera Housing
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
I like to use my SLR, but there are many times when I leave it behind because I’m not sure whether it’ll be able to handle the conditions I plan to be using it in. LA-based hardware startup is trying to make sure that photographers can use their cameras anywhere, without having to fork over north of $1,000 for environmental protection gear, and it’s taking to the latest piece in its product puzzle. The Outex is a flexible casing for DSLR and other interchangeable lens cameras (it works with mirrorless systems, too) created by founder JR deSouza and his cousin Roberto Miglioli based on their shared love of photography, a hand-me-down from their grandfather, and a lack of good affordable options on the market for protecting cameras during use in harsh conditions. DeSouza told me in an interview that he and his cousin needed something that would work for surfing, kayaking, shooting around the pool, military applications and more, but that didn’t mean sacrificing portability or spending a mint to buy. In a little over a year, the company has already managed to rack up some impressive customers, including photographers working for Red Bull, National Geographic, Outside Magazine and Vogue. The Outex is being used by a lot of videographers now, too, and the company wanted to build a solution into its product that better serves that market, while also opening up new possibilities for still photography. That’s what this Kickstarter project is about: funding the creation of the “Big O,” an LCD viewfinder window for the Outex.
DeSouza says they came up with the window after first toying with the idea of adding some kind of external LCD monitor to the Outex, and then realizing that the simpler, better and more widely compatible solution would be to simply add a glass window to the case (which itself resembles a kind of camera wetsuit) that would allow the built-in monitors on cameras to be used in any circumstances. Being able to see the viewfinder while the camera was in the Outex was one of the most common customer requests, however, according to deSouza, so coming up with some kind of solution was necessary. Seeking Kickstarter backing is a first for Outex, and deSouza explained that the reason it went the crowdfunding route this time around was actually the result of a combination of factors. “I felt that Kickstarter would be a good opportunity to accelerate our development,” deSouza explained. “The key is to be genuine and to do Kickstarter for what it is, and it becomes a great opportunity to get the word out and discover other things[…] I really do think there’s value to the community and the discovery process that also comes along with Kickstarter.” Outex isn’t meant to be hardcore scuba gear like the Ikelite protectors favored by professional photographers, but where those cost around $1,500, a $375 pledge gets you everything you need to outfit your SLR with protection for up to 10 meters of submersion, as well as a host of other environmental perils. With the cost of high-quality photo gear coming down, it’s only fitting that a hardware startup emerges to so challenge the price tag on some of the more expensive accessories, too.
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Groupon Stock Up 12% In After-Hours Trading Following Mason Ouster (But Has Fallen Since)
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
Andrew Mason’s loss may just be Groupon’s gain — at least as far as its shareholders are concerned. Groupon’s got a rapid and marked boost in after-hours trading today in the first minutes after it was announced that longtime . Within the first minutes of the news, Groupon’s stock had shot up as high as 12 percent from the $4.53 per share price at which it closed the official trading day. The stock hit an after-hours high of $5.10 at 4:20pm Eastern Time, . Share prices change by the second, of course, so it’s a bit of a horse race to obsessively monitor how the market responds to big news like this (Groupon’s own after-hours rally has since slowed down.) But the fact that there was a tangible initial pop shows that some investors see Mason’s ousting as a positive step. Even so, Groupon has a long way to go: The company’s stock was priced at $20 per share for its . It has been steadily lagging for months now, and took a big dive this week after the company announced . Though many staffers at Groupon will certainly , he personally seems to be taking today’s events in stride. In a very candid memo to Groupon employees that has been , Mason said that his removal as CEO was justified: “I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.”
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Fujitsu’s Senior-Focused Smartphone Is A Thoughtful Use Of Android That Tucks Away Complexity
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
Japanese electronics company Fujitsu has taken its time pushing beyond its home smartphone market. The company is best known for slick, slender high end smartphones in Japan but earlier this month it announced a European play — eschewing the crowded top tier of devices in favour of a niche in the seniors space, with a custom skinned Android-based smartphone. is designed to be easier for older people to use. Fujitsu is bringing the device to France in partnership with France Telecom/Orange in June but was showing it off at Mobile World Congress, where we went hands on. Now Fujitsu is not the first to enter the senior mobile space. Other established players include , which basically makes simplified feature phones, and , which makes a mix of devices (including dabbling in tablet software). Doro was showing off its own so, again, Fujitsu is a follower here too. But late to the party though it is, it has crafted what feels like a solid and well thought through first offering. The handset has a rubberised coating to add grip and more curves than the sleek, slick high end smartphones so rests nicely on the palm and feels less inclined to take a tumble than the average slab phone. On the front, there’s a clearly labelled home button below the 4 inch touchscreen. The button is slightly convex making it stand out so it’s easy to press. The buttons on the side of the device — power and volume up & down keys on one side, plus a dedicated camera key on the other — are also labelled (albeit with icons). These keys are raised slightly but don’t feel like they stick out enough to press accidentally. [slideshow include=”768180,768176,768168,768172″] Fujitsu has made the Stylistic S-01’s capacitive touchscreen deliberately less sensitive to cut back on erroneous key presses for a target group of users which isn’t likely to be as dexterous as the average mobile owner. The screen didn’t feel awkwardly unresponsive during my hands on but on-screen buttons did sometimes need a more deliberate press — which seems like a reassuring feature for the intended user-base. There are a couple of odd hardware touches. The Micro USB port sits behind a cover which has to be prised off with a fingernail. The cover has likely been included because the phone is dust and waterproof but it does mean that accessing the charging port isn’t as easy as it could be. The phone is also equipped with an alarm — in case of emergencies. This makes a loud noise to alert people in the vicinity that the owner is in trouble and also dials out pre-chosen contacts. The alarm is located on the back of the device, to the left of the camera lens. The physical switch is rather small and again has to be pushed out with a fingernail or similar. Of course it’s no good having the alarm go off accidentally but in an emergency it could prove a little difficult to activate. Moving on to the software, this is where the phone really stands out from the Android crowd, thanks to a simplified custom UI that foregrounds key functions, tucks away complexity and does a spot of thoughtful hand-holding — with help buttons and guides and even a phone manual included on the device. The homescreen is divided up into large, clearly labelled icons that decrease in size as you scroll down to reach functions that are likely to be accessed less. The two largest buttons are the call button, and the phonebook (a much more senior-friendly way to describe contacts). Messages and email also appear on screen at the top of the homescreen, along with three numbered buttons that can be pre-set with specific functions for quick access. Scroll further down and there’s an info widget displaying news updates and weather. Below that, there are a variety of phone functions laid out in a grid of squares — and again clearly labelled. These include Internet, camera, maps, video, gallery, a help forum and a manual. The only button that stands out as slightly obtuse is the one labelled ‘Play Store’ (thanks Google). Android apps can be downloaded to the phone via the Play Store, or via a ‘download apps’ button. Other preloaded apps are tucked away under ‘More applications’ and ‘Orange services’ — so although the phone has been simplified, the functionality has not been removed entirely. Rather they are cleared out of harm’s way until the user feels confident enough to drill a little deeper. There are lots of thoughtful little touches in the design, such as the Phonebook app being made to resemble a traditional filofax, and the button called ‘My number’ to help users out who can’t remember their phone number. The gallery also includes a ‘Take a picture’ button, to steer anyone who went into the gallery looking for the camera in the right direction. The back button is also clearly labelled with the word ‘back’ — rather than having a cryptic symbol to confuse people. And the browser has a question mark button at the top which leads to a help page to explain the browsing process for first time mobile web users. Elsewhere apps are nicely stripped down, simplified and clearly labelled — such as the camera app, which has just a camera button and a flash toggle button, and the dialler app which has two folder-style tabs to show either a dial option, or history (for call log). Time has clearly been well spent by the UI designer figuring out an intelligent way to layer a smartphone for a senior user-base that will probably feel most comfortable taking small steps away from telephones in order to get to know smartphones. [slideshow include=”768169,768170,768173,768174,768175,768178,768179″]
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The Chubby vWand Stylus Can Bring NFC Support To Non-NFC Smartphones And Tablets
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
NFC has always struck me as one of those things that everyone says is going to get really big next year, and the growing number of smartphones and tablets that come bearing support for the standard is proof that at least a few people care about it. But what if you want to experience the NFC lifestyle but your gadget(s) of choice don’t play nice with it? Enter Spain-based , and its vWand stylus. Put very simply, the vWand is part capacitive stylus, part Bluetooth-friendly NFC adapter — once it’s linked up to your tablet or smartphone of choice via Bluetooth you’ll have a pen that’s capable of reading from and writing data to NFC elements. The vWand is a chubby little thing, but it’s not overly heavy thanks to its lightweight, plasticky (but comfortable) body. A pair of LEDs ride high on the vWand’s shaft to let the user know when it’s on and ready to scan, and a more-than-adequate chunky capacitive nib (not entirely unlike the end of Wacom’s Bamboo Stylus) allowed me to doodle to my heart’s content in Paper for a few moments. The real magic happens on the other end though — tapping the vWand’s butt to a set of preset NFC tags at the vWand booth prompted the connected Android tablet to fire up the messaging app, bring up the dialer, or load particular web pages.
As neat as the vWand concept sounds, chances are you won’t be linking this up to your iPad or Galaxy Note anytime soon. At this stage it’s meant mostly as a b2b device, and Sistel Networks is looking to pick up traction in a slew of fields ranging from healthcare (think doctors scanning NFC-enabled wristbands or something) to retail and logistics though company representatives didn’t completely rule out the notion that consumers would one day be able to buy one too. In fairness, the vWand certainly makes sense as a tool to be used in those lines of business, but that doesn’t keep me from wanting one just to muck around with.
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CEO Andrew Mason Replaced By Eric Lefkofsky And Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis At Groupon
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
Andrew Mason, CEO and founder of Groupon, has by Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonisis, who will take over the new position of Office of the Chief Executive. They will serve as interim co-CEOs while they hunt for a replacement to take over permanently. Here’s the : On behalf of the entire Groupon Board, I want to thank Andrew for his leadership, his creativity and his deep loyalty to Groupon. As a founder, Andrew helped invent the daily deals space, leading Groupon to become one of the fastest growing companies in history. Groupon will continue to invest in growth, and we are confident that with our deep management team and market-leading position, the company is well positioned for the future. This decision comes fresh on the heels of , in which Groupon after an . But Groupon’s troubles have extended much further back than that, and most of has fallen on Mason. There was a push in the past few months to replace Mason at the helm, and stock dropped by double digits when Groupon’s board kept Mason around. However, a Hedge Fund investment saw Groupon’s stock in November, only to drop again after this morning’s report. Mason just tweeted the following, which seems to have broken Jottit: For Groupon Employees: (Apparently, sharing oranges is necessary but insufficient ) — Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) Here’s the entirety of his memo: People of Groupon,
After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.
You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we’ve shared over the last few months, and I’ve never seen you working together more effectively as a global company – it’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.
For those who are concerned about me, please don’t be – I love Groupon, and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve created. I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I’ll now take some time to decompress (FYI I’m looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I’ll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.
If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness – don’t waste the opportunity!
I will miss you terribly.
Love,
Andrew Mason has been the founder and CEO of Groupon since its inception in 2008, led it through a , and struggled to maintain momentum as the daily deals business began to flounder. The has secured the internal memo sent out to Groupon employees to alert them of Andrew Mason’s departure as CEO. Dear Groupon, After more than five years of super-human service to Groupon, Andrew has been asked to step down. Andrew’s achievements during his tenure are virtually unmatched in Internet history. Not only did he help invent the daily deals space, but he also created one of the fastest growing companies in history. But for all of us on the Board, maybe his greatest achievement is that in the face of extreme pressure and public scrutiny, he guided the company with grace and never lost sight of the things that matter most: our customers and merchants. It’s hard to believe that Groupon is only four years old. Our journey began in November of 2008 when we offered our first deal (pizza at 50% off) to a handful of people in Chicago. Today, with over 11,000 employees, we now offer more than 30,000 deals a day to over 200 million subscribers globally. But even more staggering is the fact that our customers purchased more than 50 million Groupons last quarter alone. Groupon is a very different company today than it was just a few short years ago. From our local daily deal roots, we have spent significant time and resources evolving into new categories including Goods, Getaways, and Live. We have also fundamentally changed the way customers interact with Groupon. We have migrated nearly 40% of users in North America to mobile, while dramatically reducing our reliance on email which now accounts for less than 50% of our transactions. And with Pull, consumers can browse among thousands of deals on our site and buy exactly what they want, when they want it. In the midst of this evolution in 2012 we delivered 35% growth in billings to $5.4 billion, 45% growth in Revenue to $2.3 billion, 22% growth in active customers to 41 million. Additionally our Operating Profit improved from a loss of $233 million in 2011 to a gain of $99 million last year. Yet we all know our operational and financial performance has eroded the confidence of many of our supporters, both inside and outside of the company. Now our task at hand is to win back their support. We also need to stay relentlessly focused on doing what is right for our customers and merchants. We’ve built a curated marketplace that is vibrant and thriving; and if we continue to invest in our future, stay focused on the long term and lead through innovation, we can achieve truly great things together. As Groupon starts to write its next chapter, Ted and I are both honored to be able to help guide the company until a new CEO is in place. We are fortunate to have a very talented and committed management team to help us execute on our vision. We appreciate the tireless effort you have poured into getting our company where it is today, and we are even more excited about the future that lies ahead. Eric Lefkofsky
Executive Chairman & co-founder Ted Leonsis
Vice Chairman
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Parking Search Engine BestParking.com Revamps Its Website And Announces A Free API
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
today launched a new version of its website aimed at helping people find the best short-term and long-term parking. It’s also announcing that it’s making its data available to third-party developers through an API. The company offers pricing data for off-street parking in 64 cities and near 80 airports, says founder Ben Sann. The data is collected from parking-lot operators and through on-the-ground surveys (conducted two to four times), and is then improved by corrections from BestParking users. The mobile apps have been downloaded more than 600,000 times and they’re used by 120,000 people every month, he said. The website, meanwhile, sees 230,000 unique visitors per month, but it hasn’t been redesigned since 2009. “We … brought everything we had learned from our mobile experience to the desktop, taking time during the process to overhaul and modernize our website’s design,” Sann told me via email. I only drive once every week or two, and when I do (using ), I usually leave San Francisco, so I haven’t tried the old version of the site. However, browsing BestParking this morning, it only took me a few clicks to find what seemed like a wonderland of semi-affordable lots near the TechCrunch office, with the prices calculated based on how long I plan to stay. As for the API, Sann said his team has been using it for a while to provide parking data to navigation systems like Garmin and Magellan. It’s also integrated with to show parking options near users’ meetings. Now the company is officially making the API available to developers for free (Sann said TechCrunch readers will get priority), and . By the way, Sann said the company has been bootstrapped and profitable since 2007.
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HGST’s Nanotechnology Printing Breakthrough Is Great News For Data Center Storage And HDD Capacity
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
If you’re at all familiar with mobile processors, you’ve likely heard a lot about 32nm vs. 28nm construction when comparing the current generation of chips from companies like Qualcomm and others. That refers to the size of the processor, where a smaller number is better in terms of power consumption, fitting more transistors in less space for more efficient processing. Currently, it’s hard to get past around the 20nm when creating individual patterns for data storage on today’s disk drives, which is another area in addition to processors where applies. Today though, HGST, a Western Digital Company, that allows it to produce patterns as small as 10nm, via a process called “nanolithography,” meaning that it can essentially double the current maximum storage capacity possible in hard disk drives, given the same-sized final product. HGST’s process, which was developed in tandem with Austin, Texas-based silicon startup Molecular Imprints, Inc. doesn’t use the current prevailing , which is limited in how small it can go by the size of light wavelengths, which is what allows it to get to the 10nm threshold, and hopefully beyond even that in time, HGST VP of Research Currie Munce told me in an interview. The upshot of all this is that HGST hopes to have the process ready for wide-scale commercial production by the end of the current decade, with a process that makes the resulting storage both affordable and dependable enough to be used widely by customers who need ever-increasing amounts of storage. The number of customers who fit that description is increasing rapidly, too: the advent and growth in popularity of cloud services means that big companies like Facebook, Apple and Amazon are continually building and expanding new data centers in search of greater storage capacity. HGST’s nanolithography process could double the storage capacity per square foot at any of those facilities, without having the same effect on power requirements, which is clearly an attractive proposition. While the process looks well-suited to disk-based storage, where redundancies and workaround can account for minor imperfections at the microscopic level, Munce says that HGST nanolithography is less well-suited to the task of creating mobile processors for smartphone like those mentioned above. “If you don’t connect the circuits properly on a processor it doesn’t work at all,” he explained. “On a hard disk drive, we can always have error connecting codes, we can always use additional signal processing to cover up a few defects in the pattern that’s created.” Still, for HDDs and computer memory (RAM), HGST’s breakthrough could have a massive impact on cloud computing, mobile devices and the tech industry as a whole, and all within the next five to six years.
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Facebook Confirms It Will Acquire Atlas Advertiser Suite From Microsoft To Close The Ad Spend Loop
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
After weeks of rumors, Facebook it will buy the Advertiser Suite away from Microsoft. Despite rumors, Facebook said it didn’t buy Atlas to launch an ad network, but to help advertisers “close the loop” and understand how their spend earns them money. The Seattle-based Atlas team will stay put, but Facebook plans to invest in back-end scaling and better measurement. Discussions between the tech giants were first reported by in December. has been closely following the story and provided many leaked details, including that Microsoft had been aggressively searching for a buyer and that the price was to be , following previous bids in the $30 million to $50 million range. Microsoft originally acquired Atlas through a $6.2 billion purchase of its parent company aQuantive, which also owned Avenue A / Razorfish and DRIVE Performance Solutions. Now the acquisition is official, though no price was announced. One of my sources says that, in the end, Facebook paid closer to $50 million than $100 million. The deal should keep relations between the two companies warm and toasty, as it’s been years since they got in bed together and Bing started powering web search within the social network. Atlas advertisers to plan campaigns, buy ads on sites across the web, and measure their impact. It can handle search, rich media and in-stream video, and display ads, as well as offer APIs for programmatic control of big campaigns. This afternoon I spoke to Brian Boland, head of monetization product marketing at Facebook, and Dave O’Hara, the CFO of Microsoft’s online services. Boland started by bluntly denying speculation, saying “Why we’re doing this is not to launch an ad network, and why we did do this is to improve measurement. We heard loud and clear from advertisers that they want to understand multi-touch attribution instead of just looking at the last click.” Facebook now owns the infrastructure and knows how to launch its own full-fledged offsite ad network, which would let it monetize its personal information about 1 billion people by targeting them with ads across the web. But that’s not the plan, according to Boland. Facebook will gain a huge slew of clients from the deal, and many advertisers who already work with the social network will gain a of their marketing campaigns. Facebook can now take advantage of Atlas’ presence in serving ads across the web to track attribution of how offsite ads lead to purchases. Advertisers may be willing to pay higher ad prices through Facebook or Atlas to get a bird’s-eye view of their real performance. The synergies could also help Atlas compete better with Google’s DoubleClick, which had pulled ahead over the last few years. Those who shouldn’t fear include Facebook’s existing ads API partners like AdParlor, Optimal Kenshoo, Nanigans, Salesforce, and BLiNQ Media. Boland tells me “We think [Atlas is] complementary,” noting that Facebook is fundamentally an ecosystem company and wants third-party adtech companies to continue investing in building tools and services for its platform. Optimal CEO Rob Leathern agreed, saying “I don’t believe [the acquisition of Atlas] is threatening to Ads API partners. Rather it may open up a new set of opportunities for partners like optimal to help optimize additional pieces of publisher inventory added to the larger Facebook ‘graph’.” Boland also said the deal shouldn’t worry demand-side platforms that enable advertisers to buy Facebook Exchange real-time bid cookie-retargeted ads. Atlas will continue to be for buying ads across the web, not on Facebook where ads API and FBX DSPs operate. In an interesting twist, O’Hara confirms Microsoft will now be a customer of Facebook, as it uses Atlas to measure ads it runs on MSN and other properties it owns. Facebook plans to use Atlas to pioneer advances in ad measurement on the small screen. Boland tells me “The ability to understand ROI on mobile is nascent right now. As advertisers increase their investment in mobile, it’s something they have to know.” He hinted that because you use the same Facebook ID on the web and mobile, the social network will be able to tie together your actions across devices to show how ads on your laptop influence purchase behavior on your phone or tablet and vice versa. Overall, it seems like a smart deal. Advertisers want to digitize their budgets, but are worried about burning cash without understanding what they get back. By combining Atlas data with that from Nielsen and Datalogix, Facebook could give businesses a way to see exactly how their online ads drive on and offline spend. You can read the full announcement of the deal below: We’re pleased to announce that we have agreed to acquire the Atlas Advertiser Suite from Microsoft. Atlas is a leader in campaign management and measurement for marketers and agencies. We believe this acquisition will benefit both marketers and users, and we’d like to explain why. Today’s marketing environment is much more complex than it was just a few short years ago. Marketers and agencies struggle to understand how their efforts across different channels complement and strengthen each other. Consequently, they are forced to adopt siloed marketing strategies for each channel, leading to poor and inconsistent end-user experiences. This challenge also provides an opportunity. If marketers and agencies can get a holistic view of campaign performance, they will be able to do a much better job of making sure the right messages get in front of the right people at the right time. Atlas has built capabilities that allow for this kind of measurement, and enhancing these systems will give marketers a deeper understanding of effectiveness and lead to better digital advertising experiences for consumers. Many marketers that advertise on Facebook today use Atlas, and Atlas has been an approved partner for measurement since June. Today’s agreement brings us closer together in a way that benefits both Facebook and Atlas’ agency and marketer clients. Atlas clients should not see any change to the service they receive today, and we will continue to innovate and invest in the Atlas platform. We plan to improve Atlas’ capabilities by investing in scaling its back-end measurement systems and enhancing its current suite of advertiser tools on desktop and mobile. We will also work to improve the user interface and functionality with the goal of making Atlas the most effective, intuitive, and powerful ad serving, management and measurement platform in the industry. Ultimately, Atlas’s powerful platform, combined with Nielsen and Datalogix, will help advertisers close the loop and compare their Facebook campaigns to the rest of their ad spend across the web on desktop and mobile. Our belief is that measuring various touch points in the marketing funnel will help advertisers to see a more complete view of the effectiveness of their campaigns. Acquiring Atlas will be an important step towards achieving this goal. Atlas is based in Seattle and the team will continue to operate from there. Our Seattle engineering office already drives important parts of our ad system, and we plan to substantially invest in and build out our Seattle engineering and product teams. We look forward to further building out the Atlas platform to help marketers better understand how well their campaigns perform, and to help them optimize their campaigns. We look forward to welcoming the Atlas team.
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The New Dyson AM05 Is The Darth Vader Of Space Heaters
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
Beautiful design and utility are, in many ways, paramount when it comes to home electronics. That’s why I was really impressed by the the new from Dyson. It’s a completely quiet, blade-less system that comes in a black and nickel color scheme that looks like it fell off of Boba Fett’s Slave 1. The AM05 is the successor to the AM04 and is 33% more powerful. It has a stock simple remote control, a nice front temperature readout, and a tilting head. In short, it’s a Dyson product – a little expensive ($399 for a fan is wild), a little weird, and a lot high tech. I tested the device a bit over the past few days and it works a treat. Setting the heater in my cold attic filled the room up with hot air immediately and it looks and feels far safer than similar heaters. This is a fan I’d trust, say, in the kids’ room. Why is this on TechCrunch? There are a few companies with both design and technology chops. Sonos comes to mind as does Apple. Bang & Olufsen are also in that category. But I think what’s most important about a company like Dyson is that they took commodity hardware and made it alluring. Who hasn’t gone to Target and looked at some off-brand vacuum and stacked it up against the surprisingly expensive yet strangely beautiful Dyson. I like when Dyson makes new stuff because it proves that there are people out there still thinking about the future of things that suck and blow.
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