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John Battelle Returns As CEO At Federated Media, Deanna Brown Steps Down
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
Online advertising company just that current CEO Deanna Brown is stepping down, while founder and former CEO John Battelle will be taking on the role again. The company says that Battelle and Brown will be working together during March “to ensure a seamless transition.” as president and chief operating officer, and a little more than a year later. Brown said in the press release that she’ll be announcing a new venture in a couple of weeks. , Battelle offers more details on the decision. He says that Brown told him earlier this year that she wanted to work on “something smaller and more directly related to content creation,” and they discussed possible replacements: And then it hit me – quite literally in mid-sentence while on a Board call. Why the hell don’t I simply step back in? I love this company, I am passionate about the Independent Web, and to be honest, I see a huge opportunity in front of us. What am I, nuts? Why didn’t I think of it the moment Deanna told me of her decision? Battelle notes that he stepped back from a day-to-day role at FM (he was still involved as chairman) to focus writing a book and running conferences like the Web 2.0 Summit. He’s still going to work on those outside projects, but he says he’s going to bringing on a co-author for the book and hiring someone to work full-time on the conferences. Federated Media started out as an ad network for blogs (in fact, during the site’s early years), and while it still runs standard ads on the network, over time it has placed a bigger emphasis on custom campaigns and “conversational marketing.” As for where FM goes from here, Battelle says it’s still his “first love” and “at the height of its running narrative”: I am utterly convinced that the media company of tomorrow will have both a technology-driven programmatic foundation, as well as the ability to execute bespoke, beautiful ideas on behalf of the entire media ecosystem – creators, marketers, and communities. When you bring the scale and precision of data-driven platforms to the brilliance of great media executions, magic will happen. Delivering on that vision for the Independent Web is the mission of Federated Media Publishing.
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Stitch Fix Gets $4.75M Series A To Scale Out Its Tech-Enabled Personal Shopping Service
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
The round, which serves as Stitch Fix’s Series A, was co-led by and with the participation of Western Technology Investment. Stitch Fix has experienced some serious organic growth since it was founded back in February 2011, the company’s founder and CEO told me in an interview this week, which you can watch in the video embedded above. The company has now served more than 10,000 clients, and has grown its own team to a staff of 50. Meanwhile, its revenue growth has been on a tear, with its annual sales run rate today double what it was just two months ago, in December 2012. The new funding is meant to put some more fuel on that fire, Lake said, enabling Stitch Fix to hire more staff and further grow its inventory, logistical components, product offerings, and general reach. The company currently has a waitlist of people who are keen to use the service, so this should help it scale up to accommodate the demand. Personal styling has been around for a long time, but it’s typically a very expensive and high-friction thing, with each stylist spending hours on just one client. Stitch Fix has created a proprietary set of technology and tools that lets its small team be much more efficient, bringing the cost of personal styling much closer to earth. The average price point of Stitch Fix clothing is $65, Lake says. Essentially, Stitch Fix operates like a clothing version of , the personalized radio app — the idea is it gets better the more you use it. It works like this: A new user goes to the and fills out a basic form with details about her body shape, size, personal style, and budget. She also rates photos of clothing items and accessories to give Stitch Fix even more of an idea of her taste. Then, a Stitch Fix uses the provided data to select and ship a box of five items for the user to try on. The user keeps and pays for the items she likes and sends back the ones that she doesn’t (a $20 per box styling fee goes toward any purchases, but is kept by Stitch Fix if the user sends everything back.) The company keeps track of what each user keeps and returns, to further hone its individual client profiles — hence the Pandora Radio analogy. Stitch Fix sources its products just like a department store does, with its own team of buyers and inventory. It’s a really clever business model that has been embraced by the early-adopting fashion blogger set from . It’ll be exciting to see how the company grows further into the mainstream now that it has some nice outside funding in its coffers. Katrina Lake swung by TechCrunch TV this week to discuss the new funding and Stitch Fix’s technology. She also gave me a hands-on look at how Stitch Fix works by bringing along a box that was put together just for me (although I didn’t actually keep the clothes — darn journalistic ethics!) You can check that out in the video embedded above.
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“Killing It” Isn’t Worth It
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
It’s unfair to take a particular moment in time, slice it, and pass judgement on that particular slice. Yet that’s our precise function, as chroniclers of news, and our role in the startup community. Like many others, I read the news this week that Vegas-based ecommerce site As I read the story, I remembered interviewing the hopeful CEO for on TechCrunch. “I hope to one day be as big as Zappos,” he said at the time. Confirmation that he died of a came on the same day as his birthday, and on the same day I received the saddest Skype notification ever (above) – that Jody was “offline” on that day. If this week’s are correct, and we’ve heard they are, Ecomom will be shutting down soon due to mismanagement of funds and some sort of purchasing decision the site somehow couldn’t recover from. More than anything, this shutdown makes me realize that the , exacerbated by the spin from this and other publications, may not entirely be the positive driving force we posit it to be. As popular culture to glamorize startups, the harsh reality that 90 percent of them fail is consistently ignored. “We the investors, the ones who write off the losers quickly and amp the winners, we share a lot of the blame for creating the fiction around startups,” Ecomom investor told me in an email. Hell, I’m terrified to start a startup and I’m relatively well-positioned toward success. While nothing will make you appreciate businesses of all kinds more than having actually operated one, I’m pretty sure I’d at least get a TechCrunch post for whatever it was I was launching. Ecomom investor agreed that our community, with its apotheosis of successes and the blind eye toward failure, was partially at fault. “Jody was obviously going through a lot of stress and probably needed a better support network to help him out. Unfortunately we are all likely somewhat to blame — I saw Jody less than 10 days before the accident down in LA and I had no idea he was considering anything so drastic. Mental health isn’t part of something we as investors are typically qualified to assess, but maybe it needs to become part of our process.” So did Craig. “I never asked Jody for an honest answer, not really – we did the startup lineup and we all knew what pattern to run. I’d ask ‘How’s it going dick bag?’ and he’d say ‘Killing it.’ We’d rush straight in with some talk about good things, jink with a little not so great stuff and circle back to the center with ‘It’s all good!’ And then ‘Awesome man, lets get more drinks.’ Of course we’d get a little deeper than that, but truthfully we’d never get to the painfully ‘truthful’ part. When you’re not a board member, you don’t want to hurt founders and dig too hard and they don’t want to bare their vulnerabilities.” Sure, there are few startups with the self-awareness to see through this cycle, but most get caught up in the hype. One of the more self-aware founders, , recently gave some much-needed perspective on startup : When entrepreneurs say they are “crushing it”, statistically speaking, they must be lying or complacent, neither of which are great traits. You have to be absolutely clueless to truly believe that someone is crushing it when they say they are. If I told my employees we were crushing it, they would see right through me. I do want them to be hopeful. And the way to do that is to praise them when they do an excellent job. And to show them numbers and traction, not fake semblances of hoopla. “The most likely animals to be left alive after a nuclear war are cockroaches, because they’re so hard to kill,” “Instead of a beautiful but fragile flower that needs to have its stem in a plastic tube to support itself, [startups better] be small, ugly, and indestructible.” While there’s plenty of speculation, there’s still no conclusive proof that Jody’s death and Ecomom’s failure are correlated. After all, we live in a time where acquihires and talent fire sales result in Twitter high fives, a couple of years at Google or Yahoo or eBay and then the world moves on. The industry has a tendency to make pariahs out of startups that aren’t doing so well, so “never show weakness” becomes a koan, to the point of self-delusion. TechCrunch gets pitched hundreds of “Top Ten Ways To Be A Successful Entrepreneur” guest posts from entrepreneurs who quite honestly aren’t that successful themselves. This super-human stoicism is at best superficial and myopic to the human component of so much of our business. The emotional travails of deciding what to build, how to build it, who to build it with, when, where, why, with whose money, etc. are harrowing. And it’s even worse when the investors are your friends and family versus nameless pension funds. Losing the savings of people you admire cuts deep. Yet aspiring to someone else’s idea of success should never be the ultimate goal or something you use to beat yourself down when your startup or career isn’t hockey-sticking or crushing it. “No matter how dark it gets, . Professional investors understand failure,” Ecomom investor keenly observed. “Your friends and family may not but they should. Your employees will move on and find better things to do with their lives. It is all temporary. You may never heal [entirely] from it, but everyone around you will.” And everyone else might just be wrong. Graham himself also wrote in the : “What investors still don’t get is how clueless and tentative great founders can seem at the very beginning. And anyone who has been denied funding because of lack of social proof knows the impact of this.” This too shall pass. On a more macro level, I don’t know what the solution is, except the immediate one of outlets like TechCrunch covering more failures in addition to all the . Let’s start with this post.
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Facebook Gifts Sales And Revenue Off To A Slow Start
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 |
A billion-dollar business? Maybe not. Despite lofty projections for Facebook Gifts from analysts, reporters and myself, a new report picks apart public statements from the company to suggest it sold a maximum of 667,000 gifts in Q4 2012, and maybe a lot less. Sure, it’s early days, but it may take Facebook a while to build Gifts into a game changer. : The original version of this article was predicated on an incorrect third-party report by Aggregift. It suggested Facebook earned a maximum of $1 million in revenue and sold 267,000 Gifts in Q4 2012 by working back from the fact that Facebook collected $5 million in revenue in Q4 2012 between Page Promoted Posts and Gifts. In reality, the $5 million announced on the earnings call was from Gifts and the more nascent User Promoted Posts product, about which less sales data is available, which prevents the type of analysis shown in the report. Facebook was given a chance to dispute the original report but declined to comment, despite the flawed methodology. This article has been heavily edited to improve accuracy. Facebook launched the ability for friends to in September, though it wasn’t rolled out to all U.S. users until December. That means it certainly didn’t get all of Q4 to rake in e-commerce cash. Still, it was the Christmas season, and Facebook hawked Gifts in the Birthdays sidebar and at the top of the , plus a big call-out to buy last-minute holiday presents. The social network has kept the performance of Gifts close to the chest, and tried to calm hype about it. On the Q4 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “I do want to temper near-term expectations a little bit on revenue coming from other areas like Gifts or Graph Search…Payments and other revenue also included around $5 million from sources outside of games primarily user promoted posts and to a lesser extent from our new Gifts product. While we remain excited about the long-term potential of commerce on Facebook, current revenue from user promoted posts and Gifts is very small, and we expect 2013 contributions from these initiatives to remain very small given current run rates.” Facebook stated that it earned $5 million in Q4 2012 revenue from non-game payments, specifically Promoted Posts “and to a lesser extent from our new Gifts product.” That could be interpreted to mean Gifts equated to a maximum of $2.5 million in revenue in the quarter. At the end of November Facebook said the average amount spent per Gifts purchase was $25. While Facebook has not disclosed its revenue cut, this research uses 15% as a ballpark figure. When you crunch the numbers, you find that Facebook could have sold a maximum of 667,000 Gifts at $25 each. The deal-breaker statistic is that at most, just 0.4% of Facebook’s U.S. users bought a Gift in Q4. Estimates like my now overzealous-sounding in yearly Gifts revenue are predicated on Facebook averaging as much as one gift sale per user per year. Facebook has to find a way to make Gifts much more mainstream if it’s ever going to be a material contribution to its bottom line. The somewhat disappointing stats confirm Mark Zuckerberg’s statements and might further dash hopes for Gifts to become a meaningful money-maker for the social network. They also explain why it’s been injecting new call outs to purchase them and discounts to lure in new buyers. Last week reported that Facebook appears to be scanning status updates for words about new jobs, pregnancies, and child births, and encouraging the author’s friends to buy them Gifts. Then yesterday, reported that Facebook is offering some users up to $4 off a Gifts purchase of $5 or more. Meanwhile it’s launched the , a slice of plastic that can be loaded up with like The Olive Garden and Target. With time, as Facebook learns more about commerce, Gifts could become a more natural and frequently used part of the social network. But right now, pushing so hard to get people to give Gifts instead of saying Happy Birthday or congrats on the new job feels a bit smarmy. If it’s not making hundreds of millions of dollars on Gifts, it might not be worth putting money before friends.
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Former Head Of Google China Kicked Off Sina & Tencent Weibo For Three Days
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
Kaifu Lee, former head of Google China and founder of Beijing-based startup incubator Innovation Works, (h/t ) that he has been banned from posting on Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo for three days. Lee is one of the most followed people on Sina Weibo, with more than 30 million fans (his Twitter account has a much more modest 997,530 followers). While he did not disclose why he has been kicked off the microblogging platforms or who blocked him, some observers believe it is linked to his remarks about Jike, the search engine of People’s Daily Online. Lee has criticised the company for spending too much money and possibly laying off up to 100 staffers (rumors ). Despite his smaller audience on Twitter, Lee has been busy tweeting his opinions, including . This is not the first time Lee has run into trouble for expressing his opinions on social media. At the beginning of January, he on his Sina Weibo account that he had been “invited to tea,” Internet slang for being temporarily detained for questioning by China’s state security officers. Lee’s Weibo ban comes amidst several high-profile moves by the Chinese government to tighten press and Internet censorship. Last month, there was after officials forced newspaper Southern Weekly (also known as Southern Weekend), to run an opinion piece glorifying the Chinese Community Party. Around the same time, influential online magazine was closed after it ran an article calling on Chinese leaders to guarantee constitutional rights such as freedom of speech and assembly. Furthermore, there are concerns that will limit online discourse by forcing users of sites such as Sina Weibo to register with their legal names.
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China’s 360Buy Raises $700M Ahead Of Potential IPO, Wants To Become Stronger Alibaba Rival
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
360Buy, the quick-delivery shopping site once described as the , announced $700 million USD in funding on Friday. While this gives the company, China’s second largest e-tailer after Alibaba, enough cash to delay its much-anticipated IPO, one of its investors, Kingdom Holding Company, a Saudi Arabia firm, focuses on companies that will make a public offering within three years. In a , Kingdom’s executive director Ahmed Halawani said the deal is “in line with Kingdom Holding’s private equity investment strategy through selecting high growth companies potentially seeking to be listed in one of the international capital markets within three years.” Beijing-based 360Buy’s CEO Richard Liu wrote in a companywide email that the funds will be used to continue strategic investments. According to (link via Google Translate), this funding round increases 360Buy’s valuation by about 20 percent to $7.25 billion USD from $6 billion USD. 360Buy has focused on building its coffers recently-just three months ago it . In his staff email, Liu said the company’s current cash flow following this round of funding is 15 billion yuan. Despite the size of the latest round, Liu brushed off its significance in his company email. “Financing is not technology, there’s nothing to celebrate,” he wrote, adding that 360Buy’s main focus is still profit. But the money can help 360Buy become a stronger rival to Alibaba. 360Buy will use the cash to make strategic investments, including in IT, its cloud-computing network and, importantly, logistics. Last month the Alibaba Group that it and its partners will spend 100 billion yuan ($16.08 billion USD) in the first phase of investment to build a countrywide logistics network. Over the next decade, Alibaba plans to complete a network that will allow the delivery of products across China within 24 hours, supporting annual online sales of 10 trillion yuan. Investors are also eagerly awaiting the first public offering of Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company. Rumors of an IPO were fueled after founder Jack Ma announced in January that he will step down as CEO on May 10. His announcement came after a management restructuring and the June delisting of a Hong Kong unit. In addition to Kingdom Holding Company, 360Buy’s investors in its latest round of fundraising includes the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, one of Canada’s largest institutional investors, which invested about $300 million USD, a 4.1% stake in the company. Kingdom Holding Company invested $400 million, or a 5.6 percent stake. After this round of financing, 360Buy’s management stake of 9.7% will be reduced. Earlier investors in the company include Capitol Today, Bull Capital, Pak-to Leung, Digital Sky Technologies (DST) and Tiger Fund.
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JustMigrate Launches To Move Posterous Blogs To Tumblr Just As Posterous Announces Imminent End
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
Just in time for , a service has launched to bring Posterous blogs over to rival service, Tumblr. was announced the same day that Posterous unceremoniously via its blog. The service requires you to punch in your posterous URL, authorize it with Tumblr, and you’re all set. For those with multiple Tumblr blogs, granting JustMigrate access via your primary Tumblr will bring you to a page where you can select which blog you want to port over to. Moving 100 posts is free, and it’s $10 for 250 and $25 for 500 posts. Tumblr’s API allows 250 posts, or 75 photo posts to be uploaded daily, so JustMigrate will queue posts over days if you have a large Posterous blog. The service was created by , a five-man team out of India that has produced a mobile shopping app. Its co-founder, Siddarth Menon, said the idea to create Posterous porting tool was conceived in December, during a hackathon. The startup is bootstrapped, and he hopes the service will bring in some revenue to help support 3Crumbs’ . Since the service was announced less than a day ago, about 150 blogs are now waiting in line to get ported. Menon said former New York Times design director and Mixel co-creator, , has had that has been ported. JustMigrate’s team should brace itself for a lot more migrations to happen. Back in 2011, Posterous said it had on the site, most of them by individual users. JustMigrate’s entrance couldn’t be timelier. Last march, when Posterous announced its team was getting , founder Sachin Agarwal said his team would provide “ ” if the service was going to get closed, and also promised tools to export content to other services such as Tumblr and WordPress “in the coming weeks”. Sadly, the Posterous team remained silent on those tools, and nine months later in December offered a way for users to download their entire archives as a huge zip file, instead. The lack of tools was especially disappointing, given that the service had initially acquired its users by providing a robust tool to port your existing blog over from services such as Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger and even custom self-hosted blogs. Posterous’ last blog post pointed to WordPress and Squarespace’s existing porting tools, before it bid its adieu.
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The Weekly Good: Worldreader Wants To Put A Digital Book In Every Child’s Hand
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
One of the amazing things about technology is that it opens the doors to things for less fortunate folks that many of us take for granted. Being able to sit down and read a good book is something that we do on a daily basis, but never think about all of the people out there who don’t have that luxury. With sites like Amazon, we have a seemingly infinite number of choices on what we’d like to read, but a child in Africa may never have that luxury. A non-profit founded by ex-Microsoft and Amazon employees called is trying to extend this luxury to every child in the world. It’s a lofty goal, and that’s what social good is all about. Its CEO and co-founder, David Risher, was a Senior Vice President for Retail and Marketing for Amazon. He says that he is a “lifelong reader” and that books can change lives. Instead of just thinking this way on his own, he started Worldreader to put his thoughts into action: Growing up, books were my way to explore the world. We can make it possible for children everywhere to do the same. Worldreader has come a long way since we in 2010, as its vision is now being fully realized. While we have books all over the house, in the basement, iPads stocked with titles on the coffee table, kids in third-world countries don’t even have access to a newspaper, let alone a classic literary work, which is really sad. Worldreader has gotten support from former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, so it’s safe to say that Risher is on to something with this venture. The organization has created a platform for e-books that can be put onto feature phones and other inexpensive devices. Feature phones are widely available in developing countries, as things like texting are huge in places like Africa. As of last month, it has put 428,000 e-books onto these devices for over 3,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa. The organization believes that by helping kids read more and giving them the ability to make decisions on what they read, when they want, it will help their entire families and communities. The more you read, the more you know and the more empowered you are. Books like Pride and Prejudice and A Tale Of Two Cities are at the fingertips of thousands of kids who would have never had the opportunity to read them before, and Worldreader wants that to grow quickly. Along with books, the organization has put educational information about HIV/AIDS and malaria, instantly turning the device into a life-saver as well as a learning tool. Check out one of these devices below with the platform on it: Worldreader was nominated for a Chase American Giving award, but didn’t win the million dollar prize ultimately. What they did get was support and awareness for what they’re doing, which pretty much makes up for the million that it missed out on. You can , knowing that an e-book reader will make its way into the hands of a very lucky child. There’s not much better than that. Wordlreader’s ultimate goal is to send one million e-books to Africa and is well on its way to doing so. As far as results, it says that kids who have received the readers spend up to 50% more time reading, with some of them having read 90 books in a single year. That’s action.
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Let’s (Gamify) Date(ing) And Make It Addicting In The Process
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Leslie Hitchcock
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
A few months ago I broke down and did something I swore I’d never do. Yes, that’s right. I opened a dreaded OkCupid account. [Y’all, I’m so embarrassed right now, you just don’t even know.] For many years I’ve dated successfully in real life. But curiosity got the best of me and it was enhanced by, uh, let’s call it a dry spell despite working in a target-rich environment. As my friend says, in our industry “the odds are good but the goods are odd.” Go tech scene! So I opened an account just to see what would happen. In the three months I’d been a member of OkCupid, I went on one date. The site was creepy, felt really amateurish in its design, had a reprehensible mobile product and wasn’t terribly inspiring to me as a single woman in San Francisco. As a result, I called my online “dating” experiment a wash and closed that brief chapter of my romantic life. Enter ‘s last week on the growing Los Angeles-based application . Considering myself something of a , I downloaded it, prodded along by Anthony’s glowing description of a beautifully designed app experience. I’m a sucker for aesthetics. Here are my thoughts and some feedback from some of my amazing lady friends I wrangled to test Let’s Date for me. Perhaps it’s because Let’s Date pulls in data from your Facebook profile, but all of the people my friends and I encountered seemed like actual real people. Not like “1happyguy000” or the like on other identity shielding sites. So @ is super-addictive, but half my interactions involve trying to convince the app that I really don’t want to date 19-year-olds. — Anthony Ha (@anthonyha) While it hasn’t worked so well for me and my lady friends, in theory you’re supposed to be able to train the app to stop showing you the types of people you theoretically wouldn’t want to date. No 20-year-olds, no “smokes like a chimney,” no Paleo, etc. The basics. Plus being able to cross things out on someone’s profile is pretty gratifying; it makes it seem like I have autonomy over who shows up in Let’s Date’s cards. Some type of filtering would be great, too. Says a self-described borderline cougar friend of mine: “It was so frustrating to be like ‘oh this guy is cute’ and then to realize of course he’s cute…he’s 22.” Continuing in its differentiation from other sites, according to nearly a quarter of Let’s Date users go on dates within the first two weeks of on boarding. That beats my half-hearted one date in three months OKC experiment by a long shot. Checking out this Let’s Date app because rejection before 10 a.m. really builds character and my editor is out sick — Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) There are lots of guys on Let’s Date and once women on board, from my experience (and that of several girlfriends who I coerced into testing the app under the condition of anonymity), the fellows tend to bombard any potential match with interest. “It’s a really good ego boost,” unnamed friend #1. That it may be; it gets incredibly overwhelming. While I don’t have very many notifications in my phone’s lock screen by design, the first night I tested Let’s Date I kept the traditional settings turned on. When I awoke in the morning, I found about twenty notifications waiting for me of people who had indicated they’d date me over the night. I quickly adjusted my settings and am able to ignore the alerts easily. With the combined number of notifications from the app, it does not surprise me that users spend an inordinate amount of time on Let’s Date. Also according to Pando Daily, over 25 percent of users visit 10 or more times a day. That’s astounding to me and leads me directly to my final point on why this app is so successful. What is so fascinating to me about Let’s Date is how they, in effect, gamified dating. Here’s how it works: Choosing from one of the random alerts the user receives, she goes into the app and attempts to guess who indicated they would date her. The prospective suitor’s information will show in the first five profiles the app shows our user. If she, too, indicates she’d date the person who chose her, then and only then would they be connected through the app to set up a date. A little trip into my psyche: I like to win. I’m a recovering competitive person who tries to enjoy the game and not be a sore loser, blah blah blah. But the phenomenon that Let’s Date creates makes that hard. When I got connected with people, I was elated. because we both theoretically found each other interesting, mind you, but because I was correct! When I didn’t choose the “right” person, I was bummed because it seemed like I “lost” that round. In the same way that I had to eventually delete Angry Birds because I was furious with those damn, smug pigs, Let’s Date will most likely go the way of the . My serenity is more precious to me than “winning.” A worthwhile suggestion from one of my friends I enlisted to test the app was for Let’s Date to tell a user if you have any friends in common on Facebook, since it pulls from Facebook to make your profile. Not tell you who, just that you have people in common. As for my online dating experience, it went fine as far as dating goes. But I haven’t made an effort to my match a second time. Not once did we ever talk about how we ended up on our date. Absolutely no one mentioned online dating, which I find amazing. Were we embarrassed? Is this normal? If so, I see no real reason to subject myself to my own prejudices and other people’s shame about the process. At least IRL, in my experience, we’re pursuing each other for mutually interested reasons. Let’s Date feels slightly different if not for the fact that people seem more earnest and, for lack of a better word, real than they do on OKC. Should I end up on a date with one of these Let’s Date folks, maybe I should bring a TCTV crew with me. How do you think he’d take it?
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Nexus Tablet Success And Why There’s No Time Like The Present For A Google Retail Store
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
Rumors from an “extremely reliable source” speaking to have suggested Google will start to operate its own physical retail stores starting as soon as the 2013 holiday season in the U.S. Brick-and-mortar shops from an Internet search company? , but the Goog is breaking out of its search box big time, and recent additions to the Nexus line are proving it has a real chance at establishing a direct relationship with customers. Google has had a , with the device being mostly unavailable through Google’s Play store until just recently. But the company’s efforts to sell direct weren’t an overnight success; it , but stopped selling after a few months, since very few customers opted to buy the device at its full, unsubsidized price online. But if Google does one thing well, it’s iterating on less-than-stellar product launches and building on a firm foundation of failure. And that’s exactly what it has done with Nexus; the tablets it starting selling the via its online hardware store did major one thing better than the Nexus One, by offering no-strings-attached hardware at a bargain basement price. Hardware sales, Google seems to have learned, won’t work if customers are asked to eat a cost hit in exchange for freedom. They needed both, and weren’t willing to trade economy for freedom. Now Google has the recipe right for online sales, and it appears to have worked very well for the Nexus 4, and at least moderately well for Nexus tablets. But Google is still missing a key ingredient that has helped the iPad gain enormous consumer traction, and this latest rumor indicates it’s listening to the words of its biggest rival about how to possibly finally come up with a significant breakthrough for Android tablet market share. Apple CEO Tim Cook has made no secret about Apple retail’s impact on iPad sales. Most recently, he essentially attributed the iPad’s worldwide success to Apple’s physical stores, and the opportunity they provided to make believers out of customers who might otherwise not necessarily have understood Apple’s tablet as a product category. As Ingrid noted in her at a Goldman Sachs investor conference last week: “One of the things that’s not understood that well about the stores is that I don’t think we would have been nearly as successful in the iPad as an example if it weren’t for our stores,” said Cook. He noted that people’s view of the tablet, prior to the iPad, “ingrained in their minds [was] a heavy thing that no one wanted.” Google needs a tablet to achieve the same kind of thing with an Android tablet, or at least to come close. Making an “experience”-baed retail store akin to what Apple’s offering doesn’t guarantee consumers warm up to Android tablets, but it’s a risk that’s likely worth taking, given that Google has had positive indicators for its online retail efforts of late, and that Apple seems to place a lot of the credit for the iPad’s success squarely on the Apple Store’s shoulders. Nexus tablets need a home run, and that hasn’t come in the form of hardware so far, despite modest gains by gadgets like the Nexus series and the Kindle Fire. But maybe that’s because a device isn’t the answer they’re looking for: customer outreach is.
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The Pros And Cons Of A WebKit Monoculture
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
The that Opera is shutting down the development of its own browser rendering engine and moving to the open source caused quite a stir earlier this week. With WebKit powering the built-in browsers of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, it’s already the de-facto standard engine for mobile and it has the potential to do the same on the desktop. Worldwide, Chrome now holds a over Microsoft’s Trident-powered Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Gecko for Firefox already. The question is: are we better off because we have competing engines trying to outdo each other, or would we be better off if all the browser vendors just standardized on WebKit? As an open source project, WebKit allows all the vendors to contribute and the combined efforts of Google, Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera and everybody else in the browser ecosystem who may want to contribute could quickly push the web forward. Those in favor of this kind of consolidation on one rendering engine also argue that this wold make life for developers considerably easier, given that they won’t have to work around the quirks of all the competing engines we have today. As numerous commenters on point out, as long as we can trust those in charge of WebKit development to work together to innovate, an all-WebKit web would be a boon for developers and users. The most vocal opposition to this kind of monoculture has come from Mozilla, which is obviously heavily invested in its own Gecko engine and , its forthcoming successor. Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich argues that monoculture is a problem Mozilla must fight because of its mission. Adding to this, Mozilla engineer Steve Fink that an all-WebKit web – both on mobile and desktop – would prevent innovation and lead to a small number of companies controlling the web as a platform and just lead to added complexity and confusion in the long run. Given that WebKit is an open source project, though, it could easily be forked if development stalled or one of the stakeholders started to block important changes for political reasons. On the Web, of course, we went through a period of stagnation thanks the total dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer during the days of IE5 and IE6 (and the demise of Netscape and the 5-year lag between the launch of IE6 in 2001 and IE7 in 2006). On the other hand, the arrival of competition from Firefox starting around 2004 and Google’s WebKit-based Chrome – with the stated mission to push the development of web standards, rendering engines and especially JavaScript performance forward – undoubtedly helped to turn the web into the powerful platform we are now used to. Even Opera, in its own , argued that “monoculture is bad,” but then also added a somewhat defeatist note to this, saying that it “was never really in a position to prevent it in the first place,” because despite its considerable market share on mobile, “web developers still designed just for WebKit.” The interesting twist in Opera’s argument, however, is that the real competition isn’t between browsers and rendering engines. Instead, it’s about the web competing with native apps. Opera’s move, the company argues, is more about the fully open web competing with “the closed world of ‘apps'” and switching to WebKit allows it to counter this more effectively. Ideally, of course, all the different vendors would just implement the same standard to the same specs and developers wouldn’t have to worry about which rendering engine will display their code. It would always look the same. Sadly, that’s obviously not what happens given that every implementation has its own quirks. Most users obviously also don’t care about how exactly a given site or web app is rendered. To them, a browser is basically the chrome around the rendering engines. That’s where the features live that users care about (bookmarking, plugins, tabs etc.). Those are also the features that get users to switch (assuming speed remains comparable). Mozilla argues that the best way to push those features forward is to control the browser stack from top to bottom. The WebKit-only proponents argue that Mozilla and Co. could just focus on bringing the best features to their users if they only let go of this notion. Personally, I think having a few competing engines that all implement the same standard will lead to a faster innovation cycle. The web is still in a phase where that is more important than consolidating on a single engine. This involves extra work and may even break things at times, but it’s worth the effort in the long run.
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Mobile Commerce On The Rise As Amazon AppStore Tops Nielsen’s List Of Fastest-Growing U.K. Android Apps
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
Google’s Android platform dominates the U.K.’s smartphone landscape, powering 54 percent of the handsets in use at the end of 2012 ( ). But what apps are U.K. Android owners spending increasing amounts of time on? Researcher Nielsen has come up with a method of measuring the fastest-growing Android apps and has just crunched the data on app usage during May to October 2012 — which it says flags up growth in mobile shopping and commerce. The rise of mobile shopping in the U.K. was also flagged up last December in put out by the U.K.’s telecoms regulator. Ofcom’s data suggested the U.K. leads several international markets when it comes to technology adoption and usage, indicating the market is something of a bellwether. There are also plenty of signs that (Data put out by Flurry found time spent in retailers’ mobile apps grew more than 5x between 2011 and 2012.) Nielsen’s new U.K. Android app usage study is based on devices used by a monthly average of 1,500+ adults who have opted to install a meter on their smartphone. The meter measures the total time an app is visible on users’ screens (the screen has to be on and the app has to be in focus, with background activity “deliberately removed,” for usage to be measured). The study excludes system apps, such as camera and native email. Nielsen’s criteria for applications to be included is a minimum reach of 4 percent and a “minimum time-spent growth” of 30 percent as of October. Nielsen has also ranked the most popular U.K. Android apps, which features the of Google Play, Google Search and Facebook in the top three slots (for the full top 10 of most popular apps see the bottom of this post). But its meter measure system also allows it to take the temperature of what’s blowing up in popularity. Nielsen’s take on the fasting-growing Android app data is that U.K. consumers are becoming more sophisticated in how they use their smartphones — looking for apps to help with “real world tasks” not just “fun gimmicks and games,” as its managing director for digital in Europe, David Gosen, puts it on the company’s blog. According to Nielsen, seven of the top 15 fastest-growing “major” Android apps for usage over the May to October 2012 period were ‘commerce apps’ — by which it means apps that let users “buy digital products, general retail products, and experiences through social commerce.” Of the other eight, two were also banking apps. The top 15 fastest-growing apps in Nielsen’s commerce category were: Amazon AppStore, Tesco (supermarket shopping), Quidco (cash-back shopping), Google Play Movies & TVs, TopCashBack (cash-back shopping), Asda (supermarket shopping) and Google Books. The two banking apps in the list were HSBC Fast Balance and Lloyds TSB Mobile Banking. Here’s Nielsen’s full breakdown of the top 15: Worryingly for Google, time spent on Amazon’s rival Android AppStore, the fastest growing major app in Nielsen’s list, increased 7.6x over the metered period, with the quantity of time per user spent on the app now up to 15.24 minutes per month. As you’d expect Google’s Play store remains the most popular U.K. Android app, reaching 95.5 percent of users vs. 10.7 percent reach for Amazon’s AppStore, but considering users have to go out of their way to install Amazon’s store (which is not on Google Play), its reach is significant. Second in the fast growing list was HSBC’s banking app, which saw usage grow 6.4x over the metered period and users spend 19.80 minutes per month using it to check whether they are overdrawn or not. Third fastest was social magazine app Flipboard, which saw usage increasing 4.4 x and users spending an impressive 53.19 minutes per month using their phone to read stuff their friends have liked. Returning to the mobile shopping theme, Nielsen said its data shows retail apps are experiencing increasing reach and engagement. It noted that supermarket apps for Tesco and Asda are the fastest-growing in their sector in the study. Tesco’s app reached 145 per cent more users and those users spent 45 per cent more time engaging with it between May and October 2012, according to Nielsen. Two cash-back service apps also made the list: Quidco and TopCashBack, growing 3.5x and 2.5x respectively. Other fast-growing, non-commerce Android apps include: MX Player (video player), Coin Dozer (a game), and the Google+ social network — which in order to try to drive usage. If Nielsen’s data is anything to go by Google’s press-gang tactic appears to be yielding some results, with usage of the Google+ app up 2.7 x and time spent per user standing at 19.38 minutes per month (still light years behind , of course). Google+’s U.K. reach was 17.5 per cent vs 71.9 per cent reach for Facebook, according to Nielsen’s data. Facebook-owned photo-sharing app Instagram, which only landed on Android in April last year, also made the fast-growing list — increasing by 2.1 x over the metered period, and achieving a reach of 13.9 per cent. Instagram users spent a very impressive average of 78.76 minutes per month using the app to look at their buddies photos and presumably also create and upload their own. Turning to the U.K.’s top 10 most-popular Android apps by reach, the list is, as you’d expect, dominated by Google services which come bundled with (most) Android handsets sold in the U.K. — namely Google Play, Search, Maps, Calendar, Gmail and YouTube. In the third-party/non-native app category Facebook takes the prize, grabbing third place in the popularity stakes, while eBay Mobile (more mobile shopping!) is in ninth place, and the WhatsApp Messenger app takes 10th place. WhatsApp’s reach is around a third (32.9 per cent) of the U.K. Android users, according to Nielsen’s data. Here’s Nielsen’s full top 10 most popular U.K. Android apps:
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What Games Are: The “Beyond Games” Mirage
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Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
Here are : 2012 also marked the Xbox’s biggest year for entertainment and games usage. Users enjoyed more than 18 billion hours of entertainment in 2012, with entertainment app usage growing 57 percent year over year globally. Last year in the United States, Xbox LIVE Gold members averaged 87 hours per month on Xbox, an increase of 10 percent year over year. That entertainment number sounds very impressive, and, yet, only Microsoft seems to think so. That’s because it’s not. There are 76 million Xboxes out there, 24 million Kinects and 46 million Xbox Live users. 18 billion hours of “entertainment” (which I’m going to assume is mostly video services like Netflix and ESPN) breaks down to 236 hours per machine per year. Put another way, that means about two movies per week per machine. Or, if you want to just think in terms of the Xbox LIVE crowd, three movies per week. Moreover, I think the 18 billion number is soft, much as the idea that the PS2 would own DVD proved soft. All it will really take for Microsoft to lose that ground is for cable providers to make better boxes, or Apple to actually advertise the Apple TV (5.3 million sold with no push whatsoever). This despite having hundreds of partnerships, simulcast content, HD output, Sky TV in the UK et-cet-era. Those 76 million Xboxes took an awfully long time to put together ( ). To put that in context, Sony’s PlayStation 2 sold 130 million machines. In a smaller time period, Apple has sold more than half a billion iOS devices, including more than 100 million iPads. And, not to be unfair to Microsoft, the picture is very similar for Sony’s PlayStation 3. Remember when it was the machine that was supposed to drive Blu-ray adoption? I bring all of this up to talk about a particular delusion that both companies (and to a lesser extent, Nintendo with the Wii U) have fallen into. In the MicroSony paradigm, the world is filled to bursting with feature-loving media customers. These “medians” want nothing more than to own a single device that serves you games, movies, music, social networking, status updating, showing off, books, podcasts, avatars, phone calls, video calls, holographic calls, interwebs, emails and so on. They’re out there, just waiting to be tantalised with exactly the right suite of features, and they will come in their droves. And yet, while both can talk as long and as loudly about living-room strategies, wedge strategies, battles for the living room and moving beyond just games, customers continue to buy Xboxes and PlayStations to play games. While both can get very excitable about video cameras, connectivity, streamed media and so on, nobody gives a good goddamn about the vast majority of those features. If anything, they are voicing their displeasure through supporting . Yet the powers that be in Redmond and Japan are simply not listening. It’s worse than just a lack of focus. The issue for both is that they have largely run out of . They either don’t believe that there is anything more to the gamer market than they have already captured, or that they have no meaningful way to attract them any more. So, like the Tom Waits song “Step Right Up,” wherein he recites a laundry list of features for a product (“it fillets, it chops, it dices, slices, never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn…”), for both big-M and big-S, life is about seeing just how many boondoggles and doohickeys they can staple to their platforms. Those days of courting the lifestyle gamer, the passionate gamer and the indie gamer? Long gone. All in the hope of attracting a median dollar that is more mirage than reality. Perhaps the most poignant article on this subject is Nat Brown’s “ “. Brown – one of the original engineers behind the console, who even dreamed up its name – lambasts Microsoft thoroughly for making deep dives on features that nobody cares about (and, in my opinion, are mostly poorly executed) and navigation systems that are unusable (again, agree – the Xbox dashboard gets worse with every major iteration) while failing to solve the obvious problems in front of them. The main problem, as Brown sees it, is the ham-fisted way in which Microsoft handles independent development and relies on big partnerships. While you can easily build an app for mobile, tablet or PC these days, building for Xbox is impossible unless you have a lot of money and partner-level relationships with the platform. Your game will, at best, end up in a graveyard hidden under 100 tonnes of nonsense. Even the portrayal of the Xbox 360 as seen in (which is not kind) is like some shining reverie of the past compared to the modern version. Of course we do tend to sometimes converge on devices, such as the PC, the tablet and the smartphone. This is largely to do with either necessity (we need a family computer) or convenience (why carry a walkman and phone when my smartphone can save pocket space) or both (tablets). Manufacturers mistake this for a desire for features, inferring that there must be other markets out there that want all of their stuff under one lid. But they don’t really. Regular users , and they actively hate the sensation of being jerked around. The PC has always lived with this tension, and smartphones are showing signs of it, too. These devices attract several groups of people whose use cases are very different, and so each has gripes. For some, one interface goes too far, while for others not far enough. The word-processor-and-email user just wants a simple computer to do that and finds the techie side frustrating. The gamer wants power, and for the operating system and other software to get out of the way. The programmer wants something different again. So too the graphics artist. Arguably the big reason why iPads are so popular is that they are much simpler than PCs, drawing the word/mail crowd away. Meanwhile the gamers are still sticking with their power PCs but couldn’t care less about Windows 8. While game consoles certainly seem as though they could be the ur-box that sits under your TV and converges everything, that vision is one which has been in front of users for a long time, yet they just don’t care. When Sony lifts the lid on the , and Microsoft presumably does something similar at GDC for Xbox, we will know more about their concrete plans for the future. We expect that both will be long on waffle about entertainment applications, especially Microsoft, and the awesome power of using Internet Explorer on your telly. My prediction has long been that the console that convinces gamers that it’s really just about games and focuses on executing for that is the one that will win. We already know that Nintendo has laid a big egg with Wii U (sadly), and that means the market is wide open. So the question is whether the other two will fail to capitalise or not. Thus far neither of the other two major platform holders is doing that, which is why smart eyes are starting to instead.
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Fresh Stats On Social Networks: Pinterest Catches Up With Twitter, Digital Divide Shrinks
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
I find statistics absolutely delicious. Pew research on what slice of Americans are addicted to all of the various social networks as of December 2012. There are a few big business and cultural implications. , with 15 percent and 16 percent of adult U.S. Internet users on each network, respectively. Pinterest, which launched in 2009, has experienced explosive growth, especially with a white, female and affluent user base. Women are five times more likely to use Pinterest (5 percent vs. 25 percent) and almost twice as likely to be white and college-educated. It’s become a magnet for hip urbanites searching for the hottest wedding gowns and apartment decor. Twitter, however, gets a lot more attention, since neither presidential campaigns nor Middle Eastern activists are leveraging style catalogs to rearrange their countries’ political leadership. The surveyed groups (whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans) hover around 68 percent of total adults. Almost twice as many African-Americans (26 percent) use Twitter as whites (14 percent). The disproportionate African-American use of Twitter has fascinated culture commentators and scholars. found that African-Americans in celebrity news strongly predicted their Twitter use. Former web editor of the , Baratunde Thurston, hypothesized that “there’s a long oral dissing tradition in black communities,” explaining, “Twitter works very naturally with that call-and-response tradition — it’s so short, so economical, and you get an instant signal validating the quality of your contribution.” Those with a college degree are slightly less likely than those with some college to use social networks (69 percent vs. 65 percent). While the difference isn’t statistically significant, verified the trend among educated users to ditch Facebook for moral, political or cultural reasons. “Many Facebook refusers actually revel in their difference from the mainstream, seeing it as a mark of distinction, superior taste, and identification with an elite social stratum,” said New York University Professor Laura Portwood-Stacer. Hipsters find it too mainstream and others find their privacy policies troublesome. In other words, not using social media is likely a product of education, not a lack of access. Sixty-seven percent of online adults say they use Facebook, 15 percent of online adults say they use Pinterest, 13 percent of online adults say they use Instagram, 6 percent of online adults say they use Tumblr, 16 percent of online adults say they use Twitter (and 20 percent of online adults say they use LinkedIn as of August 2012). Below is a full table summarizing the results of the survey:
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 2 | 28 | null |
Fly Your Flag — Let’s See Some European Country Pavilions At Disrupt In New York
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtDaNoHGdqM] This year we want to make it very, very obvious that TechCrunch events are open to all. In the past we’ve had startups appear from everywhere from Tokyo to Russia to Ghana, Africa. And this year we want to see a great turn-out from Europe, so we’re specifically inviting European startups to . After-all, there’s a , so this is very much the . You can apply for the upcoming Battlefield competition at Disrupt New York and also apply to be part of the ‘pavilions’ in Startup Alley, our demo area for newly launched startups. Please apply to be . Apply for the . Get a taster for the Alley in the above video. It’s important to note that the deadline for applications to the Battlefield is this coming Friday, February 22nd. For startups that want to be in the Startup Alley they need to be less than two years old and have less than $2.5 million. And not only will we have “country” pavilions but also “category” based pavilions (e.g mobile, healthcare, education, etc.). Accelerators, VCs and industry/government associations who would like to partner with us and bring a group of startups to Disrupt NYC please email . We would love to have a Pavilion from every country in Europe. We look for between 10-20 companies to create a country pavilion. If the minimum of 10 companies is not reached we can include those startups into our category pavilions. On Monday and Tuesday during the Disrupt conference, the audience votes for one startup to be their “Audience Choice Winner” who will be given a spot on-stage to compete in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield with the chance to win the $50,000 grand prize and coveted Disrupt Cup. is being held at the The Manhattan Center at 303 West 30th Street NY, from April 29-May 1. There will be pavilions specifically dedicated to Indian, Brazilian and Israeli startups. We were joined in September at Disrupt SF 2012 by , , , and Korean startups. So remember, .
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Iterations: How Founders Can Fight Through The Great Fragmentation Of Talent
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
TechCrunch The #1 request I hear when talking to founders in San Francisco is: “We are hiring engineers. Know any?” We all know this is a big issue that’s only getting worse, and so do most of the investors. But, I’m now starting to hear this so often, I’m beginning to worry that all the conventional tactics simply won’t work. Early-stage startups that don’t start experimenting with new ideas to source, recruit, and close engineers and other technical hires may end up running out of money or never achieving the product traction they need to get to the next level. I don’t have data to support this, but my intuition is that technical talent is so fragmented right now, all options need to be reexamined and placed on the table. In that spirit of investigating all available options, here are 10 tactics your startup may consider given today’s conditions. And, while we often read high-level posts about how to hire people, the on-the-ground reality is that so many early-stage companies are being funded every day that when the founders close that first round, they often turn into (near) full-time recruiters, and many of them don’t succeed at it because they either don’t understand the weight of the issue before them and/or because they aren’t willing to consider these kind of options below, some of which require a serious change in thinking: Naval Ravikant tweeted a great line last year: “It’s never been easier to start a company, but it’s never been harder to build one.” This fragmentation of talent is the other side of the coin in this bubble we are in — and yes, it is a bubble, but the bubble isn’t where you may think it is. Today, the asset that is overvalued is the amount of funds and shares of equity that founders are in control of and chose to hold on to — to recruit the right people, founders now have to work extra harder or be even more creative and daring to fill in their open slots. Put another way, in order to win in today’s game, many founders are going to have to make uncomfortable decisions, especially with respect to money for salaries and equity as incentives. I am not an expert on all of this. And, I know it’s not cool to suggest these tactics because everyone says it’s all about “team” and because you want to protect your culture and because you don’t want to manage people remotely or hire contractors or spend time training a diamond in the rough, but for many early-stage companies in a flooded market like San Francisco, the harsh truth of 2013 is that everyone and their mom has a tech startup now, and everyone and their dad has a new seed fund, and you, as a founder, are caught right in the middle, forced to make suboptimal tradeoffs between quality and speed. It’s not a pretty choice, but in order to survive or succeed in this environment, I simply don’t see another way.
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Google May Open A String Of Retail Stores, But What Does It Hope To Gain?
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
Microsoft and Apple already have their own physical retail stores, but thus far Google has managed to resist that particular temptation If a recent report from is to be believed though, that may not be the case much longer. According to a single “extremely reliable source,” Google will erect its own standalone stores by the holidays in an effort to more effectively push its hardware to consumers. These stores will reportedly carry Google’s Nexus devices as well as Chromebooks, but the curious report goes on to note that Google conceived the project as a way to get its ambitious Glass project in front of more people. But is this all really necessary? Let’s just say that these rumors are true — the value of something like Glass can be hard to discern without seeing what it brings to the table first-hand, but the more practical thing to do would be to leverage its existing partnerships. Google has a fair number of Chrome Zone experience areas already like Best Buy and PC World in the U.K., and those stores already get plenty of foot traffic (if perhaps less than in recent years). Even if Google had to pay for some more experienced folks to demo Glass, it could still be less expensive and potentially more impactful than going it alone in the retail space. Sure, there’s something to be said for Google controlling that experience end-to-end the way Apple does, but that approach isn’t without its potential pitfalls. Putting Glass aside for a moment, Google may have a hard time turning a profit off these stores thanks to some of its other products — devices like the Nexus 4 smartphone and the Nexus 7 and 10 tablets are sold at or around cost, meaning that Google hardly makes any money on them. Google’s hardware then is something of a Trojan horse (and not all that different from what Amazon offers): it’s generally cheap and powerful enough to make it worth a purchase, and Google has been aiming to make up that money in Play Store revenue down the line. That’s all well and good, but running a physical store takes a decent chunk of money. Rent is a pain, as are utilities, training and staffing costs, paying for interior design and fixtures; there’s a considerable amount of overhead that goes into a venture like that. Sure, Google could still make some money in the long run but it doesn’t seem like much of a sure thing unless Google manages to perform very, very well in terms of sales volume. If we’re looking at this whole situation purely in terms of dollars and cents, a big retail push seems like a very dicey decision. Of course, that’s not to say this whole thing is completely impossible — Google may be going after more than just money. A move like this may serve to solidify Google as a real consumer brand instead of just that thing you use when you want to scour the Internet for, well, everything. That sort of shift in public perception could only help when it comes to pushing hardware products in the future, especially if Google really does end up creating ambitious new devices on its own. Rumors of a have more or less petered out (thanks in large part to the that its supposed existence was revealed), but the furor it caused shows rather nicely that there’s interest for that sort of high-end Chrome computing experience. And to return the whole issue of Google Glass, the notion of carving out small retail locations to highlight new and novel Google-powered experiences isn’t without precedent. Consider in Kansas City — while it’s set up to provide in-person customer support for Google Fiber’s growing number of users, it’s also meant to showcase what the Fiber service is capable of. It’s a very pretty little area that Google has put together and it already plays home to at least a few Chromebooks, so it’s not inconceivable that Google would take that concept, tweak it a little, and transplant it into some “major metropolitan areas.” Still, if true, this retail crusade would be a pretty drastic little about-face for Google. Google Shopping’s Sameer Samat told just this past December that the company doesn’t “view being a retailer right now as the right decision,” so either this is all bunk, or Google’s having to adjust to the sea change more rapidly than it expected.
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CrunchWeek: Elon Musk Vs. NYT, The Uber For Private Jets, Zynga Settles With EA, Everyone Harlem Shakes
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
In this edition, , and I (our usual host was working out of town this past week) got together to discuss very publicly for his electric car company Tesla after the published a less than flattering (and perhaps less than ) , the , the company that aims to be the , Zynga’s with its gaming nemesis Electronic Arts, and the Harlem Shake meme.
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There’s Already An Apple In The Games Industry: The Games Industry
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
Apple entering the games space has been a topic of discussion for a long time. Some people think they already made their move and it’s still playing out. Some people think they are yet to drop the bomb. Most oversimplify the issue. There’s a funny thing, though, about the way proponents of Apple (I say this without denigration) cheerlead their champion. In a lot of ways, there’s already an Apple in the games industry: it’s the games industry. Apple is filling the position in the games industry that Android fills in the mobile world. Part of what makes it problematic to discuss is that is that it’s really difficult to disentangle content from platform these days, both in mobile and gaming (and mobile gaming, for that matter). The complex network of relationships, channels, and emerging methods for distribution make practically every comparison apples to oranges. I’m not going to unravel that knot just now. I’ll get to the nut of the issue instead of dancing around it. One of Apple’s greatest strengths, something that it understood early and has exploited continuously, is the value of the premium platform — including hardware, of course. They were always, and remain, the premium choice in consumer tech. As others have put it, this moots certain comparisons: you can’t, they say, compare a Ferrari to a Toyota. And that idea is not without legitimacy. So it’s funny when the opposite seems to apply for the games industry. There’s already a premium product out there: the triple-A games produced by huge studios like Ubisoft, EA, Valve, and so on. The Xbox 360 and PS3, and soon the Xbox 720 and PS4, or whatever they’re called, have always been and will continue to be the premium platform — something that has worked well for Apple elsewhere, and something they’ll never be in the games space. Why? Here’s that content-platform thing again. Apple simply isn’t a triple-A platform for games. Sure, there are great games on it, good-looking games, expensive games. And millions of people play them. But let’s not kid ourselves. Notice that almost everything relating to the success of games on iOS is in terms of numbers downloaded and hours played. In like wise, one could say that YouTube is far more of a success than Hollywood, based on viewer hours. In a way, it’s true! But what is iOS’s Godfather? What is its Shadow of the Colossus? Angry Birds and Infinity Blade are arguably is the closest thing to either. Talk about comparing a Ferrari to a Toyota. In the other corner is a premium platform with exclusive, popular content — the very thing Apple was when Android entered the scene. And now Apple is playing the scrappy underdog, eating up all the low-end users, winning on volume instead of quality. It’s the same strategy that provokes such venom against Android! Thousands of options, barely differentiated, priced to sell, with wildly varying quality, except for a few high-end flagship items – am I talking about Android handsets or the games in the App Store? Hard to tell, isn’t it? And of course, that’s a recipe for success, as either Apple or Google can tell you. But again, as either can tell you, it’s hardly a recipe for total domination. For that, one must control the vertical the horizontal. All the same, it’s funny to see the bottom-up strategy of the App Store and Android reviled one moment and then praised the next. So far, so obvious. But the unknown creeps in when you consider how platforms may evolve over the next five years — which is about what we can realistically expect for the life of the next consoles, with increased entropy due to changing markets. The platform/content thing enters again, bringing with it quite a bit of uncertainty. How long is Call of Duty and its ilk going to remain a console exclusive? It’s practical now, and I’m willing to speculate that it will be practical two years from now. After that, things get more hazy. The way people acquire and play games is changing in a serious way. Will the next consoles have huge hard drives to store downloaded games? Will they stream them over high-speed internet? Will they integrate with smartphones? Will they use discs? Will they allow used games? Will they replace your set-top box? Will they be open to hacking? The answers to the questions are maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, and that’s hilarious. And there are a lot of other questions that will need to be answered before we can really start making predictions. What about Microsoft, whose long-term three-screen plan is in serious jeopardy? What about Sony, which is in many ways falling to pieces (not in all cases a bad thing)? What about Google, which is a total wildcard? What about the publishers, who know which way the wind is blowing but can’t abandon ship yet? There are too many variables to say with any kind of assurance how things will be in a few years. Apple will continue to make its play for the living room, but supplanting the consoles is out of the question (not that many have advanced this notion). But it isn’t going to enter the space in a way that requires them to abandon the last five years of app and device development, and they’re not going to compete directly against an opponent that offers a product they can’t hope to match. They may like to lead the charge, but they’re no Leeroy Jenkins.
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Backed Or Whacked: The Eyes Have It
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Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 2 | 17 |
In , I discussed watches, one of the mixes of fashion and function that many wear every day. Another example of such a combination is eyewear, where crowdfunding endeavors have taken approaches that range from high art to high volume in pursuit of recreational glasses. As multiple testimonials attest in its campaign video, there is no masking the genius of artist Danny Scheible around adhesive material. The art pieces that he has constructed are the highest-impact uses of tape since Watergate. Under the label of “tapigami” (with a long “a”), his intricately cut and sculpted permutations of sticky stuff have appeared in the Exploratorium, W San Francisco and California Museum. Now, though, the artist and his cohorts are thinking smaller by creating Hacker Glasses, minimal art installations on your face embedded in 3D-printed frames. The campaign is on pace to succeed, nearing a third of its $15,000 goal with about 20 days to go. Combine the ideas of tape, glasses and nerds, and most people come up with a makeshift repair job resulting from bullying. Rather, the Hacker Glasses fill the lens area with many tiny adjacent and concentric loops of colored tape positioned so that you can see through the holes, creating a sort of stained-glass effect. However, how the spectacular spectacles, yours for a $150 pledge, affect vision is curiously not addressed directly by the team. In the campaign video, one person puts on a pair of Hacker Glasses before stepping into his car to drive. The scene cuts, though, leaving us to imagine a resulting Death Race-like trail of wanton destruction. The idea of something being “proper” may connote appropriateness or an old-school hip-hop affirmation. The brand represents value for “Mark.” (Take this pledge with me now: “I will fund no product in which the project owner isn’t willing to reveal his or her last name.”) Positioned as a cheaper alternative to the Ray-Bans that they resemble, the Proper sunglasses would cost, at most, $30 but still have scratch-resistant lenses. They would also be available in some questionable color combinations. Risking impropriety, only one backer was willing to say Oakley-Dokley, as the campaign has raised only $25 of its $8,000 in its dwindling hours. Last week’s column noted the bamboo watch, the campaign for which is now winding down. Cycle, the Kyoto-based creator of the urushi wooden sunglasses, takes its love of wood-based products to the next level. The campaign video tells the story behind the development of its sunglasses so artfully that you’ll want them even if you live in the cloudiest spot on Earth. The metal-free objects are constructed of plywood from Japanese lime trees and varnished with a rare resin from the urushi tree. The resulting eyewear, which uses toothpicks as hinges, is complemented by an indigo-dyed protective bag and matching hexagonal case/tray, which is also made with urushi. Sorry, nature lovers, the lenses themselves are plastic. Now in its final hours after clearing its $10,000 funding goal, the sunglasses are available for $199 or $299 with the case and are due to ship in April.
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The Top Mobile Games Are Grossing More Than 4X What They Were A Year Ago, GREE’s Dharni Says
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
After a couple early stumbles in building out a mobile gaming platform in the West, GREE did a bit of a pivot with its San Francisco office over the last year. , the office is now entirely geared toward building first-party games. It’s a turnabout for the $3.5 billion Japanese gaming company, which built its business in astonishingly short eight years through being a major feature phone gaming platform. (Yes, eight years is short in Japan where the culture can be averse to risky, new entrepreneurial ventures.) They aimed to replicate that success as a dual game developer and platform in the West with a few big-ticket acquisitions. But now it appears that the U.S. arm is just doing games for now. “We’re pretty singularly focused on content,” said , GREE’s senior vice president of studio operations, in an interview from the company’s Mission Bay offices. “The platform — whenever it’s ready for the U.S. market — will get integrated later. The produce spirit and guidance had to happen from Japan.” Dharni was one of the co-founders of Funzio, . That change was a bit of a difficult one, . More senior GREE managers who came over with the OpenFeint acquisition like . It came around a tough earnings quarter for GREE, around game mechanics in Japan. Dharni said that all of Funzio’s four founders are still working at GREE. (That’s unlike what happened with OpenFeint, which the acquisition closed to work on other projects.) “Even if you look at the attrition rate from the ex-Funzio guys, overall it’s gone really well,” Dharni said. “All four founders are here and they have pretty significant chunks of responsibility in terms of product.” Some Funzio employees were affected by the recent layoffs however. Like many other game developers on the iOS and Android platforms, GREE is trying to prove that it’s not so vulnerable to the hits-driven nature of the business by having a network of users that’s so large that it can cheaply distribute games of its own or of other developers. Yet Apple is notoriously controlling of iOS. Even as players migrate from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets. This will be a huge challenge for GREE’s platform efforts back in Japan. Can they offer something above and beyond what iOS already gives developers in terms of marketing and monetization that would be worth giving up extra revenue share? Dharni said, “We feel like platforms in general on mobile can be more or less a commodity and we are looking to see how we can make ours very unique.” That said, the developer-only route isn’t a bad one as iOS has become more lucrative over the past year. “It’s 4X and beyond in terms of revenue [compared to a year ago],” Dharni said. A major contributor is the emergence of the iPad as a gaming device, something that Dharni said that GREE’s Japanese leadership, which have spent years fine-tuning the freemium gaming model back in Japan, helped the U.S. team better understand how to run games as a service. “While we had been running live games, we weren’t running them at the depth at GREE was,” he said. “What that means is creating new fun and engaging content on a daily or weekly basis. You want your players coming back every week to check what’s new. We conceptually understood this, but didn’t see the extent to which it improves our metrics.” Android is still lagging iOS on per user monetization, but Dharni said, “We feel that Android is going to grow faster this year.” Facebook, the platform where Funzio started, to distribute their work on mobile platforms. “Overall, it’s still too early to say but some of the test results that are coming in are pretty good actually,” Dharni said. “The ROI is definitely there. It will definitely become one of the top channels for user acquisition long-term.”
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Apple, Microsoft, Adobe Called By Lawmakers To Defend Higher Prices In Australia
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
Three American companies-Apple, Microsoft and Adobe-have been by the Australian Parliament to explain why they charge higher prices Down Under than in other countries. The three companies were called by the House Committee On Infrastructure And Communications to appear as part of regarding the disparity in tech pricing. The inquiry started in May 2012 to examine “whether a difference in prices exists between IT hardware and software products, including computer games and consoles, e-books and music and videos sold in Australia over the Internet or in retail outlets as compared to markets in the U.S., UK and economies in the Asia-Pacific.” Ed Husic, a member of the Australian House of Representatives, says that some estimates suggest Australian prices on some products are up to 60 percent higher than in the U.S. Husic told that “in what’s probably the first time anywhere in the world, these IT firms are now being summonsed by the Australian Parliament to explain why they price their products so much higher in Australia compared to in the U.S. Adobe, Apple and Microsoft are just a few firms that have continually defied the public’s call for answers and refused to appear before the IT Pricing Inquiry.” This is the latest development in a long-running dispute between Australian lawmakers and U.S. tech companies over unequal pricing. Back in August 2011, Apple Australia managing director Tony King agreed to speak with Husic about higher tech prices in Australia. says pricing disparities back then included the MacBook Air, which was 15% more expensive in Australia and some software, like Adobe’s CS5.5 Design Premium, which was nearly 75% more expensive even when accounting for currency exchange. Husic said, however, that he had struggled to pin down a meeting with Apple reps and the Cupertino-based company was accused of “snubbing” Australian consumers, media and the Parliament by continuing their pricing strategy. According to the , Apple blames “layers of Australian taxes, warranties and copyright holders for higher local prices.”
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Visual How-To App Snapguide Passes 1M Uniques, Snaps Up YouTube Designer, And Gears Up For Growth
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
Daniel Raffel says that when he started work on the app that eventually became the how-to platform , people advised him to make a “food guide” app (he has worked as a chef so might naturally gravitate to that vertical). He resisted, possibly because he had a bigger ambition in mind: “My goal is to inspire people to make things that they might otherwise buy,” he told me in a conversation earlier this week. In an online/offline world filled with lots of ways to consume just about anything you want, wherever and whenever you want, Snapguide is one of those places that runs counter to that, and its flavor of DIY — delivered via a series of mobile-friendly, photographic and video-led how-to guides covering everything including crafts, makeup, cars, and, yes, food — is growing. Launching in , Snapguide’s still small — just nine employees — but something that Raffel has tried to put into place is an emphasis not just on technology but also design. Currently there are six engineers and three designers. “An insane ratio,” he calls it. “It’s not shocking usually to see 1 designer to 15 engineers.” He believes this is part of what’s helping Snapguide get one up over would-be competitors. “We’re in a space where competition is still on desktop and they’ve not worked out yet how to do it on mobile.” Raffel says that he considers Snapguide a “design driven” company, giving an attention to detail that he says was reinforced by his experience working as a chef. “The experiences I want to build are deeply considered. It’s not just slapped together.” Snapguide recently picked up another designer to help with that goal: Rebecca Bortman, who joined Snapguide in January as a product designer. She is a catch, having come from YouTube, where she led the design team in YouTube’s in seven years. She will work with creative lead Edwin Tofslie. “We are super excited to have her working with all of us in a product designer capacity where she is lending her amazing visual and interaction skills in addition to her product management chops,” says Raffel. (And in addition to her singing chops — she also sings in punk band Happy Fangs and previously was in My First Earthquake.) Raffel says Snapguide is currently growing at three-digit percentage points per month (2.5 times in the last 30 days). It passed one million unique visitors in November across both apps and web, and is now “well past that,” said Raffel. Searches on the site also passed the one million mark in January. Today it’s having its biggest traffic day ever Raffel says, a result of a “combination of search traffic, Pinterest traffic, and ton coming from .” The social pinboard , as it happens, is proving to be one of Snapguide’s biggest and most consistent sources of traffic — Snapguide’s pictures and general purpose lend themself to how Pinterest is used and explored as a social pinboard of interesting ideas and concepts, and it has the distinction of being the , shy of an official Pinterest API. And for those who have wondered why Snapguide has yet to develop an Android app, Pinterest is partly to blame for that: “Pinterest is driving nearly as many page views per month as Google,” says Raffel, “and one of the things that’s really interesting is that we see a large perentage of Pinterest traffic coming from Pinterest on iOS. The traffic shows that iOS is the place to focus for now. It’s mouth droppingly shocking how much mobile traffic comes from iOS and how much comes from Android. It just reinforces that social services are performing exponentially better on iOS.” That traffic from iOS is one of the reasons why Snapguide has decided to keep developing on iOS before expanding to other platforms. Starting first with its iOS app in , it followed that up in with an iPad app. There is also a much-used website, and a mobile web version — it’s the web versions that people see if they click on links from other sites. That doesn’t mean that Snapguide is not working on Android, but right now the focus is to make iOS work better. “It’s tempting to go wide and add stuff and apps to the product base, but for a startup it’s not a small thing to take on a new project,” says Raffel. Improvements that are coming up include small things like upgrades to basic editing on the iOS apps, as well as bigger projects like trying to make it easier for people to figure out they could learn from Snapguide, and what they should be creating to share with others. “That’s not obvious to everyone, and we want to be a place for people to get inspired,” he says. Snapguide will also soon feature some ways to encourage more interactivity among the community: this includes what Raffel calls a “leaderboard.” “There are all these people making stuff, so why not give them some ideas?” So, the community of Snapguide users will be ask to pitch in on 10 ideas around an event like Valentine’s day. “For some people, that will inspire them to physically make a guide; for others it will inspire them to like and follow those people,” he says. “It’s been a challenging feature, something we’ve wanted to do for a long time.” And there is likely to be more developments on Snapguide’s desktop and mobile websites. “We think that’s a place where we haven’t invested enough, based on the proportion of web traffic we get today,” which he says is “pretty significant.” It seems fitting that one of Snapguide’s most recent hires came from YouTube. Raffel says that he views Google’s video site as Snapguide’s toughest competition at the moment. YouTube has become the home for a number of other how-to site’s video content — Howcast being one well-executed example mentioned by Raffel — and that content is easily found through search engines. “We’re not trying to beat traditional how-to sites because they’re getting in their own way,” says Raffel. “They’ve in the past paid people to make their own content. But that doesn’t scale well and the people writing the content aren’t passionate.” The other issue is that much of their content has been created for web use, but those experiences are not that easy to transfer to mobile. “It’s millions of pieces of unique content — you can’t reformat something that large. They don’t have photos or other ways of looking good on mobile.” While Snapguide already lets users add videos to their guides, this may be an area that will see more attention. “We feel like a lot of how-to searches do end up on YouTube, so if we don’t make experiences that compete, that will spell trouble for us,” Raffel says. But it will likely keep video length short and not compete head-on with YouTube. “Making video is hard, snapping pictures is easy,” he says. “If you’re documenting something it’s much easier to do with photos.” Photos also are what helps Snapguide “lend itself naturally” to its big traffic-driver, Pinterest. “Every one of our guides has multiple images, and when you pin something usually it’s an image.” Raffel would not comment on whether Snapguide is raising more money to continue growing — in June 2012 it picked up a from Index Ventures, Atlas and CrunchFund, on top of a $2 million round in 2011. But money is on Raffel’s mind in other respects. For one, it is starting to consider business models for its service. “We’ll look at revenue sharing, allowing people to sell content. I enjoy the fact that at the moment we can be pure and not do that, but longer term it is not realistic not to do those things.” Inevitably, ads will also be considered. “When you chase advertising too early you make it a different experience, but we’re not opposed to it and don’t have an issue and I don’t think it’s a bad fit for us.” Driving more inventory to the platform may also lead Snapguide to paying contributors. “It’s possible we might compensate,” says Raffel. “We will will always be interested in exploring what incentives motivate people to create high quality content. Maybe [creators] are getting ideas for things they can make. That might not be enough. But when you reward people financially you get back to that model where it’s not the most passionate people. It just changes the reason for sharing.” He believes, though, that the content farm model has been proven to work effectively. Their weapon has been SEO experts who look at query traffic and “quickly rise to the occasion” to get whatever is needed made. “We should all be so responsive,” says Raffel. But he also thinks that there can be another way to achieve this, such as through Snapguide’s leaderboard concept. There may also be partnerships in Snapguide’s horizon: Raffel wouldn’t name names, just the “sorts of brands that would be natural fits on our platform, that would complement it.” Remember that Snapguide’s 12 employees consist of 6 engineers, 3 designers, 1 community manager, a office manager and Raffel — no business development people. That means the partnerships that are being cooked up come from third parties reaching out to Snapguide. “And the top of our list has already reached out to us,” Raffel says. “There are certain brands making stuff on our service already, and larger partners and brands will want things like being treated specially. They want additional analytics that traditional users don’t need. They need to evaluate whether something working or not.” He says that as an app that was created thinking about the consumer first, it would be “amazing to have a huge brand who we respect, with high quality content, sharing content with us.” This goes back again to Raffel’s and co-founder’s Steve Krulewitz’s original concept of making the platform as wide open as consumers wanted it to be. That has ended up being a business engine, too. “The variety has not only challenged us but opened us up to a much wider audience faster,” says Raffel. “And it has created a wealth of marketing opportunities that would have otherwise been closed to us.”
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Menlo’s Shervin Pishevar And Goldman’s Scott Stanford Leave Their Day Jobs To Do Something Really Vague, By Design
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar and Goldman Sachs managing director Scott Stanford have left their day jobs to build a new venture called Sherpa. The creation of the firm, which was , is designed around a new model for building and creating companies through a mix and match of strategic corporate partnerships and working with well-known entrepreneurs. Sherpa will be divided into two parts: First, there will be The Foundry, which Pishevar says will use funds and assets from a number of strategic corporations, combined with help from some well-known entrepreneurs to create new companies. There will also be a corresponding fund to invest in those new companies that have been created. If that seems vague, it’s by design — Pishevar wouldn’t reveal either the strategic corporations that the new venture would be working with, nor any of the well-known entrepreneurs that we can expect on board. That information, we’re told, will be revealed at a later time. But the idea of combining strategic resources from corporations that have them to spare, along with entrepreneurs to help found or advise new companies does sound appealing. What we do know is that the firm will combine the talents and the contacts of two of the most well-connected men in Silicon Valley. Pishevar is best known for his investments as an angel investor and venture partner in the collaborative consumption space, putting money into businesses like Uber and TaskRabbit. Meanwhile, at Goldman Sachs, Stanford has been behind the scenes of nearly every big tech IPO over the past few years, including Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon. While he’s leaving Menlo as a venture partner, Pishevar will remain a venture advisor at the firm. He’ll also become a strategic advisor to on-demand car service Uber, which he . Pishevar said that the model for Sherpa will be similar to the work he’s done with Uber, where he’s apparently gotten more deeply involved than is typical for VCs, even those who are on the board of the company’s they invest in. The circumstances behind Stanford’s departure are less clear, but we have confirmed that he and Shervin will partnering on the new venture. We’ll be keeping an eye on Sherpa, and will keep you up to date as more details come to pass. In the meantime, check out this video of Shervin being interviewed by our own Alexia Tsotsis. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxNhc64b_po&w=560&h=315]
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A Dell Was Gotten, Dude
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MG Siegler
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
The year was 2004. I had just graduated college and my old Gateway mini tower PC was on its last legs. I was about to move out to California to begin my life. My parents asked what I wanted as a present before I left. But they already knew the answer. Dude, I was getting a Dell. I went online and customized the hell out of an Inspiron 8600. The price tag was well over $3,000. The thing was a beast. If computers came with hemi engines, this would have had one. When the fans kicked on it sounded like a space shuttle launch. It was thick enough to stop a bullet. It just about as portable as a Microsoft Surface — . It had a retina-searing red cover. I was in heaven. My god, how times change. Incidentally, that era was probably the peak of Dell’s power. At the time, it was the No. 1 PC-maker in the world with over 16 percent market share. The company had even withstood the merger of HP and Compaq in 2002 — its two largest rivals at the time — to come back to the top of the PC heap. The “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” advertising campaign had just ended a very successful three-year run. Dell’s market cap was right around $100 billion. Founder Michael Dell felt comfortable enough to to someone else. Then everything started to fall apart. I’ve been thinking a lot about Dell’s fall from grace this week, following the news that Dell officially has a deal in place to take itself private. Yes, humorously, it’s Dell and not Apple that will be giving the money back to the shareholders. (A statement which is totally not relevant, by the way, .) But Dell is not shutting down. Instead, the company will try to transform itself behind the curtains. The boring ( ) guess is that over the next few years, Dell will fully become a software and services company — almost exactly following the IBM transformation of yesteryear. But the Microsoft involvement in the buyout suggests that Dell could still be eyeing a personal computing future. But how did Dell get to this point? You’d think they simply got complacent given their dominance of the PC industry. That’s undoubtedly part of it mixed with a nice dash of mismanagement. But Dell was to match rivals coming at them from other sides. I fondly recall my , a Palm Pilot competitor from the PDA era of handheld computing. And there was the Dell DJ, the iPod competitor, which people probably have . The bigger issue, of course, is that the entire PC market has been collapsing. But rivals such as Lenovo (which facilitated the IBM transformation by buying its PC business) and even HP have fared better. If trends hold, Dell could fall to fourth — or possibly — in the race this year, behind Acer and maybe even Asus. it’s entirely possible that Dell will fall to third place behind Apple. Yes, “not relevant” Apple (see: above). In , the “Dell Dude” himself, actor Ben Curtis, was forced to admit something that must be embarrassing for the company. When asked if he was using a Dell at the time the commercials were running, Curtis responded: “Absolutely.” The logical follow up: “Are you using one now?” His response: “I have a… desktop. I am using a Mac right now.” Curtis, probably realizing what that must sound like (and clearly hoping Dell will eventually bring him back), tried to backtrack a bit, saying the MacBook he uses was a gift. But then he pushed forward with something that’s fairly obvious to everyone. About his Apple machine: “It’s something that has also been sort of one of the necessities now. Which is what I think Dell is competing with. Trying to get back to the younger generations which have been inundated by Apple.” You visit college campuses these days and you see this. More importantly, you visit the homes of people with young children and it’s iPads galore. Does anyone really believe these kids are going to grow up to buy Dell computers? Does anyone believe any of these kids will actually know what Dell computers are? Does any kid today remember what a Gateway 2000 machine was? And those guys had cow boxes. All of this sort of makes me sad when I think back to my Dell, which was, incidentally, also the last Windows PC I ever bought. It could, without question, beat the shit out of my current MacBook. But that’s only in the brute-force sense — like a heavyweight boxer beating up a flyweight. Let’s go with that analogy for a second. Dell as the heavyweight boxer works because much like the world in which we now live, heavyweight boxing no longer matters. In fact, boxing as a whole really doesn’t matter anymore either — increasingly like the PC industry. Tablets and smartphones are various types of the new sport that does matter: MMA. Dell was the last great heavyweight champ. (With HP potentially ruining its legacy by continuing to slog it out in a pathetic way, well past its prime.) And heavyweight champs .
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The Future Of Fractional Ownership
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
Over the last several years, the idea of collaborative consumption has really taken off. Thanks to startups like Airbnb, Getaround, Taskrabbit and others, people are making more efficient use of their assets or time. The idea that anyone with an extra room to share, or a car they barely use, or spare time or skills that can be better utilized by others — all of it has created a whole new group of marketplaces built on connecting “those who have” with “those in need” on a short-term basis. That’s what the sharing economy is all about. In a lot of ways, the sharing economy is helping to reduce peak demand for goods and services. That guests can rent rooms on Airbnb during SXSW is a more efficient use of resources than if the Austin hospitality industry decided to build a whole bunch of hotels just to deal with one week of visitors. And Getaround or Relayrides renters are helping to make use of cars that otherwise go unused most of the time. But the thing about the sharing economy is that, at least when it comes to marketplaces like Airbnb or Getaround, it still relies on a lot of people owning a lot of things. And if we’re talking about true efficiency, it seems to me that we’re going to need to go a step beyond just the owner-renter model for the collaborative consumption market, and into an area that’s based on fractional ownership of goods. Fractional ownership is not a new idea — vacation time-shares have been around forever, for instance — but it could be applied more broadly and more efficiently in more markets. One prime example is in the way people own and use cars: It’s no surprise that most vehicles go unused 23 or 22 hours out of the day. And the various car- and ride-sharing services are getting users one step closer to not needing their own vehicles, at least in urban areas and at least part of the time. But what if, instead of most people on my block owning a car that sits parked the vast majority of the time, each of us shared ownership of a vehicle or group of vehicles in the neighborhood. Sure, I can rent nearby neighbor’s cars today on an a la carte basis, but that still requires a person to purchase, pay insurance for, and maintain that vehicle for himself, me, and anyone else who wants to use it. For those of us who don’t own our own vehicles, there’s also the tricky matter of insurance, and who’s to blame or who will cover for an accident that happens in someone else’s car. On-demand car rental services like Zipcar have gotten us one step closer to answering at least some of those questions. But the infrastructure around Zipcar has its own inefficiencies: It has built its fleet to handle peak demand, and so it’s cars, also, go unused a lot of the time. As a result, it tends to be more expensive than the real sharing economy of car rental startups. Anyway, I don’t want to rent a car by the hour or by the day, whether it be a neighbor’s car or one from Zipcar. What I really would like is to be able to share a car along with other people in my neighborhood and find a way to finance, manage insurance, and manage booking in a single dashboard. I want to be able to subscribe to a service where I’m paying for access to get around when I want, with insurance (and maybe gas) built in. Where a car sits in a shared lot and is maintained by someone else. Ultimately, I think this is where the auto industry is headed — or at least where it should go. At some point, U.S. auto manufacturers will likely find that people are buying fewer cars and hopefully holding onto them longer. That sharing economy companies are allowing those who previously owned a car to be able to go without. And when that happens, I think it will make more sense for automakers to set up their own Zipcar-like lots in major cities and to lease access to their vehicles rather than sell them outright. Of course, the same efficiency model could be applied to other goods: Why should everyone in the suburbs buy their own lawnmowers when they could all use the same, jointly owned piece of equipment? Why build an Airbnb for boats when you can build a platform for fractional ownership of a boat? And the old standby — why Airbnb a vacation home to others when you could have ownership of it with a group of others? We know that these models can work as long as we have the right tools to manage them. The question is, who’s going to build us this future based on fractional ownership? [Photo Credit: via ]
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Apple Reportedly Developing A Curved Glass Smart Watch
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
Both and have reported that Apple is currently developing a smart watch. According to anonymous sources, the company is experimenting with “wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass” that would operate on Apple’s iOS platform in its Cupertino headquarters. The New York Times report says that Apple’s watch would differentiate itself from competing devices “based on the company’s understanding of how such glass can curve around the human body” (like , eh?). Though it’s unclear what features the watch will have or even when it will be released, it’s reasonable to assume that an Apple watch will be constructed from glass from Corning, which made the and announced last year that after a decade of development, it had created bendable glass, called . Pete Bocko, the chief technology officer for Corning Glass Technologies, told the New York Times, that “you can certainly make [WIllow Glass] wrap around a cylindrical object and that could be someone’s wrist. Right now, if I tried to make something that looked like a watch, that could be done using this flexible glass.” This is not the first time that reports of an Apple watch have surfaced. Last December, said that Apple may be in the process of developing its own smartwatch that connects Apple devices via Bluetooth. That report said Apple would be working with Intel to create the smart watch with a 1.5-inch PMOLED display made by RiTDisplay with ITO-coated glass. Like every other Apple rumor that has and , time without end, this one should be taken with a little sprinkling of salt (maybe a soupcon of Green-e certified Himalayan salt, because this Apple that we’re talking about). But there are several signs that an Apple smart watch may indeed soon come to fruition. Many users rig the iPad nano into a full-functioning watch with the simple addition of an . But the iPod nano/strap combo faces stiff competition from high-profile upstarts like the , which started shipping watches at the end of January after raising an impressive $10.2 million on Kickstarter. Even Sony has its own smart watch, called (ahem) , which works with Android-based smartphones. It would be a wise move for Apple to get on the watch bandwagon as soon as possible. As , it would be surprising if competitors like Google aren’t also working on their own smart watches. There are a lot of people out there who would enjoy the convenience of a bluetooth watch connected to their smartphones, not just for the convenience but also to play out their Dick Tracy fantasies (or, in my case, their from Inspector Gadget fantasies).
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Moda Operandi Lets You Buy Fashion Week Looks, Now
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Leslie Hitchcock
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
Have you ever been at a runway show and been irritated that you can’t purchase a look from the collection right then and there? Oh. You haven’t? Well, then you probably haven’t heard of , and that’s your misfortune. There are and then there are 1 percent problems. , a fashion retail site co-founded by of Vogue Magazine fame, solves both of them for the well-heeled (and incredibly impatient) fashionable set. And the company exhibited in Startup Alley at New York Disrupt 2011, so clearly they’re in the know. Now you can be, too. As a loyal reader of Vogue, I did a dance for joy when Moda Operandi was announced in 2010. Bridging the pesky gap between , the site’s premise is simple: In partnership with select designers, it offers up to 16 pieces straight off the runway in an online trunk show. The trunk shows are only open for three days. In that window, you can purchase the looks you want by paying half of the cost upfront and the other half when the garment ships. The upside is clear: highly coveted, exclusive looks that can be ordered directly upon collection presentation. The downside? The pieces aren’t shipped for months. MONTHS. Which makes sense, if you understand runway shows. The garments sashaying down the catwalk are meant for production for the following season. This arcane system has been in place for decades and makes less sense now that collections are streamed, and immediately. But that is how the industry works. After a few years of watching Moda Operandi grow, and not pulling the trigger on a purchase, I was finally ready to place my first order last summer. The site is well-designed and mimics most online retailers in its layout. Most looks are displayed as whole outfits, and when you click, you’re able to look at, say, a coat, blouse and trousers from a particular outfit. I like seeing what the designer had envisioned even if I’m hesitant to wear one brand from head to toe. A daily email is sent out each morning announcing the sales that opened and those upcoming. My hook was Tibi, a fast-growing clothier whose pieces are a mix of whimsical prints and lush fabrics that I can seldom resist. The sale opened in early July 2012. As I’m understated in my fashion choices, I homed in on a silk faille ball skirt in a bright red color. I happily entered my payment information and clicked “submit.” The glow wore off when I received my confirmation email. Delivery window from October through JANUARY?!? Le sigh. A season passes. Summer becomes autumn, autumn winds its way toward winter. And then I receive shipping verification. It was like a surprise present in the mail! For the record, it was shipped on November 22, 2012. The skirt was everything I had imagined. I’ve worn it to appropriate places like the ballet. Image by Colleen Stockmann Random places such as to an upscale pizzeria with sneakers and a t-shirt. To a holiday celebration at my grandmother’s house. (By the way, I’m blonde now.) In short, I love it. And I love how easy Moda Operandi made it for me to buy something that I wear so frequently. The process was not without disappointments, though. While some of the pieces a designer offers through Moda Operandi are not planned to be mass-produced, many do end up as part of that season’s wares. This particular skirt is a top seller on the Tibi website and was available for purchase directly through the brand considerably earlier than it was delivered to me. If I’d known that was going to be the case, I might have waited, but in all honesty it was nice to be able to in effect layaway a garment and not feel the sting of a more pricey item all at once. Also, I received a shipping notification but no tracking code. The skirt arrived a week or so after the first shipping alert email, almost by sneak attack. That part of the process could be more user-friendly. Watching Moda Operandi as I have through the years, I’ve seen it grow beyond simple trunk shows into boutiques where Santo Domingo identifies her favorite looks, which are then offered for longer periods than three days. One may browse by type of clothing rather than just by designer. The site is also beginning to support fashion from other countries, most notably celebrating Australian Fashion Week. I do ! Based on my experience, I’ll continue to actively pursue a future purchase on Moda Operandi. And I’m very excited to see how they expand next!
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A Walk Through Downtown Las Vegas, Where A New Generation Of Startups Is Taking Root [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
When many people think of Vegas, they think of the casino- and tourist-filled area known as . But the Downtown Project, which is headed up by Zappos CEO , is focused on bringing new life to what’s also known as “ ,” an urban area that’s rich with history (it used to be the playground for the likes of ) but is now ripe for revitalization. The startup scene that’s growing in Downtown Vegas is the kind of thing that’s best understood by seeing it, so we took a walk through the area with , who is one of the most prominent characters in the core group of people working around the clock to make the Downtown Project happen. Ware’s without a doubt one of the most well-versed on the whole situation, so it was a pleasure for him to take us through the streets of old Vegas and talk about how the area has changed recently and the vision for its future. And since Ware is also one of the co-founders of , a project that’s bringing a host of new coworking spaces to the Downtown Vegas area, we ended our stroll at one of those construction sites. You can see all of that in the video embedded above. Be sure to check back in for more TCTV coverage from Vegas (we shot a lot of things!) Already posted is our tour of the Vegas-based robotics startup — check that out .
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The Five Ways Users Organize Their Apps And What App Designers Can Learn From This
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
A reveals the five main ways people are organizing the applications on their smartphones. Despite the somewhat esoteric focus of a study like this, the resulting analysis has a broader impact on our digital lives. The content found in mobile app stores is growing at an exponential rate. There are over 800,000 iOS applications, just under that on Android, and app downloads . And yet, even though we’re heading into a world where we’ll soon have over a million applications at our fingertips, the methods for discovering applications, downloading them to our devices, and managing them once there, are holdovers from the desktop era. The desktop era which, mind you, is now over. According to the latest numbers from the major analyst firms tracking PC market share, if you start counting tablets as computers – as some are – then the desktop days are done. For now, . This is what “post-PC” looks like. Smartphones are PCs, too – they’re just little ones. That makes managing the applications that grace our homescreens and app trays even more important. We don’t have the room to spread out anymore. We can’t fit as many apps on a screen. We have to make sense of diverse collections, where unrelated items – maps and games and social tools and communicators – lie side-by-side. Because I find this shift to mobile interesting – and because I have now accidentally downloaded over 600 mobile applications (yes, many of which are for “testing” purposes) – I’m fascinated by which surfaces the many ways in which users are arranging the apps on their smartphones. The researchers, Mattias Böhmer and Antonio Krüger from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, will present their findings at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in May 2013 in Paris. The two analyzed over 1,400 screens from over 130 users, both on iPhone and Android devices, and asked the study’s participants to answer a range of questions related to their behavior. From the data collected, the team found that there were five high-level concepts which people have adopted for organizing the apps on their phones. And they are: All five concepts are not mutually exclusive, of course, as the below chart indicates. But you can see that the most popular way to organize involves usage and relatedness. A common overlap involves three conceptual areas – the most frequently used apps on the first screen, folders of related apps on the following screens, and rarely used apps on the last. For app publishers, this kind of data matters because it speaks to the chances of an app being opened and used after download – or in developer-speak, repeat usage and engagement. Some users told the researchers that they reserved the last page of their app screens for “silly apps,” or those they might use “some day.” They also shoved any of their apps that didn’t readily fit into their preferred organizational system to the last screen, too. One referred to this section as the “land of misfit apps.” Raise your hand if you have a screen like this. Many of us do. That’s important to note because it could mean that truly unique apps could end up hidden away and forgotten simply because they don’t fit in the structures we have in our minds about how our apps should be organized. From personal experience, I know that being included in a regularly used folder means there’s a higher chance I’ll open that app again (e.g. “photo edits”) The study also examines some iPhone-specific results, finding that those who organized apps by usage tended to have more apps on their phone’s first screen than others. Meanwhile, those who organized by relatedness were more likely to have folders on their first page. These people also arranged their apps more often. Those who used external concepts were less likely to use folders at all. Folders were generally used to group related apps, or they were used to group apps that share a similar workflow – like shopping apps and payment apps, or photo editing apps with camera apps. In terms of Android-specific findings, the data was more limited. That’s probably because, to some extent, Android’s operating system design is less about organizing pages of apps, and more about building functional interfaces – some of which include live data in the form of widgets, like weather, stocks, social updates, news, and more. The report did look into the placement of apps versus widgets, however, and found that Android users tend to keep widgets at the top of their screen and icons below, likely for ease-of-access. What this research tells app designers and developers, is that it’s important to know what kinds of other apps are placed around your app, because it can speak to your users’ needs. For example, if users have put your photo editing app next to Instagram or Facebook, maybe you should add “share with…” functionality to your app. (This is a basic example, of course – most photo-editing apps have sharing built-in.) This sort of research applies more to apps that are not games, it seems, as those tend to follow different usage patterns. More often than not, games are seen as disposable apps by their users. Today’s app makers already study engagement metrics for their own apps, and look to maximize repeat usage through push notifications and other reminders. But by learning more about how their apps live on users’ homescreens, what sort of context surrounds them, and where they fit into a user’s workflow, they could increase engagement by becoming a part of more established routines.
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Silence For Android Automatically Hushes Your Phone (And Helps You Save Face)
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
We’ve all been there — you’re right in the middle of a sensitive situation and just a moment later you’re scrambling to find your ringing phone and shut it off like an ape groping for a particularly pesky nit. Alternately, I’ve missed more than my fair share of phone calls just because I forgot to turn silent mode . Surely there must be a happy medium. Well, of course there is. I’ve been playing with an Android app called for the past few days now, and it’s been nothing short of magical for me. The app’s unassuming name belies what it’s really capable of. Long story short, the app silences your phone (or sets it to vibrate) according to some preset event triggers — once that pre-determined amount of time has elapsed, your smartphone goes right back to its usual boisterous self. What’s more, there’s no limit to the number of events you can create, so go ahead and map out your entire week if you feel like it. Sure, it requires a bit more forethought than you might otherwise be willing to devote to a task that seems so menial, but it’s made my past week just a bit more bearable since I wasn’t coming off as a jerk for not answering my phone. Silence isn’t new, strictly speaking, but the team behind the app just recently pushed out a 2.0 update that happens to add a slew of new goodies — think turning your mobile data connection on and off as needed and the ability to pull events from your Google Calendar. Perhaps most importantly, the new update means that notifications, media and alarm volumes can be automatically tweaked at preset times, too, so an errant text received during the middle of a funeral (I’ve been there — it’s not pleasant) doesn’t throw things off too much. Granted, this isn’t the sort of app that everyone is going to need in their respective toolboxes, but it works like a charm. The concept is simple, the execution is smart and the price (free!) is right if you’re all right with a few ads. You can check Silence out in the Google Play Store .
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Looking For A Valentine’s Gift With A Literary Touch? Coliloquy Is Offering Personalized Erotica
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
You’ve only got four days left until Valentine’s Day, and if you’re scrambling for gift ideas, e-book startup has an unusual promotion. Be warned, though: It is, in the words of co-founder and CEO Lisa Rutherford, “very explicit and very dirty.” That’s right. Coliloquy is offering free, personalized erotic short stories through a program called . It’s part of that the company created with the L. Perkins Agency. For the Val-Entwined promotion, author Lissa Trevor has created a story template that readers can personalize with the details of their relationship, like the name and gender of their significant others, their most sensitive body parts and so on. You can then personalize the cover and send it as an email attachment that opens on Kindle devices. To demonstrate the program, Rutherford had me create a story for her co-founder and CTO Waynn Lue. To my mind, at least, the content definitely lived up to her promise of dirtiness — I like to think that I’m reasonably hard to shock , but when Rutherford started reading passages out loud, I’m pretty sure I turned a little red. I also laughed a lot, which I’d argue is a natural reaction to hearing the details of the torrid sex that you’re going to have with the entrepreneur sitting next to you. Put another way: This probably isn’t the right gift if you’re still feeling things out in a new relationship. But if you and your significant other are pretty, uh, comfortable with each other (or if you’ve got a friend with a sense of humor), then this could be the perfect gift. If nothing else, it’s arguably classier than sending each other dirty pictures. The fill-in-the-blank personalization of the Val-Entwined promotion might not seem particularly sophisticated (when I was a kid, I remember receiving a picturebook that was personalized in the same way), but it’s a fun introduction to the Coliloquy platform. The company, which launched in January of last year (in fact, ), aims to add a layer of interactivity to e-books, for example with multiple versions of a single scene or reader polls to determine the plot of future volumes. At Entwined, the stories actually split into four paths, each written by a different author. As of late January, Coliloquy had 39 authors under contract, with 14 series actually launched. Two of its big genres, erotica and young adult fiction, are potentially an uncomfortable fit for a single publisher, and Rutherford acknowledged, “If we had raised a ton of money, we probably would have had different imprints and different voices for each of them.” Entwined seems like the first step in that direction, and the company may be getting more serious about it this year, especially since it plans to launch three more genres.
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Scroogled: Why So Negative, Microsoft?
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
The sure makes it look as if Microsoft had a pretty good week, but while its hardware division is out celebrating, the web division seems to be hell-bent on adding fire to its war with Google. Just after the Surface Pro review embargo expired earlier this week – and Microsoft got to bask in far more praise than it got for the Surface RT – its marketing team picked up the unnecessarily aggressive “ ” campaign against Google once again. For this campaign, the most visible marketing efforts it currently runs for its Outlook.com email service, Microsoft has decided to take a very aggressive approach. But why? is a very good email client that offers a lot of features that differentiate it from Google’s service. Why then does Microsoft feel the need to go negative? [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63u-RG-31B0&w=640&h=360] In this new campaign, Microsoft reminds people that the evil Gmail Man “goes through your personal email sent to Gmail and uses the content to sell ads.” It features all the requisite Surface-studded videos (thankfully, they are a step above the and the infamous ), Facebook and Twitter campaigns, and . That petition, by the way, isn’t exactly going viral. Just over 4,100 people have signed it so far. Microsoft is hoping for 25,000. It’s no secret that Gmail’s algorithms do evaluate the content of your email to serve you personalized ads – Google is and you can . Our own Sarah Perez already . What I don’t get is why Microsoft feels the need to run such a negative campaign. Outlook.com is a very well-designed modern webmail client. It can compete with Gmail on features alone. Quite a few Gmail users have tried it (and you can use it with your Gmail account, too). It’s got tools like Active View that Gmail doesn’t have. Its interface is clean and modern, while Gmail is starting to feel a bit cluttered. Before Christmas, Microsoft ran a similar campaign that put Google’s now paid-for shopping search into its crosshairs. That campaign, too, included a healthy dose of given that Bing’s search results also include a . I don’t think that campaign left a lasting impression on those who read about it. Why doesn’t Microsoft just focus on what it does better than Google? People won’t switch to Outlook en masse because of privacy concerns, but they may switch for the features. Email, of course, is just part of what users expect from a modern suite of web apps, and even there, Microsoft doesn’t need FUD. Its free SkyDrive-based Office Web apps, for example, feel more feature-complete than the Google Drive tools, even though they get very little hype in the press. SkyDrive itself is pretty impressive, too, and can easily keep up with Google Drive. Bing is a matter of preference, but instead of focusing on how Google’s shopping results may or may not be driven by paid placements, why not highlight Bing’s focus on social search – an area where it has a leg up against Google (though it still remains to be seen if that is something people really care about). Negative campaigns like the “Scroogled” ads can work well, as every seasoned politician will likely tell you, but the potential backlash makes them a risky proposition. Microsoft’s marketing team clearly believes that the benefits outweigh the risks, but even though the campaign got plenty of media pickup, I doubt that it will get people to switch. Instead, it makes Microsoft look petty, desperate and overly aggressive. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fanf_5v3mkQ?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WIluNt0mvA?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360]
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Iterations: SnapChat’s Success Challenges Many Silicon Valley Assumptions
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
TechCrunch Yesterday, it was — raised a big round of funding. By now, everyone also knows that SnapChat is a new communication medium, a phenomena reflecting a desire for , and the fastest-growing consumer app out there . As I was drafting this post last night, Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers mentioned the service during the shows “Weekend Update” news segment. We do not know how large SnapChat will become. So, just for fun, let’s assume SnapChat continues to grow and actually turns out to be “the next big thing,” in the same manner that Instagram and Pinterest ascended over the past few years. If this happens, there are fascinating facts about SnapChat that challenge many widely-held within the tech startup community: SnapChat may have been initially viewed as a “toy,” reminiscent of Chris Dixon’s post on this topic. What may have initially seemed like a gimmick could likely be, as Dustin Curtis opined, a new communication medium all together. Again, I have no clue if SnapChat will be a runaway hit like Instagram. I have never even used the app or service. But the facts around the company’s founders, its location, and its offerings provide a provocative challenge to many widely-held assumptions about what ingredients are required for consumer technology success. SnapChat shows it can be done within the confines of college, done outside of the Valley or NYC, done without Facebook or Twitter, and done by leveraging the most important sensor (camera) on the most important devices (phones). And, if SnapChat can continue to grow and become the next Instagram-like sensation, it would have done so as many other breakouts have — by being improbable, by being initially dismissed, and by overcoming many or all of the assumptions many of us hold inside and believe to be conventional wisdom.
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Fly Or Die: BlackBerry Z10
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
The running the new BB10 operating system is a pivotal phone for the company formerly known as RIM. It’s BlackBerry’s flagship all-touch device, and while it has fine specs and cool features, the phone may not be enough to save the beleaguered Waterloo-based company. To be clear, the BlackBerry Z10 is not a bad phone by any means. According to various sources, the phone’s launches in the and were quite successful. It has respectable specs, including a 1280X768 4.2-inch display, an 8-megapixel camera, NFC, LTE, and plenty of storage, and that doesn’t include all of the nifty features built into BB10. Unfortunately, many of those features and specs are already on competing phones from Android OEMs and Apple, making it difficult to convince users on other platforms to jump ship. Even messaging, which BlackBerry has taken to a new level, might not be enough to pull Android and iOS users from their respective platforms. BB10 has possibly the best all-touch messaging experience available, but traditional BlackBerry users will hold out for the QWERTY-packed Q10, while non-BlackBerry people will likely need more than a cool keyboard to migrate. And then you start to measure the various platforms ecosystem-for-ecosystem, both in terms of digital content and accessories. Apple’s content library for music, movies, and apps extends way further than BlackBerry, and the same is true for Android. BlackBerry has promised that BB10 will launch with over 70,000 apps, more than any other OS at launch time. In fact, many of them will be the top apps we use today. However, I’m not convinced it’s enough to compete. At the end of the day, the BlackBerry Z10 is a fine phone. It just happens to be very late. By the way, the BlackBerry Z10 is allegedly delayed getting to U.S. carriers, but it appears that with a mid-March launch.
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The Weekly Good: This Analytics Company Wants To Help Put An End To Human Trafficking
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
Random acts of kindness and good come from many different sources, some of them being from the last place you thought you’d find it. One such source is a New York City based analytics company called . What business have trying to put an end to ? I wasn’t sure, but it’s quite clear that the team has decided to make it its business. That’s exactly how good things get done though, when good people decide to make it so. Their product brings all of your data together to figure out how much you’re spending and making through services like AWS, PayPal and eBay. It then mashes up your costs and sales with social data from services like Twitter and Instagram to bust down silo walls so you can see everything in one place. That approach and passion easily translates into the non-profit venture . I”ve witnessed companies attempt to take some parts of their technology or product and make it available to other non-profits, but it seemed force. That is not the case with SumAll. Here’s their approach: SumAll.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to doing social good by analyzing data. One of the biggest challenges facing charities and non-profits is the lack of resources and data analytics at their disposal. By providing better analytics, we can gauge the success and impact of a social effort and how to improve. Our goal is for charitable organizations to reach more people and to be more effective in the way they do it. If non-profits knew how successful their fundraising campaigns were, or not, they could use their resources in a better way the next time. There’s nothing worse than watching a charity churn and burn, only to fall flat on its face without ever realizing their original core mission. That’s where SumAll steps in. Next week, SumAll will be releasing some analytics that focus on different types of current slave labor: a comparison of 1860s slavery vs. 2012 slavery; a comparison of slavery in different countries; and other human trafficking topics. The information will fittingly become available on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th. Even though the 13th Amendment abolished human trafficking and slavery, it is still very much an issue all over the world. It’s a dark underbelly of society that nobody wants to talk about, and so it’s difficult to make inroads on eradicating it once and for all. SumAll and grabbed $500,000 in extra funding for its non-profit arm, which is a really great approach for any company that is passionate about helping the people around them. When you have core values built into your company culture, you have more in common with your colleagues than just putting in long hours and nightly visits to the local bar to unwind. This is the type of company that investors get excited about and want to fund. The company believes that it can crunch all of the information that is out there, be it numbers or social discussions, and put it into formats that can help society understand the issues at hand a bit better, as well as push non-profits to be more efficient in how it handles its time and funds. Raising money is wonderful, and potentially selling to a larger company could be a huge dream for the whole team, but when you can make a real impact in society by educating people and changing minds of non-believers who are sticking their heads in the sand on a topic, you’ve just effectively changed the world for the better. Can data make the difference? The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. ( , SumAll has the .)
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CrunchWeek: Twitter’s Purchase Of Bluefin, Perfecting Email With Mailbox, AOL, About.me And GDGT
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
It’s time for CrunchWeek, the TechCrunch TV show where a few of us writers take a look back at the past seven days and talk about a few of the week’s most interesting stories. In this edition, , and I discuss in its biggest purchase to date; the , the email management app from the folks at Orchestra; and from AOL, as well as AOL’s
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Reminder: The Disrupt NY Pitch-Off/Meetup Is On Tuesday
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 |
It’s been a few months since our last NYC meet-up and, in an effort to find some of the best startups in New York for Disrupt this year, we’re planning a . The winner will get free tickets and a spot in Startup Alley at the event. One runner-up gets two free tickets to the event. is being held on April 27 – May 1, 2013 in Manhattan. Pitch-off applications are closed and we have 20 teams lined up for your pitching pleasure. They will begin pitching at 7pm. It should be a hoot. Last year, we had over 1,200 attendees come to the meetup, so we know the Big Apple’s tech community is hungry for more social opportunities. We aim to please. But 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. But before we get too excited, a few details: . If you’d like to attend , please register on Plancast . Remember, to participate in Disrupt and the Pitch-Off you must have an unlaunched product (either in stealth or private beta) and you must be ready to launch in late April. We’re looking for sponsors for our event, so if you’d like to purchase a sponsorship and be featured on all of our signage at the event, as well as a link and images in the event posts, please email . Looking forward to another amazing evening in New York!
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Test Prep Giant Kaplan Launches A New EdTech Accelerator In NYC, With TechStars Providing The Bankroll
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
With early-stage capital , it’s a good time to start an education business. (Even if investors are still wary about doling out larger rounds, but ssshhh on that bit.) Of course, when it comes to education, many entrepreneurs are still green. It’s not as easy as it may seem to learn the landscape and understand how best to maneuver lengthy sales cycles and create products teachers and students will actually use. That’s why we saw a glut of dedicated EdTech incubators and accelerators pop up last year — a trend which has continued in 2013 as the big names in education have begun to take notice. This week, , a familiar name in education the growing cavalcade of EdTech accelerators, as the 70-year-old test prep company, teamed up with TechStars to launch the . For some perspective on how quickly the landscape is changing for education startups, if one were to travel back in time to the ancient era of 2011, one would only find a couple of lone accelerators (like and ) holding down the fort. In just the last 12 to 18 months, that list has grown considerably, as EdTech entrepreneurs now have a choice between , , , , and — to name a few. ( .) The old guard of education, which represents some of the largest companies in the industry (like Kaplan) have begun to realize that, in order to survive, they need to invest in technology. While some will inevitably fall thanks to archaic (and inertia-defined) models, education stalwarts like the 90-plus-year-old publishing giant McGraw-Hill as the industry transitions from print to digital and augmented learning experiences. that it’s ready to get into the accelerator game as well. Not all of them will be able to buy their way back into relevancy, but, on the whole, this effort is a net positive for the incumbents and a win-win for education and EdTech startups. For Kaplan, continuing to cultivate new innovations in education technology is critical to the future of the company and the industry at large, Kaplan CEO Andy Rosen said recently. With its new accelerator, the company will be casting a wide net in its search for promising founders and business concepts — any startup or team that “harnesses the latest learnings from the fields of science, instructional design, and technology to support the development of highly effective, evidence-based learning products,” to use the company’s words. Over the next few months, Kaplan and TechStars will select ten education startups to participate in its three-month mentoring and business development program, which will kick of officially on June 18th. Interestingly, Kaplan won’t be taking direct ownership or control of its chosen startups; instead, TechStars is providing the funding and will invest $20K in each founding team. This means that startups in the accelerator program get access to help and resources from Kaplan with no strings attached, TechStars founder David Cohen tells TechCrunch. “This is pretty powerful for EdTech startups,” he continues, “and we’re committed to supporting this … TechStars is a long-term investor.” As to those aforementioned resources, the accelerator will be providing seed capital from TechStars, along with the requisite mentorship from top entrepreneurs, investors, experts and Kaplan executives, co-working space and a Demo Day, which aims to help connect teams to investors. In terms of what Kaplan brings to the table, specifically, the company says that it will provide its startups with access to market insight and a feedback loop from its base of one million active students and 10,000+ instructors, as well as the ability to interface with decision-makers as part of Kaplan’s relationship with 300+ U.S. school districts and 20+ university partners. The company says it will also be providing access to its Learning Science Group, which will provide instructional design resources to help founders get on the right path. In addition, entrepreneurs will be able to tap into a mentor network which includes people like Andy Rosen, David Cohen, Washington Post CEO Don Graham, veteran investor and Foundry Group Managing Director Brad Feld, along with EdTech startup founders like Jose Ferreira of Knewton and Udemy’s Eren Bali. The accelerator will make its home at its headquarters in New York City’s West Village and entrepreneurs can begin applying now. Applications are due by April 14th, with the program beginning on June 18th and culminating at Demo Day on September 12th. For more details on the program and application criteria, .
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EE, Three, BT, Vodafone, O2 All Win 4G Spectrum In The UK, But £2.3B In Bids Falls Short Of The £3.5B Expected
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, has just the winners of the UK spectrum auctions for 4G spectrum on the low-frequency 800MHz band, used for LTE and other mobile broadband services. The list is an attempt at playing fair: it includes fixed line incumbent BT; major mobile carriers Vodafone, Telefonica/O2, and EE; as well as smaller mobile upstart Three. Meanwhile, two applicatants, MLL Telecom and HKT (UK) Company Limited (PCCW and Hong Kong Telecom in Hong Kong), were unsuccessful in their bids, Ofcom said. In all, , and the first services will come in 6 months. That means it fell short of the , and an even bigger drop down from the £22.5 billion raised by 3G auctions a decade ago. “Despite all the noise being made about the UK’s 4G auction, what you can’t hear is the sound of champagne corks popping over at the Treasury as Ofcom’s 4G auction fails to raise George Osborne’s optimistic expectation of £3.5 billion coming in at £2.34 billion,” noted Matthew Howett, telecoms regulation analyst at Ovum. “For the mobile operators there must be widespread relief that the amount paid is a mere fraction of the £22.5bn they were asked to cough up during the 3G licencing process.” Still, this is a major auction in terms of value (let’s say money saved by carriers, perhaps) as well as capacity, and potential services on that capacity. Ofcom says that it went through more than 50 rounds of bidding, and a total of 250 MHz of spectrum was auctioned in two separate bands in 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz — “equivalent to two-thirds of the radio frequencies currently used by wireless devices such as tablets, smartphones and laptops,” Ofcom says. For a country that has one of the highest smartphone penetrations in the developed world ( according to Kantar Worldpanel), the UK has been running behind others like the U.S. when it comes to rolling out superfast broadband services, specifically on LTE. Finally setting this auction date, after many delays, , and now completing the bidding, Ofcom believes it’s now getting off on the right foot to change that. “This is a positive outcome for competition in the UK, which will lead to faster and more widespread mobile broadband, and substantial benefits for consumers and businesses across the country. We are confident that the UK will be among the most competitive markets in the world for 4G services,” said Ed Richards, Ofcom Chief Executive, in a statement. Still, you can also argue that consumer appetite in the UK for the services is still nascent — or at least waiting for more price competition in the area of LTE. EE, the combined efforts of T-Mobile and France Telecom/Orange in the UK, launched the first UK LTE network last year on unused spectrum in another band. Yesterday, the carrier revealed that it’s had . As a bit of background on the two spectrum areas: the lower-frequency 800 MHz band was part of the ‘digital dividend’ freed up when analogue terrestrial TV was switched off. It’s good for long-distance coverage over big areas, such as the UK’s rural expanses and smaller towns and villages. The higher-frequency 2.6 GHz band is better for short distances and fast speeds, ideal in urban environments. Ofcom says that in all the coverage should extend to 98% of the UK’s population, and 99% outdoors. By 2017 “at the latest,” coverage should also extend to 98% of each of the UK’s individual nations — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Ofcom is careful not to be prescriptive when it comes to exactly what technology winning bidders will implement on their spectrum. While mobile carriers like EE, Three, Vodafone and O2 are likely to use it for LTE, BT — which backed out of being a mobile network owner when it spun off its Cellnet network as O2 (now owned by Spanish incumbent Telefonica) — may end up using it for other services like building out its existing WiFi network as well as wholesale services. Ofcom had originally set aside a special tranche of spectrum for on bidder to provide mobile broadband service specifically for indoor reception, and the winner of that lot, it said, was Telefonica/O2. Here is how the spectrum awards break down, according to Ofcom: Release below. After more than 50 rounds of bidding, Everything Everywhere Ltd, Hutchison 3G UK Ltd, Niche Spectrum Ventures Ltd (a subsidiary of BT Group plc), Telefónica UK Ltd and Vodafone Ltd have all won spectrum. This is suitable for rolling out new superfast mobile broadband services to consumers and to small and large businesses across the UK The auction has achieved Ofcom’s purpose of promoting strong competition in the 4G mobile market. This is expected to lead to faster mobile broadband speeds, lower prices, greater innovation, new investment and better coverage. Almost the whole UK population will be able to receive 4G mobile services by the end of 2017 at the latest. A total of 250 MHz of spectrum was auctioned in two separate bands – 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz. This is equivalent to two-thirds of the radio frequencies currently used by wireless devices such as tablets, smartphones and laptops. The lower-frequency 800 MHz band is part of the ‘digital dividend’ freed up when analogue terrestrial TV was switched off, and is ideal for widespread mobile coverage. The higher-frequency 2.6 GHz band is ideal for delivering the capacity needed for faster speeds. The availability of the two will allow 4G networks to achieve widespread coverage as well as offering capacity to cope with significant demand in urban centres. Ed Richards, Ofcom Chief Executive, said: “This is a positive outcome for competition in the UK, which will lead to faster and more widespread mobile broadband, and substantial benefits for consumers and businesses across the country. We are confident that the UK will be among the most competitive markets in the world for 4G services. “4G coverage will extend far beyond that of existing 3G services, covering 98% of the UK population indoors – and even more when outdoors – which is good news for parts of the country currently underserved by mobile broadband. “We also want consumers to be well informed about 4G, so we will be conducting research at the end of this year to show who is deploying services, in which areas and at what speeds. This will help consumers and businesses to choose their most suitable provider.” Ofcom has attached a coverage obligation to one of the 800 MHz lots of spectrum. The winner of this lot is Telefónica UK Ltd. This operator is obliged to provide a mobile broadband service for indoor reception to at least 98% of the UK population (expected to cover at least 99% when outdoors) and at least 95% of the population of each of the UK nations – England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – by the end of 2017 at the latest.
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Yota To Mass Produce E-ink Phone In Singapore
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Russian phone maker Yota Devices will start making its first in Singapore. The company has signed with Hi-P, a manufacturer in the country, to have it mass-produce the devices. Yota’s COO, Lau Geckler, told us that he is also in Singapore to help set up Yota’s Asian sales office and the company’s second R&D facility. Its original R&D center is in Finland, and it has development teams in Russia and the U.S., he said. The company is now hiring mainly sales and marketing staff for Asia and in the U.S. to add to the 55 people it has in its headquarters in Russia, which take care of software development and design. Geckler, who joined Yota last August, said the company has been on an aggressive hiring spree, and that the team has grown from 15 when he joined to its current size. When I met him, he showed me the YotaPhone. The charger was hastily bound to the phone by a rubber band, and he apologized, noting that it is still in prototype form, but the company expects to iron out all those kinks together with Hi-P here, as it takes it to mass production. He wouldn’t talk of how many phones they had committed to make here, but I get the feeling that once things ramp up, Yota could be free to move the process to a cheaper location in China, perhaps. Geckler said that the company intends to own as much of the manufacturing process’ IP as possible. Still, it won’t be for a while. He said that Yota isn’t looking to sign on more manufacturing partners for now, and it is keen to first start selling in Russia, before moving into Asian markets, particularly Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and Hong Kong, where interest has been high. Japanese users, in particular, tend to hold both e-ink e-reader devices and smartphones, so the product seems fit for them, he added. Yota was a spin-off of Russian operator, Yota, in December 2011. Yota recently merged with Megafon, a fellow operator in the country. Back in Russia, Yota also sells LTE modems, routers and dongles. It’s sold 3 million of these devices so far, and last year sold a million.
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Ingredient Subscription Service Blue Apron Raises $3M To Help You Cook Fresh Meals
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
, a startup that aims to help you cook new foods while taking a lot of the inconvenience and waste out of the process, announced today that it has raised a $3 million Series A. The company delivers fresh ingredients and instructions for up to three meals a week, for $9.99 per person per meal. When , it was only available in the Northeastern U.S. Now the company says that it delivers to 50 percent of the country (it hasn’t reached the West Coast yet) with 6,000 meals delivered each week. It has also added a vegetarian option. With the new funding, co-founder and CEO Matt Salzberg said he’s hoping to continue the geographic expansion (it should be nationwide “reasonably soon”) and to add other meal types. It sounds like growing a service like this can get pretty complicated — especially since he thinks of the company as “a food company first and a logistics company second.” He added: “It requires an enormous amount of skill, a network of suppliers, assembling new recipes for people every week, then obviously getting it all across the country.” But it’s definitely something that I can imagine lots of busy people (who don’t want to eat out or eat prepackaged foods all the time) wanting to use. The new funding comes from First Round Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Dave Tisch and others. Blue Apron previously raised a $900,000 seed round.
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 2 | 10 | null |
BrightBytes Grabs $750K To Help Schools Measure The Real Impact Of Technology On Student Learning
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
has been on a mission to “improve the way the world learns through data” — and, in turn, to help schools solve their technological woes. To do that, the San Francisco-based learning analytics startup provides schools with the tools and services they need to be able to more effectively measure the impact of technology on the learning process. The company’s first product, Clarity, is a SaaS data analytics platform for K-12 schools, which the startup offers on a one-year subscription basis, to be renewed annually. Clarity measures the efficiency of tools in use in the classroom and the impact those tools have on student achievement, while providing easy-to-use roadmaps to address shortcomings. In the first six months of sales, BrightBytes co-founder Rob Mancabelli tells us, more than 2,000 schools in over 20 states joined the platform, and the startup is on track to have 5,000 schools by the end of the summer. To support this growth, BrightBytes recently secured its first financing in a $750K seed round led by Learn Capital. NewSchools Venture Fund and an unnamed “strategic investor in the education sector” also participated in the round. Thanks to the rise of social networking, the growing ubiquity of mobile devices and the cloud, and the fundamental maturation of the web as a distribution channel (among other things), the opportunities for learning look far different than they did five years ago. However, teaching itself remains remarkably unchanged. Educators still teach the same way they did when we were in school — when our parents were in school. Students today grow up with mobile phones, with Facebook, the web and laptops. With the rate of technological change accelerating (and our behaviors slowly adapting to that change), it’s imperative that educators begin teaching not to precedents but to the way students actually learn. Today. Schools, educators and administrators understand the importance of integrating technology into the classroom, but as the number of EdTech startups, tools and platforms increases, it can be tough for educators to find the signal from the noise and identify which technologies are having the biggest impact on what’s most important: Teacher performance and student outcomes. In the EdTech sector, where schools are traversing relatively new ground, experience in education is critical to winning over teachers and administrators and gaining the trust of both schools and investors. Part of the interest in BrightBytes stems from the fact that Mancabelli has worked in and around the education industry for more than 15 years (at both private and public levels) and about how schools can better prepare their students in the midst of technological change. Mancabelli also sits on the “educational boards” at companies like Acer and Dell, advising companies on how to best interface with educators. His co-founder, Hisham Anwar, was the director of global technology operations at Zynga before leaving for BrightBytes and already has two startup exits under his belt. The co-founders have since assembled a team of data scientists, statisticians and educators, who have helped create a platform that aims to capture and give a more granular look into the relationship between technology use and student achievement. To do that, its team of researchers analyzes research papers, publications, reports, case studies and best practices from schools all over the country to identify what’s working and what isn’t. It then combines these qualitative factors with quantitative data from the school in question (in tandem with data from third-party sources) in a customized dashboard for easy consumption. The startup also creates reports for individual schools, offering recommendations on how schools can improve their use of technology as well as decision support and other business intelligence-style services. Basically, that means that BrightBytes’ own technology takes a look at the cross section of demographics at play in each individual school, identifies the problem areas (What?! No iPads?!) and lays out exactly how the school can go about (affordably) closing that gap. There are plenty of startups already out there offering quality, realtime analytics help to schools and educators (like . But few if any offer the kind of comprehensive comprehensive comparison between an individual school and key performance indicators at district, state and national levels. Combining internal data with external data allows BrightBytes (presumably) to provide a much more nuanced look at where schools are dropping the ball and, as a consequence, more valuable intelligence and recommendations on just what to do about it. Because, after all, you can only tell a school so many times that it needs to “get with it” and “start living in the modern era” … in practice, that means nothing. Just another hollow directive. But actually showing the efficacy of adaptive learning tools on student outcomes and showing them how to prevent their school from having the lowest test scores in the district? That’s money in the bank — and technology improving education, rather than just confusing it. For more on BrightBytes’ approach to Clarity, .
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Samsung, LG Display Feud Winding Down As LG Drops Sales Ban Request Against Galaxy Note 10.1
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
The War of the Korean Tech Giants: Battle Display is approaching a detente. LG Display has dropped its request for a domestic sales ban on rival Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1, . The world’s two top display makers (Samsung is in the number one spot) have been by slapping each other with lawsuits since September. LG had sought the sales ban in response to an injunction Samsung filed against LG’s products based on Samsung’s confidential OLED tech. It looks like Samsung and LG, cornerstones of South Korea’s economy, are sticking to their to settle their patent dispute through mediation instead of in court, a move they reportedly made in order to keep the situation from escalating further. Rivalry between the two, however, remains just as intense. The fued over OLED tech stretches back to 2011 when Samsung that several of its researchers had leaked details of its OLED tech to LG Display. Six LG Display employees were charged with the theft of Samsung’s technology in July, as Samsung demanded a formal apology. In response, LG Display that the information obtained was industry-wide knowledge and did not constitute a trade secret. Instead of litigation, LG Display now wants to claw its way to the top of the display market by investing more than $600 million to mass produce thinner, more energy efficient OLED panels for televisions, though analysts are skeptical about whether that will help it beat Samsung Display. , analysts don’t expect OLED TVs to contribute to either company’s bottom-lines soon due to the difficult manufacturing process and low production yields.
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Today We Hit Peak Hack (Or So I Hope)
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Can we talk about how ridiculous today was? It feels like we’ve reached some kind of turning point. As a cultural idea, when hacking becomes a tool for , it has well and truly left the domain of . I am, of course, referring to the time on their own Twitter accounts. And then Denny’s posted a little joke of its own with — or ? Maybe I’m just getting old, but when major entertainment brands are that they’ve been hacked, I feel like I’m living in . If you want to understand , just think about the fact that MTV pointed to “the spirit of corporate camaraderie” in order to explain a tweet declaring, “MMM. THIS BURGER TASTES GOOD!!!!!!!!!!” Yes, sir. Corporate camaraderie. To be clear, I know, uh, next to nothing when it comes to actual hacking. And the real hacking and fake hacking aren’t entirely separate: MTV and BET hopped on this because it really was starting to seem like every big-brand Twitter account (well, Burger King and Jeep) had been hacked. Plus, hacking was on everyone’s mind anyway, because of like Facebook and Apple. Still, when it becomes part of a company’s social media marketing, well, we’ve crossed some kind of threshold. So yes. . Savor it. Not that we’ll see an end to hacking jokes and memes. Indeed, .
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Sina Shares Rise 6% After Hours On Q4 Earnings As It Promotes Former Cisco VP To CTO & Co-President
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Despite investors’ concerns over a slowing online advertising market in China, Sina managed to that exceeded analysts’ expectations, though its earnings fell 74 percent from a year earlier. Investors were encouraged by Sina’s results, however, and . Sina’s stock price has dropped 13.4 percent since the beginning of the fourth quarter, falling alongside the shares of peers like Baidu and Sohu.com due to a weaker economy. Sina reported overall Q4 net revenue was $139.1 million, outperforming Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S’ average forecast for $133.9 million. Non-advertising revenue slipped 4 percent to $28.5 million. Net profit fell 74 percent in the Q4 to $2.4 million, or 3 cents per share, from $9.3 million, or 14 cents per share, a year earlier, though excluding certain items, non-GAAP earnings were $9 million, or 13 cents a share, compared to $14 million or 21 cents a share a year earlier. That was much better than analysts’ average forecast for 5 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Sina’s guidance for Q1 adjusted net revenue is in the range between $115 million and $119 million, in line with Wall Street’s expectations for $117 million. It expects advertising revenue of $94 million to $96 million this quarter. Advertising revenue in Q4 was $110.7 million, exceeding the company’s previous projection for between $110 million and $112 million. The company also new management appointments, including the promotion of its chief operating officer Hong Du to COO and co-president, and the naming of Jack Xu to the position of chief technology officer and co-president. Last December, while reporting directly to him. Before starting at Sina, Xu was corporate vice president of the communications and collaboration business unit at Cisco. His prior positions also include stints as vice president of engineering and research at eBay and CTO at Netease. In a statement, Chao said, “With these management appointments, I believe Sina will be able to compete in China’s online advertising, social networking and mobile Internet spaces with even greater focus and agility.”
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With $1.4M In Tow, Celly Launches On iOS To Let Anyone Create An Instant Mobile Social Network
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Once upon a time, the pinnacle of social networking was the ability to connect with former classmates and share what your cat had for breakfast. Today, the requirements for social networking have evolved and are more immediate. We need social networks to quickly connect us with the classrooms, businesses, hospitals, rallies and neighborhoods we frequent on a daily basis to allow private communications between parents and teachers, to notify neighbors about a burglary, to alert co-workers about emergencies, and so on. Yet, for many real world purposes, today’s social networks are found wanting, suffering from steep learning curves and on-boarding friction, confusing privacy controls, oversharing and fixed sharing policies that don’t necessarily reflect or adapt to niche communication patterns one finds in real life. , a Portland-based startup that makes it easy to instantly create your own social network, believes that the opportunities for social networking in the real world are fundamentally emergent — that groups tend to arise spontaneously, grow and then combine to form interdependent networks. Unlike existing social networks, Celly allows groups to create lightweight, private social networks called “cells” that members can join in seconds from any device. As membership grows, group discussions can be moderated to keep communication on-topic and free of chat storms, oversharing, and cyberbullying threats. The idea is for these cells to serve as social building blocks that can stand alone or link together to form networks that adapt to the size, shape, and sharing policies of any organization. In turn, the startup’s decentralized approach secures private data within autonomous groups, while unlocking communication, workflow and cross-group collaboration throughout your organization. In sum, Celly aims to provide companies and groups with instant, device-agnostic on-boarding for flash networking scenarios, while allowing universal access across those devices, unlimited group sizes and the ability to streamline conversations with moderation roles. Since launching last fall, students, educators, coworkers and community members have created more than 20K cells via the startup’s platform. Celly co-founders Greg Passmore and Russell Okamoto tell us that the most prevalent use cases thus has been among schools, which are using the service for teacher-student and parent-teacher communications and hospitals, which are communicating two-way messages and emergency alerts through the system. The City of Portland is also currently leveraging the service to keep its citizens informed of important alerts related to neighborhood safety and gang activity. On the heels of this adoption, Celly is , which will complement its already existing Android app, allowing users to create cells with one click and invite members to participate from any device that supports SMS or the Web — while on the go. In addition to basic group messaging, Celly’s apps allow users to send polls and alerts and track topics so they can more easily share and organize information. Both the startup’s Android and iPhone apps can also now be used outside the U.S., although SMS is still only available in the states. In conjunction with the the launch of its new iPhone app, Celly is also announcing today that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by Oregon Angel Fund (OAF), with contributions from Upstart Labs, Portland Seed Fund and a handful of angel investors. With its new funding in tow, the startup plans to begin expanding its team, starting with engineering talent. “We’ve got a lot of challenges still ahead of us,” says Celly CTO Greg Passmore, “from trying to reach scale to creating better, simpler user interfaces. But we’re on a mission to build the smallest tool that can have the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time, and we want to work with people who, like us, believe in using software for social good.” For more on Celly,
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Qwiki’s New Storytelling iPhone App Was Downloaded 125K Times In Six Days
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Startup launched a little more than a week ago, and it now says that the app was downloaded 125,000 times in the first six days, with 27,000 Qwikis created. A Qwiki is a slideshow-style video automatically assembled from a user’s photos, videos, and music. It still shows the company’s roots as a multimedia search engine, building a video presentation around any topic that you want to look up. It was in that form that at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2010. But the technology has been redirected towards personal storytelling rather than information consumption. In an email last week, CEO Doug Imbruce told me that the new version of Qwiki (which first last December) was “the ultimate result of all the years we spent building this technology platform,” as well as an extension of , “now as powerful for ABC as it is for my sister in law.” And businesses are already starting to experiment with it. A Qwiki spokesperson told me that the most popular users include WeAreBigBeat (that’s the record label Big Beat), Lucky Magazine, and Smith Hotels, which all had between 1,000 and 1,500 followers. (Qwiki itself has 3,210.) It’s still early days for the new app, but the numbers suggest that there’s some potential here. The startup had plenty of help from Apple, which featured the app in the App Store shortly after the launch. You can .
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Online Fitness Startup Wello Launches Group Workouts, Enabling 3-5 Users To Work Out Together
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Last summer, online fitness provider to provide personalized instruction to users via two-way video conferencing. The platform allows users to easily create time to exercise based on their own schedules, all from the comfort of their own homes. Now, Wello users will be able to take group classes with trainers, allowing them to connect with friends, family, or other users who wish to participate in the same classes. Each group workout can have three-to-five participants, with class times and curriculum set by the trainers. In addition to interaction with the trainer, group workout participants will be able to see and chat with other members of the group workout. People who sign up for group classes on Wello can then invite their friends to also join. That adds a new social element to the service which previously wasn’t available. Meanwhile, trainers can still provide feedback to users, as they can monitor each participant’s actions via video. While motivation and being able to work out with those in other areas is nice, what’s even nicer is that Wello group workouts come at a discounted rate. They start at just $7.50 per session, compared to individual training sessions on Wello, which typically start at $19 each, and go up from there. The Wello group workout rate is also a significant discount over typical group classes at the local gym. Wello was founded by Ann Scott Plante, who had previously worked for Bain & Company, and Leslie Silverglide, who had founded MixtGreens and sold to Nestle’s investment arm. The company in seed funding from Kleiner Perkins, Mohr Davidow, Aberdare Ventures, Mayo Ventures, Morado Ventures, S-Cubed Capital, PhilQuo Ventures, and other angels.
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Demand Media Says It Will ‘Explore’ Split Into Two Separate Companies
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
In today’s , (which operates sites including eHow.com and Livestrong.com, and which has been criticized for being a “content farm”) says it’s considering a plan to split into two publicly traded companies, one focused on content and one focused on website registration. In the earnings press release, chairman and CEO Richard Rosenblatt says: We improved content quality and diversified our distribution channels by successfully revamping our content platform in 2012, and are now prepared to significantly increase our content investments in 2013. In addition, we became a leader in the generic Top Level Domain opportunity, due to substantial investments we made in 2012. We plan to increase this investment ahead of the expected launch later this year. As a result of these two different growth opportunities, we also announced today that our Board of Directors has authorized a plan to explore the separation of our business into two independent publicly-traded companies via a tax-free spin-off. If approved, the separation will facilitate better operational and strategic flexibility, enabling each business to focus on its distinct priorities and growth opportunities. The release notes that at the end of last year, which should expand its registrar business. Demand’s content and media business brought in $227 million in revenue (minus-traffic acquisition costs) last year, up 18 percent from 2011. Meanwhile, revenue from the registrar business is up 12 percent to $134.2 million. For the past quarter, the company reported total revenue of $103.1 million, with net income of $4.7 million.
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‘State’ Opinion Network Defines You By What You Think, Not How Famous You Are
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
wants to democratize opinion sharing, and make Twitter and Wikipedia looks like elitist popularity contests. Led by Jawbone founder Alexander Asseily, State has raised $14 million and will launch later this year. Today it revealed details to TechCrunch about its strategy and investors, plus the first screenshots of its app that could help you change the world or just geek out. “Opinions are the one thing everyone is qualified to give”, explains Asseily, State’s co-founder and Chairman. “On Wikiepedia, only experts can curate. If you’re on Twitter and you say something witty, it might retweeted, but that’s a bit of a crapshoot. “You could say 98% of people are effectively muzzled” on social media because only people with big audiences or lots of background knowledge are really heard. State hopes to give a voice to everyone by combining the ease and short-form format of Twitter with the built-in audience of new blogging platforms like Medium and Quora Blogs. Asseily explains “State is the simplest way for people everywhere to connect their opinions with the world. That applies to you no matter who you are, how popular you are, or how eloquent you are. This is supposed to appeal to the broadest set of people. We’re trying to get individuals everywhere to stand up and speak on whatever topic.” State plans to roll out with an invite-only beta this spring, and you can . Asseily didn’t want to discuss too many specifics about the State interface, but from the screenshots and some coaxing I was able to eke out that State’s mobile apps will start by showing you several opinion areas you could weigh in on, like music, entertainment, sports, news, and politics. In those, you’ll find feeds of opinions from other users that you can comment on or endorse. State also plans to have embedded feeds on news sites (the BBC and Al-Jazeera in the screenshot), so you can wax about what you’re reading. When you post, State hopes to analyze or categorize your thoughts to connect you with like-minded individuals. That means you’ll have people listening even if you don’t have tons of followers. It levels the playing field, and Asseily notes that “On Twitter, saying something frequently increases your chances of being discovered.” But on State, “If you’re loud it doesn’t necessarily give you more airtime.” In more care-free areas like arts and culture, State could just be fun place to discuss your favorite Radiohead song, the best soufflé recipe, the worst player on the New York Yankees, or what will happen next on House Of Cards. But for more serious topics like news and policy, State hopes to let people harness their passion and take collective action, such as petitioning to change out-of-date laws. The key to State’s business is structuring opinion data into something that could aid outside companies. Right now, everyone from news outlets to entertainment companies pay to mine insights from the Twitter firehose. Asseily wants State to take sentiment analysis to the next level. He says “Twitter is a phenomenal service, but it’s unstructured real-time data, and that make it a challenge to extract meaning.” With State, “the insights will be generated in such a way that they are far more precise than what exists.” The former Jawbone founding CEO and current chairman hopes that if his new startup gains scale, business will open their wallets to look into our hearts and minds. The game plan has attracted from an unconventional list of investors, including of Atomico, of Access Industries, Richard Witten of Columbia College, of French ISP Iliad, former UK Minister for Trade , current Jawbone CEO and co-founder , : of Match’s Meetic and Jaina Capital. State’s got a big challenge ahead. Trying to tear people away from their ingrained social networks and post directly to State won’t be easy. State users will be able to quickly syndicate opinions to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, and with any luck their friends will follow them back to the opinion network. The State team is split between the UK and US, It includes Alexander, along with his brother who is the startup’s CEO, and was the head of product development for VoIP disruptor Rebtel and director of biz dev for Skype. To assist with the roadmap and traction in key opinion categories, State has recruited some solid advisors like Atom Factory CEO and Lady Gaga manager , Internet activist , author . State’s also brought on Tim Berners-Lee, one of the “inventors” of the World Wide Web who about the need for something like State. The pursuit of knowledge doesn’t have to be the realm of geniuses alone. There needs to be a middle-ground between sites where only the intelligentsia are creators, and the chaos of old-school forums where anonymous trolling derails conversation. State is trying to invade the space of some of the best-entrenched services on the web. It’s in for a tough fight, but if it succeeds, it could liberate our opinions to make us happy, and to make things happen.
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Codecademy Partners With Twitter, Evernote, Box, And Others To Offer A Suite Of New API Lessons
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
It’s a great time to be a programmer right now, for many reasons — one of which is the wide variety of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that are available that allow developers to build applications with sophisticated features more quickly and easily than ever. , the startup that aims to teach people everywhere how to code, wants to help make those APIs even more accessible. Today Codecademy is that it has partnered with a number of established web companies to offer a host of new lessons that concentrate on the basics of building with their specific APIs. Codecademy first launched API lessons , but this release brings a number of new big name API providers to the mix. Codecademy now has from , , , and . The full list of Codecademy’s new API partners is rounded out by WePay, Microsoft SkyDrive, 23andme, Mashape, Ordr.in, Firebase, Easypost, Github, MailChimp, and Dwolla. What can be done with these types of APIs is significant, Codecademy co-founder told me. “Within a few minutes of starting lessons on Codecademy, users can do a few really awesome things,” he says. The Twitter API lesson teaches users how to read twitter from the code editor and create their own tweets, while the WePay and Dwolla APIs let users send money from the code editor and create invoices, for just a couple examples. It’s a nice update from Codecademy, which has steadily iterated on its platform since its August 2011 launch and now has 17 staffers and . Updates such as these makes the Codecademy platform a more robust one not just for beginning programmers, but also for people with a bit more experience that are keen to learn new things. Check out the full list of new API lessons .
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MTV Twitter “Hack” Prank Was A Risky Ploy For Attention
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
MTV has officially acknowledged that early reports of their hacked Twitter account was, in fact, a prank. An hour ago, MTV’s twitter account began tweeting naughty comments about musicians (screen shots below) and media outlets into reporting the prank. A spokesman for MTV tells TechCrunch in an email “the hack was pre-planned in the spirit of corporate camaraderie with our sister network, BET [Black Entertainment Television]”. The hack seemed real, given the raunchy tweets coming from the account, “Wowz. @SelenaGomez, @AshBenzo + @VanessaHudgens showed major skin n’ sideboob at the #SpringBreakers premiere,” tweeted MTV’s official account” MTV’s marketing director shortly before it went live. After realizing it was a hoax, users began heckling MTV for what appears to be a widely criticized stunt. Denny’s Diner in to make fun of MTV, with a clever tweet that instantly went viral. Perhaps, this stunt, which ended up making Denny’s look cooler than MTV shows that all this hacking news has saturated, to the point of parody. The hoax a coordinated effort to promote the BET Experience, a live music event in Los Angeles. There is some reason to believe such a stunt could end up successful. After Burger King’s actual hack earlier this week, by thousands of users. For better or worse, MTV and BET are getting a lot of (free) coverage. If you subscribe to the notion that “all news is good news,” then the strategy was a marketing success. But, if the on-going torrent of negative tweets keep rolling in, this may have been a very high profile mistake.
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Microsoft Says Outlook.com Gained More Than 1.5M New Users In The 12 Hours After Last Night’s Official Launch
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Last night, Microsoft that it was taking its new webmail service and starting to transition its huge Hotmail user base over to the new interface and platform. That transition is scheduled to last until the end of the summer, when the old Hotmail interface will be retired and the currently optional upgrade will become mandatory. During the first twelve hours since Outlook.com left preview, Microsoft’s senior director of product management Dharmesh Mehta just told us, more than 1.5 million users have already opened new accounts. “In the first twelve hours since Outlook.com left preview, we’re excited to see that 1.5 million new active accounts had been created,” Mehta told us. “This spike in adoption happened prior to sending emails to all Hotmail customers encouraging them to upgrade. It’s great to see so many people like what they see and making the choice to upgrade to Outlook.com.” These new accounts, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed, are a mix of Hotmail upgrades, switchers from Gmail and other services, and people opening new accounts. The spike in new accounts, the company noted, came after the first wave of news about Outlook.com coming out of preview hit last night. This means it still remains to be seen how quickly the existing Hotmail user base will switch over to the new service, but Mehta is probably right that there is a strong interest in alternative email services. You can read more about the transition from Hotmail to Outlook.com in our previous coverage .
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Vine Is Hiring Engineers In NYC, Including One Android Developer
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Vine has just a few new positions for the NY-based engineering team, as by co-founder Colin Kroll. As it would appear, there are to work alongside the three-man team currently developing for Vine. Notably, one of the positions is for an Android developer, which could mean that we’ll see the video-sharing app on Google’s platform relatively soon. The app, owned by Twitter, launched to great fan-fare. If you haven’t been around for the past month, a good description for Vine would be Instagram for video. The app lets you record short six-second looping video and share it to your social network. Vine ran into a couple small speed bumps between today and launch day, namely that the app was almost instantaneously filled with porn upon launch. After regulating various search terms to cut down on user access to the porn vines, Twitter made the tough decision to put a on the app. This was almost certainly nudged along by Apple’s of the Vine app from its featured section a few hours after #porngate, which is a relatively tame reaction compared to the way Apple has yanked other apps from the App Store for similar offenses. Luckily, the porn stuff seems to be in the past, and Vine has quite the future ahead of it. This rapid expansion of the dev team points to a growing user base, which is expected considering Twitter’s expansive reach throughout the digital landscape. Here’s the official : Vine is expanding our 3 person engineering team in NYC. Join us: — colin kroll (@ckb) Job openings include: While building an app, as well as the team, Vine is also working on building out their NYC office. Co-founder even posted a Vine of the work being done. We’re building more than just products here at Vine. — Dom Hofmann (@dhof)
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From An Office Hours Meeting To Crowd Favorite In The Disrupt Battlefield, Buyou Tells All
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
It’s not often that a 20-minute Office Hours session with TC Staffers turns into a spot on the Disrupt Battlefield stage, but for , it just so happens to be the case. The virtual mall app, founded in May 2012, is about as straightforward as possible. You download the Buyou app from the App Store, and you’re instantly teleported to a mall, complete with all your favorite brands and storefronts for easy one-stop shopping. It sounds like every other shopping app out there, but it’s actually quite unique in that it learns your taste and curates the Buyou mall accordingly, and it even shares those preferences with its brand retail partners, letting them be more effective in targeting you for the future. We first met founder Krish Jayaram at an Office Hours meeting in NY, which led him to present at a pitch-off in NYC. (Yep, just like the pitch-off we held a few weeks ago.) After winning top prize at our mini-meetup, the Buyou team went on to apply for Disrupt, getting a choice spot on the Startup Alley floor. From there, things only got better when Buyou was notified that they were a fan favorite, and would have six minutes to present their product in the Battlefield competition. “It was a whirlwind,” said Jayaram. The company has since grown from 10 storefronts to 45 today, with an additional 130 retailers signed on to join the app. Buyou is currently working on partnerships with big-box retailers which should allow for in-app purchases, and a revamp of the app to version 2.0.
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Twitter Is Testing A New Advertising Card For Lead Generation
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 |
Twitter is testing a new ad unit that gives direct marketers a way to generate leads directly from tweets. You can see an example of the unit in promoting Twitter’s small business guide. Not only is there a small image promoting the guide, but if you’re logged in, it also shows a “Get it now” button. When you hit the button, you don’t get asked for a phone number or email address — instead, you get a message saying that “Twitter Advertising will reach out soon.” Presumably, the advertiser will get a list of interested Twitter accounts. Twitter says this functionality is being delivered through , the technology that enables additional media and functionality (like embedding a photo or a video) in tweets. It also says this unit is still being tested. So it could change significantly, or it might not ever see a broad rollout at all. This does seem like something that would be pretty appealing to advertisers, since it gives them a new way to get their messages across, as well as to measure the success of their campaigns in a way that’s more meaningful to them than retweets or clickthroughs to a landing page. Of course, as with any expansion to Twitter advertising, it could also spur some user whinging. For what it’s worth, this sample doesn’t seem particularly obtrusive to me. I’ve asked Twitter for more details about the test and will update if I hear back.
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TechCrunch Writer Update, Sat 02/16 – Fri 02/22
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
They also provide updates on notable news within the organization, like new hires, new roles, and important upcoming events and goals — that sort of thing. This was my response to our fearless leaders’ last update, reprinted by request.) Hey TechCrunch edit team, Here’s my breakdown for the week (2/16-2/22): Total meals: 18 (-2)
# of drinks: 0 (same)
# of days biking: 4 (-1)
# of cigarettes: 14 (+2)
Cups of coffee: 15 (same)
Hours slept: ~24 (-4) All in all, not a bad week, but I could have done better. Most notably, my meals were down over the week, and I had gotten less sleep, due and a I just couldn’t shake. I’m still doing a dry February, so there was no change on the drinks front — expect that number to jump significantly when I resume drinking next week. The good news is that hard drug consumption will likely be down as a result.
The biggest news for me last week was that a . It serves Four Barrel coffee, so it should be a good alternative place to work if I need to get out of my tiny studio apartment but don’t have the wherewithal to visit the office. (Rip Empson disease.) In other news, I hired a cleaning lady (drastically needed), but efforts to get a Taskrabbit to pick stuff up from IKEA for me were unsuccessful over the weekend. Will try again this weekend, or book a Zipcar and get the stuff myself.
Some of you in San Francisco may have noticed that one of the two edit desks in the office was surprisingly clean this week. That’s because I threw out a lot of shit that had been lying around for a while. Apologies if there was swag in there meant for you, but I get the feeling you won’t miss it.
I’ve been asked to head up scouting for our next viral video project, due to the . I’ll be on the lookout for new popular videos to imitate. Unfortunately, I don’t think ‘ ‘ or ‘ ‘ are particularly replicable. Look forward to hearing more in the coming weeks. Onward and upward, Ryan
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China Plans To Expand 4M Broadband Coverage To 70% Of Its Internet Users
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) minister Miao Wei (link via Google Translate) that the Chinese government plans to increase the number of households with broadband access, with more than 70 percent of China’s Internet users getting 4M broadband service by the end of 2013. The initiative is part of the 2013 Broadband China project, which aims to increase FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) coverage by more than 35 million households this year. In 2012, the number of households with FTTH increased 49 percent to 94 million, the MIIT said. The government also plans to add 1.3 million wireless hotspots this year, Miao said. MIIT’s latest update on its Broadband China project follows an (link via Google Translate), when the Ministry said it plans to have broadband coverage in China hit 250 million users by the end of 2015. Expanding broadband coverage is crucial to improving Internet infrastructure for small- to mid-sized businesses in China, especially since the country is lagging behind other member countries in the Organistion for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED). As of December 2012, China had 564 million Internet users, a penetration rate of 39.9 percent, . In that report, the CNNIC also stated that stated that: “At present the Internet penetration rate among SMEs in China still remained at a low level and the broadband construction needed to be pushed further. Meanwhile, compared with the penetration rates of online purchase and online sale of some member countries at the end of 2011 published by OECD, the portion of online sale among SMEs in China was 25.3%, and that of online sale was 26.5%, both remaining at a low level.”
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Computer Science Education Had A Good Day In America
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
America’s elite institutions came out in full force for computer science education. First, the House of Representatives voted to update its traditional students to include a . Then, to top off the day, the nation’s leading geeks, from Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, to encourage young programmers. For now, the congressional competition will include students from each congressional district and “initially focus on developing applications for mobile, tablet and computer platforms” reviewed by community leaders and entrepreneurs in these fields. However, given that technology rapidly changes over time, the competition has been designed with the ability to evolve for the future,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor ( : A), who is one of TechCrunch’s . “This program will introduce students to STEM fields and encourage those who are already interested to explore them,” says Matt Lira, senior advisor to Cantor. The near-unanimous passage of the bill to authorize the competition signals an important turning point in the focus of American priorities, as it recognizes science, technology, education, and math (STEM) as essential to an innovative society (and, the role of government in encouraging STEM) To make the day even better, a super-powered coalition of technologists are supporting Code.org’s mission to make computer programming part of the national education curriculum. The mission also seems to have the support of President Obama, who said during his that he thinks mandating computer programming “makes sense.” High five, America!
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Adobe Debuts Photoshop Touch For Phones, Bringing The Full Power Of The Tablet Version To Your Pocket
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
Adobe’s mobile Photoshop strategy has so far kept more heavyweight editing capabilities to tablets with , and left the iPhone with Photoshop Express. But today the company has officially released Photoshop Touch for iPhone and Android smartphones, which inherits virtually all of the functionality of the more powerful tablet app, with an interface tailored to the smaller screens. Photoshop Touch for phones brings layers (which decrease to three if you’re editing at max resolution), the popular Scribble Selection feature, which lets you use imprecise finger selection to pick out precise parts of a picture, and also carries over all the filters, paint-strokes sharing and other components that make up Photoshop Touch. There’s also the unique Camera fill feature that allows a user to fill in a layer in their creations using their device’s camera. Projects from the phone version can be synced and edited using Photoshop on either tablets or the desktop, too, thanks to Adobe’s Creative Cloud service. [gallery columns="4" ids="766406,766405,766404,766403"] Clearly a lot of attention was paid to making sure that the functionality of Photoshop Touch was not lost in translation as the app was redesigned for smaller-screen devices, but I asked Photoshop Product Manager Stephen Nelson if we might see more differences introduced into the phone and tablet versions (which sell as standalone apps rather than as a single universal piece of software) down the road. “One advantage of having them as separate apps is we do have the flexibility for the two products to diverge slightly,” he said. “And diverge in a way that’s appropriate for the context and the device. You’ll notice a few things that are different already about the phone version, just to fit a smaller screen, but I could see it continuing to evolve slightly differently on the phone compared to the tablet.” Photoshop Touch is priced at $4.99 on the App Store and Google Play, and is available for iPhone 4S or later, 5th gen iPod touch or Android phones running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) or later. If you’re a photographer, mobile or otherwise, and want some powerful editing tools in your pocket, this is definitely a worthwhile upgrade from Photoshop Express.
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EA’s Digital EVP, Playfish Co-Founder Kristian Segerstrale Departs
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
, the EA executive who was in charge of leading the company into a games-as-a-service era, has just left the company. CEO John Riccitiello just announced it in an internal memo and said that EA COO Peter Moore is taking on his responsibilities. Segerstrale , a social games developer that he co-founded with a high school friend Sebastien de Halleux. That deal was a watershed moment for the social gaming industry and an acknowledgment that virtual goods and currencies could represent a significant new revenue model for the industry. . Although Zynga has had a rocky year following its debut as a public company, most of the largest and highest-grossing developers on iOS and Android employ a free-to-play model that includes purchases of virtual currencies and goods. Segerstrale was leading the charge on moving EA into this world where games are not sold as $50 or 60 dollar products off shelves, but instead are services that people subscribe to or pay for through virtual goods and currencies. Internally, it’s not a terribly surprising move. , while Segerstale chose to take on the challenge of moving an older, more bureaucratic gaming company into a world where games are free-to-play. Riccitiello says that Segerstrale is going back into the world of startups, but we don’t have more details on his next move at this time. FROM JOHN RICCITIELLO Today, we are announcing Kristian Segerstrale’s departure from EA, and the consolidation of the digital publishing, marketing and Origin groups that make up EA Digital to report to our COO, Peter Moore. Kristian has elected to return to the world of start-ups where we first met him. I want to thank Kristian for the vision and tireless energy that he invested to help make EA Digital what it is today: a highly-efficient and digitally-tuned operation unlike anything else in the gaming industry. Kristian’s contributions strengthened EA and we wish him well in the future. With the move of the EA Digital teams under Peter’s direction, he will now have responsibility for all of EA’s revenues globally – packaged goods and digital. Aligning the EA Digital groups in Peter’s organization, which already includes Global Publishing, EA Global Media Solutions, Worldwide Customer Experience and Mobile and Social Publishing, gives us greater focus on how we can use digital tools to accelerate revenue growth and improve the customer journey across all of our business. Congratulations to the people and teams that helped build EA Digital into a game-changing asset for our business – I look forward to seeing your efforts continue to help shape how EA leads this increasingly digital industry. And congratulations to Peter Moore as he steps up to take on new responsibilities at EA, and lead this exciting new chapter in our business.
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Pinterest For Products Wanelo Raises At North Of $100M
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
You wouldn’t think that a would be one of the hottest Series A deals of the quarter, but it was. , a site that allows you to bookmark items that you like and, this is crucial, allows you to buy those items via direct links from the site, has been the prettiest girl at the party for the past month or two while it completes its raise. Of course its popularity among investors is boosted by the fact that its mobile app is in the “Top 30 Free Apps” in the App Store currently (at No. 30) and has been oscillating between the No. 1 and No. 2 slots in “Free Lifestyle.” Yet, the high valuation for an e-commerce company is a surprise considering the sector is sharply divided into and The company monetizes through on items sold through the site. Everybody wanted in on this deal: I’m hearing that VCs were literally begging for intros to Wanelo founder , and among the very interested was Sequoia. The deal was closed last week, say sources, and the round was likely between $5 million to $10 million at “north of a $100 million” valuation. Rumor has it that a strategic investor (someone like ) and not a VC firm won the lead. So how do you explain such a high valuation for such a small check? “If Pinterest is the magazine, then Wanelo is the catalogue,” one investor told me on the investment’s appeal. And if the company’s seed valuation was anywhere near normal, the $2 million invested by First Round Capital, FLOODGATE and does indeed look like a .
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Inside ‘Cook Taste Eat,’ The Startup From Celebrity Chef Michael Mina That Wants To Be The Web’s Foodie Destination
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
Celebrity chef has certainly conquered the world of cuisine. Through his , he operates more than a dozen high end restaurants around the world, with his namesake eateries in San Francisco and Las Vegas regularly earning . But now he is setting out to conquer a different realm: The web. Along with his co-founder business partner , Mina has launched a startup called that aims to be the online destination for all things food, ingredients, and recipes. Cook Taste Eat is essentially a digital media company, creating and churning out super high-quality videos and content with an array of celebrity guests. The result is a bit , a bit (RIP), with a splash of “how-to” info regarding kitchen basics — but with a more high end feel and slightly younger vibe, and all in one sleekly designed destination. It’s also got full tech startup cred, with an in-house engineering team based in San Francisco and from Harrison Metal, SV Angel, Khosla Ventures, TriplePoint Capital and Blumberg Capital. It’s the kind of thing that you’ve got to see to really understand, so we were glad to have the opportunity to stop by the in Hayward, California where Cook Taste Eat films its segments to get a first-hand look at the company and its vision. Watch the video embedded above to hear Mina and Melillo give us the rundown on what they’re aiming to bring to the web, why now is the time for food-oriented content to come online, how running a restaurant compares to running a startup, and much more.
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Squeeze Virtual Reality With The Upverter + YC Hardware Hackathon-Winning Cyborg Glove [Video]
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
What if you could actually grasp the sword you pick up in a video game, or if surgeons could feel their robots hit bone? That’s the promise of the , which won this weekend’s Upverter + Y Combinator . Watch as we demo the Frankenstein-meets-Nintendo contraption that lets you touch objects in virtual reality. Duct tape, twine, and a whole lot of hot glue. That’s how Jack Minardi and his team forged the in just eight hours. Minardi, a Python researcher for by day, said he gravitated to hardware hacking because “I could tell a computer exactly what to do, but I wanted to be able to tell the world what to do.” Other teams built gadgets to burn images into toast and more, but Minardi’s squad won an iPad, some Pebble watches, and access to some of Silicon Valley’s top investors. The teammates won’t be quitting their jobs just yet. However, their is on GitHub, and they’re looking for companies to help them build a second prototype using pneumatic artificial muscles. One day the device could rehabilitate stroke victims. Strapping this thing on was surreal. As it pulled my fingers back to simulate the resistance of holding a hard object, I had a sudden urge to go on a robotic rampage. Watch up top as the servos fire and actuators tense to let me feel something that doesn’t exist.
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Budding Service Management App Mhelpdesk Hits 5K Customers
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
is fielding a message to small businesses: help us help you. Headaches can ensue when businesses use separate applications to manage the daunting inflow and outflow of service tickets, scheduling and billing. With little to no communication between those applications, a lot can fall through the cracks. That’s where Mhelpdesk is aiming to make a difference. Mhelpdesk merges those functions into a single unified application that it hopes will attract businesses with its simplicity and functionality. Founded by Vincent Wong, Khoa Ho, and Ryan Shank, Mhelpdesk was originally envisioned as a “help desk” app for closing tickets for IT departments. That direction quickly changed when Wong realized businesses as a whole needed a better way to bridge the gap between service tickets and billing. There are two reasons why Mhelpdesk is staking its claim to become the de facto service management application of choice. The first one is simplicity. “Our software requires no training, setup, or handholding,” says Shank. Its software is easily accessible on both desktop and mobile app platforms (iOS and Android). Mhelpdesk also claims that most of its users got things up and running within a day, surely a boon for more tech-adverse business owners. The second reason is price. Mhelpdesk is based a freemium model which allows users to signup for a free 30 day trial on their website, and upgrade to a premium model with more features and capabilities if they so desire. There are four separate tiers that range from “Lite” ($19 a month) to “Gold” ($149 a month). Instead of paying for the licenses of three separate “fragmented applications”, Mhelpdesk is banking that businesses will aim to cut costs by paying for one application that does all of the above. Mhelpdesk was recently accepted into AOL’s very own Fishbowl Labs, and looks to be on the rise. Here’s some user stats from Shank: “Over 5788 companies use Mhelpdesk to manage their service businesses. Of those 5788+, over 1438 are paying customers. Since Jan 1, 2013 we’ve processed over 44,820 service tickets and over $6.06 million dollars in service billings.”
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How Bad Did Analytics Bugs Fool Facebook Pages? Reach Looked Down 14% When It Wasn’t
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
Months of mysterious Insights bugs duped Facebook Page owners into thinking their reach was plummeting. The median Page’s analytics showed it reached 14.39 percent fewer people than it actually did, according to early data and graphs from , a Facebook analytics startup that gave us the first look. The bugs may have caused people to mistakenly undervalue their Pages, change strategies or buy ads to make up for “lost” reach. Facebook the bugs last week. During its efforts to speed up its iOS and Android apps in August and December, it accidentally stripped out the markers used by Page Insights to count impressions. This and other bugs led several metrics to be underreported. Fixes and bug-prevention systems are now in place, and accurate data began flowing into Page Insights yesterday, making today the earliest opportunity to get a concrete sense of the glitch’s impact. EdgeRank Checker analyzed 1,000 Pages who posted both last week when Insights was still wrong, and yesterday with reach reported accurately. How much reach was underreported depends a bit on the Page’s fan count, as those with 500,000 to 1 million Likes were led farther astray. A Page with 750,000 fans would have been reaching 47,000 fans per post (6.24 percent), according to the broken analytics, when in reality they were reaching 78,000 (10.35 percent). That means Insights was underreporting reach by a massive 66 percent. The impact was more subtle for a Page with 100,000 fans. The buggy Insights would have shown them reaching 10,000 of their fans per post when they were actually reaching 11,000, with reach underreported by 10.2 percent. The most stunning part of the data was that the median Page’s viral reach according to Insights went up 275 percent after the fix. ‘s CEO Chad Wittman believes Facebook also fixed a bug that caused viral reach to exclude the impressions from posts re-shared by a Page’s fans. Once there’s a whole month of accurate data, we’ll get a more precise look at the effect of these bugs. Facebook tells me it doesn’t calculate the aggregate impact, but didn’t dispute EdgeRank Checker’s findings. However, it did note the day-over-day data may look a little more extreme, and the data may even out a bit with time. While in some ways Page admins should be relieved, some are certainly mad. Though squashing the bugs as soon as they were discovered, it still didn’t disclose the issues for the three weeks while it fixed them. Some admins have complained about wanting refunds for ads they bought during the bug period, because they wouldn’t have paid for them if they knew their real reach was higher than shown. If Facebook wants these Pages to keep filling it with content and buying its ads, it can’t have any more slip-ups like this.
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Orange Throws Its Weight Behind Tizen OS, With Phones Launching In France In Q3 — Other Markets In 2014
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
All the mobile OS underdogs are coming out to play at this year’s Mobile World Congress — from Firefox OS, to Ubuntu and Jolla’s Sailfish — rushing in to fill the void left by . Now it’s Tizen’s turn. At an event in Barcelona this evening has officially launched Tizen 2.0, according to , showing off a developer handset running version 2.0 of the platform. It has also announced that carrier France Telecom-Orange has signed up to sell Tizen 2.0 handsets this year. Orange is not the first to get in on the Tizen action: Late last year Japanese carrier in 2013. According to IDC analyst , who also attended the Tizen launch, the first Tizen device will debut in France in August/September — with Orange and Samsung, followed by other markets in 2014. On the hardware side, Tizen devices will come from both Samsung and Huawei. Huawei is also joining the Tizen steering group, according to . Samsung that it would be releasing Tizen devices this year, having backed the open-source Tizen initiative from its , along with Intel. [Image: ] Tweeting from the launch, Jeronimo that Orange has 10 engineers working on its customisation of the Tizen device. With Telefonica stepping in to take an active role in collaborating with , Orange’s interest in Tizen looks like a similar play to diversify away from Android. It also evidently wants to paint Tizen with the Orange colours — customising the OS as it has for own-branded Android powered devices such as the Orange San Diego. At the time of writing, Orange was unavailable for comment. An Orange spokeswoman confirmed its intention to launch a Tizen device this year, saying: “We are planning to introduce a device in Q3 but not sharing details yet.” The current companies on the Tizen Association board of directors are: Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, Kt, NEC, Docomo, Orange, Panasonic, Samsung, SK Telecom, Sprint and Vodafone. Mozilla announced at its MWC press event on Sunday.
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BlackBerry Launches BBM Money Pilot In Indonesia
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
BlackBerry may be launching a new platform in certain markets to try to win back users, but it’s focusing on service additions in other places where the BlackBerry install base remains strong. Today it’s officially launching in Indonesia, in partnership with PermataBank and Monitise to bring real-time mobile payments to BlackBerry’s platform-specific social network and messaging service. The service ( ) allows BlackBerry users to create a mobile money account attached to their BBM identity, and use that to transfer money to other BBM contacts, as well as purchase airtime credit for their device, or move money to bank accounts. The mobile payments play will mean that million of Indonesian BBM customers will be able to quickly conduct business transactions right in the service where many of them already communicate on business matters, and allow merchants and others to quickly accept payments with the devices they already own without requiring the involvement of any third-party device or software. Market saturation of phones overall in Indonesia is high, and BlackBerry is the number one selling smartphone in the country, which makes it a logical place to launch a mobile money service that requires both parties to have BlackBerries to work. Monitise Group Strategy Director Richard Johnson went into more detail about just why the Indonesian market was such a perfect fit for this launch. “BlackBerry Messenger is the dominant short message communication platform in Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world with 240 million people,” he said in an interview. “There is also the country’s 90 percent mobile penetration and the fact that BlackBerry is the number one selling mobile smartphone there – more than half of all smartphones sold in Indonesia are BlackBerry devices. At a global level, what is really exciting here with real-time chat evolving through real-time engagement, is that you are effectively taking a social network and turning it into a payment network.” Users aren’t charged for sending money between BBM contacts, or topping up their airtime minutes on a prepaid SIM using the service. They do incur normal banking and mobile rates, however, depending on their specific bank’s policies regarding fund transfers, and on their mobile plan. It work with any device running BlackBerry OS 5 or higher, with BBM 6 or higher, though it isn’t available on BB10 (which is of little consequence, since it has yet to launch in Indonesia anyway). BBM Money does two key things for BlackBerry: It helps entrench the service in markets where BlackBerry is still the smartphone platform of choice, and it offers yet another opportunity for service differentiation to continue to help evolve BBM into something more than similar offerings from Apple (iMessage) and third parties (Kik, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger). Should the pilot go well, I’d expect to see further launches in other markets where BlackBerry needs to dig in to help keep its lead, like .
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The Super-Slim Xperia Tablet Z Feels Like Sony’s Finest Tablet Yet
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
After Sony released a string of curious Android tablets that failed to catch on, the company had no choice but to go back to the drawing table and try something different. That something different wound up being the , easily one of its most conventional designs yet — a choice that may end up paying off nicely. Now that the decidedly non-kooky Xperia Tablet Z is gearing up for , we tracked one down here at MWC to get a glimpse at what Sony’s tantalizingly thin tab brings to the table. First things first — if you’re a fan of minimalist industrial design, then you’ll find a lot to like here. Sony’s bright 10.1-inch Reality Display (running at 1,920×1200 no less) is the clear focal point of the device’s face, and there’s nothing else save for a Sony logo, an IR blaster in the corner, and an easily missed 2-megapixel camera. The display is also aided by one of Sony’s Mobile Bravia engines, which means colors can easily take on a lurid cast unless you dial it down. Meanwhile, the back is a matte black slab devoid of any detail other than a small Xperia logo and an 8.1-megapixel camera in the top- right corner. One could easily call it dull, but “understated” feels like a better fit because of how nice it feels. The Tablet Z weighs in at a scant 1.09 pounds, and its trim waistline is only 6.99mm thick — for a bit of perspective, the iPad mini is just a hair thicker at 7.22mm. In order to keep the weight as low as possible Sony resorted to an almost entirely plastic body. That sounds like the recipe for a chintzy-feeling tab, but that’s definitely not the case here. Despite being very light, the Tablet Z has a remarkably solid, premium feel to it. There’s a little bit of give to be felt if you grab the thing by the sides and give it a twist so it may suffer from some long-term issues down the road, but it’s a far cry from some of the overly creaky, plasticky tablets that still pepper the market. [slideshow include=”766263,766269,766264,766271,766270,766268,766262,766267″] A quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset and 2GB of RAM are tucked away inside the Tab Z’s waterproof chassis, and my time with the Tablet Z was largely lag-free. When faced with the prospect of putting out tens of devices for public consumption at Mobile World Congress, most companies typically try to do something to keep we nerds from mucking around with them too much. Not so here — I was able to download and install Quadrant from the Google Play Store to get a slightly better idea of what the Tablet Z is capable of. Over the course of three trials the Tablet Z consistently put up scores in the low to mid-7,000s and topped out at 7601 — devices like the Nexus 10 and Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 usually hover around the mid-4,000s. Granted, this is a synthetic benchmark and doesn’t provide a complete picture of performance, but it’s clear that Xperia Tablet Z is no slouch. I only really have one gripe with Xperia Tablet Z — the custom UI that Sony has loaded on top of Android. Longtime readers may know that I’m an avid proponent of leaving Android untouched, and Sony’s implementation just doesn’t do it for me. In fairness, it’s lighter and less cumbersome than some of the other overlays currently clogging up other Android devices so you may disagree, but the occasional bit of visual stutter while rifling through menus, and the fact that background images were distorted when set, raised some flags. That said, Sony has added some neat features to help make up for it, such as a universal remote app that doubles as a programming guide, and a revamped new gallery that displays geotagged photos on a globe. At an early morning press address yesterday, Sony Mobile CEO Kuni Suzuki pointed to a renewed focus on bringing the company’s “cutting-edge technology and resources” to Sony Mobile, and confidently called 2013 a “breakthrough year.” Naturally, it’s too early to tell if that actually pans out, but certainly not impossible. The Xperia Tablet Z is a (hopefully not so) rare return to form for Sony, and here’s hoping that the rest of 2013 is full of products as well-executed as this one.
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Tech Analytics Startup Synapsify Nabs $600K Seed Round Led By ICG Ventures
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
Tech analytics startup announced a whopping $600,000 in seed money today from a cluster of investors that includes , Fortify Ventures, and Middleland Capital. It’s just another part of the ongoing narrative that’s seen the value of data analysis rise over the past several months. After all, last year we found that . This quote from their website delves a little more into Synapsify’s abilities: Synapsify’s technology can (i) read any type of written content based on several dimensions, (ii) reveal the quality, balance, credibility and quotablity of such content and its most important topics and phrases (iii) index and match against any other written content or customized indexes, and (iv) raise the ability to discover, understand and segment actionable insights. In other words, Synapsify takes content from any website (like, say, TechCrunch) and measures its overall value. It even measures quality against competing content, and quantifies, say, the amount of traffic a post from TechCrunch might receive in comparison to one of our friendly competitors. Websites could use these tools to better moderate their forums. Publishers could produce better selling books. Governments could get a clearer sense of what their citizens do and say through social networks. Synapsify promises that the use of its own patented text analytics and search technology will provide clients with expansive abilities to analyze written content. It’s an interesting little departure from what has been the prevailing assumption about data analysis: it’s the collection of numbers. Going beyond how people spend money and what they watch and what time they invest into certain things, Synapsify is seeking to provide a comprehensive and predictive analysis into what people say, like, write, and think. It’s a little scary if you think about it. Welcome to our brave new world. Syanpsify’s API as well as its first set of enterprise customers is set to be announced in the beginning of Q2. “The world has become overwhelmed with written content that can no longer be curated and understood solely by costly human moderators,” says Stephen Caldelmo, CEO and co-founder of Synapsify. “Our patented text analytics technology goes beyond simple keyword mentions or one dimensional positive, negative or neutral classifications, bringing value to the market in a new and exciting way.” We’re sure Fry would have a response to that.
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Calling All Startups, Get Ready For TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
For the fourth year in a row, TechCrunch Disrupt will take over the San Francisco Design Center Concourse, and we’re bringing the hottest startups and best minds in the industry with us. Block off September 7-11 on your calendar, because you’re not going to want to miss . The Disrupt Hackathon kicks everything off the weekend before, where companies like and first started as a gleam in some hacker’s eye. Then comes the main event, which starts every morning with one-on-one chats featuring TechCrunch writers and editors, special guest speakers and judges, along with panels of leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs addressing the most pressing topics facing today’s tech industry. After the talks each afternoon, chosen startups will pitch our esteemed judges for the Startup Battlefield competition, with the final presentations held on the last day of Disrupt, September 11th. Some truly amazing startup stories have had their humble beginnings on the Disrupt stage, like those of Yammer, GetAround, Dropbox, Redbeacon, and Mint.com. Last year , a giant $50,000 check and lots of glory. Each Disrupt is better than the last, so there’s no telling what great things will happen at the SF Design Center Concourse come September. Early bird tickets are and more details about Disrupt SF will follow. We’re very excited about being on home turf. But first we’ll be seeing you at , of course.
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Onswipe Data Suggests Kindle Fire Maintained Its Holiday Traffic Bump, While Nexus 7 Shed Share
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
Last year, noticed that despite considerable growth for the Kindle Fire during its first holiday sales season, interest seemed to drop off pretty quickly a month or so after all the gifts were unwrapped. This year, it wanted to see if the same held true for two leading Android-based tablet platforms, to see if it couldn’t back up the Apple claim that most tablets using Google’s mobile OS quickly fall into disuse. The results saw a considerable jump for both Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 tablet devices during the year’s peak shopping season, with Onswipe traffic from Fire tablets jumping 51.84 percent immediately following the holiday, and the Nexus 7 experiencing a 136.77 percent increase in share. One month later, the Nexus 7 had already shed 25.68 percent of the traffic it gained from the holiday, however, a number which Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste called “significant.” The Kindle Fire, however, actually gained traffic, adding 18.01 percent on top of its existing growth one month after its holiday bump. Baptiste says this is a sign that consumers are responding better to the latest generation of Kindle Fire hardware, in part because of new device designs like the Kindle Fire HD, and in part because of an improved software experience and media ecosystem from Amazon. Google, he says, needs to learn from the Kindle Fire’s example and focus on improving its next-gen Nexus slates, both in terms of hardware specs and software experience, in order to accomplish the kind of sustained traffic increase next year that the Fire managed this time around. The big winner remains the Apple iPad, however, as despite growth by Android tablets from major rivals, the iPad retains a massive 91.96 percent of overall tablet traffic, meaning it has “nothing to worry about” in the foreseeable future in terms of challenges from other makers, according to Baptiste.
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 19 | null |
Instagram Hits 100 Million Monthly Users 28 Months After Launch
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
From just two guys at rented desks to a $715 million sale to Facebook, a second wind on Android and a mess of privacy scares, Instagram today 100 million people use it every month to share the way they see the world. The startup hedged its bets by being acquired just as it expanded beyond iOS, but despite what it could have sold for now, there’s no disputing Instagram’s success. In a heartfelt blog post that smooths over the rough patches, co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom explains the journey to building an app that’s created “a world more connected and understood through photographs.” The untold story is that Instagram made a tough decision right after its April 3rd launch on Android. Before that it had 30 million installs on iOS. Whether it would succeed outside of the design-focused iPhone was a gamble. It could have flopped, attrition could have set in, and it was still small enough to be vulnerable to competitors. So despite racking up 1 million new users in the first 12 hours, there was a lot to lose. for a company with just 13 employees was too good to pass up, so it sold. If Systrom had foreseen what would happen next, he may have held out longer. The Android app maintained its sprint, and the iPhone version continued to pick up steam. Even without much help from Facebook, and in fact despite Facebook’s own competitor Camera, the Instagram juggernaut could not be stopped. At over three times as many users now as when it sold, and seemingly beyond quick disruption, would Instagram have sold for $2 billion or even $3 billion today? Would anyone have been willing to pay that? Remember this was when fervor was frothy for the coming Facebook IPO. Social companies still saw going public as a lucrative option. But Systrom chose to become a made-man (and make made-men out of many of his employees), rather than roll the dice. He chose greater impact by aligning with the world’s premier social network over total control. He still runs Instagram somewhat independently from Facebook, so he may be getting to have his cake and eat it too. Twitter co-founder Ev Williams last week wrote that there are , and any one will suffice: If the offer captures your potential upside, eliminates imminent threat, or if you want to. With one of the best exits in startup history on the table, insurance against failure on Android and competition from Facebook itself, plus a desire to connect the world just like Zuck, Systrom had all three, whether or not 100 million users was just 10 months away. Here’s the full blog post from Kevin: Instagram’s first office had few redeeming qualities—and insulation was not one of them. There were only two of us, so we rented desks in a co-working space on a pier over San Francisco Bay. At night, it was common to find us working in winter jackets huddled over our laptops where the air was so cold we could see our breath. It was October 2010 when we launched Instagram, and San Francisco had dealt us a particularly unforgiving and chilly fall. One night soon after launch, about a half-mile away, Giants Stadium was full of fans cheering on their team in a race for the NLCS against the Philadelphia Phillies. You see, having so little insulation in the office had an unintended consequence of being able to hear the crowd roar every time someone hit a long ball out towards McCovey Cove. Back in the office, we’d lift our heads up from code with every eruption of the fans, wondering who was at bat, what had happened, and whether the ball had made it or not. We never knew, but that wasn’t the point. While we may only have had a few thousand people around the world using Instagram that night, we had a sense that maybe through Instagram we could tune in to what was happening just a few steps away. With a few quick commands at his terminal, my co-founder Mike’s screen filled with images of the game: the bullpen, dugout, concession stands, cheering fans and a panoramic view from somewhere up high. In a matter of hours, the people in that stadium had recorded moments in time through Instagram and allowed us to tune into an event while we sat a half a mile away, working—winter coats and all. For the first time, we understood why Instagram was going to be different. We understood the power of images to connect people to what was happening in the world around them. And, although Instagram had a fraction of the user base it does today, that night we saw a preview of what Instagram would enable at a much larger scale down the road. Now, nearly two and a half years later, over 100 million people use Instagram every month. It’s easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company, but I think the truth is that it’s an accomplishment for our community. Now, more than ever, people are capturing the world in real-time using Instagram—sharing images from the farthest corners of the globe. What we see as a result is a world more connected and understood through photographs. Of the 100 million people on Instagram, there are stories that awe us: stories like Kathryn Mahoney’s (@ ). Kathryn is an aid worker for the United Nations in the most remote refugee camp in Southern Sudan. She shares vivid photos of the day-to-day life of the people who live in Yida as well as the struggles and triumphs of the UN’s work there. From thousands of miles away, Kathryn reminds us of the power of images to educate and inspire. There are love stories that move us, like the story of Cory (@ ) and Bethany (@ ) who began following each other a year and a half ago at the suggestion of a mutual photographer friend. After trading likes on photos, meeting for coffee, and finally joining up for a photowalk, a mutual interest in photography turned into dating. To this day, they still go on photography adventures and explore the world together with Instagram in tow. And there are inspiring stories of small businesses and artisans. Mission Bicycle (@ ), a small, independent manufacture in san Francisco, has amassed nearly 50,000 followers as they share the photos from their daily work of making beautiful bicycles by hand. Similarly, Sightglass Coffee (@ ) shares photos from their harvesting grounds in El Salvador and Ethiopia to remind us that even a local business has global connections. Images have the ability to connect people from all backgrounds, languages and cultures. They connect us to aid workers halfway across the world in Sudan, to entrepreneurs in San Francisco and even to events in our own backyards. Instagram, as a tool to inspire and connect, is only as powerful as the community it is made of. For this reason, we feel extremely lucky to have the chance to build this with all of you. So from our team to the hundred million people who call Instagram home, we say thank you. Thank you for sharing your world and inspiring us all to do the same. Kevin Systrom Co-founder, Instagram
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Former Lolapps Engineers Launch Rollbar, An Error-Tracking Platform For Developers That Has A Sense Of History
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
(formerly Ratchet.io), an error tracking product for developers, is launching its product out of a beta today, following nine months of private testing. Founded by former Lolapps engineers and inspired by tools they once relied on internally, the new company is backed by a small, “pre-seed” round of funding ($250,000+) from , of KISSmetrics, and , former Lolapps CEO. The startup was founded by one-time Lolapps CTO Brian Rue, . He began work in May on what’s now called Rollbar along with Cory Virok, one of Lolapps’s first employees. Now a three-person team based in San Francisco, the company is going after a somewhat unsexy, but definitely necessary piece of development infrastructure: error-tracking. The core problem error tracking products solve, Rue explains, is that as developers are writing code, they break a lot of things. “With the previous generation of solutions for this, is that you could see what’s happening in your logs and get an email when there’s an error,” Rue says. But this solution isn’t that useful because if you get a single email, you don’t know if you’ve seen this issue before, or if it’s been fixed in the past. And you don’t know the severity of the issue. “So the core part of this product is grouping things together so you know what the history of each issue is,” he says. With , when you get an alert, it’s actionable because the issue is either new, or something which has been re-opened. You can dig in and see the history, as well as things like when did the issue start, was it caused by a certain employee, what services was it on, what browser was it on, what countries were affected, what parameters are associated with it, and more. What makes Rollbar different from some of its competitors is its idea of severity levels – the service offers five of these ranging from “debug” to “critical.” For example, an error caused by the Facebook API being down wouldn’t be considered as severe as an issue that was affecting a mission-critical part of your system. Rollbar’s feature set is also fairly rich too, with support for advanced search capabilities, deploy tracking, comments, automatic customer support emails (to tell them issues are fixed), forensics, and more. The system also has a strong understanding of what an exception is, and is able to de-duplicate error messages in order to tell which issues are different from each other, and which should be considered the same. Rollbar’s JSON API is platform-agnostic, and works with most of the web languages, including Ruby, Python, PHP, Node.js, Javascript, and Flash. Work is now underway for iOS and Android support, coming in a few months time. Developers can get up-and-running in around five minutes, in terms of integrating the necessary libraries. They can then view the data and notifications in an online dashboard. This dashboard doesn’t yet include its own workflow, but Rollbar supports integration with GitHub Issues, PivotalTracker and Asana at present. Customers pay for Rollbar on a usage-based model based on occurrences, , depending on company size. Current customers include a number of well-known tech startups, including MapMyRun, Everest, Sincerely, CrowdFlower, InstaCart, InstaEDU, Spruce Media, MesssageMe, Homejoy, Bombfell, SocialSci, and others. Interested users can for a free trial.
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The Chromebook Pixel Is The Most Brilliant Laptop You’ll Never Buy
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MG Siegler
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 |
“Wait. That’s a touchscreen?!” That wasn’t the first thought that popped into my head when I started to use the Chromebook Pixel — it was about the tenth. But that’s only because it seemed impossible that a screen this nice could be a touchscreen. Of course, being that nice, comes with a price. I dove into using the Chromebook Pixel almost completely blind. During the unveiling, I saw some buzz about a new device Google had just unveiled, but I really had not read anything about it when I received one that afternoon from the company. I just figured: Oh, another Chromebook. Cool. (But not that cool.) All it took was holding it for about five seconds to realize that this Chromebook was very different. It was actually well made. that evening sent some people into . Yes, I liked this thing. A Google product! (Of course I have plenty of times and have I would if it was a good product.) But the true test came the past few days. I have not used my MacBook since I got this Chromebook. No, I’m not making some grand statement there — I simply wanted to see if I could possibly use a Chromebook as my primary machine. There’s good and bad news: Yes, I could. No, I won’t. Simply put: the Chromebook Pixel is a brilliant device. That’s not to say it’s all rainbows and puppy dogs. , Frederic hits on many of the downsides of the device — and there are a number of them. I’m going to focus on my experience trying to use this thing as my primary machine, both good and bad. Just as I did, the first thing you’ll notice about the Pixel is the build quality. It’s solid. Unlike previous Chromebooks which ranged from to downright janky, this thing is handsome. It’s not exactly like a MacBook, but it’s not completely different either. In some ways, it’s sort of like a cross between a MacBook and a Microsoft Surface. Really, my only (minor) complaint is that the ports don’t quite feel like they have the same attention to detail as the other parts of this machine (power input is ho-hum, headphone jack is way too tight, etc). When you turn the Pixel on, you’ll see a machine that starts almost immediately. It’s a first taste of just how fast this thing is when paired with the svelte Chrome OS. When the desktop loads, all you’ll see is an amazing background image. It looks like a framed photograph. The retina MacBooks have displays like this. But this is a Chromebook. I had to keep reminding myself of this. As you’re undoubtedly aware, Chrome OS is really just the Chrome web browser with some added functionality to make it more like a traditional OS (file handling, etc). When you load up the browser, you’ll find razor-sharp text and beautiful web pages. Unlike when the retina MacBooks first hit, it’s much harder to find sites that look like total crap — though there are still plenty of images that do. But the big sites: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc, all look great. Because most of what I do on a daily basis on a computer is already in a web browser, I was right at home with the Pixel. With previous Chromebooks, I was frustrated by the lack of speed of either the hardware or Chrome OS (or some combination of the two). Here, everything performs fluidly. That includes the trackpad. You may recall myself and others on the original Chromebook, the prototype Cr-48 device. That remains one of the most frustrating bits of hardware I have ever used. Some improvements came over time (via software updates) and in , but nothing could match the trackpad found of MacBooks. This trackpad comes very close. But again, you don’t actually have to use the trackpad because you can just touch the screen. Amazing, right? Eh, sort of. Maybe it’s a case of old habits dying hard, but I basically never find myself touching the screen. Honestly, I think it has more to do with the fact that it’s sort of a pain to reach up and touch the screen when you can just manipulate the on-screen elements using the trackpad where your hands already lay. What’s weird is that as an addicted iPad user, I have found myself from time to time trying to touch the screen on my MacBook. Maybe I’ve shamed myself enough times to have learned my lesson. Or maybe I’m just not used to manipulating Chrome this way (I still prefer Safari on my iPad). Either way, I find it odd that I’m not more drawn to touching the screen. I keep forgetting about it. And again, it’s simply not that convenient to do so. It’s something that gives great demo. But in practice it’s a figurative pain that may lead to a literal pain. It’s cool to show off Angry Birds and Google Maps, I guess. And it may be good for some other games down the road. But for now, it remains a novelty. Worse, it’s a novelty that’s often a bit laggy. Having said all that, Frederic that the bottom of the touchscreen has some Chrome OS APIs as well. Right now, you can swipe to hide/show the toolbar. If they do more there, maybe the touchscreen will gain use over time. But manipulating standard windows with touch still feels weird. I feel the need to be very careful when trying to hit menu drop-downs and window tabs. It stresses me out. That’s not what touch computing should be. (See also: desktop mode in Windows 8.) Despite (or perhaps because of) the vastly improved performance of the Pixel, I find the fan kicks on quite a bit. Most of the time it’s not too loud, but it’s noticeable. Even more noticeable is the heat that the device puts off in the upper left corner of the bottom of the machine. It’s not quite George Foreman Grill-hot (like my old Dell laptop), but it can be uncomfortable (to fire up the grill, trying running ). It has been a while since I’ve noticed any of my MacBooks getting this hot. And the fans enter jet-engine-mode (loud fan whirring) far less often on MacBooks as well. In fact, basically the only times I notice the fans kick on while using a MacBook anymore is when Flash is enabled and running (which is rare on my machines). Perhaps that’s the issue here as well since Google ridiculously still insists on bundling Flash with Chrome (and Chrome OS). It’s time to move on, Google. Our computer fans and laps will thank you for it. And since it’s undoubtedly related to all of the above, I’ll note here that the battery life of the Pixel is, in fact, disappointing. Maybe I’m spoiled by the MacBook, but 4 to 5 hours isn’t good enough anymore. And really, I’ve been seeing a lifespan much closer to the 4 hour end. BUT the good news is that part of this battery performance is undoubtedly related to the fact that the version of the Pixel that I received comes with LTE built-in. It’s amazing to not have to worry about tethering to my phone (or using the undoubtedly awful WiFi at the local coffee shop). It takes a little bit to connect (to Verizon, in this case), but once you do, it’s solid and fast. I wish MacBooks came with this option. I just went from gushing to negative about the device in the span of a thousand words. But the bottom line remains that the Chromebook Pixel is a very good laptop. It’s a laptop I would have no problem using on a daily basis. In fact, I’m writing this post on it right now. It’s nice to see how far Google has come with both Chrome OS and the hardware of these Chromebooks over the past couple of years. People will complain that it can’t run things like Office, but the reality is that most of what many of us now do on a traditional computer is through a web browser (and Office is slowly but surely moving there as well). I still absolutely adore the dedicated search key on the keyboard. And I still absolutely abhor the fact that the copy-and-paste shortcuts are basically the reverse of what they are on a MacBook. From a pure product perspective, this device is a winner. It’s the Chromebook that should show many PC users they no longer need Windows in their lives. Hell, it could even convert some Mac users as well. This is how a browser-based computer should be built. Unfortunately, many of you will never know this firsthand because you’re never going to buy this device. It’s not the battery life issue that’s the real problem, it’s the price. At $1,299 and $1,449 (for the LTE version), the Pixel is far too expensive to get users to switch from what they know (PCs or Macs). There’s no real reason to do so. The touch element on the brilliant display is cool, but not nearly enough. I have to believe Google realizes this. Maybe the Pixel is meant to be more of a look-what-we- -do machine. And if that’s the case, great. But it just seems sort of silly to go to all the trouble of making a very good product that will never sell. To me, Chrome OS still makes the most sense at the low end of the market. Apple owns the high end, with Microsoft dominating everything else. And “everything else” is still a much bigger market than Apple’s end. Yet Google is more or less playing in Apple’s end here. Yes, the margins and as such, the profits are much better on this end. But Google has never played that game. Why would they now? Further, much of the audience at the high end of the market still likely wants native applications that deliver performance and functionality that the web simply cannot match yet. Photoshop, Final Cut Pro — even things like the iLife suite of products. You don’t get any of those things with the Pixel. And the inverse is true: basically everything you can do on the Pixel, you can do on a high-end laptop (except maybe the touch element, but we’ve already been over that). And those machines can probably still run Chrome itself faster than this device. If there’s one saving grace, perhaps it’s the 1 TB of Google Drive storage that is included with every Pixel. That kind of storage isn’t cheap. In fact, it’s if you were to pay for it monthly over the three years it’s included with the Pixel. (For comparison’s sake, a 2 TB Time Capsule is $299 — but not in the cloud, obviously.) The Chromebook Pixel proves that Google can make great traditional computing hardware. They need to take what they learned here and put it in play in the sub-$1,000 market — and ideally, the sub-$500 market. Eventually, if Chrome OS is to work, $199 (and maybe one day, $99) Chromebooks from the bottom while MacBooks continue to squeeze from the top. Then iPads and Android tablets come in to punch Windows machines in the kidneys repeatedly for the TKO. In a world without MacBook Airs (lighter and cheaper) and Retina MacBook Pros (more robust and powerful), maybe the Chromebook Pixel makes some sense on the market. Or in a world where this device is $500, maybe the Pixel blows away its PC counterparts in terms of quality and ease of use. Or maybe even in a world where touchscreens on a laptop are a must-have feature, the Pixel would be perfect. But none of those things are true here. And so what we’re left with is a great product without a market fit. A classic startup story. Time to pivot, perhaps. : So, us Mac users ctrl/alt functionality in the settings!
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Zendesk Hacking Affects Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter Users
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Customer service software provider Zendesk that affects users of Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. Zendesk said that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who have contacted those three websites for support, as well as support email subject lines. Tumblr and Twitter have notified affected users (see below), while Pinterest is expected to the same. A says that some customers may have also had their phone numbers revealed, but passwords, password hashes, and encrypted passwords were not part of the breach. Twitter says no passwords were affected: Emailing a small percentage of Twitter users who may have been affected by Zendesk’s breach. No passwords involved. — Support (@Support) Here is the email Tumblr sent to users: Important information regarding your security and privacy For the last 2.5 years, we’ve used a popular service called Zendesk to store, organize, and answer emails to Tumblr Support. We’ve learned that a security breach at Zendesk has affected Tumblr and two other companies. We are sending this notification to all email addresses that we believe may have been affected by this breach. This has potentially exposed records of subject lines and, in some cases, email addresses of messages sent to Tumblr Support. While much of this information is innocuous, please take some time today to consider the following: The subject lines of your emails to Tumblr Support may have included the address of your blog which could potentially allow your blog to be unwillingly associated with your email address.
Any other information included in the subject lines of emails you’ve sent to Tumblr Support may be exposed. We recommend you review any correspondence you’ve addressed to [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected].
Tumblr will never ask you for your password by email. Emails are easy to fake, and you should be suspicious of unexpected emails you receive.
Your safety is our highest priority. We’re working with law enforcement and Zendesk to better understand this attack. Please monitor your email and Tumblr accounts for suspicious behavior, and notify us immediately if you have any concerns. Here is Zendesk’s blog post: We feel that it’s important our customers receive an update from us on a recent security situation. We have an investigation underway and do not have the answer to every question. We’ve become aware that a hacker accessed our system this week. As soon as we learned of the attack, we patched the vulnerability and closed the access that the hacker had. Our ongoing investigation indicates that the hacker had access to the support information that three of our customers store on our system. We believe that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who contacted those three customers for support, as well as support email subject lines. We notified our affected customers immediately and are working with them to assist in their response. We apologize to our customers and to their users. Our investigation thus far has revealed that no other Zendesk customers (or their users) were affected. We’re incredibly disappointed that this happened and are committed to doing everything we can to make certain it never happens again. We’ve already taken steps to improve our procedures and will continue to build even more robust security systems. We will continue to diligently work with our affected customers to mitigate any impact. We are also completely committed to working with authorities to bring anyone involved to justice and make certain we fully understand what happened. As this process unfolds, we aim to update our customers in as transparent and timely a manner as possible about new developments.
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BoxTV Aims To Be The ‘Netflix Of India’ And A Bollywood Discovery Platform For Overseas Audiences
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
, Times Internet’s online streaming video service, doesn’t just want to become the Netflix of India–it also sees itself as an Indian film discovery platform for viewers in other countries. It is now available for all viewers after its limited launch in September. Like , , BoxTV, makes finding content easy, even for people who can’t speak Hindi. Films have English subtitles and Times Internet CEO Satyan Gajwani told me the service has “invested a lot of energy into really perfect metadata, so every movie has an English description that not only summarizes the movie, but summarizes each of the key scenes and music sequences, which is really what Indian cinema is known for globally.” Content is also organized by popularity, genres, curated features, and the viewing habits of your friends. BoxTV licenses content from Indian movie producers across seven languages (including Tamil, Telegu, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Bhojpuri, and Bengali) and makes it accessible across a wide range of platforms, taking into account the wide range of ways in which Indian consumers access the Internet. In addition to a Web site, BoxTV is available on iOS devices, Android phones and tablets, Kindle and TV-connected platforms like Roku, EvoTV and Woxi Pod. Bollywood producers providing content for BoxTV include UTV Motion Pictures, Shemaroo Entertainment, Rajshri Entertainment and Everymedia Technologies. Aside from Indian production studios, BoxTV has also signed contract agreements with Sony Pictures Television and Disney UTV, allowing its audience to gain access to Hollywood TV shows and movies like “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Spider-Man” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Developers are keen to reach an audience outside of India. Besides India, BoxTV is also now available in the U.S., U.K., United Arab Emirates and Singapore, and will expand to all other countries. Gajwani says he expects that outside of India, the U.S. will be the service’s biggest initial market, but it’s also had unexpected traction in the U.K. and U.A.E. “In the medium to long-term, we think India will be the largest market, but to start, we expect the U.S. to be larger,” says Gajwani. While there are other services out there that offer streaming videos and films from Indian producers (and a lot of older films and TV shows are available on YouTube), Gajwani hopes that Times Internet’s name recognition and large catalog will set it apart. “There’s a huge base of Indian content which isn’t easily accessible by Indians globally and so we want to serve our userbase by making that connection. As we scale I’m sure our strategy will evolve as well, but today we are really connecting content and users in a way that isn’t significantly there. In many cases, we’re the ones helping to digitize movie catalogs for a content producer for the first time,” says Gajwani. BoxTV is a member of the Times of India Group and plans to monetize through advertising and paid subscriptions.
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Foxconn Hiring Freeze May Be Because Of Robots, Not Slack iPhone 5 Demand
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Apple’s after investors worried that a hiring freeze at Foxconn’s China plants is related to slowing iPhone 5 sales. Foxconn at its factories in Zhengzhou and Shenzhen and it also reportedly postponed the construction of a new factory. Though this may point to slackening demand for the iPhone 5, it could also mean that Foxconn is preparing to adjust its production line in order to as a way to get around increasing wages and concerns that poor working conditions played a role in a series of worker suicides. The Taiwanese electronics manufacturer refuted reports that the hiring freeze is related to iPhone 5 production and . Foxconn’s hiring freeze may also be related to Apple’s . For example, Foxconn rival Pegatron assembles about 40 percent of iPad minis, which have taken market share away from the original iPad, manufactured by Foxconn. Analysts, investors and Apple fanboys (and fangirls) have kept a close eye on demand for the iPhone 5 as the company weathers increasing competition from Samsung. In January, concerns that the smartphone is underperforming were fueled by . Exane BNP Paribas analyst Alexander Peterc estimates that Apple , 20 percent less than the prior period. On the other hand, that said the iPhone 5 became the best-selling smartphone globally in Q4, overtaking Samsung’s flagship Galaxy SIII. The research firm estimates that 27.4 million iPhone smartphones shipped worldwide during Q4, compared to 15.4 million Galaxy SIII units. But, as Natasha Lomas , neither company discloses quarterly handset sales and comparing the performance of the two devices is somewhat unfair, because the and the came out back in May, meaning that the newer Galaxy SIV may have eaten into some of its sales. Either way, next time reports emerge about Foxconn’s recruitment numbers and their potential link to demand for Apple products, it’s worth keeping in mind that the manufacturer plans to take the H out of HR and replace it with R as in Robot Resources. Terry Gou, CEO of Foxconn, has is to “see the first batch of fully automated factories in five to 10 years and to eliminate simple and repetitive processes through automation in the new few years.”
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PayrollHero Gets $1 Million In Seed Funding For Dev Efforts In Asia
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
When we , it was aiming to change the way small-business timekeeping is done in Asia. With a $1 million seed round from 500Startups, LX Ventures, Futura, and others, it looks like they may do just that. The app allows businesses to manage scheduling, attendance, and payroll using a cloud-based solution. It’s headquartered in Manila and Whistler, Canada, and, not unlike other services, is offering subscription-based controls for employers to manage worker clock-in and clock-out as well as GPS-based confirmation that the worker isn’t fibbing. Founded by Michael Stephenson and Stephen Jagger (no relation), the company has focused its efforts on Southeast Asia. What differentiates them from the other players in the space? “PayrollHero uses the face as the biometric and uses facial recognition to ensure that the right employee is in the right place at the right time. Employees can clock in and out using the web, their iPhone or iPad,” said Jagger. Jagger said that some of the investment will go towards moving more of the company’s iOS apps out of the development stage. They are also planning further regionalization, including Indonesia. “Their tax code, etc. will be going into the system for testing shortly and then we will be launching there in the coming months,” he said. Although they’re not naming names, the company is also seeing traction in Canada and the United States, recently adding Taskus.com in LA to their roster of clients. Other PayrollHero investors include Ryan Holmes, Dan Martell, Benjamin Joffe and Christian Cotichini.
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RedBus Continues To Dominate In India, But That’s Not What Makes Them Special
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
As I start my trip in India along with Dave McClure’s “ ,” I am reading about all of the startups in India that are used to proving that the country is making inroads and is relevant. It’s a story that I’m very familiar with in emerging markets: a group of VCs and entrepreneurs that want to prove that India is worthy of time, effort and, more importantly, investment. One of the companies that I had heard quite a bit about is called , a service that has standardized and centralized India’s bus system. Having been to India before, I kind of laughed at the notion of that being possible, even after having read from two years ago. This was supposed to be one of the “ones,” the company that is supposed to make the investment world make the pilgrimage to Bangalore, India, which is about 18 hours worth of flights away from Silicon Valley. I visited the offices, which don’t seem to have changed much since Lacy described them, but I did notice something new. I spent time in India two years ago, so trust me on this. It was a sign that happily announced that RedBus was hiring. It doesn’t sound like much – maybe a sign that the company is growing – but it was my first signal that something very special was happening in these offices. Our entire “tour” packed into RedBus’ conference room, and once we were introduced to the team it didn’t feel like we were in India. We were in a successful startup’s office, and they were about to matter-of-factly explain to us why and how they’ve disrupted a system in a country that had no business being disrupted. Buses in India are a lifeline, along with manual and motorized rickshaws. There’s not much joyriding happening in this country; it’s very much a “point A to point B” proposition: A group of friends isn’t going out to a club; someone is going to the market to bring food back for the family. When it comes to travelling outside the city in which residents live, the bus is the only option. There are thousands of buses. They’re cheap compared to trains and flights, and people will take a 23-hour bus ride from one side of the country to the other without batting an eyelash. Yes, 23 hours, and I just complained about 18 hours worth of flights from one side of the world to the other. If someone were to tell me I had to sit on a bus, even with a few rest stops, for 23 hours, I’d probably have something that looked and felt like a panic attack. Throw in the fact that I wouldn’t know where to get the bus, whether the bus would be on time or show up at all or how much I’d have to pay for it. Yes, it’s a stressful situation, yet India’s billion residents do it daily. In India, you can’t pull up an app and have a nice comfy car come pick you up and take you somewhere for a rate that won’t make you poor for a month or more. Everything you’ve ever heard about India from trustworthy people is probably true. It’s a country of hustlers, trying to pay rent, put food on the table and make a good life for themselves and the people that they care about. When purchasing one of these bus tickets in the past, the experience is similar to walking into Burger King, ordering a hamburger and then being charged whatever the cashier feels like charging you. If you look hungry and desperate, that burger might cost you 10 bucks. That couldn’t happen in the United States, yet it happens in India every single day. That’s the situation that RedBus saw as an opportunity. Without any standardization of pricing or centralization of routes, fares and information about the bus fleets, India’s bus system ran like the rest of the country tends to – in complete chaos. Sure, there was a massive opportunity to make money and control the show here, but I found that RedBus has other motives that make it a truly special company, whether it’s based in Mountain View or Mumbai. We were given a basic demo of RedBus and shown some pretty interesting statistics on how far they’ve come since launching six years ago. But the meeting wasn’t led by its CEO. It was led by its Chief Product Officer, . Goel spent roughly three years at Google in India, focusing on geo and local, as well as becoming the head of mobile search and products after spending fewer than two years there. The most interesting part is that Goel joined RedBus in October of just last year. As soon as he started speaking, I turned to my travel pal Sean Percival of Wittlebee and said “He clearly has a Google mind.” A Google mind is something I’ve noticed from current and former Googlers where they attack a problem as if they have all of the world’s resources at their fingertips, whether they have $1 or $1 billion. That type of is what propels a startup into a world-class business. [tweet https://twitter.com/davemcclure/status/304516245053644802] Not only does RedBus want to be the only trustworthy source for purchasing bus tickets in India, it wants to be seen as a company that does “no evil” and truly cares about the people who use their service. Yes, Goel has that . He knows that if he makes the purchasing experience a good one on the first try, then that person will be a customer for life. A customer for life is exactly why RedBus is dominating India’s tech scene, as well as making itself valuable globally from a learning perspective. It’s not all gravy, though, as India’s government and policy is way stricter than what we see in the States. At any moment, it feels like someone could step in and disrupt the disruptor, but it hasn’t happened yet. Anyone could see that RedBus is successful, but that’s not why it’s intriguing. I asked Goel if bus fleets always accept an SMS ticket receipt as payment? “No,” he said. “Up until last year, most bus drivers required a printout of a ticket, which is difficult for most people to do.” With only 120 million desktop Internet users in the entire country, that’s a big ask. Even I don’t like to print things out. I pressed with the obvious follow-up: “So, you basically forced bus drivers to accept SMS because it was the best experience for your users,” to which he answered “Yes.” That fire, confidence and drive to do what’s right for both your company and your users is a hallmark of every successful company. Goel and his team know that unless people feel good while using the service, they won’t be a return customer, and if they’re not a return customer, then the old and broken bus system will win. That’s disruption. After a few more questions from the group, Goel showed us some of RedBus’ new features, which include photos and panoramic shots from all of the major bus stops that its users rely on. The idea, Goel says, was to make sure that you knew exactly where you were supposed to be, along with when you should be there. That type of empathy goes a long way, and the approach sounds very Googly to me, especially with its Street View-esque pictures and Google Maps integration. Tie that in with community review and ratings functionality for over 7,000 available buses, and you’ve got the beginnings of a complete solution. I also had the opportunity to take a look at something that hasn’t been launched yet, something that I’m looking forward to testing, and it’s probably something that could grow the company’s revenue 5x easily. Why hasn’t it been released yet? It simply wasn’t time, Goel said. My second question was “How many times has Google tried to acquire you?” to which Goel answered “They’re not in this market yet,” and smiled. He didn’t answer my question, and it’s clear that RedBus is building the type of company that utilized a brilliant approach to infrastructure to completely change the way that an entire country operates and gets from place to place. Again, this isn’t a perfect company or market. No company or market is, and it seems like there’s quite a bit of work to do in the mobile space. But in a country that is slow to adopt and adapt, RedBus has taken the lead. It’s not often you find a company that can do that no matter its location. Maybe it’s time to call a win a win, no matter where a team is based or the market that they choose to attack. Goel says that with what RedBus has built, the Indian bus industry wouldn’t be able to survive without them now, even if it tried. If a country like India can stop worrying about being like Silicon Valley and find its true self, there could be a new RedBus every other week. It’s moonshot thinking, of course, but that’s what it takes. The real story isn’t that RedBus is dominating a market in India. It’s how. The term hustler used in this article was not meant in a derogatory way. This is a term used by those that I’ve interacted with while on this trip and my previous one. Also, charging more than what something costs is indeed prevalent in some markets and services in India. RedBus’ success and business model proves that out.
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FastPay Has Provided Digital Media Companies With $100M In Credit
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
recently announced that it has placed $100 million in credit with digital media companies. That’s $100 million used to deal with the common cash flow challenge in the ad business, where it can take 60 days or more to get paid by the advertiser. That can be a problem if, for example, you need to pay the publisher in 30 days. So FastPay provides the funding to help companies deal with those issues. In the company’s words: “We finance the digital ecosystem.” So the service can be seen as an alternative to one of the other ways that companies deal with cash-flow problems — raising venture capital. In fact, I’ve spoken to . To fund its operations, last summer. The company has raised more funding since then, said CEO Jed Simon, but he didn’t offer any specifics. Simon also pointed out that none of FastPay’s customers have defaulted, so the company seems to be making the right bets. It also started working recently with two new client groups, Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers (including Compass Labs) and YouTube Channels. FastPay is already working with “half a dozen” PMDs, including Compass Labs. As for where the company goes next, Simon said he wants to integrate with other services, so that media companies will have access to FastPay funding through partner services, rather than having to go exclusively to FastPay itself.
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The Best Platform For Online Discussion Doesn’t Exist Yet
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Blog commenting systems are bizarre, broken and dated. TechCrunch recently switched from Facebook Comments to Livefyre – a change that, for the record, I had no say in. I’m not sure I see value. I don’t agree with some of , which almost makes it sound like this site, and all its authors, missed the trolling days of TechCrunch Past. We don’t. What was really missing, at least in my opinion, was the sense of community that blog comments once provided. But there’s no system alive that can bring that back, because that era of the web is over. And it has been for a long, long time. In the early days of tech blogging in particular, comments were a value-add to a website. They were a way a blogger found others who shared their same passions and interests. They were a place to discover new authors – people whose sites you would read and then add to your blogroll. Remember those? Blogrolls? Where you would link to people in your sidebar ? Commenting sections back then were a place for questions and answers. Sometimes, for a continued story. For personal experiences related to the subject at hand from regular readers. For agreements and disagreements, but ones without death threats or the extremely aggressive trolling of . (That’s something I don’t understand. I’m enthusiastic enough about technology to make it a living, but people seem ready to kill over choice in mobile operating system or productivity suite.) This older era of commenting – , if you will – was in many ways a simpler time. It was a time when posts even had trackbacks, so you could see who had linked to you from their own blog. Trackbacks were a great solution for building and discovering your blog community until the spammers ruined them. Just like they ruined commenting. I do sometimes miss those early days. And I miss the trackbacks in particular because they were a technological implementation that accurately reflected the reality of online discourse. What I mean by that is that some of the most thoughtful commentary about an article doesn’t appear in the comment section. Someone with a longer thought than “yeah, Apple sucks!” (or whatever) used to take to their own website to write out their thoughts, linking back in the process. This would then appear as a trackback to the original post. It was an important part of online discussion which is lacking today because the person who takes the time to read an article then write out their thoughts long-form is more likely adding value to a conversation than someone who simply logs in and writes a few lines. It was a signal – maybe a small signal, yes – but one that helped you identify the thought leaders. Those who spoke and said things that mattered. We need that sort of signaling mechanism today, if not a better one, and we need it desperately. The best thing about the Internet is that it has democratized access to creating, discovering and sharing information. The worst thing about the Internet is that it has democratized access to creating, discovering and sharing information. We need something that tells you whose opinions have more weight. Because the dirty little secret which the new, new Internet aims to obscure – – is that some people’s opinions just matter more. Some people are experts in their field. Some people have inside knowledge. Some people are better educated. Some people have 30 years of life experience on top of your 15. . Some people have access to more data from which to make an informed opinion. And so on. The problem, which the Internet hasn’t solved at all, and has in fact even made worse, is that opinions are not created equal and therefore shouldn’t be considered in equal measure. The Internet has put people on such an even playing field that we now have to create entirely new systems to verify who’s worth listening to. From Google rankings to headlines to retweets and number of followers, we’re still struggling to figure out who deserves to be heard. Although I miss the days where a handful of trackbacks let you navigate an online discussion, it was a system that would have eventually failed because it was based on a flawed premise: that everyone would have a blog, and would want to contribute to a discussion via a long-form blog post. This is not the case. . It supports everything from the to the silent but powerful reblog and the pithiness of a tweet. Meanwhile “proper” blog commenting systems, like Facebook Comments, Livefyre or Disqus, like threaded discussions, email replies, social profiles and crowdsourced anti-spam techniques. None of those improve the nature of online discussion, though. That’s because no system truly addresses how to give weight to the thoughts and the people who matter. Sure, some things are more annoying now that we have Livefyre. And some things are better. But swapping out the plumbing of one commenting system . According to our internal data, our commenting averages are up, but it’s hard to compare the two systems because Facebook Comments doesn’t count replies. However, even if you add 15 percent on top of the total number of Facebook Comments per week, then the two systems are basically equal on weekly comment count averages: Pageviews per visit are the same post-Livefyre launch; pageviews per unique are the same; bounce rates are stable; Facebook referrals are stable. The real change that commenting sections need, both here on TechCrunch and elsewhere on the web, isn’t ripping out one old, outdated technology and replacing it with another. We’re ready for a radical overhaul that reflects how people are communicating and sharing information today; one that shows which comments have resonated and why, and one that understands who deserves to be heard.
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Orange Ramps Up Own-Brand Range With 3 More Android Handsets, And Its First LTE Device, Has Sights On Windows Phone
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Perhaps aware of the tsunami of news that will hit during , we are seeing an increasing amount of news releases coming out before the actual event. has already told us about one device — an — and now it is following that up with three more, own-branded, Android handsets aimed squarely at the middle market of smartphone users. The Lumo (pictured) is the carrier’s first own-branded LTE device; the Nivo is a device aimed at the budget segment; and the San Remo is a large-screened 4.7″ device with a brushed-metal casing. All will be out in selected markets in the first half of this year. And while each of these devices will come loaded with Android 4.1, Patrick Remy, the VP of devices for France Telecom, also notes that we may soon start seeing own-brand handsets from the carrier built on Android. “There is no willingness to only have Android devices in this range,” he said. “We believe the best opportunity is with Android right now, but we are looking at other operating systems, specifically Windows Phone, but potentially others.” On the subject of Firefox OS — the mobile platform being built by Mozilla with other partners — “we are monitoring what is being done there,” says Remy. “We are not announcing any launch of such devices at this point in time, but we are definitely interested in that area and depending on the opportunities, there is a chance for an Orange-branded device among those.” Remy also admits that Orange’s own-brand smartphone devices do not move the needle when compared to the volumes sold by carriers from smartphone leaders Samsung and Apple. But they are proving to be small hits for the carrier, specifically when targeting users in the mid-market — or “higher-end pay-as-you-go or lower end contract customers,” in Remy’s description. This naturally means these devices do best in markets where these segments are biggest. “Not Luxembourg,” Remy joked of the very affluent little principality where the carrier offers services. But other markets do quite well. In Spain last year, Orange’s best-selling device was the Monte Carlo, another handset in its own-brand range. Overall sales of this line of devices has grown by 62% over the last year. But it’s telling that there are currently “no plans” for any of these three to be offered in the UK this year. France Telecom/Orange does not release sales numbers on how well these smartphones do but did note that last year its entire range of own-branded devices — including both feature phones and smartphones — were about 10% of all handset volumes, “and that’s increased a bit to about 12%,” says Remy. He notes that within that proportion smartphones are a “significant part of that.” Orange has struck deals with Alcatel/TCL, Gigabyte, Huawei and ZTE to make its own-brand devices. The Lumo and Nivo come from Gigabyte, whereas the San Remo is made by Alcatel/TCL, with Huawei and ZTE sitting out in this particular round. Perhaps more than other European telcos, Orange has over the years dedicated a lot of time and energy to creating devices that are filled with Orange-customized services and the Orange brand. These devices play into that theme, but for now will not be packing as much Orange-punch as they can. Baidu, for example, which has inked a deal with Orange to provide a customized browser for its devices, will not be making an appearance on the devices for now, although this may be something we will see going forward, says Remy. “They’ll come with our standard suite of services and customization,” he noted. These include customized lock-screens, the ability to port your services when roaming, and links to Orange services specific to your home country.
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PayPal Here Is Coming To The UK, Its First Mobile Payment Market In Europe, Armed With A New Way To Read Your Card
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Make way for one more player in the European mobile payments space, and a big one at that. Today, the online payments giant PayPal announced that from this summer it will be rolling out , its first foray into the European market, equipped with a new piece of hardware to accomodate the chip-based cards prevalent in this part of the world. PayPal has not set a definite launch date or revealed pricing for the service, but the company tells me it will be “competitive” with existing offers from rivals. The standard fee among them right now for transactions is 2.75%, and two who have recently launched chip readers are pricing them at €49 ($65). PayPal says that it picked the UK for its first stab at mobile payments in Europe because, with 18 million
customers (out of 123 million worldwide), the UK is the company’s second-largest market outside of the U.S. And it also has one of the highest smartphone penetrations in Europe — currently at around 61%, according to Kantar Worldpanel Comtech. Establishing PayPal Here in the UK will be used as a lever for further expansion into the rest of Europe. “We are launching Here this summer but will expand to other markets as we go forward,” noted Cameron McLean, MD of PayPal in the UK, in an interview with TechCrunch. It also means that David Marcus, the president of PayPal, has a chance to come full circle and finally bring PayPal’s mobile payment service to his own home market. (Coming from France, Marcus founded and then sold his mobile carrier billing startup Zong to PayPal, first becoming head of mobile and then eventually president of the whole operation.) “PayPal Here has been a big hit since its launch last year, and I’m thrilled that we’re bringing a brand new version that’s designed for Europe and beyond,” Marcus said in a statement. PayPal would not say how much revenue it has generated from PayPal Here in the U.S. but it is one of many different services that it offers to increase touchpoints with businesses and their customers. The company says that in 2012 it processed some $145 billion in payments overall, across both mobile and web. All of eBay-owned PayPal’s efforts up to now have been centered around a triangular dongle that plugs into an iPhone or Android device to read the magnetic strip on the back of a card — similar to the square-shaped dongle produced by its big U.S. rival Square (which has yet to enter Europe). Europe will see a different approach from PayPal. To accomodate the chip-based cards used in Europe, as well as the requirements of companies like Visa in Europe, PayPal will be producing a separate chip-and-pin device that will let customers insert a card and enter a PIN number to verify their identity. This is also the direction that all of the other Square-like European mobile payments companies have had to go as well. One of these, iZettle, introduced its , no doubt to get a little PR jump on PayPal Here (and to get around some of the that it ran into with Visa over the use of its dongle). It may also be the case that while the U.S. still has mag stripes for now, companies like Visa are , so PayPal Here’s European card reader may end up having more currency beyond the Old World. PayPal joins a number of European-based startups, such as the American Express-backed ; ; and ; as well as U.S. rival , to tackle the large base of small and medium-sized businesses in the UK (and beyond) that have yet to accept card payments because bank fees on traditional card services have been too high in the past. The UK becomes PayPal’s fifth market out side of the U.S., where it first launched in . PayPal here is also available in Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and Japan — the last of which it operates in a . The chip-and-pin card reader will work using Bluetooth connectivity to pair with a merchant’s smartphone to read and then process the card number and PIN code. Merchants will then use apps on their smartphones to both complete the transaction as well as generate receipts. McLean tells me the reader will also be used for more than just card transactions. It will also let merchants log cash and check payments, as well as make PayPal payments. Release below.
· PayPal’s pocket-sized Chip & PIN solution will make it easier for businesses to take secure card payments face to face, anytime, anywhere · Businesses need never again turn away sales because the customer has no cash, and no more lines to deposit funds at the banks London, 22 February 2013 – PayPal, the company that has been leading innovation in payments for 15 years, has unveiled a breakthrough Chip & PIN version of its award winning global payment solution for businesses, PayPal Here. The pocket-size handheld device is a game-changer for small businesses. It will enable them to accept credit and debit cards and PayPal payments easily and efficiently wherever they do business – increasing potential sales. Aimed especially for businesses that have traditionally relied on cash or cheques, the Chip & PIN version of PayPal Here has been designed for use in countries where credit cards rely on Chip and PIN technology, rather than swiping a card, for transactions. It will be available to select UK businesses over the coming months before it fully launches in the UK this summer. The Chip & PIN version will be available in other relevant markets after the UK launch. PayPal Here is unique: a complete payment solution that allows any business to simply and securely accept PayPal, credit & debit card payments, log cash and cheques, even send invoices & receipts so they never miss a sale. There’s no contract or ongoing fees, just the initial competitive purchase price and a small fee for each transaction. Businessmen and women can pair the device with their smartphone to accept secure payments anytime, anywhere they’re trading, whether at a market stall, shop, restaurants, taxi or even in a customer’s home. David Marcus, President of PayPal, said: “PayPal Here has been a big hit since its launch last year, and I’m thrilled that we’re bringing a brand new version that’s designed for Europe and beyond. We aimed to create game-changing device for businesses in the UK and other nations where Chip & PIN payments are standard. The result is a beautiful device that offers a strong and secure solution for businesses and, as importantly, their customers. Small businesses are the heart of economies worldwide and we are thrilled to launch this product to help them succeed. “At PayPal, we spend a huge amount of time talking and listening to small businesses. They are the core of PayPal’s business and they’ve told us that they want a simple, secure way to take card payments anytime and anywhere they trade. We’ve used that feedback to create what we think is the best payment device ever created. It’s a great example of our vision for PayPal: a wonderful customer experience from the moment the PayPal Here app is downloaded to taking the device out of the box and accepting a first payment. We’ve even included a ‘click to call us’ button in the app so our customer service team can be reached in one click just in case help is needed.” Cameron McLean, managing director of PayPal UK, said, “Cash and cheques have served us all well over the years, but businesses that rely on them risk missing valuable sales. PayPal Here will let them offer their customers extra ways to pay, while saving them the hassle of taking cash and cheques to the bank. The arrival of PayPal Here in Britain is the latest example of how we’re helping UK businesses make the most of connected commerce: the new opportunities created by the merger of the online world and the high street.” Emma Jones, Founder of Enterprise Nation, said, “One of the challenges small businesses in the UK face is getting paid. Cash and cheques seem easy, but soon people start to realise the lack of security, the inconvenience for customers and the Friday afternoon wait at the bank to deposit your money. Equally, many people are put off from signing up with a traditional card processing company because of the high fees, long-term contract commitments and bulky handsets. PayPal Here promises to change all that, by offering start-ups and established businesses a smarter way to get paid, and helping British business to grow in the way that PayPal has already done for many small businesses here and around the world.” Mark Thomas from Greedy Goat ice cream, a PayPal Here UK launch partner that trades at London’s Borough Market, commented, “Cash is king in the market, but people run out of cash very quickly, and we often lose sales because customers can’t face the long weekend wait at the ATM. PayPal Here is the perfect solution for us, as it gives our customers the chance to pay by card, backed by the reassurance of the PayPal name on the machine. It means more people will enjoy our goats’ milk ice cream this year, which is great for our business.” PayPal handled $145 billion in payments in 2012 and has more than 123 million active accounts, 18 million in the UK alone. UK businesses who wish to register interest in PayPal Here can do so at www.paypal.co.uk/here.
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In A Play For More HTML5 Muscle, Intel Buys appMobi’s HTML5 Developer Tools, Leaving appMobi To Focus On The Cloud
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
will not be left out of the party when it comes to being central in the mobile app ecosystem. The company today acquired a set of HTML5 development tools, originally created by and used by some 150,000 developers, and has hired staff from appMobi that worked on the product to continue to maintain it. appMobi, meanwhile, is going to forge ahead as a standalone company, focused on the remaining part of its business as a provider of cloud services for mobile applications. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition was first made public by appMobi in a letter sent out to the 150,000+ developers that use its platform. A copy of that letter was sent to TechCrunch and is below. In it, appMobi spells out the basics of what Intel has now taken under its wing. In short, it’s a set of app creation and testing tools that cover mobile web, Windows 8 and Windows Phone, iOS, Android and more. The HTML5 development tools acquired by Intel include appMobi’s XDK IDE, PhoneGap XDK, GameDev XDK, jqMobi and jqUI mobile development frameworks, directCanvas HTML5 acceleration, appStarter and appSnap app creation tools, OpenBuild and chromeBuild hybrid app packagers, debugMobi and testAnywhere on-device debugging tools, Mobius enhanced web browser, Windows 8/ Windows Phone 8 app templates, appLab test containers for iOS and Android, and Facebook and Twitter authentication and connection libraries.
appMobi, it appears, is getting at least part of its payment in the form of an ongoing strategic relationship with Intel. These development tools will remain tied to the cloud services that appMobi will continue to operate, which include cross-platform solutions for mobile app monetization on iOS, Android, Windows 8 and HTML5, covering both desktop and mobile. It’s not clear exactly why appMobi, which has in VC funding to date, decided to sell this part of their business to Intel, but it is likely that the cloud portion of appMobi’s business, tied in as it is with monetizing apps and other services, may have been yielding better returns for the company. On the other hand, Intel has long been courting mobile app developers and wanting to grow its influence in mobile (both externally though projects like and of course , but also ) and this gives the company one more route to connecting with them and developing those relationships. In that regard, it’s less of a strain on Intel’s balance sheet to maintain those tools. Letter below, and below that a little video visualizing the changeover.
Today we are pleased to inform you about appMobi’s new strategic relationship with Intel that includes the acquisition of appMobi’s HTML5 development tools division and ongoing integration and availability of appMobi’s monetization and engagement cloud services. You may not be aware that in 2012, our HTML5 developer base grew by 6X to over 150,000 and that growth rate is still increasing. We are especially proud of that growth and the fact that a powerful industry leader such as Intel has chosen to invest resources and capital to continue scaling the HTML5 ecosystem. As a top tier supporter of HTML5, Intel is ideal in this respect. We believe the combination of our HTML5 tools and services with Intel’s resources will make 2013 the “tipping point” year for HTML5. For app developers, our relationship with Intel means an exponential increase in resources and R&D going into the tools that support cross platform development with HTML5. Intel’s strong and vocal support of HTML5 eliminates any doubts developers might have had about committing to an open, cross platform solution. Migration of existing appMobi developer accounts and apps to Intel is seamless, following a one-time re-registration the first time a developer logs in. The HTML5 development tools acquired by Intel include appMobi’s XDK IDE, PhoneGap XDK, GameDev XDK, jqMobi and jqUI mobile development frameworks, directCanvas HTML5 acceleration, appStarter and appSnap app creation tools, OpenBuild and chromeBuild hybrid app packagers, debugMobi and testAnywhere on-device debugging tools, Mobius enhanced web browser, Windows 8/ Windows Phone 8 app templates, appLab test containers for iOS and Android, and Facebook and Twitter authentication and connection libraries. Going forward, appMobi continues as a strong, ‘pure play’ cloud services company, focused on advancing the HTML5 platform. The two biggest challenges facing app developers today are engagement and monetization. The appMobi cloud answers these challenges, delivering important capabilities to your mobile apps, including in-app purchasing, on-device updates, push messaging, app store analytics, social gamification, and much more. As an appMobi developer, How will this affect me? The short answer is that this is a great thing for you and your apps, and it validates your choice of appMobi for HTML5 development. Other than a one-time registration for Intel, there’s nothing else you need to do or change. It’s painless! While appMobi is considered a leader in the mobile app development world, Intel is a top tier technology company, respected worldwide for its leadership and innovation. Intel now owns all the HTML5 development tools that made you choose appMobi, and they are committed to applying their resources and efforts to continue to improve and advance them. Although a few names will change, these tools will now be supported and enhanced by Intel. As a pure-play cloud services company now, appMobi will still provide the solutions that power mobile apps across all platforms, giving your apps in-app purchasing, live updates, push messaging, gamification, app store analytics, and more. The availability and integration of our cloud services will be just as before, ensuring that you can continue to take advantage of the great engagement and monetization capabilities that appMobi has always offered for your current and future apps. As an HTML5 developer, we hope you realize the importance of such a major industry player getting behind HTML5. It’s a huge step toward the continuing deployment, improvement, and ultimate success of HTML5. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3yZKYyWKFc&w=560&h=315]
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Inventory Management Startup Stitch Labs Integrates With Quickbooks Killer Xero To Simplify Accounting
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Inventory management startup knows it’s not easy being a small independent vendor. In addition to tools for tracking their inventory, those folks also need to be connected to multiple online stores, shopping carts, payment systems, shipping and fulfillment providers, and accounting tools. And so the company has spent the last year or so integrating with various other companies as a way to provide a single platform for connecting online store owners with all the pieces they need to build a successful business. That means connecting with sales platforms such as Etsy, Shopify, and BigCommerce, and , and . Next up? Making it easier for vendors to keep track of their finances by integrating with cloud accounting software provider Xero. By doing so, clients will be able to seamlessly pull in sales data from their Stitch accounts and have it automatically appear in Xero. That will allow them to track all sorts of taxes and other accounting stuff that I’ll never understand because I don’t have a small business and frankly it scares the crap out of me to even think about it. Anyway, Stitch will be the first U.S.-based inventory startup to work with Xero. For Xero, the partnership adds another way to connect with users. By providing cloud-based accounting solutions with a robust API, Xero hopes to integrate with third parties to reach small businesses through the tools they use for inventory, point-of-sale, and other transaction-related applications. Stitch Labs has . The company has seven employees based in San Francisco.
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YC-Backed Padlet Brings Drag-And-Drop To Collaborative Web Site Creation
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr have done a great job of making website creation accessible to anyone, but the novice can still be a bit overwhelmed by sometimes sophisticated back-ends and CMS, especially when these platforms are built specifically to be as complex as they are simple, to expand the potential demographic. But a company called ( ) is launching into public availability, and its intuitive drag-and-drop interface bests even the top platforms when it comes to quickly and easily building a website. What’s more, Padlet works a lot like Google Docs in that multiple users can modify and add to the page in real-time, forming a truly collaborative place to work and create. “We wanted to solve the problem of ‘I want to put something on the internet, but how do I do that’,” said co-founder Nitesh Goel. “There are 25 answers to that question — images go on Flickr, videos go on YouTube. We wanted to make the experience of posting things to the internet as fast and easy as possible.” It’s available now, and you can check it out here. Clearly, it’s an interesting take on democratizing website creation, but the question remains — who is this for? Padlet claims that its users are quite diverse, ranging from project managers using Padlets as creative white boards to teachers collaborating with students. It’s also being used by companies and organizations to engage with their fan bases/audiences, which you can see , , and . “We hear a lot of positive feedback from customers who aren’t familiar with computers, but the other core part of our demographic are people who are ultra-comfortable with computers, like bloggers,” said co-founder Pranav Piyush. “They want to build a place where they can interact and create something collaboratively online. Padlet gives the user plenty of control over the end-product, offering various wallpapers and customization options. And since you can drag and drop various content, the layout is anything you want it to be. Padlet lets users dictate who can modify the page with the privacy settings, and from there the link to the page can be shared just like any other website. But how will the company make money? For one, Padlet has already started generating revenue. The company has found that small businesses and organizations want to use Padlet privately, under their own website, with the content uploaded going through their own storage systems as opposed to Padlet. But it has the potential to expand beyond that. “We actually believe we can play a part in payments down the line, by letting you build a page full of stuff that’s for sale and adding a payment widget,” said Plyush. “Right now it’s very basic, but more sophisticated interactions are on our timeline.” Padlet is available now, and can be found . [gallery ids="763069,763070,763071"]
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Grishin Robotics Invests In Boston-Based Incubator, Bolt
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Grishin Robotics, a Russian VC group dedicated to the commercialization of robotics, has dropped an unnamed sum into , a hardware incubator in Boston. Grishin’s investment is part of a $3.5 million financing package closed this week. “Since our launch in June last year and past two investments, we realised that there is plenty of smart entrepreneurs with good ideas, but they lack guidance and mentorship, and it’s too early for them to take VC money. Bolt is an ideal place for them to go,” said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics. “We believe that hardware startups, and consumer robotics and connected devices specifically, should have supporting ecosystem around them in order to succeed, and it’s just being built now.” Bolt is a “product-focused” accelerator that allows for hardware startups to mature in a solid engineering environment. The six-month program puts startups through the ringer while supplying them with solid mentors as well as a complete machine shop and electronics lab. Grishin was unable to describe its actual investment but told us it was significant. “Strategic partners (GR, Logitech, Autodesk) combined have provided the biggest share of funding, and size of this investment is much bigger than our previous two deals,” he said. What’s next for Grishin? They’re still hunting for a few good hardware startups. “We can see a lot robotics companies emerging on a connected devices market, around ‘internet-of-things’ idea, and now talking with plenty of companies in this area,” said Grishin.
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Memolane, The ‘Internet Time Machine,’ Announces Abrupt Shutdown As Team Joins Unnamed Company
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
, the startup that helped users archive and explore social network activity across different platforms, is shutting down. The company announced the closure in a published this afternoon. The shutdown will be quite abrupt: Memolane accounts and content are set to be deleted (the company has not specified at what exact time this will occur.) All Memolane content is pulled in from existing social networking sites, of course, so the data will still be out there in its original format. But regardless, this is very short notice for a service to completely disband. It’s almost always sad news when a startup doesn’t quite make it, but this seems to have a silver lining, albeit a very vague one. Memolane says its team is “joining another company that will utilize the Memolane features in an expanded way.” We’ve reached out to Memolane founder and CEO for more details on which company is involved and if any money was involved in the transaction, and will update this when we hear back. Lagier has responded, but says that he “cannot share any more information” at this time. Memolane at the time of closure has five staffers, he said. Memolane was founded and raised a total of . The company’s idea of creating an “internet time machine” for easily viewing and exploring your past social networking content on sites such as Facebook and Twitter was certainly compelling — but perhaps a bit too much ahead of its time. , of course, amid much fanfare in September 2011, which many saw as rendering Memolane’s service moot. In the meantime, has emerged and garnered a with its own method of letting people walk down memory lane by surfacing past social networking content. Up until now, Memolane and continued to , but ultimately it has opted to wave the white flag end its run as standalone entity. In fact, its farewell blog post pointed to both Timehop and as alternatives for its service going forward. Here is the full text of Memolane’s blog post announcing the closure: “Here at Memolane, we’ve had an amazing two years helping people see, search and share all of their social media content from across the web. Our goal was to make it exciting to relive great adventures with friends. We are proud that we could bring joy to people’s lives by sending out daily emails with fun memories from the past. As well, it has been a thrill to share in the excitement when one of our fans rediscovers a precious moment that was once lost. Today we want to share the exciting news that our team is joining another company that will utilize the Memolane features in an expanded way, adding more value to all the great memories captured on social media. Unfortunately this also means that we will be shutting down the memolane.com service. Your account with Memolane and all its content will be deleted on Friday Feb. 22th 2013. Please note that Memolane only aggregates content so all of your social media memories will still be available on the existing social media services you use. As well, if you love receiving your daily MemoMail, there are other services which you can use, such as Timehop. JoliCloud also offers a service for accessing all your social media. Check it out! Since our launch almost three years ago at StartupWeekend CPH 2010, we have seen continued innovation around our vision of rediscovering great memories. With the launch of Facebook Timeline we saw the ultimate validation of our vision. If you feeling a bit nostalgic then you can read all about how it all started. Also, feel free to send us a message on Twitter or Facebook. Also check out our FAQs post for more information. Finally, we would like to share a word of heartfelt thanks with our loyal users, partners and our incredible team. We cannot thank you enough for all of your support, feedback, and warm wishes over the years. And as always… Keep making great memories, thanks for being part of ours!
Eric, Nikolaj and the Memolane Team”
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Vevo Quietly Redesigns Its Homepage To Streamline Search, Navigation, And Playlist Creation
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Over the past few years, has been working hard to simplify the process by which users search for and discover new music videos on its site. With that in mind, the company today, aimed at making it easier for users to check out new music videos and to search for those they know and love. The latest update to the homepage provides some incremental improvements to the during SXSW. Interestingly, most of the changes are focused on removing features rather than adding new ones for users to play with. Vevo SVP of product Michael Cerda told me by phone that the update was designed to provide a more immersive experience for users, and also to help them find the content that they want more quickly. “We decided, ‘Let’s not give people too many places to click around,'” he said. As a result, the company has stripped out some pieces of navigation that were part of the old design. For instance, the company removed the navigation bar and radio buttons that were previously there for creating playlists and discovering what friends were listening to. Instead, with the latest update, all the playlists, friends and video pages are hidden behind the browse button. That provides an unobstructed view of the “larger than life” artist photos that rotate on the homepage. It also simplifies the scroll navigation to discover editorially curated and trending videos below the carousel. Search is another area that the new design seeks to improve. There’s now an autocomplete feature when users begin typing in the search bar, which reduces the amount of time it takes to find and begin watching a video. “We don’t want to take people from the home page to a landing page,” Cerda said. Instead, the autocomplete function should get them directly to the video they’re trying to find. Playlists were also an area of focus. While it’s the one feature that users need to be signed in to take advantage of, Cerda said that users will now have better tools for creating, curating and managing playlists. That will let users arrange and rearrange content the way they want to. Doing that will hopefully keep them on the site longer, as they can create and tune into near-continuous streams of their favorite music videos. All in all, the update is aimed at getting people to discover more and get to what they want faster, Cerda told me. The new streamlined features come a few weeks before Vevo is planning a major announcement at SXSW. It also was released as the company is in the midst of renegotiating a new deal with YouTube. That would replace the original deal that YouTube and Vevo had, which expired after three years of working together beginning in late 2009. Vevo had no comment on those talks, or the rumor that it is expected to raise more financing, including taking some money from Google/YouTube.
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Facebook Gives Graph Search To More People, Makes Those Left Out Jealous
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Five weeks after launch, Facebook gave reporters a ‘State Of Graph Search’ today at its Menlo Park HQ. It’s been rolled out from the original 100,000 users to “hundreds of thousands,” and now a news feed story is appearing to lure people’s friends to sign up for the early access wait list. This morning I noticed Facebook was admitting a slew of wait-listed people to Graph Search. That’s because now when new people gain access, Facebook automatically publishes a news feed story, e.g. “Eric Eldon just got Graph Search.” Click through those last words, and people can , too. Facebook tells me this is a viral driver meant to increase waitlist sign-ups. The story frames Graph Search as the cool new feature you should be willing to beg to get access to. Beyond user counts and the roll out, today’s “Graph Search Whiteboard Session” saw some of Facebook’s lead engineers delving deep into how people are using its , and how it works on the back end. Graph Search Director Tom Stocky noted that early usage patterns show people using Graph Search for the same things they use the social network for: looking at friends and photos. “But Places is third” said Stocky, an encouraging sign for local businesses. Interests aren’t getting as many queries. One thing that surprised Facebook was the ways people search for their friends. Rather than asking for something like “photos of my ‘friends'”, users frequently typed in terms like ‘chums’, ‘besties’, ‘buddies’, ‘homies’, and ‘peeps’. At first those stumped Graph Search, but a dedicated natural language team has now built those in so they’re recognized as synonyms. Next, Facebook is working to scale up Graph Search — both the back-end system (called Unicorn) so it can support more users and the roll-out can continue, and in terms of foreign languages so it can expand beyond English. However, that second part may require it to hire linguists in each language to identify sentence structure and synonyms, or figure out a way to crowdsource this process the same way it did to translate the whole site. It’s also trying to work out syntax problems so people can run “Or” queries. Right now you can ask for “friends who Live in New York who Like Game Of Thrones and Downton Abbey,” but not “Friends who live in New York who Like U2 or The Rolling Stones” which could help you quickly find someone to go to a rock concert with. But where I see the real potential of Graph Search is intelligent sorting of results in a way only Facebook could do. For example, if you search for “people who work at TechCrunch” you get all our real employees, but lots of people who just list TechCrunch as their employer as a joke or to look like a techie. Luckily, Graph Search is smart enough to identify which people who “work” at TechCrunch are friends with each other. Since groups of real employees are often friends, it knows which are more likely to be real and to show at the top of the results. Facebook also looks at which people have listed a verified @beta.techcrunch.com email address in their profile as another sign of legitimacy. Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), an old method put to new use by Facebook, is helping sort Graph Search results. Ask Facebook Graph Search for “books liked by founders” and you won’t see The Da Vinci Code or The Bible first, though they’re among the most Liked books. Instead you’ll see books disproportionately Liked by founders compared to the general population thanks to TI-IDF. Surfacing The Tipping Point, and Design For Hackers shows how smart Graph Search is. Facebook’s Mike Curtiss explained TF-IDF to me using the example of “TV shows Liked by my friends.” He says “There’s a tough balance with TF-IDF. If you don’t use it you’d just be promoting the most popular TV shows. But if you can bias it towards the preference of these individuals and not what’s objectively the most popular, you get different results. It’s nice to use that when you can. It’s a good signal. You can show the things with the most Likes, or you can show the things that are very unique to people [you’re asking about], but often you want a balance of those to provide the most interesting results.” Facebook is trying to leverage its social data to essentially create a custom search engine for every user. Then by sorting results further with TF-IDF, it could build something not just different from Google, but potentially better where they overlap as well.
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 26 | null |
HP Beats Expectations With Revenue of $28.36B, $1.2B Earnings And EPS Of $0.82 For Q1 2013
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
HP just its Q1 2013 earnings report and for once, the company beat analyst expectations: revenue was once again down 6% to $28.4 billion, but still higher than most analysts expected. The company reported an income of $1.2 billion and EPS of $0.82. , HP still reported earnings of $30 billion and a net loss of $6.9 billion after its $8.8 billion write-down due to alleged at Autonomy prior to HP the company. The stock market is reacting very positively to this news. HP’s stock is at $18.35 in after-hours trading, up $7.3%. The general among analysts was that HP’s total revenue would decline by about 7.5% compared to the year-ago quarter and that revenue would be around $27.79 billion, with a net income of around $1.39 billion and earnings per share would be around $0.71, a decline of 24% compared to last year’s EPS of $0.92. HP clearly beat these expectations. After last year’s $17 billion write-off after the acquisitions of Electronic Data Systems and Autonomy, as well as five previous quarters of declining revenues, many shareholders were hoping that CEO Meg Whitman would be able to stop the company from sinking even further. HP’s ailing PC business shows no sign of recovering so far. After a 14% decline in Q4 2012, the company reported n 8% decline in revenue from personal computers for this quarter. With its Servers, Storage and Networking revenue also dropping by 9% in Q4 2012 and 4% this quarter, the only area where HP really made some progress last time around was in software, where revenue grew 14%, but revenue from this business declined by 2% last quarter. “We beat our non-GAAP diluted EPS outlook for the quarter by $0.11 per share, driven by improved execution, improvement in our channel and go-to-market efforts and the impact of the restructuring program we announced in May 2012,” said , HP president and chief executive officer. “While there’s still a lot of work to do to generate the kind of growth we want to see, our turnaround is starting to gain traction as a result of the actions we took in 2012 to lay the foundation for HP’s future.” HP, of course, faces a lot of headwind given that sales of its core products, including PCs, printers and servers, are on a downward trend that the whole industry is feeling and that isn’t likely to recover anytime soon. The company missed its chance to become a player in the mobile phone and tablet market and it remains to be seen if Whitman and her team can turn the company around. For the second quarter of 2013, HP estimates that non-GAAP diluted EPS will be in the range of $0.80 to $0.82 and GAAP diluted EPS will be in the range of $0.38 to $0.40. Here are the full segment results from HP:
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Those Rumored Google Stores Are Starting To Make A Lot Of Sense
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MG Siegler
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
When talking about Apple’s rise from near-bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world, people often credit the amazing string of products from the iMac to the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad. And rightfully so. But just as important was another piece of the puzzle that ensured said products would find mainstream appeal and acted as an accelerant for Apple’s success: the Apple Stores. When Apple first got into the retail game a little over a decade ago, many people scoffed. In hindsight, Apple seems to do quite well when people scoff (see: and ) — it sort of makes sense, if an idea was obvious, others would have done it. But others in Apple’s position to do retail and failed (see: Gateway — — Sony, etc). Yet Apple became the most effective and prized retailer in the world. Naturally, this led others to take a page from Apple’s playbook. Notably, Microsoft. And while the experiment is ongoing, so far, those stores do not appear to be taking off in the same way. So when you that Google is considering as well, you might, well, scoff. But I think . I think Google could be poised to nail retail as well. With the about the , the pieces are all starting to come together. Google says it’s selling that product through the Google Play online store and through Best Buy’s and Currys PC World’s websites. (And they’ll be available to use, but not buy, inside some Best Buys and Currys.) That won’t be good enough. Google has been attempting to sell various Nexus products through their online stores for years now. The results have ranged from some success (Nexus 4) to fail (Nexus One) to major fail (Nexus Q). The Best Buy results seem mixed as well. While Chromebooks are finally , it’s still minimal despite the reach of Best Buy. What Google for these products is what Apple needed a decade ago: their own stores that they’re in complete control of to showcase their products. You have to believe Google knows this — hence attempts to create Chromebook sales areas staffed by Google employees in places like airports. But they need permanent hubs. They need central locations in cities around the world where people know they can go for all their Google needs. They need people in those stores to play with their products. And they need Google-trained employees there to answer any questions. It’s not good enough anymore to see a spec sheet online. We’re in an era of new usage paradigms. Hands-on time is key. This is especially true for Google with products like the Pixel and soon Google Glass. Average consumers are never going to buy these products online without having tried them first. These are not standard PCs that are simply faster than the last PC you bought. Okay, but how can Google Play Stores (the presumptive name) follow in the success of Apple Stores and not the mediocrity of Microsoft Stores? By exactly copying Apple. One of Microsoft’s mistakes with their stores is that they’re carbon copies of Apple Stores. Anyone who walks into one immediately feels this. It was an obvious but insanely stupid strategy on Microsoft’s part. Microsoft is trying to play to Apple’s strengths instead of their own. And in the process they’re reinforcing just how good Apple is at what they do. In the beginning, Apple Stores made sense because Apple was generally considered to make high quality products. But that can only be truly appreciated when consumers them. And because OS X (and later iOS) were not as ubiquitous as something like Windows, there was a large barrier to entry in people buying their first Apple product. And big retailers were reluctant to give a lot of space to Apple at their stores because of their low market share. Classic chicken-and-egg. Apple their own physical stores. I’d argue that they were the single most important factor in the iPhone’s success as well. Without the stores, Apple wouldn’t have had the same leverage over the carriers. They would have those carriers to sell the phones and would have likely had to strike some unsavory deals with those devils as a result ( ). That Apple nailed other elements like the Genius Bar was just a very smart cherry on top of the strategy. Microsoft has had almost the opposite problem. Basically everyone both knows and has used Windows, Office, etc. Retailers have been awash with PCs for decades. Yet Microsoft still decided to copy Apple’s store model. You could argue that they now need these stores to get people to play with their Surface products. But I’d argue that doesn’t help because those products are . That is still the key, remember. (Honestly, Xbox may be the best thing those stores have going for them, going forward. Microsoft may be wise to pivot the focus. Come for the Xbox, stay for the Surface and Windows 8. Maybe. Please.) In contrast, Google products have been improving since the first Android and Chrome OS products. And they seem to be at the point where they’re ready to be showcased in a retail experience. People need to know firsthand if they can replace their BlackBerrys or *shudder* iPhones with the Nexus 4 (yes yes, my thoughts on that device are still coming — it’s tough when you have ). They need to know if they can really use a laptop with an OS that is essentially just a web browser. They need to know what the hell Google Glass actually is. But again, these Google Play Stores shouldn’t be Apple Stores. They shouldn’t be stark white minimalist spaces of carefully crafted wood, cement, and glass. They should like Google products. They should be colorful and sort of playful. There should be a self-driving car in there. There should be Google Glass stations. Android devices galore. Chromebook areas. Maybe even Google TV. (Maybe.) Every machine should be connected to the web (maybe via Google Fiber?) and prominently displaying Google.com or Google Now. Another key insight Apple had for Apple Stores was to let people play with their machines as they would in their homes. I recall going to stores like CompUSA back in the day and only being able to see PCs with canned demos playing on the screen. Those places didn’t want people just hanging out and using their machines. Huge mistake. Microsoft would love people hanging out in their stores like they do in Apple Stores. Yet they don’t. Maybe that means internet access isn’t enough. So maybe Google should do something I always wish Apple would do: open a coffee shop in the stores (Google Ventures did just into — just saying). Make the Google Play Store a destination for the connected wanderer. Loiter all you want, just keep $earching for thing$. Other companies now look at Apple Stores with their mouths agape. $6000 in revenue per square foot — their closest retail counterpart, Tiffany & Co (motherfuckin’ !). But that can’t be the focus. That can’t be why Google is getting into this business. It has to be all about showcasing great products that simply need a bit of hands-on time (or a bit of hand-holding) to be truly understood and cherished. It feels like Google is primed for this.
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Tale Of The Tape: Chromebook Pixel Vs. Surface Pro Vs. MacBook Air
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 2 | 21 |
Google hasn’t always been known for making breathtaking hardware, but today’s — arguably one of the best-looking laptops ever made, if nothing else — means that may no longer be the case. Still, you can’t be blamed for being wary of shelling out a decent chunk of money on Google’s first foray into laptops, let alone a Chromebook of all things, so here’s a preliminary look at how the Chromebook Pixel stacks up against two prominent rivals in the computing space: the stock version of Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Air and Microsoft’s Surface Pro.
Compared to the base 13-inch MacBook Air, Google’s Pixel has a lot of similarities. It’s priced around the same, but actually comes in as more expensive that the OS X ultraportable, at $1299 and $1449 for options with Wi-Fi only, and Wi-Fi + LTE networking. What does the Pixel offer to justify the extra cost? It does have a denser display, with 239 ppi on a nearly 13-inch display. And that screen is touch sensitive, which isn’t something Apple can claim. But until now, it hasn’t shown off much about how touch might work with ChromeOS, though it has reportedly been “optimized” for finger-based input. Another place where the Chromebook Pixel falls short of its competition is in local storage. 32GB on the Wi-Fi model and 64GB on the LTE version is tiny compared to the MacBook Air, which is already pushing it with 128GB. LTE is nice to have, but, with the prevalence of hotspots and modems, arguably less important than more offline-accessible storage space. The Chromebook Pixel is very much aimed at the same market as the MacBook Air, with Google stressing that it’s an upscale device. But despite what looks to be a beautiful screen, this arrives with an even more experimental, touch-enabled version of an OS that has yet to prove itself with general consumers, meaning that the reasons to opt for Google’s brave new laptop over the Air perhaps aren’t as apparent as Google would’ve hoped. I can’t help but think about the Chromebook Pixel in relation to something like the Surface Pro, another premium computing device from a company that has historically shied away from making its own computers. Granted, the differences in execution between the two are pretty staggering, but it’s hard not to look at both devices as fresh steps into a market increasingly driven by novel hardware. The Pixel certainly has the Surface Pro beat when it comes to sheer screen size and resolution (it has a 12.85″ display running at 2560 x 1700, compared to the Pro’s 10.6″ panel running at 1920 x 1080), but the Surface Pro seems to sport better touch support with its included stylus and Wacom digitizer. It’s too early to say whether or not one device has a definitive advantage of the other because of their seemingly similar processors (though the Pixel could squeak by because of its slightly quicker chipset), but we’ll return to that once we get our hands on a review unit. Again, the Pixel may fall flat with its paltry 32GB of internal storage (though folks who spring for the LTE model will have around 64GB to play with). Sure, having a terabyte of cloud storage is neat, but those in need of real speed will prefer the Pro’s SSDs and memory card slot. The other big question mark here is Chrome OS itself. The Chromebook is a very handsome little machine that seems to have some horsepower under the hood to boot, but I’m curious whether or not people will choose to plunk down upwards of $1299 for a computer that exists outside of the two entrenched environments that have dominated consumer computing. Windows 8 isn’t a shining star yet either, but it’s far from a company’s side project. While the Air and Surface Pro have their share of advantages, it’s still a little too early to write the Chromebook Pixel off completely. It may just be the right computer at the right time to give Chrome OS the boost it really needs, but for now Google needs to make a better case for instead of, you know, else.
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Maybe The PS4 Isn’t So Bad After All
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John Biggs
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Although I, like many of you, suffered through Sony’s last night, I came away less concerned about the PlayStation’s future as a platform. What I saw, in short, was a company that has finally embraced the network to a degree that forces its competitors to play catch-up and, barring a horrible blunder on Sony’s part, could guarantee some modicum of success for the platform. First, I don’t when it comes to the changing face of the modern gamer. There is little any of the console makers can do to stem the tide of the “casual” gamer and his or her mobile predilections. My seven-year-old son has stopped playing the 3DS and Wii U and instead downloads horrible, horrible little games on the iPod touch, much to my chagrin and his frustration. When presented with a plethora of titles in the App Store, however, a little plastic case full of Nintendo discs or 3DS carts seem less interesting. That said, the console will always be with us, so we may as well look at the as an interesting addition to the living room and less as Sony’s folly. Last night’s presentation was about whetting our appetites for E3 and, potentially, a November 2013 launch. That’s why they didn’t show the hardware – it probably wasn’t complete yet and, besides, why rent a booth in Los Angeles if you’re going to uncover your product a year (or two) from launch? As frustrating an effort as this was, it made perfect sense. What did Sony show off instead? Their focus was on network play, network sharing, and the platform’s unique system of game broadcast. Why is this important? Well, web video is pretty darn important to the mass of humanity and in-game web video is a large subset of that fan base. Any method that will make it easier for a 12-year-old to share his gaming prowess online is valuable for the gamer (Sample Video Title: “LOLS TEABAGGED UR MOM! LOLS!”), the game maker (Sample Buzzfeed Title: “10 Amazing Moments From The New PS4 Game, Flark”), and the console maker. The features also places Sony into a more interesting position with professional gamers. By being able to broadcast matches to the world in real-time, pro gamers can enter into interesting forms of competition. They can offer tips and tricks in branded channels and share videos and stills from their victories. There obviously isn’t much call for “professional” console gaming right now, but that doesn’t mean things couldn’t change. More important, it seems that the PS4 finally does network play and discovery right. This is a console designed for the post-disc generation. By letting you demo games instantly Sony has a better chance of selling a high-margin download vs. a mid-margin disc. By letting better players help lesser players online – a feature I could have used even in the NES days – you encourage more play time and more chances for DLC downloads. By making things mostly about the network you ultimately capture a bit of that App Store magic – hopefully. The trick is to make games culturally relevant and, in this era of “share everything” it makes perfect sense to add a share button to the PS4 controller. Could it be too little/too late? Sure. But is it absolutely necessary to improve the PS4’s network capabilities to at least match, say, Xbox Live? Absolutely. But seriously, Sony: the next time someone tells you it might be fun to run a two-hour presentation with nothing to present? Don’t do it. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0rJDn0jRnUQ#!]
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