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Pinterest Launches ‘Place Pins’ To Help Pinners Plan Their Trips
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
Pinterest released a new set of tools for users that would help them “explore” and share the things around them. At an event with 150 “Pinners” (and an untold number of journalists) at Pinterest HQ in San Francisco, CEO Ben Silbermann announced that the company would introduce new ways to plan trips. “We’re excited to inspire you to go out and do things,” Silbermann told the audience. The new product, called “Place Pins,” is designed to help users provide a visual guide to finding places to go and things to explore. Pinterest users, or “pinners” can beginning planning trips by creating a new board based on location, and then adding pins with locations to those boards. The tool adds a map, images, and relevant information to the pins, and allows pinners to view the places they’d like to visit both online and on mobile. While being able to share online could help users find inspiration and plan trips together, the real killer app is on mobile, where Pinterest users will be able to keep track of places even while they’re on the go. (And hey, how important is it that you can access those places while traveling?) The new Pinterest Place Pins depend on Foursquare’s location API, along with Mapbox’s map technology. But even if a location isn’t on the map doesn’t mean that pinners can’t add them — they can also add locations of their own. And Pinterest users can also use their mobile apps to get directions, based on location information they have collected. The new , which was , could give Pinterest a new potential revenue model. The announcement comes not long after Pinterest raised a huge new funding round, from Fidelity Investments, as well as existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, and Valiant Capital Management. To justify that investment, which valued the company at $3.8 billion, Pinterest has begun looking for ways to make money off the massive number of user-curated pieces of content that have been collected from around the web. One of the ways Pinterest is accomplishing that is with , which are paid placements from various brands and advertisements that show up within Pinterest category and search fields. There are a number of other features the company has recently rolled out, such as , , , and more that are designed to increase the reach of companies trying to connect with potential customers. While Pinterest didn’t mention monetization plans at the event, it seems like a no-brainer that connect its users to local businesses in places all around the world. Because if it knows they want to go to the place, offering up discounts or providing some other incentive to get them there seems like an obvious next step.
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Android App Marketplace 91 Wireless CEO Joe Wu Speaks For First Time About $1.9 Billion Acquisition By Baidu
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
After his company, Android app marketplace 91 Wireless, was acquired by search giant Baidu for $1.9 billion in the largest deal in the history of the Chinese Internet, CEO Joe Wu says he is busy with the Baidu integration and also wants to help startups by becoming an angel investor and mentor to other entrepreneurs. During Wu’s fireside chat at the Technode/TechCrunch event in Shanghai yesterday — his first in public since — he also talked about life at one of China’s largest Internet companies after heading a startup. Before its acquisition, 91 Wireless was already one of the top players in China’s lucrative but highly segmented Android app industry. But Wu says he knew that competition would only become more heated thanks to the country’s rapidly growing smartphone penetration rates. “I struggled with the idea of selling for a long time. When I talked with other companies they were shocked that I was considering the idea,” Wu said. “But I could only see the mobile Internet industry becoming even more competitive. 91 Wireless was a NetDragon subsidiary and we were doing well, but I thought we could collaborate with Baidu because of the synergy between us. $1.9 billion is not the end of our story, I hope we’ll get bigger and bigger.” Wu liked Baidu’s culture, which he says emphasizes “simplicity and reliability” in their products. When asked about the record-breaking $1.9 billion deal, which critics considered an extravagant valuation, Wu responded “we can’t say if the price was too high or too low. We just needed someone who could see how 91 Wireless is changing the Internet in China. I thought that maybe we could collaborate with Baidu or Alibaba since the giant companies control the strategic landscape.” In 2008, when Wu joined 91 Wireless, there were only 10 people in the NetDragon subsidiary. He took over as CEO the next year. Though 91 Wireless grew rapidly, it also had its share of growing pains. At one point, a third of its employees were poached by large tech companies. Wu said that he once became so agitated while thinking about 91 Wireless’s debt and creditors that he nearly crashed his car. “It made me think that if I had been killed, then those people wouldn’t have caused my death. It would have been my fault. I had to start thinking about how to get away from my depression,” says Wu. “That’s the mindset. No matter what kind of business you start up, everyone is going to get grilled at some point and you have to figure out a solution. You can’t be threatened or crushed by challenges. You need to see them as tests that will fully enhance your capabilities.” Despite 91 Wireless’s setbacks, Hu said the team had a very “easygoing” attitude. Now that he works for Baidu, Wu says he is busier than ever. “At 91 Wireless I was content as long as I saw growth every day. I wasn’t obsessed with our market share. But at Baidu we’re facing different kinds of competition from other big companies and Baidu has very high targets for its metrics and market share.”
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With $2.4M From Atlas, 500 Startups & More, Colingo’s Live Online School Aspires To Teach The World English
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
Like clockwork, today brings yet another entrant into the fast-growing and noisy language learning space. Just last night we told you , which is putting a live, interactive spin on language education. This morning, joined Verbling and others in this mission — to take on tired incumbents like Rosetta Stones and tackle the multi-billion dollar opportunity in the language learning market. Unlike many of its cohorts, yet similar to Verbling, Colingo is taking a web-first approach, using in-browser, Google Hangouts-based video chat to bring language learners together with native speakers (and teachers) and to help them learn through conversation and immersion. However, while some startups and services focus on breadth and offer support for multiple languages, Colingo is trying to stand out from the pack by focusing on English-language proficiency and learning. The startup wants to create a live, global and digital English school, starting with the launch of its teacher-led, group video chat classes, personalized skill training and private tutoring. To do so, Colingo founder Ben Lowenstein told us today that the company has raised $2.4 million in seed funding to help it ramp up hiring and meet the growing demand for quality English-language learning services in developing countries. Atlas Venture led the startup’s first investment, with contributions from 500 Startups, Morado Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Havoc Capital and Social Leverage, as well as handful of angel investors, including Khosla Partner Ben Ling, Dogster founder Ted Rheingold and Chegg founder Aayush Phumbhra. With Livemocha, Babbel, Voxy, MindSnacks, OpenEnglish and Duolingo all having raised multiple millions, Colingo becomes the latest indication that investor interest in language learning continues. Although it launches officially today, Colingo has been building the foundations of its English-language platform for over a year now and as of today, the startup counts 27 teachers, 70-plus curricular skills and over 150,000 students from 180 countries in its network. Given the early success OpenEnglish has had in Brazil, and the huge opportunity it sees going forward, it may not surprise you to learn that it has the largest share of Colingo’s customer base with over 30K students. Following Brazil are the U.S. and Mexico and Lowenstein that Eastern Europe and Latin America (at large) represent two potentially core areas for Colingo’s growth going forward. Beyond a growing Latin American user base — which is really just a micro-representation of the fast-growing demand for quality English-language learning programs across Latin America — Colingo is trying to differentiate by not only focusing on English, but a particular segment of English learners. Colingo’s core demographic, Lowenstein says, is those who have a basic understanding of English but lack the confidence or fluency to speak comfortably in conversational and professional settings. Offering live classes 24-hours-a-day, Colingo’s classes aim to blend “authentic conversation about contemporary topics,” Lowenstein says, with a more structured curriculum of skill-training and assessment. So, while users have the freedom to join as many classes as they want and seek, private, one-on-one tutoring, at their own pace and speed, Colingo is trying to strike a balance on its approach to language education. On the one hand, it’s meant to be casual and conversational, so ESL students can learn English from a certified teacher (and native speaker) by discussing topics they actually care about, whether that’s the latest news from the NFL, the day’s political headlines or fresh celebrity gossip. The idea, the founder says, is to remove formalized learning methods from language education, whether it be rote memorization or using boring examples and exercises (the book is on the table, under the table, next to the table, etc etc). But the goal of removing the formality from learning isn’t to reduce Colingo’s responsibility or to avoid having to offer credentials, it’s to provide a more authentic and appealing learning experience, he says, balanced with the structure of training and assessment on over 70 core grammar and pronunciation skills. In addition, like Harvard (and Verbling to a degree), Colingo is focused on becoming a Small Private Online Class (SPOC) platform, as opposed to the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) model which has skyrocketed to popularity thanks to the likes of Coursera, Udacity and EdX, among others. The Colingo CEO believes that part of the reason MOOC platforms have traditionally suffered from such appalling dropout rates (near 90 percent in some cases) has to do with the lack of sustained interpersonal interaction. While some MOOC platforms have been battling this, it’s easy for students to fall through the cracks when their classmates are remote, remain relatively anonymous and number in the the thousands. Conversely, Colingo has made its live, online classes the centerpiece of its platform for this very reason — to encourage group interaction among students and teachers. The startup also intentionally keeps class sizes small, with the average size of classes on Colingo being three to five students, allowing students to build confidence without having to pronounce unfamiliar words in front of 50K people. Ultimately, one doesn’t learn to drive a car by watching a YouTube video, the CEO explains, so the mission for Lowenstein and Colingo’s teachers is to get their students to tap the brakes on studying and start testing themselves by speaking with others — as much as possible. But it’s not just aimless immersion, again, the startup wants to focus these conversations on a succession of skills within a larger learning path. It may sound obscure, but that’s potentially where Colingo’s real value could lie: In its ability to create a conversational and immersive learning experience that’s both casual and structured. A little bit of formal education, a little rambling video chat about how terrible the Jacksonville Jaguars are. After a 7-day free trial, Colingo offers a monthly subscription for $50/month, which offers students unlimited access to its platform, or those looking for more personalized, one-on-one instruction can opt into its “Personal Teacher” plan, which costs $150/month. Colingo has an uphill battle in front of it just given how many language learning services, apps and platforms are out there. It will have to find a way to overcome an obstacle that has stalled many language startups: Maintaining both teacher and curricular quality at scale. It’s not easy to do, but the startup is off to a good start. Find .
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Dropbox-Rival Box Is Raising $100M In New Funding At A $2B Valuation
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
Enterprise cloud file storage firm Box is raising an additional $100 million in capital at a valuation of around $2 billion. A filing with the State of Delaware was first . We’ve heard from sources that Box is indeed raising a new round, at a $2 billion-plus valuation. The company raised $125 million in June of 2012 at a valuation of roughly $1 billion. The new funds could be viewed as capital to help Box reach the public markets, provided that its revenue growth is on track. This will likely be the last round of funding for the company before it IPOs next year. According to Justin Byers, on October 14, 2013, Box authorized a new series of preferred stock. To be exact, there were 5,556,000 shares of Series E-1 Preferred stock authorized at $18 per share, or a $100 million value, authorized for this new preferred stock. The prior round of preferred stock authorized by the company was a Series E Preferred on August 3, 2012, at a price of $13.0949 per share. VC Experts is calculating the valuation following this round at just shy of $2 billion. According to the data VC Experts has collected, this price at $18 per share is still a far cry from where they recently priced their Class B Common Stock. VC Experts obtained a filing from May 17, 2013, that showed the company pricing their Class B Common stock at $4.63. Box just raised in new funding last year, and another $25 million A new round would put Box’s funding at over $400 million total. Box famously turned down a . The company was said to in the fourth quarter of 2011, with around $25 million in revenue for that full calendar year. Revenue for 2012 was tipped to be . It was later reported that Box instead was in revenue for that year. It isn’t clear what Box’s current revenue rate is, though the company is presumably growing in keeping with its prior rates. What’s odd about the news is that Box is raising funds at a valuation of one fourth that of its rival, Dropbox, a company that has had a somewhat comparable revenue curve. According , Dropbox had 2011 revenue of $46 million, $116 million in 2012, and will produce something over $200 million this year. So, Dropbox was around $21 million ahead of Box in 2011, around $31 million ahead of Box in 2012, and likely a similar chunk this year. So, Dropbox appears to be ahead. But the percentage different isn’t anything close to a four times multiplier, making Box’s paltry – in comparison – $2 billion valuation almost strange. For example, Box had 2012 revenue of roughly 73% of Dropbox’s top line. Which makes the delta between their valuation odd unless either Box has seen its growth decelerate, or Dropbox has found an updraft and is beating its internal metrics. Assuming Box doubled its 2012 revenue in 2013 – essentially mirroring the doubling of its market capitalization – it will generate sales of $170 million in the year. At a $2 billion valuation, Box is valued at a mere 11.7 times trailing earnings. When Twitter went public, it was valued three to five times as richly, looking at its past revenue and market cap (using a diluted share count). We contacted Box for comment and will update if we receive more information.
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In Case You Thought BuzzFeed Needed More GIFs, The Site Launches A GIF Feed Sponsored By Google+
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
Do you sometimes read and think, “This is great, but why is all this text getting in the way of the funny GIFs?” If so, there’s a perfect new section for you, called . It’s actually not a standard editorial page but ratherof a promotional campaign sponsored by Google+ as a way to show off , which creates GIFs. (This parenthetical remark was originally where I , but if you don’t know, then this post probably isn’t for you.) Most of the GIFs are shared by BuzzFeed, but there’s also a sponsored unit in the upper right corner which points to more Google+-sponsored GIF collections. A Google spokesperson sang the praises of GIFs via email and told me the company created the Auto Awesome feature because “we love them so much.” The campaign seems worth pointing out for a couple of reasons. First of all: GIFs! Secondly, it’s a good example of the kinds of that have apparently . A BuzzFeed spokesperson said the campaign will run until the end of the year, and that it’s the first such section that the company have created. When I admitted that I wasn’t as totally addicted to the feed as they claimed to be (maybe it’s because you have to click on images to see the full picture and the animation, maybe it’s because my heart is made of stone), the spokesperson added: BuzzFeed users that love GIFs get to look at a comprehensive library of their favorite GIFs and share with their friends. Just like any other piece of social content on our site, this is another fun way for users to share their favorite moments via social sharing.
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 11 | 5 | null |
TOMS Founder Blake Mycoskie On Turning The One-For-One Charity Model Into A Platform
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
In a way, TOMS’ latest web launch turns the company into a platform — a concept that should be quite familiar to anyone in the tech sector. The TOMS Marketplace is a one-stop-shop that brings together hundreds of “socially conscious products” from 30 different companies. The idea, Mycoskie said, is to encourage people to look at more purchasing decisions as opportunities to think about giving to those in need. Mycoskie was visiting the San Francisco Bay Area last week, so we asked him to swing by TechCrunch HQ to talk about his new foray in the e-commerce space. We also discussed how tech companies can start thinking in a more philanthropic way from the start, how giving back can be good for business, and more. You can check that all out in the video embedded above.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: Moto G’s Big Battery, Moto X Financing And Google Wallet Card
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
This week, me and Chris Velazco talk about using the Moto G for a prolonged period, Motorola trying to attract more Moto X shoppers with no-money-down deals, and Google going after shopper activity with a . We have a grand old time, and for once a mid-market phone is the talk of the town, which is actually refreshing. Also Chris needed like fifteen takes just to get us started, because apparently he’s a completely ridiculous person.
We invite you to enjoy every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific (generally speaking), in addition to our at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the . Intro music by . Direct .
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TaskRabbit Takes Its Errands Marketplace To London For Its First Move Outside The U.S.
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
, the U.S. startup that runs a marketplace for people who need help with short-term work and errands, is hopping over the pond for its first international city launch. On Thursday, it will open for , starting with 50 Taskers ready to take on your every need in the areas of Christmas-related errands, cleaning and handyman-type work. Further UK cities will come in the months ahead, Stacy Brown-Philpot, TaskRabbit’s COO, told me on Wednesday. Prices for the initial errands on offer while TaskRabbit is still in beta in the UK range from between £12 to £25 per hour ($19-$40). TaskRabbit has seen some knocks in its home market — manifested in the form of to refocus on what the company believes are opportunities in enterprise, mobile and geographic expansion. And have also faced business challenges. In that sense, expanding internationally and the move to greener pastures could be a way for the company to spur growth. The London launch follows on the heels of a five-city expansion in the U.S. in . London brings the total number of cities where TaskRabbit is active to 20. But TaskRabbit is not entering a new market without its own hurdles. The UK, as , is not exactly known for its service culture around food delivery, partly because the people who bring the food are surly, and partly because customers find the whole exchange so awkward. Taking that another step further, and going on my own experience as a longtime London transplant, I’d venture to say that perhaps many UK consumers are not naturally inclined to call on strangers to do lots of other things for them at the spur of the moment. The pictures that TaskRabbit supplied to me, in their stilted staging, only emphasize that feeling to me even more. There are other challenges in the UK, in the form of existing players in the delivery market. Among them, the UK has , , , , along with at least one casualty, Milk.ly, which started as TaskRabbit clone but now has pivoted to e-commerce. Interestingly, although there are a ton of offerings in the UK already, TaskRabbit says that London has been the most-requested city outside of the U.S. for the company. “Paris is a hot city that has the largest amount of demand after London,” Brown-Philpot says. “Toronto and Sydney after that.” (All those expansions would make a big dent in the the company has raised to date.) You could argue that the fact that these other startups are here working will make the market more receptive to TaskRabbit, too. So what will set TaskRabbit apart from the rest? At its base, TaskRabbit is coming into the UK with the feeling that it is the market leader. Even if there are others, none have “our reputation,” she says, with 75% of its business coming from word-of-mouth. (And, from my own experience, using TaskRabbit in San Francisco, I have wished we had it here in London — although the service I have used it for, slightly odd purchasing and delivery requests, doesn’t fall into the three categories TaskRabbit’s launching with here in London.) Brown-Philpot says that TaskRabbit has also done its homework, with a survey of some 2,000 consumers. The three areas where it is first concentrating (Christmas shopping/wrapping/preparing; cleaning; small repairwork) came directly from those results. The target audience, she says, are professional women who are married and have kids and just want more time in their lives. On the supplier side, Brown-Philpot says that TaskRabbit had no problems getting people to sign up to become Taskers. She says that TaskRabbit found them through Facebook and Google advertising, and as part of getting onboarded they were vetted for fraud and other security-related areas, “and to make sure they had the skills they said they had.” There are more applications coming in, as there always have been in its home market, she says. Putting demand and cultural norms in the UK to one side, “We never have a problem with supply. There are always people looking for extra income.”
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Google’s Cerf Says “Privacy May Be An Anomaly”. Historically, He’s Right.
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
One of the original architects of the Internet wants to remind us that privacy is a relatively new concept. “Privacy is something which has emerged out of the urban boom coming from the industrial revolution,” Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and a lead engineer on the Army’s early 1970’s Internet prototype, ARPANET. As a result, ‘privacy may actually be an anomaly,” he told a gathering of the Federal Trade Commission. Looking back at history, Cerf is mostly right. Up until the 19th century, most houses had few or no internal walls. . For most of the post-Roman era, the very concept of “solitude” , who dedicated their lives to private worship. “Intercourse, birth, death, just about every aspect of the life cycle plays out with some sort of audience,” architectural historian Bernard Herman explained to me. An expert in early American housing, Herman found that the average home was about 16×10 ft with multiple families living under one roof. Indeed, the invention of the “Bed Chamber” really doesn’t become among the European wealthy until around the 1600s. The few Medieval aristocrats who could afford a bed still used to sleep with house guests and servants on extra large mattresses. In Rome, bathrooms were public; people chatted while relieving themselves in open multi-toilet rooms. Indeed, in Rome, even for those who could afford to build houses with internal walls, still chose to put their private lives on display. Ostentatious displays of one’s wealth to the world with an open house was a status symbol. There may have been once exeption to this rule: excavations of ancient greek houses reveal architecture with partitioned rooms and windows that obscured views inside the home [ ]. But, for the most part, privacy didn’t really exist in ancient cities. Perhaps the real concern is with privacy? Well, that’s new too. The “right to privacy” was not coined until 1890, by future Chief Justice Louis Brandeis. The right to privacy would not be recognized by the Supreme Court until the landmark 1967 case, . In some ways, informational privacy isn’t a concern until the modern age, because few people had the technology or knowhow to write anything down. Still, privacy regulations did not catch up with literacy until the mid 19th Century. For instance, while there were scattered concerns with the very first census in 1790, the results were still posted publicly so that citizens could double-check their accuracy [ ]. “So I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be interested in privacy, but I am suggesting to you that it’s an accident, in some respect, of the urban revolution,” concludes Cerf. Now, our liberty-loving readers could argue that the invention of privacy is just a natural evolution of social advancement, like democracy or medicine. “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” libertarian heroine, Ayn Rand. Cerf’s comments have gotten pickup due to of Google’s ad targeting policies and . Governments around the world want to rein in Google’s ambitious mission to organize the world’s information. Regardless of the law, Cerf’s point was that transparency “is something we’re gonna have to live through.” It’s quite difficult to find technological solutions to privacy. Savvy data scientists are from anonymous datasets. Even if an individual chooses to keep information private, its to ID someone’s tastes, gender, and sexual orientation from the public activity of their share-happy friends. The more sustainable solution maybe to rekindle the social norms we had around tolerance. Like Cerf, I lived in a small town (in Brazil); knowing everything about everyone else isn’t the end of the world. In some ways, it’s beneficial. We often suffer alone unnecessarily. Perhaps, there is something in our history that can help us adapt to a life that is, once again, radically transparent. [ ]
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Ribbon Is Building A Peer-To-Peer Payments For Consumers, No App Or Account Required
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
Payments startup , which launched last year with a focus on making it easier to accept payments online across websites, blogs and social media services like Facebook and Twitter, is expanding in a new direction. The company is now working to develop a person-to-person payments service that will allow users to send money to friends over the web. Though the company’s main website at was reflecting what appeared to be an entirely new service, we understand that Ribbon’s earlier, merchant-facing product is not being shut down in favor of the peer-to-peer payments product. In fact, it’s still live . Instead, the consumer-facing version of Ribbon will arrive early next year to complement merchant service, potentially furthering Ribbon’s reach. Today, the majority of Ribbon merchants use the service on their own website, where it’s easy to add a line of code in order to have a fully functional checkout experience set up in a matter of minutes. As of last month, Ribbon had 10,000 merchants using the product, and saw 150,000 unique buyers who visited checkout pages. The company also recently scored Target as a customer, who used Ribbon as part of a Facebook campaign. The consumer version of Ribbon, however, is not about buying and selling, but rather about moving money quickly between two people. It will include a responsive, web-based version of Ribbon which you can use without having to first establish an account – basically, it’s a web-based Venmo, from what we’re hearing. You’ll be able to quickly type in a URL, and then dash off your payment and note to a recipient from a single webpage. This new product would compete more broadly with things like PayPal, Google Wallet or Square Cash, for example, all of which have a consumer angle to their services intended for those who need to pay back friends or family. (PayPal also Venmo maker Braintree this fall, for $800 million in cash). But unlike Square Wallet or Google Wallet’s Gmail integration, the new Ribbon service for consumers is designed to work on the web or mobile web, not email. Nor will it work over text. An earlier version of the updated Ribbon (now pulled) mentioned that the service would support Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express, and noted that payments could be sent via the web or mobile. The site has changed again today, offering still few details on the product, but adding that the service won’t hold your money for a week before you cash out, and won’t freeze accounts without explanation – something PayPal . Interested users are also invited to sign up for invitation . We should hear more about the consumer service after the holidays. When reached for comment, Ribbon co-founder Hany Rashwan confirmed Ribbon’s new direction, and provided the following statement: “For the last few months, we’ve been working on a new version of Ribbon that takes the technology and ideas that we’ve already built, and uses them in a different way. We’re not ready to fully announce the new Ribbon, but are excited for people to use a payment system built for +today’s age and technology.”
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Microsoft Now Sells T-Shirts That Claim Google’s Chrome Steals Your Data
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
Microsoft has t-shirts, hats, mugs, and sweatshirts that bear slogans from its Scroogled campaign that needles Google as bad on privacy. I confirmed with the company that the clothing line was released today. It’s more than cheeky. Here’s one of the offered shirts, bearing a statement that you can also get on a mug if you so desire: Yes, that’s the Chrome logo sitting on top of text that says that you should really kick back as your data is stolen. Oh my. Google is not going to be happy with this, I presume. Scroogled, as you certainly know, is a campaign by Microsoft to paint Google in a negative light when it comes to things like Gmail’s automatic scanning of incoming email to target advertisements. Google maintains that it doesn’t do so for sensitive categories such as bankruptcy. Microsoft also scans incoming email, but only to weed out malware and the like. This has always felt like a small distinction to me. A to Microsoft’s claims went as follows: “Ad targeting in Gmail is fully automated, and no humans read your email or Google Account information in order to show you advertisements or related information. […] We also don’t deliver ads based on sensitive information, such as race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or sensitive financial categories.” Still, Microsoft is pushing on with the campaign with apparent gusto. You don’t release a clothing line like this if you don’t want to make a little noise. The above shirt will , if you were curious. Google has had a few recent scraps with the law on the privacy front, including a that it paid over its changing Safari settings. The fine was token, given its size when compared to Google’s wealth as a company. Microsoft and Google have , fighting over email, YouTube, and more. Given their huge competitive surface area — from selling music, to search, to mobile operating systems, and so forth — that’s not surprising. Still, Microsoft appears more willing to sling mud.
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Coin, Kicking Credit Cards To The Curb, Answers A Few Questions
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
electronic credit card that stores multiple cards on one Bluetooth device, made a big splash last week . Turns out, people not only want to buy more Coins but they want to know more about Coin, too. That said, the company is responding to consumer feedback, announcing a number of features that will be available in the first release. Most importantly, Coin will be equipped with an alarm that learns how many times your Coin is being swiped and alerts you if it believes there is fraudulent activity going on. For example, your card may be swiped once by a merchant or waiter to pay for the transaction, and again to steal the information on your card. Traditionally, your bank or credit card company wouldn’t notify you of the fraudulent activity until a transaction was completed in another city or in an odd way using your information. Coin actually notifies you the moment the information might be stolen, allowing you to make an inquiry about the activity. You can also lock down one particular card so that friends, waiters, or strangers can’t swap to a different card on their own. The team has also revealed that Coin can work without being tied to a phone. “When we released Coin we wanted to have a succinct message,” said founder Kanishk Parashar. “We just wanted to let our users know that yes, we understand your feedback and we have been designing these features all along, and that they will be available in the first release.” Beyond the new features, Coin has also updated its FAQ to answer the influx of questions its been receiving since launching the pre-order. Here are a few helpful answers:
Parashar also assured us that the Coin will be available throughout the rest of the campaign, for the next 24 days, with no cap on the amount of pre-orders made. “It actually helps when we have more orders,” said Parashar. “It means that larger manufacturers will be willing to prioritize us and work with us.” Interestingly, this is Parashar’s first time running a hardware business, previously founding a software payments company called SmartMarket. It asked for both merchants and consumers to change behavior entirely by using a mobile only payments product. This is what led to Coin. After realizing that the app was getting plenty of downloads, but not very frequent use as a payment method, Parashar decided to build a payment solution for consumer side only. When asked if Coin would eventually morph into his grander scheme for payments, all digital on consumer and merchant side, Parashar simply said that Coin is currently focused on delivering the first version to consumers. If you want to get some more information on Coin, head over . [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Sx34swEG0&w=640&h=360]
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Windows Phone Now Sees 10M Transactions And 500 New Apps Daily, Has Served 3B Total Downloads
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
Today , bringing two applications to Microsoft’s smartphone venture that it has long lacked. The platform tallies 10 million app transactions each day, or 300 million per month. That’s up from 9 million per day in September, and 6.66 million per day in June. According to the company, 500 new Windows Phone applications are uploaded daily. The release of Windows Phone 8 remains the crux moment for the platform, with “monthly paid app revenue” up 181% since its launch. Also in roughly the past year, app downloads have increased 290%. Windows Phone is small, but growing at healthy rates. The above figures indicate that there is likely enough user activity for developers to warrant the platform enough attention to build for it. However, Windows Phone remains especially small in its home market, the United States, a key application revenue source for iOS and Android developers. Its lack of popularity in that country likely tempers developer enthusiasm. Sales numbers for Windows Phone handsets are growing, often at triple digit paces on a year-over-year basis, but the platform was small enough a year ago that those figures don’t indicate rampaging growth that could rival iOS or Android on a unit volume basis anytime soon. The company still has most of its work in front of it: Unit volume must rise in the United States, and other issues such as developer lassitude persist. The above all sums to the simple fact that Microsoft, through expense and struggle, has managed to build a mobile platform that has achieved something close to exit velocity. It wasn’t long ago that that wasn’t true, and that Windows Phone was more the butt of jokes than something for developers to begin to get to know. The Windows Phone story remains mixed, but I think it’s trending positive.
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Tumblr for iOS 7 Sharpens A Great Design Without Diluting It, And Brings Focus Onto Activity Stream
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
Today, Tumblr is releasing its redesigned client for iPhone and iPad, bringing along a completely refreshed look and feel for iOS 7. The redesign, unlike some others to come out of Apple’s big shakeup, manages to maintain the core of what makes Tumblr so attractive to its millions of users. The new Tumblr app will look fairly familiar to users, as the trademark blue remains, as does the post format that puts the focus on the content being shared, with a slim bar of interface hovering behind, helpful but not intrusive. What’s gained this time is a big focus on the Activity stream, which was previously buried underneath the account tab. Moving the Activity stream out to the tabs, says Tumblr’s Creative Director Peter Vidani, was a decision that was made simply because it was so popular. Users, especially heavy users, were checking it a lot to see the latest likes, replies, reblogs and follows incessantly. Moving that out to the tab bar is a statement about how important this stream is. It’s the feedback loop, the thing that keeps you coming back to the app obsessively, just to see if you’ve got some new interactions to check out. The same concept drives feeds in other apps like Twitter’s Connect tab. If you’re getting feedback, you’re going to keep producing content (or re-blogging it) to get more. Call it Pavlovian, but it makes a lot of sense. In addition to the Activity stream’s promotion, posting has also gotten a complete revamp. Tapping the new post icon gives you access to six large and easier to tap icons for all of the content types. Each of the composition screens has also gotten a revamp, but the photo sharing option is probably the most different. The photo capture screen is really cleverly done, and now dumps you onto a grid of images from your camera roll, rather than allowing you to choose immediately between the roll and the camera. This, Vidani says, was done after the data suggested that people dipped into their albums for images to post far more than they went to the camera. But the camera experience isn’t neglected — there’s a square near the bottom with a camera icon that displays a live view of your phone’s camera, inviting you to shoot an image if you choose. It’s neatly done. Nicely detailed touches are scattered throughout. There are now ‘toast’ notifications that pop up while you’re using the app to tell you if you’ve gotten a reblog or like. This behavior was more difficult to implement on previous versions of iOS, Vidani says, because it was tough to get the metaphors to make sense. iOS 7 allows for much more freedom to ‘play with shapes’, letting the tab bar expand outwards to display the notification naturally. The Explore screen has also gotten a nice refresh, with a line of hashtag topics near the top that use iOS 7’s dynamics engine to stretch and scroll quirkily. They’re also animated, displaying video or gif content to catch the eye. Vidani says that Tumblr has been making an effort to make posting more of a ‘casual’ function. This, he says, is in keeping with Tumblr’s design directives to ‘keep it small’. Even the number of things that a user is being asked to assimilate on the screen at once is given careful consideration. This fits in thematically with other interesting experiments in the online publishing world. Medium, for instance, leverages the lowered barriers that come from making the act of creating a post the same as publishing a post. It’s a one-for-one equation. When you make a post in Tumblr, the post screen looks exactly like it will once you hit go. There’s no ‘rendering’ process here like there is with some platforms like WordPress. Yes, there are limitations to this approach, but it also keeps the threshold for self-publishing to the bare minimum. Services like Tumblr (or Twitter, for that matter) have taught a generation of content creators that publishing things to the web can be something we do from anywhere, at any time, without a major production. This redesign keeps to that tenet well. The overall feel of the Tumblr app for iOS 7 remains close to its previous editions at heart. Everything has been touched, massaged or redesigned, but it doesn’t feel foreign. “We thought hard about how to apply the feel [of iOS 7] without compromising what we know to be Tumblr, what users know to be Tumblr,” says Vidani. From our brief time with the app, that appears to be true. It’s a solid, clever and beautiful update that has found a home on iOS 7 without selling all of its belongings to buy it.
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The Great Instagram For Windows Phone Photo Taking Controversy Explained
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
Instagram made it onto the Windows Phone platform today as a beta and immediately, everyone lost their mind. You see, the Instagram app for Windows Phone defaults to an in-app screen that shows you the photos you have already taken. You can click on a little button to take a photo, but you are then scooted out of the application to the default camera application where you shoot the picture. Then you are scooted back into Instagram. It’s about as smooth as sandpaper. The iOS experience, for contrast, let’s you quickly shoot a picture inside the application itself, something that is fast, and far more seamless. People have pointed out the discrepancy, stating variously that you can’t take photos inside of the Windows Phone Instagram application. This is technically true. Others, incensed by the assertion, claim that you , you just have to exit the application to do so. That’s not quite the same thing. The shitbag of all of this is that Windows Phone users have waited years for the application to land on their platform in an official capacity. And when it finally did, it was not as good as what the photo sharing service offers to others. You get to wait, and then you get less. The official line about this is that many Instagram users use photos that they have already taken, and given that Windows Phone devices have other pretty darn good photo taking applications, defaulting in-app to your photo roll makes sense. Not really, as if I am Instagraming a photo I’m hardly fretting about its crispness given that I am about to Sepia its brains out, but even still, it would be nice to have the same flow that I have on other platforms. Don’t make the choice for me, essentially. Instagram on iOS has been one of the largest mobile application success stories, ever. It worked. The version that Windows Phone users received today – albeit in beta, somehow – is less good than what other platforms have. No matter how you slice it, late and less good isn’t so great.
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After 15 Years Of Whipping The Llama’s Ass, Winamp Shuts Down
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
If you had a PC and you listened to MP3s in the late 90s, chances are you managed your playlists with . Since then, Nullsoft sold Winamp to AOL (the parent company of TechCrunch) and online music has changed quite a bit, but there was always something reassuring about the fact that Winamp was still hanging in there. So much for that. Winamp is shutting down. The website and all of Winamp’s will shut down on December 20 and the desktop player will no longer be available for download. Even if you don’t remember Winamp, you may remember the demo MP3 that played when you installed the app: “Winamp, it really whips the llama’s ass.” In an last year, Rob Lord, the first hire at Nullsoft and the first general manager of Winamp said that he believed that “there’s no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition.” While AOL kept Winamp going – it released an Android version in 2010 and Winamp Sync for Mac, including a full player, – there was never a clear sense of what was going on with the product. The Winamp blog, however, hasn’t been updated and judging from Ars’ portrait of the company’s fortunes from 2012, it seems like AOL never quite knew what to do with it. If you still want a copy of Winamp, now is the time to and to import those MP3s you downloaded from Napster back in 1999 into it. Are you going to miss it?
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Google Takes You Through Middle-Earth, Providing Both An Eagle- And A Hobbit’s-Eye View
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVvMGD8LNL0&w=640&h=360] Google has launched an ambitious Chrome experiment today, in . It’s an interactive updated version of those great hand-drawn maps Tolkien included in his print edition of the works upon which these movies are based, that provides a guided tour of Middle-earth and the people, elves, trolls, wizards and other beasts that populate it. Accompanied by soothing, presumably Elvish music, the narrated feature allows you to zoom into a 3D map of Middle-earth from a prospective somewhere just above the cloud line, to a current total of three locations (with more promised to follow). Once zoomed in, you can learn more about the place, why it’s important, and who lives there. There’s also a 3D exploreable render of each location, which is all done in CSS3 and WebGL – and it’s designed to work on Chrome on Android, too, thanks to those technologies. If you’re interested in the nerdier side, there’s . Admittedly this is tech demo, and a promotional piece of marketing for The Hobbit sequel that’s coming out in December, but it’s also a pretty cool use of modern web technologies and a proof of just how powerful the browser can be, especially on mobile. And really any excuse for additional Tolkien geekery has me on board.
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Google Wallet Invades Your Physical One With A New Prepaid Debit Card
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 |
For a while there a physical Google Wallet card seemed like the stuff of rumors, and then it looked like another project lost to the ages when former Wallet chief Osama Bedier (who purportedly pushed the concept) officially resigned from his post earlier this year. Larry Page’s disapproval of the card after a buggy pre-launch demo certainly didn’t help the project’s chances either. But here we are, months later, and Google has gone ahead with the project anyway. The folks at spotted the updated first, which allows Google Wallet users to order their own physical Wallet cards — that first batch is expected to hit doorsteps in under two weeks. Don’t expect Google to be getting into the lending and collections game (but hell, could you imagine?) — this card is a purely prepaid affair, affording its users access to the funds that are currently stored in their Google Wallets. At first glance it doesn’t seem like a game-changer considering most of the particulars will be familiar to anyone who already owns a debit card, but there are some neat Googlean touches here. According to a on Google’s Commerce blog, there’s a distinct lack of service fees tied to using the card, and users will get instant notifications on their phones when they’ve made a purchase (just like Simple). So sure, if you have a Google Wallet account and it’s got a few dollars ferreted away in it, there’s really no reason to get one. While it may be a low-risk action for you though, the card provides plenty of value to the folks in Mountain View — an earlier report from painted Google’s push into a more physical payment scheme as a way to gather more consumer purchasing data to help power its gigantic online advertising business.
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KlearGear Goes Into Social Media Lockdown After It Charges Customers For Posting Bad Reviews
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
KlearGear, a sort of for folks who don’t value good web design, is in trouble. The rose to prominence when they charged a customer $3,500 for posting mean social media commentary. After unleashing the righteous anger of the Internet the company has protected its and closed in response to repeated snark attacks. How bad was the whole thing? Well, really screwed up. The story begins when whose husband ordered some junk for Christmas three years ago. The stuff never arrived and Paypal closed the order but Palmer wrote a scathing review on , a complaint site. Three years later the company contacted her husband and asked for $3,500, citing a disparagement clause that wasn’t actually in the terms of service three years ago. The terms, obviously, were egregious: In an effort to ensure fair and honest public feedback, and to prevent the publishing of libelous content in any form, your acceptance of this sales contract prohibits you from taking any action that negatively impacts KlearGear.com, its reputation, products, services, management or employees. Should you violate this clause, as determined by KlearGear.com in its sole discretion, you will be provided a seventy-two (72) hour opportunity to retract the content in question. If the content remains, in whole or in part, you will immediately be billed $3,500.00 USD for legal fees and court costs until such complete costs are determined in litigation. Should these charges remain unpaid for 30 calendar days from the billing date, your unpaid invoice will be forwarded to our third party collection firm and will be reported to consumer credit reporting agencies until paid. That’s right – they’ll hold your credit history hostage if you say mean things on Twitter. As this is fraud. This is pretty damning for a company that has a revenue of $47 million catering to an audience of cubicle dwellers and, presumably, Internet users. Like GoDaddy before them, social media behavior in the face of negative press can make or break a company. By retreating the company has essentially destroyed its own Internet reputation and, in honesty, I’m glad. These sorts of stories – company gets burned for being mean – are short-lived but important and each instance is a white paper in itself on how not to do business. In short, when you’re cornered apologize and make it right instead of committing business suicide.
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With A Focus On International Adoption, Uber Integrates PayPal As An In-App Payments Option Via New Mobile SDKs
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Armed with from Google Ventures and TPG, is making a big change to its payments structure that could help adoption and transactions internationally. Uber is making PayPal a payments option, leveraging a new mobile SDK for both Android and iOS that the payments giant is releasing in Q1. With the PayPal integration and new SDK, Uber now allows you to add your PayPal account as a payments option the same way you would add a credit card to Uber. To add your PayPal account you simply enter in your email/password or phone number and pin, and you’ll be logged in. Via the new mobile SDK, the Uber app won’t redirect to PayPal the way it normally would in the sign-in process. You simply enter your credentials within the app. And you won’t have to login every time to use PayPal in Uber. PayPal CEO David Marcus explained in an interview today that this new SDK is just one step further in providing developers and users with a frictionless payments experience. Starting today, Uber riders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States will have the flexibility to pay for their ride with PayPal. But according to CEO Travis Kalanick, this integration is really about giving international users the ability to use a payments method that doesn’t necessarily require you to have a credit card. Currently, Uber doesn’t work with bank accounts or non-credit card enabled debit cards. In the U.S., most users have credit cards but this isn’t the case in countries outside the U.S., he explains. Enabling PayPal was the simplest way to allow a universal payments method that is used across the globe by 140 million users. We’re assuming the plan will be eventually expand the PayPal payments option to other international localities, including in India, Korea, Japan, Australia, China and other areas. It’s also worth noting that Uber has been a longtime user of Braintree for payments processing, a company PayPal There are other potential marketing and promotional opportunities that Uber (and PayPal) can benefit from, he adds, especially abroad. For now, until Nov. 28, any Uber user who pays for their ride with PayPal will receive $15 or €15 off (this excludes uberTAXI). The fact that Uber is choosing to integrate PayPal as an option into its payments app is a big win for PayPal, which has been viewed in the past as being more of a clunky online payments experience. But with no redirects and re-engineered logins, perhaps this could help PayPal become more of a go-to payments platform for developers.
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(Mostly) Believe The Bitcoin Hype
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
According to Mt. Gox hit a high of $900 in the past few hours, something that even the frothiest of supporters will agree is ludicrous. This is a bubble and it won’t be pretty when it pops. That said, I would argue but ignores the platform’s potential as a weath transfer medium. In short, what is happening now is indicative of a level of interest that will rocket the BTC out of the realm of cranks, goldbugs, and hobbyists and into something far more powerful. Bitcoin, in short, is a money transfer platform. Call it a currency, call it the next stage of economic evolution, but in the end it’s a shared hallucination (like all currencies) that affords us the possibility of instantaneous, anonymous money transfer. This is massively important. The entrenched banks see it as a grave danger and governments clear understand the potential for, by their definition, abuse. But the average human on the planet – the kids sending money to their parents back home, the traders who can now perform instantanous transfers right at the marketplace, the small businesses who can avoid credit card charges – at the very least understands the power of a free, open platform for wealth transfer. Why is China so excited about Bitcoin? Well, there is a certain madness of the crowds aspect to it – as Stan Stalnaker notes there was a similar run up in QQ, a virtual currency created by Tencent – but it also enables a certain amount of freedom and is poised to be a valuable instant value-transfer platform in commodities and small transactions. Swiping a credit card at the wheat market in a developing country is hard to do. Sending a text message connected to a Bitcoin transaction is easy. This run up, however, is ridiculous. Without a stable, non-fluctuating price Bitcoin is worth no more than a tulip bulb in a Dutchman’s purse. There are endless Bitcoin defenders who will say that we’re seeing the currency finally coming into its own. They’re wrong. At this point we’re looking at pure speculation. There is value there, to be clear, but it’s not in the exuberance we’re currently seeing. It’s in the value of Bitcoin as a liberator, as a change agent, and as the world’s first open, international, and usable cryptocurrency with world-wide adoption.
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Instacart Eyes 10 New US Markets For 2014 While Its Relationship With Trader Joe’s Remains On Hold
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Grocery delivery service recently , marking its first expansion outside of the Bay Area. Despite self-described strong unit economics and a service that is quite popular in its home market, the company was slow to expand geographically. Before the Chicago move, if you asked Instacart why, their answer was simple: They wanted to lock down their model before they took it on the road. Two months in, how is the company doing? Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta told TechCrunch today that his company is now serving more deliveries now in Chicago than they did in their 40th week in the Bay Area. That doesn’t tell us much, but Mehta did confirm that the company’s overall growth rate is roughly on par with past levels, clocking in at 35% per month. In September, the service claimed it was growing 10% weekly, or around 46% each month. Instacart plans to “very quickly” expand to new cities. Different locations have different patterns, of course. According to Mehta, whenever the weather is worse in Chicago, order volume goes up. People want to stay inside. That would be less of a problem in, say, Los Angeles. The company plans to be in 10 markets by the end of 2014. All of Chicagoland, or the Bay Area count as single markets in the firm’s thinking, so by the end of next year, a sizable chunk of the United States population should have access to Instacart’s service. I’m guessing the Seattle area, LA, the New York City sprawl, and so forth. Maybe Boston, and some place in Texas. The company declined to be specific, unsurprisingly. An obvious next step at that point would be international expansion. The company confirmed that that is something that they have planned. Think late 2014, or early 2015 for Instacart’s jaunt across a border or ocean. So, what about Trader Joe’s. If you are a long-time Instacart customer you certainly recall the days in which Trader Joe’s was supported. In fact, when the company launched in Chicago, Trader Joe’s was the only available option. No more. The grocery store has disappeared from Instacart. Mehta told TechCrunch that the companies are a talking. It is unclear if and when Trader Joe’s will return to Instacart. However, the company is delivering booze again, which is more than welcome. Mehta mentioned inventory concerns as part of the dance with TJ’s. It could be the we lazy schmucks were sucking local stores dry from our keyboards, leaving IRL shoppers in the lurch when it came to organic burritos and cheap wine. I suspect that this is not the last time that Instacart will have this problem. For now, its time for the company to prove that its model can be quickly applied around this country, and then in far off lands.
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Facebook Expands Its Definition Of Small Business Pages, Says It Now Has 25M Of Them
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Facebook is tweaking the way it counts up the small and medium businesses that have a presence on the social network. Why the change? Well, it increases the count. Dan Levy, who leads Facebook’s small and medium business team, told me there are now 25 million Facebook Pages for SMBs, and 1 million of those businesses are active advertisers. This may seem like an arcane tweak, and, well, it kind of is, but it’s worth noting as we track this side of Facebook advertising, In addition, Facebook likes to frame a lot of its ad-related changes in terms of how they might help small businesses (and not just giant advertisers), so it’s good to be reminded that those businesses really do exist and really are active on the site. Back in April, there were 15 million SMBs with Pages, but that was under the old definition. According to Levy, the company only counted businesses that had a physical location, whereas now it’s including e-commerce companies that may not have a brick-and-mortar store but aren’t big brand advertisers either. Facebook is counting SMBs based on three criteria, he added — they must have a Page that’s been active in the past 28 days, it must be a business Page (rather than personal one), and they can’t be one of Facebook’s “managed clients” (those clients are the company’s big advertisers). Facebook has been this year, for example by , and Levy said that’s already beginning to pay off with more SMB advertisers, but he added that the company has just “started that journey.” “We continue to hear feedback from small businesses and incorproate it, and we still have a lot of potential left,” he said. As for the mobile ads that , Levy argued that Facebook is a great way for SMBs to establish a presence on smartphones — by creating a Facebook page and advertising on Facebook, they automatically have “a mobile marketing presence” and “a mobile advertising strategy” without doing any extra work. Levy will also be discussing Facebook’s small business strategy at a session this afternoon at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
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To Mini Or To Air, That Is The iPad Question
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MG Siegler
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Pop quiz, hot shot. You walk into an Apple Store to buy the new iPad. But there are two new iPads. The iPad Air and the new iPad mini. You can only buy one. What do you do? The new retina iPad mini is great. It’s everything you loved about the first iPad mini, but upgraded in the two most important ways: a sharper screen and faster speed. Both are amazing updates by themselves, made all the better when you consider that the device is largely the same size (it’s ever-so-slightly heavier and ever-so-slightly thicker) and maintains the same excellent battery life. It’s clearly the class of smaller tablets. That one paragraph, roughly 75 words, is all you need to know about the new iPad mini. If you’re at all debating getting one and have the means to do so, you should. End of story. The more interesting question about the new iPad is the one I’ve gotten over and over and over again on Twitter and elsewhere: iPad mini or iPad Air? That, is the question. It’s a hard one to answer because it obviously depends on many factors. And it’s actually even to answer this year because the new iPad mini and the iPad Air are basically the exact same machine on the inside. So it simply comes down to size. But since so many people were asking, I figured they’d want an actual answer other than the “it depends” cop-out. So, it’s time to be subjective. I’ve been trading off using both devices over the past few weeks. At first, I was carrying around and using the iPad Air (since it came out first). Then I started carrying around and using the new iPad mini. And for the past few days, I’ve been swapping between the two, trying to get a better sense of which one I’m more naturally drawn towards. It used to be that at home, the 9.7-inch iPad was my go-to machine on the couch. Meanwhile, the iPad mini is the device I’d take on the road. The larger iPad was more powerful, while the smaller iPad was more portable. All made sense in the world. . Not only did they shrink the dimensions of the 9.7-inch iPad enough to give it the “Air” moniker, they boosted the innards of the 7.9-inch iPad enough so that it was every bit as powerful as its larger cousin. The result is a befuddling predicament of choice. The new iPad mini is now sharp enough and powerful enough to do everything I want to do on my couch. And the iPad Air is sleek and svelte enough to throw in my bag without worry. To answer this question for myself, it comes down to both the past and the future. First, the past… The new iPad mini provides a great experience, but it really takes using it next to the original iPad mini to appreciate how much faster it is. Every application I tried loaded significantly faster on the new iPad mini — which you’d hope were true given how much more powerful it is. But using it day-to-day, I honestly didn’t notice the speed improvements all that much for the majority of apps. That may be because very few apps are yet optimized for the new A7 chip. Or it may be because I’ve been spoiled by the speed of the iPad Air and iPhone 5s (which have the same A7 chip). Side-by-side, it’s no contest. The original iPad mini seems pokey compared to the new model. But day-to-day, at least right now, the speed difference is not something I think the majority of users will notice simply because they’re not going to be comparing the two side-by-side. To some degree, the same is true with the new retina display. Side-by-side, there’s no comparison. The retina display is much nicer than the display on the original iPad mini. It’s like looking at a printed page from a glossy magazine versus looking at the same page out of a dot matrix printer. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not by much. The old screen looks pixelated and blurry next to the new one. But because the 9.7-inch iPad has a significantly larger screen, the jump to retina-level was more pronounced on that device. There also seemed to be more complaints about that old iPad screen since Apple had just made the move to the first retina display in the iPhone 4 as well. All screens looked bad in comparison. But again, day-to-day, unless you’re comparing the old and new iPad minis, I’m not sure the screen upgrade is going to be hugely meaningful to the majority of consumers. If you do a lot of reading on the iPad, then sure. Otherwise, it’s simply not as big of a jump as it has been to retina in the past, in my opinion. Which brings us to the future… I can’t help but wonder if we’re on the verge once again of a new, larger screen iPhone. The are swirling and while some may be bogus, some may not be. And if indeed we do see something like a 5-inch iPhone later this year, the gap between that device and the iPad mini will obviously be far less than it is right now. Would I still feel as compelled to use a 7.9-inch iPad mini in a world where a 5-inch iPhone reigns supreme? Hard to know for sure. Perhaps for some of the iPad-optimized apps. But my sense is that in such a hypothetical world, I’d be more drawn to the 9.7-inch iPad Air in the times that I’m not using my iPhone. And the truth is that I’ve already found myself more drawn to the iPad Air in the past week. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why other than the obvious: the larger screen mixed with the newly impressive size and weight. In day-to-day usage, it like the iPad Air is a bigger upgrade to me versus the new iPad mini. It’s always going to be easier to perceive a difference in physical size and weight than it is in speed and resolution. The former two can take advantage of muscle memory (size, in particular) while the latter two often need points of comparison to be truly appreciated. That’s why I’d vote for the iPad Air if someone were to ask me what iPad I’d recommend getting if I had to pick only one. To me, it feels like this year and perhaps even more so next year, if a larger screen iPhone were to be unveiled. That’s a big “if”, of course. You can never be sure what Apple is going to do. In fact, the only thing you can be sure of is that both of these new iPads are going to get upgraded in some way next year again as well. But aside from sitting on the sidelines forever or upgrading every single year, you need to take the plunge at some point and get an iPad mini or an iPad Air. And this year, again, I’d vote for the Air. But it’s close. Real close.
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Engadget Makeover Folds In ‘All The Best Things’ About Gdgt As It Fields More Mainstream Readers
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
In just the past couple years, I’ve noticed something: My colleague , who shoots and edits video for TechCrunch TV, has increasingly become one of the most popular people in any room he enters. Anywhere we go on the days we shoot video, whether it’s a startup office or just a pub to grab some lunch, wants to strike up a conversation with him to ask about his camera equipment. The lenses, the shutter speed, the megapixels. It’s become clear that it’s no longer just the professionals or the early adopters who are into talking about gadgets — nowadays, it’s the mainstream. The people over at , the gadget-oriented blog (which, disclosure: is owned by AOL, which owns TechCrunch too), say they’ve noticed the same thing. So over the past few days they’ve launched , with a host of new interactive features, aimed at appealing to — an Engadget that’s not just for the early adopters, but for “the early adopter in all of us.” Many elements of the new look, such as personal profiles, product profiles, pricing comparison engines, and the like, are being folded in from , the consumer electronics review site founded by Engadget co-founder and former Engadget editor-in-chief that earlier this year. In a phone call this past week, Ryan Block and current Engadget executive editor said that this integration was not initially planned when — but it soon became apparent that it was the most logical next step. “There was so many more commonalities than we expected between Engadget and Gdgt,” Block, who currently heads up the product team that has now shifted from Gdgt to Engadget, said. “So all of the best things about Gdgt are now in Engadget.” The changes also set Engadget up to be an online destination for the mainstream electronics buyer looking for help with a purchasing decision, in addition to the hardcore gadget geeks that have read Engadget since its inception. This puts Engadget more squarely into competition with the likes of Consumer Reports and CNET, in addition to its existing competitors in the gadget blog world. It’s a big step, but it’s one that Block and Perton say is coming at a perfect time. “We’re evolving. We’re going to continue to tap into the traditional tech enthusiast market — we’re not going to dumb anything down,” Perton said. “But at the same time, we’ve got a much broader market than ever before. People who had never thought about electronics have now become the early adopters.”
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Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
According , cloud file storage firm Dropbox is looking to raise an additional $250 million at a valuation of around $8 billion. The news comes on the heels of Pinterest’s massive $225 million round that valued it at $3.8 billion, and endless hype that Snapchat is raising some god-tier amount of money at a valuation of lots of billions. So, if your first reaction to the Dropbox news was to spit out the bile that welled up from your stomach, I get you. But hold on, this time round the nine-figure bush, there is some substance in play. According to the BusinessWeek piece, Dropbox’s revenue has grown rapidly, and is now in the “hundreds of millions of dollars” area, meaning that Dropbox could quite easily have top line close to what Twitter currently generates. For the first three quarters of 2013, Twitter had revenue of $422.2 million, if you had forgotten. Depending on how you forecast Twitter’s revenue, Dropbox could be outperforming it handily. And that is precisely why the $8 billion figure feels oddly inexpensive. From an , here’s the revenue multiples that arose from its public offering: Twitter, in the trailing 12 months (TTM) leading to its final private quarter (ending September 30), had revenue of $534.5 million. […] Twitter filed to go public at $26 per share. Using a fully diluted share count of 705,098,594, Twitter valued itself at $18.3 billion. The company opened instead at $45.10, valuing the firm (again: using a diluted share count) at $31.8 billion. Comparing those figures to Twitter’s top line, the company valued itself at 34.2 times its trailing 12 month’s revenue. Its forward revenue figure would be substantially less, of course. The market valued Twitter at $31.8 billion, instead, or 59.5 times its trailing revenue. Now, we’re comparing trailing revenue for Twitter, and forward revenue for Dropbox (measuring past, and future revenue, respectively), so the ratios are not to be taken directly. Still, valuing Dropbox at something around 8 times forward twelve month revenue, and Twitter at up to nearly 60 times trailing revenue feels disjointed. And the above comparison doesn’t take into account profits because Twitter loses buckets of money, so if Dropbox is also in the red tough snakes, it doesn’t really matter for this comparison. Dropbox could be managing its valuation, hoping to avoid getting its figures too high, and thus spiking its chance of later private money if it wants to delay its path to an IPO. That’s utter speculation, however.
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Developers Port 1,000 Unity Apps To The Windows Store, Windows Phone Store In First Four Months
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Today Microsoft announced that there are more than 1,000 games in its Windows Store and Windows Phone Store . On July 22nd this year, Unity off of its support for the platforms. Therefore, in the ensuing 17 weeks, developers have released Unity-based games at a pace of around 58.8 per week, or 8.4 per day. That’s a decent clip, as the titles that are being ported over to the Windows platforms (mobile, and mostly not, respectively, or Windows Phone and Windows 8.x) are of generally of a decent quality. Microsoft remains grimly determined to grow the number and quality of applications on its twin platforms. It’s doing so by integrating them, lowering the price of entry, and working with folks like Unity to open as many doors as possible are open, and stay that way. I’ll have more on development figures for the Windows world later this week, but keep in mind that while download counts for the platforms are growing, they remain small compared to iOS. Windows 8.x sees around . iOS is around 74 million. Still, the march of 1,000 miles starts with one step, and apparently a lot of pushing.
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Google Pays $17 Million Settlement Over ‘No Harm’ Browser Privacy Violations
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Google to pay $17 million to 37 states for circumventing privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser in 2011. Safari blocked tracking cookies by default, but Google overrode the settings. Stanford researchers , leading to a nationwide investigation. New York’s Attorney General wrote an , announcing “nearly $900K from Google to prevent future violations of consumer privacy”. Google has also paid $22.5M to the FTC over the same issue. Interestingly enough, a federal judge a class-action lawsuit from users, finding that plaintiffs could not prove any harm had occurred. “While plaintiffs have offered some evidence that the online personal information at issue has some modicum of identifiable value to an individual plaintiff,” explained Judge Sue Robinson [ ], “plaintiffs have not sufficiently alleged that the ability to monetize their PII has been diminished or lost by virtue of Google’s previous collection of it.” While it’s obvious that Google misled users (intentionally or not), it’s not clear why that should result in a multi-million dollar fine. I’d like to remind readers that consumers are affected when states rush to the collect money from the Google lawsuit piñata. AllThingsD reports that the much-loved Google Reader was shuttered because the company could not justify the privacy costs necessary to keep the program running. These lawsuits are not a simple David vs. Goliath story. It’s as likely that overzealous prosecutors can affect consumers as much as a data-hungry search giant. [ ]
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Less Than A Year Post-Pivot, Payments Platform Spreedly Raises Additional $500K
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Payments platform , which offers customers a credit card vault in the cloud that works with , has just raised an additional $500,000 in seed funding from Emerge.be, bringing its total raise to date to just under a million. The funding comes not even a year after Spreedly’s pivot from a digital subscriptions service it sold off this July. Spreedly has been around for some time. The company was founded in 2007, but had been focused on subscription-based payments until demand from customers found the team examining a new area involving payments: a cloud-based credit card vault and API platform for sending payments to multiple payment gateways. In fact, a company called Pin Payments, basically the Stripe of Australia, funded Spreedly’s initial efforts in making this pivot, offering $120,000 in a seed investment last December. By March, Spreedly had its new service off the ground, and ended up selling its subscription business to Pin Payments, too. A credit card vault, in simple terms, allows businesses to store a customer’s credit card information for repeated use. The ways this works is that a business will typically pass a credit card charge to a payment gateway like Stripe or Braintree, and that company then returns a token which the business stores. And when the business needs to run a charge again for that same customer, they send the token back the gateway for processing. The use of tokens is more secure, and allows for things like PCI compliance. Developers use Spreedly by plugging into an API for storing cards in the cloud – that is, Spreedly returns the tokens, just as you would see with most payment gateways today. But the difference is that Spreedly itself is a payment gateway – instead, it allows developers using its API to specify which payment gateway they want to use for each transaction. “On the front-end, we look like a modern payment gateway API, and developers really like that,” explains Spreedly CEO Justin Benson. “And then they just have to do one additional step,” he says, referring to the addition of the payment gateway. “We don’t touch the money flow – Stripe, Authorize.net – those guys do.” There are a number of businesses that need to work with multiple payment gateways, Benson tells us. These include billing platforms, those in e-commerce space/subscriptions space, those selling into specialized vertical markets (Spreedly has found traction with companies selling to gyms/health clubs, in the vacation rental market; etc.), and companies which need to process transactions in different countries. In the latter case, the companies generally want to take advantage of the better rates and lower declines that come with using a local payment gateway. Today, some of Spreedly’s customers include Cabify ( ), , BusBud ( ), , and Giftcardzen. The company has 130 customers, and will do 125,000 transactions this month, totaling roughly $8.5 million. Benson admits that most of Spreedly customers today are smaller startups, who pay for the service on a SaaS model starting at $50 per month and going up to around a couple thousand per month. But longer term, the goal is to grow Spreedly to the point where it could support much larger businesses. Some discussions on that front are underway today, he says. The company connected with , a group of four angel investors in Belgium, on AngelList. The angels had been an earlier investor in Ogone, which , so they are familiar with the space. They’re also investors in some potential Spreedly customers, like Cabify, which could help Spreedly’s business grow. Durham, N.C.-based Spreedly is using the additional funding for product development and hiring, with plans to grow its four-person team to seven with the hire of its first sales person and two engineers. The company also offers a useful (pictured above) in partnership with Shopify, which lets you track metrics associated the various gateways on its platform, including success rate, volume, average ticket size, and more.
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NFL, MLB Threaten To Ditch Broadcast If Aereo Wins In Court
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
In the never-ending court battle between and major network broadcasters seeking to have Aereo shut down, the NFL and MLB are chiming in on the matter. , the MLB and NFL are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule against Aereo, threatening to move their programming from free broadcast channels to paid cable networks like ESPN. This that Aereo opponents have made threats. NewsCorp said in April that it would be forced to pull its programming from broadcast and offer it as paid content should Aereo remain in business. The networks, including Fox, ABC, NBC, and others, believe Aereo is stealing and rebroadcasting their content without permission. Aereo’s technology lets users rent out remote antenna/DVR systems to provide access to free over-the-air signals, similar to the way rabbit ears work. Based on precedents set by a Cablevision case with regards to recording and replaying individual copies of content remotely, Aereo operates within the law thus far, winning earlier rulings in New York and Boston courts. In fact, it’s entirely probable that Aereo was developed with the Cablevision precedent in mind. Still, the media industry is digging in and ferociously clutching the current system, with outdated UIs and overpriced content bundles. Though the leagues are openly threatening to back away from broadcast, it seems they have a that stretches through the 2022 season, including ABC, Fox, and CBS. Of course, Aereo’s legality is ultimately up to the courts, as are the leagues’ abilities to back out of previous agreements with broadcasters.
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 11 | 20 | null |
Salesforce Reports FQ3 Revenue of $1.08B And EPS Of $0.09, In Line With Investor Expectations
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Today after the closing bell Salesforce reported its fiscal third quarter 2014 , with revenue of $1.08 billion and earnings per share of $0.09. Investors the firm to earn $0.09 on revenue of $1.06 billion. The company fell more than 3% in regular trading. In after hours, Salesforce is up almost 1%. The company is richly valued – the Wall Street Journal calculates that it is currently trading at around its forward 12 months earnings per share. The company’s GAAP diluted earnings per share totalled a negative $0.21 for the quarter. Salesforce has just over $1 billion in cash and equivalents. To be fair, the company did manage to beat expectations today, but by such a thin margin, I can’t call the above anything more than a meets expectations. That said, the company is raising its fiscal 2014 revenue outlook, which will help its stock price. For its fiscal 2014, Salesforce now expects revenue between $4.050 and $4.055 billion. For its fiscal 2015, Salesforce expects to grow its top line by just over $1 billion, with revenue of $5.15 to $5.20 billion for that period. Its fiscal third quarter (2014) revenue of $1.08 billion represents growth of 36% year-over-year. Operating cash flow for the period was $138 million, up a slightly more modest 30% year-over-year. All told, a solid quarter for the quickly growing company, but nothing that will change market perception of the company, and allow it to carry a higher valuation. After-hours trading of Salesforce is somewhat confused, with the company managing to be both up and down one to two points in five-minute intervals. Investors appear conflicted about the quarter.
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Al Jazeera America’s Bet On Serious News Only Snags 13,000 Daily Viewers
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Earlier today, that the newly launched Al Jazeera American cable news channel has very low ratings. For its first few months, the channel has averaged around 13,000 viewers. That’s low, but not zero. The kicker is that the predecessor to what people now call AJAM, Current TV, had a larger average audience of, wait for it, 31,000. That number was so low the channel sold itself to the Qatar based Al Jazeera, committing suicide by corporate takeover. The channel, according to the Post, is available in more than 40 million homes in the United States, which is mostly good news with a tinge of negative: It has the reach to grow to any size possible, but it’s also correct that even with that potential reach, it has failed to attract much more than tumbleweed. Its rivals are a full order of magnitude larger. What I am surprised at is the surprise that AJAM is tiny. Of course it is. What else would it be? Current TV’s ratings were a running joke. Who honestly expected the channel to be born with an audience in its grip? Also, as Peter Kafka , the total audience size for cable news is small to begin with. Summing all the large channels’ audiences together barely breaks the three million mark. So AJAM is fighting for a scarce number of eyeballs. The TechCrunch crew, while chewing over the ratings news, posited partially that perhaps there is no market for serious news journalism on television, or at least that the niche is satiated by current offerings. I hope that isn’t the case. Our own Greg Ferenstein correctly pointed out that CNN’s ratings fell during its period of heavy coverage of the rollout debacle of the Affordable Care Act. The other side to that fact is this, : I don’t doubt that taking a more partisan view to the news is an effective way to firewall yourself an audience segment. But I also think that we can agree as a body that CNN is hardly great television. It’s gamification of healthcare news was dull, and its regular quality is . There are some signs of life in other corners. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is seeing his ratings from their firm slump that kicked into gear when he took over his primetime spot. Hayes is noted for his wonkish take on the news, with better discussion, commentary, and smarter guests: Nielsen returns have All In With Chris Hayes posting its best averages yet among total viewers and adults 25-54 — excluding the breaking news boost from the Boston Marathon bombings (April 15). For the week of Aug. 26, and compared to the week prior, Hayes was up 71 percent to 224,000 viewers in the cable news network’s targeted demographic and up 47 percent among total viewers with a nightly average of 772,000. Hayes of course came into his new time slot after a successful weekend show drew attention to his method of handling the news. If AJAM wants to bet that a serious news channel has a shot in a market that includes endless helpings of the asinine and petty, I hope that it succeeds. But let’s give it enough time to find its legs before we write it off. There’s a Newsroom joke here that I’m missing. Feel free to submit it in the comments.
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Microsoft Research Builds Office Remote, A Tool To Control PC Docs With Your Windows Phone
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Good morning, super troopers. Out fresh this week is a neat little app from Microsoft Research that turns your Windows Phone into a remote to control Office documents on your PC. Dubbed Office Remote (natch), the app lets you run presentations on screen, or on a projector, say, from your smartphone, so that you can wander around a conference room, bedazzling the audience with your ability to not misspell large words bolded in your title sections. The app works with all forms of Office 2013, except for Office 2013 RT, so if you are rocking the new Surface 2, buzz off. It’s a neat little app that could make your grey corporate life slightly more lively. Via the , here’s what the Windows Phone client looks like: You can , if you are so inclined.
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Amazon Japan Launches Instant Video Service
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
Amazon Japan has , with more than 26,000 imported and local films and TV shows for streaming or download. Amazon’s decision to enter the online video market in Japan is interesting for two reasons. For starters, it is entering an already crowded marketplace with several major local competitors. It’s also another sign that the competition between Amazon and its Japanese counterpart Rakuten is heating up. The launch of Amazon Japan’s Instant Video service comes just before the debut of the Kindle HDX, which goes on sale in Japan tomorrow. The device will come with a 2,000 yen ($20) coupon for Instant Video as a promotion. Instant Video’s pricing tier begins at 100 yen (about $1) for a 24-hour rental. Amazon Japan also started selling e-books at the end of last year and now has more than 25 million songs on its music service. The debut of Amazon Japan Instant Video pits it against local competitors like GyaO Corp, Tsutaya TV and NotTV, as well as Hulu and Apple’s localized Japanese services. Amazon Japan’s new focus on streaming video comes after competitor Rakuten took several big steps to position its $16 billion Internet services ecosystem as a significant worldwide competitor to Amazon and Netflix. Over the past two years, Rakuten has , and , a global video streaming platform that crowdsources translated subtitles. Rakuten is probably best known in the U.S. as , but it is also one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies with a current market cap of about 1.9 trillion yen ($18 billion USD). That amount, however, still puts it far behind Amazon’s market cap of $177 billion. With e-commerce’s extremely thin margins, Rakuten’s decision to focus on aggressively expanding its digital content business makes sense. Amazon Japan’s move into the online video market is another sign that, despite its much larger size, the e-commerce behemoth will not take its business in Japan for granted.
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Bitcoin $645? Yeah, That’s Totally Reasonable
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency on everyone’s mind, is booming in value. Currently trading around $645 per coin, it has never been worth more, or generated more headlines that I can recall. The two are likely connected. If you can remember April, , spiking to around $275 per coin on the Mt.Gox market. It then fell to the $60s. That was the second Bitcoin rally. The first was quite a while ago, in June of 2011 according to the same dataset, with Bitcoin spiking to a then sky-high $30 or so. It later fell to the single digits. And so, in the first two Bitcoin rallies, we saw short-term spikes followed by sharp declines and price troughs. The gap between Bitcoin Rally 1 and Bitcoin Rally 2 was far longer than the distance between Rally 2 (April) and Rally 3 (now), but the pattern appears to be about the same. And oh, darling is Bitcoin putting on a show. For perspective, here’s a weekly Bitcoin chart, starting around July in 2010, to today: Kaboom, essentially. The current rally is being fueled by the usual combination of presumed scarcity, an overzealous investor class, and truckloads of optimism. So, things will calm down in a bit, with a decent price correction. History teaches us that much. Also, can I sell you this tulip bulb. Bitcoin was given a boost of sorts recently from the , chairman of the Federal Reserve, speaking to Congress in epistolary format: [T]hese types of innovations [such as Bitcoin] may pose risks related to law enforcement and supervisory matters, there are also areas in which they may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system. So that didn’t hurt. There is fear in the market that regulation of Bitcoin by the government could make it less anonymous, stripping it of one of its most important tenets. For now, however, on goes Bitcoin. Buy another monitor, toss a chart on it. This is going to get fun.
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iPad Mini With Retina Display Review: The Best Tablet On The Market
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
mini for 2013 introduces by far the most oft-requested feature that was missing from the original version: a high resolution Retina display for ultra-sharp rendering of text and images. Apple has added that screen without introducing trade-offs in terms of battery life, size (substantial ones anyway) and portability, too. This is the iPad mini everyone wanted to begin with, and now it’s here, and it’s the best tablet money can buy. The Retina iPad mini retains essentially the same design as its predecessor, with some slight changes to account for generational differences. The most noteworthy changes from an exterior standpoint are the addition of the space grey finish, which replaces the black version, and the addition of a tiny bit of size and weight to the original case specifications. [gallery ids="916407,916408,916409,916410,916411,916412,916413,916414,916415"] Before anyone gets too worried about that size and weight gain, however, rest assured that this is nothing like the additional girth added to the 9.7-inch iPad between generation one and two. Apple packed on the pounds in that generation, in order to make room for the extra battery needed to power the iPad 3’s Retina display. This time, it has also had to change the dimensions slightly, but the difference in negligible: it adds just 0.3mm of thickness, and 29 grams of weight to the svelte proportions of the original. In practice, this makes literally no difference to how you’ll perceive the mini. It still feels the same in the hand, and is just as comfortable to use one-handed as its predecessor. The original iPad mini set the bar for tablet design as far as I’m concerned, and the new version maintains that. There are also some small but crucial tweaks to the exterior design in terms of function: a second microphone input helps detect and compensate for background noise, making FaceTime calls and Siri more effective. The iPad mini with Retina display is all about that last bit – “with Retina display” – so the screen is the real star of the show in many ways. And it delivers an outstanding performance. On our review model, photos were just outstanding. Comparing them to photos viewed on the first generation iPad mini’s display reveals levels of fine detail not previously visible. And just glanced at casually, there’s such an improvement in sharpness original device owners might feel as though they’ve needed glasses all this past year and just never knew it. The display on our review unit worked perfectly in testing, and didn’t display any of the image retention uses that seem to be affecting a small portion of users. The most amazing part of the screen is how it can achieve those results using a case design that’s otherwise similar: packing twice the pixels into the same amount of screen space as was found on the original is no mean feat, and Apple has essentially pulled off a show-stopping magic trick in doing so. The original iPad mini quickly replaced my iPad 3 as my tablet of choice in most, if not all situations. But the lack of a Retina display was a tough pill to swallow, and every time I’d go back to using a Retina screen on a Mac, iPhone or 9.7-inch iPhone, I felt the lack of the same tech on the mini. Apple has now delivered on the only thing holding the ur-mini back, and it’s hard to understate the value of that. This Retina iPad mini offers up that excellent sound isolation tech I mentioned before thanks to the positioning of its mics, and that pays big dividends for FaceTime calls, according to my testing. It also packs new MIMO capabilities for the Wi-Fi antenna, which ensures that your iPad should have more reliable Wi-Fi connections, available at longer ranges than before (so long as you’ve got a wireless router that’s MIMO capable, which you should if you’ve bought one in the last few years). It’s hard to test this with much accuracy, but I definitely found the Mini’s Wi-Fi connection to be solid throughout testing on various networks. The version I tested was the iPad mini with cellular connectivity, and the LTE radio also worked very well throughout testing. I was only able to test it on Canadian networks, but the Retina iPad gets the same multiband LTE radio that’s available in the iPad Air, which means it can easily tackle 4G networks around the world. In testing the Air, I found that it worked flawlessly between the U.S., UK and Canada, and I expect the iPad mini with Retina will be no exception. The iPad mini with Retina has a brand new, gorgeous display, but it also has an A7 processor and M7 coprocessor that are every bit as powerful as the ones within the iPad Air. That means one thing: this device gets a huge boost over its predecessor when it comes to performance, and can handle every type of creative task you might think to throw at it. Apple putting an M7 activity tracking chip in the iPad mini seems an odd choice, since it’s a device that’s far less likely to be in your pocket with you at all times than the iPhone 5s, but it actually has some neat tricks up its sleeve. It can tell Day One what type of activity you were doing while you logged something in that digital journal, for instance, offering up more context. It’s easy to see how gathering that contextual data about what’s going on while you’re using your iPad could be put to other uses, too. The A7’s power is truly awesome, though. When you run an app like iMovie, and can near instantly compose clips with inset video and then have them render and playback with virtually no wait time, it’s apparent this is no mere evolutionary step in computing. It’s faster than when I use Final Cut Pro X on my primary video editing Mac, and it can be done by anyone, anywhere. Plus, the camera on the iPad mini, while only 5 megapixels, still beats those in most flagship smartphones out there. The rear shooter gets a boost thanks to Apple auto-improving multi-frame recombination tech, and the front-facing one gets an upgrade too, which is better able to deal with low-light situations thanks to bigger pixels. Apple has managed to increase the capacity of the battery considerably, while not drastically increasing the size. But it paid off: The Retina iPad mini gets the same long-lasting battery life on a full charge as its predecessor. On mixed use, I was getting an average of about 8-10 hours out of a full charge during my testing. Battery continues to be the iPad’s strong suit, and a big advantage it has over competitors. The iPad mini easily beats its closes rival, the Nexus 7 on this score for instance, and its ability to hand both the outstanding increased processing power of the A7 while still maintaining the same usage time as the iPad mini is really remarkable. [gallery ids="916423,916424"] As with the iPad Air, Apple offers two different case options for the iPad mini with Retina display, including a Smart Cover and a Smart Case. The Cover protects the screen and is remarkably light and made of polyurethane, while the Smart Case protects the back as well as the display but also adds a bit more thickness. Of the two, I prefer the Smart Case with the iPad mini, since the leather shell feels great in the hand, and it offers peace of mind while still managing not to compromise the iPad mini’s portability. The iPad mini with Retina display is the iPad mini I’ve been waiting for since the concept was even floated many years ago. You’ll pay a premium price to get it, but that nets you not only the gorgeous screen, but also the power of the A7 processor within. Since that offers 64-bit processing and power that developers have only begun to explore, this is also, maybe more than any other device that came before it, a future-looking iPad that’s nearly perfect as-is but sure to get better with age.
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Deeplink.me Brings Twitter Card Support To Mobile Developers Without A Web Presence
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 |
, an open initiative which encourages app developers to embrace deep linking – that is, linking directly to content inside an application from anywhere on the web or mobile – is today for Twitter Cards. This means app developers who don’t currently have a web presence are now able to take advantage of Twitter’s ability to point users to a specific page inside a mobile application from a tweeted link. Twitter Cards are used by thousands of developers to post richer content to Twitter’s network, including article summaries, photos, videos, songs and more. And in April, for mobile app deep-linking, too, as a tool for app discovery and user engagement. With Twitter Cards, developers could tweet links pointing existing users to a page within the app on their phone, or if they didn’t have the app installed, they could be pointed to the app store to download the app in question instead. However, the problem with the Twitter Cards implementation when it came to mobile app deep linking is that it required developers to also maintain a web presence in order to host the metatags Twitter required. For many mobile-only developers, especially game developers, this meant they weren’t able to take advantage of the Twitter Card feature. “We realized that this is a quite an issue for a lot of app developers,” explains Cellogic CEO Itamar Weisbrod, whose company . The service has now grown to support thousands of developers, too. “We’re actually hosting all the metatags and the markup for [developers using Deeplink.me],” he says. Today, developers interested in using the Deeplink.me service simply set up a URL scheme, define some translation rules, then route incoming URLs through Deeplink.me. The service is free to use, and easy enough to set up which has encouraged its adoption, Weisbrod notes. Going forward, those developers who want to have the added benefit of using Twitter Cards won’t have to take any additional steps beyond and creating their Deeplink.me links – Twitter Card support is built-in. “The links hit us first and then because we’re handling which platform it’s on and passing the data along, it’s already hitting our servers,” says Weisbrod of the new Twitter Card support. “For each link, we’re dynamically inserting all the metadata that Twitter needs for this specific app on the fly.” In other words, instead of having to establish a web presence for their app to use Twitter Cards, developers can just use Deeplink.me. When they then tweet a Deeplink.me link (which can also be masked behind a URL shortener if they choose), the tweet will display richer content, including the “open the app” button to point users to the app itself or the app store, if they’re not a user. Many developers are already using Deeplink.me URLs, but Weisbrod doesn’t yet have permission to share these companies by name, only saying that the lineup includes several “large mobile gaming companies” and “mobile commerce companies.” In the weeks ahead, the Deeplink.me service will be upgraded to support a few other options specific to Twitter Cards, like the ability to control the icon that displays and more. But in the meantime, interested developers can get started . Deeplink.me competes with things like and and more directly with , which has a smaller list of supporters at present. Plus, Google also recently announced its intentions to , starting with Android KitKat (Android 4.4) – something that will force developers to start taking mobile app deep linking more seriously. “We shifted into this mobile world without a proper link standard…and you need to be able to link to specific things in order to monetize properly, discover things, use things properly,” says Weisbrod. “Having to make your app linkable is like having to make your website linkable,” he adds.
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MetaPack Gets $33M From Index To Help Businesses Beat Amazon In The Delivery Dept
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
We’re entering the peak season for shopping, and along with it a big rush on e-commerce services and getting packages before the 25th. Timely news, then, that , a London-based provider of delivery management technology, is picking up a round of £20 million ($33 million). The funds will be used to take MetaPack international — with acquisitions a key focus — and to swing at the biggest e-commerce retailer of all, Amazon. Or, in the words of MetaPack’s CEO and founder Patrick Wall, “help retailers stay ahead of the Amazon proposition.” Index Ventures is the sole backer in this deal. MetaPack’s business has two parts to it, consumer-facing and enterprise-facing. Its technology sits behind the feature that you see when you order something and select options (and delivery pricing) for a parcel. Its tech also powers pricing and availability for different parcel carriers to the business itself so that it can select the most cost-effective option for how to deliver that parcel and then analytics on how performed and overall cost breakdowns — an important part for retailers to get right to have parity or even a better experience than a shopper might get on Amazon. MetaPack’s sales have been growing on average 60% annually for the last four years. Now more than 75% of the UK’s top 100 retailers are clients of MetaPack with some 400 million parcels delivered in total to date. Clients include brick-and-mortar companies like John Lewis but also pure-play e-commerce storefronts like eBay and ASOS. Metapack has actually been around since 1999, and this is the company’s first major rase from a VC, but not the first high profile investment. In 2011, it picked up a from the former, iconic head of Tesco, Sir Terry Leahy, which valued the company at about £20 million ($33 million). (Prior to that, Metapack had in 2006.) Although Metapack is not revealing revenue or current valuation, it’s a testament to its growth that the round getting announced today is the same as its valuation was in 2011. Wall tells me that the investment is getting spread across three areas that point both to MetaPack’s own business strategy, as well as changing tides in the delivery business. Part of the investment will be going towards international expansion through acquisitions, starting first in Europe, to bolt on relationships with local parcel delivery companies; and to establish business with local retailers. Who might MetaPack buy? Right now a key competitor, Wall says, is based in Germany, which may either mean a bid for them, or another company to get more competitive with XLogics. Another priority is to invest in core technology and new products. The majority of MetaPack’s business is based on supplying delivery data covering the transfer from retailers’ warehouses to their customers. But increasingly Wall says that the delivery chain in the “global commerce trade lanes” is getting shorter, with more demand for deliveries to come straight from the factory or company that supplied the retailer. “We see that coming as a development,” he says. “Right now have 700 suppliers shipping direct from the UK for major retailers, but where the market will go eventually is that companies will ship form the source.” That will inevitably lead companies like MetaPack to work more in countries like China, where most of its work today involves helping retailers export goods in bulk to their own warehouses. The other area will be to look at more sophisticated forms of delivery. Wall points to the rise in same-day delivery services from companies like Amazon and eBay as setting a new standard for what customers now expect from their online shopping. “Today you see the emergence of same day and we think that there will be more of those services, also shipping directly from retail stores and more complex multichannel supply chains.” That will also likely lead MetaPack to the U.S., where its main business today involves helping U.S. retailers export out of the UK. “We have the world’s largest label library,” — that is, the labels that you put on parcels and the subsequent integration into the parcel carrier networks — “we provide that plug in and can help us retailers export all over the world,” he says. As for why the choice to go with a VC now and for that VC to be Index, it was a mutual understanding of what the opportunity was in this space, and also the fact that Index has in its portfolio a number of e-commerce companies and enterprise software companies that complement MetaPack’s business. Dominique Vidal, the Index partner (and former Yahoo exec) who led this investment and now joins its board, notes that what MetaPack is doing is akin to developments in the payments market. “They bring to delivery what payment service providers brought to the payment market: choice for the customer and the merchant,” he says. “It is a long term trend. Most merchants need to offer better services to their customers. Delivery is pretty painful for most merchants they need to bring specialists to help them.” Other board members include Sir Leahy, Iain McDonald, David Burtenshaw and Mike O’Connell; Bob Willett, former CEO of Best Buy, who is also chairman. Photo:
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Search Data Points To Stronger Launch For Surface 2 Than Its Predecessor
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
The Surface 2 appears to be easily besting the consumer interest that its predecessor, the Surface RT, engendered during its release in late 2012. In fact, the Surface 2 is now the most-searched-for, single device among the larger Microsoft line of tablet hybrids. Here is the Google Trends for Search data regarding the four discrete Surface devices that have been released: Surface RT, Surface Pro, Surface 2, and the Surface Pro 2. Here’s , tracking search volume from late 2012 to the present day (yellow: Surface RT; red: Surface Pro; green: Surface Pro 2; blue: Surface 2.) The Surface RT had a very modest launch in terms of consumer interest. The Surface Pro spiked following its later introduction. This mirrors with its sales that were stronger than some anticipated (myself included). The Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 have had twin spikes, hitting on their unveiling and release respectively. The Surface 2, however, has enjoyed the sharpest spike, reaching search volume levels that are unmatched by any of the other Surface devices. However, there is a wrinkle to the above chart that could indicate that, among some consumers, the Surface Pro line remains supreme. Searches for “Surface Pro,” even after the original model , have remained strong (second place), overshadowing the new Surface Pro 2. Does that mean that among potential customers, there is nostalgia for the first-generation product? I don’t think so. Instead, I think that people are merely searching “Surface Pro” when searching for the new model. The following graph charts searches for the generic expression “Surface” over time: What we can see here is declining interest in the search “Surface” since the introduction of the line despite obvious spikes that coincide with the peaks in the first graph. Consumers are therefore more savvy in searching for the device they want, and not the line itself. That’s good for Microsoft, I think. Connecting the two, we’re seeing increasing savvy, and strong Surface 2 interest, in comparison to other Surface devices. This puts the strong Surface Pro searches into question. I wonder if the larger difference between Surface RT and Surface 2’s names than between Surface Pro and Surface Pro 2’s names is helping people keep them apart. Still, it appears that the Surface 2 is doing a far superior job at capturing consumer interest this holiday sales cycle than the Surface RT did last year. If you want to see Microsoft succeed in the space, you should find this encouraging. The fun part to this is that we will get a simple revenue report card from the company after the current quarter is over, which we will be able to measure on a sequential quarter basis. How much total top line can Surface drive for its parent? That I can’t say, but reading the entrails, things aren’t looking too bad for the end of calendar 2013.
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Gaming’s Next Revolution Will Be Live Streamed, And The PS4 Has A Nice Lead
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
This holiday season, only one of the two major next-gen consoles will feature an out-of-the-box game-streaming solution: Sony’s PlayStation 4. And that streaming feature taps into some powerful trends that should act as an ambassador for the hardware and Sony’s online network. If you’re not familiar with the feature, it’s very simple. The PlayStation 4 controller has a streaming button that you tap at any point while playing a game. From this screen you can upload a clip of your last 15 minutes of play (the console buffers a chunk at all times just in case you do something cool you want to share). But you can also choose to live stream your gameplay, with or without a feed from the PlayStation camera or mic that carries your image or voice. You can also choose to allow comments to be displayed on the screen during your stream. This is all powered by Twitch, the gaming video network born of Justin.tv. You can also use Ustream to send live video, but the majority of gamers I’ve seen are using Twitch. I’m not sure it matters which you use, as the audience is likely coming mostly from your shared links, not the networks themselves. Though this could change if either/or builds special browsing tools that surface new streams faster. While Microsoft has plans to implement game streaming, also via Twitch, those plans hit a snag and the only option available at launch is to save a video and upload it for later watching. You can’t do the same kind of real-time streaming on Xbox One as you can on PS4, at least not yet. Microsoft says that this functionality should arrive early next year. I’ve been testing out the live streaming on the PS4 and it’s a pretty awesome experience. The streaming is incredibly easy to get going. You can sign up for a Twitch account right in the flow and get going. You can share the stream to Facebook or Twitter so that people can hop in and watch, and a channel gets made on Twitch as well. People can comment on your gameplay as you run through Knack or Call of Duty or what have you. There’s something invigorating about having people watch your play in the game live. This partially taps into the ‘ that’s been gaining steam on video sites like Twitch and YouTube in a big way. Millions of people watch pre-recorded videos of other people playing games. It’s a crazy phenomenon that seems counter-intuitive. Why wouldn’t you just play the games yourself? The answer, I think, lies in the realm of spectator sports. Yes, we can all play basketball or football in one form or another, but there is a pleasure in watching people play that are really good at what they do. And there’s a sort of thrill that comes in seeing people fail as well. In addition to the charge you get out of having an audience, there’s also the collaborative aspects. People watching my streams give comments, advice, encouragement and, yes, insults. I’m able to respond with the mic without having to type anything. It’s a super fun mechanic and really well executed on PS4. Both ‘let’s play’ and the PS4’s live-streaming feature tap into something primal; games as performance art, to a degree. I used to play games competitively in ladders, climbing rung after rung with every match, until I was close to the top of one of the biggest amateur leagues. Those matches often hosted spectators, who watched and chatted as they went on. This was long before the days of or the or any of those huge formal events. It was cool then, but now the audiences are massive, with finals held in huge arenas. Live streaming allows anyone to get a small taste of that kind of performance. Live game streaming is set to be the next big social layer for platforms big and small. Yes, it’s on the major consoles now, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to see most portable devices, including those running iOS and Android, get some support for this kind of thing. Playing a game is fun, sure, but playing in front of an audience gives it another kind of punch, something I haven’t felt for a lot of years. Sony and Microsoft have tried for years to get people to share achievements and trophies on social networks, or even to passively send status updates like ‘watching Netflix’ or what have you. But this is another level entirely. Sony has a nice early start on the streaming layer for the holidays, and I think it’s going to be a big win for them. Microsoft’s Xbox One has a host of media-related features that outstrip Sony’s offering, and I’m enjoying both consoles. But when I play the Xbox One, I’m immediately missing the ability to just ‘pull’ people into my session to see what they have to say. Not having streaming ready to go on launch day has to irk them. Now, Sony has roughly two months to capture the interests of gamers with its streams and the network effects of the social followers of those streamers. People are going to be seeing tons of these Twitch.tv links on Twitter and Facebook over their winter breaks of whatever sort, and they’re going to be intrigued. Clicking on them and seeing a human playing a fighter or shooter in real time is a compelling sales tool. Beyond that, once both consoles have the capability, It will be interesting to see how fast and how far it spreads when it comes to other platforms. Twitch recently announced it , and raised $20 million in a series C. That’s growth of in 3 months and all of that was before the PS4 and eventually the Xbox One. Game streaming is just getting on its feet, but the possibilities are strong.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: We Give Thanks To BBM, Custom ROMs, And… Yoga?
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
Holiday weeks tend to be a little quiet, but there’s always going on in the world of Android to dig into. This time around, though, Darrell and I roped in Daniel Bader and our very own Natasha Lomas to liven things up before it goes quiet for a few days. And I daresay we pulled it off nicely. Oh, but you want details. We four jolly bloggers couldn’t help but dig into BlackBerry’s curious new BBM preloading deal with Android device OEMs, and it wasn’t long at all before Dan and I shifted the conversation to the joys and tribulations of loading some custom ROMs on your smartphone (for the record, he’s a fan of Paranoid Android). Throw in some kooky startup ideas and some even more outlandish funding offers, and you’ve got this week’s show in a nutshell. We’re not exactly the sappiest people you’ll ever meet, but we even had ourselves something approaching a heartwarming moment. Despite the fact that I’m the only one of the four who’s actually celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, I made everyone sit in a make-believe circle and share what they’re thankful for. Guess who went the classy route and chose something alcoholic? (Hint: it was Darrell.)
We invite you to enjoy every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific (generally speaking), in addition to our at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the . Intro music by . Direct .
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23andMe CEO Responds To Customers, Calls The FDA “An Important Partner”
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
After releasing a brief statement when the FDA’s decision to block the sale of 23andMe’s home DNA testing kits was made public, the company’s CEO Anne Wojcicki has sent a letter to her customers further explaining their position relative to the ban and the government agency that oversees and regulates medical devices and technologies. In the letter, sent out to 23andMe registered customers earlier today, Wojcicki begins by reassuring folks that their tech is both solid and trustworthy, and the product of years of development. Accuracy is the central point of the explainer, and she says they remain comfortable with their track record in that regard. This is likely an indirect response to some criticism that surfaced after the letter was made public, with risks of contracting certain diseases, including breast cancer. Wojcicki characterizes the issue with the FDA as part of an ongoing process to clarify how their service is classified, which explores “new territory” for both parties. It’s true that the FDA has never before had to regulate a test that provides general genetic testing beyond just a specific type of disorder. The FDA, for its part, has given 23andMe 15 days to respond to its letter and describe a plan for resolving its issues with the service. You can see the full text of Wojcicki’s letter pasted below. Clearly, the company is taking the position that it’s providing a service which is accurate to the claims that it makes about what it provides, while the FDA seems worried more about what consumers will do with the info they receive. As with any type of diagnostic information, there’s a huge amount of agency left in the hands of the person being diagnosed, but the FDA seems intent on making sure that 23andMe’s results don’t somehow result in a public that’s misinformed about the risks they face. Dear 23andMe Customers, I wanted to reach out to you about the FDA letter that was sent to 23andMe last Friday. It is absolutely critical that our consumers get high quality genetic data that they can trust. We have worked extensively with our lab partner to make sure that the results we return are accurate. We stand behind the data that we return to customers – but we recognize that the FDA needs to be convinced of the quality of our data as well. 23andMe has been working with the FDA to navigate the correct regulatory path for direct-to-consumer genetic tests. This is new territory, not just for 23andMe, but for the FDA as well. The FDA is an important partner for 23andMe and we will be working hard to move forward with them. I apologize for the limited response to the questions many of you have raised regarding the letter and its implications for the service. We don’t have the answers to all of those questions yet, but as we learn more we will update you. I am committed to providing each of you with a trusted consumer product rooted in high quality data that adheres to the best scientific standards. All of us at 23andMe believe that genetic information can lead to healthier lives. Thank you for your loyalty to 23andMe. Please refer to our 23andMe blog for updates on this process. Anne Wojcicki Co-founder and CEO, 23andMe
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Obamacare’s Online Enrollment For Small Biz Delayed
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
In an era of Google Glass, Siri, and Snapchat, small businesses will still have to enroll for some new health insurance plans by paper or phone. The White House admitted that on-going problems with the federal e-commerce website, healthcare.gov, the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) Exchange until Nov 2014. “We’ve concluded that we can best serve small employers by continuing this offline process while we concentrate on both creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP Marketplace,” wrote the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. Right now, the administration has conscripted on hand to fix enrollment for the individual market, with the hopes of snagging enough young-invincibles to lower the costs of everyone else. reports that the malfunctioning healthcare.gov website is now able to handle 50,000 concurrent users, the original goal for the failed launch on October 1st. “With this new delay, small businesses will likely see little change in the way they purchase health insurance until 2015. They will, however, need to use the SHOP exchange if they want to access a health law tax credit available to employers with fewer than 25 employees,” explains The Washington Post, in their early report of the announcement. When they do enroll, they’ll have to figure out how to sharpen a pencil.
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Keen On… The Future of Money: Kickstarter and the Bitcoin Climax
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Andrew Keen
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
Having over $37,000 on Kickstarter to make a TV show about the future of money, knows a thing or two about both social and financial value. “I ate my own dogfood,” she explained why she used Kickstarter – which she intriguingly describes as an “ATM to tap our social capital” – to finance a pilot for her TV show. So, as a current victim of digital disruption, I asked Schlegel if the financial establishment could be about to go through the same meltdown as the media industry. Perhaps she says. Schlegel believes that we need “more currencies” and describes what she calls the “Bitcoin climax” as a “harbinger of the future.” So let’s hope she raises that next $350,000- $600,000 which will finance her six-part tv show. The future of money is a critically important subject for both startup entrepreneurs and consumers, and we need well-informed futurists like Heather Schlegel to make sense of what she rightly calls this great “paradigm” shift.
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Microsoft Publishes Sexist Form Letter To Help Dudes Convince Women To Let Them Buy An Xbox One
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
Today Microsoft released a essentially created for men to send to women, encouraging their partners to let them buy an Xbox One console, as the new device will be great for both of them. The letter, which can be customized slightly, is incredibly bad, playing to ridiculous male and female gender stereotypes. It presumes that women don’t like sports or play video games and need to be condescended into technology purchase decisions by their male partners as they oh-so-certainly couldn’t come to those conclusions on their own! Holy hell, Microsoft. I know that young male gamers can be a touch on the ignorant side when it comes to gender equality, but from a company worth more than $300 billion, and with better-than-normal female representation in its senior leadership, producing something this sexist and ignorant is an incredible disappointment and shame. Propagating sexist stereotypes isn’t something to be tolerated. What’s almost incredible in the letter (before its language is potentially shaken up by the user) is that it manages to be directly sexist in implication, using loaded language like “honey” and comments on the physical appearance of the unnamed recipient, while eliding direct indication of gender. But it’s there. If you can’t see it, open your eyes. This from a company that managed to come out on the right side of history on gay rights in Washington. The letter is also stridently heteronormative. Its almost oppressively straight tone is off-key from a company such as Microsoft, which has a large LGBT workforce. You almost want to wonder what’s up over in Xbox-land. For flavor, a few quotes: After all, women don’t follow news, let alone technology news, and so how could she know! Time to let her in on the secrets of little boxes with blinky lights! Again, women don’t play games. Ever. And apparently don’t like football. But they do love those movies! You know, the ones with the actors and actresses they read about in their fluffy women’s magazines! The sort of magazines that never discuss technology, of course. We know that as we’ve already established that the women this letter is for have never heard of the word “Xbox” before! Because men don’t have close family! That’s for women! And dear heavens if men have, you know feelings and all that. Those are for women! And fine dear we can talk to your goddamn sister so long as I get Man Time later to shoot things. Pew, pew, pew, woman. Again, women don’t own consoles! Silly women! Microsoft, did I mention how stupid this letter is and how much respect for you I just lost?
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Facebook Testing A ‘Save For Later’ Feature, Chasing That Engagement Carrot
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
Facebook is looking at implementing an Instapaper- or Pocket-like “Save for Later” feature, according to . There’s no offline access at the moment, however, so it seems more like a way to try to drive better engagement and click-through rates for stuff shared by users on the network than anything else. The implementation is fairly simple: When you see a link shared by your network in your newsfeed, you can click a small bookmark icon on the right side to save it to a list of saved links available from your apps menu. The feature is currently visible only to a small selection of Facebook users, as is common when the company rolls out new features. Whether or not it gains wider release is up in the air, and while some features Facebook tests in this way do make it to the general population, many others do not. The advantage of something like this, as demonstrated by the success of Pocket and other services, is that it results in better engagement for content partners on the site. That’s because people who otherwise might have ignored something they were too busy to read, or to busy to go through the steps to click through and bookmark, would still potentially save that link and view it at a later date. In the past, is. Unlike social networks like Facebook and Twitter, it seems to enjoy a lower growth rate but higher engagement out of that smaller pool of users. Popularity for content on Pocket peaks sometime after it spikes on social feeds, providing an echo boom, and also drives engagement for longer, meaning there’s a more even curve of interaction over an extended period versus how people interact with it on more fleeting platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Even without an offline mode, Facebook could use a saved article mode to drive up engagement, return visits and perceived value delivered to publishing partners, which is a group it’s increasingly interested in bringing on board. It sets up the network to become even more of a portal. I think the danger lies in making it feel too much like a personalized Yahoo homepage and not enough like a social network where you can actually connect with friends and loved ones, but that’s why Facebook tests these things: To see if they strike the right balance with its user base.
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Betaworks Is Closing On $20 Million, Its First Raise In Over Three Years
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
New York City-based technology studio, , home to Digg, Instapaper, Dots, Bitly, Chartbeat, and many other products and services, is raising $20 million in new capital – news that betaworks CEO John Borthwick last Friday, in case you missed it. The company is raising $10 million in fresh capital, while the other $10 million was from a note, Borthwick confirmed to us via email. In terms of the new capital, the company has closed on $4.25 million out of this larger round, which includes both old and new investors. From our understanding, the round is less about betaworks needing to raise more capital, and more about the company allowing some interested new investors in – something that was made possible by the timing with the note’s conversion. There are several high profile new investors, sources close to the matter tell us, including Tumblr’s David Karp, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Ev Williams (Twitter), Abdur Chowdhury (Summize founder), Dave Morin (Path), and Gerry Laybourne, Nickelodeon founder, among others. Betaworks is also doing something with Laybourne in the kids space, which should be out in either January or February. Previous investors from betaworks’ A and B rounds have returned, an shows, including RRE Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Intel Capital, and White Star Capital. In addition, and are also listed (update: as they board members). The company had previously raised roughly $28 million, according to . Betaworks, along with other outfits like IdeaLab, has long been a pioneer in the “studio model” method to building new companies. That is, the company actually incubates several products in-house, and it makes smaller seed stage investments in outside companies of around $100,000 to $200,000 apiece. The product teams inside betaworks are able to leverage a shared platform of tools, including those for data, analytics, and monetization, all of which can help services quickly build up, ship and market their products. This allows for a more flexible environment, where failures can happen fast, thanks to the experimentation the studio model allows for. In earlier years, betaworks made a name for itself by Twitter search engine Summize to Twitter, and later with TweetDeck. This year, the company has been heavily focused on , the once leading crowdsourced and crowd-voted internet news portal, which has now returned as a fuller suite of news gathering and news reading products, including a Google Reader replacement called , , a pair of native mobile applications, and more. Traffic to the new Digg has since its relaunch, with of the so-called “Digg Effect” even making a comeback. Digg has also grown by 600% in unique visits since its relaunch, sources tell TechCrunch, and its one-month old Digg Video vertical has seen traffic go up by 15% month-over-month. Betaworks also made headlines for Instapaper this year, after founder Marco Arment decided the popular “read-later” service needed a new home. The addition helped betaworks increase its bottom line, too, as Borthwick at this year’s Disrupt NYC event – Instapaper alone makes roughly $1 million per year after Apple’s take, he claimed. As for the new funding, as Borthwick himself previously noted, this is the first time the company has raised capital in over three years. Earlier in November, the company hired former Huffington Post Media Group publisher Janet Balis as its chief revenue officer, AllThingsD . At the time of the hire, Borthwick gave a hint of what was to come, saying, “Phase One of Betaworks was building great companies. And Phase Two is really building Betaworks as an operating media company.” From what we’re hearing, that means that while betaworks won’t necessarily stop its company building focus, it will be looking to further monetize its current products. In particular, that includes Digg, which runs sponsored posts; Giphy which has done joint promotions with “The Hunger Games” and Gap recently; Dots, which has 15 million installs and ; and bloglovin, which has 10 million users and 15 million monthly pageviews. More to come, apparently. Excited to bring a few new investors into betaworks. Approx. 20m total capital. The first time in 3 yrs+ that we have have done a raise — John Borthwick (@Borthwick)
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Nokia Controls 90% Of The Windows Phone Market, As Its Lumia 520 Continues To Impress
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
Ahead of the formal transfer of Nokia’s hardware business to Microsoft in exchange for a few dollars, a new report out today details how dominant the Finnish handset company is in the Windows Phone market. According to , Nokia now controls 90 percent of the Windows Phone market. That’s to say that 9 out of 10 Windows Phone handsets in the market today were made by Nokia. As that number continues to rise on a monthly basis, its current sales share is higher than 90 percent. Or, put another way, Windows Phone is Nokia as much as the reverse is true. Another milestone was reached today: Among Windows Phone handsets in the market, more than 75 percent now run Windows Phone 8. That’s to say that in the past year, Microsoft has sold enough new handsets to triple the usage of all Windows Phone 7.X handsets that are still in use. Of course, some Windows Phone 7.X owners upgraded to new Windows Phone 8 hardware, but it’s still a mark of maturity for the new Windows Phone build to cross the 75 percent threshold. The low-end Lumia 520 continues to perform strongly, picking up another 3.3 percent market share in the month. Its 521 variant broke into the top 10 most-used handset list with 3.4 percent. A new version of the phone, the Lumia 525, will reach markets in short order. Tossing light onto why the Lumia 520 matters for Windows Phone (and therefore NokiaSoft), is the Vietnamese market, which, by percentage, is made up of 57 percent Lumia 520 handsets. The low-cost side of the Lumia line of smartphones is driving unit volume for the platform. That’s the gist of the market: Nokia is the only Windows Phone OEM that matters; the Lumia 520 and its children are selling well; and Windows Phone 7.X is firmly in the past. What Microsoft needs now is a hit handset in its home market, and it will have a decent footing the world around. What will be more than interesting will be whether Windows Phone can move more than 10 million units in the fourth quarter of 2013. If not, concerns about its unit volume growth rate will resurface.
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Paygarden’s Platform Lets You Finally Redeem Those Unused Gift Cards For Good And More
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
After , former Y Combinator partner Aaron Iba is at work launching his next project. After getting frustrated with all of the unused gift cards he would rack up over the holidays, he started Paygarden. It’s a way for businesses that the original gift card provider to accept the cards as an alternative form of payment. “When I was working at Y Combinator, many startups had big challenges around payments — how were they supposed to grow revenue and get more users to pay?” Iba said. “But many users don’t have credit cards, or are unwilling to enter in their credit card numbers into a webpage.” The big vision here is that providing these alternatives helps consumers pay for goods and services online without giving up too much information about their identities or compromising their privacy. Businesses can integrate with Paygarden by adding a link alongside their traditional credit card billing form. Iba says he’s designed the experience to be as easy as PayPal: users just enter their gift card number and PINs. Paygarden’s platform checks the balance on the gift card and uses the remaining value for the online purchase. (You can see what the user flow looks like below.) They’ve done deals with gift card networks covering about a hundred big retailers including Best Buy, Walmart, Target and Starbucks. (The full list of accepted brands is .) On the other side for redemptions, Paygarden is launching with two partners — and Private Internet Access. Prizeo is that channels celebrities’ social media influence into funding for charity. So now you can use your unwanted gift cards for good, instead of buying things that you may not necessarily need. “Something is sitting there in people’s wallets, purses and drawers. Some of that could go for charity,” Iba said. The other company, , is a VPN service provider. VPNs or virtual private networks are used by privacy-conscious web users who want to protect data on their browsing activity from outside observers. (They’re popular in China for netizens that want to get around the Great Firewall.) This particular partnership ties more deeply into Paygarden’s longer-term vision, which is to provide an alternative payments system that helps protect identity and consumer privacy. Instead of using credit cards, people can hand over gift cards without compromising any data about who they are. Their identity is never linked with their purchase. Iba is also exploring ideas around Bitcoin. But for now, the crypto-currency is still difficult for mainstream consumers to use or understand. On top of protecting privacy, Paygarden helps another segment of consumers. There are who don’t have credit cards. Now they have more of an ability to make online purchases if they have gift cards on hand. The Paygarden team, which includes Iba’s former MIT classmate George Huo and early Cardpool engineer, is bootstrapped for now.
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Live Nation Buys Mobile Startup Meexo, Courtesy Of Acquisition Marketplace Exitround
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
Live music giant is announcing today that it has acquired , a startup that in 2011. The companies connected through , a website that . Co-founder and CEO Jacob Mullins (a former colleague of mine from my time at VentureBeat) told me that , but this is the first time he’s been given permission to . The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Meexo’s two co-founders will take on new roles at Live Nation Labs, the digital-focused arm of the company, with Romain David becoming head of mobile product and Dav Yaginuma leading mobile engineering. Ethan Kaplan, Live Nation’s vice president of product, said that including Meexo, Live Nation Labs has made three talent acquisitions — one of them was , while the other hasn’t been announced yet. And there will probably be more: “In the next year, I have a big mandate for mobile.” According to David, Meexo had already turned its attention away from the dating app that it launched at Disrupt, working instead on a new product that he wouldn’t say much about, except that it was a mobile social app that involved “context.” However, there were unforeseen technical challenges, and after talking to investors (Meexo was backed by undisclosed angels) and hearing from potential acquirers, David and Yaginuma decided to look at their options, including Exitround. When I asked David if he had any regrets about leaving his startup behind, he replied via email: I made my very first cellular call on July 3, 1994 at the Formula One Grand Prix in France on a Mitsubishi MF 450. I knew that one day mobile would change our lives, not only in a utilitarian way but also in an emotional way. This is why I made every decision in my education and career around it, since that day. I have had dreams about what mobile should do and what it should become. Some of these dreams have become reality, some have not. To me, the most important is for these dreams to happen rather than being part of a small company or large company.
This post has been updated with Kaplan’s correct title. It has also been corrected to reflect David’s statement that (contrary to what I had understood initially) Live Nation acquired both the Meexo team and its assets.
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gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 11 | 18 | null |
Meet Omakase, The Charity That Wants To End The Tech Industry’s Giving Problem
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
The tech industry is one of the in the economy today. It’s where lots of jobs are being created and lots of money is being made. But there’s one notable area in which the tech sector lags in comparison to other well-performing industries: Philanthropy. The average salary of Silicon Valley tech professionals is . So it’s pretty embarrassing that as flush with cash as so many people here are, mean that many needy families in the San Francisco Bay Area are likely to be without turkey this Thanksgiving. And in the to charity in 2012, there was not one tech company to be found. A new San Francisco-based organization called wants to help change that, by creating a non-profit giving system that’s explicitly built to appeal to people in the tech industry. Omakase is named after the that is often used in sushi restaurants to allow the chef to choose your meal for you. The Omakase Charity works the same way: You leave the selection of non-profits to experts, people whose full-time job it is to source the most well-run organizations targeting the most worthy causes. The only decision you make is whether to give $10, $25, or $50 per month. To make a tech startup comparison, you could say it’s like a for charitable giving. Omakase’s founder has spent her career in the non-profit sector, with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and years of experience studying global inequality and volunteering throughout the world, particularly in Central America. So when she moved to San Francisco and tried to encourage her friends and acquaintances in the tech industry (many of whom she encountered through her husband, co-founder and CEO ) to participate in philanthropic causes, she found it incredibly frustrating and perplexing to be met with ambivalence. Why were all these people, who were smart and affluent and seemingly conscientious, not donating their money or time to causes that need help? By asking around the tech community, Preston-Werner says she discovered that it’s not that techies are stingy — but there are several barriers that keep them from charitable giving. For example, they want lots of data because they’re hyper-afraid of being scammed, but at the same time they’re overwhelmed by the number of non-profits out there. They want to donate money to causes, but they don’t want to be included on mailing lists or receive telethon calls for years to come. So Omakase has been structured to address those exact needs. I think it’s a fantastic idea that’s come at just the right time, as tensions about the gap between the tech elite and the less fortunate . As Omakase’s it’s the perfect gift to give to the “techie in your life” — someone who already has all the gadgets, games, and hoodies any one person could possibly need. Hopefully, Omakase can be the tech industry’s of sorts for generosity — people can start with $10 per month, and eventually become more philanthropic in larger ways. Theresa Preston-Werner came by TechCrunch’s headquarters recently to talk about what inspired her to create Omakase Charity, how it selects its non-profits, and much more. Watch that in the video embedded below.
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Clumsy Ninja Took A While To Get Here, But It’s A Terrific Demonstration Of The A7’s Power
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
An app that was demoed at Apple’s iPhone 5s launch just got its official release last week, and despite the wait, proves a solid game that really demonstrates the power of Apple’s new A7 processor. It’s part virtual pet, part RPG, part tech demonstration, but it turns out that’s a very addictive combination. I played the game in a zeroed in stupor for about 10 hours on Sunday while waiting for a service technician to show up and install my Internet. It was a near-perfect example of the “just… one.. more… level” type of gaming experience, driving you on via a cleverly designed series’ of challenges that make even repetitive in-game action seem fresh and new for a long time. There is a lot of repetition, to be sure: Most of what you do with your Ninja involves getting it to either jump on a trampoline or hit a punching bag. There are a number of other activities facilitated by in-game items, too, each of which is purchasable via one of two forms of in-game currency (one which is earned freely through activities, and one which is much more easily achievable via in-app purchases). But the balance here is well-struck: in-app purchases greatly increase the speed with which you can advance through the game, but they aren’t necessary to its enjoyment or ultimately, your ability to finish the game. The point of the whole thing is that your Ninja is searching for his long-lost Ninja (girl)friend, and needs to improve his skills to be able to find her. He progresses by accumulating experience and advancing through a series of levels, picking up a different coloured belt once every other level. Hitting new levels unlocks new training accessories, and training on those builds experience and unlocks special moves. [slideshow include=”920593,920594,920595,920596,920597,920598″] The graphics in this game, and the physics that animate the ninja, which is essentially an elaborate rag doll, are both outstanding. It’s enough that you forgive the odd blending of virtual pet and human central character (some challenges require you to rub the ninja’s belly or pet its head, which is absolutely bizarre and more than a little uncomfortable). What really makes this game so good is the attention to detail and the flawless execution: This doesn’t feel like your typical mobile game, with bugs and cut corners and a maximizing of revenue opportunities with a minimum of effort. It instead feels like something that could approach a console quality of experience, but with game mechanics uniquely suited for mobile devices. Ultimately, Clumsy Ninja did get me to fork over some money for in-game purchases, despite the free price tag, but at no point did I feel like I was being unfairly bullied into doing so. This is a great game with a unique character and interesting play mechanics that should provide ample opportunity for distraction this holiday, if that’s what you’re after.
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Microsoft Brings Xbox Video To The Web Ahead Of Windows Phone, Forgets HD Playback
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
Happy pre-fat day, Super Troopers. Today Microsoft brought , meaning that if you use the service on your Xbox or Windows 8.1 device, you can access your content on other machines. The downside? There is no HD playback, which will disappoint many. The easy rebuttal to that is that people who use Xbox Video likely have an Xbox console, which is probably linked to the largest screen in their house. So, where they need HD content the most, they have it. Still a bit of a bummer to not have it on the web, but perhaps it will come in time. As , Microsoft is “planning to release a Windows Phone version of Xbox Video shortly,” but notes that that version will also lack HD playback. This is more excusable, as you can only imagine the bandwidth cost of such content flowing over Verizon or AT&T’s networks. As a product move, this is about as surprising as Apple introducing a new iPad on a yearly basis. Microsoft is building out its consumer content business, which will eventually contain in-house-created video and the like. It wants to ensure if you toss your lot in with it, you can hit up all your videos regardless of what device you’re on. Now, stop reading tech news and go hug someone.
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Twitter Surveys Users On Live TV Viewing, Second Screen Habits As It Pulls Thread On Television Features
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
Twitter fielded a survey to a subset of its users yesterday about their live TV viewing habits. The survey began by asking age and gender info, then asked whether a user had watched live TV on Monday night. Judging from chatter on Twitter, the survey ended if you didn’t say you watched any live TV. But, if you did, the questions then delved into which TV programs that users had been watching, including NFL football, WWE wrestling, Love & Hip Hop, The Voice or Sleepy Hollow. If you answered one of them, it then asked which device you were using while you watched. Other questions in the survey included queries about apps or websites that they used while watching the shows. The survey was delivered from inside Twitter’s website and native apps on Android and iOS and featured a short list of questions delivered by the Toluna polling platform. Developer was kind enough to share screenshots he took of the survey. Twitter was interested to know whether people had been using Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, email, Instagram, Vine or another (to be filled in by the user) app while watching the game. Also on the list was an entry for ‘chat’ apps like G-Chat, Snapchat, WhatsApp or text messages. The interest in what people are using their second screen for is obviously of intense interest for a company like Twitter, which hopes to couch itself (heh) as the ‘TV companion’ app. The thing to do while you’re doing nothing watching TV. Obviously there are several initiatives underway at Twitter that this survey could be looking to gather information on. It recently button, which allows users to control their TV with Twitter. And Twitter has a partnership with for the U.S. market. Its first report last month showed that year-over-year and offered a variety of metrics surrounding various TV programs. We asked Twitter last night whether this was part of the Nielsen deal or just an internal survey, but hadn’t heard word back yet. Obviously, Twitter is very interested in what people are doing around live TV. We’ve been tracking its efforts to make TV a bigger part of its platform for a while. A added some trending TV features, but . We hear there were originally some plans to make this more prominent, but those got scaled back. It wouldn’t be surprising at all to see this section pop out and into its own tab or timeline in the future. Here’s what the survey looked like: Image Credit:
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Report: NSA Considered Revealing Porn Habits To Discredit Radicals
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 |
I feel like when people freak out about the unknown threat of mass government surveillance, they’re secretly worried a clandestine agent will reveal their naughty web-surfing habits to friends and family. Today, that fear was revealed. At least for suspected terrorists. The Huffington Post* on new top-secret documents showing that the National Security Agency considered blackmailing suspected Muslim radicals by revealing their Internet porn history. The classified documents leaked by whistleblower and current Russian language-learner Edward Snowden show that an “assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent.” According to the document, the NSA has embarrassing information on at least two suspected targets and some of the data was gathered through FBI surveillance under the controversial Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA). There’s no information on whether the NSA actually used the red-face-inducing porn discredit plan. Perhaps more importantly, it’s unclear whether the NSA was targeting suspected terrorists, or those assisted in radicalizing others through Internet messaging. Stewart Baker, former NSA general counsel and the media’s favorite defender of surveillance, said that “On the whole, it’s fairer and maybe more humane” than bombing a suspect, describing the “it” as “dropping the truth on them.” It’s a safe bet that the NSA could likely find terrorists that sneak in some porn on their downtime; not because it’s a scientific fact that all men look at porn, but because officials have it before. U.S. officials discovered an “extensive” porn library in Osama Bin Laden’s last hideout in Pakistan. For those readers who have finished this story without erasing their Internet history, the Huffington Post reminds us that our intelligence agencies have kept juicy secrets on political dissidents in the past, Martin Luther King. The Internet apparently has a sense of irony, because the first suggested “you may like” link on the Huffpo story was “Why Do Lesbians Watch Gay Porn,” perhaps posted in a deliberate attempt at entrapment — or because porn is just all over the Internet.
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“It’s Just A Big iPod Touch”
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MG Siegler
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
Over the weekend, I got two emails from my mother. The most interesting aspect of them was the sign-off at the bottom: “Sent from my iPad”. This stood out to me for two reasons: First, I’ve now been using the iPad Air for the past couple of weeks, and thinking a lot about the state of the product. Second, this is my mother using an iPad. An iPad! Regularly! On a scale of 1 to 10 when it comes to tech savviness, I’d generously give my mother a 2. Sorry mom — but I think she’d (reluctantly) agree. Some of my earliest childhood memories revolve around “fixing” the television for her. “Fixing” here often meaning selecting the correct input or making sure the power was in fact on. Later, I would put the same work into the VCR. Then the computer. She certainly doesn’t hate technology, but it doesn’t seem to get along too well with her. And I know that the rapid pace of change in tech has been a source of frustration for her throughout the years. Just when she learns how to use one thing, the entire world changes. I completely understand her reluctance to embrace any new technology. So again, imagine my amazement when I saw the telltale sign of iPad usage: that email signature. To be clear, I’m the one who gave her the iPad. About a year ago, I gave her an iPad 2, knowing her computer (my old, old, old computer) was likely on its last legs. And while I gave her a walk-through of how to use the new device, I didn’t expect it to stick. After all, not only was she not an iPhone user, she wasn’t even a smartphone user. The idea of “apps” was a foreign one to her. I’m guessing the only times she was regularly using a touchscreen was at an ATM. And yet, “Sent from my iPad”. So I did what any fascinated tech blogger would do: I emailed my mother a series of questions about her usage of the iPad. Her response was illuminating: So yes, I like the iPad, but I miss a keyboard. I don’t like this touchpad. But I use it now in place of my old computer. I go on Pinterest. But I am having a few issues (as usual). It just shuts down and the Apple appears on the black screen. Must be that I’m using it too much? I use it for email, Facebook, and checking things out. Love you. Xoxox Sent from my iPad I’m not 100 percent sure this is the perfect response from an “average” iPad user of a certain age, but I’d bet it’s pretty close. “Miss a keyboard.” “I go on Pinterest.” “Email.” “Facebook.” “Checking things out.” The iPad has become a full-on computer replacement for my mother. And beyond the keyboard quibble, it sure seems to be a more than adequate one for her. So I have to laugh when I think back to the unveiling of the original iPad nearly four years ago. At the time, a not insignificant portion of the population seemed to write it off as “just a big iPod touch.” That Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Meanwhile, in their last reported fiscal year, Nintendo did $6 billion in sales. The iPad? . Yes, the iPad alone is now roughly five times the business of of Nintendo. My mother would never use an iPod touch. But she is using an iPad. And I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the iPad Air. between whether or not I’d rather have the forthcoming retina iPad mini or the svelte iPad Air. Using the Air these past two weeks has just led to more conflict in my head. I can come up with perfect use cases for both devices (before having regularly used the retina iPad mini, of course). And while a lot of people I know in the tech scene seem to be firmly in the retina iPad mini camp, I think of users like my mother, who I don’t think would like the mini as much as the Air. In fact, she saw my first generation iPad mini last year and thought it was too small. Remember, she’s using the iPad as a computer replacement. So this iPad Air would seem to be the perfect device for her. It maintains the same screen size and battery life of the elder iPads. But it’s now significantly lighter and faster. I’ve been thinking about my mother’s remarks about the keyboard/touchscreen as well. It’s fairly remarkable that it’s the only real source of pain at this point in her transition from a laptop to the iPad. (Well, beyond the Apple black restart screen of death, which I see all the time too — what’s going on here, Apple? Unlike my mother, I it’s not due to overuse.) I’m actually sort of surprised Apple hasn’t attempted to do something interesting in the keyboard accessory space. Yes, it may mean copying Microsoft. And yes, it may mean admitting that typing on a physical keyboard is easier than a virtual one. And yes, Apple won that battle on the phone side of things. But this is different. Apple won the phone touchscreen keyboard battle versus the physical keyboards because most people were not used to any keyboard (beyond the number keys) on their phones when the iPhone launched. It was only BlackBerry users that were the longtime diehard holdouts since they had known the physical keyboard world and had a hard time adapting to the new world order. And while the tablet space was also relatively new and so there was no entrenched keyboard power, a lot of people are coming to the iPad from the PC and using it as a replacement. People like my mother. She longs for that keyboard. Of course, there are a number of good third-party keyboard options for the iPad. I’ve long had and loved the Logitech variety (though not the one for the iPad mini, it’s too small for my taste). And it’s great that Apple’s own iOS software accommodates these third-party devices. Which again is why I’m sort of surprised Apple itself hasn’t made a move here. The iPad may not be a PC, but there are a lot of users who are now using it in lieu of a PC. And while kids growing up today may be fine using a virtual keyboard having never have really known a physical keyboard (and not sending nearly as much email as the rest of us), there are probably tens of millions of users — if not more — who would make the jump to an iPad if there was some sort of physical keyboard option. Which is undoubtedly exactly why Microsoft made the Surface keyboard covers. All of this is a long-winded way of getting to the real question: is the iPad finally good enough to be your only computer? For the vast majority of people reading this on TechCrunch, the answer is undoubtedly still “no”. But for my mother, the answer is clearly “yes”. And that’s the iPad 2. Holding an iPad 2 next to the iPad Air now feels like night and day. Truth be told, the iPad Air actually feels a lot more like an iPad mini than any of the older 9.7-inch iPads thanks to the trimmed down sides. I mainly carry around an 11-inch MacBook Air these days as my work machine, but when the Logitech keyboard is available for the iPad Air, I’ll be tempted to make the jump myself. The difference in size and weight may not seem like much on paper, but it’s actually just about the weight of an iPad 2. (A bit more with the keyboard, obviously — though I wouldn’t carry it around all the time, just when I knew I had to do a lot of typing.) But again, what’s most interesting to me here isn’t my own usage. I’m clearly an edge-case that will go out of my way to try to make the iPad Air fit into my life while in the name of progress. My mother is a common user. All she wants to do is pin things on Pinterest, post things on Facebook, and send some emails. She wants convenience, portability, and simplicity. And she’s iPad-only. And this new iPad Air is better in every way compared to the iPad 2 (except now in price). Those people still using an old 8 pound HP machine that runs so hot that you can cook an egg on it, must be looking at the iPad Air and salivating. It’s salvation — perhaps just minus a keyboard. It’s a device clearly accessible to the computing mainstream. One thing it’s not: a big iPod touch.
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Messaging App Line Now Brings In Nearly $100M A Quarter, But No Official Word On An IPO
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
, the messaging app that blew up in Japan over the past two-and-a-half years, is in revenue a quarter. The app, , said it brought in 9.9 billion yen ($99.9 million) in net sales for the quarter ending in September. Overall revenues, which include the amount that Line has to pay out to the app stores and developers, has more than doubled in the past six months to 15.6 billion yen ($157.6 million). While there have been , the company remained quiet on the subject in an interview on Friday. But we separately hear from investor sources closely connected with the company that they are considering an offering in mid-2014. “Of course you’re going to ask questions about an IPO,” said , who is the chief strategy and marketing officer for LINE. “It’s a strategy we’re thinking about, especially looking at services like Twitter. But at the current moment, we don’t believe that it’s something that we have to do right away. We currently have enough cash and we don’t have a pressing need to do an IPO.” Line has seen an astonishing rise for a skunkworks project that came out of Naver, which is the company behind South Korea’s big search portal of the same name. From its launch shortly after the devastating 2011 earthquake that crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Line has accumulated 280 million registered users worldwide. They have never shared figures on monthly active users. The app has totally saturated Japan with 49 million registered users and completely upended the mobile gaming market in Japan, undermining the historical power of gaming platforms like DeNA’s Mobage network and GREE. These two companies ruled in the feature phone era, but DeNA has now seen its shares slide 32.5 percent while GREE shares have fallen 41.5 percent over the last year. Line’s rise, along with that of other apps like Tencent’s Weixin (which has 236 million monthly actives), shows just how volatile the mobile social networking and messaging space continues to be. Now Line is picking up momentum in the gaming space, with 39 published titles and deals in the works to bring more third-party games from abroad over into the Japanese market. They recently closed a deal with Finland’s Boomlagoon, a studio from a team of former Angry Birds developers. Before adding a games platform, Line had aggressively pushed stickers and sponsored accounts for revenue. (Stickers, notably, were copied by many other Western rivals like Facebook and Path). But now, the key part of Line’s massive revenue growth now is in gaming. The games part of Line’s business now makes up 60 percent of their revenue, followed by stickers, which make up another 20 percent of their sales. Then there are sponsored accounts and merchandising, which is pretty minimal. Their gaming-centric strategy closely follows what neighboring South Korean messaging app Kakao did in coming to dominate Google Play’s charts. Kakao publishes all 10 of the top 10 grossing titles on Google Play in the country, . Like Facebook, which also saw rapid gaming revenue growth in the early days of launching its platform, Line wants to be much more than a games distributor. They see themselves as a communications platform, which they believe will them more durability than games-only platforms like DeNA’s Mobage and GREE. “There’s a fundamental difference between companies like us and Mobage (DeNA) and GREE,” he said. “Their SNS (social networking services) were based around games, so it was easy for users to quit the service quickly. But Line is based around communication. Users use it every day for free calls and messaging, so we think our lifespan will be longer than former SNSs.” Next, they’re considering building some type of e-commerce service or marketplace, handling both consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer transactions. That could create competition for giants like Rakuten and scores of other small e-commerce startups based in Japan. After saturating Japan, their big growth markets are in countries like Taiwan and Thailand. Then they’ll be looking at Spanish-speaking or Latin American markets like Mexico, Spain and Brazil for growth. The U.S. remains a tough and incredibly competitive market, even though they’ve hired local U.S. executives and to grow an audience there. “We’ve considered strategies to enter America for awhile, but it is a very difficult market at the moment,” Masuda said, declining to share how many U.S. users the app has. He said despite upstarts like Weixin or WeChat, the venerable WhatsApp is their strongest rival, especially in growth markets like India. “You’re able to use that app in areas with poor network connections or on smartphones without very high specs,” he said.
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CustomInk Nabs $40 Million In Funding From Revolution Growth, Adds Ted Leonsis To Its Board
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
Custom apparel company just raised a whole lot of money, bringing on $40 million from , the investment fund from Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, and Donn Davis. Along with the funding, Leonsis will join the company’s board as it seeks to expand and go after new opportunities. This isn’t your usual tech startup funding story. Founded nearly 14 years ago by a bunch of friends who had gone to school together, CustomInk was built to scale the world of custom printing on the Internet. Raising just $600,000 to get off the ground, it survived the first dot-com crash and, after some time, even flourished. The bootstrapped company was successful in part because the custom shirts its users ordered were for groups, teams, and causes that they were affiliated with. The result was that they would return whenever they needed to do another printing or were organizing around something new. “We found out early on that the things people were ordering were pretty special,” CustomInk CEO and co-founder Marc Katz told me by phone. As a result, CustomInk has seen its core business increase to nearly $200 million in annual revenues, and it continues to flourish, with year-over-year growth of 50 percent. To reach that number, it’s delivering more than 20 million custom t-shirts a year, and there’s plenty more room for CustomInk to grow. Custom apparel, after all, is a $5 billion business today, of which the company has only captured a small portion. Based on its current growth and revenue numbers, you wouldn’t think that CustomInk would even need funding. And, in fact, it doesn’t. When Revolution Growth co-founder Ted Leonsis first approached Katz about doing a deal, the co-founder was reluctant to bring on outside capital after already building what is a pretty successful and scaleable custom printing business. It took about nine months to change Katz’s mind, according to Leonsis, who was drawn not only by the huge market opportunity, but by CustomInk’s viral and organic growth. He was also impressed by the average order size and the number of return users who come back to the platform each time they needed custom shirts printed. More than just adding fresh capital, CustomInk gets the benefit of adding Leonsis to its board. “I’m a big believer in the value-added board member,” Katz told me. Leonsis, of course, was a longtime executive at AOL, holding roles that include vice chairman and president during the 13 years he was there. More recently, he’s joined the board of major companies such as American Express and Groupon, where he currently sits as chairman. As Katz said, “A mentor is someone whose hindsight can become your foresight” — a description which is apt for someone like Leonsis, who has immense background in helping to grow and run consumer Internet businesses. That experience will come in handy as the company goes after new opportunities. In addition to CustomInk’s core business, it’s also going after two new growth opportunities. The first, called Booster, is a platform designed to help users raise money for charities, causes and other projects. Booster users will sell custom T-shirts to other supporters, with proceeds from the sale going to the cause they choose. CustomInk is also working on a sponsorship platform called that will enable brands to back various groups and occasions. Imagine, for instance, if brands had the opportunity to sponsor the custom shirts worn by local sports teams or at various charity events. In addition to the new business opportunities, CustomInk also plans to ramp up production and expand its core business. The company now employs 800 employees in three facilities across the U.S., with one in Northern Virginia, another in Charlottesville, Va., and a third in Reno, Nev. It has plans to expand all of those facilities over the coming months and to add a fourth office in Dallas.
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Pinterest Launches Japanese Version 18 Months After Rakuten Investment
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
The is now live as the site ramps up its global expansion. The launch comes became an investor in Pinterest. For the first time ever, with Japanese Pinterest, Rakuten login is available on a non-Rakuten product. Japanese users can log onto the site using , its version of which gives access to Rakuten’s online store and other services. Rakuten has 80 million members, compared to Pinterest’s current base of 70 million users. The localized site features subcategories that cover 100 different topics for hair styling, paper crafts, products, design, art and food popular in Japan. A Pinterest blog post says that the company took into account market research in Japan, as well feedback from a beta version. We’ve contacted Pinterest and Rakuten for more information. Rakuten lead a $100 million Pinterest in May 2012 in a round of funding that was said to value the site at $1.5 billion. Then in October 2013, that of $225 million from Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Valiant Capital Management. Rakuten did not return for the Series E, but Pinterest said that the proceeds would be used for corporate purposes including international expansion to build on its 125% international growth since the beginning of the year. Pinterest’s new Japanese site comes on the heels of its launch into the UK, France and Italy. It said it plans to launch in 10 more countries by the end of this year (now presumably 9, since it’s checked Japan off that list). The company also added that it would continue to develop its monetization model, which began testing earlier this month, into a global program. Pinterest’s Japan launch comes amid continuing questions about how the site will justify its rich valuation. Potential answers include a developing a new advertising scheme that resembles a revenue share where it gets paid dollars when its ads lead directly to people buying items, opposed to getting paid cents per impression. Last year, Rakuten’s CEO Hiroshi Mikitani that his company made its $100 million bet in Pinterest in part because he had developed a strong relationship with its founder Ben Silbermann. Rakuten’s stake in Pinterest also fits into its ongoing investment into U.S. e-commerce startups. In 2013 alone, it has helped , a company that organizes commerce data by tapping into your inbox; , an enterprise IT platform; retail marketplace ; and luxury retail site . It also acquired , a e-commerce fulfillment company, to help expand into the US. All these companies may help Rakuten fuel the expansion of its e-commerce business outside of Asia and make it a stronger competitor against Amazon.
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Microsoft’s Windows Store Averaged 1.7M Daily Downloads In October, Up Nearly 40% From June
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
According to information Microsoft provides to developers, the Windows Store marketplace for applications on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 racked up roughly 1.7 million daily downloads, both free and paid, in October, a 38.56% increase since June. Microsoft’s dataset, located on the company’s developer portal, indicates that around 51.2 million applications, again free and paid, were downloaded during the month-long period. While that figure represents growth for Microsoft, the company lags steeply behind its classic rival Apple. Microsoft breaks out download rates for Windows Store applications by category, subcategory, free, paid, and even by country and gender if you want to see that information. I ran the data for the following months in 2013: January, February, June, and October: January because it was a peak for app downloads, coming the month after the holiday season in which PC sales tick higher; February to measure the post-holiday trough; June to check in during the summer; and October because it is the most recent provided full month. Here is the raw summed data for each month, including all locations and application categories: From this, we can see that after the holiday cycle, downloads were strong compared with their February decline, staying mostly consistent through the summer. I suspect that Microsoft was slightly worried during that point at the lack of yeast in its numbers. After looking through the charts of every application category, both free and paid, I can state that things have recently improved. Although there was material variance between the different application categories and their popularity, the general kick over the last few months, and especially in October, was one of positive growth. Microsoft recently stated that during its holiday cycle, application downloads and developer revenue . The charts appear to confirm this. It’s hard to draw direct comparisons, as platforms in this case don’t line up directly. The Windows Store covers tablets, laptops, and desktops, and across its two versions (8 and 8.1), and controls of the PC market, in terms of its active install base. That bests the market share of OS X, which tallies to across all its versions. But, Windows 8.X is broader than OS X, which is not a tablet operating system. So while we could argue that Windows 8.X (by that I mean Windows 8 and 8.1 combined) beats the Apple Mac Store, I’m not sure if that proves much, given how Microsoft is pushing Windows 8.X on tablets. We could compare the 1.7 million daily tally to Apple’s figures, but stacking that daily number next to Apple’s most recent total download report (60 billion downloads on iOS!) is silly. Let’s sharpen the figures: Comparing that figure to the Windows Store figure details that Apple is tallying 43.8 times as many downloads per day than Microsoft. And, of course, we’re comparing the best month of the Windows Store’s history, and an average of several Apple months, which is slightly unfair to Apple. We don’t have current Windows Phone app download data, and also lack Mac OS X information, so we can’t directly compare Microsoft and Apple in aggregate with precision, but we can say that Windows remains a nascent platform. However, we do have another data point from June that is worth mentioning: Microsoft reported that Windows Phone’s (then) 160,000 applications were seeing . That means that Windows Phone’s app store was then around four times as large as Windows 8.X’s months later. This could indicate that the Windows Store is having a hard time connecting with consumers, given that its hardware install base is likely already larger. Assuming that Windows Phone has continued to grow, reaching, say, the 250 million app downloads per month mark in October. That would give the combined Windows ecosystem 300 million downloads per month, or 10 million per day. That is still under one-seventh of Apple’s only App Store-only tally. So, Microsoft’s platforms are growing, but they remain by every comparison that I can imaging that matters (except Windows Store against Mac App Store for obvious reasons), far behind. But we knew that. What we can now do is track the struggle. For Microsoft, by January we’ll have Windows Phone sales numbers, Surface revenue, Windows 8.X combined market share, and app download rates. And we’ll have the same for Apple. I that the smartphone wars were iOS v. Android and Windows Phone v. BlackBerry. Those days are gone. BlackBerry is over. So now Windows Phone has but two much larger rivals to compete with. You wanted a place at the Big Kid mobile and app store table, Microsoft? Now you have one. Time to prove that you belong there.
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Apple, The Hyperion Ion Cannon And Why Future iPhones Could Have A Sapphire Screen
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
Late last week we published a piece about to manufacture sapphire crystal, and why it might want to own over $570M worth of that production up front. Today, by connecting a few more dots, we can piece together how it could overcome the pricing and production volume barriers in order to use the material in smartphone screens. Let’s start back in March of 2012, when a to talk about a new production system it had created to manufacture photovoltaic (solar) cells that were cheaper and thinner, called Hyperion 3. The manufacturing process for most solar panels involves manufacturing a block of sapphire or other crystalline silicon and then slicing a .2mm-thick sheet off of it with a wafering saw. Twin Creeks’ hydrogen ion particle accelerator (basically an ion cannon) allowed them to place wafers around the edges of the device and smash them with hydrogen ions. Here’s a description of the : A particle accelerator bombards these wafers with hydrogen ions, and with exacting control of the voltage of the accelerator, the hydrogen ions accumulate precisely 20 micrometers from the surface of each wafer. A robotic arm then transports the wafers to a furnace where the ions expand into hydrogen gas, which cause the 20-micrometer-thick layer to shear off. The process, when applied to solar, is then followed up by backing the sheets with flexible metal. The result is a huge reduction in thickness of sheets without the use of saws. This results in a big reduction in costs. Why do we care about a cool, but esoteric manufacturing process for solar panels? Well, jumping back to our piece from last week, you may recall that Apple is going in on a manufacturing deal with a company called GT Advanced Technologies. The deal will see Apple building a factory in which GT Advanced will make sapphire glass in high volumes. The only problem with the high-volume production of sapphire for smartphone screens is that most analysts will tell you that it’s simply not cost-effective. A early last year quotes analyst Eric Virey of research firm Yole Développement as saying that a sapphire display could cost around $30 or fall to around $20 in ‘a couple of years’. Gorilla Glass, by comparison, runs less than $3 for a typical screen. This is where it gets fun. See, GT Advanced actually made an acquisition late in 2012 of a . Along with that acquisition, GT Advanced got a bunch of patents and equipment, including its Hyperion ion implanter (pictured above). Though the ion cannon was primarily used for semiconductor substrates and solar wafers, GT Advanced noted another use in its release. “In addition, GT expects to pursue the development of thin sapphire laminates for use in applications ,” the release reads (emphasis ours). “The Hyperion ion implanter has the potential to minimize, or in some cases eliminate, the need for wafering saws, which would .” So, the Hyperion tech should enable GT Advanced to significantly lower the costs associated with building sapphire screens for smartphones. But super thin wafers made cost-effective is only half of the puzzle. The other half is a lamination process, where sapphire is mated to another sheet of material. This brings us to a few months ago, when Apple ’, in which it discusses a variety of ways to laminate sapphire sheets together with other sapphire sheets or with glass. There are a variety of abstractions, but the key is a method which mates two separate sheets together to create one ‘piece’. The key claim we’re looking at here is “a glass assembly comprising: a glass sheet; and a sapphire sheet adhered to the glass sheet, wherein the assembly is less than or approximately equal to 1 mm thick.” This claim outlines a process where a glass sheet could be produced and mated with a sapphire sheet to create a screen (another claim describes a ‘sandwich process’ as well, with two sapphire sheets). Why a screen with glass underneath and sapphire on top? Because glass is much, much cheaper than sapphire and Apple has been using it to create in-cell touch panels. Another patent filed late in 2012 explains the process ( ): By integrating the layered structure of an LCD and a touch sensor, a variety of benefits can be achieved. This integration can include combining or interleaving the layered structures described above. Integration can further include eliminating redundant structures and/or finding dual purposes (e.g., one purpose for the touch function and another for the display function) for particular layers or structures. This can permit some layers to be eliminated, which can reduce cost and thickness of the touch screen LCD, as well as simplify manufacturing. Basically, Apple will be melding the touch circuitry with the LCD display, creating a single, thinner part. This will obviously make the devices thinner and more cost-effective if the price of production is driven down. This works for both standard and in-plane-switching (IPS) panels, which Apple has taken to using lately. Unfortunately, there aren’t any commercial solutions for in-cell technology and sapphire crystal as of yet. Instead, Apple’s patent outlines a method where it is possible to meld the hyper-thin sheets of sapphire created by GT Advanced with much, much cheaper glass sheets. By doing this, Apple could drive the costs of sapphire sheets down incredibly low in comparison to the traditional method. It will be able to create many of these super thin sapphire sheets from the same amount of raw material it would take to make one full piece of sapphire cover glass. It could then laminate the assembly together in the way that it currently does iPhones (but does not do for iPads, even the new Airs). By doing this, Apple could stretch out the production and cost factors of sapphire enough to support manufacturing full-size display cover sheets, not just small wearable panels, buttons or protective camera covers. This, in turn, could mean sapphire cover sheets that are on your iPhone years sooner than most analysts have predicted.
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The PUC Crowdfunding Project Comes To A Close, Bringing MIDI To All The Things
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
The is a clever little device that converts older MIDI systems into wireless powerhouses, allowing you to connect to iPads and the like with one small disc of electronics. Zivix, the maker of the , is closing their . The company has been working on unique musical devices for the iPad for most of the year and are very close to production with both their products. The Jamstik, for example, is nearing production and should begin shipping in a month. The PUC will ship to backers in January. I saw both products today and I’m impressed with how diligently the team has reduced latency in these experiences. As a semi-competent musician I’m well aware of the problems raised by messy wireless connections and Zivix has done their darnedest to work around the new limitations in MIDI connections imposed by iOS 7.
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Microsoft Didn’t Get Its Math Wrong In That Excel Billboard
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
Scandal! Intrigue! Can Excel actually add? Yesterday, AppleInsider that Microsoft appears to have made a calculation error in a billboard touting the fact that its Surface tablets ship with the Office productivity set of applications. A math typo in Excel while shouting that Excel is bundled with your new hardware? That would be embarrassing. Here’s the image, which includes math that should sum to $9,500, but is instead calculated to $9,000 by Excel (image via ): The Microsoft chattering class – there are about eight of us – ran tests after Frank Shaw, the company’s VP of communications, said that the image wasn’t wrong, but that “Excel recalculates when done editing” and the “ad shows work in progress.” He suggested that those in doubt try it themselves. Todd Bishop, an excellent human, and failed: I tried a variety of different input scenarios, including the possibility that the bottom two cells in the list were left out of the autosum formula, but I haven’t been able to reproduce precisely what the ad shows. I even tried snapping it to the side as shown in the billboard. I tried as well, on Office Web Apps, Office 2010, and Office 2013 RT on a Surface 2. I also failed to recreate the above screenshot. Then, friend of the blog rode to Microsoft’s rescue, and showed that it was possible in both Office 2013 and Office Web Apps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rehklbSkZJw&feature=youtu.be So the ad isn’t incorrect; it’s only very oddly constructed and begging for a solid mocking. There is one final wrinkle. In the advertisement, there is no “$500” in the equation bar, as exist in both of our examples of the Excel spreadsheet working with the same input. Sams thinks that the bit has with a photo-editing tool. Mary Branscombe has about what version of Excel is being used. I don’t really care, frankly. The gist is, no, Excel isn’t so internally broken that it can’t add. Yes, Numbers can do the same thing. But I have to say, if AppleInsider’s screenshots of Numbers are current, yuck.
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Nathan Richardson Departs AOL, ‘770 Live’ Program Put On Hold
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
Nathan Richardson, who (the company’s live video initiative) just a few months ago, has departed, . A spokesperson for AOL, which owns TechCrunch, declined to comment on the status of individual employees, but he confirmed another aspect of the Politico report, that the 770 Live From AOL program (not the broader live video platform, which Richardson was presumably leading) has been put on hold: “We have decided to pause on launching 770 Live From AOL to ensure we are building a platform that will deliver across the board for consumers, partners and for AOL.” Richardson was previously co-founder and CEO at Waywire, the social video initiative co-founded by then-Newark Mayor (now Senator) Cory Booker and Sarah Ross. He in August and the company was . I emailed Richardson but he did not immediately respond. Even though it seems like he has left, still lists him as president of Live from AOL.
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This Is Apple’s New Mothership Of An HQ
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
The most realistic and detailed images yet of Apple’s new spaceship headquarters have just been published in an awesome piece on . The latest images of the 2.8 million square-foot campus show an expansive cafeteria, an underground parking garage, and a subterranean auditorium where forthcoming Apple products will be unveiled to the media. The office will sit on a 176-acre plot of land, most of which will be dedicated to indigenous flora and fauna to act as a barrier between the floor-to-ceiling glass walls and the outside world. There will also be separate facilities outside of the main campus for R&D. Enjoy a peek inside the new Apple campus, and make sure to check out , and/or to the city of Cupertino.
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Confirmed: Fab COO To Exit As Company Looks To Winnow Down ‘Top Heavy’ Management Structure
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
, the design-oriented e-commerce site, is indeed seeing the departure of its chief operating officer , a person with knowledge of the situation has confirmed to TechCrunch. Ferreira will be transitioning out of her role at the company in the coming weeks, and is slated to depart at the end of the calendar year. Word of Ferreira’s departure was first reported today , citing an email reportedly sent by Fab CEO Jason Goldberg to the company’s board. The exit comes as Fab is currently working to winnow down its “top heavy” management structure, we’re told. This is the second executive exit at Fab in as many weeks, following the of co-founder and design chief Bradford Shellhammer. More executive level departures and reassignments are likely to be announced in the coming days. In an email, a Fab spokesperson sent the following comment: “It is accurate that Fab is undergoing management changes as we realign the business to execute on our 2014-2017 plan. There will be a number of management changes involved as we streamline the organization and move to a category P&L based structure. As not all of the organizational changes are final yet, we are withholding comment on any specific individuals until later this week.” It’s an interesting downshift for the company, which has become known as an example of blockbuster global growth in the four years since its launch. But it now seems that in some ways Fab may have gotten too big for its britches, as recent months have brought layoffs, global office closures, and other strategy shifts as part of on achieving profitability. With more than invested in Fab, the stakes are certainly high for the company’s success — and at this point, only time will tell if the current changes wind up being for the best.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 11 | 27 | null |
Humble Bundle Goes Head To Head Against Steam With The New Humble Store
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Romain Dillet
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
Slowly but surely, is expanding its offering to cover all your indie gaming needs. After the indie bundles and the smaller , the startup just opened the . As the name suggests, the new store allows you to purchase individual games just like you would on or — but there’s a twist. There are only nine games currently available on the store. Every 24 hours, you will get a brand new set of games from the company’s catalog. All of these games are on sale with a fixed price that is between 50 and 75 percent off. Humble Bundle has always been about indie games. Even though the company released a couple of bundles with major publishers like EA, small developers and publishers are still on center stage. The first titles on the Humble Store include Don’t Starve, Prison Architect and Rogue Legacy. Before today, Humble Bundle had already partnered with hundreds of developers through the . The company provided a tiny embeddable all-in-one store for the official game website. Then, Humble Bundle handles payment processing and downloads in exchange for a 5 percent fee. So the Humble Store provides a central location to see some of the games already available through the Humble Widget. Yet, developers will only get 75 percent of the revenue through the new channel, while charities, such as the American Red Cross, Child’s Play Charity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, World Land Trust and Charity Water, will receive 10 percent of the proceedings — Humble Bundle keeps 15 percent. While the Humble Store keeps the flash sale aspect of the Humble Bundles, Humble Bundle has never been so close to competing directly with Steam. As always with Humble Bundle games, in addition to DRM-free downloads, you often get a Steam key. From the outside, Valve and Humble Bundle are still partners, but it looks a lot like after today’s update. If the Humble Store becomes more popular, the relationship between the two companies could change at the same time.
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Print-On-Demand Network Print.io Debuts Hellopics, A Shutterfly Alternative That Competes On Price And Selection
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
Bootstrapped startup has been quietly serving as the print supplier for a number of larger companies for a year now, including (now “Twenty20”), and others. But today the company is breaking out on its own with a new consumer-facing application called , which will serve as both a testbed and demo for what Print.io has to offer in terms of print-on-demand products. The app allows users to order custom printed items, like iPhone and iPad cases, canvas wraps, posters, photo books, coffee mugs, and much , all emblazoned with your own photos from the iPhone Camera Roll, Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Picasa, or Flickr. At launch, there are around five products live, and several more listed as “coming soon.” In time, the company will scale the service up to over 100 different product lines and thousands of SKU’s. According to Print.io founder Austen Bernstein, the plan is to launch five to ten more products each week leading up to the holidays, all of which can be shipped worldwide. Bernstein, who says he’s always had an interest in art and photography as well as having an entrepreneurial spirit, founded Print.io after previously working in growth stage capital at Tiger Global Management, and Insight Venture Partners in New York. With Print.io, his goal has been to build the largest international print network, and then offer that as a service to developers who could then integrate the print-on-demand option in their own applications as a tool to help them monetize. While companies like Angry Birds maker Rovio a hundred million dollars through product merchandising, smaller development teams don’t have the manpower or resources to build those same networks on their own. “What we allow is to give them the plugin for their mobile app on iOS or Android or their website, and they can choose to sell t-shirts or mugs with their characters on it,” explains Bernstein. “And there’s a huge use case for that.” To date, Print.io has shipped to over 40,000 customers in 110 countries, says Bernstein. “We realized very early on that we’d prefer to go the Aviary model, where they had…a lot less friction to get to where they now have almost 5,000 partners. And that’s the kind of partner base we’re looking to have,” he says, referencing Aviary’s photo editing toolkit, which developers can integrate in their apps. Today, Print.io has a “fairly comprehensive beta list of partners,” says Bernstein, but he isn’t allowed to disclose many by name, due to agreements with those businesses. However, he says that the company has shipped over $1 million in revenue during Print.io’s first year, and following last week’s soft launch of the consumer-facing Hellopics service on iOS and Android, they’ve sold over $1,000 worth of product from only a few thousand registered users. The company is now aiming to make Hellopics something of a Shutterfly alternative, competing both on price and with a broader selection of products, too. Most photo printing apps today are limited, states the founder – one will offer photo prints, another a mosaic, another a photo book, and so on. “The full breadth of photo commerce should be in one app,” Bernstein says. With Hellopics, the plan is to offer a lot more than you would usually find in photo printing or photo gift apps, including things like t-shirts, flip-flops, fleece blankets, show curtains, pillows, sticker books, and more, in addition to the more traditional photo products like prints, calendars, canvases, and books. To kick of the launch, the company is also offering a $1 canvas sale which runs for a month. Customers will be able to order a 6×6″ or 5×7″ canvas wrap print for a dollar (normally $20+), through the free Hellopics iOS app, Android app, or website. (The website is functional today, but isn’t officially “launching” until next week.) In addition to Twenty20, Print.io works with art retailer JuicyCanvas (http://juicycanvas.com), e-commerce site Sole Bicycles (http://www.solebicycles.com/), and artist Andrew Saul Visuals (http://www.andrewsaulvisuals.com).
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American Express Teams Up With Mightybell To Connect Small Businesses With Each Other Locally
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
While there are plenty of opportunities for small businesses and merchants to advertise, market and even sell online, there aren’t many platforms that allow them to actually communicate with each other by neighborhood and share best practices. the platform that allows communities to learn and share together in groups, has scored a major partnership this morning that hopes to change this for small businesses across the country. and Mightybell have teamed up to create a forum, which you can access , for local businesses to rally and organize events with other local businesses and customers in their neighborhood for Small Business Saturday on November 30 and beyond. Mightybell, which was founded by Ning founder Gina Bianchini, has steadily evolved from a into a new, interconnected platform for communities. The startup recently redesigned to allow organizations of local chapters, or a network of learning or discussion groups to use the site to connect online. In fact, Mightybell is to organize and bring together the circles and groups created in Sandberg’s movement. With Shop Small Neighborhood Circles, Mightybell and American Express are hoping to help local merchants connect to each other for the holiday shopping season and beyond. Part of the launch is around Small Business Saturday, which is a Black Friday/Cyber Monday-like marketing campaign started by American Express OPEN in 2010 to create a national movement in support of shopping for the holidays with small, independent businesses. While American Express OPEN offers businesses advice and best practices, the partnership with Mightybell allows these businesses to connect with each other by neighborhood. Shop Small Neighborhood Circles all live in the Shop Small Community on Mightybell and include the ability to post events, chat and more. Each neighborhood will have its own specific circle within the community. Interested members can search for the neighborhoods, or create a Circle if they don’t see their neighborhood listed. Nearly 500 neighborhood Circles have been created; you can see what the Battery Park, NYC Circle looks like American Express will be sharing best practices for these businesses, including entertainment, marketing and promotional ideas and small business education. For example, clothing company Pure Detroit started offering discounts to customers who presented receipts from other local businesses. This, along with other best practices, are organized into content collections in each Neighborhood Circle to help businesses make the most of Small Business Saturday. Bianchini explains that she has been thinking through how to create the “digital glue” for local businesses to connect to each other. The community aspect of networks is a big part of what Mightybell is trying to use as the glue. And AmEx, with millions of small business owners on its Open Forum, allows Mightybell to be the digital layer that brings these communities together. “Mightybell meets an emerging need in the market: companies and organizations that want to influence networks of neighborhoods, local chapters or project teams getting stuff done. For the first time, organizations can publish great ideas and exclusive content into a network of groups learning and sharing together,” said Bianchini. What AmEx and Mightybell are doing has some crossover with Nextdoor, the . But Nextdoor focuses also on connecting residents in a given neighborhood, whereas Mightybell is focused exclusively on small businesses. Local networks are not easy to pull off, but with the promotion and content from American Express, Mightybell could avoid some of the challenges others have faced.
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itBit Raises $3.25 Million To Launch A New Global Bitcoin Exchange For Institutional Investors
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
There are a today, but a new startup called hopes to legitimize the market by providing bank-like security and compliance. This newest Bitcoin exchange has raised $3.25 million in a funding round co-led by Canaan Partners and RRE Ventures, with participation from Liberty City Ventures, as well angel investors such as Jay W. Jordan II and Ben Davenport. To date, it’s raised $5.5 million. itBit seeks to differentiate from many of the more consumer-focused exchanges out there by providing a higher level of security and compliance than some other options. The hope is that by doing so, it will be able to attract interest from traditional financial organizations, in addition to a growing number of retail investors. The idea is that by offering a higher level of service and security, itBit will be able to service institutional investors and make trading in Bitcoin not that different from more traditional currency exchange. Today, it trades between Bitcoin and U.S. dollars, Singapore dollars, and Euros, and is built to handle trading volume at an order of magnitude greater than Bitcoin is traded at today. Using Nasdaq exchange technology, it is able to support millions of trades per second and provides 24/7 customer service. itBit also boasts a multi-factor authentication and DDOS attack mitigation, while also trying to provide enhanced liquidity in its marketplace. It screens and monitors for suspicious activity and has identity verification also built in. With headquarters in Singapore, itBit is in full regulatory compliance there and is available to institutional investors globally. It’s also available to retail Bitcoin investors in all markets except the U.S. The company has 13 employees distributed around the world, and plans to invest in expanding its operations and offerings, while getting further regulatory approval.
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Easy Drum Machine App Keezy Lets You Tap To Record, Tap Again To Play
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
With , making music doesn’t require a lot of work, know-how, or talent. This dead-simple drum machine app lets you hold down one of its eight buttons to record a sound with your device’s microphone, and tap that button again to play it. “Beatbox with your fingers” on the free new iOS to create fun little jingles, harmonize with yourself, or add effects over a DJ set. Keezy comes from the artsy and irreverent development house . It was founded by , who was the co-founder of Vimeo and BustedTees, as well as the CTO for College Humor. Elepath’s goal is to make “tools and toys for the modern mind”. That includes building apps that are fun and thought-provoking, even if they can’t become full-fledged businesses. Other projects from Elepath include the “ ” to-do list app, an idiot-proof way to remember movies you want to see, restaurants to visit, or your latest super villain plot. Elepath’s forward-thinking design style means Keezy has no menu, and a minimal on-boarding flow. Hold to record, tap to play, drag the black dot to delete samples or undo your last action. That’s it. It’s a refreshing 180° from most music apps that keep getting more and more complicated. And it’s nothing like hardware drum machines with their laborious process of finding samples and assigning them to buttons. You can check out the video below to see and hear sound magician Reggie Watts build a song on Keezy. Keezy’s bright colors and responsive feel make it a joy to play with. Record a friend saying a few words and mix them up into new sentences. Sample an octave on a real-instrument and play your own melodies. Elepath even suggests you could make a fart machine or insult generator, just in case you thought the company took itself seriously. There are plenty of other drum machine apps out there, but most are either semi-professional tools that cost a few bucks ( ), are too complex for novices ( ), or focus on pre-made instrument sounds ( ) rather than letting you make your own. Keezy won’t let you record and refine a masterpiece, but instead you can shove it in the hands of a friend and they’ll be having fun in seconds.
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Senator McCain Calls For The Resignation Or Firing Of the NSA’s General Alexander
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
Sen. John McCain is a stalwart of the Senate, a former candidate for president, prisoner of war and fighter pilot. As such, his voice is among the most prominent of the American Congress, and when he speaks, foreign powers listen in order to get a feel of the wind of our political climate. So his words matter. Sen. McCain recently , a paper that has taken part in breaking the intelligence releases related to and stemming from the Edward Snowden leaks. His responses to select questions, including agreeing that NSA chief Keith Alexander “should resign or be fired”, are important to read because they demonstrate views that I think are annoyingly pro-NSA, as they shape that side of the political spectrum. The , but I will present you with a few excerpts that relate to the ongoing privacy scandal, followed by short commentary. : Senator McCain, do you still use your cell phone? Yes, because I don’t say anything that I am concerned about being publicized. Off the bat, I disagree with the Senator on why we should protect the privacy of individual communications, most especially here at home. The overtones here are that privacy doesn’t matter . You should have no fear about having zilch in terms of protection of your communication in that case. This . Also, McCain does have things that he doesn’t want publicized. Private calls with his family about medical issues. Campaign plans. Donor call sheets. His views on current issues that might not match his public stance as he works through difficult political issues. What he thinks of certain Senate colleagues. The list goes on. It’s important to keep the above perspective in mind as McCain answers questions regarding your privacy, as he doesn’t seem to want much for himself. : Can you understand why German Chancellor Angela Merkel was so upset by the revelation that her cell phone had been monitored? Yes, absolutely. A certain amount of eavesdropping goes on amongst friends. We all know that. But it happens to be my personal opinion that the German chancellor’s personal cell phone is not something that should be eavesdropped. The key here is that the Senator is opposed to monitoring the cell phone of the Chancellor. How did it happen? Well, he has an opinion on that: : Why did the NSA do it then? The reason I think they did it is because they could do it. In other words, there were people with enhanced capabilities that have been developed over the last decade or so, and they were sitting around and said we can do this, and so they did it. Bingo. This is a brilliant answer. The idiom that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail is apt, but insufficient. The NSA is a modern hammer, itching to find a nail to prove its worth as it spends billions each year. Also the Senator’s comments are perfect commentary as to why the NSA must be reined in: If we grant it increasing power, stuff of this sort will only continue at a quicker pace, as its technology – and, apparently, therefore its hubris – grow. : Are the intelligence services out of control? There has not been sufficient congressional oversight, and there has been an absolutely disgraceful sharing of information that never should have taken place. The first part of McCain’s comment relates to oversight, the second to sharing information with those who might not need it, such as contractors and Private Chelsea Manning. The questioning continues: : You mean Private First Class Bradley Manning, now Chelsea, who leaked thousands of secret documents to Wikileaks. And now we have a contractor employee, not a government employee, who has access to information which is, when revealed, most damaging to the standing prestige of the United States and our relations with some of our best friends. Why did Edward Snowden have that information? And what are we doing as far as screening people who have access to this information? It’s outrageous, and someone ought to be held accountable. I think that the damage to America is more internal than external due not to the revelations, but instead due to the degradation of the Constitutional right to privacy that the revelations unveiled. The senator appears to disagree. : Who must be held accountable? The head of the NSA, the president of the United States, the Congressional Intelligence Committees, all of these contractors we pay that were responsible for performing the background checks. There should be a wholesale housecleaning. Should Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, resign? Of course, they should resign or be fired. We no longer hold anybody accountable in Washington. So close, senator. Yes, General Keith Alexander should resign, but not for the leaks, but for what the leaks disclosed. His actions, not his failure to not have his actions reported on are why he should be shown the door, and if he fails to walk through it, be given the boot. Finally, later on in the interview, McCain draws the line on the limits of what surveillance should be able to collect, and answered that the “limit should be the potential damage to relations with that country. In other words, is it worth the collateral damage that could result in those techniques being revealed?” As , McCain did not mention the privacy of either U.S. or global citizens. Above, the likely consensus view of Washington. Something to think on.
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Email Productivity Startup Yesware Makes Its First Acquisition, Buys San Francisco-Based File-Sharing Service Attachments.me
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
, an email productivity startup for salespeople, which just this fall raised an additional , has made its first acquisition. The company is acquiring the email file-sharing startup , which is also officially as of today. The entire five-person team from Attachments.me is joining Boston-based Yesware, but will remain in San Francisco, effectively establishing a new office for the company in the area, where Yesware reports a growing customer base. Attachments.me, for those unfamiliar, was working to make it easier for users to find and securely share files, send large attachments, and track file openings, among other things. The startup had raised $2.5 million in funding from Foundry Group, , which is also how the two companies’ co-founders initially met. Around four months ago, discussions about working together came about, as Attachments.me hit a fork in the road. At the time of the deal, Attachments.me had just under 310,000 registered users and around 60,000-80,0000 monthly actives, but was having trouble growing revenue. Attachments.me CEO Jesse Miller said his company had “missed the mark on the initial monetization strategy” and knew that it was going to make a shift in any case. “We were exploring that, and because of what we had raised, that would have meant a different funding strategy,” he admits. The company had some traction with real estate pros, recruiters, and small law firms, and was offering a couple of low-priced plans (under $10/month) for individual users, and custom pricing for teams. “In hindsight,” says Miller, “we should have focused completely on the teams.” After exploring the option of joining Yesware, Miller found the company to be a good fit in terms of product and culture. And while the team had at least two other similar offers on the table, Yesware was the one with the most appeal. Neither company is discussing deal terms, but Miller says that Attachments.me hadn’t run out of money, and investors are getting a return. “Everyone’s happy,” he says. Attachments.me had already announced in dated October 28th that the service would be shutting down, noting that paying users would receive a prorated refund, and those who upgraded through the iOS app could request a refund through iTunes. The post also pointed to Yesware as an alternative to Attachments.me’s download tracking feature. In the comments section, Miller said a further explanation would come in a few weeks’ time. Matthew Bellows, Yesware CEO, describes the deal to acquire Attachments.me as more than an “acqui-hire,” despite the fact that only some of the technology will make its way to Yesware going forward. “The people are awesome, and they’ve proven they can build amazing products in Gmail and mobile,” says Bellows. “But they also bring a bunch of technology for changing the way Gmail works…if you think about attachments and how salespeople use attachments, you can imagine that [Attachments.me’s] approach and understanding would be helpful for improving salespeople’s performance,” he adds. Yesware, too, has been growing its user base over the past few years, now reaching some 360,000 customers, up from the 300,000 users reported in September, at the time of the Battery-led Series B round. But unlike Attachments.me, revenue has been growing too, increasing by 17 times over last year. With the new San Francisco-based arm of the company, Bellows says the plan is to hire more Bay Area staff, particularly “customer confidence advocates” with enterprise experience, and additional mobile engineers – which Yesware needs to do quickly to meet customer demand for a mobile solution, expected next year. He’s also fairly pleased that Yesware is a Boston-based company buying a San Francisco firm, and not the other way around. “In the early days of Yesware, people were always saying, you’re going to sell out, you’re going to flip this company, you’re going to sell to Salesforce…and I kept saying, ‘no,’ we don’t want to do that. In fact, my aspiration is to start buying some of those San Francisco companies instead of always having those Boston companies poached by the San Francisco ones,” says Bellows. “That’s not a reason to do this deal, but it is icing on the cake,” he adds.
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On Xbox One, SkyDrive Will Put On A Show With Your Stored Videos And Photos
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Alex Wilhelm
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
Today that SkyDrive, its online file storage product, will display user photo and video content onto their televisions via the new Xbox One console in a more attractive fashion than on the preceding Xbox 360 devices. SkyDrive already has a presence on the Xbox ecosystem, with an application that did allow for the viewing of photos and the like on the current Xbox 360. On the Xbox One, Microsoft is lashing the SkyDrive ecosystem more closely to the new console, better uniting one of its most popular services – SkyDrive has over 250 million users – with its new device. Previously, the SkyDrive experience was basic on Xbox. The new app will allow for deep zooming into high-res photos, so that you can get as far into an image as you want. And, of course, you can ‘snap’ SkyDrive inside of Xbox One to allow for two apps to be run at the same time, as with Windows 8.1. Also, new slideshow options have been added to prevent an overload of what the company name-checks as “the Ken Burns effect.” The update is small, but matters as it again underscores how Microsoft is aligning its consumer experiences. This improved integration, by the way, is another example of why Microsoft might not want to sell the Xbox unit – it’s part of its larger services and devices play that is so important to the company’s business model.
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Stackdriver Adds Automation Tools And Endpoint Checks To Its AWS Monitoring Solution
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 |
, a monitoring service for Amazon Web Services, is adding a number of to its platform today. Instead of just getting alerts when there are issues, users can now also decided how to fix these without having to manually start and stop servers. In addition, Stackdriver is also today the ability to monitor endpoints like websites and third-party APIs. These new services are now available to all users and those who sign up before the end of the year. After that, they will become part of Stackdriver’s yet-to-be announced “Elite” plan. All Pro customers who sign up before December 31 will be automatically upgraded to this new plan. Most monitoring services do a great job at alerting users when something goes wrong. Say an application is running out of memory or a noisy neighbor is degrading the performance of a server. Or a Relational Database Service (RDS) instance is running out of memory and you need to add more capacity. That’s important to know, but if it happens at 2am, a developer still has to wake up and take action based on this information. With automation, Stackdriver users can now set a number of policies for how to react when certain alert thresholds are met. Stackdriver then makes the right API calls to AWS on its users’ behalf. So instead of having to start and stop an instance when the performance on a host is degraded, users can now just set a trigger to start this process automatically. Optionally, users can then get a notification for when every step in this process is completed (by email, SMS or PagerDuty). Other options include the ability to delay actions by a set amount of minutes, which is useful for situations when resources may be able to recover without intervention. For now, Stackdriver Automation will be able to reboot instances, move Elastic Block Store-backed instances and add additional capacity to an RDS instance. Additional features, the company’s co-founder Izzy Azeri told me, are also in the works. All of Stackdriver’s alerting features now also tie in with its new endpoint monitoring system. This system, the company argues, “lets you fill in this last piece of monitoring the full stack of your application by setting up periodic checks of an endpoint within your environment from a number of locations around the world.” Developers can use this to ensure that a certain API they rely on is up and running, for example. You can find more information about Stackdriver’s monitoring system .
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How To Sell Your Business And Make And Lose Millions
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James Altucher
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
First I totally gave up. I thought there was no way to sell my web services business. It started when I was in the offices of Loud Records, run by Steve Rifkind. My company, Reset, was doing websites for the Wu-Tang Clan and other Loud artists. It was 1997. Ol’ Dirty Bastard would call me on the phone sometimes. Mobb Deep would stop by. Trent Reznor would hang out (we did Interscope’s artists as well). Steve Rifkind’s dad, Jules Rifkind, was a music mogul from the 50s, signing acts like James Brown. He was infamously (supposedly) portrayed in The Sopranos as the character Hesh Rabkin. And the rumor was that Jules Rifkind’s father used to handle all the details whenever Meyer Lansky threw a party. When you walked into Loud Records these huge beefy older Jewish guys would pat you down to make sure you weren’t carrying a gun. They looked like they were about 70 years old but you had to have a suicide impulse to disagree with them. Someone said to me, “Steve needs you in his office. He’s got some guy in there pitching BS.” So I went in there. This guy, Justin W., was saying, “Steve, let’s do a rollup of all urban businesses. We take Loud Records, combine with SRC, combine it with five-star basketball camps, maybe get The Source magazine in there. We take it public. You could have a billion-dollar company! This would be hot on Wall Street. Rollups like this are fucking sexy.” Steve was sitting in the center of the room and everyone was sitting around with him. “A billion dollars. This is too much for me. I gotta go to the bathroom and jack off.” And he got up and left the room. Justin introduced himself to me. He was a banker at [big investment bank]. A few weeks later Justin called me even though we hadn’t exchanged cards or anything. True to my style, I didn’t pick up. I don’t like talking on the phone very much. The next day he called. The next day he called. The next day he called. The next day he called. Finally I picked up. “Why do you never pick up?” he said. “Sorry about that,” I said, and that was that. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve got a hot company. I know people who want to buy it. Go to this address.” So I went to the address he gave me. It was a huge empty room about 10,000 square feet with one desk in it. It was the soon-to-be offices of a company called Rare Medium. The CEO, Glenn Meyers, was there. “I like your company,” he said. “I want to buy it.” But I didn’t understand anything then and his company wasn’t public yet. It would later merge with an air-conditioning company that was trading for one dollar, and then it went up to $300 at the height of the boom and then it went bankrupt. Someone recently told me that Glenn pulled $200 million off the table and relaxes now. So I didn’t return Justin’s calls for a while more. Finally he got me on the phone. “Listen,” he said, “you have to pick up when I call. I’ve got other guys who want to buy your company.” He sent me to two or three other places. Everyone made offers. They were all complicated, though. Like, $X up front and then $Y over five years. I had to practice going to places and saying, “I want to be a part of a larger team” and other BS. But all I really wanted was money. Independently, for the prior year I had been sending updates to the person who bought companies for Omnicom, the big ad agency, Felice Kincannon. After a year of meeting her and sending her emails of our updates, we were finally big enough. She started introducing me to other agencies within the Omnicom family to see who would want to buy us. Everyone did. And I started sending ad business to Omnicom agencies. But again, the deals were all too complicated for me. Deals should be simple. Because they get complicated later. They should start simple. Honeymoons are meant for love-making. Finally, I got tired of it. We wouldn’t get acquired. I called Justin, “Just forget it. I appreciate your help and we’ll figure it out some other time.” “No wait,” he said. “One more try. These guys will be at your place in 20 minutes.” Twenty minutes later two guys show up. A tall, older, suited, German guy with a thick accent. And an Orthodox Jew. They took the tour of the offices. I made sure everyone would be working hard, even if they had no work to do. When we got into the “map room” (which was also the kitchen), Werner Haase pointed to the map and said “What is this?” I said, “This is where we have clients,” and there were pins all over the world. “I find New York City is big enough to have plenty of clients,” he said in his thick accent. About an hour after they left, Justin called me. “They fucking loved you. They want to buy the company.” “Ok,” I said, “but everything has to be up front.” “Give me a number,” Justin said, and I said a number, and he said, “wait for a call from them.” Ten minutes later they called and offered the exact number. Werner even said, “I look forward to playing chess with you.” Handshakes don’t always mean a deal is closed. The closing of the deal took too long. I was stressed every day. Lawyers stopped calling back. Everything was going slow. But Justin and Yitz, the Orthodox Jew, kept telling me to keep my cool. But I wasn’t cool. I couldn’t focus. I was going to go out of business because I was so anxious. One time Werner offered to lend the company money. “If you need it,” he said. I said no. I felt like it was a trap. Meanwhile the Asian Financial Crisis happened. Werner was having second thoughts. The deal was already taking six months. Finally, it closed. I called my sister. “It’s closed!” I shouted into the phone. A woman passing me by on the sidewalk yelled at me, “Who fucking cares!” Justin wanted his fee. I drove up to his house as soon as I got the money so I could hand-deliver his fee. Four years later the company that bought us filed for bankruptcy. The chairman of the company, Scott Mednick, produced the movie “Superman Returns” and is now in the movie business. Werner went back to being in the travel agent business. Yitz has a company that cures irritable bowel syndrome. Justin still does deals. Steve Rifkind never did his urban rollup but kept putting out platinum albums. Every web agency that Omnicom bought went bankrupt or near bankrupt. With the money I made I bought a 4,500 square foot apartment in Tribeca and I played poker every night at private clubs and in Atlantic City and in Las Vegas. Even the night my first child was born I played poker all night. Four years later I was broke and had to sell the house, and I moved 80 miles away and didn’t leave my new house for three months because I was so depressed. The story never ends. This is just a chapter. Lessons learned: As much cash as possible. This applies no matter what you are selling. A service, a product, a company, etc. Recognize who they are and pick up their calls. You don’t have to lie to get acquired if you have a good company. This works no matter what you are selling. People pay a premium for authenticity. to the people who are rejecting you. This works for all sales. Water ultimately dissolves rock. else you have nothing to sell. You don’t need to be worldwide. NYC is pretty damn impressive. . Eventually your company will be part of the fad because all industries have their day in the sun. But make sure you are profitable so you can survive it. Corollary to the above rule: Sell all of your stock the second you can. Usually it’s restricted at first. Never be fooled by people smoking crack. Sell Sell Sell the second you can. The reason is: chances are your company got bought for an inflated price anyway. You have to let new money marinate your soul. I didn’t do that and my soul exploded and leaked over all the people I loved, hurting them all. The closer someone was to me, the more they were hurt. I felt really bad about that for many years and only recently made amends. I never said a bad word about Werner no matter what. If someone helps me feed my family, they are a friend for life. If someone takes money out of my pocket, they are out of my life. Never break this rule. I pay my fees the second they are due. This was the first company I ever sold. First of too many. Sixteen years later Justin W. and I still do deals together. It was together that the two of us screwed Yasser Arafat out of two million dollars.
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Gillmor Gang Live 11.29.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
– Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor.
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IronSource Announces KudosKits, Allowing App Users To Show Their Appreciation With Money
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Israeli company has come up with a new way for developers to ask their users for money or other forms of support. Chief Design Officer Dan Greenberg told me that the product, called the , evolved from an experiment conducted with the iOS app , which was initially developed by Fried Cookie and distributed by IronSource (IronSource has since acquired Fried Cookie). Greenberg added that developers are “all struggling to earn money for the work that we’re doing,” because for many, existing monetization systems such as in-app purchases have proven to be “very, very hard for them to crack.” With a KudosKit, instead of requiring users to pay for the app, or for additional content/virtual goods within the app, developers can present them with a screen asking for their support. That can ask users to “buy us a cup of coffee” (make a small donation), Like the app on Facebook, tweet about the app, rate it in the App Store, and more. In some ways, it’s similar to the “tip jar” widgets that you’ll see on some websites, but customized for mobile. And with the underlying analytics technology, Greenberg said his team is “100 percent focused on making this work.” Specifically, he said the KudosKits can identify the most effective points in the app to ask for support, direct requests at specific user segments (so loyal users see the message while first-time users don’t), and localize the messages in different geographies. Greenberg said that although the company is only announcing the technology broadly now, six months of early usage are promising, with 700,000 users donating a total of $1.2 million. The KudosKits have supposedly seen an 0.58 percent conversion rate to paid “appreciations”, with an average appreciation size of $2.10. By the way, IronSource is adopting a similar approach in how it makes money from the KudosKits itself — it’s a revenue sharing arrangement, but developers can determine what percentage of the proceeds they give to the company. In Greenberg’s words, “We’re actually giving the developer the opportunity to decide how much they appreciate our service.” KudosKits are available for both iOS and Android apps. Interested developers can .
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Agent Makes Your Smartphone A Little Bit Smarter
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
You can’t teach an old phone new tricks. Hah! Just kidding. Of course you can. This isn’t 1998. Agent is an app that aims to make your Android smartphone just a little bit smarter, using all of your phone’s sensors to detect what you’re up to and tweak your settings automatically. Driving? It’ll automatically respond to texts to let people know you’re busy, and remember where you parked your car. Sleeping? It’ll only let the most important calls through. is a spin-off, of sorts, of another Egomotion product called “Trigger” (or, as it was once known, “NFC Task Launcher”). With Trigger, Egomotion sells packs of programmable NFC tags which can fire off actions on your phone. Want your phone to silence itself and set an alarm when you go to bed? You’d stick one of their NFC tags on your nightstand, then set up a series of tasks to fire whenever that tag is detected. Want it to automatically launch your favorite music app when you get in the car? Tuck one of the tags into your cup holder. In time, however, the team realized that many of the most popular use cases didn’t really NFC. Instead of an NFC tag on your nightstand, why not just auto-silence the phone during certain hours? Instead of hiding a tag in a cupholder, why not just detect when the user is connected to their car’s Bluetooth? Thus, Agent was born. Agent takes the core concept of Trigger and boils it down to its essence. Gone is any mention of NFC tags, instead relying on the handset’s built-in capabilities — things like its accelerometer, clock, or WiFi/Bluetooth. Gone is the relatively complicated task setup process, with Egomotion instead providing a small set of pre-built actions that they call “Agents”. At the moment, the app’s got five different built-in agents: The company says that they’ve got more agents in the works, potentially offering add-on agent “suites” tailored to certain use cases — one set that’d be good for school, one set that’d be good for work, etc. That way they can keep adding more functionality without complicating the core application. If you’re a battle-tested Android expert, Agent’s tricks might not raise an eyebrow. “Pft, I’ve got !” you say. “And I rooted my imported HTC J One and flashed it with a custom rom that does all this ago.” For the less intense folks (read: most people) out there, though, Agent should hit a sweet spot. It’s simple, it does what it promises to do, and the setup is very straightforward and well thought out. My one hesitation: while I normally when people say “But what if just decides to do this”, it’s a pretty valid concern here. With all of the data that Google gobbles up and pipes into Google Now, it’s almost certain that they’re tinkering away with similar concepts right this second. Actually, it’s not certain. It certain. Google-owned Motorola has already released an app that they call , which aims to do much of the same stuff that Agent does. As Egomotion co-founder Kulveer Taggar pointed out to me, Assist only works with a handful of Motorola phones, whereas Agent works on many, many Android phones. But Moto’s handsets tend to be a test bed for Google (See: the always-listening “Okay Google” voice command debuting on the Moto X months before being integrated into Android 4.4). If the concept proves popular, how long will it be before Google starts tying such functionality right into the core of Android itself? In the mean time, though, it seems like Egomotion is on to something: according to the company’s stats, 95% of agents that get turned on, stay on. The app, normally $1.99, is for the Thanksgiving weekend.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: PS4, Xbox One, And The Sense 3D Scanner
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers. What are you thankful for? My list is short, but sweet: I’m thankful for you guys, gaming consoles, and 3d scanners. This week, on a very grateful episode of the TechCrunch Gadgets podcast, we look into the differences between the and the , the latest generations of console gaming. Meanwhile, John’s excited about the new from 3D Systems, even though he can’t stop calling it “Scene”. For our phone fans out there, we’re also chatting about the Moto G smartphone. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the , featuring , , and , and . Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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Kiind Launches An API For Its Digital Gift Card Platform
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Just in time for the holidays, virtual gift card service today announced that it now offers an API, which will allow third-party vendors to hook right into its services and to create gift cards from their own systems. The company also today said that it has added Nike and Apple’s iTunes as gift card options to its store. These are two major deals for Kiind, which already offered gift cards from major retailers like Amazon, Columbia Sportswear and Gap. Unlike other gift card services, Kiind’s system, which launched , is based on . The sender is only charged when the gift card is actually claimed (and a surprisingly large number of gift cards remain unclaimed). For shops like Amazon, Kiind also offers gift givers the ability to pre-select certain items from their stores, though the receivers can always change these selections. The new API allows developers to easily create and send cards from Kiind, but also to create their own gift card marketplaces based on Kiind’s inventory. As the company’s CEO and president Leif Baradoy told me earlier this month, the Victoria, Canada-based Kiind has seen good traction in the B2B space and decided to focus on this over making its service available to consumers. In the business world, most enterprises already use similar services to offer their employees or good customers gift cards. Kiind hopes that at least some of these services will use its API to also offer cards through its service. Some businesses, the Kiind team believes, will also integrate this API into their regular CRM or HR tools (and real estate agents, apparently, have taken to it to send gifts to homebuyers after a deal closes). The idea here, Baradoy said, is to extend the reach of the Kiind platform as wide as possible. As for the relationships with Nike and Apple, Baradoy couldn’t say too much, given that these deals tend to be confidential. He did, however, note that the company likes to create direct relationships with vendors whenever possible. He sees the fact that some of these major brands are now interested in the service as a sign that Kiind “has something interesting going on.” The company also recently launched a user-based referral program to attract more businesses to its platform. Referrers now get 5 percent of the first gift and 0.5 percent for every gift after.
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Google’s Android 4.4 Update Seems To Hurt Video Playback Performance On Nexus 7
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Google’s Android 4.4 KitKat update is rolling out to Nexus devices globally, and I was eager to get it on my Nexus 7 tablet. Turns out, it’s possible I should’ve left well enough alone. Immediately after updating (via official, OTA channels), I noticed performance seemed to suffer, and now a study conducted by Finnish mobile video and touch testing firm adds some solid data to back up my observations. OptoFidelity of HD video playback, both 720p and 1080p at both 30 and 60 fps on the Nexus 7 from 2012, and the Nexus 7 from 2013, before and after an upgrade to KitKat. The results show dramatically better performance on Android 4.3, before both tablets made the jump to Google’s latest mobile OS. Frighteningly, the Nexus 7 from 2013 couldn’t even play any 60fps video after the update. The score differences aren’t small, either, as according to OptoFidelity’s classification system, both Nexus 7 devices drop from delivering “satisfactory” performance to offering up something in the “unsatisfactory” range, with the newer model suffering the most. I found using my own device that animations seemed to execute less smoothly, and I was more prone to encounter missed touches than I had been before the KitKat update. For an update that was supposed to be backwards compatible with a lot of down range devices, this performance backslide on the most modern tablets is a little bit of a head scratcher. Hopefully it’s just a launch bug that’ll be zapped in a future update. We’ve reached out to Google for more info, but for now you might want to hold off on that KitKat update, unless you really badly need those emoticons.
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Record-Breaking Black Friday Online Spending Up 19 Percent; Mobile Sales Surge 43 Percent
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
After a in e-commerce spending, Black Friday online sales were up close to 20 percent in 2013 over the same period last year. IBM says that by their counts, sales are record-breaking. The data, from IBM’s Benchmark real-time reporting unit, covers 800 online retailers and millions of transactions. For the day, the average order value was $135.27, up 2.2 percent year-over-year. Mobile shopping continues to grow, as mobile traffic grew to 39.7 percent of all online traffic, an increase of 34 percent over Black Friday 2012. Mobile sales were also strong, reaching 21.8 percent of total online sales, an increase of nearly 43 percent year-over-year. Smartphones drove 24.9 percent of all online traffic on Black Friday compared to tablets at 14.2 percent, making it the browsing device of choice. Tablets drove 14.4 percent of all online sales, double that of smartphones, which accounted for 7.2 percent of all online sales. On average, tablet users spent $132.75 per order compared to smartphone users who spent $115.63, a difference of 15 percent. By smartphone OS, iOS users spent $127.92 per order on Black Friday compared to $105.20 per order for Android users. iOS traffic reached 28.2 percent of all online traffic, compared to 11.4 percent for Android. iOS sales reached 18.1 percent of all online sales, compared to 3.5 percent for Android. New York City took the top spot for online sales on Black Friday. Rounding out the top five were Atlanta, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Chicago In terms of social, shoppers referred from Pinterest on Black Friday spent 77 percent more per order than shoppers referred from Facebook. Facebook average order value was $52.30 versus Pinterest average order value which was $92.51. However, Facebook referrals converted sales at
nearly four times the rate of Pinterest. On average, IBM says more retailers were trying to engage with shoppers on their smartphones–retailers sent 37 percent more push notifications during the two day period over Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday when compared to daily averages over the past two months. Average daily retail app installations also grew by 23 percent using By sector, Black Friday online sales for department stores grew by 61.4 percent over 2012, with mobile percentage of sales growing by 46.4 percent. Average order value was $146.84, an increase of 15 percent year-over-year. Black Friday total online sales for health and beauty grew by 28 percent over 2012, with mobile percentage of sales growing by 65 percent. Average order value was $66.31, an increase of 3.2 percent year-over-year. For home goods, online sales grew by 16.8 percent over 2012, with mobile percentage of sales growing by 24 percent. Lastly, for apparel, online sales grew by 50.4 percent over 2012, with mobile percentage of sales growing by 43 percent. Average
order value was $123.31, an increase of 3.5 percent year-over-year. IBM is saying that this was a record breaking Black Friday by online sales but it’s unclear what that number is–so we’ll see what comScore reports with sales over the next few days. U.S. e-commerce spending last year on Black Friday was , an increase of 26 percent from 2012. Black Friday online sales actually surpassed $1 billion for the first time last year. But comScore is double-digit growth in both desktop e-commerce and m-commerce spending for the holiday season. : As of 11 am PT on Friday, PayPal saw a 123.9% increase in global mobile payment volume (mTPV) on Black Friday 2013 compared to Black Friday 2012. Photo credit/
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Aardvark Founder Max Ventilla Is Trying To Turn Education On Its Head With AltSchool
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Alice, a single mom living in Daly City, was facing major roadblocks with her public school system. Her five-year-old son was advanced enough to enter first grade instead of kindergarten. And her older son, who was about to enter third grade and had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hated school. She knew there was a better educational alternative but couldn’t afford to send her kids to private school. She happened to be searching online and saw an ad on Facebook for , a small one-room school, located in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, that focused on child-centric education. The school was exactly what her children needed: learning based on the specific child’s needs and challenges rather than a rigid curriculum based on standardized test results. AltSchool, while private, also offered a generous financial aid package, and she enrolled her kids right away. AltSchool is the brainchild of Aardvark founder and longtime Google executive . Ventilla, whose social search company was sold to Google in 2011, previously worked on the Google+ team, and was one of the search giant’s early proponents of social search and personalization. He sold another tech startup in enterprise software before his long tenure at Google (he worked at Google before Aardvark, as well). Earlier this year, he started thinking about his next startup and what area he’d like to focus on. Education was at the top of his mind, as he has a two-year-old daughter about to enter pre-school, and a son on the way. And he saw education as an area where he could have a huge impact. “One of top five industries in the U.S. by expenditure is elementary education, and as opposed to other large industries, the median experience is bad from every angle,” he explains. The dysfunction and relative slow-to-change nature of the educational system is one of his biggest frustrations. The cost of education is increasing, he adds, but that isn’t translating into children excelling more effectively at skills like reading and math. “If a time traveler came back from the early 1900’s, and looked at schools, they would look relatively the same. And there’s something wrong with that, because children and our world have changed.” He started researching where success was actually taking place at a broader scale in schools, in early education. What ties these schools together is the notion of child centeredness, he says, which is providing individualized education where the student learns at his or her own pace in ways most nurture them and their education. With this in mind, Ventilla decided that he wanted to build a school that approaches education and learning through a lens of things the children are most passionate about. “I believe the right way to teach a person is not as a subject but through an immersion,” he continues. An example of this is if you are teaching children about aquatic life, you can incorporate the subject to teach chemistry, ecology, economics, politics and even culture. The more he imagined what his vision would look like in reality, the more it sounded like a home school environment but with a larger group, skilled teachers, and a curriculum that focused on exposing children to experiences, as well as skill-building. Armed with this goal, Ventilla left Google in April and raised $3 million from First Round Capital, Harrison Metal, Baseline and a few other investors who had backed him during the Aardvark days. He hired teachers, operators who worked with him at Aardvark, and brought on Richard Ludlow, the founder of Academic Earth, as his COO. Ludlow’s online education video site, which was called and was a Bill Gates favorite, was Ventilla found space in Dogpatch for his micro-school, hired a bunch of former Google engineers and set upon redesigning the entire school experience in the spring and summer of this year. One of the first distinctive characteristics of Ventilla’s AltSchool is that there is no such thing as a child “at grade level.” As he explains, most students vary in skill level in subjects like math, reading, science, art, physical education and social studies, and “grades” are confining. Like Alice’s children, most children learn at different levels, so they need specialized attention. In this inaugural class, there are around 20 students between the ages of five and 10. They are split into two main learning groups, with the 5-7 year olds, and the 8-10 year old populating each group. There are generally eight students to one teacher but for some activities the entire group learns together. The actual building has one large room that is sectioned off into areas for play and learning. AltSchool teachers create highly personalized curriculum each week, called Playlists, which are a set of 10 or so goals and projects that the student has to complete for the week. Each child is given an iPad mini, where they can access their playlists through project management software . Each weekend, AltSchool teachers plan their playlists for each of their students based on what that student’s personalized curriculum and goals are for the week. Projects could range from making a list of what you are thankful for for Thanksgiving to reading a book. Another area where Ventilla is hoping to disrupt traditional education is video. The classroom is outfitted with a number of video cameras so that teachers can just press a button to document a moment. Ventilla says that teachers, parents and students who have been able to actually watch a breakthrough moment or a moment of breakdown have been able to help their children learn better. “You can see what works for specific children, and what doesn’t work,” he tells me. The technology is pretty impressive. AltSchool has built audio hardware to better record in noisy settings, and video is uploaded to an online CMS that both parents and teachers can access. Unsurprisingly technology is the central foundation of education and planning at the AltSchool. Ventilla has brought on a team of technologists, designers and engineers who are developing tools and formatting existing ones to support teachers, parents, and students. He envisions this base of talent as building an R&D shop for what works in his micro-schools. In addition, AltSchool students are using on their iPad minis to learn math skills, as well as an internal SMS where parents and teachers can access children’s work, progress, videos and more. Plus, parents and teachers can collaborate through this dashboard on students’ weekly playlists. In fact, Ventilla is hoping to build some proprietary software of his own to use within the school. His vision is to have a hundred engineers and designers working on developing better technology products for in-class learning. AltSchool also embraces a “school without walls” approach. Classes regularly venture outside the classroom to take advantage of the amazing cultural experiences available in San Francisco, often leveraging Uber SUVs for easy quick trips. Recent field trips include Smitten Ice Cream, which inspired a study of the applied physics of their innovative quick freeze process using liquid nitrogen; Mission Science Workshop, to engage in hands-on chemistry lessons; Walt Disney Family Museum, to study animated filmmaking; San Francisco Maritime Museum, as children explored life before modern transportation and communication; and (founded by Aardvark co-founder Rob Spiro) to learn about sustainable farming, healthy eating and environmental awareness. Looking to the future, Ventilla is building out a network of micro-schools, which will be modernized versions of the “one room schoolhouse” housing 60-100 students each. Continuing the theme of customization, elements of each micro-school – such as electives offered, foreign language instruction, academic calendar, and even locations – will be customized for the interests and needs of local communities of parents. Next year, AltSchool will open up another school in the Potrero Hill area, and a middle school (for older children) in SOMA. The startup is also looking at a possible Palo Alto location based on demand. Tuition isn’t cheap–it’s $19,100 per year (which is lower than many private schools in the area) but Ventilla says generous financial assistance is available. “We don’t believe that classes should be comprised of the elite who can afford it,” says Ventilla. Ventilla has much larger ambitions of taking AltSchool nationwide, or even outside of the U.S. And he says, this is definitely his last startup. And he looks forward to his children attending AltSchool for their primary education. As for Alice, within three months of attending AltSchool, her five year old is reading at a first grade level, and doing math at a second grade level. Alice’s nine-year-old son is currently excelling at fourth grade math and reading. And they both love school.
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Bond, The App For Giving Gifts, Lands On The Web
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Just in time for Black Friday, is bringing its gifting platform after spending a couple of months as a native mobile app. Bond, created by Sonny Caberwal, takes all the heavy lifting out of gift giving, with a large focus on the enterprise and professional gifts. So let’s say you just finished up a big interview at your dream job, or you just left the office of a brand new client after making a huge sale. That’s the perfect moment to open up and choose a gift in a certain price bracket, easily obtain the recipient’s address, and even formulate a hand-written note. Oh, did I mention? Bond has a robot that writes hand-written notes. And according to Caberwal, the Robot is being refined to learn new versions of handwriting, so that one could eventually send a hand-written note to a friend or colleague in . But why? Well, after a few months on the market, Bond has realized that big corporate clients are going to be the future for Bond. Caberwal eventually sees Bond becoming a platform that large corporations can customize to their own gifting needs. As a first step, the team is bringing Bond to the web.
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Is Instagram Eyeing Up @instagram.com Email Addresses For Its Users As Part Of A Messaging Service?
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Last week, Om Malik at reported that Instagram was working on a messaging feature to complement its already very-popular social photo app, now with some . Now we’ve caught wind of something that could point to a possible feature on this would-be messaging product: @instagram.com email addresses. A source who works in marketing for an e-commerce company has emailed us a list of such @instagram.com email addresses. They appeared, she says, as part of a request she made of one of the many companies out there that compiles data from social networking sites. She says that part of the results consisted of Twitter handles and Facebook email addresses, and it seems as if the @instagram.com addresses appeared as part of that list. “We requested verified email addresses for the followers of a certain fan club on Twitter and received back these results,” she wrote in an email. “We use [the data provider] as a tool for gathering information, and suddenly A LOT of the email fields were being filled in with Instagram email addresses.” (I’m intentionally keeping out the names of the users, the marketing exec, her e-commerce company, and that of the data provider.) The data provider, which uses a number of different APIs to populate its database, says that it had never seen these Instagram email addresses before. A spokesperson for Instagram declined to comment for this story. So what might be going on here? It could be a pure database fluke. I’ve been sending messages to the list of email addresses on the list provided by our source, and I’ve also tried out my own would-be Instagram email based on my own user ID. They have all come back to me with “too many hops” error messages. Too many hops can indicate an endless forwarding loop, or too many servers involved in relaying a message, but not necessarily that the address does not exist. On the other hand, Instagram email addresses could support Om’s claim that a messaging service is on the horizon. (His report noted that messaging features, which could be person-to-person or may include group messaging, will be in the next version of the app, expected before the end of the year.) For starters, look to Instagram’s owner, Facebook. There is something instructive here in how Facebook has built its own messaging services that Instagram may have gleaned. The world’s largest social network saw as far back as 2010 the usefulness of having a native email address integrated with a messaging service. It means making that messaging service more useful, but it also means more ways of keeping people on your own platform. So, when Facebook in 2010, it included the option for users to create @facebook.com email addresses. Sending messages to that @facebook.com email address then automatically sync up with Facebook’s messaging platform, which also aggregate messages sent to you by SMS (if you have a phone number associated with your account); Facebook’s standalone Messenger app; or Facebook itself. “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging experience that includes email as one part of it,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “This is the way that the future should work.” Instagram, in a way, has already laid some groundwork for using email on its platform. You share photos by default to your Instagram stream, but you can additionally send them to specific people via email. Other developers, meanwhile, have already shown the way forward for what an Instagram messaging service might do. , and are among those that are standalone apps that let you send direct messages to your Instagram contacts. Giving users on the Instagram network native email addresses could make the process of sending directly to individuals more seamless and integrated to the bigger platform. It could also be a way for those recipients of your emailed images a way to respond back to you. Facebook, it should also be pointed out, has actually already started to create a link between Instagram and direct messaging: an update to Facebook’s Messenger app let users access their Instagram libraries to send messages to friends. A first step for Instagram messenger, as it were, and a way of offering more picture-messaging services to a public that has demonstrated and appetite for the feature, courtesy of new hits like Snapchat and a host of apps with an image-first focus. We have seen much written about the big opportunity in messaging services ( ). Instagram has proven to be the king of photo apps when it comes to social, open consumption, so it seems natural that it, too, would eventually sprout its own private communications channel, to tap into that opportunity as well. But while Instagram emerged at a time when there was little in the way of its growth, times are different today. Services like WhatsApp — at an average of 15 billion messages per day as of November — are now to SMS’s 20 billion/day messaging dominance. Focusing on sending photos and video that disappear soon after they are sent, Snapchat is not quite that big — the last number Snapchat revealed, earlier this month, was (not sent) each day. But it is tapping into a key, young segment of consumers, who (at least for the moment) like to use it, a lot. Between that rock and hard place of apps attracting people to totally new features (ephemeral messages), and those that have become heavyweights in more text-based mobile messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram’s owner Facebook, and many more), whether Instagram will be able to wedge its own 150-million MAU presence into the scene — with email addresses or without — remains to be seen. (My informal straw poll points to early to the concept, but as Twitter co-founder Biz Stone once famously , it could end up being “The messaging system we didn’t know we needed until we had it.”) Image:
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Shinola’s Runwell Is A Solid Watch With American Pedigree, But You’ll Pay For The Homegrown Factor
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Detroit-based watchmaker is doing something pretty unique: hand-making watches in the United States, right down to the quartz movements contained within. The startup’s founding team includes some who worked for Swiss movement maker Ronda previously, and they built the company by flying in high-tech watchmaking equipment from Europe, as well as experts to train their Detroit-based workforce in the fine art of assembling timepieces. The result is a watch that’s on the pricey side for a quartz keeper, starting at $475 and ranging up to $900 for their new chronograph model. And the parts are flown in from Switzerland and Hong Kong, so not made in the U.S. of A, even if they are assembled locally in Michigan’s case study in disastrous metropolitan economics. It’s expensive for what it is, and in part it seems like the company is hoping to sell on the back of an “American made” campaign, but it’s also undeniable that these watches are well designed and finely crafted. I’ve been using the model seen in the photos for a few weeks now, and the so-called “Argonite-1069” movement keeps excellent time. The large readable numerals on the face are great for actually, you know, telling the time, and the small second-hand dial keeps things both uncluttered and adds to the overall attractiveness of the design. [gallery ids="921129,921130,921131,921132"] It’s definitely a retro affair, and the model I tested emphasizes that with a brass finish on the metal case. The lugs are similar to those that were once welded to pocket watches to make the first wristworn timepieces, and even the choice of typefaces for the Shinola logo and movement name harken back to a vaguely 30s or 40s-ish time period. All of which is to say, I like the look of the watch very much, but if your taste runs more modern you might not agree. Another very nice aspect of the model I tested was the Horween leather strap (made in Florida), which has a couple of lines of contrast stitching near the lugs and matte brass hardware to match the case. It’s extremely comfortable, while also remaining durable and good-looking. It’s not typically my thing to go in for quartz watches, even when the design language they use is right up my alley. But the Shinola features such a bold design that it earns a place next to something like a Uniform Wares in terms of esteem, meaning it’s unique enough that the price tag becomes less of an issue. At those prices, however, you’re still getting into the affordable range for great entry-level automatics, like the Defakto lineup or a Stowa Flieger, which means there’s going to be a lot of competition for the Shinola with any customer serious about watches. Still, it’s good-looking, works well and, marketing aside, it is assembled in Detroit by a company that employs more than a hundred Americans, so there’s plenty of reason to consider one as a gift for the watch appreciator in your circle.
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Gift Guide: Be Super-Healthy On A Shoestring Budget
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Are you tired of watching expensive gadgets turn your friends into Abercrombie models? Well, my pudgy popper, we’ve got a holiday gift guide that’ll give you five more ab packs without breaking your piggy bank. It’s well-known that , so a few savvy furniture manufacturers have begun to market chic “standing desks” boldly priced at $1,000 or more. The is an artificially intelligent $3,800 table that learns a users’ habits and automatically adjusts its height throughout the day. Or, , you can use the good ol’ 20th century technology of a cardboard box. This geometrically sound paper-based tech comes in all shapes and sizes; with enough digging users can find an ideal height for them. At TechCrunch, it took me five minutes to find some boxes laying about. According to Science, , since what the body really needs is constant movement throughout the day. Your best bet for being super-healthy is to walk while you work (it even makes doctors better at diagnosing!). But, these suckers are expensive: is $1,300 or you can DIY it for a few hundred dollars less. Or, for a price of Comcast’s shoddy Internet ($39.95), you can own the portable miracle, the , a laptop shelf that attaches to the face of most treadmills. I brought it with me on a three-week tour of the East Coast and it worked marvelously. You still need a gym membership (or a hotel with a treadmill), but it’s a great excuse to get out of the coffee shop and into a gym. Getting one’s daily allowance of vitamins can be a real pain, so nutrition-happy consumers have been more than willing to shell out their weekly paycheck for a gadget that shreds solid fruits and vegetables into a drink that can be gulped in between emails. The $300 makes bright shakes without the inconvenience of cutting, while the Costco holiday centerpiece, the , spins fast enough to prep uranium for a nuclear core. But and are probably terrible for your body. Fructose can be toxic to humans; Mother Nature naturally wraps its sugary sweetness in a fiber shield that protects the human body from blood sugar spikes and liver damage. University of California, San Francisco health guru Rob Lustic told a crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival that if you’re going to juice, the only non-toxic foods are pure vegetables (icky). Unfortunately, pulverizing foods into an indistinguishable mush could destroy much of the nutrients. It’s unclear how much survives the shredding process, and it allows people to consume foods far faster than the body prefers to process them (leading to overeating and ). are a healthy, free alternative to mashing food. Designed by mother nature, these calcium-based chompers are perfectly tailored to each individual users’ digestive operating systems. The chomping co-processor safely throttles the bandwidth of nutritional uploads, protecting vitamins in a salty liquid sheath. I honestly don’t know how hunter-gatherer societies managed to stay fit before the advent of plastic buzzing pedometers. ($150), ($150), (129.99) all delight consumers into using their legs with rainbow-colored reward screens for those who meet their daily walking goals. Or, , you could enjoy the most accurate of pedometers, the Pikachu-friendly ($43). This smile-inducing trapper of pixelated Japanese gladiators will count your steps each day while providing hours of endless entertainment. , but YouTube is just soooo entertaining. Many wrist health trackers monitor sleep and provide optimal wake-up alarm times, as do a , such as or . Fortunately, the brain has a built-in timer that naturally sends dreamy signals to the brain if a . However, the piercing fluorescent blue light from computer monitors is wreaking havoc on our evolutionary response of being awake at sunlight. To get our melatonin pumper back into shape, blue-light filtering sunglasses, a.k.a. “blue blockers, ($15.99) are to improve some sleep-related diseases. I wear mine every night two hours before bed (and try to turn out the lights, as well). There you have it, folks. How to be super healthy on a shoestring budget. In the comments section, please post photos of your rippling abs, as you roll around in a pile of one-dollar bills and Ivy-league diplomas.
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Thanksgiving Digest (IBM E-Commerce Edition): Mobile 43% Of All Traffic, Over 25% Of All Online Sales
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
For many years, Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving — marked the start of the holiday shopping rush. But with many ( ) physical stores closed on Thanksgiving, a window of opportunity has emerged for e-commerce sites to push out offers and start selling a day earlier. That has proven to be big business: online sales in the U.S. this Thanksgiving were up nearly 20% (19.7%) on 2012, with an especially strong push from mobile devices, which accounted for over one-quarter (25.8%) of all sales on the day and nearly half of all e-commerce traffic. The data, from , covers some 800 online retailers and millions of transactions. (Look here for a progress report on how the day developed , and today IBM is releasing the final, summary figures.) IBM doesn’t provide sales in gross dollar amounts — just in terms of growth over last year and average basket size. Forrester Research, however, predicts that overall sales this holiday season will reach $78.7 billion, up 15% over 2012, when sales were $68.4 billion, with 167 million shoppers holiday shopping online and spending an average of $472. Although sales started out slowly yesterday, IBM says that they “skyrocketed” around 8pm Eastern time — coinciding with some brick-and-mortar stores opening for business. But as overall sales grew, the average value of orders declined, settling at $127.59, some $5 less than last year. Both the declining orders, and the jump in traffic, make some sense: they are both based on competition for consumers, and therefore lower prices for everyone. Along with that, even those who operate brick and mortar stores are seeing logic in pushing deals online. IBM says that department stores’ online sales grew 60% this year over 2012, with mobile up 44%. Some other noteworthy data: — Mobile is nearing half of all e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving. In all it accounted for 42.6% of all traffic, and nearly 26% of all sales — up 49% on 2012. As IBM noted yesterday, tablets see the most actual purchases — 16.5% of all online sales — while smartphones accounted for 9%. Those buying on tablets, with an average of $126.49 per order, are nearly on par with average basket size overall. (Smartphones are at $110 per order, fairly impressive considering that you are browsing on a small screen.) iOS ended up accounting for over one-fifth (21%) of all sales, and $121.61 per order. Android accounted for only 4.6% of sales — a testament to why Apple and iOS will have staying power for a while with big brands and retailers, and consumers, regardless of how their bigger market share looks globally. — Yesterday Facebook and Pinterest emerged as the two frontrunners in terms of social networks leading online sales referrals in IBM’s data. In the end, Facebook won out, averaging $105.97 per order, versus Pinterest at $103.05 per order. — New York was the biggest online sales market on Thanksgiving. Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. followed. — PayPal also noted growth in mobile payments volumes on its platform for the day — up 114.7% over Thanksgiving 2012, with a 91% increase in consumers shopping through PayPal mobile compared to Thanksgiving 2012. It doesn’t break out what percentages of overall sales, or actual gross value of the transactions.
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Amid Some Fistfights, Walmart Sells 1.4M Tablets On Thanksgiving, iPad Mini A Top Seller
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Walmart is about Black Friday and we’re only a couple of hours into the actual day itself. That’s because depressingly, Black Friday has somehow subsumed Thanksgiving Thursday and become the Day That Spans Many Days. Oh well; at least they sold a huge boatload of tablets. Walmart puts its one day sales of those mobile computing devices at 1.4 million, and while it doesn’t break down by brand or model, the company also cites the iPad mini as one of a short list of top-selling items. Also included in that list are the generic categories of big screen TVs and laptops, so you can imagine that the iPad mini likely accounted for a significant portion of those 1.4 million slates to be called out by name. Other top-selling items included Microsoft’s new Xbox One, and Sony’s PlayStation 4, indicating that the home console market is still alive and kicking despite the rise of mobile game and sluggish sales for Nintendo’s Wii U console, which made its debut last year. It’s worth noting that Walmart sold twice as many towels as it did tablets, at 2.8 million moved on the day when Americans get together to give thanks, stuff themselves with turkeys and buy towels. And of course, Walmart’s press release sort of glosses over the fact that its stores have become sites for . At least some of those 1.4 million tablets sold went to the victors of squabbles, according to Twitter. NEVER will I go to Walmart black Friday again I got stuck in the middle of a fight over a stupid tablet 🙈🙈😭 if you wanna see crazy go there — courtneylexis (@CourtneyCrigler)
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gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 11 | 11 | null |
PingTune Raises $1.6M And Unleashes Messaging App Based Around Music
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
With the success of SnapChat, Line and others, who will own the next big messaging service. Now, we’re not saying it’s necessarily the next big thing, but it is interesting to us that (formerly named Tuneit) has appeared with a service which slices off a fascinating niche of the messaging space with an app for music fans that want to send slices of music to each other in an easy and simple way. The startup, based in London’s ‘Tech City’ in the East, has also just raised £1m ($1.6m) worth of investment to do it. The seed investment comes from Rupert Hambro (former Chairman of Hambros Bank, currently Chairman of JO Hambro) and Dominic Perks (serial entrepreneur and active investor). PingTune is which lets users search for music from sources like YouTube and SoundCloud, then simply message friends with that track. You can also choose a specific section of the tune or video to send, which, if you think about it, works quite well when you want to tell a friend something which just the chorus in a song is talking about. Clearly the flirting possibilities are endless. CEO Henry Firth says “We saw that people were sharing music on social networks, but it can be clunky. Copying links between windows is hard work on a mobile phone. We wanted to make that process easier… so we built PingTune.” PingTune’s 12-strong teams consists of staff formerly with Yahoo, Spotify, Skype and Sony. He says the business model will eventually be selling mp3s and other music-related purchases. Note Spotify’s partnership with Tango and Sony’s campaign with Kik, speaks to this trend for music and messaging getting together. Messaging could well be the next wave we’ll see in this space. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAgN0IUHFb4]
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CrunchWeek: Snapchat Turns Down $3B, The Justin Bieber-Backed Selfie App, IPOs Are Back
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 11 | 16 |
In this episode, , and I discussed Snapchat reportedly rebuffing from Facebook, the , an app for taking and sharing selfies that counts Justin Bieber as an investor, and how in a big way.
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Apple Not Impressed That Court-Appointed E-Book Compliance Monitor Made $138,432 In First Two Weeks
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 11 | 29 |
Apple has issued a to the court-appointed lawyer assigned to monitor its compliance with the decision handed down in its e-book pricing fixing case back in July. The monitor was assigned by the , and has apparently been charging Apple a very high price for his services – he made $138,432 in his first two weeks on the job, according to Apple’s official filing on the matter. Apple says that’s the highest rate it’s paid a lawyer in its history, which is saying a lot given the company’s decidedly litigious streak. Apple’s lawyers explained in the filing that they believe Bromwich is charging so much simply because he can, as Apple has no say in who is chosen for the position, and must pay for the court-appointed monitor as per the decision handed down by the DOJ in the antitrust price-fixing case. Apple also objected to a provision in the DOJ’s ruling that would allow Bromwich to interview company personnel and report back to the court without Apple’s own lawyers around to represent the company’s interests. The anti-trust case saw Apple charged with colluding with ebook publishers to artificially raise prices, and the DOJ handed down a decision that means Apple must have the court-appointed monitor, and is forbidden from having special arrangement with publishers around price restrictions, as well as so-called “favored nation” clauses (which essentially ties the pricing deals it works out with one publisher to the arrangements it holds with others) for four years. Bromwich has served as an independent monitor before, in the oil and gas industry and with the Metropolitan Police Department for the District of Columbia, but if lawyer loving Apple is taking exception, there might be something to the claim that this rate is excessive by any standards.
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The Lean Hardware Startup: From Prototype To Production
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Contributor
| 2,013 | 11 | 16 |
If the printing press was about “anyone can read,” the web about “anyone can write,” the hardware ecosystem changed enough to say today “anyone can build.” This idea – that anyone can build – is the cornerstone of the new “lean hardware startup.” Yet, despite successes like , , and , hardware startups continue to look daunting to entrepreneurs and investors alike. As investors in over 30 of them through our hardware-focused accelerator HAXLR8R (and in a number of startups outside HAXLR8R, too), we would like to share some ideas on how the landscape has changed for hardware entrepreneurs, and how it is now possible to be “lean” in hardware, too.
The first challenge for hardware entrepreneurs is to get from your first prototype with 3D-printed parts, duct tape and cardboard to production-ready. Steve Blank, a key inspiration in the Lean Startup movement, famously said “No business plan survives contact with the customer.” If you’re doing hardware the lean way, “No hardware plan survives contact with a factory” should be your mantra. Hardware often starts with a “bag of parts.” This won’t cut its time to hit the factory. Non-standard components make it nearly impossible to manufacture on a larger scale. If you don’t want to be doing all the assembly work by hand with your friends in the style of Steve-Jobs-the-movie, you’d better look for the right parts as soon as possible.
You got the right components? Great. But you’re not quite done yet: if your prototype can’t be made or even assembled, you’re toast. Luckily, factories often know better what can or cannot be done and can help you figure it out. Of course, it works much better if you can be on site frequently to discuss it with the people actually doing the work rather than send long emails with specifications. You can thus iterate on the design of your prototype much faster. Many of our startups saw the design of their products evolve, the sous-vide machine is probably one whose changes were the most radical between the moment they joined HAXLR8R and the moment they went into production (read their story ).
Manufacturing ability is one thing but costs are often a determining factor. A quote from Alibaba is not a reliable estimate nor is asking for “Apple quality” for half the price of a reasonable request to a factory. Avoid being overcharged or being laughed at by getting a better sense of your bill of materials and the manufacturing process. Okay so you have the right components and you know your product can be made and assembled. Are you going to select the factory and handle the relationship yourself? It’s easy to make excuses for this one: it’s complicated, it’s in China (or Mexico, or elsewhere), you don’t speak the language, it takes time.… And where to start? Overall, it is scary.
As a result, it is tempting to bring in a third party to handle the relationship with factories. Beyond reducing your margins, the problem is that those companies essentially end up doing both audit and consulting. You know the result of this. You can’t do hardware for long not knowing anything about manufacturing. So while you might need advice to get started, there is an expertise in project management and quality control you need to grow to succeed in the long term. And if you still have doubts: all the startups that went through HAXLR8R learned how to do it, and so can you. It might be worth noting that our 30 startups work with 30 different factories, to suit their needs best. To each his own!
Good products have good technology and design, but also good distribution and good branding. Can your brand encompass your values, mission, product and be memorable in many languages? As an example, Axio, a company doing wearable tech for your brain and part of the second batch at HAXLR8R, did a thorough rebranding to , revisiting entirely its name, logo, approach, app and look and feel. Pure hardware is at risk of being commoditized fast, and many products now include “smart” connectivity and a service layer. Doing hardware-as-a-service means that picking the right business model is very important. At HAXLR8R, started off by making open source hardware and software, then a device-based subscription and then licensed both hardware and software. More recently, , the , added sales of the content of a library of audio recordings to its revenue models. Changes in the ecosystem have made it much more possible to start hardware companies at a much lower starting cost. Expect to see many new successful hardware startups, as “smart” products gradually come to replace the objects in our life! [slideshare id=27735247&style=border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px&sc=no]
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From Static To Suggestive: Nokia’s Earthmine-Powered Vision For The Future Of Maps
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 11 | 16 |
N No surprise, then, that Nokia is revving up its engines in the location space. Notably, it’s fully integrated the digital mapping giant Navteq — which it acquired way back in 2007, but was running as an independent business up until last year. On its earnings conference call last month it also talked up the prospects for , and win new business in consumer facing use-cases such as on mobile devices. It’s also revving HERE’s engines literally, with a plan to triple the number of cars it has wearing down rubber mapping new roads and places, and doing the ongoing map maintenance required to keep the data fresh. Nokia’s HERE business sub-divides into three main divisions — its consumer-facing offering (of which Microsoft is among its top three customers); a b2b/enterprise play, where it works with customers such as Oracle, by, for instance, helping them track their flow of goods to better understand their own businesses; and a very big automotive business, built upon its Navteq acquisition and its turn-by-turn navigation specialism. The automotive segment is currently the largest of HERE’s divisions — as you’d expect, given how much Nokia spent on buying its way into the market when it purchased Navteq, for $8.1 billion. Globally, f Across all HERE’s division, Nokia’s maps licensing and location data platform business has “hundreds” of customers. This week Nokia was showing off one of its new-look HERE cars, pictured above, to U.K. journalists, giving live demos of the street-level mapping technology. The flagship tech on show here is the this time last year. Nokia is using this to compete with Google Street View in urban areas but also, more broadly, as the foundation for evolving HERE beyond the legacy Navteq specialism of turn-by-turn navigation. Building more dynamic and interactive 3D maps is where Nokia sees the future for HERE, says Stuart Ryan, director of Maps and Everyday Mobility at Nokia. A smart, personalised, context-aware location cloud platform may also represent the future for Nokia’s business, post-mobile phones. What kind of maps is it aiming to build? “Immersive, living, rich” maps that draw on multiple content sources and applications and change based on context, or display data in new and playful ways, says Ryan. Maps that also “know and understand you, and suggest things for you”. “Maps behave, react, inform in a way that’s very, very relevant and personal to you,” he tells TechCrunch. “The challenge our boss gives us is redesign the maps experience for consumers.” One example he brings up to illustrate Nokia’s thinking here is map of a city that’s transformed from being a realistic digital representation into an abstracted data visualisation that emphasises certain characteristics of the city’s makeup, and/or creates something that looks visually arresting, and is even purposefully un-map-like. Another scenario he talks about is when visitors to a city want to know where local equivalents for places in their home town can be found — so, in other words, they’re after a map that can show them where “the uptown version of Chicago in Berlin is”, for example. “It’s got to go from being a very largely static experience, granted built on turn-by-turn navigation, into a much more interactive and suggestive type of experience,” he says. “That’s where it’s going.” It was too dark in London’s low-light winter environs to take the HERE car for a spin when TechCrunch checked it out, but the driver showed the system working in the garage. Nokia’s Ryan was also on hand to answer questions. Nokia’s HERE fleet is not doing all the mapping itself. The company has multiple sources for its maps, and even obtains some mapping data via community (crowdsourcing) contributions to augment the rubber on the tarmac approach, although Ryan stressed that it has teams checking mapping data submissions to ensure their quality, where possible. It also draws in other third party sources, such as data from government agencies. The HERE car driver showing off the kit inside the demo car had recently been mapping the North East of England, and said he’s typically out from 7:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m.-4:45 p.m., depending on weather and light conditions. He typically covers around 200 miles a day. The hard drive in the car — which was sited on the front seat, inside the processing unit — holds a terabyte of data. After around a week’s worth of driving 64% of it had been filled. The HERE car’s modular rig, which is mounted on the roof, contains a LiDar sensor which captures the 3D data — grabbing objects and textures as the car moves along the road — by sending out signals that bounce back to build up a “3D point cloud”. “This is what creates a 3D digital representation of the world around us,” says Ryan. “It’s all managed as an X, Y, Z point so we have the location and height information… It’s similar to laser and sonar, those kinds of technologies. It’s based on light pulses and then when it comes back in we just store the location. And we create a composite view, then, of the real-world in a 3D construct. ” Here’s an example of the street level imagery being captured by Nokia’s rig: And while, on the surface, Nokia’s street level view may look much like Google’s Street View, Nokia argues that because its technology captures 3D data rather than just taking static photographs, it offers a superior foundation for transforming the basic digital map canvas — by allowing for both new types of content and new ways of interacting with maps to be introduced. “A static image product has a lot of limitations in terms of the utility it provides,” says Ryan when asked how Nokia’s tech stacks up against Street View. He also says the imagery captured by Nokia’s cameras is “higher accuracy, higher resolution, higher quality” than Google’s Street View cameras, adding: “Which is part of the reason why we invested in the Earthmine technology”. What he’s not so quick to point out is that Nokia’s street level mapping coverage is far less comprehensive than Google’s Street View — Nokia is focusing street level mapping on metropolitan and urban areas, whereas Google, with five+ years of rubber in the game already, generally prefers to cover whole countries, as the below coverage map illustrates: Google Street View coverage map, as of November 2013 So when Nokia says it has mapped close to 200 countries, it’s talking specifically about road-level mapping, not the street level 3D data. It’s unclear exactly how extensive Nokia’s street level mapping is at this point — Nokia has previously said the — but even in Europe and North America where Nokia kicked off its 3D mapping effort coverage is selective, targeted on urban centres. Nokia justifies that selective coverage by arguing that street level mapping is more relevant to urban areas where population density is highest — so, in the short term at least, HERE’s Earthmine technology looks set to snub the roads less well-travelled. But if you can’t compete on quantity vs your biggest rival, there’s always quality. And/or doing something new and different. “Our team is looking at the utility around how do you make the map more living, more real, more relevant to people — in terms of being able to provide more detail, and make the panoramas around you and buildings around you more relevant in terms of if you think about orientation and guidance,” says Ryan. “But also… this [Earthmine technology] will allow us to make the map in and of itself more of a canvas and an interface — so we want to get away from the legacy of put something in a search box or a text box and actually scroll the map, select objects on the map, make them reveal things to you and go from there. “Because everything we have is actually a data model, and not a static image, that allows us to do an awful lot of these use-cases.” Introducing new “use-cases” to its maps is on the cards for Nokia “later next year”, according to Ryan. Fleshing out those use-cases a little further he lists the following: “truer 3D rendering of what’s around you; making things much more interactive; allowing for certain things to render in certain ways — they could be very, very detailed, or they could be a little bit more occluded”. Another feature he discusses is transitions — i.e. being able to move map users through a 3D view that takes in aerial imagery and moves down through different levels of detailed 3D content, before they arrive at street level. The aim being to wow users, with both the design and the feel of moving around the map. He also talks about allowing users to explore cities via maps in a more tactile way using a 3D mapping canvas that lets them touch a building to see what it is, rather than having to type something into a text box or click around on rails. “You don’t click an action to route to… you just click on the building itself to route to,” he explains. The HERE car’s modular mapping rig could also potentially be attached to other types of vehicles, according to Ryan — even something that’s airborne. “If there’s a way that we can find to mount this technology on the right kind of vehicle, can we also capture aerial imagery? Can we do other things as well? So it’s extensible in terms of how we can use it. “Our view is on this you differentiate on this more through actually making richer, deeper, interactive, immersive experiences with the map and really evolve how people think about a 2D or a 3D map. That’s the aspiration for us,” he continues. “It’s about trying to reinvent and redefine the whole concept of what it is to see and visualise a map, and interact with a map. That’s what no one has solved so far.” As well as the LiDar sensor, the rig on Nokia’s HERE cars carries a GPS sensor, and a Street View-esque camera that snaps the view from four sides so it can piece the visual scenery back together with the 3D mesh to colour in that data. The other sensor on board the rig is called an IMU — aka an inertia measurement unit — which captures detailed road characteristics, such as the degree of incline or bend, which Nokia then sells back to customers in the automotive sector to improve their own in-car systems. “This is a very automotive-centric sensor,” says Ryan of the IMU. “So it’s got an accelerometer, gyroscope, it helps understand direction of travel, velocity of the vehicle, but also very, very important for understanding things like slope of a road, curve information, gradient, for products and use cases around ADAS: advanced driver assistance systems. “So when you think about things like lane departure warnings, adaptive cruise control, curve warnings and use cases around fuel efficiency and route optimisation — and in essence building the foundation for how we think about automated or autonomous driving, that’s one key thing that a sensor like this contributes.” Nokia announced a partnership with Mercedes-Benz to work on developing driverless car technology, noting at the time: The requirements put on maps by autonomous driving go beyond what has been available until now. The very exact precision of lane width, road sign locations and other road network attributes are all crucial components needed to provide routing for autonomous vehicles. This is an area Mercedes-Benz and HERE will continue to explore together, as automakers and HERE spearhead the innovation for future commercial autonomous vehicles. There’s no time-frame on when such a car could make it to market — and in any case, the technical challenges of building self-driving cars are matched by huge legal and regulatory hurdles that stand just as tall, if not even taller barriers to commercialisation. So developing guidance systems to help steer self-driving cars is definitely a long-term play for Nokia; the road HERE’s automotive business unit may ultimately end up travelling along one day. In the meantime Nokia sees plenty of areas where it can more gradually extend the HERE platform’s capabilities in the automotive sector — so that it g “There’s a number of projects and discussions we’re having with major OEMs, major car companies around this,” says Ryan. “A lot is happening in that area. Basically as all of these sensors [on the HERE car], plus potentially other sensors within the vehicle, continue to tag and have user information we can use that to feed back to a platform or service… and be able to aggregate that and deliver that back in the form of some value-add service to people. “One example… [might be] if you’re on the motorway and a car is 25 miles ahead but all of a sudden its windshield wipers start going, if you could signal that back to a platform, you could signal back to the car behind you that it’s raining ahead. So all kinds of things.” Of course, that example would require car makers to add the necessary sensors to windscreen wipers. But Nokia has various other data sources feeding into HERE’s network already — such as traffic data from enterprise customers with large delivery fleets, and anonymised data gathered from its own maps and mobile users — which it refers to as “probe data”. (You can bet the deal with Microsoft to buy Nokia’s devices & services division requires that this pipeline of probes remains open to HERE.) One area Ryan mentions where probe data could be used to augment Nokia’s maps with useful, contextual information is by gathering real-time transit data — i.e. where public transport networks don’t make that data openly available. “We can build estimated schedules based on the lines, the length of the journey between stops, the speed of the train and then we get timetable data,” he says. “The next thing people want to understand is interrupted service, delays, real-time information for transit as well so getting user feedback for that kind of content is interesting.” Probe data also feeds back into the HERE business in another way: to help Nokia identify when a new road has been built that it needs to send a car out to map. Or to build “heat maps” of activity based on where people are doing map searches and how they are using other Nokia apps (some of which are available on iOS and Android, expanding Nokia’s reach beyond its own legacy/Microsoft’s mobile platforms). You could call it Nokia’s very own inner Foursquare. “We actually use [probe data] on our map assets. You can see how we think about activity heat-maps — where the most interesting places and restaurants and POIs are in a city or an area are,” says Ryan. Probe data, third party data sources, community-contributions and Nokia’s own Earthmine-equipped cars all feed their intel into the HERE platform — Nokia says it uses 80,000 different sources to layer content into its maps. The blood, if you like, that is being pumped through HERE’s digital veins to animate increasingly dynamic maps. How competitive that data set is vs the Mountain View-sized hoard that Google’s mapping business rests on top of is of course a key question. Nokia says it is planning to have a fleet of “hundreds” of HERE cars on the road by the end of 2014. It won’t be more specific about exactly how many cars it has, driving around hoovering up the topology. Google also won’t put a figure on its Street View fleet, saying only that it’s driven more than five million miles of unique road since kicking off the project in 2007. As with Google’s fleet, Nokia’s HERE cars are driving around all the time — a necessity to keep its maps updated, and also to expand street level mapping coverage to better compete with Google. This never-ending process is clearly a huge cost base for HERE, along with the unit’s 6,000-strong headcount. Nokia’s operating expenses for HERE were €153 million in Q3 this year, which is small relative to other divisions of the business but bear in mind that those divisions are involved in manufacturing hardware vs HERE being a software-focused unit. Focusing HERE’s street level mapping coverage on cities/towns is one way Nokia can cap the costs associated with gathering the more sophisticated 3D data — while being able to innovate on the technology and software side to produce more dynamic and interactive maps for those urban centres in future. And, so Nokia hopes, steal some of Street View’s thunder. In the automotive sector, Nokia primarily competes with TomTom right now, although Ryan concedes that Google is looking to get a “stronger footing” in that industry — so there’s certainly a sense that the company is checking itself about getting complacent. And that’s not surprising, given the painful lessons of its recent history. Nokia’s mobile business went from being king of the world circa 2007 to also-ran a handful of years later, having watched Google’s Android platform spread like a pandemic from a standing start in 2008 to the circa 80% marketshare of today. Ryan is also not complacent when it comes to location startups — name-checking Waze as one example of a startup that managed to build significant momentum, with a crowdsourced traffic data platform, and which was of course ultimately acquired by Google. “The opportunity for disruptors to come along is to solve that hidden use-case or that unmet need. The company that can combine a lot of what we do, and Google go, and Foursquare do, and Facebook do in a location cloud experience is the winning strategy, and that’s why it’s the strategy that we’re pursuing,” he says. That means Nokia’s challenge, as a long-time player in the location space, is to take a step back from the turn-by-turn/navigation business it knows so well, through Navteq, and allow HERE to become more mobile and social, to be “more about solving more everyday life problems”, as Ryan puts it. “That is where there is an awful lot of untapped opportunity within maps and location.” “We recognise there’s a lot of blood in the water with Google around, and other players as well, but there’s huge upside in terms of where the location area is going — and nobody’s really solved it yet,” he adds. With its phone-making days behind it, Nokia wants to plant its flag afresh on the location map — with a banner that reads HERE .
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