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Disney+ to add IMAX signature sound by DTS to select titles this year
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Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Disney+ is going to add support for enhanced IMAX signature sound by DTS to select Marvel films and more in 2023. The streaming service has been offering movies in an for more than a year now and plans to expand the experience even further with this upcoming addition. Disney Streaming, in partnership with IMAX and DTS, made the announcement this week. The companies said in a press release that IMAX signature sound by DTS will “enable an elevated end-to-end experience specially calibrated to provide fans at home with IMAX-quality picture and sound.” Select device manufacturers will support IMAX signature sound by DTS at launch, including TVs from manufacturers like Sony and Hisense. People who own certified AV receivers from manufacturers like Denon, Marantz and JBL will also be able to enjoy the experience at launch. “With IMAX Enhanced, IMAX and technology partner DTS enable content that can be experienced in-home and beyond with the highest fidelity, ensuring that filmmakers’ creative intent is fully optimized for an IMAX-quality presentation,” the companies noted in the press release. Today’s announcement isn’t exactly a surprise, given that Disney that it planned to deliver more enhanced audio and visual technology to Disney+, including immersive IMAX signature sound by DTS. Disney+’s current IMAX Enhanced titles include: “Black Panther,” “Thor: Love & Thunder,” “Doctor Strange,” “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Black Widow,” “Eternals,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” “Iron Man,” “Captain America: Civil War,” “Thor: Ragnarok,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” “Captain Marvel,” “Avengers: Endgame” and “Lightyear.” The streaming service that “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” will launch on its platform on February 1. The film will have IMAX Enhanced support.
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4 data science predictions for 2023
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Torsten Grabs
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
long been the domain of hardcore data professionals who understand the complex frameworks and languages involved, but those professionals are in notoriously short supply. Fortunately, the landscape of tools and frameworks is constantly evolving, and in 2023 I predict new developments that will alleviate challenges for data teams and businesses alike. On the one hand, the long-heralded citizen data scientists will finally play a greater role in analytics thanks to sheer necessity and a simplification of the tools and platforms involved. On the other hand, data professionals will start to benefit from some of these simpler tools to accelerate their work and a push for greater standardization will help the industry as a whole. Here are four predictions for data science in the new year and how businesses can take advantage of them. Business people can’t afford to wait for data scientists to provide the analytics they need, so they’re taking matters into their own hands. Python has become more approachable for non-professionals with the availability of preconfigured cloud runtimes and accessible tools like for numerical data, for forecasting and for geospatial data. As a result, in 2023, Python use will expand beyond data professionals and into the hands of business analysts and other less technical users. Novice Python users should not attempt to build their own runtime environments but should opt for any of the modern cloud platforms that provide built-in security and governance. Anaconda offers a popular Python distribution that helps ensure updates and dependencies are managed properly, and Snowflake installs these packages in our cloud-based Python runtime. There are numerous online resources for non-professionals to get started with Python, including this comprehensive from RealPython.
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Meet four more startups pitching at the CCC Web3 Demo Day
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Lauren Simonds
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
We have so many (12, in fact) outstanding early-stage startups ready to pitch at the on January 11. If you want to learn more about who’s on the cutting edge of building the future of web3, DeFi, NFT and gaming, you do not want to miss this event. for this free online pitch-a-thon. Buckle up, because we’re set to reveal the next four startups that will deliver their best pitch to an audience packed with the kind of movers and shakers that could, if the stars align, improve the trajectories of these companies. We’re talking about leading investors like Calvin Du (OP Crypto), Ria Bhutoria (Castle Island Ventures) and many more. Don’t miss your opportunity to in the live event chat and expand your network! Okay, let’s get to it. Here are four more rising-star startups you need to know. Meet , a blockchain credit score solution designed to make crypto lending safer and smarter, founded by Jatin Mehta. The product builds a credit score by fetching the 360-degree credit history for a crypto wallet across the blockchains and lending protocols. Blockdog’s machine learning models use that data to build a credit score. Meet , a CRM and marketing automation platform, founded by Drew Beechler. A Salesforce alum, Beechler and his team aim to help web3 businesses capture, understand and engage with their communities. Meet , a solution designed to bridge the gap between web2 consumers and web3 providers. Founded by Taariq Lewis, an ex-MIT grad and Cosmos industry vet, Paloma aims to be the blockchain of choice for controlling multiple smart contracts deployed on multiple chains. Meet , a turnkey solution for futures trading with a suite of algorithmic trading products. Founded by Eric Mayo, this startup’s software is designed to cover the entire spectrum of needs that players like FCMs, CTAs, brokers and traders use today. Join us on January 11 and see for yourself what the brilliant minds behind 12 up-and-coming projects are building. , which takes place on January 11, 2023, is a joint production between the CCC and TechCrunch. for this free online event and reserve your seat at the virtual table.
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Ember brings Find My functionality to its self-heating travel mug
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
a bit of a weird one. The Southern California firm has two distinct — though not wholly unrelated — arms. There’s the smart mug side of the business that launched the startup and the more recent cold chain shipping wing, which leverages its temperature control technology to move things like medical supplies. While it seemed as though the mug business might have been a kind of steppingstone to healthcare (where the real money is), that side of things is still going strong. Today at , for instance, Ember is announcing the Travel Mug 2+. The new addition to the line adds Apple’s Find My to the equation. Brian Heater While not exactly the most obvious addition on the face of it, travel mugs are certainly the sort of thing that gets left behind quite easily. Add a couple-hundred-dollar price tag, and it becomes immediately clear why you’d really rather not accidentally leave the thing behind on a bus. Due out at some point in Q2 2023, the mug has both the required built-in tracking and a chime that plays if you happen to lose it in close proximity (another must-have to properly use Find My). Brian Heater The product has all the same functionality as the regular Travel Mug 2, including temperature control and a built-in display. In spite of the additional functionality, the product will run the same as its predecessor — $199 — when it launches later this year. No word on whether the standard mug will stay on the market at a reduced price.
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Sony offers a sneak peek at Neill Blomkamp’s ‘Gran Turismo’ film
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Sony’s CES press conference is always a real smorgasbord of the electronics giant’s different media offerings. Tonight it kicked things off my bringing “District 9” director, Neill Blomkamp, to offer some insight into the filming of his upcoming “Gran Turismo” adaptation. Sony’s perfected a lot of unique camera tricks in order to capture the look and feel of the perennial favorite racing series. Remember, the studio was also behind this year’s incredibly well-shot “Top Gun” sequel, “Maverick.” Announced last May, the film co-stars David Harbour, Darren Barnet and Orlando Bloom. “It’s bad ass race car action, that you’re going to feel like you’re in the middle of,” says Harbour. According to the film’s log line (via Deadline), “Based on a true story, the film is the ultimate wish fulfillment tale of a teenage Gran Turismo player whose gaming skills won a series of Nissan competitions to become an actual professional race car driver.” 2001 Mark Wahlberg vehicle “ ,” anyone? The film is due out in theaters August 11 from Sony Pictures. The company also announced that “Gran Turismo” is headed for its upcoming .
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ZF and Beep to launch ‘several thousand’ autonomous shuttles in the US
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Rebecca Bellan
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Automotive supplier ZF is partnering with to deliver “several thousand shuttles” to customers over the coming years, ZF said at in Las Vegas. Beep, which describes itself as an autonomous mobility-as-a-service company, will implement ZF’s next-generation, Level 4 autonomous shuttle, which the company also launched at CES today. means the vehicle can drive itself without requiring the human to take over in most situations, as long as it’s within the vehicle’s operational design domain. ZF’s new shuttle, which will be built in partnership with AV software company Oxbotica, is designed for urban environments and mixed traffic, ZF said. ZF’s previous shuttle model only drives in designated lanes. Those shuttles are currently deployed via ZF’s subsidiary 2getthere in Rotterdam and Masdar City, and ZF says it has clocked a total of 62 million autonomously driven kilometers in real traffic with more than 14 million passengers. The new shuttle will implement other new technology that ZF unveiled , including its ZF ProConnect connectivity platform, which enables communications with surrounding infrastructure and the cloud, and the ZF ProAI supercomputer, a device that can support advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), infotainment and chassis functions. Those two platforms work together to enable ZF’s virtual driver, the company’s proprietary autonomous driving software stack. The rise of electric vehicles has resulted in increased communication within the vehicle; everything from opening and closing windows to automated driving features to infotainment to passenger comfort is controlled via computers. Instead of piling electronic control units (ECU) — which historically have handled one function at a time — on top of each other, suppliers are converging them into so-called supercomputers. ZF’s Pro AI supercomputer combines multiple systems-on-a-chip (SoC) from different suppliers into one hardware unit that’s more efficient, takes up less space (the new ProAI is 12 by 6 by 6 inches) and eases supply constraints. ZF’s ProAI supercomputer ZF Nvidia, which is quickly garnering a reputation for handling all things compute in the software-defined vehicle, is seeing the need for a new piece of hardware as well. The tech giant announced at CES it would work with with Nvidia’s Drive platform, including its Orin SoC, effectively creating a supercomputer that can replace what would otherwise be a number of ECUs in a vehicle dedicated to different tasks, such as digital instrument cluster, in-vehicle parking and autonomous driving. To handle so many complex tasks, ZF’s latest version of ProAI’s overall computing power can achieve up to 1,500 TOPS, which is a 50% increase from the company’s previous version. ZF said it has more than 13 million units already ordered and expects further growth in the future, with volume supply scheduled to start in 2024. Rendering of interior of ZF’s autonomous shuttle ZF ZF’s shuttle will be able to carry 22 passengers, with 15 seated, according to ZF. The vehicle is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and includes an automatic ramp and wheelchair restraints. The shuttle will initially hit a max speed of 25 miles per hour, and in further development will go up to 50 miles per hour, according to ZF. Customers can choose a battery capacity between 50 and 100 kWh, which will be able to cover up to 80 miles in pure electric mode. The agreement between Beep and ZF aims to deliver several thousand shuttles over the next few years, with a market entry for ZF’s next-gen shuttle starting in 2025, and a ramp-up of production in mid-2026, according to Torsten Gollewski, executive vice president of autonomous mobility systems at ZF. Neither Beep nor ZF said where they would start deploying ZF’s shuttles, but Beep said it’s evaluating a number of possible sites. “Beep has already been commissioned with concrete routes. We are currently working out the operational scenario. We will comment on this in more detail in due course,” Gollewski told TechCrunch. “Generally, we consider both scenarios for each potential customer depending on the route, as one of the advantages of our shuttle solutions is the ability to operate in mixed traffic as well as in dedicated lanes — depending on the kind of solution needed and the most efficient way of achieving that we can deliver the best option for a community and also link a rural community with surrounding larger cities.” Most of Beep’s current deployments are along specific routes within closed campuses. For example, Beep provides a shuttle service in Lake Nona, Florida, within a 17-square-mile development that connects residential, commercial, retail, recreational and medical services. The company also recently partnered with Peachtree Corners, Georgia, a 500-acre technology park, to test shuttles on a dedicated path along a main road connecting the hub. “ZF’s full suite of shuttle services, its U.S. partner network and its automotive-grade vehicle complement our turnkey mobility networks and autonomous services technology platform,” said Joe Moye, Beep’s CEO, in a statement. “This shuttle will allow us to continue to pursue our vision of extending mobility equity and reducing carbon emissions, expanding our use cases while meeting industrial requirements for vehicle service life, performance and safety.” Because ZF is an automotive supplier, the company said it offers Beep and any other future partners servicing and maintenance through its global network of 20,000 workshop partners. In North America, ZF has 3,000 workshop partners. “As a technology leader, ZF sees itself not only as a shuttle supplier, but also as a partner for the entire life cycle of its shuttles,” said Gollewski. “We offer not just the shuttle, but also services with its autonomous transport system, including fleet management, maintenance, repair and training.Therefore, the partnership also includes a comprehensive service concept to ensure smooth operation and thus maximum uptime of the shuttles.”
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Frosty fundraising environment may change early startups’ DNA for the better
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Rebecca Szkutak
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
hope that will be better for startups than . It seems likely that it will get worse before it gets better — even at the earliest stages, which have largely been insulated thus far. But for burgeoning companies capable of building business models that reflect current conditions and rely less on venture capital to grow, the frosty environment could wind up being a good thing down the line. While some sectors need to raise a lot of capital to build a viable business, like space and defense or manufacturing, most don’t — but that didn’t stop companies from collecting oodles of dollars during the past few record-breaking years. But it’s better to just raise the smallest amount you need, which many startups are now discovering. “I can’t tell you how many companies I’ve spoken to that are in a tough environment because they painted themselves into a corner because of their fundraising history and valuation,” Rachel ten Brink, a general partner at pre-seed-focused Red Bike Capital, told TechCrunch. “They started in 2017 and raised at 100x revenue. It’s a SaaS company; what are they doing from here?” But now that funding isn’t as easy to come by, early-stage founders may have the opportunity to avoid some of those pitfalls.
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With Kokomo VR meeting software, Canon takes a step away from its hardware roots
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
and deep history of being a hardware manufacturer. Most consumers know it best as a camera manufacturer, but the company has a long, deep and illustrious history in medical, office equipment, and other imaging applications. During the pandemic, a lot of its business shifted. People stopped going to offices. Sporting events were shut down. And while the medical industry was booming, Canon as a company needed to rethink its mission and vision: What does an imaging company do in a world where people have a desire to connect, but are unable to leave their homes while a deadly virus rages around the world? At CES 2023, the company — a vision that seems a lot less hardware-y than you would expect from the 85-year-old company that has traditionally made all of its money from making things with buttons. A rag-tag bunch of Canon veterans took on the challenge and created Kokomo, a VR meeting software package that, in essence, makes real-time 3D video calling a reality. Users don a VR headset and point a smartphone at themselves. The software scans your face, and creates a photo-real 3D avatar of you and the person you are calling. It uses the motion sensors in the headset and the camera to capture your avatar, moving you into a photo-realistic space, and boom, you are virtually present with a colleague, family member or friend. The technology to scan your face is similar to the tech used by iOS’s face ID, doing a brief pre-capture process. From there, your face’s shape and texture can be shown off inside the video calls. A quick scan with the Kokomo companion app captures your face so it can be shown to your friends in VR. : Canon The most interesting thing to note about the above paragraph is the lack of Canon products. Traditionally, Canon’s software solutions have focused on enhancing and facilitating the use of its hardware products. The company makes neither smartphones nor VR headsets, however, so this move represents a major departure from its roots. TechCrunch sat down with the team that led the development of Kokomo to figure out how it came about, and where Canon is going as it re-imagines its own future. “This is representing a very exciting new innovation for Canon – but also a very new business direction for Canon, as well,” said Jon Lorentz, one of the co-creators of the Kokomo solution. “As you know, traditionally, Canon is very much tied to our hardware products. When we announced AMLOS at CES last year, it was about innovating work from home. Our task [with Kokomo] is to innovate life at home, and that is where this project came from. When we started, we were in the thick of COVID, and there were not a lot of ways for people to get connected. The underlying premise for what we created was to be a solution to that. ” The team’s goal was to create a solution that takes the experience beyond a phone call, a FaceTime call or a Zoom call – to feel present rather than to just look at each other on a screen. A worthy pursuit in a world where travel is limited and screen fatigue is real. But how is Canon’s solution for bringing people into a virtual world going to accomplish that? “We support most of the popular consumer VR headsets in the market to enable people to engage in immersive calls, as we are calling them. In these calls, people can engage. They are dynamic, in living, breathing environments. You can download a companion app on a mobile phone, which lets the person you talk to see you from head to toe,” explains Lorentz. “No more legless avatars. No more wondering what someone is actually gesturing. And you can actually the other person. You can be the call, rather than the call.” Below is an in-depth interview with Kokomo co-creators Jon Lorentz, Ray Konno and Jason Williams. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. A phone and a VR headset are all you need to use Canon’s Kokomo. : Canon At our core, Canon is an imaging company, and that’s really our specialty. Kokomo is applying that specialty to the software rather than starting with our hardware first. We see that the ability to step into a call is really stepping into an imaging sensor. It’s about taking that image sensor data, and then applying it to someone else’s visual field. Obviously, there are a lot of details behind that, but our core is imaging excellence. As you bring in mesh reality and virtual reality, you need to have a certain level of meshing: it really needs to match up. Otherwise, you’re going to feel disconnected – it’s not going to feel natural. The same goes for the environments; they are not static, from another virtual place. We’ve captured real-life environments, and brought them into VR. You really feel like you’re in the dynamic, living places.
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Daily Crunch: Salesforce CEO admits ‘we hired too many people’ as company lays off +7,000 employees
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Hello, and welcome to the middle of the week. CES is starting tomorrow, so bookmark TechCrunch’s to catch up on all the happenings. Now, onto the news! — It’s Autodesk’s turn for a competitor, and Snaptrude wants to be it. to take on the design giant in the building design space, writes. Snaptrude wants to infuse better interoperability and cloud-based collaboration where others, like Autodesk, have lagged. And we have four more for you: / Getty Images Before Tracy Young was co-founder and CEO of TigerEye, she held identical roles at construction productivity software startup PlanGrid. Even though she led the company to $100 million in ARR before its acquisition by Autodesk, “I’ve had years to dissect the mistakes I made with my first startup,” she writes in TC+. Young looks back at “five key failure points” that are common potholes on every founder’s path and shares tactical advice for addressing internal conflict, losing product-market fit, and other stumbles. “If these reflections help even one founder make one less mistake, I would consider this effort worthwhile.” Two more from the TC+ team: to include a range of 11 smart televisions that the company says it designed and built with its own services in mind, writes. And you won’t have to wait very long to get them — they will be available beginning in the spring. Meanwhile, the TechCrunch team at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas filed 16 stories since yesterday evening. , but I wanted to point out a few I’ve enjoyed reading so far: And we have five more for you:
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Snaptrude gets VC backing to take on Autodesk in building design space
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Jagmeet Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Snaptrude, a young startup, is attempting to disrupt Autodesk in the building design space, giving customers modern and broader sets of features at a more affordable cost. The early progress by the New York City-headquartered firm has helped it court thousands of customers and now, a seed funding. The startup — which has raised $6.6 million in a seed funding co-led by Accel and Foundamental VC — is taking a similar approach as Figma to take on an industry that has relied on decades-old code and where cloud-based collaboration is still elusive. “The problem has been that the industry is very backward in nature. It’s dominated by companies like Autodesk, humongous companies, software built largely in the 90s. So, the software stack is very old,” said Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO of , in an interview. Popular Building Information Modeling (BIM) solutions including Autodesk’s Revit have lagged in many areas. They lack interoperability and require high-end computers. Architects, engineers, construction firms and industry groups have raised these concerns in numerous open letters to the $40 billion Autodesk to little to no success. Snaptrude is not alone in taking on the giants. Startups including Arcol, which started in January 2021 and we in March last year, is also trying to solve the same problem with their models. Ganihar said that Snaptrude is offering a full-fledged solution in the market, which is different from Arcol and other startups that may take a couple of years to bring their products out. “There are hardly any players in a full-stack scenario,” he told TechCrunch. Ganihar, who has a computer graphics and computer vision research background, got the idea to found Snaptrude after he had a terrible experience with legacy software while working on a national-level project to reconstruct the UNESCO world heritage site Hampi in India’s Karnataka. He initially built plugins to work with existing software. But in 2017, the engineer started prototyping the idea of a cloud-based design tool. He showcased his prototype at TechCrunch Disrupt that year, which got him some visibility and brought initial funding of $1.2 million in early 2018. The initial funding helped build a team to bring Snaptrude to reality and add companies including WeWork and Square Yards to its list of over 6,000 customers across more than 30 countries worldwide. Unlike Revit and other legacy solutions, Snaptrude works on a browser and offers collaboration for designing buildings in 3D as naturally as using Google Docs. It also comes with the ability to generate real-time data to inform about the impact of changing construction size on cost, climate and energy utilization. Additionally, the platform, available in a freemium model, supports all widely used file formats, including DWG, RVT, IFC, SKP, FBX, PDF and OBJ. “The AEC [architecture, engineering and construction] industry is currently being held back by antiquated software systems & hasn’t undergone a modern cloud disruption. This is baffling, especially in an industry in which collaboration between teams and specialists is necessary. This is where Snaptrude is changing the game — enabling true collaboration, and access to real-world data in a huge, global market. We are bullish on Snaptrude’s strategy and category leadership ahead,” said Prashanth Prakash, partner at Accel, in a prepared statement. The startup has cumulatively raised $7.8 million to date. It plans to utilize the fresh funds to bring product enhancements and eventually implement and allocate money for its future growth. The all-equity seed round also saw participation from Possible Ventures, Clark Valberg (founder, Invision), RFC, CapitalX and Thilo Konzok (co-founder Home). Snaptrude has a globally distributed workforce of 35, including geometry engineers and mathematicians. It plans to slightly expand the engineering team this year to bolster its market presence. “Online collaboration tools have emerged as a necessity for businesses and professionals in today’s landscape and 3D design is no different. Snaptrude’s forward-looking suite of collaboration design tools is serving this vital need and, in the process, revolutionizing workflows in the AEC industry across the globe. We are thrilled to partner with Altaf and Snaptrude on their journey to create a more collaborative world of 3D design,” said Shubhankar Bhattacharya, general partner at Foundamental.
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Sony aims to make PlayStation more accessible with Project Leonardo controller
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Sony has been embracing accessibility options in its games for a few years now, but one place it has lagged behind perennial rival Microsoft is in accessible hardware. They aim to change that with , a new gaming controller aimed to be customizable to the needs of any person. The device was described only generally onstage, but it appears to be a hub with swappable parts and plates that let users connect various other items, such as breath tubes, pedals, and switches of all kinds to activate different buttons. Each UFO-shaped Project Leonardo device can handle an analog joystick plus eight buttons, and they can be paired with each other or with a traditional controller to complement or offer alternatives to any function. Sony worked with accessibility groups AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up to make sure it was useful to a wide range of people. “Our team tested over a dozen designs with accessibility experts, looking for approaches that would help address key challenges to effective controller use,” said Sony designer So Morimoto in a blog post. “We finally settled on a ‘split controller’ design that allows near free-form left/right thumbstick repositionability, can be used without needing to be held, and features very flexible button and stick cap swapping. The controller can also flexibly accept combinations of accessibility accessories to create a unique aesthetic.” Sony It’s similar to how Microsoft’s works — some stuff is built in, some you provide yourself. Everyone’s accessibility needs are a little different, and so it’s important to support the solutions people already have. Besides, that stuff is expensive! Project Leonardo is currently being developed, so there’s no release date or price yet. We expect to hear more soon and will reach out to Sony to learn about their work in accessible hardware.
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Today at CES: Smellscapes, robot dogs, and ‘awareables’
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
is about to begin in earnest, but even though the show floor opens tomorrow, we’ve already found lots of interesting tech at the show, ranging from practical to bizarre (yet compelling). Read on for our roundup of the coolest things we’ve seen so far. Icoma Last night we spotted a suitcase-sized electric bike, . It makes a lot of compromises to get to that size (range, speed, wheel size, cost), but if you want an e-bike that fits in your trunk, it’s certainly worth looking into — it’ll be launching later this year. If you’re the type of person who likes smart home lighting so you don’t ever have to reach for a light switch (what a pain, right?), . Their new geometric smart lights supposedly learn how you use the lights and automates it without you having to set a routine. So when it sees you walk from the bedroom to the kitchen in the morning, it knows to bring on that soft, sun-like light. But when you walk in from the dining room at 6:00, bright cooking lights come on. Theoretically, anyway. This is the exact moment that your correspondent got blasted with grapefruit scent. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch How will you peel yourself off the couch, though, when you are immersed in the ? Works with anything filmed in Smell-O-Scope, so nothing yet, but there are some demo experiences that let you, for instance, enjoy the crackling sound and flickering light of a fire while getting that crucial smoky smell shot right at your nose. Haje called the smells “remarkably recognizable.” Comes out “soon.” From the creator of the strangely soothing Qoobo soft robotic cat thing comes Sounds insane, but it’s based on the idea that people naturally match their breathing rhythm to respirators, or even those near them. The pillow will act as your breathing partner. Instructions: “Switch it on and hug it. This is all you need.” You said it, Shunsuke. Expect a crowdfunding campaign later this year. Bird Buddy I wrote up the Bird Buddy , and now the company is expanding from live identification of backyard songbirds . It recognizes 350 species and of course sends pics right to your phone when you have a visitor. Interestingly, the company has a data play simmering as well — it records the species, time, and location, building a database of bird movements. Perhaps there are patterns here worth packaging as a product… Anyone who likes the idea of a smartwatch but doesn’t actually like the “watch” part should , a device the company calls an “awareable.” It does the health-tracking stuff without a display, reminding me of the from long ago. No notifications, just steps, sweat sensing, and other metrics with a nice stone or gem as the face. The Nowatch device on display at CES in Las Vegas. Haje Kamps / TechCrunch Roku has been one of the go-to brands for smart TVs for years, but now the company is graduating from powering Samsungs and TCLs to making its own. will range from 24 to 75 inches and will include the latest voice-powered remote. I have one and it’s super useful to just plug headphones into if you want to watch a show without fiddling with Bluetooth or apps or anything. The most expensive will still be under a grand, which is nice. Expect more details when they launch in the spring. I remember talking to Formlabs back in the 3D printing gold rush, and the company has made good over the years. Now it is aiming to with an Automation Ecosystem that helps printers run 24/7 in an organized way. More plastic knickknacks for everyone! Doing urinalysis isn’t anyone’s favorite activity, but a lot of that is because it’s so primitive. Why doesn’t the lab just live in the toilet, where the pee is already going? Smart home company for home health monitoring — maybe not something for everybody, but for people with certain medical conditions or those working toward a particular goal, it could be invaluable. Europe gets this one first, naturally. Amazon will soon make available a mouse-eared Echo-esque smart display and speaker Wow, finally. WowWee Toy company WowWee is still selling the Roboraptor, but now they have a brand-new robot dog . Hopefully Dog-E for short, though that may attract unwanted lawsuits. If you want a robot dog but think Aibo is too basic, try this one. It communicates by wagging its tail, just like a regular dog, if regular dogs had persistence-of-vision LEDs embedded in their bodies. NuraLogix from a 30-second selfie video, from blood pressure to stress, BMI, stroke risk, and blood sugar. Sounds like a lot of bunk to me, but I suppose the nice thing to do is let them put their thing out there and evaluate it on the merits. with some funky 3D video calling and virtual camera prototypes. It’s kind of cool, but also has the feeling of an unfiltered brainstorm session from just before the holidays. M. Night Shyamalan was there, but I think the twist is they paid him to appear. We talked with the , the 3D VR calling thing, and they really think it’s something new in the rather stagnant virtual presence space. Anything but another gallery of grainy faces. Ottonomy Delivery robots are still a novelty to be found only on a handful of college campuses and other contained locations, but the tech is getting better: looks like the little rolling containers you might have seen trundling down the street or being hit by trains, but it can securely deposit its payload into a special locker. That means you don’t have to be there to receive the package, though of course like Daleks the things still can’t climb steps. Samsung put out a . Was that not already a thing? Luminar founder Austin Russell (especially following its acquisition of a mapping startup) to do more than just make effective lidar devices. Apparently it is accelerating its move “up the stack” by buying up smaller companies at huge discounts. Smart — I do the same thing at the grocery store with almost-expired veggies. The scale is different, admittedly, but the philosophy is the same. Chipolo Normally when you’re in direct competition with Apple, you just sit in a corner and cry. Not Chipolo — its little object tracker devices compete with AirTags in a way, . Theirs fill a different, simpler role (basically “you forgot something” and it beeps) and they’re happy to have Apple take over the “sophisticated worldwide network with UWB” thing. “We’re not building a company because we want to build a company, right? We’re building the company because we want to help people. And that’s what Apple is also doing. So actually, it’s good.” How refreshing. Wearable chairs are . What’s wrong with just lying down? There’s a new washer in town from Samsung, with a couple innovations that could help . Of course that horse left the barn long ago and now fish and turtles are basically cyborgs. Let’s all just agree to wear natural fibers! Sony is making a “Gran Turismo” movie with Orlando Bloom in it, directed by Neill Blomkamp. Ridge Racer was robbed! Sony, call me. Sony’s Project Leonardo controllers next to a DualShock controller. Sony Sony also is making an accessible controller to rival Microsoft’s awesome Xbox Adaptive Controller. (for now, obviously), it’s a UFO-shaped thing that lets users plug in devices like switches and paddles so people with physical disabilities can play just as well as anyone else. We’re hoping to learn more about that one soon.
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SurrealDB raises $6M for its database-as-a-service offering
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
There’s plenty of vendors in the managed database services market — and plenty that are well financed. Take a look at , which last October raised $30 million to bring its database tech to new customers. There’s also , which landed $15 million in November ahead of the launch of its cloud database product. Tobie Morgan Hitchcock believes that there’s room for at least one more player, though. He’s one of the two co-founders of SurrealDB, a database-as-a-service platform that provides great flexibility when it comes to querying data. Hitchcock might be biased. But there’s third-party evidence to suggest that companies are increasingly adopting fully managed, cloud-based database services. In a recent MariaDB , 61% of respondents said that they were either already fully migrated or working to complete a full database migration to the cloud, motivated by a shared desire to save money and “bridge the cloud skills gap.” SurrealDB certainly appears to be benefiting from some kind of boom. After being bootstrapped for three years (and despite being pre-revenue), SurrealDB closed a seed round recently that came in at $6 million. FirstMark led it. “In 2015, after years of building cloud-based software-as-a-service systems with real-time APIs, complicated security permissions and multiple separate database back ends, my brother Jaime and I questioned whether there might be a platform for building and scaling applications quicker while still allowing for the storage and querying of data in a structured yet flexible manner — like a database rather than an API,” Hitchcock told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We began to conceptualize and plan the SurrealDB database requirements, taking inspiration from a range of databases that we had used on previous projects.” Prior to co-launching SurrealDB, Tobie and Jaime had tried their hand at a number of ventures including an app that let golf courses track how golfers play each hole. They also co-founded Hire Insight, a service companies can use to assess, curate and select job candidates online, akin to LinkedIn Recruiter and Workday. With SurrealDB, Tobie says that the goal was to improve the app development process by reducing the need to build back-end APIs and database layers or use a cloud data platform or single data model. (A data model is an abstract model that organizes data elements and standardizes how the elements relate to one another.) To this end, SurrealDB supports real-time queries, security permissions for multiuser access and “performant” analytical workloads, Tobie says. SurrealDB’s online configuration dashboard. SurrealDB Client-side apps can be built with direct connections to SurrealDB, while traditional, server-side dev setups can leverage the platform’s querying and analytics abilities. When setting up a data model, SurrealDB users can choose between simple documents, documents with embedded fields or related graph connections between records, Tobie says — depending on the nature of the data being stored. “From the data and technical perspectives, offers … the ability to query one’s data in a multitude of ways,” Tobie said. “In addition, has the ability to handle business logic and user authentication right from within the database. Because of this, enables developers and organizations to simplify the back-end tech stack, speed up development times and reduce the costs of complicated multi-interconnected back-end platforms.” SurrealDB launched first as an open source database platform before transitioning into a cloud offering, although the open source package is still available and being actively developed. Current customers include “a number of” startups and “publicly floated” enterprises, although Tobie wouldn’t name names; SurrealDB’s fully managed database service remains in beta ahead of a launch in early 2023. “The money [from the seed round] will be used to grow the team and launch the commercial offering of [the SurrealDB cloud offering,] Tobie said. “The technology stack for SurrealDB has been purposely chosen so that SurrealDB can be quick to contribute to, easy to understand for new engineers and with as few different technologies as possible … With this in mind, SurrealDB is in a position to iterate quickly with new features and releases, whilst being able to do so with an agile and nimble team.” For what it’s worth, FirstMark’s Matt Turck agrees. He’s an investor, of course, but he also cites the large and growing market for database-as-a-service offerings, which could be worth as much as $24.8 billion by 2025, to Markets and Markets. Ambitiously, Turck sees SurrealDB competing not only with database vendors like , , and but back-end service providers such as , and Nhost. “SurrealDB is an incredibly ambitious company, building a multimodel database that combines a lot of things that many thought were incompatible without major trade-offs. They’re propelled by major trends such as database abstraction, cloud and serverless,” Turck said in an emailed statement. “They’ve clearly struck a chord with the developer community — we’ve literally never seen any database open source project grow this fast. Last but not least, we loved the founding story of the company, which was started by two brothers who built the entire thing by themselves, and we see great potential in them as founders.” SurrealDB has a three-person team at present, with the aim of increasing headcount to around 18 within the next year.
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Nowatch is a health-focused smartwatch without the watch part
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Your health is all you’ve got, and you can’t change what you can’t measure, so it’s little wonder that health trackers are everywhere. The problem with a lot of them, however, is that in addition to measuring steps and heart rate and what-have-you, they also deliver a deluge of notifications. takes another tack, offering a lot of the features you’d expect from a health tracker. The company replaces the watch face with a number of interesting-looking materials, subverting the standard “tiny smartphone display” approach that Apple, Google and Samsung appear to have embraced and the more traditional analog watch look from companies like Withings. The company likes to refer to itself as an “awareable,” reflecting its mission to push back against overstimulation, anxiety and stress. The inspiration for the company stemmed from the company’s CEO and co-founder’s Hylke Muntinga’s streak of bad luck, along with a diagnosis of a rare genetic condition. “Five years ago, I lost six of my dear friends in one year. In those moments, you realize that life and death are so close together. Then two and a half years ago, I found out that I’m going blind through . That was a wake-up call not to get lost in distractions. I have to live right now,” said Muntinga in an interview with TechCrunch at CES in Las Vegas. The Nowatch device on display at CES in Las Vegas. Haje Kamps/TechCrunch From there, the company created Nowatch. The device has no screen and instead uses cool-looking, jewelry-style, ethically sourced gemstone faces. On the inside, the not-watch has advanced health-tracking technology that quietly does its thing as the wearer goes about their day. The device includes , which measures changes in sweat gland activity via skin conductance. The biosensing technology sends a small, non-harmful current to the skin and measures the change in electrical conductance between two points over time on the skin. “We actually decided not to put the option to see the time in the wearable: That only adds more distractions. Nowatch is for everybody that actually wants to embrace science and technology, and who prefers to wear something that is beautiful and sustainable. Watches have always been jewelry, showing ‘hey, this is who I am.’ We experience that a lot of people are drawn to us by the aesthetics,” Muntinga explained. The wearable is able to estimate the level of stress and send subtle vibrations to the wearer to help them become aware of their stressors and emotional outputs. Nowatch learns the wearer’s biorhythms and aims to measure and remind. The watch also uses its measurements to estimate “cognitive zones” – i.e., how clearly you’re able to think, mood and their “stress fingerprint.” “We have a way to predict stress an hour in advance. We trying to see how extreme stress relates to your habits and are working to help people change their habits or certain things that influence their habits over time,” Muntinga says. Interacting with the readings of the watch is done through an iOS or Android app, which can display the user’s physiology in real time and offer suggestions and actionable insights for a more balanced life. The sensors include red and green PPG (photoplethysmography), EDA, an accelerometer, temperature sensors and a barometer. The Nowatch battery can last up to four days (depending on use), and the MSRP starts at $500. It will be available from next week. More gemstones can be bought separately, including White Agate, Tigers Eye, Rose Quartz, Malachite, Lapis Lazuli, Labradorite, Falcon Eye and Amethysts. Prices range from $25 to several hundred dollars, depending on the stone, and the team tells us it may have some special collaborations up its sleeves. “We’re working with some artists and jewelry makers. They are in the process of making limited editions of the Nowatch, including using moonstone and meteorites. People said ‘I want to have something totally different,’ And it’s such a popular demand,” says Muntinga. “We’re excited to see what artists we can work with to make new collaborations.” The Nowatch team provided a video that shows off the tech and some of the available options:
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WowWee returns to robots with a dog named ‘Dog-E’
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
It would be a massive understatement to suggest that robot toys are a mixed bag. They largely get the looks right, but brains are another thing altogether. Look at the time and money that went into building the first , for example, and it becomes very clear why the dream of a ubiquitous home robot still seems like a lifetime away. Just ahead of the holidays, I got a tinge of nostalgia from robot toys of yore. A friend told me they’d picked up a Roboraptor for a child in their life. I naturally asked, “They still make Roboraptor?” Granted, that’s probably not the first thing you want to hear after spending $70 on what you’d thought was a bleeding-edge robot toy. They do, indeed, still make Roboraptor – “they” being , a toy company founded in Montreal that now operates out of Hong Kong. Hasbro bought the company in the late 90s, only to sell it again in 2007. Roborapter debuted to some acclaim the following year and a deluge of robot toys — including Robosapian — followed. The company also gave the world this terrifying monstrosity of a robotic “watch dog.” A “houndroid,” per the ad. In recent years, the company has been less focused on robots. Earlier this year, WowWee’s “My Avastars” from Roblox Corp over the “blatant and admitted copying of” its IP. WowWee called the suit “completely meritless.” Today the company returns to with MINTiDDog-E, a strangely named, but less threatening robot dog toy than the iron-jawed Megabyte Cyber Watch Dog. It’s not exactly a Sony Aibo, either, as reflected in the $80 price tag. The robot dog does, however, take advantage of the Dog-E app, which saves different “profiles” to the dog. The “minting” refers to a kind of robot dog imprinting process, per the company, Dog-E is a smart, app-connected robot dog with life-like movements, audio sensors to hear sounds, touch sensors on its head, nose and sides of its body, and a POV (persistence of vision) tail that displays icons and messages to communicate. As soon as you turn on Dog-E, your all-white pup comes to life through the minting process, which reveals its unique colors and characteristics. The minting process can begin by petting its head, touching its nose or playing with it, among a long list of other interactions. The dog is up for preorders now and shops this fall.
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Archelis’ exoskeleton is basically a chair you can wear
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
I’ve written a fair bit about exoskeletons on these pages. They’re a fascinating subset of the robotics industry designed to improve mobility and assist with manual labor that can be taxing on the body. The FX Stick is a lower tech version, lacking the sorts of battery-powered systems that drive those products. If anything, it probably has more in common with some of the you can find around the internet. Though the product is less about grabbing a seat and your desk and more for people who work on their feet and could benefit from taking a load off from time to time. Announced at , the FX Stick is a follow-up to the ArchelisFX system that at last year’s show. It’s more flexible, 15% lighter and designed to be put on (16 seconds) and taken off (nine seconds) significantly quicker. At ~$3,000, it’s pretty pricey. That’s significantly less than most of the powered suits out there, but my guess is that most nurses and factory workers aren’t going to shell out that much for a product like this, regardless of how much it purports to alleviate back pain (40% says the company). I suspect employers — rather than employees — are the likely target here, especially if the company can accurately demonstrate that such a technology could help keep people on their feet longer and avoid potential medical issues.
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Online grocery startup Kurly scraps IPO amid market uncertainty
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Kate Park
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
, a South Korean startup that provides next-day grocery delivery service, just announced that it has called off its plan to go public amid worsening economic situations that have put startups’ market debuts on hold. “We have decided to postpone listing on the Korea Exchange (KOSPI), considering market sentiment remained weak amid the global market uncertainties,” the company said in an emailed statement. The startup passed the preliminary listing screening on August 22, 2022. In South Korea, a private company must complete the initial public offering (IPO) process within six months after it receives the initial approval for listing. Hence, the IPO deadline for Kurly is on February 22. Kurly will have to start from scratch should it wants to resume its listing. “Kurly will resume the IPO at the optimal time when we can fully evaluate our valuation in the future,” the company said in its statement. “We have enough cash to carry out the new business we were planning.” TechCrunch covered Kurly’s $210 million pre-IPO funding at a $3.3 billion valuation in December 2021. But now the online grocery startup is valued at approximately $669 million, which dropped about 78%. Founded by Kurly CEO Sophie Kim, a former investment banker, the company expanded to non-grocery products like cosmetics, personal care products and health supplements as part of an effort to increase its revenue or gross merchandise volume (GMV) before listing. In an interview with in March last year, Kim said its non-grocery products account for more than 20% of Kurly’s total GMV. Last August, Kurly made its first overseas foray into Singapore, enabling consumers in Singapore to buy ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook meals via an app called RedMart, owned by Alibaba’s Lazada. Kurly has raised a total of about $761 million since its 2015 inception. Its investors include DST Global, Sequoia Capital China, Hillhouse Capital, Aspex Management, MiraeAsset Venture Investment, Anchor Equity Partners and strategic investors such as CJ Logistics and SK Networks.
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Aromajoin brings videos to life by squirting your face with smells
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 3 |
There are a lot of YouTube videos out there that we’d rather not smell, but Kyoto-based tech startup today showed off the option to add a multidimensional experience to the mix. Using its “Aroma Shooter” technology and a programmable “AromaPlayer,” a neck-wearable smell dispenser can add six different aromas to your video-watching shenanigans. We tried it out at CES in Las Vegas today. The AromaPlayer tool is easy to use and can combine the company’s tools with any video from YouTube or videos from your own library. The color-coded interface makes it possible to add scents, timed perfectly with the video playing in front of you. The smell, timing, and duration can be programmed, and you can mix and match smells to trigger at the same time. The scents themselves come in tiny replaceable cartridges. The smells available are remarkably recognizable. Fresh grapefruit, crackling campfire smoke, freshly baked bread, burning rubber — and when synced with video, the smells help the visuals come to life. This is the exact moment that your correspondent got blasted with grapefruit scent. : Haje Kamps / TechCrunch The tech was initially used in high-end digital signage applications, with a dispenser that can jet smells at you from up to 6 feet away, but the company today showed off tools for anyone to create their own content and aromatic experiences — a demo is available at . The neck-worn device is far more targeted than its commercially focused product and cannot be perceived beyond a foot or so away from the viewer. “Our technology gives a controllable smell, and with Aromashooter, you can choose the direction of the aromas. They can be timed to 0.1 second accuracy, and you sync them with music or videos,” says Dong Wook Kim, CEO at Aromajoin, in an interview with TechCrunch at CES, adding that the company has more than 25 patents on the technology. [gallery ids="2464158,2464157,2464156"] To emit a scent, the device first takes in ambient air, which then passes through the cartridge to add the scent to the air. The nozzles are aimed directly at the user’s nose, delivering the smell. The device can connect to smartphones, computers, or VR headsets using Bluetooth. During normal use, the battery life of the device is around two days. The device will be released “soon,” the company says, although exact pricing and availability are not yet set.
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Spotify’s new time capsule feature will let you revisit your musical taste a year from now
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Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Spotify is called “Playlist in a Bottle” that is designed to let you capture your current music tastes and revisit them one year later. The streaming service announced on Wednesday that the new user experience will help users capture the moment by the time January 2024 rolls around. To get started with your Playlist in a Bottle, you need to ensure your Spotify mobile app is up to date with the latest version. Then, you need to navigate to spotify.com/playlistinabottle from your mobile device. From there, you can begin the experience by selecting your time capsule of choice. The options include a bottle, jean pocket, gumball machine, lunch box or teddy bear. The feature will then ask you a series of song-inspired prompts. For example, you may be asked what song you want to hear live in 2023 or what song reminds you of your favorite person. Once you’re done, you can digitally seal your musical time capsule and send it off. You also have the option to share a personalized card to your social channels with the hashtag #PlaylistInABottle. Come January 2024, you’ll receive your personalized time capsule reminding you what you were listening to one year prior. Given the success of , which has taken the internet by storm over the past few years every December, it’s no surprise that Spotify is looking to recreate the same sort of buzz toward the start of the year as well. Spotify Wrapped is largely popular because you can share it across social media, which is also possible with Playlist in a Bottle. After January 31, you will no longer be able to create a Playlist in a Bottle, so get started on yours if you don’t want to experience FOMO a year from now when everyone’s sharing their results.
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Samsung’s new wireless charger has a smart home hub built-in
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Or maybe it’s a smart home hub with wireless charging built in. Either way, this is the SmartThings Station, which debuted on stage at . The hub is a bit of an unsung lynchpin in the smart home ecosystem. It isn’t especially flashy as these things go, but it can be quite useful when it comes automating your setup. Matter is, of course, the big buzz word of this year’s show, and the new hub supports the standard, naturally, letting users integrate a broad range of different products from a broad range of different companies – thermostats, lights, plugs, etc. From there, you can automate different tasks, using Samsung’s SmartThings. Samsung The first time you turn the pad on, you’ll see a pop-up on your Samsung device, walking you through the setup process. You can also just scan the QR code on your phone. The hub features a built-in 15-watt wireless charger that will send you a notification when it’s finished. You can also double-tap the pad to help locate a misplaced phone with a ring. A built in “Smart Button,” meanwhile, can fire up different routines with a tap. It’s a clever little combo device. As the Matter standard continues to roll out, more users will likely be looking toward these sorts of hubs. And hell, you can never have enough wireless charging surfaces around the house. The product is due out next month in the U.S. and Korea. No pricing has been announced as of yet.
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Camera maker Canon leans into software at CES
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Depending on whether you spend most of your time in hospitals, offices or in the great outdoors, when you hear “Canon,” your mind will likely go to medical scanning equipment, high-end printers or cameras. , the 85-year-old company is leaning in a new direction, with an interesting focus on software applications. At the show, the imaging giant showed off a direction it has been hinting at before, but this time relying far less on its own hardware, and more on the software the company has developed, in part as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic casting a shadow over people’s ability to connect. To the chorus of “meaningful communication” and “powerful collaboration,” the Japanese imaging giant appears to be plotting out a new course for what’s next. “Canon is creating ground-breaking solutions that help people connect in more ways than we ever could have imagined, redefining how they work and live at a time when many of them are embracing a hybrid lifestyle,’’ said Kazuto Ogawa, president and CEO, Canon U.S.A., Inc, in a press briefing at CES 2023. “Canon’s ultimate role is to bring people closer together by revealing endless opportunities for creators. Under our theme of ‘Limitless Is More,’ we will show CES 2023 attendees what we are creating as a company focused on innovation and a world without limits.” Among other things, Canon showed off a somewhat gimmicky immersive experience tied in with M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming thriller movie, “Knock at the Cabin.” The will give you a taster of the vibe. At the heart of things, however, Canon is tapping into a base desire in humanity; to feel connected to one another. The company is desperate to show off how its solutions can “remove the limits humanity faces to create more meaningful communication,” through four technologies it is showing off at the trade show this year. Canon U.S.A. CEO Kevin Ogawa on stage at CES 2023 along with M. Night Shyamalan. /TechCrunch The flagship solution Canon is showing off is Kokomo, which the company describes as a first-of-its-kind immersive VR software package. It is designed to combine VR with an immersive calling experience. The solution is pretty elegant: Using a VR headset and a smartphone, the Kokomo software enables users to see and hear one another in real time with their live appearance and expression in a photo-real environment. The Kokomo solution brings 3D video calling to a home near you. Canon In effect, the software package scans your face to learn what you look like, then turns you into a photo-realistic avatar. The person you are in a call with can see you — VR headset — showing your physical appearance and facial expressions. The effect is to experience a 3D video call. At the show, Canon is demoing the tech by letting visitors step into a 1×1 conversation with the “Knock at the Cabin” characters. We spoke with the to figure out how the project came about, why Canon is dipping its toe in standalone software, what the future of this technology is, and how it is going to make money. Aimed at the sports market, Free Viewpoint is a solution that combines more than 100 high-end cameras with a cloud-based solution that makes it possible to move a virtual camera to any location. The software takes all the video feeds, creating a point-cloud-based 3D model that enables a virtual camera operator to create a number of angles that would otherwise have been impossible: Drone-like replay footage, swooping into the action, for example, or detailed in-the-thick-of-things-type footage, enabling viewers to see plays from the virtual perspective of one of the players. In the U.S., the system has already been installed at two NBA arenas (including at the home of the Cavaliers and the Nets). The video can be broadcast live or compiled into replay clips. Canon also points out that the system enables “virtual advertising and other opportunities for monetization,” so I suppose we have that to look forward to as well. Returning to the “Knock at the Cabin” theme, at CES, Canon showed off a virtual action scene captured with the Free Viewpoint video system, captured at Canon’s Volumetric Video Studio in Kawasaki, Japan. The effect of watching an action scene “through the eyes” of various characters was a wonderfully immersive experience. Canon also showed off some earlier-stage tech that isn’t quite ready for prime-time viewing yet, including MREAL. This is tech that helps integrated simulation-like immersive worlds, merging the real and the virtual worlds. Use cases might include pre-visualization for movies, training scenarios and interactive mixed-reality entertainment. The company tells TechCrunch that the technology is in the market research phase. The company is trying to figure out what to develop further and how to market the product. In other words: Who would use this, what would they use it for and what would they be willing to pay for it. Activate My Line of Sight (AMLOS) is what Canon is calling its solution for hybrid meeting environments, where some participants are in person, while others are off-site. If you’ve ever been in a meeting in that configuration, you’ll often find that attending remotely is a deeply frustrating experience, as the in-person meeting participants are engaging with each other while the remote attendees are off on a screen somewhere. Canon hopes that AMLOS can help solve that; it’s a software-and-camera set of products aiming to improve the level of engagement. It adds panning, tilting and zooming capabilities to remote camera systems, giving remote users the ability to customize their viewing and participation experience. So far, the solution is not quite intuitive enough to overcome the barrier of not being in the room, but it’s certainly better than being a disembodied wall of heads on a screen.
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Trade Republic, a popular stock trading app, adds 2% interest on cash
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Romain Dillet
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
While German startup is better known as a mobile app that helps you buy and sell stock, the company is adding interest on uninvested cash. Users who hold cash in their Trade Republic account will receive 2% in annual interest. This feature reminds me of Robinhood’s brokerage . In the U.S., Robinhood users currently 1.5% interest on cash sitting in their accounts. With this new feature, Trade Republic will likely attract new customers who are looking for higher interest rates as inflation impacts the savings of European consumers. Of course, the company probably hopes that users will also start trading stock with its app. Trade Republic makes money from payment for order flow and . More precisely, Trade Republic says that interests will be calculated on a daily basis and the startup credits user accounts once per month. Users only generate interest on cash balances up to €50,000. For now, the company promises 2% APY so it’s going to be interesting to see if it can maintain a high interest rate over time. “With 2% effective annual interest per year, we are passing on the benefits of the new interest rate environment directly to our customers. Every investor can now benefit directly and easily from interest,” co-founder Christian Hecker said in a statement. Trade Republic currently operates in 17 European countries and was one of the fintech startups that raised a mega funding round in 2021. It reached a $5 billion valuation following its . 2022 was a bit different. The company a $264 million (€250 million) Series C extension but also . In addition to shares, Trade Republic also offers exchange-traded funds (ETFs), derivatives and cryptocurrencies.
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Amazon’s custom-built ‘Hey Disney!’ voice assistant will become available for purchase later this year
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Last year, to develop a custom voice assistant that combined Alexa’s smarts with Disney’s library of character voices and original recordings. Dubbed “Hey Disney!,” the voice assistant was the first non-Alexa assistant to become available on Echo devices and installed at select Disney Resort hotels. Now, for the first time, Amazon is showing off the new voice assistant to the general public at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And soon, it says, customers will be able to purchase the Disney Magical Companion voice assistant for use in their own homes, as well. The launch of the Disney voice assistant has been something of an experiment for Amazon, which has struggled to get its own Alexa users to use its voice assistant for anything more than basic tasks — like setting timers, making lists or controlling their smart home via their Echo smart speakers and smart screens or other Alexa-powered devices. Unfortunately for Amazon, shopping via Alexa — nor did other attempts to monetize Alexa through things like in-app purchases or subscriptions to voice apps. As a result of this and other economic forces, workers were among those hardest hit by Meanwhile, Amazon’s Disney partnership, which includes access to Disney’s intellectual property, allows Alexa’s technology to be used for a broader range of experiences while also offering Amazon a potential revenue stream from custom client solutions. Amazon/Disney Before today, the Disney voice assistant was available in select Disney Resort hotel rooms as a free service for the guests. Visitors could ask the assistant for pertinent information like park hours, directions to the park or where to eat. They could also make guest service requests at the hotel, like ordering extra towels or room service. And, of course, the assistant is packed with Disney features — like jokes, interactive trivia, greetings from favorite Disney characters and access to “soundscapes” inspired by Disney films. Supported voices include those from over 20 popular characters from Disney, Pixar, Star Wars and more. When you ask for the weather, Olaf from “Frozen” might tell you when it’s cold outside, for instance. The experience itself is guided by the Disney Magical Companion, not Alexa — but some guests have the voice is not a known character like Mickey. The assistant itself was built using Amazon’s , which allowed Disney to customize Alexa’s technology while also supporting its own in-house tech. To start, Hey Disney! will work with Disney’s interactive wearable, the Disney MagicBand+, which will enhance Disney’s trivia game by turning the band into a game show buzzer of sorts that reacts with lights and haptics as players answer the trivia questions. The band, which is typically used in the park for entry and other things like Lightning Lane access, will also light up and buzz when an alarm or timer the guest sets goes off. Amazon aided in the development of the assistant, it says, helping Disney to create hundreds of pieces of custom content. It’s also using the platform to introduce voice assistants to consumers who have yet to interact with them by offering hints and prompts about things they can do — like hear a joke or play a game. “Disney is the master storyteller, and its stories are so powerful for so many people,” noted Aaron Rubenson, the vice president of Alexa, in a statement released during CES. “Now people can keep talking to a character, they can continue with the storyline when they go back to their room at the end of the day or when they go home after the vacation is over. It’s just gratifying to imagine that we’re a part of literally bringing that magic home,” he added. Disney and Amazon will make the Disney Magical Companion available to U.S. customers for purchase later this year but does not have a launch date at this time.
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Seen at CES: Nuralogix uses AI and a selfie to measure your heart rate, BP, body mass, skin age, stress level and more
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
A picture is worth 1,000 words, as the saying goes, and now a startup called is taking this idea to the next level: Soon, a selfie will be able give you 1,000 diagnostics about the state of your health. Anura, the company’s flagship health and wellness app, takes a 30-second selfie and uses the data from that to create a catalogue of readings about you. They include vital stats like heart rate and blood pressure; mental health-related diagnostics like stress and depression levels; details about your physical state like body mass index and skin age; your level of risk for things like hypertension, stroke and heart disease; and biomarkers like your blood sugar levels. Some of these readings are more accurate than others and are being improved over time. Just today, to coincide with CES in Vegas — where I came across the company — Nuralogix that its contactless blood pressure measurements were becoming more accurate, specifically with accuracy corresponding to a standard deviation of error of less than 8 mmHg. Anura’s growth is part of a bigger trend in the worlds of medicine and wellness. The COVID-19 pandemic gave the world a prime opportunity to use and develop more remote health services, normalizing what many had thought of as experimental or suboptimal. That, coupled with a rising awareness that regular monitoring can be key to preventing health problems, has led to a number of apps and devices proliferating the market. Anura is by far not the only one out there, but it’s a notable example of how companies are playing out the equation of relying on low friction to yield big results. That in a way has been the holy grail of a lot of modern medicine — it’s one reason why so many wanted Theranos to be real. So while some pandemic-era behaviors are not sticking as firmly as people thought they might (e-commerce has not completely replaced in-person shopping, for one) observers believe there is a big future in tele-health and companies like Nuralogix providing the means to implement it. Grandview Research that tele-health was an $83.5 billion market globally in 2022 and that this number will balloon to $101.2 billion in 2023, growing at CAGR of 24% to 2030 when it will be a $455.3 billion market. The startup — which is based out of Toronto, Canada, and backed by the city’s Mars Innovation effort (a consortium of universities and research groups helping to spin out academic research) and others — uses a B2B business model and counts Japan’s NTT and Spanish insurance provider Sanitas among its customers. It’s also talking to automotive companies that see the potential of being able to use this to track, say, when a driver is getting tired and distracted or having a health crisis of some other kind. Right now, the results that Anura comes up with are positioned as guidance — for “investigational” insights that complement other kinds of assessments. The company claims to be compliant with HIPAA, GDPR and other data protection regulations as part of its , and it’s currently going trough the process of FDA approval so that its customers can use the results in a more proactive manner. It also has a Lite version of the application (on and ) where individuals can get some — but not all — of these diagnostics. The Lite version is worth looking at not just as a way for the company to publicize itself but how it gathers data. Nuralogix built Anura on the back of an AI that was trained on data from some 35,000 of different users. A typical 30-second video image of a user’s face is analyzed to see how blood moves around it. “Human skin is translucent,” the company . “Light and its respective wavelengths are reflected at different layers below the skin and can be used to reveal blood flow information in the human face.” Ingrid testing out the app at CES. Ingrid Lunden That in turn is matched up with different diagnostics from those people using traditional measuring tools and uploaded to the company’s “DeepAffex” Affective AI engine. Then users of the Anura app are essentially “read” based on what the AI has been trained to see: blood moving in one direction or another, or a person’s skin color, can say at lot about how the person is doing physically and mentally. DeepAffex is potentially being used for more than just tele-health diagnostics. Previous to its pivot to health, the company’s AI technology and using this technique of “transdermal optical imaging” (shortened to TOI by the company) to “read” faces, was being applied to reading users’ emotions. One was using the tech to augment or even replace traditional lie detector tests, which are regularly used by police and others to determine whether a person is representing things truthfully but have been proven to be flawed. There are also horizons that extend into hardware. The current version of Anura is based on an app that you access via smartphones or tablets but longer term the company might also work on their own scanning devices to add in other kinds of facial scanning and other tools such as infrared to pick up even more information and produce more diagnostics. (One area for example that’s not currently touched is blood oxygen, an area that the company definitely wants to tackle.) I tried out the full version of the Anura app this week in Las Vegas and have to say it’s a pretty compelling experience and indeed is low-friction enough to likely catch on with a lot of people. (As a measure of that, the company’s demo had a permanent queue of people waiting to try it out.)
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Formlabs inches toward mass manufacturing with high-volume 3D printing solutions
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
3D-printing stalwart Formlabs today showed off a series of new solutions that enables its customers to dramatically increase their 3D-printing output. The result is better large-scale manufacturing options and a significant reduction in cost per part, given that machines don’t have to sit around waiting for operators to fill resin tanks or remove parts. The Automation Ecosystem, as the company is calling it, made its debut at CES in Las Vegas today. We took a closer look. The main evolution of the system is to increase printer utilization so users can produce parts and prototypes around the clock. It’ll no doubt be a boon for its existing customers, including a large-scale adaptation in consumer products, prototyping, product design and dental applications. The Automation Ecosystem can be used to expand a Form 3+ or Form 3B+ 3D printer to a scalable fleet of 3D printers. “The Formlabs Automation Ecosystem is a seamless solution for ramping up production with 3D printer fleets, staying true to the ease of use of all Formlabs products, so anyone can make anything. These solutions will enable companies such as dental labs, service bureaus and internal job shops to ramp up production without increasing labor requirements or expensive capital investment, making 3D printing for production more cost-effective,” said Formlabs Chief Product Officer David Lakatos. “Formlabs users have recently achieved a major milestone, with more than 100 million parts printed on our 3D printers, and by adding this ecosystem, Formlabs is increasing the capacity so users can deliver further 3D-printing innovation.” The new software and hardware solution, combined with 5-liter resin supplies, means that printer arrays can print around the clock without operator assistance. The company claims that the innovations launched today provide a three-time increase in productivity while saving up to 80% on labor, lowering cost per part by 30% and reducing packaging waste up to 90%. The full suite of products includes Form Auto, which includes automatic part removal. Once the part is removed, the next part can start printing. Fleet Control is an improvement in the company’s existing software suite — Dashboard and PreForm — to introduce queue management and optimizes workflows. Finally, the High Volume Resin System increases resin capacity by 500%, from the 1-liter cartridge the printers use today, to a five-liter tank, compatible with the Form 3+, Form 3B+. Form 3L and Form 3BL.
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Wireless Power Consortium is working with Apple to bring MagSafe-like capabilities to Android
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Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) — an organization that overlooks wireless charging standards — announced a new standard called Qi2. The headline is that the WPC is working with Apple to bring Magsafe-like capabilities to Android. It’s been over two years since Apple introduced — a wireless standard that opens up a ton of magnetically attachable accessories including chargers. The company’s primary purpose was to bump up the speed of wireless charging — from 7.5 W for Qi-compatible chargers to 15 W for MagSafe Chargers. Apple also wanted to get rid of the difficulty of having to perfectly align the phone with the wireless charging pad with magnets that snap to the back of the phone perfectly. However, the standard is still proprietary and the Apple-certified ecosystem of accessories hasn’t grown much. The WPC said that Qi2 enables a Magnetic Power Profile — built on the basis of Apple’s MagSafe technology. So it’s likely that devices compatible with the Qi2 standard will work will both Android and iOS-based devices. “Qi2’s Magnetic Power Profile will ensure that phones or other rechargeable battery-powered mobile products are perfectly aligned with charging devices, thus providing improved energy efficiency and faster charging,” the WPC said in a press release. The consortium said that the new Qi2 standard will be released later this year and will replace the existing Qi standard. Qi2 compatible accessories should be available before the end of the year. Notably, it said this new standard will pave way for accessories “that wouldn’t be chargeable using current flat surface-to-flat surface devices.” This could be used for charging different kinds of headphones or smartwatches. The WPC hasn’t released full specifications related to Qi2, so we don’t know about its capabilities just yet. A WPC spokesperson told that while initially Qi2 will cap charging speeds at 15 W, it plans to work on higher power profiles for the standard at a later stage. The Qi2 standard might set the stage for a faster magnet-enabled wireless charging experience, but it won’t ensure the quality of magnets used in the chargers or phones. So it is hard to guarantee a secure magnetic fit with Qi2-compatible chargers. It’s also not clear if chargers with this new standard will work perfectly with iPhone 14 or older models. Apple didn’t comment on the story at the time of writing. As Apple will adopt USB-C for iPhones due to regulations in the EU and India, it might look for another standard to control. Right now, wireless charging — especially something like MagSafe — is nowhere near wired charging speeds. By having MagSafe be the base for a Qi2-like standard that will be widely adopted, Apple might be setting the ground for having iPhones rely more (or even completely) on wireless charging in the future.
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Lablaco seeks to help usher in the new era of web3 digitized retail
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Dominic-Madori Davis
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
The future of digital retail has arrived in Paris, naturally. Today, SPIN by lablaco, launched its first digitized retail experience called Web3 Fashion: The Origin Story at the famed Galeries Lafayette Champs-Élysées. The plan is to host a three-week takeover with Crypto.com, showing consumers how digitized fashion could lay the path toward a zero-waste and more sustainable future. The highlight of the exhibition will be the official launch of , a marketplace that allows consumers to buy and rent clothes, artwork and physical spaces using virtual and augmented reality. Speaking to TechCrunch, SPIN’s founders and said this is one massive step in their hopes to digitize retail to promote the circular economy. The partnership with Crypto.com is for payments rather than trading, Albrighi said, adding that fashion probably will not be impacted by the current crypto winter, as it’s still new to adapt much of the technology. SPIN’s focus is on high-end fashion, which typically has a long post-purchase and secondary lifestyle. Fashion is one of the top-polluting industries in the world for 20% of water pollution and up to 10% of all CO emissions. Even reducing the carbon emission it takes to travel via car to a store is progress. And so much of fashion — especially fast fashion — ends up in landfills. It’s 64% of the 32 billion garments produced each year in fashion will end up in a landfill. CFS Founders – Eliana(ShihYun) Kuo, Lorenzo Albrighi_ Image Gone are the days when one must head to a physical store, for example, to try and buy clothes. With SPIN, users can enter the VR version of their favorite store and speak to avatar customer service agents to buy clothes. There is no need for a headset; anyone with an internet connection can use the app. It’s simple, chic and the future of shopping. SPIN projects high-quality digital images of products into homes to allow consumers to see how a Murakami might look on their walls or how a dress might look for the evening. At the exhibition, visitors can use cryptocurrency to buy items on SPIN from their favorite independent designers and try on “phygital” — physical-digital — clothes using virtual avatars. Each physical garment purchased will have QR-code labels sewn in so consumers can easily scan, see and track the lifecycle of a product. Minted on the more sustainable blockchain Flow, the SPIN app helps track the ownership of an item, so consumers always know where their product is coming from and where it is going. This feature is one easy and accessible start in helping consumers become more conscious about the lifecycle of their clothes and perhaps become more aware of how fast their shopping habits can turn into waste. Or in other words, no one wants to be the person listed on the blockchain who threw their turtleneck into the bin. “The final piece of the puzzle is to reduce friction for anybody to access virtual spaces beyond virtual reality headsets,” Albrighi said. “We’re excited to see how VR experiences on mobile phones and desktop computers reduce that barrier and give access to any user around the world.” Kuo added to that, saying she hopes the exhibition and app helps consumers understand how the digital world can help create a better in-person world. “We are building the web3 commerce and marketplace to add value to the physical world,” she said. “Physical fashion products are almost like an art piece, which registers the time we lived in, the humanity and the culture. This is not something we can invent with AI in a few seconds. On the contrary, AI learns from our history to become knowledge.” SPIN’s first investor was , the co-founder of Net-a-Porter, and it has since received funding from Dapper Labs with plans to fundraise throughout the year. The goal was always to raise as little money as possible from strategic investors who wouldn’t pressure them to grow too fast, too soon. That strategy proved fruitful with last year’s venture slowdown. Right now, SPIN is focused on luxury consumers, though it’s not hard to ponder what an app such as this could do for a market in desperate need of a transfix, such as fast fashion. With these exhibitions and support from investors and partners, Kuo says the company has had the opportunity to show what it envisions the next generation of fashion to be regarding manufacturing, business models, communication, retail and even customer service experience. “Technology is the key to making fashion more sustainable and circular in the long run,” she said. “We want culture and humanity to be the entrance to the conversation.”
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Twitter’s advanced search filters for mobile are on their way
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Amanda Silberling
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Twitter is finally making a feature update that people want. According to social media analyst , Twitter’s advanced search filters for mobile are coming soon. Here’s what they look like in practice: NEW! Twitter Advanced Search feature on iOS is coming soon 👀👇 — Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) The feature makes it easier to find specific tweets you’re looking for by filtering based on date, user, retweet count, hashtags and more. Sure, this technically has existed on Twitter for a long time, but figuring out how to pull up advanced search is pretty unintuitive and clunky. On the web, you have to type in your search term, then click the three dot menu to the right of the search bar to open up advanced search. On mobile, this wasn’t even an option until now, when this feature release seems to be imminent. These changes could come courtesy of George Hotz, the security hacker known for developing iOS jailbreaks and reverse engineering the PlayStation 3. He later founded Comma.ai, a driver-assistance system startup that aims to bring Tesla Autopilot–like functionality to other cars. But in his most recent role, Hotz was a Twitter intern. Yes, an intern. Hotz tweeted his support for a controversial memo in which Elon Musk told employees to get “ ” or leave. When his followers pushed back on this, he stated, “I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I’m down for a 12 week internship at Twitter for cost of living in SF.” So Musk put his to work — according to Hotz’s own tweets, Musk told him that his job was to fix Twitter’s bad search system. In late November, he polled his followers to see what they wanted from Twitter search. Some common answers searching within “liked” and “seen” tweets, more accessible advanced search and moving away from exact text search. if I just get rid of the pop up I still consider my internship a win. I have a chrome extension on my laptop to block it reminds me of the guy who got a job at Apple, made Wallet automatically delete your expired boarding passes, and quit the next week — George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) Even Musk himself complained about Twitter’s search feature within a week of taking control of the company. “Fixing search is a high priority,” he . Search within Twitter reminds me of Infoseek in ‘98! That will also get a lot better pronto. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) It’s not clear when this feature will roll out, but typically, when a feature can be reverse engineered by an app researcher — as is the case here — it’s almost ready for the public eye. We’ll have to wait and see how good this feature is in practice, but truly, the only way for Twitter’s search function to go is up.
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It’s like the Power Glove, but for VR
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Brian Heater
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Nintendo’s Power Glove was, to quote one of the eighties’ finest films, The NES peripheral transfixed a generation of youngsters, only to later realize that the “bad” in this instance should perhaps have been taken a bit more literally. Nintendo ultimately sold 1 million of the things, but the technology just wasn’t there, and the dream controlling gameplay with a robo-glove appeared to have died along with it. With the newfound (relative) prominence of virtual reality, perhaps it’s time give the idea another go. Certainly interacting in this way makes a heck of a lot more sense in VR than it does an 8-bit side scroller. This is the promise behind ContactGlove, a new product from the Japanese firm Diver-X, which debuted this week at CES. Brian Heater In addition to picking up an Innovation Award at the show, ContactGlove is also the subject of which has already passed its $200,000 goal, with 16 days left to go. The product combines hand tracking with haptic feedback to give the user a more hands-on approach to interacting with the virtual environment around them. After calibrating the system, ContactGlove tracks finger movements for more natural interaction, as well as button/stick movements made with the hand for a more traditional gaming experience. Battery life is around two hours with haptics on and eight hours with it turned off. You can also hot swap the battery to keep it up and running. The product claims to be a cheaper/more accessible approach to VR gloves than what’s currently out there. Of course, when dealing with VR hardware, “cheaper” is certainly relative. The firm puts the final retail price of the product at just under $500 for the pair. It’s compatible with HTC Vive headsets, as well as Steam VR hardware. The company is also making an SDK available for Unity and Unreal Engine developers to make better use of the system. Diver-X expects to start shipping in July, at which point we’ll find out what kind of bad ContactGlove truly is.
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New York’s right-to-repair bill has major carve-outs for manufacturers
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 3 |
During the lull between last Christmas and New Year’s, New York State became one of the first in the country to enact a “right to repair” law — albeit with amended language that some advocates say make the law toothless. Called the Digital Fair Repair Act and set to go into effect on July 1, New York’s regulation requires manufacturers to provide owners and independent repair shops the manuals, parts, diagnostics and diagrams necessary to repair consumer devices. Which devices does the Digital Fair Repair Act cover, exactly? Well, a lot — any that constitute as “digital electronic equipment,” basically. But there are some carve-outs, including cars, home appliances, medical devices, off-road equipment and enterprise devices used by data centers, schools and hospitals. The legislation only applies to gadgets manufactured after July 1, moreover, and it doesn’t require manufacturers to volunteer any security unlocking codes needed to repair a device. It also lets those same manufacturers decline to deliver specific components if they think “the risk of improper installation heightens the risk of injury.” The bulk of those exceptions were added at the eleventh hour with the approval of Governor Kathy Hochul, who said in a statement that they’re intended to lessen the risk of security issues and physical harm while making repairs. Advocates like Louis Rossman, however, who runs a MacBook repair shop, expressed immediate skepticism, arguing that manufacturers will exploit the amendments to their own ends. Representatives for Microsoft and Apple pressed Hochul’s office for changes, Ars Technica last year. So did industry association TechNet, which represents tech companies, including Amazon, Google and TechCrunch parent Yahoo. The previous version of the bill received wide bipartisan support, passing the New York state assembly 147-2 and the Senate 59-4, but sat on the governor’s desk for months. “Such changes could limit the benefits for school computers and most products currently in use,” Public Interest Research Groups, a collective of consumer rights organizations, Engadget in a statement last week. “Even more troubling, the bill now excludes certain smartphone circuit boards from parts the manufacturers are required to sell, and requires repair shops to post unwieldy warranty language.” Rossman points out that under the Digital Fair Repair Act, companies like Apple will still be allowed to serialize components after a repair, preventing independent repairers from repairing devices with spare parts — even genuine parts removed from the same product. “[The] manufacturer will tell you that when you have a bad $28 chip on your motherboard that what you need to do is replace the $745 motherboard,” he said in a video response to the law’s passage. The Digital Fair Repair Act is among a raft of bills recently introduced in more than 40 states that aim to expand repair options for consumer devices. Supporters of the legislation say that a lack of documentation, poor spare parts access and software restrictions are limiting consumer choice. Manufacturers counter that authorized repairs are necessary to ensure quality and protect their intellectual property. Last year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that called on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to ban “anticompetitive restrictions on using independent repair shops or doing DIY repairs of your own devices and equipment.”
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India’s crypto tax pushing traders to foreign exchanges
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Manish Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 3 |
India’s tax rules on crypto, which went into effect last April, have resulted in local exchanges ceding the lion’s share of the market to those operated by foreign players, according to a new report. Binance, Coinbase and other foreign exchanges commanded 67.6% of the crypto market share in India as of October 2022, up from 50% in November 2021, according to New Delhi–based think tank Esya. During the period between February 2022, when India , and October 2022, $3.8 billion of trading volume shifted from domestic centralized exchanges to those operated offshore, the report (PDF). Indian exchanges, including WazirX, CoinSwitch and CoinDCX, lost a whopping 81% of their trading volume in four months between July and October, Esya said, attributing the trend to the local TDS rules. India is among the nations that has taken a stringent approach at cryptocurrencies. It began taxing virtual currencies in April last year, levying a 30% tax on the gains and a 1% deduction on each crypto transaction. The report argues that traders are moving to foreign exchanges because they believe they will be able to mask their activities from the local authorities. Many of the foreign exchanges, including Binance, offer a peer-to-peer on-ramp and off-ramp ability, allowing users to avoid having to make transactions to a business. Additionally, many foreign exchanges, including KuCoin and Gate, allow crypto trading within certain capital limit (typically a few thousand dollars a day) without KYC details. Decentralized exchanges such as dYdX, by design, require no KYC. In the past, top Indian exchanges executives have warned that India’s tax regime will force users to switch to unregulated entities. “These imply that India is not only losing out on international competitiveness in the VDA (virtual digital asset) ecosystem, which is closely linked to several emerging technologies, but also on scarce liquidity which is important for concurrent economic value creation in the country,” Esya wrote. “Importantly, the implications of the current VDA architecture on the government’s tax revenue are also unclear.” The report urges the Indian government to reevaluate its crypto taxation, suggesting it at least waives off the 1% TDS levy on transactions. The vast majority of local authorities remain some of the most vocal opponents of crypto. The Indian central bank’s governor warned last month that private cryptocurrencies unless its usage is prohibited. The central bank said last week that India, under its ongoing G20 presidency, will prioritize the development of a framework for global regulation of unbacked crypto assets, stablecoins and decentralized finance and will explore the “ .”
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Last chance — Apply to present at TechCrunch Early Stage
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Lauren Simonds
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
Time’s running out if you want a chance to show what you know at on April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts. What’s that mean, exactly? It’s a shot at presenting your expert content to hundreds of bootstrapping entrepreneurs and fledgling founders at the beginning or very early stages of the startup journey. The search continues for game-changing, later-stage startup founders and ecosystem experts to help guide their path. Do you have what it takes to be a thought-leader? — the application window slams shut this . TechCrunch will evaluate all applications and then select the top contenders to participate in Audience Choice voting. Our readers will vote for the sessions they most want to see at TC Early Stage. We’re not talking politics, so vote early, vote often! Here are the important dates to keep in mind — don’t miss this opportunity to apply! Previous Early Stage events have covered topics that every startup founder needs to know, including: We’re looking for knowledgeable, talented people who can share essential information to help new and early founders build a strong foundation, take their next steps and discover a supportive, inspiring community. Especially folks who can elicit feedback like this: “Early Stage provided a rich, bootcamp experience with premier founders, VCs and startup community experts. If you’re beginning to build a startup, it’s an efficient way to advance your knowledge across key startup topics.” — Katia Paramonova, founder and CEO of Centrly. If you want to show what you know, — before the — and you just might find yourself presenting at on April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts. .
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Read, which lets you measure how well a meeting is going, is now a Zoom Essential App
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Catherine Shu
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
, the app that lets meeting organizers read the virtual room and see how engaged (or not) participants are, is now one of Zoom’s Essential Apps. This means Zoom customers, Zoom One Pro Business and Business Plus users will have free access to Read’s premium features, like real-time and advanced meeting metrics, for 12 months. The app is also compatible with other video conferencing platform such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex. Read is also releasing its Meeting Summary feature, which combines its sentiment analysis tools with OpenAI’s GPT language models to produce meeting summaries that are annotated with sentiment and engagement scores. Other new features include Meeting Playback, which shows when engagement increased or dropped, Read Workspace for organizations to set benchmarks for meetings and Augmented Reality, which displays engagement and talk time in each participant’s window. Launched in 2021 by the team behind location analytics startup Placed — former Foursquare CEO David Shim, Rob Williams and Elliot Waldron — Read is from investors like Madrona Venture Group and PSL Ventures. Read’s Meeting Summary tool. Read Read uses a combination of artificial intelligence, computer vision and natural language processing to gauge meeting participant engagement and sentiment. Some of the things it tracks include if a small number of people are dominating the conversation, leaving others unheard or if people seem bored. Read’s engagement and sentiment analysis is meant to create better meetings (including shorter ones), but understandably, some people might be worried about having their reactions tracked. Shim told TechCrunch that Read protects user privacy and control by letting participants opt into meetings that measure audio and voice through a recording notification. They can declined to be recorded or, if they change their mind partway through a meeting, type “opt-out” into the chat to delete meeting data. An example of how organizations have utilized Read to improve their virtual meetings include a 400-person technology company that used Read Recommendation to cut eight hours of meetings a month for each employee. Shim said Read Meeting Summaries’ pilot clients include venture capitalists, whose days are usually packed with pitches, updates and board meetings. They use Read has a virtual assistant to produce summaries of all meetings and follow-up items. Other users of Read includes salespeople who use the app to see what resonates with their customers and follow up on those points.
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Hackers claim ransomware attack on Los Angeles housing authority
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Carly Page
| 2,023 | 1 | 3 |
The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, or HACLA, has confirmed it is investigating a cybersecurity incident shortly after the LockBit ransomware gang claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on the agency. HACLA, which provides affordable housing to more than 19,000 low-income families across Los Angeles, was added to LockBit’s dark web leak site on December 31. The listing, seen by TechCrunch, claims that LockBit has stolen 15 terabytes of data from the housing agency. Screenshots posted by the cybercriminals suggest the data includes the personal details of people who sought housing assistance from the city, as well as data from the city agency’s payroll, human resources and accountancy files. In a statement given to TechCrunch, HACLA spokesperson Courtney Gladney declined to comment on specifics, but said that HACLA is experiencing “a cyber event” that resulted in “disruption” to the agency’s systems. “We are working diligently with third-party specialists to investigate the source of this disruption, confirm its impact on our systems, and to restore full functionality securely to our environment as soon as possible,” the spokesperson said. “We remain committed to providing quality work as we continue to resolve this issue.” At the time of publication, HACLA’s website appears to be operational but has not yet publicly acknowledged the cyber incident on its website or social media. LockBit’s claimed attack on HACLA marks the second major cyberattack on a Los Angeles city agency in recent months. In September, the Los Angeles Unified School District — the second-largest school district in the U.S. — was hit by the Russian-speaking Vice Society ransomware group. The gang later stolen during the attack, including passport details, Social Security numbers, health information and psychological assessments of students. LockBit, meanwhile, is one of the more prolific ransomware gangs, with claimed , and . In November, a dual Canadian-Russian citizen was for their alleged participation with the ransomware gang.
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Apple is increasing battery replacement service charges for out-of-warranty devices
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Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 3 |
Apple is increasing service charges for battery replacement in out-of-warranty iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks starting March 2023. The price rise ranges from $20 to $50 for different kinds of devices. The change was spotted by , who pointed out that Apple had silently mentioned this change on the repair pages for these devices. “ Here is a quick breakdown of the extra amount you will need to pay for battery replacement for a device that’s not covered by warranty, starting in March: For reference, iPhone 14’s battery replacement price is $99, which is higher compared to older models. This change is global and local price raises may vary. For instance, the UK will charge GBP 20 for an iPhone battery change, while France will charge EUR 24. The service charge increase won’t affect AppleCare or AppleCare+ subscribers or folks who rely on third-party repair services. Notably, Apple opened up its last April, which allows people to get and replace parts without any external help. While the price increase in service charge for battery replacement is not ideal, it will still extend the life on your device so you don’t have to spend money on a new gadget.
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This startup brings Southeast Asia’s vacant hospital rooms into the sharing economy
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Rita Liao
| 2,023 | 1 | 2 |
Uber and Airbnb have long been the poster children for the sharing economy. In other realms of society, entrepreneurs are also trying to match demand with untapped assets and services. , a startup based out of Bangkok, is applying the economic model to healthcare in Southeast Asia. HD operates a platform that helps three parties meet: surgeons with private practice, patients looking to have their surgeries done more cheaply, and vacant surgery rooms at hospitals. The model might sound a bit counterintuitive to people in the West, but Southeast Asia’s medical system is built on very different patient-hospital dynamics. , co-founder and CEO of HD, conceived the idea when he saw surgeons in Thailand advertising on Facebook to attract private customers. Dual practice is “very common” for doctors in Southeast Asia, observed Ho, who previously co-founded the . “They get the credential from working for top hospitals, but they are paid poorly, so they also work at private ones where they get the money,” he says in an interview. In Southeast Asia, people go straight to the hospital when they get sick. The problem with public hospitals, Ho reckons, is they have very long queues, so doctors try to lure patients to the private institutions where they work. “Doctors [in the region] are kind of like merchants who operate across different platforms,” he says. Forty percent of Southeast Asia’s health spending was paid out of pocket in 2018, , compared to 29.8% in Europe and 32.4% in the Americas. Since there’s no central platform providing cost transparency, patients often end up paying a steep price. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, swathes of surgical rooms suddenly got freed up as Thailand, a popular destination for medical tourism, lost international patients. The oversupply was exacerbated by the country’s hospital-building spree before the pandemic, Ho noted, as the government bet on an aging population and increased land value. “Organically, hospitals wanted to use our platforms,” Ho says. And since HD is bringing customers to them, it can bargain for lower room rates. Patients getting surgeries such as thyroid, hemorrhoid, and orthopedic surgery through HD are paying 15% to 20% less than market prices. Why not provide a meeting point for all these needs? Hence HD launched its HDcare private-label surgery service two months ago. The platform is now sitting on a supply of over 20 operating rooms across Thailand and Indonesia, according to Ho, with the potential to access more from 1,500 healthcare providers already on its platform, and it has over 40 types of surgeries lined up. The plan is to scale the service to 200 surgeries performed per quarter by Q4 2023. HD’s surgery platform is a new addition to its established business, a marketplace for outpatient services. The model has proven successful in the massive healthcare market in neighboring , where JD.com, , runs a similar e-commerce operation selling third-party healthcare services like vaccinations, checkups, imaging sessions, and minor surgeries. The absence of primary care in Southeast Asia means people either need to ask their friends for recommendations or do several rounds of hospital hopping before landing the right doctor and treatment. That’s a contrast to the U.S., where as of 2015 to treat common conditions and are referred to hospitals only for urgent and specialist treatment. Like Airbnb, HD began onboarding hospitals and clinics through a lot of heavy lifting, like helping customers set up their product pages. “But that’s also our moat,” says Ho. “SaaS is still too early for Southeast Asia.” HD takes a cut from transactions and charges a listing fee from healthcare providers, similar to how a conventional e-commerce platform monetizes. It also offers healthcare marketing solutions to providers on its platform, similar to how Amazon Ads and Tmall Ads enable brands to increase their reach and performance. The liability of platform operators is an ongoing debate in the tech industry, and a business that could influence one’s health seems to make the matter even trickier. As a marketplace platform, HD doesn’t deal with disputes in general; in the beauty space where the experience may be more “subjective,” HD takes an approach similar to that of Amazon whereby it “puts patients first, refunds customers and deals with the providers directly,” says the founder. “In general, HD prioritizes minimally invasive, short-stay, elective surgeries that have low output variation such as thyroid and hemorrhoid surgery, in addition to outpatient procedures.” Since its founding four years ago, HD has served around 250,000 patients. It saw a 7x sales growth during the pandemic and aims to keep its growth rate at 2–3x growth in the post-COVID years. While the pandemic is , Ho is optimistic about his own venture. “Whenever a recession started, we saw some businesses take off. They were leveraging excess supply. Groupon was leveraging the excess supply of restaurants, and for Airbnb, it was vacant homes,” he suggests. “So, as we enter the recession, there is enough opportunity — hospitals sitting on excess rooms. We have a two to three-year window to rapidly grow that part of the business.” Despite the encouraging signs of growth, HD’s fundraising was off to a rough start. As the pandemic swept across the world, investors turned to telemedicine startups as the default healthcare solution. Ho disagrees with the presumption. “Telehealth works well in the Western market. Basically, you talk to the GP [general physician], you get a prescription, and you go to Walgreens to get your antibiotics, which need a prescription,” he says. “But in Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam, you can get that tier of medication at pharmacies [over the counter], removing the need for telehealth.” Investors are now waking up to the potential of HD, which is enabling offline medical providers with digital platforms rather than competing with them. The startup recently closed a $6 million funding round from Partech Partners, M Venture Partners, AC Ventures, iSeed, and Orvel Ventures. It’s also part of a recent batch accepted into Google for Startups Accelerator’s Southeast Asia program.
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How to make the most of your startup’s big fundraising moment
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Scott Brown
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facing major fundraising headwinds, but early-stage investing is for startups until they hit Series B rounds. Traditional venture capital dollars are harder to come by these days, but institutional investors are still looking for smart investments, and industry watchers are hungry for the good news a new round of financing suggests. While the market is uncertain, founders need to be ready to use their capital infusions as an asset that extends beyond the cash it represents. In any market environment, a fundraising event can act as a vote of confidence or validation from investors, supporting your company’s growth via talent acquisition and brand awareness. No matter the size of the round, securing external investment is a key milestone in many companies’ journeys, and it often takes a tremendous amount of effort. However, after putting all that work in, many founders make the mistake of letting a funding moment pass by without extracting all the value they could have. Over the course of my 20+ years as a marketing leader at startups, venture capital firms and large tech companies, I’ve helped dozens of companies announce funding news, ranging from $1 million pre-seed rounds to $50 million raises. Here’s my playbook for founders looking to make their “big money” moments go farther: Founders may overlook the value of announcing funding news for several reasons, but the biggest one is assuming the round isn’t “big enough” to warrant attention. When you see other companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars, it can be easy to think no one will be interested in hearing about your startup’s much smaller round. Fortunately, that isn’t true. While big numbers may draw splashy headlines, smaller rounds can still drive interest if the announcement is executed well and you can connect the news with some larger industry/technology/societal trend. Another reason founders hesitate is if all or part of the new capital is through a debt investment. Though it’s , especially as VC investors pump the breaks, there is still some stigma around debt funding, and founders may worry they’ll be penalized for adding debt to their balance sheets. However, securing a debt investment often requires even more rigor than an equity investment, so highlighting a debt raise can actually indicate your business’ fundamentals and revenue numbers are strong enough to support repayment. Founders may also worry about giving competitors too much information about their business and prefer to make progress while flying under the radar. There are benefits to keeping certain information under wraps, but it’s important not to get so focused on building behind closed doors that you miss the opportunity to get more visibility with the prospects and partners that will drive revenue. Finally, funding announcements are sometimes just not at the top of a founder’s long to-do list, largely because they are either unsure of how to run an announcement or lack the marketing expertise to execute it effectively. This next section should help on that front. The future is unknown, so when you have a funding round locked up and cash in the bank, you have the opportunity to make the biggest impact you can with the news you have in hand. To leverage this moment and be successful you need to: Preparing for a fundraising announcement takes time and strategic thinking. As soon as you’ve reached the point in your investor conversations where term sheets are a likely next step, you should assemble your marketing team to start working on a plan. This includes aligning with your investors early about their ability to participate in a news announcement. Some key questions your marketing lead should consider include:
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Intel unveils high-end 13th-gen 24-core processors plus N-series workhorse to fill the the Pentium and Celeron gap
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Ingrid Lunden
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Intel is taking a more subdued approach to CES these days — forgoing a splashy event staged in a big hotel showroom in the wake of COVID-19. It is also pursuing a wider change in PR strategy after years of making bullish investments in next-generation tech like drones and moonshots like Volocopter and using them as showpieces at those events. Remember the year when Intel brought a whole Volocopter aircraft on to the stage and placed its then-CEO into it for its “first U.S .flight”? Yet the Vegas megashow remains a key moment for Intel. It’s not just a bellwether for the state of the consumer electronics industry, but it’s an important marketing opportunity as a swathe of consumer electronics companies size up and buy components for their devices. Today, the company unveiled a host of news related to processors and computer specifications using them, including a new 13th generation of its Intel Core processor, an all-new 24-core processor, the i9, and — addressing the fact that there is over-penetration of computers among business and developed world users — a new N-series specifically for what it describes as “entry-level” education and mainstream laptops, desktops and edge-native applications. The breadth here is intentional: Intel made its name decades ago for its revolutionary approach to computer processors, which helped usher in a new generation of smaller devices, but it has arguably met some very stiff competition at the higher end of the market, and some would say missed the boat on mobile years ago. These new releases aim to address all of this: providing leadership in the bigger processing race of tomorrow but also hoping for a role in the making of devices for the mass market of today, not least after announcing in that it would sunset its iconic Celeron and Pentium processor brands. “The 13th Gen Intel Core mobile processor family delivers unrivaled, scalable performance for leadership platforms across all laptop segments,” said Michelle Johnston Holthaus, executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group at Intel, in a statement. “With our industry-leading technologies and unmatched global partner ecosystem, people can expect a high-caliber mobile experience in new and unique form factors so they can game or create from anywhere.” The 13th-generation Intel core mobile processor family being unveiled today is spearheaded by the i9-13980HX, which is Intel’s first 24-core processor designed for laptops. Intel claims it is now the world’s fastest mobile (that is, laptop) processor clocking speeds of up to 5.6 GHz turbo frequency and 11% faster and 49% faster performance respectively for single-purpose and multitasking usage. As a measure of what the race is like in processors today, this is less about Intel really setting a new bar as much as it is about keeping up: It notes in a disclaimer that its “worlds-fastest claim” is only valid as of December 2022. The 24 cores are divided up into eight Performance-cores and 16 Efficient-cores, it says, and also are complemented by 32 threads and “enhanced Intel Thread Director” with memory support of up to 128 gigabytes total covering two classes of SDRAM, DDR5 (up to 5,600 MHz) and DDR4 (up to 3,200 MHz). The state of features today expected by consumers in these devices is laid bare too with a wide range of other support including super fast Wi-Fi 6E (Gig+) support; Bluetooth LE Audio and Bluetooth 5.2 support for faster speeds, multiple devices and lower power consumption (so critical given earlier Bluetooth does drain battery); Thunderbolt 4 support for 40 gigabits per second transfer speeds; and more. The H-, P- and U-series mobile processors are addressing IoT, “enthusiast” and thinner devices. Intel says that more than 300 models from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Razer, Republic of Gamers, Samsung and others are going to be released this year based on them. All of the processors in the 13th generation will also include a Movidius vision processing unit (VPU), built in collaboration with Microsoft to integrate closely with its Windows Studio Effects to handle processing of more AI-based tasks to speed up overall CPU and GPU performance of machines. That collaboration is a notable mark of how hardware and software have had to tie up closer to evolve and how hardware is becoming increasingly a software play for more complex applications and faster speeds. Without its own chip-based vertical strategy in-house, Microsoft is an obvious partner. “Together with Intel we continue to innovate to deliver powerful PC performance and experiences with Windows 11 and all of the products Intel is announcing today,” said Panos Panay, EVP and product head for Microsoft, in a statement. “We’re excited for customers to benefit from substantial optimizations, like improved Windows support for Intel Hybrid Guided Scheduler, and meaningful new experiences, like with the Intel Movidius VPU unlocking a new era of AI acceleration, starting with Windows Studio.” Intel is describing its new N-series chips, meanwhile, as a direct replacement for the Pentium and Celeron lines. “Purpose-built” for the education segment, entry-level computing and IoT edge-native applications, this also means that they will be marketed as more cost-effective and aimed at overall lower-priced and lower-specced devices while being more modern than the previous generations and being a more evolutionary product for the company. With new Gracemont-based cores, Intel 7 process technology means 28% better application performance and 64% better graphics performance at the peak compared to the older (now sunset) processors; up to 10 hours of HD video playback (if nothing else is being used) with better camera and display support as well as upgraded Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (they are based also on the i3 tech). Intel said that some 50 new ChromeOS and Windows designs from Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and ASUS are due to be launched this year based on these chips. IoT is also getting addressed with these new N-series chips, which will be appearing, Intel said, in devices used in retail signages, kiosks, point of sale systems, portable medical imaging devices, office automation equipment like copiers, and in safety and security devices. In addition to the chip news, Intel has continued iterating on its laptop and portable computing specifications; this year with new developments called Intel Evo. These are based on the new 13th generation processor and focus on extended battery life to improve both the speed of charging but also how long devices can run unplugged; improved performance for videoconferencing and other video and collaboration applications; and better bridging between laptops and other keyboard computing and mobile handsets and tablets, which it’s terming “Intel Unison.” Again, in the endgame of vertical integration, this was an essential move for Intel, in an environment where those who do still use laptops are always doing it in conjunction with handsets, something that device makers are keen to make as easy as possible, not least to lose those users as customers of the former products. Intel Evo will also work with hardware made by accessory providers, covering Thunderbolt 4 docks, monitors, storage and wireless headsets, mice, keyboards and other access points. Whether those will ultimately feel like gimmicks or buggy hardware that no one ultimately uses remains to be seen. At the end of the day, the easiest and most foolproof tools tend to win the day.
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How well did Israel’s cybersecurity industry do in 2022?
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Yuval Krigel
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and funding rounds of 2021 left some room for optimism around the state of the in 2022, instilling a sense of security in Q1 of the new year. While other sectors began to feel the shifting tides of the market as the year progressed, capital continued to freely flow into cybersecurity, further reinforcing the belief that it is a persistently resilient outlier in tech, immune to market instabilities and unable to be shocked into a downturn. After closing the book on 2022 this week, it is safe to say that this optimism was somewhat misguided. With hindsight, 2021 can be categorized as an anomaly that sent the industry into a tailspin, with bloated valuations exceeding actual revenue and funding rounds scaling at what many warned was an unhealthy pace. The repercussions of this spiral are evident in our 2022 analysis of funding and M&A data for the Israeli cybersecurity ecosystem. In 2022, overall funding for Israeli cybersecurity startups fell by a dramatic 64%, from $8.84 billion in 2021 to $3.22 billion this year, and the number of funding rounds decreased from 135 in 2021 to 94. When compared to overall funding in 2020 ($2.75 billion over 109 funding rounds), it seems that 2021 was a blip on the radar, and that the industry is returning to where it left off in 2020. Our data indicate that the majority of capital that flow into cybersecurity this year poured directly into one very distinct area: seed rounds of early-stage cybersecurity startups. The average 2022 seed round actually shattered the 2021 record ($7 million), reaching a whopping $9 million. In total, seed funding rose by 65% this year, from $233 million in 2021 to $384 million in 2022. This striking amount of capital, dedicated to the earliest stages of company building, demonstrates ongoing investor confidence in the cybersecurity industry’s potential to innovate and build solutions for increasingly acute threats. Furthermore, it indicates the difficulty in raising Series A rounds this year, as investors’ thresholds for these rounds grew in light of the economic crisis. While the number of Series A rounds remained almost unchanged since 2021 (30 rounds last year and 24 rounds in 2022), investors preferred to support the seed rounds of startups that will grow sustainably and cautiously from the get-go. “Investors understand that seed funding has a clear baseline, as the costs of building a company have not decreased,” says Iren Reznikov, director of Corporate Development and Ventures at Sentinel One. “They know that building a company from the ground up and ensuring that it reaches its Series A round with maximum maturity while hitting all of its benchmarks, costs money. At the same time, investors expect founding teams to set clear goals for reaching their Series A and strive to reach product-market fit at an early stage by engaging with prospective customers faster.” This confidence is shared by cybersecurity founders, who, despite this year’s market volatility, still believe in the potential to build something meaningful for enterprise protection and business continuity. “Early-stage startups are best poised to respond to the changing needs of a fiscally constrained market,” says Slavik Markovich, co-founder and CEO of Descope, a stealth startup building a service for application developers in the authentication space. “A tight economy is usually accompanied by increased fraud and cyber attacks. User adoption and conversion have become even more critical in this market, with businesses looking for solutions that reduce friction for their end customers in order to prevent any sources of churn. Founding teams at early-stage companies that focus on solving these problems will continue to attract investor interest.”
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TechCrunch+ roundup: Normalizing down rounds, 2023 climate trends, term sheet basics
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Walter Thompson
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The “Pineapple Express” that dropped several inches of rain over the Bay Area last week left the ground saturated. The next storm front expected to arrive tomorrow is expected to bring disruption and destruction on a massive scale. It’s a decent metaphor for our startup ecosystem: Just as there aren’t enough sandbags in San Francisco to keep everyone’s house dry, rising interest rates, skittish investors and looming economic uncertainty are poised to bring valuations down even further in 2023. “In a culture where growing valuations are worn like a badge of honor, founders may fear that taking a down round would render them Silicon Valley pariahs,” writes Holden Spaht, managing partner at private equity firm Thoma Bravo. In a TC+ column, Spaht encourages entrepreneurs to they leaned on in the bygone era of cheap money. “The funding route you take has enormous consequences for the future of your company, and so it shouldn’t be clouded by ego or driven by media appetites,” he says. Cutting back is always an option, but not every company is in a position to bootstrap or freeze hiring, which is why Spaht suggests exploring “trade-offs” like convertible notes. Everyone gets wet when it rains, but accepting a down round allows founders to keep building, “and you have the benefit of resetting expectations of value in a challenging market,” writes Spaht. Happy new year! Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images No matter the size, investments are a sign of validation for any startup. However, “when you see other companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars, it can be easy to think no one will be interested in hearing about your startup’s much smaller round,” writes Hum Capital CMO Scott Brown. In his marketing playbook for early-stage startups, Brown explains how founders can use fundraising announcements to maximize media interest, comply with SEC guidelines and align more closely with investors to “get the most bang for their buck.” / Getty Images Most investors won’t sign a non-disclosure agreement before reviewing your pitch because your idea is probably not worth stealing. That’s not an insult, just a statement of fact. The odds are low that you’re the first person to come up with an idea, and an NDA could create legal hassles for VCs who interact with hundreds of entrepreneurs each year, many of whom are trying to solve the same set of problems. “Not all concepts developed by startups are legally protectable,” writes Alison Miller, trial lawyer at Holwell Shuster & Goldberg LLP. “The next best thing founders can do is to signal as much as possible that pitch materials shared with funders are confidential.” Getty Images Tim De Chant looked back on his reporting from last year to sketch out his predictions for where he believes climate tech is heading: “Will 2023 be the inflection point that marks the start of exponential growth? I suspect we’ll know more around this time next year.” / Getty Images Could the FTX debacle have been avoided if investors had taken a more active interest in the company’s operations? Given the chilly climate for late-stage fundraising and widespread economic uncertainty, “it’s time for the startup community to redefine what “founder-friendly” capital means and balance both the source and cost of that capital,” writes Blair Silverberg, co-founder and CEO of Hum Capital. In a TC+ guest post, he weighs the relative benefits of active versus passive investors, breaks down the basics of debt financing, and shares advice “for founders seeking a better balance of capital and external expertise for their businesses.” / Getty Images It sounds counterintuitive, but in this chilly fundraising environment, late-stage startups need to plan to go public when the market opens up. “While some companies delay their IPOs, others can play catch-up and prepare for the time when the open market itches to invest again,” writes Carl Niedbala, COO and co-founder of commercial insurance broker Founder Shield. In a detailed TC+ article, he looks at why “sensible companies are de-risking their public path,” which sectors are best positioned, and perhaps most notably, which benchmarks startups can use to tell if “an IPO is in their future.” / Getty Images Most financing contacts between early-stage startups and investors take the form of a SAFE note, also known as a simple agreement for future equity. Legally binding, the document establishes both a company’s valuation and deal terms. “Once you get the term sheet, the game has really begun,” says James Norman, managing partner at Black Operator Ventures. To help first-time founders better understand “what to ask for” and which red flags to avoid, Connie Loizos interviewed Norman, along with Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon, CEO of AllRaise, and Kevin Liu of Techstars and Uncharted Ventures. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
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3 ways PE firms can ensure relevant due diligence for M&A targets ahead of a recession
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Corey Massella
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volatility, rising interest rates, inflation and the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict affected the M&A market in the third quarter of 2022 to the point that deal volumes across the globe. Most experts agree that a recession is here or likely imminent, and even if one is not, it still is a scenario that companies must prepare for. That said, while private equity deal activity declined only in Q3, when compared to the years prior to COVID, it actually increased slightly. As for Q4, there was already chatter, particularly in the lower U.S. midmarket, that deal volumes might increase due to the rush to close deals before the year ended. As private equity firms continue to pursue deals, they should look to their due diligence firms and operators to ensure extra steps are taken to accurately assess and vet potential acquisition targets given the economic climate and the possibility of a recession. Due diligence providers will need to go beyond their standard reporting checklists and expand their assessments of three key areas: If the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a focus on reallocations and prompted a closer look at EBITDA and gross profits, a recession will call for a deeper focus on cash flows and the potential for surviving ongoing market swings. It has become important for any due diligence provider to stress test a company’s ability to sustain losses and maintain sustainable liquidity and cash. While conducting a cash-flow analysis is not standard practice for due diligence providers, it should be now. Analyzing a company’s cash flows will help providers determine whether it is ready for a deal ahead of a recession. During a recession, a capital-intensive company would inevitably see its cash flows being strained to pay its debt load, and it’s likely to need more cash to carry out operations. The company would likely be in a negative cash position. Whether it be due to inherited debt or lease commitments, a cash-flow analysis can help PE firms anticipate and prepare for such possibilities. A cash-flow analysis should begin by evaluating sales by discounts, returns and allowances, all related to cash, and evaluate for seasonality. It should then do the reverse for vendors and suppliers when evaluating purchases and operational expense transactions.
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5 tips for healthcare startups fundraising in a down market
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Dr. Galym Imanbayev
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greatest challenge is not selling any particular product or strategy. Instead, it is often unwinding and realigning the investor’s biases. The competition is not your market competitor or incumbent. More often, it is the investor’s set of operating heuristics, many of which are quickly influenced by market conditions. Fundraising in healthcare, especially in a macro environment like the one we’re in, is an opportunity to differentiate and take control of the narrative. When markets start to dip, most companies hunker down and focus on surviving. In moments like these, healthtech companies can take advantage of the status quo getting upset and rise to the top of a crowded field, signaling to the market why they are the horse to bet on. When the market seems to be trending downward, it’s an opportunity for founders to take control of the narrative and reframe how investors view market conditions based on a deep analysis of their sector. Broadly compared to other industries, healthcare often remains resilient during times of economic distress. When everything is going well, it’s easy to forget and even easier to underappreciate the acyclicality of the healthcare market as a whole. But a at data from the Bureau of Labor shows that employment in the sector continued to grow during the last recession, a testament to how robust the sector is. While employment may not be a comprehensive barometer for all healthcare activity, the demand for real solutions to real pain points in healthcare will continue to be inelastic. If you’re in services, frame your business around this labor demand; if you’re developing solutions for software, operations and RCM, leverage this growing gap between the need and the adoption of technology. In this environment, funds will be looking for acyclical markets to invest in. This is an opportunity for you to capture this capital pool. In a market inundated with “digital health” startups and “infrastructure solutions,” it’s vital to differentiate yourself. Move beyond generic labels that no longer tickle the interest of healthcare investors, and instead map out the progression of your company in three acts, from seed to IPO, even if you’re already a late-stage company:
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Daily Crunch: Reddit users discover Apple is raising its battery replacement service fees
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Christine Hall
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And we’re back! Well, just me for now anyway. is covering CES, so if you are there, seek him out and say “Hi!” Thanks so much to for conducting the Daily Crunch train last week. It was a joy to read it and hope you enjoyed it, too. It looks like we are back at it with a long list of news, so let’s get started. — Can co-CEOs work? If you’re a company with two founders looking for that advice, and have a good for you. This time they were joined by co-founder and co-CEO , who talked about not only the company’s corporate credit card and expense management startup, but also about what made him and his co-founder, Pedro Franceschi, decide to be co-CEOs. And we have three more for you: / Getty Images No matter the size, early-stage investments are a sign of validation for any startup. However, “when you see other companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars, it can be easy to think no one will be interested in hearing about your startup’s much smaller round,” writes Hum Capital CMO Scott Brown. In this marketing playbook for early-stage startups, Brown explains how founders can use fundraising announcements to maximize media interest, comply with SEC guidelines and align more closely with investors to “get the most bang for their buck.” One more from the TC+ team: If you were hoping for some Nvidia news today, boy, have we got you covered. , and listened in on a CES virtual press conference so you didn’t have to. Some highlights include a lot of Nvidia’s tools going into cars: to modernize its factories, will be built with Nvidia’s self-driving toolkit, and are among carmakers that will use the company for its in-car gaming features. Meanwhile, and with RTX 4080 performance for premium users. And we have five more for you:
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Product-led growth and profitability: What’s going on?
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Anna Heim
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companies, “product-led growth (PLG) companies — those who educate and convert buyers with product rather than sales and marketing (SLG) — operate at about 5% to 10% less profitability than sales-led motions,” venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz in a blog post. This data point may be specific to the moment we are in: First, because public tech companies overall are less profitable than a mere year ago. Second, because not so long ago, PLG companies had higher net income margin than their sales-led peers. But just because this reversal might be temporary doesn’t mean it isn’t worth looking into. Product-led growth these days is no longer the exception to the rule: Following the footsteps of Atlassian, Zoom and Snowflake, many private startups adopted this model. If it is inherently less profitable, founders will want to know — especially now that investors once again pay attention to a company’s path to profitability and no longer reward growth at all costs. As usual, things aren’t clear-cut. There are some reasons why PLG companies would be less profitable now that could turn into reasons why they might be more profitable in the near future. To add perspective to what’s going on, we reached out to at OpenView Partners. OpenView is a Boston-based VC firm known for advocating for product-led growth, so it definitely has several horses in the race. But this also means it’s invested in ensuring that PLG is a recipe for success and keen to look into what can make it happen. Here’s what Poyar had to say on the topic:
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Hear from ecobee CEO and founder at a special in-person TechCrunch Live at CES
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Matt Burns
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Ecobee started in 2007 when connected thermostats were an entirely different product and nothing like what’s available today. Ecobee released its SmartThermostat in 2008, bringing modern connectivity and usability to the device. I’m excited to host a special IRL TechCrunch Live event at CES 2023. We’re filming in the LVCC Grand Concourse on the first day of CES, and hope you can stop by to watch. Stuart Lombard is sitting down with me to talk about the growth and development of his startup, ecobee. He started the company in 2007 with fellow Canadians to improve household energy use. He raised $159 million to fund the effort and sold the company for $750 million. At TechCrunch Live, we host conversations with successful founders who took an interesting path, and Lombard’s journey is filled with twists and turns. The company raised its $2.23 million Series A in 2007, released its first product in 2008, and then in 2011, had to fight for attention after the sleek Nest Learning Thermostat release. Ecobee kept at it. In 2021, Generac Power Systems bought ecobee for $770 million. This TechCrunch Live will be filmed at CES 2023, and it’s free to attend. Watch the broadcast at booth #60488, located in the LVCC Grand Concourse, at 11:00 a.m. PST on Thursday, January 5. The event will also be streamed live on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. TechCrunch Live returns to its normal, weekly schedule starting in February with Benchmark’s Sarah Tavel and Cambly CEO and co-founder Sameer Shariff.
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Max Q: 2022 was big. 2023 will be even bigger.
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Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 2 |
Hello and welcome back to Max Q. I hope everyone had a restful holiday season and a celebratory New Year. Thanks again to all Max Q readers, whether you’ve been with me for many issues or you’re a recent subscriber. I’m glad you’re here. I’ll be departing from my usual format for the newsletter. Instead, at the risk of totally having egg on my face at the end of 2023, I want to give some predictions for the forthcoming year and what I think it will have in store for the space industry. 2022 may have been most blockbuster year for space in recent memory — since 1969, at least. The historic cadence of SpaceX, the launch of Space Launch System and the return of the Orion capsule, big technical demonstrations, ispace’s fully private moon mission … it’s been a momentous year. There’s a to look forward to — so much, that next year could even outdo this one as the biggest for the space industry yet. But many questions still remain, especially about the shorter-term economic outlook, ongoing geopolitical instability and (ahem) some announced timelines that may or may not come to fruition. Here are two predictions — click the link above to read the rest. It seems clear that there will be increasing pressure on the launch market as even more next-gen vehicles come online. We’re not just looking out for the heavy-lift rockets — like SpaceX’s Starship and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan — but a whole slew of smaller and medium-lift launch vehicles that are aiming for low cost and high cadence. These include Relativity’s Terran 1, Astra’s Rocket 4, RS1 from ABL Space Systems, Rocket Factory Augsburg’s One launcher and Orbex’s Prime microlauncher. As we mentioned above, space industry timelines are notoriously tricky (and this caveat applies to the whole post), but it’s likely that at least a handful of new rockets will fly for the first time next year. Proving new vehicles drives prices down and increases inventory, meaning more launches and dates are available to private and government concerns — and incumbent players will need to work hard to keep the lead they’ve established. The international space scene will continue to grow. While there’s much to look forward to from Europe, we’ve got our eyes on the United Kingdom, China and India. From the U.K., we expect to see the country’s first-ever space launch with Virgin Orbit’s from Spaceport Cornwall. We are also expecting a lot of activity from the Indian Space Research Organization, as well as the launch startup there. China had a big 2022 — including completing its own space station in orbit and sending up multiple crews of taikonauts — and we predict there will be no slowdown next year as the country seeks to keep pace with American industrial growth. How exactly the decentralizing of private space beyond a handful of major launch providers and locations will affect the industry is difficult to say, but it will definitely help diversify the projects and stakeholders going to orbit. Virgin Orbit/Greg Robinson
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LockerDome Lands $6M From Square Co-founder & More To Help Sports Fans Connect With Their Favorite Teams & Athletes
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
, a social media publishing platform designed to connect sports fans with their favorite athletes, teams, brands and sports properties, announced today that it has raised $6 million in Series A financing. The round was led by Cultivation Capital Growth Fund, a new venture fund created by Square co-founder Jim McKelvey, with contributions from St. Louis Cardinals President William DeWitt, III, a Milwaukee Brewers exec and veteran NHL defenseman (and Hart Trophy winner) Chris Pronger, among others. When , it had just raised $750K in seed capital from McKelvey and others, leading the Square co-founder to join the startup’s board of directors. LockerDome founder and CEO Gabe Lozano tells us that McKelvey has taken an active role in the company’s development as a member of the board, an advisor and has invested both personally and through his new growth fund, Cultivation Capital. The new capital brings LockerDome’s total investment to just over $8 million. At the time of LockerDome’s seed raise, Leena likened the startup to the “LinkedIn for sports,” based on its mission to create a social community in which athletes could create their own persona and profile. Looking to become a sort of private social and professional network, the startup worked with everyone from youth sports programs to professional athletes to “create profiles, upload media” and their own personal messages to amplify the reach of the pros and help the rest boost their national exposure. Since then, the sports-centric social media publishing platform has created 1,500 of these “networks” for professional athletes, brands and sports properties. The startup re-launched (and re-designed) its platform in January and has been seeing 14 percent growth (across the board) since then. This week, LockerDome officially passed 10 million monthly unique visitors for the first time, having grown by more than five million uniques in the past two months, Lozano says. The founder attributes LockerDome’s growth to its transition from a focus on profiles and acting as a “LinkedIn for sports” to one that encourages sports fans to become part of interest-based sports communities, where users can interact with content and other fans around their favorite athletes, sports, and so on. At the same time, the startup has also become more focused on recruiting professional athletes as well as publishing and media companies, providing them with a channel and the means to amplify their following across their social media properties. Today, the startup is working with NFL stars like Steelers linebacker Troy Polamalu, Cardinals’ wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald, Maurice Jones-Drew, Antonio Brown and Marshawn Lynch, along with MLB All-Star and Cy Young Award winner Felix Hernandez, Pete Rose and Wade Boggs and well-known NBA names like Blake Griffin, Rudy Gay, David Lee and Stephen Curry, to name a few. Earlier this month, LockerDome inked a deal with USA Today’s digital sports properties, which means that the newspaper has begun selling ads on LockerDome, and in turn, the startup’s traffic is now included as part of USA Today’s network. The basic idea, the CEO tells us, is to help brands, professional athletes and publishing companies like USA Today amplify their social media strategies. LockerDome’s platform works best, he says, for those who have sizable existing audiences — they may have 20 million likes on Facebook, but only 10K followers on Twitter, for example — and want to ramp up distribution across their social properties, be it Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook or Instagram. Many of the biggest sports properties already have sizable audiences, Lozano said, but usually they don’t know how to best expand their footprint on social media. So, LockerDome offers a suite of management tools (and, more specifically, event-based team management tools) that allow teams and media properties to upload their rosters, schedules — essentially, everything aside from statistics. Today, over 500 amateur sports teams are using these management tools, the LockerDome CEO tells us. The startup also enables brands and professional athletes to leverage its media tools, like photo and video uploading, contest widgets and polls to run mini promotional campaigns and giveaways around live events, for example, to help build their following on social platforms and connect with their fans. As media companies begin to focus more on amplifying their “second screen” experience for viewers around sporting events, LockerDome wants to help them do that — not by building those second screen tools themselves — but by helping them engage a brand’s twitter followers, for example, around a live event. “We want to help brands identify the barriers preventing them from getting their TV viewers online and figure out what’s preventing them from tweeting about that event live, while it’s happening,” the LockerDome CEO says. “Our goal is to help brands turn one TV viewer into four via social media.” When the site first began, it charged publishing companies and users $99/month to use its platform, but recently, the company has walked away from that, as Lozano says that the pay wall tended to add more friction to customer acquisition. So, going forward the company is focused on finding new ways to monetize its growing traffic — one that the CEO says has become increasingly loyal, as 92.4 percent of users who visited in January came back in February. Naturally, part of that strategy involves encouraging media companies to advertise against that audience and its partnership with USA Today means that it has a sizable inventory with which to work. With its new capital in the bank, the CEO says that the startup will be looking to hire a new team in New York that will be focused exclusively on monetization. The idea is, by this time next year, to have turned those 10 million monthly uniques into big, recurring, dollars, the CEO says. For more on LockerDome,
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Steve Newcomb’s Famo.us Raises $4M To Power Fast, Beautiful Apps In HTML5
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
, which offers a JavaScript framework that’s designed to power HTML5 apps that are faster and better-looking than what’s currently possible, has raised $4 million in Series A funding. The round was led by previous investor , with participation from “one or more” hardware vendors (whose name or names aren’t being shared publicly). The company is led by Steve Newcomb, who previously co-founded Powerset, the semantic search startup . It actually in San Francisco last fall. When I spoke to him about the funding, Newcomb admitted that his Disrupt presentation wasn’t exactly an overwhelming success, and that he faced some skepticism and confusion from the judges. One reason Newcomb may not have had all the answers — supposedly, the conference came only three days after his decision with co-founder Mark Lu to shift the company’s focus. Originally, Newcomb said he had wanted to build what was, essentially, a Pinterest clone, but with vastly improved design. However, the team discovered that HTML5 could not deliver the experience that they were looking for. The real issue, Newcomb said, was in the basic design of web browsers, which were built to render documents, not apps. And when it comes to rendering, while “the web got it wrong from the beginning,” the team realized that the gaming industry got it right. “We built a shitty game engine, which is basically the best app engine ever built,” Newcomb said. So a website built with Famo.us bypasses the in-browser renderer and uses the Famo.us framework instead, leading to a dramatically improved rendering experience. Once they’d built the technology, Newcomb said he and Lu could have gone ahead with their plan to take on Pinterest, but they decided that there was more potential in the platform itself. And while he didn’t have a detailed business plan when he was launching at Disrupt, Newcomb said he’s figured things out now — Famo.us is trying make the platform available for free to developers by treating hardware manufacturers as its customers, customizing the framework to take advantage of their device capabilities. Fixing HTML5 is a big promise, and one that we’ve heard from other companies. However, you can see Famo.us in-action yourself by visiting , which is basically just a demonstration of the technology. It features a 3D version of the periodic table that doesn’t use any plug-ins, WebGL, or Canvas. And it runs on smartphones, tablets, PCs, and televisions — Newcomb took me on a tour of the site using his iPad, showing off lots of little touches in the animation and interactivity, none of which slowed down the site at all. (Click on the “fun things to do” button if you want some ideas on how to stress test the platform.) [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzBC20B5dsk&w=560&h=315] The site is basically a version of what Newcomb demonstrated at Disrupt. The technology has advanced since then, he said. Newcomb gave me a demonstration of one aspect of the physics engine that the Famo.us team is developing, which featured one surface sliding on top of a second one — he could adjust the physical properties of the surfaces and the motion would change immediately. In other words, Newcomb said developers could use Famo.us to create apps with their very own “bounce” navigation (something that Apple tried to patent, ). Newcomb said he’s very self-consciously trying to be a perfectionist in how he builds Famo.us as a company. For one thing, he noted that 16,000 developers have signed up for the beta, but “we are not letting of them touch anything yet.” That same perfectionism is going into the company office, which is located in a penthouse in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. When I visited on Friday, Newcomb pointed to the desks, which seemed perfectly fine to me, and said they would be replaced in a few days because they were the wrong kind of wood. “That lean startup style — I don’t believe that,” he said, later clarifying that the lean approach makes sense for some startups, but not for everyone. Because Newcomb wants the technology to be used to create beautiful apps, “everything we do has to represent perfection and elegance.” Newcomb said most of the initial investors (Famo.us raised a $1.1 million seed round) weren’t thrilled by the shift, because the vision was too big and challenging,, but Javelin partner Jed Katz stuck by him. In fact, Katz told me that he had backed the company initially because of his confidence in Newcomb, and if anything, he had more questions about “the original consumer version — with the second generation, it really clicked with us.”
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Youth App Maker TabTale Buys Kids Games Club For $3-4M, Preps New Buying Club Model
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
The market for children’s and educational apps continues to grow — evidenced by Apple last week announcing 1 billion downloads of educational apps from iTunes U — and that growth is leading to both consolidation and new business models. In one of the latest developments, , a publisher of children’s and family apps, has bought , maker of apps like “ ” (a favorite of my kids), in a deal that TechCrunch understands was in the region of $3 million – $4 million. Together, the two Israel-based companies have produced nearly 200 apps, covering close to 100 million downloads. That makes it one of the bigger publishers of youth/family apps around, says TabTale CEO Sagi Schliesser. Schliesser says that the two companies were both profitable before the acquisition, and that they’re both still at an early stage of growth. “We’ll be disappointed if we only make $10 million in revenue this year,” he said. Although both TabTale and Kids Games Club are focused on a young audience, the two are actually complementary: TabTale, as its name implies, focuses largely on tablet apps and stories, while Kids Games Club makes — you guessed it — lots of games and educational interactive content, largely designed for smartphones. Both are mainly focused on iOS apps, although TabTale’s newer business on the Android platform, Schliesser says, will reach 5 million downloads this year. Similarly, although up to now both have been mainly aimed at apps for under-12s, now they are looking to extend that to users in the 12-18 year old bracket. The idea is to follow their users as they get older but and to try to “keep our DNA via things like ‘nice’ arcade games,” says Schliesser. And just as an audience matures, so does the business of apps, and that is leading to TabTale exploring new revenue models. Up to now, the companies’ apps have been a mix of ad-free, paid downloads and free, ad-supported apps. But now that they have a sizeable catalogue, the two are also working on something new: subscription models, based on the idea of book clubs, where users paid a monthly fee for a certain number of apps. There are a couple of reasons to consider a book-club-style model. For one, it would create a consistent and predictable revenue stream by way of repeat subscriptions — something we’ve seen extend to other areas of e-commerce like fashion by way of companies like JustFab. Additionally, it would be to help promote some of the newer or lesser-known content in its catalogue — such as some of its song books and educational games. (Not unlike a book club.) It is also a model being explored by other kids’ app makers like and follows the usage pattern that TabTale sees across its catalog already. “We see users downloading between eight and ten apps every month, and we believe that children want diversity, so this kind of thing would be good,” said Schliesser. On platforms like iOS, the “club” would run through Apple’s iTunes, and work not unlike in-app subscriptions. He says that he believes it will take another business quarter to get it into place. Another push will be in growing the publisher’s international presence. With almost all of the content in English today, some 60% of the combined company’s downloads come from the U.S. with the UK at number two. Strangely, the third most popular market is Saudi Arabia. “We don’t have an explanation for why this is the case,” said Schliesser. The company is currently adding more localized language support to grow usage in other markets.
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CloudFactory Launches CloudFactory 2.0 Platform After Acquiring SpeakerText & Humanoid
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
, a distributed workforce company that seeks to reduce poverty in emerging economies, launched its CloudFactory 2.0 platform last week after acquiring SpeakerText and Humanoid in October for an undisclosed amount. SpeakerText automates video transcriptions through algorithms and crowdsourcing and Mitch Kapor, 500 Startups, Crowdflower CEO Lukas Biewald, Roy Rodenstein, Chris Yeh and Georges Harik (one of Google’s first 10 engineers). Automated workforce management platform and backed by Google Ventures. CloudFactory 2.0 is the latest step in CloudFactory’s lofty goal of connecting one million people in developing countries to basic computer work by 2017, which the company hopes will reduce poverty in its employees’ communities. The startup is based in Nepal, which CEO Mark Sears moved to four and a half years ago after initially planning to stay for just a two-week vacation. “It was not a strategic plan to locate in Nepal but instead a matter of falling in love with the people and the country while seeing the immense opportunity with so much untapped human potential in the nation. We are now targeting similar up-and-coming countries with early [business process outsourcing] industries to expand our workforce into. The advantage is that Nepal has benefitted from so much aid and the middle class is growing very quickly with so much remittance coming back into the country–both of these have driven education over the last couple decades and there are many college graduates now emerging,” Sears tells me. The company currently has about 1,000 workers, almost all based in Nepal. Sears says CloudFactory is the primary job for most of its workers, who are on a retainer to do a minimum amount of work each week. CloudFactory is used by clients who need to process large volumes of data entry, data collection, or data processing. That work is broken down into “microtasks” that are completed along what CloudFactory calls its “virtual assembly line.” Sears says that there are already 5.5 million tasks booked for the next month and “this number is scaling aggressively as we grown our workforce.” CloudFactory’s next stop is Africa. “We are on target for 2,000 cloud workers by the end of April and 8,000 by the end of 2013. We have a pilot project in Kenya and are preparing to aggressively expand our workforce into Africa this year. Our goal is to connect one million people to computer work across about 10 to 12 developing countries by the end of 2017,” says Sears.
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If You’re Worried About Likes, Avoid Posting To Facebook From Twitter
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Michael Arrington
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Facebook is showing your content to than they used to, says Nick Bilton at the NY Times, pointing out that while his subscribers have soared, the number of likes per post has declined rapidly. Josh Constine writes his thoughts . Bilton’s theory is that Facebook wants to incentivize people to pay to promote their content, so they show unpaid content to far fewer people. has other theories (and correctly points out that comparing old data to new could be explained in other ways, as well). Occam’s razor suggests Bilton is right, simply because Facebook has the incentive to make the free views scarce in order to increase demand for the paid views. But I just don’t know. As an aside, when I promoted a post back in November, Facebook I “had 969x as many views because you promoted it.” Here’s what I do know – if you really care about Facebook likes, don’t just post your stuff to Twitter and then rely on it being republished automatically to Facebook. In my sample size of one, Facebook penalizes you significantly for that and shows that content to far fewer people. I have Twitter auto post to , and I occasionally post things directly to Facebook as well. I’ve always noticed that the direct-to-Facebook approach generates far more likes, but I’ve never actually gone back and run the averages. Today I did, although only for the last few weeks of posts. Here’s what I found. The average post published to Facebook by Twitter gets 13.6 likes. The average direct to Facebook post gets 81.1 likes. I don’t care enough to change the way I publish to social networks. But you might. I am a partner at CrunchFund, a venture firm. I and CrunchFund each own shares in Facebook. CrunchFund owns Twitter shares. More information is .
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Social Recommendations Startup Stik Relaunches, Raises $2.3M From Detroit Venture Partners And North Coast Technology Investors
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Just months after from San Francisco to Detroit, is relaunching its Facebook-powered recommendation service and announcing a new round of funding. The $2.3 million Series A round was co-led by Detroit Venture Partners and North Coast Technology Investors. Draper Associates, First Step Fund, MEDC and Automation Alley also participated in the round. Stik on the back of a $500,000 seed round led by Draper Associates. Co-founder Nathan Labenz explained to me that the new cash will go towards acquiring new talent. “We are hiring developers first and foremost, but also looking for great designers, product managers, community managers, and eventually salespeople — essentially the classic web startup profile.” Ahead of this announcement, Stik relaunched with an overhaul of the website. “It’s a complete redesign and re-build of the front-end, complete with a deep Facebook timeline integration,” Labenz told TechCrunch, adding the whole service is now mobile friendly. Despite the relaunch, the focus is still the same. Stik launched with the goal of bringing word-of-mouth referrals online and they tapped Facebook vast social graph to personalize the experience. Co-founder Nathan Labenz discovered while attending Harvard and running a business on the side that word of mouth referrals are very valuable. Together with Jay Gierak, a hometown friend from Detroit and Harvard classmate, the pair launched Stik in San Francisco in November 2010. Stik made headlines in 2012 when the startup relocated from the Valley back to the founders’ home of Detroit. The young company quickly moved into the region’s startup epicenter of , home of other startups, Detroit Venture Partners, and Bizdom. “We thought there was a culture in Detroit where we could build a long-term company that was going to win,” co-founder Jay Gierak . “Thus far it’s been true and we’ve hired terrific people who are motivated, talented, and skilled.” “When we looked around Silicon Valley, we felt we couldn’t build a long-term company there because of the turnover – not only to get people in the door but retain them.” Jay stated, “It’s hard to compete with Facebook and Airbnb but also the YC’s of the world where there are people whispering in your ear to start a two-person app company.” Stik is committed to Detroit, and judging from the various Michigan funds which participated in the Series A, Michigan is committed to Sik as well. As mentioned above the round included North Coast Technology Investors, an early stage fund based Ann Arbor, Michigan that seemingly focuses on technology-focused manufacturing and fabrication companies — you know, companies normally associated with the Midwest. And Detroit Venture Partners CEO and Manager Partner Josh Linkner is quickly becoming a major VC force in the Midwest ( ). “We are thrilled to support the passionate and creative leaders of Stik. They have identified a very compelling void in the market, and we believe Stik will become the dominant source for professional referrals and own the category,” said Josh Linkner, CEO & Managing Partner at Detroit Venture Partners, in a released statement “The company’s momentum, combined with its leaders’ vision and focus, will ensure Stik becomes one of the most valuable and recognized platforms online.” With the notable exception of Tim Draper’s Draper Associates, Stik tapped Michigan funds around metro Detroit for funding. Local investors First Step Fund, MEDC and Automation Alley all participated in Stik’s funding as well, showing that despite headlines of physical and fiscal doom and gloom, Detroit is hungry for great ideas — and has the money to invest. [gallery ids="769080,769079,769078,769077,769075"]
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Labor Shortage Forces Apple Manufacturer Foxconn To Move Further Inland Into China
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Less than two weeks ago, shares of Apple slipped after an announcement by iPhone manufacturer Foxconn that it was at several Chinese factories ignited concerns about falling demand for the Cupertino-based company’s devices. As it turns out, there were several other possible reasons for the freeze, including the and Foxconn’s . As the robot initiative points to, Foxconn’s concern is not too many workers, but too little. Bloomberg Industries that Foxconn and several of its competitors, including Quanta Computer, Pegatron, and Wistron, are opening plants further inland in China because of labor shortages in the southern coastal province of Guangdong, a main manufacturing hub. Over the past two years, Foxconn has doubled its China workforce to 1.2 million and it now needs to find workers in other parts of the country to meet manufacturing demand, says Bloomberg Industries analyst Jitendra Waral. Moving inland won’t save the company money because wages in western Sichuan province and central Henan, where Foxconn makes iPads and iPhones, have jumped 120 percent over the last six years due to economic growth and are now similar to those in Guangdong. Last May, Foxconn chairman Terry Gou in its Chinese manufacturing bases by the end of 2013. The company initiated pay raises after 11 employees of its Shenzhen factory committed suicide in the first half of 2010. But the move was more than just a public relations ploy: migrant laborers, which Foxconn has relied on in its Guangdong factories, are opting to stay put in their home provinces of Sichuan and Henan thanks to dramatic wage increases due to economic growth. Furthermore, China’s working-age population (people aged 15 to 59) was in 2012, decreasing 3.45 million to 937 million, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, which also predicts that the decline will continue to 2030. Despite the increase in capital expenditures for manufacturers, consumers probably don’t have to worry about seeing an increase in retail prices soon. As analyst Horace Dediu notes, Apple has for over five years. But while Apple , it looks like Foxconn’s slice is going to get even thinner. Foxconn is already making do with extremely slender margins of . Despite paper-thin margins, however, being part of Apple’s supply chain is still desirable, Edison Investment Research analyst Dan Ridsdale in September: “Apple suppliers make much higher margins than the rest of the industry, and because Apple only has one leading model of phone, the suppliers are in all of the 200 million or so devices that Apple will sell. In contrast Samsung will have many more models and suppliers will be in some but not others of these.”
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Songdrop Is A Delicious For Music That Lives Outside Of Paywalls
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
With competitors such as and , it may not be the most original idea, but newly-launched — which is perhaps best described as a ‘Delicious for music’ — is a fun and well designed take on solving the music discovery and sharing problem, at least for music fans that live outside of the paywalls of services such as Spotify. Today the company is announcing its first round of funding. SOIC Capital, a seed and early-stage fund that largely focuses on social fashion and music startups, has invested £100,000 (~$150k) in the burgeoning London-based company. Consisting of a web app-only for now but with mobile apps in the pipeline, Songdrop lets users ‘bookmark’, organise and share music from disparate sources such as YouTube, Soundcloud, Vevo, and various blogs. Users sign up via Facebook or directly, install the cross-browser bookmarklet or Chrome extension, and can then begin bookmarking — or dropping — music (and videos) they discover across the web for later retrieval. Tracks can be organised into playlists and shared either within the service itself — re-dropped — or on Facebook and Twitter via the liberally sprinkled ‘Like’ and ‘Tweet’ buttons. In a further nod to social, users can follow one another on Songdrop itself and/or import their Facebook friend-list. Artists can be “followed”, too, so that if others bookmark tracks by a certain band they’ll automatically show up in a user’s feed. “We believe the API for music already exists: it’s the whole internet. Songdrop is a way to make sense of the chaos,” says Songdrop’s Brittney Bean in an apt statement that neatly sums up the company’s mission. However, although it’s very early days for Songdrop, that mission feels like it still has some way to go and may never be fully realised due to no fault of the company. Missing in action is support for walled gardened or paywalled services like Spotify or Deezer, which already have their own bookmarking and sharing systems and whose business plans to some extent rely on a lack of interoporability and locking users in. On the other hand, that may be half the point of something like Songdrop: there’s a wealth of music to be discovered outside of these uber-streaming services, we just need a better way to retrieve, organise and share it. But with the service free to use, how does Songdrop plan to make money? I’m told that paid-for mobile apps is one option under development, and certainly an on-the-go listening experience is something that users might well pay for. In-app purchases for premium features, perhaps ‘offline’ playback (though I’m just speculating here), are planned, too. There’s also the possibility to generate affiliate revenue through any related music purchases. In addition, the company says it’s looking to partner with brands and media companies who could use the service to help them “build an identity using music” and to “reach new audiences”, which sounds a little woolly at this stage. Interestingly, however, along with Songdrop’s founders Brittney Bean, Richard Taylor and James Towers, the company has recently hired Chris Helm as Finance Director to help work up the business model. He was previously UK Finance Director with EMI Music Publishing, so I dare say there’s more to come on the monetization front. Of course, Songdrop will need to achieve some decent traction first.
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News360’s Roman Karachinsky Shows Off Revamped Android App, Hints At Plans Beyond News
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Roman Karachinsky, CEO of news personalization startup , stopped by the TechCrunch TV studio earlier this week to show off . He also shared a little bit of data on how the company’s behind-the-scenes algorithms are improving reader engagement. Our video actually focuses on the iPad app, just because it’s easier to see the design on a bigger screen, but you’ll see the Android app in action, too. Karachinsky said that over the past six months or so, News360 has been updating the app across all platforms to match the improved look and increased personalization features that . The Android app was the last one to be updated, Karachinsky said. As it rolls out new apps, the company has also been improving the algorithms it uses to provide personalized story recommendations to each reader. Karachinsky acknowledged that he’s facing a lot of competition from other personalized news apps, but he said that even though “it’s easy to enter this space,” you need to provide the right recommendations in order to “make this work.” That argument is often directed by smaller companies against the most high-profile app in the market, Flipboard, which they say is just repackaging your Facebook and Twitter feeds without using any deep technology. In this case, Karachinsky offered some data to back up his assertion that the technology matters. He noted that the News360 team gives each algorithm update a name, and that when the app updated from Sputnik to Explorer 1 (something he described as “a very minor change”), the average number of articles read by each user in one day went up 12 percent. “I think that what’s slowly going to change is that people are going to want much more algorithmic curation rather than just relying on the same poeple they follow or sources they’re already familiar with, because the signal-noise ratio keeps going down,” Karachinsky said. “Every year there’s more and more crap in my Facebook newsfeed, and every year there’s new sources being created or coming up that I just don’t have enough time to follow, even though they’re putting out great content.” After the on-camera interview, Karachinsky also discussed how those algorithms fit into the company’s future plans. He said News360 is already testing out its technology as a way to recommend the most interesting advertising for each user, and he plans to roll out that personalized advertising to more widely over time. He said that this approach could also be expanded to other types of content, like videos or products. “It’s more of a personal assistant — imagine that model, but with content,” he said.
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There Was That Whole Internet Thing, Too
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Michael Arrington
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Anyone wanting to see the whole “history is written by the victors” thing in process should read and battle over exactly why Apple has kicked the crap out of everyone else since the late 90s. Wu, who’s about what open v. closed systems really mean (he uses a variety of definitions), says that Apple has succeeded despite being a closed system. Gruber says open v. closed doesn’t matter, and says Apple succeeds because it produces great products fast (meaning first to market). Gruber’s can be condensed down to and I agree. Except. The Internet. So When Gruber says he’s right. But it’s to say Talking about Apple v. Microsoft without mentioning the Internet and the browser is like talking about WWII without talking about the nuke. Framing the conversation just in terms of open v. closed operating systems, the quality of the hardware or software or who the CEO was, is silly. Because without the Internet happening there’s no way Apple would have succeeded. Before the Internet all most people cared about was Office. And Office was really the only reason anyone wanted Windows machines instead of Macs. I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early 90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said, the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking if you wanted to do Office stuff you needed a Windows machine. Macs were for college kids doing graphics stuff. Windows machines were for grown ups. That all changed in the mid 90’s of course. But before people bought computers primarily to get on the Internet Apple was hurting badly. Market share was so bad there was even a question about whether Microsoft would even continue making Office for Mac. Then everything came together for Apple at roughly the same time. in 1997. He got Microsoft to recommit to Office on the Mac. From : At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as a US$150 million investment in Apple. As part of the deal Apple and Microsoft agreed to settle a long-standing dispute over whether Microsoft’s Windows operating system infringed on any of Apple’s patents.[47] It was also announced that Internet Explorer would be shipped as the default browser on the Macintosh. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates appeared at the expo on-screen, further explaining Microsoft’s plans for the software they were developing for Mac, and stating that he was very excited to be helping Apple return to success. After this, Steve Jobs said this to the audience at the expo: But more important than any of this, was the Internet. Back then Office was the first software I’d install on a computer, and a computer without Office wasn’t fully a computer. I haven’t even bothered to install Office on my last two computers at all. So as important as Office was in 1997, what really changed the game for Apple was the Internet. Accessed via the in our lifetimes, the browser, it completely leveled the playing field. Suddenly computers weren’t entirely about Office, they were now about Office the Internet. Mac had only a slightly hobbled version of Office, and they had a peachy Internet experience. As the Internet matured and browsers became better the “problems” lessened significantly. A half decade ago Office became unimportant enough, and compatibility was good enough between Mac and Windows, that it became a non issue entirely. The rise of the Internet and the fall of Office is why Apple won. Or rather it gave them the opportunity to compete on a level playing field, and all the wonderful things about Apple were able to finally influence people into actually buying them. The world went from “I’d much rather have a Mac, but Office is too important” to “I’d much rather have a Mac but the damned things are too expensive.” Post-Office but pre-Internet Apple struggled. Post-Internet, Apple won (because the playing field leveled and then, but only then, all the things Gruber says). It’s so obvious everyone forgets.
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Why Simple Is Better Than Your Bank, Both Online And On Mobile Devices
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Most banks are notoriously bad at online, and especially mobile, experiences. Some don’t have mobile apps at all, and those that do exist typically aren’t that good. That’s why the folks at Portland, Ore.-based startup think they can make banking better, with new ways of keeping track of your money. Simple isn’t actually a bank — it partners with FDIC-insured institutions to actually keep your money safe and secure — but it to help users manage their funds. Among other things, Simple stores a ton of data about user transactions that most banks simply throw out. That provides robust search capabilities that most banks can’t match. It also has a that allows users to easily set aside money without having to think about it. Last week, I spoke with Simple CEO and co-founder Josh Reich for TechCrunch TV, and he walked through all the cool tools that Simple offers online and on its iOS and Android apps. I’m already a user, and have been one for several months… But if you haven’t seen Simple yet, check out the video above for a demo of the service.
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Facebook’s News Feed, A Skittish Gift Horse
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Remember Facebook Questions? Checkins? Spotify listens? They had their time at the top of the news feed because Facebook favors new products, but their prominence diminished as they matured. This and competition for space between posts may explain why New York Times writer Nick Bilton on shares to his public followers than a year ago. The news feed is a bumpy ride. Update: Now Facebook has issued a statement, admitting the drop in engagement seen by Bilton, others, and I is real, but that dismisses our accounts as anecdotes. Read my breakdown of Facebook’s damage control: “ ] According to , we post twice as much each year, but we’re not doubling how long we spend reading our social streams. On Twitter’s unfiltered feed, that means we read tweets from a shorter period each time we browse. The last 100 tweets may now come from the last hour, when perhaps it took those we follow two hours to conjure up as many quips and cat memes a year ago. On Facebook’s filtered feed, though, push comes to shove, as in his response to Bilton. Facebook shows a digest of the most “relevant” posts from the last few hours or since we last logged in. As we share more, the bar climbs, and only the posts with the most likes and comments and those from our closest friends show up. Facebook also sidesteps its news feed sorting algorithm, unofficially known as EdgeRank, to inject certain pieces of content. For example, ads. Whether they’re posts by Pages we Like that could have appeared but probably wouldn’t make the cut, or non-social ads that are completely artificial, Facebook makes money by sticking them high in the news feed. The volume of advertising in the feed has increased dramatically this year, which Bilton says means “free posts will disappear from people’s feeds as sponsored ads float to the top.” It’s a balancing act, and Facebook may be tipping too far towards advertisers’ interests right now. I agree with Bilton. Facebook risks alienating users if the feed’s meritocracy is poisoned with paid marketing and users feel like they’re not seeing what they want. But ads aren’t the only thing Facebook gives an EdgeRank edge to. When it launches new products, it wants to raise awareness about them so people give them a try. So at first, Facebook pumps up the latest features with extra weight in the news feed algorithm. For example, when Facebook first launched and re-launched in 2010 and 2011, it flooded the news feed with queries and their answers. It did the same when it started letting people check in to local places or announce they were an organ donor. And most people remember the first few days after f8 in September 2011 when the new sidebar Ticker and the news feed were overrun with posts about what friends were listening to on Spotify. Eventually the presence of these posts were throttled back to more comfortable levels. In absolute terms, they were seen less over time, but mostly because they were purposefully shown too much at first. The fluctuations don’t cause much hubbub when the posts are just fun updates between friends. They cause a big stir when the hammer drops on third-party app developers, websites, and professional content producers. Soon after f8, Facebook was frequently showing a “Recently Read Articles” box with links to news reader apps from the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. They drove tons of traffic. But then Facebook stopped showing the box as much, and traffic plummeted. At first, and claimed users were ditching the annoying reader apps that auto-posted their news consumption. and The Washington Post confirmed it was actually news feed changes that caused reader app traffic to plummet. Facebook also meddles with the feed when it wants to box out competitors. Back in 2011, Twitter was getting a lot of love for being a powerful distribution channel for real-time news. By featuring reader apps in the feed, Facebook seemed intent on stealing some of Twitter’s spotlight and winning the hearts of news outlets. The seems to have been chasing the same goal. Until its launch just before f8, individuals could only have 5,000 friends on Facebook. If they wanted more, they had to start a Page — a product designed for big brands, not journalists and micro-celebrities. These people were gaining huge followings on Twitter, and their content was drawing people to the land of 140 characters. Facebook didn’t like that one bit. So it launched Subscribe so individuals could use their same personal account but rack up as many followers as they wanted who would see their public posts. Facebook promoted the accounts of early Subscribe adopters by showing them in “People To Subscribe To” boxes in the site’s sidebars. In just three months, my Facebook subscriber count surpassed that of my Twitter followship I’d spent several years building. Facebook was clearly trying to convince journalists like me and other public figures that it was . Now looking back, it seems Facebook may have been juicing the news feed prominence of posts to subscribers to the same end. At this point I have 160,000 Facebook subscribers, but I’m getting the same number or fewer Likes on my public posts now as when I had one-tenth as many subscribers. My Likes and comments haven’t dropped as much as Bilton’s but the fact that my engagement isn’t directly correlated with my growing subscriber count implies that public posts are indeed getting throttled. Posting to Facebook is free, but the cost is acceptance of Facebook’s iron grip on the opaque news feed. Facebook’s still a gift horse, but it’s an inconsistent one. We might not want to saddle up and build a business completely dependent on something that could buck us off so easily.
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Google Glass’ Women Problems
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Taylor Buley
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
If you build it, they will come. Perhaps. And only if you don’t chase them away. Recently Google took to the stage at the “ ” conference. His idea worth spreading? That cellphones are “ .” This newsbyte, currently making the rounds, appears here and elsewhere out of context from a much longer pitch for , a high-tech monocle that is Google’s eyebrow-raising vision for the next generation of wearable computing. But with reporters there to witness it live, readers appear to have since deemed Brin’s remark the most shareworthy headline of the event. (When asked about the remark’s larger context, Google didn’t immediately elaborate on record.) With one word Brin appears to have shot in the direction of both feet: both possibly alienating Google’s male Android smartphone customers and offputting women who might otherwise be in the market for Google Glass. This is a point made clear by close technology follower and Wharton business ethics professor , who writes to TechCrunch: That is a missed commercial opportunity. Women make a large portion of household consumer purchasing decisions in the United States, and they tend to spend equal or greater numbers of hours using technology as do men according to some studies. In other words, a marketing strategy that positions Google Glass as a “man gadget” potentially alienates half of the consumer base who might have been keenly interested in purchasing the product in the future. A question going forward is whether women beyond technology insiders like have even heard about the gaffe, let alone Google Glass altogether. In the meantime, from an armchair perspective, charts from Google Trends usage for the “emasculating” search term has skyrocketed, and thousands of references to the quote appear to across Google News. If the first rule of speaking is to know your audience, such a remark prompts questions about whether Brin, and by extension Google, knows theirs. What will Google Glass be used for? The answer seems to be literally anyone’s guess. In a recently ended contest, Google asked potential Google Glass customers — when “ ” to purchase the $1,500 developer device — to identify and define themselves via the use of a #ifihadglass hashtag on or . Thanks to public messages and public APIs, results from the #ifihadglass marketing campaign are in effect transparent. In order to guess at what Google is seeing in terms of gender breakdown amid this abundance of marketing information, TechCrunch collected close to 11,000 Google+ posts and 22,000 tweets tagged with #ifihadglass and looked at the likely gender of the authors’ first names. The results suggest that if Google isn’t yet worried about encouraging female adoption of Google Glass, perhaps it should be. Amateur analysis is fraught with guesswork — especially when dealing with gender-by-name, since names such as “Taylor” can be donned by both females and males. To attempt to compensate, a probability for each gender was assigned using on how frequently the name occurs by gender in the United States. Names like “Elizabeth” with greater than a 95 percent certainty of being a given gender was assigned to a gender group; mixed names like “Taylor” were compared across genders and become ‘likely-male’ or ‘likely-female’ and grouped together as ‘uncertain’; both never-before-seen and non-names like “JetBlue” get lumped into the ‘ambiguous’ group. To be taken with skepticism, here’s the breakdown of the TechCrunch analysis of the likely gender of authors of #ifihadglass postings on Google+: For Twitter: Google has a that makes its publicly findable data quality a little better than Twitter’s. The gender breakdown of Google+ users and so a good baseline of over-/under-representation by gender cannot be established across both Twitter and Google+. Any uncontrolled or publicly sourced are suspect and the underlying dataset here is not an exception. Another possible problem is that kind of hashtag analysis also embraces the “no press is bad press” mentality and includes those with their own marketing efforts and and those just having . Despite all the caveats, the numbers present a strong argument why Brin might be tempted to play up the “masculinity” angle for Google Glass: among early customers talking about “#ifihadglass,” about four out of five appear to be men. The other edge to this truth is that while it might be tempting to preach to the male demographic choir, in fact Google should perhaps be doing the opposite: encouraging early adoption among women. Without a representative customer base selling the first generation of this technology to their peers, Google could end up with the next Segway. An informal mining of the many uses suggested by these prospective customers — among them, health and recreation (traveling, coaching, workout, biofeedback, biking, baby care), health and emergency services (emergency care, diagnosis, surgery), reference (instructional material, study aids/practice, translation, search, research, image recognition), location (GPS/maps, directions, traffic), communication (reading, sharing, teaching, training, tours), productivity (note taking, tasks) and cooking — none but the very visually- or manually intensive applications scream for the immediate abandonment of the ubiquitous and “emasculating” smartphone. In this case, as in others, data seem to back common sense that it’s not a great marketing strategy to alienate a critical and already-trailing customer segment.
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Conde Nast Leads $20M Round In Boutique Marketplace Farfetch, Its Third E-Fashion Investment In 4 Weeks (Updated)
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
, a London-based online marketplace for independent boutiques, has raised another $20 million, led by a new strategic backer, the fashion publishing powerhouse , along with participation from existing investors Index Ventures, Advent Venture Partners and e.ventures. 2013 is shaping up to be a big year for Conde Nast in the world of European e-fashion investments: this is the third investment announced in the last month, with the first two coming out of the Conde Nast Germany subsidiary, for , and online designer shop . In both those cases, the amount of the investment was not disclosed, although TechCrunch understands that it is significantly less than the Farfetch round, which is Conde Nast’s largest investment to date outside of the U.S., with Farfetch also having a considerably more global focus across Europe, Asia and the U.S. These are not the company’s first e-commerce investments. In November 2012, it also participated in a $20 million Series C round for . The new investment in Farfetch — which has now raised $44 million to-date, after raising — was first reported in the , and we have confirmed the details of the story with Advent partner Frederic Court. The investment is expected to be formally unveiled tomorrow. Court describes it as “effectively a Series C,” although a valuation is not being disclosed. : And in true old media fashion, the investment has now been some 15 hours after the news broke. The investment will be used for Farfetch to enter into new markets (geographical and otherwise). José Neves, founder and CEO of Farfetch notes: “This investment will fuel our entry to new markets while assisting our growth in existing ones. Our goal to build a unique curated global franchise in online designer fashion is brought several steps closer through the exciting involvement of Condé Nast.” The announcement was made by Jonathan Newhouse, chairman and CEO of Conde Nast International, a part of Advance Publications. (Original article continues below.) As with the previous investments in Monoqi and ReneSim, this is a signal of how Conde Nast is looking beyond being a content portal, and playing further in the area where fashion has seen the most activity online — in e-commerce. Fashion magazines in Conde Nast’s stable — which include Vogue, Glamour, GQ, WWD and more — already have a close relationship with commerce: they are focused on presenting to the world the latest in fashion and provide a guide to consumers on what to buy. In that sense, getting involved in the actual business of e-commerce closes the loop. E-commerce potentially also provides another, complementary revenue stream alongside advertising and paywalls for Conde Nast. It could also help it potentially compete better against sites like , and many others that already offer consumers not only a place to discover fashion, but buy it, too. “We were thinking of raising money and were having a dialog with Conde Nast for a while, and could see a lot of synergies,” said Court. “The main one is that they understand fashion very well and we don’t have any conflict of interest, which might have been the case if the investment came from a particular brand or manufacturer.” But that’s not to say that this investment will be anything other than purely financial in its early stages. Jose Neves, the founder and CEO of Farfetch, also confirmed to the NYT that the two companies had been speaking for a year, and, instead of talking up what kind of e-commerce fruits Farfetch could bring to Conde Nast, emphasized what Conde Nast brought to Farfetch. Conde Nast, he told the paper, was “very much about news and newness in term of fashion discovering new and emerging talent.” “Right now we haven’t really discussed what they will do in detail,” said Court. “This is essentially a financial investmet from an investor who can clearly build synergies.” The big question is whether e-commerce investments will prove to give good yields to media companies like Conde Nast in the future. Companies like have invested in the e-commerce end of online content in the past, and on the other side, companies like Amazon have become and publishing. Farfetch’s main business to date has been to build out a marketplace and platform for independent boutiques — some 250 at the moment — to show off and sell their goods online. This means that Farfetch itself doesn’t hold any inventory of its own, and behaves more like an aggregator and service provider — providing a selling and payment platform, the ability to bring in traffic to a smaller boutique, as well as packaging and logistics. That makes it the kind of business you could see competing with the likes of eBay as well as Amazon, along with a number of smaller, independent players. The company’s annual runrate right now, TechCrunch understands, is $129 million and growing at close to 150% year-on-year (although that is actually down from the rate Farfetch provided last year, of 204%. It also recently saw its first $1 million day in terms of sales. Farfetch does not disclose the commission it takes on sales made through its site but says that it is not as high as the 30/70 split we tend to see around digital content. The NYT further notes that Farfetch, which was founded in 2008, aggregates in total some 82,000 products across those boutiques and has 150,000 customers in 140 countries, who spent $680 on average per order.
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How Halfbrick Studios Develops Games Like Fruit Ninja, Age Of Zombies And Jetpack Joyride
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
“This is the original concept shot for Fruit Ninja which was pitched to the company during Halfbrick Fridays. This is literally the very first piece of Fruit Ninja imagery ever created, so it’s historically significant,” ‘s Chief Marketing Officer Phil Larsen said in an email to me last week after I interviewed him and his colleague Richard McKinney, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, about how the company develops its games. Halfbrick Fridays is one of the ways the Brisbane, Australia-based company comes up with new ideas for its games. Fruit Ninja – its greatest hit to date – came out of this. About five to seven times a year, the company organizes these Halfbrick Fridays, they told me, where the whole company (about 70 people at this point), breaks into groups of around five people to brainstorm new ideas. The cool thing here is that it’s not just the game designers and developers who participate, but anybody who works for the company – be that in accounting or quality assurance – participates in these sessions. , for example, is the result of this process (though Larsen and McKinney told me the final version looked very different from the prototype). So is . These events either last for about a week or are spread out to one day during a period of about five to seven weeks. Once the idea for Fruit Ninja was born, it only took a few months to make, but some game ideas, the team told me, have been floating around for years and have yet to become reality. What’s interesting about how Halfbrick turns its game ideas into actual products is that virtually all of its games use one underlying engine (written almost exclusively in C++). The core engine team consists of six “hardcore programmers,” as McKinney told me, and they ensure that those teams that work on the individual games have a stable architecture that they can then write their own code for. One of Halfbrick’s larger teams, by the way, is now the cloud service team that provides the back-end technology to connect games together across platforms. Halfbrick uses Amazon’s EC2 platform for this and recently switched to a NoSQL database for better scalability. The point of the core engine, the team stressed, is to be able to publish apps across platforms as easily as possible. Many game developers who have a hit on one platform often find themselves struggling to port their games to another platform, which can take months and could make them lose precious momentum. Halfbrick Studios releases games for Windows, Xbox, PlayStation, Windows Phone, Android and iOS. All the core parts of the code are written in C++. “A lot of companies get into the mistake of writing just in Objective C and put all of their game logic etc. in Objective C,” McKinney told me. “How do you get that into Android?” To avoid having to rewrite a lot of code, Halfbrick just uses C++ across the board and drops into native languages as little as possible. The core engine provides the developers with generic interfaces into the engine that abstracts almost all of the platform specifics for them and using C++ gives the teams control over performance and lets them fine-tune things and control memory usage. C++, they also stressed, offers a large number of third-party libraries for game developers. Halfbrick then uses a mix of open source and proprietary tools to publish the code to the various native platforms. Most of the development at Halfbrick happens in Visual Studio, though the team does need to use Apple’s Xcode every now and then. Visual Studio, McKinney told me, “is the best environment for creating games as far as we are concerned.” Halfbrick doesn’t want its developers to have to learn lots of different environments and the pipeline the team has created allows coders to work almost exclusively in Visual Studio and C++, even when they are developing for HTML5. Being in Brisbane, the two told me, gives them access to a great pool of developers (there are also small teams that work out of Sydney, San Francisco and Spain). Brisbane features a number of game development schools and college programs, so finding talent isn’t all that hard. Given that C++ has long been the standard in the gaming world, game developers with the right kind of experience aren’t all that hard to find, but because the company doesn’t have too many formal review processes and works with very small teams, McKinney and Larsen told me that the company is extremely picky about who they hire. “We want to make sure we have a fun culture and don’t want to ruin the magic we got,” Larsen noted. Because of this, new hires are required to have a very high level of tech ability. Looking ahead, Halfbrick plans to launch about five games this year after mostly focusing on expanding its existing catalog to new platforms last year. Some of these new games will be spin-offs of the company’s current hits and some will be completely new, but the exact details are obviously under wraps.
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This iPhone Breathalyzer Wants To Call You A Cab
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Last Saturday, I got sauced for purely journalistic purposes: I had to test out what could be the first law enforcement-grade iPhone breathalyzer accessory. It was also , the delightful Jewish holiday that celebrates my people’s liberation from yet another anti-semitic tyrant with dancing and a lot of alcohol. Alcohoot, an iPhone accessory that plugs into the phone’s audio port, wants to make accurate breathalyzers more affordable (at only $95) and seamlessly integrates with other notable smartphone apps, like on-demand car service Uber. If a user on the verge of drunk texting their ex-girlfriend while driving home blows over the legal limit, Alcohoot wants the software to seamlessly call the sad sack a discounted cab. , any technology that connects responsible drinking to the viral nature of iPhone software is a welcome addition to society. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/50234562 w=600&h=450] Even without the potential software integration, the Israeli-based startup’s breathalyzer has an attractive price-point. While keychain breathalyzers go for the low-low price of $70, a found that they were extraordinarily inaccurate. Fuel-cell-based measures–the same used by police–will set responsible citizens back over $250. Alcohoot expects to hit the retail market for only $99. Yet, what’s really attractive about the concept of an iPhone-based breathalyzer is the social integration. For starters, the slick interface is fun to pass around. I and my other ancient Hebrew descendants were eager to pass around Alcohoot and see how drunk we were. The device promotes sobriety awareness without the buzz kill of sending a grown-up hall-monitor to dish out guilt. Second, the founders hope to partner with car services, such as , , or to offer blitzed users a discounted, convenient ride home. Imagine blowing into and Alcohoot, unexpectedly realizing you’re much drunker than you thought, and then being asked if you’d like to accept a discounted Uber? Psychologically, it’d be much harder to pass up the responsible decision, especially if you could automatically brag on Facebook for making the ethical choice. The breathalyzer prototype debuted of the Kairos Society in New York, an annual gathering of socially oriented young entrepreneurs. I go to a lot of startup pitch conferences, and Kairos had an impressive array of members. In addition to Alcohoot, the conference included a , a 3D printing vending machine, Virtual U, that sizes up consumer body measurements for online shopping, DiagnoseMe, at-home kit for detecting serious illness through sweat, and Sword & Plough, stylish bags made by veterans from recycled military materials. Alcohoot plans on releasing a tuned-up version sometime in the near future (mockups below). But, the product is still developing. Brainstorm below: how else could a smartphone-connected breathalyzer promote safe driving?
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A Chat With Robotics Pioneer Red Whittaker On The Google Lunar X Prize And The Future Of Interstellar Exploration
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Red Whittaker is a certified legend in the robotics community. The head of the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon University, Whittaker has been instrumental building the driverless car that took part in the DARPA Grand Challenge as well as the Mars Rover, a robot designed to explore volcanoes, the arctic, and other planets. Whittaker and his team is now taking on the Google Lunar X Prize, an effort to put an unmanned rover on the moon to send back video and images. His design, a unique rover coupled with a lander unit, is in the running to be one of the big winners in the race. The roboticist is a former Marine and has the brusque and wily demeanor of a man who knows what he’s doing. We had a chance to talk with him about his work, the lander, and the future of space travel.
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Fitness And Health Tracker Fitbit Is Raising $30M At A $300M-Plus Valuation
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
Fitness technology and hardware startup is raising north of $30 million in growth capital at a $300 million-plus valuation, according to multiple sources. The company in January 2012 from Foundry Group, True Ventures, SoftTech VC and Felicis Ventures. It’s unclear who the investors are in this round. Fitbit, which was a in 2008, offers a number of devices that track weight, nutrition, exercise, sleeping patterns and other health-related data for users. The company originally launched the Fitbit Tracker, which has This device clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket and captures information about daily health activities, such as steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, exercise intensity levels and sleep quality. Fitbit’s Wi-Fi-enabled scale, will transmit both weight and body fat measurements wirelessly to your Fitbit account. In the past year, Fitbit launched a more lightweight version of the tracker called the which measures steps, distance and calories burned. And most recently, the company debuted the which is similar in form to the Jawbone UP or Nike FuelBand, and also tracks steps, distance, calories burned, active minutes, hours slept and quality of sleep. While there is no shortage of health and fitness trackers that have emerged in the past few years, Fitbit was one of the first. So the company has a leg up on some of the competition when it comes to manufacturing, developing companion products and more. And we’re told the company is making meaningful revenue these days, justifying its heftier valuation.
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Google Is Building A Same-Day Amazon Prime Competitor, “Google Shopping Express”
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
Google is stealthily preparing to launch an competitor called “Google Shopping Express.” According to one source the service will be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime, so $69 or $64 a year and offer same-day delivery from brick-and-mortar stores like Target, Walmart, Walgreens and Safeway (though no specifics were mentioned by our sources). When and if it launches, the product will be a competitor to Amazon Prime, eBay Now, Postmates’ and even smaller startups like We’re hearing that the project is being run by , an e-commerce product manager at Google, and is an effort to focus Google’s e-commerce initiatives. Google Wallet and Google Shopping need a focal point, and serving as a to big-name retailers could be that in. Google has been for a way to capitalize on its advantages in the space — the fact that it’s arguably one of the first places people visit when they want to find a product — for a while. If the Google Shopping Express service debuts publicly, and we have no reason to think that it won’t, this would mean that the company could capitalize on its recent acquisitions of both and to dominate the online-to-offline retail market. Google could possibly use its BufferBox delivery lockers to facilitate the ease of shipment — like what Amazon in Seattle, New York and the UK. It could use Channel Intelligence’s data-management platform to coordinate sales and delivery. We believe Google employees may already be dogfooding the service, but we have little information as to how partnerships are handled and how subscribing works. You know where to if you do.
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MEETiiN Lands $500K To Optimize Its Cloud-Based Meeting Management Platform
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
, a meeting management platform startup based in Taipei, has received $500,000 from angel investors including . Since its launch last month, 2,400 accounts have been opened on the platform, says spokeswoman Kris Jen. MEETiiN is operated by skyWallets, a startup founded by former employees of HTC, LiteOn and Yahoo that is also the developer behind , an idea management and development platform for creative professionals. Innobridge’s prior investments include AboveNet, Canon, Mobilink, and PayPal investment. MEETiiN’s cloud-based meeting management platform is targeted to SMEs and designed to direct meetings and organize follow-up tasks. The startup’s clients currently include Epson and LiteOn. Jen tells me MEETiin has a leg-up on its competitors because “compared with other online conference platforms, MEETiiN is more like a task-oriented cloud service starting with meetings. Besides minutes taking, MEETiiN provides a powerful service to track and follow up tasks, which ensures every meeting is completely effective without any issues being sidelined. Moreover, we designed a quite intuitive interface, so every user can get the hang of MEETiiN really quickly.” MEETiiN has two core functions: the PMF and Eagle View. PMF stands for “planning, management and followup” and allows users to set agendas, take meeting minutes, invite meeting participants, and track tasks. The Eagle View function is meant for executives and allows them to track the progress of different meetings simultaneously. MEETiiN can be used on the Web and iOS devices. The company plans to use angel funding to expand its team, add more functions to the MEETiiN platform and optimize its service.
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Samsung Publicly Apologizes For Fatal Gas Leak At Semiconductor Plant
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
Samsung has a rare public apology for a January 28 gas leakage at one of the company’s semiconductor plants that resulted in the death of a contractor. The accident occurred at Samsung’s semiconductor plant in Hwaseong, and injured four other workers in addition to the worker that died. The public apology, made by company vice chairman Kwon Oh-hyun, comes after Samsung co-president Jeon Dong Su to families of the workers affected and confirmed a third-party investigation into the causes of the hydrofluoric acid gas leak. According to a report from , hydrofluoric acid is a colorless acute poison that can damage the lungs and bones and affect the nervous system. Two days after the incident, Samsung was just one million won (about $1,000 USD) for not reporting the gas leak quickly enough. An official alert was not given until after the contractor had died in a hospital. Furthermore, police that an analysis of CCTV footage showed that hydrofluoric acid had leaked into the area around the plant after the accident, which conflicted with Samsung’s earlier statement that the situation had been contained. Police said they would not rule out the possibility that tens of thousands of residents living within a 2 kilometer radius of the Hwaseong plant have been partially affected by the gas. Kwon said in his statement that Samsung will revoke its application to have its Hwaseong plants certified as “green” by the government for the next five years. The company’s plants in Hwaseong were first certified as green in 1998, which meant they could bypass regular inspections. An application for re-designation had been submitted to the government in late August. Seven people, including three of Samsung’s officials, are being on charges of negligence related to the hydrofluoric acid gas leak. Kwon said that the company is taking steps to prevent similar accidents from happening. “We plan to overhaul the system in a bid to better make environmentally-friendly workplaces,” Kwon said.
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Microsoft: We Will Continue Our Scroogled Campaign “As Long As Google Keeps Scroogling People”
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
Despite , Microsoft’s is long from over. Earlier today, a number of publications picked up on a comment by Bing Search Director Stefan Weitz who told that the campaign is “about finished.” Now, however, a Microsoft spokesperson has told us that this is not true and that we should “stay tuned for the next chapter.” Here is the full statement from Microsoft: “Scroogled will go on as long as Google keeps Scroogling people. We know Google doesn’t like it when the facts come out. Chapter two of the consumer education campaign has shown people care about their privacy. More than 3.5 million people visited , and nearly 115,000 people signed a petition asking Google to stop going through their Gmail. Stay tuned for the next chapter.” The Scroogled campaign, which alleges that Google is and focuses too much on paid placement in its , started last November and is one of Microsoft’s most aggressive attempts to paint Google’s services in a negative light. It’s not clear how successful the campaign has been so far, but as Weitz told me last month, he doesn’t believe that a campaign that just focuses on features would be enough to convince users to switch search and email providers. Google, Weitz argued, “is a habit” for most people and Microsoft wants to use this campaign to get people to stop and think about their choices. Given that it’s not over yet, we will surely get to see more gems like this in the near future: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WIluNt0mvA?feature=player_embedded]
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Why Every Office Should Switch To Walking Desks
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 |
Man was not meant to spend all day hunched over a dimly lit screen; disturbingly high incidences of obesity, and are our bodies’ not-so-subtle ways of saying they want to get up and move around. After piloting a walking desk – a standing desk attached to a treadmill – for a month, I’m convinced they should become the default workstation. Immediately, my daily calorie burn jumped 30.7 percent, and I lost 3 pounds and a percent of body fat in a week. I also experienced less joint pain throughout the day. The Lifespan TR-1200-DT5 ( : $1,500) places a square standing desk atop standard-size treadmill (74″). Instead of a large front dashboard, a relatively discrete control panel for speed is attached on the body-facing side of the desk. Speed varies from .4 MPH to 4MPH (about the pace of a light run). Migrating to the walking desk was relatively easy: I just plopped my laptop and monitor down on the squarish 46-inch desk and got to work. The intuitive interface lets you choose several tracking mechanisms for calorie burn and distance. The first day I couldn’t walk more than an hour at a time before I felt like I was losing concentration. It also takes some getting used to walking like a Tyrannosaurus rex (arms tucked-in and elbows bent at the keyboard). At first, I would work for an hour walking, and then sit for 30 minutes. The first day I walked about four hours. Now I only rest once a day. It also took a bit to develop the musculature in my upper back to support raised arms for hours on end. This is no longer a problem. After experimenting with different speeds, I now vary between .8 and 1.2, picking up speed in the late morning/early afternoon to offset the natural fatigue that precedes the morning news rush. Every so often I have to lean on my elbows or straddle the rails to take a break. While it’s intuitive to think that walking for an extra 5 to 8 hours a day would burn more calories, recent scientific evidence suggested otherwise. A study of “exergames” – video games that require full-body movement – found “no evidence that children receiving the active video games were more active in general, or at any time, than children receiving the inactive video games,” concluded the research in Pediatrics. “When you prescribe increased physical activity, overall activity remains the same because the subjects compensate by reducing other physical activities during the day,” explained author Anthony Barnett to . Second, anthropologists debunked the myth that modern-day sedentary life has caused expanding waistlines. A physiological study of one of the last-remaining hunter-gatherer tribes, the Hadza in East Africa, “found that despite all this physical activity, the number of calories that the Hadza burned per day was indistinguishable from that of typical adults in Europe and the United States,” the researchers wrote in . “We ran a number of statistical tests, accounting for body mass, lean body mass, age, sex and fat mass, and still found no difference in daily energy expenditure between the Hadza and their Western counterparts.” So, if I was walking part of the day, would I end up being lazier throughout? Getting up fewer times to grab a glass of water, unconsciously sitting on the subway more often, or sleeping more? No, it turns out — quite the opposite. My average daily calorie expenditure jumped 30.7% (2606 vs. 3408), as measured by the BodyMedia armband, which calculates personalized calorie burn from the body’s sweat and skin temperature. Calorie burn per day as measured by the BodyMedia armband. Y-axis is calories burned per minute The first week, I dropped 3 pounds (as expected from the 1500 calorie/day deficit) and a whole percentage of body fat (as measured by a Withings scale). Subsequently, my weight and body composition stabilized. But, that’s probably because I have the metabolism of a catatonic gerbil and can’t seem to find any diet that works. Others may have different results. Additionally, I find myself better equipped to take on San Francisco’s hills and will often walk to a meeting now if its less than 1.5 miles away. Indeed, I’m addicted to being upright. One day, when the subway broke down on my way to the gym, I just ran to class from the Mission to downtown SOMA (roughly 2.1 miles)–a surprise to me since I don’t think I’ve ever run two miles straight. The problem I face now is loathing to work sitting down. While traveling, I’ll look for coffee shops that have a window facing bar so I can at least stand during work. Walking while working has a few unintended complications. For one, sometimes my laptop microphone picks up vibrations from the treadmill and I have to explain that I am not in the middle of a construction site. Second, I eat while walking now. On occasion, I drop food crumbs, which inevitably get carried along the conveyor belt and pile up behind me. I am yet to find a tiny, oblong trash bin to catch the byproduct of my imperfect eating habits. Quirks aside, I’m definitely keeping the walking desk. Man was meant to be upright, and I want to live a long, healthy human life.
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 3 | null |
Microsoft Acquires Cloud Performance Management Service MetricsHub, Makes It Available For Free On Azure
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
Microsoft just that it has acquired , a service that automates cloud performance management and helps its customers manage their cloud services . MetricsHub in the , a competitive three-month accelerator program the company hosts in collaboration with TechStars. The program provides these companies with $20,000 from TechStars, $60,000 worth of cloud computing services on Azure, office space in Seattle and, it seems, a chance to be acquired by Microsoft. Windows Azure users, Microsoft also today announced, can now use a “pre-release, no charge, version of MetricsHub’s Active Cloud Monitoring,” which is available through the Windows Azure store. All of its paying customers, MetricsHub today, will be converted to the free plan. The financial details of the transaction remain under wraps, but the service currently only has 374 users, so chances are the price wasn’t all that high. MetricsHub provides users with the ability to scale their service up or down as needed and offers health and performance monitoring with alerts and notifications when things go wrong. It’s not quite as fully featured as or similar tools, but it’s definitely a great and free service for companies that run on Microsoft’s Azure platform. “Cloud solutions are compelling for a variety of reasons – scale, flexibility and value – particularly for companies looking to do more with less, Bob Kelly, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for strategy and business development writes in today’s announcement. “However, it’s difficult to understand, monitor and correlate all the application data points that tell you how and when you need to scale your application. “
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Twitter Shuts Down TweetDeck For Android, iPhone And AIR, Discontinues TweetDeck’s Facebook Integration
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
, the feature-rich Twitter client that Twitter in 2011, will soon mostly exist as a web-based service, and the native Mac and Windows apps will play second fiddle to the web and Chrome apps. The company is the AIR-based version of TweetDeck for desktop and will remove the Android and iPhone apps from their respective mobile stores in May. In addition, the TweetDeck team announced today, it will also “discontinue support for our Facebook integration.” TweetDeck will continue to support its native apps for and , but the clear focus will be on the web and Chrome apps, which, the team writes, will “provide the best TweetDeck experience yet.” The web-based apps will also be the first to get new features, “followed closely by [the] Mac and PC apps.” Given the clear focus on the web apps, it may just be a matter of time before the native apps will also get the ax. Twitter clearly remains committed to TweetDeck as a tool for power users, and today’s announcement notes that the team doubled in size over the past six months. Most users already use TweetDeck on their desktops and Twitter on mobile. The current versions of TweetDeck for AIR, iPhone and Android still use version 1.0 of Twitter’s API, which is about to be over the next few weeks. The apps Twitter is retiring today haven’t been updated in a long time, so in some ways, the writing was already on the wall for them anyway. The discontinued support for the Facebook integration is only mentioned in one sentence in the announcement (“We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration”), but we have asked Twitter for more details about this and will update this post once we hear more.
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U.K. MOOCs Alliance, Futurelearn, Adds British Council To Its Free Higher Education Roster
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
The U.K. MOOCs alliance, , which was and will be offering its first free courses “from mid-2013” with the aim of creating a globally accessible British higher education brand, has added another member to its consortium of backers. The is the latest to join the Futurelearn alliance, following the and a further five universities which piled in last month. The total number of institutions now supporting Futurelearn is 19. The British Council, which operates in more than 100 countries and has charitable status, , has particular experience in running English language courses and in arts and culture-related education. It’s unclear whether it will be offering its own branded courses via Futurelearn or helping other partners develop course content. Possibly a bit of both. A spokeswoman for Futurelearn commented via email: “The British Council will be working with Futurelearn on a variety of levels including course development, assessment and examinations. Last year, over 2 million people took exams with the British Council in more than 90 countries. They’ll be bringing this and their vast experience of Higher Education to bear in their work with Futurelearn.” Commenting on the tie-up with Futurelearn, the British Council’s Chief Executive, Martin Davidson, added in a statement: “The British Council has been bringing the UK’s education sector to people around the world for almost eighty years, so it’s very exciting that with Futurelearn we’re able to expand that to millions more people through the MOOC platform. “We hope that our recognised experience in English-language learning and delivering assessments and examinations in nearly a hundred countries will contribute to making Futurelearn even more attractive for ambitious learners around the world.” Futurelearn Launch CEO, Simon Nelson, described the British Council as a “tremendous addition to the Futurelearn family,” in another statement, flagging up its “long track record of creating educational opportunities for people on a global scale.” U.K. universities backing Futurelearn are the five that joined last month — Bath, Leicester, Nottingham, Queen’s Belfast and Reading — along with the original 12 partners: Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St Andrews, Warwick and UK distance-learning organization The Open University.
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Luxury Clothing Startup Everlane Crowdfunds Its Canada Launch, Targets More International Growth
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
It’s becoming that crowdfunding isn’t just for nascent upstart projects anymore. The latest example of this: , the company that produces and sells luxury clothing and accessories at a discount since it’s , is raising $100,000 in a to determine whether it will extend its reach into Canada. The effort, which began this morning, has been a big success so far, with some 480 contributors committing more than $32,000 just nine hours into the 17 day campaign. It bears mention that the money being raised is not all that’s necessary to fund the Canadian launch. Each provides a gift that’s equal to the amount given — $15 gets a $15 gift card (or a $15 Everlane tee,) $60 gets $60 gift card, and so on. “We’re not using any of this to fund the operations,” Everlane founder and CEO Michael Preysman said in a phone interview today. “It’s our internal benchmark. We said, ‘If we hit this mark, there are a lot of people in Canada who really want Everlane.'” Looking ahead, Preysman says Everlane is eyeing even more international expansion, with launches in the UK and Australia hopefully on deck by the end of 2013. Today, Everlane currently has more than 500,000 members in the US alone. It’s an interesting example of how crowdfunding can be valuable even for companies that don’t necessarily need the money. Hard data about consumer intent can be hard to come by, and crowdfunding provides concrete feedback about people who are truly interested in something — people who will put money down are clearly pretty serious about wanting a product. Traditionally it’s been used by upstart projects that need the money to take the next step, but this shows that it can be a valuable data collection tool in itself. It’s a big departure from how small e-commerce companies typically handle international expansion. The status quo way to evaluate which regions to expand to next is counting the inbound requests received via email — an obviously vague way of gauging demand. “Bigger companies can do significantly-sized user studies, but for smaller companies like us, it’s a shot in the dark,” Preysman said. “There have been a number of instances where you see startups enter, say, Europe and it just doesn’t work out.” The risk of something not working out is not one that Everlane was keen to take. “We had a lot of people emailing us asking ‘When is Canada coming?’ But it’s not easy for us to just launch another country,” he said, noting that Everlane, which has taken on $1.1 million in venture capital, has just 19 full-time staffers who handle all design, production, marketing, and IT in-house. The crowdsourcing move was a risk as well, though. “We spent a lot of time on this idea, wondering, ‘Is this the way to enter a country, will people get upset, will people understand, will the $100,000 number be right?'” Preysman said. Luckily for Everlane, the response has clearly been a positive one — and it’ll be interesting to see if others follow suit.
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Silicon Valley Has Hit Peak Lameness
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Jack McKenna
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
Hey , I know you think it’s cool that is being written up in TechCrunch. But seriously, half-naked girls in silver mono-kinis dancing in front of floating arithmetic, fractions and percentage signs? Why would women want to work for this company? When did Silicon Valley become so thin on actual technology that startups had to have “nerd” or “science”-themed parties to have cred? You’re YC-backed for chissake. went into hiring contortionists? What would Jessica Livingston think? P.S. In case anyone thinks Jack McKenna doesn’t know how to party, Jack McKenna thought of this post while dancing in a “rave cave” at 11 a.m. on Sunday. Because Jack McKenna rolls all weekend long. Sans fake hand and tentacle fingers.
Virool’s CEO Alexander Debelov in a comment below. He says that Virool didn’t spend any investor money on the party, is profitable and is on a multi-million dollar annualized runrate. That’s great. But success shouldn’t mean throwing parties full of hired girls. Many tech companies like Facebook and Airbnb had, erm, parties in their very early days, but they learned and they grew up. Virool should too.
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Chamath Palihapitiya Confirms That His Social+Capital Partnership Has Raised A New Fund Of $275M+
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
, the early Facebook executive who to launch , said today that he has raised a second fund. Palihapitiya, who was speaking at the Launch conference in San Francisco, didn’t specify the fund size or the limited partners who invested. (The fund was earlier in that pegged its size as $325 million, but the firm hadn’t commented.) He did say that it was “more than $275 million” (the size of his first fund), and that it came from “the same folks,” as well as some “really amazing” additions. He also mentioned the Mayo Clinic as an LP, and he talked proudly about how his investment returns can fund improvements in the hospital. That tied into one of the broader themes of the interview, namely Palihapitiya’s interest in making a social impact. In fact, he said, “If I burn through all the money I make through Facebook doing that, I don’t care.” “The point is, what’s the value?” he added. “The value isn’t when you exit and you get the check. The legacy is, what’s the value and what’s the tale that’s left over?” To be clear, The Social+Capital Partnership isn’t purely focused on doing good. True, Palihapitiya said that with a fund of around $300 million, he’s making “some pretty crazy bets” that could end up “going to zero.” On the other hand, he tries to take $100 million of the fund and “compound the shit” out of it, by investing in more likely bets. In fact, he said that through the firm’s investments and his own activity as an angel investor, Social+Capital “participated in $2 billion in liquidity” last year — which is why it was able to raise another fund.
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Facebook Admits Likes Are Down For Some Celebrities’ Posts, But Claims Up 34% For Most
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
Facebook dwindling engagement with public posts to subscribers cited by The New York Times’ , other journalists, and I, but calls us isolated cases, noting public figures with more than 10,000 fans are now getting 34 percent more Likes and comments than a year ago. While Facebook often changes the news feed to improve the user experience, the inconsistency is irksome. So here’s the story. Yesterday, Nick Bilton of the New York Times wrote that when using Facebook’s Twitter-esque Subscribe feature to post public updates to his subscribers, he’s getting a lot fewer Likes and comments than a year ago. He suggested this is because Facebook is showing more ads instead. Other journalists including me cited similar experiences, where t now than in the months after Subscribe launched. I suggested that along with the presence of ads, people sharing more posts that compete for news feed space and Facebook’s tendency to give more feed presence to new products may have been responsible for the drought. In a bit of damage control, Facebook sent out the following statement, hoping to frame these cases as flukes. Here’s the full-text, with my comments in brackets. — From Facebook: Our goal with News Feed is always to show each individual the most relevant blend of stories that maximizes engagement and interest. [ That’s true, and overall it’s a good thing, but the quietly rolled-out fluctuations can cause serious problems for businesses, app developers, and professional content producers.] There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true. We want to clear up any misconceptions by explaining how the News Feed algorithm works. [ Yes, Facebook isn’t actively suppressing organic posts, but news feed ads take up room, and may push organic posts further down the feed where they’re less likely to be read.] First, in aggregate, engagement – likes, comments, shares – has gone up for most people with followers. In fact, overall engagement on posts from people with followers has gone up 34% year over year. [ This is a relatively vague metric on paper, but Facebook says it is corrected for subscriber count growth, so most Subscribe users should have more engagement per post per subscriber than a year ago.] Second, a few data points should not be taken as representative of what actually is happening overall. There are numerous factors that may affect distribution, including quality and number of posts. [ That’s true, but it’s a bit suspicious that so many journalists had the same experience. Maybe there weren’t enough data points for a scientific analysis, but this seems dismissive.] News Feed shows people the most relevant stories from their friends and Pages they are connected to. In fact, the News Feed algorithm is separate from the advertising algorithm in that we don’t replace the most engaging posts in News Feed with sponsored ones. [ People need to accept this as fact. It doesn’t mean ads aren’t reducing the visibility of organic posts, but ads straight up replacing organic posts.] Some other background points for context: • The argument here is based on a few anecdotes of one post from one year to a totally different post from another year. [ I personally compared a half dozen posts from a year ago and last month and saw equal or less engagement now compared to a year ago despite my follower count increasing 5X to 10X.]
• This is an apples-to-oranges comparison; you can’t compare engagement rates on two different posts year over year.
• These anecdotes are taken as representative of what is happening overall. [ Anecdotes, yes, but a fair number of them.]
• In fact, the opposite is happening overall – engagement has gone up 34% on posts from people who have more than 10,000 followers. [ Except for the the next line…]
• For early adopters of Follow, we do see instances where their follower numbers have gone up but their engagement has gone down from a year ago. [ Confirmation that what Bilton and I said about our experiences is true.]
• In the past six months, however, we have introduced changes to solve the above instance – the goal being to promote more content from public figures. These include organic units in NF such as “most shared on ;,” “most shared about ;,” and redesigned feed stories for link shares that feature larger images and longer descriptions. Our index of partners has already seen a significant increase in traffic (35%) due to the introduction of these units. [ These may help drive traffic to the right place, but seem to reduce the influence of public figures as the posts don’t seem to come directly from them with their commentary. The 35% increase in traffic is to news sites and reader apps, not the individual writers and public figures that share the links.]
• We are constantly working to improve people’s experience with News Feed, and changes like the above we think will surface more of the right posts to the right people. — Long story short, the changes Facebook makes are probably good for most people. That’s not really the issue. What people are pissy about is that the changes sometime hurt businesses and self-serving public figures. And so I’ll reiterate We shouldn’t look a free publishing gift horse in the mouth, but Facebook shouldn’t be surprised if professionals and businesses are a little nervous about depending on it. For more on this issue, read:
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Hourly Worker Software Platform PeopleMatter Raises $19M From Scale Venture Partners
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
, a SaaS for hourly worker human resources management, has raised a $19 million round of venture funding led by Scale Venture Partners, with Intersouth Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Harbert Venture Partners, Noro-Moseley Partners, C&B Capital and Silicon Valley Bank participating. This brings PeopleMatter’s total funding to $47 million. As more businesses look to the cloud for talent management, PeopleMatter is focusing on a specific sector by providing a way for companies to manage hourly workers. Mostly used by companies in the hospitality, retail and food services industries; PeopleMatter’s software manages hiring, talent management and HR, as well as scheduling. It’s built purely for the needs of service-industry employers and their hourly workforces, and users can manage all of their applicant tracking, hiring, onboarding, training and scheduling. Current clients on the PeopleMatter Platform include Ruby Tuesday, Bruegger’s, Thortons, The Krystal Company, Flash Foods, American Retail Services, Noodles & Company, and franchise locations of Domino’s, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Carl’s Jr. CEO Nate DaPore tells us that the new funding will primarily be used to scale the product, and for strategic acquisitions. He adds that some of the competitors in the talent management space such as SuccessFactors and Taleo don’t offer products that focus primarily on the needs of the service industry. In the future, we’ll see PeopleMatter providing more insights and analytics around data stored in its platform as well.
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Galaxy S IV Gets The Pre-Launch Benchmark Treatment, Complete With Leaked Specs
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
The Galaxy S IV, Samsung’s next big flagship smartphone, is only around a week from its public introduction, and it’s getting mighty leaky. Today, the NYT reported that Samsung will be including an , and now a set of benchmarks have emerged that supposedly lay bare the smartphone’s complete hardware profile. Italian site HDBlog.it received word of a record of an from the device, which was later also , and which details the specs associated with the Galaxy S IV supposedly tested. The test results reveal that the smartphone has an Exynos 5410 1.8GHz processor, with an ARM PowerVR SGX 544MP GPU. It was running Android 4.2, had a screen just under 5-inches with a resolution of 1920×1080, and featured a 13-megapixel rear camera, along with Bluetooth 4.0 and capacity of either 16 or 32GB. The display stats line up with what we’ve , as do the . [gallery ids="770264,770265,770266"] The chipset supports GSM/WCDMA/LTE networks, which means that unlike previous Galaxy smartphones, this one will be a true worldphone, if these specs prove to be the real deal. The performance results on the GS IV should reassure any users who might have been expecting a less-than-impressive hardware release, following the NYT’s report earlier that the launch event March 14 will focus mostly on software: it easily beats current category leading devices like the Optimus G and Nexus 4, as well as the Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S III.
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Facebook Pushes Plot To Kill Your “Phone” App By Giving Messenger For Android VoIP In Canada
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
Facebook today will wage its war against your phone’s “phone” application on a new front with an update to that adds VoIP calling for Canadians. It’s also improving group messaging. By combining voice-over-data calling with unified instant, asynchronous, and email messaging, Facebook could dominate communication in the developing world. Here’s why this war is worth it. Facebook’s mission to connect the world breaks down into two channels: 1) public and semi-public posting to your profile and the news feed, and 2) private communication. It already hosts a lot of both of those stacks. The big parts that remain out of its grasp are serious email and short-form public publishing like Twitter, SMS and voice. Facebook already has a band-aid email system built on @facebook.com; Subscribe and public status updates to challenge Twitter; and data-based Messenger to take on SMS. What was missing was voice. Typically connected over cellular and landline connections, old-fashioned voice calling is an expensive, outdated but essential part of how people communicate with their friends and family. Facebook wants to own it. Facebook first began testing in January. If you did your voice calling through Facebook’s open-source-based voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system it’s building into its smartphone apps, the social network would learn a lot more about who you’re closest to. There’s value to users, too, as having voice calling collected with chat and Facebook messages provides a less schizophrenic view of conversations. But the real play here is eventually using free VoIP to lure users in emerging international markets. Facebook is depending on growth in places like India, Brazil, and Singapore now that it has saturated spots like the United States and the UK. Right now, many people in emerging markets buy pre-paid minutes for voice calling, but are starting to buy data plans to access email, the web, and Facebook. What if Facebook could minimize the voice minutes these users have to buy by offering VoIP that’s free beyond the cost of data usage? Suddenly Facebook goes from a nice way to connect with friends to a critical communication service that saves them money. To get there, Facebook needs to see how people use VoIP and learn how to scale it, so it’s starting in its core markets. With today’s , Canadians can VoIP call anyone else with Facebook’s voice calling feature, which includes U.S. iOS users plus iOS and Android users in Canada. The update also makes it easier to group messages by showing group conversations in the sidebar, letting you title group convos, and allowing search of group convos by title or the names of participants. Facebook is known for rapid development of incremental product updates, but less for long-term research and development. The VoIP initiative shows it has the foresight to plan years in advance for when the developing world is smartphone and data plan-equipped, and old-school voice calling is ready to die.
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With $2.1M From True Ventures (And Others), TripleLift Builds Ads From A Brand’s Trending Images
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
is a New York City-based startup aiming to help advertisers embrace what Chief Strategy Officer Ari Lewine calls “the rise of the visual web.” “The web is increasingly dominated by images, and images are quickly becoming the primary currency with which brands communicate with their potential customers,” CEO Eric Berry told me in an email. “TripleLift identifies how consumers engage with brands across the web and uses that data to create more relevant and effective advertising. ” The company was actually founded a year ago (by Lewine, Berry, and President/CTO Shaun Zacharia, who all previously worked at online ad company AppNexus), and it has already run campaigns with some major advertisers. However, the company has only received from the press — now it’s ready to do more of a publicity push, and it’s announcing that it raised a $2.1 million seed round at the end of last year. The round was led by and , with participation from NextView Ventures, Laconia Ventures, MESA+, the Social Internet Fund, Pinterest investor William Lohse’s Social Starts, former DoubleClick executive Paul Olliver, and Liberty City Ventures. Lewine and Berry told me that TripleLift monitors brand content across major publications and social media sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram — it collects more than 10 million engagement points per day, they said. Then it can automatically add that content to standard banner ads. So for example, if a celebrity is seen showing off a company’s new handbag and everyone is getting excited about it online, TripleLift will automatically detect that activity and make sure an image of the handbag gets featured in the company’s ads. And it uses technology like face detection and color analysis to crop the pictures, so images of different size and proportion will look good together in an ad without any extra work from the advertiser. TripleLift says it has already run campaigns for Martha Stewart, Gucci, H&M and Puma, among others. Right now, the data side of the business is being used primarily to power TripleLift ads (“We don’t really sell analytics, and we don’t send them into our dashboard a lot,” Lewine said). But over time that could change as the company expands its analytics features, helping its customers understand what content is working and what isn’t. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the name, Berry said the company is trying to “tie together owned, earned, and paid media” — in other words, brand content, editorial content and advertising. Plus, there are three founders, and three main products. “We can come up 10 other reasons,” Lewine added.
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There’s No Native Instagram App For BlackBerry 10, But This Ported Android Version Gets The Job Done
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
BlackBerry 10 may have launched with over 70,000 apps, but fans of taking pictures of their lunch were saddened to learn that Instagram wasn’t one of them. While there’s still no official version of Instagram for BlackBerry 10 devices, the folks at obtained and released a repackaged ready to load onto a Z10 near you. Before you get excited and run off to snap and share some ridiculous photos, know this: this is most definitely a new, BlackBerry 10-centric version of Instagram, it’s a port of a slightly older Instagram Android build. As such, you’ll have to sideload the app onto your BlackBerry 10 device — it’s not exactly a difficult process, but you do need to be least somewhat proficient with a command line (CrackBerry has some great guides for sideloading from a or an machine) As you’d probably expect, the experience is hardly a perfect one. Snapping photos and sharing them seems to work just fine (though the Z10’s camera doesn’t always grab the best shots), but scrolling through the photo feed is an awfully sluggish affair and new users won’t be able to create an account from within the app. For now though, this (or something like it) may be all that BlackBerry 10 devotees have to look forward to for now. According to a recent report from , the Instagram team isn’t particularly bullish on BlackBerry 10, with one unnamed source noting that they weren’t sure a native version of the Instagram app would ever be released. It’s unclear how BerryThai managed to get a hold of the file in question, but the site’s host shut the whole thing down not long after people started to notice what they had gotten their hands on. Instagram has reportedly been working on an Android port of the app for BlackBerry 10 for some time now ( may have spotted it at the launch event once the theatrics were over), so it’s possible that the .bar file BerryThai is peddling came from an internal source. Then again, it’s also possible that an eager enthusiast did the conversion on their own, though the points to some difficulties on that front. Frankly though, this version of Instagram is just enough of a headache to keep me from wanting to use it — hopefully whatever official version eventually gets released manages to clear up a few of these nagging issues.
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Facebook And Google Bury The Hatchet (Temporarily) To Kill A Core Problem In Gingerbread Dalvik
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
When Facebook hit a limitation in Android’s virtual machine, Dalvik, that would halt its app development, Google and Facebook worked together to create a patch for Gingerbread. “We’re a significant app to them, and they’re a significant platform for us,” Facebook’s Director of Mobile Engineer Mike Shaver explains. It’s another example of Facebook’s hardcore mobile engineering training coming to fruition. Today at a “whiteboard session” on Android at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Shaver talked to a group of reporters about the Dalvik fix, Facebook’s relationship with Google, and how it’s turning not just software engineers but project managers, designers, and even customer support staffers into mobile developers. The turning point was when Facebook hired mobile training house to put employees through an intensive, 40-hour iOS and Android development crash course. Shaver said “it’s eight hours a day, five days a week. If you have a guest come, they’re sent away. Zuck can leave a message. This is what you do. People come out with their heads a little melty but they can write production code that Monday.” Big Nerd Ranch is the same squad that’s taught iOS development at Apple and Android development at Google. Facebook has trained 450 mobile engineers with the program since July. Staffers turned mobile marines recently uncovered a huge stumbling block in Android Gingerbread, which runs on about half of all phones running Android, which on about half the phones in the world. Android’s virtual machine Dalvik, which actually runs the apps you install, had a 3 million method limit. Facebook had already hit that limit, meaning it couldn’t build any more features into its native Android app. Shaver laid out Facebook’s three options: Stop developing its Android app, stop offering its Android app for Gingerbread users, or fix Dalvik. Luckily, “we could look under the hood and see why we were hitting this limit. Not common to be able to do this in the mobile operating system,” Shaver says, complementing Android’s openness. So a bunch of Facebook mobile engineers spent a few weeks analyzing the problem and came up with a patch that was only about six lines of code. Shaver happily admits, “We were able to send the patch over to Google to get their opinion. They were very helpful.” Google looked at the patch for a day and gave Facebook the go-ahead. Then Facebook began testing. Shaver says the social network was able to collaborate with Google to use their test labs. “We went from Defcon 1 and sirens, where we could no longer develop Facebook for half the Android world, to people staying up to fix it, to being able to extend the platform a bit and work with Google on it.” Without the patch, Facebook says it would have had to consider stripping out features, such as the ability to from Facebook For Android. Later today, Facebook will publish an engineering blog post that details the patch so other developers can use it and avoid wasting weeks butting their heads up against Gingerbread Dalvik limits. The whiteboard session overall conveyed the idea that after being an iOS-first company for so long, Facebook is getting serious about utilizing Android’s reach to push its mission of connecting the world. While many of its employees might still prefer iPhones, Android’s low-cost and availability is making it the favorite in the nascent international markets Facebook is relying on for growth. Having devs ready to build Android, as well as having Google’s support, means it can lace social into the DNA of the open operating system.
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Google Updates Chrome For Android, iPhone And iPad With Focus On Speed, Search And Sharing
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 |
Ever since Google launched its Chrome browser on multiple mobile devices, more people have been getting used to syncing their desktop browsing experiences for on-the-go usage. Being able to have one browsing experience wherever you go is handy, but when a browser doesn’t move as fast as, say, Safari on the iPhone, it’s hard to dedicate yourself to making the switch. Google knows that and has pushed with the focus on bringing the speed of the experience up to snuff. On the Android side of the house, the company says that the browsing experience is now 25 percent faster thanks to expanded support for HTML5 and utilization of the latest V8 JavaScript engine. If pages load fast and scrolling is like butter, you’re going to use it more. Period. Those same changes will start being made on other platforms soon, Google says. Here’s what Grace Kloba and Rohit Rao had to say about the changes: We’re continuing to add plenty of under-the-hood stability, security improvements and bug fixes to Chrome for both Android and iOS. We look forward to your feedback on the latest versions of Chrome, now available on and in the . On the iOS side of the house, Google has added better search and sharing options, which are key components of a speedy experience on an iPhone or iPad. Clearly, Android has the advantage of having stronger sharing options baked into the OS, so Google has to be more creative with how things are done within its apps. Instead of seeing a long URL in the “Omnibox” at the top of the browser, you’ll see your search phrase so you can keep refining it instead of dealing with that ugly URL. After using a Chromebook for a while now, I’m longing for the day that I’ll never have to see an ugly URL again, especially when all you’re using is a browser on a screen. Here’s what the experience looks like; the changes might not be available to you for a few weeks: On iOS, sharing and history surfing got simplified as well. You can now hold the back button to see all of the pages you’ve previously visited and tap Share under Menu to share whatever page you’re on. You’ll also see more options than before. The big thing here is that you can share any web page directly to iOS messages, a feature that has been sorely missing. Is mobile Chrome there completely on these devices? No. But being the No. 1 desktop browser does give Google a leg up on adoption. By the time that most people have at least given the browser a chance on their mobile devices, hopefully Google will keep up its quick iteration process and lock those folks in. Apple definitely needs to take another look at Safari moving forward before it gets completely taken over by Mountain View.
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Streaming Music Service ‘Daisy’ Raises $60 Million, Spins Out Of Beats Electronics As Standalone Firm
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
Project ‘Daisy,’ the streaming music service headphone and speaker maker , has received a $60 million investment round that it is using to spin out as a standalone company. The news was announced in a written release from Beats, confirming a report on the funding issued earlier in the evening (the Verge’s report did not include the spin-out.) Daisy, which is still being referred to in press materials as the internal code name for the project, is now set to launch in “late 2013,” according to Beats. The $60 million funding round was led by billionaire along with Marc Rowan, James Packer and entities affiliated with Lee M. Bass. According to Beats, these investors bring “significant expertise in music and subscription business.” Daisy has been for a while, and many details on the project are still hard to come by, but it has some big names involved with it. Of course Beats’ co-founders and are heavy-hitters to begin with, but also teaming up specifically on Daisy is Nine Inch Nails’ , an electronic music visionary who serves as the project’s Chief Creative Officer (Daisy was first teased in a big way in an in-depth profile of Reznor in the magazine.) Then, earlier this year it was announced that Daisy’s CEO would be and music industry vet . Beats’ $14 million last year was also part of the Daisy project, and those assets will go along with it in the spin out. But more than anything, this newest funding round seems to show how serious Daisy is about building something big. With incumbent streaming services such as , , and standing as pretty solid competitors in the space, and Google’s YouTube reportedly into the ring, this financial and industry support will certainly come in handy as Daisy works to establish itself. Image of daisies courtesy of via
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Ev Williams: Medium Wants To Help Build A Sustainable Economic Model For Journalism
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
At the in San Francisco today, Twitter co-founder took the stage to talk to conference founder Jason Calacanis about everything from his experience at Twitter and the rise of Vine to sharing his take on Google and Facebook as well as the latest from , his latest effort to shape the future of digital publishing. Williams, a serial entrepreneur, has played a key role in helping to shape the way we create and share content on the web, as the co-founder of Pyra Labs, which produced — and was bought by Google in 2003. In doing so, Williams is often credited with coining the term “blogger” and helping to popularize both the term “blog” and the medium itself. After leaving Google, Williams went on to co-found Odeo and “idea incubator” , which produced both Twitter and, most recently, Medium (among others). Through his experience at Obvious, Williams said that he learned two important things about himself. After departing from Twitter, he, Biz Stone and other early Twitter employees revived Obvious, but thereafter he found himself “stuck in a rut,” he told Calacanis. In helping to incubate (and finance) startups like Medium, Branch and Lift, he came to realize that he wanted to focus on building a company and a product — not simply to play the role of investor and advisor. Seeing a market opportunity, a problem that “mattered” and leveraging his experience at Twitter and Blogger, he took a more active role at Medium, because “having an impact is at the top of my list of criteria” when deciding where and how to invest his time, he said. There was also the fact that Medium is a publishing tool, allowing people to create collections of content around a particular theme and/or subject, while inviting others to add their own contributions to those collections, The startup focuses on ideas and concepts he had while at Blogger all the way back in 2000, features that he’d even built for the platform but never got around to implementing, he said. The idea with Medium, and what captured his attention — a problem that he says he feels like he to solve, an idea most entrepreneurs are familiar with — was the opportunity to create a better Twitter for long-form content, a space that’s currently owned by Tumblr. In a sense, he says, it’s along the same lines as what Twitter has been able to do with (where Williams sits on the board). It’s “still early, and I can’t take any credit for it, but I like it because it captures the essence of Twitter, for video … it’s becoming one of the first platforms to not just duplicate what came before it — the process for every new medium or platform — but create an experience, feel and interface that is unique to the format. All of his ventures are either directly or indirectly attempting to address the long-standing problems that still exist in online media today, the Twitter co-founder says, particularly in the fact that, as the Web has succeeded in lowering the cost of content distribution, it’s created a flood of new content and information. The new economic model around publishing today incentivizes and rewards frequency, volume and keeping costs low when it comes to content creation, which, in turn, disincentivizes investment in a particular piece of content — and long-form content. It prioritizes lower quality content and burying higher quality content. While Twitter and Blogger have both played a role in creating and instituting this new model, the first generation of digital publishing has focused on metrics like unique visitors and page views, which, while it’s a good start, he says, the way we measure the engagement around and value of content needs to evolve. Medium, Williams says, is focused on understanding whether or not people have read the content, whether they read all the way to the end, whether they engaged, shared and commented — whether they actually got something from that content. “We’ve done speed and quick release in publishing, now let’s focus on the other things,” he told the crowd. When asked how Medium involves and what his product development process is like, Williams said that, for him, “usage is like oxygen for ideas,” and that he tries to focus on what people are doing on the platform, how they’re interacting with it — not doing data analysis or stressing over user feedback. That way, he says, you are able to get a more organic understanding of what’s important (and of what users care about) in realtime, as the product moves forward. Then you can nudge development in that direction. As it relates to Medium, Williams said that he wants to create a platform that can give context to the content that people create, eventually leading to a system where the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. The idea is to allow people to build a cohort of like-minded ideas and, to measure the value of its content, Medium is recording a rough heuristic for “reads,” Williams said in an attempt to discover whether or not people are reading the content, did they stick with it and get all the way through the post, etc. That being said, Williams continued, he realizes that there’s more friction for Medium as a publishing tool than there is for, say, Twitter. “It’s not like a tweet, it’s not as easy, and we don’t expect the ratio of creators to consumers to be the same for Twitter and Instagram, for example; the point, instead, is not to lower the barrier to get everyone creating, but to get the maximum audience for the really good stuff.” It would be great to get back to a system in which accuracy matters, and maybe it’s naive to think that quality can (and will) get more attention, he says, but it’s possible to use the network and great design to build a system that creates a better product — and thus creates more attention. “Most of the web is ugly, and the system is broken, it’s terrible for consumption,” he says. “By giving quality more attention and by creating a better system to create better content, we can solve that problem.” And, naturally, better design is part of that. While the economics of journalism “is a very tough problem,” Williams says, building an economic model that supports journalism “is a worthy goal” and something Medium is
“definitely going to experiment with,” he concluded. The economics are different building a content platform than it is for a publication, any time you build a content platform, you will have commercial usage, and if it’s sizable than there’s money to be made, which is different than the problem The New York Times faces, for example. The idea is to create a bunch of people who are motivated to create content not because they’re getting paid, but because they want to create. When asked what advice he would give to aspiring entrepreneurs, Williams said that they should focus on building something that they want to exist in the world and to “focus on it entirely.” Something good will come out of it. Of course, as we get older, he continued, that focus becomes much more difficult to maintain, because there are more opportunities — and distractions. “The only way I can manage that is if I say ‘no’ tons of times every single day.” The only way you can really do your best work, he says, if you learn how to say “no,” something that’s easier said than done. Calacanis also asked Williams what his impressions were of the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies, like Google, Apple and Facebook. Of Google, Williams said that he’s “still a huge fan” and that most people who have worked their maintain a soft spot for the company. “Their values are real,” he continued, “and I love that Larry [Page] is making big bets. I think they’re going to continue to take over the world.” As to Apple, Williams said that he, strangely enough, doesn’t know the company very well. “It’s funny that Apple is in Silicon Valley, employs tens of thousands of people, yet I don’t seem to know any of them. That’s strange to me.” The big issue for both Google and Apple is that it’s really hard for a company to create real value and be successful in different markets. The thinking is, he says, that Apple has all these smart people, it has all the money, so they should rule the next big thing. But, generally speaking, that’s not the way it happens. At Google, Williams said, he realized why these big companies — in spite of all their success, all the buzz and giant market caps — create a landscape in which there will always be opportunities for entrepreneurs. In any field a founder chooses, traditionally the conversation has always been one in which VCs will ask, “but what if Google got into this? What would happen to your company then?” While the Google “danger” has always loomed for entrepreneurs, when he got to Google, he realized that it’s hard to innovate and build internally. In fact, most of Google’s most popular products (like YouTube, Android and Maps) were a result of acquisitions. I realized there’s plenty of room for startups, not because of inefficiency or incompetence at these companies, but they’re just not focused on creating the best value for nimble companies, flexibility and innovation. So that’s the best part of this system, all of these companies eventually fall, or mature, or slow down, he says, and that means that we get to create new things. You can watch [Photo credit: ]
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Adobe Announces A New Social Interface For Its Marketing Cloud, Says It’s Breaking Down Silos
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
Adobe is in the middle of , its annual digital marketing conference, and as expected it’s making a bunch of product announcements. The biggest one is a new interface for , the company’s suite of products that includes Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Social, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Media Optimizer. Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s digital marketing business, said that as consumer expectations change and as companies have access to more and more data, marketers need to deliver great “last millisecond interactions” — that, he said, is “where we’re either heroes or we’re average.” And that means it’s increasingly important for design, advertising, and analytics teams to work together in an efficient way. “You’ve got to try harder to reduce these organizational silos,” Rencher said. The new interface, which allows users to collaborate across all five Marketing Cloud products, is an attempt to make that happen. For starters, there’s now one access point/login for all of those products. And each product will have a share button, which can turn any piece of content or data into a “card.” When users sign in to the Marketing Cloud, they get a news feed of cards that are relevant to them, which they can view, comment on, and annotate. Cards can also be pulled together into a board — so if there’s a specific issue or project that the team needs to discuss, all the relevant cards can be gathered on one place, then the team members can have a real-time discussion around them. Now, you may or may not be impressed by any of the individual features, but again, the promise lies in how it allows teams using different Adobe products to work together — they don’t even all have to be at the same company. Or, as Rencher put it (perhaps a tad hyperbolically), “The power of this is that it sits on top of the broadest and most complete marketing suite of applications that have ever been assembled in the history of the Earth.” Adobe says the new interface will be available this summer. Planned additions include a unified asset management system and a campaign creation tool that integrates with that system. Plus, all of this can be viewed on tablets and other touchscreen devices. In fact, all five Marketing Cloud products are getting mobile-specific upgrades, including new mobile analytics reports (and integration with Distimo) and new mobile ad creation tools.
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YouTube To Launch Music Subscriptions
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
YouTube plans to launch a music subscription service later this year, to allow people to listen to tracks online, and to possibly cut out the ads that precede each video for subscribers, according to . The largest storehouse of streaming video, YouTube relies on selling banner ads on the site and running short clips before each video, giving a cut back to record companies. YouTube has released a statement that confirmed it was considering a subscription service, but noted that ads wouldn’t go away: While we don’t comment on rumor or speculation, there are some content creators that think they would benefit from a subscription revenue stream in addition to ads, so we’re looking at that. YouTube stepping up the game as a music provider sense to me. It’s is one of the first places I hit up when I’m looking to listen to a new track quickly. Sure, it’s not often the best quality, but it’ll do in a pinch. A proper subscription service is likely to provide higher fidelity tracks, and elevates YouTube to the same playing field as labels such as Warner Music which do rely on streaming revenue. Google already has partnerships with numerous music publishers. Last November, it with Armonia, one of the largest alliances of music publishers, giving it access to 5.5 million tracks across 35 countries. And in the larger scheme of things, the company might overlap its new subscription plans into its Google Play music service. In December, it rolled out a free “ ” feature that allows users to add up to 20,000 songs from their offline collections to the Google cloud and stream it to their devices on the go.
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Watch The Grand Lighting For ‘The Bay Lights,’ The $8.8M Art Project Backed By Some Of Tech’s Biggest Names
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
The has been an artistic landmark since it was finished in 1937, even serving as a modern-day muse for tech industry visionaries . But its plainer stepsister, the six months older , is finally about to have its long-awaited moment in the spotlight. That’s thanks to ‘ ,’ a project kicking off that will turn the Bay Bridge into the world’s largest LED light sculpture every evening for the next two years. The project, headed up by technologist and artist , will illuminate the 1.8 mile western span of the bridge with 25,000 LED lights individually programmed with unique algorithms to show a never-repeating display — it’ll be viewable from San Francisco and points north, but not to drivers crossing the bridge. The Bay Lights will be illuminated each night from dusk until 2:00am through 2015. It’s a clearly ambitious project that first took root more than two years ago. It came to fruition in large part because from the beginning it caught the eye of some of technology’s biggest names, people and companies who invested money in the project and supported its regulatory approval. It’s all and should cost some $8.8 million in total to keep the project going until 2015; $6 million of that has already been raised and put toward the installation itself. To date, The Bay Lights’ investors including Bay Area tech luminaries including Yahoo CEO , SV Angel founder and longtime investor , Y Combinator partner and former Googler , Zynga CEO , WordPress founder , and others. TechCrunch TV had the opportunity to talk with Villareal a bit about the technical aspect of The Bay Lights at a press event this afternoon, so more coverage on that will come tomorrow morning. For now, you can check out the live stream of The Bay Lights grand lighting event in the embed above — the event will begin officially at and the piece will switch on at . And below is video from of Villareal working on the Bay Lights and testing the project earlier this year: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kuea04VuqY]
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AdStage Launches Its Cross-Network Ad Creator, Raises $1.4M
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
, a startup aiming to make it easy for small businesses and other advertisers to run cross-network ad campaigns, launched today at in San Francisco. The company also announced that it has raised $1.4 million in funding, with an investor list that includes Freestyle Capital, Quest Venture Partners, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Digital Garage, XG Ventures, Mark Mullen, former Facebook/Myspace/Zynga executive Owen Van Natta, Jim Patterson, Stewart Alsop, Federated Media founder John Battelle, Rich LeFurgy, and Doug Barry. You can watch , where you can see the ad creator in action (and listen as Robert Scoble declares “This is the hottest idea I’ve seen so far”). The company offers a single, self-serve dashboard for creating ads that run across Google, Bing, Facebook and LinkedIn. Every feature seems designed to create an optimized campaign with as little work as possible. Most notably, AdStage provides recommendations throughout the process based on data from similar and competitive companies. Those recommendations can help businesses write the ads and select keywords, as well as figure out the best way to spend across all four networks. And after the campaign has been launched, AdStage can look at the results in realtime and alter how much money goes into each network to deliver the best return. Prior to AdStage, Jain co-founded mobile development startup . The company launched in private beta last week, and plans to add 50 more advertisers soon. Jain said that AdStage will be adding other ad formats, too.
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The $99 Roku 3 Launches With A New Processor, UI, And Remote Control With Built-In Headphone Jack
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
Today, is launching the newest version of its streaming media box, the $99 Roku 3. While keeping a similar form factor to previous Roku set-top boxes, the latest in its series should be much faster and more responsive, thanks to hardware upgrades. It also comes with a new remote control with a built-in headphone jack for private listening, as well as a new user interface for navigating its hundreds of channels. Available for sale on Roku.com and Amazon.com, the new Roku 3 is the next evolution in the company’s streaming set-top box hardware. While the Roku folks wouldn’t go into specifics about the hardware in the new box, they said it represented a significant upgrade over the Roku 2 XS, which was the previous $99 box. (No worries — I’m sure there will be a teardown of the Roku 3 within the next few days.) Anyway, the updated hardware under the hood should mean a faster browsing and navigation experience for Roku users, as they click through all the various content choices on the box. The Roku 3 also supports up to 1080p video and has dual-band wireless connectivity and Ethernet and USB ports. It also has an available MicroSD slot for extra storage. The Roku 3 also added an interesting new feature to its remote control — a headphone jack and in-ear headphones to allow users to privately listen to the TV without disturbing others around them. It has more or less the same form factor as the one that shipped with the Roku 2, and like it, the new remote also serves double duty as a game controller. That’s important, since the Roku 3, like the Roku 2 XS, comes with Angry Birds Space pre-installed. All that said, the biggest new change to Roku’s offerings probably isn’t the hardware, but the addition of a new interface for navigating its Channel Store, apps, and settings. There are more than 750 channels available to Roku users worldwide, the previous up-down-left-right navigation scheme for the Roku Channel Store wasn’t very good. It also resulted in a lot of navigating around different channel information screens to determine whether or not you wanted to install them. With that in mind, Roku has updated the streaming box’s user interface, with an easier-to-navigate flow for scrolling through categories of apps, finding out information about them, and installing them. With an average of 15 channels installed per box, Roku also needed to improve the way that users got around the apps they had already chosen to watch. As a result, the new Roku UI also has an updated grid interface for users to scroll through the channels that they’ve already installed. Rather than scrolling left-to-right like in the previous interface, users now can see nine tiled apps on the home screen. The interface provides a view of more detailed information for the apps that users are looking at on the left side of the screen. Viewers can also set their favorites and see a stream of apps as they scroll down below the top nine. In addition to the new UI, Roku has added a universal search feature, which will allow users to quickly find their favorite pieces of premium content. Like other streaming devices, the new search works across multiple apps, highlighting TV shows and movies that are available through subscription services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Videos, as well as electronic sell-through or video on-demand services like Vudu. New Roku 3 owners will have the new UI and search functionality immediately, but Roku plans to make the same features available to existing Roku boxes through an update in the coming weeks. Last summer, to help expand into new markets and get its devices adopted as secondary set-top boxes in pay TV homes. The company has been working with partners like BSkyB and Time Warner Cable to make their programming available for streaming on the box. In fact, Time Warner Cable earlier today, just in time for the new hardware.
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Facebook Will Launch Content-Specific News Feeds, Bigger Photos And Ads On Thursday
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
At a big press event on Thursday, Facebook plans to launch new ways to filter the news feed. These include a Photos feed of Facebook and Instagram photos, as well as a revamped Music feed of what friends are listening to, concerts, and new albums, according to multiple sources both within and close to Facebook. Larger images and image-based ads in the web and mobile feeds are coming too. [ : Facebook just held its press event and my sources were right. It launched content-specific feeds for Photos, Music, and more, plus increased the size of photos and ads. and check out our .] Why is Facebook adding new streams? Because we are information junkies. Give us a feed and we’ll read it. But when we scroll so far we hit re-runs – we hit the road. So Facebook has a plan to give us something different to look at starting March 7th. If the “new look” for the news feed that it’s unveiling works, it could get us spending more hours on Facebook and seeing more — and more intense — ads. Facebook has neglected the news feed, which has functioned largely the same since it launched on the web in 2006, and on iPhone in 2009. A column of friends’ faces on the left, their status updates to the right, and a whole lot of white space. Content-specific feeds have been hard to access, and the “Top News” or “Most Recent” sorting options mostly re-shuffle content rather than surfacing different stories. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a Facebook employee, a member of the social ads industry, and several developers concurred that multiple feeds and larger images in posts by users, Pages, and ads are what’s in store for Thursday. As for what’s not confirmed for this week is the employee-only test build of a in a native iOS app that I witnessed a few months ago. One source said that they didn’t think this major mobile redesign is ready yet, when the launch event was announced. All in due time with that one. If it does launch this week, it could be a standalone app like Camera, or an option in the primary apps. Before I get to the details about what my sources say is launching, let’s look at some supporting evidence and reasons why these are the right moves for Facebook. If you want the abbreviated version, skip to “So What’s Launching?” Over the last year, Facebook has been piling up some dedicated, content-specific feeds. But they’re tough to find. Just after its September 2011 developer conference, the company debuted a , which it’s been slowly adding more content to. At first it was just what friends were listening to in apps like Spotify, but now it includes updates from musician Pages, upcoming albums and nearby concerts, as well as suggestions of music you might like. Few users know about it, though, as access is hidden deep in the Apps section of the sidebar. Considering how popular link discovery sites like Reddit have become, it’s strange that Facebook doesn’t highlight its links feed anymore. The lets you see all the websites friends have shared. In October 2012, Facebook added a that only shows updates from Pages you Like. There’s also the recently tested feed and even a forgotten feed. What all these separate feeds have in common is that they’re buried in the sidebar navigation menu and scattered across categories like Favorites, Pages, and Apps. If Faebook surfaced at least some of them in a more prominent, cohesive way, we’d be a lot more likely to switch to them when we finish reading the main feed. When I talked to product manager Josh Williams ahead of the launch of Facebook’s new location-discovery service Nearby, and to CTO Cory Ondrejka at a Facebook reporters event, both said there were interesting things to be done with content-specific feeds. For example, stories shared from third-party Open Graph apps like Instagram, RunKeeper, Foursquare, and Foodspotting could benefit from their own feed designed to show what friends are up to off Facebook and help you find new apps to download. When Facebook launched the Music feed the day after f8, I suspected “news” and video feeds to launch, but they never did. The lack of a “news” news feed was odd considering Facebook wants to compete with Twitter as a place where people discover…news. The lack of a video feed of what friends had been watching was actually the result of a legal ban. But in December the U.S. government from the Video Privacy Protection Act, paving the way for a feed of Netflix and Hulu activity. Most surprisingly, there’s no feed of just photos, though there used to be. Now the Photos sidebar bookmark just leads to your own images and albums, which isn’t very helpful. A photo-only feed viewed full-screen or at a much wider width could be a hit. It’s been very successful for Instagram, and Facebook has been doing its best to take cues from its fresh and beloved acquisition. CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself said the news feed needs to evolve to be more vivid. Smartphones and fast connections make it much easier to share media than when the feed first launched. As mentioned last week, Zuckerberg said on the that: “As our news feed design evolves to show richer kinds of stories, that opens up new opportunities to offer different kinds of ads as well…One of the product design principles that we’ve always had is we want the organic content to be of the same basic types of formats as paid content, right? So, historically, advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos and we haven’t provided those things historically. But, one of the things that we’ve done in the last year is you’ve seen the organic news feed product that consumers use moving towards bigger pictures, richer media and I think you’ll continue to see it go in that direction. And, I think that a lot of the success of products like Instagram is because of that. It’s a very immersive – even on a small screen, just – it’s a wonderful photo product.” The key word in Zuckerberg’s comment is “immersive.” Facebook’s web and mobile feeds are full of chrome. There are always-visible navigation bars on the top of both web and mobile, as well as sidebars galore on the web. Facebook tried to give the news feed a more real-time feel last year with Ticker, but a lot of people hate it, ignore it, or take advantage of Facebook’s kind option to minimize it. By taking the navigation chrome, sidebars, and Ticker and trimming them down, hiding them while we browse, or cutting them entirely, Facebook could free up a ton of space. It could use that to expand the width and height of the feed so it could show more stories and bigger images. This would keep us focused on the beautiful content shared by our friends, reduce exhaustion, and keep us scrolling. It would also throw a bone to advertisers that they’ve been barking for for years. The top request from advertisers to Facebook is “we want more attention-grabbing ad units like the auto-play videos, flash units, and home page takeovers we get elsewhere on the web.” Facebook has largely refused. The nine-year-old company only launched its news feed Sponsored Stories ads two years ago and mobile ads one year ago. It didn’t want to interrupt or distract from the user experience. But by upping the size of images and stories shared by users, Facebook could give the same to businesses without the ads being an eyesore. It could command higher prices, too. Unlike Gifts, game payments, or even search which aren’t core to Facebook, better news feed ads could help the social network make money off its most trafficked and addictive property. Even earning a little more per feed ad could make a huge difference to its bottom line. It might even be enough to convince investors that Facebook is ready to play ball with business, which could finally get its stock price back up to the $38 IPO mark it fell from. That’s all the why. Here’s the what. On Thursday, Facebook will introduce a new design for the news feed that prominently offers the option to switch between different content-specific feeds. Two sources said that on the web, buttons located at the top of the feed below the search box will let users switch to view one of the different feeds at a time. It’s unclear if Facebook will use the same design in the mobile feed. I think it’s more likely to prominently place the options to switch between the feed in the navigation sidebar if it doesn’t entirely. One of the dedicated feeds will be a Photos feed of images uploaded to Facebook and Instagram. This will make the most pronounced integration of Instagram into Facebook since its acquisition. Photos have long been its most popular content type, but one that’s been underutilized without a dedicated feed, so this could be a huge win for Facebook. Instagram showed the power of photos alone, and the new Facebook Photos feed could get people browsing for hours. There will likely be an option to browse this feed full-screen, as if it were one big album. Several sources say a Music feed will also be featured. It will show what friends have been listening to on services like Spotify, and Rdio, as well as upcoming nearby concerts, recently released albums, posts by musicians that users Like, and suggestions of musicians to subscribe to. As I noted above, Facebook already has a Music feed, but its bookmark is buried deep in the Apps section of the homepage sidebar. Facebook is known to have hired contractors to build designs of the music feed for web and mobile, and now it looks like the revamped version will launch. Other potential feeds that could launch include Links or “news,” Videos, and Apps, but sources were unable to confirm these. Lastly, Facebook will also start displaying image and link posts in a larger format, whether they’re from users or Pages or are ads. This will be especially helpful for the Photos feed, as it means even when not browsed full-screen it will have a rich feel. Ads will become more vivid and noticeable, too. The format change should coax more marketing spend out of luxury brands that are accustomed to larger, glossy-style ads. Overall, the launch event should be a big win for both Facebook and its users. We’ll have more control over what content we see and gain new ways to interact with what our friends share. Discovery of specific types of media will improve, and time on site is likely to increase. Advertisers and investors will likely rejoice. How Facebook will roll out the changes isn’t yet clear, but I’d suspect a somewhat staggered launch to prevent shock and the typical “new-is-bad” chatter from snowballing in the feed. on its app platform, the profile, and search, Facebook’s crown jewel will finally get some polish. Nothing connects us like the news feed. It delivers the feel of a small town square to a global network. It’s given us ambient intimacy, and it’s about to bring us even closer. [ : Facebook just held its press event and my sources were right. It launched content-specific feeds for Photos, Music, and more, plus increased the size of photos and ads. and check out our .]
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Apps Are Important
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
I had a little bit of time to play with the today and I’m a regular user of the Acer C7, a $199 machine that is wildly underpowered but good enough on a bad day. I really like the concept and I really like ChromeOS – it’s a solid way to get a little browsing done, say, in a cyber cafe or hotel bar. It isn’t, however, an OS. As , the Pixel is an amazing piece of hardware and it makes you wonder just what other laptop manufacturers are thinking. It’s pricey, sure, but the touchscreen works well, the display is striking, and the styling is on par with the MacBook. liked it, and he doesn’t like anything. But then there’s the problem of apps. Torvalds writes: The creator of Linux, the paragon of pure computing, wants to install a “real distro.” Ouch. What the Chomebooks can’t yet do is run real applications. I’m currently dual-booting my C7 so I can install Skype on Ubuntu and you get this sense, once you’re in a real environment, that ChromeOS is like one of those “pre-OSes” that they used to stick on laptops so you could browse the web and watch movies without booting into Windows. It’s not all there. That’s fairly easy to fix: allow vendors to create real apps for the platform. After all, Google is the “open” company, right? There should be a way for me to jackhammer Skype and Audacity into the ChromeOS environment. After all, a beautiful big screen is useless when all you open on it is Gmail. Apps matter. As much as everyone clamors that Windows Phone and BB10 will thrive, they can’t do it without lots and lots and lots of apps. They can’t win without a dedicated developer base and groups of users who go out of their way to learn programming just to program for their favorite platform. While web-based apps are fun, in theory, we’re just not there yet in terms of real value. In the uncanny valley of application programming, HTML5 and attendant technologies are too stiff and jerky, like the humans in the first Toy Story movie. We need a few more years to bake them into real usability. Until then, we’re stuck turning silk purses into sow’s ears (or, depending on your opinion of Linux, silk purses into penguins). I can’t, for example, recommend that my Mom pick up a Chromebook because she’ll immediately hit a brick wall when she wants to, say, Skype my in-laws. We can regress the argument down to “Well, they can use Google Hangouts” but that doesn’t solve the problem. In human-computer interaction, there should be more than one way to do something. That way, I’m sad to say, is through the introduction of a full SDK.
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Valve’s Steam Box Prototypes Are Being Prepped For Player Testing In “Three To Four Months”
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
As it turns out, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell gets awfully chatty when he attends award ceremonies. His appearance at the (generally awful) Spike TV Video Game Awards got him ruminating about the , and ahead of today’s BAFTA Games Awards he confirmed that Valve is working on Steam Box prototypes that will be released to testers “in the next three to four months”. The BBC’s report is a rather brief one, but Newell was awfully candid. Beyond offering a rough timeframe for actual user testing, he also noted that the team working on the hardware was struggling with keeping the amount of heat and noise the console generated in check. It’s a common problem among the current slew of consoles, especially as gamers’ demands for pure pixel-pushing performance continue to grow — turning on the original Xbox 360 wasn’t unlike firing up a jet engine, and the fat PlayStation 3 had a tendency to make its surroundings just a bit toastier. As always, Newell had nothing to say about what kind of hardware will be part of the Steam Box, but did allude once again to the prospect of adding a more personal dimension to how we play games. reported earlier this year that Valve was exploring ways to enhance the gaming experience by keeping tabs not only on a user’s direct inputs, but their biometric responses as well. Newell briefly revisited that notion again, this time noting that the company has yet to decide whether it will actually attempt to collect that sort of data using the controller — Valve is currently assessing multiple controller concepts, which appears to be one of the project’s major sticking points for the time being. Nebulous though it may be, it could be that sort of deeply personal angle that ultimately sets Valve’s console apart from the likes of Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft — players who have already spent years vying for control of our living rooms. Newell’s vision is of a reactive gaming experience, one that grows and changes depending on what players are going through at that moment. He uses the physiological effects that horror games like Left 4 Dead can produce as an example: “You need to actually be able to directly measure how aroused the player is – what their heart rate is, things like that – in order to offer them a new experience each time they play.” It’s far too early to tell whether or not Valve’s approach to living room gaming will pan out, but one thing seems clear — Valve is building up the Steam Box to be a gamer’s game console, and players like Sony and Nintendo would do well to stay on their toes.
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TC Cribs: A Look Inside Weebly, The Land Of Prohibition-Era Tunnels And (Shh) Secret Rooms
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
A big part of what makes our series so fun to make is going behind closed doors to get a real glimpse at how a company works (and plays.) But it’s not every day that Cribs take us behind a set of closed doors — ones that are completely hidden — and enter into top secret rooms. So our tour of , the San Francisco-based that has helped millions of people start their own sites, was quite the treat. Weebly is based in the neighborhood of San Francisco bordering , both historical regions that factored big in the days and later hosted lots of activity during the era. Weebly’s office is certainly very clean and modern, but it also has a few nifty features that fit into the more shadowy past of its surroundings. Watch the video embedded above to see the underground tunnel portal that opens into Weebly HQ, the company’s top secret meeting room (complete with a sneaky bookshelf door), and Weebly’s non-official mascot Lucy, possibly the cutest English bulldog ever.
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BlackBerry Community Wants Marquee Apps So Bad It’s Porting Them DIY-Style – And BlackBerry Doesn’t Approve
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
BlackBerry’s platform has seen some big-name additions in the past couple of days. Unfortunately both came via sideloaded Android apps, likely created by the community using BlackBerry developer tools and the APKs of the Android apps in question. BlackBerry has made it very easy for any developer to port their Android titles to BB10 in around five to 10 minutes, but that means it’s easy for anyone motivated enough to do so as well. I spoke to BlackBerry’s VP of Developer Relations Alec Saunders about the recent surfacing of both an (which Chris wrote about yesterday) and the . Saunders made clear that BlackBerry doesn’t officially sanction conversion efforts from anyone other than the official developer behind an app. “We don’t condone piracy,” Saunders said. “If you don’t have a license to distribute that app, that’s effectively what it is. We think the best way for a developer to deal with that is to package the application themselves, turn it into a BAR file and put it into BlackBerry World, because users wouldn’t be tempted to do that if the applications were simply available in BlackBerry World.” Saunders sees the eagerness of the community to get applications like Instagram and Netflix working on BB10 devices as a sign that there’s demand there, and he thinks it is beginning to sway companies around to BlackBerry’s side, too. WhatsApp is working on a BlackBerry port for its cross-platform messenger, for instance, and The New York Times is also working on a dedicated BB10 app. Saunders said both of those decisions have been made within the last six weeks, so clearly some minds are changing in terms of developer hold-outs. “It is really, really easy to build a BAR file for an Android application and upload that to the store, so if it’s easy for a developer to do that, it’s easy for users to do that, too,” Saunders said, discussing what BlackBerry can do about user-created apps. Only when those try to come into BlackBerry World itself and masquerade as legitimate apps can the company take action. I also asked Saunders whether or not BlackBerry expected or predicted users would take matters into their own hands, since it works nicely as a stopgap measure while companies build their own solutions and helps prove there’s a demand out there for those products. “I wouldn’t say we predicted it,” he said. “And certainly we haven’t made it easier for users to sideload applications on to our platform, but we’ve been aware of it for some time.” The home port crowd is an interesting variable in RIM’s platform launch. It energizes the community, generates hype around apps that aren’t yet committed to the platform, and shows off the ease with which Android APKs can be ported. BlackBerry may not officially approve, but it’s hard not to see the value of this kind of guerrilla tactic in an admittedly uphill battle.
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Chrome Beta For Android Gets Support For Experimental Data Compression On Google’s Servers, Reduces Data Usage By 50%
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
Google just that it has released a new feature for the that could speed up web browsing and save bandwidth for mobile Chrome users. With this turned on, all your web requests will be routed through Google’s servers, where the company then uses its to compress and optimize the content. The actual connection to the browser from Google’s servers is then handled by the , which optimizes the content even more. Overall, using this proxy can reduce data usage by about 50%. Just using the PageSpeed libraries to transcode images to the Google-backed instead of JPEG and PNG makes a significant difference because 60% of all transferred bytes on the average page are images. The proxy, Google software engineer and “mobile web performance gearhead” Matt Welsh writes in the announcement today, “performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page.” DNS lookups will also be handled by the proxy and turning this feature on, Google notes, also automatically enables the browser’s mode. To turn this feature on, visit in your browser and select Even when this feature is turned on, Google will still route all of the secure HTTPS connections from your browser directly to their destination. They won’t touch Google’s servers. The same goes for incognito tabs. While all of this sounds a bit like the Turbo mode Opera offers on its mobile and desktop browsers, the difference here is that all of the page is still rendered by the user’s browser and all of the JavaScript is still executed locally. Also new in this new beta version of Chrome is support for password and autofill entries syncing, which was previously only available for Chrome on the desktop, but the key feature is obviously support for the SPDY proxy service.
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Your Galaxy S IV Will Probably Be Plastic, And That’s For The Best, Says Samsung VP
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
We’re just over a week away from the Galaxy S IV’s official unveiling in New York City, and the pieces are starting to fall into place. Sure, we still don’t know what the thing is , but persistent rumors have pegged the device as sporting the same sort of plastic body that Samsung has been (in?)famous for. While she wouldn’t weigh in on the Galaxy S IV specifically, Y.H. Lee, executive VP of Samsung’s mobile unit, told that the love-it-or-hate-it plastic chassis endemic to the company’s gadgets aren’t going anywhere just yet. According to Lee, it’s just as much about practicality as it is about style: In order to churn out (and sell) as many devices as Samsung does, the company has to pay plenty of attention to how efficiently they can be made. Naturally, Samsung can’t just pump out loads of shoddy devices and call it a day, so durability weighs heavily on the company’s mind when it comes time to picking out materials for a final design. Meanwhile, would-be rivals like HTC have embraced metal with open arms in its latest flagship device designs. The benefits are as plentiful as they are subjective — the adjective that seems to be bandied about most often is “premium,” since these metal-clad devices tend to feel more weighty and substantial when compared to the sorts of flimsy plastic bodies that many Android-friendly OEMs still cling to. I’ll be the first to admit that I prefer handsets that like they could withstand some abuse, though in fairness I’ve found that devices like the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II can handle their fair share of turmoil despite having light, plastic bodies. Granted, I can see how the choice of materials could prove to be occasionally problematic for the companies involved here. Crafting a device like the HTC One or an iPhone 5 out of aluminum can be more exacting (and therefore more time-consuming), not to mention more expensive than sticking with a less ornate body. But here’s the thing — Samsung doesn’t need to play by those same rules. It’s an undeniable juggernaut in the smartphone space, and has proven ably over the past months and years that yes, people will often buy their smartphones even when faced with alternatives that arguably feel more premium. That’s not to say that Samsung will never rethink its position on the materials it uses. Lee concedes that the company “listen[s] to the market” and tries to accommodate it, so that sentiment could soon change if the masses demand it.
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Pew: Twitter Is A Mainstream Liberal, But A Conservative Wonk
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
Twitter’s liberal bias is no shocker to anyone who saw “Binders Full Of Women” at a . Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s slip-of-the-tongue during a presidential debate instantly became , fueling discussion of conservative gender bias for weeks after the event. Now, delicious new survey data from Pew just how liberal the Twitter universe is. And, perhaps more interestingly, when it’s also more conservative than national opinion polls. When it comes to mainstream political issues, such as President Obama’s favorability or gay rights, Twitter is decidedly liberal. But, when issues are more wonky, like the nomination of former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, for Secretary of State, conservative opinion shines. Twitter users love President Obama and Gay Marriage. The average sentiment of Twitter updates was 25% more over-the-top with Obama’s re-election than a national-representative public opinion poll. More important, of Obama’s first debate in the press and public opinion, Twitter uses came out in force to defend the president (20% of public vs. 59% Twitter). On gay marriage, Twitter was slightly more favorable (33% vs. 46%) but there was virtually zero negative sentiment on Twitter (44% vs. 8%), perhaps because it’s easier to silently judge someone’s lifestyle than say it in public.
Get More: , , When it comes to insider Washington opinion, Twitter’s liberals are noticeably silent. Few Twitter uses had nice things to say about his second inaugural speech, compared to the public, (48% vs. 13%) and there was virtually no support for the nomination of John Kerry (39% vs. 6%). In both cases, in the “neutral” sentiment of Twitter is higher than positive sentiment (i.e. people don’t care), conservatives have an easier time on social media. As I’ve written many times before, of the U.S. , if the highly-educated demographic of Twitter users had their way, Ron Paul would have been the Republican nominee and Chick-Fil-A would be out of business. “The lack of consistent correspondence between Twitter reaction and public opinion is partly a reflection of the fact that those who get news on Twitter – and particularly those who tweet news – are very different demographically from the public,” Pew. Even so, the overwhelming power of liberals on mainstream issues will make life difficult for Republicans. With a few clever tweets, Romney’s big Republican National Convention show. Even worse, from the “binders full of women” kerfuffle to Senator Marco Rubio’s , memes have a way of stubbornly sticking to conservatives. And, that is a big problem for the beleaguered Republican Party.
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Vistar Media Raises $1.5 Million To Bring Real-Time Bidding To Digital Out-Of-Home Ads
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
A new startup called is looking to change the digital out-of-home advertising market by making it more programmatic, more targetable, and more predictive. In other words, it’s hoping to make buying ads on displays outside the home kind of like buying display ads online. Ya dig? Vistar Media was founded by a couple of veterans from the real-time bidding world online, but it’s targeting the digital out-of-home market. That means TV screens in stores, malls, restaurants, bars — any display that is connected to the Internet and can serve ads to passersby. Until recently, that market was pretty fragmented, with brands and agencies having to buy across multiple different locations, without a ton of data for where their ads would appear or how effective they were. To go after this market, Vistar has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Valhalla Partners, with participation from Mercury Fund and Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Vistar Media’s founding team Michael Provenzano and Mark Chadwick were both part of Invite Media, the DSP startup . Also on the founding team is Jeremy Ozen, who was part of Goldman Sach’s European Special Situations Group in London. With this background, the team hopes to bring real-time bidding to the digital out-of-home market. Already, it has a large number of screens and impressions that it can sell. It has 80,000 unique locations and 8 billion impressions available as part of its inventory. More important than that, it has a huge amount of data that can help it target certain demographics of viewers. It also can target certain areas, making ads more relevant to local users. Already, a number of brands and agencies have used Vistar to target certain regions and even ZIP codes with their campaigns. Now that Vistar has built the platform and worked out the inventory, the company is looking to get more sales and biz dev folks on board to actually sell the platform to advertisers. That’s where the funding comes in!
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