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French Startups Are Also Taking Over CES
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 3 |
It’s true, . But this is just part of the story. CES isn’t yet another startup show. It’s a now a startup show with hundreds of companies launching compelling new products at the same time coming from many different countries — and French startups in particular are coming . This year, 190 French startups are going to have a booth at CES. And you already know some of them. We’ve covered , , , and many successful French companies in the past. Some of them are going to be next to Samsung, Sony, LG and all the big players in the Las Vegas Convention Center. But what about the dozens of others you don’t know yet? They’re basically going to take over the Sands Expo Center a few blocks away from the Convention Center. This year, a third of the startups at Eureka Park are French startups. To put this into perspective, American startups represent 42 percent of Eureka Park. All the blue stands on this map of Eureka Park are French startups: Now if you’ve been following the French tech scene, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Last year was already for French startups at CES. But this year, it seems like French startups are trying to make a point. So why are French startups coming all the way to Las Vegas for CES? There are a few reasons explaining France’s newfound love for CES. For the past couple of years, the French government has been trying to promote French startups around the world with , a government-backed team who is trying to improve the image of French startups. La French Tech has picked a dozen startups and paid for their CES trips. But that doesn’t explain why 175+ other startups are also going to CES. France is arguably the most promising country when it comes to hardware startups. And that’s why many startups are traveling to Las Vegas. France is lucky enough to have some of the in the world. Students don’t just study computer sciences in these schools. They study electronics, mechanics and other low-level courses. It’s a better training if you plan on working for hardware companies. That’s why some companies like Parrot and Withings have thrived over the past few years. But I’ve been hearing about Parrot and Withings engineers leaving their companies to work for tiny hardware startups as well. The hardware engineering mafia is making it much easier to create a hardware startup in France. And finally, over the past few years, many French startups have realized that it’s possible to build a global company by keeping the engineering team in France and opening small offices in the U.S. And this model works really well for hardware startups. We’ve covered some of these promising French startups on TechCrunch — , , , , , and countless others. But there are also dozens of new startups we’ve never heard about coming to CES. And we’ve seen this trend of new hardware startups coming out of France. A few of the startups in our are based in France or have French founders. TechCrunch is also going to interview French entrepreneurs all week long. And I’m also interviewing France’s Minister of Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs Emmanuel Macron later this week. So the rumors are true, CES is becoming a startup show, and that’s why TechCrunch is here. But CES is also becoming an international launchpad for French startups. And we’ll be following this trend closely.
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You Don’t Want A 5-Star Review
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Tom Collinger
| 2,016 | 1 | 3 |
Brands know that customer reviews play an integral role in consumers’ purchasing decisions, especially online. As such, they work hard to drive the highest ratings they can. And yet, it’s the presence of less-than-five-star reviews that can actually be what drives purchase. across 40 product categories looked at the impact of reading reviews on purchases. Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center and PowerReviews found that, in moderation, bad reviews actually help boost sales. In fact, product purchases with an average star rating between 4.2 and 4.5, according to research from . Products with five-star ratings were less influenced, likely due to today’s skeptical consumers’ “ too good to be true” sensibilities. Having a few less-than-perfect reviews decreases a product’s average star rating, but grows the business more. Why are five-star reviews too good to be true? We think it’s authenticity. There’s a healthy cynic in us all. We know nothing is perfect. So when a consumer sees only five-star reviews, they smell something fishy, something that causes their BS meter to go off. They know that some negative opinions about a product, service or place are to be expected, and become suspicious when something is marketed as “perfect.” And as against more than 1,000 sellers of fake four- and five-star reviews, consumers are scrutinizing reviews more closely than ever before — and have reason to do so. Healthy skepticism is growing for advertising, journalism and, so too, for perfect product reviews. A mix of good and bad reviews demonstrates a brand’s transparency, and may well signal that the reviews displayed on your website are not fake or filtered. In fact, some shoppers might go so far as to with only five-star reviews and look for a more genuine alternative. While it’s important to include a mix of star ratings, it doesn’t mean brands shouldn’t emphasize top reviews. Consider the following practices: Offer several options for reading reviews, from highest to lowest star rating or by ranking those as most “helpful.” This same strategy can be used for product offerings, your blog and other content. Include several options for current and potential customers to find the information they seek; customers are always receptive to a more personalized experience. The content of the reviews is another influencer of purchase behavior. When consumers read the review to find out why the product received a specific rating, what may appear to be a negative review can prompt a purchase. For example, if a product has a four-star rating instead of five because the reviewer thinks it’s “not the right shade of red,” it may be just the message to prompt another purchaser to buy. specifically seek negative feedback, so it should be made available to customers. As our research reflects, maximizing the value of customer reviews to drive purchases demands the presence of less-than-five-star reviews. Also, while brands seek ways to improve their product or service offering, fewer than five stars provides authentic and valuable insight to make strategic improvements. Our research revealed that, in some categories, reading a review can not only have an impact on purchase, but a dramatic one. So, to make consumer reviews matter most to consumers, it’s important to encourage all reviews, avoid hiding negative ones, offer customers the opportunity to expand on their reviews and act on customer reviews based on specific feedback. The consumer is expecting the brands they choose to not just offer a great product, but to listen, respond and, per our research, stay authentic.
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From Digital Disappointment ToThe End Of The App Era, Here Are Eight Trends For 2016
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Tom Goodwin
| 2,016 | 1 | 3 |
The only thing that grows faster than technology are our expectations of it. The gap between what we know to be possible and what we experience is only widening. Our children are growing up in a world where all screens are interactive and every service is cloud-connected, where any song or movie ever made it at their fingertips, yet our disappointment only grows. Why is changing my flight taking 100 key presses at the airport? Why is this film not available for streaming? Why am I using a printed ticket? How can this website be down? Surely this town should have 4G by now? A whole new generation of people will have grown up with cameras in their faces, images and intimate thoughts shared across the world, and comments made freely without concern about their being in public. Will this group of people have any notion of privacy as a concept? We’re continually redrawing the lines on privacy. The age of Big Data is more about more intimate data than scale, our heartbeats, locations, intentions are more interesting to everyone than millions of less personal data points. Thanks to our phones, the most personal devices ever, companies can know our bank details, locations, fingerprints, addresses, as we trade convenience and personalization to save time and think less, are we making a Faustian bargain? Is it reversible? The near term future will see complex discussions about intractable privacy issues. Early show complex, contradictory, and quickly evolving feelings toward exchanges between privacy and convenience that vary across generations and nations, but what’s clear is control, transparency and value exchange are key factors in what is acceptable. The collision of our intimate data with machine learning and context based thinking means we’re going to see a new way that we interact with devices and a new way that they interact with us. While it sounds like a Samsung ad, we’re going to need to think of technology as a life partner, providing us with little bits of extra data, little suggested nudges, little contextual ambient information to help us. Apps like live in the background to only appear when it’s about to rain near us; Apple maps integrates with our calendars to tell us when to set off for meetings based on life traffic info; and Facebook now allows us to Ubers directly in app. We all know our calendar tells us where to go and we can’t remember any phone number, but what happens when this sort of gentle cognitive outsourcing starts to connect and become smarter? We’ll see predictive computing combine with more intuitive interfaces and speech recognition, devices like the Amazon echo and Siri to make the internet surround us. We will see touch identification and Tinder-like user interfaces to make buying things more easy and most interactions increasingly frictionless. Welcome to a world where things just happen (at least until they digitally disappoint). While virtually all graphs of future growth are based on linear projections, the future doesn’t happen that way. Adjacent technologies combine, society either accelerates trends or breaks them while legislation, financing and business models have extraordinary effects. Our predictions about the future are not getting better. We overestimate the effects of hardware (given everyone’s predictions we should be on the moon, with levitating cars by now) and understate the effects of software, where our Teslas learn to drive, or where we are connected to every form or anything ever made. The reality is that we live on the edges of profound new technologies that could each individually changes everything or come together and change nothing. 3D printing from companies like , or or could revolutionize the entire industrial age, logistics and the foundation of retail , or remain a novel way to print trinkets. Self driving cars could change our entire societal and physical landscape or become too complex, philosophically and practically to ever work. VR could unbundle our being from the everyday and change the way we see entertainment, work, vacations and life, or we could all feel like glass-holes. From Drones to being used to change transactions online, and personalized medicine to artificial intelligence, we live on the threshold of the most profound changes that could also become pointless distractions. A whole new world of businesses are built on the idea of owning the . We’ve Airbnb, Seamless, Facebook, Alibaba, Uber and a whole generation of companies built on putting themselves as a thin layer between vast supply systems and customers. 2016 should see incredible battles between companies aiming to be topmost. Large CPG brands could aim to supply direct to the customer using their brand as that interface. Companies like Apple with Apple pay can own transaction data, Mobile operators could perform both ad blocking and ad injection, Smart TV makers could sell their own video ads. Facebook is showing 4 billion views per day, why isn’t this both the next large retailer and TV company, when you have over a billion eyeballs, you can do anything. Expect 2016 to be the start of companies leapfrogging over each other to own customers. Other than jeans, the more you use things and the older they get, the worse they became. Until now. In the modern age software becomes more vital as software and hardware intertwine. Increasingly the design the car interface becomes as vital as the physical dashboard design. Cars like Teslas become better each year, as do our phones and televisions. As software becomes integrated into cars, fridges, homes, TV’s, we’re seeing the physical and virtual blend. Many expect 4K tv’s to be game-changing, when perhaps better content search would be a bigger difference. From Nest Thermostats to Hue lighting to Sonos , increasingly the point of differences is not in what things do, but how they do it. We endlessly talk about the best digital innovations, the best digital strategies, the digital economy, digital advertising, digital publishing , what does this mean? Our world is endlessly and uselessly using the word digital. Perhaps, and this is a dream of mine, but we may one day wake up to a modern world where “digital” is like electricity. A totally vital, totally transformative, entirely background concept. We will talk about great ideas, wonderful businesses, superb business strategy and just accept this all happens in a modern world. For years we’ve assumed the natural best internet experience would be the App, but for all the new apps launched every year, our habits remain stubbornly similar. Once the home screen was there to fill, now every new app likely needs to replace an old app. We’re slowly accepting that the modern world may move beyond apps. Whether it’s the stubborn effectiveness of mobile websites, perfect for companies we don’t want a relationship with consumers, to app streaming from Google (but especially because of the growing notion that IM could become the platform that replaces the browser). Soon our first entry point for buying things, ordering things, customer service, is likely to be an IM platform with companies bolting into the back end of the messaging experience.
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What Happened To The Food Industry Last Year?
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Robyn Metcalfe
| 2,016 | 1 | 3 |
By the time you read this, you will be aware of the U-turn our system is making to find new, personalized, localized ways to your plate. Last year was a bellwether for systems, specifically distribution systems. In 2016, the traditional method of delivering from farms to tables is going to shift to include new players, more technology and shocking transparency. The recent revelations about supply chain and the sourcing of chocolate for have elevated the complexities about how companies can appear both big and small at the same time. Chipotle advertised its local, small producers and Mast told customers they were a true bean-to-bar chocolate company. But both companies have had to face issues traditionally belonging to large industrial companies — those of safety and transparency at scale. businesses now recognize that customers want to know where their comes from, but the realities of being a sustainable business in growing markets suggest these companies will have to be more creative to deliver the real thing. A marketing strategy does not make realities on the ground any easier. 2016 will reveal how smallness meets the challenge of scale. We’ll see companies working to achieve an efficient, industrial system that is also transparent and sustainable. 2015 also brought us new logistics — is having its “Uber moment.” Personal shoppers, third-party delivery such as Instacart, new services such as UberEATS and more created a scramble for the last mile, that most expensive and critical distance between a distribution center and the customer. UPS, FedEx the USPS — even Amazon and Google — are filling our highways, fueled by the Fear Of Missing Out, scrambling for faster, more personal delivery. This will be an even more crowded race in 2016, as everyone with wheels or a novel way of transporting will pile on until economies of scale and value to customers becomes more apparent. Not only have delivery services surged onto our roads, but new delivery platforms are entering the logistics landscape. Notice that the big players like Costo, Target and Walmart are all testing new formats, such as lockers and drive-through options, to address consumers’ need for delivery where and when they are. Even is searching for ways to play in the shared economy to deliver packages and, one assumes, . Everyone is seeking a better solution for the traditional distribution center or hub. The big players, such as Sysco, had a troubled in 2015. With the slow economic growth and low interest rates, large companies chose to merge and consolidate resources in order to maintain shareholder value. Sysco opted to merge with US Foods; however, government anti-trust regulators blocked their deal in spite of Sysco’s efforts to sell off various units. The merger of SABMiller and InBev, initiated in 2015, also reveals how these tie-ups might change the trend toward small, personalized (craft beer in this case), when conglomerates or holding companies control so much of the supply chain. Some companies, such as Kraft and Heinz, were able to double down on resources to create Kraft Heinz. Expect more of this agglomeration — at least until the November election, when the economy may, or may not, take a turn. also was a time for those who have made their reputations by selling organic and other “good” foods to lose market share to bigger, more commodity-type players. Walmart, Costco and other grocery chains are using their supply chain efficiencies to source more organic foods at lower costs to existing customers, along with those who want both lower costs and healthy in one shopping experience. Watch for more jockeying for brand differentiation among grocery chains that are taking customers from Whole Foods and those who can still find a way to service customers who want personalized, more mission-oriented buying experiences. But while grocery chains struggled to maintain their customer base, they also were challenged by the growth of consumers who are now searching for fresher, more sustainably raised produce and fresh meat and seafood. The center of the grocery store will be the next to transform, and supply chain disruption will play a greater role in determining new store layouts. Be prepared for your grocery store to add more value and services in an effort to compete with emerging online players like Amazon Fresh. Meanwhile, new players, like non- delivery businesses, will expand to offer delivery. Would you stop at your dry cleaning service to pick up from your personal locker delivered from your grocery store? Way back in 2013, Jeff Bezos of Amazon mentioned drones as a delivery vehicle. By 2015, both Google and Amazon meant business when it came to package delivery. In 2016, you may begin to see those packages containing items. Maybe. All that in 2015 suggests that 2016 will begin to show us how our distribution and delivery systems may look by 2020 and beyond. The ground has been primed for new players, new technology and a new landscape for how moves from farm to plate. Old-school logistics are ripe for transformation. Fasten your seatbelt.
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Startups Are Taking Over CES
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 3 |
The Consumer Electronics Show keeps on growing. Several years ago the show outgrew the massive Las Vegas Convention Center and started using part of the Sands Expo Center several blocks away. They called it Eureka Park and made the exhibit space less expensive in a bid to attract startups to the show. It worked. And it’s bigger than ever with startups filling both levels of the Sands. CES is now a startup show. That’s why TechCrunch is here. Avoid the nonsense of the LVCC and head over to the Sands Expo Center in the Venetian. This is where the interesting companies are located this year. This is where you’ll find startups making new wearables and smart home tech. It’s where small companies are displaying their new 3D printers and craving attention. The only downside? You’ll miss Samsung’s latest refrigerators and the sad booth babes employed by car audio companies that dot the North Hall. CES 2016 is the largest to date with 2.5 million square feet of exhibit space. The CEA, the organization behind CES, expects 20,000 new products to be unveiled at this year’s show. It’s also quickly becoming an auto show and this year’s event features nine out of the top ten automakers exhibiting. Plus, Faraday Future is finally taking the wraps off its plan. Young startups (or those tight on cash) have long attended CES, but not many did so in an official capacity. Founders would attend the show in partnership with a key partner such as Intel or Microsoft or NVIDIA. Or, they would simply get a suite in a local hotel and invite press for a drink and demo. Both still happen, but a quick browse of the Sands Expo Center exhibitors reveals that many startups are getting small booths. There’s Atlas Wearable, Blocks and Double Robotics. Ring and Roost. Withings and Fitbit are there, too. 3D Systems has a large booth, but is surrounded by smaller 3D printing companies like Formlabs, MarkForged, and Voxel8. There are sections dedicated to the smart home and wearables and robotics — all away from the main convention center. Even Techstars and Indiegogo have booths at the Sands. There’s now halls filled with rows and rows of startups barely out of crowdfunding vying for buyers and suppliers and the press to take notice. It’s important to remember that CES is not open to the public. It’s a trade show primarily existing for members of the industry and those like these startups hustling their way into the industry. The press, like TechCrunch and Engadget, are just along for the ride (and page views).
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5 Things That Will Disappear In 5 Years
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Tom Gonser
| 2,016 | 1 | 3 |
Just five years ago the world was a very different place. In 2010, the iPad had just made its debut, Kickstarter was introducing a new form of venture capitalism that would change the face of fundraising and Square was letting vendors of any size accept payment with a swipe of a card on a mobile device. And we haven’t looked back. The next five years will no doubt unleash products and services that we have yet to imagine. But as we progress, what will we leave behind? Here are a handful of things we use today that likely will either be gone completely or on their last breath, disrupted by new innovations, technology and methods. Today, Square lets any business accept debit or credit cards. Venmo lets you split your dinner bill with a friend through a money transfer via text message. Soon, you will have all your banking done through any mobile device — even your vehicle. Across the U.S., check use fell 57 percent from 2000 to 2012, according to the Federal Reserve. Ninety-four percent of consumers under 35-years-old bank online, and more than one-fifth of them have never written a physical check to pay a bill, according to First Data’s report, . In Europe, if you try to write a check, they look at you as if you are crazy. Rent may be the last great bastion of using checks, but even that is well on the decline as property managers switch to electronic payments, and mobile payments become so easy. One more thing: In the more distant future, there will be no cash. No cash means no cash machines — bye, bye ATMs. By 2020, 70 percent of the world will be using a smartphone, according to . Mobile data networks will cover 90 percent of the population. With cloud services like Apple, Box, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft offering near-unlimited storage at near-free prices, there’ll be little need for storage devices taking up room in your pocket. Not to mention the increase in standard storage for mobile devices in the next five years. Event organizers around the world will need to come up with new swag to reward attendees at their conferences as USBs will be a token of the analog past. This is a hard one because passwords are used so broadly today. The average person is said to have — and nearly half admit to using unsafe, weak passwords. But even if you’re adamant about using only strong passwords — guess what — those can be . Biometrics are already becoming mainstream, especially on mobile devices, which are now the main access point for many of our online activities. Fingerprints, voice and facial recognition will replace your first dog’s name and your wedding anniversary as the way you access your secure accounts. These will have their own security risks, but the character password will be no more. Similarly, soon you will not have physical keys to lose. Your key will be any of the smart devices you carry, which will be linked to you biometrically so that only you can operate them. No more scrambling around your house tossing the cushions of your couch in the air looking for the elusive remote control (or 10 of them, depending on the complexity of your in-home audio and video setup). The research firm Strategy Analytics that emerging categories in the Internet of Things (IoT), smart home and wearables will connect an additional 17.6 billion devices by 2020. Even today, devices such as the Amazon Echo are taking voice search and commands to a new level. With so many new devices connected to the Internet by 2020, building separate hardware for a remote control will just no longer make any sense. Paper-based signatures and paper-based processing — physically needing to print, fax, scan or overnight documents for reviews, approvals, decisions and/or signatures to complete a transaction — are fast-becoming archaic in today’s digital world. In the future, we will rely on “cloud agreements” to actively manage any transaction. Cloud agreements will be: actively connected to the identities of the involved parties (forever), able to mete out payments as contract objectives are met and actively contact actors in the transaction when the time is right. Real estate, financial services, insurance, high-tech and healthcare companies — even — are adopting cloud-computing models to increase efficiency, reduce costs and drive a better end-user experience. Soon, contract management will never be the same. When you’re making a list of resolutions for the New Year, consider getting a head start on cleaning out the old-tech clutter you have in your life to make way for a digital New Year. Sure, you have some time. But with all of the exciting technology disruptions taking place right now, why wait?
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Livestream’s $399 Movi Brings Multi-Camera Polish Into A Pocket-Sized Package
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 3 |
If you’re a regular person looking to shoot some video, it’s hard to complain about the many, many options available. Heck, the iPhone camera is good enough at this point that it’s been used to . But unless you’re a video professional, there’s still one big limitation — you’re probably recording with a single camera. Sure, that’s fine if you’re looking to capture something brief, but if you’re filming a longer event (say, a concert, or a baseball game), being locked into single viewpoint can get pretty dull, pretty quickly. That’s why is announcing a new product at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, called the . It creates the that you’ve captured the event from multiple cameras, rather than a single, pocket-sized device. To use it, you put the camera in place, then use your iPhone (only iPhones will be supported initially) to edit on-the-fly. Movi will automatically detect faces and other points of interest, so you just tap to cut between the different musicians at a concert or the different speakers at a press conference. You can also manually create points of interest or zoom at-will. Conversely, if you want to be completely hands-off, you can have Movi do the editing automatically — it probably won’t have the smarts of a human editor, but it can detect when someone’s speaking or when there’s other activity of interest. “No one wants to go home and edit for hours in FinalCut Pro … and certainly no one can afford to show up at an event with three cameras and cameramen,” said Livestream founder Max Haot. He added that Livestream is launching Movi as a separate brand because you don’t actually need to share this footage live — Movi will integrate with the company’s existing livestreaming services, but you can also just record the video and share later. To be clear, you’re still shooting with one physical camera, so ultimately, you’re limited to the footage that a single camera can capture. However, when Haot demonstrated Movi for me (mostly using pre-shot footage, but also using a live camera to prove that it works), it really did offer a lot of the visual variety and energy that you get from a multi-camera setup. Haot also said Movi users might eventually be able to buy two or more physical cameras and cut between them. That won’t be available at release, however, partly to avoid confusion: “We obviously didn’t want people to buy five cameras or think they need five cameras.” As for the device itself, Livestream says it’s only 2.5 inches tall and weighs 4.6 ounces. Since it’s small, unobtrusive and can be mounted on a microphone stand, Haot said you can set it up much closer to the action than you would with a regular camera. It records footage at 4K resolution (3840 x 2160 pixels, to be exact) and includes a built-in microphone. On its own, the Movi battery is only estimated to last for an hour. If you need to record for longer than that, you can plug it in, or you could buy the Movi Boost, an accessory that offers 10 hours of battery life and could also make it easier to mount or carry the camera. Livestream plans to ship the product in April with a $399 price tag. . [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PWQ__2nuf8]
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The Miami Tech Scene Is Heating Up
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Juan López Salaberry
| 2,016 | 1 | 3 |
Miami is a city of many traits. Historically recognized for the sun, beach and tourists of South Beach, it has now become much more than that. With one of the most diverse populations in the country, Miami is the strategic capital of the Americas, binding Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latin America (LatAm) to the U.S. market. Miami is , with the highest startup density in the country at , according to the Kauffman Index. Its privileged proximity to both New York and Silicon Valley will allow this emerging ecosystem to consolidate its position as an entrepreneurial hub with the arrival of accelerators and VC funds. Rather than trying to be the next Silicon Valley, Miami is following the lead of emerging tech hubs like Austin and Boulder, and is focusing on its strengths. Miami and tech have been having an on-again, off-again relationship since the 1990s, when it hosted some of the top media and financial firms from South America. One of the most iconic companies of that era was Patagon.com, a Miami transplant from Argentina that sold 85 percent to Santander for $585 million. It also served as a springboard to some of the pioneers in the Miami tech scene today, such as Juan Pablo Cappello, Constancio Larguia, Silvina Moschini and Peter Kellner, co-founder of Endeavor. A lot has changed since those days. A new Miami tech scene came about seven years ago when “some of today’s most relevant players started forming and getting together,” as The Miami Herald’s Nancy Dhalberg put it. Florida International University hosted its first Americas Venture Capital Conference (2010), Susan Amat co-founded The Launch Pad at University of Miami (2008) and soon after she started Venture Hive, Miami’s most iconic incubator. But is was in 2012 when, inspired by Dave McClure’s Geeks on a Plane stop in the city, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation decided Miami had a great shot at becoming a startup capital. Since then, the foundation started accelerating and funding different local initiatives, bringing new players to the scene and becoming instrumental in Endeavor, Venture for America, LaunchCode, Emerge, IME, The Idea Center, The LAB and 500 Startups, among others, landing in the city. The most recent grantee is PowerMoves, an initiative to raise the number of venture-backed founders of color and minorities. This particular organization well-represents the foundation’s spirit. In the words of Matt Haggman, program director at the Knight Foundation, “Diversity is our differentiator; unlock talent and amplify capital.” Matt has become the city’s superman, getting involved in most activities within the current communities; he could easily run for mayor any day. Through his work, the foundation has committed more than $20 million in funding across 165 entrepreneurship initiatives in the Miami area during the last three years. Just as FIU’s VC conference stopped, Manny Medina started cooking his annual eMerge Americas conference, where folks such as Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square, have inspired thousands of people. It was around that time when Miami’s reputation as the capital of South America got back into play as a differentiator and people started to believe a startup culture could be created by developing the community. Entrepreneurs Demian Bellumio and Ola Ahlvarsson have also found a way to connect tech with art, another one of Miami traits. For three years now they have been producing SIME — the European conference — in the city around Art Basel Week, merging art, technology and media. The opportunity has not only become obvious for entrepreneurs, but is also increasingly notorious for big companies that still make Miami their LatAm headquarters. Several companies are landing every week as Miami regains the title as a regional hub, and also as one of the most important platforms to serve the growing Hispanic power in the U.S. Companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Uber, Lyft and Vice have moved to Miami, along with new investors hungry for this opportunity. “Miami is the perfect place to start or grow your business, specially if you are interested in an international venture,” said Laura González-Estéfani, Director of Partnerships & Mobile LatAm for Facebook based in Miami. González-Estéfani recognizes Miami as a hub for the Americas and Europe because the tech community is hungry for making new things happen. “There is talent, there is support from the institutions and private initiatives that are focused on boosting innovation, and there is an incremental interest from VCs and business angels for innovative projects.” There are currently doing everything from media to tourism to health tech. Another great incentive for firms coming to the city has to do with Miami’s tax advantages where there are no local or state income taxes, and Florida’s corporate tax is 5.5 percent, one of the nation’s lowest. Jose Rasco, one of Building.co founders at the opening of the space. (Source: ) As made famous by Steve Jobs, the dots can usually be connected looking backwards, and Miami is no exception. The last few years have kept the local ecosystem busy with the starting of many initiatives. Angel investors got organized and created groups educating an increasing the number of local investors in tech, co-working spaces popped up in every district — such as the recently opened Building.co by the — and coding schools started taking over the city. Universities are now teaching entrepreneurship, VC funds are coming from outside the city and soon we’ll see accelerators arrive as Miami’s number of startups soars — up 46 percent — accounting for 1,600 companies (according to the Kauffman Foundation). , the largest local angel group, is proof of how rapid change is happening in the city; it has quadrupled the number of its members, up to 80 investors, in the past two years. The group has invested in 14 firms, for a total of $2.8 million, and is actively looking to increase that number with both companies from Miami and those attracted to the city. “Miami does not have a capital problem: We need family offices to trust new funds to leverage the power of Miami as a gateway. That is a tremendous opportunity,” said Nicolas Berardi, AGP Miami’s managing director. One of the newcomers is European accelerator Startupbootcamp. Looking to benefit from Miami’s top positioning as a healthcare and talent hub will bring 10 companies a year to Miami for the next three years, and support them with its six-month acceleration program. Christian Seale, Startupbootcamp Miami founder and managing director, believes Miami can become a global center for healthcare innovation. “Miami is the second largest healthcare hub in the U.S., with 8 hospitals, over 33,000 beds, three globally recognized research universities and a legacy of successful healthcare companies,” said Seale. Many of these dots — not to say all — have a strong debt to the Knight Foundation’s efforts. But bigger questions now arise on how to make this a sustainable ecosystem. Knight is still very much needed, but hopefully current players will get together in a joint effort to connect the dots and build a stronger and bigger community. As the city consolidates its place as one of the hottest entrepreneurial spots in the country, , Magic Leap, and others, such as CareCloud, Open English and more. Altogether, these Miami royals have so far raised more than $763 million in venture capital, attracting talent and gaining attention from international investors. In less than two years, LaunchCode, the non-profit organization from St. Louis, Missouri that received $1.2 million funding from Knight in 2014 for its first expansion city, has teamed up with more than 120 companies to hire through tech apprentices who don’t necessarily have a traditional degree. As for Magic Leap, the virtual reality startup that raised $542 million in venture capital from Google and Qualcomm, among other tech giants, (DCOTA) in Dania Beach, Florida. “Magic Leap’s move to DCOTA is an investment in the future, ensuring that we have the very best creative environment and resources to support our rapidly growing team,” said Russell Burke, Chief Financial Officer at Magic Leap, in a press release. “It’s also a pretty big statement about where we think we will be in the months and years ahead.” Another example of Miami’s thriving startup ecosystem is Andres Moreno and Wilmer Sarmiento’s Open English. The company raised $120.25 million in venture capital, and took advantage of Miami’s strategic position to launch an online English-learning business that serves more than 400,000 students in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking community within the U.S. While Miami’s royals provide proof of success and business opportunities for startups and investors in South Florida, venture capital remains a weak link in the ecosystem. In 2014, the Miami metro area attracted $656.83 million of the $867.6 million in 36 venture capital deals that took place in Florida. These figures pale in comparison to venture capital investments drawn by the states of California, with $26,840.6 million (San Francisco accounted for $10,948 million) or New York, with $4,510.9 million, with 1,631 and 422 deals, respectively (according to data from CB Insights). Yes, it is still early, and there’s more to come. A lot of it is going to come from attracting talent from outside Miami, and, honestly, it doesn’t seem to be a hard task. Miami is a great launching pad if you are interested in selling to LatAm or tapping into the U.S. market, with a privileged positioning to cater to U.S. Hispanics. The quality of life is great, it’s strategically close to Europe, LatAm, New York and San Francisco, the infrastructure is starting to be in place and the ecosystem is growing fast. Institutional venture capital funds have yet to look at Miami with better eyes — but honestly, who would have expected for them to arrive before the opportunities? This is already changing. 500 Startups has done a program in Miami, investing up to $250,000 in eight companies, and Scout Ventures established an office in Miami and made two investments. Prominent angel investors Patrick McKenna and Mark Kingdon have moved to the area, and local funds are starting to emerge, such as Z9 actively looking for companies. The landing of Startupbootcamp’s accelerator is also encouraging, and will certainly pave the way for more accelerators to come. Whoever has tried surfing at any point in their lives know something very well: There is, indeed, a right time to catch a good wave. It is certainly not at its peak; rather, it takes a bit of paddling and vision to catch the best waves and enjoy the ride.
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The BoomStick Gives Your Stock Earbuds A Major Sound Quality Boost
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 3 |
The standard sets of stock headphones being shipped by companies like Apple and Samsung are, by and large, garbage. For consumers looking to achieve more of a high-end audio experience, their best bet is traditionally in securing a new pair of cans. A new company, , is looking to help consumers boost audio quality more easily with their first portable product offering. The , launching for pre-order today, allows consumers a shot at improving the dynamic quality of all of their headphones with the addition of a single, portable device that plugs into a device’s headphone jack. It’s not your traditional portable headphone amplifier, it actually really changes how your headphones sound. When plugging a standard pair of Apple EarPods into the BoomStick, I was left with a much more satisfying low-end responsiveness in addition to considerably more dynamic vocals and high-end quality. With all of that said, Apple’s EarPods definitely aren’t winning any sound quality awards anyway, yet the headphones sounded considerably more palatable with the addition of the BoomStick. Users looking to get a taste of the improvements in sound reproduction offered by the BoomStick can check out the website to hear their favorite tunes enhanced by the company’s technologies. The design of the product itself is fairly unobtrusive. It has a single “boom” button on the top-side of the unit which allows you to really hear the difference in sound that the BoomStick is producing by toggling the tech on and off. The device sports a pretty hefty 14-hour battery which was generally satisfactory in handling my music-listening needs. I chatted with BoomCloud 360 co-founder George Appling who told me that he believed the world was “desperately in need of a sound renaissance.” “While TV has made huge strides in terms of quality, from black and white to 4K, audio has been going backwards. In fact, our research shows that only 4 percent of consumers believe they are achieving a great audio experience with their headphones,” Appling said in a statement. “Consumers shouldn’t have to settle for mediocre audio. With the BoomStick, you can make your free earphones outperform expensive headphones or you can take your expensive headphones to a whole new level of enveloping sound.” Ultimately the most critical sell of this product is in convincing consumers that their $99 is better spent on the BoomStick instead of on a more capable pair of headphones. The BoomStick is certainly a high-quality upgrade to users sporting stock earbuds or other less pronounced headphones, but for audiophiles its algorithmic sound re-engineering can perhaps strip away the specific sound signatures of headphone brands that ultimately makes them so unique. A bothersome design quirk of the product is the recessed headphone jack, which much like the 3.5mm port of the first iPhone prohibits the use of headphones with more girthy cables. This hindered me from enjoying its benefits with all of my headphones without adding a second adapter into the fray. For casual listeners, these headphones offer bass and high-end upgrades that can present low and mid-end headphones with a major sound upgrade. Standard earbuds from Apple and Samsung can offer experiences more similar to those of Beats and Bose when using the BoomStick device according to the company. This product is probably best for mobile audiophiles looking to get the most out of multiple sets of headphones. The BoomStick will be available for $99 in spring 2016. It’s available in black and silver.
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Biotech Startups Hit the Ground Running, With Six Filing IPO Plans Today
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
If we had to gamble on it, we’d bet the IPO market will be far more brisk this year than last year, which was the for tech IPOs in particular since 2009. Even still, it came as a bit of a surprise today when not one or three but six biotech startups revealed plans to go public. (If you recall, biotech IPOs, which ticked along nicely for a couple of years, practically in the second half of last year.) If you happened to miss the steady string of announcements — which, as , comes one week before JPMorgan Chase & Co’s big annual health care conference in San Francisco — here are the handful of companies that plan to test the IPO waters soon: 1.) . It’s a three-year-old, San Francisco-based biotechnology company focused on developing and commercializing gene therapy products for patients suffering from serious, life-threatening rare diseases caused by single gene defects. One of those diseases is myotubular myopathy, a degenerative muscular condition that afflicts almost exclusively males and kills one in every 50,000 newborns by the time they reach age two. The company plans to raise $86.3 million offering. As the San Francisco Business Times , Audentes first filed IPO plans confidentially in early November, about a month after it raised $65 million in a Series C funding. According to , it has raised roughly $138 million altogether, including from T. Rowe Price, Venrock, Sofinnova Ventures, and 5AM Ventures. 2.) . Like Audentes (and many biotech startups to go public before it), this Cambridge, Ma.-based company is also awfully young at just two years old. What it does: develop treatments to modify disease-causing genetic defects. What it’s planning: to offer up to $100 million in stock. That’s less than what it has raised from private investors to date. According to , Editas has collected around $120 million from investors, including Flagship Ventures, Polaris Partners, and Third Rock Ventures. The Boston Globe has . 3.) . Talk about young; this Burlingame, Ca.-based company is practically brand-new, having been founded in November 2014. But that’s not stopping it from attempting to raise $115 million in an IPO for its business, which is focused on the development and commercialization of immuno-oncology therapies that harness the immune system to attack cancer cells. Its plans aren’t as crazy as they sound, given the founding team comes from Pharmacyclics, an oncology drug company that was acquired by the research company AbbVie in March of last year for . CrunchBase shows that Corvus has already raised around of private funding; some of its biggest shareholders are Adams Street Partners, Fidelity Management & Research, Denmark’s Novo A/S and OrbiMed. 4.) . Reata is an outlier here in that the Irving, Tex.-based company, which is developing protein-based antioxidant inflammation modulators for life-threatening diseases, was founded way back in 2002. The company, which is looking to raise $80 million in an IPO, has also raised a lot more from investors than the others. According to CrunchBase, it has attracted in backing, including from biggest shareholders AbbVie, CPMG, and Novo A/S. 5.) . This 10-year-old, Waltham, Ma.-based company is looking to raise $86.3 million in an IPO. That’s not much more than the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company announced in late August, when it raised in Series C funding led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Delos Capital Fund. At this point, the company, which is developing an entinostat (a cancer inhibitor) as a combination therapy, has raised around altogether. Worth noting: it originally set terms in June 2014 to raise $60 million but withdrew its offering. Xconomy had written a story about why .
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Faraday Future Unveils The Crazy Looking FFZERO1 Concept Car
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
Electric car company unveiled its first concept car, the FFZero1, at CES 2016 this evening in Las Vegas, Nevada. And true to , it looks a lot like the Batmobile. Faraday says it sees this vehicle as more of a “car of concepts” than just a singular concept car. Along with the FFZERO1, the company revealed a variable platform architecture (VPA) — the concept being that they build the base platform of the car once, and then adapt it for different form factors of cars. In theory, the base used in that 1,000 horsepower concept car pictured above could be lifted a bit and turned into something resembling an SUV. The FFZERO1 lists with some pretty odd features. The seating is said to be made for zero gravity situations (for some reason), and the car will channel oxygen and water through a helmet Faraday is developing. You can stick your iPhone right on the steering wheel for navigation and other data, and the car will act as a “digital copilot” by projecting augmented reality visuals on the road ahead. Faraday’s head of global design Richard Kim called the car something “not of this world”, noting the strange “UFO line” design that divides the black and silver body of the vehicle; according to Kim, this “UFO line” will be signature to all of Faraday Future’s cars. The TechCrunch team actually got an accidental sneak preview of the car after arriving a bit too early for the show tonight. Lacking any signage or people to tell us to “go away” we walked right in and saw it with our own eyes before everyone else. Alas, they realized we weren’t supposed to be there before we could snap off a pic — but as you’ve now seen, it looked the same as the leaked images from earlier. Along with the modular car, Faraday revealed it would be building a car manufacturing plant in Northern Las Vegas in the next few weeks and that it has formed an alliance with Chinese electronics company LeTV. LeTV invests in many electronics companies and plans to unveil its own car concept this year, however it looks like it is in more than just an alliance with FF. You may revealed just how much LeTV backs Faraday, even buying the building it currently works out of in Gardena California. [gallery ids="1257155,1257154,1257153,1257151,1257150,1257149,1257148,1257147,1257158"] And here’s the render-heavy concept video that debuted at the announcement tonight And here’s our lovely TechCrunch intern Lucas Matney explaining what happened at the unveiling:
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LEGO’s WeDo 2.0 Robotics Kit Teaches Science And Engineering To Elementary School Students
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
LEGO Education is launching a new version of its for elementary school students at CES today. Just like , WeDo 2.0 is meant to introduce students to robotics, engineering and programming, but it’s also meant as a tool for teaching STEM in general. The set will come with a number of Lego bricks, but most importantly, it includes a Bluetooth Low Energy-based hub that connects to a motor, as well as motion and tilt sensors that are all part of the basic package. On the software side, WeGo uses a drag-and-drop interface for writing basic applications that can connect to the hub and its sensors. The hardware itself is only part of the solution, though. LEGO also offers schools a curriculum with more than 40 hours of lessons that are built on the key science standards typically taught in second to fourth grade. Some of these are basic engineering projects like building a small truck for a lesson on recycling, while use the LEGO bricks to teach students about plants and pollination — a life science project you wouldn’t immediately associate with LEGO bricks. Access to this curriculum means an extra purchase for schools, but the LEGO Education team tells me that it made the decision to sell this as a site-wide licence so schools that subscribe can then use it in all of their classrooms. The LEGO Education team tells me that outfitting a classroom with enough units should cost about $2,000, which would include the cost of licensing the curriculum. WeDo 2.0 is now available and the software will run on PCs, Macs, iPads and Android tablets and phones. Lego tells me support for Chromebooks, which are getting increasingly popular in schools, will arrive in the second half of 2016.
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Show Off Your Snapchat Stories Forever On Slinger
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
Ephemerality be damned. Some art deserves to live longer than 24 hours. So rather than just squirrel away your saved Snapchat Stories, you can upload them to aiming to be the permanent home for vertical videos. And thanks to its Popular page and the ability to Like videos, it can help you discover content creators to follow in ways Snapchat lacks. You could write off Slinger as just a dinky YouTube for vertical videos. But that ignores what’s fundamentally unique about this new medium propelled by Snapchat, Periscope, Hyperlapse, and other apps. Because they’re shaped tall and slim like humans, vertical videos can capture more emotional, personality-driven content than the horizontal format. Combined with their easy-to-make, point-of-view, off-the-cuff nature, vertical videos are better consumed by following lots of creators in a fast-moving feed than through more cautious channel subscriptions like on YouTube. Plus, no one likes constantly flipping their phones back-and-forth, so a dedicated stream for vertical vids makes watching easier. “When you watch horizontal video it’s usually on a television or far away” says Slinger co-founder Chris Carmichael. “It’s a disconnected experience. Vertical video emerged from the phone itself. It feels like a FaceTime call. It’s very intimate.” If Slinger can convince video makers it’s where they should stuff their portrait mode content, it could become the everlasting gallery for Snapchat’s transient creation tool. Slinger was built by Carmichael’s three-person team with the money he earned shooting sponsored Snapchats for big brands like Disney, Universal, and Taco Bell. After several failed startups, Carmichael became one of the most popular creators on Snapchat with his funny drawn-on stories and inspirational messages. Since March he’s been working on Slinger, and it just launched yesterday. isn’t complicated because mobile apps shouldn’t be. Make a profile, upload vertical videos, select cover frames to promote them, follow creators, like their clips, and browse the trending page for whatever delights you. For an example, you can check out my profile with a video of the robots from Y Combinator’s last Demo Day. Slinger is rough around the edges. The lack of Snapchat’s useful scene-by-scene tap-to-fast-forward feature can make boring videos agonizing. And there are no video editing tools, even just for trimming unwanted clips off the ends of a saved Snapchat Story. But that’s actually a philosophical decision. “We don’t want to be in the editing space. We want to be the gallery” Carmichael tells me. s For now there’s no way to link to or embed specific videos. Those will be important if it wants to walk through the door Snapchat left wide open. “On Snapchat there isn’t a place to discover creators” in part because there are no Likes so there’s no way to tell what’s the best content, Carmichael explains. He says getting on the Vine Popular page scores a creator tens of thousands of followers, which both inspires people to make great content and shows what works best in the format. He hopes Slinger’s Popular page will suss out what wins on vertical video. Bubbling up the best content could also propel Slinger’s business model. Carmichael imagines getting a cut for connecting brands with the top creators the emerge from Slinger, and them shooting compelling sponsored content. It’s a bit like arranging sponsorship deals on Vine and other platforms. for a reported $50 million to keep a share of those payouts to creators. [Disclosure: My cousin Darren Lachtman is a Niche co-founder]. In one swoop, could both save vertical video art for the future and make its creation a sustainable profession for aspiring stars. Carmichael says he realized “Holy shit, I’m investing so much time into my Snapchats and they’re gone after. If Picassos were destroyed after 24 hours, we wouldn’t know who Picasso was today.” That might be embellishing the significance of many of the narcissistic selfies and needless diaries that no one wants or needs a day later. But at its core, Snapchat combines all the ways we communicate digitally — photo, video, audio, text, drawing, and symbols — in a single tool. There are bound to be masterpieces amidst the self-destruction. Carmichael concludes, “We think there’s room for disappearing content and content that lives forever.”
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Nvidia Announces New Drive PX 2 ‘Supercomputer In A Lunchbox’ For Self-Driving Cars
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
Following last year’s , Nvidia just announced an updated version of its computing platform for self-driving cars, the . Compared to last year’s model, this is a much more powerful beast, able to process data from 12 video cameras and other sensors in real time to make educated driving decisions. The company calls it a supercomputer, and it’s the size of a lunchbox. Behind the scene, the Drive PX 2 features 12 different cores representing 8 teraflops of calculation power, 24 deep learning tera operations per second. The company is using a 16nm architecture, and it’s a hungry beast as it requires 250W of power. Finally, Nvidia is using a liquid-cooling system. Because the PX 2 will be used in cars, that’s not too much of a problem and Nvidia argues that car manufacturers will just plug the device into their existing cooling solutions. Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that the PX 2 was as powerful as 150 MacBook Pros. The company is certainly comparing GPU power with the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which currently sports an Intel Iris Graphics 6100 chip. The PX 2 features two next-gen Tegra processors, as well as a Pascal-based GPU. In total, the system can push up to 8 teraflops and recognize up to 2,800 images per second using the AlexNet neural network-based deep learning algorithm. The company also announced Nvidia Drivenet, its own deep neural network. It has the equivalent of 37 million neurons and was trained 120 million objects so far. Like other deep neural networks, it gets better over time. Companies will be able to leverage this network, but Nvidia also insisted in saying that car makers would want to control their own neural network. The company is promoting a platform approach, meaning that it wants to work with as many car makers as possible to kickstart their self-driving efforts. Volvo is going to be the first partner shipping Drive PX 2 in about 100 upcoming test cars. Nvidia has also partnered with Audi, Daimler, BMW and Ford to develop and test the PX 2. As Huang showed during today’s keynote, all of this power is needed to enable self-driving cars to know enough about their environment — and interpret it — to safely drive in traffic. In one demo, Nvidia showed a new dashboard that can use this data to show drivers whether there are other cars around them at any given time. Thanks to this, “we soon won’t need rear-view mirrors anymore,” Huang joked. As Nvidia clearly noted, though, identifying objects and planning basic paths is only the beginning. Looking ahead, making self-driving cars work in the real world also means that cars can recognize circumstances as well. Not every truck is the same, after all — some are ambulances, for example, and you better make space for those. [gallery ids="1257127,1257125,1257126"]
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Ford And DJI Launch $100,000 Developer Challenge To Improve Drone-To-Vehicle Communications
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
What if your drone could talk to your car? That’s probably not a question you’ve asked yourself all that often, but what if you are the United Nations or a search-and-rescue organization that wants to launch drones from the bed of their pickup trucks? Ford and DJI today announced at CES a new that asks developers to create drone-to-vehicle communications using Ford’s AppLink or OpenXC technologies. The winner of this challenge will receive $100,000. “At Ford, we are driving innovation in every part of our business to help make people’s lives better,” said Ken Washington, Ford vice president, Research and Advanced Engineering, in a statement today. “Working with DJI and the United Nations, there is an opportunity to make a big difference with vehicles and drones working together for a common good.” https://youtu.be/txrfcrf2T70 Developers will have to create a system that will allow a driver to launch a drone from the bed of a Ford F-150 from the touchscreen inside the car (which itself is linked to a smartphone app). Here is how Ford describes this process: “Using the driver’s smartphone, the F-150 would establish a real-time link between the drone, the truck and the cloud, so vehicle data can be shared. Data will be relayed to the drone so the driver can continue to a new destination, and the drone will catch up and dock with the truck.” Ford is clearly trying to push its developer cred with this challenge. As the company announced earlier this week, the open-source version of AppLink — SmartDeviceLink — is by Toyota and a number of other car manufacturers are thinking about using it as an alternative to (or side-by-side with) Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto. Ford clearly wants developers to be aware of its platform and working with DJI and on a hot topic like drones should help there.
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360fly Pushes Into Virtual Reality Sports And Gives A Sneak Peek At Its 360-Degree Camera Drone
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
The , a small, sturdy ball with panoramic views we first discovered at , is back again and buddying up with sports brand BRG to bring us live or recorded, 360-degree, stitchless, GoPro has its own spherical solution, with 4k recording capabilities for those live-action shots and Kodak’s PixPro aims to do the same. GoPro’s device sticks up on helmets and has the potential to catch on twigs and leaves during the shot. However, Giro and Bell – both BRG brands – will embed these “all seeing” 360fly cameras into their sports helmets to capture live or playback 360-degree video for use with Google Cardboard or an interactive app on an iPad or smartphone. Imagine getting panoramic video from a snowboarder rolling down the alpine wilderness, taking a leap off a high ledge and into the fresh snow below, and bringing that continuous, all-angles view to the world, live in interactive video or virtual reality. 360fly also gave the TechCrunch crew a sneak peek at a 360-degree-capable drone with top and bottom single lens cameras affixed for video from every angle – something the company has been hush on so far. Interestingly, GoPro recently introduced , a drone rumored to be 360-degree capable and VR ready, too. GoPro’s stock plummeted late last year with the introduction of better smartphone cameras. Some have speculated that a 360-degree drone could be the ticket to getting it back in the game – though 360fly’s drone might just beat it there. 360fly’s head of content Andy Peacock didn’t want to say too much about the drone but did speak with TechCrunch about the new BRG partnership and camera capabilities. He also showed off an upgrade to the app that lets you adjust camera brightness and other features for better viewing. The new advanced 360fly camera features include: The camera’s 360-degree surveillance ability also includes: Each camera will retail for $499, up from the original $400 sold at Best Buy. Check out the video interview with Peacock above to see the new 360fly balls and get a good sense of what the camera and new helmets are capable of.
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Netatmo Makes Outdoor Security Cameras Suck Less
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
just announced the Netatmo Presence, a new smart outdoor security camera packed with actually useful features. In particular, this camera can detect if there’s a car in your driveway, a person waiting outside or a pet running around your garden. The camera connects to your Wi-Fi network in order to send you push notifications on your phone so that you can see a video stream of what’s happening in front of your house. It says right on your notification screen if there’s a person, a car or an animal outside. It also comes with a big white light right above it and doubles as a driveway light. If you already have an outdoor light, you can just replace it with the Netatmo Presence. But the Presence camera can also shoot infra-red video if you’d rather turn off the bright light. Everything is customizable. You can turn off notifications and keep recording videos when there’s someone in front of your house for example. It records 1080p videos and stores them on an internal micro SD card. There’s no subscription fee and your videos don’t end up on the company’s servers. While there are many potential use cases for this camera, it’s a security camera first and foremost. It’s also a great way to know when a delivery person left a package in front of your door. Or you can monitor when someone comes to clean your house. And of course, it can be an valuable asset when you host parties and it’s too loud to hear your doorbell. The Presence will be available in Q3 2016 for an undisclosed price. The company is slowly but surely creating a complete lineup of connected devices for your home, from thermostats to weather stations and indoor cameras. Let’s see how Netatmo can make these devices work together in the future.
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Augmented Reality Versus Virtual Reality: The Battle Is Real
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Ricardo Diaz
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
Although virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have existed in some form for decades, only recently have they garnered mainstream attention. is blowing up right now, and its content and hardware advances have been exciting to watch. In a short amount of , content creators have made some mind-blowing advances in storytelling with this new technology. Brands, movie studios, gaming companies and news organizations are all tinkering with this tool and channel. will gain ascendancy throughout 2016, but my money’s on becoming the dominant technology in our daily lives. The New York Times recently distributed more than one million Google cardboards to its digital-edition subscribers. YouTube and Facebook are enabling online through digital video players. Everything is aligning to have hit critical mass next year. is the only medium that guarantees the user’s complete focus on the content. There is no looking away, no checking email or text messages and no updating social-media statuses. is the most immersive way to tell a story because what happens inside that headset makes you feel something in your head, heart and gut. But ’s biggest strength is also its greatest weakness. The immersive nature of hinders users from interacting with their surroundings. It takes them out of the moment. They can’t walk around and see what is right next to them, look people in the eye or read someone’s body language. is a powerful way to experience content, but is not practical for interacting in the world. And therein lies the major problem with . Content is king, no doubt, and providing immersive experiences is the holy grail in advertising. But will never become an innocuous part of our daily lives. The goal of advertising is not to interrupt our tasks or experiences but to add value to them on behalf of a brand. has already started to revolutionize the way we watch content, but will never be the technology we turn to in our everyday lives. adds contextual layers of information to our experiences in . We have seen this future foretold in Hollywood films, such as Avatar, Minority Report, Iron Man and Wall-E, among others. Soon these depictions will become . However, has issues with execution, which tends to feel gimmicky. Remember pointing your smartphone to a print ad to get some poorly made content? Google Glass showed some innovative applications, but they were ultimately a failure because the hardware and technology were too broad and lacked focus on the consumer problem they were trying to solve. These examples have shown the promise of , but have failed to deliver on contextual utility. Still, the future is bright for with several tech companies working on their offerings. Microsoft is working on headset glasses. Developer kits are scheduled to hit the market in early 2016. Google invested in a company called , whose technology beams lasers into the viewer’s iris to activate . That future will become a reality in another year’s . Both and tinker with our reality — but enhances it, while diverts us from it, which is why the latter will come to the fore in 2017, with its promise of contextual data for marketers and utility for consumers. It’s the future we were promised, and it’s closer to our grasp.
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 8 | 25 | null |
Parrot’s Pot Helps You Keep Your Houseplants Alive
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
is probably best known for its drones, but the company actually offers a wide range of products that also includes headphones and in-car infotainment technology. Last year at CES, Parrot first showed its . At the time, that was just a prototype, but now the company is ready to launch this new product line in the first quarter of 2016. The pot, which will retail for $99, can hold just over 2 liters of water (or about half a gallon for those who don’t like the metric system). For most plants, that’s about a week of water, but the pot can also go into water-saving mode and keep a plant alive for about a three-week period (maybe four, depending on the plant). You control the pot through a mobile app (aptly named ‘Flower Power’). With this, you can select which plant you have from a database of about 8,000 plants and then you connect to the pot over Bluetooth. It’s basically a dashboard for your plants. The pot is outfitted with a number of sensors to measure soil moisture and temperature, fertilizer, room temperature, and light intensity. It then records this data every 15 minutes and sends it to Parrot’s cloud-based services for analysis (as long as it’s connected to your phone). When you’re away, it’ll just go with the median parameters to keep your plant alive. At $100, the Pot is a bit cheaper than we expected (I thought it’d be about $200 when the company showed the first prototype). If you’re prone to killing your houseplants, the Pot is probably worth a try (or you could just go lo-fi and ).
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Withings Launches Incredibly Sophisticated Thermometer To Track Your Fever
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
You may know Withings for its , but the company has had a long history of health tracking devices. The $100 Withings Thermo is keeping up with this trend. It’s a smart temporal artery thermometer, and arguably the best thermometer you can get today. The device tracks your body temperature using your temporal artery. You just position the device on your temple, press a button, wait two seconds and that’s it. It sounds too good to be true, but the thermometer uses 16 infra red sensors to take 4,000 measurements and make an accurate measurement. You can read your temperature directly on the device, but of course, this is also a connected device. The device connects to your Wi-Fi network or your phone via Bluetooth so that you can track your body temperature over time. You can also make notes in the mobile app to say when you took ibuprofen for instance — the app supports multiple profiles as well. And this is key to understanding Withings’ move here. Now that the company sells , and a thermometer, the company has a full-fledged ecosystem of health devices. The company can gather data from all these devices and build a profile of your current health status. In just a few taps, you can send your data to your physician at any time. With an aging population in many countries around the world, making it easier to send data to your physician is important to save time and money for everyone. Withings Thermo uses two AAA size batteries. It lasts up to 2 years so you don’t have to charge it every time you want to use it. It will be available in Q1 2016 for $100. [gallery ids="1256840,1256842"]
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Parrot’s Newest Drone Has Wings
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
When you think of consumer drones, chances are you are thinking of quadcopters. But fixed-wing drones have long been a staple of the military and the model aircraft community and now , which pioneered the quadcopter craze with its AR.Drone, is getting into the fixed-wing game, too. The 700-gram Parrot Disco, which the company has been working on for the last two years, is a small fixed-wing consumer drone that looks like a model airplane. It can fly up to 45 minutes and reach speeds of just under 50 mph. The 1080p 14-megapixel camera at the front of the drone is the same one that Parrot used for its Bebop 2 quadcopter. Just like Parrot’s other drones, the Disco is controlled over Wi-Fi through the company’s FreeFlight smartphone and tablet app or through Parrot’s more professional Skycontroller (which the team actually recommends). Like all drones, the Disco comes with a set of standard sensors like an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer and GPS. The Disco also features a , which is typically used on planes to measure airspeed. On a quadcopter, airspeed isn’t all that important, but it definitely matters when you want to keep a plane in the air. The Disco isn’t the only fixed-wing consumer drone available, but the Parrot team emphasizes that the Disco is much simpler to get flying than competitors’ drones. Some fixed-wing models require users to manually set items like the pitch and yaw, but by only requiring a quick shake to situate the Disco and a toss into the air to get it going, this drone will be much simpler to get airborne. Landing is undoubtedly the hardest part of flying any plane and that’s no different for fixed-wing model aircraft either. As the Parrot team tells us, the Disco will offer an auto-land mode where the plan will slowly fly back to its take-off point and then slowly circle to land. It’s worth noting that while this is Parrot’s first fixed-wing consumer drone, it’s not the company’s first foray into this field. Parrot acquired senseFly, which makes a range of fixed-wing drones for professional applications like mapping, . Unsurprisingly, the Disco also features some autopilot software from senseFly. The device is currently in a prototyping phase, though Parrot told us they hope to have the Disco in consumers’ hands by the end of 2016. Price is the big question, but Parrot didn’t give us any hints.
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Google SEC Paperwork Reveals It Paid Over $380 Million For Bebop
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
At the end of November, , a cloud platform startup founded by former VMware CEO and co-founder Diane Greene. Today, the company filed paperwork with the SEC revealing the purchase price: $380,241,352 to be precise. In addition, the paperwork revealed that Greene’s portion of the sale, 7,244,150 shares of bebop stock was exchanged for 200,729 shares of Alphabet Class C Capital Stock at $740.39 per share plus some additional cash. “Ms. Greene intends to donate the shares exchanged to a donor advised fund,” according to the filing. The move was believed to be as much about bringing in Greene to lead its enterprise cloud effort as the bebop technology itself. Little is known about bebop, a stealthy startup, beyond the fact it is a cloud development platform that is supposed to help enterprises build and maintain cloud applications. As such, it should give Google a more a complete enteprise cloud offering. It’s certainly a healthy price tag for a company that hadn’t emerged from stealth yet, and suggests that it’s more than an acquihire to get Greene and her engineering team on board. As referencing a , “Greene will run a new integrated enterprise cloud businesses, that will combine Google for Work, Cloud Platform, and Google Apps with a new consolidated product, engineering, marketing and sales team…,” , who is managing partner at venture capitalist General Catalyst and former CTO at VMware spoke glowingly of Greene. “She is awesome and immediately changes the game for Google’s cloud efforts. The engineering team at bebop was outstanding as well and they’ll bring a ton of enterprise DNA to Google,” he wrote in an email at the time of the announcement. Google is hoping to jump start its enterprise cloud business with this move and the price tag suggests that the company isn’t afraid to spend some money to get what it wants in terms of technology and personnel. With Greene on board to run things and the bebop team and technology in the fold, it should be interesting to watch how the Google enterprise cloud strategy evolves this year.
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Activision Confirms Major League Gaming Acquisition, No Plans To Shutter Business
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
Some consolidation in the world of gaming and specifically e-sports. Today that it has acquired , a specialist in live gaming events as it vies to become the “ESPN of e-sports.” The news follows over the weekend that Activision would be buying MLG for $46 million and shuttering the business. In the event, Activision is only partly confirming these details. Perhaps most importantly for the gaming world, it’s issued a clear statement that it plans to keep the entire business going, specifically the MLG.tv, MLG Pro Circuit and GameBattles platforms. “All of MLG’s e-sports businesses will continue to operate,” a spokesperson says. No word from Activision Blizzard on price — although eSports Observer from the term sheet detailing the numbers. Activision will also continue to organize MLG’s physical, live events with partners and the spokesperson confirmed that MLG’s entire staff is coming over as part of the deal. We have reached out to Activision to ask and will update as we learn more. If the price is accurate, this is not a great outcome for MLG. The startup, based out of New York and co-founded by Sundance DiGiovanni and Michael Sepso, had raised in venture funding from backers that included Oak Investment Partners and Treehouse Capital. Sepso was a shareholder too, although he left MLG for Activision and is now SVP of the company’s media networks e-sports division (one likely bridge that helped broker the deal), while DiGiovanni had been running MLG as the CEO (and is now apparently stepping down). “Sundance and I founded MLG to highlight the incredible talent of competitive gamers all over the world,” Sepso said in a statement. “Activision Blizzard’s esports leadership, incredible intellectual property and long history in competitive gaming create a perfect home for MLG’s capabilities. The acquisition of MLG’s business is an important step towards Activision Blizzard Media Networks’ broader mission to bring esports into the mainstream by creating and broadcasting premium esports content, organizing global league play and expanding distribution with key gaming partners.” MLG, founded 12 years ago, was an early mover in e-sports. By way of MLG Pro Circuit, it claimed to have the longest-running e-sports league in North America, and it said that GameBattles is the largest online gaming tournament system across consoles, PC and mobile platforms. Here’s a crowd packing in to watch a session of Starcraft 2 back in 2012: But as more publishers have built their own e-sports businesses (not just Activision, but others such as EA), this has put more pressure on MLG as a standalone business. Ars Technica that MLG had taken out a $6 million loan to run the business. Activision Blizzard, meanwhile, is hoping to tap deeper into the growing professional gaming business, which it says currently has 100 million unique viewers globally and is projected to go up to 300 million by 2017. The idea is that the extra assets will give it a further leg up to develop its own e-sports games as well as those of other publishers to compete against the likes of EA, Valve and so on. It positions itself much like another popular broadcast network: “Our acquisition of Major League Gaming’s business furthers our plans to create the ESPN of e-sports,” Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, said in a statement. “MLG’s ability to create premium content and its proven broadcast technology platform –- including its live streaming capabilities -– strengthens our strategic position in competitive gaming. MLG has an incredibly strong and seasoned team and a thriving community. Together, we will create new ways to celebrate players and their unique skills, dedication and commitment to gaming. We are excited to add Sundance and the entire MLG esports team to our competitive gaming initiatives.”
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Yahoo Shuts Down Yahoo Screen, Its Home For Original Content Like “Community”
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
, and confirmation by Yahoo, Yahoo Screen has closed its doors with its content being split among its various magazine properties. Screen as a place to house Yahoo’s original content, which the company has since backed away from (remember the $42 million write-down?). From bringing back the show “Community” to airing an overseas NFL game, the plan was to turn Screen into a more refined version of YouTube. It clearly didn’t work. Variety reports that Katie Couric will continue to do her daily news show, probably under the Yahoo News umbrella. Here’s the statement Yahoo provided to the publication: At Yahoo, we’re constantly reviewing and iterating on our products as we strive to create the best user experience. With that in mind, video content from Yahoo as well as our partners has been transitioned from Yahoo Screen to our Digital Magazine properties so users can discover complementary content in one place. The service was shuttered last week and the apps have been removed from Apple’s App Store as well as Google Play: Screen at one time was the crown jewel of and touted over a thousand hours of viewable content, including the .
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Hide Unwanted iPhone App Icons With This iOS 9 Trick
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
For those who believe a cluttered desk is a cluttered mind, the same is likely doubly true when it comes to your iPhone’s home screen. Unfortunately, those who desire complete control of the aesthetic flow of their phones have always had to play around the unavoidable inclusion of Apple’s stock iOS apps on their launch screens. Whether it’s a free-spirited soul looking to ditch the Reminders app, a Krispy Kreme lover trying to lose the Health app or a regretful Twitter investor wanting to delete the Stocks app, this trick can help you keep the apps out of mind, though they’ll still be accessible through Spotlight search. The mechanics of the trick are simple enough and involve dragging the desired app out of a folder with a tap of the home screen button. It’s much easier to carry out after following the video above from YouTube user who discovered the hack. You may have guessed, but you don’t have to actually name the folder “Disappear” to get the hack to work. It’s cool to get “locked” icons off the home screen as this was originally only a feature available to jailbreakers or, as the comments will undoubtedly note, Android users. This trick also works for downloaded app icons, if you want to keep the functionality of the app on your phone but eliminate visual traces of it from your home screen. If you have second thoughts, the move can quickly be undone by carrying out a restart of your phone, which is kind of a bummer as it’d be nice to rid myself of all signs of Apple News once and for all, but this can at least offer some momentary relief that dies when your phone does as well.
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Amazon’s Other App Store, Alexa’s “Skills” Section, Has Quietly Grown To Over 130 Apps
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
Amazon has been quietly building out an ecosystem of applications for its connected device, the Amazon Echo. While nowhere near as well-known or buzzed about as the two top app stores on the market today – Apple’s iTunes App Store and Google’s Play Store – the Echo app store, aka the “Skills” section in the Amazon , has now grown to over 130 applications. That’s not a bad showing for the still relatively new, voice-controlled speaker, which only began . You may have not been aware that Amazon was even running a second app store, in addition to its better known where it offers a selection of mobile apps for Android and Amazon Fire devices. After all, the Alexa app doesn’t even refer to its list of third-party software as “apps”, rather referring to these add-ons as “skills” instead – meaning, things that expand the functionality of the Alexa-powered Echo speaker. Alexa, in case you’re unaware, is Amazon’s own version of something like Apple’s Siri or Google Now. It’s a voice-activated assistant that lets you ask questions, create tasks and shopping lists, order things from Amazon, hear the news and weather, play music, set timers and alarms, and even control a number of The first third-party applications for Echo, with StubHub being one of the bigger names to arrive, allowing you to ask Alexa about different activities taking place nearby. Now the Echo’s app store has 135 of these additional “skills” available, at last count. A lot of these apps are really goofy – things your kids may like, such as a fart app (yes, you’re not an app store until you have one of these!), an insult app called Angry Bard, plus various joke applications and trivia games, like Cat Facts or Dog Facts. (These are not exactly high-quality applications, mind you.) Our Amazon can now fart on command. — Tony Summerville (@summerville) However, there is a growing number of more noteworthy – and practical – apps arriving on Echo as well. This list includes things like the health-focused 7-Minute Workout app; a voice-powered TV remote from AnyMote; news and weather apps from bigger names like AccuWeather, AOL, HuffPost, oh, and TechCrunch ( ); an app that reminds you where you’ve parked your car and how much gas you have left from Automatic; a recipe finder from Campbell’s; a bartender’s guide to mixing drinks; various apps to check local transit schedules; event guides from Bandsintown.com and the above-mentioned StubHub; stock quotes from Fidelity; a family locator from Glympse; a universal translator app; and even interactive games you play with Alexa like Word Master, Bingo, or Animal Game, for example. The problem is that finding the better apps among the clutter is still a challenge, given that the Echo’s app store is fairly bare bones. Today, there are no “category” sections or top lists, for instance. You have no way to tell what’s trending, popular, or recommended. Plus, it could be confusing to end users that app developers suggest using different “trigger” phrases to launch their apps. (In some cases, the developer says to tell Alexa to “open” the app. Other times, you tell Alexa to “ask” the app a question.) That could have people installing apps (i.e., the “skills”) but then forgetting how to launch them. But there are signs that Amazon is working to turn Echo’s selection of miscellaneous add-ons into something that better resembles a “real” app store. Just before Christmas, for example, the company for standard app store features like a search engine and customer reviews that involve star ratings. That means it’s now easier to find apps to use with Echo, as well as see if other Echo owners liked the apps you’re interested in using. Unfortunately, the implementation suffers a bit at present. A test to surface apps that we know exist using obvious keywords like “news,” “travel,” or “events,” returned only partial search results. In other words, Echo’s app store still has far to go. Of course, none of the app store’s progress would matter except for the fact that Amazon’s Echo is becoming one of the more popular smart home devices on the market today. At a sub-$200 price point, the speaker has been praised as being , , , while offering experience for the home. And while Amazon for its devices, it’s telling that the Echo was the company’s top-selling device on Black Friday, across all devices over $100. Today, it . Plus, the speaker has a four-and-a-half star rating even as it nears 30,000 customer reviews. For the simple reason that the Echo itself is finding its way into more customer homes, the importance of its add-on app store may also grow over time. The question for developers, however, is whether building Alexa apps will eventually be profitable enough to be worth the trouble. After all, today, Alexa’s skills are free add-ons. But as the ecosystem grows, Amazon could potentially offer the ability for developers to monetize their apps through paid downloads or – who knows? – voice-controlled purchases – in the future.
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Images Of Faraday Future’s Crazy Concept Car Seemingly Leak Via Its App
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
Whoops. Faraday Future — the super mysterious electric car company that no one really seems to know much about — is all set to debut tonight… and it seems that might’ve just leaked. An app called “Faraday Future Concept” briefly hit the app store this morning, complete with concept images and slides describing a “1000 horsepower” vehicle. Though the app has been pulled, Twitter user grabbed a bunch of screenshots of it before it was taken down. AppShopper has the . Here’s what it looked like: [gallery ids="1256931,1256933,1256934"] And here’s a video, shot by the same person as the above screenshots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mB1_MAiAi0&feature=youtu.be At least according to the text from within the app, Faraday is shooting for a vehicle that hits 0-60 in under three seconds — right in that super car sweet spot that Tesla has thus far owned in the electric car space. Is this what Faraday Future will show tonight? Perhaps. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean this is what the car will look like whenever it eventually hits the road. It’s a concept, after all. And yeah, it kind of looks like this Hot Wheels car.
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Is The Password Dead? The Future Of Web And Mobile Authentication
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Richard Reiner
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
Will 2016 be the year when passwords become obsolete? Or will we just continue to grin and bear it? And what’s the matter with passwords, anyway? Passwords have been around a long time (think about soldiers entering armed camps at night and giving the secret password), but today, the average consumer uses 25 or more sites and apps that rely on passwords. A strong password is a dozen or more characters of letters, numbers and punctuation — even those with the best memory would struggle to recall that many strong passwords. In a data breach, such as the ones that have occurred at eBay (145 million users), Adobe (36 million users), JP Morgan Chase (76 million users) and many others, passwords are frequently the target. Even though good security practice requires sites to store passwords only in a “hashed” form (cryptographically transformed so they can be recognized when a user logs in, but not read directly), attackers often obtain a database dump containing the hashed passwords. If the hashing process is done correctly by the site operator, reconstructing passwords is difficult and time-consuming — yet not impossible. And, unfortunately, we keep finding major sites that have not properly hashed, making password retrieval quick and easy. Attackers who succeed in reconstructing a user’s password are likely to then try it on other popular sites and apps. So it isn’t safe to use the same password, or simple variations, everywhere. Better forms of authentication have been available for years — so why are we still using passwords? Biometric sensors are becoming more mainstream and are increasingly found on more devices — unfortunately, none of them can fully replace the password on its own. None of these “better” alternatives — such as fingerprint biometrics, facial recognition, iris scans, voice recognition, etc. — can work everywhere (on every device, under all lighting conditions, in both quiet and noisy environments, when your hands are full, etc.). A full replacement for passwords would also have to be able to scale up and down for convenience versus security — quick and easy for low-risk situations, tougher and possibly more time-consuming for the crown jewels. But what if you could combine any or all of those authentication factors, under your own control? You’d be able to pick factors that work for whatever environment you’re in at a given time, and that strike the right balance of security and convenience for whatever you’re doing — whether it’s logging into Pinterest or transferring funds from your bank account. Better yet, what if you could combine these biometric authenticators with “passive” factors that require no effort, like identifying which Wi-Fi network you’re on, or which city you’re in or whether your Bluetooth wearable is connected — again, under your own control and respecting your personal preferences? There might be some low-risk situations (like logging in to Pinterest) where you’d want to use passive factors alone, and simply be automatically logged in without having to lift a finger. And when the stakes are higher, the passive factors would add additional security and confidence above and beyond the more active biometric authenticators you’re using. That’s “multi-factor authentication,” and if it’s starting to sound like a powerful solution that could potentially replace passwords, then consider how much better it would be if it could also be strongly locked to your personal devices, so that even if an attacker was able to spoof your face or your fingerprint and use your Wi-Fi network, they would still be blocked because they weren’t using your laptop. That’s possible today, thanks to hardware-based “device authentication,” which can make your laptop or your phone prove its identity using features built in to the CPU, at the same time that you prove yours with a fingerprint or another biometric. Just like the passive factors that I talked about above, device authentication can add stronger security without any impact on speed or convenience. But to be of real value, a solution like this has to work right away, on the websites and apps that you already use, without waiting for the operators of all those apps and sites to update to a new technology. To do that, it would also have to be able to wrap itself around all your current passwords and manage them painlessly until they can be completely eliminated. For that to be easy and convenient, it would have to understand the structure of the websites and apps you use, so that it could save your passwords (in securely encrypted storage) when you use them and, from them on, every time you revisit each of those sites, it could automatically enter your password into the login form on your behalf. And finally, what if we could also eliminate the easy-to-guess “account reset questions” that are the Achilles’ heel of many systems that try to help manage passwords? That would protect you from “social engineering” attacks in which hackers use social media or other research to find the answers to your reset questions, then take over your account. How can those questions be eliminated? Using the same biometrics, passive factors and device authentication methods we’ve already discussed — all of those are authentication factors you can’t forget! That’s what I think the next generation of solutions will look like. So will passwords disappear in 2016? Probably not. But the pain associated with them might.
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We Want To Fly You To San Francisco To Attend The Crunchies
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TechCrunch
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 |
We want to fly you to San Francisco for the 9th Annual Crunchies Awards! Walk the Green Carpet in style! One lucky winner will be able to invite three friends on a whirlwind trip to San Francisco to rub elbows with founders, VCs and other attendees at the 9th Annual Crunchies Awards. We’ll fly you and three friends out to San Francisco on Virgin America, set you up in posh SF-based accommodations for two nights and give you $400 of Reserve dining credit to grab dinner with before being whisked away to the Opera House for the show. We’re also giving the winner $1,000 in spending money for the trip. Think of the Crunchies as the Oscars of startups and technology. TechCrunch kicks off 2016 with the awards ceremony that celebrates the most compelling startups, internet, and tech innovations of the year. Following the Crunchies, the War Memorial Opera House will provide a festive playground for this year’s After Party. As always there will be an open bar, hors d’oeuvres, networking and other fun surprises. The After Party begins immediately following the ceremony and will shut down at . In one of our most awesome giveaways yet, we want to give one grand prize winner 4 Box level seats to the 9th Annual Crunchies, round-trip airfare on for 4 people from a US city that Virgin America services to SFO leaving and returning on round-trip ground airport transfers, 2 nights accommodations in San Francisco during your stay, $400 in dining credit and $1,000 in spending money. Here’s how to enter:
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Microsoft’s Cortana Gets Baked Into Cyanogen’s Forked Version Of Android
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
Microsoft’s Cortana quietly snuck onto Android in a meaningful this week in a small but telling move that you probably missed unless you happen to own a OnePlus One smartphone. That’s because of its alternative Android operative system which features Cortana baked into the software. The move had been but this upgrade is initially only available for OnePlus One device owners in the U.S.. So, what’s the big deal here? The move looks like the first collaboration between Cyanogen, which has aggressively forked Android into a very different type of mobile software, and Microsoft, which last year and has a new focus on enabling its software and services across multiple platforms. By integrating Cortana into the core of Cyanogen, the company said it is “opening the door to future capabilities that don’t currently exist.” Cortana in Cyanogen sounds a lot like Siri within iOS: Once awake, from setting reminders and scheduling meetings, to calling and texting friends, Cortana helps you do more with hands-free multitasking. Whether you’re glancing at your lock screen or immersed in an app or game, Cortana is at attention as soon as you say “Hey Cortana.” Immediately she will go to task. Uncannily similar, indeed (it also includes the ‘Hey Cortana’ feature that was .) But, while Siri works best with Apple apps and services, the Cortana integration promises to be deeper. “When Apple launched Apple Music at WWDC, they showed the Siri integration with Apple Music. Siri doesn’t power Spotify like that so we can do these kind of things with for example, integration of Microsoft’s Cortana into the OS enabling natural language to power Spotify and other services,” in an interview with International Business Times last year. It isn’t clear when this feature will roll out to other Cyanogen-compatible devices, but already this ambitious startup is getting serious with its quest to
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WeChat Adds Skype-Like International Calls To Its Messaging App
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
WeChat, the Uber popular Chinese message app with more than 500 million active users, is taking a leaf out of the Skype playbook after it an international telephone calling service. The service is initially available for users based in the U.S., Hong Kong and India, but it will roll out to others over time. ‘WeChat Out’ is different from the existing calling options inside WeChat (voice and video) because it allows for calls to actual phone numbers (mobile and landline) rather than just to fellow WeChat users. WeChat, which is owned by Chinese Internet giant Tencent, is gifting its users an initial $0.99 in credit (which it says will allow up to 100 minutes in calls) to get things started, although it hasn’t revealed the cost of calls once that freebie has been eaten up. (Those with the calling feature enabled can look prices up inside the app .) The service is , but it is relatively late to the international calling area. Skype, of course, pioneered the concept while Line — another popular messaging app in Asia — . an standalone international free calls app back in 2014, but that service hasn’t set the world alight. Tencent doesn’t break out its user numbers for WeChat based on location, but we can assume that the majority of its active users are based in China, where WeChat is the default mobile messaging app used by people of all ages. For a while it seemed like the company had but it has increased its internationalization of late. Aside from this international calling feature, — which has — in South Africa, the same country where it just for investing in local startups.
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The Avegant Glyph Will Let You Watch 3D Movies On A Plane
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
Equipped with 3D capabilities, the wearable device can connect to a computer or smartphone via an HDMI connector, displaying movies and the Internet on a private viewing screen. When turned to its side, the product can be used as headphones. TechCrunch spoke with Richard Kerris, chief marketing officer at Avegant. With the Glyph, people can watch “anything you want, anywhere you want.” Kerris spoke of watching movies and checking email with privacy on a plane. The screen is made with Gorilla Glass and uses “a million mirrors per eye reflecting,” says Kerris. While the wearable device looks like a virtual reality headset, do not get these products confused. Kerris says that virtual reality headsets like Oculus are designed to take you to an alternate world, whereas the Glyph “keeps your spatial awareness” and lets you stay cognizant of your surroundings. Pre-orders begin this month, with the Glyph available for $599 until the 15th. After that, it will retail for $699.
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Facebook’s Secret Chat SDK Lets Developers Build Messenger Bots
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
only artificial intelligence on Facebook Messenger. Facebook has given some developers access to an unannounced Chat SDK that allows them to build interactive experiences and “bots” in Messenger for shopping, booking travel, and more, sources with direct knowledge of the SDK confirm. The Chat SDK allows developers to create bots that users can send text messages to directly and that automatically respond with information, images, location services, product prices, Buy buttons, and more. The Chat SDK can also tap into Messenger built-in payments system to let users make purchases via bots. Facebook hasn’t publicized any of the documentation for the Chat SDK, which is currently being shared with developers through PDF documents. The project is in part led by Facebook Messenger’s head of strategic partnerships . Facebook declined to comment. [ : appears to be one of the bots built on the Messenger Chat SDK. It claims that it on Messenger. When I asked the company about whether it uses the Chat SDK, it’s refused to say, writing back “ While it’s only in limited release right now, the Chat SDK could flourish into a more open platform beyond its early big-name partnership experiments like Uber. At first it might seem odd that Facebook would help developers build Messenger bots that might compete with its own hybrid human/AI assistant. But one of the big goals of M is to differentiate Messenger as a chat app with super powers, and make it what people want to use for everyday communication instead of SMS or other competitors. By nurturing an ecosystem of chat bots, Facebook could get outside developers to enhance Messenger’s value and make it more addictive. That way users stay in Facebook’s family of apps, where they’re more likely to be exposed to ways Facebook earns money and delivers connection. [facebook url=”https://www.facebook.com/Davemarcus/videos/10156429336080195/” /] for commerce, news, and more was pioneered and popularized in Asia by apps like China’s WeChat and Japan’s Line. Rather than forcing people to download entire apps for each business or use case, they can simply send messages “official accounts” or chat bots inside the instant messaging app they already use all day. These allow you to make purchases with a WeChat-connected payment option, order a taxi, buy movie tickets, pay bills, and more. These bots and official accounts make accessing added utility not only convenient for the user. Chat app platforms relieve businesses from having to build, popularize, and maintain whole mobile apps for multiple phone operating systems. With so many apps flooding the app stores, getting people to discover them and go through the hassle of installing an app can be tough for businesses. It’s much more casual and less daunting for businesses to get users to simply message them. The more useful features developers and businesses build into Messenger, the stickier it gets. It’s a , which formally launched its workplace chat app platform last month. Facebook previewed customer service over Messenger at F8 last April Previously Facebook has worked with specific partners to build bot-like integrations for Messenger, but they were rather controlled experiments with big names. We broke the news last year that for full-scale apps like Giphy and PingTank For Messenger, which help users make rich media content to send friends. But at the launch at Facebook’s F8 conference, it also unveiled its platform for allowing companies to offer real-time customer service via chat, plus receipts and ways to change orders. Its initial partnership with Everlane showed customers able to chat with someone to get their shipping address changed, and take care of all the confirmations in the chat thread rather than by email. Since then, Facebook hasn’t talked much about Businesses On Messenger, as focus shifted to the limited launch of then Facebook M assistant. Meanwhile, it built a way for users to get real-time from the MLB, and get and connect to contractors from Pro.com. TechCrunch was tipped off about one more curious thing Facebook has done in Messenger. For some users, entering the @ symbol at the start of a message brings up a “Command” menu with just one option called “Holiday Challenge”. It seems Facebook is testing in-line bots similar and in addition to full-fledged bot accounts built through the SDK. Last month, Facebook finally showed off the real potential of bots on Messenger with its . Tap the Transportation button or an address and select Uber, and you’ll start a chat thread with the car service. An interactive panel in the chat lets you set your pickup point, destination, and payment option. You’ll then get updates in the thread as the driver approaches, with options to view a map or call the driver. Bots built with the Messenger Chat SDK will look and work similar to these screenshots. They’ll be immediately messageable without having to Friend or Like them. The bots can react to taps on interactive buttons or keywords typed into the thread. Sockets technology will allow them to respond in real-time Rather than seeing M as a competitor to developers’ apps, Facebook could use it to test and experiment with what people want and what’s possible with bots on Messenger. On the web, keyword search was the core of the experience. But on mobile, it’s become clear that chat is where people spend most of their time. That makes winning the messaging war both a requirement and an opportunity for Facebook. To stay dominant on phones, it must make Messenger irresistibly useful, and the best way to do that is to augment its own product with bots from developers that offer convenience and utility for every niche use case. If Facebook controls messaging, it controls the portal to commerce and content as well as communication. Suddenly it makes more sense that to himself is building an artificial intelligence assistant to run his house like Iron Man’s Jarvis. “I’ll start teaching it to understan Before the Uber integration launch, Facebook Product Manager Seth Rosenberg told TechCrunch “We’re just getting people used to the idea that you can message more than just people on Messenger.” The Chat SDK could bring those people more to message.
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Volkswagen Gave An Apology Sandwich With The Reveal Of Its Budd-e Concept Car In-Between
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
Volkswagen’s head brand ambassador Herbert Diess quickly got the emissions fiasco apologies out of the way on stage at CES on Tuesday and then unveiled two connected and all-electric concept cars of the future, the e-Golf Touch and the much-anticipated Budd-e microbus. Diess was in the running for VW CEO shortly after Martin Winterkorn resigned in fall 2015, amidst a revelation the German car manufacturer had deliberately placed emissions-cheating software in more than 500,000 vehicles sold in the United States. Matthias Muller is now the company’s CEO. The U.S. government against Volkswagen on Monday in Detroit, Michigan. Diess took to the stage at the Cosmopolitan’s Chelsea Theater in Las Vegas this evening to address the situation. “The current issue for diesel engines is certainly nothing to be proud of. We disappointed our customers and the American people. We are truly sorry and I apologize. We are disappointed that this could happen within the company we love. I assure you, we are doing everything we can to make things right. And we are working night and day to find effective technical remedies for our customers and the authorities worldwide. In total, up to 11 million VW group cars are affected by this issue. For the large majority of these cars, we have already worked out approved solutions. In Europe, this holds true for about 8.5 million affected cars. Resolutions have been ratified by the European authorities and we will start to repair these cars this month. Most of them will be fixed within 2016. Here in the US, the set of regulations is different compared to Europe. It’s more demanding due to nitrogen oxide and less demanding due to CO2. We’re working hard to create an effective package for the US authorities.” Diess then proceeded to wow the crowd with the concept cars – both of which focus heavily on some digital touches Volkswagen hopes will give the company a good foothold in the connected car race. The Budd-e, a pint-sized version of the company’s legendary hippie van looked almost Tron-like as it glowed in the dark onstage – as if to let us know we’re now in the future. It also stayed true to what seems to be the automotive theme of CES this year – connection to everything on command. The Budd-e will let you know if a visitor is at the front of your house, what’s in your fridge and “make sure your robot cleaner is ready” before you get home, according to one LG exec who came onstage during the presentation. The car is also equipped to handle package pickup and delivery with a built-in drop box in the back where a delivery person can drop off and pick up packages wherever your car is parked. Budd-e also seems to be adherent to “the force.” The handleless car doors will automatically open at the command of your voice. Diess demonstrated this onstage as the driver inside said politely, “Hello Budd-e, please open the passenger door.” The e-Golf Touch is an updated version of the Golf R Touch concept car Volkswagen showcased last year. But this one is electric, comes with a 9.2-inch touchable dashboard resembling an iPad, and is compatible with Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and MirrorLink. One of the cool things about the e-Golf is the personalization. Different drivers can set preferred driving features in the cloud and upload them onto the tablet dashboard. Gestures like the waving of your hand can control things like volume and the e-Golf is WiFi enabled and equipped with phone charging outlets in the front and rear seats of the car. Should no Internet connection be available, the car is also equipped with a USB Type-C port. The presentation also touched on a strong theme among many car manufacturers at CES this year – automated driving. “Volkswagen is rapidly entering the digital world, utilizing machine learning and mapping,” Diess told the crowd. Note VW , one of the largest digital mapping companies, last summer. The company also unveiled a partnership with Mobileye, a vision technology company with an advanced driver assistance system that helps boost cars to a near self-driving experience. “The human eye is really complicated and it’s really hard to replicate,” Co-founder and CTO of Mobileye Ammon Shashua said onstage at the VW event. “In the future we’ll live in a digital world…the camera will continue to be a critical sensor.” A big theme for both cars was clearly about connection, but the Budd-e was definitely about the design. The car and the home cross-pollinate well in VW’s vision for the future Internet of Things, be it on the road or in the cloud and Volkswagen’s CEO indicated that these futuristic rides “could be a reality by the end of the decade.” “The car of the future will make a difference. It will make our world a better place and Volkswagen will make sure most people can afford it,” Diess said. He ended his speech with a return to what his company plans to do to make things right with the U.S. market. “We’re doing everything we can to work on the current diesel issue in the U.S.,” he said. “We’re working very hard to do so and confident we will provide solutions very soon.” *an earlier version of this report incorrectly identified CEO Matthais Muller onstage instead of Diess.
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Toast, A Point Of Sale Service For Restaurants, Raises $30M
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
When Chris Comparato joined his former colleagues at , a service that includes a point-of-sale tool for restaurants, raising new financing to continue scaling the company was near the top of the list. So today, the company said it has raised $30 million in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Google Ventures participating. Comparato says the company has more than 1,000 customers, growing from “hundreds” to “thousands” in the past year or so. “In general, our vision is to really enable a world where restaurants of all different sizes deliver the best customer experience by leveraging [an online service that includes point-of-sale],” he said. “That means providing a better experience for waiter and waitress who want to create orders much more nimbly, or a better guest experience for customer and patron, and we feel tech can be an enabler.” The service operates on Android tablets, but of course that means it’s going to compete with other point-of-sales services. That could include other providers like Square and Shopkeep. But the pitch for Toast is that it’ll provide more than just point-of-sale, making it easier for restaurant owners to choose other additional services. Still, if Square is any indicator — with its challenging initial public offering — having a point of sale service as a key hook can indicate a challenging business overall. Of course, raising financing wasn’t the only thing on Comparato’s mind. Numbers one and two on his list, he said, were expansion of sales and marketing across the U.S. and expanding the company’s research and development efforts. Both of those are capital-intensive because they require increasing headcount at the company — which already has more than 170 employees, he said. “You can be a small indie restaurant that’s full service, you need a new point of sale solution. And perhaps it starts with point of sale but as you start to weigh your options, you’re choosing a platform that includes point of sale as well as open flexibility for other integrations,” Comparato said. “That small operator is getting hammered with tech choices, they have to pick a point-of-sale solution, probably have to look at loyalty programs, online ordering platforms, look at analytics capabilities.” Another goal for 2016, he said, was to add a suite of tools that allow Toast to integrate with other services. For example, Toast may offer a delivery tool, but restaurant owners may want to go with other services instead. Instead of forcing restaurants to rely on Toast’s in-house services, they will hopefully be able to integrate with other services, he said.
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Intel Says Its Button-Sized Curie Will Ship In Q1, Costing Under $10
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
Computing devices are getting smaller by the day, and today at CES in Las Vegas Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich announced new details about one of its big (little?) efforts in the space. Curie, Intel’s button-sized wearable hardware module that was , will begin shipping this quarter and will cost less than $10, he said. Amidst flashy demonstrations involving BMX and free riding, Intel also announced partnerships with a wave of third parties to boost its reach. They include ESPN, Red Bull Media and to integrate the chip to track athletes’ performance, as well as other partnerships with high profile figures like Lady Gaga to advance its role in the next generation of computing. “We believe it will change how athletes are judged, how they train,” Krzanich said. The collaboration with ESPN will kick off with the X Games in Aspen in 2016, where the low power Intel Curie module will be integrated into the Men’s Snowboard Slopestyle and Men’s Snowboard Big Air competitions, where it will help to provide real-time data on athlete performance on in-air rotations, jump height, jump distance, speed, and force on landing. The Red Bull partnership meanwhile is a global deal that will cover “multiple genres and platforms,” Intel says. Intel has in the past announced other Curie collaborations with hardware makers to complement these deals with content companies announced today. They include the Arduino 101. Other areas where these light, small computing devices are likely to make an appearance are drones, where Intel works with companies like Yuneec as well as Ascending Technologies, which it just that it acquired. Intel has made something of a tradition of opening the CES show with its keynote and it makes a big effort to place in a lot of news to show off its pole position slot. Other Curie announcements included a partnership with New Balance to develop new technology for runners and other athletes, including a running-focused smartwatch, and a partnership with Oakley on a smart eyewear product called “Radar Pace”, which includes a voice-activated, real-time coaching system The Lady Gaga collaboration, meanwhile, will a “project that will showcase technology through creativity at the highest level” that will be shown off during the Grammy Awards in February 2016 (yes, she was that vague in her description). “You will all literally be blown away,” Krzanich said. Red Bull, ESPN and “Haus of Gaga” are not the only media partnerships announced today. Intel is also working with the MGM Television Group who will be producing a new TV program to show off Intel tech. “America’s Greatest Makers” will be broadcast on TBS this spring. Further into the enterprise space, Intel also showed off a “smart helmet” with Daqri, shipping form today, that looked pretty amazing. Part VR headset, and part safety device to protect a worker’s head, the helmet lets an engineer working in a complicated environment use thermal vision and augmented reality to guide how the engineer navigates through and does his or her job in the workplace.
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Securifi’s Almond 3 Is A Router And Smart Home Hub In A Nifty Single Box
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
Securifi just announced the Almond 3, a brand new touchscreen wireless router that wants to become the central part of your smart home. The Almond 3 will be released in the coming months for $120. At heart, Securifi’s new device remains a wireless router. You plug it to your modem and it will create a Wi-Fi network for all your devices. But instead of having to configure it from your computer, there’s a nifty little touchscreen directly on the device. For instance, you can use the touchscreen to create a mesh network with multiple Almond routers to extend the range of your network. The Almond 3 features a built-in ZigBee radio chip to interact with smart home devices, it supports Z-Wave and Bluetooth devices as well. In other words, the Almond 3 can replace the Philips Hue hub and all these other different hubs. It also integrates with Nest devices. There’s a built-in programmable siren as well so that you can create scenarios with other connected devices to trigger the alarm on your Almond 3. You can also create a list of authorized smartphones to disarm the alarm automatically. Overall, the Almond 3 is a nice iteration on previous Securifi devices. It’s supposedly 4 times faster than the previous model. You can still create “if this then that”-style rules directly on the device. For instance, you can turn on the lights when there’s motion and all kinds of crazy things. And that’s why it’s much more than your average router. [gallery ids="1257555,1257556,1257554"]
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Will The Paris Climate Change Deal Prove To Be The Catalyst For Cleantech?
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Ankit Mishra
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
Back in January 2014, the CBC aired “ ,” which highlighted the difficulty of operating in cleantech in the past few years. The documentary revealed how much the mood had changed since John Doerr’s now-famous March 8, 2007, TED talk on climate change and renewable energy. Following the talk, and caught up in the hype, Washington and Silicon Valley poured into cleantech more than $100 billion — but instead of breakthroughs, the industry suffered setbacks, with investors now scaling back . Venture capitalist Rob Day, earlier last year, pointed out how the and VCs are now more cautious in investing in technologies, which may or may not, generate attractive returns. Fast forward to Paris, where governments from nearly 200 countries recently came together to agree for the first time on a to cut greenhouse gas emissions and create a legally binding process for reviewing national emissions targets every five years. The strong consensus from COP21, which also included Bill Gates’ announcement of the was positively received by clean energy investors and venture capitalists. The International Investors Group on Climate Change, a network managing €13 trillion in assets, said the decision would help trigger a shift away from fossil fuels and encourage greater investments in renewable energy. So with the cleantech crash, and now, the Paris Climate Change Deal, the question remains: Are we going to see a cleantech revival? Or will the Paris summit result in an another bubble? When asked, well-known investors are confident that cleantech will deliver in the near future. Venture capitalist Nancy Pfund, the founder of DBL Partners (who has some of the most successful modern clean energy companies, including Tesla, SolarCity, PowerLight, BrightSource and NexTracker), seems confident that the sector will see a turnaround following COP21, and investors will again support cleantech entrepreneurs. “You are seeing renewed interest from venture capitalists, corporate investors and foundations in recognizing that we have a significant problem to solve. Where there are big problems to solve, there is opportunity for successful investment,” says Pfund. On the prospects of cleantech in the coming years, Pfund goes onto add that, “We have a very informed group of people keen to invest in cleantech; and we also have many high-quality entrepreneurs coming into the sector.” Clean energy investor Jonathan Silver, also agreed that the Paris Climate Change Deal was a step forward and should encourage cleantech investment. “The world community is coming together in support of a clean economy and this should encourage further investment,” says Silver. “I suspect we will see a number of new sector-specific funds raised soon” he says. Silver is the managing partner at Tax Equity Advisors, which invests in clean energy projects and the CEO of Greenbanc Global, a clean energy investment/consulting firm. He previously headed federal government’s $50 billion clean energy investment fund and has been named one of the , greentech “influencers.” Paul Straub, Partner at Claremont Creek Ventures, adds that the outcome from Paris is unlikely to play directly into specific investment decisions, but, instead, provide a degree of stability regarding the regulatory and policy environment from various levels of government. “From COP21, I expect policy and regulatory decisions that are created to provide a more certain environment which can allow entrepreneurs to operate,” says Straub. Historically, the has played an important role in supporting energy transitions within the economy. Following COP21, in an , World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim highlighted the need for a clean energy transformation and an ambitious global transition toward renewable energy. Much of President Kim’s vision will depend on government policies to support this transition. Andrew Beebe, Managing Director at Obvious Ventures, agreed that policy and regulatory decisions will play an important part in meeting COP21’s commitments. He suggests that carbon pricing is the most effective way to support the transition, and federal programs have an important role to play. “A carbon tax or a real cap-and-trade program at the national level is going to be the most cost-effective method for us to make this transition,” says Beebe. “Federal programs like the ITC, PTC and DoE SunShot are excellent catalysts for different forms of growth and will help people focus on the right solutions for the long term.” In June 2015, the International Energy Agency (IEA) also echoed the need to implement strong domestic policies, such as to meet COP21’s commitments. The IEA went on further to suggest that governments should gradually phase out of fossil-fuel subsidies to end users by 2030, and increase investment in renewable energy technologies. Bill Gates’ announcement of the came prior to the agreement in Paris. The public-private partnership between governments, investors and academia will likely have a significant impact, because the synergy of each party will be able to provide value-added input in scaling cleantech products, from research to deployment. The coalition, which aims to provide money for research, startups and deployment, has talked about a “dramatically scaled-up public research pipeline” and will provide “seed, angel and Series A investments” in order to support the deployment of technologies developed at scale. Therefore, with such a global consensus on climate change, and a collaborative push to scale cleantech products, I think the Paris Climate Change Deal will prove to be the much needed catalyst in reviving cleantech.
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The Return Of Technics Is Symbolic, But Will Anyone Actually Buy Them?
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Travis Bernard
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
The Technics SL-1200 turntable might be the most important piece of DJ equipment ever created. . Although the original SL-1200 might not be the best turntable ever created, the updated and improved SL-1200 MK2 is by far the most popular turntable for resale on sites like and Craigslist. DJs everywhere want it. Back in 2010, Panasonic discontinued the Technics 1200 after sales numbers dropped and supplies became limited. But last year, Panasonic announced that it would bring back its renowned turntable. Earlier today, on when the new Technics are coming and what to expect. Panasonic is releasing two different versions of the turntable: a limited edition 50th Anniversary Grand Class SL-1200GAE (limited to 1,200 units) and a non-limited Grand Class SL-1200G. The limited edition will be released this summer, while the non-limited version will be released in late 2016. From a technical perspective, there isn’t a huge difference between the two devices other than the tonearm (magnesium for the limited edition and aluminum for the non-limited edition). Panasonic is pushing the new product line for high fidelity, not just DJ use. The return of Technics is largely symbolic of the . The this holiday season, and vinyl sales have continued to grow over the past few years. Digital streaming and MP3s might give us more access to endless catalogs of heady jams, but nothing compares to being able to touch, feel and show off the music you love the most. The same could be said about throwback cameras and Polaroids. Kids born within the last 15 years have never had this experience, and now might be the time that many are longing for it. But how much are they longing for it? Is this a smart move by Panasonic, and will audio fanatics actually buy this? Whether or not this is a success boils down to price, availability of products in the secondhand market and perception as a luxury product. After the Technics 1200s were discontinued, copycat (retails for $699). This likely helped create positive buzz for the return of the original Technics. Technics definitely has the brand loyalty to be able to charge more than $699 for the new decks. But with tons of cheaper secondhand versions of the older variants still available on eBay and Craigslist, why would anyone who is seriously considering buying turntables choose the newer more expensive option? Functionally, both the new and the old versions do the exact same thing. Panasonic is entering a buyer’s market that has arguably better and less recognizable products all over the place for less money, and I’m not sure if people will really be sold on it. There are incredible and cheaper tables out there that have stepped up while the 1200 was “asleep.” Unless you perceive the new version as “luxury,” it doesn’t really seem to make a lot of sense to buy this. Will luxury brand perception prevail? Or will users make the call based on their bank accounts? We’ll have to wait and see. The price tag has been announced. [gallery ids="1258197,1258198"]
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The Withings Go Is A Cheap Little Activity Tracker
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
has up its sleeve, a new activity tracker. This isn’t a new version of the or . This is a brand new activity tracker. And the best part is that it only costs $69. The Withings Go uses an always-on E Ink display like the one on your Kindle or original Pebble. It’s very power efficient but it’s also a black and white display. The good thing about this kind of display is that the Withings Go uses a button cell battery which lasts 8 months. This new device tracks your steps, distance, running and swimming activity. You can also use it to track your sleep cycles. Compared to other entry-level activity trackers, you can do quite a lot. You don’t have to switch between activities — the device switches automatically. And of course, you can get your data in the Withings Health Mate app on iOS and Android. The Withings Go will be available in Q1 2016. Now the question is whether people want yet another Nike FuelBand style device or they’re ready for a smartwatch. Many people already bought activity trackers from FitBit, Jawbone and Withings and don’t use them anymore. For other people, the Withings Go can be a good way to see if you need an activity tracker in your life. But chances are you’ll want to go to the next level if you like it. [gallery ids="1257038,1257039,1257042"]
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Sony’s Kicking It Old-School At CES And Releasing A High-Res Turntable
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
While most companies are focused on touting their latest Internet-connected refrigerators or self-driving cars at CES, Sony is kicking it old-school and announced a turntable at . Yes, like the kind of turntable that will play your old vinyl LPs — except if you just got into vinyls and are still expanding your collection. It’s called the PS-HX500, and is designed for people who want to preserve their records in high-res quality, or just enjoy their vinyls on the go. It is shipping this spring for an undisclosed price. You can plug the device into your laptop and transcribe vinyl into digital files (WAVs or Sony’s proprietary format), or just play high-quality audio via a connected speaker system. Remember the good old time you had ripping your CDs into iTunes? Sony is trying to revive this cumbersome process — with a twist. The company’s turntable features anti-vibration and anti-skipping ripping. The new turntable is probably more about Sony showing audiophiles that the company is getting serious about high-quality audio. Sony released the product at its CES keynote, during which it spent a good deal of time discussing the importance of high-definition audio throughout its product line. While we’re not sure how many people will need the new PS-HX500, someone should let Martin Shkreli know that he now has a new way to play his . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2aEpncHG0Y
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DietSensor Scans Your Food For Calories
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
For those of you who count your carbs and calories, DietSensor is looking to make your life easier. The French-based startup has created a tool that scans your food and determines its nutritional value. The idea is that you can go out to eat at a restaurant or at someone’s home and still keep tabs on your diet…if you don’t mind holding up this gadget. A CES Innovation Award winner, DietSensor is showcasing its product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. TechCrunch spoke to Remy Bonnasse, co-founder and CEO. “It’s the next generation of diet and nutrition apps,” said Bonnasse. “This will do all the heavy calculation for you. You don’t have to think.” There is a compatible app that keeps track of and displays the nutritional content. DietSensor has worked with doctors and nutritionists to create customized diets. Bonnasse explained that his product works by using Bluetooth and connecting it with a molecular sensor developed by SCiO. The molecules vibrate and interact with light in different ways, helping to determine what’s inside of the food. The device will become available in the U.S. in mid-2016 and retail for $249.
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Watch Sony’s CES Extravaganza Press Conference Right Here
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
[ustream id=12885645 live=1 hwaccel=0 width=700 height=394] We’re live at the Sony press conference at CES in the Las Vegas Convention Center starting in just a few minutes. We got a lot of… interesting devices all day long, such as Samsung’s . We have a team on the ground ready to cover the event and give you hands-on impressions if the company has new interesting devices. You can also check it out live via Sony’s official above, and stay tuned on for ongoing coverage of all the news coming out of this event.
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Kodak Is Bringing Back Super 8
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
If you’ve always wanted to shoot video using the tools your parents probably used to film each other naked then Yves Behar and Kodak have a product for you. Super 8 was a cartridge-based film standard that became surprisingly popular after its release in 1965. It has remained popular with vintage film buffs and now Eastman Kodak is working on a $400 to $750 Super 8 camera for the modern auteur. Behars designed the camera to look retro and boxy while cleaving to a more material design aesthetic. The problem? Film is hard to get these days and even with the support of a it will be hard to see just who is going to produce this stuff profitably. Heck, the it to cost $50 just to process the stuff. However stranger things have happened – , for example – and the market is a strange mistress. “This is no longer the classic script of a war of digital versus analog,” Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke. “What it really is now is the complementary characteristics of both.” The camera will have a digital viewfinder and filmmakers who send in their film for processing will automatically get a digital copy of their video.
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Here’s Why Samsung’s New Frankenstein Fridge Is Actually Dumb
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
Is it a fridge? Is it a tablet? No, it’s a fridge-tablet hybrid, coming straight from Samsung’s brainstorming sessions. Samsung’s new features a giant tablet on the front. The Internet of the new fridge. But there are tangible reasons why this fridge innovation is a bad thing. This isn’t the first time Samsung a fridge with a touchscreen. But this year, the company is taking it one step further with a giant 21.5-inch touchscreen running Tizen. This isn’t the future we want. First, appliances are a tough business. Chances are, you don’t buy a new fridge every other year. You want to keep your fridge and washing machine for as long as possible. In the best case scenario, you’re going to keep your fridge for at least a decade. Putting a tablet in a fridge poses multiple issues. First, you can’t update the hardware. Wi-Fi standards evolve, and chances are 802.11n or 802.11ac won’t be around anymore in 15 years. Similarly, your brand new shiny tablet from 2020 will be much better than the one stuck on your fridge — faster, compatible with your Wi-Fi, etc. Second, on the software side, Samsung is having a hard time updating phones that were released two or three years ago. And you can be sure that the company’s latest flagship phone is going to be much more popular than this fridge. It’s unclear why Samsung would dedicate resources updating the device. Your fridge will have , and some features will stop working altogether. Samsung itself has a bad reputation on this front. Google Calendar support stopped working on another Samsung smart fridge — spotted in yet another useful reality check. Third, there are other issues when it comes to children buying things from your fridge, browsing the web without your consent, etc. You don’t want to set a passcode on your fridge. And yet, all of this is exactly what Samsung wants. By putting two devices together, Samsung is hoping that it will speed up obsolescence and turnover. The company hopes that you’ll buy a new fridge once the tablet stops working. But you shouldn’t. You should buy a fridge, you should buy a tablet. It’s much more comfortable to sit down when you use a tablet anyway. And this is the only way you won’t die a little inside every time you open your fridge and see this useless tablet on the door.
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Porsche Design Revs Up A Drive That Powers Your MacBook
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
CES is a time of bad photoshopping and the above image is a perfect example. That said, the product it hopes to sell is quite compelling. It’s basically a USB-C desktop hard drive that connects to and powers USB-C devices – primarily the new MacBook. Called the , the drive has a single USB-C port and a power port. The USB-C simultaneously powers the device its connected to and carries data so you can drop your MacBook on your desk and start storing mad data. No pricing yet but they are expecting to see 5GB/s transfer speeds and it also supports standard USB 3.0. Look for it later this year.
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In A Crowded Market, A VC Uses Its Office As A Hook
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
You might be hearing talk of depressed valuations, but that message certainly isn’t reaching commercial real estate owners in the Bay Area. The median price per square foot to rent office space in the city has shot up 33.7 percent in just the last three months alone, , an online real estate resource. Over the last 12 months, San Francisco rents have soared 106 percent. It’s easy to throw up one’s hands at that the situation. , a year-old, early-stage venture firm founded by longtime VCs Jennifer Fonstad and Theresia Gouw, is instead using the trend to its advantage by renting up to 20 desks in its own, 2,600-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco. It’s charging market rates, too. It’s a smart move on a number of levels. First and most obviously, it helps Aspect defray its own costs, which can’t be inexpensive given current prices. According to real estate specialist Jones Lang LaSalle, average office rent in San Francisco has hit a whopping . Aspect, which closed its debut fund with last year, is also willing to rent the desks to both startups it has backed and those it might fund in the future, which allows it to see more young companies up close. That’s harder to do than you might think. While VCs can drop into their companies for board meetings and more, once that first check is written, it’s often difficult for them to maintain a full picture of what’s happening inside a company. It’s a lot easier when a founder is pulling out his or her hair from just half a room away. Of course, what Aspect is also trying to do is find a way to interact and contribute to the entrepreneurial community. As Fonstad explains it, “We want to enable entrepreneurs to be truly independent and still benefit from a shared environment of working alongside other entrepreneurs and venture folks like ourselves.” One of those perks is being able to quickly ask someone at Aspect about a confusing term or condition, for example. Another is taking advantage of the content programming that the venture firm organizes for its founders every couple of weeks and that everyone in the office is invited to attend. Still, the biggest benefit right now may simply be the ability to land a desk in a city where there isn’t much available office space anymore. As for conflicts – what if a startup moves in and doesn’t want funding from Aspect, or isn’t offered it – Fonstad downplays the possibility, saying there’s no “implied obligation” on anyone’s part. To be on the safe side, Aspect does have each potential tenant go through a short application process to make sure it will be – in some way, shape or form – “additive to the community.” If there are any potential conflicts or concerns, Aspect is transparent about that, too, she says. After that, it’s up to the startups — who are expected to stay around six months, ideally — whether they stay or go. “They can make a choice for themselves,” she says.
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 4 | null |
Samsung Gear S2 Follows In Apple’s Footsteps With iOS Support, Gold And Platinum Variants
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
When Samsung unveiled the Gear S2, it looked lot like . And the company announced another move in this direction today by a new 18-karat rose gold and platinum Gear S2. Like the Apple Watch, it’s made of real gold and it’s not just gold-colored. The new variants with matching leather bands will be available in February for an undisclosed price. It might be cheaper than the gold Apple Watch as Samsung doesn’t traditionally target the fashion market. Also new today, the Samsung Gear S2 only worked with selected Samsung phones. Later this year, the company is going to add iOS support, making it a direct Apple Watch competitor. The Gear S2 runs Tizen, and the company has been actively reaching out to partners to build apps for the device. You can find CNN, Bloomberg, eBay, ESPN, Uber and Voxer are some of the apps currently available on the Gear S2. The company is also adding support “later this year.” Samsung Pay is available in the U.S., the U.K., Spain, China and soon Australia, Singapore and Brazil. When our own John Biggs , it had a surprisingly good looking interface. In particular, the spinning bezel works quite well. Existing Gear S2 users will be able to buy new bands and install new watch faces featuring artwork from Keith Haring, Jean-Michael Basquiat and others. So Samsung is slowly but surely making the Samsung Gear S2 more compelling. But the main question remains: are smart watches here to stay?
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Sling TV, Dish’s Internet TV Service For Cord Cutters, Unveils A More Personalized Interface
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 |
, Dish Network’s streaming TV service aimed at cord cutters, has been helping to for the pay TV provider, but its user interface has needed some work. Today, the company attempted to address this problem with the of a new interface focused on a more personalized experience for its users and improved navigation. Core to this upgraded interface is a new section called “ ,” which is designed to bring a viewer’s favorite content to them, rather than requiring them to seek it out, the company explained in announcing the changes. The idea is for the Sling TV software to learn what the individual user likes to watch, both in terms of channels and programs, then reflect that in its recommendations. The is actually a combination of several items – content selections the user explicitly indicated are “favorites;” those Sling TV automatically determines are favorites; shows and movies they viewer had been watching previously, but didn’t finish (i.e., a “Continue Watching” section); recommendations based on viewing habits; plus, a “What’s Hot” section based on what’s trending across the Sling TV platform. The “What’s Hot” section could include things like breaking news or buzzed-about season finales, but is not available in the upgraded interface rolling out soon. Instead, Sling says that this feature will arrive in a later release. Adding more personalization to Sling TV could help to better position the streaming TV service to compete with the larger players, like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, all of which offer sections where users can save favorites and/or see what’s trending. But of the changes, the more interesting one is the new feature that will pause and playback programs – aka, the “Continue Watching” section. Unfortunately, Sling’s ability to deliver here is hampered by the deals it has with programming partners. Not all its partners support pause and rewind functionality at present, but Sling says its goal is “to increase the number over time, and we will keep adding more of this content as it becomes available.” The roll out of Sling TV’s upgraded interface had already been underway for some time, with “phase one” actually , offering a full channels guide on every device, with a way to filter your channel selections for easier browsing and viewing. Another improvement to Sling’s interface includes a “Recommended” ribbon where Sling knows what shows to display based on time of day (e.g. you watch SportsCenter at 6 PM after work, so it pops up here). Live TV will also be organized by categories (kids, sports, etc.), while a new Movies tab will show all available movies in one place, including new releases, on-demand titles, and those airing live on TV. Finally, Sling TV is catering to its sports fans with an upgraded Sports section that makes it easier to find out when favorite teams are playing and on what channel. It then leverages that feature to sell the Sports Extra add-on pack to those who only pay $20 per month for its “best of live TV” channel package. That is, viewers will be able to simply click on a listing then sign up instantly to upgrade their subscription. Sling says its new user interface will begin to roll out to all devices later this quarter. Also this quarter, ESPN 3 will be added to Sling’s core lineup, where before you could only . In addition, the company has , which will now offer 10-day free trials of Sling TV with its antenna sales. Dish Network should be applauded for seeing where the industry is headed with regard to the growing cord cutting trend and the resulting pay TV subscriber loss that comes with it. But it’s unclear at this point how much impact Sling TV is having. – a group that’s now a combination of Sling TV and satellite TV customers. One analyst – Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson – said that Sling added 155,000 customers in the quarter However, that increase was not enough to stop Dish’s declining numbers. The company saw nearly double last year’s loss of 12,000 subscribers in Q3 2014, with a drop of 23,000 subscribers in Q3 2105. Dish CEO Charlie Ergen the company hopes Sling TV additions will eventually offset satellite TV’s decline.
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Slack Promotes Former Twitter Boss April Underwood To VP Of Product
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 2 |
Slack’s rocket ship has a new co-pilot. April Underwood, Slack’s former head of platform who just , has leveled up to become the startup’s VP of Product. Underwood joined Slack in June after nearly five years at Twitter where she was a Director of Product. Putting the head of platform in charge of the entire product shows Slack’s commitment to making outside developers core to the ‘s experience. With Underwood’s guidance, Slack’s product could seamlessly expand to handle the niche needs of any business. While Slack’s competitors might be able to clone its basic functionality, they’ll have a tough time mirroring the ecosystem of developers drawn by Slack’s remarkable momentum, buzz, and . “April made a huge impact as Head of Platform” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield tells me. “We’re excited to see that influence expand as she takes on a larger role.” When Underwood was hired as Head of Platform in June, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told that “April’s pretty rare in the sense that she’s done business development and engineering.” interned at Apple and 3M, and has done stints at Deloitte, Intel, Travelocity, and WeatherBill. She managed content acquisition and monetization for Google’s core products as a Senior Partner Technology manager from 2007 to 2009. This year she co-launched the #Angels fund as a founding partner. At Twitter Underwood had a prolific run from 2010 to 2015. She was a product manager on the first versions of the Tweet and Follow buttons, and worked on Twitter’s firehose and location feature. She built the Ads API and much of the advertiser experience, and ran all of Twitter’s search partnerships with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Oh, and she forged Twitter’s biz dev team as its Director. Essentially, in an era when Twitter was otherwise notoriously stubborn about shipping, Underwood got things done. Now she’ll have a massive amount of user engagement to sculpt with Slack. The company has 2 million active users, and Butterfield says “people spend on average 10 hours a day connected to Slack and a little over 2 hours of active usage.” This makes Slack a uniquely high-leverage place to be a VP of Product. Because everyone in the workplace needs messaging, Slack can be ubiquitous and heavily used enough to serve as a de facto identity and social layer for the enterprise. From there, it could potentially conquer adjacent markets to chat and become a hub for more sporadically used workplace products. How this happens will rest largely on Underwood. One aspect of the product to watch: the user profile. Personal customizations could unlock more productivity. And direct integration with expense account payment options could let employees buy services, travel, or software like Slack integrations for their business straight from Slack. Butterfield concluded that “2016 is going to be another big year for us and April’s leadership and ability to recruit will be very important as the company grows.” [ustream id=79934534 hwaccel=0 width=680 height=382]
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Silicon Valley Lies And Those Who Tell Them
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Bruno Aziza
| 2,016 | 1 | 2 |
We are now in a new year. Like most people, you’ll likely start 2016 setting a bunch of resolutions. If you are an entrepreneur, or want to become one, do yourself a favor and make the one resolution that can make 2016 your best year: Stop believing the Silicon Valley lies and those who tell them. I’ve been in the tech sector for more than two decades. I’ve worked at scrappy startups and global tech companies. I’ve read many books on entrepreneurship, from Steve Blank to Peter Thiel. They all have great lessons (see some of them ), but if you read the columns of online Silicon Valley publications or take the soundbites you hear at tech meetups as guidance, beware. There is a lot of sensationalism and oversimplification out there. Many sound great, but most are wrong. Here are my three favorite misconceptions: “Failure is good. Fail often and fail fast.” I’m sure you’ve come across this Silicon Valley adage many times. Entrepreneurs are used to encountering failure, mainly because we’re all trying to do things that haven’t been done before, faster than it is realistic to achieve them. That’s why some of our successes can be monumental. But that’s also why the majority of us fail many times — and get back up as many times as is required to succeed. But glorifying failure is a mistake. Failure is not good. And it’s worse when it is you that’s failing (sorry Eric Ries). I’ve studied and worked with some of the best entrepreneurs in the tech industry and I can tell you that failure is not something they look forward to or celebrate. One of my early investors once told me something I will never forget: “Avoid failure at all cost. Study the failure of others, learn from them and beat them.” Understand that the road to success is paved with failures. But they don’t all have to be yours. And while failures do happen, the number of times you fail is not correlated to the amount of success you might obtain. That’s a myth. While you should embrace the lessons that failures bring, you shouldn’t celebrate or invite them. Winning is the name of the game. Failure is part of the process, but it’s not the goal. So stop telling your team they have to fail to be successful. They most likely will misunderstand the message; belittle the impact that failures have on their success and you’ll grow a team of experimenters with no purpose. This has been one of my pet peeves for a long time. I must have read every book and watched every video produced on the success of the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I read about the best parts of their lives and I read about the worst. I also worked at both Apple and Microsoft, and have attended meetings with Jobs and Gates. Everything people say about their intellect is true: Each was amazingly perceptive, and showed an incredible amount of understanding for whatever concept was brought to them. But the media has played up an untrue connection between successful leaders and their occasionally dysfunctional character and demeanor. Being more like Gates or Jobs doesn’t require that you emulate some of the worst behaviors you’ve read about them. You don’t have to be a jerk to be successful. In the words of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, “Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high.” And, unless you’re a one-in-a-million genius like Jobs, if you start out being a jerk, you will likely find yourself failing fast. In his 1995 Stanford University commencement speech, Steve Jobs said: “Don’t waste your time trying to live someone else’s life, it’s already taken.” Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Worse, don’t emulate the worst things you’ve read about geniuses like Jobs and Gates. It gives tech leaders a bad reputation, and it’s not necessary. Jobs had great moments — and some terrible ones. If you think you need to be arrogant and disrespectful to be successful, think again. Yes, many great leaders are unreasonable and expect the impossible from their teams. The best leaders, however, understand that being consistent, reliable and human is the best way to build teams that respect, trust and follow them. You might be brilliant. But it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are. Your brilliance doesn’t give you the right to be a jerk. So, work hard, play hard…and be nice. Facebook, Apple, Google, Instagram, Snapchat and Box all have one thing in common: Their founders were in their 20s when they launched. The amount of press you’ll read about these companies will have you believe that youth is a required ingredient for startup success. If you hang around coffee shops in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View or even San Mateo, you’ll notice an overwhelming amount of young entrepreneurs sporting skinny Lucky Brand jeans, typing away on their MacBook Air and doing some growth hacking. This also contributes to the perception that, to be successful, entrepreneurs should start young. That might appear true, but if you look at actual data on this topic, you’ll find that age is less of a driver to entrepreneurial success than experience, and that the average age of a successful startup founder with more than $1 million in revenues is in fact 39. So, while the connection between youth and entrepreneurial success is a fabulous concept, the reality is that experience often overrides shortcuts or lucky happenstance. Don’t get me wrong, I like ‘growth-hacking’ and looove getting stuff done faster. However, I’m not a big fan of the inexperience/brilliance/happenstance theory often attached to the concept of entrepreneurial success. The best entrepreneurs I know earn their success precisely because of their experience. And by experience, I mean, “the thing you get when you don’t get what you want.”
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Samsung’s ‘Rink’ Motion Controllers For Gear VR Look Pretty Great
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,016 | 1 | 2 |
A few days ago, Samsung that they’d be showing on the floor at CES in Las Vegas. One of them, which barely caused a blip on the radar was the “rink.” It’s Samsung’s motion controllers for the Gear VR, something that is sorely needed for their mobile virtual reality experience. If you remember, Oculus just shared that their own motion controllers, the Touch, will be . HTC and Playstation also have their own flavor of controllers. Have a look at below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHrfMpH7Bf8 The video description translates to: Samsung C lab development challenges ‘rink’ is Samsung VR and interlocking gears, hand-operated controllers. Hand operation via a sensor worn on the hand may move the virtual reality contents , you can click or drag. CES 2016 showcase scene of demonstrations scheduled in the arena rink, Meet video! I’m looking forward to being able to pore through menus using the controller, which looks a bit like interacting with screens in the movie . Photos of the rink, which are basically all that we have other than the video, show what it might be like to type on a virtual keyboard. Basically, it’ll do way more than a Wii controller will, even though Samsung looks like be positioning it as something similar (see the Tennis pose.) [gallery ids="1256521,1256522,1256520"] So Samsung has gotten Oculus content to consumers faster with their Gear VR partnership, and now is preparing to get people used to using their hands in VR…perhaps before Oculus can, again. No other information, including price or ship date has been shared, but let’s keep our fingers crossed it’s sometime before the summer. We’ll know more next week.
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Real Solutions For On-Demand Worker Classification
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Alex Chriss
| 2,016 | 1 | 2 |
This past year will be remembered as the year of the on-demand economy. For many people, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, it seemed to come out of nowhere. On the consumer side, this was almost universally a welcome surprise. The impact on workers was, of course, much more hotly debated. Headline-grabbing events, such as the class-action lawsuit over Uber’s supposed “ misclassification,” were portrayed as nothing less than the on-demand economy on trial. Decisions by other companies to reclassify their independent contractors as employees were interpreted as an attempt to pre-empt an inevitable crack-down from regulators. There was drama at the local level, with Florida declaring that an Uber driver was — and then wasn’t — an employee, and Seattle passing legislation that effectively paves the way for ride-sharing drivers to unionize. I believe that in 2016 we’ll come to realize these headlines largely missed the point. Instead of worker classification, we’ll instead focus on building new solutions that support the future of work and a new generation of entrepreneurs. Here’s why: The on-demand economy didn’t make traditional employment go away, and it isn’t creating a new kind of work that demands new regulatory action. Far from being a phenomenon that came out of nowhere in 2015, the reasons people are choosing on-demand work can be traced back 30 years, or more. The benefits of traditional employment have been steadily eroding since the 1980s. Take, for example, the fact that: During this same time, the contingent workforce has been steadily growing. Full- and part-time contingent workers represented 17 percent of the U.S. workforce 25 years ago; they have reached 36 percent today, and are expected to grow to 43 percent by 2020. So, the on-demand economy is simply the next iteration of an existing trend. People are choosing on-demand work because it offers them the autonomy, flexibility and frictionless access to customers they need to take control of their careers. At Intuit, we hear this every day from the tens of thousands of freelancers who use our products to manage their personal and business finances. We’re also seeing it in the data. We recently released the initial findings of a new study of more than 4,000 people working for 11 different on-demand platforms. The study found that: This data shows that employment as we know it has shifted. It’s not black or white — employee or contractor — it’s a rainbow of options. Instead of trying to categorize workers, it’s time to focus on how best to enable on-demand companies to grow and thrive, while also protecting and enabling workers to find the flexibility they need to be successful. Moving the debate in this direction will take a concerted effort. It will require a deeper empathy for the needs and expectations of on-demand workers themselves. Who are they? Why did they choose this work? How satisfied are they? What do they want? The 2016 presidential election is a great opportunity to raise the profile of the real needs of on-demand workers. It should factor in to conversations about the middle class, income inequality and the pursuit of the American dream. After all, the 2016 election may be the last one in U.S. history before people working at least part-time as freelancers comprise a majority of the working population’s vote. The best place for government to start is to give innovators in the space the freedom to explore new ways of providing support to workers. Just as technology removes the friction of finding a job, why can’t technology remove the friction of supplementing benefits and dealing with taxes? For example, at Intuit we’re already delivering more than $3,800 in average tax savings to users of our new QuickBooks Self-Employed product. Existing rules and regulations around employee classification discourage marketplaces from partnering closely with companies providing worker services, such as healthcare, taxes or retirement, out of fear they’ll be subject to a misclassification suit. How could we work together to better support the workers if we removed this risk? 2016 needs to be the year we shift from looking backward, trying to fit new innovations into old paradigms. It needs to be the year we look forward, embrace the future of work and find innovative ways to power the new economy. Above all else, in 2016 we should celebrate people working on-demand jobs for their willingness to take charge of their careers, for their refusal to sit around waiting for the glory days of “traditional” jobs to return and for their determination to embrace new opportunities.
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The Top Five Trends For The Connected Car In 2016
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Mahbubul Alam
| 2,016 | 1 | 2 |
Many years ago, car predictions focused on what near-future vehicles would look like. Would they be bigger or smaller and how fast would they get from 0 to 60 mph? But today, as modern automobiles have evolved to moving machines bristling with sensors, software, processors and networks, future predictions are all about technology. So, what are the likely features for connected cars and their environment in 2016 and what are the major trends on the horizon ? Cars will be much more personalized in 2016, thanks to algorithms and context-aware software. Besides promoting easier and safer driving, this trend will manifest in applications that will answer queries and provide assistance in identifying the nearest parking place, the best place to have dinner and optimal routes.. This might sound similar to what our smartphones can do but it’s actually a big step beyond. Context awareness and learning algorithms will enable cars to differentiate between a work day — when getting to meetings on time and finding the closest parking lot or a valet are paramount — versus personal time, when we might be willing to make different choices. For instance, find a cheaper parking spot that minimizes walking time or locate your closest favorite restaurant. Another aspect of personalization expected in the industry is the car’s ability to act like their drivers. The driver’s persona and preferences – to be more specific their avatar – can be moved from car to car. Cars will understand and adapt to their driver’s behavior and preferences. This trend ties with the way millennials prefer to opt for car sharing or leasing instead of buying a vehicle. Car manufacturers will start selling solutions that enable taking that avatar from car to car, just like we do with music playlists as we move from iPhone to Mac to iPad. Intelligent technology is the driver of personalization, but this is just one aspect of how smart software will move into the vehicle world. Year 2016 will see the start of algorithm-driven businesses in which companies will focus on offering flexibility and personalization in all aspects of their services. In automotive insurance, as an example, machine learning algorithms will predict insurance premium based on an individual’s driving abilities and behavior as well as the driving conditions for the area. We will also see an evolution in algorithm-based vehicle pricing such as Kelley’s Blue Books with better valuation of used car pricing based on a broader set of information describing the car. This will allow buyers and sellers to make better-informed decisions about their future vehicle choices. And soon we will have the first algorithm-based vehicle warranties that will help the buyers better assess the true value and relationship to driving patterns and driving style. Based on machine learning, these new warranties will reward drivers for their behavior on the road. Predictive maintenance is another soon-to-occur capability from smart software. Users will be offered preventive measures they should undertake for maintaining their vehicle’s health. In fact, this is just one of the predictive services, which will flourish for connected cars. The software will suggest actions required for continuing a car’s smooth functioning. Having a single network — the Ethernet — in the car will be a big disruptor. To begin with, it will be applied in areas like infotainment audio and video, highly impacting the content available in the car. But the real significance is down the road a bit. Next year, we expect every major OEM to be working on Ethernet architectures. This technology will start showing up in 2018 vehicles and will soon become the standard vehicle architecture. Streaming movies in the car is fun to imagine but there are other important reasons to move to an Ethernet connection. Today, the Controller Area Network (CAN) is the main communications bus in the car and operates at just one megabit per second. But there are many networks in a vehicle — for bluetooth, audio, backup camera — and all these networks weigh in at fifteen to twenty pounds of wiring, impacting the mileage per gallon of the vehicle. Imagine the benefits of moving from one megabit to gigabits of network speed in the vehicle. Cars need speed to handle capabilities like automatic braking in case of hazards and other features, and looking further, this is a must-have technology for the semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles that with collect and process data from a large array of radars, cameras and other sensors. Next year, not only will your car receive software updates over the air (OTA) like your mobile phone in order to e.g. improve fuel efficiency through the latest and greatest releases, it will also be able to share information about user patterns and driving. This data will start going back to the cloud and give car manufacturers and app makers a world of information and the drivers a superior driving and owning experience. This is not that futuristic when you consider that Tesla, through its beta software for autopilot, is already collecting data from real-life scenarios of driving customers. General Motors is doing similar things with OnStar, collecting data on infotainment and other parts of the vehicle, to improve its products. Collected data can help manufacturers expand vehicle “testing” by sending back valuable data on how car systems and software respond under black ice, a curvy road, in a tornado or heavy rain. All this can help improve future cars. But this will show up in the infotainment systems, too. For example, if OEMs see that Pandora isn’t being used a lot, they might push down Spotify instead because they’ll get data on user preferences. Universal security solutions won’t appear in 2016 but there will be many ingenious solutions available in 2016 that will begin to target how we can protect every layer of the car. Alas, they won’t be integrated but will be available from each vendor separately. A couple of interesting areas are new autopilot systems, controlling the trajectory of a vehicle without driver involvement and in-car proximity sensors that enable avoidance of collisions and accidents. One of the most significant security areas will be an effort to quantify the level of security in each manufacturers’ products through their own safety ratings. With security being a hot topic today, we’ll see vendors offering three-point security or five-star security or some kind of certification, perhaps from third parties, designed to boost consumer confidence. Certainly, having two-way communications in vehicles creates nervousness about security hacks and data privacy, thus vendors will be upping their efforts in these areas. The goal of all the companies involved in vehicle security solutions will be to convert your car into a personalized, safe environment like your home or office.
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Why Bitcoin Matters
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Jon Evans
| 2,016 | 1 | 2 |
The most epochal financial transaction of this century, to date, occurred on May 22, 2010. It did not involve Wall Street, or the City of London; it took place in Jacksonville, Florida. It did not feature collateralized debt obligations, or credit default swaps. It was a purchase of two Papa John’s pizzas, in exchange for a payment whose present value currently exceeds US $4 million. But the most remarkable thing about that transaction was the decision by the provider of the pizza, 18-year-old Jeremy Sturdivant, that the compensation he received—10,000 units of a newly birthed currency, one called into being from the ether of the Internet, and backed by no bank or nation—was worth real bread and cheese. Those pepperoni pizzas were real-world bitcoin transaction. It has become over the last year to speak approvingly of blockchains, the technology on which Bitcoin is built, and dismissively of Bitcoin itself. The about banks “racing to harness the power of the blockchain.” : “everyone seems to agree that the technology will disrupt financial services.” But Bitcoin itself? It’s the weird sister, the ugly stepchild, the player to be named later. One gets the distinct sense that everyone would feel better if it would just go away. To software engineers like me, this all seems very strange and surreal. A blockchain is just a data structure. A fascinating and powerful one, granted, but not revolutionary in and of itself. Imagine headlines extolling “linked-list startups” or proclaiming “B-trees will transform banking.” Aren’t supposed to be the ones who confuse interesting technology with valuable applications? Allow me to suggest a heretical thought, a violation of the new conventional wisdom. What if Bitcoin is more important than the blockchain? decentralized, permissionless Bitcoin is to financial-services blockchains almost exactly what the Internet was to corporate intranets twenty years ago? Why is bitcoin valuable? For the same reason that gold is valuable. Why is gold valuable? Not for itself. Those who speak of “the gold standard” as if its worth were axiomatic, rather than a collective hallucination, forget that the value of an ounce of gold is vastly more imputed than intrinsic. If we valued gold only for its shine, malleability, and conductivity, it would be worth much less. What has made gold so valuable over so many centuries is that it is good at being valuable, something which, it turns out, is extraordinarily difficult. Gold is hard to counterfeit; easy to refine, merge, subdivide, and transport; and exceedingly scarce. (All the gold ever mined four Olympic-sized swimming pools.) It is these attributes, and only these attributes, which make gold an effective , , and … or, more succinctly, . Please note that Bitcoin meets all of these criteria, too, in spades. alchemists have quested for the digital equivalent of gold for decades. Now that it has been discovered, we expect ordinary people to understand its significance. This is a mistake. Most people shouldn’t use bitcoin. They don’t use gold. They have no need (yet) for “smart contracts,” Bitcoin’s most original and interesting aspect. The only reason for an ordinary person to use bitcoin in their day-to-day life is if they have been betrayed by their nation and its currency. But that doesn’t mean Bitcoin doesn’t matter. Because every so often, even ordinary people catch a glimpse of the rusting, sputtering, 20th-century machinery beneath the sleek facade of the global financial system, and Bitcoin is poised to do to that system what the Internet did to long-distance telephone calls. The steampunk inadequacy of that system is most apparent when we travel. Have you ever had to transfer money internationally, and been whacked with both a sizable fee and a terrible exchange rate? Have you ever tried to understand why such transfers take many hours or even several days, when ATMs function instantaneously? …And then, when you use an international ATM, have you found yourself paying five-dollar fees, on top of even exchange rates? It gets worse. Have you ever encountered people who ? Have you ever been to a country where the overwhelming majority of the population is ? Have you ever had to change money on the black market? Have you ever left a country and found yourself with a fistful of currency that was essentially worthless, unexchangeable, once you left its border behind? Have you ever had to deal with export controls, or ? I’ve seen all of these things–I’ve spent many months traveling in the developing world–and I’ve seen how of people have to deal with them. (Both and impose currency controls. The World Bank that the planet’s 250 million international migrants remitted $583 billion in 2014.) Do you know what essentially immunizes you from all of the above? Gold. And, increasingly, bitcoin. What’s more, bitcoin can do many things that gold can’t … like travel across the world, from one person to another, with no intermediaries, in a matter of minutes. Perhaps the financial industry will, in , build a blockchain killer app. I don’t rule it out. But it seems very strange to ignore the fact that , and has quite literally created out of nothing. So I’m not particularly interested in most big-bank or corporate-consortium blockchain initiatives, or other applications that claim to be revolutionary because they use a particular data structure. (I am interested in genuinely transformative initiatives such as , but that is far more than just a blockchain.) Nor am I interested in applications which expect ordinary people to use bitcoin. What I interested in are applications which seek to use Bitcoin to supplant our sclerotic, duct-taped global financial plumbing. , headed by TechCrunch’s own John Biggs. , funded by Kleiner Perkins. , a company devoted to broadening the bounds of all things bitcoin, and of their fascinating initiative. Don’t look to big banks’ blockchain initiatives for the future of payments. Look to startups like these.
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The Unicorns Of Southeast Asia
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Choon Yan
| 2,016 | 1 | 2 |
I have spent most of my life living and traveling in Southeast Asia; the last two years as the mentor to Asian startups. Southeast Asia — home to 620 million people across 11 countries — has been skyrocketing with tremendous growth; case in point, the 16 percent increase in Aggregate Investment Deal Value, to US$1.05 billion in 2014. Some of the top investors in the region include prestigious firms in the Western world, such as Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global. It is not surprising at all. The region has a huge combined GDP, US$2.57 trillion, with 60 percent of the population in the young age group of 15-34. As an avid reader, I realized that the term “unicorn” has been overly reported on Western/China/India startups. Yet, Southeast Asian startups have been missing the limelight, even though Southeast Asia is a high-growth and emerging market. The data on the seven unicorns of Southeast Asia reveals plenty of insight on the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem. The average age of a unicorn in this list is 6.5 years — the youngest is Indonesia-based Traveloka, founded in 2012; the oldest, 11 years, is Vietnam-based VNG. The total valuation lies at around US$10 billion. There are more similarities than differences in these unicorns. James Slavet at Greylock Partners believes that the path to a billion dollars is to model a “digital transaction business — a company that connects buyers and sellers so they can more efficiently transact.” These unicorns address through their platforms core lifestyle needs, such as e-commerce and entertainment. Moreover, they have a proven business model of what works in the U.S., such as travel booking and e-hailing, which should work in an emerging market. From a funding perspective, the unicorns have a good mix of foreign and local investors to provide knowledge transfer of what has done well and to aid in regional scaling, respectively. Let’s review the unicorns — better referred to as Komodo Dragon — formed in Southeast Asia’s forests thus far.
Garena is often named as the Tencent of Southeast Asia. Its latest undisclosed funding by The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in March 2015 has catapulted this gaming platform to the most valuated in this roundup. In the funding announcement, its desktop user base (17 million) still overshadowed the mobile monthly active user base (11 million) and has reached annual revenues of US$200 million. If you like the juicy founding story of Facebook’s , the rumored dramatic founding story of Garena might be your cup of tea.
Southeast Asia’s largest taxi aggregator, GrabTaxi, is Southeast Asia’s answer to Uber. Most recently, GrabTaxi teamed up with other SoftBank investees (Ola and Didi Kuaidi) and Lyft to provide seamless ridesharing across their influenced countries. GrabTaxi leads Southeast Asia with up to 1.5 million daily bookings across six countries and 22 cities.
Rocket Internet-backed e-commerce store Lazada experienced high growth after success in China’s JD and Alibaba, as well as India’s Flipkart and Snapdeal. As an infrastructure it is still in the infant stage for this part of the world. Lazada plans to use the latest funding to enhance the shopping experience by improving logistics, payment solutions and the third-party merchant base.
High-end gaming hardware company Razer was founded by Singapore-born lawyer Tan Ming-Liang and American technologist Robert Krakoff. It recently opened its third concept store in Bangkok (after Taipei and Manila), which shows its strategic focus in the growing affluence of Asian gamers first. Also, Razer has allied with the world’s biggest PC vendor to co-brand a range of China-based Lenovo PCs so as to tap into Razer’s gaming expertise and die-hard gamer fan base.
Tokopedia is Indonesia’s top C2C marketplace that lets individuals and SMBs owners open and maintain their online stores for free. It operates on a freemium model, where paying store owners get additional features such as user control and the ability to add/sell a bigger range of products. It was East Ventures’ first investment and Sequoia Capital’s first investment in Southeast Asia.
Traveloka was founded by a three-man team that consists of a Harvard dropout and NetSuite and LinkedIn engineers. It is ranked as Indonesia’s No. 1 flight search and booking site, according to comScore. SimiliarWeb noted Traveloka had 3.7 million desktop visitors in November 2015. According to a reliable insider source, its annual booking value has exceeded US$1 billion. A very big upside of Traveloka is that, although it is a B2C e-commerce business, it is able to circumvent the logistical nightmare of Indonesia due to e-ticketing.
VNG, a competitor of Garena, first started piggybacking on gaming company Kingsoft for game licensing. From there, it built a platform stretching from music downloads to mobile games to its flagship chat app, . Despite its sole focus on Vietnam, which is an anomaly itself, it has secured US$100 million revenue, with 2,000 employees across Vietnam. VNG’s attempt to venture outside Vietnam into China and Japan through game release has not garnered success.
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New Rules For Our Health’s Digital Future
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Thomas Hwang
| 2,016 | 1 | 2 |
Technology promises to transform healthcare. It’s redefining how we interact with, and act on, our health data, and reshaping how care is delivered and coordinated. But uptake so far has been limited, particularly among the elderly, those with chronic conditions and others who could benefit most from a better, smarter healthcare system. To understand why, we need to look at federal reimbursement policies and their far-reaching, albeit often overlooked, influence on tech innovation. Every year, CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) develops regulations governing the payment of treatments and services provided to the one in three Americans covered by Medicare or Medicaid. They determine not only which technologies will be funded, but also how, when and at what level they will be reimbursed. Payment matters. So to lack reimbursement is, effectively, to not exist at all. For example, even though it’s becoming a common feature in the commercial market, telemedicine adoption in the Medicare population remains . CMS restricts when “e-visits” can be reimbursed — typically only if the patient is already physically present at a physician’s office or hospital, only in rural areas and only by live, two-way video. Similarly, Medicare pays for diabetes screening and treatment, but is silent on whether evidence-based behavioral and technology-enabled intended to prevent disease are reimbursable. Unsurprisingly, to date, few seniors have participated in these preventative activities. “Of particular concern,” the agency has in the past, “is the adequacy of Medicare’s payment systems in facilitating access to new technologies for Medicare beneficiaries.” Although difficult to quantify, the downstream effects may go further than access alone. These policies also shape how entrepreneurs and investors size up market opportunities and form views on product strategy. By erecting barriers to adoption of technology, CMS could inadvertently subvert its very development. Earlier this year, Medicare to moving 50 percent of total spending in the coming years to new payment models that reward value rather than volume. While it hasn’t attracted as much attention, we also urgently need new health technology to help providers, payers and patients make the transition. And CMS ought to make its payment rules more flexible to spur innovation. A first step in this direction came with CMS’ recent for its bundled payment program for hip and knee replacements. Starting in April 2016, hospitals in 67 geographic areas across the country (including New York City, Miami and San Francisco) will be accountable for the costs and quality performance associated with the entire episode of care — spanning the initial hospitalization for joint replacement surgery to the 90 days following the patient’s discharge. The final rule grants newfound flexibility for providers to leverage technology more directly to improve patient care. One notable change: For program participants, Medicare has agreed to lift many of its restrictions on telemedicine. Telemedicine can now be used to provide remote care in the patient’s home. And gone are the agency’s usual geographic restrictions: Patients in urban areas will qualify for telehealth services, too. Participating hospitals will also be allowed to provide incentives, worth up to a thousand dollars per beneficiary per episode, directly to patients to improve engagement and treatment adherence. The agency singles out weight and vital-sign trackers, but providers will have the authority to decide which incentives would work best for their patients. Equally important, the rule is likely to trigger demand for entirely new classes of technology. The most immediate need will be for administrative platforms to build episodes and monitor clinical and financial performance. Providers will also need new tools to facilitate the sharing of health information, including electronic health records, to support care coordination. While hospitals have benefited from federal stimulus dollars to incentivize health IT adoption, post-acute care providers have generally been slower to adopt health IT systems. More so than ever, health IT will be a “critical capability,” as the agency itself , for the success of all stakeholders in patient care. For now, these tech-friendly provisions are limited to the joint replacement program. CMS can and should apply this flexibility to its other value-linked payment programs. It would be difficult to overstate the long-term impact of this change. Because Medicare is the single largest payer in the country, its rules set the standard for other insurers. In fact, commercial payers, including Aetna, UnitedHealth and Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, are already stepping up to meet or exceed Medicare’s targets for expanding value-based care. And many of the new technologies that are being developed will be broadly applicable across the care spectrum, regardless of payer or provider. It’s the start of a new chapter, one that will hopefully feature better technology and better care. But to get there, we’ll first need to modernize our payment rules. Our health depends on it.
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One Month After Lyft, UberX Finally Lands At LAX
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
Los Angeles Uber riders, rejoice. UberX is finally coming to LAX. The company that as of 8 a.m. tomorrow, riders will be able to request and get picked up by UberX cars. This comes exactly one month after Lyft launched at LAX, which was by LA’s Mayor Eric Garcetti. Uber and Lyft had with the airport and the LA city council to reach an agreement that allowed pickups at the airport. Similar to the setup at SFO, UberX cars will join Lyft by picking up passengers at designated spots on the departures level, instead of at arrivals. Uber Black and Uber SUV rides (both driven by TCP-licensed drivers) will continue to pick up passengers at arrivals. Previously, Uber riders who wanted to use UberX would often take the airport’s rental shuttles to an off-airport location to request a ride since the airport didn’t allow UberX riders to pick up on-premises. UberX is significantly less expensive than Uber Black in Los Angeles…a ride from the airport to downtown can be almost $50 more expensive in a black car. For this convenience, LAX is charging a surcharge of $4 per UberX pickup and drop-off, a dollar lower than the $5 fee the airport charges licensed Uber Black drivers. Earlier this week I requested a Lyft as my ride home from the airport, and the experience still has some kinks that need to be worked out. It seems drivers are still trying to figure out the month-old system, and it took me a few requests to find a driver who was willing to pick me up. Plus there are only a few designated ride-share pickup locations, and you’ll most likely have to trek outside of your arrival terminal to find one. Ultimately, it’s great to have another affordable pickup option at LAX, even if it’s not yet as seamless as a pickup by a traditional TCP-licensed black car.
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Apple’s First iOS App Development Center In Europe Will Be Located In Italy
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
Apple is opening an iOS App Development Center in Naples, Italy. The facility will be the first of its kind in Europe as the U.S. company explores ways to nurture mobile app developers and talent of the future from the region. The center is designed, as the name suggests, to be a place where aspiring app developers can receive training and mentorship to develop their skills and ability with Apple’s iOS software. It isn’t clear when the Naples-based hub will open, but Apple did say that it will be located at a partner institution in the city. The company added that the program will be expanded to other countries worldwide in the future. In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past five years or so, mobile apps are big business — and iOS apps, in particular. Though the number of Google Play app downloads was double that of iOS last year, the Apple operating system generated 75 percent more revenue than its competitor, . Indeed, from iOS app purchases and in-app purchases during the recent New Year period alone. Explaining its decision to open the Italy-based center, Apple said its mobile ecosystem has helped developers in Europe earn more than €10.2 billion while it estimates that, in Italy alone, over 75,000 jobs are linked to its App Store. “Europe is home to some of the most creative developers in the world and we’re thrilled to be helping the next generation of entrepreneurs in Italy get the skills they need for success,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.
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FireEye Picks Up Fellow Cybersecurity Intelligence Firm iSight For $200M
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
Cybersecurity and analysis firm FireEye has boosted its service with in a $200 million deal. FireEye, which is a member of the billion dollar unicorn club, has around its valuation, with some pundits pointing out that investors were overly bullish on the company and cybersecurity in general following a spate of attacks on corporate companies in recent years. The firm is valued at $2.45 billion based on , which has been tumbling since last summer. Regardless, this acquisition will massively increase the Nasdaq-listed company’s intelligence and analysis division. [graphiq id=”kfSjPBclahD” title=”Fireeye Inc. (FEYE)” width=”700″ height=”553″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/kfSjPBclahD” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/14758573/Fireeye-Inc-in-Milpitas-CA” link_text=”Fireeye Inc. (FEYE) | FindTheCompany”] FireEye, which based on the data it gathers while helping to defend its customers, said that iSight has 350 staff, including over 250 “cyber threat intelligence experts” spread across 17 countries worldwide. In addition, it has invested some $100 million to date to develop its cyberattack tracking and analysis capabilities, FireEye said. “This acquisition extends FireEye’s intelligence lead with an offering no one else in the industry can match,” David DeWalt, FireEye CEO and chairman of the board, commented in a statement. “The biggest mistake most people make is thinking threat intelligence is a collection of virus definitions in a shared database. Forward-looking security organizations — from governments to the private sector — know threat intelligence is the key to establishing a robust security posture tuned for the threats targeting each organization,” DeWalt added, seemingly in response to those with bearish inclinations on the industry. While the deal is undoubtedly a win for FireEye, which provides cyber threat tracking and security services for enterprises via its Mandiant business, the exit is far different to that which iSight had envisaged as recently as last year. The firm had at a valuation of over $1 billion. It’s unclear what caused the to change course and sell to FireEye. FireEye is offering iSight shareholders an addition $75 million in cash and equity if the business can hit unspecified targets before the second quarter of 2018, but even if that does happen, $285 million does not maketh a billion.
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Elder Care Startup Honor Makes Contractors Full-Time Workers With Equity
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
as Baby Boomers tip over into retirement, is making its contractor workforce into a full-time one. The care workers, called CarePros within the company, will have the potential for stock options. “I really don’t want two classes of people in our company. Everyone is in it to help the elderly and everyone should succeed if Honor succeeds,” said CEO Seth Sternberg. “The reality is from a user’s perspective, our product is the CarePro.” In a post-Uber world, one of the defining characteristics of technology companies that use software to more efficiently allocate service workers is a two-tiered labor structure. One part contains the engineers, executives and product managers that build the platform, and the other part contains a much larger mass of contractors. The first part is compensated in stock, which could be worth nothing or a lot, depending on the outcome of the company. The second part is paid by the gig or the hour, and receives no benefits, workers’ comp or unemployment insurance. It’s a structure that has provoked an unnerving debate about what worker protections and benefits should look like in the future, especially if there is a much bigger freelancer or gig-based labor force going forward. More unsettling is the reality that contractors tend to be much more socioeconomically diverse than the full-time employees in the tech companies themselves. In Honor’s case, 90 percent are women and more than half are women of color. One-third of them have dependent children and more than one-fourth are immigrants. No other on-demand tech company that I can recall has ever released racial or socioeconomic data on its contractor workforce. After class action lawsuits helped tip YC-backed cleaning company Homejoy over into failure , several other tech companies like Shyp and Luxe made their contractors workforces permanent. Labor misclassification lawsuits can be quite expensive; FedEx paid a $228 million settlement over the summer. Sternberg said none of these pressures influenced his decision. He said he felt comfortable making the decision after realizing turnover in the CarePro workforce was much less severe than he thought it would be. “Lots of people told us we would fail. We expected that CarePros would churn between 60 and 100 percent,” he said. “But our churn is virtually zero. We want to be able to train CarePros , grow them and create a path for advancement.” The other piece that makes Honor’s business unique from other on-demand companies is that this type of work isn’t really fungible. You can’t replace a care worker with another care worker as seamlessly as you can move from one Uber driver to the next. Care workers often have long-term relationships with families and sometimes, they’ll need special training to work with medical conditions or specific care and feeding routines. “With contractors, we can’t do training,” Sternberg said.
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Facebook’s Newest Feature Is A Hub For Discussing And Following Live Sports Matches
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
In its ongoing quest to be your hub for all things social and communication, Facebook is increasing its focus on sports after the social network announced a new feature to enable users to follow games and commentary around them. is a new destination inside the social network that includes play-by-play coverage of sports matches, alongside comments from a user’s Facebook friends, analysts and experts, alongside other game and play information. Think of it like ESPN or other score sites on social steroids. Sports are, by nature, among the most communicated topics on social networks, and by bringing all of these elements together, Facebook hopes to capitalize on that and increase user engagement — particularly around live events. Twitter has nothing like the overall reach of Facebook — which claims 1.5 billion monthly users — but it is arguable the most effective way to follow live events online, and sports in particularly, thanks to its 140-character limit and fast-flow of chronological updates. Snapchat also covers some sporting events with its Live Stories feature. Facebook’s timeline is, by contrast, far less suited to real-time, hence this Sports Stadium is designed to the plug the gap around sports. The feature is initially live in the U.S., where it is covering American football games and only available for users of the Facebook for iOS app. But, the social network said it “will support other sports around the world like basketball, soccer, and more soon” and expand the feature to other platforms “in the coming weeks.” Facebook isn’t cramming it down the necks of users at this point either. Those who can access it will need to search for a game to find Facebook Sports Stadium, but the social network firm is planning to make the feature more visible and easily accessible in the future. “Sports is a global interest that connects people around the world. This product makes connecting over sports more fun and engaging, and we will continue listening to feedback to make it even better,” .
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GM Unveils Maven, Its Big New Play In Car-Sharing Services
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
has taken the wraps off its latest move to put itself into the next generation of transportation. Today the company launched , a new program that brings together the company’s various efforts in car-sharing services, along with a team of 40 from within the car technology industry and people brought in from Google, Zipcar and Sidecar to develop more sharing services to add to the mix. The name and concept of Maven, you may recall, first surfaced a couple of days ago when that GM was select assets and employees from Uber competitor Sidecar. “W Maven will include a car-sharing trial in Ann Arbor, Mich.; a service first and now expanding to Chicago to provide a fleet of usable cars in residential blocks; a peer-to-peer service in Germany where people share their cars; and a GM campus program in the U.S., Europe and China to test more new ideas. Rates for getting cars through these programs will cost as low as $6/hour, Ammann said. There will also be some interesting tech touches in the mix. In Ann Arbor, GM will be relying on connected car systems so that your music and other preferences can follow you wherever you go, even if the cars are being shared, with support for GM’s own OnStar navigation, calling and security service, Apple’s CarPlay, Android Auto and more. Julia Steyn, GM VP, Urban Mobility Programs. She also noted that in the Ann Arbor car-sharing pilot, GM will use WhatsApp to as a customer service tool to get feedback and field questions from customers. Facebook has confirmed that this is a pilot of , also announced this week. Ammann and Steyn would not comment on how much money GM plans to invest in Maven, but said that this was not just a moonshot. “This is more of an opportunity than a threat,” Ammann said of the disruption in the automotive space. “W The automotive and transportation industries are indeed in a big period of flux right now. On the car front, we’re seeing a shift from traditional petrol-based cars to those powered by alternative energy sources like electricity, and cars that are significantly more connected, even to the point of being able to drive themselves. The way we’re using cars is changing, too, with companies like Uber raising the bar on how much of our car needs can be met by others doing the driving for us; and others like Zipcar raising the question of whether those of us who want to keep driving actually need to own the car at all. These all potentially spell doom for carmakers, but opportunity, too. GM has been making a lot of moves to bring itself up to speed on all of these fronts. The company this month unveiled a new all-electric car, the . And it into Lyft, the ridesharing company that competes with Uber. The two plan to work on autonomous car services as part of the investment. The Lyft deal will not conflict or compete with Maven, Ammann said, as he made a point of differentiating what GM is doing with Maven from those other two efforts. Here is a breakdown of the services announced so far under Maven: “
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State Lawmakers Create Coalition To Overhaul Digital Privacy Laws
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
State lawmakers and the District of Columbia have put together a group of bills pushing for legislation to protect our digital privacy. The coalition of 16 states and D.C. say surveillance technology and a lack of regulation has given Big Brother too much power when it comes to monitoring online information. “A bipartisan consensus on privacy rights is emerging, and now the states are taking collective action where Congress has been largely asleep at the switch,” ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero wrote in a about the move to truncate monitoring of online activity. “This movement is about seizing control over our lives. Everyone should be empowered to decide who has access to their personal information.” It should come as no surprise that privacy advocates such as Edward Snowden are also in favor of an overhaul to digital privacy laws. It's time. Ready to of your rights back from corporations and govt in 16 states? — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) The majority of Americans are in favor of a change to laws allowing law enforcement to obtain online communications such as emails and images hosted in the cloud. However, t Each newly introduced bill varies by state. Six states want to limit information gathered about students; three states want to limit “stingrays” or devices imitating cell towers and tracking a user’s location; and eight states would like to keep social media information out of the hands of hiring managers. The , which coordinated the bipartisan initiative, outlined the most pressing concerns: The participating states include Alabama, Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, and D.C. Any change in the law in these states would affect 100 million Americans.
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Uber’s Standalone Food Delivery App Is Coming To The U.S.
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
Uber is gearing up to launch a standalone app for UberEATS, the company’s prepared food delivery service, in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Austin, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Houston, Seattle and Dallas, . The app is expected to be available for both iOS and Android by the end of March. Uber also plans to expand its delivery hours in those cities. for a little over a month now. As it stands right now in the U.S., the UberEATS service is a feature within Uber’s standard app for requesting rides, and meals are only available during lunchtime. Soon, customers in those 10 cities will be able to order food from Uber’s partner restaurants for breakfast, lunch dinner.
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Anxiety Party
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Daniel Burka
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
We have a somewhat unusual at . There are six of us. Four product designers, a researcher and a team coordinator. Each of us held fairly senior design positions previously, and we each have a lot of experience. Because we’re all experienced, we function as peers — no one is at the helm… or maybe we all are. We maintain a fairly flat organizational structure at GV, so we’re tremendously lucky that we’re given the autonomy to work within our own operational teams. This is mostly excellent. But, the flat structure means we don’t have the traditional day-to-day feedback you might typically receive under a traditional management system. A couple of years ago our little team was sitting on the couches in our San Francisco office for our once-a-quarter planning session. In the middle of a discussion about improving our teamwork, went out on a limb and mentioned how much he missed getting critical feedback on his performance. He felt like some of the normal checks and balances were missing from his work life. We all nodded; we felt the same way. Something was missing, but what was the best way to get useful feedback? The first suggestion was also the most obvious — we’d do peer reviews. Each of us would be randomly appointed to review one of our fellow design partners. Perfect. Except, what the heck would we critique about each other? As Jake summed up, “Guys, I don’t mean to sound uncritical, but I either think you’re doing a good job or I don’t work closely enough with you on a daily basis to really have much to say. I honestly don’t know what I’d write about any of you.” Come to think of it, I had the same problem — and so did everyone else. This got me thinking. What were we really trying to achieve with feedback? Were we really just looking for an outside perspective on our work, or was something else going on? Like Jake, I also didn’t know what I’d write about my colleagues. But, if I was honest with myself, I knew what I wish they’d write about me. I had a bunch of anxieties; I needed to know if they were well-founded or if I was worrying about things that were largely in my own head. At that time, I’d wake up late at night anxiously worrying about a few things. I was anxious that I wasn’t enough of a team player (I was working on a few projects very independent of the overall design team). Or that my feedback in coaching sessions was too much from my personal experience. Or that I wasn’t prioritizing my time on things the whole team thought was important. Or that I was too critical and not gentle enough in my design critique with designers from the portfolio. Or… well, you get the idea. These anxieties swirled around and around in my brain. Maybe we didn’t need peer review at all. Maybe what we really needed was a structured time where we could be vulnerable and get our anxieties out in the open. So what did we do? We threw an Anxiety Party. In a quiet meeting room, we spent 10 minutes individually writing down our biggest anxious questions on a private sheet of paper. For the next two minutes we ranked them in order of severity — which anxieties worried each of us the most? Then we began. For about an hour and a half we went around the circle and took turns asking an anxiety question out loud. Then our colleagues spent a few seconds scoring how much the issue troubled them, from zero (“It never even occurred to me that this was an issue”) to five (“I strongly believe you need to improve in this area”). It turned out that many of the anxieties we had were entirely baseless. I asked my colleagues if they perceived me as an absent “lone wolf” from the team. It turns out that it was zeros and ones all around — they enjoyed working with me but didn’t mind if I was off on a project on my own for a few weeks at a time. Phew! However, some of our anxieties were well-founded. For instance, I was worried that I was placing too much emphasis on conferences and networking events over other priorities. It turns out that it did irk my colleagues. They gave it a few threes and a four. So we discussed the pros and cons and came up with a new plan together. It felt like a breath of fresh air to have the issue out in the open. Anxiety Parties are a regular event for us now — we do them twice a year. And, at least for me, it works beautifully. I’m much less worried about the things that used to swirl in my late-night brain. The things I used to be anxious about are now mostly resolved. And even new anxieties that arise are less debilitating because I know I can table them for now and raise them at the next scheduled Anxiety Party. I’m very aware that this may not be the perfect (or even a possible) solution for all teams. It requires an unusually high level of trust and respect to be so vulnerable with your colleagues. But if this sounds a bit like you and your team, maybe give it a shot and let me know how it goes by tweeting with the hashtag #anxietyparty to @dburka.
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There Is Real Fraud In The Underground Market For In-Game Virtual Goods
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Yinglian Xie
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
The that Activision Blizzard acquired King Digital Entertainment, maker of the hit game Candy Crush, for a staggering $5.9 billion is an acknowledgement of the promising (and profitable) future of mobile games. The global gaming market is to reach $91.5 billion in 2015. While PC and console games are still mainstream, mobile is the fastest growing segment — increasing 21 percent year-over-year — thanks to the penetration of smartphones in emerging markets and the successful “freemium” revenue model of free-to-play games with in-app purchases. that users are quick to shell out money for VIP status, to boost game play or even to win the game at an of $50 per user per game. Image source: Newzoo, With the market booming so favorable, it is not surprising that online criminals have also found their way into the ecosystem and are creating a thriving underground market for in-game . How do they pull this off? Here are a few attack techniques we’ve observed in the wild. Proxy servers rented out by cloud services allow online criminals to significantly scale up their operations and bypass reputation-based detection systems. In the context of mobile game , they also allow attackers to assume multiple fake identities by simulating presence in different geographic locations, depending on where the servers are located. These fake identities (or as they are known in peer-to-peer networks) are leveraged to take advantage of game promotions for rare or limited , such as those that are only given in specific regions or in limited daily quantities. They are also used to perform currency arbitrage: By simulating presence in different countries, the attacker can purchase in one location (the one with the weaker currency), resell them at another location (the one with the stronger currency) and pocket the price difference. The attacker routes traffic through an overseas proxy server to simulate presence in another geographic location (1), purchase virtual items from the game app (2) and resell to gamers for a profit (3). These “proxy” servers in different networks and regions are not limited to hosts rented out by cloud services and hosting providers. Attackers also exploit compromised machines located in homes or business DSL networks, such that the malicious activities appear similar to (or intermixed with) those from benign users. Some mobile games do not allow to be transferred between players. In this case, the cannot be purchased in advance to be resold at a later time, as in the above example. Not to be defeated, online criminals take a different approach with these types of games and item marketplaces. They will advertise price discounts so irresistible — at 25 percent off, or more — that players hand over their game app login credentials to have someone else purchase the on their behalf. The sellers will even remind you to change your password after the transaction is completed to “avoid unnecessary trouble.” Instructions from sellers on the underground market for mobile game players looking to purchase cheap virtual goods. The table below shows an example of this attack in action. Each row corresponds to an event logged by the mobile game app. We can see this attacker repeatedly log on as different users (gamer IDs) to make purchases, without generating any other types of events indicative of actual game play. In fact, each user is only logged in for at most a few minutes — until the purchases are complete. Nobody would risk being in this business if the pay-off wasn’t good, so how can the underground market offer such steep discounts? It’s back to the source of much — counterfeit or stolen credit cards from data breaches. Unlike in-store purchases that can be protected by EMV chip-and-pin technology, game app developers have very limited methods by which to verify an in-app, card-not-present transaction. Existing approaches tend to rely on rules-based systems or supervised learning models, which can only respond to known attack patterns. To make things more complicated, in-app transactions are commonly mediated by mobile payment platforms, such as Apple App Store or Android Pay, so apps lack visibility into details of the transactions for distinguishing between legitimate and purchases. Why does all of this matter to mobile games? Yes, don’t really “cost” anything, but this basically means that there is a huge amount of money lost to unrealized gains. It is estimated that for every legitimate item sold and downloaded, there are . This number can be much higher in some countries — in China, for example, there are 273 downloaded for every legitimate item. This means a staggering 50-99 percent of all good purchases are illegitimate. But perhaps the biggest concern for games is the . When in-app purchases pollute the economics of the game and allow some players to gain an unfair advantage, it ruins the experience for other players. With the gaming landscape being as competitive as it is today, most players won’t put up with this, and games cannot afford to lose users. These are only a handful of attack techniques faced by mobile gaming apps, and the full list is not only much longer, but also constantly changing to evade existing detection approaches. As mobile apps rely more and more on in-app “ ” purchases, they must also be ready to fight . There is a cost associated with lost , and one that has huge negative impact on both user growth and company profit.
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Software Testing Tool Developer QASymphony Raises $5M
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
, which makes software testing tools like qTest, has raised a $5 million Series B. The company, which has offices in Atlanta, Georgia and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, will use the capital on product development and marketing. The funding was led by Fulcrum Equity Partners with participation from returning investor BIP Capital and brings QASymphony’s total raised so far to $7.5 million. QASymphony founders Vu Lam and Josh Lieberman also run , a IT services provider and software developer based in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2010, the two saw that many software companies were beginning to switch from the “waterfall” method, which divides software development into separate stages that are completed before another is begun, to the “agile” method, where several teams work simultaneously on different parts of the project. Chief executive officer Dave Keil told TechCrunch in an email that many software testing platform were too slow for the agile method, so they created QASymphony in 2011 to give their clients more suitable tools. The company was spun off from KMS in 2014. QASymphony customers currently include , , , and . Keil says that the company has grown its yearly revenue from $400,000 to $3 million and expects to hit $10 million soon. qTest, which is used by companies like and , is designed to give developers a centralized place to store and manage all their software test cases and integrates with tools like JIRA by Atlassian, VersionOne, and CA Agile Central. qTest eXplorer records everything a software tester does during a session so they don’t have to document all changes by hand. The fact that it is tailor-made for the agile method is one of the main ways QASymphony products like qTest differentiate from competitors including HP Quality Center, IBM Rational, and Borland. The company’s founders also say that some of its clients have migrated to QASymphony from HP Quality Center because its platform costs less and integrates more smoothly with tools like JIRA.
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Jack Dorsey Has A Lot Of Work To Do
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
Twitter stock saw a mini-rally today after hitting an all-time low on rumors that News Corp was eyeing a tie-up with the company. Twitter didn’t comment on the report, and News Corp said the rumor is untrue, but the fact that the rumor surfaced and picked up speed so quickly points to just how precarious the company feels right now as a public stock and perhaps as a business, too. More broadly, since Jack Dorsey took over as CEO of Twitter, the company’s shares have fallen more than 40 percent. And Square’s stock has dipped below its IPO price briefly. Granted, some of this is due to a larger selloff in the market, but given the extended decline for both Twitter and Square, things are not going well for Dorsey. With low stock prices can come low morale, less opportunity to recruit top talent, and potentially the eyes of activist investors that see this as an opportunity to swoop in and capture board seats — taking the reins of the companies and installing their own layer of management. This is a fate that befell Yahoo, and we’ve seen how well that’s gone so far. And all this, too, makes the companies attractive acquisition targets. Let’s take a look at what’s happened since Dorsey has become the CEO of Twitter. Aside from its shares falling, the company has been unable to show sustainable user growth — which is a critical element to the company’s growth — despite its core business doing relatively well. Square is still showing that it has yet to figure out its financials, which show widening losses. The company’s first earnings report will come in March, and it could show continued struggles with its core business as it looks for avenues for growth. Dorsey himself isn’t immune to these struggles. According to a Forbes report, the dual CEO of Square and Twitter despite his stakes in two publicly traded, previously hot private companies. This likely doesn’t bother Dorsey too much — he’s released part of his stock to Twitter employees and devoted some of his Square shares to the Start Small Foundation. In short, Dorsey has a lot of work to do. First and foremost on the list is figuring out how to reignite Twitter’s monthly active user growth. That’ll be important for the company going forward, because logged-in users offer an opportunity for better advertising targeting, which can generate a better stream of revenue rather than simply advertising against logged-out users. Of course, Dorsey acknowledges this. He said it himself in a recent Twitter earnings call: “Our Q2 results show good progress in monetization, but we are not satisfied with our growth in audience.” There are a couple of potential reasons for this, but one of the primary floating theories is that the service is still confusing — whether that’s staying online, or signing up for the first time. [graphiq id=”4sWK5uHz7wN” title=”Twitter MAU Over Time” width=”600″ height=”565″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/4sWK5uHz7wN” link=”http://web-browsers.softwareinsider.com” link_text=”Twitter MAU Over Time | SoftwareInsider”] Twitter has also struggled with the dance between being a reverse-chronological service and offering the best tweets in a similar way that Facebook curates its news feed. Twitter head of engineering Alex Roetter, , probably said it best: “Every time you open Twitter, we should show the best stuff to you.” There’s also the question of how many characters Twitter will allow users to post, with and morph it into a more robust publishing platform. The service historically was meant for brevity, but users have themselves found new ways to post larger strings of text — usually in the form of screenshots. If history has shown anything, it’s the user base that eventually figures out the killer use cases for the service. These are just a few examples of the confusing state of Twitter. The service, for better or worse, still needs to figure out what it wants to be despite having hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Twitter has tried to tell part of its growth story in terms of its logged-out users, but in the end, it needs to get those users logging in to the service. That being said, there are bright spots to Twitter’s business. Twitter’s core advertising business has continued to beat expectations and grow at a healthy rate. That’s thanks to strong advertising products that the company has built, and a credit to the company’s ability to monetize its user base. [graphiq id=”gjw861gne5f” title=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Actual & Estimate Revenue – Last 5 Quarters” width=”650″ height=”527″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/gjw861gne5f” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/445483/Twitter-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Actual & Estimate Revenue – Last 5 Quarters | FindTheCompany”] Twitter is also pushing itself hard as a development platform, which could help extend its advertising tendrils beyond just its core service. Again, this helps the company’s core business continue to expand, but there’s always an upper bound to these things. Twitter is competing with other development platforms, and has to convince developers that it is the best way to build and monetize their applications — after already once abandoning and having to apologize to developers. But despite all this, Twitter shares are performing awfully. [graphiq id=”iIyOHRHcJ49″ title=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 90 Days” width=”600″ height=”490″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/iIyOHRHcJ49″ link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/445483/Twitter-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 90 Days | FindTheCompany”] In sum, Twitter needs to start growing again. It needs to figure out how to shift its product direction into something that simultaneously won’t alienate its existing users and attract large swaths of new users. And it’s something Dorsey and his team haven’t quite been able to figure out yet. Beyond Twitter’s struggles is Square, which recently fell below the company’s initial public offering price. Square, too, has struggled to show investors that it can be a strong, profitable and independent company that is worth the billions of dollars it was previously worth in the private markets. For an indication of how things are going, consider this: the company’s private financing valued it at $6 billion, and Square is now worth around $3 billion. Public markets are tough, to be sure, but that the company’s valuation has been cleaved is just another example of Dorsey’s big challenge to turn on Square’s growth engine. For better or worse, Square is now a turnaround story. One of the nagging issues with Square’s financials was a , which continues to weigh on the company’s profitability. But the company still needs to show strength in its core business — and outweigh stumbling blocks like the Starbucks deal — if it’s going to appease investors and get that stock price higher. [graphiq id=”eB3DEZeViwB” title=”Square-A (SQ) Stock Price – 90 Days” width=”600″ height=”490″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/eB3DEZeViwB” link=”https://www.graphiq.com” link_text=”Visualization by Graphiq”] Square’s primary business has been its point-of-sale service, which is supposed to make it easy to begin accepting money quickly and help small businesses spin up operations faster. That service is, of course, facing stiff competition from competitors and larger incumbents, but given that Square is pulling in a good chunk of revenue ( ), it seems to be doing relatively well — if not overly ambitious. But the company has done rapid experiments to see how to expand its core business, including and , a Venmo competitor for exchanging cash with friends quickly. Whether this is Square’s avenue for growth isn’t clear just yet, but one thing is certain: the company itself is looking for new ways to ignite revenue growth as its growth in transaction revenue declines. For a business like Square, that’s going to be key to convince investors it can be a strong, lasting and independent publicly traded company. Dorsey’s path is going to be difficult. Running two companies at the same time isn’t unheard of, but running two publicly traded companies, both of which are struggling, is rare and a challenge. For Square, . He was part of the original product development for Twitter, and of course built Square, but running two companies can lead to distractions and a difficult lifestyle. That can put a strain on his ability to run both companies, which have a combined $15 billion-ish valuation. Regardless of his role in the birth of the two companies, Dorsey’s going to have to make a strong showing for Square and Twitter, and his work is cut out for him. He needs to convince investors that the companies aren’t takeover targets and stave off activist investors. He needs to convince employees that the companies are valuable — and that their shares are also a worthwhile investment of their time. And he has to convince potential recruits that the companies’ shares are worth enough to woo them as part of a compensation package. The question now is whether Dorsey, in his efforts to run two companies, is the right guy to get everything done.
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Astronomers Find Evidence Of A Ninth Planet
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
Two astronomers at Caltech have found that indicates the presence of a ninth planet in our solar system. If confirmed, it would transform the model of our solar system as we know it. While the proposed planet has yet to be directly imaged, its gravitational influence on other known objects has allowed astronomers to detect its presence and determine its characteristics. Planet Nine, as researchers are calling it, has a mass of about 10 times that of Earth and 2 to 4 times the size of Earth’s diameter. It’s so large that it would be the fifth-largest planet in our solar system. What makes this planet so unique is that it has a highly elongated orbit that “faces” a different direction than every other planet in our solar system. The orbit itself is so long that it would take Planet Nine between 10,000 and 20,000 years to complete one trip around the sun. Interestingly, one of the astronomers responsible, Mike Brown, is the famed “Pluto Killer” who provided evidence that led to the demotion of Pluto as a planet. Brown pointed out that Planet Nine is roughly 5,000 times the mass of Pluto. Unlike Pluto, the gravitational influence of Planet Nine is so strong that there is no question as to whether it would be categorized as a planet. OK, OK, I am now willing to admit: I DO believe that the solar system has nine planets. — Mike Brown (@plutokiller) Discovery of this mysterious planet has been many years in the making. The Caltech astronomers, Brown and Konstantin Batygin, built on the work of others before them. In 2014, astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott Shepherd published a paper noting that over a dozen objects all had an odd feature in their orbit. It appeared that something with significant gravitational force was slightly “nudging” these objects throughout their trip around the sun. The Kuiper Belt is a disc-shaped region of icy bodies, including dwarf planets like Pluto, that extends beyond the region of the major solar system planets. In an effort to explain these orbits, Trujillo and Shepherd suggested the possibility of a planet. Brown and Batygin were skeptical of this explanation. Just as “aliens” are an unlikely possibility when astronomers something they can’t explain, a new planet is an unlikely possibility when orbital irregularities are discovered. With this in mind, Brown or Batygin went to work to disprove that planet theory. The two astronomers worked for a year-and-a-half to investigate the irregularities in the orbits of the Kuiper Belt objects, proposing and testing alternative explanations. They even suggested the possibility of a large number of undiscovered Kuiper Belt objects, but that didn’t match up with current evidence of the total mass of the Kuiper Belt. No other explanation made sense until they tested the idea of a large planet with an “anti-aligned” orbit, one whose closest approach to the sun is directly opposite that of the other eight solar system planets. At first, a planet in this type of orbit seemed unlikely. “Your natural response is ‘This orbital geometry can’t be right. This can’t be stable over the long term because, after all, this would cause the planet and these objects to meet and eventually collide,’” Batygin . But Brown and Batygin found that the orbits align just right to prevent any collisions. Over time, the astronomers were becoming increasingly convinced of the Planet Nine theory. “A good theory should not only explain things that you set out to explain. It should hopefully explain things that you didn’t set out to explain and make predictions that are testable,” Batygin said. Indeed, known objects with irregular orbits that were previously unexplainable were fitting their Planet Nine simulation perfectly. The next step to confirm Planet Nine’s existence is to image it directly. The challenge is, while astronomers have predicted its orbit, they don’t know the planet is along that orbit. Depending on its location, it could be hidden in the images of previous sky surveys. If it’s not there, this will be a job for the world’s largest telescopes. “I would love to find it,” Brown said. “But I’d also be perfectly happy if someone else found it. That is why we’re publishing this paper. We hope that other people are going to get inspired and start searching.” After today’s big announcement, the race is on to be the first to image the newest planet in our solar system.
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 1 | 5 | null |
Announcing The Judges For The NFL And TechCrunch 1ST And Future Pitch-Off
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
In case you missed it, the NFL, TechCrunch and Stanford GSB have teamed up to create 1ST and Future, a pitch-off competition featuring startups in three categories, Stadium of the Future, Bringing Home the Game and Tomorrow’s Athlete. Today we’re announcing the judges the contestants in each category will face in their bids to take a $50,000 from the NFL’s Strategic Investment Fund, two Super Bowl tickets, and a meeting with senior NFL executives. We think you’ll agree this is not an every-day judging line-up. As for the companies that will appear on stage, they’ve all be selected and are working hard
to prepare for the competition. We will announce the names on February 5. 1ST and Future starts is 8:30 – 11:30 a.m. PST on February 6 at Stanford University’s CEMEX Auditorium. The event will be live-streamed on TechCrunch. Be sure to tune in.
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Keep An Eye On Sidecar’s Patents
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
A day after the that General Motors was picking up assets from failed Uber competitor Sidecar, today the startup’s CEO finally confirmed the details and provided a few more details about the deal. A “key component to the transaction,” writes CEO Sunil Paul, was Sidecar’s patents, for which GM has taken a license, but “Sidecar retains ownership of those patents.” In other words, it looks like Sidecar the business may live on a little longer. A spokesperson for Sidecar tells us that the company is now “looking to monetize the existing assets,” which include both the data and patents. She would not comment on whether that would include any legal actions against companies like Uber if they choose not to license or purchase them outright. “The company is open to licensing the patents but we don’t have comment at this time about enforcement,” she added. The Bloomberg story that broke the news of GM’s acquisition noted that while Sidecar believes the patent that it has been granted — for “System and method for determining an efficient transportation route” — as well as other patents that are still pending were essential to the concept of ride-sharing. However, Uber and Lyft — collectively valued in the tens of billions of dollars in private valuations — did not respond to Sidecar’s attempts to enforce the patent. So what might happen next? One of three options, it seems. The first is that Sidecar sells the patents to someone who might be more willing to enforce them. That could be to a patent entity who has the funds and interest in trying to enforce them through the legal system. Or, it could be to a strategic buyer: another ridesharing company; or another firm that has ambitions to try something out in ridesharing; or someone who may have a long term interest or something close enough that it makes sense to acquire them in a defensive move. The tech industry is certainly no stranger to the latter kind of patent sale. Remember Color, the photo sharing startup that rose up in a big, chromatic bubble when it , only to see that bubble ? When Apple acquired them, they . Those, it turns out, were . No comment from LinkedIn about what it ended up doing with those, by the way. “ The second option is that Sidecar tries to enforce the patents itself. It seems unlikely that it would do this, however, given that even when it was an active company with funding it couldn’t get the companies to budge and respond. “Most companies know little about how difficult it is to monetize patents; you really need someone in-house to manage it,” one patent specialist told me. The third option might be to start a new company based around the assets. Paul confirms that he is not joining the rest of his team at GM and is taking a break before moving on to the next thing. As the person credited with being one of the first to think up the concept behind Uber before Uber, it will be worth watching to see if he decides to give transportation another crack.
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Investments In Virtual And Augmented Reality Hit Nearly $700M in 2015
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
The virtual fire continues to heat up beneath the AR/VR industry with investments continuing to build and soar. According to a , AR and VR investments are taking off pretty rapidly with nearly $700 million being invested into the space in 2015. The overall trends show investment steadily rising. The report notes that there “have now been 6 straight quarters of AR/VR investment growth, with a quarter of a billion dollars invested in Q4 2015 alone at nearly 6x the rate of mid-2014.” The report also detailed that 2015 saw just $311 million of AR/VR M&A exits, which it noted wasn’t all that surprising given how relatively early it is in the industry’s life cycle. The report stressed that there would likely be significant movement soon in the industry as “major players try to leapfrog the competition” Another item that’s clear from the report is the fact that secretive powerhouse Magic Leap is an impressively hulking force in the industry. Their $542M Series B led by Google in October of 2014 presents a pretty clear kink in the generally nice upward trend of yearly investments. The report also obviously doesn’t include Magic Leap’s (still unconfirmed) 2015 raise, which clocked in at a staggering and industry-dwarfing $827 million. The report has a pretty bullish outlook on the future growth of VR/AR, suggesting that the “next platform shift to AR/VR looks like it could drive growth to $120 billion by 2020.” That is a hell of a lot of dough.
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Punch Is A Clever Lockscreen Messenger App For iPhone…That You May Never Get To Use
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
Apple’s App Store rules are designed to maintain a level playing ground for developers and keep them from overtaking the operating system’s interface or feature set in ways Apple did not intend. But at times, the rules also bump up against innovative leaps in terms of how we could use our smartphones. Case in point: a walkie talkie-like messaging app called has come up with a way to let users message their friends directly from the iOS lockscreen. Unfortunately, it does so by talking over iOS’s lockscreen music controls – something that will likely keep of the app with this feature from being approved by Apple for release into the iTunes App Store. (The current version of Punch, , does not have the lockscreen functionality.) That said, it’s certainly a clever trick. The idea for the app comes from Rio de Janeiro-based founder Alessandro Berio, who had previously developed a social networking app Thinkr, which reached a few hundred thousand downloads before he shifted his focus to Punch. Work on this walkie-talkie style messenger started around a year-and-a-half ago – and was inspired by a desire to deal with the growing texting-while-driving problem. In fact, it was a personal experience that sparked the initial concept for Punch, Berio says: his mom was in a car accident caused by a teenager who was texting on her phone. What makes Punch more interesting than your typical chat app – at least in the beta build that will probably never go live – is the way it uses the lockscreen’s music controls to support messaging. “One day, as I was driving back from a road trip, I put a song on my iPhone that was hooked up to my car, and the album cover was displayed on my dashboard,” says Berio, when explaining how he came up with the idea to use the lockscreen. “That’s when I thought it could be possible to use Album Covers to show photos that people send you and use the music controls to choose to whom you want to talk. By doing this, every Bluetooth car system could immediately become a walkie-talkie and your Apple headphones could be used to walkie-talkie by clicking the mic button.” Punch’s lockscreen controls work by taking over the lock screen music player. You hit “Play” to record an audio message, and hit it again to send. Where you would normally see the album cover art, photo and video messages appear. The app also offers a “drive mode” that reads your texts to you, animates the photos you send in a similar fashion to Live Photos, and makes funny push notification sounds when you send emojis. Plus, Punch users can both receive and hear walkie-talkie audio messages even when the app is not running, as it uses Apple’s newer VoIP Push technology. The beta version of Punch doesn’t use any private APIs, but it seems to violate the spirit of Apple’s rules if not their actual declarations. One does not simply take over a feature like the iPhone’s lockscreen Music Controls and turn them into the front-end for a mobile messaging app. In other words, consider Punch as an interesting – and working – concept of how lockscreen messaging could work if Apple ever wanted to go in that direction. Thankfully, Berio has not put all his eggs into this one basket. In addition to Thinkr, which is now in the process of being sold to a media company, there’s still the simplified version of Punch, and Punch’s three-person developer team is working on a third app. The startup also has a little bit of angel funding (over 1 million Brazilian Reais) to keep them going, and are in the process of negotiating a seed round from an institutional investor in Brazil, he says. [gallery ids="1265606,1265612,1265611,1265610"] Asked what the plan is when Apple (inevitably) rejects the full version of Punch with its lockscreen access, Berio replied that the team will keep innovating and won’t be discouraged. And they’re willing to take the concept to Android instead. “We’re not looking to break any rules per se, we just think this lockscreen experience we created is inevitable and necessary,” he explains. “We may also look at other platforms to develop further our project, however we still feel passionate about developing on iOS.” Pressed further, Berio confirmed an Android app is already in development, and could launch in a few months or sooner. Early adopters should note that Punch doesn’t work on the latest developer beta build of iOS, but you can see a live demo of the app in action in the video below. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FneenwPIiAg]
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Sundance VR Trend Piece
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
So about this time of year my inbox gets flooded with junk from Sundance. Reps, PR, invites to parties. ! [Sure, why not]. Raise a glass with Canon [sense a trend?]. See the Extraordinary Difference Vaseline is Making [what?]. You get the picture. But for the last couple of years, the big inbox trend for Sundance has been VR. In 2014, there was a small VR exhibit with a few crazy experiments. Last year, it got bigger with huge corporate sponsors as device makers entered the fray. This year, VR is an enormous chunk of the Sundance press in my inbox — drowning out all but the most aggressive foreign documentary stumpers. Frankly, many of the VR projects at Sundance this year have been out for weeks or months already, and have debuted in other venues. So standing out as a premiere will be difficult, because insiders will assume what you’ve brought is a road show to get people hyped about VR in general or your forward-thinking programming attitude. Which, fine, okay. But that doesn’t leave a whole lot for dedicated VR enthusiasts to look forward to at Sundance. There are a few interesting things popping up. The Leviathan Project (pictured above) is a VR ride on a flying whale inhabited by bioengineered creatures (yes, please). There is the lithely titled Perspective; Chapter 2: The Misdemeanor, a VR experience that puts you in the center of police violence as a result of (potentially powerful). And there is GIANT, a film that puts you in a physical room designed to simulate a basement, and then puts VR goggles on you and lets you experience a mother and father trying to comfort a child through make believe as bombs fall ever closer, closer, closer to your hiding spot (I’m sweating just thinking about it). Anyhow, I’ll be at the show and will try to sample some things I haven’t tried, which is a legitimate reason for almost any company to be at a crossover event like Sundance. The base function of VR is very simple at the moment because it is truly a “you won’t get it until you try it” situation. You can go blue in the face explaining to someone what VR feels like or why it could be important, but they will never truly understand until they have a transportive experience So the roadshow stage of VR’s life cycle has some legs yet. The vast majority of the world’s population has never even seen a VR rig in person, so that’s got to continue. By next Sundance, however, I feel that this period will likely be on the wane. This will allow filmmakers to bring not just ‘experiences’ but full-fledged films and artistic endeavors to the field. For now, we’ve got one more cycle of “VR is a thing!” pieces to come from Sundance. After that we’ll be able to transition to: Is this a valid use of VR? Does it move the art forward? And, you know, is it good?
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Yik Yak Launches On The Web
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
, the anonymous, location-based social network that has taken college campuses by storm, has today launched a web client. The company has been working on the web version of the app for the past few months in a closed beta, and is now ready to unveil it to the public. To get going on the web, users simply add the same phone number they use with the mobile app, and verify their anonymous web profile to sync up with the profile they use in the mobile app. This way, things like Yik Yak Karma and comments, etc. are all the same from mobile to web. After that, pretty much everything on the web version looks and feels the same as the mobile version, except now users can type out their yaks on a real keyboard. From the : The need for a web version of Yik Yak is obvious… when your phone’s battery is on 2%, when you don’t have cell service, or when you just want to be able to reply to a yak SUPERFAST and simply can’t type the words quickly enough on your touchscreen. Whatever the situation, we want you to be able to yak without limitations! And part of helping you connect with the community of Yakkers around you means making it easy for you to do that in whatever way is most convenient for you. So we’re giving you the flexibility to yak away with your herd, whether that’s on your phone or your computer! Yik Yak first on college campuses, giving users a way to share Twitter-like messages anonymously based on their location. Content included updates about the school, jokes and, as with any anonymous messaging app, some bullying as well. It caught on with college students like wildfire, with active userbases on more than 100 campuses by the summer of 2014. But it turns out high school students simply lacked the maturity to handle an anonymous messaging app, with rampant bullying among younger users. Founders Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll, fresh out of college themselves, made the tough decision to and effectively blocking 70 percent of its user base as a result. Though it may have seemed crazy to block users from joining the app, Droll and Buffington knew that the only way to sustain an app like Yik Yak was to keep it safe. And the decision paid off — Yik Yak raised in funding led by Sequoia in the winter of 2014. With the launch of the web client, Yik Yak is simply offering even more access to the popular messaging service. That said, there’s still no sign of a clear monetization strategy. You can check out Yik Yak on the web .
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Ad-Tech Company OpenX Saw $140M In Net Revenue Last Year
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
Private companies get to be selective about the numbers they share with the public — on the ad-tech side, you usually end up with vague announcements about percentage growth, run rates and so on. , however, is releasing numbers that are a little more concrete. Specifically, it says it saw $140 million in net revenue (basically, revenue after ad payments have been distributed to publishers) in 2015, up 40 percent year-over-year. The company isn’t disclosing the size of its profits, but it does say that it’s profitable, and that its profits have tripled over the past two years. “As our core business continues to scale profitably, we are using our strong financial and market position to invest aggressively in innovative high-growth areas like video and new buying models; in the next generation of our No. 1 ranked quality control platform for ad quality and traffic quality; in customer development and service for all our clients globally and most fundamentally, in our people,” said CEO Tim Cadogan in a statement. Founded in 2008, OpenX offers . Its investors include Accel Partners, Index Ventures and AOL Ventures. (AOL owns TechCrunch.) When the company two years ago, I asked Cadogan whether he was planning to go public — he said he didn’t want to “put the cart in front the horse,” but he also acknowledged that companies like OpenX usually look to the public markets eventually. ( According to , Fuelling departed OpenX last month.) Recently, however, .
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Meet The Tech Vying For The Crunchie For Best Technology Achievement In 2015
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 |
The Best Technology Achievement Crunchie goes to the products that reflect true excellence in their fields, products that made waves in the tech landscape in 2015. There are several great products up for the award this year, so let’s take a look at this year’s finalists, as well as those companies that have won the award in previous years.
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HTC Denies Reports It Will Spin Its VR Business Into A Standalone Company
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
Virtual reality is becoming a major focus for struggling smartphone maker HTC, but not so major that it will spin out its VR business into a standalone company. The firm today issued a statement denying in its home country of Taiwan which claimed Chairwoman Cher Wang is in the process of creating a new VR entity that is wholly owned by her and HTC. The report suggested that the idea of a spin-out was first raised last year, around the time that , but was abandoned for some reason and is now being revived. Not so, : Recent media reports in Taiwan, such as by United Evening News, stating that Cher Wang is planning to spin off HTC’s VR operations into an independent entity that will be wholly owned by Wang is incorrect. HTC will continue to develop our VR business to further maximize value for shareholders. Speaking of shareholders. HTC’s stock price jumped at the initial reports, rising by over five percent to NT$76.60. If you’ve been following HTC — which was trading below its cash on hand last year, — then you’ll know that moving its needle in a positive direction is no easy thing. on a combination of cost-cutting ( ) and more marketable devices, but the company said that the Internet of things, wearables and VR are also areas where it believes it can rebuild its popularity with consumers. The company forged important links last year as as executive director role with Hong Kong-based Digital Domain, in addition to his work with HTC and in VR platform company WEVR. The initial fruit of the company’s VR labor is the HTC Vive which, , . , but how will it fare among the general public? We’ll see soon.
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Indus OS Raises $5M To Make Android Work For First-Time Smartphone Users In India
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
If you want proof that Android is the operating system of emerging markets, look no further than . The company, formerly known as Firstouch, is tweaking the Google-run operating system to the unique demands and culture of India. And it’s raised $5 million in fresh funding to push on with its lofty target of reaching one billion emerging market users. This Series A round was led by , the “philanthropic” venture capital firm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, and it follows smaller investments from India-based angel investors. In its bid to make Android friendly to non-smartphone users in rural India, Firstouch, as the company was known prior to today, places significant focus on the user interface and language support, but it goes beyond that. The genesis of the company is that smartphone penetration has stagnated in India despite the cost of a device falling to below $30. Indus OS believes that one of the primary problems is complexity, and it is retooling Android accordingly to help hundreds of millions of Indians to get online through a smartphone. The company, which said it has spent more than three years researching consumer attitudes to mobile devices and possible technology solutions, has a number of devices in-market now thanks to a partnership with Indian phone maker Micromax — which on selected devices last year — but it is aiming to do a lot more. “We’re figuring out what we need to do to provide people with their first internet device,” Rakesh Deshmukh, Indus OS CEO and one of the trio of IIT-Mumbai graduates who founded the company, explained to TechCrunch in a phone interview. “The language options [in India] are very limited [and] there’s no company developing solutions for these consumers. It’s a big market and big problem,” he added. Hindi and English are India’s official languages, but 22 others are officially recognized. The top four alternatives are to be spoken by at least 10 million people each. So it stands to reason that a device that just caters to a few of that selection is going to have a somewhat limited appeal across the whole of India. Indus OS covers 12 languages right now. The team is working to add more, but it has also completed a notable tie-in with Department of Electronic and Information Technology (DeitY) which will see it introduce text-to-speech technology for regional languages, a feature that will be baked into its operating system. Deshmukh said he believes that, with the help of new OEM partners in the $200 handset space that it targets, this DeitY partnership could boost the company’s reach to tier-two and tier-three cities and push Indus OS closer to its goal of bringing 300 million Indian consumers online over the next five years. Design is another major element to what the company is developing. More specifically, it is trying to bridge the gap between the modern smartphone and the gamut of customization options availavle, and the more limited but straightforward experience of ‘dumb’ cellphones. “People don’t know how to operate a smartphone and have very limited understanding of technology,” said Deshmukh, citing multiple field surveys and sessions with Indians in rural areas. “We want a simple interface to help people shift from a feature phone to a smartphone easily. We found, for example, that many are more comfortable with hard keys, and color-coding such as green and red for calls.” Other tweaks aimed to bridging cultural and use case gaps include a nifty real-time translation tool which enables users to simply swipe to translate text from one language into another. The feature works when both sending and receiving messages. Then there’s the company’s app store — App Bazaar — which doesn’t require an email address or credit card to active an account. That might sound trivial in Western markets, but it’s a serious barrier in India and other parts of the emerging world. Right now, App Bazaar has 15,000 apps — which is far fewer than the millions in the Google Play Store — but Deshmukh said 45 of the top 100 are present and the company intends to stock all 100 (and more) within this year. The critical part of the company’s mission is partnerships because, as a software maker, it isn’t selling hardware or operating a consumer brand. (Although it intends to be more visible so that people will pick Indus OS-powered devices when they shop for a phone). Its software is installed on 20 devices from Micromax — which have racked up over two millions sales these past six months — but it intends to broaden out and cut deals with at least two more partners — who pay to license the software — and increase its community to 20 million devices in market this year. It also working to increase its team of 70 to 200, with one project on the horizon being an Android ROM. ( , including developer positions and a CFO, on its website.) That ROM could be installed on other (more expensive) Android devices to enable the company to grow its userbase beyond entry-level and budget devices. Then there’s international expansion, too. Indus OS moved into Bangladesh last year, and Deshmukh told us that he’d like to add another overseas market to that list before the end of 2016. He said the company will spend a few months looking into which expansion destination it might hit next. Deshmukh is optimistic of the potential of a fuller international rollout — perhaps into Africa, Southeast Asia and beyond — once Indus OS has the basics of its platform nailed down and proven at scale in India. But, he added, such a move would require additional fundraising and would happen further down the line.
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Uber Makes First Big Expansion In China As It Aims To Reach 100 Cities In 2016
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
Fresh from raising new funding, Uber China — Uber’s dedicated business in the world’s largest country — is embarking on its largest expansion to date which will increase its coverage to 37 cities, up from 22. Uber China has slowly expanded its coverage of China with launches in large cities thus far. In a change of approach, it said today that it will launch in 15 new cities in , China’s fourth most populous province, before Chinese New Year on February 8. Sichuan, a 485,000 km square region with a cumulative population of over 80 million people, is already a hotspot for the company. Provincial capital Chengdu is Uber’s top city worldwide, based on weekly completed trips, and it reached the number one spot just nine months after Uber launched there. And there’s apparently promise of more: Uber said its volume in second city Mianyang, where it launched in November, is forty-times higher than Chengdu was at that stage of launch. (Uber didn’t give raw figures for either city, though.) Now, it is homing in on the region and expanding its coverage into tier-two and tier-three cities in Sichuan. Uber told TechCrunch it already ‘soft-launched’ in five cities, but it is targeting an additional ten in order to fully cover the main cities in Sichuan ahead of Chinese New Year, which is as urban-based Chinese return en masse to their hometowns for the holidays. More broadly though, this expansion is a sign of things to come for Uber in China this year. The company declined to disclose specific expansion plans for the year when we asked — citing the need to keep information confidential and away from competitors — but last year it would take its coverage to more than 100 cities in 2015. This move in Sichuan looks like phase one. “2015 was Uber China’s ‘Year of Localization’ and 2016 will be our ‘Year of Growth’,” Zhen Liu, who is Uber China’s Head of Strategy, said in a statement. “We have built a strong foundation across the country and have put in place an excellent local team that will drive our growth in the year ahead… our goal is to be in 100 cities across China by the end of the year,” Liu added. Reaching 100 new cities inside 12 months is a huge task, but even if Uber is able to pull it off, the company will still trail local leader Didi Kuaidi on total national coverage. Didi Kuaidi, which is versus Uber China’s $8 billion tag, is present in over 360 cities and towns — and is at break-even in more than 100 of them. That’s not quite all from Uber China in Chengdu. The company also said it is opening up ride-stations in “well-known” landmarks across the city. The idea is to create designated areas where drivers can meet passengers — similar — because it can be surprisingly hard to rendezvous, particularly if a passenger is new to, or visiting, the city and not familiar with its road system. The stations have been added to Baidu maps, China’s top mapping app, . Oh, and they are “Panda-themed” too 🐼
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How To Succeed When Facing Digital Disruption
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Jeanne Ross
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
In a digital economy, companies are constantly faced with opportunities, challenges and threats. Business changes are critical to successfully navigate in this environment, but there are plenty of pitfalls to watch for along the way. Some companies, like those in the media space, are probably closer to the head of the pack in addressing these issues. They’ve either survived or not at this point. Others, in areas like retail and financial services, are in the eye of the storm, while industries like oil and gas and consumer goods see this more as an issue on the horizon. Regardless of where they are in dealing with digital disruption, everyone’s assumptions about what is necessary to succeed are being shaken up. Digital disruption comes at you in unexpected ways, and businesses need to be prepared. MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) has been studying this issue for years through case studies, interviews and surveys. Based on that research, we’ve identified five propositions about thriving during digital disruption. Hiring a chief digital officer (CDO) is not the answer. While companies may see this as akin to hiring a head of marketing to handle marketing or a head of HR to handle HR, a CDO can’t make an existing business a digital success. This is because dealing with digital disruption is a broader issue that requires all parts of a business — that were never intended to work together — to now work together. For example, if you want to do more things on mobile, you need information on the customer that probably doesn’t exist in a central repository at your company. Rather, the data live in different parts of the business. The CDO can’t enable the company to do more things on mobile because the company hasn’t integrated data-sharing processes across functional or business unit silos. Instead, the CDO’s job ends up being to tell people to work together effectively, but, in the end, they are frustrated by their inability to change how the company thinks and operates. Rather than hiring a CDO, companies need to understand existing capabilities. If something is already integrated, it may be ready for digital. If not, the company needs an initiative to change processes and create new roles. It has to be very clear about its goals, then restructure the organization to make those goals happen. If your organizational structure was designed for the pre-digital economy, then no amount of tweaking management practices is going to be sufficient. This is largely because there was a divide-and-conquer mentality in the pre-digital age. Each business unit was assigned specific responsibilities, and the sum of all parts added up to the whole. This strategy doesn’t work in the digital economy because all parts are interdependent. They need to collaborate and cooperate. For many businesses, organizational surgery is required to adopt new processes and habits. Think of how Uber has disrupted the taxi industry by reinventing the personal mobility experience. If traditional taxi companies want to compete, they can’t just improve service — they need surgery. We used to think of a company as end to end. It starts with raw material, adds value and sells what comes out the other end. Now, so much of what must be done doesn’t need to happen within a company’s boundaries. It can look beyond its walls to have a broader array of products, services, markets and customers. It can develop a distinctive set of internal competencies that are enriched by the services of partners. In other words, value chains are becoming irrelevant. Apple plays well in this ecosystem by providing a platform for app designers. Anyone interested can pay a fee and Apple will host the app. Similarly, Amazon has created a platform for external sellers to sell goods directly to customers without stocking their goods in Amazon’s warehouses. These are complex relationships within an ecosystem — not a value chain. If you don’t have a digitized platform, you’re toast. By having a powerful platform to ensure efficient, high-quality transaction processing and back-office activities, management can stop firefighting and instead focus attention on innovation and customer intimacy. The best companies are learning how to leverage their platforms so they are constantly raising the bar for their competitors. This is the key to becoming any industry’s Amazon. The value proposition is increasingly shifting from the sale of assets to performance management of those assets. The problem is that if you make something that is profitable, you are inviting competition. Thus, it’s important to create your own niche where you solve someone’s problems and they become attached to you as a result. For example, GE doesn’t just sell aircraft engines, it also sells the management of those engines. Philips doesn’t just sell medical equipment, it sells the management of that equipment. Companies that think about more unique value propositions are harder to copy and have better margins. This has been the case for a while, but it is becoming more important. The digital economy provides huge opportunities to build a niche and excel, but companies must get out of any pre-digital mindsets to recognize those opportunities. Anyone can successfully navigate digital disruption with enough creativity and innovation — and a solid digitized platform. https://youtube.com/watch?v=7ao8_KE8_bM%3Frel%3D0
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New Chinese VC Cocoon Networks Opens For Business In London With A $713M Fund
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
As stocks in China continue to see a lot of volatility, some tech investors from the country are setting up a £500 million ($713 million) fund in London and are looking to back startups here. , as the new group is called, is backed by China Equity Group and Hanxin Capital, and plans to invest in UK and European startups in areas like fintech, the creative industries and biotechnology. Alongside it, Cocoon will build a cocoon of sorts: it’s partnering with the University of London to build what it claims will be the city’s biggest incubator. John Zai, the founder and CEO of Cocoon Networks, said that the group plans to start making investments later this year. Individual backers have already started to put money, he said, although he would not reveal which companies have been backed nor any deal sizes. China Equity Group may not be a household name in Europe or the U.S., but it’s been a part of some significant deals in the Chinese market. Among them it was one of the first investors in China’s search and Internet giant Baidu. Hanxin Captial is a fund that has focused on backing Chinese cloud computing and biotech companies. Zai told TechCrunch that the decision to base the new fund in London came out of a couple of different reasons. The first is that the group had been considering multiple locations but decided that London was the best bridge between the U.S., Europe, and their own home country. It helped that Hanxin’s executives have been building relations with universities in the UK . The other is that Zai believes that China has been too fixated on the U.S. market for investing, and the same forces — competitive rounds, high valuations for startups in the Valley — that are compelling some U.S. investors to pay more attention to Europe are the same that have brought Cocoon here. He added that the Chinese market is overvalued, too. The other opportunity is to look for real innovation, he said. It also appears to be part of a wider trend: London has seen a surge of Chinese companies move into the city, with some 28 committing to setting up operations in London over the last nine months. And they are also investing here, with one notable round coming from Beijing Kunlun Tech Co putting £23 million ($34 million) into peer-to-peer mortgage lending marketplace Lendinvest. In addition to the 70,000-square feet incubator facilities, Cocoon hopes to bring startups into the fold with another sweetener: help expanding startups’ businesses to the Chinese market. This is no small leg up: earlier today Reed Hastings, speaking at DLD talked about the challenges of expanding a business to China (which is the only major country where Netflix is not launching in its big global expansion announced earlier this month). Using Apple as an instructive company for how to do business in China, Hoffman noted that Apple approached the market with patience, and it paid off compared to Google’s fractious relationship with China. “You need partners and government permission,” he said. “It may take a couple of years but we’ll be patient, too.”
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Slack CEO Pays Tribute To Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
Ahead of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield shared a touching note with employees about Dr. King, the civil rights movement and why the collaboration software’s office is closed today. With Butterfield’s permission, Slack engineer Erica Baker shared the note externally “not only because it touched [her] heart,” , “but because [she] thinks it’s an important message for to read and absorb, not only Slack employees.” Only 37% of employers in the U.S. offer MLK Day as a paid holiday, . That means that less than two in five workers in the U.S. receive that day off. Instead of working today, Butterfield encouraged employees to take some time to reflect to think about Dr. King’s legacy and the people who were beaten, raped and/or killed because they stood up for their rights to vote and to have access to education and housing. Butterfield went on to write about how “profoundly shameful it is that there even ever had to be a ‘civil rights movement’.” Although some progress has been made, there’s a long road ahead with a lot left to be done, Butterfield wrote. “And it is on all of us to see it through,” he wrote. “There is only us, the people. And if we truly value solidarity at this company it is a good time to recognize, and remember, and recommit to standing with the people who lost their livelihoods, their limbs, and even their lives, merely asking for something as simple and basic and obvious as equal rights and equal protections under the law.” Head on over to to Slack employees. Slack, , is part of a handful of smaller, private tech companies to do so. Although Slack is 70% white, what’s notable is that the company has a much higher percentage of African-Americans in engineering (7%) than any other tech company that has reported its data.
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Magic Bus Aims To Magically Ease Silicon Valley Commuter Woes With City-To-City Transportation
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
is a new startup out of Y Combinator that hopes to end many Bay Area commuter’s slow, soul-crushing daily drive down the 101 with a scheduled, WiFi-enabled, private bus system to transport them anywhere from San Francisco all the way down to Sunnyvale. There are – Chariot, Shuddle and even Uber and Lyft among them, but co-founder Chris Upjohn believes Magic Bus offers something uniquely different. Rather than focusing on transportation within a city, his startup supports the ride between cities. “So we take people long distances that they would have been driving,” Upjohn explained to me over the phone. One example of this would be someone who starts out in Pacific Heights but needs to go to an office in Redwood City every day. “They’d have to take Muni to Caltrain and then Caltrain to Redwood City and then the MTA or something like that. So they have these really painful multi-level transit commutes,” Upjohn said. Magic Bus commuters taking an early morning ride. Lyft Line and Uber Pool offer a way to skip the public transport jenga within city limits but don’t currently offer that option for commuters going from one city to the next. However, on Magic Bus, the rider can schedule a ride and hook up with those going a similar route for one continuous ride to work in less time than it would take to go through the various Bay Area public transportation options. Upjohn made a similar system for his fellow college students, but it was his own aggravating commute from San Francisco to Menlo Park in a finance job that gave him the idea to create Magic Bus. “It was a problem that bothered me for a long time. How is it we are still all alone in our cars driving to work? It made no sense to me,” Upjohn said. Magic Bus is pretty new, but Upjohn told me it already has “thousands” of people signed up to use it already and Upjohn sees the platform as part of a bigger movement around smart cities. “When we think about how we’d like to contribute to smarter cities of the future we’d like to reduce the congestion that we see,” Upjohn said. “We’d like to eliminate the need for people to own cars and use Magic Busses for commuting and services like Uber and Lyft for in the city.” Upjohn didn’t want to comment on any future partnerships with either ridesharing service, but did mention “pursuing that vision.” Those interested in signing up for Magic Bus for a daily ride up and down the Peninsula can join the beta at TechCrunch readers can try out the service for free on their first trip using the promo code TCridesfree
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Twitter’s Latest Dedicated Celebrity Apps Supercharge Moments
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
Twitter has never forgotten the power that its influencers possess, though they often haven’t utilized their sway as successfully as they could. Twitter is now looking to give its A-list celebrities better tools to show their fans love while conveying their own #personalbrands on the site. Earlier this week I chatted with Jinen Kamdar, the Global Director of Product for Twitter Media, about some of the company’s latest app offerings aimed at influencers. I also pushed Kamdar to dissect the influence that he saw celebrities wielding on the site and on Moments specifically. Though these apps are currently only available to a few hundred celebrities and their teams, Kamdar says that Twitter plans to continue expanding the availability of the apps. Twitter gives powerful people a more seamless means of connecting with those that are following them, but with the visual nature of nested replies you have to pretty aggressively stalk a user’s timeline in order to see their fan interactions. With its new Twitter is making it easier for the Kardashians and Biebers of the world to interact with fans, while also giving the average user a way more attractive means of seeing celebrity/user interactions. Check out to see how engaging the new content in Moments can be. On the celeb side, the app allows personalities and their teams to comb through massive quantities of tweets with ease, adding the ability to flag specific questions for the stars to specifically address. A very cool feature of the app is a sort of scoresheet that it presents to celebrities following Q&A sessions that shows them the followers they’ve gained and the reach their tweets have seen. What users see is a stream of twitter-branded video and text responses that seamlessly flow into each other in a multimedia experience that is bitesized, easily digestible and a great deal of fun. An immeasurable amount of news-making photo and video content is being pushed out via celebrity profiles on Twitter only to be screenshotted, uploaded and then turned into their own “news” stories on disparate sites. To give celebrities a premium experience while also ensuring that multimedia experiences shot for Twitter adopt their own visual style, Twitter has created the . Happy !!! Last one before Christmas, so excited!!! Send me your makeup free Christmas glow!! — Demi Lovato (@ddlovato) The app (which borrows more than a few tricks from Snapchat) allows celebs using it to visually tag photos with hashtags and the twitter icon. It also supports quite a few emoji style icons that you can overlay onto the photos. More customization in this case equals more engaging content that allows celebs to express themselves. This content makes for great Moments material, especially when celebrities turn into reporters at award shows like the Golden Globes or Teen Choice Awards and give fans an inside look. To strengthen the content at shows like these Twitter has also created a third unique offering called which presents celebrities with a prompt to act upon and express themselves with, whether that’s doing a dance or answering a question. Having fun with 's new challenger App here at their NY HQ and taking questions for the — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) Kamdar told me the app serves largely as an update to Twitter’s Mirror app which was a single-purpose selfie app used at award shows and the ilk to get a ton of great content uploaded. Challenger adds the ability to integrate some Q&A into the mix and get celebs talking rather than just posing. The rise of the social media celebrity largely owes its visibility to Twitter. Motivated kids with flippy hair and charming personalities or dynamic voices have utilized the platform to build tweenage audiences and make real cash off of product endorsements of brands of face wash or specialty barbecue sauces. The dynamic that allows these rebirths is the same engine that has further strengthened the ability of the world’s athletes, artists, government officials and “real” celebrities to express their candid voices or heavily manicured public images to the broader Internet. With these tools Kamdar hopes celebrities have an easier way to produce cool content that ends up on Moments. “We encourage partners to basically post really great native, rich, unique content. They know that if they do that they will likely get featured in Moments, what we’re doing is a tool to make that easier,” Kamdar told me. Moments is a feature ripe to see the curation of more verified first-hand accounts of events. By giving influencers more flexibility to interact with fans and the unverified masses, they give Moments a level of interactivity that it has often lacked.
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More Money For India’s On-Demand Economy: Swiggy Raises $35M For Food Delivery
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
India has a big appetite for on-demand startups at the moment, and today one of the hopefuls in the food category has raised some money to supersize its business. , a restaurant delivery startup that claims to be the largest in India after passing Rocket Internet-backed Foodpanda last month, has raised $35 million in a Series C round. The funding, which brings the total raised up to just over , included investment from SAIF Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Harmony Partners, RB investments and an “undisclosed global investment entity”. CEO Sriharsha Majety, who cofounded the company with Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimini, told TechCrunch in an interview that the valuation is not being disclosed. We understand it’s well under $500 million but are trying to get something more specific, along with more detail on who the entity is and why the name is not being disclosed. Swiggy is planning to use the new cash injection to expand its business in its home market, where the food delivery business is estimated to be worth $15 billion, it says. Swiggy is live now in eight cities — Bangalore, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai — but is still relatively small in size, with some 5,000 restaurants on its platform and approaching 1 million orders each month. The plan is to invest in hiring more engineering talent, expanding its platform and trying to crack delivery times, which today average at around 36 minutes. Like Postmates in the U.S., the focus for Swiggy is on working with contractors to deliver food ordered on its platform. Today, they all use motorcycles but Majety said the company is now piloting bikes, too. The bigger picture in India is that the growth of smartphones and a rising middle class keen to use them to make life more convenient is leading to a surge of on-demand commerce services to meet those demands. But Swiggy is most certainly not alone in the market. In addition to , , the very well-funded on-demand transportation app that is backed by Softbank and China’s Didi and is currently working hard to beat off competition from Uber in India, has been on a food ordering service. Others include backed by Sequoia and Matrix, and , the online food ordering company that recently moved into delivery. And the focus on delivery also potentially puts it into competition with the likes of Grofers, which led by Softbank. But not all is rosy with all food startups. Last month, Foodpanda laid off 300 staff, or about 15% of its workforce, amid competition from other players in the market. That potentially points to a lot of margin pressure for everyone active in the market, and perhaps a cooling down of an overheated market. Another startup, , stopped operations in October 2015. Majety says that Swiggy charges around a 15%-25% commission to restaurants currently and for smaller orders it will charge extra to users, often between 20 and 24 rupees depending on the city.
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Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy
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Anshu Sharma
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
Stack fallacy has caused many companies to attempt to capture new markets and fail spectacularly. When you see a database company thinking apps are easy, or a VM company thinking big data is easy — they are suffering from stack fallacy. Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours. Comic credit: Mathematicians often believe we can describe the entire natural world in mathematical terms. Hence, all of physics is just applied math. And so on and so forth. In the business world, we have a similar illusion. Database companies believe that SaaS apps are “just a database app” — this gives them false confidence that they can easily build, compete and win in this new market. As history has shown, Amazon is dominating the cloud IaaS market, even as the technology vendors that build ingredient, lower-layer technologies struggle to compete — VMware is nowhere close to winning against AWS, even though all of AWS runs on virtual machine technology, a core competency of VMware; Oracle has been unable to beat Salesforce in CRM SaaS, despite the fact that Oracle perceives Salesforce to be just a hosted database app. It even runs on their database! Apple continues to successfully integrate vertically down — building chips, programming languages, etc., but again has found it very hard to go up the stack and build those simple apps — things like photo sharing apps and maps. History is full of such examples. IBM thought nothing much of the software layer that ran their PC hardware layer and happily allowed Microsoft to own the OS market. In the 1990s, Larry Ellison saw SAP make gargantuan sums of money selling process automation software (ERP) — to him, ERP was nothing more than a bunch of tables and workflows — so he spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to own that market, with mixed results. Eventually, Oracle bought its way into the apps market by acquiring PeopleSoft and Siebel. The stack fallacy is a result of human nature — we (over) value what we know. In real terms, imagine you work for a large database company and the CEO asks , “Can we compete with Intel or SAP?” Very few people will imagine they can build a computer chip just because they can build relational database software, but because of our familiarity with building blocks of the layer up, it is easy to believe you can build the ERP app. After all, we know tables and workflows. The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge of the tools, but lack of understanding of the customer needs. Database engineers know almost nothing about what supply chain software customers want or need. They can hire for that, but it is not a core competency. In a surprising way, it is far easier to innovate down the stack than up the stack. The reason for this is that you are yourself a natural customer of the lower layers. Apple knew what it wanted from an ideal future microprocessor. It did not have the skills necessary to build it, but the customer needs were well understood. Technical skills can be bought/acquired, whereas it is very hard to buy a deep understanding of market needs. It is therefore no surprise that Apple had an easier time building semiconductor chips than building Apple Maps. Google is a great example. It owned our email graph and our interest data (search), yet found it very difficult to succeed in what looks like a “trivial to build” app — social networks. In fact, this is the perfect irony of stack fallacy. You can build things higher up the stack. It is just that often it is not clear what to build. Product management is the art of knowing what to build. The stack fallacy provides insights into why companies keep failing at the obvious things — things so close to their reach that they can surely build. The answer may be that the is 100 times more important than the
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Second Home Raises $10.7M From Yuri Milner, Martin Lau, Index And Plans Lisbon Home
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Mike Butcher
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
Co-working spaces and membership clubs with a heavy tech bent have proliferated across the planet in recent years as the industry itself has exploded, and startups look to find flexible spaces to work. But not many have gone for such an eclectic mix of fashion, designers, startups and investors (among others) as , the club and work space created by (former adviser to the UK Prime Minister who ignited government interest in the tech startup community) and serial entrepreneur . Today at , Silva revealed that he’d be launching Second Home Lisbon later this year. The timing probably couldn’t be better, given that about 50,000 people are expected to attend the in the city later this year, now that it has moved from Dublin to Lisbon. He has also announced a new £7.5 million ($10.7 million) funding round from Yuri Milner (a personal investment, not DST Global); Martin Lau, chairman of Tencent (this is his first ever European investment); and Index Ventures (with Neil Rimer leading the investment). They join the list of existing investors, who include: Robin Klein, Jim O’Neill (former chief economist of Goldman Sachs), Sir Peter Bazalgette (chair of Arts Council England), Christian Hernandez, plus the co-founders of Zoopla (Alex Chesterman), Secret Escapes (Andrew Bredon), M&C Saatchi (Jeremy Sinclair, David Kershaw and Bill Muirhead) and Jawbone (Alex Asseily). Created in close association with Alexandre Barbosa at Faber Ventures, Second Home Lisbon looks set to join the burgeoning startup scene in the city, which already has accelerators like Beta-i and Startup Lisbon, but as yet hasn’t had many co-working spaces/clubs where the tech ecosystem can hang out. Silva told me: “Right now Lisbon feels like East London just before the tech cluster exploded. It’s a super-creative city, but there are not enough places for creative people to come together. At the same time, big companies are shrinking, my more people are becoming entrepreneurs and the built environment of cities needs to evolve to keep pace with this.” Second Home Lisbon will feature a huge 100m long work table snaking and bending along the full length of the entire building; private meeting rooms, all equipped with AV; a 400-person events space; and a late-night bar with a bookshop. Plus, unlike some members clubs, Second Home members will be free to move between London and Lisbon without paying any extra for membership. Meanwhile Second Home in London will be adding three new floors, and opening in Los Angeles early next year. The ‘tech meets property’ play has been a booming field in recent years with companies like , and reaching large valuations.
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Neura, A Privacy-Focused Platform For The Internet Of Things, Raises $11M Series A
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
, a platform that helps users personalize connected devices while guarding their data, will promote its new software development kit after raising a $11 million Series A. The round was led by AXA Strategic Partners and Pitango Venture Capital, with participation from Liberty Israel Venture Fund and Lenovo Group. Neura, which can currently be integrated with more than 55 devices and software channels, just held a beta program with “tens of thousands of users,” and expects that number to increase significantly after launching its SDK. Co-founder and chief executive officer Gilad Meiri says Neura will use its new funding to promote the SDK, strike partnerships with tech companies, and hire more employees. Many tech companies are busy figuring out how to make Internet-connected devices work together by “talking” to one another. For example, smart locks on front doors are triggered when a fitness tracker senses its wearer has fallen asleep or coffee makers start brewing when a smartphone alarm goes off in the morning. Neura enables functions like these, but the Sunnyvale, California-based startup’s founders say they are more interested in figuring out how human beings interact with the Internet of Things. The company’s technology analyzes user behavior patterns over time and then personalizes apps and devices for each person. Since the user behavior patterns Neura generates can include some sensitive data, including someone’s working hours, health information, and even who they live with, the company pledges to give users control over their profiles by letting them pick what data is shared with each service. The GSM Association by 2020. Several platforms, like and , have been developed to help users wrangle their connected fitness trackers, thermostats, appliances, and entertainment systems with a single dashboard. Neura’s focus on privacy may help give it a competitive edge as consumers . Meiri claims Neura can not only help protect user privacy, but also reduce liability for tech companies. Software and devices are connected into Neura’s platform with its API and can be controlled by users through its . The company’s technology analyzes how each person uses his or her connected devices or software. That information is then used to create personalized functions. [gallery columns="4" size="medium" ids="1264319,1264318,1264317,1264316"] Before functions are set into action, however, users have to review and give permission for each one. Neura “would not tell the lock where the user is at other times, how long they have slept for, or share additional data,” says Meiri. “Nor—and here’s where the liability part comes into play—will the lock need to analyze the user’s movement and sleep patterns throughout the day just to get that one event.” The company’s founder have a personal reason for wanting to make sure connected devices are both useful and private. Before Neura launched, co-founder and chief technology officer Triinu Magi’s diabetes was misdiagnosed and she was prescribed medication that didn’t work. Conventional glucometers and tests didn’t give Magi enough information to figure out what was happening and she finally had to cross-reference blood sugar readings with information in her fitness and food diaries to help doctors figure out what was going on. “She needed to utilize her skills as a data scientist to analyze that information simply because there was no product such as Neura,” says Meiri. “Every device produced its own data channel, without the ability to combine them into insights.” Meiri adds that tech companies often see data as monetization opportunity instead of helping the people they gathered it from. In turn, users are too willing to cede control of their personal information so they can use services like Google Maps or Facebook. Once people realize how much privacy they have lost, however, it often results in a backlash. Neura says giving consumers more transparency over how their data is used can help companies avoid that pitfall. “When it comes to the Internet of Things, nothing has been decided,” says Meiri. “There’s still a chance to change the web paradigms, if only because the stakes are much higher—not just search history and friends lists, but also biometrics and full mapping of our physical graph.”
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The List Of Crunchies Presenters Is On Fire This Year
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
Each year, the startup community comes together in the name of innovation to celebrate the highlights, accomplishments and feats of brilliance of the past year. John Oliver once called it “the biggest group of high-functioning nerds.” We call it the . This year you are in for a treat. Chelsea Peretti, comedian and star of , will be our host, and she will be joined by a strong cast of presenters. We are pleased to announce a few of our Crunchies Award presenters for the : Come join the party on February 8, 2016, from 8-10 p.m. at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco! To purchase tickets for the Crunchies, click We hope to see you there.
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Powering Up A New-Old-Stock PS/2 Model 30
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65QblpaFcrw] I am a big fan of watching old stuff work again and video takes the proverbial IBM cake. The PS/2 Model 30 came out in the early 1990s and was one of the first machines with an Intel 286 CPU, a 10Mhz monster that could run Sierra games like a champ. And here it is springing to life as if Toad The Wet Sprocket was still big. The important thing is that this is a new-old-stock unit which means it has never been opened. The guy who discovered it, Rick Chan, posted a and said he was looking for used vintage parts when he found a in New York full of old machines. “A company was sitting on a large pile of unsold new-old-stock inventory that’s been sitting in a warehouse and decided to see if the stuff would sell on eBay,” he said. ” They had IBM PS/2’s, NEC Pentium 1’s, Reply 486s, IBM keyboards, mice, and monitors.” “It was a stroke of luck as I was in the market for a used vintage PC and they happened to have some parts I needed so I contacted them via eBay and then they offered to sell me brand new gear fresh from the 90’s.” Seeing this sort of stuff boot up without a hitch is a testament to how tank-like these machines really were. Can you imagine a modern laptop surviving twenty plus years let alone booting up with the simple application of power? This is some cool stuff.
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European Antitrust Chief Eyeing Tech Giants’ Hold On Data
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
The European Union’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, has fired a warning shot about the competition risks posed by dominant tech platforms that harvest vast amounts of personal data, suggesting big data operators such as Google might in future be considered in breach of the region’s competition rules based on their data holdings. Vestager was giving a speech at the DLD conference in Munich yesterday. The reports her saying: “If a few companies control the data you need to cut costs, then you give them the power to drive others out of the market… If a company’s use of data is so bad for competition that it outweighs the benefits, we may have to step in to restore a level playing field.” “We continue to look carefully at this issue,” she added. , Vestager told the newspaper that big data is an area she wanted to “thoroughly” analyze and debate, to fully understand the “possible consequences” — although she described it as working “very much as a currency on the Net right now”. She continued that line of thought in her DLD speech, the handing over of personal data by users of free services as “a business transaction”, and adding that consumer “need to be treated fairly”. Google is already the subject of multiple EU competition investigations, with Vestager redoubling a long standing probe of a Google price comparison service , and also . While her big data comments aren’t going to please any tech giants whose business models are based on amassing large amounts of personal data, there’s no explicit regulatory risk yet — merely a reminder that Vestager is interested in the power of big data platforms to dominant markets based on the personal information they are able to amass on users. On Sunday, she said the EC would look to differentiate between different types of data, and also look at how data is acquired — and why some companies are able to acquire more useful data than their rivals, wondering in her speech why companies could not collect the same data from their own customers, or even buy it from a data analytics company. At the same time as its competition chief is eyeing up big data, Europe agreed at the back end of last year — which include a provision for fines of up to 4 per cent of a company’s global turnover for privacy breaches.
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Atlas, The Humanoid Robot, Could Become Your Android Butler
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0qWVKcJR3w] Here’s to good old , the walking humanoid robot. He walks, he runs, he carries heavy loads and now – as part of a calibration program – he can do chores around the house. This video shows the team at running calibration tests on Atlas. These tests let the operators understand how he moves in the world and what they need to do to tweak his motions. For example, by clicking on a bottle in a UI representation of the environment they can make Atlas reach out and grab the bottle in the most efficient way. Further, by showing him various tasks and seeing how his body reacts they can prepare more complex tasks in the future. “It takes a lot of patience and out-of-the-box thinking to be a robot operator. When you approach a task or situation you’ve never seen before, you need to think of as many different ways of completing that task as you can and figure out what approach would be best for the robot. Many of the tasks ATLAS performs are done a lot differently than a human would do the same task,” said robot operator to . Sadly Atlas will probably never end up doing this work in your home – he’s too expensive – but robots like him could start sweeping, dusting, and otherwise coddling their fleshy masters. Then, one day, when we least expect it: boom, our brains are an organic battery for a spiderbot. It will be an interesting way to go while Atlas chortles to himself about all the broom-pushing we made him do.
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Donor Data Is The New Currency Of Presidential Candidates
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Craig Spiezle
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
As we head into the presidential primaries, there is no question big data and analytics will play a major role in targeting voters, driving contributions and ultimately determining who will be the next president. As we have transformed into a data-driven society and economy, this may be expected. But the candidates’ privacy and data practices in both the news headlines and in the back room are not. While recent has focused on unauthorized access by the Sanders campaign allegedly taking advantage of a misconfigured Democratic Party website, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Candidates are pulling out all the stops to collect data. For example, Senator Cruz is voters (through their children) with the offer of photos with Santa as a means to prospect for voter data. The photos are free, but you must register and provide your email address to download photos. This is an aggressive and creative tactic aiding his campaign’s massive effort to collect profile data on current and potential supporters. What parent can say no to their child who wants a photo with Santa? What most donors and voters do not know is the broad data sharing liberties candidates are taking. It is becoming clear voters’ personal data may be more valuable than their donations alone. In September, the Online Trust Alliance our audit of privacy and data security practices of the 23 leading contenders for the office of president. The report revealed alarming results as the majority of candidates reserve the right to sell or trade personal data to unaffiliated third-parties. Others take broad liberties disclosed in the fine print of their privacy policy, yet if the same practices were used by a commerce site or bank they would make headlines and likely face legal prosecution. Senator Cruz goes further than any other candidate, that, “in order to maximize your experience with our website and to provide its features and services, we may periodically access your contact list and/or address book on your mobile device. You hereby give your express consent to access your contact list and/or address book.” This and other related practices contributed to 74 percent of the candidate’s receiving failing grades in the audit. Voter data is the new currency, and candidates are reaping the rewards. A case in point is Scott Walker. While he is no longer a presidential contender, his supporters might be surprised to learn that their data is now being sold to his former rivals. In Walker’s case, the issue is that the selling and sharing of donors’ data may be in violation of his own published privacy policy. According to public , Walker’s campaign charges $10,500 to send a single email to his database of 675,000 subscribers — contrary to the website which states that personal information will not be disclosed to third-parties (unless legally required). A business in a similar situation might find itself in the crosshairs of of the FTC Act and several states’ consumer protection acts. Although Walker had originally qualified for the Presidential Online Trust Honor Roll, based on his recent practices, he has been stripped of his Honor Roll status. While the sharing of email lists and data may be a common practice (especially in rallying political support and paying off campaign debt), the ethics are concerning. The broad liberties candidates are taking is troubling. If an industry leader such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Apple were sharing and selling personal data to the extent candidates seem to, they would likely find themselves testifying before a congressional hearing. Citizens may be contributing to candidates with their checkbooks, but the real value is the buying, selling and trading of their personal data. Consumer anxiety regarding data privacy is becoming a global concern. This year we witnessed the of the 15-year-old between the E.U. and U.S. as a result of extensive data sharing. The international standards community worked to advance the Do Not Track standard and U.S. Senators have re-introduced the with the goal of requiring sites and ad networks to respect the user’s intent. Addressing the concerns, the European Parliament and Council of the European Union reached an agreement on the final draft of the . This directive establishes a unified framework for the 28 member states for data security and privacy. The regulation aims to return control over citizens’ personal data to citizens and create the ability to fine companies found in violation. Campaigns argue their practices are disclosed, legal and protected under the “shadow of the first amendment,” exempt from state and federal laws. While state and federal regulators may look the other way, or be prevented from taking action, it does not make the candidates’ actions appropriate. In light of worldwide privacy concerns and the court of public opinion, are the candidates’ practices considered responsible or ethical? Should the next president of the United Stated be held accountable to the same standards as a business? Perhaps this is a reason to drive campaign reform. Now is the time for political candidates at the federal, state and local levels, and their respective national parties, to view these incidents and practices as teachable moments and put the citizens first. By default, consumers’ (donors’) data should not be shared with any third-party other than required by law. As our nation becomes increasingly dependent on data, we need to put the protection of citizens’ digital rights at the forefront. The U.S. needs leaders who will prioritize these protections, demonstrating integrity and commitment to data stewardship. The long-term benefit will be increased trust and support. My vote goes to the privacy party!
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Wahanda Rebrands To Treatwell, Eyes Up U.S. Entry
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 18 |
, the European hair and beauty marketplace that Japan’s Recruit Holdings (at a $240 million pre-money valuation), is getting a makeover of its own. Today the company has rebranded to . The name comes from made in June 2015 to expand its services in Holland, Germany and Belgium. The name change and brand refresh — led by the same team that worked on Airbnb’s last overhaul — comes as the company continues to eye up how best to expand to the U.S.. There, companies like StyleSeat and Groupon offer platforms for consumers to connect with local salons for haircuts and other beauty treatments; but the majority of IT solutions focused on the hair and beauty market are to sell cloud-based software to salons without the marketplace component, according to Treatwell CEO and founder Lopo Champalimaud. “I would love to do more in the U.S. We’re looking at it have had conversations to understand how we might enter,” said Champalimaud in an interview. There are a lot of software players in the U.S., with a making for a fragmented market. “It would make sense for us to go in by acquisition,” he added. Treatwell, née Wahanda, was first founded back in 2008 and has so far focused on Europe, building itself up as one of the bigger marketplaces in the category. Salons join it to gain access to its reservation management and loyalty software, and also appear on its platform as a secondary discovery route to pick up new customers who aren’t already regulars. Consumers use it as a quick way of looking for deals on specific treatments, or to find availability for a service based on time and location. The company claims to be the biggest of its kind in Europe, with 500 employees, 20,000 bookable venues and 10 million users with $108 million in sales projected for this year. Champalimaud also claims that Treatwell’s valuation is “substantially” higher now than it was when Recruit took its majority stake. And as part of the larger Recruit operation that owns Hot Pepper Beauty in Japan, Treatwell is one of the bigger platforms globally. Other players in Europe include and . The rebrand is to help the business provide a united front as it expands globally. Up to now, the company has grown both organically and by acquisition, and to keep brand recognition in each local market, it has held on to the brands it has acquired, which have also Salonium, Salonmeister and Zensoon over the years. But Champalimaud says that this started to become too inefficient to handle five different brands, and even if Treatwell is in English, the Wahanda umbrella brand, using a word that doesn’t mean anything specific in any language covered by the business, didn’t work either. “Wahanda may have built a pretty substantial brand presence in the UK, but it was a totally different situation in other places,” Champalimaud said. “In Italy the word is hard to pronounce, and nowhere does Wahanda actually say what it means.” Treatwell enlisted the help of , the same London-based agency that worked with Airbnb , to work on the rebrand.
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 20 | null |
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