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Will 2016 See The End Of Closed-Source Politics?
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Chris Latterell
| 2,016 | 1 | 17 |
As the presidential primary campaigns heat up across both parties, voters (Republicans and Democrats) are increasingly gravitating toward outsider candidates like Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson — candidates promising to shake up the establishment, with the credentials (or lack thereof) to back it up. But of all the issues gaining traction around the debates and campaign stops, one that is critical to the foundations of our society continues to go largely ignored: encryption and data privacy. While the NSA’s mass surveillance programs that infringed on millions of Americans’ email privacy has become a talking point in the race so far, there has been virtually no mention among Republicans or Democrats about practical solutions for maintaining everyone’s digital freedom — like strong encryption, increased government transparency and open innovation — all crucial parts of people’s right to privacy. Even the Obama administration’s declaration that it was siding with tech companies against allowing encryption backdoors was made on the grounds of national security, rather than out of concern for the civil liberties and privacy rights of the American public. Identifying the leading candidates on the issue is a pretty low bar to clear, and only a few champions for privacy on both sides of the aisle have emerged. The populist, self-described Democratic Socialist from Vermont, Senator Bernie Sanders, has blasted both the federal government and corporate data brokers for robbing the average citizen’s right to digital privacy by collecting consumer data and using it for their own ends. Back in June 2015, Sanders attempted to tack on an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have at least allocated two years into researching the impact of data collection and mass surveillance on privacy rights. , “we need to take a look at how the public and private sectors are gathering data on the American people and how we are moving toward an Orwellian society in which your location and movements can be tracked at any time through your smartphones and computers.” But the amendment failed. On the Republican side, the libertarian Senator Rand Paul and Tea Party favorite Senator Ted Cruz have both come out against government overreach on data privacy rights. Paul famously filibustered the Senate for more than in opposition to the Patriot Act and the NSA’s collection of phone metadata, remarking that there is “no excuse not to debate this, no excuse not to vote on a sufficient amount of amendments to try to make this better, to try to make the bulk collection of records go away.” Paul’s filibuster succeeded in letting parts of the Patriot Act expire on June 1… which were then restored with the USA Freedom Act on June 2, committed to law until at least 2019. Paul has continued the charge over the past year, arguing in debates and his own speeches about the need to uphold the Fourth Amendment rights that prevent the government from spying on Americans or sifting through their information without a warrant first. But most of the other candidates in 2007, voted in favor of the Patriot Act and continues to stand by that vote and the NSA surveillance program that resulted. Others, like Carly Fiorina and Governor Chris Christie, advocate even more radical interpretations. Fiorina said that the government needs to “tear down these cyber walls” — e.g., encryption — that companies like Google and Apple use to protect their customer information (an ironic position for the former HP CEO). And Christie has said that the government should be allowed to listen in on Americans’ conversations, reading their emails and text messages, to more easily find a probable cause to procure a search warrant — defeating the whole purpose of Fourth Amendment protections. Even more disturbing than these extreme positions is the fact that data privacy has just not been treated as a pivotal issue by most of these campaigns. For most candidates — and their supporters, for that matter — it’s just not a relatable or “sexy enough” issue to even think about, much less defend. This creates a trickle-down effect, where a government and a presidential campaign that de-emphasizes the importance of data privacy for the public in turn creates a public that feels apathetic toward the whole concept. How often in the midst of the Snowden leaks or Patriot Act controversies did you hear someone say, “It doesn’t bother me, I’ve got nothing to hide”? But whether they do or don’t isn’t the real issue. We see this same mentality bleed into how websites and apps are being programmed. Closed-source software is sold to the public as secure solutions for harboring data, but all they really ensure is that one provider has complete control over your information — and if they go offline, or are a victim of a data breach, their users are hurt in the process. That’s what makes open source so necessary for the Internet now: it democratizes data privacy and security, providing more transparency into how our information is being handled. But when has openness and transparency ever been raised during this election thus far? The fact that so many are so willing to surrender their privacy and the freedom their forefathers fought for — just because that’s the way things are and they don’t consider their own privacy to be that big of a deal — is what’s most troubling. How quickly we forget how important it is to remain vigilant against the corruptive forces that are part of a democratic society. If the government upheld data privacy as a First Amendment right, the people wouldn’t feel that way; if the candidates running for president fought over who champions data privacy the most, then voters could believe true freedom is possible once again in America; and if there were more secure, open-source alternatives to popular closed-source sites like Facebook, there would be fewer ways their privacy could be compromised. But as it is, most Americans have no known alternatives to choose, and no politician to even address that their lack of privacy is supposed to be an issue at all. For too long the U.S. has been governed by a culture of “closed-source politics” that asks for ultimate transparency from the public while providing comparatively little around the government itself. As the primaries and general election come into view, it’s important that Americans go to the ballot boxes knowing they are both entitled to their privacy and entitled to hold their politicians accountable for infringing on it.
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Startup Step-By-Step: No Cryptocountry For Old Men
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 17 |
“Let’s make a country,” my friend Rich said. He was serious. He and I were talking outside of a bitcoin conference in New York. It was April, 2014 and we were inside the Javits Center, the glass abomination on the Hudson that event goers hated. It was raining wildly and the crypto-folks were bumping into each other as they milled about talking about the future of money. I was thinking about the future of getting out of the Javits Center. “What does it take to make a country? Why can’t we create a digital country?” he asked again. He wrote down a few ideas. He was always writing things down. I never did. “We need a passport,” I said. “A cryptographic ID. That’s the start.” Rich is tall and imposing. He’s got black hair and a voice like gravel. He talks a lot and when he talked I liked to listen. He had a lot of great ideas and he was tired of working as a consultant for big pharma. He always had a philosophical bent, hence the question about a cryptocountry. We’re both about 40. This is important information because neither of us had any business thinking about cryptocountries and startups but here we were. I’d known Rich since college. We both went to Carnegie Mellon. I studied Information Systems and he studied History & Policy. We both double-majored in Creative Writing. We ran mostly in the same circles – the arty writer crowd – but he was always hanging with the cool kids while I was futzing around with the school paper. We talked quite a bit during school but didn’t talk much after graduation. He spent a week at my apartment in Fairfax, VA after I graduated writing a history paper but that was the extent of our interaction for about 18 years. He worked at a famous digital agency before the dot-com boom and I wrote COBOL code for telecomm billing systems just before Y2K. We’d chat, off and on, but now he was back in New York for a while and wanted to talk about building a digital country mostly because we were in the middle of a bitcoin conference. I had been thinking about crypto as well and was even writing . It made some kind of sense. “So let’s do it,” he said. I was game. But we’d have to talk more. We left the conference and walked up the street to a Mexican restaurant. It was still raining and neither of us had an umbrella so we skirted the downpour under scaffolding and awnings. It was one of those afternoons in New York that encouraged either yelling or drinking. We decided to take the latter route. We talked more. What was the digital passport? The cellphone. How could we identify citizens? With heavy cryptography. We could raise taxes via lottery. We could offer banking services offshore – we considered setting up in Sealandia or one of those weird places – and we talked about what rights you had as a digital citizen. We talked for a good hour before Rich left. As a hardware guy I was fascinated by the phone. What would happen if you owned a phone that could identify you specifically? Perhaps it had some biometric systems on board, perhaps it held a digital wallet. But it would be a tool that could identify you as part of a very special thing and it could give you rights that you didn’t have before. It was a very esoteric idea, to be sure, and I was a pragmatist. Rich was the thinker. I thought he and I could get together and figure something out. We talked off and on over the next month and I was scheduled to speak at . Rich wanted to come and I offered to let him stay in my hotel room. The primary problem, however, is that Rich is a light sleeper and I am a snorer. He didn’t seem deterred. Iceland is famous for its scenery, its food, its music, and its people. It’s also famous for its , its crypto-anarchist tendencies, and the fact that it is a great place to hide bitcoin mining servers. All of that was swirling in our jet lagged heads as we got off the plane outside of Reykjavik and headed to the city. Rich, before the flight, had run around the airport trying to find a way to change his dollars into krona. He liked to be prepared as much as I liked to not be prepared. I assumed I’d be able to swipe my credit card anywhere on the island and the vagaries of money transfer were unimportant to me. Who cared? You’re going to get screwed no matter what so why try to fight it? Rich was of a completely different school. He was from Brooklyn. He didn’t like getting screwed. He wanted to be ready to pay for dinners and drinks and touristy stuff with the currency of the country he was visiting. More important, he didn’t want to lose money doing it. In the end, we both lost money because exchange rates are, at best, opaque and at worst rapacious. But more about that later. We spent a few days in Iceland talking to crypto ninjas and entrepreneurs. We ate lamb. We drank through a single day that never ended and Rich went to bed with eyeshades and earplugs while I sawed away in the next bed. That he didn’t strangle me was a miracle. We decided we weren’t going to build a country – one smart guy I knew told me that when he looked into the idea all he found were a bunch of weirdos and bad people – so we decided to build a phone. At this point the company had nothing to do with bitcoin. Instead, we wanted to build something like a cheaper It would be a secure phone with dedicated security apps and a secure portion of memory that would store your ID. Only you could use it and you could make secure calls and send secure texts. We wanted to make it really cheap – we were eyeing the devices that would eventually become and I knew how to source them. We made a deck. [gallery ids="1264170,1264158,1264159,1264160,1264161,1264162,1264163,1264164,1264165,1264167,1264168,1264169"] You should note a few things about this deck. First, it is awful. It’s full of words that do not help the cause and it was based on a deck we found searching for “best deck for pitching.” I had seen hundreds of decks but I had no idea where to start. It was the most frustrating thing in the world: I could judge others all day long but when it came to helping myself I found myself lacking. I would sit listening to pitch after pitch and, quite smugly, make comments. Now I was producing my own deck and I had no idea that it was horrible. My first bit of advice: find a friendly entrepreneur who has raised money and ask for their deck. You will notice a few things. First, there aren’t very many slides. Second, it’s very clear how they will make money. Third, it is well-designed. This deck featured none of those things. But we had an idea! And I knew people in the industry! We’d send the deck around and get some interest and we’d win. Easy, right? Nope. But this was a start. That first deck began the next deck… and the next deck… and the next deck. I didn’t follow the advice above so we waddled our way from deck to deck. A startup is a hypothesis testing machine. It is a broken box full of moving parts, clashing personalities, and market vagaries. It’s a damn mess. I made it a bigger mess by not following my own rules. But it was also fun. That’s one of the beguiling things about all this. No matter how silly you feel, no matter how down you get, it’s still a lot of fun. You want to know the reason entrepreneurs like all those goofy maxims and pictures of sunsets they post to Facebook? Because those things – “Skate towards where the puck will be” and “Be your best self” and “I hate Mondays” – best describe how they are feeling. They feel like they’re pulling one over on the rest of the world. I get to work with my friends and build something amazing and maybe change the world? Wow! And there are a bunch of people who did it before me and they can distill my feelings into a pithy quote? Why not share that on social media! Entrepreneurs have always existed. TechCrunch and a few other sites made them the “rock stars” they are today. There’s an entire industry catering to them now, an entire school of thought, an entire university. And they’ve always told themselves that they were the luckiest people in the world. And, in a way, they are. They are given the opportunity few others have and, if they have it, fewer still take. As the sun never set over the cold water of the North Atlantic and the warmth rose in our bones as we hopped from bar to bar, I suddenly felt very excited. We could do this. I thought, just for a moment, that this idea was great. I thought that we’d build a phone, sell it on Kickstarter, and have some fun. I thought we’d eschew VC and instead bootstrap while still working our jobs. And I thought this was just another side project for us to mess around with. Heck, we were old and we didn’t need to completely disrupt our lives to do this. We’d play it safe. And I thought we were onto something really cool. Only one of those things ended up being true. The last one. And that’s what I want to tell you about. I love the people who make startups, the entrepreneurs. The vast majority, except for a few notable exceptions, are driven, humble, and kind people. They have taken on a heavy burden and they always try to give back when asked. As a writer it was always my mission help them whether it was by writing about them or bringing them to Disrupt or listening to their pitches in the countless meetups I’ve held with Jordan Crook and the events team. I love seeing startups outside of the main startup cities and I love seeing a small ecosystem blossom in places like St. Louis, Norfolk, or Belgrade. When I started traveling the world talking to startups – way back in 2009 – the idea of a small company entering the global stage was laughable. Now it is commonplace. Fast forward to 2016. I have been writing about startups for nine years and I want to build something so we started building what I’m writing about right now. It’s a bold move for an older dude like me but I suspect it’s been done before and will be done again. Writing for TechCrunch is a dream job and I’m pretty dumb to quit it but, as they say, John Biggs is not a smart man. Thankfully I have two great partners who are helping me and I think we’re going to be OK. Our goal, ultimately, is to change the way the world thinks about bitcoin and the blockchain so I think anything we do on that front is worth doing. The rest is gravy. So now it’s my turn. I’m starting with two friends and I’ve been given permission to tell you about it. I know this is an unfair advantage but I also feel that it’s a great way to talk about a startup from beginning to, well, end. I’ll talk about the troubles we’ve had, the joys, the pitches, the mistakes. So this is the first in a series of columns about starting my startup, I am transitioning to a columnist soon and my goal is to offer one or two of these a month. I think they will be an important record of all the awful stuff I did and, as such, allow you to avoid the same mistakes. These stories will not be in chronological and I’ll leave people out to protect the innocent. However, I will tell the unvarnished truth about this whole thing and I will try to have some fun. I hope the information will be helpful to folks who are stuck in a cubicle somewhere hoping to get out and I hope I can learn something from the folks who have been there before. Until then, enjoy and see you next time.
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AdSemble Will Give One Startup Some Billboard Space Near The Super Bowl
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 17 |
When people talk about ads at the Super Bowl, they usually mean those TV campaigns that big brands ( ) pay millions of dollars for. But AdSemble is giving startups an opportunity for free Super Bowl advertising of a different kind — on a digital billboard near the event itself. aims to and for this year’s Super Bowl, it’s created for placing ads on 50 billboards around the San Francisco Bay Area. One of those billboards runs along the offramp from Highway 101 to Levi’s Stadium (where the Super Bowl will take place), and that’s where AdSemble will let one startup advertise without charge. To participate, you just with your contact information and your “unique origin story.” CEO Matthew Olivieri and his team will choose the winner based on that origin story (bonus points if you’re bootstrapped, like AdSemble), and their ad will get shown on that billboard at least once every 10 minutes on the big day. So, okay, it doesn’t quite have the glamour of being broadcast into millions of homes across the United States, but Olivieri said it’ll still be seen by plenty of drivers passing by, and it’ll run alongside ads from big companies: “It’s a cool way to be put on the map.” Of course, a competition like this also raises the sometimes thorny question of how you define a startup. AdSemble is going for simplicity. To enter, your company just has to be five years old or less — even though that would actually disqualify AdSemble itself, which Olivieri described as “a nine-year-old startup.” You can .
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Hike Adds Quora And Automattic Founders To Its Roster Of Investors
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
Hike, the Indian messaging app competing with global giants like , is adding a quartet of Silicon Valley veterans as investors and advisors. These include co-founder and chief executive officer Adam D’Angelo; founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg (who is also a co-founder of WordPress); vice president of engineering Aditya Agarwal; and Ruchi Sanghvi, the former vice president of operations at Dropbox. Each made undisclosed personal investments and will serve as advisors to Hike as it attempts to gain more traction. Hike’s main competitor is Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which and India, where , is its biggest market. Hike has been holding its own since it launched in December 2012, however, and now claims 70 million users, with over a billion messages sent each day. In a statement, Mullenweg said “As an online social media entrepreneur myself, I have keenly observed India. I believe in Hike Messenger’s vision and I can see the team gearing up and are well positioned for aggressive growth in the country.” One of Hike’s advantages is tailoring its services to people who are going online for the first time, founder and chief executive officer Kavin Bharti Mittal told TechCrunch. WhatsApp , which may make it even more difficult to compete with (both services already have voice calling), but Hike’s goal is to create a simple messaging app (which is useful for people on limited data plans or in areas with poor connections), but that still offers the same wide variety of services as other Asian messaging apps like and . “Specifically, for those people just coming onto the Internet, Hike’s a true platform and one gets far more than just messaging and photo sharing. People have easy access to real-time news, live cricket scores, coupons from their favorite brands, and much, much more,” he says. The company plans to work with its new investor/advisors to grow its user base. “They’ve seen immense scale and have launched and been involved in products that scale across the globe over hundreds of millions of users,” says Mittal. “Very few people have seen such scale, and access to that knowledge and those insights will be extremely useful in scaling up the company.”
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The Federal Government Must Act To Ensure That The Autonomous Vehicle Revolution Takes Place In The U.S.
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Rob Toews
| 2,016 | 1 | 17 |
The advent of autonomous vehicles is around the corner, and the economic and social benefits will be vast. The U.S. government must take action to ensure that the United States remains the global center for this transformative technology. Much is at stake: If the federal government does not act, there is a very real risk that development of autonomous vehicles — one of the defining innovations of this generation and a potentially massive engine for economic growth — will take place in another part of the world. The tremendous safety and convenience benefits of autonomous vehicles have been well-documented. Millions of lives can be saved: Last year, car accidents claimed 1.3 million lives worldwide and more than 30,000 in the United States, 90 percent of which were caused by human error. Morgan Stanley that auto accidents are a $500 billion annual drain on the U.S. economy. For the elderly, the handicapped and those otherwise not able to drive themselves, autonomous vehicles offer life-changing mobility and freedom. Beyond these first-order impacts, the spread of autonomous vehicles will spur dramatic innovation and economic activity as entire industries spring up around this new technology. Just as the rise of the personal computer led to the now-$300 billion semiconductor industry and the birth of world-leading American companies like Intel, autonomous vehicles will fuel the development of innovative new electronics components, like LiDAR and advanced computer chips, to power the cars. Software firms will emerge to address the significant computing and cybersecurity demands that Internet-connected cars present. Media companies will pioneer lucrative new paradigms for generating and consuming content (and advertising) as individuals gain hundreds of additional hours of free time in their cars every year. In an increasingly competitive global economy, it is critical that the United States take the lead in advancing this technology — and reaping the associated economic benefits.The Obama administration’s proposal, , to invest $4 billion over 10 years to accelerate driverless car adoption is a huge step in the right direction (the plan still requires Congressional approval). It is critical that the federal government follow through on this commitment to promoting autonomous vehicle innovation. In particular, policymakers should take the following key steps. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) should issue a comprehensive set of regulations for autonomous vehicles, to be adopted uniformly across the 50 states. To date, the federal government has provided effectively no guidance to states about how to regulate this new form of transport. The result is an inconsistent and often restrictive patchwork of regulations from state to state. If it persists, this regulatory uncertainty will impede the commercialization of these vehicles and make the U.S. a less attractive place to innovate. A helpful analogy for how this could work can be found in the government’s regulation of traffic signals. The U.S. Department of Transportation sets forth national standards for highway signs, road markers and other signals in its . Each state must then adopt and implement these standards, with minor adaptations allowed. The outcome: Road signs look the same across the country and drivers can easily navigate from state to state. In announcement, federal regulators indicated an intent to take action on this front within the next six months. This is an encouraging development. It is imperative that they do so in a clear, definitive and timely manner. In crafting these uniform regulations, the NHTSA should allow autonomous vehicles to operate on public roads with or without a driver. Regulations that require a human to remain ready to retake control of the vehicle at all times — like — largely defeat the technology’s benefits. For instance, one promising application of autonomous technology is a driverless, shared fleet of vehicles that provides “mobility on demand” to a large population. Such a fleet could reduce congestion, fuel emissions and the cost of transport while empowering the handicapped and elderly. This model would be rendered impossible by regulations requiring a human driver, however, because cars could not shuttle from one passenger to the next on their own. More to the point, restrictions like this appear to offer no safety benefits anyway. Several years and millions of miles of testing have convincingly demonstrated that self-driving cars are safer and better able to follow road rules than are human-operated vehicles. As technology design expert Donald Norman has , scientific research shows that “people are incapable of monitoring something for long periods and then taking control when an emergency arises.” Indeed, he argues that “the most dangerous kind of autonomous vehicles are those that require human monitoring.” By allowing autonomous vehicles to operate truly autonomously, regulators will ensure that the U.S. is an environment in which this technology can reach its full potential. The federal government should work more closely with policymakers and innovators at the local level to ensure that America’s cities are ready for autonomous vehicles. The spread of autonomous vehicles will necessitate significant adjustments to cities’ layouts and infrastructure, and urban planning processes can take years. Yet to date, of U.S. cities are even factoring autonomous technology into their long-term transportation plans. This must change. The , a program announced last month by the U.S. Department of Transportation to encourage U.S. cities to modernize their infrastructure, is a good start. These actions are all the more urgent given that several other countries, aware of the tremendous economic and social promise of autonomous vehicles, are making a concerted effort to lure the industry to their own territories. U.K. government officials have met with Google executives at least five times in the past two years to discuss building out an autonomous vehicle presence in their country. According to , U.K. officials “emphasized [their] desire to work with Google to ensure the U.K. stays ahead” in autonomous technology. Perhaps more notably, Chinese technology giant Baidu (often called “the Google of China”) announced recently that it had successfully tested its first driverless car. Baidu has partnered with BMW to bring autonomous vehicles to market within the next few years. Given the country’s political system, China’s government can enact a regulatory regime virtually instantaneously that is friendly to autonomous vehicle innovation and commercialization — and can devote immense resources to encouraging it. If U.S. regulators do not adopt policies that foster rather than hinder autonomous vehicle development, the epicenter of this technology may well soon shift from Silicon Valley and Detroit to China. The vitality of the U.S. economy has long stemmed from our country’s unique ability to imagine and then commercialize “the next big thing” — from electricity to air travel, from the personal computer to the iPhone. U.S. policymakers and innovators must work together to ensure that America leads the way with the transformative technology of tomorrow: autonomous vehicles.
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Chat App Kakao Buys Majority Stake In Korea’s Top Online Music Service For $1.5B
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
Kakao, South Korea’s dominant mobile messaging app that in a $3 billion deal in 2014, is pinning its international expansion hopes on music after to spend $1.5 billion buying a majority stake in Korea’s top online music service. The company is investing 1.87 trillion KRW (around $1.54 billion) in exchange for 76.4 percent of Loen Entertainment, the company behind streaming and download service , which claims 28 million users in South Korea. The deal is being pegged as the largest tech acquisition in Korean history and, in order to finance it, Kakao is selling 750 billion KRW ($620 million) in new stock to a range of investors, including Loen’s previous majority shareholder. to help grow its footprint in Indonesia, a key market in Southeast Asia with a population of over 260 million people. Messaging apps in the U.S. and other Western markets are beginning to move into content and services, , but Kakao was one of the early pioneers of the ‘messaging app as a platform’ strategy, along with fellow Asia-based companies WeChat and Line. Over the past year or so, Kakao has introduced , a YouTube-like TV service, and to rival Uber, . , Kakao is moving into music and entertainment. That’s an obviously strategy to maintain Kakao’s influence in Korea, but beyond that, as Rim pointed out in a statement, it could help the service expand overseas and into markets where Korean culture and music — like K-Pop — are hugely popular. “Music is one of the most loved content genre in the mobile era. It is also incredibly powerful in that one song can set trends for an entire generation and highly influence the global pop culture,” Rim said. “By combining Kakao’s various platforms and content services and Loen’s leading music content, we expect tremendous synergy that could establish a strong foundation for global expansion.” As for the immediate plans, Kakao said it will stoke demand for music services by adding them to its existing services. In particular, it is aiming to create new services that run across social networks, create music communities across Kakao services and curate ‘smart’ music playlists and selections via user data. Korea’s top artists are already on Kakao, so the synergy could act much like Line and its , boosting both the chat and music services by enabling users to get closer interaction with their favorite artists via Kakao. Kakao confirmed also that it plans to “service international markets [further] down the line.” That’ll be interesting to observe since it failed to export its success overseas, despite being a mobile messaging pioneer. Even WeChat and Line have , due to hugely competitive markets and the requisite sums of investment, but it seems Kakao believes it can ride the waves of K-Pop by aligning its service closely with music. Time will tell.
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General Data Protection Regulation: A Milestone Of The Digital Age
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J. Trevor Hughes
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
The conventional wisdom is that the recently agreed-upon (GDPR) is the in the history of the European Union. I’m not quite sure how you quantify that, but it’s not surprising. This law will likely go down as a milestone of the Digital Age, similar to industry-changing laws like the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act here in the United States. For, just as new laws and regulations were needed to address the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, the European Union has responded to the privacy concerns presented by the Digital Revolution with a law that attempts to apply new order to the complexity of data in society. Like most laws born of intense compromise, everyone will likely find fault with it. Privacy advocates will say it doesn’t go far enough in its risk-based approach to protect human rights. Industry voices will say it stands to cripple innovation and will consign Europe to a digital island. Despite these differing opinions, the message to the global information economy is clear: It is time to get to work on the tough tasks of understanding and, eventually, complying with the GDPR. Virtually every company doing business in the European Union has some challenging months ahead. Companies will need to figure out how to create a data breach response plan that both evaluates the risk of harm to consumers and still allows for regulators to be notified within 72 hours of discovery if that risk is deemed to be great. Social media and other companies serving teen audiences will need to decide on a good way to acquire parental permission to gather the data of children. Every company will need to create systems for the demonstration of compliance with the law upon demand by regulators. Much of this work will fall to the privacy profession. The GDPR mandates the appointment of a “data protection officer” (a DPO), a term that might be foreign to U.S. ears. These DPOs are privacy professionals, and they’ve been proliferating around the world lately. The new regulation requires DPOs for many companies, particularly those that handle sensitive data like biometrics or health information, but also those that make building profiles of their customers integral to their business plans. The good news is that you’ll have three years from this spring to put one in place — but the work of compliance will likely require a privacy professional in your organization far ahead of that deadline. The potentially more challenging news is that privacy professionals are already in high demand, and will likely be even harder to find in the coming years. Training from within may be the most viable solution as companies struggle to find staff for these functions. Without question, we will continue to see a public policy debate over many of the provisions of the GDPR. European regulators will create reams of analysis and guidance on the new regulation. Businesses will define best practices within industries and negotiate the new, risk-filled terrain of compliance. Customers will continue to demand innovative technologies that improve their lives, while at the same time expecting even greater respect for their privacy. In this manner, the GDPR represents not a destination, but an important milestone — a marker that indicates how far we have come and how far we still have to go. Or perhaps the GDPR is more like another type of road sign: “Caution, Work Ahead.”
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Xiaomi’s Sub-$150 Redmi 3 Gets A Full Metal Body And Much Larger Battery
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
Xiaomi has announced the Redmi 3, the latest version of its budget smartphone. The five-inch device, which sports a full metal body for the first time and a new diamond lattice design, goes on sale January 12 for 699 CNY, that’s around $107 and is . The Chinese phone maker looks to be upgrading its devices from plastic to metal casing. got the metallic treatment when it was unveiled in December, but, interestingly, while the Note 3 became Xiaomi’s first device with a fingerprint scanner — unlocking potential for payments and other services — the Redmi 3 doesn’t have a scanner. We asked Xiaomi why, but the company declined to comment. It’s certainly an odd move to omit that feature. The other major change in the Redmi is a larger battery — 4100 mAh — which Xiaomi claims gives the device an additional 80 percent of juice versus the previous version. In terms of other specs: you can expect an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of on-device storage, a 13-megapixel rear camera and five-megapixel front camera. this year for forgoing its annual tradition of revealing its total sales for last year. That’s almost certainly because it undershot its target of 80 million, which had been revised from an initial 100 million. ( .) The company has scaled at speed over the past few years, but growth is slowing down in line with and a realization that replicate its domestic success overseas will take time. What we can expect to see soon, however, is Xiaomi’s next flagship — the Mi 5 — which Hugo Barra, head of international, teased on Twitter. No sneak peaks at the device just yet, though. My own Mi 5 just rolled off our production line today and… into my pocket. Qualcomm Snapdragon 820. So worth the wait :) — Hugo Barra (@hbarra)
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Streaming Services Dominate 2016 Golden Globes, But Amazon Takes The Win
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
Streaming services showed up in force for Sunday night’s 73rd Golden Globe Awards, but it was Amazon’s year to shine. Though Netflix with – even beating out HBO – the streaming service didn’t take home the top prize in any of the categories it competed in. Instead, it was Amazon that was tonight’s winner among streamers. The now well-established competitor was effectively battling against itself this year, having received five nominations, including nods for “Mozart in the Jungle” along with last year’s winner “Transparent” – the latter which had won before for Best TV Series: Musical or Comedy. In addition, “Transparent’s” Jeffrey Tambor won Best Actor in a Comedy at the 2015 event. However, the Golden Globes like to shower the newcomers, so this time around, Amazon’s “Mozart in the Jungle” stole the crown away from “Transparent” for both Best Comedy, and for Best Actor in a TV Comedy (Gael Garcia Bernal). Amazon’s lesser-known show was certainly something of an underdog in the Best TV Comedy category, where it beat out popular programs from HBO, Hulu and Netflix. That being said, Netflix made an impact this year simply by having so many of its shows and those programs’ actors up for consideration, with noms for “Orange is the New Black” (2), “Narcos” (2), “House of Cards” (1), “Master of None (1),” “Bloodline” (1), and “Grace and Frankie” (1). Netflix, as these nominations indicate, is the new “network TV.” The service also made news for being the first streamer to earn a nomination for a feature film with Idris Elba’s nod – though not a win – for Best Supporting Actor in the movie “Beasts of No Nation.” (He lost to Sylvester Stallone in “Creed.”) The film notably was also Netflix’s first foray into feature-length projects. Hulu made its mark this year, too – not by the total number of nominations, clearly, but for getting on the ballot for the first time with its single nod for “Casual,” which lost Best TV Comedy early on in the evening to “Mozart in the Jungle.” Meanwhile, HBO – something of a streamer itself thanks to HBO NOW – earned several nominations this year for its shows “Game of Thrones,” “Veep,” and “Silicon Valley.” However, it lost the Best TV Comedy title to Amazon, and its “Games of Thrones” lost Best TV Drama to USA’s breakout hit “Mr. Robot.” Though the streaming services obviously didn’t walk away with trophies for every category they competed in, they did easily shut out traditional TV broadcasters like ABC, FOX and PBS, each which only saw four nominations, and CBS, which had only been nominated one time. And with Netflix now moving into films, too, future Golden Globes may see further shake ups from the streaming industry.
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Aerodrome Is The First Commercial Airport For Drones
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
is working with the City of Boulder, Nevada, to launch the first commercial drone airport — the Eldorado Droneport. It’s one of only a handful of FAA-appointed UAS test sites in the United States. The plan is to offer training, maintenance and other support functions for the commercial drone industry, as well as for individual drone pilots. The company already operates teaching facilities in Detroit, Michigan and Henderson, Nevada. The plan is to complete the construction of the droneport with its adjacent training facilities in about three years. The team tells me that it already operates on a five-acre parcel in Boulder. We caught up with Aerdrome’s at CES.
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What’s Your Customer’s Online Personality?
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Liraz Margalit
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
In the retail world in which we live, it’s hard to know who your customers are. Unlike in the days of brick and mortar stores, customers in today’s online shopping marketplace are cloaked in layers of anonymity, their wants, desires and specific shopping styles all filtered out by keyboards and IP addresses. This presents a major marketing problem for many web enterprises. How do you cater to your shoppers when you know hardly anything about them, and how do you target your online campaigns when you can’t see your target? We all have clearly identifiable personalities when we shop online, and our online behavior sends specific cues — just like our clothes, appearance and mannerisms would in real life — that can be crucial for companies to understand when targeting clients. So what is your customer’s online personality? We all know what shopping cart abandonment is, but did you know that the worst offenders of this practice tend to fall into one category? Wish Lister shoppers are the modern-day equivalent of window shoppers — the ever-daydreaming, forever-Pinterest-pinning type of shoppers who browse, browse and browse some more, but never actually buy. Because online shopping carts are virtual, Wish Listers feel a sense of ownership over the items they place in there, allowing them to experience a bit of the high of purchasing something lovely without having to actually pull the trigger. How can you best serve the Wish Lister? After she leaves behind yet another stocked cart full of unpurchased items, offer her a discount on one or two of those items. The next time she returns to your site to browse but not buy, the incentive just might put her over the edge and send her, at last, to the checkout. Brand-Oriented Visitors are harder to plan for, because they are the ultimate impulse buyers. Concerned with status and labels rather than form or functionality, these shoppers shop based on emotion — rather than necessity. It’s easy to identify Brand-Oriented Visitors based on their shopping history. If they stick to one tried and true designer and spend long hours testing out different colors and accessories online, you can bet you have a Brand-Oriented Visitor on your hands. So how can you best serve the Brand-Oriented Visitor? Play into their emotional system. Keep product information at a minimum so as not to overwhelm these shoppers with the sorts of stats and numbers that they aren’t interested in, and instead focus on beautiful imagery and captivating text. Brand-Oriented Visitors tend to shop based on their gut feelings, so target your site accordingly. On the opposite end of the spectrum from the Brand-Oriented Visitor is the Rational Visitor. This is the shopper who comes to your site focused almost exclusively on meeting her price point, and also the kind of visitor who will carefully analyze cost and benefit ratios to make sure any potential purchase is practical and responsible. For these visitors, go in the opposite direction. Offer bullet points that clearly state the product’s values and benefits, and make them clear and bright so they are prominent from the get-go. Minute details are of utter importance to the Rational Visitor, so honor that need and provide all the stats you can. The more information you offer, the more informed and empowered a Rational Visitor will feel and, as a result, the more likely to make her purchase with you over a competitor site. Customers whose online behavior shows them visiting every single product review, hovering over statistical information and scanning pages from the very top to the absolute bottom — these customers fall into yet another category. They are the Maximizer shoppers, the visitors who are obsessed with making the absolute best purchase they can and who often drive themselves a little nuts before they are able to make a decision. For these customers, anxiety is an issue. When faced with too many options on an e-commerce site, Maximizer shoppers can panic and end up closing their browser all together. All the choices and stimuli presented to them end up scaring them off rather than providing a sense of entertainment or comfort. So be smart when offering text on your site. Limit the options presented to Maximizers — utilize filters to keep things organized, limit rows of products to five items at a time and offer encouragement or a slight “nudge” by suggesting purchases that are streamlined to each visitor’s shopping history. Sometimes when we analyze website traffic at Clicktale, we see shoppers who start browsing at the top of a page, scroll down a bit and immediately stop and purchase an item when they find their match. They do this regardless of the fact that there are other items below that also fit their search criteria. These shoppers are called Satisfiers — they come to an e-commerce site with a specific need in mind, and the minute they find an item that meets that need, they plow ahead and purchase. Satisfiers hate wasting their time with useless browsing and they find themselves easily pleased. So help these shoppers along by filtering down their options and keeping things in razor-sharp focus on the page. Another great tool for helping Satisfiers find their products in as little time as possible is by allowing them to search by size, color and brand, immediately homing in on exactly what they are looking for and keeping irrelevant search results out of the page. What about shoppers who come to your site ready and poised to buy, enjoy their browsing experience, stock up their cart and then freeze when the time comes to click “purchase”? These shoppers also have a name. We call them Hesitators. These are customers who enjoy shopping and genuinely want to buy, but they are plagued by the fear of making a wrong decision and ending up with buyers’ remorse. You can spot them by their online behavior — they tend to hover over the final call-to-action button that will take them to the checkout page, choosing instead to leave their cart full and click and hover around nearby tabs while trying to decide what to do. To help Hesitators feel more confident on their way to opening their wallets, consider the power of reward-based behavior. Design your website so it offers feedback and positive reinforcement along each step, scrapping neutral language like “Welcome to our site” for the more encouraging “You’ve made a great decision shopping with us!” Also, focus on streamlining your site so there are fewer opportunities for opting out along the way, keeping the number of pages on the way to checkout at a minimum and making it harder to return to a previous page once the customer has finally clicked “purchase.” In the brick and mortar era, sales representatives knew how to identify shoppers based on body language and appearance signals. In today’s world of online shopping, the game has completely changed, but businesses should know that even an anonymous online shopper is offering dozens of cues about his or her shopping tendencies based on how they browse and click. If you can identify a shopper’s personality, you can tailor your website to help get him exactly where you want him to go — onto the checkout page and straight into conversion.
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The Industrialist’s Dilemma
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Aaron Levie
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
at CES this week when it announced a major partnership that will integrate Amazon’s technology into its cars, also following rumors that to develop and manufacture self-driving cars. Even a couple of years ago, these combinations would have seemed shockingly strange, but today the only thing remotely surprising is that it took so long. Ford, to its credit, is barreling into a digital future with a Silicon Valley innovation lab, self-driving car investments, car sharing programs, and more. After surviving world wars, tectonic shifts in the economy, onslaughts from foreign competitors, and more, Ford knows all too well how difficult survival is in the Fortune 500. Since the first rankings of the Fortune 500 was published in 1955, a whopping 89% of the list has turned over. That’s astonishing: in less than one lifetime, the dominant players in the global economy have almost completely changed. Technologically speaking, 1955 and most of the decades since, were the dark ages. Today, clever entrepreneurs are benefited by the increased ability to use the power of emerging technologies and shifting capital markets to disrupt any business – and every business – quicker than ever before. With billions of smartphones, near-limitless computing power available on-demand, and contract manufacturing, the same forces that have shaken up the technology industry are causing upheaval for every other industry as well. It is hard to think of an industry that is not under attack. Media, retail, life sciences, healthcare, transportation, hospitality and agriculture are all under siege by new products that blur the boundaries of the physical and virtual. And these new digital experiences are inspiring customers to put major pressure on established analog peers. Most traditional players are not prepared to answer these calls. Slowed by heavy regulation, years of codified processes and aging technology, incumbents are burdened to the point where it is nearly impossible to move quickly enough against an unencumbered challenger. This is the Industrialist’s Dilemma: the systems, management and assets that led to success in the industrial era are holding incumbents back today, in some cases fatally As we learned with the Dilemma, new forms of disruption make it hard for managers in existing businesses to respond gracefully to these attacks; however, today we see that the move from the industrial world to a digital one is far more of a nonlinear shift than most even the most innovative incumbents are used to. It’s one thing for a car company to react to a more reliable or more affordable car marker, as US automakers dealt with in the 1970’s. It’s another to respond to the very threat of car ownership going away forever, or the challenge that making self-driving cars requires a fundamentally different skill-set from what you’ve invested in over a century. So what can the established players do? Out of fear, or denial, most will choose to sit back and wait until the shift is so profound that their moves become as limited as the taxi industry’s are today. The rare exception in the Fortune 500, however, will employ a mix of tech acquisitions, investments in startups, building out talent and operations in Silicon Valley, and driving partnerships to transform their companies. Ford is hedging their bets by developing self-driving car technology directly and partnering with Amazon and potentially Google, while considering the business model implications of a world where cars are managed in fleets, not parked in our garage. Charles Schwab is taking a hint from automated online advisers like Wealthfront and FutureAdvisor, attempting to leverage its customer relationships to stave off an attack, while also enter a new market it never served previously. And Kaiser, realizing that providing virtual care lowers its costs and offers better convenience for patience, has built out an own array of technology and invests in startups to bring personalized, digital healthcare to life. Ultimately, no two digital strategies are the same, but all must start with the incumbent’s core competency at the center of the effort. World’s Fair – General Electric “Progressland”. Photo courtesy and . For years, GE has been one of the best examples of an industrial giant that’s going digital. Recognizing earlier than most that in a connected world, through the crunching of big data and constant optimization of its services, GE can move to providing solutions as opposed to products (e.g. selling energy savings vs. wind turbines). To get there, they needed each of their business units to think like a digital business, as well as build out a centralized software and computing effort to standardize approaches across the conglomerate. Today, their successful software efforts have led them to going on the offensive in the internet of things, launching GE Digital as a standalone unit with the goal of becoming a top-10 software company by revenue by 2020. The retail industry offers emerging examples of brick-and-mortar players using partnerships with startups to turn a former weakness into a weapon. With online commerce offering infinite selection at unbeatable prices –enabled by centralized warehouses instead of thousands of locations– it looked as if nearly every retailer was doomed to face the same fate as Borders or Blockbuster going against Amazon. But as more consumers are getting hooked on on-demand experiences, physical retailers may have the upper hand, as they are able to deliver both online and offline shopping which offers better convenience than their online-only rivals. To get there, a plethora of on-demand delivery partnerships are being struck between the likes of Walgreens, Best Buy, Starbucks, 7-Eleven and Postmates, DoorDash, and Deliv, with . In many cases, M&A will be the industrialist’s fastest path to the right digital experiences. Monsanto, Nordstrom, and Under Armour have acquired their way into digital expertise, buying would-be disruptors and incorporating their capabilities into their core businesses. Startups like Climate Corporation, Trunk Club, and MyFitnessPal have given these acquirers an edge in emerging categories, bringing in fresh talent, modern technology stacks, and new business models. While acquisitions turbocharge entry into a new market, retaining the talent and DNA that made the startup so effective becomes the most important task for sustained innovation. With over sitting on the balance sheets of the S&P 500, and demand for liquidity among venture capitalists, we can expect the industrialists to world over the coming years, perhaps even outpacing traditional technology companies in tech M&A. Telephone switchboard operators circa 1914. Photo courtesy and . Of course, none of these efforts will matter if organizational change, and significant shifts in how the companies are run, don’t accompany them. It is not enough to have the right products and technology, as those will only solve the problem for a single point in time. Organizations themselves need to adapt to ensure long-term competitiveness and innovation. The ability to separate the organizational structures and cultural dynamics that were developed for slower, industrial-age processes (like manufacturing) from the fast moving ones required for more digital-based experiences will be critical. Just as Tesla can both build cars at scale and update them with regular software upgrades – two very different operational paradigms and capabilities – companies will also need to learn how to evolve to flex both of these traits. Most incumbents outside of the technology world (and many within it) are not prepared for this kind of future, and every day that goes by reduces their ability to adapt in time. The coming years will be crucial for any blue chip firm looking to keep its leadership spot. Consumers are not going to accept friction in their retail experiences when Amazon is an alternative. Banks will have to contend with increased choices and a world where their physical sprawl matters little to consumers. And owning cars may very well be a thing of the past if Google and Uber have their way. The future is going to look very different; the only question is how the Industrialists will respond.
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A Visit from Chelsea Handler, And A Nervous Wait Afterward
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
As you may have heard, brash comic Chelsea Handler is set to host a new series on Netflix entitled “Chelsea Does…” in which she’ll explore a range of issues, including a universe still foreign to many outside of it: Silicon Valley. Now, as the series debut approaches on Saturday, January 23 , at least one venture firm –- — is waiting on pins and needles. The reason? Foundation somewhat bravely agreed to let Handler and crew into their offices so she could pitch them on a mobile app while the show was being filmed. On Friday, we talked with general partner Paul Holland and Foundation’s marketing partner, Meg Sloan, about what went down and how they’re feeling about it now. MS: [Foundation entrepreneur-in-residence] RJ Jain was working with [Handler’s] development team on her app. We’re also early investors in Netflix, so I think we were on the radar of the production team. I used to work at Facebook, where we have posters that say: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” I joked [to the team here] that the answer was to say yes to being in a Chelsea Handler documentary. MS: That she would pitch us her app. We also talked with the producers, who asked for our help with some locations, and we put together a happy hour for Chelsea in Palo Alto with a cross section of folks we know. I think she was super interested in the social scene here in Silicon Valley, to the degree that there is any. MS: It all happened back in June. It’s surprising how quickly they pull these things together. It’s not months and months of preparation. It’s weeks and days, though to them, it probably felt like an eternity. [Laughs.] PH: In the spirit of keeping our relationship with entrepreneurs confidential, she doesn’t want a lot of exposure [regarding the app] until the show airs. But it was definitely in the power alley of what you’d expect a Chelsea Handler app to be, meaning it has a little edge, it’s a little irreverent, and it’s associated with relationships and things of that nature. PH: She came in with an entourage – not her entourage from [her long-running E! Online show, “ ”], but she’d encountered a young kid along the way, a 10-year-old, Silicon Valley kid who has [his own] app and she was fascinated by him. She also brought her dog, Chunk, who is very cute and incredibly devoted to her. I’ve never seen such a devoted dog. It stared at her the entire time. PH: I’ve seen her [E!] show and I’ve read her books because I think she’s hilarious. We had a discussion around, is she going to come in and abuse us and make us look foolish or, in my case, make fun of the middle-age white guy. But we ran [the pitch meeting] as if she were coming into any partner meeting. We gave her a serious hearing. We spent time outlining what we look for in investments, and where her offering fit in terms of pros and cons, and she was into it. She was very excited about entrepreneurism. She didn’t come in as a diva or Hollywood personality. It was: I’m proud of this thing I’ve done and I think it’ll be useful for people. PH: We can’t say one way or another. We agreed it would be part of the reveal for her when she does her show. I’d say the broad category is a very lucrative one and has yielded a lot of significant prices and outcomes. PH: Well, we don’t usually have entrepreneurs bring along a dog and small child. MS: I think it anyone who does anything with Chelsea Handler is probably a little nervous. But if we can’t laugh at ourselves a little bit in Silicon Valley, we’re all taking ourselves too seriously. PH: It’s funny. You go from, I hope it goes well, to I hope they like me enough that [our part] doesn’t get left on the cutting room floor. It’s entirely possible that what we did was too mundane. (Readers, if you’ve missed the trailer for Handler’s show, which looks to be very funny, you can check out here.)
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 28 | null |
The Less Sporty Side Of E-Sports
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Daniel Li
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
The e-sports industry is getting big. Really big. More people watch Twitch than CNN. Riot, Valve, -Blizzard and EA all have e-sports initiatives. The largest tournaments attract tens of millions of viewers and offer multi-million dollar prize pools for the best players in games like League of Legends and Dota 2. However, the focus on , and misses the mark on one of the most interesting aspects of e-sports. When taking a closer look at the economics of e-sports and streaming, it turns out that it pays much better to be entertaining than good. Source: Madrona Venture Group Traditionally, professional e-sports players earned the majority of their income from tournament winnings. Following this model from sports like golf or tennis, players would travel around the world to major tournaments and compete for prize money. For example, the 400th-highest-earning competitive e-sports player of all time is a Korean League of Legends player. He has made $80,000 in 13 tournaments since 2013, including a Top 3 finish at the 2014 League of Legends World Championship. Today, however, with the popularity of live-streaming services, there are a variety of new revenue models like subscriptions, donations and crowdfunding. These new models are leading streamers to focus more on entertainment and viewer engagement rather than winning prize money. For example, the 400th-most-popular streamer on Twitch is He has made only $2,444 in tournaments since 2011, but he earns more than $100,000 per year on Twitch, primarily from subscriptions ($5,000/month) and donations ($1,500/month). Below is a breakdown of his monthly income, which he shared in an with The Daily Dot. Source: The Daily Dot, Destiny This model works for e-sports streamers because the cost to “go pro” and begin broadcasting is nearly zero, and streamers can earn meaningful amounts of revenue with only a small audience. Streamers don’t need to invest in years of practice and coaching or spend millions of dollars on broadcasting infrastructure. Anyone can start streaming at any time, for free. explains how a law student became a professional streamer, with 2,500 subscribers (that’s at least $6,250/month in subscriptions) and more than 50 fans who have sent her donations of more than $1,000. Because of subscriptions and direct donations, streamers are not reliant on ads, and they can generate enough revenue to support themselves with a relatively small, but engaged audience. Destiny, for example, earns $6,500 per month from subscriptions and donations, despite having an average of only 2,000-2,500 concurrent viewers, and KittyPlaysGames, who typically has an audience of 2,000-5,000 concurrent viewers, has said “a career in corporate law would be a step down” in income. This unique level of access and opportunity in e-sports is incredibly exciting, and we are seeing more and more new companies focus on e-sports entertainment over competition. Check out ’s great Esports Market Ecosystem Maps for more details. We are still in the early days of e-sports, but there are many opportunities for companies to grow and define the category. Here are some of the ideas that we are on the lookout for at Madrona: Twitch has been a fantastic platform for the gaming community, but it’s unclear if Twitch will win other verticals. Here are the top video categories on YouTube — will people want to watch these activities live, and how will they want to interact with content creators? Source: ESPN and FiveThirtyEight ESPN started on cable, BuzzFeed started on Facebook and VICE started on YouTube. Each of these companies mastered their channel to grow rapidly, then expanded to other channels. Which media companies will grow up on Twitch (or other streaming platforms)? Streaming is often a 50+ hour per week, full-time job; streamers need to find creative ways to engage and monetize their audience. Madrona’s latest investment, , falls into this category. They help streamers engage their audiences when they are not streaming and utilize crowdfunding as a mechanic to help fans support their favorite streamers.
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Six Transformations From 2015 That Will Reshape The World
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Vivek Wadhwa
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
Looking at the for the Crunchies, you could get the impression that the greatest advances of 2015 were sharing and delivery apps, software platforms, and pencils. Yes, these are cool. But much bigger things happened last year. A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity. We haven’t seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. And this is just the beginning. Starting in 2016, a wider range of technologies will begin to reach their tipping points. Here are the six amazing transformations we just saw. In the developed world, we have become used to having devices that connect and inform us and provide services on demand, and the developing world has largely been in the dark. As of 2015, however, nearly half of China’s population and a fifth of India’s population have gained Internet connectivity. India now Internet users than does the U.S., and China has twice as many. Smartphones with the capabilities of today’s iPhone will cost less than $50 by 2020. By then, of Facebook, Google, OneWeb, and SpaceX to blanket the Earth with inexpensive Internet access through drones, balloons, and microsatellites will surely bear fruit. This means that we will see another three billion people come on line. Never before has all of humanity been connected in this way. This will be particularly transformative for the developing world. Knowledge has always been a privilege of the rich; tyrants rule by keeping their populations ignorant. Soon, everyone, everywhere, will have access to the ocean of knowledge on the Internet. They will be able to learn about scientific advances as they happen. Social media will enable billions of people to share their experiences and help one another. Workers in the remotest villages of Africa will be able to offer digital services to the elite in Silicon Valley. Farmers will be able learn how to improve crop yields; artisans will gain access to global markets; and economies based on smartphone apps will flourish everywhere. All of this has been made possible by advances in computing and networks. In a progression called Moore’s Law, computers continually get faster, cheaper, and smaller, doubling in speed every 18 months. Our $100 smartphones are more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1970s—which cost millions of dollars. With faster computers, it becomes possible to design more powerful sensors and artificial-intelligence (A.I.) systems. With better sensors, we can develop sophisticated medical devices, drone-based delivery systems, and smart cities; and, with A.I., we can develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems, and digital doctors. Yes, I am talking about applications that can diagnose our medical condition and prescribe remedies. In 2015, smartphone-connected medical devices came into the mainstream. Most notably, Apple released a watch that, using a heart-rate sensor and accelerometer, can keep track of vital signs, activity, and lifestyles. Through its free , Apple provided the ability to monitor, on a global scale, the use of medicines and their efficacy. Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, and Google too, as well as a host of startups, are developing sensors and A.I.-based tools to do the work of doctors. These technologies are expensive and geared for the developed world; but companies in China, India, and Africa are working on inexpensive versions. The sensors that these devices use, and the computing and storage that A.I. systems need cost very little. Previous generations of medical advances were for the rich; now all can benefit. One of the most technology advances of late is Bitcoin, an unregulated and uncontrolled digital currency. It gained notoriety for its use by criminals and hackers and the fall of its price from a peak of about $1100 to $250. Yet, in 2015, it gained acceptance by retailers such as Overstock.com. And the technology that underlies it, blockchain, became the basis of hundreds of technology-development efforts. The blockchain is not useful just for finance. It is an almost incorruptible digital ledger that can be used to record practically anything that can be digitized: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, medical records, contracts, and votes. It has the potential to transform the lives of billions of people who lack bank accounts and access to the legal and administrative infrastructure that we take for granted. Another technology that came into the mainstream was CRISPR gene modification. Discovered by scientists only a few years ago, CRISPRs are elements of an ancient system that protects bacteria and other single-celled organisms from viruses, acquiring immunity to them by incorporating genetic elements from the virus invaders. Via CRISPRs, DNA can be edited, either removing unwanted sequences or inserting payload sequences, the genetic and chemical components necessary costing as little as $100. CRISPR modification introduces if used wrongly—to edit human embryos, for example. But it could also be used to correct faulty DNA that’s responsible for genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, and Alzheimer’s, and to edit the genes of plants to produce more-nutritious food and require less water. Labs all over the world are working with this technology to solve a wide range of problems, and we will see breakthroughs. Americans will have purchased nearly half a million drones during this holiday season, according to some estimates. With the cost of these flying machines falling to less than $100, the has officially begun. We will see them everywhere. As the technologies advance, these will carry increasing amounts of weight and travel over longer distances. You can and Walmart to deliver your groceries and Starbucks to bring you your morning latte via drone. And they will monitor traffic and crime, perform , and provide emergency assistance in disasters. These are an even bigger deal for the developing world. Large sections of Africa don’t have roads; remote towns and villages can’t get medical supplies; and large cities are clogged with traffic—much of it for delivery of small goods. Drones will solve many of these infrastructure problems and reduce pollution and traffic. They will also allow the constant monitoring of the Earth’s changing climate and wildlife ecology. The biggest geopolitical breakthrough in clean energy in 2015 wasn’t the climate agreement in Paris, between 196 countries, to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide. It was the deal that U.S. lawmakers struck to extend tax credits for solar and wind capture for another five years. The good intentions of nations will only take us so far; the U.S. deal will accelerate the progress of clean energy world wide. Solar and wind capture are already , installation rates regularly doubling and costs falling. Even without the subsidies, the costs of U.S. solar installations could be halved by 2022, reducing the returns on investments in homes to less than four years. By, 2030, solar capture could provide 100 percent of today’s energy; by 2035, it could be free—just as cell-phone calls are today. The tax credits for renewable energy generation will accelerate and ensure progress. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that the extension will add an extra 20 gigawatts of solar power—more than every panel ever installed in the U.S. prior to 2015. “The US was already one of the world’s biggest clean-energy investors. This deal is like adding another America of solar power into the mix,” said. We are also seeing similar advances in battery storage. Combined with the advances in energy, large swaths of the planet that don’t presently have electricity have the potential to light up in the early 2020s. Having unlimited, clean energy will be transformative for the developing world—and the planet. So we have a lot to be cheerful about and a lot to look forward to during the years ahead, as technology makes its major leaps forward. We just have to be careful to use it for bettering mankind rather than for holding it back—because there are as many risks as opportunities. In my next post, I will talk about what we can expect in 2016.
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Apple Music Surpasses 10 Million Subscribers
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
The digital music platform draws similarities to Spotify, which now boasts over 20 million paid members. Both services offer unlimited streaming at similar price points — Spotify Premium costs $10 per month. Pandora, which is also in the online music arena, has more than 78 million monthly active users, but only 3.9 million paid subscribers. But the services are fundamentally different, with Pandora focused on customized radio listening. Apple has not responded for request to comment.
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Why Bitcoin Can’t Help The Poorest – Yet
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
The term “financial inclusion” is a new buzzword in the fintech space. With the rise of services like and , we are convinced that bitcoin is the solution to the problems of the unbanked. With bitcoin, we say, the house cleaner in Dubai can get her money home and the refugee can get his money over the border into a safer place. I’m even known to . That’s fine. Optimism is a wonderful tonic for the soul. But we have entered a bubble made of cryptocurrency buzzwords and it’s important to assess what is going to happen over the next few years. In short, right now the infrastructure is insufficient to support the unbanked. This must and will change. Before we begin, a bit of disclosure: I’ve been researching this for my own project, , and I’ve been talking to startups in this space. There are many differing views and I absolutely want the unbanked to receive the help they deserve. But it’s up to the entire industry to shift its practices to help the neediest. First, let’s discuss the unbanked in the US. , tells of the fall of the rural bank and the growth of predatory and pernicious banking. During the early years of the banking industry, when the US was an agrarian society, each small town or community had its own bank. These multiple mini-banks served the community directly and were often the only place a farmer could get a loan before next year’s harvest. These mini-banks are what we think of when we imagine the nefarious landowner and banker in small town America – their whims could make or break a farm. The truth was that these small banks were the lifeblood of early America. Regulatory changes created nationwide banks that slowly subsumed the smaller banks. These tiny banks fell or were bought and the resulting banking deserts further gutted the agrarian towns and led to the growth of industrial America and its various discontents. You could now sell your soul to the company store and, further, deal with a faceless bank that had no connection to your local community. You could also get a large mortgage that let you buy a home in the suburbs and, barring the occasional horrible crash, that has been said to hold us all in good stead. Now, thanks to the hollowing out of bank branches, we have payday loans where a $600 loan can balloon to $2000 in fees and the only ATMs available feature a $3 fee. Once again, this is not always the case and this pessimistic view of the banking core but this same situation repeats itself in New York to Jakarta. But how do you solve this? Bitcoin will be the solution, but not until the entrenched players open connectors to the entire blockchain network – which, obviously, goes against the big banks special “internal blockchain” efforts. The banks still think that the blockchain is like the Internet – there should exist special private networks that only they can use “for security’s sake.” This is evocative of companies, back in 1999 or so, who wanted special VPNs for their companies so the big bad Internet – a catalyst for change that remade the world – wouldn’t interfere with their TPS reports. What the banks are really saying is they want to pull the jet engines off of the blockchain 747 but they don’t want to deal with all the smelly passengers and headstrong pilot. It’s folly that will soon be remedied. Still, this doesn’t solve the problems of the unbanked. Here are some pressing issues. A bank owner I spoke to noted that the primary problem in serving the unbanked is that they live in a cash economy. They want to remain anonymous for various reasons, be they immigration status, fear, or distrust of banks. The only way to solve this is to rewrite the onerous rules associated with closed networks like Western Union to allow the unbanked to use completely transparent networks. Regulations are scaring off money sending projects because they were written for a more barbaric age. This can only change but will take effort by the industry to move the perception that anonymous money sending is the tool of terrorists and drug dealers. By allowing $100 in cash to move anonymously you are helping a poor worker and not a gangster. The gangsters have their own ways to move money and $100 is a pittance.
New School professor Lisa Servon “having quick access to their money is one big reason low-income people choose not to use traditional banks” “The South Bronx has only one bank per 20,000 residents,” she said. This means that check cashing and money changing spots, not to mention money sending kiosks that charge high rates, are the go to spots for transactions. New ideas like human ATMs are definitely interesting and work in places like Hong Kong where and where many small bitcoin remittance plays like . But these are small markets and not interesting to the big banks or big investors. Like, say, the Netscape browser in the early days of the Internet, these services are the small strange outliers that will eventually grow enormous. Acquiring unbanked customers that will trust your brand is difficult. That’s why the tools associated with Internet banking must first address the early adopter. The first mobile phones were found primarily inside expensive cars. Now they are found in every pocket around the world. This means the phone has moved from a tool for the rich (like bitcoin right now) to a tool for everyone. The first Internet shops and hundreds of engineers to understand (like bitcoin). Anyone now can can use the to build anything they want. The barrier to building an Internet startup is basically an understanding of a little code. The same thing will happen in banking. As these apps become more usable the banking deserts will be no more since we will soon have a bank in our pocket that can do more than pay a few bills. As I’ve explored our own project, I’ve heard again and again of startups that failed because bitcoin is illiquid in the poorest countries. That’s why the best startups are over borders or that can be topped up remotely. These are alternative forms of value that can land in a country without proper infrastructure or access to cryptocurrenies and help people immediately. It will take a long time before the truly poor will even know about bitcoin and even then there is no reason to even discuss it. Instead it should be the sharpest sword in the arsenal of banking inclusion and fintech should work hard to ensure that the policies created now will help everyone, not just the rich. The bitcoin infrastructure is excellent, secure, and powerful in the abstract. In practice it is useless… but not for long. Fiat in and fiat out will become a real thing this year – hundreds of folks are working on the project – but to focus on the unbanked does nothing to interest big banks. They’ve already quite well ignored that subset of the world. I predict a number of exciting changes to this in the next year but it will take time for the true promise of bitcoin to express itself. When that happens we will see an engine of change that will rival the Internet in power and reach.
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Ledger Wallet Is One Of The Most Secure Bitcoin Wallets You Can Get
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
You can call CEO Eric Larchevêque the Winklevoss of France given that he stores around 1,000 bitcoins on his bitcoin wallet — that’s around $450,000 as of today. But it also shows how secure the company’s wallet is. I interviewed him on our stage at CES. Ledger Wallet’s first product was a sort of USB key that you would unlock using a PIN code. Now what happens if you lose it? Your bitcoins are safe as you need a private key to send these bitcoins. You can even recover your wallet and transfer your bitcoins to a new wallet. In other words, Ledger Wallet multiplies the number of factors to access your bitcoins, including a physical element. And even if your computer is infected, hackers can’t access your bitcoins as the most important part of the code is executed from the wallet directly. The company also showcased a new wallet, the . It has a touch screen, supports USB, Bluetooth and NFC and uses the same kind of mechanisms as the company’s previous wallet. I also asked Larchevêque what he thought about the current climate around bitcoin. He’s still bullish but things it won’t become as ubiquitous as people previously expected. And he probably means what he says given how many bitcoins he personally owns.
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A Vegas Drone Rodeo In The Rain
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
Just like last year, we paid a visit to the annual in the Nevada desert ahead of the first day of CES this year. Unlike last year, though, the weather was horrible. As we arrived at the (and no, drone shooting wasn’t on the program), it was already windy and miserably cold. After about ten minutes, it started raining. Unsurprisingly, drones don’t like rain and even though 3DR, DJI, Parrot and a number of other drone manufacturers were on hand, we barely saw any drones flying for the rest of the afternoon. I really hoped Parrot would fly its , but it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, we headed inside and had a good chat with the organizer of the Rodeo and a couple of the vendors who were exhibiting inside the heated, welcoming tent the team had thankfully set up. Here is what we saw. First off, we chatted with Drone Rodeo organizer Matt Sloan about this year’s event. We then went on to talk to the makers of the , which bills itself as the “first wearable camera that can fly.” Nixie co-founder and COO Jelena Jovanovic from Nixie explains the company’s unconventional drone to us. Drones and wearables apparently go together rather well. The built a follow-me drone that comes with a (large) smartwatch-like controller that allows you to control the drone using voice input. And drones don’t have to be complicated. What if you could just add a motor and a controller to a paper airplane? That’s exactly what the FPV paper airplane does — and it even allows you to use a smartphone and a virtual reality viewer to see your flight from the perspective of the paper airplane. The team just finished a campaign. Just as we were about to leave, Parrot CEO Henri Seydoux also walked into the tent (only to find that his team had already fled the cold to head back into the warm embrace of Vegas’ casinos). So we grabbed him for a brief interview about the state of the drone industry. And because we couldn’t experience it ourselves, here is what the drone race course would’ve looked like if it hadn’t rained… CES Drone Rodeo track test. Simple layout, lots of room. Amazing location. Posted by on Monday, January 4, 2016
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Reimagining Internet.org
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Hassan Baig
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
In the wake of the and growing calls for permanently banning ‘s app(called Free Basics) in India, it seems a course-correction is now unavoidable for the initiative. A step in the right direction was announcing the Internet.org developer platform in May 2015, allowing developers to submit their web apps for consideration. The idea was that the Free Basics team would appraise the web apps, publishing those that met a certain standard, giving published developers more eyeballs and Free Basics’ users greater choice. And although these developer apps did not get the same visibility as the official partners Free Basics initially launched with (e.g., Bing, AccuWeather, Wikipedia etc.) — being relegated to a secondary tab within the Free Basics experience — it was nevertheless a step in the right direction from the earliest incarnation of the app. Left: The main page in Free Basics. Top right: Sub-menu links to more services. Bottom right: Developer apps listing appears once More Services is tapped. Internet.org envisions Free Basics as a kind of dial tone of the Internet — a default that anyone should be able to freely access as long as they are in a coverage area and have an Internet-capable device. And in inviting developers to this platform, clearly the brain trust behind the initiative was looking to ameliorate the critique that Free Basics is exclusive and beholden to corporate interests. But with the current suspension of Free Basics being enforced in India (Free Basics’ biggest test bed), it’s now obvious that the change hasn’t done enough to sway the tide. Where does it go from here? It’s hard to predict, but perhaps it’s high time to rethink the foundations of Free Basics and Internet.org. Firstly, starting with Free Basics, why not entirely remove the hierarchical distinction between the apps of corporate partners and published developers, and provide a public API that can be integrated as long as a pre-defined technical and UX spec is followed? There need not be strict appraisal in the middle; taking more of a Google Play Store approach than an Apple App Store approach. The spec could be finalized per country via consultations between stakeholders such as host governments, usability experts, civil society representatives, telecom operators and, of course Internet.org itself. Moreover, Facebook could ameliorate another chunk of the criticism if it credibly anonymized user data on the Free Basics platform, discontinuing its policy of keeping excessive personally identifiable information. From the user’s point of view, they’ll experience a monolithic list of organically sorted apps they can browse and try for free: no gatekeeping, no preferential treatment and transparently open to every developer who connects to the API. Secondly, why not improve the rather rudimentary Free Basics product, too? For instance, from the current basic website listing, how about turning it into a tool that not only redirects newbie users to various web applications, but also shows them how basic digital conventions work? So far, it seems neither Internet.org nor those in opposition get what the state of being unconnected is like. Here’s a glimpse: [vimeo 150829123 w=500 h=889] from on . This video is from an actual usability experiment (one of many my team has conducted). For those who naively believe that Internet.org’s Free Basics is undoubtedly inferior to free data schemes, there’s another side to the argument, as well. What do you think the test subject in the video above will try if given free, open access to billions of web pages? Nothing. He wouldn’t know what to do with it. It would be like giving a computer from 2016 to an American in 1960, and then further cranking up the challenge by throwing in illiteracy and languages barriers. To be fair, there are exceptions — those resourceful enough to onboard all this tech through self-teaching. But such feel-good anecdotes fail to create a meaningful dent in all those vast regions of the world where entire generations have never developed a culture of using technology. Such demographics — forming the bulk of the four billion-plus unconnected worldwide — can really be helped in their Internet journeys if the tech is designed with their needs in mind. Hence an app like Free Basics — meant to onboard newbies to Internet services — ought to include functionality to nurture the required mental models among its target demographic. Free Basics currently doesn’t do that, and that’s a miss. But that’s also an opportunity. An opportunity to build a product that even its staunchest critics will be forced to concede adds real, tangible value to the world. Thirdly, instead of running Internet.org like a department within Facebook, why not alter its structure to something akin to the Mozilla Foundation? That is, as an independent entity, not-for-profit and with a loose connection to Facebook’s core business rather than a direct one. This, too, can help sanitize a sizeable chunk of the negative perception that Internet.org has hitherto been unable to separate itself from. It signals alignment of incentives that will potentially diminish many concerns held by those on the other side of the fence. Not all of Free Basics’ criticism is rooted in objectivity. The movement against it has snowballed into a kind of “me too” parade, where some of the most vociferous participants are shooting first and asking questions later. There are actual posters as a way of getting more players on to Candy Crush; there’s a YouTube comic likening it to [sic]; there’s a marketer-turned-venture capitalist as “Facebook jail.” There’s speculation that Facebook is to bribe Indian government officials. Pro net-neutrality activists who — only a couple of months ago — lined up for selfies with Mark Zuckerberg on his trip to India, are now incessantly censuring him on their social media feeds. Most of this inanity distracts from what, at its core, is a serious debate. Ultimately, as more people come online and become engaged users, many among them will get exposure to Facebook’s core offerings. This is inevitable because social networking is a veritable honey pot, and Facebook virtually owns the space with its triad of social networking, messaging and photo sharing. Facebook does not really need to hold a conspicuous spot at the very top of Free Basics for this to happen, which is where it currently appears in the Free Basics experience, giving critics needless ammunition to second-guess the motive behind Internet.org. Who would disagree that the world doesn’t need a “ ” that helps onboard all, and is democratized for every developer? We just have to unearth the right model to do it. To be fair, the domain is in its infancy, and nobody can claim to be an expert in it; Internet.org’s teething pains are part of the process. But what’s important is that Internet.org has begotten a conversation that the world needed to have. By evolving to the next step, it can move this conversation toward actualization, helping shape the lives of more than four billion people and their progeny yet to come.
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Saudi Arabian Startup NOMADD Looks To Clean Up Solar Energy Production
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Bérénice Magistretti
| 2,016 | 1 | 10 |
In Saudi Arabia, a country known more for its vast oil reserves than its commitment to renewable energy, a small startup called has developed a new way to clean up the process of solar energy production — literally. Even the Saudi kingdom realizes that despite the attractively low prices of fossil fuels, solar energy is gaining momentum. Solar panels are therefore going to play an increasingly important role in the global energy market this year. But one challenge that some countries face is the dust build-up forming on desert-based panels, which considerably decreases the amount of energy being produced (there can be up to 60% energy yield losses during and after sand storms.) NOMADD is a Saudi-based startup that has developed a viable solution to this problem: The NO-water Mechanical Automated Dusting Device, a smart and ecological desert solar panel cleaning system. The NOMADD is a long tube (3-5 meters) built in a sleek and simple design that brushes away the panel dust. It can handle large misalignments or settling in the arrays and doesn’t rest any weight on the panels as it runs on rails. The secret, as with painting, is in the angle of the brush. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sa-y7dbLS4 It’s a viable alternative to the existing solution — hiring janitors with water hoses. Labor looks cheap, given the size of a large scale solar installation and add all the costs associated with cleaning the panels (time, water, etc.) expenses mount up. NOMADD is waterless and fully automatic, making the whole process much less expensive. “You basically push a button on your smartphone and your whole array is clean within half an hour,” explains Georg Eitelhuber, the co-founder and chief technology officer “The array is 99.5% as clean as if you were cleaning with water.” Eitelhuber is an Australian Mechanical Engineer who moved to Saudi Arabia in 2009, where he became a Physics high school teacher at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology). He simultaneously completed a Masters in Renewable Energy and began collaborating with Energy Oasis, a campus-based testing area for companies to try out their new technologies. Noticing that there were no effective solutions to cleaning desert-based solar panels, Eitelhuber saw an opportunity to solve a big problem in the industry. “I believed then, and I still believe now, that solar is going to be huge in the Middle East,” says Eitelhuber. After collecting data, he began building prototypes out of LEGO for about 18 months, involving his students in the project. Once the model was completed in 2012, Eitelhuber took it to the Tech Transfer office of KAUST, got it patented and eventually received seed funding in the amount of $200,000. This financial boost allowed Eitelhuber to get a technician on board, start carrying out deeper tests and build a bigger model. With the backing of the Solar Research Center at KAUST, the team worked on making the product simpler and lighter, integrating it into different solar panels. NOMADD has been commercialized but is still in beta mode. They have sold a couple of models and are fostering strong partnerships with Engineering Procurement Construction Firms (EPCs), who are the main distributors in this sector. Basically, government entities put out tenders for projects and it’s up to the EPCs to place bids. They decide what panels they’re going to use, define the understructure, the operations and maintenance, etc. They then put together a package and stick that package in for tender. “What we’re offering them is a way to value add their proposals by integrating us in the design stage and offering us as part of their bid,” explains Eitelhuber. NOMADD has entered a booming market. The Saudi oil Minister announced in 2014 the launch of a $100 billion solar program for Saudi Arabia. Other markets like the UAE, Jordan, Egypt and India are also hot for solar energy. “The biggest challenge for us, [is] we’re selling a solution to a problem that most people don’t know about”, explains Eitelhuber. The startup has just signed a term sheet for a $1 million Series A funding round. “This is what we need to get this project commercialized,” says Eitelhuber.
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FCC Urged To Rein In Broadband Providers On Privacy Grounds
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
More than 50 U.S. consumer and privacy organizations including the and the have co-signed a letter to chairman Tom Wheeler calling for “strong rules” to protect the privacy of broadband users by reining in ISPs’ and telcos’ ability to harvest user data without explicit consent. Last year, as part of its , the as a so-called ‘Title II telecommunications service’ under the 1934 Communications Act — a move that also paves the way for a more active regulation of how ISPs use consumer data, given that the FCC can issue proper privacy regulations, vs the FTC only being able to do so for minors (under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). Susan Grant of the , another of the organizations co-signing the letter, cites the Verizon* super-cookie smartphone tracking system as an example of the kind of problematic behavior the NGOs are keen to see reined in by proper regulation. Initially Verizon offered no way for smartphone users to opt out of being tracked by its technology. (*NB: Verizon is the parent company of TechCrunch’s parent, AOL.) “What tracking is going on now and how the info is being used is in most cases not readily apparent,” argues Grant. The letter calls for the FCC to “move forward as quickly as possible on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking proposing strong rules to protect consumers from having their personal data collected and shared by their broadband provider without affirmative consent, or for purposes other than providing broadband Internet access service”. It also calls for data breach notices to be included in rules, and for broadband providers to be held accountable for any failure to take suitable precautions to protect personal data collected from users. And for providers to be required to “clearly disclose their data collection practices to subscribers, and allow subscribers to ascertain to whom their data is disclosed.” Grant suggests it is widely known the FCC has been considering establishing privacy rules for broadband providers, noting it held a public workshop last year to discuss the issue. “I expect that the will be very receptive to this call as it has long regulated privacy in the other communications services that come under its jurisdiction,” she tells TechCrunch. Also commenting on why there’s a need for pro-privacy rules to protect broadband users at this point in time, Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy argues the techniques being used by ISPs to track users have become as sophisticated as those being deployed by big data powered Internet giants like Google and Facebook. “ISPs are using the same big-data tracking and targeting techniques that have raised privacy concerns about Google and Facebook when we go online,” he says, arguing these companies pose a new threat to consumer privacy because they can have such in-depth access to data — including from computers and mobile phones but also because they can know what people watch via set-top boxes and connected TVs. “Phone and cable broadband companies (such as Verizon and Comcast) are connecting our TV sets, for example, to vast databases of information that enable advertisers and programmers to engage in ‘microtargeting’ us commercials, ads, political messages, and other content,” he notes. “[They] are retooling their technology so they can engage in what’s called ‘programmatic’ advertising, that uses sophisticated data tools to target us in milliseconds, regardless of what digital device we use.” Chester points to various acquisitions — including last year’s Verizon-AOL purchase — as having enabled ISPs and their partners to build out fine-grained data-driven advertising capabilities in recent times, with user targeting techniques and technologies driving multiple developments in the space. Verizon-AOL, for example, to step up their ability to track users for ad targeting purposes — widely seen as the primary motivator for the . “With ISPs positioned to have so much information about our online use, and further expand data surveillance when we view video programming, the FCC must step in and create a set of fair consumer safeguards,” adds Chester. The full letter and list of co-signing organizations follows below.
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Computer Vision Has Its Sights On Disrupting Search
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Court Westcott
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
You do two things when you type a query in a search engine: you provide the search engine with object identification and its context. This manual input precedes a valid query result. Computer vision has the potential to change the entire nature of search, because it eliminates the need for the user to input a search query, and instead utilizes sensor information (like noise and images), which provides the engine with context for the search. It makes sense. Humans create meaning and relevance of objects in the real world in a very similar way as computer vision. Say there was an object in front of your eyes. It’s obvious that your brain must first use its eyes to see that object and its context before it can create meaning about it. What object are you looking at? Oh, it’s a shark. So what situation are you in? Are you behind glass, at an aquarium, or is it next to you in the ocean? Only after the object has been recognized and placed in context can your brain create the right query to give that object the appropriate meaning: Oh, cool shark … or, Uh-Oh (and total panic). Eyes and computer vision are game changers, but to establish perfect context, our devices must also be able to process natural language, too. In augmented reality, computer vision and speech recognition together will transform search. They will replace the traditional search engine as the origin point of most queries. Technologies like look more like search in the future. Flow uses both bar code and image recognition to continuously recognize tens of millions of products in a live camera view. Users point to an item and Flow overlays pricing, availability, reviews, media content and other information directly over the item in view. Some day your devices will already know what you are trying to find because their sensors will have enabled them to contextually anticipate your query, like Flow in real time — and a lot more powerful. Computer vision also will change where the query originates. The query will no longer originate when a user goes to a search engine site and manually enters the object and context they seek, but will now originate from the computers eyes and ears. Therefore, the eyes and ears disrupt the search engine by circumventing it to the top of the search pyramid, and will have the leverage to get the majority of the finder’s fee, while search engines will become a back-end commodity that only get queries at the discretion of those who control your smart devices’ eyes and ears. This has to be why Amazon created Amazon Flow. Further, we will eventually get to a point where humans will often not need to initiate the query; our devices, through their sensors, will be able to anticipate the query before it is asked, hence post-search anticipatory computing, which is why we will start to see sponsored recognitions replace sponsored searches. And whoever controls the brand scanner can monetize without having to pay a finder’s fee. The visual search engine replaces Google’s search page’s prime Madison Avenue real estate, making it more like a back-end commodity to those that control our devices’ ears and eyes. It sounds a little Orwellian, but to get to post-search, our devices are going to have to be constantly listening and watching what we are doing. This is all inevitable — and good. It will lead us into a new age of true anticipatory contextual and augmented computing, where our devices provide the information and intelligence at the exact moment we want it. However, while AR HMD will enable us to summon on demand anything we can imagine, this technology will need to move even further — to the Post-Search Era — to be fully impactful. Whether AR HMDs can do this is the billion-dollar question.
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Dating App Happn Reaches 10 Million Users, Adds Voice
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
to find a match. The key difference is that Happn is hyperlocal. It shows you the people you walked by each day (or people who were located within 800 feet). The service works best in major metropolitan areas, where people are walking past hundreds or thousands of people on a given day. It is currently available in large cities, including London, Paris, Hong Kong and New York. “When we launched Happn in 2014, we aimed to fill a void in the online dating scene by offering a way for people to connect with those they’ve crossed paths with in real-life – and really, a way to put the spontaneity back into dating,” said co-founder and CEO Didier Rappaport, in a statement.
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Arizona Votes To Build Spaceport For Space Ballooning
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
The high altitude balloon company reached an important milestone today, when Arizona’s Pima County voted to award them a $14.5 million deal to build a spaceport. Jane Poynter, CEO of World View, told TechCrunch that this vote comes after a yearlong, nationwide search for a World View headquarters location. The core competency of the company is its ability to bring payloads up to 100,000 feet and safely back down to the ground. Today’s spaceport decision will enable it to expand testing and development work in an effort to ramp up payload flights. Taber MacCallum, World View’s CTO, noted that Arizona was particularly well-suited for the company’s business. Arizona has consistently good weather, making regular balloon flights more reliable. Also, in-air traffic issues aren’t likely to be an issue because nearby military bases ensure that the air space is well controlled. The payloads that World View could accommodate could include anything from cameras that look down for remote sensing, to telescopes that look up for astronomy experiments, to paying customers themselves. To date, World View has launched technology payloads with NASA, Northrop Grumman and the Department of Defense. In addition to technology payloads, the company can also fly humans to the edge of space. Back in 2014, the company provided the technology for Google executive Alan Eustace to conduct the highest free fall is history. The company is perhaps most famously known for its “World View Experience,” which is a high-altitude balloon ride for people who want to view the Earth from the stratosphere and softly glide back down to the Earth. According to World View, their passengers would gently lift off in a pressurized capsule, complete with Wi-Fi and a bar, that would hold six passengers and two crew members. During the ascent, the helium would expand in the balloon as the pressure inside the balloon attempted to equalize with the low-pressure of the high-altitude atmosphere. After a couple of hours, the passengers reach their peak height at 100,000 feet at which point the balloon would be fully expanded. The capsule would then “sail” the stratosphere for around two hours. When it’s time for the capsule to return home, the pilot descends by venting the helium and eventually detaching from the balloon itself. The pilot would guide the capsule back to the ground using a ParaWing (similar to a paraglider). Although crewed flights won’t begin until late 2017 or early 2018, you can purchase World View Experience tickets today for $75,000. The company isn’t releasing details on the number of tickets sold at this time, but Poynter said that they already have customers from all around the world, some of whom are even 80 years old. She emphasized that the space tourism opportunity that they offer is unique compared to other options out there because it’s an “extremely gentle” experience. It’s also a fraction of the cost of suborbital space tourism companies like Virgin Galactic where tickets run $250,000. However, it’s not entirely fair to compare the two. Virgin Galactic plans to send people into space (328,000 feet) on a rocket, whereas World View is simply giving people a better view of Earth and space (at 100,000 feet). One cannot actually send someone into space in a balloon, but it is an interesting niche in the emerging space tourism market. Suborbital space flights are more of an extreme sport, where the passenger experiences high levels of G-forces in order to float in space for a few minutes. With these more extreme flights, the passengers have the additional benefit of going home with bragging rights: they’re now considered astronauts. World View is offering an inherently different, more relaxed experience that is open to the young and the elderly alike…as long as they have $75,000 to spend. Before World View can launch paying customers, they’ll need to get certified by the FAA by testing out their technology. To date, the company has successfully completed the World View Experience flight profile with a one-tenth scale model of its capsule. A full-scale capsule is set to be tested this summer, and crewed test flights will begin in the summer of 2017. Commercial flights are projected to begin by 2018.
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Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Breaks Ground To Make Elon Musk’s Hyperloop A Reality
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
Plans to construct the beginnings of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop are now underway in Quay Valley, California. (HTT) announced plans for a 5-mile test track late last year and is about to break ground on an initial framework for what HTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn hopes will become the U.S. transportation infrastructure of the future. Musk first proposed the Hyperloop, a vacuum tube intended to speedily shoot passengers at 800 mph from city to city, in 2013. The idea was to create a mechanism of transportation that could get folks from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under 30 minutes. But Musk is a busy man, managing both Tesla and SpaceX, and left building plans up to others. HTT is one of two startups to take on the task since then. Ahlborn assembled a team of volunteer engineers and scientists shortly after Musk put forth the idea, offering equity in the company instead of pay to those willing to put in at least 10 hours of work each week. The project soon attracted talented individuals from companies like NASA, Boeing, SpaceX and Tesla – and a lot of interest from outside investors as well. According to Ahlborn, more than 600 investors have approached the currently self-funded operation, hoping to get in on the ground floor. “We think of this as more than a company, it’s a movement,” Ahlborn told TechCrunch over the phone from JumpStartFund headquarters – a crowdsource funding platform he also runs out of L.A. The company aims to create a system traveling faster than the speed of sound at a potential 760 mph, and a lower construction cost than “any existing, and yet proposed railway projects,” according to the website. Compare that to a in California to build a high-speed rail system going (tops) 220 mph and initially costing $6.6 billion and upwards to $33 billion over time to go 400 miles – $82.5 million per mile. It’s about $20 million per mile to build HTT’s version of the Hyperloop, according to Ahlborn – a fraction of the current cost of building high-speed rail in the U.S. Though the initial construction is referred to as a test track, Ahlborn told TechCrunch this was actually the beginning of what will eventually become ground zero of a much larger system. HTT bought land last year to begin initial construction on the Hyperloop in Quay Valley – a proposed 75,000 resident, solar-powered concept city being built in King’s County, California that intends to use HTT’s test track as its main transportation system. HTT shared some renderings with us to show what this system will look like in Quay. Construction on the test track begins this year, with analysis of the speed and optimizing the route happening in 2017. Actual passengers should be able to hop on board by 2018 if all goes according to plan. Quay is halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles and the beginnings of what Ahlborn envisions for the future of high-speed transport in the U.S. The HTT CEO would like to eventually expand his hyperloop to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles and said he’s been speaking with many rail and bus companies as well as government officials to make that happen. But for now, Ahlborn and his team is focused on building about five miles of test track in a little, futuristic town in the middle of California farm country. Just how quickly will this initial Hyperloop be able to whiz town folks about the length of Quay? A mere 80 seconds, he tells me. Quay also gives HTT a chance to experiment with newer digital tools Ahlborn believes should be a part of modern transportation. HTT will eliminate coal age relics such as ticketing and include augmented windows and WiFi within its new structure. Ahlborn mentioned working with a European AR company to help implement some possible Hollywood experiences into the ride as well. “Being in L.A. and being in Hollywood we think there’s maybe some movie experience on the screens,” Ahlborn explained. “Rather than a trailer, it’s like you are going through Jurassic World and look outside and you see dinosaurs outside. You would have the screens all over the capsule so everybody has kind of the same experience.” Built-in AR screens could also help HTT monetize in other ways – with digital advertising to a captive audience for short bursts as passengers zip from city to city. HTT isn’t the only company laying down tracks. Elon Musk built a test track of his own at SpaceX, allowing students to offer up improvements and play with the plans. The other startup working on the Hyperloop, aptly called , is laying out its own track in the California desert. It’s early days for all parties and each one still needs to address questions like how this type of rapid acceleration might affect the human body, how to prevent passengers from getting trapped in capsules inside the system, deceleration techniques, and how to manage traffic. The Hyperloop could change the way we travel or even commute to work on a daily basis. In the future, some of us might even find ourselves working in SF, but commuting from a much more affordable area far away from Silicon Valley’s outrageous rental environment. Of course, the biggest question will be how to win over city and county governments to allow further construction of such a structure and which startup will prevail in the bid to build our human vacuum tube of the future.
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Prepd Pack Is A Lunchbox You Won’t Be Ashamed To Carry
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
There are a ton of clear benefits to taking your lunch to work. It’s more sustainable, you are able to assess exactly what you’re putting in your body, you can save a ton of cash and most of the time it encourages you to be much healthier. And it doesn’t have to be such a hassle. Launching today on Kickstarter is the , a lunchbox for those with an eye for design.. and their waistline. The modular culinary system has a distinctly bento box feel but instead of flimsy tupperware inserts, the “device” sports a slick-looking bamboo construction with a magnetic close, a few sturdy containers and magnetic cutlery that stays secure in the enclosure. I had the chance to check out a near-finished prototype of the Original Pack when I met with the Prepd team at CES, and it was clear there was a pretty serious amount of energy put into finessing the design and creating a well-built product that people wouldn’t be embarrassed to take to work with them. The product isn’t just a snazzy lunchbox. The team at Prepd is hoping to let people use the lunchbox as a way of tracking their nutrition. First off, the containers are purposefully somewhat conservative in their sizing to encourage proper portioning (i.e. you probably can’t fit a whole rotisserie chicken in them). The Prepd Pack also benefits from a companion app that incorporates recipes from professional nutritionists and chefs that will appropriately fill the containers. Additionally, the app boasts Health Kit on iOS integration so that you can view all of your health data within a single app. The premium lunchbox and its accompanying ecosystem is operating at a somewhat premium price with a starting price of $50 for backers. The team says they’re intending for the device to retail at $70. After launching just this morning the Prepd Pack has already blown through its $25,000 goal. The team is aiming to start shipping the units to early supporters in June.
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Digital Magazine Startup Magzter Puts The Focus On Individual Articles
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
With its latest update, is unveiling a more article-centric way to browse its library of digital magazines. Seems like a pretty obvious move, right? Sure, there are people who still read magazines cover to cover (says the guy whose apartment is filled with back issues of Wired and The New Yorker), but as Magzter co-founder and President Vijay Radhakrishnan put it, most of us “don’t crave to read a magazine that way.” What’s cool about Magzter’s new article format is the fact that it’s optimized for wherever the article is being displayed. Radhakrishnan showed me articles on both his smartphone and tablet, and they looked good (the layout reminded me of Flipboard or a well-designed news website). In comparison, digital newsstand service Texture last fall, but those articles are basically just bookmarked PDFs from a larger magazine that don’t always look great on smaller screens. The new feature is available to anyone with a subscription to Magzter Gold, with all-you-can-read access to its library of magazines. Behind the scenes, Radhakrishnan said Magzter has developed a technology to automatically create these article layouts from a PDF, though human editors still have final approval. Magzter will also allow you to browse articles based on topic, to perform a full-text search and to share individual articles on social media. (You get 10 free articles each month on Magzter, so people can follow your link without paying.) Initially, Magzter is curating the top articles from about 250 magazines in the United States, but again, Radhakrishnan said the process is completely scalable — the company is holding back for now to avoid completely overwhelming users with content. Of course, when you talk about things like article-centric browsing and full-text search, it starts to sound like Magzter is just catching up with the web itself. The difference is the service’s library of thousands of magazines. If you like enough of the content, and if you can’t find all of it online, then the subscription price of $7.99can seem like a pretty good deal.
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Gawker Is Raising Money To Fund Its Legal Battle With Hulk Hogan
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
Gawker Media is raising outside funding, and for a specific purpose — it says it’s getting ready for its legal battle with Hulk Hogan. As , the company has called for an “extraordinary general meeting” of shareholders on Thursday, where it will discuss changing its capital structure to accommodate new financing. We’ve confirmed the news with a source of our own, but it turns out we didn’t need to. When we reached out to Gawker founder Nick Denton (pictured at left in the photo above) the company sent us this statement: With the Hulk Hogan trial beginning in early March, Gawker Media is fortifying its finances to ensure full resources are in place for the continued cost of litigation. Gawker Media is the most heavily trafficked digital media company that has not raised institutional funding and continues to grow at double-digit rates, with significant untapped opportunity across its seven core brands. Until now, Gawker Media has been funding the Hulk Hogan legal expenses from general revenues and given the expenses of continuing to defend our First Amendment rights, the management of Gawker Media has concluded that additional financing should be locked in before the trial begins. Gawker declined to comment further, but the fundraising process has “reached an advanced stage,” . Hogan, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea, has filed a $100 million privacy lawsuit against Gawker over a sex tape that the company’s flagship gossip site published in 2012. It’s not clear how much the funding is intended to cover legal fees vs. general company expenses vs. an insurance policy in case Gawker loses the suit. (Denton said last summer, “ .”) Even aside from the lawsuit, 2015 was a bumpy year, with and for the Gawker site. The company also from Silicon Valley Bank last summer.
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Microsoft Pledges To Provide Nonprofits With $1B Worth Of Its Cloud Computing Resources
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella today that his company will donate $1 billion in Microsoft Cloud services to nonprofits over the course of the next three years. The plan is to support a total of about 70,000 nonprofits on Microsoft’s cloud platforms like Azure, Office 365, PowerBI and CRM online through this program. “Microsoft is empowering mission-driven organizations around the planet with a donation of cloud computing services — the most transformative technologies of our generation,” said Nadella in today’s announcement. “Now more than 70,000 organizations will have access to technology that will help them solve our greatest societal challenges and ultimately improve the human condition and drive new growth equally.” In addition, Microsoft plans to expand its grants for free access to Azure storage and computing resources for university researchers. Currently, about 600 research programs are in this program and Microsoft plans to expand its donations program by 50 percent. Microsoft also plans to combine access to these services with “investments in new, low-cost last-mile Internet access technologies and community training.” In practice, this means supporting projects like the use of TV white space for internet access in Africa, for example. The company plans to support at least 20 similar projects in 15 countries by the end of 2017. Ever the cynic, I can’t help but wonder what will happen after these three years are over. Often, these kinds of programs are also meant to get people on a platform and then hopefully keep them there after the initial free program runs out. The same goes for programs aimed at universities. After students graduate, they are likely to continue using the services they were familiar with in college, after all.
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Augmented Reality For Trying On Makeup Is A Booming Business
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
“Sure, that looks great on a model, but how will it look on me?” Now you can find out thanks to , an augmented reality startup that’s quietly grown to power apps for 55 of the top makeup brands like Sephora, P&G and Unilever. Fire up the camera on your phone or a store makeup counter’s tablet, choose different styles of lipstick, eye shadow or whatever else, and ModiFace applies them to your skin in real-time on your screen. Move around, wink and smile, and you’ll see your new style without the work or cost. ModiFace can also simulate hair changes, anti-aging treatments and more. its , and apps here. In stores, ModiFace’s virtual makeup mirror is increasing sales by 31 percent because customers are more confident they’ll love what they’re buying. That’s why brands are paying $200,000 to $500,000 a year to integrate ModiFace’s augmented reality tech into their own apps. And it all started with Botox and military research. “I was a grad student at Stanford working with the defense industry on lip tracking for lip-reading at a distance,” says ModiFace founder and CEO . The electrical engineering PhD had invented a technology that could track how someone’s face moved. But it wasn’t until he was approached by pharmaceutical giant Allergan that the consumer use case came into focus. Allergan makes Botulinum toxin, or Botox, a neurotoxic protein that can be injected into the face to smooth and prevent wrinkles. Allergan commissioned Aarabi to build a version of his software that could simulate the impact of Botox on a prospective customer’s face. It worked, and the ability to preview people’s tighter skin made sales shoot up. With $500,000 in seed investment and the cash from Allergan, Aarabi launched ModiFace in 2007 and started signing cosmetic brands. Suddenly, it’s a hit. ModiFace grew from 10 to 55 partners in just the last year. Here’s the secret sauce behind ModiFace’s 25 patents. First, the startup brings in models with different skin colors and puts them under dim, medium, and bright lights as they try on a company’s makeup for real. ModiFace’s scanners teach the app how the makeup should actually look, generating an algorithm for virtually applying it on anyone. , or you can find its tech in apps from L’Oreal, AmorePacific, Yves Rocher and, starting today, Jane Iredale. ModiFace’s tech has powered apps with 100 million total downloads to date. Now it’s battling , PhotoMetria, and other competitors. The space has heated up since in November. Aarabi tells me his company is pushing to increase frame rates so its virtual makeup stays in place no matter how you move. Meanwhile, it’s trying to better prove how it boosts sales on mobile, not just in stores. The face race is worth running. The global cosmetics market hit around last year. Big brands will pay for whatever helps them sell more makeup. Aarabi explains these companies already cough up $100,000 for a single page ad in Vogue magazine. And that just shows what makeup looks like on someone else. Augmented reality technology like ModiFace unlocks the true purpose of cosmetics: expressing one’s ideal self.
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Texas Attorney General Says Texans Using DraftKings Or FanDuel Are Probably Breaking The Law
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
In a situation nearly identical to what a few weeks ago, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has to a request from a state representative who asked if Paxton believes Daily Fantasy Sports should be illegal under state law. Not surprisingly, Paxton said that he believes DraftKings and FanDuel both violate state law, saying that “it is prohibited gambling in Texas if you bet on the performance of a participant in a sporting event and the house takes a cut.” In this case, Paxton is referring to companies holding DFS contests as “the house” since they take a cut of each contest. This is an important distinction because it means that Paxton believes that traditional fantasy sports leagues are legal, because “participants generally split any pot amongst themselves, so there is no house that takes a cut”. Paxton also notes that while proponents of DFS say that skill is required to predict what players will have the best performances in a game, Texas law says that it doesn’t matter if any skill is required, because only a “partial [aspect of] chance” would make it gambling. Paxton confirmed this by referencing a previous decision where a Texas court concluded that poker was considered gambling, regardless of how much of the game is considered chance or skill. “If an element of chance is involved in a particular game, it is embraced within the definition of ‘bet,'” he said. In his conclusion, Paxton says that a person would be breaking state law by just participating in DFS contests: Under section 47.02 ofthe Penal Code, a person commits an offense if he or she makes a bet on the partial or final result of a game or contest or on the performance of a participant in a game or contest. Because the outcome of games in daily fantasy sports leagues depends partially on chance, an individual’s payment of a fee to participate in such activities is a bet. Accordingly, a court would likely determine that participation in daily fantasy sports leagues is illegal gambling ‘under section 47.02 ofthe Penal Code. – Ken Paxton, Texas AG Interestingly, Paxton decides to focus his conclusion on the illegality of a player participating in a DraftKings or FanDuel contest. This is a different stance than other state AGs have taken, which is to focus on the illegality of the companies themselves. It’s important to note that this is just a written opinion by the state’s AG, and isn’t legally binding. A Texas court would have to hear a case before any legal action could be taken against DFS players or operators. As expected, DraftKings issued a quick rebuttal against the AG’s decision, reiterating that DFS is a game of skill, and games of skill are legal under Texas law. “We strongly disagree with the Attorney General’s prediction about what the courts may or may not do if ever presented with the issue of whether daily fantasy sports are legal under Texas law. The Texas Legislature has expressly authorized games of skill, and daily fantasy sports are a game of skill. The Attorney General’s prediction is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of DFS. We intend to continue to operate openly and transparently in Texas, so that the millions of Texans who are fantasy sports fans can continue to enjoy the contests they love.” – Randy Mastro, counsel to DraftKings and Partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP As we’ve said before, it’s going to continue to get messy before we see any state or federal action that gives us a definitive answer on the legality of DFS. More than likely, the issue will need to be settled by lawmakers instead of judges, meaning we’ll need to see new legislation that regulates DFS once and for all. In the meantime, wouldn’t you like to see what the billable hours for DraftKings’ and FanDuel’s lawyers look like this month?
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Netflix Added 5.6 Million New Subscribers In The Fourth Quarter
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
Netflix , and once again showed strong international growth — so much so that investors seem to be overlooking its weaker domestic growth and sending shares soaring. The company added about 4 million new subscribers internationally, and about 1.56 million subscribers domestically. That’s a big jump for the company’s international presence, though once again the company appears to be struggling in its domestic growth. “Our high penetration in the US seems to be making net additions harder than in the past,” the company said in its earnings report. But it appears that its outperformance internationally has outweighed concerns about the company’s subscriber growth as a whole. Shares of Netflix promptly show up as much as 12% in extended trading. CEO Reed Hastings at CES this year said Netflix would launch in 130 new countries, which represents a massive opportunity for the company given that much of its growth is happening internationally. Here’s another big one from the earnings report: Netflix is expecting to add about 6 million new subscribers in the first quarter this year. If the company hits that target, it’s going to be its best-performing quarter for net subscription additions in at least the past year — no doubt thanks to its big international push unveiled at CES. Shares of Netflix spiked immediately after Hastings , jumping around 9%. The jump was a big recovery for the company’s last 10% crash after its third-quarter earnings announcement. At that time, Netflix missed expectations for domestic growth and its financials — but we’ll see how things go now that the company has launched in a huge slate of new countries. Netflix has had a rocky month, seeing its share price dive in the past 30 days. But so far, it looks like it’s making a big comeback. [graphiq id=”dAntfrzQfTD” title=”Netflix Inc. (NFLX) Stock Price – 30 Days” width=”600″ height=”490″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/dAntfrzQfTD” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/16808888/Netflix-Inc-in-Los-Gatos-CA” link_text=”Netflix Inc. (NFLX) Stock Price – 30 Days | FindTheCompany”] In the company’s last earnings report, Netflix , with most of those (around 2.74 million) coming from outside the United States. The company also had a huge beat on its earnings for the fourth quarter, likely further helping its stock rise. Adding new subscribers is critical to the company in order to continue expanding its business. As that goes on, it can continue funding its expansion efforts and original programming.
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IBM Beats In Q4, But Sales Of $22.1B Are The 15th Straight Quarter Of Decline For Big Blue
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
IBM reported its Q4 earnings at the close of trading today, and while its revenues were the 15th-straight quarter of declines, Big Blue beat analyst expectations both on sales of $22.1 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $4.84. Analysts were expecting EPS of $4.81 on sales of $22.04 billion. Non-GAAP net income was $4.7 billion compared with $5.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2014, down 19%. It also posted full-year revenues of $81.7 billion, with full year non-GAAP EPS of $14.92, down 10% on 2014, citing the divestiture of its “System x” business to Lenovo. As a point of comparison, the company missed on revenues of $19.3 billion and revised down its full-year profit forecast to between $14.75 and $15.75 per share for the full year. Wall Street looks like it’s not completely pleased with these numbers. After declining 1.43% in trading today, after hours the stock is down around 0.77% in after-hours trading. We’ll keep monitoring it to see what happens next. “We continue to make significant progress in our transformation to higher value. In 2015, our strategic imperatives of cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security grew 26 percent to $29 billion and now represent 35 percent of our total revenue,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer, in a statement. “We strengthened our existing portfolio while investing aggressively in new opportunities like Watson Health, Watson Internet of Things and hybrid cloud. As we transform to a cognitive solutions and cloud platform company, we are well positioned to continue delivering greater value to our clients and returning capital to our shareholders.” Breaking down the business into the different categories, IBM says that “strategic imperatives” — which include cloud, analytics and engagement — were up 10% year to year. Full-year sales from strategic imperatives increased 17% to $28.9 billion and now represent 35% of total IBM consolidated revenue. Total cloud revenues (public, private and hybrid) increased 43% to $10.2 billion in the year. Revenues from business analytics increased 7% to $17.9 billion. Revenues from mobile more than tripled and security was up 5%, but IBM didn’t break out the actual numbers, an indication that they are not yet that large. But if you are wondering where all the decline is coming from, you need to look at the quarterly numbers and the bigger business segments: Global Technology Services revenues were down 7% to $8.1 billion. Global Business Services segment revenues were down 10% to $4.3 billion. And revenues from the Software segment were down 11% to $6.8 billion compared with the Q4 of 2014. Revenues from IBM’s key middleware products, which include WebSphere, Information Management, Tivoli, Workforce Solutions and Rational products, were also down to $4.9 billion, a decline of 10% year to year. Operating systems revenues of $0.5 billion were down 12% year to year. Revenues from the Systems Hardware segment totaled $2.4 billion for the quarter, down 1%. More to come.
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Netflix Stock Surges After Beating Q4 Earnings And Global Growth Estimates
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
Netflix just , sending the stock up more than 8 percent (as of 4:35 p.m. Eastern) in after-hours trading. The company reported revenue of $1.82 billion, up from $1.48 billion during the same quarter last year, and earnings per share of 10 cents. Analysts had been revenue of $1.83 billion and EPS of 2 cents. So that’s a very slight miss on revenue but a big win on earnings/profitability (apparently ). Investors have been paying close attention to Netflix’s subscriber numbers, with . This time, Netflix reported 1.56 million new subscribers in the U.S., coming short of of 1.65 million, but exceeding its 3.5 million global project with international net additions of 4.04 million. So it , and says it now has 75 million members globally. Looking beyond Q4, the company has announced that it’s (just not China), which is probably why it’s predicting growth of 6 million members this quarter. The Q4 investor letter also discusses Netflix’s continuing efforts to produce its own TV shows and movies, saying it plans to release 600 hours of original content this year, up from 450 hours in 2015. And it says, tongue presumably in cheek: The growth of Netflix has created some anxiety among TV networks and . Or, at the other extreme, an NBC executive recently Internet TV is overblown and that linear TV is “TV like God intended.” Our investors are not as sure of God’s intentions for TV, and instead think that Internet TV is a fundamentally better entertainment experience that will gain share for many years. The challenge for traditional media companies, most of whom see the future pretty clearly, is to use the revenue from Netflix and other SVOD services to fund both great content and their own evolution into Internet TV networks. Seeso, BBC iPlayer, Hulu, CanalPlay, HBO Now, and CBS All Access are the beginnings of these efforts.
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Adestra Raises $7.2 Million For Marketing Software
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
Adestra recently launched its U.S. operations in New York and Dallas and will be using the capital to further its U.S. efforts. The company views itself as a competitor of Salesforce, Exacttarget, and Sailthru. Adestra’s over 500 enterprise clients include Crabtree and Evelyn, Pearson and Thomson Reuters.
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Is Bitcoin’s Promise Going Up In Smoke?
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Vivek Wadhwa
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
, venture capitalists were talking about how Bitcoin was going to transform the global currency system and render governments powerless to police monetary transactions. Now the cryptocurrency seems to be fighting for survival. The new reality came to light on January 14, when an influential Bitcoin developer, Mike Hearn, the cryptocurrency a failure and disclosed that he had sold all of his Bitcoins. The price of Bitcoin fell 10% in a single day on the news — a sad result for those who lost money on it. Bitcoin did have great potential, but now it is damaged beyond repair and a replacement is badly needed. It’s still true that most currency and transaction systems today are opaque, inefficient, and expensive. Take the North American Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, as an example. It is amongst the most technologically advanced in the world. Yet if I buy or sell a share of Facebook on the NASDAQ, I have to wait several days for the trade to finalize and clear. This is unacceptable; it should take milliseconds. In Venezuela, citizens wishing to buy anything of value on supermarket shelves wait all day in lines to do so, because hyperinflation causes the paper currencies in their pockets to lose significant value every day. When migrant workers there send money back to their families in places such as Mexico, India, and Africa, they are gouged by money-transfer companies — paying as much as 5%–12% in fees. And even in the U.S., payment processors and credit-card companies collect merchant fees of 1–2.5% of the value of every transaction. This is a burden on the economy. Bitcoin aimed to change this, but it was born with serious flaws. It was unregulated and provided anonymity, so it rapidly became a haven for drug dealers and anarchists. Its price fluctuated wildly, allowing for crazy speculation. And, with the majority of Bitcoin being owned by the small group that started promoting it, it has been to a Ponzi scheme. Exchanges built on top of it also had severe security vulnerabilities. And then there were the venture capitalists who got carried away. Several of them purchased considerable coinage and then began to hype it as a powerful disruption that could underpin all manner of financial innovation, from mobile banking to borderless, instant money transfers. They also poured millions of dollars into Bitcoin startups hoping to reap even greater fortunes. But Bitcoin was not ready for prime time. Hearn’s criticism has laid bare the nightmarish reality — a list of negatives that is both long and frightening. Chinese Bitcoin miners control more than 50% of the currency-creation capacity and are connected to the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem through the Great Firewall of China. This slows down the entire system because, as Hearn explained, it is the equivalent of a bad hotel WiFi connection. It also gives the People’s Army a strategic vantage point over a global currency. The Bitcoin distributed network can process only a handful of transactions per second. That causes unpredictable transaction-resolution times and other behaviors that one really does not want as part of a monetary system. Bitcoin fees can, at peak times, exceed credit-card fees, for example. As if all this weren’t bad enough, the Bitcoin community appears to be engaged in open civil war. Its members have been censoring debates and attacking each other’s servers. A tiny committee of five core developers that controls the Bitcoin codebase has become the Star Chamber that guides the future of Bitcoin. This has been a severe blow to the reputation — and wallets — of VCs. Yet some of them are still staunchly defending Bitcoin. It’s time to admit that the current Bitcoin needs to be scrapped and to take advantage of the innovations behind the technology that underlies Bitcoin: the blockchain. The blockchain is a transparent ledger of transactions—concurrently hosted on numerous computers around the world — allowing the creation of digital currencies and virtual banks. Implemented correctly, it will, I believe, prove to be a better transactional and verification model that we presently use for the global financial system and for many other types of activities such as voting, public registries, provenance of works of art, and real-estate transfers. From Bitcoin’s failures, we have learnt how digital communities shouldn’t operate. We have seen how ledger systems can be hijacked. And we have seen the wastage in a mining system that consumed gigawatt–hours of electricity and spawned giant server farms in China solely to crunch numbers to “mine” Bitcoins. We need to learn from successful open-source technology projects such as the Linux Foundation, which is thriving largely because it has proven its worth as a neutral body to govern all manner of open-source projects that grew too big for small groups to manage in a casual manner. We also need to rethink aspects of the blockchain, along the lines that Hearn and Bitcoin loyalists have suggested. Let’s also bear in mind what it is that makes some venture capitalists Bitcoin zealots: pure greed. That is the reason clearest to me for Bitcoin’s failure. Intended as a level playing field and a more efficient transaction system, the Bitcoin system has deteriorated into a fight between interested parties over a pool of money. In the beginning, Bitcoin was a noble experiment. Now, it is a distraction. It’s time to build more rational, transparent, robust, accountable systems of governance to pave the way to a more prosperous future for everyone.
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Join Me In Pittsburgh Next Week For Quit Yer Pitchin’
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
The folks at to judge a pitch-off in Pittsburgh on January 28 and I’d like to see yuns there. As a CMU grad Pittsburgh is near and dear to my heart. From the O to the Beehive (RIP) some of my formative years were spent in a stupor of coffee and fat. I want to see what you guys are up to in PGH and want to eat some Primanti Brothers, in that order. You can get .
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With Google, Facebook And Nextdoor, What’s Next For Lead Generation?
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Sam Madden
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
A number of lead-generation platforms have emerged over the past few years to help local service professionals (“pros”) win more clients. The pro market is an industry, so tech companies (big and small) are starting to take notice. As it stands today, the lead-gen options for pros — who have been a notoriously underserved part of the labor market — are now plentiful. Startup platforms range from review-based to premium-paid, cost-per-impression, pay-per-lead, pay-per-transaction and more. And because of their successes, mega players are now entering this space to take their share — most recently , Facebook’s new and Nextdoor’s “ ” As a result, lines in the sand are being drawn. Platform models are maturing, innovation is dwindling and certain players are worrying about their own . Such players are beginning to invest in deeper platform tools to help better pros as competition heats up. Companies like Yelp ( ) and Thumbtack ( ) are among the first to explore ways to give pros insights as to what ROI (Return On Investment) their platforms are truly delivering these pros — the thought being that identifying clear ROI will demonstrate the value that pros are realizing, and will motivate them to engage more with the platform itself. As it stands today, ROI is something that’s clearly lacking across the entire lead-gen space, and, if nailed, could be a huge differentiator within an increasingly crowded market. (YP) is the notorious example of the free business listing site that helps pros get “discovered” by clients looking to hire. YP’s model was significantly improved upon by (and in a distant second place), which takes listings and crowd-sources client reviews to help pros boost their rankings in search results on said platforms. Similarly, Facebook allows pros to create business pages free of charge to show off posts, photos, reviews and other relevant content. Facebook recently launched to make local service discovery even easier on the social network. Nextdoor has also begun to roll out (free for pros) to help neighborhood residents find local professionals hired or reviewed by neighbors. The core investment for pros on these platforms is time. To leverage the free listings properly, pros need to spend a lot of time building up content — crowd-sourced or their own — to build up viral effects and boost search rankings. It’s an ongoing battle trying to put a dollar value on one’s time ( ), so any new lead “return” on these free platforms is tough to benchmark vis-à-vis an investment. And because consumer purchases of these services are done offline (i.e., calling, emailing the pro), capturing the source of these client leads is a manual process for the pro, as well. Traditional marketplace platforms like YP and Yelp also allow pros to spend advertising dollars to promote their businesses higher up in searches on their respective platforms (along with other ad-based offerings). Pros also can spend on a cost-per-click basis with Google AdWords (and now with Yelp, as well) to ensure that clients searching for “dog walkers,” “home cleaners,” etc. in specific cities will find the appropriate pros at the top of Google (or Yelp) searches. Finally, pros can spend money on Facebook to get local clients to “like” pages or engage with posts. CPC gives pros a glimpse into what ROI is for an engagement — like a website or a profile click. But that means little if no paying clients come out of it — lead is the other huge variable of return. There also is no way to capture any detailed information about a “lead” that simply clicks on a pro’s profile or website. Other engagement actions like Facebook “likes” are also difficult to be valued — go ahead and Google “What’s a like worth?” and you’ll see a range of opinions and results. At least with Facebook, pros have the ability to re-engage with clients who like or interact with any advertising. Spearheaded by , the “Premium Listing” platforms ask pros to pay monthly fees in exchange for their profiles being put in front of serious clients (i.e., clients who also are paying fees to get access to pros). The issue with platforms like Angie’s List is that pros are hesitant to incur an ongoing (i.e., monthly) charge unless they are seeing a consistent and measurable return from that continuous expense. Especially with the growth of free listing platforms, premium sites need to work that much harder to deliver tools to pros that explicitly demonstrate the value they are delivering the pro — with in 2015, the pro’s behavior is showing us that the value is not there. Daily deal platforms — like and — provide a unique angle to help pros get in front of prospective clients. These discount platforms allow pros to offer eye-popping discounts on their services to attract interested first-time clients. For 50 percent off the pro’s typical rate and an additional 50 percent fee paid to Groupon, take-home income for the pro can be as low as 25 percent for the typical job. Deep price discounts can attract many clients to purchase services (i.e., high volume), and Groupon handles the payment aspect of the transaction, so cost per booking is straightforward. The Groupon ROI model only works, however, if participating pros can convert these clients into returning customers, and make back the deep discounts that were given upfront. There’s no playbook or tool to measure the conversion rate of these consumers into long-term clients, and, unfortunately, most clients browsing Groupon are typically (and continuously) in search for price over quality. (acquired by IAC) had been the frontrunner in the pay-per-lead (or pay-per-introduction) model. Clients post jobs or services needed, and pros can pay a fee to send a quote to or access said client. The fee (or “bid”) gives pros the opportunity to pitch themselves to consumers who can sit back and choose which pro to hire. is now leading the pack in pay-per-lead business, and Google recently launched its division (currently in beta, but looks to soon monetize with a cost-per-lead structure). With this model type, pros can (in real time) measure how much they are spending to pitch clients versus the win rate — a pretty immediate return on investment calculation. The art of pitching, however, can be very time-consuming, and the “ ” on these bidding platforms can lead to a lot of money (and time) spent with no gain seen. And similar to discount sites, clients have a tendency to accept lowest bids, leading to a race to the bottom on pricing, with pros simply hoping they can convert initial client wins into lifelong customers. The pay-per-transaction model is the surest way for pros to understand how much they are paying out per client, without laying out tons of upfront capital with nothing to show for it. Companies like , , , Homejoy ( ) and others have coined this “on-demand” platform model, making 20-30 percent per new business they assign to pros. Even Amazon launched its platform so you can book a reliable handyman to mount the TV when you order it on Amazon (for example). Although the “return” to the pro is a transparent (and fairly reasonable) ~80 percent net revenue with each booking, the issue with these on-demand platforms is there’s no opportunity for the pro to scale. The pro is capped at their return since the platform technically “owns” the client information and data, and prevents the pro from taking any client offline — the new client cannot be converted to a lifetime client at full 100 percent net revenue ( ). And clients are incentivized to stay on the platform because of the convenient booking and payment experience, as well as certain protections that come with the transaction (i.e., quality assurance, middle-man in case of dispute, etc.). Delivering platform value to pros will be a crucial step for many of the early platforms to fend off the billion-dollar balance sheets of Google, Facebook and Amazon. This is not an easy task, as the customer purchase of the pro’s base product (i.e., professional services) tends to be sold off platform (versus online retail, for example). But with more transparency will come more platform adoption by pros, better retention numbers and a deeper engagement with the fundamental lead model. And fortunately for pros, the more platforms innovate around data and feature sets to compete in a market that is notorious for its , the more pros themselves can efficiently and cost-effectively grow.
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Trello Launches Developer Platform
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
A few months ago, project management tool launched third-party integrations with tools like Slack, GitHub and Salesforce for its paying users. Now, it is opening this platform to more developers with the launch of its so-called “ ” for developers who want to integrate their services with Trello. The company also today said it now has “12 million users,” up 20 percent from September 2015. It’s worth noting that these are 12 million sign-ups, not registrations. About a year ago, Trello that it had 1.7 million monthly actives but wouldn’t provide us with updated active users numbers this time around. Instead, a spokesperson told us that Trello now sees 130,000+ signups each week, up from 120,000 before the holidays. How many of those eventually convert to paying customers remains unclear, of course. Indeed, Trello also didn’t want to disclose how many of its users are on its paid platform. Launch partners for Trello’s new developer platform include the likes of SurveyMonkey, Zendesk, join.me and Giphy. In total, Trello currently features about 22 add-ons . For Trello users, having access to these third-party tools directly inside the service means they won’t have to switch context quite as often to perform some routine tasks and will be able to automate more of their workflow inside of Trello. “The way we work has changed drastically in recent years; there are tools to tackle every business challenge, but they all work independently,” said Michael Pryor, CEO and co-founder of Trello, in a canned statement today. “Now, as a platform for work, Trello is a one-stop-shop for a shared perspective across all of your projects.” It’s worth noting that Trello has long had that gave developers access to some of Trello’s features from inside their own apps. With the new platform, though, developers can directly integrate into the Trello user interface. These integrations can be public or, for internal tools, developers can choose to only make them available to a single organization. Developers who want to make use of the Power-Ups platform still have to for the time being. Trello competitors like already feature a similar plug-in architecture for . Atlassian’s marketplace for third-party developers recently hit (though this is across all of its services, not just JIRA). Trello is currently mostly using Power-Ups as a way to upsell its free users to a paid plan, but over time, it could likely build out a real marketplace, too.
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Google Tests “Tap 10,” A Rewards Program For Android Pay Users
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 |
Google confirmed it’s now running a limited promotion in the U.S. dubbed “ ,” which is aimed at increasing usage of its mobile payments service, a rival to Apple Pay and others. Some Android users are being gifted rewards like a free Chromecast or free songs, movies, or subscriptions on Google Play in exchange for using Android Pay at local stores. The name “Tap 10,” meanwhile, refers to the promotion’s goal of getting users to make 10 such mobile payments before the promo wraps up, which will be at the end of next month. A number of Android blogs recently reported on the promotion’s existence, citing tip-offs from readers, or pointing to , including sites like , and more. A spokesperson for Google says the company did not make a formal announcement about the new program because it’s a “small program currently being tested with a limited set of users.” That backs up what the blogs were claiming – that only some users were seeing the invitation to participate in Tap 10. What wasn’t clear, however, was how these users were being chosen. We understand now that there isn’t any formal criteria involved – the testers are being picked at random. In other words, instead of being the early stages of a larger rollout of an Android Pay promotion, this is a more limited test aiming to determine if offering rewards will actually translate into increased Android Pay usage. That being said, Google does hope that it will be able to offer more promotions like this in the future. [gallery ids="1265010,1265009,1265008,1265007,1265006,1265004"] The problem that Google faces, as well as Apple for that matter, or any mobile payments provider, is not just one of availability of point-of-sale terminals that accept NFC-based (aka tap-to-pay) payments. Today, a good number of retailers accept NFC payments, and many are listed as specifically supporting Android Pay, including names like Babies R Us, BJs, Bloomingdale’s, Disney Store, Duane Reade, Express, GameStop, Foot Locker, Macy’s, McDonald’s, Office Depot and . Google says that Android Pay is now accepted at over a million stores across the U.S., in addition to mobile applications. However, it’s challenging to change deeply ingrained consumer behavior at point-of-sale. After years of swiping, it’s hard to make a shift to tapping – not that tapping is difficult, but because old habits are hard to break. For example, a year after Apple Pay’s launch, . iPhone 6 users who say they used Apple Pay “every chance” they get fell from 48 percent in March 2015 to 33 percent in June, And those who said they “rarely” considered using Apple Pay grew from 17 percent to 23 percent at the same time. To some extent, the decline could be contributed to spotty acceptance; while there are a growing number of supported terminals in the U.S., tap-to-pay isn’t available everywhere the way swiping is today. But consumers said their top reason for not using the mobile payment option was simply because they “forgot.” While that study examined Apple Pay one year in, the same sentiments and issues are likely shared by Android users. And that’s what Google is hoping to change with the Android Pay “Tap 10” promotion. To create a new habit, however, it will take more than 10 taps (it may take many , in fact) – but at the very least, just remembering that there’s a chance to win could help some Android Pay users not “forget” that tapping to pay is an option. This isn’t the first time Google has linked Android Pay with a program aimed at boosting usage. Over the holidays, which saw the company donating to charity for each Android Pay purchase.
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Prototyping Suite InVision Is Acquiring Design Tool Macaw
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
InVision, a prototyping tool we’ve , is acquiring code-based design tool . InVision is a product and prototype design tool used by hundreds of companies including Uber, Twitter, and Airbnb. Launched in 2011, the company has since raised around $80M in . The acquisition, which is InVision’s first, comes after a long collaboration between the two companies on products like and . Macaw, which has 125k active users, originally raised about $300,000 during a 2013 Kickstarter campaign. Tom Giannattasio, Founder and CEO of Macaw, explained that the company always wanted to join a larger team, and “InVision was the first time it made sense”. InVision explained that acquiring Macaw will help them achieve their goal of bridging the design-to-development gap by implementing Macaw’s “design to code” features into InVision’s products. Notably, InVision is not shutting down Macaw. The company will indefinitely allow access to the current version, while Macaw’s latest product Scarlet (a live, real-time design environment) will be bundled into other InVision products this year.
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Sweden Is A Tech Superstar From The North
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Dennis Mitzner
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
While most of Europe has been mired in economic turmoil since 2008, has managed to stay afloat — and even accelerate its growth. The country and, especially, its capital, Stockholm, have outpaced other European nations with a mix of unique cultural traditions, visionary leaders, globally oriented startups and smart government policies. With companies like IKEA, Spotify, Skype, Ericsson, H&M, Electrolux and Volvo, and leaders like Niklas Zennström (Skype), Martin Lorentzon (Spotify) and Daniel Ek (µTorrent and Spotify), is behind some of the most recognizable global brands. Stockholm has produced more unicorns per capita than any other city in the world, and, in 2014 the city — with a population of 800,000 — 15 percent of all foreign investment in the European sector. A Google-funded report from 2014 showed that there are 22,000 technology companies in Stockholm, and 18 percent of the city’s workforce are employed in technology-related roles. Between 2000 and 2014, 263 exits at a total value of $23.7 billion — leaving its Nordic neighbors Norway (75 at $10.5 billion), Denmark (58 at $7.4 billion) and Finland (91 at $6.3 billion) far behind. In 2014 alone, to 50 percent of all exits in the Nordic region. With nearly 500 million daily users — adding to ’s exit successes — Candy Crush maker in November 2015 by Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion. Since the acquisition of Skype by eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion, the country has witnessed the emergence of a dozen present or future unicorns, including Spotify, King, Mojang (Minecraft) and fintech company Klarna. Although ’s eastern neighbor , the Nordic region, representing only 0.3 percent of the world’s population, makes up for 33 percent of the planet’s billion dollar exits. Often falsely considered a socialist utopia, has employed innovative regulations over the years to keep its budgets balanced. According to the , the government set a ceiling for government expenditures in 1996 following a difficult recession. A number of other mechanisms were introduced to make sure “high debt doesn’t accumulate and that debt isn’t passed on to future generations.” Today, boasts a low level of national debt, low and relatively stable inflation and a healthy banking system. The healthy state of the Swedish economy has given local entrepreneurs plenty of confidence to invest in companies and ideas. What’s more, actively supports local startups, and some argue that the government’s decision to invest in R&D is one of the driving motors of ’s startup successes. “Innovation is closely linked to research and development. is ahead of the game. A uniquely high proportion of research funding in comes from private foundations and other non-profit bodies,” says Donnie SC Lygonis, Senior Advisor at . “Among OECD countries, only the UK has a higher proportion than . The research financing from companies in are more modest, but in sum private, nonprofits and companies financing represent 15 per cent of research funding at Swedish universities — a level comparable to the U.S. and surpassed by only a few EU countries,” “Swedish government also contributes to the success of startups. For example, government programs offer various seed fund programs, such as the ‘market validation’ program that provides grants to startups to get their companies off the ground. There are also government-funded incubators that encourage innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Rickard Hansson, a Swedish serial entrepreneur, CEO and founder of , a Malmö-based startup. Claudia Olsson, CEO and founder of and a former senior advisor to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, echoes Hansson’s reading of the situation. “During the past decades, the Swedish government has invested heavily in the technology infrastructure, creating one of the world’s most digital economies which has been a key factor in the creation of companies like Skype, Spotify and Mojang. In addition to the technological advantages, there is an enabling social safety net for those who venture on the entrepreneurial path. Entrepreneurial mothers and fathers have been able to enjoy a relatively high quality of life while building their companies.” Hansson also attributes ’s prowess to a surprising source. “The widespread success of Swedish startups is in large part due to Swedish entrepreneurs’ common origins. The Commodore 64 created the first generation of people interested in coding, especially in gaming. The people behind two of the most successful Swedish gaming companies, King (Candy Crush) and Mojang (Minecraft) used Commodore 64 when they found their passion for coding back in the 1980s. There are several cultural markers that contribute to ’s decades-long success story. Some attribute it to which roughly translates to a mentality that downplays individual effort and places the emphasis on the collective. Today, however, most see jantelagen as a celebration of mediocrity. “Equality and flat hierarchy within businesses — each person’s opinion tends to be respected, regardless of their position, offering significant advantages in today’s fast-moving and innovative environment. Arguably, this has its roots in Jantelagen — although sometimes seen as a negative in its traditional meaning,” says Caitlin Collins, a manager at , an agency working closely with Swedish startups. Although once jantelagen may have had a positive role to play in terms of creating a harmonious culture based on consensus, it’s doubtful whether such a mentality would have given birth to disruptive companies like Skype, Spotify and Klarna. Swedes attach negative connotations to jantelagen and believe it to have an adverse influence on creativity. After all, the of startups is to challenge existing traditions, thinking patterns and frameworks in their pursuit to create better alternatives. While cultural idiosyncrasies and the Swedish government’s active role help companies get off the ground, conservative fiscal policies and discipline are what keep them afloat. “Swedish companies are more fiscally responsible than most — no flashy hotels or first class travel — even for management. Every dollar matters. Swedish startups are long-term oriented. While it may take startups a longer time to break through, they have more staying power; many startups have strong owners, as well as a focus on building core values and company culture, and translating these into long-lasting partnerships in the market,” says Fredrik Nilsson, GM of , a manufacturer of network cameras located in Lund, a city located in southwest . Although is moving away from its traditionally homogeneous character based on Lutheran values with a generous welfare state, the country is still maintaining identifiable cultural characteristics with an emphasis on big government and team thinking. “The Swedish culture has a unique mix of educated, independent people who are also good team players. Swedes enjoy a good social welfare system that provides a cushion to take risk, we have not been oppressed by wars, and no country in the world has more innovation per capita,” said Stina Ehrensvard, CEO and founder of . Even though is currently in the throes of a housing shortage due to a growing influx of immigrants, it’s unlikely that local or global events will threaten the northern superpower’s dominance anytime soon.
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Meet The CEOs Vying For The Crunchie For Top CEO Of 2015
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Talk about tough acts to follow. Since being appointed as Apple’s CEO by Steve Jobs in 2011, has had to navigate periods of unprecedented success and occasional backlash at the helm of one of the most valuable companies around. His tenure has seen major product releases, including many notable releases this past year: the Apple Watch, the iPad Pro and the new Apple TV. You probably can’t list ‘s accolades in 140 characters or fewer but maybe that’s why he’s toying with the idea of a . The dual CEO of Square and Twitter has had a pretty busy 2015, seeing his mobile payments startup go public while also making some major feature changes to his ever-evolving social media platform. Few people seem to be as busy as . The Xip2/PayPal/Tesla Motors/SpaceX/OpenAI/SolarCity founder has been hard at work in 2015, particularly with SpaceX in landing rockets (with degrees ) on floating platforms and with Tesla Motors where his company is busy pioneering the self-driving technologies that may redefine the future of transportation. Following Google’s transition into Alphabet, , who had been running the show at YouTube for a while, was give the title of CEO as it was spun off into a separate entity. She convinced Google executives to buy the video-sharing startup in 2006 and is now overseeing such new initiatives as the company’s subscription service YouTube Red and its YouTube Gaming product. When the Crunchies began in 2007, Facebook was just a couple of years old and had 58 million monthly active users. Fast forward to the present and their last reported MAUs was 1.55 . has been at the helm of the social media giant since he helped found it in his Harvard dorm room. He’s a two-time Crunchie winner, and this year he has seen such milestones as the explosive growth of Facebook Video, Instagram and Messenger, as well as newer initiatives surrounding Facebook’s virtual reality company Oculus. Schneider served as the CEO of Automattic, the web development platform behind WordPress. Schneider is now serving as a partner at True Ventures.
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Toxic Water, Toxic City
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
is toxic. The state of Michigan inadvertently poisoned the city’s well, and it will take years to flush the system. And that might not be the worst part. The state has yet to reveal how it will repair Flint’s image. I live down the road from Flint. I went into Flint for weekend trips with my parents. I played in her parks and ate at her restaurants and I remember mostly good times. You don’t. If you grew up in the 1990s you know Flint as the town where a crazy lady skinned and ate rabbits for food because that’s Flint through the eyes of Michael Moore. You know Flint as just another forgotten city in the rust because you’ve seen Flint through the eyes of newscasters. If you read the news today you know Flint as hell on Earth, a town waiting for a reckoning of even more crime, violence and neglect. Maybe you’re right. Or maybe I am. But my memories don’t help this situation. Move past the potential cover-up and the short-term fixes of celebrities buying trucks of water. Flint was already a town teetering on the verge of utter collapse. Before the water crisis hit, Flint was known as the city General Motors left behind. Now it’s known as Toxic Town, Leadville, a goddamn national disgrace. The city that the bigwigs forgot is now the city that the bigwigs poisoned. speculate that it could take $60 million and 15 years to repair the damaged infrastructure. Flint Mayor Karen Weaver said it will take $1.5 billion. Replacing pipes could prove to be just the start of the rebuilding. It will take much longer, and perhaps much more money, to repair the public’s perception of the entire region. The state must include provisions for economic redevelopment. Once the pipes are fixed, the city’s image will need to be repaired. Flint has long fought with the image of a broken factory town. As General Motors employed 80,000 people in the city. Now it’s closer to 8,000. At this point, the facts matter very little. Flint is not the only city with tainted water or lead poisoning. Yet the spotlight is shining on just one city. The city that the bigwigs forgot is now the city that the bigwigs poisoned. There isn’t a quick fix or magic technology to solve the crisis. Hard work is needed. Vast chunks of infrastructure need to be ripped out of the ground and replaced. Entrepreneurs, this is your time to shine. // Not all of the water in Flint is contaminated with lead. Confirmed reports of bad water are scattered throughout the city, although there are plenty of clean glasses here and there. But what happened is truly tragic. In 2013 the city of Flint, under the direction of a state-appointed official, decided to draw its municipal water supply from the nearby Flint River instead of buy water from the city of Detroit. This was said to have been done in an attempt to save money. The local water source itself does not have elevated levels of lead, but rather a high level of the corrosive substance chloride. Water treatment plants generally add an anti-chloride agent to the water supply to prevent corrosion of lead and copper pipes. That didn’t happen when Flint switched water sources. The city started piping water through its aging infrastructure, which was eight times more corrosive than the water it had previously purchased from Detroit. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a single solution. Flint went from Motor City to Lead City and I doubt it’ll head back into the world’s good graces any time soon. Nearly immediately after the switch, reports began to surface of murky drinking water. Some residents claimed their water smelled like gas or fish. Some water was cloudy and dirty. And others claimed their water contained fecal matter. But for most people in Flint, their water was fine and continues to be. But “most” doesn’t mean all. A state of Michigan from the end of 2015 notes that the majority of the water in Flint does not test positive for high levels of lead. Only 2 percent of the 2,182 individuals tested in Flint were found to have elevated levels. The city switched its water source back to the original one in late 2015, but the damage had been done. Since the toxins are seeping from the infrastructure, changing the source of the water did not result in a reduction of lead. There is not a global problem with the water in Flint. When the water was drawn from the Flint River, the water’s higher levels of chloride reacted differently with the variety of pipes and distribution systems used throughout the city. And now some neighborhoods are fine. Some are toxic. Sometimes, apparently, a single house could be the only one that tests positive for higher levels of lead in the area. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a single solution. Flint went from Motor City to Lead City and I doubt it’ll head back into the world’s good graces any time soon. Residents in the former auto-making hub — a poor, largely minority city — feel their complaints about lead-tainted water from the Flint River (shown) flowing through their taps have been slighted by the government or ignored altogether. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) Several weeks ago the national media started bringing attention to the water crisis in Flint. A sick toddler, poisoned from toxic water, appeared on the cover of Time Magazine and the cable news networks are dedicating chunks of programming to interview local officials and residents and show videos of disgusting water. The attention was warranted and needed. People are sick and the government was denying there was a problem. And now that the spotlight is on the city, the cogs of government are turning. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder he is seeking $28 million in state funding and President Obama for Michigan infrastructure repair — though how much of that money will go to Flint has yet to be disclosed. But here’s the bad news: The coverage of the water crisis is turning the image of the city as toxic as the water. Flint is the town General Motors built and destroyed. It was once the home of Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and countless other startups-turned-giants. But most moved to Detroit and left an empty shell of a town behind. The city’s population dropped to around 99,000 from a high of 200,000 in the ‘60s. Flint’s water crisis is the state government’s mess and it’s their responsibility to clean it up. But it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs and private companies to make a difference. Flint is surrounded by numerous suburbs that have fared better than the city proper. Some of these suburbs, such as Fenton, Grand Blanc and Davison, saw impressive growth the past several decades. None of the communities surrounding Flint switched to the new water source, but they will be directly affected by the toxic water all the same. I live in one of these communities: Swartz Creek. It’s located seven miles to the west of Flint. I was born in Flint and raised in Swartz Creek where I graduated from the public school system. It’s still home. My kids attend Swartz Creek schools. I’ve worked for TechCrunch since 2008 from my home office. Like most cities, the future of the surrounding area is largely determined by the success of the closest major city. In recent years, Flint has experienced bursts of revival but has largely been stagnant. The loss of over 70,000 General Motors jobs still looms over the city like smoke. Local universities have been a source of life. The University of Michigan has expanded its footprint in Flint and now occupies a sizable chunk of the downtown area. Just to the west, Kettering University continues to expand into vacant land that once contained a General Motors factory. Then to the east, Mott Community College is constantly a source of local pride by offering affordable education and a basketball team that wins national titles. Children in Flint’s schools cannot drink the water from drinking fountains. What parent will want their child to attend a school in a city that has toxic water? And what about athletes at these schools? Who is going to cool down in a refreshing lead shower? Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette that the water is not safe to bathe a newborn in. What parent would want to put their child in Flint’s water even if it was reported to be safe? In 2014 General Motors that it couldn’t use it to wash automotive parts — the water was eating the metal. That was two years ago. The Motor City was so bad that its water couldn’t be used to clean car parts. What business will move their employees to the region where pipes are leaking lead? One of the two Flint hospitals discovered last year to have its . Who would send their loved one to Flint hospitals or medical facilities for critical care when there are hospitals just outside of the city border? Will home buyers seek certifications saying the water is safe or simply look for a home in a different city? I would opt for the latter, and I live here. Trust is gone and the public perception is tainted. It will take longer to repair the city of Flint’s image than to repair the city’s water supply. Flint’s water crisis is the state government’s mess and it’s their responsibility to clean it up. But it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs and private companies to make a difference. The state of Michigan and city of Flint cannot fix everything nor should the citizens of Flint expect as much. Trust is gone and the public perception is tainted. It will take longer to repair the city of Flint’s image than to repair the city’s water supply. At this point, bottles of water are being shipped to Flint en masse and distributed by the National Guard, volunteers and law enforcement. That’s not sustainable. The city is also distributing water filters and replacement cartridges for use in the kitchen. Still there’s a trepidation to bath in the water or use it for brushing teeth. There’s quickly becoming a market for a whole-house water filter. There’s an opportunity to advance pipe rehabilitation technology so the city doesn’t have to be dug up to manually replace every bit of old pipe. The residents of Flint will need water tests and medical tests. They will need medical care. They will need improved education and they will need a reason to stay in Flint. Startups can’t solve all of these problems at once and I’m not so naive as to suggest that hosting a hackathon is the solution to Flint’s woes. But I’ve seen the good that new energy can do to a broken city. I’ve seen Detroit rise from the literal ashes. I’ve seen small towns like Raleigh, Charleston, and Norfolk gain new life through entrepreneurial efforts. And I’ve seen the sure movement from old to new, from good to better, from fear to hope. Startups are part of that. They aren’t the entirety of it, but what else do we have? Pallets of bottled water serve as the emergency water supply for Flint residents affected by lead-contaminated water. (Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images) I know Flint is a mess. It’s embarrassing. It’s like seeing an old relative laid low. It’s like seeing a town that nurtured and built me — all at her own expense, mind you — stumble and fall. And, to add insult, the world is jeering. Flint! Come for the parks and lakes, stay because you died of lead poisoning. Fuck that. I spoke with the founder and CEO of while at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland. As the leader of one of the largest startup incubator programs, naturally, he’s . He sees an opportunity for startups to step in and assist in cleaning up the water in Flint and elsewhere. MassChallenge Founder & CEO John Harthorne | 6:33 // Flint is not alone. There is a growing concern about lead poisoning and it’s not limited to being exposed to it from the water supply. The state of Michigan with elevated levels of lead poisoning. : America’s lead problem isn’t just in Flint. It’s everywhere. Repairing Flint seems to be at the top of the state of Michigan’s to-do list. The governor dedicated his entire State of the State address to the water crisis. NBC reports that he recently hired a crisis PR firm. Let’s fix this. Let’s use the tools that allow us to deliver booze on demand and the tools that let us order a masseuse and the tools that let us get a box of fancy snacks delivered monthly to rebuild a great American city. If the so-called smartest generation stopped trying to solve the problem of replacing their mothers with robots and fixed Flint and the countless other dying cities in America, they’d have statues erected in their name. They’d be modern philanthropists, modern heroes. That sure is better than having 1,000 followers on Peach.
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Foreign Exchange Weighs On Apple’s Q1 Sales To The Tune Of $5B
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Apple today another record set of results, with an all-time high profit of $18.4 billion and revenues of $75.9 billion, with some $216 billion in cash now on its balance sheet. But it could have made even more were it not for the strength of the dollar compared to other currencies. The iPhone maker said that in constant currency, Q1 2016 revenue “would have been $5 billion higher, reflecting an 8% year-on-year increase.” “For perspective, that difference is the size of an average Fortune 500 company,” CEO Tim Cook said on the earnings call today. Total revenues would have been nearly $81 billion with constant currency. In a graphic displayed prominently in the first slide of its , Apple charted the decline of its revenues as the dollar has continued to gain strength against foreign currencies: $100 in Q4 2014 equates to $85 today. Apple also detailed how its revenues were impacted across different markets. It looks like Europe, China and Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) were the most significantly hit by currency with declines of 18%, 17% and 19% respectively. In particular, during the conference call, Cook singled out China’s economic pressures, noting that while the country continued to be a major market growing rapidly for Apple particularly in iPhone sales, the company started to notice “softness” in Greater China earlier this month, staring in Hong Kong. He said Apple would continue to invest in growth in the country. “We remain very bullish on China and don’t subscribe to the doom and gloom there,” said Cook. India was another place where Apple saw a lot of currency issues, Cook noted, but the company is very much taking aim at high-growth markets like this for the future. Currency headwinds have a bigger knock-on effect, too, as Luca Maestri, Apple’s SVP and CFO described it. Asked by an analyst about softening demand for its devices as evidenced by a decline in sales, Maestri noted that revenues will be down between 5 percent and 10 percent in constant currency, and that the macroeconomic environment in both developed and developing markets “is significantly weaker than a year ago.” He noted that one of the things that Apple has done to respond to the foreign exchange effects is to increase the prices of some of Apple’s products to keep margins high. But he also said that inevitably, the higher prices also affect demand and, of course, overall sales.
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Apple TV And Apple Watch (Probably) Had A Big Quarter
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Without giving specific sales numbers, CEO Tim Cook said on the earnings call that it was the “ Cook added that the company “ Upon seeing the “other” numbers, Asymco analyst Horace Dediu updated his Apple Watch projections: My estimate on Watch sales is about 5.5 million units during Q4. 12.4 million to date. — Horace Dediu (@asymco) He also showed this chart, with an estimated breakdown by device. iOS shipments (includes estimated Watch units) — Horace Dediu (@asymco) Analyst estimates for Apple Watch sales have varied widely.
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VMware Confirms Layoffs In Earnings Statement As It Prepares For Dell Acquisition
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
VMware as part of its fourth quarter earnings statement. The layoffs had been last week. The move appears to be part of the ongoing dance among EMC federated companies prior to the . Dell announced in October for $67 billion. EMC owns 80 percent of VMware, but it operates as a separate, independent company with its own stock. It decides when to make layoffs and other strategic decisions. It’s worth noting, however that EMC also and each of these moves, regardless of the setup of these organizations has to be seen through the prism of that upcoming Dell acquisition. VMware stockholders have taken a dim view of VMware’s role in that acquisition since day one. Consider that on October 7th just five days before the Dell deal was announced, VMware was rolling along with a share price of $82.09. By October 21 the price had plunged to $55.42, and even though it stabilized a bit after that, it still continued to drop. The price as of close today was below $50 at $49.30. Meanwhile at its last quarterly earnings call in October, VMware threw another wrench at shareholders when it announced , the company as a separate company. The part of the arrangement that spooked stockholders was that even though the spin-off was a 50-50 split, VMware was going to carry Virtustream on its books. As the stock price continued to drop over the coming weeks, VMware grew increasingly uneasy with the deal and on December 14 As I wrote at the time, even that failed to placate stockholders and the price continued to plunge further down. That could be because of the tracking stock provision in the Dell deal. Part of the problem is the way the Dell-EMC has been structured, using a concept called tracking stocks. Under the terms of the merger agreement, Dell will pay EMC shareholders $24.05 per share, but it will pay the remainder of $9.10 per share in stock that tracks against the price of VMware’s stock. As the price of VMware drops, that provision continues to decline in value. This Dell-EMC deal appears to be full speed ahead, and it feels like these moves from EMC and VMware could simply be house cleaning ahead of the deal or they might have happened regardless and the two companies are going ahead with previous plans. All we do know for sure is that 800 people are out of work tonight and that’s never good news. [graphiq id=”aC8SNR5ZmEl” title=”Vmware Inc. (VMW)” width=”700″ height=”553″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/aC8SNR5ZmEl” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/7174298/Vmware-Inc-in-Palo-Alto-CA” link_text=”Vmware Inc. (VMW) | FindTheCompany”]
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Apple Reports 1 Billion “Active” Devices
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
In Apple’s Q1 ’16 “ ” – documentation added to today’s earnings primarily to how foreign exchange rates are impacting revenue – there was another notable figure revealed: Apple says now its “active” install base has reached 1 billion devices. (Actually, it has surpassed it, CEO Tim Cook.) That figure includes iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod touch, Apple TV and Apple Watch devices that have been engaged with Apple’s services over the past 90 days, the company explains. If this 1 billion number sounds vaguely familiar, you may recall that it was around this time last year that Apple announced it . This new 1 billion figure is an update on that. Devices sold is one matter, devices being actively used is another. In fact, many people take issue with companies that only report on devices sold or shipped, saying they don’t represent an accurate picture of real-world usage. That’s more true, of course, for companies that sell through third-party resellers or distributors who don’t necessarily move all the product they’ve bought from the company – meaning it doesn’t wind up in the hands of consumers. That’s less of problem for Apple, which does a good bit of its business by selling direct to consumers through company stores and its robust online store, however. Still, a figure that speaks to devices actually in use is valuable when it comes to analyzing Apple’s real-world footprint. Note also that the 1 billion figure stated today goes beyond iOS to include the entire Apple product line, including its newest hardware, the Apple Watch and unveiled last fall. “Our team delivered Apple’s biggest quarter ever, thanks to the world’s most innovative products and all-time record sales of iPhone, Apple Watch and Apple TV,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a statement. “The growth of our Services business accelerated during the quarter to produce record results, and our installed base recently crossed a major milestone of one billion active devices.” Contributing to this milestone, in large part, were Apple TV and Apple Watch. Apple’s “Other products” category up from $2.7 billion a year ago, or a 62 percent increase in revenue year-over-year.
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Apple Beats Earnings Expectations, But Misses On iPhone Sales
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
It was a hugely important quarter for Apple, and it looks like it came about in line with what investors were expecting — including, potentially, the company’s first sales decline going into the second quarter. Apple said it recorded $75.9 billion in revenue and earnings of $3.28 per share in the first quarter. That represents a record quarter for Apple on revenue, but slightly under what analysts were looking for. Analysts were expecting earnings of $3.23 per share on revenue of $76.6 billion. , compared to the 75 million that analysts were expecting. Last quarter, Apple shipped 74.5 million iPhones, which means its iPhone sales growth has potentially hit a wall. That could be due to a number of factors — like slowing growth in China, hitting a saturation point — but either way its main growth engine appears to be slowing. That’s a small miss on iPhone sales, b big number that people were watching closely was the company’s forecast for Q2. Analysts were looking for $55.7 billion, while Apple said it expected revenue to be in the range of $50 billion and $53 billion. In Q2 last year, the company recorded $58 billion in revenue — meaning Apple’s upcoming quarter could be the first negative growth quarter in recent memory. The stock is about flat in extended trading, which means that weak guidance was built into what analysts were expecting for the second quarter. [graphiq id=”fSQ8HGDTerH” title=”Apple Inc. (AAPL) Quarterly Revenue” width=”650″ height=”526″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/fSQ8HGDTerH” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/8500602/Apple-Inc-in-Cupertino-CA” link_text=”Apple Inc. (AAPL) Quarterly Revenue | FindTheCompany”] This is a deal for Apple. The iPhone has always been the main growth driver of the company, with iPad sales stalling, and if that engine starts to slow down it does not bode well for its future performance. To be fair, growth engines inevitably hit a saturation point, but this is something that Apple has been able to maintain since it launched the iPhone in 2007. Apple also sold 16.1 million iPads, another miss from what was expected. Mac sales came in at 5.3 million, which was also a miss on what analysts were expecting. Both of those also represented declines from the first quarter last year. We still haven’t seen what the iPad Pro will do to iPad sales just yet, which have also already stalled. There was one interesting note on the call relative to some buzz building around Apple’s potential involvement in VR: Cook said he didn’t think VR is a “niche.” “It’s really cool and has some interesting applications,” he said. [graphiq id=”7ayEeZP82SV” title=”iPhone Quarterly Sales Over Time” width=”600″ height=”580″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/7ayEeZP82SV” link=”http://smartphones.specout.com” link_text=”iPhone Quarterly Sales Over Time | SpecOut”] Apple is still printing money off its iPhone sales, but it puts the company’s efforts to diversify its products with new pieces of hardware like the Apple Watch and the iPad Pro in context. Apple recorded $4.35 billion for its “other” category, which includes products like the Apple Watch and Apple TV. A year ago, Apple recorded $2.7 billion, meaning a 62% jump in revenue year-over-year. Apple has $216 billion in cash as of the end of Q1. “We have the mother of all balance sheets,” Cook said on the call. Foreign exchange rates continued to be a huge headwind for the company, so much so that Apple specifically called it out in its earnings presentation. The difference would have been around $5 billion in revenue, the company said. In fact, Cook mentioned it within the first 2 sentences of the earnings call — along with the major challenges the global economy is facing. Two-thirds of the company’s revenue comes from outside the United States, making foreign exchange rates a major headwind for Apple, Cook said. “We’re seeing extreme conditions just about everywhere we look, major markets including Brazil, Russia, Japan… have been impacted by slowing economic growth, falling commodity prices and weakening currency,” Cook said. “We saw softness in China, noticeably in Hong Kong.” This was expected to be a hugely important quarter for the company given how its stock has performed this year. In short, 2015 was not a great year for Apple’s stock. [graphiq id=”2rNixEL8K69″ title=”Apple Inc. (AAPL) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”490″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/2rNixEL8K69″ link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/8500602/Apple-Inc-in-Cupertino-CA” link_text=”Apple Inc. (AAPL) Stock Price – 1 Year | FindTheCompany”]
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Apple Shows Soft China Revenues At $18.37B In Q1, Up 14% YoY
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Apple showed soft year-over-year revenue growth for China in Q1, and it’s clear the party may be slowing down in the region. During Q1, Apple saw 14 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the Greater China region, which accounts for the company’s sales in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. In this first fiscal quarter of 2016, Apple’s revenue in China grew to $18.37 billion from $16.14 billion in 2014. Following the trend of 2015, Apple’s revenue in China again outpaced that of Europe at $17.93 billion but at thinner margins than past quarters. In the earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted “economic softness” was beginning to grow evident in the region. The Greater China region still remains Apple’s second-largest market after the Americas, making up just under a quarter of Apple’s total revenues. The sales struggle in Japan continues with Apple posting $4.79 billion, a 12% YoY drop in the region. Sales of the iPhone in China has been a pretty significant thought on a lot of investors’ minds as there’s been a pronounced slowdown in growth in the number of smartphones being shipped in the country. The latest numbers estimated that 2016 would only see 1.2 percent year-over-year growth for smartphone shipments in the region. Fluctuating global currencies left Apple to add a to this quarter’s earnings report, highlighting the global decline in non-U.S. dollar currencies. In a “currency index” in the release, Apple specified that $100 in Q4’14 non-U.S. dollars was worth only $85 today.
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Apple’s iPhone Grows 0.4% Yearly With 75 Million Units Sold In Q1
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Apple today reported sales of 74.8 million iPhones, 16.1 million iPads, and 5.3 million Macs in its Q1 earnings report today. Apple’s first quarter includes holiday sales, as the three-month period ends December 31, 2015. As such, it was supposed to be one of Cupertino’s best quarters of the year. Plus, both went live on September 25, meaning that Apple’s next-gen flagship devices were available for the whole of this quarter. Last year at the same time, Apple sold nearly 75 million units of the iPhone, which represented 57 percent revenue growth from the year before. This quarter’s sales of 74.8 million iPhones puts yearly revenue growth at just one percent for the category, and device sale growth at 0.4 percent. In terms of quarterly growth, Apple sold 56 percent more iPhones from . Apple was expected to sell at least 75 million units of the iPhone this year, a forecast that analysts have had a very close eye on during the course of the quarter. that the iPhone may finally start declining after nearly eight solid years of growth. On the other side of the spectrum, Apple is having more difficulty cultivating the iPad line of products. The company sold 16.1 million iPads in the first quarter, down 25 percent year-over-year, but up 63 percent from last quarter. That said, Apple unveiled the new last quarter, which went on sale on November 11, making it available for approximately half of the quarter. Sales have been declining for Apple’s tablet devices — last year at the same time, Apple sold 21 million iPads, representing a decline of 18 percent year over year. Meanwhile, the PC industry as a whole has been steadily slowing, and Apple is no exception. Apple sold 5.3 million units of the Mac, down four percent from last year. Though the iPhone didn’t blow this year out of the water, Apple still reported remarkable financials, with the company earning .
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Down The Hype Cycle: A 3D Printer In Every Home?
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Filemon Schoffer
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
When he famously said “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” in 1977, Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, certainly wasn’t expecting a reality like the one we live in today. In less than half a century, computers don’t just exist in multiple rooms of our homes, they’ve taken over our pockets, our wrists and are embedded in a multitude of products around us, including light bulbs and basketballs. Needless to say, there are now plenty of reasons why anybody would want a computer in their home. Although Olson’s might have been one of the worst tech predictions of all time, variations of the same question continue to be asked with seemingly every new major technological advancement — particularly, is there a need for a printer in every home? The ability to design and manufacture a physical object at home within hours, while bypassing traditional manufacturing supply chains, is certainly a powerful notion. After all, what if replacing a $125 dishwasher part took literally minutes and $5 of material, rather than a few weeks and a lengthy phone call with a customer service representative? But then again, how many dishwasher parts does one have that need replacing on a regular basis? Despite all of its possibilities, hitting “print” on a printer is a lot more involved than just loading the paper tray and hitting a green button. Preparing and finishing a printed object can be an arduous process. For those who regularly use a printer and take the process in stride, these are usually small issues. But for those who aren’t ready to take on the challenge, it can make an otherwise pleasurable experience turn sour, fast. In short, “ease of use” is still a thing. In addition to the operational difficulties involved with owning and maintaining a printer, there are still too few applications for the average person to justify the cost of purchasing a $1,000-$4,000 machine. Unless you’re already using a printer in your line of work or hobby, or regularly spend thousands of dollars a year on small plastic parts, the time and costs involved with printer ownership are just not worth it. Having access to a printer is certainly ideal for those in creative and engineering fields who wish to envision their ideas, thoughts and “prototypes” physically. This is why most printed objects exist today; as a tool for design thinking and iteration. As we continue to move toward a future that’s becoming increasingly dependent on STEM skill sets, access to a printer has also become an invaluable tool for students learning the foundations of science, technology, engineering and math. Still, even some of the most frequent users of have turned to services that are increasingly making ownership unattractive. After all, why commit to a large purchase and add clutter when you can have the final product delivered to you without the hassle of ownership and maintenance? To be fair, though, although price and ease of use are indeed things to consider, printers will become more easy to use and cheaper every year. It’s the range of applications that’s really the only fundamental limit to the current adoption rate for . Unlike personal computers, which can take on a countless number of tasks within the home, printers are limited to one thing: creating physical objects from digital files. When looking back at Olson’s 1977 prediction and comparing it to the role of in the home today, it becomes clearer why he might have thought the way he did — there just were not enough applications to justify owning a personal computer. If printers are to be taken more seriously as a universal home appliance, they need to provide more solutions that are valuable for every home. Personal computers have evolved to have this level of value, but a machine that can produce the occasional spare part or small product from plastic does not. When thinking about the amount of home applications potentially possible for home , it’s not hard to see an exciting future ahead. Among other developments, the addition of more advanced materials will enable users to produce a variety of functional objects on demand — such as the ability to print electronics and sensors directly within a print, like the for example, hitting the market this year. Similarly, developments in glass, ceramics and even metals will greatly expand upon the potential for applications in the home. A clear example of how the role of printers in the home could affect our day-to-day lives is the ability to print everyday objects on demand. Take a commonly used home object that is owned purely for its functional benefits, like a kitchen knife. We own this knife to access its functional benefits at any given time, for example, when we have dinner. We don’t necessarily want to own the knife, we want access to the ability to cut something. Using a, currently imaginary, printer that could print (and dispose) a functional knife on demand, we would never need to own such a knife again. We simply print it when needed and dispose of it when done. Ultimately, this is where the true digitalization of products comes into view, a powerful notion that has the potential to redefine materialism altogether. We may not be there yet, but seeing its potential, it becomes easier to imagine the role of a printer in every home. Similar reasoning holds true for . We’re already living a future consisting of smartwatches that can track our vitals. Sending that data to a food-based printer would allow the machine to prepare the optimal meal or nutritional supplements for each individual throughout the day. Who wouldn’t want to replace the microwave in their kitchen with a new appliance that was capable of producing meals near-instantly, personally compiled from fresh ingredients? Looking forward, the potential of home is tremendous, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of to come. With this in mind, the methods for moving forward — like the evolution of computers — are still fuzzy and unclear. Looking at the current state of technology, I do not foresee the need for a printer in every home at this time, or even in the near future. The big question is, will I be as wrong as Mr. Olson was?
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Walmart Launches OneOps, An Open-Source Cloud And Application Lifecycle Management Platform
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Walmart (yes, that ), is launching a new open source DevOps platform for cloud and application lifecycle management. , which was developed by , is meant to help developers write and launch their apps faster and make maintaining them easier. The company first announced its plans to open source the service . “Our mission is to give our customers the most agile, cost-effective, flexible application lifecycle management solution for enterprise-class workloads in the cloud,” the team says. While Walmart may seem like an odd company to launch a tool like this, there can be little doubt that few other legacy retailers have used technology to their advantage to the degree that Walmart has. As the company notes today, though, it’s a cloud user and not a cloud provider. “It makes sense for to release OneOps as an open source project so that the community can improve or build ways for it to adapt to existing technology,” Walmart CTO Jeremy King and WalmartLabs VP of Platforms Tim Kimmet write in today’s announcement. “We are no stranger to open source. We’ve been an active contributor, releasing technologies such as Mupd8 and hapi with the community.” OneOps was actually founded in 2011 and Walmart in 2013. Today, about 3,000 engineers within the company use it to build and manage new products. Its e-commerce sites like walmart.com and Sam’s Club are managed through OneOps. The company its engineers use the platform to commit over 30,000 changes per month. So what can OneOps actually do? According to Walmart, one of the key benefits of the platform is that it works with multiple public and private cloud platforms out of the box. These Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, AWS and CenturyLink Cloud, as well as any OpenStack cloud (Walmart was of OpenStack and is still one of its largest users). “Greater control of cloud environment means that instead of cloud providers dictating what proprietary tools and technologies we have to use, or how much bandwidth we can have, OneOps puts the control back into the hands of developers,” the team writes today. The team says it also worked with the NoSQL database company to integrate its product into its stack. OneOps is also set up to work with technologies like Node.js, Docker, ElasticSearch and . Other features of OneOps include monitoring tools, auto-healing and -replace when things go wrong, and auto-scaling tools to manage the size of a given cluster. For admins, the platform also offers integration with enterprise identity services, quota management, as well as a configuration management system. The code for the project is now . “Walmart continues to make important contributions to open source and we’re looking forward to seeing how the GitHub community engages with OneOps,” GitHub VP of Product Management Kakul Srivastava said. “It’s great to see a retail giant also become a software giant.”
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Apply Now! The TC Meetup + Pitch-Off Is Coming To Boston And Atlanta
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
We’re one short month away from TC’s first regional Pitch-offs of the year, and I couldn’t be more excited to be hitting up a couple of my favorite cities, and . On February 23 and February 25, TechCrunch will be visiting Boston and Atlanta, respectively, to host our world-renowned Meetup + Pitch-off. Over the course of the evening, 10 companies will duke it out onstage with 60-second presentations. A judges panel, comprising local VCs and TechCrunch editors, will hold a quick Q&A after every pitch and eventually determine a winner. First place gets a table in Startup Alley at TC Disrupt NY in May. Second place gets two tickets to the conference, and the Audience Choice winner walks away with one ticket to the big show. Think you’ve got what it takes? . Applications close February 11. But the night is about so much more than a friendly startup competition. Folks will be able to network with their local tech community and have the chance to pitch their own startups and products to TC editors and writers. Tickets cost $20 and, since they include alcohol, we ask that you please be 21 and older. You can buy tickets for Boston and tickets for Atlanta . Can’t wait to see you!
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Oculus “Quill” Turns VR Painting Into Performance Art
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Art doesn’t have to be an end product. Thanks to Oculus’ new internal creation tool, Quill, illustrators can draw in virtual reality and let audiences see their creations come to life stroke by stroke around them. Quill works much like Tilt Brush, the VR painting app Google acquired. Using Oculus’ Touch controllers and motion cameras, Quill users can select different brushes and colors, swing their hands through the air, and each flourish appears instantly within the 3D canvas. Oculus has no plans to make Quill available to the public like Tilt Brush or its own , at least not yet, and is reserving it for its own illustrators. Oculus Story Studio built Quill to make its new VR short film Dear Angelica, where hazy watercolor drawings let a daughter explore the fantastical memories of her movie star mother. Oculus announced the film’s production at Sundance 2015 and it will be released later this year, but it’s now showing off a few scenes. Dear Angelica lets you watch flying fish, dragons, and a child’s bedroom be birthed into being one line at a time, reacting to where you look. Even if Oculus doesn’t publicly release Quill, it could inspire a whole new medium of VR performance art by showing how to add dimensions of time and 3D space to live illustration. The order and cadence of Quill brushstrokes could let artists infuse suspense, humor, or crescendo into the journey of creation. I sat down with the Oculus Story Studio team, including Wesley Allsbrook, the illustrator for Dear Angelica. She told me why Quill is such a leap forward for VR, and even gave me a crash course so I could paint a derpy little shark onto her 3D masterpiece. “He made this tool for me to paint in space and time — something I’ve dreamt about all of my life” Allsbrook tells me. She’s referring to Inigo Quilez, a VFX supervisor for Oculus. Allsbrook was tasked with drawing up the memories explored in Dear Angelica, but was frustrated trying to translate her 2D illustrations into VR. Over barbecue chicken wings one night, Quilez decided to build what Allsbrook needed as a hackathon project, and she named the tool after him. Here’s a video of her using it: Oculus Story Studio’s technical founder Maxwell Planck explains Quill could assist with storyboarding, concepts, production design, and more. “Coming from computer animation at Pixar, we’d use a lot of illustrations to inform what we’d eventually build in 3D, but there were as a lot lost in translation.” He hints that after illustration, Oculus is trying to figure out the best way to handle cinematography elements like lighting and camera angles in VR. It might end up building an in-VR editing tool like . The experience of watching the Dear Angelica teaser and then drawing with Quill is overwhelming. The moment I stepped out of it, this was the stream of consciousness I typed out. On Dear Angelica: The genesis of image. Taking a journey to the output rather than simply arriving there. It feels participatory, responding to fill your gaze with motion. You choose whether to marvel at what’s already appeared or follow the brush strokes. You become spaceless and bodiless, as images spawn underneath and looking up at you while simultaneously inhabiting the more common planes. On Quill: Creation becomes performance. It’s VR watercolor. There’s suddenly a relevance to what order I draw. jokes and feelings can emerge from the order, and you can build suspense through quickening the pace of visualization. They’re both jaw-dropping. Imagine the infinite white construct of The Matrix. But in Dear Angelica, rather than filling with racks of guns, dainty streaks of color materialize around you. You can walk around and through the art as it emerges. If you want to inspect the tiny riders upon the dreamy dragon, you simply lean in close. Otherwise, you can spin in circles to see the latest brushstrokes emerge. While not overtly interactive like a video game, Dear Angelica adapts to your field of vision, dynamically moving the brushstroke action in front of you. Director Saschka Unseld says Quill “makes sense with Dear Angelica on a story level because the main character is recalling memories. When I remember things, it usually starts with small, fuzzy details and then it grows.” That’s exactly how a few wisps of color evolve into drawings like this: A drawing within Dear Angelica In the second scene, the strokes start slow, filling in the desk and dresser around the bedroom, creating suspense. But as the music builds to a glorious crescendo, the strokes appear faster. The whole rooms springs to life as the bed and the main character Jessica are drawn into being in the center. This is how Quill enables performance art. The artist’s choices of what to draw first impact the emotion that’s conveyed. Quill could produce humor by showing one figure character’s reaction to something you don’t see yet, then slowly drawing it in as a punchline. Or an artist could create tension or release by speeding up or slowing down the pace of their strokes. Quill relies on Oculus’ Touch controllers When it’s my turn to paint, I quickly discover the pallete, a cube that spawns from your left hand. Turning your wrist reveals the different sides, that include a color selector, brush sizes, opacity controls and more. It’s simple to select them with your right hand on the fly as you draw, giving a distinct feeling of dexterity. You can also grab whole portions of your drawing to re-angle or move them. Dear Angelica illustrator Wesley Allsbrook I draw the gray outline of my shark with a ribbon-esque brush with little depth. Then I switch to a sphere and enlarge it to fill in between the lines like a kid in a VR coloring book. Holding the cursor on any color on the canvas lets me instantly sample it. Drawing an exterior on the 3D figure is a bit tricky, as it’s easy to press too far and end up painting on the inside rather than the outside. It takes a few tries to get sharky’s toothy grin right. I’m no artist, yet Quill was instantly intuitive. Making something worthy of a VR film will take skill and practice, but blunt sketches were easy just minutes after strapping in. That’s why I see the rapid-prototyping potential of Quill as even more important that Dear Angelica. VR producers are constantly plagued with trying to develop scenes, characters, or action in 2D and then port them into 3D where everything works different. But with Quill, they could simply draw rough concepts of what they want, when and where. Finally, artists will be able to create in VR for VR. Allsbrook has certainly become attached to the idea. She says she’s already asked Inigo, “If they fire me, do you think that I could have a build?”
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Peach Creator Just Released A Web Version, But Is That Enough To Juice Activity?
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
You can now message your friends on the web , a new chat app created by the founder of Vine, Dom Hofmann. The iOS app became a viral hit in Silicon Valley after it first launched at the beginning of this year. Someone else even made an unofficial web and Android version of the app called . Some think Peach has already , and according to App Annie, downloads took a sharp nose dive last week. Nonetheless, Peach now has an official online app of its very own – albeit a slimmed-down version. You still have to first create an account on your iPhone to use the desktop version and you can’t add friends just yet. And there are no magic words or fun stick figure drawings the app is notable for on the web version, either. What you can do (for now) is upload GIFs and links to the web platform, and Hofmann’s indicates there are plans in the works to open it up to developers to improve the online version. According to the Peach team, an Android app is also in the works. But is the app already dead? It picked up some good initial traction and quickly hit the App Store’s . But our attention spans for these types of apps are short and it already took a tumble. We’ll just have to wait and see if the web version sweetens downloads once again.
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Microsoft Launches A Bing-Powered News App For iOS Devices, News Pro
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Microsoft today yet another application aimed at iOS users, with the launch of a news application that greatly resembles Apple’s own News application that comes built into iOS 9. Called “ ” Microsoft’s app aims to offer readers a personalized experience by connecting them to articles that match their current interests, while also uncovering other sites and stories they may like. The biggest two differentiators between Microsoft’s news reading app and Apple News is that Microsoft’s version is powered by Bing News, and it personalizes its interface by way of social networks. Users can sign in with either LinkedIn or Facebook in order to have the home feed update with stories that match their interests. For example, after signing into the web version of News Pro, the keyword “TechCrunch” appeared under my interests. Oddly, though, the app didn’t immediately show me any stories from the TechCrunch website, which makes me think perhaps the app is a little undercooked for the time being. On mobile, however, the app seemed to do a slightly better job. After authenticating with LinkedIn, it picked up another interest (“internet”) and then began to show me both technology news and TechCrunch stories. [gallery ids="1268084,1268083,1268081,1268085"] A separate tab on the mobile app lets you also customize which topics and industries you want to follow, as well as which organizations and products you want to track. But this tab is divided into two sections, “Browse” and the oddly named “Pilot” – the latter which appears to offer the ability to toggle off or on the same topic choices as on Browse, but here they are laid out in a grid format using small thumbnail images. It’s not clear why there are two different sections focused on customizing the app’s content. Users can like and comment on stories in the app, which also sets it apart from Apple News. (Apple’s app only allows for liking by clicking on hearts.) However, one feature Microsoft’s news app offers that’s really handy is its “Speedy Mode” option. This presents a stripped down, quick-to-load version of the news article in question. If you’re at all familiar with the popular app on iOS, the feature will look strikingly similar. Maybe too similar, in fact – it even presents the Speedy Mode option with a nearly identical green arrow you tap on to change modes. Yikes! Unfortunately for Microsoft, nothing about this new app comes across as truly unique, and in some cases, it looks like it’s trying to directly clone its competitors. That “me too” feel makes it less compelling than others in the space, which is disappointing. There are so many opportunities to deliver re-imagined and compelling takes on mobile news reading today, but Microsoft’s News Pro is simply rehashing what others have already done. The app is the latest project from Microsoft’s internal incubator, Microsoft Garage, which is home to a variety of oddball projects ranging from to . In other words, it’s not something Microsoft is backing as heavily as it is Office, Outlook for mobile, or even that . Instead, Garage projects are more like spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what sticks. News Pro is .
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 19 | null |
Pinterest Is Looking To Tackle “Belonging Uncertainty”
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Through , the company is gearing up to test an intervention process aimed at addressing “belonging uncertainty,” which can potentially inhibit the performance of those who experience it. Paradigm is designing an intervention process that Pinterest, as well as other tech companies, can implement in order to address the issue. Belonging uncertainty is about people entering a new environment, like a new school or job, and spending mental energy to determine whether or not they’ll belong, . That concern can be a lot more pronounced for people from underrepresented groups in particular environments, according to . “When something good happens, they feel like they probably do belong, but when they have a negative experience, they’re more likely to question whether they belong,” Romero wrote. “This means that instead of focusing all of their mental energy on their work, some mental energy is expended on trying to figure out whether or not they belong by interpreting information from the environment around them. As a result, belonging uncertainty can prevent people from performing to their true potential.” At Pinterest, Paradigm has been testing the hypothesis that belonging uncertainty might exist among underrepresented groups in tech companies. Using survey prompts from previous academic belonging uncertainty research, Paradigm has already found that women new to Pinterest have experienced more belonging uncertainty than men. Paradigm also found that people who feel more confident about their belonging at Pinterest are more likely to feel better about their performance at work. “This study is an important step in understanding how to build a more inclusive environment,” a Pinterest spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’re in the early stages of designing a program to help all employees feel certain they belong at Pinterest from day one. We hope other companies can benefit from this study, and we’ll share additional findings as they become available.” Ideally, Paradigm would like to test this hypothesis more broadly at other tech companies because the larger the numbers, the better, Paradigm CEO Joelle Emerson told me. Paradigm also works with tech companies like Slack, Airbnb and Asana, and is reaching out to those companies today with the hope that they will get on board the intervention train. You can .
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Walking Down The Crunchies Memory Lane, Don’t Forget To Buy Tickets
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
We’re just a little under two weeks away from the , which takes place February 8, 2016 at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. As we look ahead to the show, we also wanted to take time to look back at past Crunchies shows to see how the show has progressed over the years. After Facebook won the Best Overall Startup or Product award at the first three Crunchies, it was another social network’s turn to win at the 4th Crunchies in 2011. After nipping at Zuckerberg’s heels for a few years, Twitter took home the award at the 4th Annual Crunchies. 2010 was the year music streaming became mainstream, with Pandora and Rdio taking the winner and runner-up spots, respectively, in the Best Internet Application category. That year was also the year Groupon surged into the mainstream: The daily deal service won the Best Social Commerce App, was runner up to Twitter in the Best Overall Startup or Product category, and its founder and former-CEO Andrew Mason won the CEO of the Year award. There were a lot of other cool things that landed in 2010, including Google Maps for Android (Best Mobile Application), Google’s self-driving cars (Best Technology Achievement), and the iPad (Best New Device), which we used to play Angry Birds (somehow only the runner up for Best Time Sink Application). At the fifth annual Crunchies in 2012, cloud storage stormed onto the scene, with Dropbox taking home the awards for Best Cloud Service and Best Overall Startup of 2011. The popularity of the cloud also saw Dropbox CEO Drew Houston as the runner up for Founder of the Year. There were a slew of other useful products and services that took home awards at the 5th Annual Crunchies. Perhaps most notably, Apple’s Siri mobile assistant was the Best Technology Achievement, Evernote won the Best Mobile Application, Nest was the Best New Device, Imgur was the Best Bootstrapped Startup and Pinterest was the Best New Startup of 2011. And there were a handful of products that seemingly failed to take off. Google+ — the Best Social Application of 2011 — had a pretty passionate user base at the outset, but the community has largely died down since then, and Path 2.0 seems to have never gotten on the path to wide user adoption.
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Firefox 44 Launches With Support For Push Notifications
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 |
Mozilla today the latest update to its for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. The of this release cycle is the addition of web-based push notifications to its desktop browser. Firefox already supported a different type of web notifications before, but to see those, you had to have a site open at all times. These new push notifications — which will look just like native notifications — work more like mobile notifications. They’re opt-in and you’ll be able to manage them in Firefox’s Control Center. As Mozilla rightly notes, this feature is especially useful for “websites like email, weather, social networks and shopping, which you might check frequently for updates.” It’s worth noting that Google already these notifications last year and Facebook, for example, . If you’re a developer and want to get started with push notifications in Firefox, Mozilla also today a more detailed breakdown of how to implement this. While this improved push notifications support is clearly the most visible feature in this release, the team also made a number of other changes to the browser — and especially to the built-in developer tools. You can find the full release notes for the desktop version and the Android notes are .
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The Tor Project Raised Over $200,000 From Its First Crowdfunding Campaign
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
In the quest to lessen its reliance on grants from the U.S. government, the back in November. That initial funding drive is now over with the organization that it brought in just over $200,000 in donations — $205,874 from 5,265 donors, to be precise — over the six-week period. Tor — which uses anonymous, volunteer-based servers to provide Internet experience — has always been open to donations, but this time around it mounted a more public campaign with a focus on its most prominent users, including , who explained why they value the service. The Tor Project recently that its annual revenue was $2.5 million in 2014, however most of that money came from the government. The organization said in that federal grants accounted for 75 percent of its 2014 revenue. That’s lower than in 2013, when grants were 90 percent of its income. Tor is likely to continue to rely on grants for the bulk of its funding for some time, but the crowdfunding push and increased visibility is aimed at increasing donations to offset that somewhat and give it resources for additional projects. “We knew we wanted to diversify our funding sources; crowd funding gives us flexibility to do what we think is most important, when we want to do it. It allows us to fund the development of powerful new privacy tools. Or make the ones we have stronger and more resilient. Or pay for things we need like a funded help desk or an Arabic version of our web site,” the organization said in . As we wrote back in November when this donation campaign kicked off, there’s tension between the Tor Project and authorities, despite the fact that Tor routing was initially developed as a U.S. Navy project and was first funded by . A number of reports last year suggested that the FBI compensated researchers at Carnegie Mellon with $1 million for working on ways to crack Tor. The university denied the “inaccurate” claims, but the link was enough to raise suspicion among the cybersecurity community. In other Tor-related news this week, for Tor to cover Android. The social network giant first offered support for the project in 2014, when it : .
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Google Reportedly Paid Apple $1B In 2014 To Remain Default Search Engine On iOS
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
There’s always been plenty of speculation around how much Google pays Apple to include its search services inside iOS devices, and we finally have some clarity over that figure. Information raised as part of an ongoing legal case between Oracle and Google shows the search firm compensated Apple to the tune of $1 billion in 2014. As part of a five-year case against Google’s apparent use of Oracle’s Java technology, a court heard that “at one point in time the revenue share [between Apple and Google] was 34 percent,” according to . The specifics of that comment are unclear — we don’t know if that figure is what Google kept, or what it paid to Apple — but there does seem to be some truth behind it since both Apple and Google are submitting filings to have the quote redacted and sealed from public view. “The specific financial terms of Google’s agreement with Apple are highly sensitive to both Google and Apple. Both Apple and Google have always treated this information as extremely confidential,” Bloomberg reports a filing from Google as saying. Beyond shining light on a very sensitive deal, the disclosure is interesting because it shows two things. The value that Google places on its rivals’ platforms to boost its search business and, second, that Apple draws revenue from Google’s advertising-based business model despite Apple CEO Tim Cook having made numerous public statements criticizing companies that make money from using personal data. Speaking at EPIC’s Champions of Freedom event in Washington last summer, : I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be. There is, of course, a response that Apple uses Google services to provide best-in-class features and options for its customers. Although for Siri-related search services in iOS for some time. Another factoid thrown up by the case included a claim that in annual revenue to date, of which $22 billion is profit.
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With Lo And Behold, Werner Herzog Offers Up A Humanist History Of The Internet
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
What does a humanist history of the Internet look like? Though it isn’t a documentary in the journalistic sense, Werner Herzog’s paints a unique picture of the bones and skin of our technologically interconnected universe. I’ve seen and read countless documentaries and histories of the Internet’s creation and proliferation, but that didn’t stop Lo and Behold from feeling fresh, with a clear but curious perspective that had me looking at familiar events and listening to people well known to me with a different level of intensity. The film, which is debuting at the Sundance film festival this weekend, is presented by , a firm that specializes in network monitoring. Netscout’s Jim McNiel, who executive produces here, saw Herzog’s texting and driving doc and thought that he could perhaps examine the infrastructure and underpinnings of the web, exposing questions of reliability and, yes, likely crafting some nice synergy for Netscout’s core business. , Herzog was incredibly clear to me that he is not a journalist. Indeed, he frequently interacts with the subjects, asking them viewpoint questions designed to provoke a reaction. The choice of ‘nodes’ to focus on was an interesting one. Herzog speaks to Silicon Valley luminaries like roboticist and Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun and Elon Musk (whose fears about the future of Artificial Intelligence make an appearance), but he also talks to pioneers like Ted Nelson, whose concept would have created a far different Web than the one we know today — many argue a more stable and sustainable one as well. To a creator and Internet worker, Nelson’s ideas about more durable linking that allowed you to always see the source material for a cited passage and to follow its provenance always felt like a missed opportunity to me. Herzog certainly seems to feel a connection in the segment with Nelson. He tells me that Nelson was a filmmaker when he was younger, which led to a common language. The film bounces around, with connections between topics that feel more fibrous than a well-ordered shot list. Indeed, Herzog says that he let himself be led from topic to topic by his discussions with subjects. Some of those connections are surprising to Herzog, as well. It’s not called out in the film, but an astronomer at the displays tattoos derived from Herzog’s seminal documentary . The experience of following a strange hyperlink to a familiar destination made physical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtEMD4JfVp4 These connections led Herzog to explore the darker sides of the Internet, as well. One segment in particular, about people who claim to be hyper-sensitive to the radio signals that are given off by mobile devices like smartphones, was a matter of serendipity. Herzog came to the and its accompanying National Radio Quiet Zone because it was completely devoid of mobile Internet signals — so as not to interfere with the powerful radio telescope on the site. When he arrived, he discovered a loose commune of people who found some sort of peace there after being tormented by what they believe to be reactions to the signals that permeate most places where people live now. No judgment is passed in the film on their conditions, but it is clear that they are in distress, and that this ‘hole in the Internet’ is the only place they feel at peace. Another moment, antipodal but still as surprisingly affecting, comes when Herzog asks a roboticist whether he loves “Robot 8,” his team’s favorite soccer-playing cylinder. “Yes, we do,” he replies, earnestly. Thematically, the darker shades of the Internet are represented, including trolling and harassment. And some focus is put on the infrastructure of the Internet and its vulnerabilities — both in terms of logic traps and abuse. The growing pains of a system originally designed to be open, yet having to take on the trappings of privacy and civilization as it entered the larger world. The poster for the film features monks who appear in the film underneath a particular Herzog-ian voiceover. “Have the monks stopped meditating? Have they stopped praying? They all seem to be tweeting.” This transition is brought into sharp relief for Herzog, who owns a mobile phone only for emergencies, and then turns it on so rarely that it is rendered nearly unusable by requests for updates when he does so. If you’re looking for a blow-by-blow of how the Internet rolled out and participation from each and every one of the technological pioneers responsible, Lo and Behold will not give you that. But it’s absolutely worth watching when this hits Netflix or Amazon (ideal landing pads for this) if you’re interested in an examination of how the Internet is both incredibly robust and yet brittle at the same instant. If you relish a dissection of how it creates both wild interconnectedness and yet can foster isolation or even exile, this is your bag. It’s a film about the Internet made by the most genuinely curious of all documentary filmmakers, and what could be more human than that? Read my full interview with McNiel and Herzog about the film .
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Canvs Raises $5.6M To Help TV Networks Track Viewers’ Emotions
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
is a startup measuring emotion on social media, but CEO Jared Feldman insisted that we shouldn’t think of it as . He said that’s because existing tools for measuring sentiment have earned something of a bad reputation. Where those tools are usually limited to classifying social media posts as good, bad or neutral, Canvs can classify a statement into 56 different emotional categories, including like love, dislike, annoying, boring or crazy. Canvs announced today that it has raised $5.6 million in Series A funding led by KEC Ventures. Other investors in the Series A include Rubicon Venture Capital, Gary Vaynerchuk and BRaVe Ventures, Social Starts and Milestone Venture Partners. The company’s big goal is to update the way television networks, media agencies and other businesses measure audience response to their content — not how many people watched, but rather how they felt about it. So instead of calling a handful of people into a room for a focus group, you get a timeline showing the breakdown of all the different emotions expressed on social media around given piece of content. You can even connect that data directly to the moment in the show or the ad that provoked a certain response. Canvs customers include Sony Pictures, SMG, NBCU and Viacom. Feldman said the company has built semantic and natural language technology that helps it parse the vagaries of how we all write on social media, with slang, misspellings, emojis and more. For example, he said it can understand phrases that sentiment analysis tools would struggle with, like “I can’t freaking stand how much I love this show.” To do that, Canvs has built a data team led by Chief Scientist Sam Hui (also an associate professor at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business), plus an editorial team that deals with the “nuances” of language: “They spend a lot of time on Urban Dictionary, they spend a lot of time talking to people.” With the additional funding, Feldman said he’ll continue to expand the product to cover more social media platforms (it currently looks at Twitter, plus the customer’s Facebook and YouTube pages) and to track social media 24/7, rather than just when a show is airing. Ultimately, Feldman said Canvs’ real strength doesn’t lie in any one platform or source of data, but in the broader problem of analyzing text for emotion. “Social is our medium,” he said. “We’re using this as a means to understand how people feel about things, and that’s a much bigger problem.”
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Jeff Schumacher Of BCG Digital Ventures On The Merits of Corporate VC
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
Though the unit is seemingly late to the corporate venture game — corporate VC represented around of all invested capital last year — Schumacher suggested to TechCrunch editor-at-large Mike Butcher earlier today that BCG’s timing is actually pretty great. “We grow by acquiring a lot of broken startups and [can] provide an exit for them that they otherwise wouldn’t have.” Added Schumacher, who is based in Manhattan Beach, Calif., “I’m starting to get a lot of calls already.” You can see their quick chat, at our temporary studio in Davos, here:
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The World Economic Forum On The Future Of Jobs
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Roshan Choxi
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
The World Economic Forum (WEF) published an analysis today on the technological and sociological drivers of employment. The report, titled , validates the accelerating impact of technology on global employment trends, and also highlights serious concerns that job growth in certain industries is still very much outpaced by large scale declines in other industries. The report surveyed senior executives and chief human resources officers of various companies “representing more than 13 million employees across 9 broad industry sectors in 15 major developed and emerging economies and regional economic areas.” Executives were asked about employment trends and their drivers. The WEF summarizes the trends with: “According to many industry observers, we are today on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments in previously disjointed fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and genetics and biotechnology are all building on and amplifying one another. Smart systems—homes, factories, farms, grids or entire cities—will help tackle problems ranging from supply chain management to climate change. Concurrent to this technological revolution are a set of broader socio-economic, geopolitical and demographic developments, each interacting in multiple directions and intensifying each other.” The WEF report also stresses that socioeconomic drivers such as changes in work environment (more flexibility, on-demand work, remote work), a growing middle class, and urbanization in emerging markets contribute as much to the changes in employment trends as technology. Of the technological drivers, specific technologies highlighted in the short term (2015–2017) are mobile internet, cloud technology, cheaper computing power, and large scale data storage (“Big Data”). While their relative impact is expected to be small in the nearterm, hardware and physical technologies like robotics and the Internet of Things are expected to contribute most of their overall impact after 2018. The impact of these drivers on employment rates in various industries is both promising and concerning. While technological innovation often leads to greater productivity and prosperity, the speed of change will put an unprecedented stress on a transitioning labor force. On the impact of job creation, the report states: “…current trends could lead to a net employment impact of more than 5.1 million jobs lost to disruptive labour market changes over the period 2015–2020, with a total loss of 7.1 million jobs— two thirds of which are concentrated in the Office and Administrative job family—and a total gain of 2 million jobs, in several smaller job families.” The report argues that the world is on the cusp of a “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The first revolution was spurred by the use of water and steam to power machinery, and the second replaced water and steam-powered machines with electrical power. The third is the information technology revolution and the current revolution is described as an extension of the third, using a combination of hardware, robotics, and massive computing power to expand information technology beyond just software. There’s great reason for Silicon Valley’s optimism in a future techno-utopia, these technologies have the potential to make enormous advances in productivity and solve challenging and previously intractable problems in every industry from healthcare to transportation. Even if we take the surveys estimation of 5.1M lost jobs by 2020 with a grain of salt and trust that job growth can keep pace with job declines (albeit in different industries), it’s unequivocally clear at this point that the shift in employable skills will be a challenge for those on the losing end of that exchange. This is a problem that we can prepare for though, and the WFE is rightfully ringing the alarm bell for employers and governments to prepare the global labor force for a sudden shift that could leave many workers at risk of losing their jobs. The WFE report writes: “During previous industrial revolutions, it often took decades to build the training systems and labour market institutions needed to develop major new skill sets on a large scale. Given the upcoming pace and scale of disruption brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, however, this is simply not be an option. Without targeted action today to manage the near-term transition and build a workforce with futureproof skills, governments will have to cope with ever-growing unemployment and inequality, and businesses with a shrinking consumer base. Moreover, these efforts are necessary not just to mitigate the risks of the profound shifts underway but also to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The talent to manage, shape and lead the changes underway will be in short supply unless we take action today to develop it.”
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Hyperloop Transportation Technologies COO Explains The State Of Hyperloop Development
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Jonathan Shieber
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
It’s been a big month for hyperloop transportation. Both , the first company to try to bring Elon Musk’s vision of a transit system that could take passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under 30 minutes at speeds of around 800 MPH, and , its venture-backed competitor, have begun for the technology. In the video above, HTT chief operating officer (and former MTV-VJ) Bibop Gresta talks about what’s happening with the hyperloop company and how HTT is revolutionizing more than just transportation, but also entrepreneurship and business as well.
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From Barter To Bitcoin
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Danial Daychopan
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
Whether it’s the dollar, pound, rouble, rupee, euro or yuan, physical or digital, our entire world is built on currency exchange. But from , banknote to , the means of exchange have evolved significantly. Let’s have a look. Bartering was first recorded in Egypt in 9000 B.C., when farmers would go to market to exchange cows for sheep, with grains passing through the hands of harvesters in exchange for oils. As developed along ancient trade routes, articles of exchange became more sophisticated. Egyptian papyrus, precious stones and chariots could now buy you exotic animals, skins and minerals from Africa and Asia. Although hieroglyphics show us trade was not hassle-free, with arguments over price a common occurrence. Putting an end to such arguments, the first known currency was recorded in the ancient kingdom of Lydia (now part of Turkey). The world’s proudly displayed the head of a roaring lion on one side, with simple markings on the other. Irregular in shape and size, the coins were made from electrum – a naturally occurring mix of gold and silver – and minted according to weight, with the lowest denomination weighing a meager 0.15 grams. For that reason, coins were often weighed rather than counted. The Florin was issued in Florence around 1250 A.D.; this gold coin kept a stable value for more than a century. It was accepted across Europe and its stability played an important role in encouraging international trade on the continent. In the 13th century, travelers such as Marco Polo introduced the concept of banknotes to Europe from China, where paper currency had been in circulation since the eleventh century. But Europe was not ready for banknotes; it took another 300 years for them to take off, with Sweden the earliest adopter. The Black Death and the rise of counterfeit coins caused severe inflation. Prices returned to normal by the mid-1400s. But when Columbus established contact with the Americas later that century, a glut of precious metals on the European market destabilised currency for centuries. Founded as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in 1851, Western Union built a transcontinental telephone line across America in 1861. But after a party of Sioux warriors cut a large part of the wire to make bracelets, the pace of change slowed. When some of the bracelet-wearing warriors fell ill, a Sioux medicine man declared that the great spirit of the “talking wire” had sought revenge for its destruction. Western Union was left to connect the East and West Coast of America, with the first fund transfer via telegram taking place in 1871: the concept of e- was born. Created in 1950 by Frank McNamara when he found himself without enough cash to pay for dinner, the Diners Club Card was the world’s first credit card. Realizing his shortfall as he reached into his pocket to pay for dinner, McNamara was forced to call his wife and ask her to bring cash to the restaurant. He vowed this would be the last such supper. Today, more than half of all transactions in the U.S. and U.K. are put on plastic thanks to McNamara’s embarrassing dinner. Legend has it that John Shepherd-Barron devised the while taking a bath, which has historically proven to be the single best place to have an epiphany. Eureka! He pitched the idea to Barclays Bank, with the first model installed in Enfield, North London, in 1967. As plastic payment cards had not yet been invented, early ATMs used checks impregnated with carbon 14 – a radioactive substance – and paid out a maximum of £10 at a time. The expanding ATM network then paved the way for the rise of debit cards. In 2016, ATMs are now simply a (sometimes frustrating) fact of our daily lives. Convenience is a drug with the most bitter and exponential buildup of tolerance. As soon as you have even a smidgen, it becomes a standard requirement and you suddenly lose any idea of how people survived without it. The Bank of Scotland offered Nottingham Building Society customers the first Internet banking service, named Homelink. Customers needed a television set and a telephone to send transfers and pay the bills, building the foundations for Internet banking as we know it. The beginning of the 90s marked the bloom of click-and-brick euphoria, wherein businesses and banks alike sought to gain the loyalty of their customers by expanding into the web. But this strategy proved trickier than previously thought, as it took over 10 years for Bank of America to acquire . In 1997, Mobil Oil Corp introduced Speedpass, an electronic payment tag that let consumers pay for fuel at the pump. Speedpass was the , a concept that has now spread across the globe. As the new millennium began, it dealt a substantial psychological blow to internet culture worldwide. Seen as the mark of an era, customers were now more eager than ever to go online. To go “modern.” In 2005, retailers that had not yet signed up to chip and pin became liable for fraudulent transactions, as shoppers downed their pens and tapped in four-digit personal codes at pay points instead. Retailers were up in arms; at the time of the shift, around four in ten bank cards were yet to be upgraded to chip and pin technology. After Satoshi Nakamoto posts a paper about the cryptocurrency on the Internet in 2008, the first bitcoins are issued in 2009 against a backdrop of the global financial crisis. In the early days, individuals used the to negotiate the value of the first transactions, with one payment of 10,000 bitcoins used to indirectly buy two pepperoni pizzas from Papa John’s in 2010 (based on today’s price, those pizzas cost more than $4 million). Digital, decentralised, flexible and secure, the birth of programmable gives us control of our currency. Who knows, someday our driverless car might be able to pay nearby vehicles to let us overtake when we’re late for work. The possibilities are endless and exciting. Continuing the fintech revolution, Apple Pay is released to the public through an iOS update in 2014. The mobile service lets consumers pay using the Apple device, removing the need for a wallet. And with nearly 40 percent of U.S. retailers now accepting contactless payments, it will soon be time to leave the plastic at home. Even though b is gaining more traction as time goes by, banks and businesses still seem more interested in the underlying technology for better or worse. However, , the industry has already received over a billion dollars of VC investment and industry-wide recognition with over 35 projects announced by the world’s foremost financial institutions including NASDAQ and NYSE.
From to b , and the means of trading have morphed beyond recognition. Thanks to the new technology, this century is less about doing more for our , and more about making do more for us. This is a formative opportunity to break into the space, and at this rate of development, it is almost impossible to predict what may come next.
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Dr. Peter Vogel Makes The Case For Startups In Switzerland
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
There’s more to Switzerland than skiing, chocolate and endless beauty. Dr. Peter Vogel spoke to TechCrunch at Davos 2016 and argued that Switzerland is a great place to startup a company. But of course he would say that. Vogel is management and the Scientific Lead of a foundation dedicated to promoting startups in Switzerland. Vogal points out that Switzerland has a long history of churning out successful companies. He admits late stage capital is tough to come by in the small country, but there is an active network of angel investors and early stage VCs. Plus, there’s the location of Switzerland. It’s in the middle of everything. And then there’s the skiing.
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BitFury CEO Valery Vavilov On Increasing The Size Of Bitcoin “Blocks”
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 | null |
Ice.com’s New Owners Raise $2 Million To Bring Fair Pricing To The Jewelry Industry
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
The jewelry industry is notorious for its insane markups on products and confusing array of terminology related to the metals used or gemstone grades – as with the “ ” of diamonds, for example. Now, a new startup – that’s managed to snag the old domain name – is trying to change that. With its online jewelry marketplace, the company aims to not only offer great deals on rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and more, but also wants to educate consumers so they know what price they should be paying for a given item. , the domain, has actually been around for a while. In its previous incarnation, it was also an online jewelry store. But the older company didn’t make it through the recession, allowing the new owners to buy the domain name for $3 million in 2014 in order to set up their own shop. Now, the new Austin-based Ice.com is led by Justin Yoshimura (Chairman), who earlier his to Merkle, along with Brandon Proctor (CEO), previously CMO at , where he helped grow the business from $70 million in online retail to over $500 million over the course of five years. Ice.com also raised $2 million in seed funding, in an oversubscribed round which included investment from Maveron, Rivet, Quest, Uj Ventures, and angels Chris Friedland (Build.com founder), Kevin Chou (founder/CEO of Kabam), and Niraj Shah (founder/CEO of Wayfair). (The funding actually closed in July 2015, but the company hadn’t announced this until now, because it wanted to bring its platform out of beta first.) Explains Proctor, the founders decided to enter the online jewelry market because of the opportunity they both saw. “The online part of jewelry is still in its infancy,” he says. While the U.S. jewelry market today is over $80 billion (for fine jewelry and watches combined), the e-commerce portion is still very small. “It’s between 5 and 7 percent of the total jewelry market that’s actually online,” Proctor notes. “It’s one of those laggard categories – it’s still stuck in the dark ages. And the growth you can experience in an underdeveloped category is huge,” he adds. Ice.com’s website today operates as a marketplace, and specifically one that targets the middle of the market – meaning rings that are more likely around the $100 price point, not $5,000-plus, as on high-end sites. Since Ice.com’s goal is to offer affordable, but quality, jewelry, its on-staff gemologists vet the sellers before they go live by ordering samples, and then they continue to randomly test the products after the sellers are live. Today, there are currently over 100,000 SKUs online, but by the end of this year, the plan is to increase that to 350,000 or possibly even 500,000. That would make Ice.com bigger than any other jewelry site on the web. In addition, Ice.com negotiates with vendors on pricing – it even requires they offer their items at a certain – but undisclosed – percentage off from competitive market pricing. (Ice.com actually crawls other retailers and marketplaces on the web to determine the current market price for an item.) Proctor explains that Ice.com’s advantage over other marketplaces is that it’s a jewelry-specific site. Ebay may be large, but its reputation is still that it’s a “secondhand” marketplace. Amazon, meanwhile, isn’t specifically designed for selling jewelry and doesn’t always have all the attributes an online jewelry store would have. “Because we have a specific jewelry-based site that caters just to this audience, it gives us the ability to acquire product today at a much lower rate,” says Proctor. “And we actually require that of our vendors.” The website itself has been live for the past 18 months, but only in the fourth quarter of 2015 did the company launch the current platform which involves custom-built infrastructure over half a year in development. This includes pre-cached JavaScript on the front-end for fast load times, and the site is fully responsive so it works on any mobile device. It also just rolled out that lets buyers pay a monthly subscription (currently $12.99/mo, though that could change) in order to buy jewelry at close to cost, as well as enjoy other benefits like free birthday gifts, recommendations from a personal stylist, extended warranties and more. However, one of the key features Ice.com will offer won’t go live for about three more months: the education component. The company has been developing a database of information that will be dynamically linked to products on the site that will help consumers understand what different terms mean, and most importantly, what a fair price for that item may be. In the future, the goal is to help consumers find the best price – even if that’s not on Ice.com. As someone who’s the ideal demographic for Ice.com – female and 30’s-ish – I’d say the site has a good shot. When checking it out ahead of our interview, I found myself favoriting items and even buying something for myself – yes, at full price, out of my own pocket, in case you’re wondering.
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Google’s WiFi for Indian Train Stations Launches At Mumbai Central Railway Station Tomorrow
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Nitish Kulkarni
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
Google’s is slowly going operational starting tomorrow. As was announced late last September, Mumbai Central railway station will be the first location at which Google will provide high-speed internet access. The program, part of Google’s Access & Energy Team, is in partnership with Indian state-owned company . RailTel has built a network of fiber-optic lines along most major rail tracks across the country, which Google will be using to support Wireless Access Points at train stations. Initially, the partnership aims to provide access points at 100 train stations across India, with plans to grow to 400 stations nationwide. covers over 26,000 miles of railway track, and the company plans on growing that to cover 33,000 miles of track. At the moment, internet access is limited to train stations, with access points not being mounted on trains themselves. The program was first announced when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Google’s campus last September, and was detailed further when . At the moment, internet services at Mumbai Central and other pilot stations will be free and unrestricted. “Best of all, the service will be free to start, with the long-term goal of making it self-sustainable to allow for expansion to more stations and other places, with RailTel and more partners, in the future,” wrote Pichai on Google’s Official Blog. Taking a look at the scope of India’s railway system really gives an inkling of the scale of the operation. Mumbai Central Railway Station alone , both for Mumbai’s local commuter rail as well as for longer-haul intercity trains. The city’s commuter rail services alone transport around 7 million people daily, which gives you an idea of the kind of bandwidth that the system supports. As it spreads to more stations and rail subnetworks nationwide, it’s going to be interesting to see if Google can continue to support the speeds and connectivity that is currently promised. Google’s decision to provide internet services for free at the onset comes at an interesting time for India . While for the moment internet access through the new system is both free and unrestricted, Google does have plans to make the system financially viable. It hasn’t yet clarified if this will be supported by access fees or other types of monetization routes.
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Microsoft Adds Apple Pencil Support To Office
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
The Apple Pencil was billed as a tool that could assist both creatives and professionals. Microsoft, a company known fairly well for assisting professionals with pretty much every important document of theirs thanks to their Office suite, their Office app for iPad Pro so that users can utilize the Apple Pencil to notate and illustrate their documents, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. As part of our effort to make Office even more intuitive and easier to use, we want to make pen and ink a primary input across Office apps. While digital inking tools have been available in Office on Windows PCs since 2007, today we are releasing new inking tools in Office for iPad and iPad Pro to make it easy to use your finger or Apple Pencil to work on documents, presentations, spreadsheets and notes. You don’t need a pencil to take advantage of the new inking features in Office for iPad and iPad Pro, your finger and other active pen styluses will work just fine as well. Office has implemented some cool tricks so that you can actually use hand-drawn images or graphs in your documents. There’s a new feature called ink to shape that automatically will convert the sorry excuse for a circle (or box or arrow or line) that you drew into a perfect vector that you can then manipulate appropriately. The update itself is important as Apple looks to convince people about the potential of the iPad Pro and its giant touch screen when utilizing productivity apps. The new features are available with today’s Office for iPad update.
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MassChallenge’s John Harthorne Explains How Startups Can Fix The World
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
John Harthorne sat down today with TechCrunch at Davos 2016. And boy is he enthusiastic about startups. Harthorne is the CEO of , a large startup accelerator based in Boston and quickly expanding across the globe. As Harthorne explains, MassChallenge is different from other accelerators as it does not take an equity stake in the companies that graduate from the program. MassChallenge is a non-profit — and Harthorne is apparently kosher with not becoming a billionaire like leaders of other accelerator programs. For him, it’s about making the world a better place through startups.
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The Pine A64 Is A $15 PC With Endless Possibilities
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
PINE64 has so far raised over $1.4 million in its for their tiny, yet versatile, $15 computer. The Pine A64 costs less than three bottles of asparagus water from Whole Foods, but for that price you get a 1.2Ghz board, 512MB SDRAM, 10/100Mbps Ethernet Port, 3.5 MM Audio/Mic Output, 4K HDMI and 2 USB ports. I had the chance to chat with Johnson Jeng, Pine64’s co-founder, about some of the cool things their little PC could do, check out the video above for my interview.
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If You Hate Mornings, You’ll Really Hate Microsoft’s New Android Alarm Clock App
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
https://youtu.be/VWJyCYkMc3Y today what must be the most annoying alarm clock for Android yet — especially if you hate mornings as much as I do. The app only lets you dismiss the alarm by — you guessed it — mimicking certain facial expressions, taking a picture of an object that matches whatever color the app decides on for the day, or by repeating a tongue twister (“All I want is a proper cup of coffee, made in a proper copper coffee pot”). If you hit the snooze button, you’ll get a five-minute respite. If you don’t complete the game within 30 seconds, the app will assume that you’ve fallen asleep again and the alarm will start ringing again. Microsoft built the app as an example of what developers can create with its machine learning services. Those are surprisingly good and the company loves to show them off with odd little experiments. The first one — — was the surprise hit of Microsoft’s last Build conference, for example. With Mimicker, we are showcasing several different Project Oxford APIs,” Allison Light, a program manager on a team that develops apps for Project Oxford, said in today’s launch announcement. “We wanted to build a simple app that used Project Oxford to make it unique and interesting. Since we’re , we thought an alarm app would be easy for other developers to read the code and see how we used the APIs.” Microsoft says “an internal beta test of the app delivered positive feedback to the team.” That’s clearly a team of morning persons right there. To be fair, you can always turn off the games and use the app as a normal alarm clock, too, but what’s the fun in that?
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Walkie-Talkie Voice Messaging App Roger Lands $1M Led by Social Capital
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
, a walkie-talkie-style voice messaging app that launched in late 2015, has led by Social Capital. Voice messaging — known as push-to-talk — is nothing new. in response to the complexities of punching out Chinese characters for text messages and the rise of blockbuster chat app WeChat. Voice messaging feature is supported in almost every mainstream messaging app — including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Line and more — but the habit hasn’t really stuck with smartphone owners outside of Asia. That’s where New York-based Roger, which was founded by ex-Spotify engineers and , hopes to make a dent. (The founders’ past employment also explains why the six angel investors who also took part in the round are all former Spotify executives.) The app — which is initially for with — is beautifully designed and made with simplicity in mind. You select a friend to message and then simply click the large button to begin recording. That’s how the basics work. Vice Santos, who is Roger’s CEO, said the company has deliberately built the app to ensure that the experience is spontaneous. For example, you can’t cancel a recording once you start. While users can’t hear their own voice, since people often detest doing so, while you can’t save messages that are received from others. In a nice touch, the service can link up to iMessage to send messages to those without app, they can listen to your message via a link that loads a web-based recording. “The overall objective is how do we get people to talk more often,” Vice Santos told TechCrunch in an interview — using Roger, of course. “There are already [push-to-talk] solutions [available], but we weren’t using any of them. So we asked ourselves: ‘Can we do this dead simple thing to talk and reach anyone with an app?” he added. The idea literally hit Vice Santos when he bumped into a pole while walking and texting a friend in Sweden. Roger isn’t saying how many people are using the app right now — Vice Santos said upwards of “thousands” in over 60 countries — but he stressed that the key metric is usage and conversation threads, rather than sheer numbers. As for making money, that isn’t a focus at this point. “Monetizing too early can damage the platform. We want to grow the platform and return to this topic late,” Vice Santos explained. “More than the money, having Social Capital involved [is important.] The things that [CEO Chamath Palihapitiya] has been doing are about behavior changing — creating something people aren’t asking for, yet you change. We’re about getting people to use voice again.” “Phone calls are declining as communication increasingly moves to messaging, but texting lacks nuance and context,” Palihapitya said in a statement. “With Roger, Ricardo and team have built a beautiful app that takes the best aspects of these two mediums, creating a conversation platform that’s far more dynamic and personal.” One area where we can expect Roger to make changes is around the contextual information inside of the app, known as glimpses. Right now, the app can display the location, weather and an indication of the time of day for the person you are messaging with, and the team plans to develop this concept further. That’s important, Vice Santos told us, because this information can be a real “conversation starter.” He added that the company’s multi-national team — which includes people from Portugal (Vice Santos), Sweden, Singapore and India — and the need to communicate with family overseas puts the company in a good position for future product development and ideas. “We have family in lots of places and are big consumers of the app so we know it how it could be better and what opportunities there are,” Vice Santos said. ( : If you just downloaded Roger, you can set up a profile page with your own greeting message — , for example. Simply choose a username in the ‘Settings’ menu inside the app, then go to the ‘People’ tab and search for “greeting.” Once your new friend loads, leave a message for ‘greeting’ and that will be set as the default recording for your online URL, which will be rogertalk.com/<your username>. )
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Facebook’s Engineering Wizardry Makes Even VR Videos Load Fast
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
How did Facebook go from 1 billion to videos views per day in 18 months without the whole server farm catching fire? It’s called SVE, short for . SVE lets Facebook slice videos into little chunks, cutting the delay from upload to viewing by 10X. And to ensure the next generation of 360 and virtual reality videos load fast too, it’s invented and open sourced new geometric encoding formats. By mapping a spherical video from a typical equirectangular shape into a cube with Facebook’s specs, 360 videos on your phone or computer drop in size by 25%. Now that cube filter is on . Facebook has also developed a pyramid encoding technique that makes virtual reality videos for headsets 80% smaller. That means even when a video lets you look in any direction, you won’t have to sit there buffering first. Facebook revealed this new tech at its Video @Scale conference, an unabashed attempt to recruit top video engineering talent. This is critical in to be the home of video. On YouTube, you’re purposefully trying to watch something, so you’ll put up with a slight delay. But you usually don’t go to Facebook trying to watch videos. You just as you scroll the News Feed. If they take forever to load you’ll scroll right by or go elsewhere. Facebook knows video is the future of social. If it’s literally slow to adapt, not only will it miss out on an addictive content format that drives tons of engagement. Video ads are incredibly lucrative, but Facebook doesn’t want to jam too many in your feed. Instead its strategy is to show them as related videos after you watch one you discover organically. But none of that will happen if you have to interrupt your feed reading while a loading icon spins. [facebook url=”https://www.facebook.com/Engineering/videos/10153781047207200/” /] With so much video being uploaded to the Internet, Facebook has also been working on how to make sense of it all. Facebook is making breakthroughs on using artificial intelligence to identify objects, scenes, actions and more in videos. Rather than having humans teach AI by manually labeling videos, Facebook’s Vision Understanding team is investigating ways for AI to identify individual voxels — or video pixels. If Facebook can figure it out, it could suddenly recognize what’s in videos so it knows who to show them to. You like cats? Facebook’s AI will find you cat videos. Sportsball? Facebook could push those clips to its . Advertisers would kill for this…or at least pay Facebook a boatload. We are rapidly approaching the era of the artificial intelligence haves and have-nots. Companies like Facebook and Google that make enough money to fund pioneering research will reap huge benefits their poorer competitors can’t touch. Companies like Yahoo and Twitter may encounter tough times if they can’t build this AI adtech. And it’s an upward spiral for those who can. Sell ads, fund research, develop AI ad tech, sell more ads, develop better AI ad tech, build or buy next-gen technologies, win the future.
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 26 | null |
Microsoft Announces A Dropbox App For Windows 10 Tablets & PCs, Windows 10 Mobile App “Coming Soon”
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 |
Microsoft and Dropbox unveiled an expansion of their partnership today with the debut of a native application for Windows 10 devices. The app, which will work on both Windows 10 PCs and tablets, follows the companies’ earlier integrations across both web and mobile devices. However, the app is not yet live in the across all regions – instead, it will become available over the next few days, notes Dropbox in an . This new app was built on the Universal Windows Platform, with support for Windows 10-specific features like Windows Hello, Live Tiles, and Notifications. A is also available, but lacks the Windows 10 features. Similar to other Dropbox application on competing platforms, Dropbox for Windows 10 will allow users to drag-and-drop items in between the Dropbox app and Windows File Explorer, as well as copy or paste files. It also supports other features, including Quick Search (where you can just start typing to see results); interactive notifications that let you accept invites without launching the app; comments, @mentions; Jump List access (meaning you right-click on the app icon in the taskbar to access recent files); as well as “Windows Hello,” a feature that lets you use your fingerprint, face or iris to unlock Dropbox. In addition, Microsoft says that a version of Dropbox designed for Windows 10 Mobile is also “coming soon,” but declined to provide a launch date. Microsoft and Dropbox, as you may recall, have rolled out a number of integrations between their two businesses, beginning with the of a formal partnership in November 2014. Since then, the companies have made it easier for users to access each others’ products and services from their respective platforms. For example, , including the ability to edit Office documents from inside the Dropbox app. And Microsoft Office users were later allowed , too. [gallery ids="1266174,1266173,1266172,1266169"] According to a from Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Developer Platform and Evangelism and Chief Evangelist, the company’s partnership with Dropbox has since helped “more than 17 million people” get their work done. The expansion to natively support Windows 10 devices is a notable one, given that Microsoft now claims worldwide.
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MyMusicTaste, A Crowdsourcing Platform For Concerts, Raises $10M Series A
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
, a Seoul-based startup that gauges fan interest to help figure out where to plan concerts, plans to expand throughout Asia after landing a $10 million Series A led by Softbank Ventures Korea. Other participants in the round include Samsung Ventures Investment, Formation 8, Golden Gate Ventures, Timewise Investment, Partners Investment, Bokwang Ventures Investment, and DT Capital. Chief executive officer Ethan Jaeseok Lee came up with the idea for MyMusicTaste while running a Korean fan site for Coldplay. While trying to figure out why Coldplay hadn’t toured to Seoul yet, Lee realized how risky live concerts can be for music artists and organizers. “Due to low ticket sales, even people like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga have had concerts cancelled,” says Lee. “I thought, what if fans can request an event first and then we analyze how many people will come and how many are willing to pay for concert tickets?” Though Lee hasn’t managed to bring Coldplay to Seoul (yet), MyMusicTaste, which works directly with event planners and artists, has organized 80 concerts in 32 cities since it launched in 2013 and currently claims 500,000 users, 90 percent of whom are based outside of Korea. Many of the artists on MyMusicTastes’ platforms are Korean pop groups (including boy group EXO, which ) but it plans to use its Series A funding to add more artists from labels in the U.S., Japan, and Thailand. MyMusicTaste is also eyeing growth in China, where it will set up an office soon. Lee says that the worldwide music market is worth $50 billion and over half of that, or $26 billion, comes from the concert industry, which . To figure out how many users will actually spend money on a ticket and aren’t just casually expressing support for an artist, MyMusicTaste asks them to go on “social missions.” For example, the site will ask fans to fill out short surveys, like how much money they are willing to spend on tickets in certain cities, or share video clips from artists on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. People who are willing to complete social missions are more likely to buy tickets. MyMusicTaste makes revenue by selling tickets and taking a commission and promoting concerts organized through its platform. When it first launched, most concerts organized through MyMusicTaste had audience sizes of 200 to 300, but that is quickly increasing. For example, MyMusicTaste is currently promoting an EXO show with capacity for 15,000 people. Lee identifies , which is based in California and promotes about 22,000 concerts a year, as his startup’s main competitor. MyMusicTastes hopes to differentiate by working with up-and-coming artists in addition to established stars. Lee also claims that MyMusicTastes’ social missions help keep its marketing costs lower and that it plans to preserve its margins by continuing to focus on helping concert organizers instead of diversifying into artist and event management like Live Nation.
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RNTS Media Completes $45M Acquisition Of Mobile Ad Company Heyzap
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
The deal is done — Germany company says it has completed its acquisition of . The acquisition is worth up to $45 million, specifically $20 million in cash upfront, with cash and stock earn outs of $25 million. It was and represents a team up between two mobile ad companies, namely Heyzap and RNTS subsidiary Fyber. RNTS CEO Andreas Bodczek said the entire Heyzap team will be joining the Fyber office in San Francisco, and the companies will be working together to create “a unified platform that combines the best of both worlds,” though he added that the details are still being worked out. “Monetization strategies on the publisher side get a lot more sophisticated,” Bodczek said. “Publishers have become more demanding about the quality of these services.” Heyzap was incubated at Y Combinator and raised $8 million in total funding from investors including Founder Collective, Union Square Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures, . RNTS also says that by adding the Heyzap’s reach of 130 million unique users, the combined platform will reach more than half a billion people each month. An earlier version of this post reversed figures for upfront payment and earnout. The figures are now corrected.
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Grocery Delivery Startup Honestbee Launches In Taiwan
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
, a grocery delivery service backed by Formation 8, has launched in Taipei, its fourth city so far. Services are already available in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Niseko, Japan. During the first half of this year, Honestbee also plans to expand into Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta. Based in Singapore, Honestbee that is earmarked for international growth. Honestbee operates similarly to because it sends shoppers to grocery stores to pick up items for customers instead of maintaining its own inventory. The company promises same day delivery. Customers pay store prices for groceries purchased through Honestbee, which monetizes by charging a flat delivery fee (though that is currently being waived for purchases over $199) and splitting revenue with retail partners. In addition to large grocery chains, Honestbee also works with smaller specialty merchants, like organic food stores and wine sellers, that want to reach more customers but don’t have the resources to set up their own online stores. Increasing its roster of sellers that aren’t on other platforms is one of the ways Honestbee hopes to differentiate from competitors like HappyFresh, a . Though Taiwan is often overlooked as a potential market by consumer tech startups, Honestbee co-founder and chief executive officer Joel Sng said it was on Honestbee’s list because one-third of consumers there already order grocery products online and one-half say they would be willing to buy groceries online in the future. “People in Taiwan are very busy, and more often than that, grocery shopping tends to be a bit of a chore,” Sng tells TechCrunch. “We have conducted research and found out that people spend three hours per week on average to do grocery shopping. This brings us to 156 hours per year which can be saved to focus on something that matters more.”
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Chinese Travel Booking Giant Ctrip Invests $180M In India’s MakeMyTrip
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
, the Chinese travel booking site valued at over $10 billion, has taken a big step in India after it in , a fellow booking service that covers flights, hotels and bus ticketing in the South Asian country. The investment is in convertible bonds but MakeMyTrip, a 15-year-old company that is listed on the Nasdaq, will allow Ctrip to own up to 26.6 percent of its existing shareholding. Ctrip will also get a seat on the MakeMyTrip board. News of the investment sent the Indian company’s share price soaring — it rose by at the close of trading on Thursday to give MakeMyTrip a market cap of $689.4 million. Statements from both companies indicated that they will work closely together going forward. “We believe there are many similarities in the Indian and Chinese online travel markets and we expect this strategic relationship between two market leaders to be mutually beneficial,” commented Deep Kalra, founder and group CEO at MakeMyTrip. Ctrip closed out the year with , which is controlled by majority shareholder Baidu, in October. The deal, which wasn’t one of the many consolidation mergers that happened in China in 2015, gave Ctrip a 45 percent voting interest in Qunar in exchange for Internet giant Baidu taking 25 percent of Ctrip. Together, to account for 70-80 percent — iResearch claims Qunar leads flight bookings with 32 percent marketshare, while Ctrip is winning on hotel bookings with 39 percent marketshare — so, with a dominance in China secured thanks to their alliance, Ctrip’s foray into India makes sense. India is increasingly an attractive market for Chinese tech companies. at home coupled with the run in stark contrast to India, where and have the potential to bring hundreds of millions of the population online for the first time. That’s caused Chinese tech firms — in both the hardware and software spaces — to move into India over the past year or so. Phone-maker , but China’s top internet firms BAT — an acronym that covers Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — have done so, too, illustrating that the industry in general is casting glances westwards towards India and its billion-plus population. Tencent made a major India-based investment last year — by leading its $90 million Series C round — while Alibaba increased its holding in mobile payments and e-commerce company Paytm, which was valued at over $1 billion from . Baidu, is yet to make an investment, but the company has for potential opportunities. Now we can add Ctrip to that list. “Today’s announcement marks the beginning of the strategic relationship between Ctrip and MakeMyTrip. Through this transaction, Ctrip has now gained exposure to India’s fast growing online travel market,” James Liang, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Ctrip, said in a statement.
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Colleges Are Overreacting Like Your Parents And Banning Hoverboards
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
Surprise, surprise! If you buy cheap off-brand electronics from a shoddy factory in Asia, they may have poorly-designed lithium-ion batteries that can catch fire. After nearly basically banned hoverboards overnight, college campuses are now jumping on the hoverboard hate bandwagon. Over a have banned the two-wheel devices (that don’t actually hover), with the latest being Georgetown University. In a letter to students today, Georgetown’s COO explained their rationale: Based on these reported safety risks and as a precaution, do NOT bring hoverboards or self-balancing scooters to campus. Until the Consumer Product Safety Commission makes a determination on the safety of these devices, we are their use or storage on our campus. We continue to encourage the proper use of other transportation means for daily life, including bicycles. Now I want to make it clear that I find faux hoverboards pretty dumb and, while fun to ride, I make a fool of myself every time I ride one. However, that being said, this new trend of banning hoverboards is an overreaction and shows that people don’t really understand how gadgets work. Do these colleges know that hoverboards aren’t the only gadgets that can be made with faulty, cheap lithium-ion batteries, and other devices like , , and also occasionally blow up? If you want to ban off-brand hoverboards, why not just ban all off-brand electronics? As of three weeks ago, the U.S Consumer Protection Safety Commission has discovered of hoverboards catching fire. Considering millions of devices were sold this holiday season alone, 12 isn’t exactly an epidemic. That being said, I understand that hoverboards with cheap lithium-ion batteries are bad, and that any risk of fire or explosion is serious stuff. But, instead of causing FUD and banning them from your college campus (which, let’s be real, will probably lead to more students using them), why not be realistic and find a better solution to the problem, like actually helping your students figure out if their hoverboards are shoddy or legit?
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Samsung Continues Its Financial Recovery Despite Missing Analyst Expections
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
Samsung’s slow recovery appears to be continuing after the South Korean tech company release its financial projections for the final quarter of 2015, although they are lower than industry analyst expectations. that it expects to see a 6.1 trillion KRW ($5.1 billion) profit on total sales of 53 trillion KRW ($44 billion) for Q4 2015. That would represent a 15 percent year-on-year increase in profit on , but a 7.5 percent dip on Samsung’s . Analysts had expected the company to post total revenue of 6.6 trillion KRW, a figure which it looks like it will fall shy of. We’ll find out for sure when the full figures are released at the end of this month. There’s plenty of caution coming from the company already though. Samsung co-CEO Kwon Oh-hyun warned employees that 2016 could be another challenging year for the Korean giant. “The global economy will continue to see tepid growth while uncertainty will grow in emerging markets accompanying financial risks,” he said in a New Year’s speech, . in the high-end of the smartphone market, while a collection of Chinese OEMs, led by and the , are battling it in the mid- and low-end sectors, particularly in emerging markets like Latin America, India and Southeast Asia. Added to that, global smartphone shipments growth is expected to continue to slow, continuing primarily due to lower growth in China, which is the world’s largest phone market. That trend is impacting all phone-makers, not just Samsung, but, as one of the big dogs in its space, Samsung could feel the chill harder than most.
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Lenovo Is Making The First Google Project Tango Phone
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
Lenovo announced at CES that the company would be producing the first phone. As a reminder, Project Tango is that adds depth as well as a bunch of sensors to your device’s camera. The conference was a little short on details. All we know is that Lenovo is going to release a phone that is going to cost less than $500. The device is going to be released this Summer and the company doesn’t have a final design just yet. The picture you can see above is just one out of the five designs they are currently working on. Also new today, Google announced an to motivate developers. The best apps will be pre-loaded on Lenovo’s phone. The only remaining question is whether Lenovo is an exclusive partner or if Google is going to announce more phones with other OEMs in the coming months. Project Tango is still brand new and Google is probably not going to roll out Tango to millions of Android phones just yet. In case you need a refresher, we played with the that was released last year. You can watch our video recap below.
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Announcing The Finalists For The TC CES Hardware Battlefield: Nima, Carbon, IdentiLock, And Wiivv
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
The third annual Hardware Battlefield at CES 2016 is nearly complete. Fourteen companies took to the TechCrunch stage at the Sands Expo with six minutes to prove their viability in the market. And it wasn’t just the audience that they were trying to impress. We had expert judges including Fitbit’s James Park, FirstMark Capital’s Matt Turck, and GV’s Lo Toney waiting in the wings during presentations to put these hardware startups through the ringer. But now, it’s finally time to announce the four finalists who will battle it out tomorrow for the Hardware Battlefield trophy and the $50,000 prize. The finalists are: has developed a product called the Nima, which lets you take a small sample of food and test it for gluten traces through a portable sensor and disposable pods. built a robotic arm called Katia (short for “Kick Ass Trainable Intelligent Arm”, which is just $2,000 and can be trained to do a wide variety of tasks by just about anyone, whether or not they have expert knowledge. The is a smart trigger lock for firearms that uses ultra-fast fingerprint reading technology to let you unlock your weapon the instant you need it and keep it 100 percent secure when you don’t. is a fully custom insole for your shoes that can be ordered by simply taking a few pictures of your feet, with the potential to steal market share from both high-end orthotics and low-end store-bought insoles. Judges for the Hardware Battlefield finals include TC Senior Editor Matt Burns, CyPhy Works CEO and Founder Helen Greiner, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and Highway1 VP Brady Forrest. You can catch the Hardware Battlefield Finals at 2pm PT tomorrow.
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Lumus Is Showing A Wide Field-Of-View Smart Glasses Prototype
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Jay Donovan
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
These days, it’s hard to stand out in the smart glasses category. There are many underwhelming products coming to market now and many more that, while extravagant, seem to be caught in the “forever-coming-soon” stage. It’s therefore refreshing to see a real live demo that really delivers. Among other things, makes tiny optical displays for viewing augmented reality content. We often see these displays manifest themselves as the lenses of smart glasses like in their DK 50 and DK 45 smart glasses–on view at CES. These two glasses have 40 and 23 degree fields of view, respectively. They’re the brightest overlay displays I’ve seen in smart glasses. covered these two latest offerings from the floor of CES in great detail yesterday (40 degree FOV, 720p binocular vision, Snapdragon processor) and I have to say that after trying them on myself, Lumus’s intellectual property, which relies on multiple prisms in their lenses, is rad. It was better than I thought it would be. It was, in my opinion, profound. But what Lumus also had laying around its booth that didn’t get reported on was a new prototype of lens with a 60-degree field of view. Ari Grobman and Dave Goldman from Lumus prefaced that it was a very raw prototype and only had one lens, but as I looked through it, the content pretty much covered the field of view from my nose to my wider periphery. It was bright and colorful and ripe for enterprise, medical or tactical uses. And according to Lumus, the wider the field of view, the more realistic the augmented content and experience can be. Let me say this loud and clear: it is not a consumer device. Many of Lumus’s contracts are military or medical. However looking through a display like this–that covers this much of your field of view–is definitely a picture of what could be possible when their technology comes to consumers. This could be as early as 2018 according to Lumus. My rudimentary photo doesn’t do the 60 degree prototype justice, but it was expansive.
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App-Improvement AI And The Future Of Web Development
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Larry Alton
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
Artificial intelligence (AI) is permeating our lives — just not in the ways we might have expected from reading sci-fi novels or watching robot apocalypse-themed movies. Instead of having live robots walking around, doing our dishes and engaging us in conversation, AI exists primarily in web and mobile apps designed to help us with small intellectual chores, like finding out when the Civil War began or where the nearest taco restaurant is located. Until recently, most of these AI developments have been designed to make consumer processes easier; for example, digital assistants take on the role of an intermediary search engine to process a vocal request and fetch appropriate results. Now, the trend is starting to shift toward app development — at least in an early stage. Rather than introducing a layer of AI to help users make use of a given app, these AI programs are operating in the background, making the apps better. They’re less glamorous than the human-like interactions programs like Siri that are capable of mimicking human speech patterns, but they’re even more useful — even if you never see them. Google is known in the search engine optimization community because of its frequent, manual algorithm updates that shake up rankings and frustrate webmasters. Now, its algorithm is starting to update itself. Google RankBrain is , an algorithm update that centered on identifying semantic patterns in human speech and delivering results that match a user’s intention (rather than individual keyword phrases). RankBrain works by clarifying complex, ambiguous or hard-to-understand queries so the search engine can fetch better results. As it learns new correlations between semantic phrases and successful results, it will update itself to serve queries better in the future. If applied to more areas of Google’s search algorithm, eventually the software could “learn” to update itself with little to no human interference, resulting in a self-modifying app on a constant cycle of improvement. Wikipedia is also developing an to improve its massive store of information. Previously relying solely on human editors, Wikipedia’s new Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES) automatically identifies problematic or inaccurate edits to articles and assigns them quality scores, helping editors catch them quickly and easily. As ORES spends more time identifying damaging edits, it will learn faster and more efficient ways to catch similar edits in the future. As by Bloomberg Business, 2015 was a breakthrough year in the world of AI. It’s not the type of new developments that are coming out, but rather the pace that these developments are being produced that’s astounding. The rate at which new learning algorithms are developed is faster than ever, and new AI programs are rolling out almost constantly to address new problems. The developments at Google and Wikipedia are just two examples of this. As quantifiable examples, image recognition error rates have fallen from 42 percent to just over 5 percent between 2011 and 2014, and the number of AI software projects at Google has climbed from less than 100 in 2012 to more than 2,700 this year. There are several reasons why there’s such a renewed burst in AI development. First, cloud computing is more available and more cost-efficient than ever, giving more people and companies more power with which to innovate. Researchers also have access to more information with more plentifully available data, meaning more people can learn new things in the AI field more quickly and efficiently. AI is more affordable, more practical and more quickly evolving than ever. Major tech players like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are already finding new ways to incorporate the technology into their consumer-facing products. But more importantly, they’re starting to use it as a substitute for the demand for human innovation. Rather than relying on humans to find and apply improvements, apps will theoretically be able to find and apply updates to themselves, freeing up the tech workforce to fuel even further AI developments. The step beyond involves AI algorithms developing even better AI algorithms. At that point, we’ll be well into the — but that’s a topic for another day.
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IBM Sells Salary.com Compensation Business To The Original Founding Team
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
This week at CES, unveiled some that underscore its push into big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence. But at the same time, the company has quietly divested itself of an older asset. Today it was that — a portal for people to find and compare remuneration data across lots of different industries, as well as look for jobs — along with IBM’s wider compensation business, has been sold by IBM back to the original Salary.com founding team, which has teamed up with H.I.G. and Prudential Capital to finance the deal. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed, a spokesperson for Salary.com tells TechCrunch. IBM said the business was no longer strategic. “IBM continually manages its portfolio by identifying and divesting non-core, non-strategic areas within our business,” a spokesperson said. IBM had been looking to sell the business and found a willing buyer in the founding team, a source said. For some context, Salary.com was a startup that first emerged in the first wave dot-com businesses. It went public back in 2007 and was then acquired by a human resources company called Kenexa in 2010. IBM then acquired Kenexa for in 2012 to build out more analytics tools for businesses, specifically aimed at HR and talent functions. Kenexa then became integrated into IBM’s cloud applications business. The acquisition includes a list of current customers (including “many of the world’s largest employers” and small businesses); cloud-based compensation data and software that is sold to enterprises; consultation services and historical data on compensation; an online ad business targeted at HR professionals; and consumer-focused content that includes an analytics tool that lets people determine the worth of a given job based on parameters like location. The plan will be to augment all that with more next-generation analytics focused on employee compensation strategies. And in a cool twist, Salary.com is now going to get the band back together, so to speak. It says it’s in the process now of hiring back more than 20 of its original employees, to add to the 120 that worked for it under IBM in the U.S. and China. Considering that IBM is still developing lots of other cloud-based analytics tools for enterprises, , and has been focused on amassing many data points for is bigger big data play, it’s not clear why Salary.com is no longer considered core to its strategy. Recent years have seen a big push into HR services from the world of startups and other big tech companies — from companies like and through to biggies like . There may be an argument that the original Salary.com founders — including Kent Plunkett, who is returning to become its CEO — are in the best position to figure out how best to develop the business through a reset back to startup mode. “Compensation is complex, and for today’s employers to be successful, they need the tools and data that enable them to simplify the connections between people and pay,” said Kent Plunkett, CEO of Salary.com, in a statement. “Salary is the most widely recognized and trusted source for employer-reported compensation data to facilitate decision-making around employee compensation. On behalf of the founding team, we are thrilled to provide our customers with the high-touch service and expertise that they expect in the compensation space.” Even if IBM is not keen to pursue it with Salary.com, it seems that there may yet be a gap in the market that the original founders think they can fill. “As the compensation category remains under-served, the growth opportunity in front of Salary is tremendous,” said Plunkett. “We are eager to steer the company in an exciting new direction and become the SaaS platform of choice for employers seeking the most accurate and reliable compensation data available.” Updated with comment from IBM.
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The GoSun Stove Cooks With Just The Power Of The Sun
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
Fire is for prehistoric man. The modern man uses the sustainable and renewable energy of solar power to cook meats an veggies – like the GoSun Stove. The company was selected from the halls of CES as the Wild Card contender in Hardware Battlefield 2016 where it is competing with 14 other startups in a bid to win $50,000 and the Hardware Battlefield trophy. The stove is clever. It uses a unique design that directs sunlight towards a cylinder, which the company says can heat up to 550 degrees in some models in 10 to 20 minutes. The food cooks inside a solar evacuated tube that absorbs more than 80% of the sunlight reflected onto the tube. The design captures light from a broad range of angles, allowing the GoSun to keep on cooking while the sun moves across the sky. The stove is efficient enough to even work in the winter. And if clouds cover up the sun, the GoSun Stove stays warm enough to even continue cooking food. The company sells a variety of models. The GoSun Sport costs $279 and is currently available. The GoSun Grill is the company’s latest model and is expecting to ship it this summer at a price of $599. This model is much larger than the Sport and can even cook whole chickens or bake a cake. Then, for $749, there’s a model that features a USB recharger that harvests energy from the stove’s heat to recharge electronics while your roast is cooking.
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Kymeta’s Partnership With Panasonic Brings Internet To Maritime Markets
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
This week at CES, Kymeta announced a partnership with Panasonic to bring lightweight, flat-panel antennas to the maritime market. Kymeta’s core technology, the mTenna, is designed to communicate with satellites in order to bring high speed internet to anything on the move. The partnership will allow Kymeta to leverage Panasonic’s satellite network as well as their current maritime customer base, which includes owners of yachts, merchant vessels, cruise ships, and other vessels. Panasonic has agreed to order a “significant volume” of mTennas to manufacture and distribute for vessels around the world. The mTenna would replace larger and more complex antenna options in the maritime market. Traditionally, an antenna for a vessel requires weeks of downtime to install. The current technology also requires moving parts which means a noisier antenna with more wear and tear. One of the unique innovations in the mTenna is its ability to use software to electronically acquire signals with no moving parts. However, the mTenna isn’t ready for commercial use just yet. More work is required to perfect this new technology and prove its capabilities. Prototype testing of the antenna and terminal specifically for maritime use will begin this year and will become commercially available in 2017. The partnership comes shortly after Kymeta successful results from a mobility test, which analyzed the on-the-go functionality of the mTenna on the roof of a car over the course of 8,000 miles. The test also proved that the mTenna was capable of communicating with Ku-band satellites, whereas previously the antenna had just been tested with Ka-band satellites. This distinction is important because while some satellite operators (potential Kymeta partners) may work with both types of satellites, others will only operate in one band or the other. Panasonic, for example, uses a global Ku-band satellite network which can provide internet, television, and mobile phone services to planes, ships, and those in remote locations. Panasonic is a customer of Intelsat, the operator of the world’s largest satellite fleet. This means that the Panasonic satellite fleet that Kymeta would be using is operated by Intelsat, with whom Kymeta partnered with back in February, 2015. Håkan Olsson, VP of Maritime at Kymeta, told TechCrunch that for this reason, the new Panasonic partnership “harmonizes nicely with our current partnership with Intelsat to develop Ku-band antennas for maritime.” The Panasonic eXConnect Antenna / Image Courtesy of What’s interesting about this partnership is that Panasonic already offers a Ku-band antenna (albeit for airplanes) to communicate with its satellite network. Their eXConnect antenna, currently used to provide internet for United airplanes, is thicker and larger than Kymeta’s mTenna. The eXConnect technology is also inherently different. It uses motors to steer the antenna and catch a satellite signal whereas the mTenna uses software to electronically communicate with satellites. With a smaller, lighter frame and no moving parts, the mTenna is a large improvement over Panasonic’s existing options. If, for example, Kymeta partnered with another company to provide internet to the maritime market, Panasonic may not have been able to compete with the mTenna’s patented technology. Image Couretsy of Kymeta In addition to maritime vessels, Kymeta’s technology could bring Internet to planes and cars. Kymeta told TechCrunch that another key partnership related to the automobile market will be announced next week. There’s certainly a lot of promise associated with the mTenna. To deliver on those promises, Kymeta will need strategic partnerships with satellite operators and various manufacturers in addition to proving out their technology. To date, the partnership with Panasonic has been Kymeta’s most significant step toward achieving these goals and bringing the mTenna to market.
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Today On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Drones, Smart Fridges, French Startups And Tales Of CES
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
This week, we’re bringing you not one, not two but three episodes of the TechCrunch Gadgets podcast, live from CES. Every morning, we look back at the news coming out of the show. In case you missed it this morning, have a look at this morning’s show to get our take on the current , Samsung’s and other wearables, and a preview of the interviews of the day. You can already re-watch some of today’s program in and experience CES with us from the Sands Expo in Las Vegas. Today’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast is brought to you by , , and . Make sure to watch the live stream of our second Gadgets Podcast at 9:40 A.M. PT tomorrow morning.
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Segway Made A Robot That Connects To Your Two-Wheeled Scooter
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
Another day, another autonomous two-wheeled robot. , the maker of two wheeled riding machines, has released something called the Segway Robot. This little robotic head connects to a standard Segway and adds an Intel RealSense RGB-D camera, speech recognition, and self-driving capabilities all powered by an onboard computer. It will also have an SDK so you can program your robot to do things like interact with people and, with arms, pick up object. The robot fits on the new Ninebot Segway base in April. This base is self-balancing just like the old Segways and it allows the little robot to scoot around with reckless abandon. The robot is a joint partnership between Intel and Ninebot. A developer version will launch in 2016 followed by a commercial version.
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Meet Glance, A Smart Wall Clock That Displays More Than The Time
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
is a smart wall clock featured in our Hardware Battlefield competition at CES and launching soon. The device is not only a good looking wall clock, it is also a great way to get all the information you need in a visual way. When you wake up, the clock will display how much you slept based on your activity tracking device. The clock, which is 12 inches in diameter and lasts 3-6 months on a battery, can also showcase emails and Uber arrival times. The company’s founder and CEO Anton Zriashchev spoke to TechCrunch about additional use cases for his clock. “It shows your sleep hours right at the moment you wake up, the weather forecast at the moment you are going for a walk,” he says, and it can show your schedule from Google Calendar for the next day. Ziraschev said he was inspired by a book from entrepreneur David Rose called “Enchanted Objects,” which spoke of a more organic way of interacting with digital data. And it’s true, Glance is a good looking yet useful object. The Glance team is based in Singapore and is marketing the company as the first smart wall clock that displays data from wearables including Jawbone and Fitbit, smart home devices like SmartThings, Nest and more. This is not the first rodeo for Ziraschev. “Last year I had a startup in the smart home area and it failed for some reason,” he said. But it’s all about timing after all, and Glance knows a few things about that.
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Snap, The 4K Flying Camera With Auto-Tracking, Is Ready For The Spotlight
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
, a flying camera we , is ready for the spotlight as it takes the stage today to compete in the TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield at CES. The device, made by Vantage Robotics, provides an alternative for those who want professional aerial shots but don’t want the hassle of controlling a cumbersome (and expensive) drone like the DJI Inspire. We now have specs for Snap (which will ship this spring), and they look pretty great. Snap will weigh just 1.1 pounds, and have 20 minutes of flying time per charge. The camera itself will be a 4K-capable Sony Exmor sensor, mounted on a mini mechanical smooth-lock gimbal, which the company says is about 6 times lighter than standard drone gimbals. While users will be able to use their phone or tablet to control Snap, Vantage Robotics has included a ton of software-based features that will let users capture professional quality camera shots without even having to control the drone. Some of these features are air tripod, which lets the camera stay in place while automatically turning to keep the subject in frame; virtual wire, which allows the camera to follow a subject along a predefined wire (while avoiding any obstacles); and free-form following. Snap will eventually retail for $1,295 but is available for preorder now for a limited-time price of $895 from .
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