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Mike Butcher
| 2,016 | 1 | 21 | null |
Gilt’s Unicorn Tale Comes To An End After Being Acquired For $250M
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
Hudson’s Bay Company, the owner of department chain stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, said today it was acquiring Gilt Groupe for $250 million. The sale still represents a tough end to the story of Gilt. The startup was one of the original darling flash-sale sites coming out of New York. But that whole market has found itself challenged by slim operating margins, its initial popularity waning, and the difficulties of building a large-scale e-commerce operation. HBC CEO Jerry Storch said the company expects to address primary issues with Gilt’s operation that can put a strain on its bottom line. The company hopes to reduce costs by lowering Gilt’s customer acquisition through a physical integration with its Saks Off 5th — where Gilt members can return items. Part of that plan is to open Gilt concept shops inside Saks Off 5th stores with curated assortments, which the company thinks will be a prospecting tool for Gilt members. “[Flash sale sites] continue to be quite successful, they grow with the customer,” HBC CEO Jerry Storch said. “The struggle is the bottom line, and we’re addressing two of the most critical pain points by sourcing customers at a lower cost and having returns to stores. These flash websites, it’s their manifest destiny to be part of brick and mortar.” There’s also the mobile part of the equation: Storch said the company will continue to invest in Gilt’s mobile presence, which is one of the company’s strong points. “Gilt can teach us a lot for our other banners,” he said on the company’s mobile strategy. Prior to the acquisition, the company had been widely considered to be part of the billion-dollar startup club. But the company struggled to become profitable, and in October last year the company continued cutting jobs ( ). The company previously said a few times that it would go public in 2013 and 2014, before putting that on hold indefinitely and raising additional capital. It’s also not the greatest return for its investors. , which makes this look like a deal that will not return the total amount of money that it had raised. Fab, too, was valued at $1 billion before collapsing and eventually pivoting to a home design startup . Re/code . But perhaps with the scale of Hudson’s Bay Company, Gilt will find itself able to swing its way to profitability as a cog in a larger-scale operation. Storch seems to believe so, and as part of the acquisition, Hudson’s Bay Company expects Gilt to contribute approximately $40 million of Adjusted EBITDA by its fiscal 2017 year. The company also expects Gilt to contribute $500 million to its 2016 fiscal year sales. HBC does not intend to reduce Gilt’s staff as part of the acquisition, Storch said. “Gilt will remain Gilt,” he said. “It has an incredible, loyal customer base, and a culture of innovation we intend on fostering and growing.”
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Who The F Is The EFF? John Legere Wants To Know
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
Welp, it happened. T-Mobile CEO John Legere decided to field questions about the company launched. Is it great? Is it throttling? The . The organization also decided to participate in Legere’s Twitter Q&A which led to this gem: . — John Legere (@JohnLegere) “Who the fuck are you anyway, EFF? Why are you stirring up so much trouble? And who pays you?” Legere says in response. I mean, there’s this official description: “The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights group based in the United States.” But just in case that wasn’t enough, the has responded and needs your help: T-Mobile's CEO is dying to know who EFF is. Friends, please tweet at with the hashtag to enlighten him. — EFF (@EFF) This should be interesting. Stay tuned.
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Get You A Growler Of Brass Monkey On Demand With Hopsy
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 |
We truly live in the future, friends. Food on demand. Love on demand. . Now you’ve got growlers – essentially buckets – of beer on demand. This new app, created by Sebastien Tron, Andrew Perroy, and Bodie Paden, is called and offers 32oz growlers of microbrew beers on demand. The company has raised $450,000 in pre-seed from angels and are looking to go to seed in April. They have been running for 20 days and they’ve already seen 600 orders and $20,000 in revenue. This means that the world loves beer and wants to put it into their mouths. “I’m a big beer lover,” said Tron. “I was born and raised in Belgium. When I moved to the US, I was amazed by the craft beer miracle that was happening. In Europe, we’ve been brewing beer for hundreds of years with the same recipes. The US has taken every style of beer in the world and experimented every variation possible, giving birth to some of the best beers in the worlds. This is the result of the hyper fragmentation of the market: large brands milk the same recipes on and on, when small craft brewers experiment and invent new styles.” The goal for Tron, then, was to bring real craft beer to folks who drink it directly from the brewers. Tron, Bodie, and Perroy all worked for NakedWines and Tron worked for Munchery and Spoonrocket. The service is only available in SF for now but they are looking to expand this year. The most interesting thing about Hopsy is that they are bringing beer directly from the makers to the drinkers. This cuts out the middle tier of distributors that have driven prices up and fought for legislation that made them an integral part in the whole system. Thankfully, California is a state where the distributors are slowly grasping the potential for change. “In the Bay Area alone, within 50 miles of SF, there are 160 breweries. The problem is: only a fraction of these local micro breweries are distributed in retail, where shelf space is dominated by the big beer companies that have been able to strike the best distribution deals. By going directly to the source, we give our customer online access to local breweries they usually don’t find in traditional retail,” said Tron. “That’s how I started thinking about how I could create a startup to shake up this industry. I came up with a first idea that I pitched to few brewers. They said it was crap. So I came up with a second idea, that I pitched again. They said it was better but not good. Then I came up with the idea behind Hopsy. They loved it.” So here’s to that funky monkey, that funky monkey. Put your left leg down your right leg up
tilt your head back let’s finish the cup and you, too, can enjoy some fine craft brews with your friends Mike D and Ad-Rock and pour a little out for MCA.
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Rocket Internet-Backed Easy Taxi Confirms Asia Exit, Doubles Down On Latin America
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
, the Uber and GrabTaxi rival backed by Rocket Internet and among other investors, has confirmed that it has exited Asia in order to focus on the ride on-demand market in its native South America. The writing had been on the wall for some time, but now Easy Taxi has confirmed for the first time that it has pulled out of Asia. It isn’t a huge surprise since the company had steadily left key markets across the region and beyond during the past year or so. It , , and , but had remained active in a few final countries in Southeast Asia and the wider Asian continent until recently. At its peak, Easy Taxi covered 420 cities worldwide, including 20 locations in Asia and cities in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Late last year it began to transition, however. The company let go of or relocated its remaining staff in Asia, but opted to leave its apps open in each market to allow any customers left to try to connect with any remaining drivers. It seems unlikely that many (if any) rides will happen though, since Uber and GrabTaxi are working hard and offer attractive incentives to snare both drivers and passengers. Few drivers or passengers would think to use an app with zero presence. Easy Taxi, which started out in Brazil, raised more than $75 million from investors, including in the summer of 2014. It soon became outgunned in Asia, however, when Uber began ratcheting its presence in India, where , Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia, while local rivals and raised warchests of hundreds of millions of dollars each to turn their respective markets into two horse races against the U.S. giant. While it got edged out in Asia, Easy Taxi is doubling down on Latin America, where it operates in 16 countries and covers more cities than . “Easy Taxi is now focusing on Latin America — a region with significantly higher GMV and more favorable regulatory environment,” Paul Malicki, Easy Taxi global CMO, told TechCrunch via email. “Combining Easy Taxi’s dominant position in the region and immense growth potential of the sector, we will continue to raise funding and invest it in LATAM to keep reshaping the industry and consolidate our position,” Malicki added. Indeed, in December to solidify its position. Malicki said that move has taken the combined companies to eight million rides per month and half a million drivers. That’s more than Lyft, but a lot lower than Uber’s largest global rivals — China’s Didi Kuaidi does eight million daily rides and Ola does one million per day in India — but Easy Taxi is now focusing on a market where it is one of the bigger fishes. With Uber housing global ambitions, though, you wouldn’t bet that it will be too long before Easy Taxi is faced with another expensive war of attrition. It already appears to be hedging itself for that battle, one that perhaps it has a better of chance of competing in.
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How Startups Are Solving A Decades-Old Problem In Education
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Roshan Choxi
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom published research on a new method of teaching, commonly called . summarizes it: “The average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods — that is, “the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class.” The term “2 Sigma” comes from the results of the study, which showed that students who were provisioned with a combination of one-on-one mentorship and mastery learning performed two standard deviations (“sigma”) higher than students in a conventional classroom setting. To put it another way, nearly all the students (98 percent) who were educated with one-on-one mentorship and mastery learning did as well as the average student in the comparable classroom setting. Bloom’s research says two things are necessary for students to achieve these results: Mastery learning is an educational approach where educators work with a student as long as necessary to ensure the student has mastered one topic or skill before moving on to the next. Mastery learning can be applied either in small classrooms or with one-on-one mentorship. Bloom concludes individual mentoring is more effective, but too expensive to use widely. He writes: The tutoring process demonstrates that most of the students do have the potential to reach this high level of learning. I believe an important task of research and instruction is to seek ways of accomplishing this under more practical and realistic conditions than the one-to-one tutoring, which is too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale. Several technology have launched “online mentorship” products in the last five years. Thinkful created a structured, online mentorship program in 2012, while AirPair and HackHands emerged with on-demand mentorship services in 2013. in 2013, and earlier this year. These products take advantage of unique strengths that technology can provide to scale mentorship and resolve the 2 Sigma P Remote videoconferencing creates liquidity in a mentor-student marketplace: If mentors aren’t constrained to the geographic location of their students, it becomes much easier to connect the right mentor to the right student. While Bloom may have imagined mentors reciting lessons and provisioning lectures, lessons and lectures can be recorded (often with higher production quality than a live lecture) so mentors can focus on individual students. When the constraints of a classroom are removed, students can move through course material at their own pace. This allows mentors to practice mastery learning and tailor to their individual students. Every aspect of the student experience is quantitative by default in an online program, allowing mentors to have fine-grained visibility into their students’ progress. Instead of proctoring an exam once every month, mentors can monitor their students’ engagement and progress in real time. Tools that automate logistics like scheduling, messaging and tracking allow mentors to work with more students (while still providing individual attention) than would otherwise be possible in a traditional classroom setting. Screenshot of a HackHands session (source: ). Bloom’s research shows that a student’s ability to learn is strongly affected by the educator’s approach. This means trying to assess which students are likely to learn a given skill might not be helpful. Even moving a below-average student from a classroom to an individual tutor can have significant benefit. Using technology to increase the reach of mentorship will amplify these results. Bloom’s study demonstrated a method where 90 percent of students scored the same as the top 20 percent of students in a conventional classroom setting. A more recent study corroborates similar results: In 2004, . If these statistics hold in practice, resolving Bloom’s 2 Sigma could be the greatest educational breakthrough since Socrates. But without randomized, controlled experiments comparing online mentorship programs with conventional classrooms, how can we verify and reproduce Bloom’s results with these programs? While online mentorship addresses many of the issues identified by Bloom, online environments might have negative trade-offs that neutralize the benefits of one-on-one mentorship and mastery learning. For example, MOOCs (massive online open courses, like edX and Coursera) . An online program, where a student isn’t locked into a physical classroom, might have more difficulty keeping students engaged. There are no studies on the specific structure of “online mentorship,” but there are a few on online in general. to trial a “flipped-classroom” model, where it demonstrated a 46 percent improvement in pass rates. It was not a randomized trial, so it’s possible that students self-selecting into the flipped-classroom model are inherently more likely to perform better. A found that online is on par with face-to-face , but a blended model is better than either: Again, neither of these studies specifically examined online mentorship, only online . In this study, face-to-face means “offline and in a classroom setting,” but this model of online blended with a face-to-face component hints at the strength of online mentorship. There’s room for more research on this approach, but so far it seems that are using online mentorship to combine the strengths of technology with the unique value of human beings to make a fundamental change in how we teach.
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C-Way Is An Apple Watch For Kids
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
While wandering the Eureka Park floor at CES, we ran into , a cool French startup that is making GPS-enabled smart watches for kids. So what exactly does a smart watch for kids do? Well first off, it helps parents keep track of their kid’s location. By embedding a GPS sensor in the device, parents can open C-Way’s app and see where your child is at all times, thanks to a built-in, 5€ per month EDGE data connection. C-Way also acts as a scheduler for your child. Parents can input their kid’s schedule into the app, and the device will send alerts to the child, as well as let parents know if the child’s current location matches up to where their schedule says they should be. The watch also lets parents send one-way “text messages” to the kid’s watch, using the built-in data connection. The device has a 48-hour rechargeable battery, and has different attachments that can be used depending on how old your child is. Older kids can use a version with a small LCD screen, which younger children may prefer the version that swaps a screen for a wearable lego platform where they can attach their favorite Lego figurine. The company is also producing a smart alarm clock called , which is designed to sit in a child’s room and includes similar features like scheduling, 1-way voice chat, and even the ability to monitor air quality. C-Way and Bubble are available for , and cost $149 and $139, respectively.
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Nest’s Smart Home Apps Are Back Online Following Outages
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
Nest users who depend on their connected products to monitor their homes experienced a hiccup in connectivity Saturday that left users scrambling to figure out what was happening. In the absence of any initial details from Nest, many users flocked to Twitter to vent their frustrations with the company’s products, and also reflect on the risks inherent to trusting connected devices with sensitive tasks like monitoring children. since is down, can someone from please come and tell me when my toddler wakes up? — Jonathan Aisenberg (@JonnyAis) Hard to rely on as a baby monitor when the service is down so frequently. expect more from a company. — Jace Cole (@jacecole) Looks like is down. Shouldn't there be a local network solution if their servers are down? Unusable $200 cameras is weak. — Lynn Collette (@pdxposhy) Users were reportedly unable to log into the mobile or web apps at all, with many users reporting several hours of outages on Saturday afternoon affecting the use of their smoke alarms, thermostats and camera monitoring systems. This outage follows a software bug in Nest thermostats that yesterday had left thermostat batteries drained (leading to devices shutting off) for many Nest users. Both of these service interruptions came at a pretty inopportune time for Nest thermostat owners as a good chunk of the United States has been experiencing some pretty frigid temperatures. https://twitter.com/meepmeepnikki/status/684789755515695104 A representative from Nest confirmed to me that services had indeed been interrupted Saturday but that all login access has since been fixed. We’re experiencing an issue with the Nest web and mobile apps and are investigating the problem. More details to come soon. — Nest Support (@nestsupport) The issue affecting the Nest web and mobile apps is now fixed. If you still need assistance, please contact us: — Nest Support (@nestsupport)
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What To Know Before You Co-Invest
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Shelly Hod Moyal
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
One of my investors candidly asked me recently, “Shelly, if I have an opportunity to invest with people I’ve just met, how do I avoid getting screwed over?” This is a good question; for most investors interested in startups, co-investing is the way to invest. Just like you scrutinize the entrepreneur, the technology and the market opportunity before investing, you also need to assess the people with whom you’re investing. Why are they investing? What is their track record? What type of value do they bring to the startup? Why did they present the opportunity to you? Here are 10 tips for successful co-investing. This might sound like stating the obvious, but you’d be surprised. I see investors invest in companies for various reasons. Angels sometimes invest because they have a relationship with the founder or want to help. Corporates may invest because there is strategic value of the technology to the company, not the potential for a big exit. If you are partnering with other investors, take the time to understand their motivation behind the investment, and always strive to co-invest with people who are in it for the financial potential of the opportunity. Aim to co-invest with people who have a proven track record for identifying talent (a history of successful portfolio companies) and adding value (opening doors and securing investments). These types of investors see the most deals and attract the highest-caliber entrepreneurs. More importantly, their superior access and active involvement increases the likelihood that the investment will succeed. When an investor brings you deal flow on a regular basis, you should feel much more comfortable co-investing — as opposed to an investor who sends you a deal once in a blue moon. In the former case, you don’t have to ask why the deal is coming your way, especially if every deal is shared. In the sporadic case, the investor may be having trouble closing the round, and you should evaluate with caution. Although you can leverage the due diligence your co-investors have performed on the company (to save time and energy), reviewing the deal terms proposed by your co-investors is just as important. Notable investors who get involved in the company’s day-to-day often will demand preferential terms in the form of kickers (options or warrants), effectively reducing their entry valuation. Your job as the co-investor is to ask yourself whether this special treatment makes sense, and if your price points reflect the risk adequately. When you see a company for the first time, assume others have seen it, as well. Try to understand on what grounds other angels and VCs passed. Some investors may have wanted to invest, but already invested in a competitor, have a past history of conflict with the founders or lack the industry connections necessary to add value. See if you can identify insights that others likely missed (with respect to technology, team, market, etc.) to strengthen your case for investing, and avoid the notion of doing the deal that no one else wanted. It’s always great when investors from previous rounds follow-on their investments and continue to support the company. But be aware that these investors already have a working relationship with the founders, inside information on the company’s prospects and knowledge that new investors are watching carefully for a signal. If they don’t believe in the company, this puts them in a catch-22… invest, and they risk more money in a losing bet; don’t invest, and the company may fail to raise a subsequent round, resulting in guaranteed losses. In contrast, investors seeing the deal for the first time lack an emotional and/or financial attachment to the company, and their investment conviction will come from a less biased position. In venture capital, everyone is co-investing… accelerators, angels, VCs, corporate VCs, PE funds. Even most of the professional VCs that “lead” rounds co-invest 90 percent of the time. To avoid this circularity, try to identify at least one smart person with a track record. It can be an angel, an industry expert, a partner in a good VC — someone who understands the industry and has conviction in the opportunity, regardless of anyone else’s opinion. This is a true lead. You want to invest with someone who is truly vested. In dollar value, that means different things for different investors. For an angel investor, $200,000 could mean a lot of money and a real bet on the company. For a VC, it could mean just a foot in the door. To illustrate, when a $200 million VC fund invests $200,000, they are risking only 0.1 percent of their capital on the opportunity. In such a case, you can guess that the amount of attention this company received is limited. Furthermore, if the company doesn’t evolve into being a huge opportunity, the VC might not be keen to make substantial investments down the road, which will hurt the company’s chances to raise from other investors. Alignment is more natural when you invest with someone who has the same disposition as you. For example, if you have a net worth of $3 million, co-investing with a professional angel investor who has $20 million creates more alignment than co-investing with a $300 million VC fund. Like individual investors, angels are usually sensitive to valuation, while VCs are sensitive to ownership — the reason being that angels typically won’t be able to follow-on on their investments indefinitely, while VCs have deeper pockets, prefer larger opportunities and allocate smaller amounts in the beginning to double down at later stages when the company does well and they want to maintain their position. Strategic investors (corporations) often do a lot of ground work and due diligence around their investments to ensure they create a viable exit strategy for the company, or to understand how the technology will integrate into one of their product lines or IT infrastructure. This can benefit the co-investor if the startup quadruples revenues by selling through the corporation’s distribution channels. But if the company signs an exclusivity arrangement that prevents the startup from doing business with other companies, or a right of first refusal that discourages other strategics from bidding in an M&A situation, it can actually hurt the company a lot. Consider each potential co-investor’s motivation when evaluating the deal. Startup investing should be fun. Invest with good people you trust and build your reputation as a good, trustworthy co-investor that others want in their cap table. Each startup investment is a partnership with the entrepreneurs and co-investors. These are long and bumpy rides with much that can go wrong if you are doing it with the wrong people. I have witnessed tense boards, investors putting down entrepreneurs, aggressive financing rounds… and other such instances that reduce your chances of success and, frankly, take out all the fun from the ride. If you can check off the majority of these boxes, you’ve got yourself an interesting deal.
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Tesla Model S Can Now Drive Without You
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
Well, authorities in Hong Kong aren’t going to like this one bit. Back in November, they told Tesla to remotely its semiautonomous driving technology until they can confirm that the features, released in mid , are safe. They were concerned (sort of understandably) by hijinks by drivers who were using Tesla’s new Autopilot software to shave and sit in the backseat of the car, among other things. Tesla complied. That doesn’t mean the company isn’t moving forward at full speed, though. Today, it released version 7.1 of its software for the Model S and X that includes a “Summon” feature that enables the car to drive itself without anyone inside. More specifically, using their key fob, Tesla owners can now direct their cars to park themselves in a spot within 39 feet, and to drive themselves into and out of their parking garages. In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) In a nod to safety concerns, the company has also now restricted its Autosteer technology on residential roads and roads without a center divider. When Autosteer is engaged on a restricted road, Model S’s speed will be limited to the speed limit of the road, plus an additional 5 mph. The site Electrek was first to . Tesla says the following in its release notes for v7.1: Autosteer is now restricted on residential roads and roads without a center divider. When Autosteer is engaged on a restricted road, Model S’s speed will be limited to the speed limit of the road plus an additional 5 mph. When entering such a restricted road, Model S will reduce its speed if necessary and will do so even if you increase the cruise control set speed. Tesla says that Autosteer’s lane keeping has been improved near highway exits and when the lane markings are faded. Autopark features in the Tesla Model S have been updated with a ‘beta’ version of its Summon feature as well. Here’s how it works: To prepare to park your vehicle, align Model S within 33 feet of the final parking space so Model S can move straight into the space in either Drive or Reverse. With Model S in Park, stand within 10 feet of the vehicle and press and hold the center button on your key fob until the hazard lights flash continuously. While the hazard lights are flashing, press the frunk button once on the key fob to drive Model S forward into the parking space or the trunk button once on the key fob to back Model S into the parking space. Model S will move up to 33 feet or until the sensors detect an obstacle, at which point parking is considered completed and Autopark will shift the car to Park. Repeat the process above to use Summon to exit a parking spot remotely. You can cancel the procedure by tapping the center button on the key fob. If you’ve set up your Model S with Homelink, it will open and close garage doors for you as well. Back at an October press briefing, when Tesla’s last software update enabled cars to steer, change lanes, and park on their own, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had said he envisioned fully driverless cars. He said then that while its still “important to exercise great caution at this early stage,” in the long term, he added, “people will not need hands on the wheel — and eventually there won’t be wheels and pedals.” For now, the wheels and pedals remain. For the beginning and end of the drive, however, the humans are now optional. You can check out video of the Summon feature in action here, courtesy of an undoubtedly excited Tesla owner:
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Bonaverde Plans To Reinvent The Way You Drink Coffee
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
co-founder Hans Stier took the stage this week at CES to give us an update on his company. As a reminder, Bonaverde nearly $700,000 on Kickstarter a few years ago for a coffee machine that roasts, grinds and brews coffee in fifteen minutes. It’s hard to manage expectations when you have thousands of backers on Kickstarter. And Bonaverde is still working on it, producing and shipping its smart coffee machine to backers. But the company doesn’t plan to stop there. As Stier told me on stage, Bonaverde is more than a hardware company. The team wants to reinvent the way you consume coffee by connecting you directly with farmers. The company greatly cuts the number of middlemen as you directly order green beans. Your machine will take care of the roasting and grinding. In the future, Bonaverde wants you to easily find a machine around you so that you can enjoy a cup of freshly produced coffee. Now it doesn’t mean that Bonaverde’s story has been a smooth ride so far. The company has had to deal with all the kind of issues you can get when producing a gadget, including having one of your employee leave with all the blueprints. But Bonaverde also wants to expand its coffee delivery platform.
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Google And Amazon Talk About Managing Drone Traffic At CES
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
Figuring out how to manage drone traffic over the United States to allow for drone delivery services and other drone-based service is going to be critical if and Google ever want to deliver packages of their customers. Earlier this week, Amazon’s VP of Global Public Policy Paul Misener and Dave Vos, Google’s lead of , as well as representatives from NASA and Intel, discussed their visions of how the FAA should go about coordinating drone traffic during a panel at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. While everybody seems to agree on some basics, there are also some subtle differences between how Google and Amazon want to approach regulation. Here is Google’s proposal: the company basically wants a system where drones declare where they are and what they want to do before they take off. The centralized system then tells them that they are good to go — or that they will have to modify their plans a bit to allow for other traffic. Then, once the drone operator gets approval, the drone takes off and updates itself as it follows its path. This means commerical drone operators would have to file a flight plan ahead of time and then take off and follow it. They could also request a little bubble of airspace for themselves to take photos in a certain area, too, and law enforcement agencies could cordon off an area for their activies, too. If something unexpected happens, the drones would handle it in flight and coordinate with the control system. What Google basically wants is an automated version of the air traffic control (ATC) system that already exists today. Indeed, Vos noted that the biggest limitation on ATC today is that “humans have to be involved. If it’s fully automated, it can happen at the speed of processing.” One other key feature in Google’s plan is that the communications link with the drone should always be non-critical. The drones need to be able to function without having a working connection to the operators’ and the FAA’s servers, after all. Amazon, on the other hand, puts its emphasis less on a central coordination facility and more on in-flight sense-and-avoid technology. Misener noted that he largely agrees with Vos, but at the same time, he doesn’t agree with the assumption that having a collaborative environment will be enough. There will still be birds, balloons, kites and other manned and un-manned flying contraptions in the air, after all — especially at the low altitudes that won’t play nice with the ATC system. Amazon, as far as I could gather from the discussion, is thinking about a collaborative sense-and-avoid system that isn’t so much focused on a central command-and-control structure and more on making drones can see and avoid each other, using their on-board sensors as they make their way to the backyards of Topeka, Kansas to deliver the latest Grisham novel. One thing both Google and Amazon seem to agree on, though, is that the technology shouldn’t be baked into the regulation from the start. What they want is an agreed-upon framework that doesn’t suddenly lock the industry — which continues to innovate at a rapid clip — into a straightjacket while it is still figuring out the underlying technologies itself. It’s worth noting that Google, Amazon and almost everyboyd else involved in commericial drone usage are working together with NASA and the FAA on the (UTM) project. The general idea here is to carve out a space of airspace between 200 and 500 feet that would allow for commerical drone usage and to build a system that would allow for managing that traffic. This is a long-term project, though, and the results won’t come in until 2019. Google and Amazon surely would like to fly sooner than that.
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Edwin The Duck Is A $99 Connected Rubber Ducky 🐥
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
I’ve had a pretty decent amount of conversations with my college roommate about his great distaste for the fact that almost every new device in existence is “connected” in some way to the web. Light bulbs with WiFi would have likely seemed to be a truly ludicrous concept a few years back but now I rarely bat an eye as I immediately archive the cavalcade of connected bulb pitches to my spam folder. That being said, as bizarre as some connected product concepts may seem, occasionally there’s something that clicks. This CES, that was the smart duck, which is, in fact, a $99 high tech rubber duck for kids. I had the opportunity to gain a little face time with the little guy at CES and also chat with Garrett Curry, brand manager for , in the video above.
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GameFace Labs On Their Upcoming Untethered VR Headset
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
Yesterday on the CES TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield stage I sat down with Edward Mason, Founder and CEO of VR Headset startup . Founded in London, GameFace Labs makes a self-contained VR headset, meaning it doesn’t need to be attached to an external computer like Oculus or other headsets that require a high-powered gaming rig. GameFace Lab’s first device will ship in 2017, but I had a chance to try on a beta version yesterday, which I was pleasantly surprised by.Afterwords, I talked with Mason about the future of virtual reality, what it’s like building VR startup in London, and the difficulties of converting the masses to VR.
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10 Of The Coolest Gadgets We Saw At CES 2016
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Anna Escher
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
We met tons of brand new tech startups at CES this year and saw gadgets ranging from health-focused wearables, drones, 3D printers, and AR/VR headsets. We even got views of the Las Vegas strip from . These were the hottest hardware startups and most interesting gadgets from the show, and you can find our .
The built by the Chinese UAV company EHang. It is an autonomous drone that will be able to carry a single passenger for 23 minutes at a speed of 60 MPH. The 184 also has gull-wing doors and arms that fold up. Lenovo announced that the company would be . The conference was short on details, but we know is that Lenovo is going to release a phone that is going to cost less than $500 this summer. The company doesn’t have a final design just yet, but pictured above is a glimpse one of the 5 designs. Garmin’s that you mount to your sunglasses. And it’s not just about displaying how well you’re doing, it can alert you about traffic and directions. The$400 device could be a dream come true for cyclists when it comes out in Q1 2016. Parrot reveals the Disco drone http://on.tcrn.ch/l/S0s3 Posted by on Tuesday, January 5, 2016 Parrot unveiled the 700-gram . It can fly up to 45 minutes and reach speeds of just under 50 mph. The 1080p 14-megapixel camera at the front of the drone is the same one that Parrot used for its Bebop 2 quadcopter. Hands on with DAQRI's smart helmet http://tcrn.ch/1S72TeS Posted by on Thursday, January 7, 2016 is an industrial device that projects important information in front of the eyes of the wearer. It doubles as a hard hat and safety goggles making it ideal for anyone working with heavy machinery or in technical fields. The is a$249 gadget that can test food for gluten in under 2 minutes with antibody-based test and disposable pods. Something like this could change the lives of those with Celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. 6 Sensor Labs took home the . The is a solar powered grill that 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. on display. The car company that it uses “magnetic levitation” and “liquid nitrogen cooled superconductors and permanent magnets” to achieve hover flight. We spoke with Bonaverde’s Hans Stier on our Battlefield stage about their end-to-end . The Grillbot is a Roomba for your grill http://on.tcrn.ch/l/tK1k Posted by on Thursday, January 7, 2016 The . Lazy grillers can appreciate a robot that you plop down to automatically clean your dirty grill. Selling for $129, the robot has three replaceable metal bristles that help the robot both clean and move around your grill. The device has a rechargeable battery, three electric motors, and an LCD alarm and timer so you can leave it and walk away while it does its thing. However it can only work on surfaces cooler than 200 degrees.
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Fee-For-Value Drives Trillion-Dollar Healthcare Opportunity
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Steve Kraus
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
One of the main tenets of healthcare reform has been to better align payment/reimbursement schemes to incentivize healthcare providers for achieving improved outcomes and lower cost. Historically, insurance companies (including Medicare) have made separate payments to providers for each of the individual services they provide to patients for a single illness, visit or course of treatment. This payment system, called Fee-For-Service (FFS), incentivizes quantity over quality because a doctor gets paid more when they provide more services. However, this traditional FFS payment model is experiencing massive disruption due to healthcare reform. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) advances new reimbursement models which incent doctors on the quality and cost of a patient episode rather than the quantity of services provided. This new system is called Fee-For-Value (FFV). In a FFV system, providers take on financial risk for their patients, meaning that providers share in the burden of a poor outcome and the upside of more efficient and higher-quality care. Since PPACA was enacted five years ago, nearly 20 percent of all healthcare payments are value-based. Healthcare industry experts expect this to increase to 75 percent or more by the year 2020. By our account, that’s easily a trillion-dollar-value shift that will take place in the next five-10 years. That’s not just a big, but a market opportunity for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to pursue. Here is a of companies leading the sector: By our count, ~$4.5 billion of private equity dollars have been invested in companies capitalizing on the shift. Within the FFV ecosystem, three segments stand out as driving the creation of new companies and capturing the attention of investors: consumer tools, new risk-bearing provider models and telemedicine. Interest in these areas should come as no surprise. In the new value-based world, consumer engagement and technologies that lower the cost of care become critically important to healthcare providers. There are more than 175 companies listed on the BVP Healthcare Valuescape; the top ten in terms of VC/PE investment are: Brighton Health, Zocdoc, Castlight (pre-IPO), HealthCatalyst, Welltok (a BVP-funded company), Alignment Health, American Well, GrandRounds, Evolent (pre-IPO) and Remedy Partners. Four companies on the BVP Healthcare Valuescape (Evolent, Teladoc, Castlight and Everyday Health) have gone public in the past two years. Given the massive trillion-dollar opportunity, we expect many more IPOs to come from this list in the years to come.
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Risks And Red Lines As UK Prepares To Reforge Surveillance Law
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
On Thursday a half-day conference taking place in London’s Kings College heard a range of views about the U.K.’s draft , currently before parliament. The government’s intention with the IP Bill is to pass legislation that cements and extends the surveillance capabilities of domestic intelligence and law enforcement agencies to keep pace with tech developments in the 15 years or so since existing legislation was formulated. Speakers at the event described it as a historic opportunity for the U.K. to lead the world in creating a transparent legal framework for the operation of secret state surveillance powers. However others noted the same opportunity means there is a parallel risk of badly cast legislation enshrining surveillance overreach and encouraging other countries down a similarly problematic path. The stakes, all agreed, could not be higher. The timetable for examining what is a complex, technical and lengthy ( ) piece of legislation is relatively short, given the government wants to whole process to be done and dusted — with an act in place — by the end of the year when a sunset clause means existing emergency surveillance legislation, , will expire. The government has already been , currently examining the IP bill, by not giving it enough time to do a proper job. So there is also a very real risk of inadequate scrutiny of complex proposals with opaque implications resulting in major collateral damage to citizens’ privacy and security. And potentially also to the competitiveness of U.K.-based Internet companies, if businesses end up losing the trust of users because of ill-thought-through legal requirements foisted on them by politicians. One plainly worded intervention came from , with the company warning in a statement submitted to the bill committee that: “The bill threatens to hurt law-abiding citizens in its effort to combat the few bad actors who have a variety of ways to carry out their attacks. The creation of backdoors and intercept capabilities would weaken the protections built into Apple products and endanger all our customers. A key left under the doormat would not just be there for the good guys. The bad guys would find it too.” The IP bill was introduced to the U.K. parliament by Home Secretary Theresa May in November. As well as the joint select committee, due to report in mid-February, a bill committee will also examine it, line by line. And it will be put through Parliament and House of Lords scrutiny in the coming months, allowing for MPs and Peers to debate its measures and propose and vote on amendments — before any vote on a final bill, incorporating any agreed amendments, can take place. Assuming, of course, the legislation is not derailed by majority opposition during the scrutiny process. The Conservative government’s prior attempt to legislate in this area — the 2012 Communications Data Bill (CDB) — had to be withdrawn when the government’s then coalition partner, the Liberal Democracts, refused to support it, dubbing it a ‘Snooper’s Charter’. The new IP Bill has also been branded a Snooper’s Charter by critics, not least because it includes an expansion of surveillance powers — such as . It also sanctions bulk equipment interference — aka the mass hacking of devices — as an investigatory tool. And has some , hence Apple’s concerns. More broadly, the bill seeks to give explicit legal blessing to mass surveillance, at a point when the U.S. has been making moves in the opposite direction, reviewing and rolling back so-called ‘bulk collection’ initiatives, via the likes of the . At the same time, and , including the , have censured mass surveillance on human rights grounds — calling it a threat to democracy. In the U.K., it’s been the opposite story since the the 2013 revelations, with continued government attempts to shore up, rather than roll back, mass surveillance — culminating in the current bid to enshrine the practice at the core of the surveillance state by giving it a legal footing, balanced — argue supporters — by robust oversight safeguards. Safeguards that critics of the bill counter are not nearly robust enough. Security is one core critical theme, with concerns, for instance, about the vast honeypot of user data the bill proposes to create, via provisions such as the aforementioned ‘Internet Connection Records’, risking becoming an inevitable target for hackers or blackmailers. And concerns about government agencies working to intentionally exploit and enlarge vulnerabilities in software and systems. So the U.K. government stands accused of, on the one hand, , while at the same time trying to hand a mandate to another set of government-funded actors to undermine digital security at will. The Conservatives are a majority government so don’t need a junior political partner to sign up to their legislative plans to get bills through Parliament, meaning the IP bill looks likely to face less opposition than the failed CDB. And it’s not at all clear that the official opposition Labour party has any philosophical objections to increasing the capabilities of the surveillance state. Or to the practice of , specifically. Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham welcomed the bill when it was introduced in November, couching it as neither a Snooper’s Charter nor mass surveillance — although he subsequently wrote to the Home Secretary saying the party wanted to see put in place in the legislation, especially around the issue of judicial sign off for authorizing interception warrants. Speaking at the ‘s event on Thursday, Labour MP Keir Starmer, who noted he would be the party’s lead on the IP bill, said it’s clear new legislation is needed to govern surveillance powers, given that the outdated and often obscure patchwork of existing legislation currently used to authorize surveillance activity is long past its sell by date. He also said he supports expanding state surveillance capabilities — but also with a caveat on safeguards. “There is a requirement for extended powers,” said Starmer. “But just as powers are extended so must safeguards be — and this must be the absolute governing principle, I think — from the Labour party point of view, from any point of view… The safeguards have to be more robust, more transparent than they were before.” He went on to argue that the so-called ‘double lock’ sign off mechanism for intercept warrants proposed in the bill, which would mean the Home Secretary retains the power to sign off intercept warrants but a judge must also sign off the same warrant (although there is also a provision allowing warrants to be signed off by the minister in ’emergencies’ and retroactively looked at by a judge), would only be appropriate if judges “play a real part”, rather than what he described as the “long arm judicial review” currently proposed. “I do think that if judges are to play a part they’ve got to play a real part,” he said. “And therefore an exercise which is in truth a rubberstamp is not worth having. Close up scrutiny — looking at the material kind of our use of these intrusive powers — is a different proposition.” Data protection and data retention provisions in the bill will also require greater scrutiny, Starmer added. But the former director of public prosecutions also took time to flag up what he couched as the “vital” role played by communications data when it comes to investigating and prosecuting “serious and difficult cases” — giving the example of the thwarted 2006 plot to simultaneously bring down multiple airplanes mid way over the Atlantic. “There was a very elaborate plot… that was uncovered in real time in a number of places, including in North London. And there was a real scramble to get the data available very quickly because once it became clear there was a plot it was very important to move from that stage to stopping any part of that plot being implemented,” he said. “In very many cases we would not have been able to prosecute without the sort of data that was made available because of the existing [surveillance] regime,” he added, thereby giving tacit support to so-called ‘bulk collection’. Speaking during another panel, Shami Chakrabarti, director of U.K. civil rights advocacy organization Liberty, argued that the current application of surveillance capabilities in the U.K. has in fact yet to be justified — arguing that far more debate needs to take place about targeting. “Just because things were happening outside the law and it is now proposed to put them inside the law doesn’t mean that we’ve got the balance right,” she said, adding that targeted surveillance has been the “traditional approach” in open, democratic societies, rather than the mass surveillance measures set to be enshrined in law if the bill passes in its current form. It’s notable that the IPT, the oversight court for the U.K.’s intelligence agencies, for the time in its fifteen year history (and did so on ), deciding, in one ruling, that the agency had acted unlawfully in its data sharing activities with the NSA. Yet despite such rulings, the U.K. political establishment appears almost entirely comfortable with — and ready to legislate for — mass surveillance. “I completely applaud and support the idea we must now come out of the shadows when setting the legal framework that will then be applied, of course, often in the shadows but we still must have a debate,” argued Chakrabarti. “Just because things were happening without public knowledge or parliamentary insight, let alone judicial sign off, doesn’t mean that the balance is yet correct — that we have proportionality [when it comes to state use of mass surveillance].” She went on to argue that “proportionality principles”, as applied under the European Convention of Human Rights, have generally required “a more targeted approach to surveillance than you see in many parts of this bill”. “That is a real challenge,” she added, emphasizing it’s her view that “an operational case for using mass surveillance has still yet to be proven”. Various specific concerns about the proposed legislation were also aired on Thursday with speakers from a range of NGOs, and legal and industry bodies, as well as politicians, discussing the draft bill in three themed panel sessions, with questions taken from the audience. Panelists were, for instance, asked how police or intelligence agencies would be able to assess the risks of hacking a particular piece of equipment — sanctioned by the IP bill under its ‘equipment interference’ and ‘bulk equipment interference’ (aka: mass hacking) provisions — given the complex interplay of digital devices and services already evident in a nascent but growing Internet of Things. Might there not be huge potential risks, even potentially risks to life, of interfering with digital services, asked one audience member — and how could an untargeted process such as mass hacking avoid generating unknown ‘collateral damage’, let alone be judged ‘proportionate’ by those authorizing such activity? “On the question of how do you assess the risks of interfering with a technology, if you’re going to do at all it needs to be extremely targeted,” argued Caroline Wilson Palow, of civil rights advocacy organisation Privacy International. “Otherwise you can’t judge proportionality — you don’t know what device you’re targeting, you don’t know who is actually going to be subject to this type of interference, then how can you possibly judge proportionality?” “This problem we have with the powers across the bill, not only with equipment interference,” she added. Another speaker at the event, Malcolm Hutty of Internet infrastructure membership organization , also raised concerns about the risks of state actors causing unknown damage via legalized hacking activity. “If you were to hack into a DSLAM or something like that, you might think that that’s only supplying broadband service for a relatively small area — it can’t be that significant can it? But in fact how do you know whether that it providing, amongst other things, the back up line for some safety critical service, maybe a water purification system or a monitoring system for somebody’s health. “The idea that an intelligence officer can assess what the likely impact would be if that vulnerability that they exploit and maybe exacerbate — that they could assess the impact of that without knowing… not only what that system is and how it works but how it was used seems to me to be deeply problematic.” “The consequences of a mis-assessment of that range from the minor to the wholly catastrophic,” he added. “It’s our view that this particular part of the bill needs to be made much tighter, not in the interests of the balance between privacy and security, but to avoid doing significant harm to the security of the U.K.” Anthony Walker of trade association , warned of the potential economic impact of companies losing the trust of users as a result of being subject to explicitly broad state surveillance powers. “This question around equipment interference has some real direct relevance in terms of the extent to which companies are subjected to these kind of broad powers can potentially sell their services around the world. And that can be trusted by their customers around the world. I think that’s a really significant commercial and economic impact that we need to bear in mind,” he said. He also argued that many aspects of the bill, including specifically the language around encryption, is too vague — and is therefore open “to interpretation”. (A point also made to the joint select committee .) “There is definitely more work to be done to improve the transparency of the bill. What are these powers? What do they actually mean? And in many ways I think companies are struggling to really understand and fully understand the implications of the bill because there are too many aspects of the bill that they just simply don’t know what it means,” he said. Walker also warned of the risks of the U.K. being out of step with other countries’ approach to surveillance legislation, arguing that being an outlier might well be counterproductive by jeopardizing the international co-operations needed for data to flow across borders. “The more that we insert extraterritorial powers into the bill the more that we go against some of the norms that are emerging elsewhere, the harder that international co-operation becomes. So the extraterritorial issue is, I think, very important because it potentially undermines the security objectives we’re all trying to achieve,” he said. “Technology is global, the threats that we face today are global, the axis are global, companies are global. If the security services are going to be able to access the information they need at the time that they need it that depends upon international co-operation between agencies, between companies,” he added.
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Endless Has Built A $79 PC For The Offline World
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
There are affordable computers, there are cheap computers and then there’s the , which is available for as little as $79. “Everybody in the world deserves the option to have a computer,” said Endless CEO and Chief of Product Matt Dalio. In other words, Endless is building Linux-based computers for people who have never owned a computer, particularly those in developing nations. Usually, when people talk to me about bringing offline populations online, they’re focused on smartphones, but Chief Growth Officer Marcelo Sampaio argued, “Everybody who’s predicted the death of the computer owns a computer.” In Sampaio’s view, a keyboard and mouse will always be a better interface for certain tasks — such as writing this post. So the main obstacle to computer adoption has been cost and Internet connectivity. I’ve already mentioned the cost, though to be clear, the Endless Mini price tag doesn’t include a screen, a keyboard or mouse. Dalio said a customer’s TV could serve as the screen, while a keyboard and mouse could cost as little as $10. (Endless is also working on a more expensive model that starts at $189.) I saw the Endless Mini in-action earlier this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It offered like a pretty standard graphical interface — besides the price, what really set it apart is Endless’ approach to connectivity, which it describes as “Internet Optional.” For example, the computer offers an encyclopedia app with offline versions of popular Wikipedia articles, and there’s an education app with videos from Khan Academy. So if you don’t have an Internet connection, you can still get access to online content, even if it’s not 100 percent up-to date. Then, when and if you are connected, the apps will update. The Endless team builds the apps, but Sampaio described the company’s role as being “content curators rather than content creators.” While creating a $79 computer is already an impressive feat, both Dalio and Sampaio emphasized that they see Endless as more of a software company than a hardware company. “Cheap hardware is a commodity,” Dalio said. “The operating system is the key.” In fact, he suggested that Endless might eventually license the operating system for free to other hardware companies. Endless is , but more importantly for reaching its target audience, Dalio said it has a presence in 20 countries, thanks to partners like Mexican telecom company América Móvil. The company also has an impressive list of advisors, including Tony Robbins (yes, ) and Nicholas Negroponte (founder of One Laptop per Child).
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Faraday Future’s Chief Engineer Is Short On Answers, Full Of Buzzwords
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
Faraday Future’s Nick Sampson joined me on the TechCrunch CES 2016 for what turned out to be a lively interview. Sampson is Faraday’s Senior Vice President of R&D and engineering and, I guess, moonlights as the company’s spokesperson. But he’s no Elon Musk. So far even after the company’s public reveal, very little is known about Faraday Future. Sampson barely knew how to describe the design features of the wild concept the company had just announced. The company seems more interested in building hype than cars. The full 20 minute interview is embedded here and I have a lot more thoughts on the company that I’ll publish in the coming days. From my vantage point, Faraday Future feels like the Donald Trump of startups.
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Photo Evidence Shows Facebook Is Building Messenger For Mac
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
TechCrunch has obtained photographic evidence and an eyewitness report that Facebook has built an as-yet-unreleased Facebook Messenger For Mac desktop app. The photo below shows a Facebook employee using it. Photo of a Facebook employee using Facebook Messenger For Mac, attained by TechCrunch from a source Releasing an official Facebook Messenger For Mac app could make it easy for people to chat whenever they’re on their computer. Instead of getting buried in one of many web browser tabs that users have to switch to so they can text friends, the dedicated Messenger desktop app would be instantly accessible from the Dock. Facebook declined to provide a statement or confirmation, telling me “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation.” However, that’s the same boiler plate response I’ve received from Facebook when my sources were correct in the past, like about Facebook having built . The more people that chat on Facebook, the more they get locked into the company’s family of apps and features, including Facebook’s News Feed where it earns money on ads. Messaging is the future of mobile. Increasing the number of people who are instantly available through Facebook Messenger makes the app more valuable for everyone regardless of what device they access is through. Detaching Messenger from Facebook could potentially make it easier for people to avoid Facebook’s ads. But that’s a sacrifice Facebook seems willing to make to boost its chances of winning the war to control chat. After all, Facebook already separated messaging from the News Feed on mobile. Facebook was spawned on the web, and openly experiments on mobile, but has never put much focus on the desktop. Way back in 2011, Facebook began posting job openings for desktop software engineers to work on PC and Mac apps. A year later, an early tester of a leaked the download link, leading Facebook to hastily give the desktop app an official launch. Over the next two years, Facebook seemed to largely ignore the app. Then in in March 2014 Facebook shut it down, telling users “We’re sorry, but we can no longer support Facebook Messenger for Windows, and it will stop working on March 3, 2014.” Unofficial Facebook Messenger For Desktop app Since then, Facebook hasn’t had any desktop software available. In April 2015, Facebook did launch a dedicated . This was designed to let people chat in a distraction-free site that doesn’t include the News Feed and other Facebook features. There’s been plenty of demand for a desktop Messenger, though. Random hackers have built several , including Messenger For Desktop and FbMacMessenger. But my source’s eyewitness account and the photo they provided confirm that these unofficial products are different from the official Messenger For Mac app spotted in the wild. They report that the app used by the employee included the Messenger logo as the icon in the app Dock, and was named Messenger in the menu bar. You can see the Messenger tab bar matching the mobile in bottom left corner While it’s tough to see in this grainy close up, the official client the Facebook employee was working on includes a navigation tab bar in the bottom left. It matches the tab bar options in official Messenger for iOS mobile app, including Recent, Groups, People, and Settings. Unofficial versions lack this tab bar. My source also confirms that the employee was logged into Facebook’s internal portals and VPN, further confirming they were on an official Messenger For Mac app that’s not available to the public. It’s unclear but seemingly unlikely that Facebook would require users to chat via the desktop software instead of the website. We have no information about when or even if Facebook might release Messenger For Mac. The company often builds and internally tests apps that never ship. Still, this app seems like a smart move. Slack has proven people enjoy a dedicated desktop app for messaging. It could help Facebook box out competitors like Google, WeChat, Line, Kik, and KakaoTalk. Escaping the chaos of the browser tabs is advantageous for Facebook. It recently integrated with the Google Chrome browser’s desktop notifications features, which temporarily pops up a separate mini window with alerts about Facebook activity. I’ve found those quite useful for rapidly parsing and responding to Facebook notifications that would have otherwise been drowned in my sea of tabs. Messenger isn’t a website you check. It’s a communication tool you use constantly throughout the day. Having to locate your Facebook tab or juggle its window into view is cumbersome when Facebook’s goal is to remove friction from communication. Just as Facebook chat was buried in its main mobile app until Facebook split it off into a separate Messenger app, today on desktop it’s buried in the browser. But the Messenger For Mac could let chat rise above.
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The 2015 Analytics Software Market
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Sameer Al-Sakran
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
Now that the books have closed on 2015, it’s time to look back and take in some of the changes in the analytics software market. There have been several trends (open source, cloud hosting, SQL on Hadoop) that have continued to play out, as well as the emergence of AWS Redshift as a major force in data warehouses. Additionally, a number of startups have converged around the ecological niches the emergence of Redshift has created in an otherwise stagnant market. With the exception of Spark, most of the fuss in the Hadoop ecosystem is around Presto, Impala and Drill. The fight to succeed MapReduce is being fought; the major common factor in the short list of contenders is that they are based on a SQL interface. The writing has been on the wall since Hive started to edge out Pig back in 2010. Too much of the value the Hadoop ecosystem delivers revolves around analytics and business intelligence (BI). That entire world has run on SQL for decades, and the institutional competence built around it was too much to displace. After all the NoSQL fuss with relation to Hadoop, things have gone back to where they started. Of the main large-scale in-memory OLAP databases, Pinot out of LinkedIn and Druid out of Metamarkets are two main players. Druid seems to be getting a fair bit of as well as a number of increasingly using it to power real-time BI. In October, some of the primary contributors Imply.io, a company that provides commercial support and will build out the ecosystem around Druid. Overall, lots of smart people are settling in on this as an in-memory database to allow interactive analysis with huge data sets. In November, , a generalized library for computing using data flow graphs. It was used heavily for machine learning and deep neural networks, specifically. It joins , and , which came from Microsoft in November. While these libraries aren’t a simple plug-in to add AI to any product, they serve as foundational pieces to making state-of-the-art algorithms available to anyone with sufficient data to train their systems. As others build on the foundation, the overall sophistication of products, both analytical and otherwise, will ratchet up. IBM, in June, on -related projects. Spark is in many ways the successor to MapReduce in the Hadoop ecosystem. It allows developers to mix and match a low-level data-processing language, a machine learning library, graph algorithms and a SQL-on-Hadoop database. While it’s still on the bleeding edge of the adoption curve, it has massive developer support behind it. In October, , and ported its Data Works product to Spark. What this does for , the company that has hereto had the mantle of the Apache Spark project, will be very interesting to watch. Historically, most disruption from open-source software has occurred pretty low in the software stack. With time, and the evolution of viable business models for open-source software companies, more and more end-user-facing software is being developed in the open. Last year saw one of the two old guard open-source BI companies, Jaspersoft, acquired by Tibco for $185 million. This previous February saw the other, acquired by Hitachi Data Systems for more than $500 million. Meanwhile, a number of lighterweight open-source projects emerged in 2015. and are focused on making it quick and easy to run SQL queries on Redshift clusters (see more below), while has an easy to install tool that allows non-technical users to run queries and share dashboards and reports using data from a variety of databases. While Google Analytics continues to be the default for everyone, there has continued to be a lot of activity in all-in-one analytics systems centered around collecting and analyzing user behavior on a website or mobile application. Meanwhile, the main competitor to Google Analytics, Mixpanel (having raised $65 million to close out last year), was mostly quiet until the mid-year. In July, it followed in Heap’s footsteps and announced “Codeless Analytics.” This is the ability to auto-instrument your mobile application by adding the SDK to your mobile application, and also get event analytics without manually instrumenting specific events like button taps. In November, it announced Predict, which lets you apply lightweight machine learning to predict whether your users will perform an action (such as a conversion). Meanwhile, Heap has been making some noise for its ease of use in mobile and web event analytics; Amplitude and recent entrant Interana raised a $20 million Series A in January, with a story centered around speed of analysis. Meanwhile, the emergence of a cheap and easy way to run a data warehouse (AWS’s Redshift), has thrown a wrench in the general notion of a fully hosted, specialized event analytics offering. In 2015, a new standard was emerging in how growing startups (as well as companies willing to live on the medium-rare edge) were dealing with BI. There was a return to the Unified Data Warehouse concept of the 1990s. The key component that allowed this was the widespread adoption of AWS Redshift as the analytics data warehouse. Because it is relatively easy to maintain, compared to dealing with the old school of databases (Aster, Vertica, Teradata, etc.), it quickly become the default starting point for a data warehouse for most growing tech companies. There are two groups of startups riding this wave: those that help you get data into Redshift and those that let you analyze data once it is in Redshift. The first group includes some companies centered entirely around loading data into Redshift ( , , ). Additionally, officially announced the ability to send data into Redshift this year. Meanwhile, RJMetrics, an e-commerce analytics provider, is now offering just the data ingestion portion of their system that lets you send data into Redshift as well. All in all, a number of companies are hitching their wagons to Amazon, most before the QuickSight announcement came out last fall. It remains to be seen how much of a business for them remains, as AWS’s data pipelines and other ingestion services continue to improve. Given the existence of AWS’s mobile analytics SDK and ingestion pipelines, it’s a matter of will on Amazon’s part how much oxygen remains in this system in 2016. Given the currently rudimentary capabilities shown by the preview version of QuickSight, there are a number of BI software vendors who derived a large portion of their growth in 2015 from customers heavily invested in Redshift. Looker, Mode Analytics, Periscope and Metabase have all been prominent in being used to analyze data in Redshift. Again, it remains to be seen what comes out of AWS this coming year, as well as how the landscape for these companies shift. All in all, 2016 is looking to be a very eventful year as the implications of a funding slowdown become more apparent. While this should favor larger players, there are a number of trends very dangerous to the larger, slower incumbents. While it’s always hard to tell during the thick of things, looking back, it seems pretty clear that the revenue multiple compression on the public markets side finally made its way through the snake when down a large number of its late-stage investments. Of the companies relevant to analytics, Cloudera was mostly untouched while Dataminr got a valuation haircut of 35 percent. In general, capital costs for analytics startups, be they early or late-stage, got much higher. While plenty of venture firms closed new funds and have plenty of money to invest, the overall sense is that the valuations have crept downwards for given run rates or other metrics of traction. There will be some turbulence this year in both the fundraising and, more importantly, the downstream budgets of the customer base of many analytics companies. Given how sensitive most companies’ customer lifetime values are to the C word (churn), 2016 looks to be a time to strap in and make sure you know where the airsickness bag is located.
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 1 | 7 | null |
Gillmor Gang: Stock Footage
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Matthew Panzarino, Ari Weinstein, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 8, 2016. The Gang welcomes Workflow’s Ari Weinstein for a deep dive into the science and politics of the Notification Layer. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Halley Suitt Tucker, Kristie Wells, Francine Hardaway, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @borthwick, @panzer, @arix Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=81169580 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302]
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Virtual Reality And A Parallel Universe Of Cyberclones
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Sampriti Bhattacharyya
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
One of the biggest technology trends of 2015 was virtual reality (VR), from to . saw a lot of VR experiences where users could wear headsets and navigate an immersive 3D world. In Las Vegas, demonstrated a range of new gadgets and gaming experiences involving both VR and AR (augmented reality, e.g., ). It is exciting to predict which killer app incorporating these technologies might become the next unicorn in 2016. But perhaps it is equally worthwhile to pause for a moment and ponder the implication of these technologies in the physical world, both in the near and distant future. Some of you might be familiar with Linden Lab’s virtual world , where you can create an avatar of your own and explore a fantasy world with other users. Unfortunately, it never got past a million active players in the last 12 years. Yet the speculation is that playing Second Life using a to get a totally immersive 3D experience might be the : You see and navigate from your avatar’s perspective. Such integration can bring a in our digital social experience. However, it is not yet that smooth to navigate in the virtual world; it will require a seamless integration of AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms. , a robotics engineer at Magic Leap, points out, “The real intersection of VR/AR and AI is going to be world-modeling. It’s essential for a virtual avatar to walk around a place’s representation (VR) as well as for a virtual avatar (in the form of a hologram) to walk around the real place (AR) or for a robot to navigate through it (AI). These converging needs may drive the unification of how we create the real world’s digital shadow and unlock applications we never saw coming.” However, according to , an AI researcher at MIT working on mapping and navigating robots in complex virtual environments, the big leap in technology will actually be “an extended model, where your avatar operates in the Virtual World even when you are not actively playing. that requires the avatar has some sort of — and something more than Siri’s level of intelligence. It needs to have Essentially, that means a virtual me that operates without my control. How does that work? In machine learning, researchers use a bunch of sensors to detect what excites you, saddens you, scares you, relaxes you… all fed into an algorithm. Kind of like you and your best friend knowing the small details about each other, except the computer never forgets and never stops paying attention. has been doing extensive work in neural architecture creating what is called “mindfiles,” or putting human consciousness in digital files. Wearables that monitor everything from sleep to calories, hydration and levels can be used for continuously updating our digital imprints. In fact, a startup called came up with a digital avatar that stores your medical data in it, from height, weight and blood pressure to lab test results. The implication is that such a data-enriched avatar can perhaps even provide a future prediction of your health and how you age, as well as be a life coach. While the seamless working of an autonomous self is quite a while away, it is being extensively explored at universities ( , , ) and giant tech companies (Google, ). Google and Amazon already know your favorite songs and movies, and your taste in food and clothing. It’s not hard to imagine a future where all data is consolidated into a very legit digital imprint of yourself: a “cyberclone.” Where it gets creepy is your cyberclone could live in the virtual world despite your death in the real world. A cyber spirit? Would it compensate for your absence in the physical world? Imitating human behavior we don’t understand ourselves is not yet quite possible (memories, love, physical pain, etc.). And to roboticists like us who see our robots break every day, it’s hard to imagine a self-sustaining avatar. But think how fast technology has grown in just 200 years, from no light bulbs to satellites imaging every square inch of the earth. On the scale of the universe, or even human existence, that’s no time at all! Suppose we can replicate ourselves in the virtual world. Then it brings us to some questions that we probably should give some thought to. If a program can imitate us, aren’t we all just programs? Perhaps all the program, with different parameters loaded? Load one set of numbers, you get me; another, you get you! Mixing data gives rise to new beings; tweak the program for virtual genetic engineering. Which means, companies like could use your virtual clones to create customized babies in the future! If you think, as I do, that thoughts and feelings — not the physical body — define the person, and if every detail of that individuality is captured by a computer script, is the virtual being any less real than me? My cyberclone is me… except “me” can travel the world in microseconds. Multiple instances of my script (or multiple clones) means I could be talking to you in Tokyo and hiking the Appalachian Trail and having dinner in Paris — all at the same time! So would this be another me — but more powerful, more flexible and immortal — living in a parallel universe in cyberspace? Initially, interaction with the physical world could be through holograms, enabled by companies like plus robots directed by virtual people. But the virtual people don’t die, so that world’s population grows faster than the physical one. As time goes on, the physical world becomes less and less relevant. What would the physical world even mean to the virtual people? They need to check some servers, fix some solar panels now and then, maybe throw some more silicon in the hopper. Mindless robots directed by virtual people can do that. All the serious thinking would be in the virtual world. Experience would shape the avatars, just as it shapes us. Cyberclones will grow into unique entities as they interact with the virtual world. Eventually, your cyberclone won’t live by your rules. In fact, it would probably outright disobey. Recent is working on exactly that: teaching robots to disobey humans if it’s harmful to them. But our clones would inherit from us both good and bad traits. Love, honor and imagination… but also hate, envy and war. They won’t have to compete for the resources our ancestors did, and that we still do today. But there will be competition for memory space, CPU cycles — or whatever those concepts morph into. Imagine terrorism in the virtual world, where pathogens — computer viruses turned deadly — can span the world in nanoseconds. We can only hope our cyberclones learn something we never have: how to resolve their conflicts peacefully. Looking at AI in today’s technology — be it Siri or Amazon’s Echo — it is hard to imagine the future I described. It’s albeit a very distant extrapolation, but I’m not the only one making it: all propose restrictions on AI research to avoid creating virtual beings we are unable to control. Brilliant minds like theirs cannot be completely wrong. If AI continues on its present path, it is possible that the virtual world might overtake and overwhelm us. If we want to prevent that, we should proactively define the boundaries. Or we can accept cyberclones not as a threat, but simply the next generation.
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The Cruel Inequities
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Jon Evans
| 2,016 | 1 | 9 |
There are few people in technology more infuriating than Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, who earlier this month dropped a of the ongoing refragmentation of modern societies, followed immediately by a on technology’s role in economic inequality. It’s a bizarre piece, almost reading as an attempt to back away from some of the logical implications of his refragmentation essay. The response from his fellow tech VCs was remarkable, and far from laudatory: 3/ But ..celebrating inequality? I dare you to visit a school in EPA, Oakland or Richmond & host a pizza party celebrating INEQUALITY — Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) 8/ For the vast majority of us: you are born rich, or born poor — with little economic variance in your life. — Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) luck is the dominant factor for all individuals starting with where you are born includes start-up founders and investors — Albert Wenger (@albertwenger) Mark Suster was moved to : Yes, income inequality exists and yes it’s a natural consequence of capitalism and other forms of government are decidedly worse than capitalism […] But the celebratory nature of today’s conversation felt tone deaf and seemed to ignore the rules that get bent in favor of those with resources or born into privilege […] There are a lot of things the go into the advantages of Silicon Valley and the tech ecosystem. The starting point is often the birth lottery […] It really pains me when smart people are both tone deaf and color blind. Y Combinator alumnus Seth Bannon : High levels of inequality are a problem […] it’s necessary to call out a straw man argument PG appears to be making […] It’s quite hard to see how some of the most popular proposed policies to reduce economic inequality would hurt startups […] there are an abundance of studies that show that reducing economic inequality (even through redistributive means) actually boosts overall prosperity/ Granted, not all of the responses were intelligent or helpful: I too disagree with that Paul Graham inequality essay, but this inexplicably popular response is terrible and dumb: — Jon Evans (@rezendi) …which, hopefully, is why Graham wrote a which “leaves no room for misinterpretation.” But a lot of very smart people understand what he’s saying perfectly well: they just think he is . As my old friend put it in email, “[Graham’s] biggest flaw is a failure to apply the same criticism to his own opinion as he does to others.” Graham writes, in the no-room-for-misinterpretation version, “economic inequality per se is not bad.” This itself is more than arguable. Would it be just fine if a thousand people on Earth held all the wealth, while the other 7 billion were left penniless? extremes of economic equality are, to put it mildly, suboptimal. Where is the sweet spot? Where exactly does one cross the line into “bad”? How can we be sure that we’re not already past it? More importantly, even granting that “economic inequality per se” is not necessarily bad, It is to imagine that Silicon Valley startups form a pure meritocracy. The wealthy and well-connected — and, yes, the white and male — get disproportionately wealthier; the poor, the , and underrepresented minorities remain disproportionately less successful. It’s easy to handwave that this is no big deal, and will magically work itself out in the long run, if you benefit from those inequities. It’s a whole lot harder if you don’t. “Startups are on the whole good,” Graham writes in the “simplified” version of his essay. But one can make a strong case that things which increase today’s skewed, unfair, and often exploitative version of economic inequality — including startups — are not necessarily “on the whole good.” Yes, you can also make a strong countercase (based on trickle-down technological wealth, and/or, more interestingly, the notion that new tech / new businesses will work against existing inequities.) But it is by no means the slam-dunk tautology that Graham seems to think it is. To many people, any force that makes an unfair system even unfair actually seems pretty awful. I’ve been writing about tech’s contribution to inequality for . I concur that increased economic inequality within societies will be an of technological progress. But technology is also — or, put another way, tech will increase inequality societies, and . I absolutely agree that on the whole, the long-term outcome is a huge net gain (although I’m worried about the medium term.) But I don’t believe that intensifying the inequities of today’s society will be anything but a negative, albeit one much outweighed by the development and promulgation of better technology for everyone; and I believe that, as a society, we can powerfully influence just how much inequality we’re talking about here. There is a lot of data arguing that economic inequality is bad for all of us: “Countries do get happier when they get richer, but only if they share the wealth,” according to . The : “living in a community with high income inequality also seems to be bad for your health.” The Ford Foundation is so convinced that inequality is bad that it has “to work on inequality and nothing else.” I’ll close with a quote from Hanage again: “Finally, and the most important thing for my money — the case against inequality can be made in a purely utilitarian way. If you want a well educated workforce for your startup staff, you are more likely to get it from a more equal society.” Indeed. A less extremely unequal society is better for , and, very possibly, better for technological progress. Especially if those inequities are not built on the cruelties of history.
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Samsung Announces Feb. 21 Galaxy Unpacked Event, Teaser Suggests Focus On Gear VR And New S7 Line
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g3O94WALV8 Samsung is ready to show off some new Galaxy phones again, and it’s also becoming overwhelmingly clear that the company believes virtual reality is a key to its future mobile strategy. Samsung just sent out invitations and released a teaser video for the company’s Galaxy Unpacked 2016 event where it is expected to unveil its new Galaxy S7 devices. The teaser definitely places a major emphasis on the Gear VR platform, which suggests that either the new S7 line will work with the existing consumer headsets or, more likely, that the team at Samsung is planning to release an updated Gear VR headset (or both). The tagline for the video is “Get ready to rethink what a phone can do,” and with the entire marketing for this event focusing on the Gear VR, it’s not ludicrous to expect a phone update that adds significantly to the headset’s functionality. A hint that people have been dissecting from the teaser involves the instance where the subject leans forward and reaches towards the glowing cube, which many are speculating as a clue that Samsung *might* have finally cracked positional tracking, a feature that has been noticeably absent from the Gear VR’s feature set (and all mobile phone-based VR to date). As far as the Galaxy phones themselves, most rumors out now are suggesting the S7 and S7 edge devices will likely see more internal updates rather than complete redesigns since it was just last August that the Galaxy devices received complete facelifts. Evan Blass over at is suggesting that the S7 line will see the return of one of the favorite Galaxy customizations taken from users in last year’s Galaxy update, the microSD slot. Other upgrades may include water resistance and higher capacity batteries for the smartphone line. Chipsets being rumored for the device include the company’s own Exynos 8 Octa 8890 chip or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820. What’s interesting about the Snapdragon chip in particular, is the major emphasis Qualcomm has placed on its VR chops, on the page that the GPU and CPU “are capable of generating photorealistic graphics for console-quality gaming and next-generation virtual reality apps.” The Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2016 event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday, February 21 and will be available for live streaming on the company’s . This will be a major event for the company’s flagship phone line, but may further be a huge event for the company’s virtual reality ambitions.
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European VC Creandum Closes New €180M Early-Stage Fund
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
I can barely keep up with the amount of new , as new funds are closed. And, if my sources are correct, we aren’t done yet. The latest to close a new fund is Stockholm and Palo Alto-based . ‘Creandum IV’ is a €180 million early-stage fund, and will be primarily targeting seed and Series A investments, but also follow-on rounds, in Internet and software startups across Europe. As is becoming a theme these days, Creandum will be on the look out for companies that can impact large markets, including reaching out to the U.S., something the VC, who is perhaps best known for being an early backer of Spotify, is well-placed to help with given it has an office and partners based in Silicon Valley. For reference, Creandum’s previous fund, ‘Creandum III’ was €135 million in size and has invested in more than 30 companies, with half being at seed stage. I’m also told this latest fund closed in record time for a European VC, a matter of months, as LPs in the U.S. and Europe are becoming more bullish regarding the European tech scene and its potential to build true market leaders and demand billion dollar-plus exits. In a call, Creandum General Partner Staffan Helgesson said that “tech is nowhere, tech is everywhere,” echoing the theme that digital technology is impacting every facet of our lives and therefore every industry. In the future we won’t necessarily think of a business as a technology company in the sense that every company will have technology or online at its heart or it will become extinct. “What we and entrepreneurs should do is look for those huge markets and find ways of using Internet and software to transform them,” he says. One area where Creandum sees a lot of potential is the food market, with Helgesson noting that the grocery market in a country like Sweden is worth as much as the music industry as a whole, referencing the VC’s investment in both music streaming site Spotify — a global leader — and the regional recipe kit subscription service/e-commerce company Linas Matkasse. Another example Helgesson says is the shipping industry and specifically what portfolio company Xeneta . The Oslo, Norway-based startup offers a crowdsourced price comparison service for sea freight, and in doing so, is cracking open a huge legacy industry, but one that has until now remained opaque. Asked about what areas of Europe — or what European hubs — Creandum has its eye on, he says the VC is pan-European and will go where the interesting opportunities are, though he talked up its home turf of the Nordics as remaining key. That’s because, according to the firm’s own research, the region has produced nearly 10 per cent of the world’s and 50 per cent of Europe’s billion dollar or ‘unicorn’ tech exits over the past 10 years. Helgesson also told me the VC has recently recruited two new members to its investment team from Berlin. They are Simon Schminke, previously at Early Bird, and Bjarke Staun Olsen, who most recently ran Rocket Internet’s Vaniday, the beauty and wellness marketplace.
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Uber Takes Its Alipay Partnership Global To Tap Into Chinese Travelers
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
Uber is hoping to squeeze more money from users in China after it a tie-in with Alibaba’s Alipay that will enable Uber China customers to pay their fare using the payments service when they are overseas. Alipay and Uber China first partnered to cover domestic rides in 2014, but now the duo is tapping into the huge market for Chinese tourism and business travel. Initially the partnership goes live in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan — three hotspots for travel during the upcoming Chinese New Year — but Uber China said the agreement “will be extended to more regions around the world during the year”. Making payment straightforward is clearly a major hurdle to capturing a large slice of overseas travelers. While Uber is a global brand present in over 300 cities worldwide, the Chinese branch of its service previously required a dual-currency credit card to take rides overseas, with all billings made in U.S. dollars. With fewer dual-currency cards in circulation, that stipulation limits its potential user base. Adding Alipay, which boats over 400 million active users, is sure to ease things for Uber customers headed overseas. That’s particularly important since Didi Kuaidi, the company leading Uber in China, with Lyft in the U.S., Ola in India and Grab in Southeast Asia, which — over time — will enable its customer base to use these other services via the Didi Kuaidi app when they are overseas.
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Marketing In The Fast Lane With Self-Driving Cars
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Loni Stark
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
From George Orwell predicting the overwhelming reach of television in to the video phone calls in , it seems that technology often imitates pop culture. Nowhere could that be truer than with the new developments in self-driving vehicles. These self-driving vehicles won’t just change the way we look at transportation. They will shift people’s behavior in a critical way, making it a new avenue for digital marketing. When you consider how much time the average person spends in their vehicle every day — about two hours according to most studies — this type of marketing could become a new cornerstone. This new avenue could be a great new way for brands to connect with their target audience, by creating personalized, value-added services. One of the champions of self-driving cars, , likens them to elevators and the elevator operators of old: “They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just come to the floor that you’re at, you just press the button. Nobody needs to operate the elevator. The car is just going to be like that.” As the technology improves, cars will actually be able to do the job more efficiently than humans. After all, are due to human error. Once it’s evident that self-driving cars can eliminate the vast majority of accidents, they’ll become the standard for roadway use. Indeed, having a car you could actually drive would be prohibitively expensive, or even illegal. The end of the need for drivers will impact just about every industry. Public transport options will become less popular as self-driving vehicles become available at a moment’s notice. Governments will be able to funnel money away from expensive public transit programs and instead focus it on ways to take ridesharing to an individual level. Airlines will feel the impact as well, as short commuter flights are abandoned for the privacy and convenience of a self-driving vehicle. After all, if the driver can sleep in their car, it’s just as convenient to drive that 8-9 hour trip rather than fly it. Advertising that already exists in these public transportation venues is aimed at the masses. Flat-screen advertisements in subways have been around since ; in-flight movies and magazines have been around for much longer. These advertisements are not personalized for the individual, but instead focus on gaining as much attention from a large group of people in order to convert an extremely small percentage of them. But when individuals are able to order up their own vehicle, these advertisements aimed at the masses will no longer be appropriate. Instead, the individual will come to expect individualized service and in that, individualized advertisements. By ensuring that in-vehicle advertising is focused, and designed to give the individual something they need, companies can connect and create brand recognition. Instead of staring at the road, occupants might browse the Internet, watch TV or decide on a restaurant along their route. People spend an , and that time that used to be occupied by driving will be wide open for other tasks. This is where personalization will be important. Cars will not be just a mode of transportation, but an extension of the individual inside. Things like picking up groceries or take-out for dinner have the potential to be done by the car itself. The car might receive the address from their owner, or even get a check-in from a company letting it know that an order is ready. In a way, self-driving cars could become the new delivery man. The focus of driving itself will change. It will go from being a purpose-driven activity to an experience-driven activity. The time spent staring out the windshield at the concrete will be occupied elsewhere. Self-driving cars will be expected to know their occupants, making the impact of marketing in these places even stronger. Of course, when it comes to this marketing avenue, it’s not about spamming a captive audience with ads for products or services. Instead, it’s about enhancing their in-vehicle experience. If the traveler is on their way to an amusement park, the vehicle could send them information ahead of time about any special events or things to see. If they’re on the way to a grocery store, they can receive more information about products and even learn about specials that might be going on. The vehicle can become a tool for enhancing the customer’s trip and helping them plan their day. While this seems like a distant future, it’s important to always be marketing toward the future. Things we already know about mobile marketing will work when implemented in a vehicle, as well. That’s why it’s important to focus on things that will work with technology on the move, like: With apps turning vehicles into moving wearables, more opportunity grows for marketers. On average, people spend about in their vehicles. If these people didn’t have to drive, what would they be doing? As vehicles become autonomous, drivers will become passengers. Marketers need to prepare for this by working on location-enabled, personalized messages that can happen in real time, on multiple devices.
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Online Censorship Rears Its Ugly Head In Southeast Asia
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
With a growing middle class rising up across its population of more than 600 million people, Southeast Asia is truly a growth market. Added to that, the influx of mobile devices bringing Internet to hundreds of millions of people for the first — and putting it right in their pocket, no less — makes it , which has the potential to be hugely transformative. Unfortunately, while that includes improving communications, increasing access to resources, making payment methods more robust and more, attitudes across the region can be major hurdles that hinder development. Particularly from governments and other authorities. To make that point clear, three prominent and very different examples of censorship from countries across the region made headlines last week. Indonesia grabbed the somewhat unwanted accolade of becoming the first country to block Netflix following announced in early January. Telekom Indonesia blocked the service “from all of its platforms” last week, . While the government distanced itself from involvement, the state-run mobile operator’s concern focused around Netflix’s ability to run violent and adult content without adhering to content moderation regulations in the country, which has the world’s largest Muslim population. The company also lacks a permit to do business in Indonesia — a problem that Uber and local rival Grab know well enough — which was cited as another reason. So, if you think challenges with licensing in your country are responsible for Netflix running a small library of content, imagine what it’s like in Indonesia where a lack of paperwork is responsible for switching off access to the service in its entirety for users. For a reminder of how random/unclear bans can be in Indonesia, , which were blocked then unblocked during a 24-hour period last month. Example two comes from Malaysia, where for carrying delving into corruption claims related to Prime Minister Najib. The media outlet — — regularly publishes stories on Medium because its website is already blocked in Malaysia, but its latest report appeared to be enough to push authorities to take action. The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission contacted Medium asking that the post be removed for being “false, unsubstantiated, misleading, and in violation of the written law of Malaysia.” Medium stood firm, however, claiming that it stands by the report and investigative journalism generally. “Medium’s in no position to evaluate the truth of the Sarawak Report’s Medium post. We’ve received no evidence that the post violates any of our Rules, or any law,” the company wrote in a blog post. Since it uses HTTPS to secure its site, Malaysian authorities were left with the choice of leaving the post as it is, since Medium wouldn’t remove it, or . It look the latter choice, so now the publishing platform is no longer available in the country. Quite absurd. Exhibit three comes from Thailand, where the government — — is pressuring leading Internet companies Google, Facebook and chat app Line, which has over 30 million users in the country, . Thailand has cracked down hard on dissenting voices online since the coup — last week a politician was mocking junta leader (and Prime Minister) Prayuth Chan-ocha — and it is . If deployed, such a system would allow authorities to directly control the availability of online content without needing to liaise with mobile operators, ISPs or Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Line. The Internet has the potential to positively impact life in this vibrant part of the world, but these three examples — and there are countless that are thrown up each week — show the kind of challenges that push back on progress.
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Asia-Focused KFit Lands $12 Million To Expand Beyond Fitness Services
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
, a nine-month-old service offering gym and healthcare services in the style of ClassPass in the U.S., has announced that it closed a $12 million Series A funding round to move into new verticals. The round was led by , with participation from new investors SIG and Axiata Digital Innovation Fund. Also in on the round were Sequoia Capital India and 500 Startups, two investors from . KFit started out like ClassPass, as a way consumers could find gyms and fitness center packages without signing up for a long-commitment contract, while helping gyms tap on a new audience of potential users, but CEO Joel Neoh — who formerly led Groupon’s efforts across Asia — told us that the model has shifted somewhat this past year. Neoh said the coming is now building out an “active lifestyle platform” which will expand beyond gyms and fitness to include related categories such as spas, beauty services and massages. Those expansions will focus around services, however, not selling physical goods, so you could picture KFit as an online-to-offline service for fitness and wellness services rather than a place to buy sports equipment. “We ask ourselves: ‘How do we help people exercising find things around them?’ — and that comes down to discovery,” Neoh told us in an interview. As of now, the service is present in 10 cities in Asia, including countries in Southeast Asia, Australia, Taiwan and Korea, across which it claims to have taken 250,000 activity reservations from some 4,500 gyms and fitness centers. That’s a lot of geographical expansion work to have covered inside of a year, and Neoh said that 2016 will largely be about locking down its business model and (potentially) hitting profitability by the end of the year. Reaching profitability before the year is up would be notable, given that KFit was carding a fairly high monthly burn rate — negative $320,000 in Q3 2015, 80 percent of which went to staffing, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. On that note, while things may settle down this year, the KFit CEO does expect two or three new city expansions to happen over the coming months. That could include Indonesia, where Venturra Capital is based, but neither China nor India are on the radar. Moreover, the main focus appears to be on vertical expansion rather than location. That’s particularly interesting because it could bring KFit into competition with a range of dedicated beauty booking platforms — including , and — that have risen up across Southeast Asia in recent months.
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SpaceX And Russia Change The Rules Of The Military Launch Market
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
It’s been a tough week for United Launch Alliance (ULA). A hearing last Wednesday brought news of a potential ban on Russian made RD-180 engines which ULA requires for their Atlas V rocket. To make matters worse, the U.S. Air Force is also considering ending an $800 million-per-year contract with the company. This bad news actually works in favor for SpaceX, who is now certified to compete with ULA for high-budget military launches from the Air Force. In fact, SpaceX is the other company capable of competing with ULA for these launch contracts. Last Wednesday, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) said that he was going to introduce legislation to reinstate a purchasing ban of Russian RD-180 rocket engines for military launches. This is a problem for ULA whose Atlas V rocket, which they use for military launches, requires a single RD-180 engine. If McCain’s ban is approved, that would leave ULA with only 9 already-purchased RD-180 engines for Air Force launch contracts. Congress originally cut ULA’s supply to RD-180 engines back in 2014 after Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. The ban was intended to reduce the United States’ reliance on Russia, especially when it came to military assets. However, that ban was temporarily lifted in December when Congress enacted the 2016 omnibus appropriations bill. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) amended the bill to lift the RD-180 ban on ULA, whose rocket facility is located in Alabama. In Wednesday’s hearing, McCain argued that the ban should be reinstated. But the situation is complicated. The Air Force wants reliable access to space, but Congress doesn’t like companies giving money to the Russians in order to do that. Unfortunately, ULA doesn’t currently have another option. This ban could also be seen as unfairly singling out ULA since NASA continues to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Russia for rides to the International Space Station. People are particularly angry about an event that happened late last year. In November, the Air Force opened up a competition for the 2018 launch of their GPS 3 mission. At the time, the original purchasing ban on RD-180 engines was in effect and ULA declined to bid for the contract. ULA stated that, with the purchasing ban, they couldn’t guarantee an Atlas V rocket would be available when 2018 rolled around. That Air Force contract is now expected to go to the only other viable option: SpaceX. Some have that this was a move by ULA to pressure the government into freeing up more RD-180 procurements. The reasoning behind this is that ULA has a longer and better track record for successful launches than SpaceX and it would be in the government’s best interest to maintain ULA as military launch provider. For the past decade, ULA has enjoyed a monopoly on Air Force military launches. Because they were the only means to get military assets into space, the Air Force needed a way to ensure that ULA could maintain that capability at all times. Their answer was an $800 million annual “launch capability contract,” which was set to run through 2019. When ULA opted not to bid in the Air Force’s November competition, some started to question the purpose of the $800 million capability contract. In fact, during Wednesday’s hearing, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said that they were going to study the implications of ending the $800 million contract early. This contract was already a point of controversy after SpaceX received certification to join the military launch market back in May of 2015, ending ULA’s decade-long monopoly. The question was, if SpaceX can maintain the necessary launch capabilities a nearly billion dollar contract, why should taxpayers continue to pay ULA $800 million each year? Recent developments in Russia and the fact that ULA no longer holds a monopoly are the two factors that have turned the military launch market on its head. With two players now in the game, decade-long policies and contracts are getting called into question. ULA has, however, taken steps to move away from the RD-180 engine. In September of 2014, the company with Blue Origin to jointly develop a new U.S. made rocket engine. The engine is estimated to take 4 years to develop and be launch-ready in 2019. But will that be soon enough? Because of their pristine launch reliability record, ULA has always been an attractive launch provider for the Air Force. But today, ULA’s reliance on RD-180 engines has proven to be their greatest weakness, and SpaceX’s greatest asset.
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Africa’s Tech Gold Rush
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Nik Milanovic
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
Africa is on the verge of something big. This seems to be a quiet, cautious consensus in some investment communities. The past year has been peppered with stories of tech startup hubs emerging across the continent, from Lagos to Kigali to Agadir. The model of American tech entrepreneurship looks to be slowly sparking a renaissance in the Silicon Sahara. As the gaze of America’s VCs begins to settle on African entrepreneurs, many open questions are left unanswered. Will Africa play host to the tech world’s next gold rush? Can these markets stay stable enough to grow the next billion-dollar Internet companies? Does Africa have what it takes to emulate Silicon Valley? The answer is a resounding “Yes.” Big things are ahead for African tech. But to understand the rising star for Africa, you first must understand why the road to Africa goes through China. The Chinese credit crunch and the crash of the Shanghai Composite should have come as a surprise to no one… with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Beginning in the early 1990s, the Chinese economy grew at a of between 8 percent and 16 percent, year over year (only dipping to 7 percent following the global financial crisis). This happened mainly because the west began to outsource and offshore its traditional manufacturing in favor of less expensive Chinese producers. The Chinese middle class made exceptional gains as a result, and grew tremendously during this period as manufacturing generated new wealth for the emerging . It seemed inevitable that the party would end at some point — where the roulette wheel would stop though, was anyone’s guess. The first warning signs came in 2013 and 2014 as reports began to trickle out about Chinese “ .” Developers were running deep in debt from loans originated mostly by government municipalities, which the developers had taken out to build the audacious mega cities that would house the next wave of the urbanized Chinese middle class. There was only problem: The next wave didn’t come. As the defaults from construction started to trickle upward, it likely became clear to the People’s Bank of China that growth may be slowing for the first time in a few decades. Meanwhile, the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, Europe, were slowly but steadily recovering from their recessions. Harmony and stability are values central to the policies of Chinese President Xi Jinping — and to the communal ethos of China as a whole — and are lauded much the same way Americans praise liberty and equality. A credit crunch, a cooling growth rate and underwater construction loans all flew in the face of a stable, harmonious China, and threatened the newly minted middle class, looking for returns on its capital. So the CCP guided retail investors to a new asset class: public equities on the Shanghai Composite. From mid-2014 to mid-2015, the Chinese stock market was an investing barn burner, more than doubling in value in less than a year. It looked like the CCP had solved the problem of what to do with the glut of wealth held by its middle class — until the market crashed spectacularly in June 2015. Again, the warning signs were there. Companies like Shanghai Duolun Industry rebranded themselves as “technology” companies and made that just their domain names alone were worth hundreds of millions. I made a brash — and admittedly uninformed — bet against the Shanghai Composite. A few bearish investors and I got lucky; many millions of Chinese did not. Now, as the Chinese stock market enters its third bear market — marked by sustained losses of more than 20 percent — in less than half a year, Chinese retail investors are again looking for a promising asset class to . So why does this matter for Africa? While China was reaping the windfall of massive growth and dealing with the investment challenges of a “free” market within its borders for the first time, it was quietly scaling up its investment outside the country, as well. War, hunger, malaria, tribalism, Ebola and crushing poverty… these are the common western images conjured up at the mention of Sub-Saharan Africa. Since the end of the last world war, those headlines have been sadly reflective of the condition of some unstable African republics. Driven by motives ranging from charity to profit to a renewed “white man’s burden,” the western world has during the past half century poured money into the African continent to combat these ills. But over the past decade, driven by its meteoric economic growth, China has quietly but steadily increased its foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa. In the five years from 2003 to 2008 alone, Chinese by a CAGR of 105 percent, from $75 million in 2003 to $5.5 billion in 2008. The same went for imports and exports between the two, which from $10 billion in 2003 to more than $50 billion in 2008. Unlike the west’s investment, China’s ravenous appetite for African labor and resources is not tied to countries with good governance. The only two in the continent appear to be stability and profitability. This has allowed China, which still only accounts for 3 percent of the FDI in Africa, to grab the lion’s share in some of its larger FDI recipient markets, such as Sudan, Congo DR and Nigeria, all of which score low in world democracy rankings. Zimbabwe, long a thorn in the side of the western world, recently , effectively making it an economic vassal state of China. Yet this new spate of FDI leaves one big question unanswered in the west: Why is China investing so much in Africa? Conventional wisdom holds that Chinese investors want to — such as mining — as fuel to power China’s mighty manufacturing sector. However, the data tell a different story: China is . Indeed, 38 percent of African FDI has gone to manufacturing and construction, and another 20 percent to finance and business services. So why does this matter for Africa? In all likelihood, it means that over the last two decades, as the Chinese middle class grew and became richer, and as western standards for factory labor became more strict, Chinese goods slowly became more expensive. As evidence, China has consistently devalued the yuan in recent years in order to keep its exports cheap. But at some point, prices will catch up with producers, and China will need to find cheaper factories for its companies to be competitive. Enter Africa. Chinese FDI in Africa shows no sign of slowing, even as it goes through a credit crunch and a run on its stock market. If it continues at this rate, Africa could become the new world’s factory in the next 10-20 years, and the African middle class could find itself yanked out of agrarian poverty just as quickly as China’s over the last 20 years. And why wouldn’t Chinese investment continue? Relative to the boom and bust of the Chinese debt and equity markets, African FDI has looked remarkably stable. As long as China, like the Medicis of Renaissance Italy, continues to be a patron of Africa’s enterprising manufacturers and builders, both will profit, and the African middle class will grow. Silicon Valley is boring and oversaturated with capital. At least, that seems to be the conclusion some of its largest investors came to as they looked longingly west. Over the past few years, Sequoia, Matrix, Tiger Global Management and other VC and PE firms have been for Chinese Internet startups. They’ve been met with equally fierce competition from Chinese investors, such as Tencent and Alibaba. China is seen as the “market to conquer” for mega-startups such as Uber or WhatsApp. All this offshore investment activity has been driven by two factors: an increasingly crowded VC and PE market for American tech and the new stability and wealth of emerging economies like China and Brazil (another big focus of American VCs). The rise of China’s middle class led to a mature, stable business environment that encouraged entrepreneurs like Alibaba’s Jack Ma to found startups and reap their fortunes. Over the next 20 years, Africa will walk down the same path. As more and more manufacturing and services companies look to increasingly stable African economies in which to offshore their operations, the African middle class will grow. And as the middle class grows and business environments become increasingly wealthy and stable, entrepreneurs will emerge in Africa’s nascent tech startup scene. It’s important to note here the alluring temptation to over-homogenize Africa. The western world tends to think of Africa as a cohesive unit, while countries as close to each other as Egypt and Rwanda are in reality as diverse as Luxembourg is from Turkey. Some will welcome the tech scene; many will not. But early signs are encouraging. Literacy and education rates are . Studies are coming out on entrepreneurship as the on the continent. The Rwandan government just announced a $100 million . Djibouti is with an eye toward becoming East Africa’s Singapore. Mobile phones still . And The World Bank says that Africa is “poised to become .” It’s tempting to patronize a bit and characterize these entrepreneurs as “African solutions for African problems,” seeing them only as incubators for social enterprise. Western ears tend to hear about these startups and call up pictures of mosquito nets, clean water, cheap lighting and malaria vaccines. Yet these companies will compete for the same markets to distribute the same products as western ones, with new tactics. Which is not to say that there isn’t a looming, powerful opportunity to amass what C.K. Prahalad calls “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.” Local contexts will allow entrepreneurs to create new services that wouldn’t even make sense in western contexts, such as the much derided “Yo!” app which Marc Andreessen smugly — and correctly — is hugely relevant in Bangladesh. Look no further than China for evidence of fierce local competition. Didi Kuaidi in China to Uber’s 1 million, in the one market that Uber has repeatedly stressed is most important. Look to Alibaba, challenging Amazon’s monolithic supremacy in online purchases while also spinning out payment subsidiaries (Alipay and ANT Financial), streaming music (Xia Mi) and news (South China Morning Post). Or to Tencent’s WeChat, whose 650 million users challenge WhatsApp’s 900 million. As support structures grow around entrepreneurs in emerging markets, they will gain access to the resources that have buoyed Silicon Valley for 30 years now, and will compete head-on with Silicon Valley startups. In the , a Nigerian education startup backed by the American VC firm Spark Capital, “genius is evenly distributed; opportunity is not.” This is just the beginning.
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Gett Adds £6 Couriers To Its On-Demand Cab Service In London
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
As continues to raise ever more funding to drive its on-demand transportation app into more categories and countries, one of its smaller, regional cab-hailing rivals is quietly expanding into its own adjacent services: , a startup with service in 50 cities globally whose app can be used to hail black cabs in London, is today adding a courier service, starting in the UK capital. For a flat fee of £6 ($8.50), you can have a package of up to 5 kilograms picked up anywhere in central London in 20 minutes, and delivered within an hour by scooter. For those of you who don’t live in London, a little context: a £6 flat-fee courier service for central London is pretty damn cheap — a discount of some 30% on typical courier services. The courier service will sit alongside Gett’s other flat-rate promise — £10 for black cab rides, also across the middle of town. Gett Courier is launching at an interesting time for the on-demand transportation market in the UK and Europe. Sources tell us that Chinese transport startup Didi Kuaidi and India’s Ola have been among those eyeing up transportation services in this part of the world as potential investments, or at least as potential partners in a global alliance in part to better compete with Uber both in seamless global services as well as technology. Notably, when that partnership — between Didi, Ola, Grab and Lyft — was announced, there was no European partner in the mix. Companies that have been mentioned to us as possible targets include Hailo and Gett. In an interview with TechCrunch, Gett’s European CEO Remo Gerber would not comment on any future partnerships or investments with this group unless you count a nervous laugh as a comment. But Gett is raising, with funding “in a critical phase right now,” he noted. The company, co-founded by Shahar Weiser and Roi Moore and based in New York, is currently backed by , with investors coming with a strong Russian accent. They include Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries, Inventure Partners, Kreos Capital, MCI, and Vostok Investments. But he did give us some insight into just what Gett is getting up to with this new service. It turns out that the courier service is more connected than you think: the scooters that will be doing the delivering for Gett are actually trainee black cab drivers, who have to spend a number of months learning London’s complicated tangle of streets, and how to get from one to the other backwards and forwards — a body of study referred to as “The Knowledge.” Trainee black cab drivers do this through programs, using scooters to get around the city. While they are not paid to ride around for their Knowledge training, Gett smartly realised they they could start working with them early-doors, by paying them to pick up and drop off parcels. The other reason why this is a smart move has to do with how Gett has been trying to grow its business in London. While Uber has wedged its way into many smartphone-using consumers’ transportation options by offering an easy to use, and often very cheap hired transport option, Gett has been quietly building up a business mainly targeting business users. Building out a courier service will give Gett one more sticky service to sell to their target market of corporate companies. Gerber says that today Gett counts 3,000 corporate clients, including Of course, there are many potential hitches in Gett’s bigger business. For starters, Gett is not the only one targeting corporate users. Uber for Business as of September 2015. In Gett’s defense, Gerber says that many top clients rate due diligence is an important factor. “We don’t have a single lawsuit against us,” Gerber says. “This is important for corporate clients.” Given the many regulatory spats that have followed Uber across various markets, some clients are searching for a “safe” option that is 100% reliable. This is essentially what a hailing service working just with the black cab fleet in London is able to provide, he adds. Another potential issue for Gett is the business model it’s applying here. Given that the scooters are driving around regardless of whether they are delivering packages, it’s a clever move by Gett that should mean a quick margin for them on the service — although it seems like only a matter of time before the trainee cabbies decide to raise their rates in order to be available for courier jobs. There is also the spectre of other competition. In addition to existing standalone courier services, there are those from other transportation companies. Addison Lee — a big competitor in targeting the business market in London — provides a courier service. Uber’s is live in San Francisco, Chicago and New York, but seems more focused on the delivery of goods, linked up with e-commerce services where you initially buy them, rather than messengering a package from your office to a destination. For addresses outside Zone 1, Gett says a fixed price gets confirmed in the app when you enter the destination at the time of booking. Gett Courier will be available from each day.
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The League’s Amanda Bradford Is Not Impressed By Stanford Student’s Criticism
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
Well, that’s one way to respond when someone doesn’t like your startup. After a Stanford student spotted an internship opening at , they declared that they were “totally and utterly ashamed that this dating service came out of Stanford,” and asked, “Is it possible to get any more elitist than this? Does it even cross your mind that you are endorsing the idea that wealth, class and privilege determine a person’s character?” (FYI: We’re not printing the student’s name, since it’s not the name they used on Facebook. We have, however, confirmed that they’re a senior at Stanford.) Skeptical Facebook comments are nothing new, but Amanda Bradford, The League’s founder and CEO, as well as an alumnus of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, decided to respond, point by point. While I wouldn’t recommend arguing with college students as a marketing strategy, Bradford’s comments offer an extended defense of The League from . Apparently Bradford was pretty happy with them, since she . The League even shared them with its users (while reassuring them that Bradford was in the office when she wrote her comments and that there was “no booze involved”). Here’s how she takes on the charge of elitism: Is it possible that Stanford admissions standards have gone down? Let’s start with the definition of elitist: rule by the people who have the most wealth and status in a society, the most successful or powerful group of people. I would postulate that anything that is NOT 100% merit-based and requires one to have money to be part of said group is more elitist than The League. Higher Education in the United States is a great example of this. For instance, I was admitted to Dartmouth based on academic merit. However, I could not afford to go because they did not offer me financial aid and I didn’t want to take on massive debt. Therefore, in my eyes Dartmouth, and any school that does not offer academic scholarships, in general is more elitist than The League. Charity events, Tahoe ski-leases, Tech Conferences like SXSW could all be put in this category – the list goes on and on of things I STILL can’t afford to do even at 31 due to MBA debt coupled with a startup salary, but I think I’ve made my point. As for whether The League is reinforcing retrograde ideas about wealth and class, Bradford said: Anyone can apply and join the League regardless of their income, the family they’re from, their profession, or what schools they’ve attended. Just like most people at Stanford are not trust fund kids from Atherton, most people in The League did not come from wealth or expensive private schools. Are there some? Of course. No one is denying the fact that success often breeds success. But the common thread in the League community, as I would guess is the same at your school, is the desire to be successful and having the ambition and work-ethic to make an impact somewhere. Bradford has previously claimed that the perception that of The League an elitist dating app is , and that her goal is really “to build a community where smart, outspoken, high-achieving women are celebrated and encouraged to progress in their career full-time.” By the way, given the back-and-forth about what should and shouldn’t inspire Stanford students to feel shame, I suppose I should note that a) Stanford is actually , and b) even so, all kinds of not-terribly-smart people got to attend, including me.
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Don’t Mortgage Your Startup
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David Frankel
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
The last 5-10 years have been an extraordinary time for early stage tech founders to raise money. But easy access to capital has ingrained some bad habits among founders. There has always been the risk of over-funding your company or not being able to find a funder for your next round, but now it’s far more common to see founders blithely accepting deal terms that could kill their businesses — or at least their ownership of them. Ironically, this is a problem for both successful startups as well as those that are struggling: Competitive founders of rocket ships aiming at a unicorn-filled fairyland often accept onerous terms precisely to secure a higher valuation, and struggling startups end up signing deals with less scrupulous third-tier firms or strategic corporate investors who haven’t bought into the Y Combinator playbook. Despite all the educational blog posts and videos available to founders, there is still an information asymmetry between investors. You’ll find that pitfalls abound as you progress down the funding path. Lending money is an inherently risky business, yet most of us work under the assumption that there is a wide gap between assets like sovereign debt and junk bonds. You’d expect to see a risk curve that starts shallow at T-Bills (which are as close to riskless as can be), that then curves dramatically upwards to junk bonds (which offer more reward to compensate for the riskiness of the bet). Blue-chip corporate bonds and parastatal organizations would fit somewhere between the two. The truth is that the curve is much flatter than you think. I’m an early stage VC, but also serve as a non-executive director of , the investment banking arm of FirstRand, a South African institution that manages more than $75 billion of assets; I’ve seen how the other side works. J.P. Morgan famously said he’d lend to anyone of character, but for today’s later-stage investors, collateral is key. Why? People who successfully bet on risky financial instruments ensure their deals leave them owning the underlying assets. Just ask any real estate developer. They ensure there is collateral on the loan, they insist on warrants and covenants. First-time founders don’t necessarily understand that it’s just the same in the startup world. At the seed stage, the downside risk is so small that investors can write off small failures as the cost of doing business. At the later stages, liquidation preferences, covenants and board control shift the balance of power. Late-stage startup investment is much closer to a personal home mortgage than most founders think. With a mortgage, you don’t buy a house. In reality, you’re placing a 20 percent down payment and living for the next 30 years in a home the bank owns. The same is true of startups. At this point, it’s important for a founder to know that their role changes fundamentally. You go from being the CEO of a company you own to the mortgage holder of a company that the VCs are letting you run — as long as you’re performing. There is always the risk that a founder will fail as a CEO, but smart investors ensure that they capture the salvage value — which may be worthless at the get-go, but increases over time. The rules change as you raise money from larger institutional funds. Gone are the days of SAFE docs, which bend the power to the entrepreneur. At later stages you’ll be negotiating terms with veterans who stubbornly hold onto things like liquidity preferences. As many unicorns have found out, to their embarrassment, larger financial institutions have no compunction about writing down the value of a struggling frustratingly-slow-to-be-listed portfolio company. Startups rarely face this kind of drama, but there are many smaller ways they can be tripped up. I recently helped one of our founders complete a later-stage deal. The deal was a huge win for everyone involved, but it nearly died during negotiation. The valuation went up. The terms were fair. But the new investor demanded a 1x liquidation preference. Unfortunately, the lead of the previous round had negotiated a 2x and was loathe to relinquish it. Even though he was a pen stroke away from both paper and cash gains, he understandably didn’t want to give up the 2x preference that protected his downside (which he had been granted only a year before). We ended up working out a deal between the steadfast financiers, but it came at the cost of new accommodations, which could create new challenges down the road. Why care? Stories about founders being pushed out of their startups are as old as Apple. Everyone who starts a company knows it’s a possibility. But I think most founders underestimate the likelihood that it could happen to them. I expect we’ll soon see a rash of this kind of activity in the industry. Have you ever wondered how a startup gets a massive round of capital at an exorbitant valuation when their fundamentals don’t seem to merit it? Simple: They’ve mortgaged their future. Promising businesses that are being managed poorly by founding CEOs will find themselves under new, VC-appointed leadership. Others will be sold off, leaving late-stage investors whole while founders and earlier investors are wiped out. If you’ve already raised a big round, all you can do is try to manage your business to plan, and try to make the results work. If you’re at the earlier stages, forewarned is forearmed. If you’re offered a clean round at a lower valuation, versus a term sheet with a more enticing topline number but scary downside clauses, closely consider the former. Don’t hamstring your future self to prevent a few points of dilution. You’ll be tempted by offers from these later-stage funders that pit your interests against your earlier investors. Feel free to take them, but if you find yourself struggling, there will be few around the table offering support. Above all, don’t try to outfox the funder and her lawyers. I wish it was as simple as suggesting you spend an hour in a deep dive with your lawyer learning to understand these terms. It would be the best $1,000 you’d ever spend. But founders are at a deep disadvantage. Investors use financial terms to protect their interests in so many ways, every day, that they’ve got an unfair advantage. It’s highly unlikely that you will be able to pick up all the intricacies and nuances of complex deal terms in a crash-course format. More often than not, you’re going to be at a disadvantage in negotiation. You need to invest in top-notch legal counsel, and hope your earlier investors are more aligned with you than the later-stage investors. Otherwise, you may be kicked out of the house that you built.
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UberPUPPY Is Exactly What You Think It Is
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
Oh my god. Uber has finally done it. They’ve made my dreams come true. Uber wants you to “paws whatever you’re doing,” because in honor of this week’s Puppy Bowl, the company is teaming up with Animal Planet, the SF SPCA, Peninsula Humane Society, and Berkeley Humane Society to deliver on-demand puppies to your house to hang out with you for a bit. The puppy packs will be available this Wednesday, February 3 from 11am-2pm for $30 in an understandably limited supply. The “PUPPY” option will be available in the Uber app for users in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County, New York, Denver, and Washington DC. The puppies are sure to have a fun time too as the promotion is being supported by some pretty respectable animal organizations that will have helpers there to be sure everyone’s being treated well. A specified that if you’re selected a “puppy squad and their coaches will come by for a cuddle huddle.” The promotion is part of Uber’s larger, week-long Super Bowl offerings, many of which are focused on customers in the Bay Area, including chicken wing deliveries vie Uber Eats and backseat EA football tournaments via Uber Pool aimed at gearing customers up for the big game.
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Tech Valuations In 2016: The End Of The Line For Sloppy Growth
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Rory O’Driscoll
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
What’s going on in technology investing right now? Is this another 2001, when imploded? Another 2008, when the wider world crashed but powered through? Or is it like Facebook in 2012, a valuation blip and a chance to buy? Anecdotes about dead unicorns are not enough. An explanation has to start with a framework and a qualitative description of what is driving the markets — then back up that model with data. This is my model and my data. Venture-backed startups live in a crazy hyper-cyclical world driven by the constant and mutually reinforcing dynamics of burn and valuation. It is easy to sound like the elder statesman “worried about high burn” or “worried about high ” but tolerance for burn and willingness to “pay up” for high are core aspects of the entire venture model. The question is always whether the money being spent (burn) is creating enough fundamental value (revenues, customers etc.) to justify the high . From that perspective, absolute valuation (billion dollars, yes or no) is the wrong metric on which to focus. It is an output, not an input — and it is extremely prone to overshooting, with the last five years being a clear example. In that period, capital markets have been in love with . High- companies have attracted high , which allowed them to raise capital, which was then spent to generate still more and raise the valuation again. The result has been a self-perpetuating cycle of high burn, higher , still higher and a strong positive feedback loop. This puts pressure on companies to keep that going at all costs. Because the number of profitable ways for a company to spend money is finite, at some point that pressure to grow leads to investments that deliver , but at the expense of profits. Unprofitable sales channels, subsidies to acquire customers and expensive advertising campaigns are all signs that a company is focused on at all costs rather than at a profit. Companies get . The basic financial model for every technology company is the same. Spend a fixed sum of R&D dollars to develop a product, then start spending on sales and marketing to generate revenues. The hope is that (eventually) the revenue generated from customers, less the sales cost required to acquire those customers, will be large enough to cover R&D and other costs, and the company can become profitable. That is why all conversations about “burn” quickly become conversations about customer profitability. All other expenses are roughly fixed, and the speed at which sales expense yields customer revenue is the key financial metric for the company. If something is going wrong, it will show up here. It already has. For SaaS companies, which is the area I invest in, the simplest and most accessible measure of customer profitability is Sales Efficiency, the ratio between quarter on quarter revenue and the sales and marketing costs required to generate that . The chart below displays the median Sales Efficiency for all public SaaS companies from 2012 to 2015 YTD. This is the key measure of value creation for these companies, and it has been declining fairly consistently since 2012 (and is now about 35 percent below the peak, with a rate of decline that is accelerating). This is a huge deal. Customer profitability is the transmission mechanism from burn to and from to valuation. This key metric has been plummeting just as more money was being poured in. The public markets figured this out 18 months ago. Looking at the same public SaaS companies, the chart below looks just at the top 25 percent of these companies ranked by and shows how they are being valued over time. In March 2014, these high- companies were being valued at 12x run-rate revenues, but by mid-2014, this had declined to around 6x revenues, which is where it has remained since. The long-expected crash has, in fact, already happened — almost 18 months ago. Either you believe in remarkable coincidences or it is clear these two charts are linked. Unlike the private markets, the public markets get to rethink investment decisions every day. Over time, public investors either explicitly or implicitly realized that customer economics and the quality of have declined and, consequently, reduced the premium paid for excess . Capitalism works. The private markets, where decisions only get made once a year, have been slower to react; hence, the dearth of IPOs and the price adjustments seen as high-priced private companies come to the public markets. In any private company where the last percentage points of have only been generated at the expense of profit will no longer be able to attract capital at a high valuation. Smart companies will respond by cutting marginal investment, thus raising sales efficiency — even at the expense of having a lower rate. We will then see the same feedback loop kick in, but in reverse. Lower will result in less capital being raised, which will result in lower and still-lower . In contrast to the rise, the decline will happen much more quickly. Bubbles build up slowly, crashes happen fast. Eventually it will bottom out as rates become sustainable at acceptable levels of customer economics. will be out. Sustainable, smart will be back — at least until the next time. The new state will be fine, but the transition will be hard. Some companies will have left it too late to switch paths and will run out of cash. Even for the vast majority of companies that make it, management teams and investors are looking at one to two years of what is euphemistically called “growing into the valuation.” This is another way of saying working hard for no additional return! It is not 2008, which turned out to be ugly for the world but fairly benign for technology; it is not 2001, which was a bloodbath for ; nor is it Facebook 2012, a panic over nothing. The industry has overpaid for, and over-invested in, reasonably good companies. Now all involved have to take their lumps and settle back to a slower , but saner world. It’s not the worst thing that could happen.
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Startup Step-By-Step: Raising
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
look around the room. It’s five in the morning and the black car is idling outside. The driver has already called me and I quietly whispered that I was coming down. My wife, my long-limbed and tangled in sheets, is asleep. In the small light on my bedside table I see her settle into the warm place where I just was and I wish I could lie back down to sleep. I’m going to California from New York. I’m going to change the world, or at least that’s what I tell these people, these strangers I’m going to meet. The flight is early because I need to be there early. I think, for a moment, that I’m a fool for doing this. My wife stirs and wakes. She smiles at me. “Have fun,” she whispers. “I never do,” I say. I lean down to kiss her and her lips are dry. This is the kiss I’ve woken to nearly every day for a decade and a half, a smell that is as familiar and close to me as the scent of my grandmother’s house, a smell I still recall after waking from a dream of a big house in the country, the beams creaking as they shrink in the cool of a summer of evening. This is the scent of the life I chose fifteen years ago on a train between Warsaw and Gdansk, her eyes grabbing mine, forcing me to see her, this young woman, this young ad exec, for what she really was: the woman who would come with me back to New York and marry and who would support me no matter what crazy thing I decided to do or where I decided to go. And now I’m doing something that can blow up all we’ve worked on for the past fifteen years. Maybe I’m being a little dramatic. Maybe I’m being silly. But that’s what it feels like on this cold morning. I stop in the rooms where the kids are sleeping. The two boys are in one room, our girl in another. One of the boys is half naked, his shirt pulled off in the night. It is still warm so I do nothing. The other boy is in his underwear. Our girl is in her room, the light still on, shining in her closed eyes. I turn it off. It’s 5am. , the . Down the creaking stairs of this old house, into the kitchen. The coffee machine pants for a moment and spits out a cup which I down. I haven’t been eating well and breakfasts are not my favorite meal anymore. Now, in this 40th year, I’ve found my metabolism to be an enemy to be vanquished. Clothes hang on me like a tarp on a station wagon. You can tell there’s something under there, but you don’t care what it is. The coffee is good and bitter. I’m about to go to San Francisco and drink Starbucks in meeting after meeting. I hate Starbucks. I hate the bad burnt coffee, the egg smell that sometimes overpowers the stench of low-level detergents. In Menlo Park where we usually go the only Starbucks is full of dealmakers and designers. It’s full of smiling people who can go outside and enjoy their decaffeinated chai lattes in the kind of weather New York only gets for a few weeks in the spring. But I honestly don’t like all that sun and I honestly don’t like the coffee. The best coffee is here in my kitchen and I’m about to leave, to forgo it for two weeks. I’m a traveler and I’m going on a trip. It’s not a trip for pleasure but it is necessary.
I’m like a kid going into middle school: I have to make new friends, learn a new building, and become true explorers. For a while someone held our hands. Now there’s no one there to help us, just endless articles about crushing it and pounding it and raising in a bad economy. And in this middle school 50% of the students fail almost immediately. The rest putter along and only 1% actually succeed. It’s a really crappy middle school but it’s a fun ride. I grab the long rucksack that carries my clothes. I pack light. I’ll wash my stuff there. I have a necessaries case that came from an old camping kit. It is see-through but has undergone so much travel that it looks opaque. An Aleve, my drug of choice, dissolved in it long ago and so there is an orange smear that reminds me of blood. Things that stay there are not sterile yet I use the toothbrush there with regularity. It doesn’t bother me: in that bagged petri dish, I wager, all the bacteria comes all from me. Further up and further in. I put on my boots. I wear jeans and a t-shirt, a heavy hoodie – the uniform of the modern success story. This is my travel wear and my pitching wear. I have a plastic belt for easy pass-through at the metal detector and usually wore slip-on shoes until I got tired of them. Now I wear normal shoes but I rarely have to take them off. I’ve signed up for a government program that lets saps like me skip the lines. We pay for the privilege of being herded through a bit faster through to the thresher. But before all that there’s “the moment.” This is how I remember these trips. On winter mornings I see the snow swirling in the streetlight outside. On fall mornings I smell the snap of the air. In the summer I am welcomed by the binaural sound of traffic and crickets. On this morning none of that is there, just a blankness to the air that means that summer is over. The humidity has fallen and so has the heat. New York is in stasis until it gets much colder. This moment is made up of the dull light in the front vestibule before I open the door. That’s the moment. That’s the one I’ll remember about this trip. The car is idling. The driver, a middle-aged Russian man with a big driver’s belly, opens the trunk and helps me with my rucksack. Into the morning we drive, classical music on his radio. The edge of the world wakes up as we roll from my house to the highway. The streets are already bustling and even in the few minutes between waking and the slam of a Lincoln Town Car door the world is changed. The river goes from black to grey to red and the Verrazano, that miracle of 1970s bridgework, is suddenly cast into silhouette. I spend most of the ride on my phone though, as you do. I swipe, watch the early morning drabs of Twitter and Facebook show up, check the overnight mail. But then, as the classical music begins to pep up and the driver gets a bit more lively I look up, settling into the bouncing of the springs. I honestly don’t want to waste my time on my phone. However if I don’t focus on something else cars like this one tend to make me carsick. It’s a tickle at first, like a feather down the throat, then full bore nausea. It is one of the banes of my commuting existence, these horrible floppy cars and their terrible transmissions. I’m going to meet a few VCs. We’re at the airport. I enter the time of waiting. Further up and further in. I board. I fly. It takes about six hours to get to SFO. I spend some of that time watching movies – it’s the only time I have to watch anything that isn’t a kids’ program – practicing and writing. I’m about to land and pitch and pitch and pitch. Further up and further in, right? The plane rises over New York and into the slowly scattering clouds. It’s morning and the sun is rising pink in the window. In six hours I’ll be on the ground and in six hours I’ll know, roughly, what the next six years will be like. Until then this tube of metal will race above the clouds into the new morning and, inexplicably, I will smile. . Sounds about right.
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Transcending Borders Through Technology
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Ayman Sayed
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
As is clear from the front pages of newspapers recently, we are living in a world where open democratic values are under attack. Paris, Bamako, San Bernardino, Jakarta and Ouagadougou have all been targeted by terrorists. The European Union is being challenged over nation-state loyalties: Geopolitical realities are driving many EU nations to open their doors to refugees while others are closing them in a time when the world is being held hostage to the senseless actions of entities that are neither nation nor state. At the same time, we are in the midst of a technological revolution that is reshaping our society. The Internet of Things (or the fourth Industrial Revolution as it is sometimes known) is driving a whole new way for businesses to optimize operations. The widespread use of software applications has already launched powerful new business models, where cost structures have completely been reshaped. Excess supply and demand are being taken up and satisfied. Operating-profit models are shifting. Labor models, also, eventually will be transformed. But as essential and transformative as software has become, it also has introduced a digital threat vector for many of the same actors who seek to attack democracies in the physical world. We must resist responding to this threat by simply hardening borders, rescinding access and limiting the capabilities of technology. Rather, we must embrace a security posture that is empowering and foundational to the emergence of the type of society we strive for — an agile society. What makes this revolution unique is that the user is now in the driver’s seat — demanding an ever-improving, easy-to-use, always-on digital experience. Enterprises and, interestingly, even countries are reshaping their value propositions to gain mindshare and market share in a digital age. Take Estonia, which is pioneering the idea of a country without borders with their recent launch of the world’s first “e-residency” program. With it, you get a government-issued digital identity and an Estonian address, and you can set up a “location-independent” company online and conduct banking. A small country that, through digital transformation, can now count the entire world as its potential market. Already we’ve seen industry pillars such as transportation (taxis, travel agents), finance (digital banking, bitcoin) and healthcare (remote access to care) being rewritten the world over by software applications. It used to take decades for enterprises to expand their global reach, but in the digital age it takes mere weeks, if not days. The real power of the Estonian example is that it goes beyond individual industries to demonstrate that software can transform how we think about the very borders upon which we have relied to organize our world for centuries. At the heart of the e-residency aspiration is digital security — to ensure a level of trust and enable a business model that, without security, wouldn’t be possible. Whether it’s securing against hackers the Internet of Things — — or the industrial Internet and its connected power plants and factories, realizing the potential of our new connected world will take new approaches to security. As the technological surface area of our world expands, now is the time to take a look at the cyber-borders we are already constructing and stress-test them beyond the nation-state for a changing world. If there’s one thing that vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, malware like Conficker and breaches like Sony Entertainment have taught us, it’s that hackers don’t recognize borders and security cannot be an afterthought. As software increasingly flies our planes and drives our cars and runs our economy, digital security enables physical safety and data protection at a minimum, but it also provides the impetus for better lives and global growth. As hackers begin to exploit vulnerabilities deeper in the technology stacks around us, we need to focus on security as a global challenge that demands a new paradigm. For the potential of the digital age to be fully realized, we need to ensure that the world’s borders feel open while protecting individuals and institutions from attack. That protection will increasingly be identity-based and in the background. One emerging example is how banks are protecting their customers from card fraud. Putting up multiple barriers makes using an app or service cumbersome. Instead, access is streamlined and friction-free using identity and access management, authentication and analytics technologies that automate security processes in the background. As we move forward, we need to be increasingly mindful that we are actually building out a new kind of global infrastructure in real time. Starting with some simple truths may help. First, as an agile society, we need to start seeing the world as a system, not a collection of discrete digital entities, with all that this implies for how governments and standards organizations need to work together. Second, we have to accept that the massively organic digital world cannot be accurately predicted and controlled; rather, it must be sensed and responded to. It is temporal and alive and moving fast. This requires technological innovation inherent in sensors, machine learning and analytics. Third, we need to foster agility in the form of open innovation and a belief that, just as in software development, iteration is the only way to both keep up with the rate of change and avoid large-scale, catastrophic failures of systems we thought were “perfect.” Behind the attacks taking place against open democratic values everywhere, the democratizing influence of the Internet and the fourth Industrial Revolution are marching ahead boldly unimpeded. While the explicit borders of nation-states are being challenged and, in some cases dismantled or diminished, the implicit borders of the digital world are just starting to take shape. The opportunity to get this right is now, and it will take the world to make it happen.
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Digital Transformation Requires Total Organizational Commitment
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 1 | 31 |
By now you’ve surely heard that moving forward, every company will be a software company, and that shift is happening now as companies large and small scramble to transform into digitally-driven organizations. Wherever you turn, businesses are facing tremendous disruptive pressure. What’s interesting is that the theory about how firms should be dealing with this massive change is itself in flux, transforming if you will, as organizations come to grips with the idea that the most basic ways they do business are being called into question. Just over a year ago when I researched this topic, I found that the general method for dealing with disruption was using labs or incubators to prime the innovation pump. Today, when I explore the same issues, I’m finding that companies are taking a much more comprehensive approach that has to do with reviewing every department and business process in the organization. The issue with is how you move the kind of innovative thinking from that internal innovation test bed into the organization at large. The reasoning behind isolating innovation was sound enough, because those fledgling ideas would very likely be sucked up into the vacuum of existing business policies where they get lost forever in a haze of bureaucratic negativity. If you want to kill innovation, you just keep saying “no.” The new thinking says you have to start looking at the big picture from the first day and you have to consider the impact that these changes are going to have on the entire organization. You have to figure out how to grease the skids of creativity so they don’t get slowed down by HR, legal, IT and by all the systems and departments that have been put in place to protect and limit these kinds of changes inside large organizations. Now the idea is to teach those well-meaning naysayers to get the heck out of the way and for them to also find new ways of achieving their goals and requirements as the organization marches forward into a digitally driven future. As we’ve seen through the experience of implementing individual enterprise systems such as content management, ERP or CRM trying to get a large organization moving in the same direction across departments is a huge challenge. When you suddenly put your whole business model on notice, a pocket of innovation is just too incremental to deal with that scale of change. Aaron Levie, CEO at Box is co-teaching with professor Rob Siegel called where they explore the kinds of issues large established organizations face as they maneuver through these massive changes. “What happens when you take a business that’s good at analog stores, and software can deliver new disruptive experiences? How do they respond? No product is more physical and analog than a retail store or car. We are seeing those [delivery models] inverted and flipped over by technology,” says Levie. When I spoke to Edward Hiaett, SVP of services at Pivotal and in charge of Pivotal Labs, at Web Summit in October, 2014, his company approach, but he said his company’s thinking has evolved. When he looks at a firm he sees a company that has to completely change the way it does business. In the next decade it’s possible that many people won’t own cars in the traditional sense. In fact they might not even be driving them anymore as self-driven cars become more widespread. That means the whole firm has to start examining all of its long-established systems around how they design, deliver, market and sell automobiles. And they need to start looking at these systems now before the delivery model changes, Hiaett says. It doesn’t mean it changes all at once, but if Ford is in the midst of pivoting from a business selling cars to one that’s in the ‘the mobility business’, it’s clearly going to have a major impact on all of the company’s long-established business processes. This means that the executive suite has to have a clear plan for the future, and a way to put the company on the road toward delivering on that vision. They can’t hide the innovation team in the basement. They need to inject innovative thinking into every process in the organization and that requires reconsidering every process, says Michael Krigsman, founder of , a weekly web-based talk show on which Krigsman interviews leading tech industry executives. “The successful executives are able to embrace change. This is a very key point and it’s really the most difficult thing about this. With the exception of startups, every company has an established business model and way they do business. Product lines, services and employees have been optimized for standard processes,” Krigsman told TechCrunch. Executives require a particular set of skills and approaches as the organization shifts: Levie says that he sees CIOs with these kinds of traits in his job as Box CEO, but he says he has seen organizations held back when there isn’t a unified front in the C suite. “I think the majority of companies recognize how disruptive these trends are. A small percentage recognize this at the CEO level and board level. Me personally in building and selling enterprise software, we interact with a large percentage of CIOs that get it, but don’t always have the support from CEO and that makes it harder without top-down support,” Levie explained. As we tend to do in this business, we have been attacking this type of change by throwing different technologies at it, and while technology can certainly help, it requires a much more personal approach by management, one that takes the people who have to implement these massive changes into account. Photo by on Shutterstock. Just last week Accenture released and the consulting juggernaut says the success of any company going through fundamental digital transformation is understanding that it’s first and foremost a people issue. Finding ways to help people across this digital divide and the culture shock that rapid change brings is going to be just as important as the technology we use to get there, says Marc Carrel-Billiard, global tech R&D Lead on digital transformation at Accenture. “When we talk to clients, we usually start by talking about technology, but [typically] after 15 minutes, we shift gears. We start talking about people and the digital culture shock they are in. If [clients] want to be digital, it’s not just about technological change because it’s coming [regardless]. Companies need to think about people or it will not work at all,” he said. One lesson we should have learned after all these years of trying to implement incremental change management is that it’s always been about people and managing how to deal with these changes. Today, the speed of change is coming so quickly, and the requirements are so daunting, that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. It requires companies to shift their mindset completely, Krigsman says. “Companies that do this well are able to adopt a beginner’s mind set, taking an approach of looking at things from a fresh perspective,” he explained. This could involve, for example, having fewer impediments for customer service by implementing systems so that information flows more seamlessly from one department to another and across systems. “What does that mean to customers and internal processes? It comes down to being willing to experiment and look at things through a new lens,” Krigsman said. In fact, he recommends that companies partner with startups, which tend to be smaller, more nimble and creative. “The reason for that, the big challenge is how do you inject new thinking. And that’s a very hard thing to do because it comes down to several things, the ingrained behaviors of people who have been doing this job this way for a long time,” he said. By injecting new thinking into a company, employees can start to see that there are different ways to handle those standard business practices and can begin to incorporate that type of creative thinking into their organizational philosophy. When you consider that , it’s not hard to see that change has always been with us, but the rate of change is accelerating dramatically due in large part to the disruption brought about by digital transformation. “The cool thing is that incumbents recognize that the same assets that can hold them back, can also be used to compete in a different guise,” Levie said. That means it’s not all gloom and doom, companies just have to start thinking much more creatively about their digital future and the effect that will have across the organization.
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China Just Released True Color HD Photos Of The Moon
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
This month, the China National Space Administration released all of the images from their recent moon landing to the public. There are now hundreds and hundreds of never-before-seen true color, high definition photos of the lunar surface available for download. The images were taken a few years ago by cameras on the Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover. In December of 2013, China joined the ranks of Russia and the United States when they successfully soft-landed on the lunar surface, becoming the third country ever to accomplish this feat. What made China’s mission especially remarkable was that it was the first soft-landing on the moon in 37 years, since the Russians landed their Luna 24 probe back in 1976. Today, anyone can create a user account on China’s website to download the pictures themselves. The process is a bit cumbersome and the connection to the website is spotty if you’re accessing it outside of China. Luckily, Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society spent the last week navigating the Chinese database and is currently hosting a suite of China’s lunar images on the . Chang’e 3, named after the goddess of the Moon in Chinese mythology, was a follow-up mission to Chang’e 1 and Chang’e 2 which were both lunar orbiters. The objective of the Chang’e 3 mission was to demonstrate the key technologies required for a soft moon landing and rover exploration. The mission was also equipped with a telescope and instruments to perform geologic analysis of the lunar surface. Once the 1,200 kg Chang’e lander reached the surface at a location known as Mare Imbrium, it deployed the 140 kg Yutu rover, whose name translates to “Jade Rabbit.” The Yutu rover was equipped with 6 wheels, a radar instrument, and x-ray, visible and near-infrared spectrometers (instruments that can measure the intensity of different wavelengths of light). Yutu’s geologic analysis that the lunar surface is less homogeneous than originally thought. Due to Yutu’s inability to properly shield itself from the brutally cold lunar night, it experienced serious mobility issues in early 2014 and was left unable to move across the surface. Remarkably, however, Yutu retained the ability to collect data, send and receive signals, and record images and video up until March of 2015. Today, the Yutu lander, which provided the mission capability of sending and receiving Earth transmissions, is no longer operational. China’s follow-up mission, Chang’e 4 is scheduled to launch as early as 2018 and plans to land on the far side of the moon. If this happens, China will become the first nation to land a probe on the lunar far side. With the Chang’e series, China has shown that, unlike NASA, their focus is on lunar, rather than Martian, exploration. But they’re not the only ones that have their sights set on the moon. Through the , a number of private companies are building spacecraft designed to soft-land on the lunar surface in the next few years. One of those companies, Moon Express, plans to be the first ever private company to land a spacecraft on the moon and has already a launch for their spacecraft in 2017. It’s been nearly 40 years since anyone soft-landed a spacecraft on the moon. This next decade, however, is set to see a wave of lunar exploration like we’ve never experienced. With the China National Space Administration focusing their resources on lunar probes, and private companies planning to profit off of lunar resources, the moon is about to become a much busier destination.
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Will the Bubble Burst? Ask Your Cabbie
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Jerry Bowerman
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
There are too many headlines and articles about bubbles, market crashes, negative interest rates and venture-backed unicorns. Why write one more? Because I believe there is a much more pragmatic way to evaluate what you are reading from all the “experts.” Experts armed with mountains of data and statistical analysis predict the stock market is going to crash, while at the same time foresee it soaring to new highs. If you’re not trained in finance and economics, how do you make sense of it all? My degree is in finance and economics, and I can decipher all the expert articles. But I have found it’s easier to predict the future by paying close attention to what is happening to me, my family and my friends. Back in the early to mid-1990s when I was No. 2 at Sierra Online, I engaged Piper Jaffray multiple times. One of the benefits of a good, personal relationship with an investment bank is they let you buy “friends and family” shares in an IPO. Prior to a company going public, the investment bank sells most of the stock to mutual funds, pension funds, family offices, etc., but they hold back a small amount for friends. 1998 and 1999 were crazy years for going public. About 450 companies . It was common for a stock to jump 30-50 percent on its first day of trading, and wasn’t unheard of for a stock to double on its first day of trading. The day before a company was to go public, Piper would call and ask if I would like to buy friends and family shares. The deal was always the same: 1,000 shares at the IPO price set by the investment bank and I had about an hour to make up my mind. It was common back then for an IPO stock to be priced around $15, pop $5 to $7 on its first day, then maybe go up a bit the second day. For $15,000 invested, I would get $20,000-$22,000 back in two to three days tops. It was a nice perq while it lasted. In late June 1999, Piper called and asked if I wanted 1,000 shares of Internet.com at $14.00 per share. I asked, “How does Internet.com actually make money?” The reply, “Who the fuck cares? With a name like that it’s going to pop at least 50 percent tomorrow. Are you in or out?” I decided to pass — and close my account at Piper. I didn’t know how long it would take, but the IPO party was coming to an end. If no one was actually even looking at the financials and expected a 50 percent return in one day, a crash couldn’t be far off. I called the person that managed my money at Smith Barney and told them to sell all common and preferred stocks and either stay in cash or tax-free municipal bonds. She told me I was over-reacting and the market was fine, but still processed my order. The market crashed in March 2001 and wiped out a ton of wealth for people holding stocks in their investment account. My account barely budged. Fast-forward to late 2007. One of my close relatives called to tell me she was buying a home. She struggled with being consistently employed and was on and off State assistance, so I asked about her loan application. She told me a friend at a bank I never heard of took care of all that for her. I asked where the bank was located and was told over a Pizza Hut in a rundown office. That got my spidey senses tingling and I started reading about collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. They were complex securities, but one thing was clear: Housing prices had to always rise for them to earn the return they promised. A few months later, in the spring of 2008, I flew to San Francisco for a meeting at Lucasfilm. On the ride from the airport, the cab driver took a call that obviously was about a deal he was excited to close. After the call I asked about the deal; he told me he was flipping his third house. It was about a 45-minute cab ride from the airport to the Presidio and he was more than happy to go into all the details of house flipping with no money down and a “huge” upside. At the point my unemployed relative and this cab driver could both buy houses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with no money down and no income history to prove they could repay it, I knew the housing market would have its day of reckoning. After my meeting at Lucasfilm I called my portfolio manager at Citigroup (they had bought Smith Barney) and told them a real estate market crash was coming and to dump anything in my portfolio with exposure to real estate. He went on to lecture me for a good 10 minutes about how irrational I was being and that just this week he had invested his entire retirement in Citigroup stock. That was the final straw (a diversified portfolio is Investment 101). I told him to sell everything, close the account and wire me the funds. On April 5, 2009, Citigroup’s stock fell to an all-time low of $0.97 per share — from an all-time high of $57 (as adjusted for splits) in December 2006. The S&P 500 fell 53 percent from its peak of 1,549 on September 30, 2007 to 735 on February 1, 2009. It took four years for the market to recover. Many people in the U.S. lost their homes and most of their savings. As 2015 was coming to an end, my son was working on his Personal Management Merit Badge for Boy Scouts of America. One of the requirements is “Discuss your understanding of what happens when you put money into a savings account.” I asked him to grab his latest bank statement from the filing cabinet in my office and explain it to me. He has saved $1,029 from birthday money and odd jobs over the years and is a natural saver (unlike his brother, who likes to spend his money). He noticed his interest for the entire year was a paltry 12 cents, a 0.01 percent annual percentage yield. I told him several European countries have negative interest rates: You pay the bank to store your money. The expression on his face was priceless. Even a teenager with limited understanding of money and investing wasn’t going to pay a bank to store his $1,000 in savings. And yet, there is an entire generation retiring right now who believed if they saved a retirement nest egg of a few hundred thousand dollars, the interest they earned (along with their Social Security) would fund their retirement. For example, $500,000 in savings at a 5 percent savings rate yields $25,000 per year in interest, or just over $2,000 a month. That same savings at 0.01 percent interest earns $50 per year in interest, or about $4 per month. That won’t even buy a latte at Starbucks, let alone pay for groceries or gas. So what happens? People (and professional investors at mutual funds, hedge funds, venture capital funds, retirement funds, pension funds, life insurance companies) go looking for higher returns by taking on risk. They buy riskier and riskier assets to earn the return they need. But this strategy only works when the markets are rising. What will happen when interest rates start to rise and markets peak? People will move their savings to less risky assets and the price of risky assets (such as a startup unicorn) will fall. On December 16, 2015 the Federal Reserve of the United States raised interest rates for the first time since 2006. Granted, it was only a 0.25 percent increase, but it is an increase and the beginning of a new trend. The S&P 500 peaked at 2,131 on May 21, 2015. It’s been more than seven months and the market refuses to go higher. The stock market has peaked and interest rates are rising. We know what happens next. It may be a gentle decline over many months or years, or a sudden crash, but the value of risky assets is going down.
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One Sidecar, Up With A Twist
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Robbie Goffin
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
I’m old enough that when someone says Sidecar, I immediately think of Cointreau, lemon juice and cognac, shaken and served up. What’s remarkable to me is that the folks at GM, one of the country’s most venerable industrial enterprises, heard “Sidecar” and instead saw an interesting enough opportunity to find $39 million in cash to . Looking at this deal — hot on the heels of a $500 million — you have to wonder just what is going on at GM these days? More broadly, does it mean anything in terms of the (rapidly) altering landscape of ridesharing? It could be a tectonic shift, and one that has implications for everyone, from competing car manufacturers to venture capital investors to, last but not least, the good people at Uber. I spent the majority of my career working at banks, and I can say that we always paid attention when a “strategic” was buying assets. A strategic investor simply means an entity that is in the same or similar business as the target company. There are 50 shades of grey here, because a lot of venture investors argue that they have industry expertise, or may have at one point come from your industry. But at the end of the day, a venture investor is looking for simple mathematical returns — a dollar goes in, and (they hope) many dollars come out. A strategic investor, because they are actually in business, has more variance in motivation because there are more ways for them to realize value. If a competitor is for sale (or is going out of business), you could buy them and use their factories to make your stuff. Or you could sell your stuff to their customers. Or you could just be a lot better at running this particular type of operation than they are, so could improve margins. In general, we expect a strategic investor to pay decent prices for assets, too, simply because they have more ways to realize value than a purely financial investor does. Want to figure out the price of an umbrella? Best to ask a person standing in the rain. Fast-forward to today, where we have seen GM, fresh from spending $500 million for a stake in Lyft, paying $39 million for Sidecar’s assets and a clutch of key employees. First, in combination, this says some remarkable things about GM and the company’s determination to actually participate in the future of their own industry. This is the company, after all, that famously did an about-face on the electric car (thankfully, I might add, for Elon Musk). But now, GM is the company that is not only building hybrid and , but has made a key strategic investment in Lyft — and in return is getting access to Lyft’s most valuable asset — its data. Smart. As of today, GM also is the company that is picking over the intellectual property of Sidecar, working to integrate its people, data and customers into its own division (Maven) responsible for, for lack of a better description, the future. And to me, they’re looking shrewd doing it. The prices GM is paying for what we might consider to be “Admit One” tickets to the future are, on balance, low. Or, if not low, they’re at least a combination of reasonable and manageable, and made doubly so that these are investments GM, as a company that builds and sells an incredible number of vehicles in dozens of markets, is uniquely positioned to monetize. Further, these prices raise a few questions about the valuations that financial investors are ascribing to certain other, really big, ridesharing companies. A lot of money has been deployed toward this space, to one company in particular. But even though they’re growing like mad, they don’t make any money, and, as we liked to say on the trading floor, it’s tough to make a career selling dimes for nickels. In a very real sense, Uber is a data company, in which case, investors such as could arguably be viewed as strategic. But there is, in my mind, a real difference between, say, marketing alliances and actual operational synergies. Uber is reportedly looking to build its own cars, an enterprise-level concession that, if you’re in the business of driving a lot of people a lot of places in cars, maps pretty cleanly to making cars. Making cars is tough, though, even for the people who make them: Daimler and BMW, for example, who both know a thing or two about the auto business, famously endured costly encounters with their own kind. This begs the question: If a true strategic like GM (with more than a century of experience making cars) can enter in the rideshare game with just about every base covered, it’s not quite over, is it? Perhaps of greater importance is that GM operates in cooperation with multiple regulatory bodies in multiple jurisdictions, so this seeming runaway race in which we crowned a ridesharing king yesterday may have been called very prematurely. I guess the good news is that if it turns out that financial investors have backed the wrong company in the ridesharing race, and it ends up shutting down, they now know there are strategic buyers for the assets. These investors might, however, benefit from downing a couple of quick sidecars before learning what the price of those assets will be.
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Onfleet Has Powered Over 1 Million On-Demand Deliveries
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
, the company that provides infrastructure for on-demand delivery, recently powered its one millionth delivery. More than half of those deliveries occurred within the last four months, Onfleet CEO Khaled Naim told TechCrunch. Onfleet powers deliveries and logistics for companies like , , , and others. To be clear, Onfleet does not provide the drivers — it simply offers the software platform to handle all of the logistics that go into providing delivery services. Most of the deliveries Onfleet facilitates are in food and beverage, like groceries, prepared meals, alcohol and food from restaurants. In April 2015, . Here’s a look at Onfleet’s delivery growth since October 2014. Nationwide, there are about 7,500 courier and parcel delivery companies. Nationwide, FedEx is one of the top courier delivery services, with about 49% of the express shipping market in the U.S., . Meanwhile, the local courier business is very fragmented space, and many of the services in that space are operating with low-tech tools to operate their businesses and organize deliveries, Naim said. That’s why we’re seeing companies like Postmates, Uber, Amazon, Google, Shyp and others getting into the on-demand, local delivery space. “A lot of people do compare us to Postmates and Uber, but it’s really about how can companies can leverage a technology product if [they] have [their] own drivers and if [they] want to outsource deliveries during spikes of demand,” Naim said. “We can facilitate that.” Onfleet has raised $2.3 million from investors like CrunchFund, Semil Shah and Winklevoss Capital. In December, a similar company called Bringg, but with an emphasis on bigger businesses, recently , bringing its total amount of funding up to $7.5 million. While Onfleet does serve some business-to-business needs, it’s bread and butter is business to consumer.
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How The Growth Of Mixed Reality Will Change Communication, Collaboration And The Future Of The Workplace
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Pete Sena
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
Sci-fi tech, meet Wall Street. A recent from investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted that virtual hardware be an $80 billion industry. This “base case” forecast assumed that adoption be slow, as compared to that of smartphones and tablets, but, the report noted, “as the technology advances, price points decline, and an entire new marketplace of applications (both business and consumer) hits the market, we believe VR/AR has the potential to spawn a multi-billion dollar industry, and possibly be as game changing as the advent of the PC.” While the conversation around VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) often focuses on gaming and video entertainment, the Goldman report theorizes that these use cases account for less than half of the software market. As a , it’s fun to think about strapping on a headset and diving headfirst into my favorite virtual worlds. But to limit our imagination to these applications is ignoring the unlimited potential of a hybrid created by augmented and virtual technology to affect every business and industry. By combining analog, two-dimensional ways of working with new – experiences, we can transform our ability to communicate, collaborate and create. The challenge for businesses not be to provide a more immersive experience, but a more valuable experience. Message carriers were put out of work by the telegraph, the telephone was disrupted by the Internet and the good old-fashioned conference call was replaced by VoIP video conferences and screen-share-enabled unified communications systems. Before the Internet, the historical evolution of long-distance technology was always toward replicating human connection in its clearest form: a face-to-face conversation. The telegraph may have missed the human voice, but its relative speed was a step toward an immediate verbal response. Ironically enough, the first words spoken across a telephone line in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas A. Watson were, “Mr. Watson, come here — I want to see you.” Most digital across the Internet lacks the verbal, facial and body language cues of a face-to-face conversation, but the reach of our messages and the media at our disposal (photos, videos, memes, gifs, articles, etc.) has made it a medium of undeniable allure and value. Why would I call a friend on the phone and tell them about a great concert when I can post a status and let all my friends know at once, all while showing them a video of me belting out my favorite song with the performer? That being said, to say there is sometimes breakdown across the Internet is an understatement that requires no further explanation for anyone that has ever read a Comments section. Don’t get me wrong, a connected world is undoubtedly a better world. I defer to the mission statement of the Mark Zuckerberg-led for a perfect summation: “The internet is essential to growing the knowledge we have and sharing it with each other. And for many of us, it’s a huge part of our everyday lives. But most of the world does not have access to the internet. Internet.org is a Facebook-led initiative with the goal of bringing internet access and the benefits of connectivity to the two-thirds of the world that doesn‘t have them. Imagine the difference an accurate weather report could make for a farmer planting crops, or the power of an encyclopedia for a child without textbooks. Now, imagine what they could contribute when the world can hear their voices. The more we connect, the better it gets.” But the more we connect, the more important it is that we connect better. Virtual, augmented and experiences that exist at the intersection of our physical and digital worlds bring the humanity of the face-to-face conversation back into the evolution of our . Don’t make the mistake of equating these virtual experiences solely with sci-fi and gaming applications in which you have a surrogate and exist in a different, alternative system. , or hybrid , merges real and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. I’m not talking about plugging into the Matrix as a means for improved I’m talking about the ability for two people across the world to put on a headset and share any experience they choose — whether it’s to sit next to each other and physically flip through a photo album or to visit their dream destination. Five or 10 years ago, we used text to communicate. Today, we communicate and share with photos and videos. Tomorrow, with VR, we’ll be able to communicate with experience. For one, it means improved . has the potential to allow a global workforce of remote teams to work together and tackle an organization’s business challenges. No matter where they are physically located, an employee can strap on their headset and noise-canceling headphones and enter a collaborative, immersive virtual environment. Language barriers become irrelevant as AR applications are able to accurately translate in real time. Imagine Google Translate acting in real time between two or more people. It also means a more flexible workforce. While many employers still use inflexible models of fixed working time and location, there is evidence that employees are more productive if they over where, when and how they work. Some employees prefer loud workspaces, others need silence. Some work best in the morning, others at night. Employees also benefit from autonomy in how they work because everyone processes information differently. The for learning styles differentiates Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic learners. Visual learners appreciate the immersion and optic stimuli of . If nothing else, auditory learners benefit from the reduction in auditory distractions that plague the modern open office space. Kinesthetic learners that learn best by moving, touching and doing benefit from being able to explore and collaborate in . Conference calls that cause kinesthetics to tune out can be replaced by interactive, tactile modes of work-like whiteboarding sessions. This greater autonomy in where, when and how employees work serve to maximize productivity by empowering them to complete tasks in the manner that is best for them. It allow employees to enter and work in “flow” states of complete absorption. Named by renowned psychologist , flow refers to “the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.” Video gamers should immediately recognize this mental state, as game design is particularly adept at inducing flow states where hours and hours fly by and the player is completely enveloped in the game. Csikszentmihalyi theorizes that in order to retain flow and “stay in the zone,” the activity must reach a balance between the activity’s challenges and the participant’s abilities. If the challenge is too great, it promotes anxiety — too easy, and it promotes boredom. The seesaw between anxiety and boredom is far too familiar to the modern workforce. Without fail, we try to get heads down on a project, and the emails, slack messages and “do you have a minute?” desk drive-bys keep us from ever being able to focus. Anxiety rears it ugly head. We finally get the project done and while we are waiting for feedback from the client or organizational leadership, the channels miraculously quiet down. This is where boredom comes in. is conducive to inducing flow states because of its ability to immerse employees in designed experiences that match their learning styles, preferences for stimuli and ability. But perhaps more importantly, it can serve to limit the distractions that cause anxiety and the latency that leads to boredom. Distractions are eliminated by the worlds we are able to design that only push the messages imperative to the work we are doing. Latency, or the time between an action and its response, is eliminated when our work is memorialized digitally as we complete it. A client or supervisor is able to join our work process digitally at any time to track and review progress. Last, but certainly not least, creates solutions for the universal problem of finite resources. Aside from eliminating the monetary travel cost and the opportunity cost of time spent on red-eye flights and in jet-lagged meetings that plague global business, reduces an even more sparse resource — real estate. On a macro level, population is increasing and space is not. Reducing the need for large offices by creating virtual workspaces make the office park a relic. On a micro level, just think about your own office. There are never enough conference rooms, and never enough workspaces. That awesome whiteboard you just covered with great ideas? Your colleague is coming in 30 seconds after you finish for a client call and needs it erased. workspaces that memorialize our work while we complete it not require furious note taking and cell phone picture snapping in those 30 seconds. In fact, those 30 seconds not exist, because whether we are sitting at our desk, in our home or in Starbucks, accessing a perfectly designed virtual workspace is as simple as putting on your headset. The of and at work be defined by virtual, augmented and experiences that provide economic value. To equate this collision of our physical and digital worlds solely with play and entertainment is to miss one of the great upcoming technological evolutions of our workforce.
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Telegraph Academy Bootcamp Teaches People Of Color How To Code
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
Where are all the people of color in engineering roles at tech companies? Berkeley, Calif.-based coding bootcamp Telegraph Academy, which plans to relocate to Oakland in the next few months, wants to make it so that the tech industry has no excuse not to hire black and latino/a people for technical roles. “First and foremost we wanted to be in a city that was racially diverse and had strong communities of color who would be excited about this,” Telegraph Academy Founder Albrey Brown told TechCrunch. “The origin of our name comes from finding out that Oakland, California is one of the most racially diverse cities in America and that the oldest street in Oakland is Telegraph Ave. Secondly, we did a lot of research and found that there was nobody in the market with our offering, a professional Software Engineering career in as little as three months. Being able to build a bridge to the Valley in such a unique place is a huge opportunity for us.” Telegraph Academy’s coding bootcamp is part of the prestigious network, which has a 99% hiring rate and partnerships with over 30 tech companies. Telegraph Academy started after Brown went through Hack Reactor in June 2014, and ultimately felt that the program could be beneficial to people of color in the San Francisco Bay Area, but with an added emphasis on what it’s like as a person of color trying to become a better engineer. “When coming to the idea of offering a bootcamp experience to people of color, I wanted to start at a baseline of excellence,” Brown said. “That’s what I wanted to offer first and foremost. We also wanted to build off of it by having some flavor of our own, like leadership and brand building geared toward people of color.” I visited Telegraph Academy at its headquarters in Berkeley on day one of its second bootcamp. The day kicked off with a welcome lecture by Brown, in which he gave the 11 students an honest, no-bullshit idea of what to expect in the next three months. ur job is to make you as uncomfortable as possible all of the time and push you towards mastering something — a concept that you’ve never even thought about it — and enjoy that process of feeling uncomfortable.” Through Telegraph Academy, students get access to equipment, space to hack for 12 hours a day, every week day, lectures, facilitated collaboration, job search support, solution walkthroughs and more. In the first week (last week), there were be 28 lectures. “It’s going to be a shit show in the best way possible,” Brown told the students. Next up was a session on recursion. Although I knew absolutely nothing about recursion — yet alone had ever heard the word before that day — I decided I was officially in over my head once the instructor started talking about stringifiable objects and JSON. [gallery ids="1267963,1267966,1267968"] Telegraph Academy’s first cohort started in June 2015. Since then, Brown has realized that there’s been “a bit of a culture shock” for Telegraph Academy graduates because the tech industry isn’t predominantly black and latino, Brown told me. That’s why Telegraph Academy has started offering a leadership development seminar, where students participate in two-hour, weekly workshops around owning their differences in the workplace and work on “breaking down the racism and subtle microaggressions,” Brown said. “We want to make them well-equipped to handle microaggressions and break them down into constructive criticism.” The leadership development seminar, called Transformational Leadership, is optional but highly encouraged for each student going through Telegraph Academy. Through the coding bootcamp and leadership development seminar, Telegraph Academy’s goal is to prepare its students to work at tech companies . Unfortunately, a lot of those offices are not only based in cities with a lot of white people, , but the companies also employ a lot of white people. Just look at some of the recent diversity reports from , and . Although Uber’s imminent move into Oakland — a city that is 34.5% white, 28% black and 25.4% hispanic, — has sparked some controversy, . Uber has been on a “listening tour” in Oakland, meeting with local organizations to see how the Unicorn can be a true partner when it lands in Oakland. Uber Global Diversity and Inclusion Lead Damien Hooper-Campbell has personally met with Telegraph Academy, and has given them an overview of Uber’s goals and strategies around diversity, inclusion and community engagement. “We’re really excited about his ideas and to see Uber taking the initiative in improving diversity in tech,” Brown said. “There’s a clear synergy with what we’re doing to broaden opportunity for people of color.” Ultimately, Silicon Valley should not be limited to just San Francisco and the Peninsula, Brown said. There’s Silicon Beach in the Los Angeles area, Silicon Desert in Phoenix and other innovation ecosystems in other cities throughout the country, and even the world. “Tech is spreading, and the bootcamp model makes sure as many people as possible have access to the education to get them into it,” Brown said. “If not, we’re putting our city economies at risk.”
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President Obama Wants $4 Billion To Bring Computer Science Education To Every K-12 School
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
President Barack Obama more than $4 billion in funding for states, and $100 million specifically for districts in order make sure every K-12 student has access to computer science curriculum. President Obama is calling this the “Computer Science for All Initiative.” “Our economy is rapidly shifting, and both educators and business leaders are increasingly recognizing that computer science (CS) is a ‘new basic’ skill necessary for economic opportunity and social mobility,” . Right now, only 25% of the K-12 schools in the U.S. offer computer science with programming and coding, and only 28 states allow those courses to count towards high school graduation requirements, according to the White House. The money would give states and districts the resources to train new and existing teachers to teach computer science, and build out the curriculum to ensure that it’s top-notch. In addition to the funding for states and districts, Obama’s proposed initiative calls for $135 million to become available from the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service. Before any of this goes into effect, the Republican-led Congress first has to approve Obama’s 2017 budget. That said, the initiative already has support from tech companies like Google, Salesforce and Microsoft, as well as from cities across the U.S. Over in Oakland-Calif., for example, the Kapor Center for Social Impact, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, the Oakland Unified School District, Congressperson Barbara Lee, and tech companies Uber and Twilio, announced a series of commitment in coordination with the recent announcement from the White House. One commitment is to ensure that all PK-12 students in the Oakland Unified School District will have access to computer science education in school by 2020. “Oakland has become a major center of innovation,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a statement. “Increasingly, the tech industry has seen the value in the vibrant, diverse and progressive community that Oakland has cultivated and they want to be part of it. What we need to ensure now is that our residents, particularly our young people, are ready to step into their rightful place in the tech sector that drives our global economy. That’s why equitable access to training and opportunities is so critical.”
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Silicon:Safe Bags $1M Seed For Its Hardware Fix For Bulk Password Theft
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
. . . . . . … Those are just a handful of the companies that have suffered massive password-related breaches in recent years. is Cambridge-based U.K. startup reckons it has the answer to these kind of massive password hacks. For the last three years it’s been developing a piece of hardware that’s designed to store passwords so the data cannot be read from outside. The box can only be queried to specify whether a password is valid or not valid. The actual password data never leaves its hardware prison. Silicon:Safe is touting “100% protection from password theft” on its website. Albeit co-founder and product designer, Dr Will Harwood, is careful to specify the solution is specifically aimed at fixing password theft . “We are about preventing theft of the data from the enterprise. So we’re very much about protecting the enterprise, making sure the enterprise cannot be blamed, if you like, for the username and passwords being stolen. Or certainly being stolen in bulk form,” he tells TechCrunch. “I would not make the claims that this is a universal solution in the sense that there’ll be other places where the passwords reside temporarily in an enterprise’s computer architecture where potentially you could steal them from. If you send your password to a front end web server, you could steal it from there.” The startup has various ideas for applying its tech to address other sensitive data areas in future — including credit card data and biometrics storage — but it’s starting off with a password storage product, called Password Protect, due to launch in April. Harwood, who used to work at Citrix, said he came up with the idea for the product after finishing a security-related PhD, and casting around for potential research areas to move into academia proper. “I wandered along to a workshop that was taking place in Cambridge on four methods applied to security. This was in early 2013 and at the workshop somebody stop up and basically said look this really [and lots of other companies]… This is going to be a problem. And we need to find better cryptographic solutions to deal with it,” he says. “I was thinking about this and realized that there was a problem which amounted to cryptographic solutions weren’t actually good enough for dealing with the problems that the businesses had.” Although initially Harwood was considering using the idea for an academic research proposal, an encounter with his now co-founder, Roger Gross, convinced him to attempt the commercialization route instead — and the pair co-founded the business in late 2013, bringing Nick Lowe (ex-AppSense) on board as CEO. Harwood argues the core of the problem for businesses is actually the reputational damage caused by bulk data theft. Because even if stolen data was properly encrypted — so it’s highly unlikely any passwords will ever be compromised — they still have to tell their users to change their passwords, just to be on the safe side. And thus the reputational damage is done. “Cryptography is great. This is not an argument against cryptography,” he says. “This is an argument that says you have to stop the theft.” So what exactly has Harwood designed? “Quite simply it’s a box, you put your user IDs and passwords in… and once you’ve registered a user account with a user ID and password it will never release the password out of the box,” he explains. “So if you want to know if a user has a particular password you ask the box does this user have this password — and it tells you yes or no.” The Ethernet-connected device is installed in the datacenter, linked to a company’s front end webservers. It runs proprietary firmware, rather than an OS. “Essentially we have a platform where instead of millions of lines of code we have… ten thousand lines of code,” says Harwood. “We don’t have an operating system there. It’s bare metal programmed. And it’s programmed on a machine architecture which will not allow things like code injection attacks… The administrator cannot get the passwords out of the box.” “We avoid as far as possible relying on complicated software when we can actually do things directly in the hardware,” he adds. “So for example the Ethernet connectivity and the TCP connections are actually hardware TCP chips, which we can get, rather than actually having a complicated TCP stack. And that also has a secondary advantage of having defense in depth. Because a standard way of attacking a system is smashing the TCP stack… Which is perfectly possible if it’s in software but it’s not really feasible when you talk about hardware implementation of the TCP.” The concept is a bit similar to hardware security modules that store encryption keys. But instead of just storing keys, Silicon:Safe’s tech is designed to store bulk sensitive data such as passwords. So it’s effectively treating passwords (or other sensitive data targeted for bulk hacking) with the same storage sensitivity as encryption keys. The firmware is not open source but Harwood says it will be letting customers review the product’s code to workaround the trust issue. It’s also not yet had the tech independently verified by a security researcher but has let some third party penetration testers at it — and Harwood claims they weren’t able to extract any data or significantly affect the system. So if it’s so secure, why hasn’t someone else thought of doing this before? According to Harwood there are various factors explaining why hardware has been overlooked as a security solution for bulk data theft, not least the industry’s general focus on software. He also points to the fact that the hardware industry has historically been based on using commodity hardware — e.g. Intel or ARM processors — to make products, because these chipsets were cheap and plentiful. Which meant, in years past, it would have been very expensive to develop proprietary hardware such as this. But the cost of prototyping hardware has decreased significantly over the past decade. “One thing that’s changed it is the IoT [Internet of Things] movement has been pushing the price of hardware down and making it more widely available. And generally there’s been a drop in price of electronics so the cost of prototyping something has dropped from… hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. In over a ten year period. So we can basically now sort of start building things in hardware which we’d think well it wasn’t worth the effort previously because of the cost barrier,” he says. Silicon:Safe has filed several patents around the core concept at this point — including in the UK, the US and internationally. It is also about to start on worldwide patent filing. And Harwood says it will also now start filing patents covering specific elements of the design. It’s raised $1 million in seed funding from private investors to fund development thus far. And has four beta testers trying out the system at present — including a U.K. high street retail bank, a telecoms organization, a pension company and a financial investments organization (it’s not disclosing any customer names yet). Lowe says it would be happy if it has “half a dozen” customers signed up a year from now, as it works to prove its hardware concept in a marketplace used to paying for software security solutions. In Harwood’s view the biggest operational cost to users of the tech is exactly this change to a new way of doing things. “As a commercial activity we’re working to minimize that so our objective is to have the integration time down to between half a day and two days into an existing infrastructure,” he says. “Part of our commercial route is to develop plug-and-play kits which will allow you to plug a piece of software into an existing identity management solution and then plug our box into that software,” he adds. The other big cost is the hardware price-tag itself, of course. One of the Password Protect boxes is likely to cost around £100,000, and the pair say a company would likely need at least two for a “minimal configuration”, and perhaps up to four for the purposes of data replication and if operating from multiple data centers. But they do also plan to launch a SaaS-style version of the product in future, for smaller businesses to be able to “offload critical data storage into a cloud service” without having to spend such large sums up front on buying the hardware themselves. The team is also already working on their next produce — involving credit card data storage. “That presents some slightly different challenges,” says Harwood. “It has some of the same challenges, but it also, unlike passwords, you do disclose details of the credit card transaction to the acquiring bank. “As far as the user and the enterprise are concerned it’s just like passwords. But it has this exception that it has this secure channel to the bank. Now the secure channel to the bank is something which is well defined in credit card processing. So what we do with that is, inside our box, we have… almost like an air gap process between handling everything on the merchant side, on the enterprise side, and then saying — once you’ve sorted everything out — then saying to the bank now do this transaction.” The big selling point it sees for this future product is to help merchants who want to be able to process credit card transactions achieve plug-and-play PCI compliance. Harwood notes that achieving the highest level of PCI compliance protects a merchant against credit card fraud but that advantage is off-set against the cost of achieving and maintaining top tier PCI compliance. “Essentially what we’ll be saying to a merchant, here is a box that it’s already been agreed that it’s PCI compliant. If you plug it into your infrastructure in this way you will have your highest level of PCI compliance,” he says. On the biometrics side, Silicon:Safe will be designing a security product for the kind of large scale, often government run databases that store biometrics en masse for authentication purposes — and also, therefore, present an attractive target for hackers. And the really big problem with stolen biometrics? You can’t exactly ask people to change their fingerprints ‘just to be safe’… Ergo, there’s even more of a critical case for rock-solid security for this type of data. And Silicon:Safe hopes its hardware ‘digital safe’ is the answer.
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The State Of P2P Lending
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Sonny Singh
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending became one of the hottest industries in fintech — or any other any industry — in 2015. Companies raised large venture rounds, investors found unicorns and there were even a couple of IPOs. Will 2016 continue this trend, or will the P2P lending bubble finally pop? Here are some of the highlights of 2015: Prosper its numbers for 2015. In the last year, Prosper originated $3.7 billion in loans (with $1.15 billion coming in a record-breaking Q4). This growth was double that of the previous year, with revenues of more than $200 million in 2015 — up from $81 million in 2014. Lending Club hasn’t released their 2015 numbers yet, but it’s estimated they will have originated more than $8 billion in loans, as they had already done $5.8 billion in the first three quarters of 2015. While Lending Club and Prosper were disrupting the personal lending space, companies like OnDeck, Kabbage and Funding Circle became brand names in the small-business lending space. SoFi went after the student loan space and has quickly become the largest provider of student loan refinancing. After the financial crisis in 2008, banks started tightening their consumer lending policies. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in 2010 added even more restrictions. The days of acquiring cheap, quick loans were over, and consumers found it very difficult to get loans, even if they had good credit. This inefficiency led to the emergence of online lending sites like Prosper and Lending Club, the first large players to really emerge in the consumer space. They offered consumers a chance to get loans easily and quickly. To minimize risk, they only focused on consumers with high credit scores, and the typical loan amount ranged from $20,000-$30,000. While Lending Club and Prosper were attacking consumer lending, OnDeck, Kabbage and Funding Circle went after the small-business lending space. They focused on business loans ranging from $100,000-$200,000 for businesses who wanted to pay for inventory, franchises, equipment, etc. While these online small business lending sites expanded, lending from large banks decreased dramatically. According to bank regulatory filings, the 10 largest banks lent $44.7 billion in 2014, which is down 38 percent from its peak of $72.5 billion in 2006. There are several factors that will determine if the rapid growth in peer-to-peer lending will continue: Most experts believe that as interest rates increase, so too will the number of loan defaults. They believe this will cause the bubble in the lending space to pop. The Fed has already started raising interest rates. However, as long as the economy is doing well and unemployment is low, the number of defaults should not rise that much. Regulators are continuously looking at this space, especially since the San Bernardino terrorist/shooter a $28,500 loan from Prosper weeks before he killed 14 people on December 2, 2015. Prosper issued the loan after all the proper paperwork and background checks were made. While Prosper is not under investigation, the government is now looking at additional regulations to prevent terrorists from getting loans. While Goldman Sachs , most of the other large banks have decided to partner with the existing lending firms. JP Morgan a partnership with OnDeck Capital that will allow it to outsource to the OnDeck platform business loans under $250,000. Other banks, like BBVA, Credit Suisse and JP Morgan, have directly invested in Prosper’s latest funding round, while Silicon Valley Bank and Norwest Venture Partners (Wells Fargo is the sole LP for Norwest) have invested in Lending Club. How big is the lending market? Lending Club’s IPO filing cites the size of the consumer credit market at $3.2 trillion — $380 billion of that would qualify for Lending Club’s loan policy. Lending firms also may be able to target verticals like auto and medical loans — indeed, . International markets also could be a large opportunity, but, with the exception of Funding Circle, most sites are focused on the domestic market in the U.S. Lending sites in 2016 will continue to put up impressive numbers. The rise in interest rates should not slow things down, as long as the economy doesn’t crash and cause unemployment to increase dramatically. The lack of defaults due to rising interest rates also should cause the stock price of Lending Club to go up. We also may see IPOs from Kabbage, Prosper, Avant and SoFi in 2016, with potential acquisitions from large banks, as well as card associations like MasterCard, Visa and Discover. However, don’t be surprised to see Internet consumer companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon enter this space and either partner with or acquire existing lending sites. These Internet giants would have great synergies with lending sites — and be able to offer these loans to a lot more consumers.
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The Great White Fail Whale
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Jon Evans
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having nothing particular to interest me in meatspace, I thought to visit the . It is a way I have of driving off the spleen. Whenever my meds get such an upper hand of me, that I yearn to troll passersby–then, I account it high time to get to cyberspace. Soon I found myself in the insular City of Saint Francis, belted round by wharves, beaches, and anti-housing NIMBYs. Circumambulating the city one dreamy Sabbath afternoon, passing thousands of mortal men and women fixed in entrepreneurial reveries–tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks–does the magnetic virtue of their stock options attract them thither?–I happened to encounter one Queequeg, a native of Rokovoko, an island far away. (It is not down in any map; true places never are.) ‘Twas he who told me of , as it was then known. Curiously, Pequod was ruled by a triumvirate; Captain Stone, Captain Williams, and, most memorably, Captain Ahab “Jack” Dorsey. They offered Queequeg and myself positions as sailor-developers, for a voyage of unknown duration, into treacherous, uncharted waters. Immediately we accepted. Weeks later, after a frenzy of coding, rigging, and seasickness, Project Pequod — renamed at the last to the allegedly catchier — launched on its maiden / “alpha” voyage. I will not dwell overlong on the alarums and excursions of our subsequent seafaring; the rise and fall of Captain Costolo; Queequeeg’s fate. You know these tales already. Now Captain Ahab is returned, and, having the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth mates, he drives us newly into storm-tossed waves, in arctic climes, so that every developer-sailor among us (to say nothing of our financiers in Nantucket) has begun to fear for their career, their sacred honor, and worst of all, the strike price of their stock options. Yesterday I encountered Captain Ahab as he waited for his skiff to carry him away. (Incredibly, he remains captain of another flagship, in another ocean; Starbuck “Adam” Bain stands watch for us while he is away.) Into the sea Ahab stared. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. I gathered my courage and dared to ask him what he dreamed, what titanic goal drove him–and us–ever further into the wastes. He gave me a look that thrilled me with fear, that he might seize me and cast me forth into the icy waves; but at length, in a hero’s gravelled voice, he answered: “Longer tweets,” he growled. “Swapping the Moments and Notifications tabs. And most of all,” his voice took on the fixed fury of a fanatic, “above all else, I say: , not stars!” Oh, Twitter. Where did it all go so wrong? I ask that . Twitter remains my most-used app, usually the first I launch in the morning, often the last I use at night. But there can be no denying that it has languished and stagnated for more than a year now, while every attempt at improvement (eg Moments) has failed ignominiously, and its most glaring flaws–like Dick Costolo’s admission “ ,” and the baffling ongoing inability to edit tweets–remain unrepaired. Meanwhile, Twitter’s stock price continues to plummet; the markets demand user growth, which has plateaued. The apparent solution-in-waiting is to become more like Facebook, with longer tweets and curated streams. But the problem is that becoming more like Facebook is good tactics but terrible strategy. The more Twitter grows to resemble Facebook, the less relevant it becomes. Nobody needs Facebook Two. It is true that Twitter is opaque and intimidating to new users (and the countless hordes who have already tried it and given up on it.) It is true that the rise of “screenshorts” — posting images full of text — is a strong indication that Twitter’s 140-character limit needs to become more flexible. But longer tweets are a distraction, not a solution to Twitter’s most fundamental problems. (And 10K characters is 9K too many.) Twitter Moments are not the answer; Moments have probably already failed. Curated timelines may be good for new users, but they will alienate the many millions who still love the service today. Focusing on people who don’t like your business, while ignoring the huge market that loves what you do today — does that really sound like good strategy to ? Aren’t great leaders supposed to leverage one’s ? I have a not-especially-modest proposal for how to solve almost all of Twitter’s problems. It’s very simple: let third-party developers build feeds. Extend their API and allow external developers to design, and users to install, custom tabs with custom feeds. So a user’s Twitter interface include the Twitter-built Moments tab, if for some demented reason they actually wanted that … or, instead, an NBA fan who lives in Toronto could have a custom-built NBA feed, and a custom-built Toronto feed. Or the StockTwits feed. Or the Nuzzel feed. Etc etc etc. All built by third parties– who share the income from “Promoted Tweets” within their feeds. Sure, give new users a default, Twitter-built curated feed. But also let them choose from a “Featured Feeds” list … or, better yet, from the Feed Store. In short: . twitter should replace the moments tab with beefs — МОРРИС (@pmorris) https://twitter.com/DougHeffercan/status/688904959740395520 Twitter should replace the Moments tab with Lists. Seriously, that'd be a million times better and more useful than a dumb trending tab. — Bman (@SomeSortaBman) https://twitter.com/2William/status/687009238175068160 Twitter can’t solve all of their problems themselves. What I wish they would realize is that . They have enough revenue that an offer to share it will provide third parties with more than enough incentive to create, and market, custom feeds for them. Those, in turn, will bring new users in, and old users back. There is no need for Twitter to grimly quest for preeminent success alone. All they need to do is open up their feeds to the developers of the world–and that great white whale can be brought to them on a silver platter. Frustrated by Twitter’s , and the procession of inferior sailor-developers promoted over his tattooed and dark-skinned head, Queequeeg , where he soon became Chief Harpoon Officer. Obviously.
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Gillmor Gang: Parse This
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,016 | 1 | 30 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 29, 2016. The Gang discusses Facebook sharecropping as Parse joins FriendFeed on the scrapheap of post app momentum. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Halley Suitt Tucker, Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=82211123 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302]
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Parrot’s Henri Seydoux Shares His Vision Of The Future Of Drones
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
has had an interesting week. Many were expecting a new drone from the famous drone maker (among other things). But when you think about drones, chances are you are picturing a quadcopter in your mind. Instead, the company and airplane-like drone with two wings. I had the chance to interview Parrot founder and CEO Henri Seydoux on our stage so that he could share a bit more about his vision of the drone industry. Parrot is capturing the market on multiple fronts. First, there are the consumer drones like Parrot’s new Disco drone. Millions of people are now buying drones because they want to fly above the ocean and bring back a video. And Parrot is one of the most successful consumer drone maker in the world with kid-friendly drones and drones for enthusiasts. Second, there are the cool not-so-futuristic applications. Parrot is a big software and hardware maker when it comes to agriculture use cases for instance. Third, there are now dozens of companies releasing drones of all kinds. When I asked Seydoux if Parrot would be the leading drone maker, his answer was a resounding yes. Parrot was created in 1994. The company started working on drones nearly ten years ago. That’s the equivalent of half a century in startup years.
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Why Seattle’s Ridesharing And Taxi Unionization Measure Misses The Mark
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Richard A. Lazar
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
The Seattle City Council recently passed a first-in-nation local that seeks to allow ridesharing and taxi drivers to unionize and collectively bargain. The city is trying to solve a problem created under federal law that doesn’t permit companies to provide benefits and protections to independent contractor workers like private for-hire drivers. While this is certainly an understandable goal, the city’s ordinance misses the mark in a number of ways. For those looking to Seattle as a model for independent-contractor organizing, it is important to understand what the measure does and doesn’t do and why, in many contexts, it is bad public policy. While changes in employment law are certainly needed (see the white paper to understand why), here are the top seven reasons Seattle’s approach is not the way to go. Federal law (the National Labor Relations Act) allows only employees to unionize and collectively bargain. Independent contractors generally do not have this right. Federal law, therefore, prohibits Seattle from going around this restriction in its effort to grant organizing rights to independent contractors. Also, independent contractors who collectively bargain on compensation or other working conditions may run afoul of federal antitrust laws. It seems likely the ordinance will be legally challenged for these (and other) reasons. The result will no doubt influence whether, and in which ways, other states and localities pursue similar measures. In an effort to stay within the bounds of state limitations on what the city can and can’t regulate, Seattle’s ordinance says that driver unionization is needed to ensure the “safety, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and the economic viability and stability” of ridesharing and taxi services. Viewed in context, this stated public policy goal makes no sense. No other city has pursued a private for-hire driver unionization policy. And no city has experienced public safety or economic viability problems because of non-unionized independent-contractor drivers (nothing in the record identifies any specific examples in Seattle). Interestingly, nearly 90 percent of U.S. taxi drivers are independent contractors. Yet policymakers have not previously sought to allow taxi drivers to unionize in order to protect the public safety, or for any other reason. This is true of the Seattle City Council, which has regulated taxi services for decades. If public safety and economic harm are risks of non-unionized ridesharing and taxi drivers, then the same is also true for Seattle delivery, courier, truck and other independent-contractor drivers that the ordinance ignores. The ordinance says that ridesharing and taxi companies must negotiate with the drivers’ union on a variety of subjects, including vehicle equipment standards, safe driving practices, criminal background checks and work hours. These subjects all relate to public safety which, from a public policy perspective, is the City Council’s sole responsibility to protect. Any effort to assign these decisions to a collective bargaining unit can create public safety risks. For example, drivers may want the right to drive older or less safe cars (to reduce the costs of vehicle operations), work longer hours (to make more money) or utilize less comprehensive background checks (to allow more drivers to participate). It is unwise and risky for the city to delegate these types of decisions to anyone else. The ordinance requires ridesharing and taxi companies to provide the union with the names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers of all independent-contractor drivers. This is true even if drivers don’t want to be part of the collective bargaining process. For drivers, this requirement raises serious information privacy and choice concerns. The ordinance is less than clear about whether individual drivers can choose whether collective bargaining is right for them. There is certainly no express opt-out provision. Assuming the ordinance stands, drivers should have the express right to decide whether or not to be part of the union and pay union dues. If drivers see value in relation to cost and other factors, they will join. If not, the city should ensure they have the right to forgo participation. Federal laws, along with thousands of agency determinations and court cases, govern the relationship between employers, traditional employees and independent contractors. Seattle’s ordinance essentially requires that ridesharing and taxi companies treat workers in ways that would likely convert otherwise independent contractors into traditional employees. Put differently, federal policy does not allow these companies to provide the benefits and protections the city is requiring. Seattle estimates the unionization process will cost the city $2.2 million in 2016, and more than $750,000 in each of the years 2017 and 2018. These costs will be passed on to riders in the form of higher fees. Estimates do not appear to include the full costs of multi-year litigation and a highly contentious and burdensome agency rulemaking process, both of which are likely. Bottom line, Seattle taxpayers will probably need to subsidize the city’s unionization effort in amounts that are not yet known or budgeted. Federal policies currently prohibit employment innovation. Ridesharing, taxi and other companies utilizing independent-contractor workforces are not allowed to offer selected benefits and protections to workers even if they want to. Only Congress can modernize employment policies in ways that allow greater employer/independent contractor flexibility and solve the problem Seattle’s ordinance exposes. Until that happens, Seattle’s approach is unworkable on many fronts and wrong for the city, drivers and riders.
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Why SpaceX Is Changing Its Rocket Landing Location
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
SpaceX has confirmed that they will attempt another, more difficult, rocket landing on their next launch January 17 . Their Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with NASA’s Jason-3 satellite on board. This time the rocket will be returning to a “drone ship” (an autonomous floating platform) in the ocean rather than a launchpad on land like their last successful landing on December 21 . [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCBE8ocOkAQ] If they succeed, it will be the first successful rocket landing in the sea. Elon Musk named the autonomous drone ship “Just Read the Instructions” as a nod to the fictional starships in sci-fi novels written by the late Iain M. Banks. Just Read the Instructions, which was used in the previous SpaceX landings from Cape Canaveral, has been restored, modified and brought over to the West Coast for this launch. Landing a rocket on a floating drone ship at sea is much more difficult than landing it on stable ground. The sea itself is constantly in motion, which means you’re trying to land an already unstable rocket on a slightly unstable platform. When landing a rocket, so many things can go awry, so you’d really want to limit the number of variables that are constantly changing. It seems that it would make more sense for SpaceX to use its next few launches to continue to perfect the less difficult, but still incredibly complex, strategy of ground-based rocket landing. There’s a few reasons why SpaceX may be changing up the landing location for its next flight. For one, it’s simply safer to test out this technology away from populated areas. SpaceX’s first two landing attempts, which were on drone ships, were close to sticking the landing but ended in explosions. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMSzC1crr0] Explosions make people nervous. NASA, who is paying for this particular SpaceX flight, is potentially less willing to take risks than SpaceX. So even if SpaceX wanted to bring its rocket back to land, they may not have been able to get it approved. The December 21 flight took place at Cape Canaveral and was commissioned by the private company Orbcomm. It’s possible that there are simply different policies in place for this launch. If SpaceX can stick this second landing, it will be even more impressive than the first. Perfecting the ability to land a rocket on a drone ship in the sea will give them greater flexibility for future launches. Depending on where they launch and who’s calling the shots, it may not always be possible to bring their rocket back to land. A drone ship can also move its location and theoretically optimize for the safest, most efficient landing spot. The recovered first stage from December will not be used in this launch. Musk has stated that while the recovered rocket from the December launch was in , it will not likely be used again. The new Falcon 9 rocket used for this January 17 launch is scheduled to have a static fire test on Saturday, January 9 . The payload fairing will then be mated to the rocket on Tuesday, January 12 . If California’s El Nino rain fails to delay the launch, we’ll all have another highly anticipated SpaceX rocket landing to look forward to next week.
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And The Winner Of Hardware Battlefield 2016 Is… Nima By 6SensorLabs
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
very fierce for the third edition of our Hardware Battlefield. Fourteen shockingly good hardware startups competed to win the coveted Metal Man trophy. These companies had a very special CES experience as they all pitched in front of multiple groups of judges on stage at the Sands Expo. The startups were competing for $50,000 and being named the winner of the Hardware Battlefield. After many deliberations, our judges narrowed the list down to four finalists: gluten-testing device , programmable robotic arm , fingerprint-powered mobile gun lock and 3D-printed insole maker . These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which were CyPhy Works CEO and Founder , Intel CEO , Highway1 VP , and TechCrunch Senior Editor . And now, meet the TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield 2015 winner. lets you test your food for gluten in less than two minutes. You just take a tiny sample, put it into a capsule and then put it into the device. Once the test is done, you’ll get a smiley face or a sad face depending on whether your food contains gluten. You can read of our coverage . [gallery ids="1260123,1260125,1260127,1260128"] lets you create a custom, 3D-printed insole in a brand new way. First, the company asks you to take 5 pictures of your feet using your smartphone, then you can customize colors and have your name engraved. Finally, the company uses an adaptive manufacturing system that is both convenient and affordable — it only costs $75. You can read of our coverage . [gallery ids="1260141,1260142,1260143,1260144,1260145"] And that’s a wrap! But CES doesn’t stop with the Hardware Battlefield. We will be in town for another couple of days and you can read coming out of the show.
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Unicorns And Little Ponies Hit The Slaughterhouse As Maker Media Lays Off 17
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
Stables full of startups are being turned into glue, whether they’re mythical beasts, donkeys in party hats, or just baby horses. The latest forced to do layoffs is Maker Media, the champion of the do-it-yourself movement. 10 years and $10 million later, multiple sources tell me that Maker Media laid off 20% of its staff today. When asked, Maker Media confirmed to me that 17 people have been let go. Maker is known for its Maker Faire festival, MakerSpace social network, Make Magazine print publication, MakerShed online store, and MakerCamp. These properties unify a community of people inventing and crafting at home. Increased competition in online resources for DIY enthusiasts and management inefficiencies have slowed the company’s growth, sources say. The layoffs are apparently focused around Maker Media’s digital assets, including MakerSpace, MakeZine, and MakerShed. Maker is not alone. Tech has entered a season when a lot of companies are realizing they got a bit too big for their britches. In just the past few months we’ve seen: Plus, at the public giants and unicorns: And these are just the layoffs that were widely reported. With survey showing most founders believe it will get harder to raise money, many startups are taking preventative measures to decrease their burn rates. That means laying off staff to make capital last longer in hopes that they can hit big enough milestones to raise more money in a frosty climate. Make began as a print magazine in 2005 that provided tips and content around robotics, electronics, computers, metalworking, and woodworking. It was started by , co-founder of O’Reilly Media, Make Magazine’s publisher before it was . MakeFaire launched in 2006 in Silicon Valley as a gathering of DIY hobbyists and the weird stuff they built. It slowly expanded to more cities, and 2015 featured around 150 Maker events, with a dozen festivals in major urban areas around the world and scores of community-organized Mini Maker Faires in smaller cities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEXEMgAPfrc O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures funded a for Maker Media in 2013. In 2015, Maker Media beefed up its online component with the launch of the . On that momentum, a few months later Maker scored another . It came from Ev Williams’ Obvious Ventures, Raine Ventures, and Azure Capital But facing off with AutoDesk-owned Instructables and eHow for learning how to build things, Pinterest and Facebook Groups to share them, and Etsy to sell them, Maker’s online properties haven’t cornered the market the same way its magazine and events have. Maker Media’s CEO Gregg Brockway gave TechCrunch this statement : “ , we shared with our team a strategic restructuring, and unfortunately had to let go of 17 really great people. As a growing multi-faceted media company, we’re streamlining and adapting to the shifting media landscape. In order to best serve the burgeoning Maker community, we are simplifying our business to focus even more on our growth areas, including digital, video, social and our Maker Faire events. Maker Faire last year enjoyed its biggest year ever with over 1.2MM attendees. As part of these changes, we’ve reorganized and created a handful of new positions to better serve the global Maker community.” When venture capitalists fund startups, they don’t just want them to win their market. They want them to invade and conquer other markets too. But that can strain a modest but reliable business by pushing it into areas the team is unfamiliar with and unequipped for. Maker Media’s events are a hit, but social networking is a whole other ballgame. With capital harder to come by and the war for talent raging on, startups will have to make tough decisions. Is that really an adjacent market where you’ll have an advantage? Or just a related market, a dangling carrot that will make you trot til exhaustion?
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Analytics Startup Mixpanel Lays Off 18 Employees
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
laid off 18 people yesterday, representing less than 10 percent of its 230-plus person team. “This is obviously a deeply tough decision,” said CEO Suhail Doshi. “By no means do we intend to hire people only to let them go … We’re very sorry that it happened.” Many other startups are also cutting costs by . The news was , which quoted Doshi as saying, “We just overhired.” He confirmed to TechCrunch that 18 people were laid off, mostly in sales. Founded in 2009, Mixpanel says it provides mobile and web analytics tools to 3,683 customers including Airbnb, Spotify and Venmo. It from Andreessen Horowitz at the end of 2014.
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Uber Lowers Fares In Over 100 Cities
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
This is the third year that Uber has cut January fares for some cities. The company showcased Boston, DC and Los Angeles as examples of cities where past price cuts resulted in increased demand. A large part of Uber’s success can be attributed to its emphasis on balancing supply and demand. While some competing apps struggle to have enough drivers or riders, Uber aims to optimize its pricing so that there is always a driver or passenger available for pickup.
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Edtech 101
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Amy Lin
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
In 2015, the investing community sat up and took notice of edtech. , and ever since, more analysts have been meticulously studying the growth of edtech funding and innovation. With and a nod from Mary Meeker’s , more people are starting to realize that the Internet has just begun to impact education. Since 2014, I have noticed an increase in volume and diversity among strategic buyers. Ten years ago, edtech startups were often sentenced to slow growth — or “death by integration” within a big publisher. But today, edtech firms are generating from big brands like Google and Amazon, while driving scale through unconventional education business models. Are the days of big publishing’s R&D by acquisition a thing of the past? What do the interests of edtech’s new strategic buyers tell us about what’s to come? Life in the classroom is changing fast. It’s hard for big, albeit well-intentioned companies, to stay on top of the latest trends and teacher preferences. As a result, teacher-founded businesses are more appealing than ever to strategic buyers. Tech-savvy teachers, turned entrepreneurs can bring design thinking to bear on corporate strategy. Earlier this year, for example, for its products and services. uClass founder Zak Ringelstein was a teacherpreneur who knew first-hand how to create authentic solutions for real-world education problems. The head of M&A from one strategic buyer told me that entrepreneurs should get out and meet the leaders of big publishers or edtech firms — and even potential competitors — proactively and in-person. The idea seemed crazy at first, as big companies almost always rely on advisors and bankers to broker deals and facilitate introductions. But even tiny companies should get to know their bigger siblings right off the bat. When TES Global was courting prior to its acquisition in March of 2014, the founders were the face of buying conversations, not an investment banker. Companies who know they are “acquirable” should be capable of running deal conversations themselves, without giving away proprietary strategies and insights. Startups pride themselves on being able to pivot, but there’s a fine line between adaptive and unpredictable. We meet with a lot of the same companies throughout the course of the year at conferences and events and often see wild swings in their product and strategy, which can be a turn off. Companies that get acquired aren’t chasing financial returns — they’re going after results for the long haul. Sophisticated education investors and strategic buyers understand that progress takes time. Rather than exaggerated usage numbers, they look for high-quality adoption and a proof of concept, particularly with district, school or parent customers. Tell your story objectively; don’t adapt your vision based on what you buyers want to hear. Bigger players can be powerful allies and provide a platform to help earlier-stage products make an impact. But, the first meeting often only gives a sliver of the broader, long-term strategy. You may not know your product or tool is interesting as a part of a corporate strategy or product suite initially, and that’s okay. Andrew Joseph, co-founder of never expected Amazon to be for their math intervention business — and while the remains confidential, it’s clear that the long-term vision for Amazon in edtech represents massive departure from the way we have historically thought about the role of content and technology in education. Focus on what you do well and help partners and potential buyers understand your unique value rather than boiling the ocean with a vision that falls short of reality. Candor and focus are not only great values to embrace in partnerships, they’re also indicators of whether a management team will succeed in executing a strategy as part of a larger organization. It’s hard to spot patterns in edtech M&A, given the range of divergent interests and business models that are being experimented with today. Without a doubt, the most consistent trend is, perhaps, inconsistency. Early exists, or exits at all, aren’t going to be the right move for every entrepreneur — but I’m encouraged that new and bigger corporate platforms are creating an unprecedented opportunity for entrepreneurs to scale ideas that work more quickly, solve challenges and make an impact.
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I Am Cardboard Showing Newly Funded DSCVR Headset AT CES
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Jay Donovan
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
, makers of a variety of Google Cardboard viewers, recently delivered their new (pronounced “Discover”) after a recent, successful Kickstarter campaign. Since delivering the 3,000 headsets promised to backers just before Christmas, the Hong Kong-based company of 10 have sold approximately another 20,000 of the DSCVR model on Amazon and at their own website according to CEO Joseph Li. Ironically, the DSCVR viewer for Google Cardboard apps is made out of plastic, and therein lies one of its strengths, literally. It won’t get mashed up being carried around in your bag all day. An additional advantage is that the back end where the smartphone attaches is not enclosed like some other cardboard viewers. Instead of holding the phone in place with cardboard flaps and velcro, the DSCVR uses a wide rubber band and therefore can fit many different phone types without needing to remove the phone’s protective case to make it fit. It worked pretty well with my iPhone 6 Plus (thanks to Google opening up the platform to iOS last May). On the downside, you can’t really bend it around slightly to fit your face the way you can with a viewer actually made out of cardboard. But overall, i’d say the strength of the plastic outweighs that. It’s not like cardboard on your face is super comfortable either. If I were going to pay 15 or 20 bucks for a headset made out of cardboard, I would probably perfer to pay an extra 10 bucks for this one and have it last longer. I Am Cardboard is hoping you think the same thing.
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Peach Is A Slick New Messaging App From The Founder Of Vine
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
Chat chat chat, talk talk talk. We love it, you love it. Messaging apps are hot for 2016 (again) and there’s seemingly a niche platform for all of us. There are also big platforms for the rest of the world like Messenger, WhatsApp, Line, Snapchat and Hangouts (and tons more). , is . was created by the founder of Vine, Dom Hofmann. What’s different about it, though? Well, the onboarding is pretty slick and the engagement experience is kind of like using Slack commands, if you’re familiar with that. The onboarding also feels a lot like Slackbot, too. We just signed up to 🍑 and their on-boarding is magical ✨ — Product Hunt (@ProductHunt) For example, you can type “GIF” and then you’re prompted to find and share one. Type “Draw” and you can draw a picture. Others: * Use the magic word “shout” to write a few words (+ emoji) in BIG letters on a background color.
* Use “draw” to post a doodle or sketch.
* Use “song” to share whatever’s playing right now. Friends can tap on the song to open it in Apple Music or Spotify.
* The magic word “rate” lets you give anything—anything!— a 1-5 star rating.
* Other magic words: gif, here, goodmorning, goodnight, battery, weather, move, meetings, safari, dice, time, date, movie, tv, and game. With more on the way. [gallery ids="1260029,1260030,1260031"] You can also be prompted with interesting questions to answer if you’re not sure of what to post. All of it goes to your home, which serves as a Facebook Wall of sorts where people can like your stuff and comment on it. No “direct” messaging here, all out in the open like Twitter. So yeah, messaging, communications, social network, AIM status messages, etc. Naturally, there’s even a “wave” feature that’s like a Facebook Poke (or “Cake” or other actions). It sends a push notification (yes, like Yo) and fun is had. It’s also cool to watch your friends update their status in realtime from one screen: Is there room for YAMA (Yet Another Messaging App)? I say yes, especially when people like is thinking outside of the box. One thing to note, it looks like it’s . However, it’s definitely catching fire quickly. In fact, I’ve seen something similar to it before, but that’s a story for another time. Peach reminds me of Twitter in the early days (share "what's happening"). Add me: . — Jack Dweck (@jackdweck) Give it a try, I’m “Drew” there. Welp, people are definitely trying it. The team is having a few technical difficulties, but they’re working on them. Thanks to everyone for downloading Peach! Still experiencing issues. We're working hard to resolve ASAP. 🔌 — Peach (@peachdotcool)
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YC Switches Up Its Management, As Altman Shifts Focus
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
Famed accelerator Y Combinator has grown a lot under the direction of Sam Altman, who was appointed president roughly two years ago. It’s grown so much in fact that Altman, known for constantly iterating on YC’s model, says it’s now for him to manage as closely as he once did, so he’s shifting more responsibility to a number of his longtime colleagues. Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail and founded FriendFeed, and who joined Y Combinator a little more than , is taking over for Altman as managing partner of the core YC program, which admits hundreds of startups every year and whips them into shape for other investors. YC Fellowship, a lighter-weight version of YC that provides startup teams with $12,000 grants and access to advice from the YC community, will now have Kevin Hale as managing partner. (Hale joined YC in 2013, two years after selling his YC-backed company, WuFoo, to SurveyMonkey.) Meanwhile, some things won’t change: For example, former Twitter CFO Ali Rowghani will remain the managing partner of YC Continuity, the late-stage growth fund that YC announced in October of last year. Hacker News, which was spun out of Y Combinator last September to provide it “full editorial independence,” will also continue to be managed by Dan Gackle, who joined YC full-time in March 2014, after previously cofounding a spreadsheet startup called Skysheet. As for Altman, he’ll now be running YC Research, a nonprofit research lab formed by the company last October that will make any IP developed freely available to everyone. (Note: Altman is still looking for the right person to run it full-time.) He that he’ll also spend his time across YC Fellowship, YC Core, and YC Continuity. We talked with Altman earlier today for more details. He explained that the new structure “generally reflects how we’ve been operating unofficially over the past few months. It just gives us the opportunity to get more done in parallel, which has been the goal going forward.” Asked if he was relinquishing any of his decision-making authority, he said no. “I still expect to be involved in every major decision. I just won’t be doing some of the things I was doing before, like, if some investor is misbehaving and we need to go deal with that, I can avoid getting involved hopefully.” Altman added that he does not expect to spend an inordinate amount of time tinkering with YC Research, saying it doesn’t require much oversight as it has made one investment to date and expects to make just one or two this year. He’s also not in a rush to hire someone into the job of leading the unit. “It’s good to do things for yourself for a while to get a feel for [what the job] requires,” he said. Altman also made some other announcements today. In the same order that he announced them: Kirsty Nathoo is going to be the CFO across the entire YC group. Carolynn Levy and Jon Levy are going to be the General Counsels across the YC group. Dalton Caldwell is going to be responsible for admissions to the core program. Kat Mañalac is responsible for the outreach efforts YC does to meet potential new founders, and she’ll also be working closely with Hale on the Fellowship. Matt Krisiloff, a new hire, is working with Hale on YC Fellowship. Krisiloff previously cofounded a couple of companies, including Entom Foods, which aimed to turn insect meat into a “palatable, sustainable food source.” He also co-founded a mental health directory that helped people find therapists and logged time as an associate with Hyde Park Angels in Chicago. Denis Mars, another new hire, will work with Caldwell on admissions for YC Core. Mars is a YC alumni (he was the founder of Meetings.io) and the founder of several other companies. Verena Prescher, a third new hire, is working with Nathoo as the controller of YC Continuity. Prior to joining Y Combinator, Verena was the controller at Felicis Ventures.
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Today On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Project Tango, iPhone Headphone Jack, Faraday Future And More CES
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
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 , Google’s Project Tango , the , and a preview of the . 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 . And that’s a wrap for this week’s gadgets podcast extravaganza! Make sure to watch the Hardware Battlefield final round on the at 2 PM PT.
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Hands On With Google’s Project Tango Developer Kit
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
Yesterday we checked out an event hosted by Lenovo and Google, where the duo that Lenovo would be making the first Phone. While we found out that the device would ship this summer and cost under $500, we didn’t get many other details on the device. However, the company gave us a chance to play with Project Tango’s developer kit, which, is a tablet jam-packed with all of cameras and sensors required to run Project Tango. We tried out a few different consumer-targeted apps, including a AR measuring stick, 3D room scanner, and a AR shooting game. While its going to be at least another 6 months before Project Tango makes it into the hands of consumers, it was nice to see that the technology is progressing nicely, and will ultimately provide a bevy of features for developers working with AR and 3D technologies.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 01.08.16
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
– John Borthwick, Ari Weinstein, Matthew Panzarino, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session for today has concluded. Gillmor Gang on Facebook Our sister show – G3 – on Facebook
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You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
Despite the glorified status that entrepreneurship has obtained in modern culture, it’s a huge pain in the pass. The work is long. The lows are low. Showering? Good luck with that. One of the worst parts about being an early-stage founder, however, is realizing just how little you really know about the broader ecosystem that you’re supposed to navigate your way through — and not having time to figure it out. There’s no shortage of venture capitalists posting tips about crucial decisions you should be making, but who has time to read all of it? Again, you are a person who has to be strategic about because you’re so damn busy. Well, good news. As often as we can over here at TC, we’re going to take on one of your questions and bring you the feedback of numerous experts. (This may become a weekly thing; we have to see how it goes.) Let’s kick things off with our very first question from a reader, which is: “How do you establish a valuation for a nascent SaaS startup when there are no similar products?” While we find it difficult to imagine a nascent SaaS startup with (c’est possible?), plenty of the pros in our network have some great advice on this very topic. First, you can focus on underlying business metrics to get to a valuation, suggests serial entrepreneur Peter Kazanjy, who says “product variety” matters a lot less than these numbers. “A SaaS company exists to solve business problems and provide customer ROI and in return gets recurring revenue at fairly high margins — at least if it’s typical SaaS. So its value is contingent on how well it achieves that goal.” What metrics are most important? Think monthly recurring revenue, monthly bookings, customer lifetime value (though this one is “pretty tough to converge on very early as your initial churn numbers are likely not very accurate,” Kazanjy notes), customer acquisition cost ratio, churn, and your startup’s growth rates. What? Your company is too young to look at said metrics? Okay, fine. Let’s say that it’s pre-revenue. In that case, as you can imagine, your company’s valuation is going to be based almost solely on your team and its ability to execute on its vision — and there’s a very wide valuation range based on those things, notes Joe Floyd of Emergence Capital. Floyd says that, “On the high end of the spectrum, I’ve seen a proven SaaS entrepreneur raise $15 million at a $35 million pre-money valuation with nothing more than a PowerPoint. On the low end of the valuation range, SaaS startups outside of Silicon Valley without access to a vibrant angel community might raise $200,000 to $500,000 on a $2 million to $3 million capped note.” For the majority of nascent SaaS startups, adds Floyd, “The truth will lie somewhere in the middle.” Still not satisfied? Maybe this feedback from Alexander Niehenke, a principal at Scale Venture Partners, will help. In his view, the “most rudimentary way to value is a company is at a discount to its future cash flows.” Sure, he acknowledges, many start-ups don’t have positive cash flow today or even expect it in the near future. But many of the value techniques used by investors build on this assumption, he says. “Even a nascent start-up with little to no financial or metric traction has the expectation of future growth and eventually cash flows. Therefore, valuations will be established not based on the nascency of the business today, but rather the expectation of what the business will become in both the near-term and long-term.” One more thing to note, says Niehenke: It’s not uncommon for a startup to create a unique product — as our reader has clearly done — but valuations are often established by business model or industry. In other words, he says, “If your business model and product delivery is SaaS, a public company like Salesforce is a likely benchmark. If your market is HR software, for example, Workday might be a likely comparable.” Don’t rely on one or two comparables alone. He advises looking at a basket of them to reduce the variability for any single company. He also advises thinking hard about which companies to use as comparables. For example, he notes, “Using taxi cab companies as comparables for Uber would likely result in an unfairly low valuation [because while they’re] in the same market, they’re very different business.” You might look instead at similar marketplace business models like eBay or OpenTable, he notes. Okay, good luck, and founders, send us another question so we can get you some answers .
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Harry Potter Books Head To Kindle And Nook After Pottermore Suffers Cruciatus Curse
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
Whether you side with Hufflepuff or Slytherin, it sucked that you could only get Harry Potter ebooks from a special service called … until now. The company has is now selling these books for $9 on the Kindle and Nook and for a very interesting reason: the goblins at Gringotts realized Pottermore didn’t have much money left. Harry Potter ebooks have long been part of Kindle Unlimited but this move opens ebooks sales to new services. Pottermore launched in 2012 as a digital home for all things Potter. Interestingly, its biggest parter was Sony, then quite active in the reader space. As points out, the company licensed the branded, offered a Harry Potter-themed area in Playstation Home and gave away free Harry Potter ebooks with the Sony Reader. Old Draco Malfoy must have gotten a Confundus Charm brewing over there because, after a while, Sony realized that it was hopeless to stem the tide of bigger ereaders and content plays. Sales dropped in March 2015 from £24.8 million to £7 million. The site suffered a loss of £6 million in 2015. So give old Dobby his sock and strap on your House Cup because now you and yours can read Harry almost anywhere, including the Chamber of the Back Seat of the Minivan.
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Lily, A Camera Drone That Automatically Follows You, Pulls In A Mountainous $34 Million In Pre-orders
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
Self-driving drone has had quite the success in sales and it’s not even on the market yet. The startup pulled in a whopping $34 million in pre-orders by the end of 2015, with 60,000 units already sold. While that’s not as massive as (1.2 million sold in the first day), it’s still a pretty good indicator Lily is onto something. The little flying bot is pretty cute with its rounded style and smizing blue LED lights. The 10.29-inch-wide by 3.22-inch-tall device can fly 50 feet up and comes equipped with a 1080p HD camera. Lily acts as a robot videographer, automatically following you anywhere. It starts recording videos as soon as you toss it into the air and is even waterproof, should you want to take it to the pool. A small tracking device lures Lily along as it uses technological wizardry to find the perfect shot. But don’t call Lily a drone. “It’s a camera,” co-founder and CEO of the company Antoine Balaresque corrected me as he gave me a demo of the camera in the lobby of the Courtyard Marriott in downtown Las Vegas during CES. How does the FAA feel about that? As an unmanned aircraft, the device still must meet (because it’s a drone). Drone or self-flying camera, Lily is still available for pre-order on the site for a comparatively reasonable $800 (the , another automated drone with a built-in camera, goes for $1350 retail). The commercial price will be $1,000 when it officially launches sometime in summer 2016. Balaresque and I chatted about Lily’s unique features and his successful pre-order campaign on camera. Click on the video above to see the interview and learn more about this fun hovercam that could even become a member of our TechCrunch TV crew one day.
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3D-Printed Insole Maker SOLS Lays Off 20 Percent Of Staff
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
, a company using 3D-printing technology to , has laid off 20 percent of its workforce, or 14 employees in total across all teams, TechCrunch has confirmed. The staff reductions come just ahead of a forthcoming product announcement due in a few weeks, as well as further efforts aimed at broadening SOLS’ product offerings, says co-founder and CEO Kegan Schouwenburg. The startup is notable as being one of the first companies to use 3D printing technologies to market custom-manufactured wearables. To date, SOLS focused on printing shoe insoles, in particular by working with doctors who prescribe its products to patients suffering from foot pain and other ailments. This fall, SOLS also with the launch of an iPhone app where individuals could virtually scan their foot with their phone’s camera, in order to help create their custom insole in combination with other data, like weight, height, and lifestyle details. Schouwenburg, an early employee at 3D printery Shapeways before founding SOLS, tells TechCrunch that the team members who were let go were provided with severance packages, and the company is working to help each individual new opportunities. “As we broaden our product offerings, we are exploring distribution channels to extend our core medical business and support our overall strategy. There will be an exciting product announcement in the next several weeks,” she said. “We are sad to see our colleagues go, but believe these changes will enable focus, and set us up for greater success.” SOLS has raised $19.25 million to date in outside funding, , from investors including Felicis Ventures, Founders Found, FundersGuild, Lux Capital, Rothenberg Ventures, RRE Ventures, Melo7 Tech Partners, Tenaya Capital, and others.
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MatterHackers Releases A Tablet That Lets You Design 3D Prints On The Go
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
Most 3D printer apps are fairly basic – mostly they’re used to monitor print jobs. MatterHackers has just released the MatterControl Touch T10, a 10-inch, $299 tablet that allows you to place items, edit them, and even print them on the fly using a powerful Android-powered tablet. Because the device is dedicated to 3D printing it can slide 3D models and around and resize them on the screen. It supports “any 3D printer that runs G-code and has a direct USB connection.” This means it doesn’t support Makerbot or FlashForge printers yet. It may seem a little goofy to release a tablet for your 3D printer but it definitely makes sense it, say your printer is in a public lab where it’s easier to allow users to edit models right from the printer than futz around on a laptop. This also gives wireless capabilities to printers that might be a little on the disconnected side. Can you just run a regular tablet and get the same deal? Oh, no, good sir: You can order the .
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Over 200,000 People Have Signed A Petition To Stop Apple From Killing The iPhone’s Headphone Jack
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 |
You may have that Apple might be doing away with the headphone jack on the iPhone to push forward the wonderful world of wireless listening. Awesome, right? Well, hold on. First off, as per usual, Apple has said nothing to confirm or deny this, so it’s just a rumor. Still, we’re treated with baffling headlines like this: This confusion is from people who don’t want to have to buy new headphones and hardware to go along with the next generation of Apple’s phone. There’s asking Apple to keep the jack as it is: Apple is about to rip off every one of its customers. Again. Forbes and FastCompany are reporting that Apple plans to ditch the standard 3.5mm headphone jack when it releases the iPhone 7 later this year. Only a massive international campaign can force Apple to change course now. Not only will this force iPhone users to dole out additional cash to replace their hi-fi headphones, it will singlehandedly create mountains of electronic waste — that likely won’t get recycled. According to the United Nations, up to 90% of the world’s electronic waste is illegally traded or dumped each year. Tell Apple to respect its customers and our planet. Keep the standard headphone jack. This is right out of the Apple corporate playbook. A few years ago it swapped out the original iPod-dock connector with a new one, making countless cords, cables and chargers obsolete. Apple plays up its green credentials, but the truth is that Apple only invested in renewable energy, and began phasing out toxic chemicals when public pressure became too strong to ignore. People power did it before, and we can do it again. Tell Apple to keep the standard headphone jack and ditch planned obsolescence! Again, these are just rumors. They might even be spot on, but until Apple does something, we don’t know anything. And well, the Internet loves drama and people love to sign petitions. I doubt that this will elicit a response from the mothership, but these folks sure hope their cries are heard. Personally? Kill , I can’t stand them. But hey, try and #SaveJack if you like. ? — Adam Marx (@adammarx13)
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If At First Your Acqui-Hire Sucks, Try Again
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Courtland Alves
| 2,016 | 1 | 1 | |
The First International Beauty Contest Judged By Robots
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Zoltan Istvan
| 2,016 | 1 | 1 |
Robots are starting to appear everywhere: driving cars, cooking dinners and even as robotic . But people don’t usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world’s first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury. The contest, which requires participants to take selfies via a special app and submit them to the contest is touting new sophisticated facial recognition algorithms that allow machines to judge beauty in new and improved ways. The contest intends to have robots analyze the many age-related changes on the human face and evaluate the impact on perception of these changes by people of various ages, races, ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, a consultant on the competition and CEO of Insilco Medicine, a bioinformatics company focusing on aging research, says “Recent advances in Deep Learning have made machine recognition of beauty aspects far better than ever before.” Machine intelligence capabilities have been steadily growing in sophistication every year. Some say Moore’s Law — where a microchip doubles in computing power about every 24 months — may not hold up as well as it has in the last two decades. However, even if Moore’s Law fails in the future, new methods of computing, like may again set the industry on breakneck development speeds. Part of the AI beauty contest framework is not just for humans submitting selfies, but also programmers submitting their best algorithms for machine detection of beauty. Near the bottom of the contest website is a for algorithm submissions that takes coders to a page saying, “Would you like to go down in history as one of the first data scientists who taught a machine to estimate human attractiveness?” In a way, this makes the contest a crowd-sourced event. Of course, getting robots to understand beauty is not just for kicks. Behind the motive is a massive anti-aging industry that wants to better understand how youthfulness can be better monitored and implemented. I suspect it’s part of the reason Microsoft, Nvidia, Youth Laboratories and other companies are prominently listed on the website as “partners and supporters.” “This contest will help build impartial feature-specific and general robots that will help us understand our faces. But my personal dream is to have this contest extended into anti-aging and general healthcare space,” said Nastya Georgievskaya, robot tutor at Youth Laboratories, a company developing deep learning systems for facial analysis. Dr. Zhavoronkov told me the contest hopes to facilitate the launch of a series of apps that will allow people to track the effects of various products (including cosmetics) on their face — ones that quickly allow them to understand the impact on perception using impartial opinion of deep-learned algorithms. “People may not care about how to extend their lifespans, but they definitely care about the way they look,” Zhavoronkov wrote me. “Insilco Medicine used massive multi-omics data from academic and commercial partnerships to predict the likely geroprotectors that may have beneficial effects on human skin, and we need a way to test the efficacy of these interventions. We will be launching an application called RYNKL in the coming weeks if all goes well, which will allow users to take standardized selfies periodically to analyze the changes in ‘wrinkleness’ of their face in the context of their lifestyle, behavior, and other interventions.” This beauty contest will run every half a year, and more and more teams from all over the world will be invited to try their robots on human faces linked to multiple other parameters. The overriding goal of the contest is discover complex rating systems that will teach machines to evaluate humans, which will be important to getting robots to act more like us — and also to understand our ways. Of course, humans may be in for a surprise if machines decide many of us are not attractive — or are even downright ugly. Alex Shevtsov, founder and CEO of Youth Laboratories, recently asked, “You may like your Tesla, but would you like your Tesla to like you?” Despite the competition featuring the next generation of machine recognition, the beauty contest does not allow participants to use make-up, have beards or wear hats in their submitted selfies. Maybe in a few years, that will be worked out, so machines will be able to understand more than skin-deep beauty, but also human’s love of endless and often artistic material accessories, like earings, fancy dresses and even tattoos. Eventually, through this technology, machines may even learn to judge another machine’s appearance, opening up the possible world of robot attraction and love.
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Why Silicon Valley Should Bring Unsexy Back
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Rana Gujral
| 2,016 | 1 | 1 |
. . “ .” These are just a few of the goofy startup ideas that have cropped up in in recent years. I can’t be the only one who’s disappointed with this. The is the birthplace of game-changing innovations, like the microprocessor and the PC. It’s home to enough brainpower to take on the biggest problems of today, like world hunger and climate change. So why, in 2015, was it so myopically focused on silly wearables and more efficient pot delivery? To me, the answer seems like an obvious one. Like middle-schoolers at a high-school dance, startup founders are trying too hard to be cool. And it’s not only hurting the world — it’s hurting the longevity of the entire tech industry. I know tech industry insiders want to be cool because I used to be like them. I started my career at big companies with famous names, like Logitech and Kronos. But I quickly grew disillusioned with the waste I saw in the corporate environment. I wanted to solve real problems, not just fatten a bottom line. But that was before I joined with my partner, Stephen Kawaja, to found a startup that makes software for the least of industries. In the eyes of Generation Y, actually making things — as opposed to apps — seems hopelessly . A recent found only 2 percent of 21-29-year-old respondents worked in manufacturing. Students interviewed called the sector slow and out of date. Most people associate factories with repetitive work and mindless conformity — like that disrupted by a sledgehammer-wielding Anya Major in the . But just 150 years ago, factories were the startup incubators of their time. Henry Ford’s Model T was every bit as disruptive as Uber (or Facebook or Google). How does a once-cool industry become so uncool — and yet still survive? For one, by realizing that cool doesn’t matter that much in business. Just take our customers, for example. Specialty chemicals have become an $800 billion industry, despite making what are frankly some of the most prosaic and least sexy products on earth. They’re behind the coating on a washing machine that makes it look shiny and new, the polymer added to concrete that makes it more flexible and less likely to crack, the glue that sticks the wood veneer to your desk securely enough to make it look authentic. “Innovation” in this context is often incremental. It’s not about “disrupting” a whole industry — it’s about redesigning to improve performance by a mere 0.0001 percent. But here’s the secret: That 0.0001 percent is ultimately more useful to the world than 10,000 pairs of . To quote the tagline of German specialty chemicals company : “We don’t make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.” And customers are willing to pay a premium for those better products. Already in today’s crowded startup ecosystem, a new company that can’t make inroads outside the bubble is . In a survey by venture capital database , 42 percent of tech startup founders cited “ ” as the main reason for their company’s failure. Just look at Secret. The VC-backed anonymous messaging service was a darling — but , having failed to take off outside of the tech-industry fairyland. That’s a trend that’s likely to accelerate in upcoming years. Most of today’s fast-growing tech companies are created by and for a small, affluent, urban population — the 1 percent. But these users’ share of the market is contracting. By 2020, will be in developing nations, where efficient pizza delivery is often less of a concern than access to clean drinking water. And woe to the tech company that doesn’t prepare itself for this change. I’m not suggesting that startup founders drop everything and start to work on an app that somehow makes washers shinier. Nor am I suggesting that developers resign themselves to merely making incremental improvements to their existing products forever. What I am suggesting is that developers, startup founders and venture capitalists stop running headlong from every business opportunity that doesn’t have a catchy, easy “Uber for X” nickname attached. Think about the roots of the computer revolution. They’re not in the flashy offices of venture capital firms. They’re in industrial labs like , where scientists invented the transistor in 1947. Or , home to the world’s first Ethernet connection and its first Graphical User Interface (GUI). These were places where great minds worked hard to solve big problems, without pressure to rush new products to market or create early exits for VCs. And as they’ve , America has been left with . To move toward the future, the Internet really needs to get to its roots — its , specialty-chemicals–like roots. It needs to turn its attention to real, practical problems that matter outside the urban, affluent 1 percent. And it needs to learn how to think big again. The good news is that some tech companies are already showing the courage to do so. They’re stepping up to solve the real-world problems the ignores. , a solar panel installation and distribution startup, recently raised to expand its operations in Mexico, where power from conventional sources is often prohibitively expensive. , a cloud-based solution for the life sciences industry, fills a much-needed technology space by tailoring data services specifically to big pharma and biotech. designs and builds complex buildings like hospitals for 20 percent the usual cost by applying the same software and techniques used to automate microchip design. It’s these types of companies that will continue to see profits long after goofy wearables startups have faded away. The question is only whether the rest of the will ever catch up.
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Urban.us Raising $10 Million Fund To Invest In Startups That Impact City Living
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 1 |
Venture fund is gearing up to close a $10 million fund to continue investing in startups focused on impacting urban city living across mobility and logistics, environment, utilities and local government. Urban.us expects to close the fund later this year, but it has already committed some of that money to smart irrigation startup , , the maker of electric board OneWheel, and connected heating and cooling systems startup . Urban.us’s first fund was $1.3 million, which it divvied up amongst 20 startups relatively equally. Other startups in Urban.us’s portfolio include , , , and . The goal of the first fund was to help get companies from the pre-seed to Series A round. With Urban.us’s second fund, the idea is to provide follow-on investments to the some of the companies that have shown growth and achieved measurable public benefits. “We believe climate change is the biggest challenge we’re going to face as a society,” Urban.us co-founder Stonly Baptiste told TechCrunch. “And we see cities as one of the key mechanisms for efficiency to impact what that trajectory looks like.” Cities account for roughly 70% of greenhouse gas emissions across the world, , the UN’s program for urban development. By 2050, urban populations are expected to double and therefore increase the overall gas emissions coming from cities. That’s why Urban.us invests in companies that have the potential to rapidly scale and positively impact approximately 100 cities within five years. That’s why Baptiste especially likes OneWheel, because it highlights the concept of sneaking in public benefits. OneWheel is both fun and useful, Baptiste said, but at the tail end of it, there’s a big public benefit. If more people choose to get around on small, personal electrical vehicles like the OneWheel, it could impact the number of people driving, Baptiste said, and ultimately impact CO2 emissions from cities.
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What’s The Half Life Of A Unicorn?
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Simon Crosby
| 2,016 | 1 | 1 |
“Cybercorns” are companies that have surpassed the magical $1 billion valuation. Several of these extraordinary ventures are , , , , , , , , and . Each has attained an enviable position as a valued solution to an important set of customer security pains. The entrepreneurs who built these companies (many of which are privately held) and the investors that backed them deserve their success. But in a world where technology is changing rapidly, and in which attackers are agile and focused, which of these will survive? is the – , perhaps measured by stock value, of a cybercorn? The most profound trends in the IT landscape are, of course, the rapid adoption of cloud services and growing mobility of the workforce. All too soon, application back-end micro-services will automatically and reliably scale as needed in the cloud, accessed by users over the public Internet. Cybercorns that have bet on a long-lived traditional IT infrastructure are already in trouble. If the user is working in Starbucks, value is a network security product that attempts to protect an indefensible network perimeter? If your organization is adopting Office 365, when a user opens a potentially threatening attachment, it runs in a virtual machine, in Azure. You have no need for a supposedly secure “email gateway” that attempts to find evil attachments on your Exchange Server. FireEye stands to lose most among the cybercorns I’ve listed — its – is already being . Companies that are built for and can secure the future of IT infrastructure — cloud-based applications and mobile app users — can ease customers’ transition to the cloud and deliver value that stands the test of time. A quick sort of the cybercorns I listed identifies those that deliver value as a cloud service: Okta, Zscaler, CloudFlare and Illumio deliver products and technologies form-factored for the cloud, paid for on a subscription basis, that are easy to adopt, sticky (valuable) and non-intrusive in traditional IT operations. Splunk has delivered tremendous value and is very sticky, and though its deployment is primarily tied to traditional enterprise on-premise infrastructure, it also can be consumed from the cloud. As a big data platform, it has the opportunity to unlock tremendous incremental value through the addition of new vertical apps that help to further streamline IT operations, including security. On the downside, Splunk’s core technology is not awfully hard to replicate, and open source competitors already exist. Splunk’s biggest weakness is its data size-based pricing, which leaves customers wondering about the marginal value of more data — the precise opposite of the obvious strategy, which is to encourage customers to store more and more data in the platform and to charge based on the value delivered from it rather than the volume. Proofpoint is also cloud-centric, but like Tanium and AVAST, it controls and manages the endpoint. Proofpoint is an agile escape artist that has avoided the rapid commoditization of mobile security products thus far. But Microsoft’s presence looms large, and its Enterprise Mobility Suite offering includes Enterprise Mobility Management, Azure AD and mobile security for only $7 per user, placing an immovable floor on the market opportunity. Proofpoint also needs to compete with well-heeled enterprise players such as VMware and Citrix in a crowded market that has already witnessed the shocking collapse of Blackberry and Good Technology. Rapid changes on the endpoint will dramatically challenge other cybercorns. For instance, AVAST is popular among consumers for its , and charges for premium versions. But even my mother knows that AV is not needed for her iPad, and the appeal of free, consumer-centric AV in the enterprise is limited. Sophos is a successful cybercorn in the enterprise endpoint security market. It faces an uphill battle, though. Antivirus-style detection is outmoded and ineffective and Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection is included free with the enterprise license agreements. Sophos also faces stubborn incumbents in McAfee and Symantec, has yet to offer any substantially differentiated technology and faces commoditization from the 25+ other traditional endpoint security vendors fighting for the same dollars. Tanium, which cut its teeth in patch management and then pivoted into endpoint detection and response (EDR) faces a double whammy: Its idea of a peer-to-peer patch delivery protocol has already been subsumed into , and its EDR feature set offers little more than the free utility offered by Microsoft. It has the advantage of a rumored in annual revenue, and may be able to avoid commoditization. But to do so successfully it will need to escape from the already crowded EDR market. Gartner is tracking more than 40 vendors of EDR products, including the major incumbents, Symantec and McAfee (now part of Intel Security). Finally, all of the detection-focused cybercorns face the brutal mathematics of Turing’s : In an online environment faced with agile, adaptive adversaries, every detection tool will fail at some point. Detection tools cannot protect their customers, and while helping IT staff to more quickly sniff out breaches is useful, it amounts to little more than closing the stable door once the have bolted. Ultimately, I foresee only two long-term defensible plays for these cybercorns. First, a focus on securing customers’ transition to and use of the cloud. And second, companies that quickly and intelligently sift through reams of data to make IT more responsive, agile and secure. It will be fascinating to watch happens.
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With Debt Round, Web Publisher LittleThings Plans For More Positivity-Fueled Growth
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 1 |
There’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of , but apparently it’s seeing rapid growth, thanks to a focus on positive and inspirational stories. In fact, , LittleThings was responsible for the single most popular Facebook post of 2015. The story is basically just of of Ann and Nancy Wilson covering “Stairway to Heaven,” but thanks a clever, attention-grabbing description (“44 Years Ago, He Wrote This Song. But When He Hears Her Sing It Like THIS, He Cries”) and perhaps some Facebook voodoo, it has nearly 1.8 million Likes. That’s not just a fluke, either. The New York City startup’s comScore numbers show 49.5 million unique visitors in October, making it the seventh-largest Lifestyle property. Not bad for a site that didn’t exist a couple of years ago. LittleThings is also announcing that it’s raised a debt round from City National Bank. Unfortunately, it’s not disclosing the size of the round (a spokesperson said the company doesn’t have permission to share that number), but it still seems worth noting as LittleThings’ first outside funding, and in the context of ever-larger funding rounds for digital media companies . In addition to drawing readers to its own site, LittleThings has also put a lot energy into attracting readers on Facebook — hence the big hit mentioned above. Speiser said he’s expecting publishers to see big video monetization opportunities on Facebook in 2016. The real question may be whether LittleThings’ positive focus is enough of a foundation for a big media company. Speiser argued that the site is filling a real need for its readers — for example, he said traffic to LittleThings spiked in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. It might seem crass to benefit from something so horrible, but Speiser said those readers weren’t coming for stories about Paris. “People needed a break, a relief from the onslaught of news,” he said. “It’s tough to consume all this content, it makes you feel really depressed, so we’re happy to be … a safe haven.” He added that LittleThings is “trying to not just report on the news, but break the news.” For example, it helped grant a terminally patient’s dying wish by working with Gentle Carousel Miniature Therapy Horses to bring a mini therapy horse to her hospital room — and . Apparently, this is .
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A Quick Tour Of Wearables In 2015
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 1 | 1 |
Wearables had a varied year in 2015, with a lot of hype and a few big winners streaking ahead of the field, leaving plenty of also-rans struggling to stand out. It’s fair to say that the entire category is yet to prove whether it offers lasting utility or mere faddish novelty. The success of the smartphone is such than any supplementary technology inevitably lives in its shadow — and wearables are all about offering some kind of add-on functionality. Mobile undoubtedly still wears tech’s crown, and will do for the foreseeable future. The wearable category climax — at least, from a consumer point of view — was the much anticipated launch of Cupertino’s first foray into wrist-mounted gadgetry. Although confirmed by the company in fall last year, in the hands of pre-orderers this April. Long-standing rumors that Apple was making a wearable arguably fired up and fueled the entire category in earlier years, with into the market in the hopes of making a mark before Apple could. But with Apple finally having its watch in play the frenzy to be first evaporated — and with it a little of the fire that was fueling early wearable developments. That’s not a bad thing, given that hasty attempts to out-do a device that doesn’t even exist yet are hardly a perfect recipe for thoughtful product design. So what of Apple’s wearable? The jury is still out on its utility — reviewers generally failed to articulate what exactly the gizmo is . And as for sales, Apple doesn’t break out Watch sales, but analyst over the first two initial quarters on sale. Not bad for a device without a clear proposition. Those quarters were not holiday season, either. So sales are bound to get a further through the end of the year. For some comparative context sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatches (pictured below), which have been in the market since debuting , apparently totaled some 1.2 million in 2014, according to analyst statista estimates. Quite how big and festive the Apple Watch festive bump ends up being remains to be seen. But it seems likely that 2015 ended with Apple in second place in the wearables category, behind fitness tracker maker Fitbit — which between July and September. Apple vs Fitbit is something of an apples to oranges comparison, given the price-differential between the Apple Watch and Fitbit’s range of trackers — the latter’s wearables start at less than $50 for its Zip-clip step-tracker and rise to $250 for its flagship Surge smartwatch. And the fact the Apple Watch offers fitness tracking as one of myriad possible functions, rather than as its — as Fitbit does. When it comes to just smartwatches, Apple appears to have taken a clear lead. By this summer concluded the company was already dominating smartwatches, despite rivals like Samsung having a category headstart of well over a year. One notable Apple Watch development as the year went on was a collaboration with luxury accessories brand Hermès. A launched in the fall. The of an old world luxury brand with newfangled fashion tech underlines how difficult the wearables category is when it comes to satisfying consumers’ personal tastes. The Apple brand may be premium in tech terms but it’s still the new kid on the block in the long-lived world of luxury fashion. What will be key in 2016 is how sustainable Apple Watch sales prove to be — as the novelty of a new Apple device wears off leaving the utility of the watch to prove itself by convincing buyers they really do need an expensive supplementary gizmo on their wrist. . Elsewhere in the smartphone space, after less than a week on sale, citing hardware problems. And an embattled HTC, still sweating to turn around its mobile fortunes, of a planned co-branded fitness band with Under Armour. The mobile maker has so far stayed away from smartwatches — although it will rectify that early in 2016. Meanwhile in 2015, fitness wearable maker — not an amazing return for investors who had put $64.4 million into the company, across three rounds of funding, since it was founded in 2011. Although, from Misfit’s point of view, it’s a story of a series of successful investment decisions, not least the which turned into almost $850k in crowdfunds raised via Indiegogo — and eventually that $260M exit to Fossil. The sight of a smaller wearable maker being folded into an established watch brand is interesting from the point of view of determining which is more important for wearables: fashion or technology? Fossil said it will be integrating Misfit tech into its existing watch brands. So it’s evidently confident in its design smarts. But reckons it’s just a case of needing to add a little tech to stay competitive. Time will tell on that one. Another wearables high point this year was , which saw the values of its shares spiking by as much as 50 per cent as it begun trading. The company pulled in nearly $740 million from the IPO. Its shares have continued to hold their value. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt SF , Fitbit CEO and co-founder James Park described the health and fitness category as “a pretty large and diverse opportunity”, noting that consumers spend over $200 billion on related products and services — and arguing that Fitbit’s kit does not significantly overlap with Apple’s wearables play here. The company certainly offers a far larger range of wearables at this point, and all its devices undercut the Apple Watch on price. “There’s going to be a lot of different companies that win in different bits of this market,” Park argued. “For us and Apple, we don’t see ourselves as directly competitive today. And the numbers show it. Year over year our revenue tripled towards $400 million last quarter. The guidance that we gave analysts for our last earnings call was $1.7 billion in revenue this year, so we’re doing incredibly well. And I think consumers like the fact that we’re really focused on the category.” Being tightly focused on fitness also seems to be enabling Fitbit’s brand to transcend the fashion issue which continues to hamper other smartwatch and wearable makers. Point is, if you’re intending to sweat on something you’re going to be less fussed about how fashionable that something looks. While investors rewarded Fitbit by keeping its share price buoyant, other fitness-focused wearable players weathered tougher times in 2015. Early in the year Jawbone, maker of the UP fitness trackers, continued to be beset with its latest wearable, the UP3 (pictured below). There was in fact for the company in 2015 — instead it got a $300 million convertible loan, and had to shrink operations, including making , going on to slash . Ongoing with Fitbit also piled more distractions onto its plate. also dogged early wearable darling, Pebble, which revealed early in the year that it had shipped 1 million devices cumulatively, over some three years in the game. Years when it was not having to compete directly with Apple, of course. How Pebble is responding to competition from the Apple Watch was a question continually — and inevitably — fired at CEO Eric Migicovsky this year. He claimed the company is seeing “no material impact” from the arrival of the Apple Watch, telling in November: “They are very focused on being the Rolex or the (Tag Heuer) of smartwatches. On the other hand I think we are trying to be the Swatch of smartwatches. We are building something that’s fun, a little bit more colourful. It’s affordable. At the core, it’s just a different type of watch.” The notifications wristwear-maker kicked things up a gear on the design front this fall, announcing its first round-faced smartwatch — (pictured below) — priced between $249 and $299. The round design entails an unfortunate compromise on the battery life front, shrinking the typical five or six days’ of juice down to just two – and thereby reducing one big differentiating advantage vs the Apple Watch. Price wise Pebble’s flagship remains cheaper than the entry level Apple Watch ($350), however Best Buy in the US discounted the Apple Watch by $100 at the back end of the year – which underlines how Apple’s pricing is hardly well characterized as akin to Rolex levels of luxury. There’s actually only a small premium standing between Apple kit and Pebble’s flagships. Apple is also rumored to be planning another Watch event for March 2016. It would not be unusual for Cupertino to reduce the price of an older gen device as it launches a new version so that differentiating price margin between the Apple Watch and the rest of the smartwatch field may well shrink further. Whatever happens in the short term, there’s little doubt Pebble is sitting in a tough spot — squeezed between Apple at the high end and an ever growing sea of mid range smartwatches and notification gizmos all vying for consumer attention. Talking of budget wearables, Chinese upstart Xiaomi got into the space in mid 2014 with a $13 waterproof fitness band, which tracks steps, activity, sleep and more, and has a month-long battery life so is designed to be worn daily, continuing the company’s philosophy of disrupting the competition on price. That hyper budget pricing strategy saw Xiaomi step up its share of the wearables market this year, with analyst IDC estimating it had taken a quarter of the market by Q1 2015, shipping 2.8 million of its Mi Bands (vs 3.9 million Fitbits). That placed Xiaomi second globally by mid 2015, when it opened up Mi Band sales to the U.S. and Europe. And , behind Fitbit and Apple. Such is the scale of the Chinese market. Xiaomi added a second wearable device, the (pictured above), in November, also priced very aggressively, at around $15. Rumors that the company would branch out into the smartwatch space have yet to come true but do seem likely given its existing playbook of offering a comprehensive portfolio of device types to compete with all the products sold by rivals. That said, fashion is a fickle creature. And without a clearly articulated purpose for smartwatches how they look is pretty important — so a budget Xiaomi smartwatch isn’t necessarily going to be too exciting from a consumer point of view. Unless it’s offering some super compelling function. Undercutting the competition on price at least looks set to sustain Xiaomi as a significant player in fitness wearables, where looks are less important — provided its strategy of wafer-thin profits is sustainable. And provided it can see off growing competition from other fast-following Chinese makers also intent on earning a place on consumers’ wrists. Elsewhere, investors made a few bets on some fashion-focused wearables in 2015, with so-called ‘smart jewelry’ startups pulling in some dollars. At the start of the year both and (the latter pictured, right) raised almost identical Series A rounds in the $5M range. The two startups play in the screenless notifications space, and also — in Cuff’s case — have plans to integrate fitness tracking into fine jewelry too in future. , which detailed its $3M seed this fall, is another startup focused on putting tech inside fine jewelry, embedding notifications systems into designer wearables. The general thinking that links all these players is the idea that (some) women want an alternative way to be notified of incoming messages — i.e. without having to keep checking their smartphone. With fashion being such a multifaceted animal there is room for plenty of niche fashion-tech plays to offer an alternative to people who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing an ugly piece of plastic but might be persuaded to slip on something that can pass as costume jewelry. But whether any of these businesses can scale into something more significant than a niche player is a big question mark. The challenge they are setting themselves is twofold: not just producing slick and useful tech features but embedding those in a designer wrapper that looks good enough to compete with the likes of the Apple Watch and luxury/premium fashion brands who are also targeting this demographic. A tricky balancing act to pull off then. Meanwhile, another kind of wearable — the virtual reality headset — was making waves in 2015. Albeit, mostly hype waves. Or else the kind that make people feel queasy. Consumer demand for virtual reality has yet to be tested but we sure heard this year with tech companies lining up to pour dollars into the idea that The Next Big Thing will be a vision-altering headset. Not that we haven’t … Even beleaguered HTC is betting on the VR space, albeit in partnership with games maker Valve. The pair but the HTC/Valve Vive isn’t shipping in any quantities til . Also still in development stasis: the now Facebook-owned Oculus Rift. The but the headset isn’t due to ship til Q1 2016. But you’d hardly know that judging by the being issued this year as the company attempted to fire up developers to build ‘experiences’ for its forthcoming headset, while also priming gamers to be ready to slip on a face computer and gawp open-mouthed into other worlds. The start of 2015 also saw Microsoft get in on the virtual action, when it showed off an . Not full VR but the blended compromise that is augmented reality, which mixes digital content into a real world perspective. Microsoft demoed its and for more practical stuff like doing a spot of DIY plumbing. In less positive signs for Redmond’s AR vision, by the end of the year it was without explaining why. Rumors suggest it isn’t happy with the tech’s development. The dev version of Hololens is not due til Q1 2016 but given the rethinking Redmond is already doing it seems prudent to expect some delays. The biggest winner of the still untested (and largely unformed) VR/AR space in 2015 was perhaps Magic Leap, a stealthy startup that’s building some sort of AR headset. Details of what exactly it’s making are scant but it’s attracted some big name investors, including Google. And has a serious war chest – of more than $1 billion — at its disposal. In December it emerged so while the startup still can’t bank on reliable consumer demand for vision-disrupting wearables, it can at least say its vision has convinced investors to make some very big bets indeed. For all Magic Leap’s flashy, consumer-focused demos — such as these videos of — the more mundane reality of augmented reality might actually be something early mover Google Glass is now apparently focused on. While Glass never earned more than mockery from the mainstream consumer, it appears to be carving out for itself in the enterprise space, for things like warehousing inventory or security tasks. And while the year began with , it ended with detailing new designs for a more robust enterprise version of the wearable – underscoring that Google isn’t giving up on Glass entirely. Wearing an AR headset for work neatly circumvents the stigma associated with the general public rocking a face computer when mingling with their fellow humans. And while pure VR can shut itself away from public ridicule in a private room, AR’s pitch tends to involve claims of more general utility because of the blended view it offers. (For instance, , Google’s Sundar Pichai, who sits on the company board, said Google sees broad use-cases for the augmented reality tech – i.e. not just gaming.) However no-one wants to be walking around alienating strangers by drawing unwanted attention to a gizmo sitting on their nose. So unless Magic Leap’s technology is indistinguishable from a pair of glasses it’s going to have a tough time blending in in a way that’s socially acceptable. And even then, people don’t want to wear the same pair of glasses. Typically the first decision a glasses-buyer makes is about the style of the frames they reckon suits them. It’s a highly personal fashion purchase. So for Magic Leap to really fly it would need to be a technology that can be invisibly fitted to third party glasses frames. No pressure then. Seen from that angle, mid to low range VR headsets like the super budget , or Samsung’s $100 Gear VR, which — which can offer gamers a novel diversion that doesn’t break the bank, being as it utilizes their existing smartphone hardware — have perhaps the most realistic chance of making a sizable impression with consumers. Samsung certainly made a lot of noise about the Gear VR leading up to its launch. And scored a by London based design studio ustwo — of Monument Valley fame. As things stand right now, the most visible impact of VR remains the distinctive, slack-jawed expression on the faces of people caught peering into ‘The Future’… Expect to see a whole lot more ‘VR mouth’ in 2016.
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 8 | null |
Now That Netflix Is Global, You Should Go Buy A VPN
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
Netflix shocked the tech world ( ) with yesterday. That move means that the video streaming service is now available in 190 countries, so the chances are that you, dear reader, are eligible to access it right now — unless you happen to live in China, North Korea, Syria or the Crimea. Netflix’s original content — which it is ploughing billions of dollars into — is available worldwide, but the exact catalog for users varies based on their country. That’s because licensing deals are different from market to market, and Netflix also curates its content based on what it thinks locals will like. That can be pretty frustrating, particularly since Netflix regularly pulls popular programming to keep its content fresh. But, in actual fact, the global expansion has literally opened a whole new world of opportunity for Netflix users — if you’re prepared to invest a little money on some special software. If you buy a VPN — software that allows you to access the Internet while appearing to be in another country — then Netflix’s differing global catalog is an invitation to sample a range of programming beyond what is available where you live. For example, in Thailand, where I am based, the local catalog doesn’t include some blockbuster content from the U.S. and UK. Having a VPN allows me to jump that barrier by making Netflix think I am in the U.S.. That gives me access to content that nobody in Thailand can view on the service. But it works two ways. There are many classic films or shows that have long been removed in the U.S. and other Western markets, but are accessible in these new Netflix launch countries. Or perhaps you specifically like Korean dramas or other country-specific content. You just need to know where to look. Given of sites online, it won’t be long until someone begins compiling a master list of what is available where. Interesting that new Netflix markets have some classics (eg Godfather 1/2 in Thailand) which are absent from Netflix US catalog [h/t ] — Jon Russell (@jonrussell) There’s always a risk of a clamp down, since VPNs breach licensing agreements. But Netflix has, to date, been fairly sympathetic to VPN users. I’ve had a U.S.-based account for two years without problems thanks to a VPN, despite using a credit card in Thailand to pay my bill. That gives me hope that it will continue keep this option open for VPN users. (Famous last words I hope not.) So which VPN should you use? They are generally less than $10 per month, but will be cheaper if you pay for a longer period upfront. It’s best to pay for a VPN, by the way. , its users were manipulated to direct DDOS attacks. While Hola and others claim to uphold user privacy, I’d advocate paid software as being a better bet. There are numerous good quality options on the market, but I can speak to those that I know. I personally use — which has , and is Verge editor-in-chief — but , , , and are others that I have used in the past and can vouch for. TorrentFreak has of others if you want to assess further options. A VPN, which costs little more than the price of a lunch or a couple of coffees each month, isn’t just useful for surfing Netflix’s global catalog. In the post-Snowden era, they help keep your Internet browsing and activities more secure. So let Netflix be the excuse for getting into VPN software in 2016. You won’t regret it.
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AmpMe Syncs Multiple Devices To Become A Portable Speaker System
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
There are plenty of services out there that promise to sync up your devices to form a surround-sound speaker system. But , an app that launched out of Montreal three months ago, claims to be the only one that can work across both iOS and Android. The company was founded by serial entrepreneur and angel investor Martin-Luc Archambault and has grown to over 1 million downloads in three months. “The app is inherently viral because it’s useless unless your friends are using it, too,” said Archambault. Here’s how it works: Once you’ve downloaded the app, you sign in as a host and give a code to your friends. They input the code in the app and music is automatically synced among devices, both smartphones and tablets, to offer louder sound anywhere. “We want to be a portable Sonos,” said Archambault. In terms of music, users can play music files that are downloaded onto the device, as well as SoundCloud music and Songza playlists. The company says it’s working on adding integrations with other music services like Spotify and Apple Music. [vimeo 139997901 w=500 h=281] from on .
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Meet H. Moser & Cie., The Swiss Watch Company Apple Is Probably About To Sue
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TWWv8yd8c] Oh, Switzerland, you seem to have it all: fine chocolates, fondue, goats with bells around their necks. But what you don’t have is a sense of how to beat smartwatch makers without looking silly. To wit: meet the H. Moser & Cie. Swiss Alps watch (they probably meant the “alps” to be a play on “apple,” if you catch my drift.) This watch is supposed to be a direct thumb in the eye of the Apple Watch, but I suspect H. Moser & Cie. doesn’t have quite the reach they imagine they do. The watch, which , is a nearly exact replica of the Apple Watch with one subtle difference: it contains a mechanical movement. That’s right, no moon phase and step counts for you, Mr. Fancy Computer Man. Just wind this thing and go. The best bit? It costs $25,000 so you can buy this watch and not buy the next 60 or so Apple Watch versions that are coming down the pike in the next century. There is little else to say about this piece except that it’s hand made, features a beautiful dial and nicely worked movement, and all of the marketing materials look just like Apple’s. Switzerland has been losing market share to smartwatches all year and this piece is clearly an effort to outfit an older gentlemen with a taste for smart suits with something that looks like an Apple Watch but, upon closer inspection, isn’t. “Ho ho ho,” he will say as his driver pulls up in the Mercedes G-Class with diplomatic plates. “I do not buy garbage.” Again, I’m glad little old H. Moser – a storied if unknown watch brand – is getting some buzz. Mechanical fans are slowly dying out as people realize you don’t need to spend as much as a Toyota Corolla on a nice timepiece. Further, smartwatches are slowly eating away at Switzerland’s lower-cost Swatch and fashion watch core, a market that buoys brands like Omega and Breguet and lets them keep manufacturing mechanical novelties. H. Moser might be onto something here but, in the end, these little guys aren’t going to be laughing when either Apple sues or they’re eventually thrust out of business for lack of demand. Either case is more than plausible.
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Sphero’s New Wristband Will Let You Control BB-8 With Gestures — And Also The Force
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
“We’re giving every Star Wars fan the power of the Force,” said CEO Paul Berberian. He stopped by the TechCrunch stage at the Consumer Electronics Show today to show off the company’s Force Band, which will allow people to control the company’s BB-8 robotic toy with gestures. When pressed on how it worked, Berberian first said that “the Force works in mysterious ways,” but he eventually offered a little more detail. “What’s really happening is, we’re detecting all the motions in [the user’s] body and we’re syncing those motions up to the sensors inside BB-8 — they’re completely aligned,” he said. The Force Band will be available sometime this fall, at a yet-to-be-announced price, he added. We also talked about how the robotics startup first started working with Disney to . He wouldn’t reveal how many BB-8s have been purchased, but he said Sphero sold well over 1 million robots across all its product lines in 2015 – “the emphasis is on .” And of course BB-8 was the top seller.
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Today On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Oculus Rift, Wearables And We’re Live From CES
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
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 , the new and other wearables, and a preview of the interviews we’ll be doing until Friday as well as our Hardware Battlefield competition. You can already re-watch 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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Oculus Co-Founder Confirms The Rift Will Be Sold At Cost
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
The Oculus Rift will be sold with a $599 retail price. And Oculus is taking a wash on the hardware. Oculus Co-Founder and VP of Product Nate Mitchell revealed to TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook earlier today that the company is selling the hardware at cost in an effort to kickstart the VR ecosystem. This is in addition to units to early Kickstarter backers. At $600, the Rift isn’t an impulse buy — especially since a decent gaming computer is required — but $600 isn’t a crazy price. This is proved by the overwhelming demand, as Oculus sold out of its initial pre-order run in a matter of hours. “It’s about getting the Rift into as many hands as possible,” Mitchell said. “We want the Rift to be in the hands of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people and to bring them into VR. That’s ultimately the goal. “Pricing the Rift farther and farther away from people is not what we want,” he added. This strategy likely wouldn’t be possible without the deep pockets of Facebook, . If Zuck can , he can probably afford to keep the price of the Rift low enough to make it as affordable as possible.
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IBM’s Watson Now Powers AI For Under Armour, Softbank’s Pepper Robot And More
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
From its debut to the world as a Jeopardy champion in 2011, has made a name for itself as a powerful artificial intelligence platform for large enterprise applications, from through to . Now IBM is aiming to take Watson to the consumer. Today at CES, IBM CEO Ginny Rometty unveiled strategic partnerships with sportswear maker Under Armour, Softbank Robotics’ Pepper and more, which are using Watson’s machine learning algorithms and AI to run intelligent and more personalised apps and other services. This is the latest step in IBM’s Watson expansion: earlier this year the company started a and also a separate IoT center in Germany. And on stage today, Rometty also noted that IBM has made some 30 acquisitions to build out its expertise and data. Under Armour says that it will use Watson in its fitness and health apps. A new version of its app — which first launched a year ago as an activity aggregator and monitor (integrating data from wearables from Jawbone, Withings and Garmin) — will now start to include different AI features. The first of these will be a “just like me” feature which will compare users with anonymized other individuals to provide some insights about that person’s performance and also make suggestions. Later, the plan is to include a Siri-like personal trainer called the Cognitive Coaching System. Essentially what Record will do now is learn more about you based on your activity, sleep and nutrition data and provide suggestions on how to improve your performance. Record is a first step for IBM and Under Armour, the companies say, with plans also to create apps for athletes to tap into the wider pool of big data that IBM is amassing (sometimes ingesting that data through its own Watson applications): these will include some interesting data twists, such as the effect of weather on performance and training (think here of IBM’s acquisition of The Weather Company). “When it comes to digital health and fitness tracking, the past ten years have been about data collection,” said Kevin Plank, Founder and CEO, Under Armour, said in a statement. “We’re now at a point where a shift is occurring and consumers are demanding more from this information.” What exactly does “strategic” mean in this context? IBM says that both companies are contributing employees, tech and resources to develop the Congnitive Coaching System. IBM is also working with Japan’s Softbank on the development of Pepper, its new robot that is now starting to ship outside of Japan for the first time. Watson-powered Pepper will draw on a wide range of data sources, from images and text through to social media and video. IBM says the idea is to give the robots the ability to “understand the world the way humans do — through senses, learning and experience.” “This is no longer in the world of science fiction,” said Kenichi Yoshida, director of SoftBank Robotics The first Watson-powered robots will be piloted in hospitality and consumer retail environments, IBM says, giving a wider audience first-time, first-hand experience with the platform. The thinking here is not that robots like Pepper are replacing sales assistants, but that they are replacing some of the more dry kiosks that had already replaced them. “Today’s self-service options in retail environments are typically tablets or kiosks, limiting the scope of how truly interactive and intuitive the customer experience can be,” IBM notes. “With a robotic assistant, users can have a natural conversation where their words, as well as gestures and expressions are understood.” In Japan, some of this is already in action. Rometty noted that there are hundreds of Pepper robots already being rolled out in Nestle retail stores and in banks in Japan, where they are helping with things like customers buying coffee machines after brief Q&A sessions. Since going on sale in mid-2015, Pepper robots have consistently been selling out in their limited runs. Indeed, Pepper is not just a simple B2B product: the idea is that Watson will be loaded on to the Pepper robots by way of an SDK, giving developers the ability to modify and tailor how it works. Watson first worked with Softbank earlier this year, partly to help Watson learn Japanese. Other partnerships covered today by Rometty included a new diabetes test from Metronic that will be able to detect potential hypoglycaemic events hours in advance of them actually happening, to help prevent them. Unlike the Under Armour and Softbank partnerships, however, the test is not yet available as it’s still making its way through regulatory hurdles.
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L’Oreal’s Sensor Warns You If You’re Getting Too Much Sun
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
No more getting red at the beach! L’Oreal has come out with a new product that will warn you if you’re getting too much sun. The new skin sensor, known as My UV Patch, was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. It looks like a heart sticker and it can be worn for several days. It’s also free. The sticker was developed by L’Oreal’s tech incubator for their skincare line, La Roche-Posay. The goal is to educate consumers about skin cancer prevention and to reduce aging. Users can take a photo of the patch and upload it to La Roche-Posay app to determine how much UV-exposure they’ve experienced that day. The My UV Patch will be available to consumers later this year. Guive Balooch, Global Vice President of ’ Technology Incubator, demonstrated the sticker on TechCrunch TV. Balooch also spoke of L’Oreal’s commitment to technology, including its popular Makeup Genius app.
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MyFitnessPal Makes It Easier To Order Healthily At Restaurants
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
I’m in Las Vegas for this whole week, which means two things. One, I hate myself. Two, I’m constantly out at restaurants, which makes it even harder than usual to eat healthily. , the popular nutrition and fitness app that was last year, is unveiling a new feature today that should help. The app already allows you to log your meals at restaurants — in fact, co-founder Albert Lee said users are logging restaurant menu items every 3.2 seconds. However, MyFitnessPal now includes nutritional data about a much broader swath of restaurants, and it makes it easy to look that information up you order. “It’s been pretty clear to us for some time now that one big pain point is how to make a healthy choice when they’re eating out at a restaurant,” Lee said. The new feature includes menu information from 500,000 restaurants nationwide — not just big chains, Lee said, but also “single outlet” restaurants. MyFitnessPal is working with Foursquare to get a lot of that menu data. Of course, many of those restaurants don’t provide any nutritional information publicly. In those cases, Lee said MyFitnessPal employs data science to make an estimate based on the information available. Users can also provide feedback on those estimates, so they should get better over time. There’s also a new interface, making it easy to drill down to the menu of whatever restaurant you’re at, based on your location, or to look at a map with recommendations nearby that fit your nutritional goals. MyFitnessPal says it’s rolling the new feature out to iOS users, with Android to come.
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Instagram Goes Beyond The Feed With Everyday Spotlight Compilations
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
Instagram’s answer to Snapchat’s Live Stories isn’t and big events any more. Internally, they’re known as Spotlight Compilations — vertical slideshows of the best videos related to a theme, like “Dynamic Duos – Odd Couple Animal Videos” or “Ramped Up – Rad Skateboarding Videos.” They appear in the Spotlight section atop the Explore tab which launched in June. Until now, Instagram Spotlight Compilations for Halloween, Thanksgiving, the winter holidays, and New Year’s. It also had plans for curating collections around big music festivals and news events. But Spotlight Compilations were so popular that starting this week, Instagram’s community team began spontaneously coming up with themes. They comb through the top relevant clips, and show them off in its “immersive video player” each day so there’s always at least one to watch. The strategy behind Spotlight Compilations goes beyond just keeping people engaged and coming back to Instagram. Gabe Madway, Instagram’s communications manager, tells me Spotlight is “where you go to discover things you don’t follow but might end up following. Things you never expected to see.” That’s critical for an app in danger of going stale after a of sunsets and food porn. It’s easy to get complacent with following your friends and a few accounts matching your interests. That’s why Instagram has released new standalone app tools for making fresh content types like , , and . And that’s why Spotlight Compilations heavily promote the creators behind the videos. “Every piece of content there has attribution” says Madway. “That is something we hope will spread the word about the talented people who use the platform.” Instagram Spotlight Compilations make it easy to follow the creators behind the videos It’s one thing that drastically differentiates Spotlight Compilations from , which don’t let you see who made the clips it compiles. The lack of ways to discover people to follow on Snapchat has spawned whole apps like and other vertical videos, plus browse leaderboards of the best creators. Instagram knows keeping the stars of its app happy means they’ll continue posting there and their fans will keep visiting. Plus, Spotlight gives users something to aspire to as they record. Video was slow to take off on Instagram. It still feels a bit bolted on since so many people scroll their feed while in public with their phones muted. It’s not worth it to find some place private or put headphones in to catch the sound from the occasional video. Yet since the Spotlight Compilations are video only, they establish a more long-session video experience worth turning up the volume for. Naturally, this curated, filtered channel creates a big opportunity to slide in sponsored content ads. But Madway says putting ads on the Explore tab has “not been on the table.” Instead, Spotlight Compilations could teach users to watch videos. That’s important for Instagram’s bottom line because video ads command high prices since they’re much more impactful than photos. Meanwhile, Instagram is encroaching on Twitter’s turf by making a newsy yet inviting consumption mechanism like . “We might do a compilation around an event like Coachella, or a collection of amazing portrait artists or architects…action sports, NBA players…We try to be topical…to make them jive with what’s happening.” You don’t even need to know who to follow. Much like its parent company Facebook with its non-stop , Instagram wants to develop a lean-back watching experience. Apparently we’re too lazy to even scroll any more. Just let your eyes glaze over, and Spotlight will auto-advance you through the pretty moving pictures.
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The EHang 184 Is A Human-Sized Drone Taking Off At CES
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff on day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company . Yes you heard right — a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down to the size of a LEGO and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was shrunk, and the giant flying machine was sitting smack in the middle of the CES drone section. EHang, which was founded in 2014 and has raised about to date, was pretty gung-ho about telling everyone at CES that the 184 was the future of personal transport. And for the most part, people were too in awe to question them. But the reality is that the company probably was using the 184 as more of a marketing tool for their standard-sized drones like the . Not that we’re saying that the 184 will never be a real thing, just that it probably isn’t coming to a Best Buy near you anytime soon. https://youtu.be/IrPejpbz8RI None of their employees were in tune with the drone’s technical specifications, let alone an MSRP or release date. But we did snag a press kit from the company, which actually provided some worthwhile information. The drone is about four-and-a-half feet tall, weighs 440 pounds, and will be able to carry a single passenger for 23 minutes at a speed of 60 MPH. The 184 also has gull-wing doors and arms that fold up. EHang said that the drone will be totally automated, meaning passengers will input a destination and have no control during the flight. The company says this will make the machine safer by eliminating “the most dangerous part of standard modes of transportation, human error.” This also means that passengers are basically helpless in case anything goes wrong, but the company notes that their fail-safe systems include multiple backups for each flight system, as well as a feature where the aircraft will immediately land if a passenger’s life is at risk. Ultimately, it’s probably going to be a few years before we ever see the EHang 184 flying in anything more than a demo video. Plus, we can’t imagine what the FAA would say about the thing. That being said, it’s nice to see a company thinking ahead and inspiring the drone community.
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10 Under 10 Years Old
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPFhtdvdZ08] Watch a sad old man (age 25) interview the top pre-tween entrepreneurs in this hilarious video. Even though it’s a parody of the Forbes 30 Under 30, this is too real. “Even an 8-year-old could have regrets because there’s always going to be that 6-year-old inventor who speaks 7 languages” filmmaker from tells me. Thanks for capturing everyone in Silicon Valley’s deepest fears about becoming irrelevant. Guess I’ll go try to disrupt the retirement home.
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A Few Quick Laps In Chevy’s New $30K All-Electric Vehicle, The Bolt
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
This morning at CES, Chevrolet unveiled an all-new electric vehicle called the Bolt (not to be confused with their hybrid, the Volt.) For around $30K after rebates, Chevy is promising a range of around 200 miles per nine-hour charge and a pretty sweet suite of technology. I’m not going to go deep with my impressions here, as my experience thus far is limited to a few quick laps around a test course. But the car, even in this early, pre-production state, seems pretty solid. I’ve never been a huge fan of this crossover vehicle form factor, so I wasn’t too blown away by the exterior — but the interior packs some tricks that caught my eye. Namely, it’s deceptively spacious. I’m around 6′ tall on a good day, and I was comfy in every seat of the vehicle. The touchscreen in the dash is snappy and, in my cursory experience, intuitive. I particularly liked the reverse camera setup; by merging a bunch of imagery from cameras around the car, it’s able to fake an overhead view of what’s around you. It’s trippy, and really, fun to use. Oh! And the rear view mirror! Check this thing out: Flip the lever at the bottom one way, and it’s your standard rear view. Flip it the other way and it instantly transforms into an 80-degree view of whatever’s behind you by way of the rear-view cam. I’m excited to give this thing a closer look as it heads to production at the end of 2016.
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Uber Settles Privacy Probe With NY Attorney General’s Office, Pays $20K Fine
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
Uber has agreed to pay a $20,000 fine to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office for failing to report unauthorized third-party access to its drivers’ personal information in timely manner, . Schneiderman is expected to announce the settlement tomorrow morning, according to BuzzFeed. This settlement comes after a 14-month investigation by Schneiderman’s office that was prompted by without her permission. That investigation later expanded to include the data breach that exposed the information of 50,000 Uber drivers, which Uber discovered in September 2014. Uber, however, , and that’s ultimately what got Uber in trouble. “By not providing notice to affected New York residents and the NYAG about the Data Breach in the “most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay,” Uber 6 violated GBL § 899-aa(2). Uber did so knowingly or recklessly in violation of GBL § 899- aa(6)(a),” the settlement reads. In a statement to TechCrunch, an Uber spokesperson said the following: “We are deeply committed to protecting the privacy and personal data of riders and drivers. We are pleased to have reached an agreement with the New York Attorney General that resolves these questions and makes clear our commitment to best practices that put our community first.” Uber has also committed to continuing doing things like conducting annual privacy and security trainings, designating employees to supervise the privacy and security program, and limiting access to geo-location information only to employees with “a legitimate business purpose.” Anyway, a $20,000 fine for Uber is not a big financial blow for the company, which .
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This Robotic Arm Can Do Everything From 3D Printing To Laser Cutting To Cake Decorating
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
Having hands is pretty damn great, you know. Most of us take it for granted just about every day. Armed with the right tool, your hands can do just about anything. That’s the idea behind KATIA, a product launched at the TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield in Las Vegas today. One robotic arm, and endless array of possibilities. KATIA — or, as it’s known best to its creators, the ick ss rainable ntelligent rm — is a super flexible and programmable robotic arm that uses swappable hands to take on a huge variety of tasks. Want it to be a 3D printer? Pop on the 3D printing module. 3D Scanner? Swap out the print head for a laser head. Laser cutter? It can do that. Cake decorator? Why not? Give it some icing, a path to follow, and fire away. Not sure how it all comes together? Here’s a demo video: The KATIA has a payload capacity of 1kg, allowing it to pick up, rotate, and precisely place anything weighing up to around 2.2 lbs within a radius of about 1 meter. And don’t worry: they didn’t just slap an Arduino into the base and wire it up to a few servos. After making it into Qualcomm’s Robotics Accelerator, they went with a Snapdragon 600 chipset and all the guts that come with it: a 1.9Ghz quad-core CPU, WiFi/Bluetooth/etc. You could theoretically add multiple high-def cameras to this thing to give it a vision system (something the company actually wants to do, in time) and the chipset could chew through that footage in real-time with ease. But why give a robotic arm spec’d out guts? Because it lets it do all the number crunching required to do all sorts of wonderful stuff, like training the arm to perform tasks by touch. Need the arm to repeatedly pick up and move an object? Move the arm around to teach it where said objects are and where they need to be, and it’s able to learn those motions and replicate them with a high degree of precision. While they set out with a focus on the consumer and DIY market, Carbon Robotics’ CEO Rosanna Myers says they’ve since seen an enormous amount of interest from aero, bio, manufacturing, and other industries. Carbon plans to sell the KATIA base unit , with optional add-ons (like those aforementioned laser/3d printing modules) available for purchase down the road.
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DCM’s David Chao On Investing In China, And VR, And, Oh, Hey, Cannabis
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
, the early-stage, cross-border venture firm, has scored many hits by sticking it out in China since nearly its 1996 founding, even as many competing firms – because they were unable or unwilling to invest the time in local relationships – have come and gone. Among the many China-based companies backed early on by DCM are Renren, Dandang, and Vipshop, all of which held highly successful IPOs and have since grown into far bigger outfits. Vipshop, for example, went public in 2012 with a market cap of $600 million. Today it’s valued at $8.4 billion. Still, even DCM cofounder David Chao acknowledges that right now, investing in the country has more than a few challenges. Yesterday, we chatted about the there, as well as where Chao plans to focus more of his attention this year. DC: I spend between 30 and 40 percent of my time there. Look, there’s a definite slowdown, but I do think the world is a bit too jumpy. You’re talking about an economy – the second largest in the world — that’s still growing 6 to 7 percent annually, compared with a lot of developed countries like the U.S. and Japan that are barely growing. Also, if you look at Japan or the U.S., when it went through a recession over the last 10 years, we lowered our interest rates and we pumped a lot of money into the economy through [quantitative easing]. Meanwhile, China has a lot of room still to lower its interest rates. It has a lot of macro cards left to play. DC: There’s no question that it has hit a hew phase. For a decade, it was growing at 10 percent. Now it’s 6 or 7 percent. Of course you’re going to feel a slowdown. Labor costs in major cities are rising rapidly. A good programmer or engineer in Beijing used to cost a quarter of a Silicon Valley engineer and now, arguably, for junior employees, it’s maybe 80 percent. A lot of areas, including smart phones, are also slowing down in terms of penetration. Even still, I think these market jitters are exaggerated. DC: The last two years, there was a bubble in the U.S., China, Japan, and even Korea. It’s kind of unusual to have all go through a bubble at the same time, but it was all growing overheated. A lot of the financing announcements that you’re seeing now were probably deals that got done in September or October of last year and finally closed. In the U.S., you’ve had these companies going public below their private market price, and in China, there’s kind of a similar phenomenon going on in the later-stage market where people are much more cautious about paying into high-priced rounds. A lot of the term sheets that were out in Q4 haven’t closed, and there’s been a lot of pricing negotiations going on. In terms of harvesting, it’s a little tougher right now. But we stick to our knitting. We’re still investing in [regional] seed and Series A deals and new companies. DC: VR is a new platform that was underrated for a long time and is finally coming to fruition. [Our investment in] Matterport in the real estate space [it creates 3D visualizations of physical spaces] is doing well. Everybody is making cheap VR machines, like Google. The smart phone guys are making their products adaptable to VR. It’s going to go from an esoteric technology to something real and usable and I think it has a much better upside than any platform to come out in the last two years. DC: The hardware is being manufactured in Asia but the applications, the newest greatest developments, are happening in the U.S. That said, I think China and Japan will catch up quickly because the killer app will probably be games and these vertical solutions [like Matterport’s] and movie-like content, and a lot of that will start to be produced worldwide, just like mobile apps were produced worldwide. DC: Cannabis. California is about 50 percent of the U.S. market, and a ballot that would legalize the recreational use of marijuana for adults in California will most likely pass in November, just like in Colorado, and we see a whole new economy growing around that. Just like you have smart phones, you’ll have certain vaporizers and other hardware that will be easy to use. Like you have VitaminWater and soft drink brands, you’ll have cannabis brands. There hasn’t been a lot of investment so far; people have been conservative because of the nature of how it would be perceived, but come November, a new world will open up.
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TechCrunch Takes The UberCHOPPER
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
So this just happened. This afternoon, Uber activated its UberCHOPPER promotion in Vegas. Walking out of the GM keynote, I open up the Uber app to get a ride and up popped the $99 UberCHOPPER option. A few Slacks later, our splendid editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino (thanks Matthew!) approved the expense and off to the chopper I went, picking up our social media and audience development analyst Anna Escher on the way. Matthew said we had to write a post, though, in case you are wondering why you are reading this… So what do you get? Sadly it’s not a flight from the Convention Center to your hotel. Instead, Uber gives you a ride to a heliport near the McCarran Airport and you get to take a 15-minute helicopter sightseeing tour with Mavericks Helicopters over the city. We were the second party to grab one of these rides. Sitting in the heliport lobby after our ride, though, I’ve seen a few parties come through now. Uber launched in Vegas four months ago and it’s clearly using CES to promote its business here. What better way to do that in a town like Vegas than with some discounted helicopter trips down the Vegas Strip? There is some irony in the fact that Uber is now flying people around Vegas, given how much trouble it went through to ensure its drivers could pick up from the airport. Being the geeks we are, we Periscoped most of it. You can watch all of the fun (at least for the next 24 hours). And here is a quick YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA2nHMoYKy4 We good, Matthew? [gallery ids="1258688,1258689,1258690,1258691,1258692"]
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FITGuard Is A Mouthguard That Detects The Severity Of A Blow To The Head
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
There are 3.8 million sports-related head injuries each year, and 47 percent of athletes do not report symptoms of their head injuries, whether out of lack of understanding or a need to feel tough. As we’ve learned over the past few years, from the death of NFL athletes like Frank Gifford or the movie , based on the research of , blows to the head can cause permanent damage to the brain. ForceImpact Tech is looking to prevent this type of damage with their first product, the FITGuard. is a mouthguard that detects the severity of an impact to the head, and then uses LEDs embedded in the mouthguard to indicate how intense that impact was. The lights turn green to show a low-impact blow, whereas blue means there is a moderate risk of injury. Red LED lights signify that the impact was severe enough to immediately remove the player from the field, and does so in a way that coaches, teammates and referees can see without any indication from the player. As is standard with most modern gadgets, the FITGuard pairs with a mobile app that can be monitored by a coach or parent, providing real-time insight into an athlete’s injury. This also allows medical professionals to look at the athlete’s history of head injuries and impacts. Because FITGuard’s app uses information around the user’s weight, gender, and age, it’s able to be user-specific when it measures the impact of a blow. Individuals will be able to purchase the device for $129, but the company is looking to ramp up distribution by selling directly to leagues, teams and universities at a price point under $100. Moreover, they want to partner with insurance companies to ensure that those insurance providers will offer a discount to users of the device. ForceImpact Tech plans to ship before the fall season of football this year, and you can learn more about the product .
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Indiegogo Now Wants Fortune 500 Companies To Create Pre-Order Campaigns
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 6 |
Indiegogo has historically been about helping the young and scrappy entrepreneur to put their idea out there and get some much-needed capital for a first production batch. The company is launching a brand new set of tools today dubbed ‘Enterprise Crowdfunding.’ This time, it’s all about the large well-established companies and helping them make risky bets. Indiegogo is going to work with General Electric, Harman International Industries, Hasbro and Shock Top at first. Compared to newly launched startups, these companies don’t need cash to launch new products. It would be unfair to talk about crowdfunding for Fortune 500 companies. Instead, this new focus should be seen as a way to test consumer’s interest by leveraging Indiegogo’s audience and reach. General Electric can create a pre-order campaign and see if people actually want these new products. Now, there’s a risk that these large aging companies will use Indiegogo as a way to market themselves as edgy companies. Indiegogo will have to make sure that these big clients are showcasing actually interesting products. The company is going to provide strategy advice, hands-on support, promotions and analytics data. General Electric already successfully tested the model with its . Harman is going to launch a campaign for selective noise cancellation headphones. Hasbro is going to work on board and card games. Shock Top already launched a campaign in August 2015 called . Potentially, these new campaigns from large companies could be much more successful than campaigns for new companies. That would mean more revenue for Indiegogo. Today’s news shouldn’t come as a surprise as more and more established companies have been using crowdfunding platforms to launch products. Pebble $20 million on Kickstarter with its second campaign. Indiegogo is hoping that many other companies will follow the same path.
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Jack Dorsey Confirms Departures Of Several Twitter Execs
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 1 | 24 |
Was really hoping to talk to Twitter employees about this later this week, but want to set the record straight now: — jack (@jack) “I’m sad to announce that Alex Roetter, Skip Schipper, Katie Stanton, and Kevin Weil have chosen to leave the company. Alex and Kevin, both here over five years, scaled the ads product and engineering teams from producing near-zero revenue to the over-$2 billion run rate it is today…” After 7 incredible years, I'm moving on from Twitter. Next up: , , and some long trail runs. Also, GO TEAM! 💪❤ — Kevin Weil (@kevinweil) Dorsey added that COO Adam Bain and CTO Adam Messinger will be taking on additional responsibilities. Bain will oversee the “revenue-related product teams, the media team, and the HR team on an interim basis.” Messinger will combine engineering, design, user services and Fabric into one group. Dorsey said that Messinger “has a very strong sense of how to bring our development together so we can continue to ship faster and producer stronger work that people will love to use. And I will be partnering with him day and night to make sure we’re building the right experiences.” Jason Toff, who served as GM of Vine, also announced his departure on Sunday evening. Personal update! I'm joining Google to work on VR. So much exciting potential there. — Jason Toff (@jasontoff) Co-founder Jack Dorsey was named permanent CEO of Twitter in October, following the departure of Dick Costolo last summer. Dorsey is seen as a visionary, and has been tasked with improving Twitter’s product. The news of the Twitter executive departures Re/Code is that the company is hiring a new CMO.
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