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Salesforce AppExchange Revolutionized Software Distribution When It Launched Ten Years Ago Today
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 1 | 14 |
The Salesforce AppExchange turned ten years old today and it represents quite a milestone for enterprise software development. In fact, the app store concept that Salesforce developed pre-dated Apple’s consumer app store by a couple of years. It’s safe to say that when Salesforce launched the AppExchange a decade ago, a place where you could sell and distribute the apps you built on the Salesforce platform, there wasn’t anything out there like it. Today, the goal of practically ever startup out there is to replicate it — to build a platform and have third parties build applications and even businesses on top of it. That’s what Salesforce has achieved over the last 10 years and it is constantly held up as an a successful example of this model. The AppExchange was a natural extension of Force.com (now part of the broader Salesforce App cloud), a place where you could build an application using Salesforce’s development resources and find a waiting market for the software you created. Salesforce’s, Leyla Seka, who is currently SVP & GM of Desk.com, and who worked on the AppExchange team for many years says the AppExchange was one of the things that most attracted her to the company. “It’s been a crazy ride! The idea of delivering software the same way you could deliver products from Amazon was incredibly exciting. That’s the whole reason why I came to Salesforce. It was focused on the future,” she said. The AppExchange and what it represents gave the first real impetus to the cloud as we know it, and it gave Software as a Service legitimacy, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst at Digital Clarity Group. “On demand and ASP (application service providers) had all tried without success to push what we now call the cloud model. But an open B2B exchange, exposing the underlying platform to developers meant the number of applications available exploded,” he said. If you go to Dreamforce, Salesforce’s huge customer conference held each September in San Francisco and walk the vendor displays, you’ll find hundreds of applications built on top of the Salesforce platform. Many if not all of them are distributed through the AppExchange. Dreamforce 2014 . Before there was the AppStore there was AppExchange, says Brent Leary, managing partner at CRM Essentials, LLC who has been covering the CRM business for years. “It changed the way apps were discovered, integrated, developed and consumed by businesses,” he said. Today looking back, it’s easy to see that it’s a good idea, but it was a risky move for early adopters like Kirk Krappe who launched Apttus, a quote to cash product built on Salesforce in 2006, the same year the AppExchange launched. He recognized the potential of the development platform and the app store idea. “Having the foundation of the AppExchange to build upon saved us enormous expenses and allowed us to become more successful than we ever imagined. I think it’s fair to say, 1,000 employees later, that while we dreamed of this level of success, we couldn’t have anticipated it,” he said. Hitching their wagon to Salesforce proved to be a wise move. “Simply put, it was because it democratized the software business – we were a handful of guys in a laundry room and it brought not only reliability and customer access, but also inherent marketing because of the strength of the Salesforce brand,” Krappe said. Yet not everyone thought it was a great idea to build an application on someone else’s platform, at least early on. When Jeremy Roche launched FinancialForce in 2009, an ERP software package built on top of Salesforce and distributed through the AppExchange, people thought he was crazy going that route. “When we launched FinancialForce.com, I heard all types of questions and doubts, mostly on whether I had gone mad building a company on someone else’s platform,” he said. He was placing his bet on Salesforce and it has worked out pretty well for him and his company, which has raised over $186 million. In the end, these two companies were just a couple of examples of the thousands of developers building stuff on top of Salesforce. What Salesforce did with AppExchange was fundamentally change the way companies developed and distributed software, Pelz-Sharpe explained. “In 2005 the cloud was novel and revolutionary. The AppExchange allowed developers and VAR’s to target the true and huge mid market with highly cost-effective, but still enterprise grade applications running on a high-end platform and infrastructure,” he said. Today that revolutionary idea is ten years old and it’s proven to be quite a catalyst for building businesses.
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Apple Watch And Holistic Presence
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Bernard Desarnauts
| 2,016 | 1 | 14 |
What if you went to start your car and Apple Watch stopped you? Yes, Apple Watch, with your permission, knew you had spent time at a bar, monitored your heartbeat and other physiological data and saw changes indicating that you had been overdrinking. When you walked to your car, it connected to the CarKit-powered entertainment system, understood your situation and disabled the car’s Start button. You used your Apple Watch to call an Uber instead. Or, you’re leaving work instead of a bar. Your device connects to your car’s stereo system and, based on your elevated stress level, starts playing your favorite relaxing jams. It’s almost possible. For the first time, we will be able to combine previously unattainable data to change how we’re seamlessly interacting with the world (and measuring ourselves in the process). The Apple Watch is where your digital, physical and physiological worlds begin to intersect. How does this happen? It starts with location. Location data has been and still is at the core of the modern mobile phone. But combining GPS, and more recently iBeacon interactions, with passively collected data has always been the holy grail of mobile. Until recently, the average consumer had numerous sensors on their devices: GPS, accelerometer, sound measurement and so on. But for most of us, our smartphone was hidden away in our pocket or handbag. It wasn’t . These sensors, combined with user input, have made geodata useful and actionable. The likes of Yelp, Foursquare, Google Maps and Fitbit wouldn’t without it. Now, a slew of other companies are working on in-store solutions that merge hyper-local data with commerce, among other things. How? That answer is part of the . Based on our surveys last month, we saw that users want to walk down a grocery store aisle and have their shopping list sort dynamically. Simple interactions like that are just the tip of the iceberg. But the Apple Watch takes sensors a step further. Sensors can now measure an individual’s physiological data, augmenting and complementing their other data. The Apple Watch can monitor: Unlike the iPhone, the always-on aspect of the Apple Watch means these things can be constantly monitored and 100 percent correctly identified to the right owner. Whereas your iPhone might be hijacked by your kid for gaming purposes, or buried deep in your pocket, the Apple and uniquely identified to you, the wearer. Apple’s introduction of these new human sensors allows companies and their consumers to . Suddenly, we’ll be able to assess how stressed you are in a group meeting or how nervous you are before a first date. People are already using and experiencing the benefits of Apple Watch as an augmented, connected health-monitoring tool. The Apple Watch’s heart monitor when it detected early signs of a life-threatening kidney problem. EpiWatch, the first app for the Apple Watch, is designed for users with epilepsy to track seizures and ultimately better understand their condition. from both Apple Watch sensors and manual input before, during and after epileptic seizures. The Apple Watch (and iPhone) also can interact with other IoT devices and the cloud. The more we engage with and use the Apple Watch in trackable ways that can be analytically visualized, the richer our potential insights will be on what is “ .” We know that some emotions and states of mind leave physiological traces that the Apple Watch can measure — increased pulse, slowed or increased response times, unsteadiness. By combining this physiological data with other data from the user’s environment, the “intelligence” of the data is increased. Other wearables or connected objects — like noise and sound monitors, thermometers, pollution sensors, sun exposure detectors, etc. — would contribute to an analysis of the person’s current mental or physical state. The device could then alert the user about any abnormal behavior or state of mind. In the near future, new Apple Watch apps will offer gentle reminders to users to slow down and maybe take a break — all based on a truly holistic understanding of one’s state of well-being. These kinds of possibilities can benefit our well-being so simply. It opens up an entirely new dimension of innovation. In that sense, Apple Watch is truly the first intimate and personal device. It’s set to change how we experience everyday life.
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Screw Those $300 Standing Desks. This Cardboard One Is $25
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 14 |
Is sitting at a computer all day making you fat, but standing desks are too expensive? The Hootsuite CEO’s nifty new side project could save your spine and slim your belly. is a made of cardboard. Just unfold the contraption, stick it atop your normal desk, and you can work without hunching. Some employees at Hootsuite were already bolting little IKEA shelves and end tables together to build cheap standing desks. Their CEO Ryan Holmes decided to team up with designers Steve Suchy and Nathan Martell to make one that works right out of the…err…it’s a box. The two-pound Oristand is strong enough to hold laptops, and wide enough to work with a mouse and compact keyboard. You’re not going to want to bang into it or spill coffee on it, but the environmentally friendly cardboard should survive a while. Do your back a favor without draining your wallet.
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US Government Plans To Invest $4B In Autonomous Driving Research Over The Next 10 Years
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 14 |
Every car manufacturer now has an autonomous driving program, but the rules and regulations around actually driving autonomous cars on public roads remain scattershot. Now, the U.S. government is starting to work on a national policy for autonomous cars, and it’s to invest $4 billion over the course of the next 10 years “to accelerate the development and adoption of safe vehicle automation through real-world pilot projects.” Ford’s autonomous car in the snow The $4 billion is part of President Obama’s 2017 budget proposal, so it could still get shot down in the process. The idea here is to work with the technology industry and auto manufacturers to test connected and autonomous cars “in designated corridors throughout the country.” Over time, these designated corridors will have to give way to a broader policy. To get to this point, the DOT today said it wants to develop a model state policy on automated driving within the next six months. In the long run, this state policy could then lead to a consistent national policy. The DOT is also asking car manufacturers to submit rule interpretation requests to see if their autonomous driving features (including self-parking systems, for example) meet its standards. Manufacturers can also ask for exemptions. “We are on the cusp of a new era in automotive technology with enormous potential to save lives, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and transform mobility for the American people,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx today. “Today’s actions and those we will pursue in the coming months will provide the foundation and the path forward for manufacturers, state officials, and consumers to use new technologies and achieve their full safety potential.” One thing our friends at Google will likely be is that the DOT and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are also looking at rules for cars that were “designed without a human driver in mind.” For now, the states that have policies around self-driving vehicles still require a human driver behind a steering wheel who can take over control if necessary. Ten years is obviously a long time, but even though the incumbents in the car industry are starting to move faster, it still takes about two to three years to develop a new vehicle in Detroit. While there are also still plenty of technological and regulatory hurdles to overcome before self-driving cars will be able to drive down any street, newcomers like Google and Tesla (and, who knows, ?) will work faster than established car companies. For them, 10 years is an eternity.
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The GoProblem
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 14 |
Action cameras are like tablets. Lots of people want ONE. But very few need to constantly update to the latest model. I suspect this is why , it’s reduced sales , and it had to lay off 7% of its employees this week. It’s hitting market saturation. Many of the people likely to buy a GoPro already have one and don’t need another. Their first one is probably already gathering dust for 11 months a year. Face it. We’re not all extreme sports champions. We go skiing or surfing or biking occasionally. We want something to capture those experiences. Any GoPro will do. Our friends will be impressed and we’ll get to relive the memories even if the photos and videos aren’t shot at cutting edge resolution. Even if the battery ran low and we couldn’t choose from the entire day’s activity. Even if it was a little bulkier in our pocket. An action camera does what none of our other devices do. But upgrading to this year’s version doesn’t do much more. It’s not your phone, that you use all day every day and that every one sees. It’s not a status object. It’s not your laptop, where slightly better specs can make your life or work less annoying. It’s not a fundamental tool. An older, used GoPro or a is fine. An action camera is like a tablet. It’s nice to sometimes read or watch movies or play games on at tablet. But my years old iPad is fine. When I bought it, I bought the newest one. But since then I’ve never even considered buying another. This, combined with growing phone screens has led to , and I believe the same is happening with action cameras. Tablet sales plateau Sure, there are adrenaline junkies and adventure photographers who will want the best action cam they can get. And GoPro’s own drones and virtual reality rigs could unlock new functionality that spur sales. But GoPro’s stock is down 15% today and around 77% over the past year. To thrive, the company will need to do something truly innovative. Otherwise there’s little reason for people to buy the newest GoPro. The one they already threw in a drawer is good enough.
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Former Twitter Engineering Manager Leslie Miley Lands At Recruiting Startup Entelo
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 14 |
Leslie Miley, , is now the director of engineering at a recruiting software startup called . Entelo, which has over 350 customers, including tech companies like Box, Facebook, Uber, Tesla, Zenefits, Pinterest and Yelp, is a software platform that helps businesses recruit employees. A couple of years ago, the company introduced a diversity tool that enables companies to specifically search for women, racial minorities and veterans. Entelo talks the talk walks the walk, Miley said. When you look around the company, Miley says that you can see it’s a company of diverse people. And it’s not just a diverse group of ethnicities and genders, but also includes people with different educational backgrounds. “If you start from a core of people who aren’t all from the same six schools, [the company] has diversity at its core,” Miley said. “When you look at the breakdown of gender and ethnicity in the engineering organization, even though it’s smaller than a Google or Palantir or Pinterest, it is diverse now, which means that for us, we have to keep it this way. We’re not going to fall back. We’re going to keep looking for people who are diverse and that to me means [diversity is] at its core. It is because you start from diversity. You don’t try to add it on.” As director of engineering, Miley’s goals are to accelerate hiring and continue building a great engineering culture. With fewer than 100 employees, Entelo is at a great size to set the foundation for what its company culture will be like. Instead of culture fit, which “can be used to exclude,” Entelo CEO Jon Bischke said, the company tries to focus more on culture add and how potential hires can make the team better. With Miley in a leadership position and Bischke’s views on culture, the company is in a good position to set an example for young, venture-backed companies around diversity and inclusion. Of the nine Entelo employees that have director or more senior positions, two of them are African-American, and three are female, Bischke said. “From my perspective, it’s really important that people inside the organization are seeing diversity from all levels,” Bischke said. “And I think that’s great too because it gives people lower down in the organization, on the org chart, something to aspire to. They can see that they’re not capped.”
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PewDiePie Now Has His Own YouTube Network Within Maker Studios
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 14 |
PewDiePie is launching his own multi-channel network called . You may remember that PewDiePie was part of , Disney’s successful MCN. PewDiePie isn’t really parting ways with Disney as PewDiePie is working with Maker Studios for this new MCN. Revelmode is an imprint of Maker Studios with Felix Kjellberg aka PewDiePie in charge. PewDiePie has the with 41.6 million subscribers. He releases videos of himself playing video games every day. His reactions are the reasons why people keep coming back to his videos. That puts him in a very powerful position at Maker Studios. The company has no choice but to agree with PewDiePie’s vision. Revelmode will produce YouTube videos obviously, but also video games, merchandises and charity drives. PewDiePie’s friends are joining the network, such as CinnamonToastKen (Ken Morrison), CutiePieMarzia (Marzia Bisognin), Dodger (Brooke Lawson), EmmaBlackery (Emma Blackery), JackSepticEye (Sean McLoughlin), Jelly (Jelle van Vucht), Kwebbelkop (Jordi van den Bussche) and Markiplier (Mark Fischbach). You can expect one-off videos, original series featuring multiple YouTubers and more YouTubers joining the network. An animated series featuring PewDiePie is in the works. As you can see in the list of YouTubers, Revelmode won’t be just about gaming. But it’s interesting to see that PewDiePie wants to be in charge of another side of the business and not just his own YouTube channel. Having a network can be useful when it comes to producing and editing videos, but the of MCNs is advertising. It’s much easier to book lucrative advertising deals when you can tell brands that you are managing YouTubers with millions of subscribers. Revelmode is off to a great start with around 75 million subscribers in total and billions of views.
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What 2015 Taught Me About The London Tech Scene
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Suzanne Noble
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
You’d think that working in one of the world’s largest cities — especially one with a global rep for innovation and excellence — would make it pretty easy to get some traction. But that misses a vital point: London’s tech ecosystem is in its infancy. There’s a definite feeling here that working for a tech startup is cool — but that doesn’t mean this city (or this government) has a handle on what’s needed to make a new tech company a success. The problem is that London wants to be the next Silicon Valley — but it hasn’t grasped the fact that it’s got 20 years of catching up to do. It’s not so much a lack of talent or commitment that’s the problem. It has more to do with attitudes to risk and understanding the difference between bricks-and-mortar and online. The other thing is that, although London is a huge city, its tech ecosystem is pretty small. That’s both good and bad. The good part is that you soon get to know the other players. The bad part is that you can rapidly run out of new people to meet. Londoners keep trying to reinvent the wheel — they just don’t realize how much has already been done in Silicon Valley (or, just as important, what has been tried and found not to work). That means heading west could save you a lot of time and money (and maybe even some heartbreak), because you won’t have to do everything from scratch. (Ignoring fintech, of course; those guys seem to be cleaning up over here.) Like most people new to the scene, I started my journey at a networking event. The city is awash with them — so many, in fact, that I know of at least half a dozen startups whose business focus is helping entrepreneurs discover them. You’ll meet the full gamut of “characters” at them. One to beware of is the snake-oil salesman who masquerades as an investor but then tries to charge you a consultancy fee. Yet, you’ll also meet real professionals who are seeking new clients. Then again, with the big firms in town all creating their own “startup” divisions, it’s hard to move these days in Shoreditch without tripping over lawyers or accountants. As one who has fallen prey to their charms in the past, I’d advise you to do your due diligence before you hire. For instance, they aren’t all fully up to speed on the tax relief available to tech entrepreneurs — I had to tell my own accountant about R&D tax credits (a government scheme designed to provide substantial tax relief on research and development costs). There’s a lot of advice to be had in London. Trouble is, while some of it is good, a lot of it is bad. That’s mostly because very few people over here have built, scaled and sold a tech business of any size… so how much can all the mentors, advisors and investors you’ll meet really know? And that’s the well-intentioned ones… Ageism and sexism are rife here, too. Coming from the world of PR, where female company directors are well represented, I wasn’t expecting it. As an example, a male investor told me, “You’re not the usual type we go for.” And a young female entrepreneur told me that once, after a pitch, an investor said to her, “I’m not sure if I should ask you for your business plan or a date.” It turns out that desirability, or the lack thereof, is a problem either way if you’re a woman who wants to work in tech in London. Older guys are not immune to ageism, but at least they usually have stronger networks. Even if this bias is unconscious, it has to change. Those handing out the money have had their heads turned by watching and believe the only entrepreneurs with a good idea must look like Mark Zuckerberg (or rather, Mark Zuckerberg as played by Jesse Eisenberg). They need to get over it. It’s 2016, and it’s time to have a broader perspective. After my initial networking, my next stop was going on a part-time accelerator programme. London is full of accelerators and incubators, which sounds great. One or two of them are genuinely good, but — big surprise! — they’re massively oversubscribed. The rest are mediocre to very poor, and may take equity or stock options out of all proportion to what you get in return. Why? Mainly, there just aren’t enough been-there-done-that people around to run all the incubators and accelerators that London offers. Once I’d done the accelerator, I launched the MVP version of Frugl. I soon realized I was going to need more money if I wanted to scale it up quickly. It can be incredibly hard to raise funding here unless you have a background in the city, or you have a close connection to someone who does. You may be out of luck unless you can say you once worked at Goldman’s or Deloitte’s. I got what I needed, but not from where I expected. Instead, I tapped into a small group of people who, perhaps unsurprisingly, were somewhat like myself: a little older, and who were working (or had worked) in the creative industries. London is an expensive city at the best of times. Add the very obvious talent shortage, and you have a recipe for spiraling costs. If I learned one thing in 2015, it was that surrounding myself with good people who want to work hard is paramount, yet I ended up contracting outside the U.K. based on recommendations. If there’s one reason London is awash with so many one- and two-man bands, it’s that the cost of finding and hiring a team is so high. Sure, you can go to Lithuania or Pakistan or Timbuktu and find someone who can get the job done, but that’s no replacement for in-house talent — and without a good team, you’re basically nowhere. The government’s plan to loosen up visa requirements for suitably qualified candidates should help in the short and medium term, but only a greater emphasis on training will sort out the problem in the long term. And to top it all off, there’s the government’s woefully under-publicized initiative: the SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme). This provides investors in early stage businesses with 50 percent tax relief on their investment, together with other longer-term benefits. The scheme has created a tech ecosystem that focuses on early stage revenue over innovation. It’s also capped at £150,000. Compare that to Silicon Valley, where the “average” early stage investment is $1 million, and you can see the dilemma we face here. With no history of successful tech exits behind us, we lack a community of sophisticated investors who have made money in tech. As a result, we are left with, for the most part, individuals seeking tax relief or those who are willing to take a small punt on early stage businesses. Until we see more sophisticated investors coming to the U.K., pre-revenue businesses will struggle to achieve scale. Closing an SEIS round (as it’s commonly called) may be relatively easy, but the funding gap that exists between £250,000 and £1 million is a real worry — one that doesn’t look like it will be solved anytime soon, even with incentives such as the London Co-Investment Fund. With early stage investment based around tax relief, businesses struggle to find follow-on funding. There just isn’t the money to go around at that crucial time when most businesses need it to grow and achieve critical mass. A friend of mine recently returned from a two-week programme she attended in Silicon Valley that was aimed at introducing a selection of international businesses to investors and influencers. She spoke about the SV culture of “giving back.” Here, it’s about finding out what works for oneself. There are many urban legends flying around London about the startup that got 20,000 downloads in their first month through their amazing growth hacking skills, or the one that had a million views in a week. But nobody — and I mean NOBODY — will tell you exactly how they did it. The best marketeers in London keep their tricks to themselves (and if you try to hire them, they’ll charge you a fortune), so you’ll only discover the perfect formula for growing your business through trial and error. As a result, over the course of the past 12 months, I’ve taught myself a lot about digital marketing. I’ve come a long way, but I know there’s a long road still ahead of me. If 2015 was about gaining perspective, 2016 is definitely going to be about using the knowledge and experience I acquired to move forward. Nothing quite beats a healthy dose of cynicism — combined with a reality check — to make me want to kick some serious butt — and that’s what I intend to do this year. See you around the Silicon Roundabout.
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Profit From A Profile On AngelList
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Evan Baehr
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
At a basic level, is the LinkedIn for startups; it’s a directory for finding and researching great startups. Many of the biggest seed venture capital firms and angel investors are on the list, and many use it to help them source and validate deals. But AngelList is also a crowdfunding platform, a way for startups and investors not only to connect with each other, but also to actually raise money through what AngelList calls . Most of the startups on the list that do well raising money with AngelList are in their seed or A round. Even if you aren’t likely to raise money on AngelList, it may be worth creating a profile — for both you and your company. Follow people whom you find interesting; do due diligence on your competition; search for great designers and engineers to hire. Posting your profile to AngelList is very easy, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to raise money through it. Many founders are tempted to bet on a build-it-and-they-will come strategy with AngelList: Get your profile out there and then sit back and wait for some rich billionaire to reach out wondering how you came up with such a brilliant idea and where he can send the money. This is the lottery scenario. The majority of ventures on AngelList raise no money at all. Those that do raise money pay attention to how the round dynamics and momentum affect their strategies. If you plan to try to raise money on AngelList, here’s what you should pay attention to: You can list people as informal advisers, employees, even as customers and ask them to give you a testimonial. The more people who are connected to your profile, the more people who will see your profile when you raise money. You want to make your company look as if you have a really great set of friends and supporters. The most ideal time to post on AngelList is you have raised at least a third, if not half, of the total amount of money you want to raise. Most investors are likely to rely on the due diligence that other lead investors have already done. If you already have some major supporters, lots of additional people will be interested in taking part in something on which someone else has already done the homework. Also important is the quality of those investors. The more well-known they are and the larger their followings on AngelList, the better. AngelList helps you raise money in two ways. First, it helps provide introductions to larger investors, including traditional VC firms. When these seed firms ask for an introduction or reach out to you on AngelList, they are beginning a conversation that will likely evolve in the same way it normally would outside of AngelList. You probably start with a phone call, maybe followed by a meeting in person. If someone chooses to invest, it will feel just like a traditional round — lawyers putting together documentation, wire transfers and so on. The other mechanism that AngelList has created for investing is called Syndicates. Syndicates are ways for angel investors to pool together much smaller investments, $1,000-$10,000, and co-invest it in a venture. In a Syndicate, a group of angels commit capital that is unlocked every time the Syndicate’s lead angel invests in a startup. With Syndicates, AngelList handles the logistics of the actual financing, including validating that an investor is accredited and handling the transfer of money. AngelList takes five percent of each deal done in the platform. While a traditional seed firm may invest $500,000, a seed investor on AngelList may invest only $5,000. Thus, for your round, you may have dozens of small investors come together to form a pool of $500,000. If your company is the kind that needs lots of support — maybe launching in different geographical markets, getting the word out or sending you business — AngelList presents a way for you to engage a special kind of fan — the investor fan. For Baehr’s first venture, Outbox, he chose to raise money through AngelList. At the time, he closed the second-largest amount ever raised on the platform. Here’s his story. We were interested in raising a Series A and knew we’d likely have one lead institutional investor. Alongside our traditional investor, we decided to raise money from AngelList for two reasons. First, we wanted to see if we could raise an additional million or two to increase the overall size of our round beyond what the lead institutional investors had planned to do. Second, we wanted to find a way to engage dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people in our future success as a company. In that sense, AngelList was, for us, a way to connect with different kinds of investors. Given that they are investing significantly less money, there will obviously be significantly more people involved in your round. We were advised that we should have lined up a major institutional investor and 50 percent of the capital before we posted to AngelList. When we actually posted on AngelList, we published that we had already closed $2.5 million of the total $4 million round. Over the following week, we received introductions and offers for an additional $8 million. We ended up closing $2.5 million from investors through AngelList. About $2 million of that came from only a handful of people who were actually institutional investors and had their own funds. The other $500,000 came from about 40 individuals who were bundled through the AngelList co-invest online product. This gave Outbox an additional 50 people who were rooting for our success and wanted to be helpful however they could. Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams
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Gravit Lets You Illustrate In Your Abode Or On The Road
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
There have been plenty of tools around that replace powerful photo editors but very few that replace tools like Illustrator. Sure you can fake it but what if you want truly unique designs like the one above? Pretty tough. is a design tool that resides deep within the cloud and lets you create documents, advertisements, and illustrations within your browser. Created by Alexander Adam, the app is free and lets you build documents, export them, and even edit .svg and .eps files. Adam has built multiple graphic design editors and has been working with Scalable Vector Graphics since he was fourteen. He has received 600,000 euro from High-Tech Gründer-Fonds and he put another 300,000 euro of his own into while bootstrapping. The product is live now and he is seeing 80,000 designs made on the cloud-based service every day. “We have also received support from Wayne State University in Detroit to switch over to Gravit from Adobe Products and are expanding to other universities as well,” he said. Interestingly, Gravit works on all modern browsers including Safari on iOS. It supports smart and compound shapes and includes effects and filters. “You can think of this as ‘Github for Designers,'” he said. “By having people share content to the public and collaborating together on Open Design Projects or even with teams on those private works, Gravit is changing the way designers and clients even think of designing.” The project is the product of a dare. “The project started as an accident. I went out with friends one day where we discussed the future of web and how every app will one day be on the web. Few friends disagreed and provided an example that Design apps will never be on the web. To prove them wrong, I went in search to find one to support my argument. When I failed to find a pure web based (non-Flash) design tool, I took it upon myself to create one,” said Adam. “A few weeks later, I proved them wrong by creating Gravit.” If it lets a schlub like me create an ebook cover to my next magnum opus then I’m sold.
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Get A Free Gear VR At Best Buy This Weekend When You Buy A Galaxy Phone
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
If you’re in the market for a new Samsung phone, this weekend might be the right time to go for it. Now through Saturday, Best Buy is offering a free Samsung Gear VR with the purchase of a qualifying Galaxy phone. Gear VR retails for $99, so this is definitely an awesome deal and a great way to get your hands at one of the only commercially available headsets. Now, you can’t just go buy any old Samsung phone, it has to be a model compatible with the Gear VR. Best Buy all the information you need. Free Samsung Gear VR a $99.99 value, when you buy or lease and activate any Samsung Galaxy S6, S6 edge, S6 edge+ or Note5. When you add a qualifying Galaxy smartphone to your cart, a free Samsung Gear VR will be added automatically as well. Gear VR is awesome, and is really a great beginner’s step into VR that takes you beyond some of the limitations offered by Google Cardboard’s “kind-of-VR” experience and is a lot more approachable to novices than dropping $599 on a Rift pre-order + whatever a gaming rig would be. Check out this to the Gear VR if you’re looking for more reasons to drop the cash. For a lot of people Gear VR makes owning a Galaxy phone that much more tempting, which makes this deal pretty notable.
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LendUp Scores $150M For A Credit Card That Won’t Screw You Over
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
that LendUp can undercut them, help people avoid debt, and still make a profit on its payday loans and credit card. Not only is software eating finance, but morality is too. LendUp’s slogan is “Ladders Not Chutes”. Building a business that doesn’t try to exploit everyone has not only brought it years of double-digit monthly growth. LendUp has now attracted an $150 million Series B. That includes $100 million in debt from Victory Park to finance LendUp loans, plus $50 million for equity from patient investors like Google Ventures, Kapor Capital, and QED. Each only invests its own money, rather than cash from a long list of LPs. That’s why CEO Sasha Orloff tells me they’re giving the startup time to build a long-standing brand in finance “the right way”, rather than squeezing as much profit as possible from its customers in the short-term. Everything has to be transparent. There is no fine print. No hidden fees. And everything has to get someone to a better place” Orloff insists. There’s something deeply genuine in his plucky smile. Lots of entrepreneurs make strained claims about how they’re making the world a better place with social apps, enterprise software, or on-demand services. But LendUp’s leading man found an obvious way to actually do it. Straighten out a massive, crooked business that preys on the poor. Use software to make it more efficient. Split the savings with the customers. And grow because people like LendUp enough to tell their friends and family. “Would you quit your job if we got into Y Combinator?” Sasha asked his step-brother Jacob Rosenberg. The book Banker To The Poor had inspired Sasha to work distributing loans in the developing world before spending years in different departments of CitiGroup, a giant bank. He’d complain about Citi’s backwards methods, and Jacob, who’d worked at Yahoo since he was 16, would always chime in that they were software problems. On an impulse, Sasha recorded a video application for YC with a blunt pitch: “Let’s build better software for banks.” A few days later, “Oh shit”, Sasha exclaimed. They’d gotten in. “We had to come up with this whole story for our nervous Jewish parents to break them in on the idea that we were going to join YC and quit our jobs” Sasha tells me. “They freaked out be we did it anyway”. Originally, the brothers were trying to build software for the big banks rather than create their own way to distribute loans. But banks weren’t buying. “You’re just a startup. Software has never been a competitive advantage” is all they heard. One did show interest in acquiring them, but the brothers facepalmed when the lender told them its software couldn’t even tell which people were already customers. It was time to raise a Series A, and the founders had offers from Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, who knew banks would wise up eventually. Yet Google Ventures led a $14 million round with a different idea. Build a whole bank from scratch, full-stack, create a brand people loved, and use software to run circles around the lumbering finance giants. Those institutions relied on code written in COBOL in the late 80s. “We were going to be able to launch products faster, learn and adapt” Sasha says. He pivoted the company and bought the LendUp URL. The startup’s first product is the . The brothers asked themselves “What’s the most horrible product on the market?” The answer will be familiar to anyone living in a low-income area. The payday loan. It’s a same-day infusion of a few hundred bucks for people who need money to pay bills or want cash but don’t have good enough credit to get a traditional loan. “It’s a debt trap. The average loan size is $400, but you pay less than the fees on the interest due so the amount you owe gets bigger and bigger. They’re called ‘rollovers’” Sasha says, exasperated. “They’re framed as convenient but they’re very dangerous to consumers.” The LendUp Ladder is different. To make sure it gets its money back from people without credit histories, LendUp also looks at public records, specialty bureaus, and bank statements. Its machine learning technology lets that happen quickly and automatically rather than waiting for a bank employee to do the research manually. LendUp Ladder works. The company did several hundred million dollars in loan volume last year, and grew new customers by 36% in December alone. Users are becoming evangelists. A new study conducted with TransUnion, one of the big credit score companies, shows that people who use LendUp had a higher chance of upping their credit score than those using other online lenders or who didn’t borrow at all. “If you’re below a 680, a bank can’t loan to you. But 56% of the country is below 680” Sasha explains. “LendUp’s goal is to take people locked out of the banking system and give them a change to build their credit score.” Now after several months in beta, . It’s a 100X bigger market than payday loans, but LendUp is bringing its same attitude that puts honesty first. No hidden fees. If you pay on time, it’s free, compared to the average payday loan that costs 500% to 700% APR. The startup hopes to graduate Ladder customers onto its cheaper L Card. That’s when Sasha stops our interview and pulls out his phone. “Let me show you why having our own software is cool”. He toggles a switch on his LendUp Card app, and instantly halts the credit card. No charges allowed. Another tap, and it’s on again. There were no touchtone phone trees, holding times, or delays involved. “We can do things that don’t exist in the credit card market” Sasha beams. The L Card lets you opt to be notified about every purchase, so you could pause it if you see anything unauthorized. You can set budgets you can’t spend past, and set up whitelists for your utility bills, grocery stores, or gas stations. A wife could configure it so her husband can grab the family dinner but not splurge at Best Buy. Parents could prevent children from spending more than $50 at a time and monitor their purchases. You even get a health bar. It turns out that after paying on time, the most important contributor to your FICO score is having a lot of available credit. Financial institutions want to know that if you have to go to the hospital or have unexpected bills, you’ll be able to pay them. That means that even if you have a $10,000 credit limit on your L Card, you credit card will improve if you don’t spend much of it or pay it off before your statement comes. So the top of the LendUp Card app shows your credit health bar. Have over 70% left and it’s green, under 30% and it turns a frightful red, encouraging people to keep their balance paid. With the $50 million in equity funding from Google Ventures, Data Collective, Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris’ QED Investors, Susa Ventures, Yuri Milner and Kapor Capital, LendUp plans to try more features like this. “I want to hire a bunch of creative developers and product people and designers and let them build out stuff” Sasha tells me. “That’s the problem with banks, they’re not testing ideas and innovating.” LendUp has 140 employees but plans to potentially double that by the end of 2016. Sasha says he sometimes worries that another startup will enter the market, burn all their capital, go bankrupt, and sour investors on more disciplined finance businesses like LendUp. There are other tech companies trying to beat the banks, but none that focus on serving credit to the poor. Marqeta just does debit cards and pre-paid cards. Avant does bigger $5000-plus personal loans for people already in good standing. SoFi offers cheap student loans to reliable Ivy Leaguers. Perhaps the closest thing to LendUp is Capital One, the largest subprime lender, but they don’t have software to underwrite loans with machine learning insights. As Y Combinator’s Sam Altman says, “99% of startups die by suicide”. Sasha knows it. He tells me his biggest fear is actually keeping LendUp’s culture of duty to the less fortunate. “It’s so easy to make money the wrong way in payday lending or subprime credit cards. It’s easy to take advantage of people and charge them more” he admits. “I get scared that someone on our team will start suggesting we do things that are against the mission of our company…that greed takes over. As you grow bigger it gets harder and harder to make sure every hire is mission-aligned.” is already profitable on a per loan business, and would be overall if it wasn’t pouring so much capital into growth and engineering. One day, Sasha says perhaps it’ll license its technology to other banks like it planned to pre-pivot. But for now, he sees plenty of opportunity to positively impact the world creating a banking brand people trust. Funnily enough, LendUp’s first office was above one of those exploitative payday loan places. Sasha says he’d walk by it each day whispering under his breath, “you’re going out of business.” Now he has the firepower to make that dream come true while unshackling people from debt along the way.
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Werner Herzog On His Documentary Lo And Behold, Cockroach Movies And Moving To Mars
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
entitled Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World is being premiered at Sundance tomorrow. I’ve already written about my impressions of the film, which is very good and very different from other documentaries about the Internet you may have seen. I was also able to talk to filmmaker Werner Herzog, as well as one of its executive producers, Netscout’s Jim McNiel, about the process of making the film, its inspirations and its goals. What follows is a lightly edited interview in which I talk too much because I am nervous. Enjoy. It’s astounding. There’s over 5 million views on YouTube on this I think, and there should be 50.
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A Day After Launch, “Exploding Kittens” Tops The App Store
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
“ ,” the hugely successful from ex-Microsofties Elan Lee and Shane Small along with The Oatmeal’s creator Matthew Inman, has now been translated into . And that game is now onto the App Store, too, having scored the #1 Paid App slot only a day after launching. The game, as you may recall, became one of ever, pulling in nearly $8.8 million in pledges from over 219,000 contributors. It also for the project with the most individual donors, at the time. , where it was touted as the new “Cards Against Humanity,” the game’s concept was to deliver a “kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette.” That is, players take turn drawing cards until someone pulls an exploding kitten and loses the game. Of course, there’s more to it than that – players can also use various cards to defuse the kitten (with belly rubs or catnip sandwiches, e.g.), or skip their turns, attack other players, relocate kittens and more. In part, the card game’s launch was so successful because of Inman’s involvement, and his ability to leverage The Oatmeal’s sizable fan base to invest, as well as Lee’s reputation in the gaming world. To bring the game to mobile, Lee and Small partnered with the Seattle-based digital product studio , as well as Inman, in order to translate the table game into a local, peer-to-peer party game you play on your phone. Substantial, though not a name consumers may be familiar with themselves, does client work for a number of big names, including The WSJ, News Corp, Google, Amazon, Universal, IDEO, Getty Images, Starbucks, Citi, Genetech, ESPN, Lexus, and others. The company says goal was not just to clone the original, but make an evolved, improved and mobile-friendly version that would appeal to both fans of the card game and new users. The end result is that the app version of “Exploding Kittens” is a bit different from the original card game. It has pulled some cards and added others, introduced new game mechanics, and has introduced new art from The Oatmeal’s Inman, as well as sounds and voices. [gallery ids="1266754,1266752,1266764,1266763,1266762,1266761,1266760,1266759,1266758,1266757,1266756,1266755"] In addition, what’s interesting about the mobile game is that it climbed to the top of the App Store, despite the fact that you can’t play it by yourself, as you can with most mobile games today. You can’t even play with strangers over the internet for the time being. Instead, as the game’s website explains, “Exploding Kittens” is “very much a party game” – meaning, a “multiplayer game you play with people who are actually sitting near you.” To enable this functionality, the game uses a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to allow players to communicate with others around them, instead of relying on the Internet or Game Center. The creators warn that this technology is new and may have some kinks to work out, and bugs. The technology is similar to what you’ll find in apps like FireChat, that’s been used at , and Occupy Wall Street, as well as in the teen-focused that can work without a data plan or Wi-Fi connection. Adding the same sort of offline capability to a mobile game meant to be played in groups, then, is a fairly clever trick. That eliminates the potential problems users could face when their signal isn’t as strong as their competitors, where Wi-Fi isn’t accessible, or even when you’re lacking cellular/data connectivity altogether. The $1.99 game has now soared to the top of the App Store, again leveraging its prior viral buzz. And it won’t just be raking in revenues by downloads, the app also offers in-app purchases for “Avatar Packs’ that let users personalize their experience. The question for now is how long “Exploding Kittens” can retain its top spot. According to Substantial’s, Adam Pearson, the Lead Developer on “Exploding Kittens,” the metrics show that a lot of people are playing the game simultaneously, but he declined to provide download numbers. The product, described as a “version 1.0” release, doesn’t yet include the full feature set. For example, for now it doesn’t offer the “Nope” cards nor is there an Android version available. But the developers say these and more features are in the works for the future. “We focused on doing the best possible job of adapting the physical card game to the mobile platform by sticking to a face-to-face, party game style of gameplay that still felt natural on a smartphone,” says Pearson, when asked about the company’s plans from this point forward. “Players can expect any future developments to open the game to a broader user-base.”
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SpaceX Tested Its Capsule That Will Send Humans To Space
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
Yesterday, SpaceX released a video showing a successful hover test of its human-rated spacecraft, Crew Dragon. If all goes according to plan, in 2017, Crew Dragon will be placed on top of a Falcon 9 and send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The test, which was completed in McGregor, Texas, back in November, analyzed the spacecraft’s ability to fire its SuperDraco engines. NASA that while Crew Dragon is in the early stages of analysis, the end goal is to use the spacecraft to land humans on the ground with the accuracy of a helicopter. Interestingly, Crew Dragon won’t be using its SuperDraco thrusters in SpaceX’s first crewed flights. The thrusters are designed to bring astronauts back to land in a controlled descent. Instead of this strategy, SpaceX will initially use parachutes to slow Crew Dragon’s descent and splash down in the ocean. SpaceX has that they are working toward propulsive landing because it is a necessary capability if you ever want to land humans on a planet without oceans, like Mars for example. While the first version of SpaceX’s Dragon is currently used by NASA for ISS cargo flights, SpaceX has yet to use the second version, Crew Dragon, for a crewed mission. The recent hover test was one of many tests SpaceX will need to conduct in order to receive certification to fly humans into space. Crew Dragon is one of two spacecraft, each capable of carrying seven people, that will transport U.S. crews to and from the ISS, tentatively starting in 2017. The capsules are being developed under NASA’s Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contracts (CCtCap). CCtCap is the last phase of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program (CCDev). Starting in 2010, CCDev was designed to identify U.S. companies that could develop a replacement to the Space Shuttle. At the start of this program, NASA subsidized five promising companies for their human spaceflight concepts. In 2014, that search was narrowed down to Boeing and SpaceX. Boeing’s crewed capsule, the CST-100, has been its own engine tests, as well. Similar to SpaceX, the CST-100 is to touch down on land. Rather than a propulsive landing, Boeing’s capsule will parachute to an airbag-cushioned landing. Between their rocket tests, NASA contracts, engine development for the Air Force, and Crew Dragon development, SpaceX certainly has a lot of work to look forward to this year.
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Why Cloud Computing Will Shake Up Security
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Tom Gillis
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
As the curtain opens on 2016, you can expect massive changes in the security landscape. Technology providers such as firewall vendors, switching vendors and others will fade as new solutions better suited to the cloud computing environment emerge. On the flip side, companies that provide encryption and anti-malware technologies will continue to see their fortunes rise because the demand will continue to grow. But to thrive, these vendors must bring out new products and services evolved for cloud computing. Let’s take the case of anti-malware vendors that have traditionally served on-premise clientele. As more companies move to off-premise solutions — the cloud — so, too, will the attacks of nefarious hackers and others intent on stealing or compromising your company’s data. For anti-malware vendors, the new year brings a huge opportunity to update and create new solutions tailored to the cloud. The good news is these are essentially the same types of services that analyze data traffic for malware, but designed for the cloud. It still won’t be easy; there are some technical hurdles, like figuring out how the anti-malware solution gets inserted into a cloud system to which it doesn’t necessarily have access. Still, I think the top-shelf anti-malware vendors will be hugely motivated to attack this problem with gusto, and will figure it out. Of course, Amazon and other cloud providers will continue to enhance their security, but dealing with the many and evolving strains of malware is not their core competency. Instead, I think they will be more inclined to work with, or at least make it easier for, established security vendors to deploy their solutions onto cloud platforms. Expect to see more APIs and frameworks from cloud providers that allow for more seamless integration of third-party anti-malware. While anti-malware vendors have new opportunities, the same can’t be said for traditional firewall vendors. The reason is that access control (a core firewall feature) is being commoditized. Firewalls are typically used for access control to determine who can talk to what over which protocol. They’ve also been very IP-centric. Over time, firewall vendors have added application awareness, as well as protocol and packet inspection. The cloud doesn’t change the need for these advanced functions, but often the core access control is embedded in the cloud provider’s system, and I don’t see firewall vendors being able to subvert or co-exist with what’s already there. Also, access control is already being built in to cloud providers’ hypervisors and tied to provisioning of individual compute instances. Amazon’s Security Groups is just such an example. Like traditional firewalls, vendors of load balancers and application delivery controller appliances face tough sledding in 2016. Load balancers have long served a useful function, distributing network or application traffic across servers to handle high volumes of users or visitors. But auto-scaling of compute power is already part of the cloud provider’s infrastructure, so customers don’t need to buy it separately. I fully expect that legacy apps closely tied to traditional load balancers will continue to be used on-premise or, in some cases, rewritten for new cloud architectures. Mobile devices weren’t always so ubiquitous. Remember when only doctors carried beepers? The same could be said for encryption, a technology that companies deployed only in certain scenarios that absolutely required it. Moving to the public cloud means the expectation is that everything needs to be encrypted — always. But in this new cloud computing era, encryption vendors need to develop solutions that are massively scalable and truly transparent. Like anti-malware, the opportunity here is huge, and I fully expect encryption vendors to make solid progress in 2016. Another reason I think this will be a big year for encryption is that it’s becoming far easier to deploy. Traditional agent-based encryption is well-established, but has always been hard to deploy because it doesn’t work seamlessly with data management and other infrastructure functions. There is such a demand and focus on encryption recently that you can be sure plenty of bright minds are working on more advanced solutions that overcome the limits of traditional encryption. Expect to see some of these released in 2016. Cloud providers will continue to offer built-in encryption capabilities, similar to firewalls and load balancers, but the evolution of third-party solutions will broaden the reach of encryption. Looking further out, it’s not hard to imagine that encryption will do more than just protect data; it will take on a bigger role in protecting other parts of the network with access control. I think it’s inevitable, as the cloud becomes more ubiquitous in the years ahead, that encryption will essentially become the new perimeter and insertion point for companies to enforce their security policies. It’s a fantastic opportunity for encryption vendors to start delivering on in 2016. Switching products offer many complex features, such as VLANS (Virtual Local Area Networks), that are manifestations of physical constructs. But with cloud computing, switching is far more straightforward and the role of switch vendors changes. Traditionally, switching products have relied on elaborate routing protocols and network encapsulations to make sure that, for example, Rack A doesn’t talk to Rack B, but can talk to Rack C. It gets way more complicated in the jumble known as network management. But in cloud computing, the network management mess goes away. For example, Security Groups, the network controls Amazon uses that are defined up front and deployed automatically. This is a huge time saver because you no longer have to set up network access control policies and the need for software switches is greatly reduced. There is still going to be a need for switches; for example, customers who want to project one network onto different infrastructures — but this is far from a big growth opportunity. In my opinion, switch vendors are going to have difficulty finding new revenue for their traditional products in 2016. That pesky issue of insertion in the cloud is also a tremendous challenge to switch vendors. To get a so-called virtual switch inserted in a cloud-based data center, it would need to be tightly integrated with a cloud-based hypervisor. But I see no incentive for cloud providers to give third-party switch vendors special access to their systems. As a result, I think switch vendors are going to be left out in the cold when it comes to opportunities in the cloud. Enterprise data is already growing exponentially, and the cloud will accelerate this trend because it provides readily accessible infrastructure to store all that data. Simply put, it’s a great opportunity for software-based storage systems. But there’s the issue of managing all this data in a way that spans both private and public clouds, because most companies will leverage both. This point is where software storage vendors can thrive to the extent they’re able to bring new cloud-based data management solutions to the fore. I strongly believe that for these software storage solutions to succeed, however, they need to be tightly integrated with security, such as encryption. The alternative is to keep encrypting data separately from the storage system, but that just makes it a hassle to replicate, back up and move data around. Solutions that tightly integrate encryption will be the big winners in the year ahead. You might say 2015 was the year of cloud computing — at least when it comes to media coverage. But the fact is, only a small percentage of enterprise workloads moved to the public cloud this past year. That’s about to change. The transition of the enterprise from private to public clouds is likely to be the most impactful transition in the IT data center sector in the past three decades. I expect we will see a much larger percentage of enterprise workloads moving to the cloud in 2016, with a much bigger migration to follow. I’ll be fascinated to see what the established vendors and upstarts bring to the table this year to accelerate the inevitable transition to the cloud.
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Apple Has A New Apple TV Ad, And It’s All About Apps
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bisUwKlSi60 Apple has released a new TV spot for the Apple TV. Compared to that were focused on content, this time, it’s about apps and the Apple TV App Store. This is interesting for a few reasons. Apple has used the app angle when it first . But does a TV App Store make sense? When you buy a connected box for your TV, you expect to be able to stream content from Netflix, Mubi, HBO, Showtime, MLB, Hulu, WatchESPN, and some sort of movie-renting service like the iTunes Store, Google Play or Amazon Video. But what about all the apps you love on your phone? Maybe a TV isn’t made for Twitter, The New York Times, Instagram, Facebook, Slack and Pocket after all. By definition, the Apple TV won’t get as many apps as the iOS App Store. And that’s OK. People are paying for services like HBO Now. Service providers need to have an app on the Apple TV. These apps will always be there. But that also means that the Apple TV won’t generate startup or indie successes. The Apple TV App Store is made for big content players. And then, there are the games. It’s still too early to say whether the Apple TV is going to become an . It seems to have a lot of potential. The on the Apple TV App Store is games. And it’s possible that many game developers are waiting for a bigger installed base before dedicating resources to this new platform. Apple believes that the future of TV is apps. As of today, the Apple TV is mostly about free apps from big content companies and games. It’s going to be interesting to check back in a few months and look at the state of the Apple TV App Store and see if there’s room for small app developers.
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After 30 Days, The FAA Has Now Registered Almost 300K Drone Owners
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today that almost 300,000 drone owners have now used its . The site went live and until today, the FAA would refund the $5 registration fee. The biggest rush of registrations probably came in the first couple of days (about 45,000 people registered after the site opened), but the agency says it’s still seeing a “steady stream of daily registrations.” It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean people have registered about 300,000 drones. Because you essentially register yourself as a drone pilot, wich allows you to affix your registration number to as many drones as you want to, the actual number of drones/quadcopters (and model aircraft and helicopters), is likely a bit higher. The FAA people would buy almost a million drones during the holiday season. If that’s true then there are still quite a few unregistered drones flying around. I personally think that number is probably too high. Just to recap the rules: If you own a drone that weighs , and you plan to fly outdoors, you have to register your drone. If you buy one today, you have to register before you fly. If you owned your drone before December 21, you get a bit of leeway, but you still have to register before February 19, 2016, to stay on the FAA’s good side. The FAA has until March 21 to also open this system up to commercial operators, but the details around how this will work remain unclear (and that deadline may still shift, too).
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Meet The Apps Vying For The Crunchie For Best Mobile App Of 2015
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
The Crunchie for Best Mobile App goes to the mobile application that made the most waves in the mobile app landscape in 2015. Below are the companies that have been selected as finalists for the Best Mobile App award this year, as well as a look at some of the previous winners.
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Facebook Is Bringing 3D Touch To Your Timeline
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
Facebook is bringing 3D Touch to its Timeline, the company says – meaning that users of Apple’s latest devices, the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, will soon be able to press on links, profiles and more, in order to preview content without having to navigate away from their current spot. This previewing feature, dubbed “ ,” was last fall on Apple’s new smartphones, where it was touted as a way to add another dimension to the iPhone’s multi-touch interface. Instead of just tapping, swiping and pinching, 3D Touch takes advantage of the new hardware’s pressure-sensitive screen to allow users to hard-press on items to preview content and then optionally act on it. For example, today you can “peek” at emails from your inbox with a light press, then press a little harder to “pop” into them. To date, of app developers have introduced support for 3D Touch as a function that can be accessed via their app icons. That is, when you hard-press on the icon on your homescreen you’re offered a variety of shortcuts for that app in a pop-up window that appears. In Facebook’s case, it , offering users the ability to take or upload photos and videos, or write a status update, via this menu of shortcuts. Arguably, 3D Touch is more useful within apps than on the app icon. Though studies on 3D Touch user adoption have yet to surface, it seems likely that many people forget that these app icon shortcuts exist, and continue to use their apps as they would normally. However, when you’re actually within an application and tapping on content, it’s easier to remember that 3D Touch is an option. I find myself using it a lot more within email but almost never remember to hard-press on my app icons. To some extent, 3D Touch still suffers today because not all iOS developers have rolled out support for 3D Touch for their applications, so you’re not always sure if the feature will work. Without universal support across the entirety of your homescreen, it can be difficult to adjust your ingrained behaviors. That’s why implementing 3D Touch within Facebook’s Timeline sounds a lot more practical, I believe. Says Facebook, you’ll soon be able to lightly press on a Facebook story or profile to view a preview, then hard-press to “pop” to see the full story or profile. This feature will work with web links, profiles, Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Facebook Events, photos, profile pictures, and cover photos. Effectively, that’s the majority of the content that users on Facebook will care about, and such broad support on the world’s most-used app could help push user adoption of the 3D Touch feature forward. “We are excited to start rolling out support for 3D Touch in our iOS app so people can quickly and easily peek into a preview of anything they are interested in on Facebook, and pop into that content to see more,” a Facebook spokesperson said, confirming the addition. Note that you might not have 3D Touch just yet, however. Facebook says it’s just beginning to roll out 3D Touch on the Timeline to a “small group” of people, and will later expand the roll out more broadly in the “coming months.”
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13 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week
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Anna Escher
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
This week, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop got one step closer to becoming a reality, Amazon’s Dash-powered devices went live, Snoop Dogg announced an and astronomers found evidence of a ninth planet in our solar system. Some of our TechCrunch team is reporting from the , where we’ve hosted , the , , and others on our stage. These are our biggest stories of the week. Elon Musk first proposed the Hyperloop, a vacuum tube intended to shoot passengers at 800 mph from city to city, in 2013. Now, plans to construct the beginnings of the Hyperloop are now underway. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced plans for a 5-mile test track late last year and is for what the organization hopes will become the transportation infrastructure of the future. We will get at some point. The possibilities are many, and Apple will surely capitalize on longer battery life and lighter casings. But when? We heard a bit more that suggests that Apple might ship a minor revision of the Apple Watch that includes a FaceTime camera and not much else — but still that it would not be a full “Watch 2.0.” SpaceX was hoping to . While the company successfully completed its primary mission of bringing the Jason-3 satellite into orbit, it was unable to safely recover the first stage of the rocket due to an issue with one of the landing legs which caused the rocket to tip over after landing. Apple released for Mac, iPhone and iPad focusing mostly and bug fixes, security fixes and performance improvements. Facebook-owned WhatsApp made a about how the messaging app plans to evolve to its next phase as it approaches 1 billion users: the company plans to drop its $0.99 annual subscription fee, and will start to test out more commercial services. Sarah Buhr recounted . She writes that with the rise of ridesharing services, people are turning to Lyft and Uber instead of taxis not only for convenience, but for their safety. She urges regulators to favor Lyft and Uber over taxis for safety reasons. In efforts to lure sports fans who crave real-time updates away from Twitter, Facebook . It’s a part of its main app for following sports games where you can watch play-by-play news, read commentary from athletes and critics, and cheer with friends. Lucas Matney checked out , dubbing it an electronic musician’s dream. He points out new features like Live Loops, a new way of producing tracks that’s more conducive to building electronic jams. Since Jack Dorsey took over as CEO of Twitter, the company’s shares have fallen more than 40 percent and Square’s stock has briefly dipped below its IPO price. . Amazon’s first (the ones that automatically re-order supplies like laundry detergent or printer ink for you) went live. Astronomers at Caltech found that indicates the presence of a . If confirmed, it would transform the model of our solar system as we know it. Josh Constine reported that called “Alrawi.” The terrorist group’s use of the app raises the question of how far mobile platforms are willing to go to fight terrorism. Guest contributor Anshu Sharma wrote about stack fallacy, or “the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours,” and . He writes, “Stack fallacy has caused many companies to attempt to capture new markets and fail spectacularly. When you see a database company thinking apps are easy – they are suffering from stack fallacy.”
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These Are The Most-Watched Vines Of The Year
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
Vine, Twitter’s social platform for six-second looping video, just turned three. The company says that over 200 million people watch Vine videos (either on mobile or on the web) each month. But what are all those people actually watching? In celebration of time’s eternal trench forward, Vine has curated the most-watched (looped) Vines throughout the third year of the company: Some are funny.
Some are serious.
A few of them are things that originally aired on television.
But most of them include children being funny and/or getting injured.
While Vine remains a great platform to share bite-size video, the company has also introduced features ( , , etc.) that allow for the explosion of trends. Ever heard someone say “On fleek”? What about the Shmoney Dance or The Whip? Vine is where some popular bits of pop culture have started, and the company will introduce a new website dedicated to trends over the lifetime of Vine starting tomorrow. For this past year, however, here are some of the vines that started the biggest trends of the past year:
Which leads to awesome sauce like this video: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vClwsEYjy7Q&w=640&h=360]
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Andreessen Horowitz GP Scott Weiss Won’t Be Investing Next Fund
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
This morning, former IronPort Systems cofounder and CEO Scott Weiss announced that he’s no longer going to be investing in new companies on behalf of Andreessen Horowitz, the Sand Hill Road venture firm. Weiss had joined AH in March 2011 as its fourth general partner. Weiss isn’t the first partner to step back at the now 6.5-year-old firm. Its third general partner after cofounders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — John O’Farrell — also of an investing role back in 2013. An earlier hire, Balaji Srinivasan, who was brought into the firm in December 2013, has since become the CEO of 21, a bitcoin company that he’d cofounded before joining the venture outfit. (Srinivasan was originally expected to play an to 21; the firm says it was to instead join 21 in as its chief executive early last year.) The firm currently has nine GPs altogether, including its newest hire, Vijay Pande, who is leading the firm’s . Pande joined in November. The firm also TrialPay founder Alex Rampell to focus largely on fintech. It would seem to us that Andreessen Horowitz, which has raised ginormous funds every couple of years, is moving around some pieces as it gears up to raise (or perhaps close?) a new fund. However, asked about that , managing director Scott Kupor told us that wasn’t the case. “We haven’t made any decisions yet about when we’ll raise another [fund]. We literally haven’t even sat down to start thinking about it.” Things can change quickly, of course, as Weiss’s shows. Using the company’s blog to announce the news, Weiss writes that he has “struggled to find the right balance between work and the rest of my life,” and that “despite my best intentions, too often my family has gotten shortchanged.” Adds Weiss, ” I’ve now reached a point where I’ve decided to shift the equation. I’m not leaving the firm; instead, I’ll focus the majority of my work hours on my existing board seats. The rest of my time will belong to my family.” You can read his update in its entirely below. In the meantime, we’ve reached out to the firm and will update this post when we can.
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Get Ready For A Smaller iPhone 6s Mini
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
Are you reading this post on an iPhone 5s? Chances are the iPhone 6s is too big for your taste and you’re now holding onto your trustworthy iPhone 5s. But it’s time to rejoice! Many leaks indicate that a smaller 4-inch iPhone is in the works — and there’s a brand new one from . It’s unclear when it’s going to be released, but there are many reasons why a smaller iPhone would make sense. As you can see in the video with the leaked device below, this new iPhone looks very similar to the iPhone 6s, but in a smaller form factor. Let’s call it the iPhone 6s Mini for now, even though it could have a completely different name. The name ‘iPhone 6c’ seems unlikely given that the iPhone 5c and was phased out . And it doesn’t look like the iPhone 6s Mini will have the same ‘unapologetically plastic’ design. According to M.I.C Gadget, the device you can see is a Foxconn demo unit. In other words, it’s not something coming out of the production line, and you shouldn’t expect a release in the coming weeks. While it’s hard to know for sure if it’s a 4-inch display, it definitely looks smaller than the iPhone 6s. We can also see a a Touch ID home button and all the usual iPhone buttons (including a sleep/wake button on the side and not at the top). It’s still unclear if the new iPhone 6s Mini is going to receive an A8 or A9 chip, and most reports say that 3D Touch support is unlikely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8la5yjlPcs There have been about a smaller iPhone. In particular, rumors have become over the past two months, indicating that there’s something happening. And it’s true that a smaller iPhone makes a lot of sense. When Apple released the iPhone with its 3.5-inch display, it was a very different company. Apple wasn’t trying to please everyone because it didn’t have the bandwidth and the supply chain infrastructure to release dozens of variants of the same device. You could buy a 4GB or 8GB iPhone. That’s it. A few years ago, Apple was releasing best iPhone for people. The company now has a different strategy — Apple wants to find iPhone for them. Same thing for the MacBook line — you could choose between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. There wasn’t any MacBook Air, MacBook Pro with retina display or 12-inch retina MacBook in 2007. Now, it’s a very different Apple. When the company realized that people wanted a bigger iPhone, the answer wasn’t the iPhone 6 — it was the iPhone 6 the iPhone 6 Plus, with different color options and . Similarly, Apple isn’t afraid to try new form factors and release a wide array of iPad models to fit everyone’s needs. By releasing two form factors with the iPhone 6, Apple was able to accommodate a larger portion of the smartphone market. Those who wanted a phablet could buy an iPhone phablet for the first time. And the same thing is happening now. The iPhone 5s is currently Apple’s entry-level phone. It’s a small device that works well for those who want something as small as possible. But the iPhone 5s was also . Apple will likely phase out the iPhone 5s in September with the release of new iPhones, leaving a hole in the product line. As a reminder, iPhone sales represent of Apple’s revenue. It is by far the company’s most important product. Apple needs to do everything to foster sales and improve the average sales price. That’s why a brand new iPhone 6s Mini makes sense. And it also makes sense that the updated design looks like the iPhone 6s. The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will likely stick around when new iPhones are released in September. The new 4-inch iPhone will fit nicely in this product lineup. And yet, there’s an important remaining question. When is Apple going to announce the iPhone 6s Mini? In December 2015, 9to5mac’s Mark Gurman that an announcement in March was still possible along with the Apple Watch 2. But this seems unlikely. First, Apple a brand new watch just yet according to TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino. Second, we should have seen leaked components everywhere by now if Apple was still on track for a March event — and not just a Foxconn demo unit. It’s more likely that the iPhone 6s Mini is going to be announced in September with the brand new iPhones, or even later.
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Announcing The 2016 Crunch Network Editorial Calendar
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Jonathan Shieber
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
Last year we debuted Crunch Network, a collaboration between our community of thinkers, readers and makers that produced insights into how technology is shaping (and reshaping) society. Frankly, the results were amazing. , and came through with amazing insights into where we stand now and where we’re going — as innovation continues to transform fiction into fact and yesterday’s dreams of how to make the world better into tomorrow’s businesses that actually make the world better. It’s been a pleasure to read all of your wise words and share them with the wider world. And we’d like to keep going. So we’re here to present you with the editorial calendar for 2016. Again, we’re looking for pieces that explore the intersection of technology and aspects of society. Everything from the latest laboratory research, to surveys of the startup landscape and its relationship with diversity, to the newest innovation in the arts and latest thinking from philosophers on the ramifications of it all — we want to read about all of it — and, apparently, so do you. By no means are these subjects exhaustive. We find it exhilarating to read your best thoughts about anything. So in addition to getting articles on the themes below, we’ll take your words on anything and everything you think worth writing about. Head over to our brand-new to submit your post today. How are startups, entrepreneurs, researchers and others thinking about ways in which technology can enliven our lives? What does money mean these days and how is technology changing our economies? What’s the latest from the tech world to help secure our physical and virtual lives? How technology is changing the environments where we live, work and play for better or for worse. In the digital age, what’s real? What’s human? What does existence mean? How are these things changing with new innovations? What technologies will reshape human health … and healthcare? How is technology changing the ways we get around in our neighborhood, on our globe and in our solar system? What are the biggest questions our innovations are forcing us to face? How does technology shift our moral compass? How is work changing in the age of AI, automation and autonomous robots. How algorithms are changing politics and how politics are changing startups. How is tech changing the ways products are planned, produced and promoted? And what marvels are around the corner from the design world?
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Netflix Makes Good On Promises To Crack Down On VPNs, But Blocks Are Short-Lived
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
Netflix has begun blocking some users of VPN services, following the company’s , and that it would begin to crack down on those customers using VPN software to access content not licensed in their region. According to a Melbourne-based VPN provider, uFlix, some users started to see an error message when they tried to stream non-Australian content on Netflix using the company’s unblocker service. The message read: According to , not all of its customers were affected. However, the company suggested that may change in time, saying “though it is only affecting a few users at the moment, we expect this number to grow.” Of course, many assumed that Netflix’s statements regarding its plans to begin blocking VPNs were more for show – that is, they were meant to appease broadcasters who were already concerned about the company’s inability to enforce the geographical licensing restrictions on Netflix’s content across regions. And with Netflix’s expansion to 130 more countries, bringing its total reach to 190 countries worldwide, the expectation was that in order to access Netflix’s content libraries not currently available in their own country. In addition, at this year’s CES event in Las Vegas, Netflix’s Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt that while Netflix does “apply industry standard technologies to limit the use of proxies,” going after these VPN providers is “likely to always be a cat-and-mouse game.” He even added that it was fairly easy for these providers to evade Netflix’s blocks. “[We] continue to rely on blacklists of VPN exit points maintained by companies that make it their job. Once [VPN providers] are on the blacklist, it’s trivial for them to move to a new IP address and evade,” , at the time. Netflix later noting vaguely by way of a blog post that it would, “in the coming weeks,” begin to clamp down on the use of unblockers and proxies. “…those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies,” read the , written by Netflix’s VP of Content Delivery Architecture, David Fullagar. As of today, it seems that Netflix’s attempts to block uFlix may have been futile after all, though. The VPN provider said it was working on a solution that would “get around these new measures,” and now reports that a fix is already in place, only days later. In fact, it had developed a fix by January 20 – only a day after announcing the problem to its users – but needed to put an additional measure in place before rolling it out. Hi everyone! The new fix is in place. Please test it out. If anyone gets proxy/vpn error issues, please submit a ticket immediately. Thanks! — uFlix (@uFlixDNS) That indicates that while Netflix may be trying to make good on its plans to crack down on VPN usage, it will ultimately remain a game of “whack-a-mole.” That is, Netflix may be able to temporarily disrupt services like uFlix, but dedicated proxy providers will quickly find a workaround.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 14 | null |
Zach Sims Of Codecademy On Running A Company That (Still) Doesn’t Charge Users
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
Though the four-year-old online platform now teaches employable tech skills to 25 million users around the globe, it still doesn’t charge for its services, some early testing notwithstanding. The company is choosing instead to remain focused on growth before introducing what CEO Zach Sims describes as a “prosumer” business. In today’s market, that’s an unusual stance to maintain. It’s even more unusual because Codecademy has raised just $12.5 million over the years, a small sum by the standards of most online learning platforms. The six-year-old, San Francisco-based online learning and teaching marketplace Udemy, for example, has raised $113 million to date. In a sit-down in Davos, we asked Sims about Codecademy’s strategy; whether he’s feeling nervous about waiting so long to charge (or else raise more capital); and if Codecademy might eventually branch into the seemingly lucrative business of coding boot camps. Spoiler alert: Sims thinks that Codecademy is far better positioned to survive and thrive than the many startups that have raised piles of cash and are now having to “right-size” their businesses. The entire interview runs around nine minutes long, but to catch the portion of the interview where we start discussing the business side of Codecademy, skip to the 4:15 mark.
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ZestFinance Expands Parental Leave To Six Months Paid Time Off For Primary Caregivers
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 |
ZestFinance, a data-driven underwriting and credit analysis platform, is implementing an expanded parental leave policy. Now, ZestFinance is offering employees six months of paid time off for primary caregivers, three months of paid time off for secondary caregivers, and the option for primary caregivers to work part-time for an additional six months without losing any benefits coverage. This comes after tech companies like Facebook and Netflix have started offering more time off for parental leave. At Facebook, . In August, . For reference, ZestFinance has also come through on its diversity commitments, , having increased the number of ethnically diverse employees by 25%, thus increasing total minority representation at the company to 39%. ZestFinance also doubled the number of veteran employees since August. ZestFinance did this by recruiting from places where the majority of candidates were diverse, employee referrals, and focusing less on prior experience. “We hire for intellectual horsepower and culture fit vs. skill,” ZestFinance Chief People Officer Sonya Merrill told TechCrunch. “We believe people can learn skills on the job. Not being so rigid about skills allows us to hire from a much wider pool of candidates, whereas many companies put skills first on their list of requirements, which gives them a more narrow pool of people to choose from.” Regarding gender diversity, ZestFinance has not yet achieved its goal of gender parity, with just a 42% female workforce. By the end of 2016, ZestFinance is aiming to triple its number of employees with disabilities. ZestFinance has also partnered with the National Business and Disability Council (NBDC) to create a consortium to help Los Angeles-based startups recruit and hire people of color, women, people with disabilities, and veterans. ZestFinance, founded in 2009 by former Google CIO and VP of engineering Douglass Merrill, has raised over $130 million in funding from investors like Peter Thiel, Northgate Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and Kensington Capital Holdings.
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A Tiny Selfie Drone You Don’t Need To Register With The FAA
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
The palm-sized is an affordable GPS-enabled drone that automatically takes photos using smile and obstacle recognition technology. Normally the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires registration for unmanned aircraft systems. Nearly since the government introduced this rule in early January. However, this bite-sized flying camera is so small (0.3 lbs) it doesn’t need to be on the books. According to the , only drones weighing more than 0.55 lbs or 250 grams must register but because the ONAGOfly is so small, it flies right under the regulation. This little drone goes for $199 on Indiegogo right now ($299 after campaign ends) and comes with built-in obstacle avoidance sensors, as well as some other features usually reserved for larger, more expensive drones like 15 MP camera, 1080p HD video, throw and fly capability (you throw it up and it automatically starts to fly), resistant to wind speeds up to1.6-3.3 m/s, peer-to-peer live streaming, and can be controlled from either an Android or iOS device using WiFi for up to 66 feet in distance. Compare that to larger, pricier drones like or the camera drone. ONAGOfly doesn’t generate its own Wi-Fi hotspot like the Bebop, but it has a lot of other features for a lot less. ONAGOfly has so far raised more than $1.8 million on Indiegogo, from nearly 9,000 backers, with 11 days to go before the campaign ends. Those backing this campaign are promised a comparatively quick delivery date of March 2016. Though other well-funded drones like Zano , the short ship date makes us think ONAGOfly is likely already in production. Check out more about the ONAGOfly in the video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzQ_Y-uh5k
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Meet The Gadgets Vying For The Crunchie For Hardware Of The Year For 2015
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
The Crunchie for Hardware of the Year goes to the gadget that had the biggest impact on the tech landscape in 2015. Below are the companies that have been selected as finalists for the Hardware of the Year award this year, as well as a look at the previous winners of this coveted award.
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Watch Microsoft Venture’s London Accelerator Right Here
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
TechCrunch is pleased to host the live video stream of the demo day. Watch the presentations right here starting at 3:30p GMT on January 27th. The event is private so this live stream is the only way for the general public to watch the event. Ten companies will take the stage and present their company to a group of investors. Microsoft Ventures launched in 2013 in a bid to consolidate Microsoft’s various startup and ventures programs, including Bing Fund incubator, the BizSpark program, and the Microsoft Accelerator in Seattle. There are seven Microsoft Ventures Accelerators worldwide including Bangalore, Beijing, Berlin, London, Paris, Seattle and Tel Aviv.
3:30 p.m. Welcome and Opening remarks
4:00 p.m. Presentations start
6:00 p.m. Event concludes Meet The Startups | is i provides an e
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Cedexis Raises $22M Series B Round For Its Internet Traffic Monitoring And Routing Platform
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
helps large enterprises monitor and optimize how their traffic flows from their servers, CDNs and cloud providers to their customers. The company today announced that it has raised a $22 million Series B round led by Ginko Ventures with participation from Foxconn, Nokia Growth Partners, Citrix Systems Ventures and its Madrona Ventures and Advanced Technology Ventures. This new round brings Cedexis’s total funding to $33 million. The company, which is headquartered in sunny Portland, Oregon, currently counts the likes of Accor Hotels, Airbus, Comcast, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Nissan and Shutterstock among its customers. Cedexis claims it has almost 1,000 customers. Cedexis offers a range of network management and optimization features. At the core of these is often , Cedexis’ crowdsourced real-time cloud and network performance monitoring tool. The company’s customers can then use this data to optimize how they want to route traffic based on their priorities (cost, performance, availability — or a mix of these) using Cedexis’s service. In addition, the company also allows its customers to measure the of these decisions on its key performance indicators. “Having grown the Cedexis Radar community to nearly 1,000 companies, including large web scale properties such ad Tumblr, Microsoft, LinkedIn etc., we will be expanding our sales and marketing efforts to capture this rapidly emerging market,” Cedexis CEO Scott Grout tells me. As Grout also told me, the team has recently seen good adoption of its new “Buffer Killer” video traffic optimization tools and that he expects it will be the second or third largest use case for the service in 2016. “We created the Buffer Killer at the request of our traditional website and mobile app customer base, as almost every enterprise is now using video to more richly communicate with their audiences,” he said. “In addition to our traditional customer base, we were pleasantly surprised by the number of enterprises that signed on with us for primarily video delivery, with some great wins at PBS, ViaPlay, StarzPlay, JadooTV, Viewlift, etc.” The company says it plans to use the new funding to expand its size and global reach, as well as to accelerate customer growth. Unsurprisingly, this means the company plans to quickly expand its engineering, marketing and sales.
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People.io Is Another Shot At Rewarding People For Sharing Personal Data
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
There have been multiple attempts to convince web users of the value of their attention and/or personal data — by, for example, offering them free mobile connectivity for watching ads (e.g. ). Over the years it’s proven a . But with privacy such a high profile issue in the tech and political sphere, post-Snowden, it’s inevitable we’re going to see more startups trying to build businesses promising to license — rather than harvest — user data. In exchange for this ‘controlled sharing’ of their interests (and/or eyeballs) consumers are ‘paid’ in rewards or discounts for products and services. While the selling point for advertisers is the promise of for their messages, and a workaround for the . It’s the latter factor that’s convincing another U.K. startup to attempt to make a go of this space. , launching today initially focused on the East London district of Shoreditch, is offering consumers the ability to license their personal data (and/or attention span) to local advertisers in exchange for building up credits — which they can later redeem against digital services such as streaming music services. Or even donate as a cash value to charities. Unsurprisingly, co-founder Nicholas Oliver has a background in digital marketing and advertising, including working for WPP. “In the last few years I’ve started to explore the concept of an attention economy and how multiple factors, including adblocking, are inflating the direct value of a person’s attention. The ‘ah-ha’ moment was when I looked at how data ownership could be combined with the attention economy,” he tells TechCrunch. He founded the startup last August, raising some £150,000 from private angel investors with backgrounds in media, telecoms and publishing to fund the first development push. He points to rising rates of ad-blocking in the U.K. as a big pain point for local advertisers — and one he reckons can be circumvented by convincing Brits of the benefits of licensing their personal data to advertisers. “Last year the UK saw an 82% growth in the adoption of ad-blocking, higher than any other country in the world. Naturally, that has made it harder to reach certain audience groups and as a result, the amount a brand is willing to invest on reaching those consumers has increased,” he says. “With . , we can use a persons’ data to ensure that whenever a brand wants a person’s attention — they’re sending the right message. If we know how to connect the right brand, with the right person, at the right time — we can help reward users and brands alike.” Why should people.io succeed in scaling the concept of paying users for their data/eyeballs, given and none of these attempts has yet to scale significantly. He argues his platform is not just trying to “rebalance” the big data relationship by giving users control over how their data is used, but also that control — and strong privacy protections (user data shared with People.io is never shared with advertisers, according to Oliver, and can be deleted by the user at any time) — are not in themselves compelling enough to change consumer behavior en mass (although he adds they are essential to “start to rebuild trust in the digital marketing space”). The missing piece, in his view, is the feedback mechanism — aka instant and transparent gratification for the trade-off. “With our platform your reward is instant and transparent,” he notes. “Every time you share or enhance your data your are rewarded in the form of credits, so immediately we build the association between information and reward. We also declare upfront the value associated to each question we’re asking the user, or what a brand is willing to ‘pay’ for that moment of their attention.” Oliver says the startup is forecasting than an “average user”, who is accepting one ad message per day, would earn enough credits in a month to pay for a music streaming subscription (although he does not specify which one). It remains to be seen whether such averages prove compelling enough to drive significant sign ups to the platform. Certainly, significant scale can’t happen immediately, given its limited launch in trendy Shoreditch. But Oliver says he’s expecting People.io to be nationwide in three months, and launching in other European territories within the next six months. He notes that concerns about data privacy and intrusive advertising behavior have not only been growing in recent times, but are being driven at a regional level by political developments in Europe. “The recent explosion of adblocking is evidence of consumers becoming more concerned about how their personal data is being used to create intrusive advertising,” he suggests. “Ad-blocking simply provides a short-term, superficial solution. Importantly though, this increase in awareness has contributed to the introduction of new policies, such as , which we believe will open the door to a consumer-centric data ownership model.” “As consumers become more aware of how their data is currently being collected and used, they’ll also become more aware of its value and also the need to have control over it. An awareness that hasn’t existed until now,” he adds. It will certainly be very interesting to see whether the notion of rewarding consumers for licensing their data or giving up some of their attention span is an idea whose time has come — or an over-exaggeration of more marginal but noisy privacy concerns. Although — pro tip — I’d suggest a startup that’s touting its pro-privacy credentials needs to add a prominent link to its privacy policy on its website… Oliver says this will be coming tomorrow, once it’s had a final review by the startup’s lawyer.
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PSA: A Link That Crashes Safari Is Being Passed Around On Social Media
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
A website that crashes the Safari web browser is making the rounds on social media. The name of the site, (don’t click!), makes its intentions pretty obvious, of course. But pranksters can use a URL shortener like bit.ly to obfuscate the URL and then trick their victims into clicking. Doing so will indeed crash your browser, but there isn’t permanent damage. On iOS devices, the browser will crash and/or your phone may reboot, according to users’ reports. Meanwhile, on the desktop, the browser will hang requiring you to force quit the browser instead. Twitter users have been posting the link alongside juicy clickbait, in attempts to get their followers to crash their browsers. But the native Twitter iOS app is now warning about the link when clicked, saying that it has been identified as “being potentially harmful.” That will likely prevent the prank from blowing up further on its platform, though it’s still possible for friends to text each other the link privately. So be warned. the troll site was created by 22-year-old San Francisco coder Matthew Bryant, who discovered the bug and made the phone-crashing website as a joke. The bug in question runs JavaScript code that overloads the address bar with an infinite series of numbers, the article explains. The Chrome browser on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android is also affected by CrashSafari, though the system doesn’t reboot in that case. (We should also note that clicking the link from iOS’s latest beta build only crashed the browser – the phone didn’t restart). The prank website is hardly the first to use a bug in the browser to wreak havoc on end users’ devices. In 2013, for example, a text string was that could crash Safari, too. However, this new trick is nowhere near as serious as by way of text messages. In that case, as you may recall, – not only by patching the bug, but also offering removal instructions for those already affected. https://twitter.com/mikko/status/691600741832720384/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Crashing my iPod touch. — Sean Sullivan (@5ean5ullivan) https://twitter.com/hatefakejb/status/691555536618258432
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Why The Stick Figure Meme Caught On So Fast And Why We Hate It So Much
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
The “ ” meme (that stick figure about [insert name here] blowing up on your Facebook feed) is the latest viral hit glorifying our greatness – and it’s annoying the hell out of your friends. According to the , the meme started late last year for a guy named Bill. The “Be Like Bill” meme recently gained a dedicated Facebook page, which quickly grew to more than 1.5 million likes. There are even parodies like the Spanish version “ ” and “ ” for the ladies. But the meme started blowing up on my Facebook feed (and probably yours) over the weekend when a newly created allowed the ability to insert your own name instead of Bill’s. The attention has annoyed a lot of people who suddenly found their Facebook feed covered in passive-aggressive messages. It has also caused a counter meme “ .” According to the “Be Like Bill” meme’s originator Eugeniu Croitoru, a Moldovian programmer living in Italy, Bill is “Just a fictional character who conveys messages in a funny yet often sensible ways.” His meme co-conspirator Debabrata Nath also emphasized that Bill is there to make us laugh and “has no resemblance to any real life person.” The idea came to Croitoru after posting a similar stick figure meme on his gaming page . The “Be Like Bill” version blew up so he and Nath made a separate page from there. Both versions seem to be very popular, but the “Be Like Me” meme, some outlets say was created a mere 48 hours ago, is the one covering my feed – and only highlights our enthusiasm to glorify ourselves on social media. Did it catch on based on our need to share with the world what we do and do not do right? It’s tough to say what made this one catch – or what makes any meme go viral. But what can be said is that this meme will likely go the way of all the others and be over by next weekend. The haters will have to find a new meme to groan over then.
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Harry Stebbings
| 2,016 | 1 | 22 | null |
“Fast Fashion” Jewelry Biz BaubleBar Grabs Another $20 Million
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
E-commerce shop , known for its “fast fashion” take on women’s jewelry, has closed on $20 million in new funding, the company announced today. The Series C round was led by prior investors, Accel Partners, Greycroft Partners, Burch Creative Capital and Aspect Ventures, but also includes new investors who will bring expertise in international expansions and large-scale operations, the company says. These new investors include strategic partners Hubert Burda Media and DSW. Co-founded by longtime friends Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky, whose backgrounds were in banking and private equity, BaubleBar is meant to satisfy consumer demand for fashionable jewelry pieces that don’t break the bank. But more importantly, BaubleBar is focused on reacting to current market trends and then delivering product with a faster turnaround than its traditional competitors. In the past, Jain said that the company’s compressed supply chain could see jewelry going from the design process to sale in as little as four weeks. Technology continues to play a large role in BaubleBar’s business, Yacobovsky says. “We are a highly tech-enabled business, touching everything from our shopping platform, which now includes a mobile app, to our logistics systems,” she tells TechCrunch. “We fulfill and ship all of our orders out of our owned Brooklyn distribution center, so having the right software to manage that is critical. We also rely very heavily on data to ensure we are able to fully benefit from our compressed product lifecycle, and are creating product that meets [consumers’] current demands.” The company’s primary demographic is the 25- to 40-year old female shopper, who lives in a metro area and is fairly digitally savvy. These women often find items on social media and shop across platforms, including both web and mobile. In addition to being sold online, BaubleBar has relationships with several retailers including Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, and Anthropologie, all of whom now sell its products in stores. And more recently, the company . These include like decked-out selfie sticks, phone cases, glittery charging cables and earbuds, and gold power packs and speakers, for example. However, Yacobovsky says that these wholesale relationships today account for less 10 percent of BaubleBar’s overall business. That’s down from – an indication of the company’s growing e-commerce success. In addition to offering its jewelry for sale on the site, BaubleBar also . Shoppers can chat or email the company for help – even by sending in photos of an outfit, video chat to see the pieces live on a person, and track products on Instagram. Yacobovsky declined to provide any metrics on customer base, growth or revenue, however. She notes that BaubleBar’s current focus is on expanding its existing retail relationships and growing its direct-to-consumer channels. With the additional funding, BaubleBar is not doing significant hiring to grow its now 150-person team, but is rather using the new capital to further scale. “We have historically seen a lot of success investing in both marketing concurrently with software and systems that help us to scale smarter,” says Yacobovsky. “We will be continue to invest in both as part of this next round.”
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SAP Melds Social And Learning In New Tool
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
For many years, we’ve had social tools and formal learning management systems, but we have never really had anything that combined the two — until today, that is when SAP announced a new system called SAP Jam Collaboration for learning. The new tool is designed to bring various aspects of corporate learning together in a more social setting. It uses SAP Jam as a platform that combines user content, mentoring, communities and formal learning systems, also called Learning Management Systems or LMSs for short. While learning and employee engagement are normally on the periphery of executive concern, Sameer Patel, senior vice president and general manager for collaboration and communities at SAP says as companies are forced to respond to disruptive forces in the market, executives need to pay more attention to knowledge management and shared learning in the company. “The system was designed to bring the best brains to every problem,” Patel said. SAP is trying to achieve this by fusing social with learning and employee engagement, so for every subject of interest you can combine practical experience with formal classroom training and peer mentoring, Patel explained. The latter point is especially important here. “There is as much to learn from experienced employees, but how do you bring that to the formal learning experience? You need to find experts and broaden topics from not just taking courses, but from individuals who have valuable nuggets of experience,” he explained. In practical terms that involves creating learning communities that link to an LMS, while letting people collaborate and share around that. It could mean surfacing relevant course materials or offering ways to share user-generated expert videos or identifying people who are available as mentors. It also involves making it simpler to sign up for courses and see what people are saying about them. According to (ASTD pdf) it costs more than $1700 an hour to develop training, regardless of the quality. Yet, the training can often sit inside a big organization with employees having no way of knowing what’s out there. By combining it with a social platform like SAP Jam, it gives a structure for the training inside a social community that employees may be using anyway. SAP believes you can reduce the overall cost and increase interest with this approach In many ways, it’s trying to bring back the notion of knowledge management. In the 1990s, companies tried (and often failed) to create databases outlining people’s experience. More recently Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools were supposed to expose this information in the community. To some extent, both approaches didn’t do the job. In the first it was simply too much to ask employees to share what they knew in an explicit fashion, and in the second the data could get lost in the onslaught of social traffic. What this system does is combine the best of these worlds, giving people access to mentors and experts within the context of a particular learning discussion, surfacing their expertise so that users don’t have to explicitly look for it. When you combine that with the formal classes in place and user-generated content, it begins to fill in a much bigger picture than any of these pieces could have done on their own. The proof of course will be in the practice and how well it improves on past attempts to bring knowledge and learning under control. If it works as described, it could solve a deeply rooted problem around surfacing knowledge in the enterprise.
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Why Cars Must Follow Mobile’s Disruption Curve In 2016
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Yo Koga
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
With connected entertainment, driverless technology, a revolution in car-hailing and the fumes from VW’s emissions scandal still lingering, 2016 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for the auto industry. As the auto industry approaches its one-hundredth birthday, it’s crucial it keeps up with the disruption that has hit other industries. GM’s of the now defunct Sidecar team is an indication automakers have started to dip their toes in the otherwise unfamiliar waters of Silicon Valley, recognizing there’s value to be had in the tech community. Our only comfort is that we’ve been here before. The telecom industry was also once on the cusp of change. The rise of mobility, and the trend lines smartphones have followed in the last decade, now show us the road that may lay ahead for cars. Polarization of high and low ends When Apple launched the first iPhone in 2007, it pretty much had the smartphone market all to itself, by introducing a new standard of what we could expect in the way of features from our mobile devices. Since then, in the smartphone market, competing with Apple to introduce the fastest and flashiest systems with each new model. As a result of this competition to build the most technologically advanced smartphone, some mobile manufacturers are going above and beyond what is necessary. Sony, for instance, a 4K resolution on one of its new smartphone screens. A 4K resolution would be barely noticeable on a 60-inch TV, never mind a 6-inch mobile screen. In response, we’ve seen manufacturers like Huawei, Xiaomi and OnePlus prove that if you keep production costs low you can offer advanced technology at more attractive pricing.These companies are establishing themselves by offering smartphone at a fraction of the cost of the high-end models, with “good enough” technology. This segmentation of the market allows users to only pay for the features they use – the avid photographer can buy the $700 smartphone with a 16MP camera, while the rest of us can pay half of that for the 5MP camera, which is all we need. While iPhone remains priced at a premium, upstarts have found a way to offer equivalent features at a fraction of the price. This market diversity is coming to cars, too. While the high-end segment in first-world markets will adopt electrical and self-driving cars, the bulk of automotive growth in the next 50 years is predicted to come from emerging markets. Here, drivers may not own a Jaguar or Tesla but will have a vehicle with just enough tech to offer the basic comfort and safety features, leaving the rest for the user to customize as they choose. You can already see this segmentation taking place. Just look at the competent infotainment systems in Vauxhall’s budget in the U.K. or Mahindra’s in India, for instance, which offer the same new technology that less in-tuned consumers are getting in new vehicles. Big auto will partner with small startups When it comes to innovation, the established car makers have shown little ability to change in line with consumer interests. Recent innovations have been reactive, tweaking a new model in response to the latest financial or safety scandal rather than pushing hard to update its technology. History tells us that’s a fool’s errand. Nokia and BlackBerry ruled the handset business, but failed to shift gears when iPhone shook things up, remaining wedded to their keyboards, even as consumers moved on to touch screens. Automakers must realize the shifts already taking place in their industry. For consumers, the value of cars is moving away from the act of driving. What they now want is highly technologically centric vehicles that look, feel and act like the kinds of online services and consumer electronics they use every day. To differentiate, smarter car makers will race to offer these features in 2016. But having stalled on rolling out connected car features so far, their track record shows they will need to build with friends on board. Just as Apple acquired Siri and Google bought in the precursor to its Maps, car makers may need to invest, partner or acquire to tool up. Cars, like smartphones, will become commoditized While many mobile makers once battled to mimic the iPhone, today differentiation is the leading trend in smartphones, largely thanks to open-source technology. Mobile-centric, in-car entertainment systems improve manufacturers’ proprietary systems by orders of magnitude. But their emergence seems fixed on just two standards: Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto. These systems enable drivers to connect their smartphones, enabling their devices to become part of the car instead of just an accessory. We’re likely to see many more in the next 10 years. Android has changed mobile not because it runs on a single product but because its open-source underbelly is customized and remodeled by all manner of smartphone makers. The same is likely to happen in the car, where open-source systems will allow automakers to benefit from modern, future-proof connectivity all while maintaining unique identities and even features. This integration also enables automakers to seamlessly issue updates to its technology, keeping pace with its competitors’ technological developments without forcing consumers to buy a new vehicle. We are still waiting to see this unifying, enabling framework emerge. But the first car company that offers an open-source in-car system can expect rapid migration of consumers from automakers’ own, expensive preconfigured offerings to cheaper and more easily customized cars.
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TechCrunch Giveaway: Win 2 Tickets To The RSA Conference
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TechCrunch
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
The folks at RSA want to give one TechCrunch reader a pair of full conference passes to the 2016 in San Francisco (a $4,590 value). The tech conference runs from February 29 – March 4 in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. The winner will have access to over 400 sessions, will be able to explore over 500 exhibitors and watch the top 10 finalists battle for the title of Most Innovative Startup at the RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest. Now, some details on the contest and how to enter:
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Lydia Becomes A Serious Alternative To Cash To Pay Back Your Friends In France
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
French startup has come a long way. When I first covered it , it wanted to become a sort of Venmo for France. Now, Lydia tries to cover a wide array of use cases when it comes to sending or requesting money. Today’s update goes one step further. I’ve tried using Lydia with my friends. Some of them instantly get it. Others are reluctant, don’t want to sign up or give up after a couple of transfers. Starting today, it’s much easier to send money to people who don’t use Lydia yet. In France, wire transfers using someone’s are free. That’s why most people still use wire transfers when they need to pay someone back. And yet, adding a new contact in your wire transfer list is a cumbersome process. With Lydia, you can now send money to anyone. If they have a Lydia account, the money will automatically appear in their Lydia account. If they don’t, they’ll receive a text message with a link. When you follow this link, you can enter your IBAN and receive a wire transfer from Lydia. It’s much easier for everyone involved. If you’re requesting money, it’s even simpler as non-Lydia user receive a text message with a link to enter their credit or debit card information. And the best part is that all of this remains free. Lydia has found a great way to associate a phone number with an IBAN and/or credit card, making it much easier to sign up later. Lydia has been focused on growth for the past couple of years. The company is leading when it comes to smartphone payments in France with 1,000 signups per day, but it has yet to become mainstream. That’s why Lydia now offers different products. You can pay back your friends, pay for your school parties, pay in some shops, pay online, organize money pots for a birthday and more. Lydia isn’t just about peer-to-peer payments anymore, it’s about replacing your cash and credit card. It’s a long and winding road, but the startup is doing everything to change your habits when it comes to payments.
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Chelsea Handler’s New App “Gotta Go” Gets You Out Of Awkward Situations
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
Chelsea Handler’s new mobile application has hit the App Store. The humorous, but also potentially practical, app is designed to get you out of awkward situations – like bad dates or boring meetings, for example. The launch coincides with the debut of Handler’s new Netflix series, , which began streaming over the weekend. The app’s creation and design was featured in the second episode, , where the technically disinclined comedian attempts to get a handle on what technology is doing to both our culture and our minds. Much of the episode involves Handler’s own complaints about how confusing technology is, and how it never seems to work properly for her. But she also drops in on a few tech-focused companies in the area, including Netflix, Twitter and Wired – the former where a patient and amused CEO Reed Hastings tries explaining to Handler what streaming actually . Some of the jokes Handler makes in the episode fall flat – she mispronounces “Silicon” as “silicone,” for instance, and later uses her new Gotta Go app to get her out of one of the aforementioned “terrible” situations – a coding class for kids. That seems to miss the mark about what’s worthy of poking fun on in the Valley. By spending time picking on the fact that today’s bright kids are becoming literate in technology (one kid even likens it to learning a new language), she misses the opportunity to skewer the more troublesome aspects of Valley culture. For instance, the bubble effect where some tech entrepreneurs are disconnected with the needs and desires of a mainstream user base is one area that Handler – with her supposed tech frustrations – could have easily tackled. Still, Handler’s attempt at building a mobile app people may truly like went better than expected. The comedian San Francisco-based software product strategy, design and development firm on the project. For Yeti, a firm that does R&D work with companies like Google, Qualcomm and Alcatel-Lucent, Gotta Go was a fun side project for them – and one that recalls Yeti President Tony Scherba’s past where he once built apps and websites for music celebs, including Britney Spears, Bob Dylan, Dave Matthews, the Beastie Boys and others. Though discussions about building the app have been underway for a year, the app development only took a couple of months, says Scherba. In the episode, Handler discusses the app’s concept with Yeti’s team – including one meeting where she totes along a kid who does a better job of speaking the language of app development than Handler apparently does. This, too, is meant to be funny – a kid in a meeting! – but, in reality, the child speaks fairly intelligently about the product’s feature set and Yeti team members barely react to the pint-sized speaker, and instead quickly move to follow-up questions after just a few smiles. However, the result of Handler and Yeti’s efforts is a pretty clever little app that lets you generate excuses and set alarms for text messages and calls. To use Gotta Go, you tap on the emoji associated with the excuse you want to use, add the contact number to your address book, and set the alarm. The excuses then come in as real phone calls and texts you can show to your companions to get you out of the bad situation. Handler herself even narrates the calls, telling you what to say to your companion. (Some pauses between instructions would have been nice, though.) The pre-built excuses are useful enough – a car being towed or a missing pet, for example. More importantly, though, they’re customizable. That makes the app more practical than being just the celeb marketing vehicle it would otherwise seem. However, the concept itself is not original – apps that fake a call or a text have existed for some time, and there are dozens in the App Store today. Plus, apps that offer you gracious ways to exit bad situations are not likely to be the sort of thing you need to use on a regular basis, which limits Gotta Go’s potential. Also, unfortunately, we found the verification code process during sign-up was experiencing delays during tests. We had to wait 15 minutes, then try again to get the code to come through. That said, reception to Gotta Go’s launch has been decent – it hit No. 14 on the App Store’s Lifestyle chart on Sunday, thanks to the Netflix show. And now, says Scherba, Gotta Go is generating a massive phone bill for Yeti. “We have one of the largest telephone bills in the country right now because we’re calling and texting people,” Scherba says. ( is powering the app’s backend.) “We maxed out our phone bill this weekend, and we started getting flagged by carriers because it was too popular. We were sending too many text messages.” The team has now resolved that problem, he adds. Yeti, which was compensated for building Gotta Go more in terms of exposure if not cash, will continue to maintain the app. But whether it will be expanded or improved will be determined by whether or not people continue to use it. “It’s an experiment…we’re taking an organic approach to the whole thing. It’s about having fun…we’re going to see how it sticks,” says Scherba. Gotta Go is a on iTunes. [gallery ids="1267423,1267420,1267419,1267421,1267422"]
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Mark Zuckerberg Is Back To Work
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
Earlier this morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Facebook that he’s headed back to work this morning after a two-month-long paternity leave, asking — alongside a of a closet full of identical T-shirts and hoodies — “What should I wear?” (Already with the dad jokes!) Zuck’s got dad jokes for days — Maya Kosoff (@mekosoff) Zuckerberg was the first public company CEO to announce he’d be taking a couple of months off to spend time with his (very cute) new baby, daughter Max. But he could have taken off twice as much time, per Facebook’s newest parental leave policy, in November.
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Technology Is Powering A New American Century, And The World Will Benefit
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Vivek Wadhwa
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
, Americans become incredibly pessimistic. They begin to believe the nation is falling behind in competitiveness and innovation, that their children will not be as well off as they themselves have been, and that some other country will own the future. They fear that the U.S. will go the way of the British Empire in the 20th century. This may be the country’s greatest advantage, because it engenders a level of humility and a drive to constantly reinvent itself. But the fears are completely unfounded. The United States is in fact in the middle of a dramatic revival and rejuvenation, propelled by an amazing wave of technological innovations. These breakthroughs are delivering the enormous productivity gains and dramatic cost savings needed to sustain economic growth and prosperity. And they are enabling entrepreneurs to solve the grand challenges of humanity, the problems that have always bedeviled the human race: disease, hunger, clean water, energy, education, and security. Through advances in computing whose rate of acceleration Moore’s Law describes, faster computers are being used to design faster computers. These faster computers, in turn, are making it possible to design new forms of energy, smaller and more powerful sensors, artificial-intelligence software that can interpret the massive amounts of information that we are gathering, and robots that can do the mundane work of humans. It is even becoming possible to redesign human cells and other organisms. Almost all fields of science are becoming digitized, enabling them to start advancing at exponential rates. The really good news is that the world will share in the prosperity that this American reinvention is creating. There are 1.2 billion people with no connection to a power grid, for example, and another 2.5 billion who can get power only intermittently and so use fuels such as kerosene for lamps. Kerosene is a dirty fuel that, to , costs $10 per kilowatt–hour— which is about 50 times more than Americans pay for their energy. Worse, kerosene fires are epidemic in Africa, and their toxic fumes cause respiratory ailments that kill hundreds of thousands per year. This is all about to change: within a decade and a half, we will have the ability to harness the power of the sun and wind to provide 100% of the planet’s energy needs. The cost of clean energy will fall to the point that it seems free. We will be able to light up every corner of the globe and allow children in Africa to be able to study when they get home, to equip all homes with heating and air conditioning, and to produce unlimited food and clean water. Desalination plants have so far struggled to get funded, because they are power hungry. This makes water production through desalination prohibitively expensive. When power costs decline by 30% to 40%, desalination will become an economical option; when they approach zero, which will happen, coastal zones will become water-rich regions. We will be able to remove environmentally damaging dams and transport water everywhere. Despite the recent El Niño, California is still suffering from an extreme drought. Farmers and city-dwellers are fighting over water rights; where I live, in Silicon Valley, some towns have dramatically increased water rates—affecting rich and poor residents alike. The doomsayers are warning that California will need to change forever and that it will need to stop growing fruits, vegetables, and almonds. With almost free energy and desalination, though, Sacramento River Delta will easily afford to grow rice, and the San Joaquin Valley can grow more almonds. Affordable smartphones are also becoming available world-wide, connecting the human race as never before. When Silicon Valley companies succeed in perfecting their drones, balloons, and microsatellites later in this decade, they will be able to blanket the Earth with Internet access, thereby providing everyone with access to a sea of knowledge. Communities across the globe will be able to learn from each other, participate in the global economy, and uplift themselves. With the and with that connect to smartphones, our entire health-care system is about to be upended. We are moving into an era of data-driven, crowdsourced, participatory, genomics-based medicine. Just as our bathroom scales give us instant readings of our weight, devices we wear on our wrists or ingest into our bodies will monitor our health and warn us when we are about to get sick. Artificial intelligence–based applications will prescribe medicines or lifestyle changes holistically, on the basis of our full medical history, habits, and genetic makeup. This is a good thing, because health care is a misnomer for our medical system: it should be called sick care. Doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies only make money when we are in bad health. The technology industry, which is creating these advances, is however motivated to help us prevent illness and disease and stay healthy in the first place—so we can surf the Internet more and download more apps. Advances in and 3D printing will also, over the next decade, change the way in which we manufacture products that we use every day. Our home 3D printers will produce our toothbrushes, clothing, and even our food. Robots will soon start driving our cars and stocking shelves in supermarkets, and will care for the elderly and provide companionship. America is leading the world in technology advances, but innovation is happening everywhere. It is an unstoppable force, one that will create great opportunities and disruptions. Entire industries will be wiped out as new ones are created. Jobs such as taxi driver and machinist will be , and a few new ones will emerge. We will find solutions to the grand challenges of humanity, and everything will be more affordable, but income inequality will rise because the creators of the new technologies will be the ones most to gain financially. As America turns 250 a decade from now, it is going to be a time to reflect on how far the country has come and what has made it what it is. But it will be past time too to foresee the effects of technology changes and to prepare for a future far different from anything we have imagined. Management consulting firm A.T. Kearney has presented four for the United States, from “twilight’s last gleaming” to “so gallantly streaming”. Anything is possible, and that is why we need to change the national dialog now from one that is bogged down in pessimism to one in which we discuss how we make the most of the amazing opportunities ahead.
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Bitfinder’s $199 Smart Air Monitor Knows That Looks Matter
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
that I think long and hard about the air in my apartment. It’s air. But then again, I wouldn’t drink murky water, so why is it that I don’t remember to care about what goes in my lungs? The , a smart air monitor from BitFinder, is looking to bring the flair back to air. There are toxins in the air from chemical-based cleaners, plus dust and other general imperfections like a lack of humidity. The Awair gives you a read out on all of the different qualities of your air, grading your space on humidity, dust, VOCs, temperature and CO2. The device then makes suggestions based on your air quality score, all through a paired mobile app. It will tell you to buy a humidifier or switch to cleaners with less harmful chemicals. But the Bitfinder Awair goes beyond simply measuring the air quality and making suggestions to improve it. The device can actually help you target specific issues, like a tough time sleeping or various allergens. Users can set various goals like sleep, allergens, or productivity. For example, a user with Eczema could set their device to the Sleep preference and actively monitor the VOCs and humidity levels in the home. If you’ve set up any IoT device in your home before, like a Canary or Amazon Echo, this should be a piece of cake. Once you’ve downloaded the app, plug the device into an outlet in the wall and it should immediately display a four-digit pin with the LEDs on the front side of the Awair. Once you pair with Bluetooth by punching in the code (registering your device) you can use the app to connect the air monitor to your Wifi network. From there, you simply list your preferences and tell the Awair which room it’s living in, as well as your general location (ex.: Brooklyn, NY). quick note: if you unplug the Awair and place it in a new room, you’ll have to go through the setup process again. The look of the Awair makes a big difference for this little device. Prime billing in the smart home usually goes to a thermostat, a home security system, or something more utility-friendly like the Amazon Echo. But the Awair stands out by looking like something you’d put in your home anyway, even if it wasn’t checking for air quality. It looks like a little clock radio with LEDs shining out of the white front-side of the device. These LEDs can be set to show your Awair score, or simply display the time. The company is also beta testing a feature that will allow you to switch between displays by simply knocking on the top of the monitor. That way, a user can have the Awair set to show the time, and periodically knock to check the air score without diving into the app. With the simple, almost mid-century design and the use of wood, the Awair is quite the beauty when it comes to connected gadgets, which usually end up looking more like gadgets than home furnishings. If you’re an indoor smoker who gets a kick out of Windex, chances are the Awair isn’t right for you, unless you’re looking for a chic-yet-expensive digital clock. But if air quality is a concern for you, whether because of allergies or sensitive skin or a general focus on health, the Awair is a pretty small price to pay for peace of mind.
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Microsoft’s Personal Assistant Tech, Cortana, Now Generates Reminders From Emails
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
Microsoft’s personal assistant tech Cortana is getting a few more feathers in its cap, with the company rolling out the ability to push reminders to users based on their emails. Users of the Windows Insider early access program will get the feature first — followed in future, Microsoft , to all users of Windows 10. So if you’re the kind of person who’s so busy with work you forget to buy the cinema tickets to go on that date with your S.O. then Cortana can now step in and help to save your marriage by digitally reminding you there’s more to life than answering work emails. It can also do the same for specific work commitments, creating reminders based on the wording of your emails — so if you often message your boss to say you’ll deliver ‘such and such a report by so and so a day’, yet promptly forget to add this to your calendar, Microsoft’s digi-assistant can help by scanning your emails for key phrases and offering to create reminders for stuff you’ve promised to do. Microsoft is calling this new feature ‘Commitments’, and says it was developed in conjunction with its Microsoft Research division. The emphasis here, as with all these digital assistant technologies, is — although there’s always a sensitive balancing act to pull off when it comes to generating useful timely reminders but doing so in a way that’s light-touch and hassle free (and which avoids being creepy). If you don’t like the idea of Cortana scanning your email — or of a robotic assistant popping up with ‘shall I create a reminder for this?’ suggestions — you can at least turn it off. Scans are also apparently performed locally, according to Microsoft’s Marcus Ash talking to the , with reminder details only sent to Microsoft’s servers after you agree to have a reminder created. Another new feature coming in this Cortana update is increased sensitivity to a user’s calendaring routines — meaning the tech can analyze when a person prefers to have meetings and flag up any requests landing outside their usual time slots. Cortana started life on Microsoft’s Windows Phone smartphones as a voice assistant aiming to rival Apple’s Siri, Google Now et al. But with Microsoft’s mobile project so stalled in marketshare terms Cortana was expanded to its full-fat desktop OS last year. Redmond demoed the integration in January and rolled it out gradually to different regions over the course of 2015. Last year it also expanded to and — chasing the bulk of smartphone users. It said today it intends to keep evolving the tech to “continue to refine Cortana’s intelligence and add new capabilities”. If it can’t own the mobile platform, Redmond at least wants a shot at earning indispensability as an app (and the still extensive reach of Windows gives it the chance to familiarize users of other mobile platforms with what Cortana can do). Albeit, there’s plenty of other tech giants vying for the same trophy. One of whom — Facebook — is even at the problem. So Cortana can’t rest on its laurels.
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Apply Now For Disrupt NY 2016 Startup Battlefield
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Samantha O'Keefe
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
Applications are for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt NY! That’s right, TechCrunch’s premier startup competition is headed back to the Big Apple. We’re looking for the best up-and-coming companies to launch on the most visible stage in tech and compete for a cash prize of $50,000 and the illustrious Disrupt Cup. Why apply? Aside from stage time and feedback from judges like Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, our Startup Battlefield teams have a lot more behind the scenes to be pumped about. For starters, companies receive pitch coaching from TechCrunch to ensure their pitches knock the socks off our judges. Teams will also receive a free booth in the Battlefield section of Startup Alley to network their way to glory, as well as the opportunity to rub elbows with our speakers and judges at our VIP events. Disrupt NY will take place May 9-11 at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Brooklyn. Apply now to launch on the same stage as 2014’s , Zenefits, Google’s , Vurb and our favorite way to . The Battlefield is open to startups in any vertical, hardware or software, consumer or enterprise, bootstrapped or seed- or Series A-funded. In selecting participants, we give heavy preference to companies that launch Full eligibility rules can be found . Teams around the globe are welcome to submit their startups for consideration. Applications are only open until February 22 at 9 p.m. PST and it’s in your best interest to submit early.
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OpenGov’s Zac Bookman On Doing “About the Hardest Thing”: Trying To Transform U.S. Governments
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 |
You may have heard about it already. is a nearly four-year-old, cloud-based platform that state and local governments — as well as cities, counties, and school districts — are beginning to use for financial and other performance intelligence. OpenGov’s big idea: to enable these public administrators to see what’s going on internally and to communicate their findings to elected officials, all with the aim of helping each of them operate more effectively (and reduce waste). Investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Formation 8 and Thrive Capital like the idea so much, they’ve already plugged nearly $50 million into the company, which says it’s now working with 750 entities around the country. Still, what OpenGov wants to do is easier said than done. In Davos last week, we sat down with the company’s CEO and cofounder, Zac Bookman, to delve into just how big a mountain the company is having to climb to realize its vision. (You can skip to around the 3:30 mark to jump past some of the small talk.)
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Crunch Report | Tony Fadell Exits Nest
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Are buyouts the new IPOs?
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
Buyouts may replace IPOs as the exit of choice for tech companies in the coming months. This comes as the number of startups With only and poor market returns for the majority of those already public, companies are turning elsewhere to cash in on their efforts. Just this week, analytics firm was acquired by for $3 billion after a mostly successful IPO in 2010 followed by five years of turbulence. Another private equity firm, , has gobbled up three tech companies in the last six weeks. First, SaaS events management platform sold for $1.35 billion, followed by marketing automation platform for and identity management firm for a sum that has yet to be announced. Ping Identity’s sale is unique in that the company skipped the IPO process entirely, instead opting to be acquired by the San Francisco-based software and technology private equity firm. “My eyes started to open up to what was happening and the advantages of growth private equity,” said Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity. “I think about how history could have played out and I now look at this and think growth private equity is the new IPO.” Durand told TechCrunch back in October 2015 that he reasonably believed an IPO would be possible for the company in . “In this case, I look at this outcome and actually see it as superior. The liquidity here was significantly faster than in the public markets, market timing not withstanding,” added Durand. Durand also said that nothing precludes the possibility of an IPO later once the company has more scale. Not only is Ping unique in being acquired by a private equity firm while still private, it is also one of a small number of tech companies with notably robust financials. “We were not burning cash, nobody was afraid we would go under or have a down round. We were past that. This was not a conversation around fear,” said Durand. Moving forward from Ping Identity’s surprising acquisition, the question remains of whether tech unicorns will begin considering private equity as a viable means of exit. Private equity has more than enough dry powder to begin making more moves in the technology sector. “In the last 12-18 months, private equity had $15 billion dollars going after tech companies with total dry powder available sitting between $300 and $400 billion,” said Richard Davis of . “In theory this is enough to take every software company on the planet private, except giants like Microsoft.” Larger private equity firms like KKR and can be expected to hop on the tech acquisition bandwagon in the coming months. They are going to want to buy companies that are pretty close to making money, it’s harder if you’re losing tons and tons of money,” continued Davis. While short-term memory loss is epidemic in the valley, private equity has historically stepped in to return order to inefficient markets. “It’s like how a forest fire clears out the underbrush,” said Davis. In 2005, Canaccord Genuity began tracking business software companies that had undergone an IPO. Within 10 years, 78 percent of the 95 software companies they were tracking had been acquired. Despite such staggering numbers, some tech unicorns are more ripe for buyout than others. “Some may end up here because public markets are not available but I’m not sure how a private equity investor would look at the cash requirement,” added Durand. Some unicorns have hit multiples of 12-15X revenue. Public companies average 5X revenue multiples. This discrepancy may be enough to scare potential buyers away, but if exit opportunities continue to become more limited, companies may be forced to take what they can get at lower valuations.
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Hey, I’m John, a new summer writing intern at TechCrunch
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
Hi, I’m John and I am super pumped to be TechCrunch’s new summer writing intern. As a venture-capital-obsessed , I’m thrilled to be thawing out in the startup mecca of SOMA, San Francisco. I hail from Montgomery County, Maryland, where my belief in youth rights and public education brought me on the Montgomery County Board of Education (shout-out to fellow SMOB alums turned technologists: and !) My first tech gig was consulting my elementary school teachers on how to play Bill Nye VHS tapes. I dropped my first seed investment (undisclosed) on a group of ambitious middle schoolers disrupting global lemonade-stand sales. One day I will uncover how humans work, how to manage my tabs and how to keep espresso from foaming over when mixing it with sparkling water. I enjoy stress-testing technology to its limits ( ), creative cooking with rare botanicals and spontaneous adventures — like spur-of-the-moment mountain climbing and late-night forest exploration. Please email me at if you would like to chat or grab coffee. You can also tweet at me and check out my .
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Tony Fadell exits Nest, Marwan Fawaz to step in as CEO
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
Can’t say we saw this coming. In on the official Nest blog, co-founder Tony Fadell announced that he will be exiting his role as CEO of Nest, in favor of an advisory role at the company’s parent, Alphabet. According to Fadell, “This will give me the time and flexibility to pursue new opportunities to create and disrupt other industries – and to support others who want to do the same – just as we’ve done at Nest.” Industry vet Marwan Fawaz will be stepping into Fadell’s role as head of the smart home device maker. Fadell again, “Marwan’s extensive technology and engineering knowledge, his experience with global service providers, as well as his background in connected home platforms will be valuable in continuing our trajectory, especially in scaling the business, working with our partners, and supporting our enterprise channels.” 1/2: What a ride! Proud of what we’ve built ! Great team, business, products, awesome roadmap & momentum — Tony Fadell (@tfadell) Fawaz has extensive experience in executive positions, having worked at Charter, ADT and Motorola Home. He served as CEO of the latter, back when the company was still a part of the Google family, a position that no doubt helped qualify him for his big new gig. Fadell, for his part, has helped lead Nest Labs since the beginning, forming the company with fellow Apple ex-pat Matt Rogers in 2010. It began life as a , later diversifying into smoke detectors with the , along with the Nest Cam security camera, a result of its . Nest itself was earlier that same year for $3.2 billion. 2/2: Thanks to the millions of customers, all our partners & developers and Larry for sharing our vision! — Tony Fadell (@tfadell) In his post, Fadell noted that the transition “has been in progress since late last year.” The move comes on the heels of in the company he helped found. In today, the executive largely defended the decisions he made during his time at Nest in the face of such criticism. “We have a road map,” he told the site. “You know, people don’t see that, but we have a road map that’s really well-established and understood and teams are working on those products. We have lots of products coming and services coming. People will say, ‘Oh, oh, oh, they didn’t ship enough product.’ Well, guess what? We have shipped product. We shipped a lot of product. We shipped a lot of software. Oh, they’re going to say, ‘This business isn’t healthy.’ Well, guess what? We have great revenues and great growth on the business.” Fadell added that he plans to continue investing in companies with “disruptive ideas that can change the world in a positive way” while he continues his role advising Larry Page and Alphabet. Since first reporting the news, Nest has reached out with additional statements from Fadell and Page. Here’s Larry: And Tony:
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VOEZ is an addictive anime-themed rhythm game
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Felicia Shivakumar
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
is a new game out of Taiwan that is climbing the app gaming charts. It is part Rock Band, part DDR, but in a karaoke-esque setting. Put simply, VOEZ is an anime-themed rhythm game. You need to tap, hold and swipe as colorful commands fall to the target line. There are only a few different moves, but the difficulty of the game increases as you move on to more and more intense tracks. One thing that felt different to me is how the fall lines shift and move as you play the level. Unlike Rock Band where the gameplay is static, there is something ethereal about how the levels shift, pulsate and expand as you play. Making the game extra challenging, to me at least, were the hard-to-spot white dots and the slide hold that shifts the track as you play. These were the game mechanics that tripped me up the most, but also make it more fun. I was a bit surprised that I not only loved this game but that I was quite good at it. Despite the club-esque dance beats (which made me feel a bit like a DJ), there is something to the rhythmic play of the game that makes it equal parts exhilarating and relaxing. I tried the game on both my iPhone SE and full-sized iPad and learned that VOEZ is way easier and more fun on a smallish phone. You can enjoy unlimited play of approximately 10 free songs that rotate through. If you love a certain level, you need to purchase a “key” to unlock the song permanently. Songs range from mellow pop, rock or intense techno. Song lyrics aren’t in English, but don’t worry, you can watch tutorials and navigate the game in four different languages, including English. VOEZ is the second successful game from Taipei-based developer . After their prior hit with , a similar-styled rhythm game, the company is back with something different enough that it doesn’t feel like a sequel, but in the same vein. An important thing to note is that you need to be on Wi-Fi to download the game. The main app will require about 200MB of space, with each additional song taking up another 5MB or so. And that’s about it. VOEZ is fun and free on both and . So the real question is whether or not you like it enough to make space on your phone.
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Recharge, used to book hotel rooms by the minute, raises $2.3 million
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
, a year-old, San Francisco-based company whose app enables users to book a stay in a hotel for just 67 cents a minute, or $40 an hour, has closed on $2.3 million in seed funding. Binary Capital led the round, with participation from Floodgate, entrepreneur Rick Marini, Eniac VC, Expansion VC, entrepreneur-investor Scott Banister and early Google engineer Harry Cheung. We talked with the company and, at the time, it had already partnered with Hyatt and Starwood Properties in San Francisco, where a Recharge user can stay as long as he or she likes and the hotel will clean the room afterward. In a quick exchange this morning, CEO Emmanuel Bamfo told us that more properties are coming online soon, but he declined to discuss the details. splits the revenue with each property, depending on the day and time and time of the month that the hotel’s rooms are being booked. When we interviewed Recharge, we noted that the app could appeal to people looking to conduct extracurricular activities during working hours (wink), something its hotel partners might not like for long. But Bamfo and Recharge’s new investors clearly see the app as having far broader appeal. Think of the person who works far from home and wants to shower before a business dinner, or who wants to practice a speech, or who’d like to breastfeed a baby in privacy. Certainly, hotels seem to like the prospect of making better use of their empty rooms. Yet another startup, , has inked partnerships with several hotels in New York, San Francisco and L.A. that allow users to book a hotel during working hours rather than overnight. The key word in its marketing materials: daycation.
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Alan Patricof
| 2,016 | 1 | 25 | null |
Airbnb begins testing City Hosts program to give guests guided one-of-a-kind experiences
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
has long lauded their ability to give guests really unique vacation experiences that go beyond just staying in bland and forgettable hotel rooms. Now the company is looking to revitalize the entire travel experience by giving guests the option to experience city life with specialized guided experiences. The house-sharing service has launched a private beta of a new program called City Hosts which allows Airbnb guests to go beyond lodging and rent private tour guides to show them the hidden gems of the area they’re in. The private beta currently allows access to City Hosts available in San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, Paris and Tokyo. Airbnb wants to inject itself more into the experience of people’s vacations. The interface bares a sharp resemblance to Netflix and in a lot of ways that’s how Airbnb is treating this program: giving users the ability to choose custom entertainment experiences simply. There are currently 36 experiences available and they all honestly sound pretty awesome, ranging from adventures with a kite surfer in SF, Vietnamese cooking lessons with a Parisian chef and tours through London’s Grime music scene with a record scout. The experiences are charged per guest and you need to book a place to stay through Airbnb in the city of the experience. Depending on the City Host you choose, you may be sharing the tour with other Airbnb guests or you may have the whole experience to yourself. Someone wanting to go on the “Art Luminary” City Host experience in Tokyo will pay $250 per guest and will, in turn, be given a tour of the city by Yoko, a local art curator. Guests can expect to spend about 3 hours a day for four days with Yoko checking our local art galleries, meeting with artists and bonding at little-known restaurants and bars. Most of the costs of the experience are covered by the initial payment. Though this program is still in its incredibly early stages, it suggests a definite widening of mindset for Airbnb which is attempting to command even more of the vacation experience of its users. It also gives guests a more activity-focused way to select when and where they travel. After booking an experience, the site will give you a list of spots close to the action where you can book a few nights to stay. City Hosts’ scalability is something to wonder about. It’s clear the company has put a lot of work into gathering and vetting some of the cooler custom experiences in these cities, but one wonders whether the company would open this up to all users wanting to show off their cities. Many of the experiences will not be available until later this summer.
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Navy researchers develop ‘Iron Man’ style in-helmet HUD for divers
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
Researchers at the U.S. Navy have created a high-tech, in-helmet display for divers in the service that looks like something out of “Iron Man” — perhaps one of Stark’s early prototypes. The invention could make divers safer and more effective, and it definitely looks cool. If you’ve ever been diving, you know it’s (usually) a pleasant experience, but a clumsy and isolated one: you mask restricts your field of view and, often, your hands are encased in thick neoprene gloves. Especially for professionals, anything that streamlines the experience is welcome. And the ability to check your location or view satellite and sonar data without fiddling with a wrist-mounted display is definitely streamlining. “By building this HUD directly inside the dive helmet instead of attaching a display on the outside, it can provide a capability similar to something from an ‘Iron Man’ movie,” said Dennis Gallagher, leader of the research team, (look, it’s just the go-to visual metaphor these days, okay?). “You have everything you visually need right there within the helmet.” Simulation of what an augmented reality view through DAVD could look like. Information could be passed to DAVD (Divers Augmented Video Display) from surface sources, like a ship overhead sending birds-eye imagery (well, water birds) or, in the future, cameras or miniature sonar built into the helmet itself. Divers frequently have to do their work in low visibility conditions like nighttime or silty water, so alternative vision modes are a highly practical addition. DAVD goes directly in front of both eyes, allowing for the illusion of depth — a crucial element of true augmented reality. There are other HUDs, such as those in fighter jets, but the challenge presented by a wireless, underwater version completely contained in a pressurized suit is a unique one. It’s just a prototype now, but the team, located at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division, hopes to make it available for first responders and eventually commercial divers as well.
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This app builder is letting students turn their ideas into apps for free
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
“We just need a technical co-founder!” “We have the idea, we’re just trying to find a CS major to build it!” In 2016, everyone and their mother has an idea for an app. This is especially true on college campuses, where starting an app has seemingly replaced beer pong as the most popular extracurricular activity. The only problem is that there are far fewer developers than ideas, and no CS major is going to turn your napkin sketches into a full-fledged app for a 3 percent stake in the business. That being said, the trend of students starting companies (app-based or not) is great. It provides a type of entrepreneurial education that is unobtainable in the classroom, and can even spur the economy if it turns into a full-fledged business. So to help non-technical students get started, , a DIY app development platform, has been . In the first few months about 30,000 students have registered for the platform, and the company has partnered with entrepreneurship departments in about 50 universities to onboard students. What exactly does access to the platform get them? Either the tools to build an app for their own startup, or the ability to use Bizness App’s white-label solution and sell apps to local small businesses, which could be a business in its own right. But why is the company giving away a tool that normally costs $59/month per app, plus an optional $2,000 design fee for the white-label portion of the platform? Mainly because Bizness Apps was started while its founders were still in school. Andrew Gazdecki, co-founder of Bizness Apps, explained that starting a company in college changed his life, and “if [he] can help one student do the same I would consider this mission accomplished”. Of course, the more students using the platform, the stronger word-of-mouth promotion the company will get. But ultimately, the company is genuinely interested in helping create as many student entrepreneurs as possible. And in this app-crazed world we live in giving students access to an app-builder is probably the best way to make this happen. Is using a platform as good as learning to build a native app? Of course not. But for many students, free access to this platform could help them build the minimum viable product they need to prove traction, which help them raise funding or recruit real developers. Any student , and as long as they use their .edu email address to sign up before September 1st they will receive free access forever. that deadline is mainly to encourage students to get to work ASAP, and maybe even entice them to build something over the summer to bring back to campus in the fall.
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Startup step-by-step: The battle
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
before it is fought. This bit of pop wisdom, brought down to us from Sun Tzu and countless motivational speakers, is the koan for a generation of can-do entrepreneurs. But there is another version of this line, one that is less rosy.
In the all-singing, all-dancing world of entrepreneurial theatre, the important part is the part that nobody tells you. It’s the part that you forget when you’re at the pitch-off, when you and your friends are eating ramen, when the world turns from ink to pink and gold and blue as you fly across the country to meet VCs. Nobody says you’ll lose. This is how we lost the first battle. When I last we were in an interesting place. The team was nearly 10 people strong — two Eastern European programmers, a big data guy from Colorado, a young lawyer and a young UX person. There were the founders — , my college buddy and a true product guy; Paul, a friend I met at Lamaze class; and myself. We had gotten a little bit of money from angel investors who saw a promising team and we had joined the . Rich had spent months living in the Valley learning how to pitch and scale and build and we were on the road to lots of great meetings and lots of great results. We were trying to build a remittance product. It was bitcoin-based with an M. Night Shyamalan twist. See, we saw an interesting disparity that a lot of people had used individually to make a profit. If you bought bitcoin with one currency and sold it for another, the exchange rates were most often very competitive to legacy systems. That’s what we set out to test, build and scale. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAgX6qlJEMc]
One of the primary tools we gained from the Alchemist Accelerator was that a startup is a hypothesis testing machine. You ran a test, you got numbers and ran another test. You needed something to show. This has always been true, but in some eras — namely between 2010 and 2014 — we saw a VC market that would dump dumb money on silly ideas like . Then, in 2016, we tried to raise in a market that was down on bitcoin investments generally and where unicorns were starting to be re-evaluated. VCs were looking for products that had traction, revenue and even profit. We had none of that. What we have is a dream that we could beat the market by (and we saw that we could) and that we could beat major players using this technique (again, we saw that we could). And we could even move money at rates competitive to legacy, non-blockchain remittance services around the world. But we needed to asses if the bitcoin markets were liquid enough to support the necessary scale to woo investors. What we learned within a month of talking to very smart VCs was that the risk of bitcoin markets not being liquid enough in the near term was too high and there was no way we were going to survive as a business with that model. But we fought. We met with VC after VC and explained our position. Our bet was that markets would eventually catch up to our idea. There would be enough transaction volume and high enough speeds to make it work, and we explained that we would build the product to target travellers instead of remitters. If you were sitting with your friend in Madrid you could simply Freemit them a few Euro from your wallet. If you wanted to buy flowers for grandma you could send the florist 60 zloty in Poland via Freemit. It would be fast, free and seamless. Heck, we even had a way to get cash out in India using a point of sale partner. It was an amazing idea. There were three reasons it failed. First, the bitcoin markets couldn’t support our dream. Using the amount of BTC we would have to touch would move the markets in very real ways. It was akin to dumping a bowling ball into a bathtub — the effects could be catastrophic. Second, American VCs never felt the pain we described because they were too rich and didn’t care. Why did they need our service when they had an Amex Platinum? Finally, we were beset on all sides by regulation. People were getting arrested for operating money transmission businesses without a license, so we couldn’t actually launch the product without funding and we couldn’t fund the product without launching. Every battle is won or lost before it is fought. We had just started the fight, but we had already lost the battle. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q03JjSTpd6k] We pitched to nearly 50 VCs and every answer was the same except one. Our former CFO who saw something in this ragtag team of misfits. That was the last investment we got. We entered what called the . This was a stage after incubation — during which we were energized, funded and staffed — when we, like all other startups, went to VCs to assess whether or not the business was worth funding. The answer we got, in the end, was “No.” As the year progressed we decided we needed to regroup. We got rid of the entire team — everyone we had worked with for half a year — and tried to code things ourselves. Our competitors were catching up to our vision and companies like Revolut and Circle launched products that attacked our use cases. They proved that this could be done in different ways, but they also put our limitations — geographic, legal and financial — in stark relief. Our tech lead and CFO both left. Friendships frayed and faltered. It was a tough time. Hoot all you want about confidence, power and the go-go-go attitude you need to be an entrepreneur: Unless you are a fully blown sociopath, this process is hard. We got sick. I gained 20 pounds. I had back pain and panic attacks. There is a clear path from building a startup to mental illness, and it’s well worth exploring in order to prevent susceptible folks from hitting a wall or worse. But that’s a discussion for another post. We learned from our mentors , , Ravi Belani and that because one hypothesis fails doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong path. It just means you’re asking and trying to answer the wrong questions. Rich and I were working daily from each other’s houses and we ran through a number of permutations to figure out the best way forward. We started working with a new tech lead who had a different technical solution that wasn’t reliant on bitcoin trading and Rich and I surveyed where the bitcoin/blockchain world was heading. It had changed a lot while we were in our startup tunnel and we had some interesting new ideas. Necessity is the mother of invention. While working through the mechanics of the new technical solution we encountered a serious obstacle. We were stuck… but not for long. The conversation got heated and nearly went off the rails during one meeting in May. That was when Rich stopped everything and said in his deep Brooklyn brogue the best words an entrepreneur can hear: “Wait a second. I’ve got an idea…” We’re not licked yet. But this isn’t a story of startup redemption… not yet. We are here to bury our first idea, not to praise it. The future is unclear, still, as it always has to be with businesses like this one. But it feels good to explain what happened and how things work in a modern startup. Modern startups work like this: After gathering data you have to have the strength to let go of the stuff that doesn’t work. “This doesn’t work” doesn’t mean you suck. “This doesn’t work” means you try again. By going through this process and being true to the startup way, one failed idea may yet lead to one successful one. And so we take a few more steps forward, take a few steps back and keep walking.
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New Warcraft featurette shows off the movie’s Easter eggs and real sets
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
The movie, a fantasy action film based on the popular video game franchise, is coming out next week. To whet your appetite, here’s a new behind-the-scenes featurette from Universal Pictures. The video focuses on Easter eggs on the set for Stormwind Market, suggesting that if you’re a regular player, you’ll see lots of familiar elements from the game (or at least glimpse them in the corner of the screen). Personally, my experiences with are many, many years in the past, so the winks and nods didn’t give me much of a nostalgic buzz. But I thought the featurette was interesting for a different reason — it showed that while you might think is all about computer-generated special effects, the team actually built big, practical sets — something co-writer and director a few months ago. I suppose I should mention that . I actually got to watch an early screening and interview Jones, so I’ll be writing a bit more about my reaction when I post the interview this weekend. For now I’ll just say that has its problems, but I liked it a lot more than the reviewers did. The film will go into wide release in the United States on June 10.
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Lifeliqe debuts VR-enabled educational content to keep kids interested in learning
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Jay Donovan
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
San Francisco-based startup (pronounced “life like”) debuted and demoed its new virtual reality, educational content experience from the floor of the 2016 this week. According to co-founder and CEO Ondrej Homola, Lifeliqe spent the last three years creating a library of high-quality, interactive VR content. The patience may have paid off, as the results are pretty impressive. Using HTC’s Vive as the hardware to demo the content, Lifeliqe’s experiences allow students to virtually examine a satellite in space, climb on dinosaurs from the jurassic period or even examine shark anatomies (from the inside out). This new VR capability will join the company’s existing, eponymous, tablet product that is already in use with over 15,000 schools across the globe (mostly in Europe). The tablet content is also compelling and fun to use (see below) although not as immersive as their VR counterparts. However the combination of content will simply give teachers more options for how to engage their students. The company’s thesis is that if students can participate in a variety of learning situations that are deeply immersive and interactive, their retention and interest will increase. This makes sense, as I can easily see how these learning scenarios could keep kids’ attention. Lifeliqe is planning for its VR content to hit the market in the second half of this year and it is still vetting exactly which hardware platform to build for.
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Instagram’s new algorithm that puts the best posts first goes live
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
If you’re looking at your Instagram today, you might notice something has changed: older posts from friends and other accounts you care about are now appearing above those that were shared more recently. Yes, that rearranges the order of posts to show you the “best” posts first is now going live. We already knew that the company was planning to reorder our feeds. In March, Instagram plans to move away from showing posts in strict reverse chronological order, and instead boost those based on the “likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting, and the timeliness of the post,” as it explained at the time. If you think that sounds a lot like parent company Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, you’d be right. As Facebook came to understand long ago, the posts people want to see aren’t necessarily those that are the newest. They’re those that matter to you, personally. But since most of us aren’t on our phones 24/7 – hey, even the busiest people sleep for a few hours per night! – we tend to miss posts from our favorite people. This is especially true if you’re trying to keep up with friends in other time zones. As Instagram says in its brief published on Thursday, on average, people miss 70 percent of their feeds. And as Instagram has continued to grow and expand – the company now over 400 million monthly users – the number of photos and videos on its service have increased as well. That’s why it’s making this change. Naturally, the original announcement from earlier this year among professional Instagrammers and brands. They were worried that this switch would mean their followers wouldn’t see their posts as often, and . Their concerns may be justified – after all, if brands are not posting content that users engage with, their posts could be buried further down in users’ feeds as of now. That change could also fuel Instagram’s advertising efforts, of course. However, earlier this week, that will help them address that problem. And just in time. With a new in-app analytics system called “Insights,” brands can better understand the demographics of their audience, including where they are, when they tend to engage, what posts perform well, and more. If the brand sees one post is doing well, they can transform it into an Instagram ad with just a few taps in the app, too. These new tools are arriving in the “coming months” for businesses in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, and will reach the rest of the world by year-end. The new Instagram algorithm for users is now going live – or, at least, if you aren’t seeing it yet, you will very soon, according to the blog post. How soon? According to an Instagram spokesperson, the rollout will reach the entire user base in the month ahead.
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Facebook is disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
Facebook is removing the messaging capability from its mobile web application, according to a notice being served to users: “Your conversations are moving to Messenger,” it reads. Welcome news to the millions like me who switched to the web app in order to avoid Messenger in the first place! At the moment, you can just dismiss the notice and go about your business. But this summer the warning will become an impenetrable wall, and your only option will be to download the official Messenger app. I’m a little worried about this, because surely the mobile site is much used by people who have good reason not to download the app. People whose phones don’t have official clients, for instance, or who can’t upgrade to the latest version of an OS, and must access via the web. And really, it strikes me as quite a hostile move, as it did before when they axed messaging from the main app. If, as everyone in the company is constantly repeating, mantra-like, that they want to connect the world, shouldn’t a diversity of access options be part of that? The usual excuse, which I am expecting to receive at any moment from Facebook PR, whom I contacted for details, is that the company wants to provide the best possible experience in messaging, and the Messenger app is the platform on which they’ve chosen to provide it — so to avoid confusion they’re consolidating everyone there. ( : that’s totally the statement I got, it even said “best experience”) I don’t think a single person has ever bought that particular load of horsefeathers. It’s pretty plain for anyone to see that it’s easy to embellish, enrich and, of course, monetize a powerful platform like Messenger, while it’s near-impossible to do so with basic text-based chat. In other words, one service provides valuable utility to users, but not to Facebook. Can’t have that! There are differences in the core experiences of the desktop and mobile versions of Facebook — that’s okay! It’s perfectly fine that posts look different, you interact with things differently and certain features are absent or less easily accessed. This should be the case with messaging. Just offer plain text chat, for god’s sake, and quit it with this reach creep. Your users will thank you, and it’s really not going to hurt Messenger’s growth. By all means, advertise Messenger on top of the message feed, or point out that some content will be missing. Messenger is more full-featured! You can do video, and stickers! Look, chatbots! But the decision to switch should be the user’s. By removing that agency, Facebook erodes a trust it should be tending to carefully. And one more thing while we’re at it. Let us download Facebook Lite (where messaging still works, by the way)! This geo-restriction BS has got to go. Some of us have the phone equivalent of trash fires and don’t want to run that pair of hogs you call official apps.
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Drones: Putting China’s economy on autopilot
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Hugh Harsono
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
The global drone market has been rapidly expanding, attracting loyal consumers while integrating itself as an emerging pillar in the technological sector. One country that has seen an extremely rapid rise in drone growth in terms of usage and production is China. Already heavily invested in producing intermediate parts for other aerospace vehicles, the Chinese are starting to prove themselves a drone-manufacturing powerhouse — and eager consumer base. As an up-and-coming sector of technological innovation, in which China invested in 2015 (comprising over 2 percent of the GDP), drones are set to bolster the growth of the Chinese economy in the future. Drones will continue to support economic growth in China because it is a pillar of technological innovation, something China needs to drive its economy (as opposed to simply mass manufacturing disposable goods). “Indigenous innovation” campaigns and programs targeting innovation in the technological sector have been launched by both governmental and private entities. Investors in the U.S. are already seeing the potential for economic growth in this Chinese market, with Intel investing $60 million in Chinese manufacturer in August 2015 (with another $67 million in eight other Chinese drone companies that followed). reported investments totaling nearly $500 million in the drone sector alone in 2015. Additionally, reports drone exports totaling more than US$413 million, with projections slated to only keep increasing. This embrace of technological innovation has allowed drones to become an ever-growing part of technological R&D in China, making it inevitable for drones to become a significant part of increasing China’s GDP in the future. By enthusiastically embracing technology changes in its systems, the Chinese government is one of the primary reasons drones have been integrated into Chinese society so well. Instead of outright litigation or banning of new technologies, the Chinese government has chosen to regulate them. With drones, China’s released a series of regulations in early 2016, categorizing UAVs into seven classes based on weight and size and setting rules about flying near populated regions. The widespread use of drones by both Chinese civilians and the government will help contribute to economic growth. The Chinese government is using drones for a variety of tasks, from the municipal level all the way to the national stage. Chinese individuals are using drones for aerial photography and construction/real estate purposes, among others, while Chinese companies use drones to protect oil/gas interests and help boost China’s agricultural sector. Government services on a local level will greatly improve because of the Chinese integration of drones at the village and municipal level. Emergency medical services and public safety mandates will see the most improvement, something that is already happening at the local level. In 2014, a 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck Ludian County, located in the Yunnan Province in southwest China. This earthquake leveled more than 12,000 homes, killing more than 600 people and displacing another 200,000. Because of the dense rubble and vegetation in the mountainous area, the (CADERM) teamed with private industry drone pilots to rapidly search for survivors and assess the damage. These UAVs provided responders with a bird’s eye view of the damage, allowing them to prioritize their search and rescue efforts. Used in the search and rescue EMS context, the local Chinese government, led in their efforts by CADERM, was specifically able to “map and monitor a quake-formed lake that threatened to flood areas downstream,” said PLA Reserve Engineer Xu Xiaokun, which resulted in the proper allocation of time and resources to help save lives. Drones are also being used at the municipal level by Chinese police agencies. Lin Daolin, deputy director of the Police Aviation Administration Office, that more than 300 police drones are in use in 25 provinces, helping to patrol areas that are difficult for police officers to access. For example, Huidong County, in Guangdong province in southeast China, was a major production base for the date-rape drug ketamine, and at one time contributed one-third of the drug’s circulation in all of China. However, local Chinese police forces have for raids on drug labs. With more than 1,000 police officers involved, the raid not only yielded a large number of drugs and drug producers, but also local governmental officials who benefited from the drug trade. This is just one example of how the Chinese are using drones to protect their local municipalities. At the provincial level, China’s use of drones has allowed it to supplement and bolster its pollutant monitoring services and border patrol units. While not as localized as municipal services and not implemented on a nationwide basis that a PRC-wide mandate would carry, the provincial implementation of drones has helped Chinese provincial governments immensely, providing key data and surveillance monitoring for areas that are not normally accessible. The Chinese are also using drones at the provincial level to monitor and help enforce wildlife protection laws. In Hunchun in the Jilin province, located in northeast China, the is investing 12.8 billion yuan (US$2 billion) to monitor the welfare of the endangered Siberian tigers and Amur leopards. With more than 4,000 square kilometers to monitor, this role is typically not successfully filled by wildlife officers working in the region. However, the integration of drones will allow wildlife officers to ensure that illegal poaching does not occur, while ensuring that ground conflicts between humans and animals do not result in any harm. These drones have a potential to revolutionize the protection of China’s wildlife, as well as bolster China’s drone economy. Border patrol has been another focus of the Chinese provincial drone community. in Tibet, Xinjiang and Yunnan are using drones to provide aerial surveillance. Difficult to cover with only personnel, and with satellite coverage being funneled for national use, border patrol units have faced difficulties in border monitoring. However, drones, particularly those fitted with electro-optic devices to detect object presence and border range, are allowing these units to function at a higher standard. Additionally, these drones can function year-round on a 24/7 basis, providing border patrol units with the ability to combat both drug trafficking and illegal crossings along China’s borders. Nationwide governmental services have always varied in China, with different funding parameters allotted to different regions. However, the use of drones changes these parameters, allowing authorities the ability to see and monitor areas that were difficult to access before (with these roles specifically encompassing environmental pollution monitoring and Chinese military use). Pollution is an immense problem in China (it has the most pollutant-filled skies in the world). China’s has mandated the use of drones to monitor environmental pollutants in China. These UAVs, armed , provide authorities with the ability to monitor suspect factories and workshops that are excessively contributing to China’s pollution problem. Typically, the Chinese have been using ground inspections and satellite remote sensing. However, because these resources are very localized and national, the Chinese have a gap at the provincial level. Drones help fill that gap, ensuring that companies are fully complying with China’s environmental protection laws. Provinces participating in these provincial-level programs include Shaanxi (northeast China), Shandong (northeast China) and Henan (central China). In fact, the released preliminary results implicating more than 25 percent of 254 factories reviewed as flagged for further inspections because of environmental infractions. The Chinese military has been integrating the use of unmanned aerial vehicles into its military capability at a very high rate. Chinese drones such as the Wing Loong drone of the and the CH-3 and CH-4B of the . have been developed as offensive weapons, with the ability to launch missiles and bombs while collecting intelligence for further military movement. China’s willingness to adopt this technology at such a fast pace is a testament to the Chinese desire to integrate technology as fast as it can develop it. Additionally, with Chinese company debuting a passenger drone, speculation is rampant about the Chinese military’s use of EHang’s 184 to transport soldiers to and from the battlefield. China has also been heavily using drones in the services sector, specifically in aerial photography, construction/real estate and deliveries. Drones are being used by the Chinese for aerial photography and filmmaking. Multiple Chinese wedding photographers’ websites tout the ability for couples to have their pictures taken by drone, allowing for a wider photo, incomparable with those taken at ground level. These photographers’ relatively small investment has enabled them to take shots only capable with extremely expensive equipment, while harnessing the power of the booming Chinese wedding industry. Additionally, photographers are using drones to create spectacular photo displays seen worldwide, such as Hong Kong-based photographer , whose pictures of 100 of China’s megastructures won the International Photograph Awards One Shot Competition. Drones in China have also been used for construction and real estate services. , a startup funded by leading drone manufacturer , helps rent out drones and their pilots. DJI reports that typical requests for users involve “real estate promotion, construction, mapping, and terrain modeling.” This is simply because the drone’s aerial view far supersedes the costs and liabilities associated with committing individuals to the same task. Additionally, the drone can cover areas farther and higher up than a normal surveyor. The Chinese large-scale industries of oil and gas, along with agriculture, are also benefiting from the use of drones. Drones are being used by the Chinese to exercise control over oil/gas resources. China is extremely hungry for energy resources, and its search for them has increasingly led it to rural areas within China and Africa. Chinese companies have used drones for surveying areas for potential pipelines, particularly in rural China, where the local areas are not easily accessible. Additionally, the Chinese government is using drones to expand its command and control of resources in , where much of China’s oil/gas supply lies. Drones allow the Chinese to be present in areas that would be hard to reach otherwise, allowing them to secure and protect their energy resources. Drones that specifically target the agricultural industry are also being developed and unveiled by Chinese companies. Leading manufacturer has unveiled a crop-sprayer drone, designed to spray 2.6 gallons of pesticides over 7-10 acres of farmland per hour. is among more than 70 companies trying to introduce drone technology to the Chinese agricultural market. With the Chinese government encouraging innovation in the agricultural drone market through the Planning for Natural Agricultural Sustainable Development authority, the Chinese are tapping into the more than 120 million hectares of available farmland to provide a market for drones, with millions being spent by the Chinese to support drone development. With agriculture being the previous backbone of the Chinese economy, innovations in drones seek to bring a high-tech approach to bolster the country’s lagging agricultural economy. The Chinese ability to implement drones so seamlessly into their everyday lives points out both the Chinese government’s willingness to embrace new technology and the Chinese population’s new-found wealth to afford this sort of technology. With China’s fascination with technology at its infancy, the potential for technological growth and innovation is huge. The drone market is one that is currently somewhat niche, but if used correctly, will set the Chinese economy’s stage for years to come. The Chinese are currently among the world’s leading manufacturers, developers and consumers of drones. Who’s to say that home-grown innovations in smartphones and solar-powered vehicles, as well as other innovations stemming from involvement in drones, aren’t next?
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Announcing the TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-off in Berlin!
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
Hallo Berlin! Did you miss us? We missed you which is why we’re returning for a on 14 July, in conjunction with the incredibly fun conference, Tech Open Air. If you’re looking to pitch your startup to the TechCrunch team, local VCs and your local tech community, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. Ten companies will be selected to participate in the pitch-off. Each will have exactly 60 seconds to summarize why their startup is going to be — pitching in front of a panel of expert judges, including TC editors and local venture capitalists. Judges will conduct a quick Q&A after each rapid fire pitch, and at the end of all the presentations the panel will determine the winners. First place at the Berlin Meetup + Pitch-off wins a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt London. Second place gets two tickets to the show, and the Audience Choice winner takes home one ticket to the conference. Apply to pitch our editors and panel of judges . And even if you aren’t interested in pitching on stage yourself, the Meetups are a great opportunity to network with the local tech community and meet TechCrunch writers. Plus, there will be . Buy tickets for just 10 Euros by . See you there! A bit about Tech Open Air, our partner:
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Tickets are now available for the TechCrunch Summer Party at August Capital
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
The is a thing of tradition and we hope you can make it out this year. Like in year’s past we’ll gather on the spacious grounds of August Capital in Menlo Park and enjoy an evening of cocktails and the spirit of entrepreneurship. Tickets are very limited and released on a rolling basis. It’s $85 to attend and $1000 to exhibit your startup at a demo table. About the Summer Party at August Capital TechCrunch parties have a history of being the place you want to meet your future investor, acquirer or co-founder. Case in point, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington used to hold these events in his Atherton back yard, Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith met one of their first investors, DFJ. And in 2010, we spotted 500 Startups’ Dave McClure writing a check to then-stealthy startup Tello, which was bought by Urban Airship. Hope to see you all there this year!
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In a VR world
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Signe Brewster
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
Whether the story is true or not, virtual reality filmmakers are recalling it with interest. Less than a year after the release of the first modern VR headsets to the public, filmmakers are in the same position as the film industry was in the late 1900s. The technology is new, as are viewers’ expectations. No one knows what type of content will work best, or even what type of content will be possible a few years down the road. “In virtual reality we’re right at that beginning stage again,” said Mark Walsh, a Pixar alumnus who leads an interactive VR studio called . “It’s not that we need a different kind of film stock or a different kind of camera. We just need more artists to be playing with the medium.” So filmmakers are borrowing techniques from movies, video games, theater and oral storytelling and seeing what happens. The early results are promising. VR has the potential to wow audiences with intimate access to people and places once contained to a two-dimensional screen, and that’s drawing veterans of Hollywood, animation studios and the gaming industry. Together, they are creating a new reality. It’s unclear if VR films should even be called films. On one end of the spectrum, there are traditional movies; you sit in a chair and watch something happening in front of you. On the other end of the spectrum are games that require a high degree of participation. VR films fall somewhere in the middle and, depending on which one you are experiencing, the expectations for you as the viewer can vary wildly. “Invasion!” is an early standout film that makes use of one of VR’s most interesting mechanisms: eye contact. The film, which was created by the 15-person team at , places you in the body of a rabbit. You don’t need interaction to build empathy. On a vast frozen lake, you encounter another rabbit who looks straight into your eyes and smiles sweetly. Instead of the jarring feeling of a character breaking the fourth wall, the gesture places you within the story as a central character. This is the transportative nature of VR. While it’s exhilarating to hack a zombie to pieces with a virtual axe, it’s also powerfully immersive to simply be near a character we care about. Like every medium ever, storytelling is what we humans crave. And now we can take an intimate seat within every story. The Future of VR Storytelling | 5:27 // VR filmmakers face a bit of an identity crisis here. When people watch a movie, chances are they want to relax. They don’t want intense participation; if they did, they would play a video game instead. You don’t need interaction to build empathy. Entering a story adds another interesting truth: Once a viewer is a part of the action, they gain a feeling of responsibility. “There’s this constant struggle between ego and empathizing,” Baobab Studios CEO Maureen Fan said. “Your mind is thinking about yourself and your own ego and the other characters. You may not be thinking about those characters as much as if you weren’t a character in the world.” In ’s “ ,” a lonely porcupine throws a birthday party for himself. The studio realized early on that Henry can’t make eye contact with the viewer, because that would mean he’s not alone. Instead, the viewer plays observer to Henry’s painful solitude. The tension of being so close but so far is heart-wrenching. So as novel as it is right now to place the viewer in the story, it doesn’t always make sense. If a viewer is supposed to be building understanding of a Syrian refugee, it can be distracting to make them wonder how they should help within the movie. Once you step into a virtual world, it’s natural to want to reach out and touch a character. But most films don’t let you do that. A viewer might not even know if they’re entering a game or a film. In these early days, directors are learning the importance of cueing the viewer on expectations. “You don’t want to dangle a delicious piece of cake in front of somebody and then not let them eat it,” Walsh said. “If you’re going to put something within their reach, they expect to be able to reach it.” When a viewer pulls on a VR headset, they gain control of the camera. They become the director. If a filmmaker forgets that, they risk losing the viewer’s attention at the most critical moments. Or they risk overshooting the limits of human attention. “We can only keep track of two-and-a-half things at a time,” Oculus Story Studio creative director Saschka Unseld said. “Once you can not only look around but you can move around in an experience, that takes over two of those attention things you can keep track of. You have about half left over for a voiceover.” Basically, don’t make it too complicated. Stick to a story that flows with viewers’ innate expectations. Filmmakers can regain control of their films with suggestions and optical cues. Audio is one of the strongest options; make a noise, and people are sure to look for its source. In “Invasion!” Baobab’s animators used natural frames like mountain peaks to guide the viewer’s eyes. They also created natural stopping points on the frozen lake’s expansive surface by making certain areas lighter or darker. More obviously, the viewer can follow the bunny’s eyes. Her ears prick up with curiosity or she cowers low in fear. It draws the viewer’s eyes toward the arrival of an alien ship, which flies into view and then dips behind a patch of trees. The film’s team found that after a few seconds, viewers start to look around, wondering if they are missing the action. And that means they might not be looking in exactly the right place when the alien ship reemerges. The film forgoes long, drawn-out periods of suspense in favor of keeping the viewer clued in, according to CCO Eric Darnell. It’s okay to be blunt, too. At the Game Developers Conference in March, I sat down on a virtual beach and met the characters of Motional’s “ .” I couldn’t move my body or touch Gary, but he asked me questions. Then he looked at me expectantly until I realized he wanted me to nod my head yes or no. After a stilted but functional conversation, he tried to steal from my cooler. But it all comes back to characters. Without curiosity and delight, viewers lose interest and start looking around for something else to do. Motional’s Mark Walsh, who led animation on films like Ratatouille and Finding Nemo, designed Gary. While the animation in “Gary the Gull” is somewhat crude, the characters are irresistible. Gary talks in a charming, over-the-top voice that you can’t help but engage with. “The big trick is creating a personality that people will identify with or be entertained by — that has flaws that make it lovable or likable,” Walsh said. “In virtual reality, we’re meeting these characters. So the way that we approach creating empathy or creating entertainment with a character is for me completely different.” Gary’s big trait is that he’s a con man. In a film, creating Gary would entail animating a gull conning another character. But in VR, he has to prove it. He has to con you as the viewer to build out his character. It’s a more difficult sell, but it results in a more authentic connection with the character. VR tricks our brains into believing that what we are seeing is real, which creates some interesting nuances, according to former CEO Jens Christensen. Actors have to act less like actors and more like real people or else it’s distracting. At GDC, some VR developers argued VR experiences shouldn’t have music at all, opting instead for realistic ambient noises. One of the most difficult challenges is overcoming the technology itself. Giving viewers the ability to determine the shot means each frame must be rendered almost instantly if a filmmaker is working with animation. VR only looks good at an incredibly high definition, so getting the desired look requires some trade-offs. For example, very few VR films allow the viewer to walk around because it would make it so much more difficult to render. In “Henry,” the filmmakers decided to apply texture in only the most important parts of the film. The team spent a lot of time making Henry’s quills and fur look just right, but since the viewer only sees one side of him, his back is just empty space. He also has a simplified shape and limbs. Many of the features of his home are hidden in shadow or filled with less detail, because they just don’t matter as much. Cutting and panning can be problematic in VR because, done wrong, they make viewers queasy. The obvious challenge of shooting a live-action film for virtual reality is hiding any evidence of the shoot. The director and crew can’t be in the shot, and neither can boom mics or any other type of equipment. The VR film sets I’ve attended took place in small rooms the crew could quickly exit, or involved dashing away to take cover after each scene reset. It’s something that forces even actors to relearn their jobs. “You have to remember in VR that no matter where you are, you’re in the shot,” Christensen said. “You have to remain in character for much longer than you’re used to.” Lighting and other specialty equipment must be subtly integrated into the set. Directors seek out natural light or build out existing sources like streetlights or campfires. Traditional film techniques have to be rethought as well. Cutting and panning can be problematic in VR because, done wrong, they make viewers queasy. Christensen still believes they have their place, but a lot of filmmakers are staying away from them altogether for now. A few years ago, shooting a virtual reality film involved assembling GoPros or DSLR cameras into a ball and then laboriously stitching all the footage together into a spherical film. Now, there are options. Consumer cameras are hitting the market, but there are also professional-grade cameras like the system built by Jaunt. Editing platforms that ease working with 360 degrees and interactive points are also hitting the market. Animators usually opt for game developer software, which is better suited to interactivity and a work pipeline that lets multiple teams work on a film at once. But there are also emerging options that let animators work directly within virtual reality. Oculus recently unveiled Quill, which provides a 3D space in which to paint. Unseld described it as a closer representation of an artist’s intentions; it’s not photoreal, but it’s real brushstrokes — a style that works especially well for the right types of stories. Filmmaking could be the world’s entry point to VR. One of the most interesting technologies on the horizon is stereoscopic VR, which creates a limited depth of field that mimics the way the human eye sees. This tends to feel even more real than the most common types of VR film, which have everything in view in focus. is working on a camera in this style, and NextVR has demoed stereoscopic films. The technology could mimic our eyes even more with the help of VR headsets that track gaze, allowing the film to refocus based on where you’re actually looking. Filmmakers are also hoping to see lighter headsets become available in the next few years. Films currently tend to max out at around 10 minutes. That’s partially because it’s so labor-intensive to produce a VR film, but also because that’s all viewers can stand. “It can be uncomfortable to watch a single piece of content for much longer than 10 minutes unless it’s very good,” said Neil Graham, who leads VR production for Europe’s Sky channel. “But this will increase as headsets get lighter, and as stitching and motion improve, which it is doing by the week. // In these early days of VR, it’s tempting to prey on audiences’ emotions, just as “L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat” supposedly did. Attend any VR gathering and you can expect to be terrorized by zombies and shark attacks. The emotions you feel in VR are real and raw. There’s no longer a screen dividing you from the virtual world. You’re there. But the medium has already drawn storytelling masters who want to move VR beyond viewers’ screams and sweaty palms. There’s a healthy pipeline of new talent on the way, too. They’re applying decades of lessons from film and gaming to create an entirely new mashup. While some of us are gamers, most of us are cinema goers. And that means filmmaking could be the world’s entry point to VR. “With everything we keep doing, we’re starting to build vocabulary and ideas to in a year or two create something that is so unlike movies that you won’t even compare it with that anymore,” Unseld said.
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How to listen to, and delete, your Google Now voice history
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
Google might be more than you had originally imagined, though not on purpose. Since June 2015, Google has been storing personal data on its users on , where users only have access to their own information. The feature works a bit like a digital diary, storing web searches, YouTube history, and (you guessed it!) Google Voice Search history. The issue with Voice Search is that the system can pick up the words “Ok Google” (or words that sound like ‘Ok Google’) from a rather long distance. Accidentally activating voice-powered AI, from Google to Siri to Alexa, is inevitable. But since Google stores that information and makes it available to users, it’s easy to see just how many conversations stored on the system were unintentionally recorded. This is especially true for Android users, who have their phone on them all the time. Google likely stores these conversations for a number of reasons, like giving users access to their voice searches as well as learning from this recorded natural language to improve the service. In any case, you have total control over your stored search history , and can have a listen to yourself or delete unwanted recordings as you wish. Given that this search history feature has been around for a year, there is probably plenty of information to check out about yourself.
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PHIND’s new app will help you discover places, see if they’re buzzing
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 |
A visual technology and search startup called took the stage to debut what it was then calling a “Shazam for places” – that is, an app that let you snap a photo to learn about the world around you. Today, roughly a year later, PHIND is launching its production version, which focuses on helping users discover new places – including via browsing and text-based search – as well as gather real-time information about those places through a community-reporting feature, and more. Perhaps you can call it a “Waze for places” now? While the app’s earlier clever hook was its ability to , PHIND’s co-founder and CEO Rishi Jhunjhnuwala admits that this limited the app’s reach. “We realized we were only hitting the travel market with that, and we were actually shooting ourselves in the foot as we wanted to expand even further,” he explains. “That’s when we included text and category search…now we encompass more of the planning of trip,” says Jhunjhnuwala. With the launching today, PHIND is continuing along this path of enabling people to seek out new places from a distance. While the photo-snapping search feature is still present, the new app offers deeper integrations with services like Yelp, OpenTable, Foursquare, and Uber, so you can immediately learn about the places around you where you may want to eat, drink, or visit. You’re able to see things like the number of Yelp stars a place has, for example, or view photos, see how far away a place is, or even book an Uber right from within the app. The goal today is to better appeal to those who want an alternative way of finding places, instead of using Google Search or Google Maps, while also eliminating the constant app-switching that takes place when you’re researching a business. “It’s a simplified search experience,” says Jhunjhnuwala. “Sometimes people want to see reviews on Yelp, or the tips on Foursquare, or even get the history on Wikipedia,” he explains. “As simple as everyone thinks search is – and people think that Google has simplified it already – we think that it’s still broken and it can be simplified even further.” In addition to the improved user interface that puts place information front-and-center in the app, PHIND is also now testing the waters with a community reporting feature where users can report back about the activity at a place at that very moment. For example, if it’s crowded or has long lines. The number of reports will then influence whether the place is presented as “trending” within the app. This idea, however, is not novel – startups have tried time and again to do exactly this, including , , , , , , and many others. The challenge is getting people to actually report in. Unlike with Waze, where the community data allows you to avoid accidents, take different routes, or not get busted for speeding, fewer are interested in sharing information about whether a place is busy. The impulse just isn’t there. [gallery ids="1331732,1331739,1331737,1331736,1331735,1331733"] The better solution is to collect this data passively – as where it presents busy times as bar charts right next to the place listing, thanks to the user location data it pulls from Google Maps. PHIND, however, believes it has a solution. It’s working directly with local business owners in L.A. in order to promote the app in that city instead of trying to focus on everywhere at once. Once it gets well-known in this market, it will then try to repeat the process in other major metros, like NY and San Francisco. To date, PHIND has been downloaded 30,000 times and reports 7,000 monthly users. However, the focus has not been on marketing, but on the technology improvements rolling out now, the CEO says. The new version of PHIND is a free download . [vimeo 168734030 w=640 h=1138]
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Innovations in 3D printing
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Tyler Benster
| 2,016 | 6 | 4 |
Ten miles north of Barcelona lies a centuries-old hotbed for ink technology. Founded in the 9th century, the ushered in Spain’s era of ink and scrolls. Nearby, a 21st century HP facility perfected the art through bus-sized printers capable of precisely depositing a of ink as massive reams of paper whizz by. From this backdrop comes HP’s first printer using Multi Jet Fusion (MJF), an industrial machine designed by an R&D facility best known for Large Format . The printer uses familiar inkjet technology, combined with a powder base material and, surprisingly, even paper, for use as a cleaning roll. More than mere vestiges, the reuse of such modules underlies how HP can leverage billions of dollars in previous R&D expense to bring economies of scale to its supply chain. MJF closely resembles selective laser sintering (SLS) printers sold by EOS and Systems. Although all systems use a similar base material, a nylon powder, MJF additionally deposits a liquid plastic “fusing agent.” This key innovation allows the printer to deposit a fusing agent for each layer in one pass rather than slowly tracing each vector. Compared to SLS, MJF is 5X faster. The quality is presumed to be superior, as well, thanks to a detailing agent that enhances edge definition. However, the full details are yet unknown, as two plastics must mix in a novel process to form a new microstructure. While less relevant to desktop , such details are critical to automotive and aerospace manufacturing, where new processes must go through exhaustive quality assurance processes. This interaction between fusing agent and base powder is the source of much excitement. HP promises that future printers could address each voxel with a different combination of inks to vary material properties like color, conductivity, transparency and strength. With an addressable resolution of 1.6 TeraVoxels (where voxel means “volumetric pixel”) in 3,072 cubic inches, the hardware addresses more voxels than current software can handle. A printer with three print heads and one byte to describe each voxel would require up to 12.8 terabytes per print. HP, incumbents or startups must build new software to power “digital materials” created by combining multiple plastics in varying ratios. Five miles northwest of the HP Garage in Silicon Valley lies a building once used for a Google car collection. Today, the building brims with Carbon’s humming printers and buzzing engineers. Just a little more than a year ago, the co-founder and CEO of , Joe DeSimone, unveiled the Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) process on-stage at TED and on in a masterful product launch reminiscent of the late Steve Jobs. With the launch of the Carbon M1, messaging that began as “What if was 100x faster” became “Isomorphic parts with mechanical properties and surface finish like injection molded-plastics.” This reflects the dual reality that such speeds remain forward-looking and that throughput efficiency only matters to manufactures when parts have the necessary material properties. While the CLIP process resembles the stereolithography (SLA) used by and , Carbon touts that its parts have consistent material properties and maintain integrity when exposed to UV from the sun. These challenges constrain today’s SLA printers to prototyping and ancillary manufacturing usage. Carbon’s new materials and post-processing techniques promise to go beyond rapid prototyping and enable direct production of finished goods. Like HP, Carbon created an open “App Store” for materials, with partners signed up to bring new chemistries to production. Existing plastics must be modified for compatibility with Carbon’s light- and oxygen-based process. Thus, a manufacturer must typically evaluate both a new manufacturing process and a new material for production. While some bleeding-edge users in automotive, medical and consumer goods have already begun production, many more incumbents will remain flat-footed, leaving room for startups to capture the emergent whitespace. MJF and CLIP provide a jump over today’s manufacturing in a similar fashion to how Amazon Web Services disrupted the internet, enabling rapid iterations, horizontal scaling and separation of application from underlying infrastructure. With both machines starting at $120,000 — the base price for HP MJF and the cost of a three-year Carbon M1 lease — entrepreneurs can start a manufacturing business with greater capital efficiency than ever before. Software is eating the Factory.
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Gillmor Gang: Hold the Lettuce
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,016 | 6 | 4 |
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Rob DeSisto, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Thursday, June 2, 2016. Salesforce writes a big check, Bezos shows teeth as Trump attacks the press, and Twitter (so far) says no to Medium. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Halley Suitt Tucker, Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @RobDesisto, @kevinmarks, @fradice, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=87732295 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302]
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Manhattan CRE prices spark a mass exodus of startups to Brooklyn
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David Mandell
| 2,016 | 6 | 4 |
, once the mecca for technology and innovation on the east coast, is now losing ground to the outer boroughs. Massive growth has led to high rents and lack of space for burgeoning businesses. Demand for office space by tech companies from 2002-2012, representing 25 percent of New York City leases. To that end, the vacancy rate in NYC is just 9 percent (compared to 15 percent nationwide), creating supply and demand issues that are grossly impacting rents. But the startup nation is great at finding solutions to their problems. Because the problem is high-priced prime locations, they’re simply expanding their definition of prime and extending the Alley to a place where they can afford to grow their business — . With the development of formerly working-class neighborhoods like Bay Ridge and the Waterfront well underway, land developers and brokers are now pushing commercial space in these non-traditional areas, making the distinction between residential and commercial neighborhoods even grayer. Undaunted and receptive, tech companies are packing their bags and venturing across the Bridge. Companies like and , as well as like and , are pioneers settling in non-traditional spaces in DUMBO, downtown and the Navy Yard — now dubbed the Tech Triangle. Tech companies are taking over old factories and warehouses and creating shared workspaces, incubators and office buildings for the creative class. Tenancy in this area in just three years, to the point where an increasing lack of commercial space in the Triangle is creating a wider circle of opportunity for bound ventures. , where they found 45,000 square feet of space surrounded by old factories from which to launch and grow a series of new initiatives for their business. One of 2016 was for a 550,000 square-foot industrial space in Clinton Hill just south of the Navy Yard that will specifically target tech and creative tenants who can no longer find or afford space in DUMBO, Williamsburg, Fort Greene and downtown . is also seeing this trend play out. When compared to the Flatiron district, PivotDesk saw an 80 percent increase in space availability on their platform in Crown Heights, Clinton Hill and the Navy Yard since 2015, and a 300 percent growth in request for space from 2014 to 2015. However, the need for space continues to grow. Where people go, jobs go. Employment in the Brooklyn Tech Triangle, catalyzed in part by Fortune 500 companies like , which moved 2,000 jobs to downtown in 2014, and , which to Industry City in Sunset Park, . On the flip side, computer developers are thriving in and refusing to commute to thus compelling companies to move where they can find rich talent that will help their businesses flourish. New York City is also responding in kind. Programs like the provide $3,000 in annual tax credits for each employee, and the provides $10 per square foot rebates for up to five years, which can mean big savings for looking to hang onto some cash. Even the awards property tax refunds for up to 25 years to building owners who complete significant renovations on their properties. And then there is transportation. Plans to build the — a light rail streetcar system — are in the works to connect the and Queens waterfronts. But that will take some time, and the City will be forced to find alternative ways to better connect these traditionally underserved neighborhoods with new transportation options like expanded Select Bus Service and bike lane routes. A new will launch in summer 2017, linking Brooklynites with the Financial District and Midtown. The private sector will also bridge the divide. is already as compared to yellow cabs in Queens and . Bike-sharing programs that are so popular with the tech community in New York City will fill the gaps, and carpooling and ridesharing apps like and will take off in a big way. Rapid business growth in response to a growing populous attracted to lower rents have drawn Manhattanites to the Other , but this is fast hitting the wall of supply versus demand, which will compel companies that are part of the creative economy to become even more innovative in finding affordable solutions as rents start to increase. When easier transportation becomes available in DUMBO, Williamsburg, The Navy Yard and Gowanus, these outer borough destinations will become even more attractive to tech companies that want to attract top talent and avoid astronomical rent. Shared office spaces are already in high demand, and we expect companies will take on larger spaces to secure their foothold in and simply monetize their excess space until they grow into it. And when becomes the next , will just reinvent another city and grow into other outer boroughs — starting with Queens.
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How chief information officers become chief innovation officers
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Jai Das
| 2,016 | 6 | 4 |
In the early 1900s, large organizations needed another type of CEO: Chief Electricity Officer. Before there was an accessible and reliable power grid to plug into, organizations that needed electricity employed a CEO to make sure they had steady and cheap access to this vital commodity. Given the aging data center architecture, it’s now the Chief Innovation Officer who is increasingly becoming the Chief Electricity Officer of the past, responsible for keeping the lights on of their IT infrastructure. According to , 80 percent of IT spend worldwide is allocated for maintenance, while only 20 percent is devoted to driving innovation. I believe that ratio needs to shift dramatically to enable enterprise IT to spend less time “keeping the lights on” and more time rolling out new services and apps, testing new business models and achieving greater efficiency. For the old guard to succeed in this hyper-competitive landscape, I believe businesses need to radically transform their IT infrastructure. Across virtually every industry, upstarts are often outmaneuvering incumbents. The oft-cited advantage Amazon, Uber and others maintain over their legacy competitors is web-scale IT infrastructure, which delivers agility to rapidly grow the business and innovate at a breakneck pace. Because they do not need to devote the bulk of their time and budget maintaining on-premises environments, these companies are empowered to innovate at a much more rapid rate. For instance, while Walmart was getting its unlimited three-day shipping service off the ground in 2015, Amazon brought one-hour delivery service to market . is the key word for these incumbents. Many companies are currently engaged in the process of completely changing their business models and how they deliver their product and services to customers. Unfortunately, their IT organizations struggle to keep up and, thus, simply add layers and piecemeal solutions to their existing infrastructure. The resulting transformation is incremental when it needs to be sweeping. It fails to make a meaningful impact on the 80:20 ratio of IT spending on maintenance versus innovation. To turn IT into an innovation engine, businesses should bridge the gap between the public cloud services they want and the on-premises infrastructure they need in order to deliver the performance and experience their customers expect. The enterprise cloud has attracted considerable attention as a new infrastructure model that merges cloud and on-premises experiences, effectively unlocking the power web-scale companies enjoy for businesses that were built before the era of cloud computing. Venture capitalists are looking at companies that can bridge the gap between on-premise and cloud to reap the benefits of both computing platforms. This includes players like , , , and that are creating the new enterprise cloud. These forward-leaning enterprise cloud companies will simplify the datacenter — not make it more complex. One example is that solutions in the future could determine where applications should run and move the workloads to their corresponding place — with no interaction needed by IT teams once they set the parameters; this will forever change the way enterprise IT operates. There is plenty of time before this ambitious vision will be realized. Because we are in the early innings of this game, it’s an exciting time to invest in the IT sector, and we are carefully watching for companies that could deliver the next game-changing solution. The winners will be those that build products that directly address these pain points. The investment opportunity is tremendous, but the market need is even greater. Chief Information Officers who are able to implement web-scale IT infrastructure via an enterprise cloud platform and push their IT infrastructure to the speed of modern business will become Chief Innovation Officers. Those who fail to elevate IT from a time-consuming maintenance task will become extinct, like the Chief Electricity Officers of the past, along with their businesses.
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Tor Project developer steps down amid sexual mistreatment allegations
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 4 |
The Tor Project confirmed today that one of its prominent developers, Jacob Appelbaum, stepped down in response to what it called “public allegations of sexual mistreatment.” The Tor Project, which develops the Tor browser and network, had previously only acknowledged Appelbaum’s departure in a one-sentence statement Thursday afternoon, but went into further detail about his resignation after rumors of assault emerged online. Tor is free software that channels internet traffic through a series of relays to anonymize its users. In addition to his security research at the Tor Project, Appelbaum is a journalist who worked on WikiLeaks and the Edward Snowden disclosures. called him the “public face of the Tor Project” in a 2010 profile that detailed his involvement with Tor and WikiLeaks. Before joining Tor, Appelbaum worked on security for Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. Tor Project executive director Shari Steele said in that allegations of sexual assault had followed Appelbaum for quite some time. “These types of allegations were not entirely new to everybody at Tor; they were consistent with rumors some of us had been hearing for some time. That said, the most recent allegations are much more serious and concrete than anything we had heard previously,” Steele wrote. Steele added that The Tor Project had heard allegations from several victims about Appelbaum’s behavior towards them. The Tor Project has hired a legal firm to investigate the statements, but Steele said she did not expect that the results of the investigation would be made public. Steele initially in a simple statement on Thursday: “Long time digital advocate, security researcher, and developer Jacob Appelbaum stepped down from his position at The Tor Project on May 25, 2016,” she wrote. Despite the terse announcement, the backstory of Appelbaum’s resignation quickly emerged online. Andrea Shepard, a Tor developer, tweeted the decoded version of a message she’d originally posted on May 24, one day before Appelbaum stepped down. “It seems one rapist is one rapist too many,” she wrote. (SHA-256 references the hash used to encode the original message.) Precommitment revealed: sha256("It seems one rapist is one rapist too manyn") ( ) — Andreⓐ (@puellavulnerata) Alison Macrina, the founder of , also referenced the allegations on Twitter, saying she had spoken to several victims. The Library Freedom Project is an organization that educates librarians about privacy and collaborates with the Tor Project to establish Tor exit nodes in libraries. “no more open secrets, no more missing stairs. you’re not alone. you were never alone. and I’m pretty sure things are just getting started,” Macrina . Several anonymous accounts of assaults allegedly committed by Appelbaum were also posted on a website bearing his name, but TechCrunch has not yet been able to verify them. Steele said the Tor Project would work to foster a safer environment. “Going forward, we want the Tor community to be a place where all participants can feel safe and supported in their work. We are committed to doing better in the future. To that end, we will be working earnestly going forward to develop policies designed to set up best practices and to strengthen the health of the Tor community,” Steele wrote. Appelbaum posted a response to the allegations against him on Twitter, saying they are part of a “calculated and targeted attack” intended to undermine his advocacy work. “I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false,” Appelbaum wrote. “Though the damage to my reputation caused by these allegations alone is impossible to undo, I nonetheless take the concerns of the Tor community seriously.” Appelbaum suggested that he would sue his accusers if necessary to clear his name, calling the allegations libelous. His full statement is .
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Groupon is selling its Indonesia business to fitness membership startup KFit
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
Groupon continues to streamline its global business after it the sale of its operations in Indonesia to a somewhat unlikely buyer. , a one-year-old startup that sells gym and fitness memberships in the same style as U.S.-based ClassPass, is picking up Groupon Indonesia in an undisclosed deal. Malaysia-based KFit said it has “no immediate plans” to change Groupon Indonesia’s business, which claims to have more than one million subscribers and over 15,000 merchants. That means that the company will branch out into regular deal-based e-commerce that Groupon is famous (infamous?) for. The mechanics of the deal, which is scheduled to close in Q3 2016, are notable too: Groupon Indonesia is to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of KFit, with Groupon Inc becoming “a strategic shareholder of KFit”. That suggests that there may have been little-to-no price upfront for the transaction. last year, so it remains possible that it was open to offloading its Indonesian business at an attractive cost. The deal signals KFit’s entry into Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country and one of the few sizable markets where smartphone sales are tipped to continue to rise despite a global slowdown. KFit KFit hinted that it would expand into new categories when in January, and Indonesia-based Venturra Capital led its Series A, but few people would have predicted that it would turn out like this. ( , it should be noted.) There are, however, strong links between the two companies. KFit CEO started group-buying site GroupsMore in Malaysia which Groupon acquired within months of launch. Post-acquisition, Neoh led Groupon’s operations in Asia before leaving to start KFit in 2015. Fellow KFit co-founder was regional operations director for Groupon APAC, too. With Groupon generally on the decline, or at least struggling compared to the days of regular acquisitions worldwide, why would Neoh get back into the business? There are a few possible answers depending on your personal view. Indonesia is a huge market, it is , and e-commerce remains nascent despite tens of billion of dollars invested by Rocket Internet (Lazada and Zalora) and retail conglomerate Lippo (Matahari Mall). That growth is tempting for ambitious startups, particularly if you can get a rolling start by acquiring a business and get a favorable acquisition cost, too. That’s the more positive theory, but there remains the strong possibility that KFit is diversifying because its current model isn’t working as well as expected. Back at that Series A, we reported that KFit was operating with a pretty serious burn rate — negative $320,000 in Q3 2015, according to internal documents we had seen — which had put it months from running out of cash in late 2014. It could be that the opportunity to re-enter the group-buying space, where Neoh has had success, is seen as a way to augment the finances and provide an engine for growth. “Indonesia represents an untapped opportunity for us and serves as a natural expansion of our regional footprint in Southeast Asia,” Neoh said in a press statement. “The combination of Groupon Indonesia’s established presence and KFit’s experience in building a mobile-first platform will propel us in a high-growth local commerce market, further accelerated by increasing mobile penetration,” he added. Speaking to TechCrunch in an interview, Neoh confirmed that he was unable to provide details of the deal itself — since Groupon is a public company and the transaction is pending — but he did explain that it is somewhat an “anomaly.” “It’s a very specific case as we’ve been looking at the [Indonesian] market since the end of last year. It’s very attractive [country] for a consumer-facing company,” he said. Neoh said KFit may enter one or two more cities before the end of this year, but it isn’t actively seeking out other M&A opportunities. Going forward he said the company will experiment with new models for the Groupon business. “We want to build a platform [for] any time you are going out to experience local services… we’re building beyond a deals platform,” he said. That’s also the focus for KFit’s 10 other cities in Asia Pacific, but they are likely to develop the model at a slower pace than Indonesia, where KFit has this Groupon momentum, Neoh added.
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Artificial intelligence is changing SEO faster than you think
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John Rampton
| 2,016 | 6 | 4 |
By now everyone has heard of , the new artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm that is supposed to be the latest and greatest from Mountain View, Calif. What many of you might not realize, however, is just how fast the SEO industry is changing because of it. In this article, I’ll take you through some clear examples of how some of the old rules of SEO no longer apply, and what steps you can take to stay ahead of the curve in order to continue to provide successful SEO campaigns for your businesses. There are generally three different classifications of artificial intelligence: When we talk about the context of Google’s RankBrain, and the machine learning algorithms that are currently running on Google, we are talking about Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). Actually, ANI has been around for some time. Ever wonder how those SPAM filters work in your email? Yep, that’s ANI. Here are some of my favorite ANI programs: Google Translate, IBM’s Watson, that cool feature on Amazon that tells you products that are “recommended for you,” self-driving cars and, yes, our beloved Google’s RankBrain. Within ANI, there are many different approaches. As Pedro Domingos clearly lays out in his book , data scientists trying to achieve the perfect AI can be grouped into five “tribes” today: Google’s RankBrain is in the camp of the Connectionists. Connectionists believe that all our knowledge is encoded in the connections between neurons in our brain. And RankBrain’s particular strategy is what experts in the field call a back propagation technique, rebranded as “deep learning.” Connectionists claim this strategy is capable of learning anything from raw data, and therefore is also capable of ultimately automating all knowledge discovery. Google apparently believes this, too. On January 26th, 2014, Google it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, which was, essentially, a back propagation shop. So when we talk about RankBrain, we now can tell people it is comprised of one particular technique (back propagation or “deep learning”) on ANI. Now that we have that out of the way, just how much is this field progressing? And, more importantly, how is it changing the business of SEO? from explains the growth of technology better than anyone in his article . Here is what technological progress looks like, when you look back at history: But, as Urban points out, in reality, you can’t see what’s to your right (the future). So here is how it actually feels when you are standing there: What this chart shows is that when humans try to predict the future, they always underestimate. This is because they are looking to the left of this graph, instead of to the right. However, the reality is, human progress takes place at a faster and faster rate as time goes on. calls this the Law of Accelerating Returns. The scientific reasoning behind his original theory is that more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster than less advanced societies — they’re more advanced. Of course, the same can be applied to artificial intelligence and the growth rate we are seeing now with advanced technology. We see this with computing resources right now. Here is a visualization that gives you the perspective of just how fast things can change because of this Law of Accelerating Returns: As you can clearly see, and as we all can intuitively feel, the growth of advanced processing and computers has benefited from this Law of Accelerating Returns. Here is another shocking revelation: At some point, the processing power for an economical computer will surpass that of not only a single human, but for all humans . In fact, it now appears that we will be able to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) some time around 2025. Technology is clearly expanding at a faster and faster pace, and, by many accounts, most of us will be caught off guard. As I have explained above, Google’s RankBrain is just one form of ANI, which means that, while it can perform things better than a human in one specific area, it is just that: a relatively weak form of artificial intelligence. But we may be blindsided by how fast this “weak” intelligence might easily turn into something with which we have no idea how to deal. Here, you can clearly see that Google’s RankBrain, while super intelligent on one particular task, is still in the general context of things, fairly unintelligent on the intelligence scale. But what happens when we apply the same Law of Accelerating Returns to artificial intelligence? Tim Urban walks us through the thought experiment: So what does this mean for the business of SEO and the artificial intelligence that is upon us? Before we get into predicting the future, let’s take inventory on how RankBrain has already changed SEO. I sat down with Carnegie Mellon alumnus and friend , now CTO and co-founder of , a company that provides search engine models for Fortune 500 SEO teams. As a search engineer himself, Stouffer had a unique perspective over the past decade that most professionals in that industry don’t get to see. Here are some of his tips for the SEO industry when it comes to Google’s new emphasis on artificial intelligence. This is the biggest current fallacy of our industry. There have been many prognosticators every time Google’s rankings shift in a big way. Usually, without fail, a few data scientists and CTOs from well-known companies in our industry will claim they “have a reason!” for the latest Google Dance. The typical analysis consists of perusing through months of ranking data leading up to the event, then seeing how the rankings shifted across all websites of different types. With today’s approach to regression analysis, these data scientists point to a specific type of website that has been affected (positively or negatively) and conclude with high certainty that Google’s latest algorithmic shift was attributed to a specific type of algorithm ( or backlink, et al.) that these websites shared. However, that isn’t how Google works anymore. Google’s RankBrain, a machine learning or deep learning approach, works very differently. Within Google, there are a number of core algorithms that exist. It is RankBrain’s job to learn what mixture of these core algorithms is best applied to each type of search results. For instance, in certain search results, RankBrain might learn that the most important signal is the META Title. Adding more significance to the META Title matching algorithm might lead to a better searcher experience. But in another search result, this very same signal might have a horrible correlation with a good searcher experience. So in that other vertical, another algorithm, maybe PageRank, might be promoted more. This means that, in each search result, Google has a completely different mix of algorithms. You can now see why doing regression analysis over every site, without having the context of the search result that it is in, is supremely flawed. For these reasons, today’s regression analysis must be done by each specific search result. Stouffer recently wrote about a where the Google algorithmic shifts be measured. First, you can take a snapshot of what the search engine model was calibrated to in the past for a specific keyword search. Then, re-calibrate it after a shift in rankings has been detected, revealing the delta between the two search engine model settings. Using this approach, during certain ranking shifts, you can see which particular algorithm is being promoted or demoted in its weighting. Having this knowledge, we can then focus on improving that particular part of SEO for sites for those unique search results. But that same approach will not (and cannot) hold for other search results. This is because RankBrain is operating on the (or keyword) level. It is literally customizing the algorithms for each search result. What Google also realized is that they could teach their new deep learning system, RankBrain, what “good” sites look like, and what “bad” sites look like. Similar to how they weight algorithms differently for each search result, they also realized that each vertical had different examples of “good” and “bad” sites. This is undoubtedly because different verticals have different CRMs, different templates and different structures of data altogether. When RankBrain operates, it is essentially learning what the correct “settings” are for each environment. As you might have guessed by now, these settings are completely dependent on the vertical on which it is operating. So, for instance, in the health industry, Google knows that a site like is a reputable site that they would like to have near the top of their searchable index. Anything that looks like the structure of WebMD’s site will be associated with the “good” camp. Similarly, any site that looks like the structure of a known spammy site in the health vertical will be associated with the “bad” camp. As RankBrain works to group “good” and “bad” sites together, using its deep learning capabilities, what happens if you have a site that has many different industries all rolled up into one? First, we have to discuss a bit more detail on how exactly this works. Before grouping together sites into a “good” and “bad” bucket, RankBrain must first determine what each site’s classification is. Sites like and are pretty easy. While there are many different sub-categories on each site, the general category is very straightforward. These types of sites are easily classifiable. But what about sites that have many different categories? A good example of these types of sites are the How-To sites. Sites that typically have many broad categories of information. In these instances, the deep learning process breaks down. Which training data does Google use on these sites? The answer is: It can be seemingly random. It may choose one category or another. For well-known sites, like Wikipedia, Google can opt-out of this classification process altogether, to ensure that the deep learning process doesn’t undercut their existing search experience (aka “too big to fail”). But for lesser-known entities, what will happen? The answer is, “Who knows?” Presumably, this machine learning process has an automated way of classifying each site before attempting to compare it to other sites. Let’s say a How-To site looks just like WebMD’s site. Great, right? Well, if the classification process thinks this site is about shoes, then it is going to be comparing the site to Nike’s site structure, not WebMD’s. It just might turn out that their site structure looks a lot like a spammy shoe site, as opposed to a reputable WebMD site, in which case the overly generalized site could easily be flagged as SPAM. If the How-To site had separate domains, then it would be easy to make each genre look like the best of that industry. Stay niche. Let’s take a look at how this affects backlinks. Based on the classification procedure above, it is more important than ever to stick within your “linking neighborhood,” as RankBrain will know if something is different from similar backlink profiles in your vertical. Let’s take the same example as above. Say a company has a site about shoes. We know that RankBrain’s deep learning process will attempt to compare each aspect of this site with the best and worst sites of the shoe industry. So, naturally, the backlink profile of this site will be compared to the backlink profiles of these best and worst sites. Let’s also say that a typical reputable shoe site has backlinks from the following neighborhoods: Now let’s say that the company’s SEO team decides to start pursuing backlinks from all these neighborhoods, plus a new neighborhood — from one of the CEO’s previous connections to the auto industry. They are “smart” about it as well: They construct a cross-marketing “free shoe offer for all new leases” page that is created on the auto site, which then links to their new type of shoe. Totally relevant, right? Well, RankBrain is going to see this and notice that this backlink profile looks a lot different than the typical reputable shoe site. Worse yet, it finds that a bunch of spammy shoe sites also have a backlink profile from auto sites. Uh oh. And just like that, without even knowing what is the “correct” backlink profile, RankBrain has sniffed out what is “good” and what is “bad” for its search engine results. The new shoe site is flagged, and their organic traffic takes a nosedive. As we can see from the previous discussion on the Law of Accelerating Returns, RankBrain and other forms of artificial intelligence will at some point surpass the human brain. And at this point, nobody knows where this technology will lead us. Some things are certain, though: In some ways, the deep learning methodology makes things simpler for SEOs. Knowing that RankBrain and similar technologies are almost on par with a human, the rule of law is clear: There are no more loopholes. In other ways, things are a bit harder. The field of SEO will continue to become extremely technical. Analytics and big data are the order of the day, and any SEO that isn’t familiar with these approaches has a lot of catching up to do. Those of you who have these skills can look forward to a big payday.
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Fintech is playing the long game
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Bernard Moon
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
Our team has been actively investing in fintech for the past two years. In addition to reading pitches from hundreds of companies and meeting with dozens, half of our team has worked in the finance sector in previous careers. SparkLabs Global has invested in 13 fintech companies from the U.S., U.K. and Sweden, and we were the only follow-on fund for the inaugural cohort of the Barclays Accelerator program. With this accumulated knowledge, we decided to create an easy to read overview for others to get up to speed on how innovation and technology will disrupt the financial sector. ; the following is a summary of what we’ve learned so far. There has been a flurry of activity over the past several years. From startups to established technology ventures such as Alibaba and PayPal, companies are working to disrupt and capture market share from traditional financial institutions — which are truly giants compared with the upstarts of today. In China, and Asia in general, mobile payment penetration is ahead of the rest of the world. The third-party mobile payment market in China increased 69.7 percent in 2015, to $1.5 trillion by GMV, with Alipay (Alibaba) capturing 68.4 percent of the market, followed by Tenpay’s (Tencent) 20.6 percent. Looking at the wealth management industry, you can see the wide chasm between traditional institutions and the startups trying to disrupt them. Compare assets under management (AUM) of leading startups in wealth management, such as Betterment ($3 billion) and Wealthfront ($2.6 billion), with established wealth management groups such as Bank of America ($1.12 trillion) or Morgan Stanley ($986.7 billion): We believe the initial entrepreneurial activity and transaction volume has been from the first layers of disruption in fintech (i.e. banking tech, payments), but long-term and more game-changing innovations will occur in the next layers. Ultimately, this will lead to new startups and technologies changing the core of the finance sector: commercial banking and insurance (life, health, property). The financial sector represents 7 percent of the U.S. economy, and has grown over the past decade. But with the loss of trust since the last economic crisis, and rapid pace of innovation, nothing is too big to fail. Wells Fargo had more than $86 billion in revenues in 2015 with a market cap of $254 billion, but Nokia in 2000 had a market cap of $300 billion with $28 billion in revenues. Today, Nokia is down to a market cap of $26 billion and a shell of its former self. In 2008, Nokia had 38 percent of the global mobile phone market; today it’s down to a couple of percentage points of the global smartphone market. The U.S. market stands as the most mature and active in startup activity and investments. The finance sector in the U.S. is being challenged on all fronts. The following categories illustrate how our team looks at the startups trying to change the financial markets: We believe the two biggest long-term opportunities for startups are in replacing the banks and insurance institutions themselves. With new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and better data analytics, coupled with changing consumer mindsets, such as the growth of mobile smartphones and millennials hating traditional banks, these industries are ripe for disruption. There are companies, such as , that have made early attempts to become the Bank of America of this new age. An earlier attempt, Simple, was disappointingly acquired by BBVA for $117 million. I personally was rooting for Simple to become a viable challenger versus traditional banks instead of an early casualty. South Korea, which is a bellwether for numerous technology trends across the globe (i.e. VoIP, micro-transactions, virtual goods), has more than 55 percent of their population using mobile banking and more than 10 percent substituting mobile payments for their credit cards. These changes in behavior have led all the major banks to start shutting down ATMs and bank branches over the past couple of years. This is not just a sign of technology creating efficiencies within these institutions, but rather a strong signal of opportunities available for entrepreneurs in Korea and across the globe. For the insurance industry, there are so many opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors with patience because you are dealing with a highly regulated industry. Within the health insurance space, I believe we will be seeing more plays such as , a new health insurance company backed by Google Capital, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Peter Thiel and others. Also the growth of self-insured plans from large companies, such as Google, to many SMBs have dramatically increased the number of people under employer group ASO (administrative services only for self-funded business) to 115.6 million covered lives. This creates opportunities for such startups as , which provides solutions for self-funded companies. There are many gaps in other insurance markets, such as life and property. Only 44 percent of U.S. households (2013, LIMRA) have life insurance, so many families are at financial risk. This is a $15 trillion unmet life insurance need. It’s interesting, because 83 percent of people say they don’t want to buy life insurance because it’s too expensive, but they believe life insurance costs more than three times the actual price. This industry is begging for more entrepreneurs to disrupt and change it. Going back to commercial banking… as startups attack the revenue streams of banks, they will slowly erode the profitability of these traditional institutions. Already half of all commercial (retail) bank customers are unprofitable, so I believe this downward trend will continue over the next decades. Even with the recent hiccups within the peer-to-peer lending space ( ), I believe this is just a minor setback and these new players will continue to slowly erode traditional consumer and commercial lending. The current leader, , went public last year and has arranged more than $9 billion in loans since it launched in 2007. As a comparison, Bank of America’s consumer loan portfolio was $489 billion in 2014. More than a year ago, there was an over-demand from matching institutions, such as hedge funds and family offices, on consumer loans through Lending Club, and others. These P2P lenders couldn’t find enough qualified loans and were leaving money on the table from these matching institutions. Then the tables turned and these institutions becoming more conservative with their capital, even before the , Lending Club’s CEO. Now there will certainty be more scrutiny from regulators because of Laplanche’s behavior. Prosper also laid off 28 percent of its staff recently, and most of these P2P lenders are now expanding their offerings to other financial offerings, such as mortgage lending and wealth management. While I may sound delusional, I still believe all of this is just a bump in the road, and peer-to-peer lending will grow in the long-term and change the traditional consumer and commercial lending industries. Fintech is not an area where we will see the rapid changes and growth as occurred in mobile messaging, or even the mobile phone industry with Apple’s takeover of Nokia. Startups challenging the financial sector are playing the long game; there will be no overnight successes. I believe we won’t see comparable giants from these crops of startups until a decade out — but change is coming, and it is inevitable.
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American Airlines strikes a deal with ViaSat to bring satellite WiFi to 100 planes
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
American Airlines has gone non-Gogo, striking a deal with Southern Californian communications company ViaSat to by September of next year. The deal comes in the wake of some fairly tense dealings between the airline and Gogo, whose traditional in-flight WiFi speeds (and near ubiquity) have been a source of frustration for passengers and carrier alike. But while the two companies have been at odds ( ), Gogo will continue to provide service to a number of American’s fleet, including 134 Airbus planes, which have been outfitted with the WiFi provider’s 2Ku satellite service. ViaSat says its service provides 12Mbps to each seat, speeds it promises will offering “at home” multimedia streaming options, as opposed to the regular old email checking pace currently available on most domestic flights. The new planes will utilize the company’s ViaSat-1 and ViaSat-2 technologies, with the even faster ViaSat-3 platform arriving in 2019.
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The Alvieri Firenze brings a bubbly touch to the traditional watch
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
Like tea and toddler’s birthday parties, everything is better with bubbles. This interesting new has a unique “bubble” or convex track around its face, a feature that will be familiar to folks who like and may want something similar… but much, much cheaper.
The watch comes in two styles – standard and with a lunar calendar – and runs a Ronda quartz movement. The current model, called the Firenze, is $175 for early birds. The Lunar model is $199 and includes a date window at 6 o’clock and a large moon phase readout at noon. The moon phase is an homage to more complicated watches that were able to display the phases of the moon with a delightfully complex set of gears and cogs. The pieces also have a complex, engraved guilloche dial and come in silver or gold and a leather strap in black or brown. To be clear this is primarily a fashion watch – a piece that focuses on design rather than “features” or complications. However, given the unique convex track, the clever moon phase readout, and the low price this is worth a look. It ships in August but there are a few hands-on photos for folks who are looking for a bit more fizz.
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Vive la France! Vive la Tech!… But do these two great tastes taste great together?
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Jon Evans
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
I spent last week on a junket in Paris, paid for by the French government, visiting the various hubs and spokes of the burgeoning French startup scene. I don’t think they’ll invite me back, after they read this. My considered assessment is that the French government, and to an extent the larger French tech scene, lacks ambition, boldness, and confidence, and their technology strategy is doomed to failure. Among our many meetings was one with , Minister of Digital Affairs for the ( ) current French administration. She, personally, impressed me greatly; but her ministry’s policies did not. Their stated aim was to foster tech startups in France in order to support France’s largest companies. The idea is that the startup ecosystem will act as a kind of farm team, the best of which will be incorporated into the big businesses, to transform them into the kind of digital disruptors that can compete with the big American Internet companies. This is, to put it mildly, quixotic. It seems far more likely that big French companies will only slow and stifle whichever startups they partner, invest in, or acquire. This strategy stands in striking contrast to the Silicon Valley ethos that startups should devour and replace legacy dinosaurs, not prop them up. And it bespeaks a curious lack of ambition, as if the ultimate goal of any self-respecting tech startup is to become a division within LVMH or Total or Peugeot, rather than an Uber or Google or Tesla in their own right. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, the French government’s attitude was echoed by most of the French companies, and incubators, and hubs, and conference planners, and venture capitalists, with whom we met. The general attitude was that startups were minor-league players competing to be acquired by big-league multinationals. Almost nobody thought big enough to imagine startups so successful that they changed all the rules of the game. Instead, almost everyone seemed to take it as a given that relationships and partnerships with big companies were, in and of themselves, extremely important and exciting. In fairness, the Valley makes a similar mistake when we celebrate funding rounds, rather than actual achievements — but still, can you imagine an early-stage AirBNB excitedly trumpeting a joint venture with Marriott, or a young Uber desperately seeking a partnership with Yellow Cab? This French attempt to turn Paris into a startup hub is admirable, but treating a startup ecosystem as an end in and of itself smacks of cargo-cultism, even if your intent is to harvest them for big-company talent. World-beaters do not grow in a petri dish of low ambitions; with the wrong messages and incentives, you risk accidentally pushing your best people and companies towards excellence elsewhere, leaving stagnant mediocrity behind. The good news is that, outside of the government, the French tech scene is decidedly in the middle of a sea change for the better. As a former Paris resident, I can assure you that the cultural attitude towards technology has been transformed. Ten years ago, tech was anything but cool. And we did encounter two extremely fast-growing French tech companies with admirably high and global ambitions, even if one of them — the long-distance ride-sharing platform BlaBlaCar — still claims, incomprehensibly, that the USA is not a good market for them. (The other is Sigfox, which .) Another beacon of francophone hope is Xavier Niel, the multibillionaire who last decade singlehandedly overturned the government-approved order of things in the French mobile-phone industry. Niel has since created and continued to fund the genuinely , a branch of which will soon open in California, and is now constructing a vast complex in Paris to house 1,000 startups. Yes, you read that correctly. And yes, that too sounds a little cargo-cult. But it’s also an example of the expansive ambition that the French —and European — tech scene badly needs.
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Why patent trolls won’t give up
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Ira Blumberg
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
In , Yoda tells Luke “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.” Luckily for me, this didn’ apply to the patent world. I spent seven years on the “dark side” working for patent trolls before coming back to the light. Patent trolls are that derive all or almost all of their revenue by asserting patents against other . My experiences while on the “dark side” profoundly shaped my view on the role that Patent Assertion Entities ( ), or patent trolls, play in the industry. The struggle between and that produce and sell products is not as stark or binary as “light and dark,” or “good and evil,” but the fact remains that PAE litigation does more harm than good. industry is fertile ground for PAE litigation, with its many patents, plentiful and an increasing global reliance on technology. have no incentive to unless we in work together to stand against them. When I first started out in law firms, I represented clients on all sides of the patent ecosystem. Then at Intel, I spent seven years defending my company against patent claims from other operating and from trolls. When dealing with other product , Intel and other high-t use their own patents to defend themselves and to balance any demands made by the aggressor. One of the big issues with trolls is that there is no reciprocal liability and no vulnerability to patents, which allows trolls to be aggressive and operate with near impunity as there is nothing a product company use to offset its exposure to the troll’s patents. After seven exhausting years of dealing with aggressive threats of litigation, demands for fast payment and being the perpetual bearer of bad (and expensive) news to my senior management, I was ready for a change. I joined Rambus, a company with a reputation for aggressively asserting its patents on computer memory. As the VP of Licensing at Rambus, I was on the front line of every patent assertion engagement the company ran for more than five years. After Rambus, I joined Intellectual Ventures (IV), the world’s largest patent-licensing company, as a Licensing Executive, where I was again on the front line of more than eight patent-licensing engagements. IV is considered by some to be troll or . After a couple of years at IV I had had enough. Working for a PAE relieved me of the onslaught of patent licensing demands and constant threats of litigation I experienced at Intel. However, there were several new sources of stress on the troll side. First, patent licensing is the income-generating engine for the whole company, and there was constant and tremendous pressure to bring in money as cheaply and quickly as possible. In a zero-sum game where are looking to maximize their revenue while the target company wants to minimize its costs, there’s no love lost for the troll side. Although I felt I was able to maintain my professional integrity, the natural inclination of the target company is to avoid you as long as possible and get away from you as quickly as possible. After seven years of the troll life, I made the decision to return to the corporate world and work for a company that actually makes things and helps push the technology industry forward, so I joined Lenovo as the Vice President of Intellectual Property. While I was eager to leave, my time on the “dark side” was valuable because it yielded insight and nuance into how operate, the negative impact they have and what be done about them. The sad reality is that the patents used by trolls do not need to be good for IV, or any PAE, to make money. Quality is not an issue when it costs $2-$3 million to find out whether a patent claim has merit, whereas settling costs “just” $500,000-$1 million. Trolls often aggressively push for extortionate settlements that far surpass the value of the IP because they know many will choose to settle rather than get embroiled in an expensive and drawn-out lawsuit. Their actions wreak havoc on of all sizes. estimates that patent litigation more than $60 billion in firm wealth each year, and that doesn’t even factor in ancillary effects, such as That said, working for did help me appreciate certain arguments in their favor. IV argues that if it didn’t buy patents, inventors would never get paid. By creating a capital market for invention, it claims to help revitalize inefficient , make innovation profitable and In theory, there is some validity to this argument. It is true that individual inventors and smaller are not always well-compensated for their inventions. But in reality, the harm businesses suffer on this front is significantly outweighed by the harm caused by the exorbitant costs of patent litigation lawsuits. The settlements IV gains from tens of thousands of patents is vastly out of proportion with the value of the innovation being licensed. It is now abundantly clear to me that are, in net, detrimental to business and innovation. Despite what they say, trolls are not making the world a better place for anyone. It is time they lay down their arms and allow to use the patent system in the way in which it was intended. Patent trolling is lucrative, however, and the chances that will forsake it for the greater good are slim. Legitimate businesses have a responsibility, both to themselves and to the industry as a whole, to try to minimize this activity. For larger, well-resourced corporations like Lenovo, this mean purchasing strong patent portfolios when they become available. essentially use patents as weapons, so the fewer patents they have, the better. A company also set its own corporate policy that prohibits it from selling patents to trolls. This is important, as more than 80 percent of patents litigated by are acquired from operating . Lenovo believes strongly in protecting innovation, and having seen the real threats that trolls pose, I pushed to join , a non-profit community of that work together to minimize their exposure to patents owned by trolls. With fellow members like Red Hat, Canon, Logitech and Subaru, we’re making a real dent in the pool of patents that would be useful to . At last count, nearly half a million patent assets were protected from being used as weapons in PAE litigation against members of LOT Network. As someone who has spent time on both sides, I feel a call to speak out against frivolous and overpriced patent litigation. The work I did for both and corporations was certainly legal, but not the same: While I was always on the right side of the law, I prefer being on the right side of innovation. want to create technologies that matter and beyond, so patents continue to matter. Frivolous lawsuits and those demanding damages far in excess of the value of the allegedly infringed patent detract from our ability to push innovation and better products forward. I hope that many more voices in will join mine in decrying the harmful effects of needless patent litigation — our future depends on it.
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Bose’s QuietComfort headphones finally go wireless
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
The Bose name has more or less been synonymous with the words “noise cancelling.” As for wireless? Not so much. The headphone maker has dragged its feet when it comes to cutting the cord, even as the competition has flooded the market with Bluetooth solutions. The company, thankfully, is , bringing wireless connectivity to its flagship QuietComfort brand. Not surprisingly, the new QuietComfort 35 headphones aren’t much of an aesthetic departure from the company’s signature mainstays. The around-ear headphones feature multiple microphones to offer up active noise cancelation. The cans feature buttons for music control and picking up calls and a rechargeable battery that promises up to 20 hours of music playback, or as Bose puts it, “longer than a flight from New York to Hong Kong.” Fair enough. The headphones are available as of today for $349.95. The new QuietComforts are also being joined by two new pairs of earbuds. The higher QuietControl 30 are clearly being positioned as an in-ear version of the company’s flagship line. Priced at $299.95 (with a September launch date), the Bluetooth buds also feature active noise cancelling microphones (six in all), along with music playback and call control built into the on-neck cable. Their battery should offer ten hours of life on a charge. The SoundSport headphones, meanwhile, are poised to take on , featuring a sweat-resistant body and tips designed to keep them in place during a workout. Those run $149.95, while the Pulse version with built-in heart rate monitoring cost an extra $50.
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Ousta is driving ride-hailing expansion in Egypt
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Radwa Rashad
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
With its major cities congested with traffic — taxi cabs, public transports and, lately, ride-hailing and ride-sharing apps — Egypt apparently still needs more when it comes to transportation. Catering to a population exceeding 90 million, international market players and launched in Egypt in 2014; a third player soon followed — a local ride-hailing app called . Launched in March 2016, the locally developed app promised no surge rates, lower fares, more safety features for riders and a seemingly patriotic approach to ride hailing. With one download a minute, and a ride request a minute as well, it might look like the locals are carving their market edge faster than the competition. Starting with Greater Cairo (with a population well over 25 million) and surrounded by ongoing controversy with cab drivers protesting and demanding complete halt of ride-hailing apps, Ousta now has around 2,000 cars on the roads of five major cities all over Egypt, with plans to expand to cover the entire country by the end of 2016. Ousta is the brainchild of , already an entrepreneur and founder of another successful startup named (hailed as ). El-Batrawi partnered with longtime friend and former Zone Manager of Nestlé North America, Omar Salah, to release the application on both Android and iOS platforms. While one would argue this is no great feat, technology-wise, as it pretty much reinvents the same technology of Uber, Lyft and other competitors, both co-founders argue differently. “We are not really reinventing the wheel, we have taken a successful business model and made it more relevant to our unique culture. Egyptians are a tough crowd to please and we know how to get the job done,” says El-Batrawi. The duo speak at length about the various Ousta offers, such as the SOS button which, when pressed by a rider mid trip, summons the urgent attention and intervention of an emergency team to increase riders’ safety on the road. “We have heard and read numerous stories about harassment, possible kidnapping and other issues happening with other competitors and we essentially wanted to give the rider the upper hand, if you are in distress mid trip, Ousta is here to step in,” says El-Batrawi. Another feature seemingly alluring to the crowds is the “Live Fare” option, which allows the rider to see the fare calculated in real time as the trip progresses. This, according to the founders, includes riders in the process instead of relying on fare estimates and roughly calculated total fares. Ousta also took a completely different approach to customer service. Instead of automated email replies and surveys, Ousta uses the power of social media to deal with all sorts of issues with complete live transparency. “No Egyptian wants to wait for an automated reply via email, they are hot blooded and when they want answers or solutions, they want them now,” says Salah. El-Batrawi adds, “Social media is a powerful tool that is left untapped by many in the Middle East, if used properly, Middle Eastern people seem to develop product loyalty faster and deeper if engaged the right way.” As for surge pricing and “peak hours,” , Ousta has made a painstakingly hard decision, promising no surge in prices regardless of traffic, supply, demand or even force majeure. “We cater to Egyptians from all walks of life and they all use ride-hailing apps while on a tight budget. In Egypt’s pressing times economically and politically, we are resolved to be on the rider’s side even if it means less money for us and our partners,” Salah explains. He adds, “Our partners are on board with the no surge policy, which is a big relief.” But such a large-scale app operating in five large cities must need a lot of funding and an army of operations staff. Not in Ousta’s case. Located in , Cairo’s Silicon Valley equivalent, Ousta operates with 30 employees, with more than half in tech roles. So when does the funding fit in? Salah explains. “Yes, we bootstrapped using our life savings and we did for a reason. We wanted to launch on our own so that we can test and modify the app and all its related loose ends to gain traction, which is exactly the result we have come to.” While some might argue that Ousta will have to fish for investment soon, the company seems to be stabilizing itself on its rapid success and growing database while preparing for investment talks and rounds. “Getting investment is in the works but we wanted to prove it was doable against all the odds before stepping into board meetings. We have built it and now they will come,” says El-Batrawi. Ousta does seem to be taking the fierce competition in stride despite the limited resources. On the other hand, regional competitor Careem ( ) and international ride-hailing empire Uber are both already invested and operating successfully in the market. “We have unique edges, i.e no price surges ever, regardless of the circumstance, complete dependence on ethical business practices and a faith in the power of our name,” explains El-Batrawi. The word is originally Turkish for “Master Craftsman,” the one who knows his/her craft to perfection and has the ability and determination to build on it and teach it to others. It has been amended over generations to denote masterful drivers. In Egypt, you can’t be a real just because you can handle a steering wheel; an is courteous, polite and respectful of riders’ privacy and completely manages a safe trip. This is exactly what the startup is built on. Salah says, “We employ the best in the profession, train them to be even better and manage the entire process with focus on ethics, respect, transparency and availability. The name being nostalgic to our audience doesn’t hurt either.” Amidst the hustle of a small yet vibrant workspace, the question had to be asked: What is next for Ousta? El-Batrawi is very elusive about it. What can be revealed are plans to cover the entire Egyptian map by the end of the current year and add to the app more tech and operation features to make it smoother and more in tune with what riders really want. Salah adds, “We have reached 30-40% weekly growth rate in under three months, why not go for more?” Both smile sheepishly and shrug, saying, “Expanding all over the MENA region sounds cool too.”
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Finland’s hot startup scene crackles at Arctic 15
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
Silicon Valley may be the startup center of the universe, but it’s far from alone when it comes to a concentration of good ideas. Innovation and creativity aren’t confined to any one place, and the startup hub idea that has taken root in the Valley can be replicated in other areas of the country and world with effort and commitment on the part of entrepreneurs, government and a whole slew of economic constituents. Finland offers one such place where, unbeknownst to many in the US, there is a thriving startup scene that extends all over northern Europe — in Helsinki, Stockholm and Copenhagen and beyond. What’s more, there are companies popping up in Estonia, Lithuania and across the Baltics. It might not be as vast as San Francisco, New York City or even Boston, but the energy is palpable and the enthusiasm extensive and it was on display last week in Helsinki at . One of the impressions I took away as I walked the conference and spoke to the various companies on the conference floor, was that these entrepreneurs are every bit as committed to success as anyone in the US, but there is the ability here, because of the small community, to quickly develop a position of influence and to become the connective tissue that is needed to build a startup community. The Arctic 15 business, which is far more than the conference itself, is indeed part of that system. It provides news coverage through its various publications. It organizes smaller gatherings beyond the showcase conference last week and it supports the ecosystem in a variety of ways, not unlike TechCrunch has in the Silicon Valley — albeit on a smaller scale. Photo Credit: . The goal of any startup community is to do more than simply provide the support system for startups to develop. It wants to seem them grow and thrive and while you might not see the pure dollar success stories we have seen over the last two decades in the US, it’s a system that’s on its way and has seen its share of decent exits. According to the Startup Europe Partnership (SEP), a think tank established by the European Commission that (pdf report), the Nordics compromised of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland have done remarkably well compared to the rest of Europe, especially when you consider how much smaller the populations are in this part of the continent. SEP was looking to quantify the growth potential of the Northern Europe startup community and what it found was quite startling. For instance, there were 205 mergers and acquisitions from this region in the last 5 years alone, and while 40 percent of those were sold to US companies, another 40 percent stayed in the Nordic region and will contribute to jobs growth in the area. (The remainder went to other areas.) SEP looked at the biggest companies in the Nordic startup scene, what it calls Scalers — those who have been able to secure at least $100 million in capital — and identified 12 such companies including Spotify, Zendesk, King.com, Klarna and iZettle. It also identified scaleups, companies that have raised at least a million dollars and it found 430 such startups across the northern region with Sweden and Finland leading by a large margin with 149 and 126 respectively — and the good news is they found it’s been growing each year. Chart courtesy of . One area that needs to build up at some point is funding mechanisms. While there are firms working at the angel, seed and A round levels, there’s not much beyond that at the local level, I was told. That means firms from outside the region need to fill in. Perhaps that’s why Tim Draper from DFJ and Draper and Associates, Seth Pierrepont from Accel, Megumi Ikeda from Hearst Ventures, Carman Chan founder of Click Ventures and many others showed up to find what was happening here. They weren’t alone. Hala Zeine, SVP in charge of portfolio at SAP was also there speaking to startups and looking for ones that would be good matches for her company. She told me she came away with some viable candidates and would be following up in the coming weeks. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Arctic Startups The center of the conference is not the speakers on stage as at so many, but relationship building. They spend more time trying to get people to connect than sitting watching someone speak and there were meetings everywhere in every space from formal meeting spaces designed specifically for that purpose to hallways and informal seating areas. People just kept chatting. One sure sign that the startup scene is thriving in Finland and Northern Europe is that young people consider startups cool. One young man bragged he worked for a startup, but when pressed for details, he really had kind of a vague idea for one. He simply liked the idea of saying he was working on it. Finland showed me that in the coldest parts of Europe, the startup scene is pretty hot, and has plenty of activity to brag about. What’s more, it has the potential to be an economic force for years to come, providing jobs and driving growth in the region and beyond — and that’s exactly what a startup scene should be doing regardless of location.
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The FBI is working on a tattoo tracking system that has privacy groups up in arms
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
According to , the FBI has teamed with government scientists to work on a technology system designed to track tattoos. In 2014, the Imaging wing of the the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created the Tattoo Recognition Technology with help from the FBI. Among the group’s earliest tasks was the creation of a database compiling some 15,000 tattoo images in an attempt to develop recognition algorithms. The concept was developed to track individuals based on commonalities, as, according to the NIST, tattoos, “suggest affiliation to gangs, subcultures, religious or ritualistic beliefs, or political ideology” along with “contain[ing] intelligence; messages, meaning and motivation.” This is, in part, what has the EFF so concerned, due to worries about implications surrounding “free expression, religious freedom, and the right to associate.” The organization’s other major concern surrounds how the information was obtained. Among the first wave of images currently collected, “many, if not most” have been collected from prisoners, according to the EFF. The program’s scope is expect to expand by leaps and bounds, with the NIST looking to build the database to more than 100,000 images.
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Atari is embracing the Internet of Things with new smart home devices
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
Admittedly, Atari isn’t the entertainment powerhouse it once was. The company has spent the last few years digging after declaring bankruptcy in 2013, focusing largely on plays and casino deals. Now the one-time gaming juggernaut is . It’s not exactly a new console, sadly, but the iconic brand will grace “a wide range of new Atari products” created by French wireless networking company, Sigfox. There’s not a lot in the way of details surrounding what appears to largely be a licensing deal, but the initial products will include low priced home, pet, lifestyle and safety devices, featuring Sigfox’s low-energy technology. The products are said to be targeted toward both at mass-market consumers and charity organizations.
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The US Army is deploying smart earplugs that block out loud noises and enhance quiet ones
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
TCAPS – that’s Tactical Communication and Protective System – are a sort of combo connected earplug/hearing aid to both reduce hearing loss from explosive sounds and enhance perception of quiet tones. The system, currently priced at a (perhaps unsurprisingly) lofty $2,000, is designed to address the problem of hearing loss in the military, one of the most widely reported disabilities among veterans. The issue has been attributed, in part, to soldiers’ unwillingness to wear traditional foam earplugs for fear of missing commands and enemy sounds. The smartphone-connected TCAPS both block out loud sounds like explosions and gunfire, and are capable of enhancing whispers. The systems come in a variety of sizes and shapes for different ear canals and can by charged via solar, standard outlets and even vehicle batteries. At present, the Army has issued 20,000 of the devices.
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Why an inevitable “bust” of the tech boom won’t be such a bad thing
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Terence Fung
| 2,016 | 6 | 5 |
Silicon Valley is experiencing an extended boom that has only recently shown signs of fatigue. While the local real estate/rental markets remain on fire, given an increasingly restrained funding environment, devaluations for once-hot startups, notable recent layoffs at high-profile tech companies and a challenging IPO market, many observers portend an ominous environment ripe for a bust similar to the early 2000s. Yes, there are many similarities between now and the dot-com boom. There are, however, key differences that will enable Silicon Valley to continue driving forward, no matter the headwinds. Similar to the dot-com era, an abundance of capital is chasing a much smaller pool of quality companies. The latest hot trends see dozens of companies created and chasing the same market opportunity. There’s been unabashed optimism and increasingly aggressive deal terms and valuations for startups. Many investors have been willing to overlook traditional metrics and invent new ones, even for mature startups. There’s fierce competition to attract talent with companies driven to one-upmanship on lavish compensation and perks. Ultimately, many companies are burning cash way too fast. The market to reach consumers today is significantly simpler — companies and consumers are benefitting from the infrastructure investments from the last tech boom. Today, much of the world enjoys reliable, faster and cheaper internet, and more than 2 billion people own smartphones, powered largely by Apple- and Android-related app stores. As a result, many companies are able to focus on delivering value straight to the customer by leveraging established infrastructure. In fact, are consumer — versus enterprise — companies. While it’s much less expensive to get most startups off the ground today, the bar for both private and tech funding is higher. Companies must rely on private funding for longer periods of time; Q1 2016 saw , something the market hasn’t seen since 2009. Companies that aren’t cash-flow positive and that can’t secure funding (or an acquirer) will be forced to shut down. Private investors/high-net individuals will largely be the big losers this time around, versus before when such companies successfully IPO’d and mom ‘n pop investors lost big. Scaled industry leaders will not remain unscathed, but will continue to profitably grow after the dust settles. And when previously white-hot startups face cost cutting and layoffs, the market leaders will be ready to absorb talent. If and when the bust hits Silicon Valley, it’s sure to hurt — jobs will be lost and many dreams will remain unfulfilled. But today’s Silicon Valley is much more fundamentally strong and resilient than the dot-com era. The very essence of Silicon Valley is about embracing change and reinventing itself. Collectively, we will take any hits in stride and improve upon our experiences and offerings to deliver something even better than before. We’ve learned from experience and are looking for sustainable businesses that provide real value — even if that means forgoing the ping pong table.
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 6 | 3 | null |
Uber: We’ll be China’s number one taxi app within a year
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
Uber says it is on course to topple bitter rival Didi Chuxing and become China’s most popular ride-on demand service within a year. That’s according to Zhen Liu, SVP of Strategy at Uber China who oversees the company’s business in the country. During an interview at in Hong Kong, Liu stated her firm would overtake Didi on overall marketshare within the next twelve months. Liu claimed Uber is growing rapidly in China, to the point that it is only a matter of time before it snatches the top spot. “Last year, we were only operating in eight cities and we were [at] about one percent marketshare. A year later, we are about one-third of the marketshare and operating in over sixty cities across China,” she said. Uber's China head predicts the ride sharing company will surpass rival DiDi "next year" — Rebecca Blumenstein (@RBlumenstein) A change at the top would represent a remarkable achievement for Uber. The firm has only been in China for just over two years and, , it has poured billions into a fierce rivalry with four-year-old Didi — which itself was created via a merger when to join forces in 2015. Generally speaking it is hard to find accurate data that measures how Uber and Didi, which is present in over 400 cities, are performing in China, although most reports and watchers peg Didi as being a large margin ahead. Nevertheless, China remains the most important market for Uber worldwide, Liu said. Didi, by contrast, is backed by local Chinese giants including Alibaba and Tencent, while Apple recently joined the party with last month. Interviewed separately at Converge, Didi’s Senior Director for International Strategy, Li Zijian, was more diplomatic on the rivalry, pointing out that his firm isn’t concerned with others. “There’s lot of competition in the ride-sharing market, that’s true [but] what we are really doing is to focus on what’s in front of us,” Li said. “It’s like running a hurdles race, if you want to win a hurdles race the only thing you need to focus on is what’s in front of you. You don’t really look over your shoulder to see what other athletes are doing.”
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After a long delay, Line may hold an initial public offering
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
After postponing it for two years, Line may finally go public. According to reports from the and the this week, the company, which is best known for its messaging app, is contemplating a dual initial public listing in Tokyo and New York City this summer. Line may also hold an IPO in Tokyo as soon as next month, . A Line spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company does not “have any confirmed decision at the moment.” If it goes forward, the IPO may raise $2 billion to $3 billion and value Line at more than $5 billion. This is almost less than half of the $9.8 billion valuation when it first applied to go public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in summer 2014. But the company, a subsidiary of South Korean Internet giant Naver, in order to tackle growth in global markets. A few months later, in December 2014, Its former COO, Takeshi Idezawa, was . Just before his promotion was announced, Idezawa that the company wanted to prioritize growth and user engagement before holding an IPO. Despite its efforts, however, Line failed to establish an international foothold and its user growth has plateaued, with just four Asian countries—Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia— . The messaging app landscape is also different than it was two years ago. After a , a handful of players (WeChat, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger) have pulled ahead in many of the markets Line wanted to tackle. Line makes most of its revenue through sticker sales and in-app games, but it’s also attempted to build its messaging app into a platform with enough services (streaming music, mobile payments, food delivery, taxi hailing, shopping, etc.) to become indispensable to users as they go about their daily lives. The company created a to invest in services that it can potentially integrate and also made several acquisitions, including . It’s still unclear, however, if Line’s efforts to grow into a lifestyle platform (a ) will succeed and there are already signs it may be struggling. For example, in February, Line announced the closure of MixRadio, just 14 months after .
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Talking Brazil with Accel’s Kevin Efrusy
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
As you might have noticed, things aren’t going so well in Brazil. Its economy shrank 5.4 percent in the first quarter, according to government figures released yesterday. Its president, Dilma Rousseff, was by a congressional impeachment vote. Brazil is also home to much of the outbreak of the dreaded Zika virus, which has a of people wondering whether it’s worth attending — as well as competing in — the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. (A U.S. cyclist today, out of concern for his pregnant wife.) We couldn’t help but wonder what kind of impact Brazil’s endlessly troubling developments are having on the country’s startups, which seem to fall and of fashion with the season. To get some sense of what’s happening, we caught up with Kevin Efrusy, a partner at Accel Partners who once lived temporarily in Rio to help steer the firm into the right investments and who still commutes to the country regularly. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity. KE: The companies down there are doing remarkably well. Our portfolio companies are growing between 70 and 200 percent annually. I know it sounds strange, but the tech and macroeconomic cycles are pretty uncoupled. Adoption of smart phones, digitization of the economy, adoption of the cloud — they’re all in their early stages in Brazil and have a long way to go there. So as bad as the economy is, no one is saying, “Hey, let’s go back to banking on our laptops instead of our phones.” These [trends] don’t decline in a recession. KE: Seven to nine years, which is why these companies are growing so well. KE: The macro does affect them in several ways. One is fundraising. It definitely scares foreign or less sophisticated investors, which makes it hard for startups to raise follow-on financing. And the valuations they command [is] lower. The third and most important factor is currency [the Brazilian real]. From the peak of the boom to the trough about five or six months ago, the currency went from 2 [reais] to the dollar to 4.2 [reais], so these companies were doing well and enjoying phenomenal growth, but in U.S. dollars, [their revenue] felt anemic. The currency is now trading at 3.6 [reais per each dollar], so it has strengthened. But when your currency in weakening, growth appears less dramatic. On the flip slide, when things get better, it’s like a rocket boost. KE: The important thing is knowing this [macro] stuff happens. If anyone thought they’d go to Brazil or any emerging market and rifle shot a great company as an investment strategy, they were sorely mistaken. You have to have a 10- to 15-year view to build an ecosystem there. It’s not about cycles. It’s how long it takes to build an ecosystem anywhere. In China, [the venture industry started to develop in 1993] and it took those firms 10 years before these really great companies like Tencent and Baidu emerged and had exits. If you look at Silicon Valley, where venture capital got started in the late 60s, early 70s, it’s the same thing; it took 10 years [to see the rise of] Apple and other companies, and it took until the ’80s before you had a venture “industry.” From our perspective, we’re about 4.5 years into [the same thing] in Brazil. That doesn’t mean it will be another six years before there are exits. There are already exits. But it will take six years until the average investor feels safe. For the past year, year-and-a-half, our pacing has been pretty consistent, meaning Accel and me personally. There have been good opportunities because the currency was at an all-time low and really cheap and we took advantage of that a little bit. Most important, of course, is to invest in companies that can be capital efficient and can wait a while before raising a follow-on round, because it can be tricky and we need to be cognizant of that fact. So we’re definitely selecting based on those that can go further on the capital they raise. We aren’t doing high-burn, big swing companies, though I think that’s not happening [broadly speaking] in the U.S. right now, either.
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Walmart will test last-mile grocery delivery via Uber, Lyft and Deliv
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
Walmart and Sam’s Club will begin testing last-mile grocery delivery that uses services including Uber, Lyft and Deliv, to bring customers’ orders to their homes. The announcement is being made at Walmart’s in Arkansas, and comes following the launch of a similar pilot program in Miami in March. There, Walmart-owned Sam’s Club is using the parcel delivery service Deliv to test delivery of general merchandise and groceries for its business members in the area. With the new pilot program involving Uber and Lyft, Walmart customers will be able to shop using the company’s online grocery service at , then request delivery at checkout for a small fee. The company says it’s starting “small” with these tests and will let customers guide the process going forward. The first tests will go live this week or the next in Denver and Phoenix. In one market, Uber will be trialed, while the other will use Lyft. (The company will test with UberX drivers, it says.) Customers will place their online orders much as they would if requesting curbside pickup, and then specially trained Walmart Personal Shoppers fill those orders. These Walmart employees are trained to understand how to select the best meat and produce, and they quickly place frozen and fresh items in a designated, temperature-controlled holding area in the back of the store. There are around 35,000 fresh groceries, dairy, meat, frozen foods, health and beauty products, baby items, and consumables available in Walmart’s online grocery store. However, at checkout in these test markets, Walmart customers will be able to select the option to have their order delivered instead of opting for curbside pickup. (The Deliv pilot with Sam’s Club in Miami will continue as before, and follows a similar process) When a Walmart shopper selects home delivery, they’ll choose a time frame, and pay an additional delivery fee of $7.00 to $10.00. This fee will help to offset the cost of using the third-party car services. Walmart’s team will then request a driver from Uber or Lyft to come to the store using the normal mobile application. The company says Uber and Lyft are working with Walmart on the tests, and the drivers will be alerted in some fashion – perhaps via a text – that these are grocery orders, not passenger pickups, when summoned. The driver picks up the already prepared order, and heads to the customer’s location. Walmart will call the customer to tell them the order is on its way. This is not Walmart’s first experiment with grocery delivery. The retailer also has grocery delivery pilots of its own in both Denver and San Jose, California. However, it has not yet moved to expand upon that program. That hints that the company hasn’t figured out how to make the economics of home grocery delivery successful as an in-house program, or that customer demand hasn’t been as strong. Tapping into Uber and other third-parties is another option Walmart now seems willing to consider as an alternative. While grocery delivery has been a lengthy experiment for Walmart, more recently it has focused on curbside pickup as its big differentiator from the growing number of grocery delivery services, like those from Instacart, Peapod, Shipt, Amazon and Google. Walmart has always said that pickup makes more sense for its customer base, who are more concerned with the cost of groceries rather than the convenience of doorside delivery, which tends to be pricey. Walmart doesn’t markup the cost of groceries, nor does it charge a pickup fee. “Whatever you pay for apples or oranges or sliced deli meat, is the exact same price as you’ll pay with us online,” says Walmart’s director of Public Relations, Ravi Jariwala. “Part of pickup’s success has not only been saving time, but also saving money – you’re not paying more for the convenience…that’s the reason why grocery pickup has been so well-received by our customers,” he adds. And with the upcharge of only around $10 for delivery, Walmart’s pilot grocery delivery services using Uber and Lyft will likely undercut rivals. At the shareholders event, Walmart is also offering an update on its curbside pickup program, which was to a number of new markets across the U.S., while also doubling its presence in some of its larger, established markets. This allowed Walmart to widen its footprint to 30 U.S. cities, it said at the time. It’s now live in 40 markets, and is now announcing expansions into 14 more in June. By the end of July, Walmart will nearly triple the number of stores and markets that offer the service, compared to when it began expanding at the beginning of April 2016. In other words, despite these Uber, Lyft and Deliv-powered delivery experiments, it’s clear that Walmart is still betting more heavily on curbside pickup for the time being.
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Crunch Report | Brand New Emojis
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
Tito Hamze, Jason Kopeck
Tito Hamze
Yashad Kulkarni
Joe Zolnoski
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A micro VC firm in Sacramento raises a fast second fund
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
There may be more VCs per capita in California than anywhere else in the world, but they aren’t paying much attention to what’s happening in and around the state’s capital of Sacramento. That’s both good and bad for what may be the only early-stage venture firm in the area, . The outfit — which is technically in Folsom, outside of Sacramento — closed on a debut fund of $25 million early last year, and, like a lot of firms that are raising fast follow-up funds, it just held a first close of $25 million for a second fund. (Its new fund is being left open through the end of the year or until it hits $30 million in capital commitments — whichever comes first.) The good news is that Moneta doesn’t have lots of competition when it comes to funding interesting startups in the region. Among its regional bets is , a healthcare commerce platform; game maker ; and , a telemedicine company that provides real-time access to physician specialists. Indeed, healthcare startups are becoming especially prevalent in the Sacramento area, thanks to companies headquartered there like Anthem Blue Cross. Additionally, Intel has a big presence in Sacramento, along with Oracle and Cisco, and all have seasoned executives who occasionally step away from Corporate America to do their own thing. Still, as you might imagine, securing follow-on funding for portfolio companies in Sacramento isn’t always a walk in the park. Instead, it often requires a three-hour drive into the heart of Silicon Valley, which Moneta’s small team has been making more often lately. “We’re close enough to where we go to a lot of Bay Area events when we can,” notes Sabya Das, an associate with the firm. “Being a new micro fund [that’s off the beaten path] isn’t easy, but we’re working on creating and fostering those connections, especially as our portfolio companies mature.” Moneta has seemingly been lining up some meetings expressly for itself, too. In addition to its Sacramento-region investments, Moneta’s bets include , a software developer specializing in AI that’s based in Redwood Shores, and , a Sunnyvale-based software maker whose was led late last year by New Enterprise Associates. was co-founded by Lokesh Sikaria, Vaibhav Nadgauda, and Denise Ferre, who’d earlier co-founded Sparta Consulting, a firm that specialized in implementing SAP AG’s business software. It for $38 million in 2009 to the India-based company KPIT Cummins Infosystems. The three have since brought aboard a senior associate, Eric Chu, who was formerly a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton; and Das, who graduated from UC Berkeley last year. The firm originally set out to fund companies with at least $500,000 in annual revenue. According to Das, it is now willing to write smaller checks to pre-revenue startups, as well as invest in companies that are further along and may have up to $10 million in annual revenue but have not yet raised outside capital. As for the sectors it’s chasing, it’s likely that roughly 40 percent of its new fund will be allocated to enterprise startups. The rest, says Das, will likely be split between healthcare, digital tech and consumer startups.
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Microsoft Accelerator startup DefinedCrowd connects machine learning with native speakers
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
Part of Microsoft Accelerator’s batch 3 of startups, is filling a niche in the big data and machine learning community, providing near-real-time feeds of rich language data, checked by actual well-informed humans all over the world. The need comes from the Catch-22 that often arrests deep data analysis, in that you have to understand the data to analyze it, but you must analyze it to understand it. The vast landscape of the spoken and written word and its big data counterpart in natural language processing is especially troublesome in this way. “In the artificial intelligence space, to develop virtual assistants like Cortana, or Apple’s Siri and things like that, you need large amounts of voice recordings, you need transcriptions of those voices, you need intents and empathy labeling of those voices,” said Daniela Braga, co-founder and chief scientist, in an interview with TechCrunch. “The crowd input provides the extra refinement of the data that basically no machine can do.” DefinedCrowd sets up pipelines through which various kinds of language data are filtered, interpreted, and enriched, partly automatically and partly with a human touch. “If you were to do a sentiment analysis learning model, and you want the machine to learn about a social media user making certain tweets — are they happy, or are they excited? The difference is very subtle,” said Amy Du, co-founder and CEO. “This is where the crowdsourcing technique comes in.” After the grammar is standardized — slang like “u” is replaced by “you” and emoji are stripped out, for instance — users are asked to score a phrase or sentence on, say a 5-point scale of neutral to happy, or curious to sarcastic. A few users score the same phrase and their inputs are synthesized, and that data goes on to the next step. Pipelines can have several steps and depending on how complex the data is, it can take a few days to get them in place — but once a workflow is established and native speakers chiming in regularly, the data can be turned around quickly enough for hourly updates. (Any network executive or social media manager can appreciate the occasional urgency of these things.) The natural objection, especially when users earn money for their work (more than an Mechanical Turk user, but think minimum wage, not get rich quick), is that someone is going to game this thing. DefinedCrowd takes a labor-intensive approach to managing their crowd. “We partner with universities internationally,” said Du. “We usually start with the linguistics department, establishing a relationship with a local language ambassador, someone we can actually trust. And from there they can expand the network by bringing in additional students from the region. We know every single person that works behind the scenes.” Not as easy as taking all comers, but this has benefits as well. “And we have that metadata. Think about virtual assistants, they need to have dialectal and gender and age balance for those agents,” pointed out Braga. “We’re in 30 countries right now, moving to 50 in July; we have 50-100 people steady in each country.” Amy Du, left, and Daniela Braga, co-founders of DefinedCrowd. Du worked in tech consulting for years, specializing in connecting major companies with crowdsourcing, and Braga started as a linguistics professor in Portugal and Spain, eventually working with Microsoft on NLP-related projects like Cortana. Their paths crossed in the Seattle area while working in an overlapping business space, and eventually just decided to throw in together. The company’s time in the Microsoft Accelerator program has been helpful, the co-founders agreed (a representative from Microsoft was listening in, I should add) — as you might expect, Microsoft is a fairly well connected company, and the startup soon learned applications it might not have thought of on its own. And it doesn’t hurt to get meetings with Fortune 500 companies from all over the world looking for a way to supercharge their big data efforts. DefinedCrowd showed their product publicly for the first time today at the Microsoft Accelerator demo day in downtown Seattle — along with seven other companies from the program’s third batch.
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Hands-on with Ricoh’s new waterproof action cam, WG-M2
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
When you think action cams, any number of brands spring to mind. Ricoh may not be one of them, but on paper, the has the perfect combination of features if you like your adventures on the wet and rough end of the spectrum. The camera is pretty simple and straightforward: Six buttons, Wi-Fi and a couple of lenses, and that’s all there is to it. The camera’s party-trick — and the reason it caught my eye in the first place — is that it has really good waterproofing straight out of the box. Ricoh claims you can take its little fist-sized marvel to 65ft/20m under the surface of big blue without needing a separate housing. As an extra bonus, the color on Ricoh’s underwater action cam matches my dive mask. For a Scuba fanatic such as myself, the 65ft/20m limit is a bit of an annoying cop-out — it isn’t quite enough to be useful. Sure, with a basic open-water certification you can dive to 18 meters (60ft), which is within the range of the camera, but few divers worth their salt would go without adding an advanced course, after which you’re good to go to 100 feet (30m). The annoying part is that without specialized lighting equipment, you’re unlikely to get any good shots below 50ft/15m anyway (so I’d almost be willing to concede Ricoh’s argument that what they have is enough), but most dives start by going a fair bit deeper. Put simply: You don’t want to fish your camera out of your pocket to find it’s been crushed by the pressure before it’s time to capture some shots. That niggle aside, I did find myself at about 82ft/25m, realizing I still had the camera in my pocket. It was fine, but I probably wouldn’t push my luck a second time; I’m sure there’s an excellent reason Ricoh printed the numbers they did on the side of the camera. The camera itself is pretty good on paper. It shoots up to 4k video at 30fps, and a series of lower-resolution but higher-framerate video speeds, too. The camera also has a time-lapse mode, “extended movie mode” (which, as far as I can tell, records over the same 10 minute chunk again and again until you stop the video) and a couple of still video modes. The 1.5-inch LCD display is a very nice touch, and should be enough to make GoPro wonder what’s taking its product development team so long. Plenty of light here, but the full-size image looks like it’s taken through frosted glass. Very disappointing. With the dome lens, the WG-M2 has an ultra-wide 204-degree field of view (roughly the equivalent of a 16mm lens on a full-frame SLR camera), which is dramatic, for sure, but at primarily high-speed-action-camera range, it’s essentially useless for anything else — it certainly can’t be used for capturing holiday snaps. In this photo — especially at the top right — you can see how bad the chromatic aberration is (look for the purple fringes along the leaves). When you set the camera to underwater mode you must switch the front dome lens to a flat-glass lens instead. A shrewd move from Ricoh — dome lenses don’t look good on these types of cameras, as witnessed by the huge cottage industry of creating flat lenses for underwater housings for other action cameras. Plenty of drama and mood in this shot, but for $299 you can pick up a second-hand point-and-shoot with an underwater casing that would have done a far better job. The quality of the lenses is such that the camera is probably best avoided for stills; the chromatic aberration is absolutely horrendous; I didn’t know they still made cameras so afflicted. In video mode, though, you notice the problem a lot less, and given that the sides will probably be blurred as you’re hurtling toward earth dangling from a parachute anyway, it’s unlikely that anyone will notice. In other words: If you’re a video fanatic, don’t write off this camera just yet… Photographing a Mayan ruin with the WG-M2 is impossible; it doesn’t have the dynamic range to deal with the differences in brightness, and the wide-angle lens completely distorts the view. Of course, you can use the wide angle to your advantage, and get all artistic… But even then, it’s not great. Something about a phone, a camera, a trash can and Facebook? Even just capturing this screenshot was nigh-on impossible. As mentioned, Ricoh’s new waterproofed wünderkind has Wi-Fi built in, which is exciting for someone like myself who is mobile-first most of the time, and doubly so when traveling. Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi functionality is bordering on useless; the Ricoh Image Sync app is almost impossible to figure out, and is buggy as hell. Imagine, for example, that you are trying to select 19 of the 20 photos you’ve taken that day. You would need to tap the screen 19 times, but even the slightest sideways swipe makes the app move to a different mode, losing your progress. Try tapping 19 different places on a screen without swiping a fraction of an inch, and you’ll see why that’s utterly idiotic. Realistically, you’ll end up wrestling with Wi-Fi exactly once before giving up and instead plugging the Micro SD card into your computer to do file manipulation. Ugh. I’d be hesitant to say that the WG-M2 is a bad camera; it just isn’t the camera I hoped it was. Given my overwhelmingly positive experience with some of Ricoh’s other cameras — the Theta S camera, in particular — I was deeply disappointed by the WG-M2 Wi-Fi functionality and overall image quality. In a world where smartphone cameras are so good, action cam manufacturers really have to pick up the pace to stay relevant. The camera is good enough for capturing the odd video; use it underwater on a well-lit reef or bolt it to the front of your snowboard for some off-piste fun, but the lasting impression I’m left with is that I just wish I had a waterproof housing to keep my iPhone safe instead. The upshot is that the WG-M2 makes a great toy for occasional use, but a retail price of $299.95 means that few people will use it as such. I suspect the camera will struggle to find a user base of people who will choose it over the better-accessorized GoPro series of cameras, or cheaper cameras from other manufacturers.
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Sean Rad says Tinder will be more trans-friendly
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
is set to unveil a new experience for transgender users within the next couple of months. Thus far, the app has never accounted for the non-gender-conforming demographic, instead exclusively serving cisgender users through filters for male and female only, both to self-identify and to search. In a talk with , Tinder CEO didn’t go into specifics on how Tinder might integrate this new filter, but he did say that the feature will help users more accurately specify what they’re looking for and “be who they are.” This comes at a time when the debate around civil rights for the transgender community is front-and-center, with the Obama administration to allow transgender students to use the bathroom that they choose. More than a dozen states have sued the administration to block the directive, which President Obama says is based on the law and the best interests of the children. But Tinder hasn’t historically been transgender friendly, Rad admits. “For a long time we haven’t done enough to give them a good experience,” Rad said. “It’s harder for them to get what they are looking for. We have to modify our experience to address that.” Almost exactly a year ago, that a transgender user named Solomon was banned after matching with a male user who reported her for being trans. At the time, Tinder responded by saying that “the app doesn’t provide a way for transgender people to avoid being matched with people who might report them.” Oddly enough, Tinder pulls a lot of user information from Facebook, which has dozens of gender options. Gender is one of the only data points that Tinder doesn’t pull directly from Facebook, leaving only options for male and female. Tinder has made a name for itself by offering the simplest way possible to meet someone new, boiled down to simply swiping right. But that same simplicity doesn’t always translate when it comes to love, sexuality and gender. “Because of the format of Tinder and how it’s right, left, and male, female, it’s meant to be simple,” said Solomon a year ago. “Tinder would have to change things about their medium in order to really accommodate. If you could select different genders, then people who aren’t aware or are transphobic could just pick one gender, as opposed to the 58 available options.” The company is working with GLAAD and activist Andrea James to ensure that the update considers all the nuances involved. I spoke to Rad, who said that even if the transgender community is a small part of the Tinder population, he and Tinder employees feel like it’s the right thing to do for the world and sends the right message. He also explained they are working with these advisors and taking their time so they get it right the first time.
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13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week
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Anna Escher
| 2,016 | 6 | 2 |
It was a short week with big news, as tech headlines saw two monster enterprise acquisitions, Mary Meeker released the annual Internet Trends Report and Uber got its biggest round of funding yet. These are the stories to catch you up on this week’s tech news. In the first of two major enterprise acquisitions this week, marketing automation giant . This ended speculation that Marketo would be snapped up by Microsoft or SAP. If that weren’t enough for one week, Salesforce took a big step into e-commerce with the . The deal will spearhead a new business division: the Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker released the . include: The best of Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends slides and what they mean http://tcrn.ch/1Ze09Nt Posted by on Wednesday, June 1, 2016 Uber took its most significant investment yet: , Saudi Arabia’s main investment fund, as part of its latest round. Several photos surfaced showing what is supposed to be the next iPhone and MacBook Pro. These leaked photos themselves are not surprising. Apple spy photos are big business and a staple in tech journalism. But if these photos are to be believed, radical changes are about to hit two of Apple’s flagship products. Facebook’s , marking a major milestone in the social network’s battle against abuse. This means that AI could quarantine obscene content before it ever hurts the psyches of real people. If only Twitter could follow suit. Regarding social live video, Josh Constine also wrote that Facebook and Periscope should take cues from other forms of mass media and build a way to stoke interest and assemble viewers before a live stream starts — , if you will. Your old emo selfies may no longer be safe. in which a large set of stolen username and password combinations were made available for sale in an online hacker forum. There are millions of apps out there, yet the number of apps that actually get used is still quite small. A new study on mobile app usage showed that On the gadget front, Samsung debuted and a new version of the Gear Fit. Sirin Labs showed off a $14,000, super-private Solarin smartphone. Any takers? Is it crazy to pay $16,560 for a smartphone? Or is your privacy worth the steep price? http://tcrn.ch/1O6bnTm Posted by on Wednesday, June 1, 2016 Lost item tracker led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Tile makes square tags that employ Bluetooth low-energy radio and GPS tech to find objects they’re attached to, like wallets, keychains, purses and gym bags. Instagram officially announced the , including new business profiles, analytics and the ability to turn Instagram posts into ads directly from the Instagram app itself. Ron Miller wrote a , the executive VP of Google Cloud Enterprise.
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