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Beamery raises $2 million to help recruiters identify and draw in talent, instead of waiting for applicants
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
London-based startup , formerly known as Seed.Jobs, has raised $2 million in a seed round from Edenred Capital Partners and Grupa Pracuj, a human resources tech firm. Beamery makes software that helps recruiters or employers identify, get connected to and nurture relationships with prospective hires, long before they apply for a job. The company’s client roster includes employers at the front lines in the war for tech talent, ranging from Facebook and VMWare, to Criteo and Instacart. But Beamery is also working with employers small and large in financial services, hospitality and retail. Co-founded in 2014 by Abakar Saidov, Sultan Saidov and Michael Paterson, Beamery is an alumni of the enterprise tech accelerator. CEO Abakar Saidov explained that Beamery uses machine learning algorithms to determine which prospects are most interested in working for a given employer, and in what capacity. Beamery evaluates data from email, social media, and other recruiting tools to create a 360-degree view of each candidate relationship, and provides companies with the data they need to make smarter recruiting hiring decisions, he said. The CEO referred to this system as a kind of “CRM for recruiting,” rather than the customer relationship management software that’s long been used by sales and marketing teams. “There are plenty of new recruiting tools to track applications and post job ads, or test aptitude, but companies are still waiting for candidates to come to them. This is no longer sufficient. The best candidates simply aren’t applying anymore,” Saidov believes. Once they have a thorough candidate profile, employers can conduct targeted outreach to bring a prospective closer to the company, over time, until they make a hire. The company plans to use its funding for further product development and geographic expansion, especially in the U.S.
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Alienware is also working on one of those VR backpacks
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
It’ll probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following gaming of late, but Alienware’s looking to join the likes of HP and MSI with the release of a VR backpack of its very own. The Dell-owned gaming PC maker wasn’t exactly trumpeting the device at E3, but it did show off a prototype of the proton pack, hung snugly from a mannequin in the company’s booth. This is really an exploratory project at the moment. The company is working with AMD to create the wearable VR computer designed to free players up from tethered headsets. I spoke to a rep for the company who told me that the toughest part in these early stages is the ventilation issue. Alienware doesn’t have any specific plans for release, instead the company really just wants consumers to know that they’re definitely looking into it. And at the very least, the backpack looks more slick than most of the competition, complete with the obligatory glowing alien head. Of course, it’s all relative.
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Razer’s VR headset is designed for developers
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
The OSVR HDK2 was arguably Razer’s biggest E3 unveiling this year – but it was also kind of besides the point. Like Google’s Daydream announcement a few weeks back, this is a reference device, a way of showcasing hardware designed specifically to work with the company’s software. OSVR VR is Razer’s attempt to build a hardware ecosystem for virtual reality, away from the proprietary nature of companies like Oculus, HTC and Sony, whose chief concern is getting and keeping people in their own virtual reality offerings. “A huge part of OSVR is enabling the community,” Razer Product Marketer Jeevan Aurol told TechCrunch in an interview at the company’s booth. “We offer a product which the community can upgrade, change and use it as their own to further their own VR needs.” Razer is certainly couching the initiative as an altruistic method for bolstering the developer community. The company offered up a good chunk of its booth space to startups like Gloveone, which has developed an impressive glove-based peripheral that both tracks motion and features haptic feedback to simulate touch. “OSVR is a software platform that facilitates the growth of an open ecosystem,” adds Jeevan. “Different brands of hardware can coexist within this ecosystem. That allows for compatibility and allows a consumer to walk into a store and purchase any type of headset they want, with any type of controller they want.” At the very least, the growth of the ecosystem positions Razer extremely well to develop consumer-facing hardware of its very own. The gaming peripheral maker is, however, still a bit cagey. Says Jeevan, “There is a strong possibility that we will make VR hardware for the industry in the future.” So, stay tuned.
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Liability in the coming age of autonomous autos
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
While we are many years away from an autonomous utopia, where cars pick us up and drive us where we need to go without a human at the wheel, we are seeing the first steps toward self-driving cars. , , , —pretty much every auto manufacturer, plus and probably —is incorporating advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) into cars we can buy right now. As humans transfer driving tasks to computers, it raises questions for the insurance industry. There will still be crashes on the way to that autonomous utopia, and insurance companies want to know who’s going to pay. Volvo, for one, has stepped up to say that when one of its vehicles is in autonomous mode, for what happens. But that’s a rarity so far. Does the liability lie with the human for not overriding the system? The manufacturer for not testing thoroughly enough? The Tier 1 supplier of sensors? The company that supplied the Tier 1 supplier with a part for the sensor? And at what point should insurers panic? Andrew Rose of , an insurance comparison site, tells insurers, “You need to be completely freaked out by the idea of autonomous cars—and completely relaxed.” He said in a phone interview that in 30 years, it’s likely most of the auto insurance business will be gone. Autonomous vehicles will wreck less over time, which means lower premiums will be required to cover losses, and therefore less auto insurance will be required. “Insurers can relax,” Rose said, “because it’s going to take time to get there.” Compare.com is part of the , one of the largest motor insurance companies globally. In preparation for our interview, Rose, who happened to be at Admiral HQ in the UK, asked to pull information on all the accidents that involved autonomous claims. He was told, “We don’t have any yet,” though there are millions of vehicles in the United Kingdom covered by Admiral Group. “People aren’t making those claims yet,” Rose told me, “But it’s out there on the horizon.” One reason claims aren’t being made yet is that manufacturers are being incredibly cautious about releasing this technology to the marketplace because of the huge implications of getting it wrong. Volvo has been working on its autonomous system for a decade or more, giving it the confidence to accept liability. “Getting little things wrong is no big deal,” Rose said, “but if adaptive cruise control fails, that could be catastrophic.” While we wait for an all-autonomous future, insurance companies are likely going to want to find the car manufacturer at fault because they want to find somebody else to pay for the accident. “Volvo says that while in autonomous mode, we are responsible,” Rose noted. “But they’re not going to let you break the law. The system won’t let you do 66 mph in a 65-mph zone.” That becomes tricky on this path to autonomy, because in the intervening years, autonomous cars are more likely to get in accidents—through no fault of their own. “They get hit more,” Rose said, “because they do exactly what the law prescribes.” This is exactly the situation that the Google car found itself in when it . “This is the ball of yarn that we’re pulling one thread on right now,” Rose said. “It’ll be much easier when more autonomous cars are interacting with each other.”
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Black Caucus urges Airbnb to take reports of racism seriously
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
Airbnb has been under fire recently . Now, the Congressional Black Caucus is urging Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky to take further action in addressing the issues of racism and discrimination on Airbnb’s platform. , the CBC notes how Title II of 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in places like hotels and motels on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. To Airbnb’s credit, Airbnb permanently removed the racist host in North Carolina, . Chesky also recently said that Airbnb has zero tolerance for prejudice and bias on the platform and that in the next few months, the company will “be revisiting the design of our site from end to end to see how we can create a more inclusive platform,” Chesky said at the company’s Open Air technical conference earlier this month. “We’re open to ideas. It’s a really, really hard problem and we need help solving it. We want to move this forward. I myself have engaged with people who have been victims of discrimination on the platform. We take this seriously.” The CBC has commended Airbnb in initiating a comprehensive review of the interactions on the platform, but asks that the review provide answers to these four questions: “Racism and any form of discrimination should never be tolerated in our society,” Chairman G.K. Butterfield said in a statement. “Members of the CBC are deeply concerned about recent reports of exclusion of African Americans on the Airbnb platform, and we sincerely hope the leadership of Airbnb will take the issue of discrimination seriously and implement common sense measures to prevent such discrimination and ill-treatment of its customers in the future.” In a statement to TechCrunch, Airbnb said the following: We appreciate Congressmen Butterfield and Cleaver’s letter and absolutely share their concern. Discrimination has no place on our platform. As the Congressmen noted in their letter we are conducting an extensive review of how our hosts and guests interact with one another online and off. We will apply what we learn to help ensure that everyone, including African American travelers, are treated fairly and with dignity and respect. We are engaged with a range of leaders on this important issue, and we will soon be meeting with CBC officials and other civil rights leaders to discuss progress on reaching our shared goals of a more fair, just and inclusive society.
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11 of the coolest video game trailers from E3
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
We’ve been focused on VR and non-traditional gaming here at E3 this year, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been walking around with our eyes closed. You might not have been paying close attention, what with having a real job and everything, so I took the liberty of collecting the most interesting trailers from the show in one place. We just had to get this out of the way since Link has nearly stolen the show this year. Nintendo went all-in on Zelda with a booth and multi-level VIP area entirely dedicated to the game, which is slated to come out some time in 2017. I played it and it’s awesome. Like it or not, a post is coming. Dystopias tend to do well in gaming, and this should be no exception. Apparently both Orwellian and Huxleyous, the game concerns a society of people under the thrall of an authoritarian regime and the Soma-like drug Joy. “We’ve got a downer!” An open world multiplayer pirate simulator where you can get drunk and engage in sea battles on immaculately rendered rolling waves? Aye, me hearties. Sure to be a divisive title, as expected from the developers of Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, this game is, like those, focused on the narrative and perspectives of those within it. Expect to play it about a dozen times to get the endings you crave. It was definitely surreal watching Hideo Kojima walk down a path of light (and outpace it, even) at the Sony press conference, but that was nothing compared to this trailer. As the kids say, I can’t even. Confession time: I didn’t play the original. But I’m looking forward to the sequel, with its single player campaign, expanded compatibility, and the traditional destruction of giant robots. It’s a strange name, but the appeal of the game is hard to deny. You’re a futuristic cave woman who hunts giant robot dinosaurs long after the apocalypse. I was afraid it would be very Ubisoft-y from the early footage but the new trailer shows that there’s a game behind the systems. Also, it looks gorgeous. “Very Ubisoft-y” was the main criticism of Watch Dogs, which was a huge success but now is remembered as being rather lackluster in light of the promises early trailers made. The sequel, however, could remedy those deficiencies. Anyway, the Ubisoft-style checklist games are comfort food at this point, so I’ll play it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLm1A2-Fr7s A game that seems to capture the power and agility of one of Marvel’s most iconic heroes, after years of decent but workmanlike adaptations? Yes, please. Here’s hoping the game lives up to the trailer. The game has been in development hell and looks it, but who cares? This game is going to be amazing, and now there are TWO baby gryphons?! If even one of them dies, I’m going to cry myself to death. More confessions: I only played bits and pieces of the original trilogy and side games, despite being a fan of both Greek mythology and endless carnage. But even I was entranced by the gameplay Sony opened with this year. The roar the audience gave when Kratos emerged from the shadows was deafening. Of course there were many more I could mention, but 11 seems like a good number. Plus, I have an appointment with Square-Enix really soon and I haven’t even put my shoes on.
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Crowdsourced data can teach your phone to follow your eyes
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
Eye tracking has always been a tough problem. Multi-camera solutions existed in order to sense the position of the eyes in 3D space, but in general watching where your peepers pointed was too hard for cellphones. Now researchers at MIT and the University of Georgia have created an eye-tracking system that depends on crowdsourced data. The team created a simple app that showed a dot on the screen and then asked if it was on the left or right side. Subjects would tap where they saw the dot and the phone would record video and images of the interaction. They used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to employ hundreds of users to perform the test and then used image processing techniques to asses exactly where their eyes were pointed when tapping on certain stops. “The field is kind of stuck in this chicken-and-egg loop,” said Aditya Khosla, an MIT graduate student. “Since few people have the external devices, there’s no big incentive to develop applications for them. Since there are no applications, there’s no incentive for people to buy the devices. We thought we should break this circle and try to make an eye tracker that works on a single mobile device, using just your front-facing camera.” Most eye-tracking systems used smaller sample sizes and tended to fail when put into practice. With 800 data points, however, researchers were able to “see” where eyes were pointing without trouble. They use machine learning technology to sense eye position from the 1,600 photos the system took of each user. The researchers’ machine-learning system was a neural network, which is a software abstraction but can be thought of as a huge network of very simple information processors arranged into discrete layers. Training modifies the settings of the individual processors so that a data item — in this case, a still image of a mobile-device user — fed to the bottom layer will be processed by the subsequent layers. The output of the top layer will be the solution to a computational problem — in this case, an estimate of the direction of the user’s gaze. This means app developers could sense eye movement in smartphones and potentially add this functionality to their devices. It’s an interesting use of crowdsourced data and the Mechanical Turk that could have implications in phone use among the handicapped… and make it easier to target advertisements.
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Jay Donovan
| 2,016 | 6 | 29 | null |
At Founders Forum — Policy, pitches and Prince William
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Mike Butcher
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
Today Prince William exhorted tech leaders to do something about cyber-bullying at the conference in London. Representatives from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat listened to the speech, but some of the biggest tech firms have already joined the Prince’s taskforce on the issue which will be chaired by Brent Hoberman, former founder of Lastminute.com and more recently a maven and investor in the UK tech scene via Founders Forum. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world-wide web, has also joined the taskforce, which will work with experts from the Anti-Bullying Alliance, NSPCC, Internet Matters, Diana Award and UK Council for Child Internet Safety. The Duke of Cambridge said that as a parent he had been “appalled” by examples of online abuse, and while he stressed that new technology could be a “force for good” he added: “What we were seeing was that social media and messaging had transformed bullying from something that was not only the torment of the classroom and playground, but something that followed you home as well – to the one safe haven that children should have.” William also toured a tech startup showcase with robots and VR companies including , created by Keith Boesky, former president of Eidos Interactive. The Prince also met with , a Silicon Valley company which produced a talking robot for SoftBank Robotics. The robot helpfully fell over. During the visit the Duke, who is an air ambulance helicopter pilot, sat in an experimental drone-like machine that can carry a person. The is a research project created by engineering undergraduates from the National University of Singapore. William sat in the machine as its 18 rotor blades spun, but it did not take off for safety reasons. Meanwhile at the conference some 50 leading European entrepreneurs, including the founders of Skype, BlaBlaCar and SoundCloud called for a “single start-up market” in Europe. The aims to create a competitive startup business environment and follows on from the ‘29th regime’ of the Union, a single economic framework for innovative and high growth startups in Europe. While the European Commission is pushing a policy it calls the Digital Single Market, to harmonize rules across all 28 member states in areas including copyright law and e-commerce, the Unicorn Forum says the EU’s plans risk favoring larger business, and not helping younger startups. “A special corporate regime accessible to qualified startups would facilitate a unique, simple and competitive legal framework for corporate, labor, tax/fiscal incentives, stock options, bankruptcy matters,” the Unicorn Forum said in a statement. Hoberman says this deficiency has meant that Europe has not been able to create huge companies such as Apple and Facebook, despite having a population of over 500 million, far larger than the US. The call for a single start-up market comes as Britain heads towards a referendum on its membership of the EU. Most surveys show the vast majority of UK tech companies believe “Brexit” would be a huge backwards step. The conference also saw pitches from idea-stage startups in a competition billed as “The F Factor”, which featured X-Factor judge Simon Cowell. Pollen8 – a marketplace for employment
Who’s in – Crowd-fund a people’s movement
UpLearn – Online courses for students
DeposititWhere – Earn higher interest by depositing cash in a country with a higher interest rate than yours.
accuRx – a big data tool to help clinicians make more accurate prescription decisions and reduce the use of antibiotics. Founders Forum has ramped up its activity in the past year starting a blistering array of new initiatives, including “Founders of the Future”, a diverse community of young people aged 16-35 selected from across Europe using artificial intelligence and peer recommendations. Additionally, it held an event this week, ‘Accelerate-Her’, about improving gender diversity in the tech industry by advocating flexible working, adult internships for older women, promoting STEM subjects and highlighting female investors. FF has also started , with the aim of launching 200 startups in the next 5 years by working with corporate partners.
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Meet Domgy, an AI pet robot from Beijing startup ROOBO
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
ROOBO, a fast-growing hardware and AI startup headquartered in Beijing, today unveiled a prototype of its newest product, a “pet robot” called Domgy. For the unfamiliar, ROOBO is the company behind , a voice-controlled, educational robot for kids. Pudding is used to teach kids vocabulary, geography, jokes and more. The company also makes the Idealens virtual reality headset, Skyseries drone and Runbone earbuds. Since its founding in 2014, ROOBO has grown to 300 employees, with 7 worldwide offices, including one in Seattle. The company previously raised a Series A round of venture funding, but declined to say how much capital they raised, who their investors are, or how much revenue they have generated to-date. According to ROOBO’s Marketing Director Anthony Chen, the company’s ambitious new product Domgy is meant to be a “family friend that makes life easier and more fun at home.” The name hints at a canine form factor, but Domgy isn’t really a new twist on the Aibo. (Remember Sony’s robot dogs?) Instead, Domgy rolls around, rather than walking on four feet. It can navigate normal obstacles in a home, or make its way down a shallow step or two but it’s not meant to navigate rugged or steep terrain. Usefully, Domgy goes back to its charging station automatically when its battery is getting low. A round, touchscreen face features Domgy’s large, animated eyes and serves as an access point to a Domgy apps menu and other settings. The device is also smartphone-controllable. Domgy’s pupils turn to hearts to show love and happiness, and it giggles. It can also growl, whine or respond with a good emotional range, for example if it’s jostled or yelled at. Domgy uses ROOBO’s proprietary artificial intelligence and facial recognition systems to identify family members, greet and entertain them and follow their rules. While ROOBO created the artificial intelligence that powers Domgy, the device and its operating system was originally designed by Innovative Play Lab in Korea. According to ROOBO executives, IPL will continue its work on the software development kit and operating system for Domgy, while ROOBO will manufacture the pet robots and develop further AI and content for them. ROOBO is also an investor in IPL, which was earlier funded by the Korean government. A 5M camera in Dogmy’s head can also serve as a monitor of sorts, alerting family members when it encounters a stranger in the house, which makes it a “good guard,” Chen said. ROOBO intends to offer pre-orders of Domgy via crowdfunding sites in China, including Tmall and Jing Dong, and Indiegogo in the U.S. aiming to ship to early backers by the end of 2016. Users can determine if they want Domgy’s voice to be male or female. They can also command Dogmy to wake or go into sleep mode, play a song, tell a story, or turn compatible, smart home devices on and off. The company is partnering with Disney English and others for content, and makers of voice recognition systems, , to enable different features on Domgy. A price for the pet robot has not yet been determined. But the company intends to keep the cost of hardware low, so average households in the U.S. and other major markets can easily afford them, Chen said. ROOBO will look to generate additional revenue through its Android-based platform, where users could buy new educational courses, music, audio books, apps or games, Chen said. The robot gets about 4 to 6 hours of use out of one full charge, and can travel at a top speed of 5 kilometers per hour, Chen said. “It’s not a race car and it won’t be able to catch up to your other pets.” However, Domgy may be able to entertain a dog or cat while their humans are away, and can recognize them, by face, as family members.
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Akamai: global average connection speed up 12 percent, bye bye IPv4
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Lucia Maffei
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
CDN network today published its quarterly “ ” report for the first quarter of 2016. The report examines global internet speeds, which are going to be more relevant than ever for live-sports in the summer of the Rio Olympic Games. Global average connection speed increased 12 percent from the fourth quarter of 2015, to 6.3 Mbps, a 23 percent increase year over year. South Korea continues to be the global leader with the highest average connection speed (29.0 Mbps), an 8.6 percent gain over the fourth quarter of 2015. Runner-up and number three are two Scandinavian countries, respectively Norway and Sweden. Singapore maintained its position as the country with the highest average peak connection speed (146.9 Mbps), an 8.3 percent quarterly increase. Average Connection Speed (IPv4) by Country/Region (Source: Akamai) The 64-page report also includes data about network connectivity, as well as broadband adoption metrics across fixed and mobile networks, and the adoption progress of version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6) over version 4 (IPv4), among other things. The U.S., which is not included in the top 10 of countries for average connection speed, ranked sixth in terms of IPv6 traffic percentage, preceding France and Japan. The number of unique IPv4 addresses involved in the research declined to just over 808 million, or a 0.2 percent quarterly decrease — about 1.8 million fewer than were seen in the fourth quarter of 2015. IPv6 Traffic Percentage, Top Countries/Regions (Source: Akamai) The clear leader in IPv6 adoption remained Belgium, with 36 percent of its connections to Akamai occurring over IPv6, down 3.1 percent from the previous quarter. As for mobile connectivity, Akamai and its partner Ericsson found that the average mobile connection speeds ranged from a high of 27.9 Mbps in the United Kingdom to a low of 2.2 Mbps in Algeria, while average peak mobile connection speeds ranged from 171.6 Mbps in Germany to 11.7 Mbps in Ghana. Akamai also found that the two primary Android browser bases — Android WebKit and Chrome Mobile — accounted for a total of 58 percent of requests for traffic from mobile devices on cellular networks, while Apple Mobile Safari accounted for roughly 33 percent of requests.
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Talking to Uber about the three pillars of its API platform
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Gordon Wintrob
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 |
The platform started out with a simple API. You could get available products at a location and time and price estimates, but developers would need to deep link into our mobile app for ride requests. Quickly, there was interest from developers to do more with Uber in their apps. As a result, we launched the . That allowed developers to recreate more of the Uber experience, even without their users downloading our app. We’ve been making more and more investments along that path — making account creation through the developer platform a bit more seamless and really trying to expose all the utility of the Uber app via the API. We believe three pillars are necessary for any developer platform: utility, revenue and distribution. Utility means using Uber to make your app better and more useful for your users. Because we’re a transactional service, we can expose all the utility of Uber without being afraid of developers recreating the Uber experience. As long as it holds up to the standards that our customers expect, any app can have an Uber mode. Regarding revenue, it’s no secret — if you’re asking developers to write apps using your platform, they have to be able to pay the bills. We launched the API with the affiliate program, which gives developers $5 for every new rider they sign up. We have other ideas in the works. There has to be a real opportunity for them to make money. Finally, if the developer building an app on your platform does have a business model, additional distribution is important. Trip experiences is our first big commitment into the second and third pillars of the developer platform. It’s opening up access to a resource within Uber that we are not domain experts on and we’re not going to specifically capitalize on it ourselves. We’re not content producers; we’re not a deals website; we’re not a gaming company. We’d rather expose that via an API and let people build and iterate on top of it. We look at the API as being a growth factor for the company in both established and emerging markets. The affiliate program was the right thing for us to do, both for Uber and for developers. We want to get new users on the platform and developers deserve the incentive. We’ve seen it be successful for partners and it’s something we’ll continue to do, but we’re looking for more creative ways to provide revenue, too. Referring a rider is a great step, but we think that developers have the opportunity to drive real value for our riders. We will do what we can to promote that kind of innovation on our platform. Providing user growth opportunities can be a very powerful thing. We have some huge integrations like Baidu Maps in China. They have a full request to ride integration built on top of the API. is another big one. United Airlines is a great example of a top partner that was with us from the beginning and built on top of the early API and included deep linking into our apps. In India, we had a partner launch that has been driving a significant amount of ride traffic called . It’s basically a chat assistant that can order an Uber. We’re seeing this style of integration more and more. Also, I’ve seen a couple of integrations at hackathons to order a ride via an SMS or over the phone. These apps help people who don’t have a smartphone but want to be able to call and get an Uber. They can set up all the authentication on the desktop and get a static phone number to call with a pin code. They can say where they are and an Uber will be sent to them. There’s a huge amount of interest out there and we would like to grow that interest and really cultivate it. We communicate via email and Twitter. We want to be very responsive and stay in-touch with the community — actually be there, listening to them, responding to their feedback. Partner engineering is built into the engineering organization. I sit next to all the engineers building the API and can contribute production code. As a team, we value developer feedback highly and work on ways we can make that a zero-hop feedback-loop. To help address this, we encourage engineers on the Developer Platform team to be part-time developer advocates. It’s a self-selecting group because the engineers interested in building the external API are engineers interested in going to hackathons and connecting with developers. We’ve been to hackathons and around the world to get people interested and make sure that we hear from them. Having partners like Baidu forces us to think on a massive scale. We’ve been at a very steady pace of onboarding new developers and all kinds of integrations. There are tens of thousands of apps on the platform and it’s growing rapidly every day. It’s accelerating more than we’ve ever seen. Uber has an awesome infrastructure and operations team that helps with some of the management of our web servers. From an architecture standpoint, a couple of things that are pretty important to our scale is intelligent caching and microservices. Uber’s backend is broken down into microservices that talk through a couple of different protocols. We open sourced a very efficient protocol called . I’d say that those microservices are really what enable us to be so scalable. We focus on optimizing each one and then we make many calls in parallel. We’re never blocking on a series of services to give us an answer on something. Caching at the API layer allows us to limit the number of things we have to look up during a single request.
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Facebook says it’s not making friend suggestions based on your location after all
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
Does Facebook suggest new friends based on your location? The answer seems to change day by day. Yesterday, reported that Facebook uses location data to make friend suggestions and pointed out that this could lead to unfortunate privacy mishaps. Users could find themselves outed in situations that ought to be anonymous (for instance, Facebook might recommend that a user add a friend from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or suggest your profile to a creeper ogling you on public transit). The report wasn’t some expose-gone-wrong — a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Fusion that location data contributed to friend recommendations. But then things got bananas when Facebook itself, saying that friend recommendations based on location. The story later changed again when it became clear that Facebook had experimented with recommending new friends based on city-wide location data to a small group of users last year but discontinued the project. It’s an unusual PR mishap for a Silicon Valley company. So what happened? And how do friend recommendations actually work? Facebook’s position is that the location-based recommendation experiment caused confusion on its communications team, and it ended up giving the wrong information to Fusion. Of course, there’s also the cynical version of the story: that Facebook did use location data to make friend recommendations, then backpedaled when and pointed out that it might violate . We don’t get to poke around in the secret sauce that goes into friend suggestions, so we can’t say definitively how the recommendations get made. Facebook says that location data is definitely not a part of that recipe. “We’re not using location data, such as device location and location information you add to your profile, to suggest people you may know,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We may show you people based on mutual friends, work and education information, networks you are part of, contacts you’ve imported and other factors.” Even if you’ve got your tinfoil hat placed firmly upon your head, the knowledge that Facebook never made location-based recommendations on a more granular level than city-wide location should help you rest a bit easier. But just what are those “other factors” that go into friend recommendations? The world may never know!
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You can’t kill email
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Jonathan Levine
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
New technology is emerging at ever-increasing speeds, transforming how we communicate, collaborate and manage our day-to-day responsibilities. As soon as we get a strong grasp on the latest workplace technology, an even newer solution surfaces. This trend is especially evident in communications technology. Among the many recent entries are so-called “email killers,” which aim to replace a form of communication to which all of us have grown accustomed. The makers of these new collaboration tools call email a “legacy” technology — unwarrantedly trying to tarnish its image. But, in fact, all of us rely on email heavily throughout the work week. Contrary to what is often suggested in the press, email usage is still very much on the rise. Users trust it, are familiar with it and leverage it all day, every day, in their business and personal lives. Radicati’s most recent estimates that by 2019, the number of worldwide email users will exceed 2.9 billion — that’s up 10 percent from 2015. Additionally, the number of business emails sent and received per user per day is also projected to increase, suggesting global email will rise 14 percent over the same period. The truth is our use of email is only increasing, because the way we use it is evolving to help us better manage the everyday to-do lists in our work and personal lives. Email is still an integral part of the way we communicate today, and the reasons are many. New communication and collaboration tools flooding the market claim they’ve built a better mousetrap. Slack, for example, has been praised for being able to significantly reduce email volume. While tools like Slack work well for small businesses and startups, this model often becomes unsustainable when companies scale, potentially subjecting the whole company to tens of thousands of alerts a day. Regardless, these new tools aren’t driving users away from email. In fact, they are relying on it. Even Salesforce, which tried to replace email in the sales process, eventually wound up having to develop Outlook plug-ins. Slack will send push notifications for activity that occurs while offline, but it uses email to notify users of mentions and direct messages. File storage and backup solutions, such as Box, will do the same when a new file has been shared. If a user forgets his or her password for any of these platforms, a reset link is typically sent via email. And while public communication tools and social media platforms like Twitter have integrated direct messaging features in an effort to eliminate the need for email, users find it difficult to facilitate any kind of external contact without an initial email introduction. Having access to a variety of tools designed for specific tasks — like file sharing — improves the way we collaborate, but email still serves as communication’s core. In spite of what some may think, email is not being killed off by these other technologies. As the need for effective communication and collaboration becomes increasingly important to everyday workflow, email is only getting smarter, evolving and adapting to the different ways we use and need it. Searching across emails is easy. Using email to keep track of workflow is straightforward. Both are vital to business operations. There also are a variety of tools and solutions that have been built on top of email to help users manage and direct what used to be just chronological workflow. For instance, one of the common grievances of email is the significant amount of spam and junk mail users need to sort. To address this issue, email now has automated capabilities to filter through inbound messages. According to , the average user receives approximately 11,680 emails per year. What users don’t realize is that out of those 11,680 messages, 74 percent is junk mail that is never seen or noticed because it is automatically filtered into spam or junk email folders. Of the email messages that actually make it to the inbox, only 8 percent are promotional offers, phishing scams or malware. This has been made possible thanks to the evolution of email and its filtering tools. As a means to keep inboxes from being cluttered, Microsoft Outlook, for example, offers the option to create rules so that messages are automatically categorized and filed into the appropriate buckets or folders, based on the user’s preference. Similarly, Inbox by Gmail and Outlook’s Clutter feature can help filter low-priority email by tracking the emails that are read and ignored, adapting to user preferences and reserving the user’s time for only the most important messages. Email is evolving to become an efficient tool that can perform the various tasks and business processes needed in the workplace. In addition to being used as a communication tool, email is relied on for marketing tactics to share promotions and information with prospects, customers and vendors, as well as for simple daily tasks, such as to-do lists and reminders. Going beyond more traditional uses for email, the platform has become an alternative strategy for storage and backup because it has virtually limitless capacity. Employees need to be able to access projects from multiple devices and multiple locations. If you don’t have a flash drive handy, no problem! You can simply email yourself the file or pull it up from a previous thread, giving you access, whether it’s from a computer, tablet or mobile phone. Additionally, email is the most trusted, reliable source for record keeping in the workplace, perhaps because it has been around for so long. It’s the first thing a company gives you upon starting in their employ. From there, it becomes the tool in which most of our daily tasks and business transactions are recorded, therefore storing sensitive and valuable information. With increasing regulatory scrutiny and stringent laws surrounding electronic content, organizations of all sizes and industries must be more cognizant about the way they manage, store and archive email messages. The U.S. government considers its email messages to be official government records because these messages provide evidence and information around all business transactions. Regulated businesses may be required to keep a former employee’s inbox active for as long as after they leave the company, or risk fines and lawsuits. And even without legal requirements, given that the average turnover in businesses is 20 percent, maintaining searchable access to previous materials and intellectual property is critical to business continuity. Robust and proven email archiving technology can solve these challenges in a way that newer technologies can’t. Email archiving systems provide searchable access to historical records, limiting e-discovery costs and avoiding potential fines should a company be wrapped up in litigation. While email is a reliable protocol, it isn’t owned by any one company, and its existence isn’t tied to a single provider. Email is inexpensive, only requiring an internet connection. There is a real risk associated with embracing proprietary communication tools: If Slack or Dropbox went out of business tomorrow, what would happen to the records residing in that system? Open email standards like SMTP, and the robust email marketplace, provides assurance that makes email a safe bet for years to come. The reality is that email has unique properties that no other new technology possesses — it’s asynchronous, reliable, multimedia and a multi-device tool. Because email is the only application that can do all of these things, and has been for such a long period of time, it remains the infrastructure foundation for collaboration that all new communications tools eventually tie back to. Email is not dead or dying; in fact, it’s still very much alive.
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Mozilla’s Codemoji enciphers your messages with emoji for fun and profit
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
📚🙈 💭🐾👊🙈 🐱📪 💧👊🍻🔍🚛 🎨📪🐾👊 🎯🌴😑☔🐱🍻🔍🙈 Read that — I dare you. Oh, you can’t? Maybe that’s because I’ve rendered it unreadable with Mozilla’s unbreakable emoji-based cipher, ! Okay, so it’s not really unbreakable (and there is no profit, the headline was a lie). In fact, it’s just a Caesar shift with character substitutions from the emoji set chosen, based on a seed emoji (in this case, my favorite, the hatching chick). The point isn’t to provide an unbreakable emoji code, but to show young folks the rudiments of encryption. Encode the text in the mobile-friendly web app, send to a friend and give them a hint regarding the nature of the seed emoji — or perform an offline key exchange by telling them IRL. It’s a simple tool, a game really, but it does explain the basic idea behind encryption: that you encode something with a key, and unless someone has that key, the content of the message is difficult — though not impossible — to get at. The kids do love emoji, of course, so this might be a good way to trick a classroom full of Snapchat-obsessed kids to perform frequency analysis on a paragraph from Dickens. (Here’s a , by the way.) Of course, someone could probably write a script that runs the text through all possible emoji seeds — and, well, that’s something else you could teach these whippersnappers about, brute force attacks. See, the lesson plan writes itself! Codemoji is part of an to raise the awareness of how important encryption is. “When more people understand how encryption works and why it’s important to them, more people can stand up for encryption when it matters most,” thundered Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman in a blog post announcing Codemoji. There are even some bite-sized videos you could probably get your class to watch in between snaps. Here’s hoping there’s more encryption education coming from Mozilla; we’ve asked for details on any upcoming tools or games.
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Silicon Valley comes out in full force behind SF Pride
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
This weekend was the annual San Francisco Pride Parade. The event drew over a million spectators and participation from many of the tech world’s most recognizable companies. Over 30 tech companies marched in this year’s parade. Whether you were there in person or in spirit, SF Pride withdrawal has already started. We here at TechCrunch decided to do a recap of some of the coolest, craziest, and most creative colorful floats from this year’s event. Regular participants like Facebook and Tesla easily made our list. Heck, even a few tech unicorns made an unforgettable impression. Let’s count down the top five tech company floats from SF Pride 2016! Facebook captured the eyes of an already energetic crowd with banging EDM, dancing, and a larger than life like thumbs-up like sign. We hear they are soft-testing this as a new emoji size option in Messenger. Uber arrived to the party with an urban inspired rainbow float. The company also gave cars in its app a special rainbow symbol to celebrate pride. Walking with today! 🌈 — Lindsey Sugino (@lindseysugino) Zendesk could not have gotten more festive with its shimmery float. Employees participated with sweet costumes and large flags. — iris (@iyau) Slack came prepared with a popsicle truck and incredible enthusiasm. The float was both refreshing and creative, like a summer popsicle truck but better. proud and exhausted. first go round for slack at and I am poopsicled out 😴 — jen reiber walsh (@jrw) Tesla brought back their awesome special-addition custom rainbow Model S and Model X. We wish buying all cars could be this much fun. Special shoutout to Apple. CEO, Tim Cook marched with employees once again. The company gave employees a special edition rainbow Apple Watch band. Hopefully the rest of us can start sporting these soon. Apple again joins in parade, gifts limited-edition band to employees — ☕️michael colorge☕️ (@CAM2Go) Google, Autodesk, Genentech, Salesforce, Lyft, GoDaddy, SolarCity, Netflix, Nest, and many, many more were also seen at the event flashing their pride. Unfortunately Theranos was nowhere to be found among the unicorn costume-wearing crowds.
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Pitch@Palace Malaysia Demo Day recap
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Samantha O'Keefe
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
TechCrunch is pleased to bring you a recap of Pitch@Palace Malaysia that took place earlier today. Investors and press heard pitches from 14 companies, but you can watch the recap right here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN9e6cejhqs (In order of appearance)
– A money-changing platform that enables travelers to book the best exchange rates via web or mobile.
– A fintech startup offering easy, secure and convenient online services to Malaysia’s massive pool of foreign workers.
– A web platform that enables undergraduates to crowdfund their scholarships from individuals, corporates and organizations.
– ASEAN’s leading mobile marketplace for local services, connecting customers to vetted service providers through a location-aware app.
– A mobile app that helps connect shoppers to local or international travelers, allowing them to buy anything at the price they want to pay.
– An online shoe design company that allows women from all across the world to design their dream shoes.
– An online tutor-hiring platform that helps students choose the best tutors based on their preferences, reducing the disappointment of hiring the wrong tutor and likelihood of overpaying.
– Aims to revolutionize urban logistics and on-demand delivery by allowing every inhabitant of the city to undertake delivery tasks under its guidelines.
– Specializes in human emotion recognition software and compatible hardware solutions for out-of-home advertising.
– A pioneer in fully automated Machine to Machine (M2M) managed services in ASEAN.
– A company that provides customized healthcare plans and medical services right at the patient’s doorstep.
– A company that embraces the latest technologies to enhance the teaching experience of teachers, as well as the learning experience of children.
– A travel activity platform that helps tourists plan, book and share their own itineraries.
– A Malaysia-based fintech startup that provides user-friendly tools, coupled with one-on-one tele-guidance to guide users through the entire loan application and decision making process.
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Compass pivots, raising $1 million to zero in on e-commerce analytics
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
, a 4.5-year-old startup that had previously raised from investors for its business monitoring and intelligence service, is getting out of the crowded business of benchmarking startups and instead zeroing in what it sees as a far more underserved market: helping e-commerce businesses grow their revenue. The 11-person San Francisco-based company just closed $1 million in fresh seed funding toward that end, including previous backers New Enterprise Associates, The pivot is a subtle one. It was already the case that more than 30,000 companies had connected their various feeds to Compass — including from Stripe, Google Analytics, and PayPal — in exchange for access to its database of private tech data. Now, Compass is asking e-commerce companies to continue providing it such feeds (and more) to create a massive e-commerce database that can help the companies learn from each other and, in the process, compete with giants like Amazon, which may have more visibility into buying decisions than any other company on the planet. “Every small and mid-size company lacks the breadth of data and expertise” to compete, says Compass cofounder and CEO Bjoern Herrmann, who says that Compass’s new automated interface — which gives merchants a single view of all their data — also includes specific recommendations about how to increase revenue and profitability. “Think of it as an analyst-as-a-service,” he says. You can see in the visual below of a (made-up) customer report that clients receive an “insights report” about their company. Among other things, they can see customer repurchase rates, average order values, and how much the lifetime value of each customer has changed over time. But Compass doesn’t leave it at that; it also provides specific, actionable suggestions — some automated, based on what Compass knows about similar companies. In other cases, clients can talk with Compass directly for suggestions about tools they might use. It’s worth noting that some of these tool makers have cross-branding relationships with Compass, including , which makes a tool that businesses use to accept payments online and the mass payments platform .) Right now, Compass’s new product is free as it works to generate more users. (So far, so good, apparently; Herrmann says Compass is already tracking $10 billion in annualized gross merchandise volume.) Soon, says Herrmann, the company will begin introducing premium features that allow those customers to further slice and dice their data. Indeed, it’s early innings, he suggests Herrmann. For example, the widely used commerce platform which will be crucial to Compass’s success, is still in the middle of allowing Compass to integrate its payment hooks so Compass can eventually launch a paid version for customers that use Shopify. In the meantime, Herrmann sounds optimistic about his odds. Though companies have plenty of data sources to turn to already, many of these business owners are feeling overwhelmed by what they’re seeing. Compass will not only make sense of that data, he says, but “we’re taking things a step further and showing them exactly the levers the can use to increase their revenue.”
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The Pleurobot robo-salamander crawls and swims like a real amphibian
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
The mad roboticists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have produced another biomimetic mechanoid — this one based on the lithe locomotion of the salamander. “Pleurobot” imitates the amphibian’s ambulation with its own articulated vertebrae, allowing it to slither along on land or at sea. “Animal locomotion is a very interesting interplay between the body, the spinal cord, and the environment,” explained the leader of the project, Auke Ijspeert, in a video from EPFL. “The novelty of this work is really the approach we took, to try to be as close as possible to the real physics of the body.” The team spent what one can only imagine was quite a long time watching X-ray videos of — also known as the Iberian ribbed newt, for reasons that are obvious to the informed reader. The bones and limb angles were carefully tracked — notably, the salamander essentially goes from crawling to walking to swimming simply by doing the same basic motion at higher speeds. That makes it so there’s no need to, for example, switch from a trotting to a galloping gait. The result: This skeletal horror! It contains only 11 spinal segments, far fewer than the original’s 40 (29 were deemed non-critical), and its joints have significantly reduced freedom of movement. All the same, it does a creditable job of imitating the salamander’s slither. That happens to be an important moment in vertebrate evolution, as well — these are, after all, distant ancestors of our own. It’s not all just for kicks, though. Understanding the complex interaction between locomotive action and the spinal cord and brain is something that benefits a number of fields. “Understanding this is very important, for instance, for neuroprosthetics,” Ijspeert explained in the video. “Being able to re-stimulate those circuits in humans in the long term is something very important, and for that you need to understand how the spinal cord works.” The team hopes to pursue other “biorobots” in their investigation of other types of movement and neural organization.
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Live.ly shoots to the top of the App Store
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
Live.ly finished rolling out last Thursday and the app has already received over 500,000 downloads, the company tells TechCrunch. The app lets people broadcast what they are doing in real time. “We want to thank the musical.ly community for embracing live.ly as an exciting new platform and canvas for creativity and self-expression,” Alex Zhu, co-CEO of musical.ly, told TechCrunch. “The fact that this comes almost one year after musical.ly hit #1 on the same chart makes the news even more exciting.” There are a lot of competitors in the live streaming space, including Facebook Live and Twitter’s Periscope. Many tech companies view this as a growing viewership category for millennials and teens.
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Ancera raises $8.9 million for tech to prevent food poisoning and recalls
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
A startup based in Branford, Connecticut, has raised $8.9 million in Series A funding for technology that helps food producers detect contaminants faster than other methods will allow. The company’s mission is to prevent food waste, recalls or worse, the spread of food-borne illnesses, said Ancera CEO and founder Arjun Ganesan. Investors in the deal included: Glass Capital Management, a Florida-based family fund; and corporate strategic backers (PSSI), and other unnamed investors. The new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $12.3 million. For the unfamiliar, PSSI and Metabiota are big names in food safety. PSSI provides cleaning and sanitation services to food processors in North America. And Metabiota conducts risk assessments and data analysis for corporations and government agencies, internationally, with a focus on finding and mitigating biological threats. Common biological threats in the food industry include: salmonella, e. coli, Listeria and other contaminants that make people very sick, and can even cause fatalities. According to the , one in six people get food poisoning every year, representing some 48 million people — including 128,000 who require hospitalization and 3,000 fatalities. Ancera’s first hardware product, launching next month, is a small printer-sized instrument called the Piper, which uses disposable cartridges about the size of a smartphone, also made by the startup. Piper allows quality control professionals who do not have training in biology to conduct precise testing of their company’s produce, poultry or other foods, at different checkpoints in their supply chain. Piper can detect and quantify salmonella in a sample within one to eight hours. It works in conjunction with Ancera’s analytics software, which stores data and delivers reports on the status of everything from raw ingredients to products shipping out the door. Prior testing methods used in the food industry involve gathering a sample and growing bacteria on a culture like agar, and sending it to a lab to quantify the levels of unwanted organisms with a series of washes that can diminish the yield and quality of the data presented in test results. These tests take 30-50 hours, typically, or up to five days. According to Ganesan, Ancera instead sorts microbes in a food sample and pushes them up against a sensor agent, then takes pictures of the microbes, counting the number of them in a sample. This alleviates the need to wait for cells to grow into quantities large enough for sensors to detect them. Cell sorting has another benefit, the CEO explained: “Every other platform on the market destroys cells in the testing process. We gather cells and do not destroy them, which means you can take them immediately into sequencing, and figure out the root cause of your problem, which is to say exactly where the salmonella originated in your supply chain.” Glass Capital Management’s Carl Zwerner said investors expect the company to use its funding primarily on hiring, and to move into commercial production and distribution of its testing instruments and cartridges. Zwerner noted that the company had previously attracted grant funding from federal offices, secured patents and attained commitments from two major food industry players, a chicken and a produce business, to begin using its technology for salmonella testing, soon. “We wanted to fund this whole thing so that Arjun could just focus on scaling up,” he said. “You can easily see society’s need for something like this if you have ever had food poisoning yourself.” Ganesan said Ancera will also use the funding for research and development, adapting its systems to test for other food contaminants like e. coli.
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Meet Articoolo, the robot writer with content for brains
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
There is great writing. And there is . And at this juncture in the internet’s evolution it seems very plain, Dear Online Reader, that you are mostly being served a tsunami of content — accelerated into your attention trough by that require a steady stream of word fodder to engage eyeballs long enough to ambush them with ads. You can weep for the state of the written word — and let’s face it, a whole lot of content isn’t even written these days; I mean, why expend energy composing actual sentences when you can just live stream a melon being slow-ploded by rubber bands, or you can build technology to automate the writing process to churn out even more # The second option is what Israeli startup has been busy doing. It’s built an algorithm that can generate an article on a topic of your choice — so long as it can be described in between two and five words. Just sum up your subject concisely, tell the machine how many words (max 500) to scribe on your behalf and select whether you prefer “better readability” or “enhanced uniqueness.” Then hit the create button and sit back and wait for your article to be baked by its AI. Assuming, that is, that your topic is not too obscure for the algorithm to tackle. (In which case it will reject your request and ask you to reword/pick from a list of similar topics to further drain the strain from the creative process.) When there is enough source material in the robot’s content data banks it will get to work, progressing through its automated research and drafting process. The time taken to deliver your content will vary, apparently depending on article length and topic complexity (and perhaps demand on Articoolo’s servers). The speediest article I managed to generate was a superficial sample of less than 250 words on the topic of “Kim Kardashian” — which took the algorithm less than 50 seconds to churn out. Although the result was more a spot treatment on cellulite than a comprehensive appraisal of Kardashian’s career. Other subjects definitely broke the minute-to-create mark. Asking the robot to serve up advice on “How to be Happy” seemed, oddly enough, to take it the longest of all. To be sure of this, I asked for content on this exact same topic twice — and got the same article, slow baked, word for word, twice. So initially I thought there must be some pretty hard limits on the robot’s capacity for original thought. But Articoolo claimed this was a bug; a passing glitch in its infinite copy-generating matrix. And lo and behold, a third attempt on the topic delivered a fresh stream of robotic agony aunting… “The algorithm will write you a different article every time,” confirms CEO and co-founder Doron Tal. “Even if you ask for the same topic 100 times. You will get 100 different articles. We actually have a feature for affiliate marketing companies that enables users to create multiple articles on the same topic at once.” The team launched their online copywriting service a few weeks ago in beta, after some two years dev work on the core algorithms — aiming to test the water to see how much bona fide commercial demand there is for automated content generation. Of course there is already plenty of being churned out online by humans to keep other humans clicking. But how much of a leap is it to flip the switch to autopilot and pump out purely algorithmic arranged thought? Tal, a self-professed “digital advertising expert,” says the team founded the business at the end of 2014, after the two other co-founders had been playing around rewriting Wikipedia articles for laughs — which in turn sparked the idea to automate copywriting for ad-driven purposes after he got involved and, he says, had his wicked way with the concept. They’ve been seed-funded by three local VCs to the tune of $1.2 million at this stage. As you might expect, the initial target customers for Articoolo’s service are SEO and content marketing types. So it’s not out to replace yours truly just yet. Although the startup claims the results generated by its robot writer are both original and readable. And their pitch email to me was the attention-grabbing one liner: “will journalists lose their job soon?” [sic] After testing the service, the truth of the matter is rather less clearly and pithily framed (although the grammar mistakes were at least algorithmically sustained). Less clearly framed unless, that is, you’re convinced your ‘reader’ is unlikely to be doing much more than skimming lightly over the surface of your content like a stone hopping atop a glassy lake, tripping from one hackneyed thought to another, eyeballing words as if they’re so many pretty shapes. Fans of cryptic crosswords, who relish the mental adrenaline kicks they get from being forced to slalom from cliché to climax, with precious little in the way of linkage, may also be unlikely appreciators of the robot oracle’s semantic gaps. Normal, average readers, however, will struggle to locate much in the way of sense. And discerning readers will read this content and weep. The robot’s output is about as intellectually fulfilling as a backwash of used tea leaves. “ ,” opines the robot scribe, once again on the aforementioned subject of “How to be Happy,” mining its eternal font of received wisdom. “ .” Clichés, tautologies, non sequiturs. This robot might actually be better employed writing speeches for politicians. Although its bland pronouncements feel like they need to be spiced up with emergency! exclamation! marks! after! each! and! every! word! “ ,” the machine pens on another well-trodden topic, getting its grammar in a twist again. “ ” it drones on with wondrous banality hammered home by additional tautology — right before switching gears and dropping this unexpected last liner: “ ” Jimmy Singh? Who he? If you’re wondering what input topic elicited this deadpan parade of stereotypical and strangely unexciting suggestions for a lady who apparently has everything yet still desires handmade and bespoke curios, or at least a coupon to go skydiving, it was a request for an article about “chocolate teapots.” Go figure. “We still have work to do on the quality,” Tal admits. “We wanted to find out if there’s a need for a solution like ours and if target audience is ready to pay for it. Our overall strategy is to provide solution to various industries where content is a significant building block.” “Building blocks of words” reminds me of the infamous phrase “binders of women” for some reason. I wonder why that is? “No, we don’t think our algorithm will be able to replace human journalists, at least in the near future,” he adds. “Algorithm doesn’t have a point of view, an opinion or an agenda. It can be a helpful tool for reporters. You can count on the algorithm to do most of the background research and provide the base of your article.” Personally I’d view a set of tea leaves/coffee beans, properly brewed in hot water, as a far more useful tool for aiding and abetting the article-creation process — but call me an old-fashioned journalist… But okay, okay, personal preference aside, the ugly reality is that content farms continue filling the internet with tasteless fodder. And these entities’ appetite to cement more words into ever more numerous clickable units is only going to grow — at least until all human communication has been rendered down to live streamed slow-ploded melons to keep our eyes perpetually peeled. So if you consider rapacious appetite for ad padding ‘a problem’, then Articoolo is offering ‘a solution’ of sorts — albeit probably just another gap filler, treading water until digital marketing missives can be wrapped unmissably across people’s eyeballs via some kind of vision-disrupting augmented reality. We’ll all be Clockwork Oranges then. In the meantime, far from helping with the wider problem of the internet’s abusive relationship with the written word, Articoolo is doing its best to accelerate the slope of the onramp that feeds intellectually vacant slabs of content online like a donut factory feeds a conveyor belt. Clickbait written by robots does feel like we’re approaching rock bottom/peak content. Tal says the startup has kicked off pilots with several companies in the native advertising, affiliate marketing and e-commerce spaces at this stage. Although he is not naming names, nor quantifying customer sizes, as yet. The current beta version of the service asks users to buy credits to pay per article created (or rewritten — a secondary feature that’s supposed to enhance your article’s SEO potential). But the aim, should they be able to prove out enough demand for robotically generated content blocks, is to move to a SaaS model, feeding the digital void with a steady stream of machine-curated “word textures” — which I think is a phrase that more properly describes the quality of the commercial output at this germinal stage. How exactly does their algorithm turn a blank page into a wall of text? The various steps involved include: analyzing/understanding topic context; parsing a specific set of related resources (using an indexed source database of ~500GB of “trusted articles,” and if it can’t find what it’s looking for there resorting to the open web); extracting sentiment and “important keywords” from the source material in order to turn out “one coherent piece of text,”; and then rewriting this text, using an NLP engine, for “multi-level semantic identification and to verify its readability,” as Tal puts it. “The most difficult part is the rephrasing process,” he adds. “We actually had to teach our algorithm how to use English correctly. It is very complexed and we keep on doing that in order to improve the results.” So human grammar police can chalk up another advantage over the robot. Talking up the plus sides of the word machine, Tal points out it’s faster than a human writer and can also scale to levels of productivity that not even the sweatiest and least sociable blogger could hope to achieve. “No human will be able to write thousands of articles per day!” is his triumphant claim. Albeit, even at 50 seconds a pop (for the shortest, simplest articles) the robot writer is still not going to be able to turn out 2,000+ articles in 24 hours. More than a thousand, sure. But not multiple — yet. In any case, whether anything except a machine would willingly digest the thousands of pieces of content that could be conjured into existence by Articoolo is a whole other question. But then it’s highly probable that the vast majority of these algorithmic content works will languish unread. Because in the ever accelerating game of ‘click here to eyeball this’, the battle to slay human attention spans has been fought and won. Economics has defeated sense. Call it a sort of reverse if you will. Progress, apparently, marches in many directions these days. I’ll leave you with the robot writer’s passing thesis on quantum physics — which at times appears to bend toward a warning on the fickle fluctuations of new media — as a specimen to feed into a wider debate about the worth of algorithmically generated content. And indeed the general proliferation of #content online. In the words of the bot: “In this chaotic time between the change of one Age into the changing of the brand new age thought and belief systems are running rampant… Don’t believe anything you hear and only ten percent of what you see.” Amen to that, at least. The free encyclopedia Wikipedia, tells us that Quantum Entanglement is just a physical system where two or more things are connected with each other even when they’re spatially distinguished. It talks about spin measurement and hidden variants, Bell’s inequity, H. Study regarding the smallest particle of issue — the physical Quantum. This is where the Quanta is explained as one soul, the smallest neighborhood of the infinite soul, Head of God. There is no real reality, except as detected by a Quanta — an individual spirit. No individual people, nothing blinks out from the Quantum Ocean, Head of God, no physical reality. Let’s realize that all is spirit, energy, non real shaking. It is true that every single soul blinked out from the Quantum Ocean, Head of God to experience Life on the real plane. It is also true that the ideas that this personal soul chooses to believe may draw energy out of the ocean Quantum, Mind of God into his\/her aura. The energies one carries in one atmosphere attracts one’s physical reality. What needs to be better comprehended is spiritual Quantum Entanglement. Which implies that even though a person soul attracts, it’s physical life by ideas and beliefs, they’re also influenced by the ideas and beliefs of others. A belief is merely a thought that has been approved and believed about over and over. On a conscious level a soul can be trying very difficult to pick and select the ideas they think and also to believe the beliefs which they believe in. In this chaotic time between the change of one Age into the changing of the brand new age thought and belief systems are running rampant. You can go outside on the Net and purchase a dozen new belief systems to get a dollar. Or they’re being electronically spewed outside at us from the mass media. Each time you turn the Television on or read a paper, magazine, see a bill board you’re being bombarded by another person’s thoughts. These thoughts and impressions might not necessarily affect or harm you do not believe them. Do you believe everything you hear or see? That is a classic definition of present day insanity. To remain sane in these difficult transitional times, we need to embrace the idea: don’t believe anything you hear and only ten percent of what you see. It’d be more helpful for mankind if the Quantum Scientists would study Quantum Soul Entanglement. Teach the people more about ideas and beliefs transfer between living souls.
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Four things to know about the FAA’s rules about commercial drone usage
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Lucia Maffei
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
The , which concern unmanned aircraft weighing less than 55 pounds and flying no more than , require that drones remain within the visual line of sight of the pilot. Remote pilots are also required to hold a remote pilot airman certificate. As overall judgement on the FAA’s rules, Gemmell said: “The new rules give a lot of leeway to people. You can be essentially someone who’s older than 16 years old, pass the knowledge test and you’re ready to go out and fly.”
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Mobile shopping startup PredictSpring raises $11.4M
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
, a startup that helps brands and retailers build mobile apps, announced today that it has raised $11.4 million in Series A funding. Founder and CEO Nitin Mangtani has said that one of his goals is to that make it easy for consumers to shop. Customers include Calvin Klein, Cole Haan and Nine West, and the company says it’s delivering an average of 200 to 300 percent improvement on conversions. “For the loyal customers who are repeat purchasers and high spenders, an app definitely provides them that very rich and first-class experience that mobile web doesn’t provide,” Mangtani told me yesterday when I asked whether users are actually downloading these apps. “And there are a couple other things happening — both Google and Apple trying to make discovery of apps much more seamless… We also see social media really helping us.” In addition to offering an app development platform, the company has become increasingly focused on using mobile technology to improve the in-store experience. Those improvements are on the consumer side, with things like geofenced notifications and barcode scanning, but also take the form of apps that salespeople can use to look up more information about customers and products while in the store. The new funding was led by Felicis Ventures. previously raised $2 million in seed funding, and existing investors Beanstalk Ventures and Novel TMT Ventures participated in the round, as did new investors Benvolio Group. Felicis Managing Partner Aydin Senkut (like Mangtani, a former Googler) and Beanstalk Managing Partner Ken Seiff have joined PredictSpring’s board of directors.
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Trak is like a Fitbit for sperm
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
If you feel the world is in danger of under-population but your fallopian swim team is letting the side down, has your back. Now FDA-approved, the company’s product Trak will be the lifestyle coach and home-diagnostics tool to help deliver happier sperm and tiny shouty miracles. The company announced this week that its Trak product has been approved by the FDA, and suggested that it’d be starting to ship its product toward the end of the summer this year. You spin me right round, baby, right round. “Male infertility is a dramatically under-appreciated condition affecting millions of couples every year,” said Greg Sommer, CEO at Sandstone. “Trak is a complete system that not only gives couples the ability to conveniently measure semen quality at home, but also provides digital health tools and population-based data to help men take charge of their reproductive health in a whole new way.” The company suggests that its service is beneficial especially because having to give a semen sample at a clinic is seen as embarrassing and awkward, and can be a deterrent to getting the help that’s required to get male fertility back on track. I can see how that could be the case, and it’s worth pointing out that doing the same at home is often ranked highly among men’s favorite pastimes. Sandstone’s Trak uses centrifugal force to isolate and quantify sperm cells using specially designed (and mercifully disposable, single-use) cartridges. The system includes the Trak Engine and several disposable test kits for repeat testing to gather data over time. In addition to being FDA-approved to offer semi-quantitative guidance on the measured sperm count (such as “low,” “moderate” or “optimal”), the companion app gives feedback and wellness advice on ways to improve and track sperm count.
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Blue Origin breaks ground on new facility to develop orbital rockets
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
In an email to fans this morning, founder Jeff Bezos announced that the company broke ground on their orbital vehicle manufacturing site in Florida. At 750,000 square feet, the new custom-built facility is designed to be large enough to accommodate manufacturing, processing, integration, and testing of orbital rockets. To put that size in perspective, SpaceX’s in Hawthorne, California is nearly one million square feet. Artist rendition of Blue Origin orbital rocket facility / Image courtesy of Blue Origin Bezos stated that the entire rocket would be manufactured in this facility with the exception of the rocket engines themselves. While the suborbital New Shepard vehicle uses Blue Origin’s BE-3 engine, the orbital rocket will use a BE-4 engine, currently under development at their 260,000 square-foot facility in Kent, Washington. The company is with the on development. Scheduled to be flight-ready in 2019, the new engine could be integrated on both the Blue Origin orbital vehicle and ULA’s Vulcan rocket. When it comes time to ramp up development of the BE-4 engine, Blue Origin will select a new location to build a larger facility. “Initial BE-4 engine production will occur at our Kent facility while we conduct a site selection process later this year for a larger engine production facility to accommodate higher production rates.” Jeff Bezos, founder Blue Origin. Orbital launches are the next big step for Bezos’ rocket company. To date, they’ve focused on perfecting the suborbital rocket business with repeated launches (and landings) of the New Shepard vehicle. In fact, this month Blue Origin continued to prove out their reusable rocket capability with the launch and landing of a single New Shepard rocket and crew capsule. Recovered New Shepard rocket / Image courtesy of Blue Origin These suborbital launches are great for space tourism – Bezos has stated that they’re working to bring humans into space as early as 2018 – and even for conducting research in a weightless environment. However, if Blue Origin wants to get into the larger market of launching satellites, they need to develop an orbital rocket. Compared to suborbital launches, orbital launches are much more difficult and require more power and technical complexity. Suborbital launches simply need to travel high enough to reach outer space (considered by many to be 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, above the Earth), and come back down to the ground. Orbital launches, however, must travel both high enough and fast enough laterally to maintain their orbit around the Earth. This will be Blue Origin’s next big challenge. “It’s exciting to see the bulldozers in action–we’re clearing the way for the production of a reusable fleet of orbital vehicles that we will launch and land, again and again.” Jeff Bezos, founder Blue Origin Bird’s eye view of Blue Origin manufacturing site / Image courtesy of Blue Origin/Aerial Innovations While the development of the orbital manufacturing facility is just getting started, Bezos stated that it should be complete by December, 2017. With the BE-4 engine slated for flight-readiness in 2019, we will hopefully get to witness a Blue Origin orbital launch, and perhaps an attempted landing, in the not-too-distant future.
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Apple doubles down on photography with new Shot on iPhone campaign
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
Apple knows that the battle for people’s pockets is going to be fought in part in the photography space. With iOS 10, the company is making it even easier to get to the camera in a hurry, but in an effort to remind people that they’re carrying a great camera around with them, Apple is launching a new round of its popular Shot on iPhone advertising campaign. How often do you carry a camera with you? Chances are that the answer is “never” (i.e. you don’t have an SLR camera in your laptop bag), and “always” (i.e. you’re never more than an arm’s length away from your phone). In celebration of this, Apple just kicked off another gorgeous set of photos in its Shot on iPhone campaign. [gallery size="tc-article-featured-image-wide" ids="1345072,1345071,1345070,1345069,1345068,1345067"] The new featured images are focusing on the bright, vibrant colors you’ll find in the world around you, and the campaign is focusing on highlighting photography local to where the billboards are going up. The campaign — dubbed by the Apple creative team — can be found in what has got to be one of the broadest-reaching art exhibits in the world, splashed across billboards in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, UAE, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Korea, China, Malaysia, New Zealand and Thailand.
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Google+ turns 5 and is somehow still alive
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
People who love sure love Google+. That hasn’t changed since Google first launched what at the time seemed like a Facebook competitor . If you’re a Google+ fan, today is a day to celebrate: Against all odds, your favorite social network turned five today. For everybody else, the fact that Google+ is may come as a surprise. The number of those who still love the service fell quickly after those heady days of the summer of 2011. Google did so many things right; the design was great (and used what were, at the time, really advanced web technologies) and its focus on privacy with the help of its Circles seemed like the right antidote to Facebook. People were genuinely excited about Google+. The honeymoon didn’t last long. Circles turned out to be too complicated for most people (and the idea of sorting your friends into buckets always seemed strange), the fact that Google didn’t allow anonymous (or even pseudonymous) users quickly and even after Google changed its policy, the sour taste of those early days remained for many. In those early days, Google also seemed to focus more on figuring out ways to than on improving the product. Unlike Twitter, Google also kept the service mostly to third-party developers because the company didn’t want to “disrupt something very special” and “magical.” Google’s insistence on building social (and hence Google+) into all of its products, largely driven by the project’s head Vic Gundotra, was one step too far and after Gundotra’s , it probably spent as many engineering hours on removing all of its Google+ integrations as it did on building them in the first place. For the most part, though, the company seemed to have forgotten about the product after Gundotra left, until it tried to with a focus on communities and collections. The reaction mostly sounded like the soothing sound of crickets on a hot summer evening. Unlike Google’s other social experiments, like the ill-fated Buzz, Google+ is still alive after five years. That’s an accomplishment in and of itself. To be fair, it birthed good products like Hangouts and the excellent Google Photos. I don’t think that was worth all of the agony Google went through, but at least it was worth something. Happy birthday, Google+!
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Decentralizing IoT networks through blockchain
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Ben Dickson
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
Imagine a washer that autonomously contacts suppliers and places orders when it’s low on detergent, performs self-service and maintenance, downloads new washing programs from outside sources, schedules its cycles to take advantage of electricity prices and negotiates with peer devices to optimize its environment; a connected car, smart enough to find and choose the best deal for parts and services; a manufacturing plant where the machinery knows when to order repairs for some of its parts without the need of human intervention. All these scenarios — and many more — will be realized thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT). Already, many of the have been transformed by the billions of IoT devices connected to the internet; other industries will follow suit as . , especially when the power of IoT is combined with that of other technologies, such as machine learning. But some major hurdles will surface as billions of smart devices will want to interact among themselves and with their owners. While these challenges cannot be met with the current models that are supporting IoT communications, tech firms and , the technology that constitutes the backbone of the famous bitcoin. Current IoT ecosystems rely on centralized, brokered communication models, otherwise known as the server/client paradigm. All devices are identified, authenticated and connected through cloud servers that sport huge processing and storage capacities. Connection between devices will have to exclusively go through the internet, even if they happen to be a few feet apart. While this model has connected generic computing devices for decades, and will continue to support small-scale IoT networks as we see them today, it will not be able to respond to of tomorrow. because of the high infrastructure and maintenance cost associated with centralized clouds, large server farms and networking equipment. The sheer amount of communications that will have to be handled when IoT devices grow to the tens of billions will increase those costs substantially. Even if the unprecedented economical and engineering challenges are overcome, cloud servers will remain a bottleneck and point of failure that can disrupt the entire network. This is especially important as more critical tasks such as . Moreover, the diversity of ownership between devices and their supporting cloud infrastructure makes machine-to-machine (M2M) communications difficult. There’s no single platform that connects all devices and no guarantee that cloud services offered by different manufacturers are interoperable and compatible. A decentralized approach to IoT networking would solve many of the questions above. Adopting a standardized peer-to-peer communication model to process the hundreds of billions of transactions between devices will significantly reduce the costs associated with installing and maintaining large centralized data centers and will distribute computation and storage needs across the billions of devices that form IoT networks. This will prevent failure in any single node in a network from bringing the entire network to a halting collapse. However, establishing peer-to-peer communications will present its own set of challenges, chief among them the issue of security. And as we all know, The proposed solution will have to maintain privacy and security in huge IoT networks and offer some form of validation and consensus for transactions to prevent spoofing and theft. offers an elegant solution to the peer-to-peer communication platform problem. It is a technology that allows the creation of a distributed digital ledger of transactions that is shared among the nodes of a network instead of being stored on a central server. Participants are registered with blockchains to be able to record transactions. The technology uses cryptography to authenticate and identify participating nodes and allow them to securely add transactions to the ledger. Transactions are verified and confirmed by other nodes participating in the network, thus eliminating the need for a central authority. The ledger is tamper-proof and cannot be manipulated by malicious actors because it doesn’t exist in any single location, and man-in-the-middle attacks cannot be staged because there is no single thread of communication that can be intercepted. Blockchain makes trustless, peer-to-peer messaging possible and has already through cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, providing guaranteed peer-to-peer payment services without the need for third-party brokers. Tech firms are now mulling over porting the usability of blockchain to the realm of IoT. The concept can directly be ported to IoT networks to deal with the issue of scale, allowing billions of devices to share the same network without the need for additional resources. Blockchain also addresses the issue of conflict of authority between different vendors by providing a standard in which everyone has equal stakes and benefits. This helps unlock M2M communications that were practically impossible under previous models, and allows for the realization of totally new use cases. The IoT and blockchain combination is already gaining momentum, and is being endorsed by both startups and tech giants. IBM and Samsung introduced their proof-of-concept system, , which uses blockchain to support next-generation IoT ecosystems that will generate hundreds of billions of transactions per day. In , IBM’s Paul Brody describes how new devices can be initially registered in a universal blockchain when assembled by the manufacturer, and later transferred to regional blockchains after being sold to dealers or customers, where they can autonomously interact with other devices that share the blockchain. The combination of IoT and blockchain is also creating the possibility of a and liquefying the capacity of assets, where resources can be shared and reused instead of purchased once and disposed after use. An IoT hackathon hosted by blockchain platform leader put the concept of blockchain-powered IoT to test, in which , including in the domain of energy sharing and electricity and gas billing. is another startup that is investing in IoT and blockchain with a focus on industrial applications such as agriculture, manufacturing and oil and gas. Filament uses wireless sensors, called Taps, to create low-power autonomous for data collection and asset monitoring, without requiring a cloud or central network authority. The firm uses blockchain technology to identify and authenticate devices and also to charge for network and data services through bitcoin. is a consortium that is exploring the role of blockchain in dealing with scale and security issues in IoT. In a recent hackathon held in London, the group demonstrated involving a solar energy stack designed to provide reliable and verifiable renewable data, speeding up incentive settlements and reducing opportunities for fraud. The system facilitates the process in which a solar panel connects to a data logger, tracks the amount of solar energy produced, securely delivers that data to a node and records it on a distributed ledger that is synced across a broader global network of nodes. The application of blockchain to IoT isn’t without flaws and shortcomings, and there are a few hurdles that need to be overcome. For one thing, over the architecture of the underlying blockchain technology, which has its roots in problems stemming from the growth of the network and the rise in the number of transactions. Some of these issues will inevitably apply to the extension of blockchain to IoT. These challenges , and several solutions, including side-chains, tree-chains and mini-blockchains, are being tested to fix the problem. Processing power and energy consumption is also a point of concern. Encryption and verification of blockchain transactions are computationally intensive operations and require considerable horsepower to carry out, which is lacking in many IoT devices. The same goes for storage, as ledgers start to grow in size and need to be redundantly stored in network nodes. And, as analyst , autonomous IoT networks powered by blockchain will pose challenges to the business models that manufacturers are seeking, which includes long-term subscription relationships with continuing revenue streams, and a big shift in business and economic models will be required. It’s still too early to say whether blockchain will be the definite answer to the problems of the fast-evolving IoT industry. It’s not yet perfect; nonetheless, it’s a very promising combination for the future of IoT, where decentralized, autonomous networks will have a decisive role.
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Google researchers teach AIs to see the important parts of images — and tell you about them
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
This week is the in Las Vegas, and Google researchers have . They’ve taught computer vision systems to detect the most important person in a scene, pick out and track individual body parts and describe what they see in language that leaves nothing to the imagination. First, let’s consider the ability to find “events and key actors” in video — a collaboration between Google and Stanford. Footage of scenes like basketball games contain dozens or even hundreds of people, but only a few are worth paying attention to. uses a recurrent neural network to create an “attention mask” for every frame, then track relevance of each object as time proceeds. Over time the system is able to pick out not only the most important actor, but potential important actors, and the events with which they are associated. Think of it like this: it could tell that someone going in for a lay-up be important, but that the important player there is the one who furnishes the denial. The implications for intelligently sorting through crowded footage (think airports, busy streets) are significant. Next is a more whimsical paper: Researchers have created a CV system for discovering the legs of tigers. Well… there’s a little more to it than that. The tigers (and some horses) simply served as “articulated object classes” — essentially, objects with continuously moving parts — for the system to watch and understand. By identifying independently moving parts and their motion and position relative to the rest of the animal, the limbs can be identified frame by frame. The advance here is that the program is capable of making that identification across many videos, even when the animal is moving in different ways. It’s not that we desperately need data about the front left legs of tigers, but again, the ability to find and track individual parts of an arbitrary person, animal or machine (or tree, or garment, or…) is a powerful one. Imagine being able to scrape video just for tagged animals, or people with phones in their hands or bicycles with panniers. Naturally the surveillance aspect makes for potential creepiness, but academically speaking, the work is fascinating. was a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and Google. Last is a new ability for computer vision that may be a bit more practical for everyday use. CV systems have long been able to classify objects they see: a person, a table or surface, a car. But in describing them they may not always be as exact as we’d like. On a table of wine glasses, which one is yours? In a crowd of people, which one is your friend? , from researchers at Google, UCLA, Oxford and Johns Hopkins, describes a new method by which a computer can specify objects without question of confusion. It combines some basic logic with the powerful systems behind image captioning — the ones that produce something like “a man in red eating ice cream is sitting down” for a photo more or less meeting that description. The computer looks through the descriptors available for the objects in question and finds a combination of them that, together, can only apply to one object. So among a group of laptops, it could say “the grey laptop that is turned on,” or if several are on, it could add “the grey laptop that is turned on and showing a woman in a blue dress,” or the like. It’s one of those things people do constantly without thinking about it — of course, we can also point — but that is in fact quite difficult for computers. Being able to describe something to you accurately is useful, of course, but it goes the other way: you may some day say to your robot butler “grab me the amber ale that’s behind the tomatoes.” Naturally, all three of these papers (and more among the many Google is presenting) use deep learning and/or some sort of neural network — it’s almost a given in computer vision research these days, since they have gotten so much more powerful, flexible and easy to deploy. For the specifics of each network, however, consult the paper in question.
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Crunch Report | Apple ordered to Stop Selling iPhone in China
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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But seriously, why did Theranos have just one spokesperson?
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 |
Theranos have a spokesperson, as in one person handling all public relations efforts outwardly. We’ve confirmed Brooke Buchanan, VP of communications, left her position within the company on Friday. Buchanan could not be reached for comment on the departure but the head of comms was handling all calls, emails, and any other messages related to the troubled one drop blood analysis company. The soap opera Theranos has become revolves around failed technology, misleading results, a dramatic plummet in valuation, government inquiries, threats to oust the founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes and bar her from working in the industry for a time, a pull out from Theranos main partner Walgreens and a criminal investigation. The company still had more than $700 million in the bank at last count and yet, with all the issues, chose to appoint but one spokesperson to answer for everything. It’s an insurmountable task for a team of flacks, let alone ONE SINGLE PERSON. But Theranos is a company built on promises and not much else at this point and it was likely a crushing job for Buchanan to continue taking on. Buchanan told journalists earlier Holmes would be revealing the inner workings of company technology at the on August 1st but Holmes has since reneged on her appearance to press there. Holmes promised to meet with a wide group of 200 members of the press after her presentation but was questioned on why she would do so while under criminal and government investigations. The disgraced Theranos founder will now be skipping the press Q&A and will instead meet with individual journalists in Palo Alto before the conference. We’ve reached out to both Buchanan and Theranos for comment about what happened and if there’s a plan to replace Buchanan. Perhaps the company, like Buchanan, has given up explaining itself to the general public, but it seems they’ll need someone if there’s any glimmer of hope left for Theranos. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe there just isn’t any hope left. We’ll let you know if and when we do hear from Theranos on the departure and what Holmes plans to tell the media before the AACC conference in August. Update:
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NASA’s new X-plane and the future of electric aircraft
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
The world is on a quest to create cleaner, quieter airplanes that could replace the fuel-guzzling, roaring commercial aircraft in use today. NASA is leading much of the research and development effort in this area and today they’ve an official name for their next X-plane concept: the X-57 “Maxwell.” Maxwell is a hybrid electric research plane equipped with 14 electric propeller-turning motors located along the wings. The experimental plane will be put through a number of tests over the next four years in an effort to demonstrate that electrical propulsion can make planes quieter, more efficient, and environmentally friendly. “With the return of piloted X-planes to NASA’s research capabilities – which is a key part of our 10-year-long New Aviation Horizons initiative – the general aviation-sized X-57 will take the first step in opening a new era of aviation.” Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator During take-off and landing, Maxwell will make use of all 14 motors to create sufficient thrust, but once it’s up in the air it will only use the two larger motors located on the tips of the wings. Illustration of NASA’s X-57 Maxwell airplane / Image courtesy of NASA Langley/Advanced Concepts Lab, AMA, Inc. NASA engineers believe that this unique design will result in a five-time reduction of the energy required for a small, private planes to cruise at 175 mph. “NASA researchers working directly with the hybrid electric airplane also chose to name the aircraft “Maxwell” to honor James Clerk Maxwell, the 19th century Scottish physicist who did groundbreaking work in electromagnetism. His importance in contributing to the understanding of physics is rivaled only by Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton” – NASA Maxwell is a result of NASA’s “ ” initiative: a 10-year program to create a new generation of X-planes that will make use of greener energy, use half as much fuel, and be half as loud as commercial aircraft in use today. In the President’s FY 2017 budget, NASA received $790 million to fund New Aviation Horizons among other similar green-aviation initiatives. While we often think of robots on Mars or astronauts on board the International Space Station when we think of NASA, we shouldn’t forget about that first “A” in the agency’s acronym (National and Space Administration). As I’ve stated in a : For over 100 years, NASA and its predecessor NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) have used experimental aircraft to advance aviation technology. Through government funds, the agency has reduced the expensive research and development burden on private companies and shortened the time it takes to commercialize new aviation technologies. Originally known as XS-planes for eXperimental Supersonic and later shortened to simply X, the X-planes are a family of experimental aircraft intended solely for research. Over 56 X-plane concepts have been created and they represent some of the greatest strides in aviation research that NASA has made over the years. NASA’s X-15 rocket-plane from the 1950’s, the fastest and highest-flying winged aircraft of its time / Image courtesy of NASA To accomplish the goals set out by New Aviation Horizons, NASA researchers are generating new plane designs and exchanging internal combustion engines that require lead-based aviation fuel with electric motors. This design change could bring about a number of advantages. Internal combustion engines require bulky, drag-inducing mechanisms for cooling air, combustion air intake, fuel lines, and handling exhaust gases. In contrast, electrical engines are smaller, less complex, and contain fewer moving parts. For these reasons, electrically powered planes could solve emission problems and, just like electrically powered cars, would be quieter than current commercial alternatives. IIllustration of NASA X-plane concepts / Image courtesy of NASA However, electrically powered planes require an energy source. Maxwell, for example, will be powered with batteries. Unfortunately, batteries need recharging, and unless you plan to cater your entire airplane design around the use of , you may only be able to complete short trips. But, as NASA stated in their press release, Maxwell is designed to be a private plane, which aren’t often optimized for long-haul flights anyway. Both the weight and storage capacity of batteries on the market today are limiting factors for electric planes, but companies in the automotive industry, like Tesla, are working to this rather quickly. Electric aircraft designs have their challenges, but with potentially huge upsides (and mandates from Congress), it’s worth the effort to try to solve them. NASA has a history of propelling the commercial aviation industry forward through fundamental research. With New Aviation Horizons, their hoping to continue that legacy. Electrical airplanes are sure to change the look of aviation, but if humans plan to continue to fly in the future we’ll have to embrace this new era of flight. According to some , the world only contains enough petroleum resources to last us through the year 2100. And as we get closer to that date, fuel prices are likely to rise higher and higher. Eventually, we’ll need to wean ourselves off of internal combustion engines and the aircraft that use them. To do that, we’ll need to see innovation in aircraft design, battery technology, solar cells and electrically powered engines themselves. In addition to NASA, companies like Boeing and Airbus, and even other countries have started investing in this future. Planes like the GL-10, Helios, E-Fan, and Solar Impulse have already demonstrated the feasibility of electric planes. [gallery size="tc-article-featured-image-wide" ids="1339084,1339088,1339089,1339091"] Even Elon Musk has that he has plans to come up with an electrically powered jet. When asked to talk about his “next great idea” Musk responded, “Well I have been thinking about the vertical takeoff and landing electric jet a bit more. I mean, I think I have something that might close. I’m quite tempted to do something about it.” NASA’s Maxwell is the first X-plane in a decade, but the agency has plans for as many as five more through New Aviation Horizons. The technologies and knowledge gained through this initiative will be passed on to the private sector with the hope that, eventually, electric airplanes will become commonplace and transform flying as we know it.
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 6 | 16 | null |
Examining the cybersecurity landscape of utilities and control systems
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Stephen Boyer
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
According to a federal indictment March 24, 2016, seven attackers with links to the Iranian government executed cyberattacks against dozens of banks from 2011 to 2013 that disabled their websites and interfered with hundreds of thousands of customers’ ability to access their online accounts. Public announcements of cyber incidents against the financial system allegedly carried out by foreign actors are undoubtedly areas for concern. However, this announcement included an unusual twist that warrants potentially even greater worry: The attackers also targeted a small dam near New York City. One of the alleged attackers is accused of repeatedly gaining access to the control system of the Bowman Avenue Dam, a small flood-control structure in Rye Brook, about 20 miles north of New York City, through a cable modem. According to government officials’ disclosure, the attacker was able to obtain information about the dam’s operations, including its water level, temperature and sluice gate, and could have sent water pouring into the city of Rye if the gate had not been disconnected for maintenance when the intrusion occurred. Though it’s one of the lesser-known of the 75,000 dams in the United States, a successful cyberattack on the dam could have a neighborhood of more than 200 residents, where 3,000- to 5,500-square foot homes sell for more than $1 million. The Bowman Avenue Dam incident illustrates a growing and disturbing reality: While online breaches such as Target, Home Depot, the IRS, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Staples and Healthcare.gov have grabbed the spotlight the last few years, and understandably so, attackers are extending the threat from the online and virtual to the world, in which damage could be even more severe. It is important to understand Bowman was not the first cyberattack on critical infrastructure, and it is unlikely to be the last, with other utilities and key infrastructure operators as potential targets. The following are other recent examples: Utilities and other industries such as manufacturing and transportation rely on an automated system known as SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) to control processes and equipment from remote locations. These SCADA systems tend to be older systems that weren’t built with the authentication and encryption technologies that have become standard in today’s internet-connected systems. Given the known , SCADA operators typically work to sever or limit connections between these systems and the outside world. In many cases these separations are effective; however, recent attacks have shown that vulnerabilities do indeed exist and are being exploited. The risk to energy and other public services worldwide, including in the U.S., will be greater accentuated as more control systems are modernized and brought online. As companies embrace smart grids, which harness a new generation of sensors, wireless technology and software applications to manage the grid and energy usage, the and system complexity will only increase. The industry is starting to take notice. After the Ukraine attack, a quasi-governmental U.S. electric industry group — the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or E-ISAC — members to review network defenses and do a better job implementing multiple layers of defense against potential cyberattacks. In July, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for utilities to do more to thwart cyber intruders. FERC said it wanted the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the nonprofit that oversees the power grid in the U.S., Canada and part of Mexico, to develop new security standards. Another government entity, the , says it has been working closely with the Department of Homeland Security, industry and other government agencies to reduce the risk of energy disruptions caused by cyberattack. The increased awareness and regulatory action are all positive steps toward progress. However, much of the responsibility will fall on the individual utilities to implement and execute sound cybersecurity programs. Recent history is painfully demonstrating to us that hypothetical attack scenarios are now today’s breach victims.
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DIRTT’s ICEreality puts VR to use for interior, office design
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
A manufacturer of custom prefabricated elements to be built into offices and other work spaces, is the latest corporation to adopt virtual reality for the enterprise, rather than entertainment. The company unveiled their ICEreality software this week at an annual construction industry trade show, , in Chicago. (Yes, tech news had the audacity to break outside of and the this week.) DIRTT wants to help architects, developers, facility managers and interior designers create eco-friendly work spaces that are stylish and fit their needs. Their process starts with creating a digital blueprint, of sorts, within DIRTT’s cloud-based design and planning software, ICE. That’s where ICEreality comes in. The feature, which will be broadly available this fall, is now accessible to a very small number of invited beta users. ICEreality allows designers, or really any building occupants, to see a real-time video of an existing space that they want to remodel, overlaid with a three-dimensional illustration of elements and objects they want to install. They can see how a counter, a custom-cut door or new walls, windows, blinds and furniture will look in the space this way. There’s a , where DIRTT “builds” cabinets and counters on an empty stage. (Skip to about 2:20)[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCyfPLZt83o&w=560&h=315] ICEreality translates the digital components of a room so they appear precisely built-to-scale in the video. This gives users a much better sense of how their office will feel once all the new prefabricated components come in, and are installed. According to DIRTT co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Barrie Loberg, ICEreality can be used with VR headsets like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive for a more immersive experience, but it also works on smartphones and tablets. Because it’s not entirely illustrated or rendered, but isn’t just text and information overlaid on a video, DIRTT insists on calling their technology neither VR nor AR but “mixed reality.” “We built this to go beyond the 3D walk-through and let people make tweaks to a design in real time. Once they get the environment designed exactly as they want it, they can also place orders for everything they need to get it built, here,” he said. Better design tools, Loberg hopes, will help the construction industry avoid costly mistakes and change orders that occur when a built environment requires tweaks after materials have already been ordered and installed.
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Department of Defense expanding Hack the Pentagon program
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
Wanna hack the military? The Department of Defense is starting to give hackers more opportunities to test its systems without the threat of prosecution. The department announced today that it is expanding its program to include more DoD systems and networks. Hack the Pentagon pays hackers to find and report vulnerabilities in exchange for cash, and so far it’s proved effective — the first bug was reported 13 minutes after the program launched. Hack the Pentagon initially ran as a pilot program between April 18 and May 12 of this year and only included five DoD websites, but DoD plans to develop it into a permanent program that collects vulnerability reports on more websites and systems. The introduction of Hack the Pentagon represents the first time the U.S. government has experimented with a commercial bug bounty that allowed participating hackers to be paid for discovering vulnerabilities. “Although the pilot was a success, it only tested the crowdsourced security concept against public-facing websites. We believe the concept will be successful when applied to many or all of DoD’s other security challenges,” a DoD spokesperson said in a statement. Hack the Pentagon was administered by the bug bounty platform , which reports that the pilot generated 138 unique bug reports and a total of $71,200 in bounties paid to hackers. One of the Hack the Pentagon participants, David Dworken, just graduated from high school. He said he reported 22 bugs to DoD, which he discovered during his free periods at school. DoD is embarking on three measures to strengthen the program: developing a vulnerability disclosure process, expanding the bug bounty program, and adding incentives for DoD contractors to allow testing on their systems. success and continue to evolve the way we secure DoD networks, systems and information,” a DoD spokesperson said.
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HeyMarket, mobile CRM for text messaging, stops you from drunk texting your customers
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
Like most stories worth telling, this one begins with bad time management. The day I was set to fly out to San Francisco, I was on the road with a friend driving to Chapel Hill from Chicago. By the time I got back, I had just under an hour to pack for my new home. I got to the airport 20 minutes before my flight and clutched a miracle. Unfortunately, my checked bag was not as lucky. It was subject to a random screening and didn’t make it onto my flight as a result. When I got to the airport, I immediately contacted my airline and a process to deliver my bags was set in motion. The next day I received a text message to coordinate the delivery and everything was solved. Unfortunately, not every business-to-consumer text-message interaction goes this smoothly. Amit Kulkarni had just bought a used coffee table from a small shop and the owner offered to have it delivered the same day. The owner collected Amit’s cell phone number, coordinated the delivery and dropped off the table. “About a month later, I got a text message from the same shop owner on a Saturday morning saying ‘sorry about last night, I was really drunk but it was good to see you,'” recalled Kulkarni. The result became . Kulkarni and his co-founder, Manav Monga, discovered that thousands of businesses, large and small, were using text-messaging to communicate with customers. Employers were collecting credit card information on their personal cell phones. HeyMarket enables professionals to use their phones to text with customers using a separate assigned phone number. This provides a veil of security to business owners and allows them to have a unique professional presence. Users send texts from HeyMarket while customers receive the messages as normal text messages. The platform offers basic CRM features so business owners can develop relationships with clients. Business owners can use templates to insert names, photos and annotations. If real estate agents need to show photos of houses to prospective buyers, they can annotate them and then attach the photos within HeyMarket. The platform will auto-stitch them together and assign a URL that the homebuyers will receive. This eliminates instability and increases speed when sending large packages of data. HeyMarket is optimized for teams. In the real world, multiple functional units are involved in a single transaction. Someone in sales must coordinate with delivery and installation. It’s easy to add and subtract participants within the platform. If a salesman with critical information adds a delivery contact, the contact will only be able to see dialog initiated after they were added. Once they are removed, they can’t see further conversation. Because HeyMarket operates separately from personal cell phone numbers, businesses can maintain customer relationships even if the employee with the original contact leaves. As a CRM, HeyMarket offers analytics that wouldn’t be available to businesses that simply text with customers. Professionals can see which photos were viewed and get impression feedback on messages. Users can quickly identify which leads are hot and which are cooling and could use a follow-up with lists and reminders. One other useful feature of HeyMarket is scheduling. Business users can quickly identify free times and forward them via text message to customers using templates. The HeyMarket team is focused on small businesses but has also developed partnerships within companies like Best Buy so that theater specialists can maintain relationships with key customers. The biggest challenge to the team will be overcoming the ingrained habits of people. “It’s up to the founders to make switching costs worth it for customers so they don’t revert back to using their generic texting app,” added Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal. HeyMarket has been funded with a $2 million Seed from Harrison Metal, IDG Ventures and Precursor Ventures. The team is also rolling out a web app and plans to experiment with bots in the future. HeyMarket will cost $4.99 a month per user. Premium tiers are forthcoming.
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Snapchat funds ‘Real Life’ internet magazine examining tech and modern life
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
If you’ve been aching for some high-minded chatter on the topic of how we, as social animals living in a postmodern society, interact with and are affected by social media and technology, you’re in luck. Snapchat is funding a site called on which just such chatter will be published. The site, headed by “social media theorist” and Snapchat researcher , will be posting one article a day on various topics, but not app reviews or hot takes on the latest web drama. “Popular discourse on technology has sustained the idea that there is a digital space apart from the social world rather than intrinsic to it,” Jurgenson writes in an introductory post explaining the mission, structure and conflicts of interest the endeavor comprises. “I’ve argued that ‘online’ and ‘offline,’ like ‘body’ and ‘mind,’ aren’t like two positions on a light switch — a perspective I’ve called digital dualism. Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it’s technological and human, virtual and real.” That should give you an idea of what to expect. Whether Real Life will prove to be insightful and critical or middlebrow pop philosophy is hard to say, but I’d like to give it the benefit of the doubt. Perspectives from outside the tech world proper are valuable checks to the tired narratives that bounce around the echo chamber many of us inhabit — or at least visit regularly (thank you to our readers). But the selection of the voices providing those perspectives is also affected by the tech mentality, so let us hope the staff at Real Life choose to reach well beyond the easy pickings of tech halo businesses and academia. As Jurgenson notes in the intro post, Snapchat is bankrolling the whole thing, just as it funds a conference he chairs and at least some of his research. He hastens to add that editorial independence is guaranteed, though one might reasonably guess from his writing that he is hardly likely to find himself in serious ethical or philosophical combat with a benefactor with which he is so closely allied and aligned. At least there won’t be ads. The site will launch June 27, and if you’re interested in the scene the editors are promoting, head to their in Manhattan that night.
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Startups and immigration: Myths, lies and half-truths
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Desmond Lim
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
has transformed local transportation in American cities and aims to enable Americans to travel to Mars. makes healthcare more accessible for Americans while simplifies making doctor appointments. has created gaming products loved by gamers around the world and created a fantasy sports platform enjoyed by sports fans. What do these innovative companies share in common? They were all founded by at least one foreign-born entrepreneur. In a by the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in Arlington, VA, it was shared that immigrants founded 51 percent (44 out of 87) of U.S. billion-dollar startups and are key members in more than 70 percent (62 out of 87) of these companies. The research also found that among the billion-dollar startup companies, they have collectively created more than 65,000 jobs. Immigrants clearly play a significant role in job creation, entrepreneurship and the startup ecosystem in the U.S. However, the U.S. has a strict immigration policy and has yet to pass the bill for the “startup visa” and, in the current political climate, it seems increasingly unlikely to do so. I recently graduated from my Masters program and needed to explore various options for my career. I decided I wanted to start my own company or work for a startup. As with most international students, I was initially under the impression that it would be impossible for me to stay in the U.S. to start a business or work for a startup. Many of my friends have gone on to work at Apple, Google and Facebook because, to their belief, these are the companies that have the credibility to sponsor an H-1B visa. I also was told that because of the H-1B lottery system that takes place on April 1 each year I would only have one chance of getting sponsorship. Therefore, the “safe route” for foreign-born aspiring entrepreneurs was to work at large companies for a few years before considering the startup route. , a student-run fund focused on investing in student startups, has shared that “immigration challenges” is the top reason why foreign-born student founders choose to work at a large company and not continue with their ventures or work at startups. However, in my conversations with my mentors and immigration lawyers, I found all these to be at most partially true, and that for the entrepreneurs who are determined to stay in the U.S. to start the next SpaceX, Uber or Palantir or to work at a startup, it’s important to learn about the following list of myths, lies and half-truths. Truth: In my experience, a candidate applying for an H-1B visa at Facebook or Tesla will have the same probability of obtaining the visa as someone at an early-stage five-man startup, given that all other conditions are identical. Granted, the HR department of Facebook or Tesla may be more competent in filing a complete application, but the key point to note is that the lottery is entirely random, and each applicant has an equal chance of obtaining the H-1B visa, regardless of the size or brand of your company. Truth: The Department of Homeland Security issued a new rule on March 11, 2016, that will allow certain foreign students with science, technology, math or engineering (STEM) , on top of the 12 months allowed for graduates in all fields. This gives applicants more opportunities to apply for an H-1B visa in subsequent years if they do not get it on their first try. In addition, because the application deadline is April 1, if you do get a job offer in your senior year or final year of graduate school, you need not wait til your OPT has started to apply for an H-1B, effectively giving you an additional shot at getting the H-1B visa. Truth: Beyond H-1B, , including B-1, O-1, E-2, J-1, L-1 and F-1 visas. The B-1 (Business Visitor) visa allows you to stay in the U.S. for up to six months as a business visitor. You may be eligible for an O-1 visa if you can demonstrate extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business or athletics, which can be supported by sustained acclaim and recognition. An E-2 visa works for you if you invest a substantial amount of money in a new or existing U.S. company. The L-1 visa is for intra-company transferees, which is ideal if your existing company is incorporated in your homeland and you are looking to transfer someone to the U.S. to open a subsidiary company here. Truth: There are other avenues to obtain an H-1B visa. At UMass Boston’s Venture Development Center, the program allows foreign-born entrepreneurs to stay in the U.S. under a cap-exempt H-1B visa by acting as a mentor as part of the GEIR and working on their startups at the same time. The GEIR program began in 2014 as a pilot program of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and University of Massachusetts. In addition, internationals born in and qualify under a non-immigrant work visa called H-1B1, in which the cap on number of visas are rarely met. Truth: In my conversation with my company lawyer, I learned that foreigners can start companies in the U.S. As a matter of fact, many of my international classmates at school have incorporated their companies while in school or after school. However, you do need to be under the appropriate working visa or OPT to be compensated for productive work. While applying for your H-1B or other non-immigrant visas for a company in which you are a co-founder, a foreigner cannot own a majority stake (more than 50 percent) in a company and must prove that he or she does not have the controlling power in the firm either through a well-developed board of directors or having other majority shareholders. Truth: There are increasingly more online resources for internationals who like to stay in the U.S. to work. One can easily access online information or work with the growing number of legal startups, including and , etc. There are also various startup programs in the U.S. focused on championing immigrant founders, helping them to work on their entrepreneurial ambitions. Among them is , a mission-centric fund for immigrant entrepreneurs that can help their selected foreign entrepreneurs handle issues of sponsoring work visas or green cards. For the aspiring entrepreneur who wants to work at an early-stage company or start their own company, it is important while deciding the proper next step in your career to comprehend the myths, lies and half-truths of immigration policy. Information about this subject tends to be opaque and online sources are often not comprehensive. However, one thing is for sure: If you are genuinely passionate about your next startup idea, don’t give up on figuring out your immigration challenges and learning the truth.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 06.17.16
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
– Keith Teare, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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Nintendo talks mobile gaming, VR and its future at E3
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
has never been afraid to go against the grain of prevailing industry trends. In fact, the refusal to follow the pack has become a defining aspect of the gaming giant’s business strategy during the ascendance of chief console competitors Sony and Microsoft. So it comes as no surprise, really, that it did something markedly different at this year’s E3 show. But just how different came as a bit of a surprise to many who follow the industry closely. Even as rumblings about a new console turned to actual news, the company made it clear in the days and weeks leading up to E3 that this show would not be about hardware for Nintendo. Instead, it would focus, as it so often has, on games — or rather, one game: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. More than three years after the next installment in one of the company’s most beloved franchises was first announced, Nintendo was finally ready to show it off in a big way. In a show dominated by VR, Nintendo constructed a wholly impressive shrine to the open world adventure, a high-walled to-scale model of Hyrule, complete with changing weather patterns triggered by Nintendo employees via switches on the ground. NX, the company’s forthcoming mystery console, hardly received mention as the company altogether eschewed a keynote presentation, instead devoting its daylong Treehouse Live stream to the new title. “We announced about a month ago that it would be a Zelda only game for us. And we also announced that Treehouse Live would be the primary way that we communicated with the public,” Charlie Scibetta, the company’s Senior Director, Corporate Communications told TechCrunch, standing against a balcony in the company’s booth overlooking the temporary Hyrule. “There’s always speculation at a show like E3, but for us, we stayed true to what we intended to do.” The exec added that while this year’s E3 presence marks a notable shift from past presentations, it doesn’t represent a new precedent moving forward. “Every year we look at it fresh and don’t think about what we did the year before,” Scibetta said. “It’s about what we want to talk about this year and how we want to get the word out. For future years, it could be an execution like we did this time, we could go back to a presentation, we could do more Treehouse Live, we could go to a digital event, we could do something new.“ This year’s E3 felt transitional in many respects. For most that means a huge push toward virtual realities. Inside the company’s sky-high walls, however, immersion has a distinctly Nintendo tone, as a huge Bokoblin points a bow and arrow atop a rickety watch tower. Nintendo certainly hasn’t been afraid to experiment with different form factors, even dipping its toes in the waters of VR in the mid-1990s with the extremely short-lived and red-hued Virtual Boy. It’s easy to see how the company might be wary leaping full force back into the virtual waters. “We’ve had ups and downs and ebbs and flows when it comes to what works,” Scibetta said when asked whether the failed mobile console has made the company reluctant to embrace the current VR trend. “Certainly motion control worked on the Wii. We have the gamepad going right now on the Wii U, that’s a great way to interact with two different screens. We have 3D with our handhelds. We have Amiibo, that’s a great way to interact with games. We try different technologies, but it comes down to what’s right for the game. We wouldn’t do it because it’s a gimmick, we do it because it enhances gameplay and brings something to the consumer that they weren’t getting otherwise. “ That’s not to say that Nintendo has failed entirely to embrace prevailing trends. After what might be regarded as either reluctant hesitation or measured forethought, the company finally dipped its toes into the mobile space with the social app Miimoto earlier this year, with more titles based on popular franchises like Pokemon and Animal Crossing coming soon. Scibetta explained that the company doesn’t regret not getting into the space sooner. “What we’re trying to do with mobile is introduce a whole new generation of people to our IP,” the exec said. “They can have a great time playing on their smart device, and if they like what they get there, they can also come over to our more dedicated systems like Nintendo 3DS or Wii U. There are so many phones and tablets out there that we didn’t want to pass up on that opportunity anymore. We didn’t do it up until the point that we did because we wanted to make sure we picked the right IP. And one of the things Nintendo always wanted to do was make sure the control scheme worked for the software.”
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New York State Senate passes anti-Airbnb bill
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
The New York State Senate has passed that would make it illegal to advertise short-term rentals (less than 30 days) for entire homes on Airbnb. Earlier today, the State Assembly passed the bill through to the State Senate. The next step in the process is for New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo to either sign or veto it. The bill would make it illegal to post a short-term rental on Airbnb that violates NYC’s multiple dwelling law, which went into effect in 2010 in an attempt to target landlords who buy apartments and use them to operate illegal hotels. If the bill becomes law, anyone in New York who posts entire home listings on Airbnb for less than 30 days could be fined up to $1,000 for the first violation, and up to $7,500 for the third violation. “It’s disappointing — but not surprising — to see politicians in Albany cut a last-minute deal with the hotel industry that will put 30,000 New Yorkers at greater risk of bankruptcy, eviction or foreclosure,” Airbnb Head of New York Public Policy Josh Meltzer said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Let’s be clear: this is a bad proposal that will make it harder for thousands of New Yorkers to pay the bills. Dozens of governments around the world have demonstrated that there is a sensible way to regulate home sharing and we hope New York will follow their lead and protect the middle class.” If this bill goes into law, up to 31,000 people in New York could be at risk of eviction or foreclosure, according to an Airbnb survey of its host community. This bill would also be bad news for Airbnb’s business in New York because over half of all Airbnb listings in New York are for rentals of entire homes or apartments, . That said, Airbnb seems to have a fair amount of support from the tech industry on this one, with everyone from prominent VC Fred Wilson to the on behalf of Airbnb. Tech is an important part of the NY economy, but & are ignoring that with a terrible anti-tech bill A8704C/S6340A — Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) Tech is the future of the NY economy, but & might throw it all away with terrible anti-tech bill A8704C/S6340A — ashton kutcher (@aplusk) You can't have it both ways, . You can't both be a startup hub and give incumbents laws banning startups. — Paul Graham (@paulg) If you live in New York and would like to weigh in, either in support or opposition of the bill, you can .
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Watch Microsoft Accelerator’s Tel Aviv Demo Day here
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Samantha O'Keefe
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
TechCrunch is pleased to bring you Microsoft Accelerator’s Tel Aviv Demo Day this Tuesday, June 21st starting at 5:30pm IDT, 7:30am PST. The is an immersive three- to six-month program aimed at helping entrepreneurs get through the challenges of building a company, finding customers and scaling to global markets. There are seven accelerators located around the world, from Bangalore to Beijing, from Berlin to Seattle. Programs have a focus on enterprise startups; this Demo Day in Tel Aviv showcases companies working on everything from a disability marketplace to mobile user tracking to analytics for genomics. Investors and press will hear pitches from 10 companies from IDT, on the 21st and you can watch it live right here. Banana Splash identifies mobile visitor behavior in real time and delivers a personalized experience that turns mobile visitors into high-converting customers. Convia delivers interactive experiences that increase conversions, resulting in more leads, sales, revenue and actionable insights. Convia experiences are optimized based on data science. Coralogix provides actionable insights on machine data and detects production problems in real time. (Formerly Report Hippo) Datarails provides a unique solution that bridges the gap between the regular, personal Excel and top-class business application standards in the areas of security, workflow, corporate governance and business intelligence. Genoox is a big data platform for analyzing and managing next-generation sequencing data in the cloud. Genoox’s platform provides a robust query engine over in-house data or millions of public data points and helps researchers and genetic labs get genomic insights rapidly and accurately. Imagry is a large-scale platform that enables businesses to build their own object-recognition engines. PayKey’s first-of-its-kind secured payment keyboard makes everyday banking easier and more efficient than ever before. Their technology puts banks where their customers are — on social networks. Spotinst provides an intelligent workload management for cloud clusters that optimizes web tiers, autoscaling environments and big data stacks to increase performance, improve availability and reduce infrastructure costs. Unomy helps sales and marketing teams at B2B companies find relevant prospects, prioritize their leads and research companies they care about, easily and effectively. Yooocan is an inspiration marketplace for people with disabilities and their families. It will enable easy discovery and buying of activities, product, services and innovation.
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13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week
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Anna Escher
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
This week, Microsoft bought LinkedIn, Apple’s WWDC took place and the E3 gaming trade show had the tech world talking. These are the stories you don’t want to miss this week. Huge news this week in the world of M&A: , or $196 per share, in cash. LinkedIn is keeping its branding and product, and it will . LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner will report to Satya Nadella. And if that wasn’t enough for one week, , a startup that develops intelligent messaging apps. Full recap of the Apple WWDC 2016 keynote http://tcrn.ch/1YotcPQ Posted by on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 Apple’s WWDC took place in San Francisco this week, and a slew of new announcements came in. Apple Watch got an , which includes an SOS button, instant loading of apps, “Scribble” and new faces. . OS X , and the first release will be called macOS Sierra. , Siri integration for third-party developers, a massive Messages refresh and more. Here’s and our . The trade show for the video game industry took place this week. Some of the big announcements from the event included the , the console and . We rounded up the at the show, as well. Didi Chuxing, Uber’s nemesis and the largest ride-hailing app in China, that includes its recent investments from Apple and China Life. Because this isn’t a subsidy war and the company denies plans for overseas expansion, why does the company, which only operates in China, ? Snapchat made a few big ads announcements, including new Advertisers can now use programmatic interfaces to efficiently buy huge campaigns instead of having to manually strike deals with Snapchat. Step inside the world of pro drone racing http://wp.me/p1FaB8-5zko Posted by on Thursday, June 16, 2016 We interviewed drone hobbyists and found out what its like to be a professional drone racer. Yes, . With that $10 billion valuation, Dropbox is larger than many public companies. But . Dropbox is “just enjoying being focused on building and recruiting,” Houston said at Bloomberg’s tech conference. Google launched Springboard, an . Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, left Google a few years back to start a hardware incubator with a $300 million fund called Playground. This week, he explained his We since the company wasn sold for $600 million to Vista Equity Partners. Ping was a mature startup with a seemingly bright future, but difficult decisions were ahead. Facebook . The app will offer more than just a simple list of recent conversations. While those will remain at the top of the screen, they’ll now be followed by new sections showing your Favorite contacts, friends’ birthdays and an “Active Now” section. Concerning Messenger, Josh Constine wrote that Crunch Network contributor Chris McKinlay recounted his experience in technical interviews, arguing that . Crunch Network contributor John Biggs wrote about how startups can help the gun control debate, as well as help address the state of mental health assessment. Instead of building the next great photo-sharing network, build something that matters.
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Devolver Digital co-founder Mike Wilson on becoming the “Sub Pop for games”
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
“Doom was made by six dudes in six months. And that’s where we are again — it’s come full circle.” That’s Mike Wilson, co-founder of , a game publisher that’s made a name for itself by finding the smallest and weirdest, yet most promising indie games out there. Whatever they’re doing, it works: Its list of successes is an indie gaming hit parade. Hotline Miami, Broforce, Hatoful Boyfriend, the new Shadow Warrior and dozens more. “Somebody once called us the Sub Pop for games,” he said, after noticing I was wearing a shirt from the famous Seattle label. “That’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.” He declined to give the epithet any credit, but I’m using it in the headline just the same. It’s not an accelerator, but it’s not just a publicity agency, either. Like a good label, it’s a facilitator. The best and worst thing about independent games seems to be that the teams have often never worked together before, much less shipped a game on their own. “When we started making this game, we were like, ‘Fuck! We could really ruin this for ourselves!'” said Pixel Titans’ Thom Blunt, who’s working on a throwback first-person shooter called , soon to be published by Devolver. “We said, okay, after two months we’ll go to Kickstarter… 10 months later, I’d grown the team to six people, we were working full time on the game, and no one was getting paid.” Brent Sodman, who worked on the surprise hit , recalled a friend’s advice who’d been asked how he’d achieved his dreams: “Take your first, dumbest idea and put your entire life savings into it. And then hope really hard.” Perhaps not applicable to everyone, but sometimes that’s the only way to proceed. The idea at Devolver is to prevent precarious positions like these from causing the premature death of what could be an awesome game. Canceled projects aren’t hard to find in the indie gaming world. Wilson at the Devolver trailer park outside E3. “A lot of these teams are rough around the edges, and that’s okay,” Wilson said. He worked at id in the early days, helping ship Doom, Heretic and Quake, and a brief stint at larger gaming companies soured him on the idea forever. “For me, when a game is a hit and it completely, permanently changes these people’s lives, that’s so much better than having a more profitable quarter or whatever.” Early efforts by Wilson and colleagues to unite independent developers fizzled — GOD Games (Gathering of Developers) and Gamecock had mixed success, but ultimately the field was retaken by gaming giants like EA and Ubisoft. And really, that balance of power hasn’t shifted — but it isn’t a zero sum game, Wilson pointed out. As gaming has grown, the number of people and dollars has increased on both sides of the equation. That means hundreds of millions of dollars in budget for huge franchises like Assassin’s Creed, but it also means millions of people willing to part with a few bucks for a game more tailored to their style. Nothing is stopping people from buying the new Call of Duty and a funky, $5 retro platformer like Downwell. Still, no one expected something as palpably insane as Hotline Miami to sell nearly two million copies. Either Devolver had their finger on the pulse, or they were in the right place at the right time. “The AAA guys need to play it safe, because they have so much money on the line. If one person can make a game, you actually get passion projects,” said Blunt. “We have a small team, so we can really dig into these gameplay ideas.” This promise has attracted people from larger studios to break away and make deals with Devolver: I played a demo of a terrific and highly original game called Absolver that’s being made by ex-Ubisoft developers. If they could have made it at Ubisoft, they would have — the resources of the company are immense, right? But creative control is one thing that’s in short supply when you’re dev #498 of thousands. Bigger projects are underway, too: A remake of the infamous 1990s FPS Shadow Warrior was enough of a hit for the team to double in size (now up to 75) and multiply the ambitions of the game for the sequel. But they seemed happy to stay on at Devolver, despite the publisher’s focus on microscopic projects. Wilson suggested a reason for that. “All we do is not fuck people,” he explained. “Yeah, we could probably get another 10 points in the contract, but… who gives a fuck! I’d rather these guys were millionaires and going around saying ‘these are the guys that didn’t fuck me.'” A powerful, if profane, way to put it (we were both a little drunk). But Devolver really seems to be nothing more than a small group of like-minded people (there are only six full-time employees) attracting like-minded developers who all love each others’ games and never take themselves too seriously. It’s a refreshing alternative to the grim, samey world of the E3 show floor and its countless grizzled space marines.
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Favor shutters service in five big cities, focuses on second-tier markets
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
, the Postmates-esque on-demand logistics company that launched out of Austin in 2013, has today announced that it will shutter service in five U.S. cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami and Washington, DC. Before this announcement, Favor was operational in 23 cities, including Toronto, so this takes the company down to 18 markets. Here’s what Jag Bath, Favor CEO, had to say in a prepared statement: At Favor, we fully embrace learning about the communities we serve. After experimenting in cities of varying size, Favor is choosing to employ our smart-scaling growth plan in tier 2 markets. The company will be withdrawing operations in: Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, and Washington DC. At heart, Favor is a high-touch logistics business. That said, we’re a young startup – and startups need to experiment to confirm what works with our current technology and operations, as well as consider the unique dynamics within each market. Scaling a logistics company requires great attention to detail, and closing operations in these markets is a healthy thing for our business, as perfecting our service and delivering it at scale has always been our number one priority. Moving forward, we’ll continue to invest in operations and technology so we can maintain our superior service levels in our current and future markets. On-demand logistics businesses are already difficult to operate, both because of high competition and the general dynamics of delivering (usually restaurant-prepared food) in a timely fashion. That said, Bath told TechCrunch that the company consistently gets five-star ratings in tier-two markets like Austin and Dallas, and can ensure that the technology and service will work for both runners and consumers in those markets. Bath does not differentiate tier-one and tier-two based on population (after all, Houston has the fourth highest population in the U.S.), but rather on density, which drastically affects things like parking, traffic and restaurant wait-times. Bath also said that at least part of the decision to focus on second-tier cities comes down to less competition. “We believe tier-2 and tier-3 cities are an overlooked opportunity,” said Bath. “The needs of these cities are no different than tier-1 cities — consumers want convenience and runners and delivery drivers want to make money in those cities — and it’s a large opportunity.” Bath said that the overall impact of shuttering these markets will be minimal, both in terms of its affect on merchants, runners and full-time staff. This is based on the fact that these are relatively new markets with smaller teams — it takes one full-time employee and 10 or fewer runners to spin up a market. will continue to launch new tier-two and tier-three markets, and Bath said that he is not closed off to the idea of eventually trying out tier-one markets in the future.
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Tablo launches its live TV and DVR app for Apple TV
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
Looking to cut the cord and have a new Apple TV? A new app from Tablo can help. Launching shortly for Apple TV 4th generation devices — the new models that include access to the Apple TV App Store — the app allows you to both stream live television and watch recorded programs. The app works in conjunction with the company’s Tablo DVR, a $200 device that can access broadcast programs it receives via a connected over-the-air antenna, as well as record those programs to a hard drive for later viewing. The company that it had this app in the works, and would be launching it sometime this spring. Clearly, it didn’t meet that deadline. The Tablo DVR, for those unfamiliar, is something of an alternative to TiVo. It’s competitively priced at $200 (for two tuners), while ongoing access to its TV Guide data is an optional and affordable $5 per month. And if you only really use Tablo for watching live television, you can easily skip paying for the guide data, which is mainly helpful for managing future recordings. For more serious TV watchers, a four-tuner device is also available for $300. Tablo is not the simplest system to set up for non-technical users because it’s not an all-in-one solution. Instead, it requires you to attach your own external drive to serve as storage for its recordings. The advantage to this, of course, is that you’re in control of how much storage you have available and can expand that at will. However, it does mean you’ll have to buy another piece of hardware beyond the antenna, and you’ll have to make room for more equipment in your media center. That said, once you get past the initial installation hurdles, the software itself is fairly straightforward to use. The Apple TV app offers a clean user interface, complete with colorful thumbnail images for show titles, and makes it easy to move between watching live TV or viewing your recordings. Plus, the app will work with Apple TV’s voice-enabled remote, allowing you to ask Siri to skip the commercials or move forward or back in the stream (e.g. “Skip ahead two minutes” or “Go back to the start”). You can also just press the pause button instead, then swipe back and forth in the scrubber while viewing the fast-forward previews. [gallery ids="1338883,1338882,1338881,1338880"] In the 1.0 release of the app, users will be able to watch live TV, and view and schedule recordings for programs airing in the next 24 hours. You can schedule both one-time and series recordings, says the company. Other features are planned for the months ahead, which will focus bringing feature parity between the Apple TV app and those on other platforms. That means things like the TV View, Movies View and Prime TV View will make their way over to Apple TV, as well. In addition to Apple TV, Tablo offers apps for a number of platforms, including Roku, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, Fire tablets, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, web, Kodi and Plex. It’s also worth pointing out that Tablo is not the only way to watch live TV on Apple TV. The app works with the TV tuner to offer similar functionality. Meanwhile, Dish’s Sling TV also just launched on Apple TV this week, but is focused mainly on live television, with a smaller selection of on-demand content. Plus, its channel lineup is cable TV, not broadcast networks, nor does it offer DVR functionality. Tablo says its Apple TV app version 1.0 has been published to the App Store, where it’s pending approval. It will be live shortly, the company says.
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Lucas Matney
| 2,016 | 6 | 28 | null |
Talking Kleiner 3.0 with Eric Feng, its new consumer investing partner
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
Kleiner Perkins has been through the wringer since the go-go dot-com days of the late 1990s. After on Google, the storied venture firm raised from investors and grew too ambitious in scope before a few years ago — but not before being hit with one of the in venture industry. (It won the case, which centered on gender discrimination, but it in the process.) To restore its former glory, the firm is largely transformed from the firm it was a dozen years ago. For starters, it has undergone some major casting changes. Only one of its five general partners — Ted Schlein, who leads Kleiner’s investments in security and some of its enterprise investments — has been with the firm throughout all the tumult, having joined the firm 20 years ago. Meanwhile, Beth Seidenberg, who focuses on everything from life science to digital health, joined Kleiner in 2005; Wen Hsieh, who focuses on enterprise and hardware deals, joined in 2006; Mike Abbott joined in 2011 to focus largely on enterprise deals; and Eric Feng, a former CTO for both Hulu and Flipboard, joined last October to lead the firm’s consumer investing. Kleiner, which is currently raising across two new funds, has also taken a page from the playbook of Benchmark and some other smaller partnerships, and its partners now enjoy equal partner economics. (Kleiner has also five associate partners, as well as To get better insight into the firm and how it operates today — as well as where it’s shopping — we talked yesterday with Feng. Our chat has been edited for length. EF: I first joined as a partner in 2010, doing two things. One was helping with traditional investing. The other was as [former Vice President] Al Gore’s , mostly focused on climate change, which is something I’m personally very interested in. I had almost no professional background in that space, so it was very generous of Kleiner and Al to let me work with him on that. After one-and-a-half years, I incubated a [platform for sharing personal content] called Erly that to Sean Parker’s Airtime. John Doerr was on my board at Erly, and as I was looking around for what’s next [in 2013], John said, “You should stay in the family, and here’s a company [Flipboard] that needs a head of engineering and that would fit your background.” Then last summer, we started to talk about next moves, and it was John and Randy who brought forward this idea of bringing me [back] into the partnership. EF: Randy is very actively involved as our coach and he’s still actively managing his portfolio companies. EF: I’d say Kleiner very early on pioneered being a full-service, company-building venture firm. We’re the first firm that brought in a full-time recruiting partner, and I think over the last six or seven years, the whole industry has jumped on that trend. Everyone has marketing and recruiting and business development and a lot of these services. We’ve always had services, but VC isn’t scalable, as we learned, so we’re almost surgical, helping our portfolio in highly targeted, high-value ways, as opposed to being a factory where we have every service under the sun. We do have two people doing marketing. We have three doing recruiting. But we don’t want to get to the point where we have a 10-person division doing recruiting. EF: It’s an equal partnership. Everyone has equal votes. Beth expects me to cast my vote in a life sciences company, and similarly, I expect her to cast her vote in a new messaging company. If you think about venture, the product that we create is our investment decision process. We’re really looking for outliers, and the way to get that is to give diverse people a forum to voice their opinions. EF: Equal economics, equal votes. It’s evolved and gone through peaks and valleys. If our product is a great investment decision process, we want to make sure everything is done to [support] equality with diverse thinking around the table. EF: It’s an interesting time for consumer [investing]. We may be in the middle of a platform shift. We’re seeing the mobile platform lose a bit of its momentum, and people are wondering if it’s time for a new platform. But it’s a little uncertain, what’s next. Five to seven years ago, when mobile was really starting to take off, a lot of investors’ attention was focused on mobile apps and anything related to messaging and media and social. That was the pool all the investors were fishing in. Now, investors are fishing in various pools. There’s the [artificial reality] and [virtual reality] pool, the ambient computing pool, the cars-as-a-platform pool. There’s little consensus. Everyone is taking their own approach. EF: Well, I don’t doubt that VR an AR will be successful. There’s no doubt cars or ambient computing represent huge opportunities. These are the right pools. The question is timing. I don’t have enough conviction yet to say where the outsize outcomes will come in the next 24 months, but we’re looking at every single deal we can to figure it out. We are seeing a lot of interesting enterprise applications for these tools, like VR for training and conversational [AI] for customer support. EF: I’ve [led one investment] in , which is building a new career services recruiting platform for college kids. It’s a $4 billion [total addressable market] annually, college recruiting. But if you earn a college student their first job, you’re in prime position to address their second, third and fourth jobs, which brings you into the $25 billion overall recruiting market, and we think there’s a window of opportunity for Handshake to be very disruptive. As for angel investing, I’ve backed mostly either people I know and want to work with, or areas I’ve wanted to learn more about, including hardware. At Flipboard, for example, I invested in , the Bluetooth tracker that lets you find lost items like your car keys or backpack. EF: We have a good healthy internal debate about it all the time. I think there can be great companies formed at all points of the cycle. But it’s very hard to predict winners. Either a brand resonates or it doesn’t. So we try to think more about the enabling tech and services that are independent of the brand. EF: Everything can be reinvented. I see that trend replaying in all areas of tech. I think one of the most exciting trends we’re going through is a generational one, from baby boomers to Gen Xers to millennials, who aren’t just the largest demographic in the U.S. but are now the largest demographic in the workforce, meaning they have strong purchasing power. So every purchase, every brand, the way things are consumed, from media to other products — it’s all up for grabs. Nothing is static.
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Apple ordered to stop selling two iPhone models in China [Updated]
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
A Beijing court has ordered Apple to stop selling the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in the city, having ruled that the phone’s design is too similar to a Chinese brand. The infringement claims were brought against Apple by Shenzhen Baili for its 100C smartphone, says the Beijing Intellectual Property Bureau. Apple can still appeal the decision. [See updated at bottom with Apple’s comment.] The financial impact of the ruling is unclear. As several mobile phone stores in the city had already stopped selling the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus a couple of months ago, and began selling newer models. In addition, it said that Apple is soon ending production of both phones. However, the ruling is one of a series of challenges Apple has faced while trying to do business in the country, which is its largest market outside the U.S., thanks to iPhone sales and iOS app revenue. The was ordered to close its iBooks and iTunes Movies stores by a Chinese government regulator just six months after launching. This was likely due to new government that are designed to make it more difficult for foreign owners to publish online content — they have to find a domestic partner, as well as receive government approval. Meanwhile, declining iPhone sales contributed to announced also in April. Sales in mainland China And sales in greater China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, were down 26 percent. Despite the struggles, China remains a key market for Apple, which prompted . There, he met with China’s main internet and telecommunications regulator during a trip to Beijing. Following the visit, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology praised Apple’s extensive collaboration with China, and said it hoped the company would continue to expand its business, research and development and supply chain there. Apple also recently in Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-hailing app. Cook said that the investment was made for “strategic reasons” — one of those reasons being an attempt by the company to win favor with Beijing, amid these ongoing challenges to it business. Apple has responded to the news with a comment about the iPhone’s availability in China, following the report. It says the order has been stayed pending review: “iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus as well as iPhone 6s, iPhone 6S Plus and iPhone SE models are all available for sale today in China. We appealed an administrative order from a regional patent tribunal in Beijing last month and as a result the order has been stayed pending review by the Beijing IP Court.”
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Domino’s backs out of free pizza promotion with T-Mobile due to higher-than-expected demand
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
T-Mobile’s latest “un-carrier” move — an attempt to reward its customers with freebies offered via an app called T-Mobile Tuesdays — has been just a bit too popular. Demand for the app and its various promotions was so high that . And now, one of the best deals it offered — free Domino’s pizza — has been pulled. According to T-Mobile CEO John Legere, Domino’s couldn’t handle the increase in order volume, and has pulled out of the promotion indefinitely. Knowing that the loss of the Domino’s deal would be a blow, the CEO placed blame on the pizza chain and even published an internal Domino’s memo explaining why the company was exiting the promotion. Among other things, the memo told its retail staff that it knew the program had “put a lot of stress on your stores.” “After reviewing yesterday’s results and taking your feedback into account, the decision has been made not to continue the T-Mobile Tuesdays promotion unless we can find a solution that is best for the brand,” the memo read. Legere’s tweet also noted that Domino’s stores saw three to four times the volume of a typical Tuesday’s sales. 3/ OMG customers slammed stores!! They saw 3x & 4x in a typical day and can’t handle the volume. — John Legere (@JohnLegere) But while the increase in pizza orders was clearly a factor in T-Mobile’s decision, the promotion was already leaving T-Mobile customers upset when they found out that Domino’s was limiting the number of free pizzas per store due to promotion limits. Stores stopped accepting the coupons for the free pizza provided by the T-Mobile Tuesdays app, which left users frustrated. Plus, in what was a huge oversight in crafting this deal’s terms, T-Mobile customers on a single family plan could all use their own codes to place large orders of multiple pizzas. That is, T-Mobile was actually offering the pizza giveaway to anyone with an available line, instead of just one free pizza per account. It’s unclear why Domino’s wouldn’t have limited the deal as one per household at the very least. A number of customers reported they were able to stack the coupons from family members to get more than a single pie. In a statement, Domino’s acknowledges that the way it handled the promotion disappointed customers, which is why it’s exiting the deal. “The T-Mobile promotion generated an overwhelming response… we are happy so many of their customers love Domino’s,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “The demand was significantly above what we agreed to in advance, which resulted in an understandably disappointing customer experience for some. As a result, we are re-examining the future of this promotion. We thank everyone who participated in the promotion and thank those individuals working in the stores who went above and beyond in trying to keep up with the overwhelming demand,” they added. While some people argue that not getting something for free is not actually a loss, and therefore customers shouldn’t complain, that’s a narrow view. This sort of promotional misstep can impact how people feel about a brand. If you say and then that coupon doesn’t work, customers feel slighted. When the goal is to promote the brand and make customers feel appreciated, that’s a sizable failure on both T-Mobile and Domino’s part. Despite the setbacks, the T-Mobile Tuesdays app is still topping the charts. It’s currently No. 11 on the iTunes App Store, after hitting the No. 1 position on — you guessed it — Tuesday. Even at its lowest point, it was still ranking No. 51, which is a more than decent spot for an app of this nature. According to Legere, the app has already been download more than 2 million times. T-Mobile has since replaced the Domino’s promotion with Lyft, which is offering free rides (a $15 value). The app also includes a free Vudu rental, free Wendy’s Frosty and a $20 coupon at MLB.com, among other things.
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The evolution of the mobile payment
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John Rampton
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 |
It’s anticipated that there will be more than using a mobile phone by the end of 2016. A recent noted that 39 percent of all mobile users in the U.S. had made a mobile payment in 2015. This is up from 14 percent in 2014 and by my estimations will in the 70 percent range by 2017. Because of this enormous growth — and potential growth that mobile devices present — we can expect to see the mobile payments industry and startups in the space evolve to meet the growing demands of users. To understand how big this industry is going to be, you need to understand the history of mobile payments and their evolution over time. Throughout history, human beings have relied on some sort of payment system to purchase the goods or services we wanted or needed. , humans began to use livestock, grain, shells, metal coins, pieces of white deerskin, the wampum, gold, the gold-backed dollar, charge cards, credit cards, the U.S. dollar and, most recently, electronic payments. If there has been one consistent theme regarding the evolution of payments, it’s that we prefer payments that are convenient and transactional. These preferences began to take shape in the early 20th century with the introduction of the charge card. Despite being first mentioned by Edward Bellamy in 1887’s “Looking Backward,” the first charge card didn’t’ appear until 1921 when a charge card was issued to Western Union customers. Soon after, department stores, service stations and hotels also began offering charge cards to customers so they didn’t have to travel to their hometown bank. After the introduction of the Diners Club card in 1950, the credit card industry began to resemble what we’re familiar with today. The BankAmericard, founded in 1958, was the first modern-day credit card issued by a third-party bank. The card became Visa in 1977. Since then, technology has given us the videotex systems of the late-1970s/mid-1980s; online banking and bill pay in 1994; the mobile web payment (WAP) in 1997; and the current wave of mobile payments apps. With that in mind, here’s a timeline of how electronic payments have advanced into the 21st century: There are three . Commerce payment options are where customers open an internet browser, add items to the cart, order, receive their goods or services and are provided with a receipt. With payments, customers use contactless/mobile technologies, where payment information is stored on their device and they enter a PIN to complete a transaction. Finally, are looking to replace your current wallet by storing all your payment information. There are other types of options available within these types of mobile payments. For example, with mobile apps, payments will occur on a consumer’s device in order to purchase goods from a specific retailer, such as the Starbucks mobile app, and data is stored on the device. Mobile POS takes places on a merchant’s device, but data is not stored. Online payment services occur on a consumer’s device, such as , for purchasing goods. Mobile P2P transfers, such as , also occur on a consumer’s device for bank transfers. Still think it’s not big enough? Venmo transferring more than $1 billion in January 2016 alone. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) takes place on either the consumer or merchant’s device where data is stored in a mobile payment account. Examples include PayPal’s beacon and iBeacon. Finally, Near Field Communication (NFC) occurs on a consumer’s device; data is stored on the mobile device and is used to purchase goods. Examples include , and . In most cases, startups would begin with a text message service, then mobile apps and finally contactless payment systems. Merchants are using BLE and NFC that connect mobile devices with either beacons or NFC tags. With BLE, the transmission is continuous and can be used in large areas so that customers can receive notifications and coupons. NFC must be activated by the customer and is better suited for one-on-one interactions. Mobile payments have been quickly evolving, with more recognizable brands stepping into the industry to advance technology and offer what consumers and businesses want in terms of apps and services that allow them to pay with their phones. For example, Google’s recently Hands Free It’s a new mobile payment app that uses either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, like most other payment apps — except that this app allows you to keep your phone in your wallet or purse. Google is also tinkering with facial recognition to confirm an individual’s identity. , major banking institutions, such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and U.S. Bancorp, have a created a joint venture called clearXchange that allows customers to transfer funds instantly to another bank account through their phones. Besides the experiments going on at Google, some of the in the mobile payment industry are offering greater convenience, security and a glimpse into the near future. When it comes to “pay” as a feature, Apple, Android and Samsung are just the tip of the iceberg. More tech companies will continue to roll out their mobile payment platforms. Wearable tech will be next. Don’t think that mobile payments will be limited to your smartphone or tablet. Expect to be able to make purchases with wearables like the , and the . Retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are rolling out their own products to , including more use of geolocation technology to provide localized coupons and deals delivered to customers’ phones while they are shopping. Bloomberg Technology noted that, “by 2019, eMarketer estimates that the total value of transactions made by tapping a phone on an in-store terminal will reach $210 billion, up from $8.7 billion in 2015.” This means that retailers, and even banks, will give Apple Pay and Google’s Android Pay some competition, more options for consumers and businesses to use as mobile payment tools and greater transaction savings for everyone. There are ongoing signs of growth for cryptocurrency and blockchain use within the mobile payments world. The technology behind bitcoin has been one of the most buzzed topics recently. In fact, tokenization is expected to disrupt the entire financial industry. Companies like are realizing the potential to use as well as an alternate mobile payment currency across developing economies like Brazil. Perhaps the biggest disrupter may be the technology behind digital currency. Blockchain has been noted as the potential “ that establish trust and transparency while streamlining business processes,” which is critical to advancing adoption of mobile payments among consumers and businesses. Social media and messaging apps have also joined the fun. You’ll be able to make purchases directly from social media apps like Facebook and use WhatsApp has a commerce channel. Big data, beacons and sensors are already helping merchants reach customers. With , merchants and retailers will be able to send targeted coupons, promotions, flash sales and even the chance to complete a purchase in advance. Regulations could lead to global standardization. There is no global standard regarding payments, but there is a (which I ) to create one technology standard that would have the same set of regulations for countries across the world. This could be the real game-changer for propelling in general and mobile payments all over the globe. With companies like Venmo processing more than $1 billion in mobile P2P payments, and the thousands of other companies like processing billions more on mobile devices, the fintech industry and mobile payments industry is ripe to becoming one of the next hottest sectors in tech. There is room for countless unicorns in the space. Before that can happen, many issues will need to be addressed, including the security questions, but the uniform help and speed in which we will be able to carry out transactions continues to show us a compelling movement in the evolution for mobile payments and the trend that by 2020, 90 percent of smartphone users will have made a mobile payment.
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Students demonstrate their HoloLens apps after a quarter of VR and AR design
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
It’s just about impossible to get your hands on Microsoft’s impressive mixed-reality HoloLens platform these days — unless you’re a computer science student at the University of Washington. Then you get to play with them whenever you want. At least that’s the case for the students in CSE 481V, in which, according to the course description, you will “learn a ton about Virtual and Augmented Reality, get familiar with the latest technology and software, and build an app in 10 weeks.” This is the first time the course has been offered in this fashion, with generous underwriting by local VR/AR players Microsoft, Oculus and Valve/HTC. The 36 students in the course had access to the HoloLens dev team and all the major headsets — there were 25 HoloLenses involved, which is probably more than have ever been in one place. Students also got to hear from like Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash and author Neal Stephenson — whose “Snow Crash” was required reading for the course. All in all, it’s enough to make a guy want to matriculate. One of the projects had users flying a virtual paper airplane through AR waypoints. “We pitched the idea of a VR/AR class last year to HoloLens leadership and they immediately got excited and were eager to make it happen,” wrote Steve Seitz, one of the class’s instructors. “I was initially quite worried about the idea of relying on a brand new device and development platform for a 36 person class. But I’m extremely impressed with the development environment… it was good enough that students with no prior experience could get up and running quickly and make some really compelling applications in just a few weeks.” You can see what those applications were at the course webpage, complete with weekly blog posts showing progress from concept to execution. There’s augmented reality cooking, a painting app and the clever idea of gamifying the process of scanning a room so it can be used in other apps. The class culminated in a sort of , where students could show off their work to the general public and serious players like Microsoft Research’s CVP Peter Lee. It’s a great opportunity for students, no doubt, but also a fertile testing ground for the companies in the space. How did these fresh young minds interact with the technologies? What did they run up against? What tools did they wish they had? This kind of extensive focus testing is always valuable, not to say this was an ulterior motive, just that it was no doubt a fruitful collaboration. Students and guests mingle at the capstone project presentation day. “For the HoloLens team, this was an opportunity to evaluate the platform in a focused educational settings, and get early feedback,” wrote Seitz. The team also provided technical support and training. Seitz and the class’s other instructor, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, aim to offer the class again next year. UW is, of course, a convenient location for Microsoft to work with, but the institution is also a hub for research in this area, having pioneered many VR and AR ideas early on in its famous .
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Whatever happened to MCNs?
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Peter Csathy
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Remember MCNs? Those quaint multi-channel networks — aggregators of YouTube channels — that generally focused on a specific vertical audience? (kids), (gamers), (fashion/beauty), (food/travel), (sports), (Latino), (dance/music) — just to name a few. And don’t forget the broader-based mega-aggregators like and . MCNs — that acronym and aggregation “plays” — were all the rage 2-3 years ago. Several of them got snapped up back then in “the YouTube economy.” AwesomenessTV started it all when it was acquired by DreamWorks Animation three years ago for about $120 million (and just recently valued at $650 million when Verizon acquired a 24.5 percent share last month … only to find Comcast three weeks later buying all of it as part of its own $3.8 billion DreamWorks mega-deal). Then, one year later, Disney — in a media shot heard ’round the world — bought Maker Studios for a deal ultimately worth $600-$700 million. Next up, Fullscreen (Otter Media paid between $200-$300 million) and StyleHaul (Bertelsmann/RTL’s ultimate price tag is between $150-$200 million). Ah, those were the days! But in the past year or so, something curious happened. All of these companies shied away from the “MCN” moniker. Some did so violently, contending they were never MCNs in the first place. And, where have all the acquirers gone? Below are the five reasons this happened. Initially, MCNs were all about scale. After scale was achieved, it was time to monetize; most MCNs focused first on ad revenues. But sheer mass served merely with ads never effectively monetized (especially since MCNs shared ad revenues with YouTube, which was overflowing with inventory) and pure aggregation “plays” became suspect. A challenged ad-driven business model meant that the video creators’ shares of those challenged revenues frequently didn’t meet expectations. On top of that, creators who were not amongst the top performers increasingly felt they were not getting the attention they deserved. AwesomenessTV saw the writing early on, built its own internal slate of creators and developed and distributed its own original, exclusive content. It honed its production craft and built a compelling library of stories and characters that it could exploit and monetize over and over again — including on both traditional platforms (like TV) and new platforms (OTT). Add brand-funded content (which it did) and you had a powerful one-two punch that knocked down the former ad-only model. The result? Scale and profitability — and Verizon’s recent massive investment and Comcast’s even more massive acquisition. Other MCNs eventually adopted AwesomenessTV’s model. They have, in essence, become digital-first production companies, and AwesomenessTV is their aspirational poster child. From the beginning, AwesomenessTV proudly trumpeted its brand to the world. Yes, it developed, distributed and marketed multiple characters and titles. But the AwesomenessTV brand stood tall above all else and, importantly to the audience, stood for something — premium, safe kids’ content. Many other “artists formerly known as MCNs” (an homage to Prince from a fellow Minnesotan) didn’t “get” this umbrella branding strategy until much later on. Several initially marketed their top individual creators first — and their brand second. This led to confusion. What exactly did the MCN stand for? That mattered to consumers, which meant that it mattered to advertisers, distributors and investors. “Multi-channel network” referred to companies that literally aggregated multiple YouTube (and only YouTube) channels together in a YouTube subset and under a different name. But, guess what? It isn’t a YouTube-only world anymore. Now, of course, we have Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Amazon and a host of other behemoths that have significantly evolved into digital-first media companies themselves. These “off YouTube” platforms are increasingly important to both creators and the former MCNs supporting them that want to distribute their content across as many platforms as possible (tailored to the specific DNA of each). That’s why “MCNs” are simply a relic of the past. Those that are content-category leaders today are simply new media companies — focused on producing compelling digital-first content that can be significantly monetized across multiple platforms. AwesomenessTV shows them (and their investors) the way to the promised land of M&A.
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What Pinterest learned in two years working on its search engine
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
About two years ago, Pinterest launched a different flavor of search engine called Guided Search. Instead of relying on deep data on the user, it would create a network of related topics that users can dive deep into. The idea being that a search like “iPhone” would net additional categories, like “design,” “hardware” and such. Now Guided Search is about two years old, and the company says it serves around 2 billion searches per month. Guided Search engineer Naveen Gavini said that people also see on average around 55 ideas per search. The team — while small — still hasn’t been able to sit still after the launch, as more and more people begin using it. After all, each tool requires continued refinement if it’s going to continue to grow. For Pinterest, that’s meant finding new ways to personalize its search tools to give users ways to figure out an endpoint for the ideas they are looking for. Localization, too, has been key — the way people search and what results they hope to find may be radically different based on where they live. The company has been focused on improving both of those in order to make Pinterest the go-to search engine for ideas, Gavini said. “I think based on [what we’ve learned] we’ve really invested in making [discovery] more suited for that style of searching,” Gavini said. “We’ve improved guides, worked a lot on localization, and applied a lot on personalization of those guides. Initially when we launched, you could click one to three guides and be at the bottom of that. Now you can go six to seven levels deep, they’re personalized and localized based on you. That’s a lot of the behavior we’ve seen and adapted to.” The refinement has taken a lot of work on the back end, as well. With performance tied directly to engagement in most instances, it’s important to ensure that each search returns enough content fast enough that users don’t get frustrated and leave the service. “Initially when we launched, it was a great first version — now search is twice as fast, that’s like everything from as soon as you type a letter the autocomplete showing results really quickly to actually completing a search and finding pins,” Gavini said. Pinterest, too, is a naturally visual experience. That’s made the company have to rethink how people search for products and ideas on Pinterest. One way the company tackled that was through the launch of visual search, which allows users the ability to highlight and search for specific parts of an image. Gavini said that was to tap into a different kind of behavior the company was seeing when users were looking to refine their searches further. Pinterest now sees around 130 million visual searches a month, Gavini said. All this may seem like a lot of searches, but in reality, it still seems a little shy of what other services have. Facebook, for example, reportedly (most of which are for names). The company has 1.65 billion monthly active users — so a little less than a query, per monthly active user, per day (though that stat was reported in February and it could have risen since). Pinterest . So if it were to serve just under one search, per user, per day, that means Pinterest still has some distance to make up. (Pinterest’s user base has probably risen since then: .) Guided Search — or search in general — is critical for a service like Pinterest. It can capture the attention of people who are in a more active discovery mode, looking for a specific range of results. That’s one step closer to taking an action than simple passive browsing, which is where advertisers can convert users into potential customers. The closer the advertiser can nudge a user to that conversion, the more likely they can close a sale, and that in turn helps drive Pinterest’s business. That requires figuring out how users are using the service. To be fair amid all this, behavior on Pinterest is likely different than behavior on other search engines. People on Pinterest are generally looking for ideas on what to do next and things to discover, which may require a lighter touch when it comes to searching. “Once they get to results, what we’ve found is people’s patterns kind of differ, they shift more into, ‘I found something and I want to get into refinement mode,'” Gavini said. “That’s where we’ve launched a few different things. I think, there’s some really basic things. That’s what we’ve really worked on in the past few years.” There’s an opportunity to learn from the way Pinterest’s search engine has evolved over time. While the service is what Gavini describes as “human powered” — pulling together results from the way other people search through ideas — a bit of personalization can go a long way in improving the experience. That, in the end, improves engagement, and gets users coming back to the service as a go-to place for figuring out the answers to their ideas (which is good for Pinterest’s business). In short, Pinterest search seems to be growing at a decent clip, but there’s a lot of work to be done.
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Crunch Report | Gawker Files For Bankruptcy
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Tito Hamze, Jason Kopeck
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Ben Lerer, Gary Vaynerchuk and Andy Dunn join the board of nonprofit RaisedBy.Us
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
, an organization that facilitates charitable giving at startups, has added three entrepreneurs and investors to its board of directors — CEO Ben Lerer (pictured above), CEO Gary Vaynerchuk and CEO Andy Dunn. The nonprofit works with startups so their employees can donate a set amount of each paycheck to the charity of their choice. (The system is powered by , which offers tools for employee giving.) RaisedBy.Us also offers guidelines on how to perform diligence on an organization, and it trains “ambassadors” who can help lead education, events and outreach in their own companies. It has already facilitated more than $600,000 in donations from New York-based companies, including Shutterstock, Sailthru, Contently and Mic, and it projects it will reach $1 million in donations by mid-2017. “RaisedBy.Us is such an awesome organization because not only does it make donating super simple and efficient — but more importantly, it’s creating a culture of giving within our ecosystem,” said Lerer (who actually joined six months ago) in the board announcement. “The hope is that with the addition of Gary and Andy, word can spread even further and RaisedBy.Us can become an obligatory service that all companies offer their employees, in New York and beyond.”
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Dango mind-melds with emoji using deep learning and suggests them while you type
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Dango is an emoji suggestion chatbot — wait, where are you going? Stay with me, this is actually pretty cool. Okay, so is one of those virtual assistants that lives in your chat apps, and this one is based on a neural network that has been trained with millions of examples to understand what emoji mean. So not only can it suggest an appropriate one, but it can translate entire sentences. Its icon is a weird piece of cute cake, which sits above your keyboard watching you type. It’s right now, with an iOS version coming out eventually. The Dango team (many of the folks who made ) to perform a deep learning task (it’s just something you can do now) examining how emoji are used. The network started by just guessing which emoji go with which words and phrases, then would check that against real-world examples, and every time it got something wrong, it adjusted its parameters. Repeat millions of times, checking those guesses against a huge amount of data gathered from the web. Assemble the data into a huge, many-dimensional “semantic space” where emoji are closer or more distant from certain concepts and ideas and phrases. Translate that semantic space into a more practically designed database — and boom, you’re done! Simple, right? And now you get this: (My examples) Others don’t turn out so well, but you get the idea. The app itself doesn’t translate entire phrases yet, though. Mainly it automatically suggests a top emoji for the situation, with others available as runners-up, as well as stickers and GIFs (thankfully you can tell it not to load them until you tap the cake thing). I had a little trouble finding a place where the cake piece wouldn’t block any text or critical buttons in my messaging apps, but your mileage may vary. Automatic emoji suggestions exist, of course, but the ones out there generally rely on something basic but functional: suggesting the storm or snow emoji when you use words like “snow,” “snowy,” “snowflake” and so on. This deeper dive into the way emoji are used — and combinations thereof that can create entirely new meanings — would seem to produce quite a powerful data set. I love the visualization they created of how various emoji are associated with one another: Dango’s database is being regularly updated to keep up with the latest slang and memes, too, but you’ll have to wait for app updates to get access to them; the associational database is local so there’s no lag or call-outs to a server. That helps with privacy, too. Unfortunately, there’s no API to call just yet, though Dango co-founder Will Walmsley told TechCrunch they were open to it if people are interested. Another potential issue I asked about was the ever-present threat when you look at data from real people: What happens when the system internalizes racist, sexist and generally bad data? Clearly sensing this is a sore point among AIs that interact with humans, Walmsley gave a more thorough response: Bad associations are a real, and subtle, concern since AI tools like Dango reflect back our human best and our worst. We’ve in the past blacklisted certain associations and we’ll keep doing this — not unlike what Google does for its search suggestions — but it will be an ongoing challenge to get right. Now that we’re publicly launched we’re also looking at adding a way for people to report problematic results. In a separate email, he told me that the functionality in the demo box on the website (producing strings of related emoji) was yet to come, and that there’s no timing on the iOS side of things. The Android app cleverly uses the OS’s Accessbility feature (it’s where you might put, for example, a text-to-speech app for the visually impaired) to overlay Dango on top of any app, but it’s not quite so straightforward on iOS.
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Mike Butcher
| 2,016 | 6 | 17 | null |
Tesla’s weird week
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
It’s been a weird few days for Tesla. In a span of just 72 hours, the Model S was accused of having major suspension issues, the NHTSA supposedly got involved, Tesla explained there is nothing wrong and the NHTSA isn’t actually investigating the issue and Elon Musk tweeted that the whole thing was a giant conspiracy. Woah. OK, let’s take a step back and dissect this. On Wednesday, a car-focused blog that a Tesla in Pennsylvania was suffering from suspension issues. It also detailed that Tesla owners with similarly affected cars were reportedly being asked to sign repair agreements with a confidentiality clause that potentially limited the drivers’ ability to report the defect to The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And lastly, the post said that NHTSA investigators were “in contact with Tesla requesting more information on these parts and others in the suspension.” The next day, a report broke saying that The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was investigating suspension problems in the model S. BREAKING: Regulators examining reports of suspension problems in Tesla Model S – Reuters • — CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) Most of the time, when it’s announced that NHTSA regulators are investigating a safety feature in a company’s flagship car, shit hits the fan. And it did. Within hours, major news publications were that the NHTSA had begun investigating Tesla’s suspension problems, and were also concerned with strange non-disclosure wording in the customer goodwill repair agreement. The markets were also reacting, with the company’s stock trading down about 4 percent over the course of the day. Thing’s weren’t looking bright for the electric car company, and the issues seem to have all stemmed from that single blog post. But then just hours later, Tesla released a blog post with their own version of the story. Titled “ ,” the blog post essentially shut down every angle of the issue, trying to prove that there wasn’t really an issue to begin with. First, it explained there is “no safety defect with the suspensions in either the Model S or Model X.” Addressing the one car from the original blog post, it said that the suspension ball joint experienced very abnormal rust, something they have never see on another car. Tesla also threw some shade on the owner, saying “the car had over 70,000 miles on it and its owner lives down such a long dirt road that it required two tow trucks to retrieve the car.” Next, it clarified the issue with the goodwill repair agreement, saying that it would “never ask a customer to sign a document to prevent them from talking to NHTSA or any other government agency.” The car company explained that the point of the document was to “ensure that Tesla doesn’t do a good deed, only to have that used against us in court for further gain.” Got it. So Tesla basically is saying that all the mentioned issues were either false or over-exaggerated. But of course that wasn’t enough for the always feisty car company. In the last section of the post Tesla got personal, throwing shade on the original blogger that started this whole ordeal the day prior. I’ll post it below so you can read it in all its original glory. Finally, it is worth noting that the blogger who fabricated this issue, which then caused negative and incorrect news to be written about Tesla by reputable institutions, is Edward Niedermeyer. This is the same gentle soul who previously wrote a blog titled “Tesla Death Watch,” which starting on May 19, 2008 was counting the days until Tesla’s death. It has now been 2,944 days. We just checked our pulse and, much to his chagrin, appear to be alive. It is probably wise to take Mr. Niedermeyer’s words with at least a small grain of salt.- The Tesla Team OK. So Tesla has made it clear that there are probably no suspension issues, but what about the NHTSA? Just a few hours later, Musk took to Twitter to confirm that the NHTSA found no reasons for concern regarding the Model S suspension, and has no further need to collect information from Tesla on the matter. NHTSA confirmed today that they found no safety concern with the Model S suspension and have no further need for data from us on this matter — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Then, Musk said that about 90 percent of the suspension complaints to the NHTSA were fake — using a false location or VIN number. Weird. Could it be a conspiracy? Musk thinks so. Would seem to indicate that one or more people sought to create the false impression of a safety issue where none existed. Q is why? — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) The whole things seems a little weird, and very confusing. Was there an isolated issue with one car suspension? It seems yes. Was there strange wording in the goodwill agreement that may have confused owners? It seems yes. But is the NHTSA actively investigating Tesla for manufacturing faulty suspensions and intentionally misleading customers with a nondisclosure agreement? No. At the end of the day, the moral of the story is probably to listen to Tesla’s blog post title and just take everything with a grain of salt, until you can actually take time and figure out yourself what is actually going on. Oh, and don’t get in a fight with Elon Musk.
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Scholarships are the new sweepstakes
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Joe Edelheit Ross
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
One million dollars. A student will earn that much more in life with a four-year college degree as opposed to just a high school diploma. That’s according to , which offers just such a degree for a grand total of in tuition, room and board paid over four years. Unless there are rich parents in the picture (or maybe ), a student will likely need financial aid to pay all that. And when it comes to financial aid, there are basically two kinds: the kind you pay back (i.e. student loans) and the kind you want. You want a scholarship. No wonder are purporting to make it easier for you to find one. “Millions of ,” , are going unused. But are they really helping? Put aside the Catch-22 inherent in a company successfully directing millions of applicants to “unused” . Here’s a bigger problem: It turns out the vast bulk of scholarship money — 93 percent of roughly — comes from the colleges themselves, n from private “outside” sources. And most of those private so-called amount to tiny, small-dollar prizes — $100 here, $500 there. If you win any of this money and actually need it to help pay a $20,000 tuition bill, your college is — dollar for dollar — from the institutional aid you receive. It gets worse. Spend a few hours checking out on one of the national databases and you’ll discover that many of them — especially the ones that are “ ” — have a sneaky hidden agenda. Think: . Publishers Clearing House — like its precursor American Family Publishers, made famous by Johnny Carson’s sidekick — does just give away money for the heck of it. They’re selling magazines. For each prize they award they snag untold thousands of leads — prospective customers willingly giving up personal contact information in exchange for a vanishingly small chance of winning. Most work the same way. A typical — the kind made easy to find by a typical e startup — features language that sounds like a (“Enter to Win”). The application reads like a “lead gen” form for a bank, an app or even another e company. This is e . This is . And it’s just for corporate marketers. Many offered by colleges are also best understood as a form of advertising. Colleges use to maximize leads — politely known by elite schools as “prospective students” — and conversion. In other words, “scholarship” is the Ivory Tower way of saying “SALE” and making it (and you) feel special. Academics have run the numbers on this practice and it appears tuition discounts of up to 13 percent can actually increase revenues, just as Black Friday does for Walmart. So is there is an e way to make work for students, just colleges and corporations? A handful of startups are taking up the challenge: These models laudably go beyond mere listings of small and marketing contests, which you anyway can find for free on various websites, including . Still, e has yet to solve the scholarship challenge. Too many players in this space confuse product with promotion. Perhaps when someone figures out how to combine big data and shoe leather to help students discover and apply for hidden gems, like the local Kiwanis Club grant that , will finally alter the return on investment students enjoy from a college degree. In the meantime, you might as well play the .
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How activist DeRay Mckesson’s Twitter account was hacked
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Even though several huge data breaches have recently exposed hundreds of millions of social media login credentials online, users aren’t re-setting their passwords — which means you’ll probably continue to see celebrities’ social media accounts getting hijacked.
Racial justice activist DeRay Mckesson became the most recent example of a high-profile account breach this morning, when his Twitter account suddenly began tweeting endorsements for Donald Trump. Mckesson’s loyal Twitter followers noticed that the endorsement and a follow-up tweet declaring, “I’m not actually black,” were out-of-character. Mckesson said two of his email addresses were also breached. After regaining control of his Twitter account, Mckesson explained that the hacker or hackers were able to take over by convincing Verizon to reset his SIM. With the SIM reset, the person responsible was able to receive text messages intended for Mckesson and therefore bypass the two-factor authentication the activist used to keep his account secure. “Verizon takes the security and privacy of our customers very seriously. We are aware of Mr. McKesson’s claims and Verizon security teams are investigating,” Verizon told TechCrunch. By calling and successfully changing my phone's SIM, the hacker bypassed two-factor verification which I have on all accounts. — deray (@deray) Mckesson also clarified his stance on presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump: No, I do not endorse Trump as the next President. He cannot be the President of the United States. He is racist & a bigot, unfit to lead. — deray (@deray) Passwords for tens of millions of Twitter accounts appeared online for sale this week, following the hacks of accounts belonging to Katy Perry, Ev Williams, Mark Zuckerberg, Drake and others. Although it’s possible that some of their passwords were included in the auctioned database, it’s more likely that their accounts were compromised because they reused passwords from other breached websites like LinkedIn, Myspace and Tumblr. That was the case for Forbes journalist Matt Drange, who broke the story of against . On Thursday, Drange woke up to find his account had been taken over by a porn bot that was tweeting #hottie and #bigcocks instead of Thiel scoops. Drange said he was alerted to the hack by text messages from friends. “Sure enough, it was just boobs and hashtags,” Drange told TechCrunch. Drange’s account was breached because he’d reused a password from a breached website — his Twitter credentials were not exposed in the recent data dump. Unlike Mckesson, Drange didn’t have two-factor authentication set up for his account, mistakenly believing that it was set up when he provided his phone number upon registering his Twitter account. He said he’s since added that protection to his account. Two-factor authentication works by sending a temporary pincode to a trusted device during login, so a user needs both his password and the pincode to access his account. Twitter and other social media platforms as a way to keep your accounts from being breached, although the hack of Mckesson’s account proves the method isn’t foolproof.
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13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week
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Anna Escher
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Gawker files for bankruptcy, Verizon inches closer to buying Yahoo, what to expect at Apple’s WWDC conference next week and more headlines to stay on top of this week’s tech news. Apple is about to kick off in San Francisco on Monday. As usual, the company will get things going with filled with secret and not-so-secret announcements. Here’s what , including iOS 10, macOS 12, Siri version 2, new Apple Music and new iTunes. Verizon may be moving closer toward purchasing Yahoo’s main internet assets. The telecommunications giant wants to make a . on Friday, according to documents filed in a Southern District of New York court. The filing comes as Gawker’s with the wrestler Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea) drags on. Hogan sued Gawker after the site published a clip of his sex tape. Bollea’s lawsuit, and others against Gawker, has been funded by . As many primaries took place this week, . While donation dollars have cooled in comparison to past elections, investors and tech figures spoke out in support of candidates. Freight forwarding just became sexy. Josh Constine wrote about that is making moves in one of tech’s biggest missed opportunity industries. Facebook got real pushy this week. Your conversations are moving to Messenger. Facebook announced it is disabling messaging in its mobile web app, . We also caught the rather than the tagging friends feature. by warning people that some of their photos will be deleted if they don’t install the app. You have until July 7th. Change your password and enable two-factor. Hackers may have used that are now being sold on the dark web. Twitter claims its systems have not been breached, and . Facebook FTW! A month ago, in Austin after voters defeated Proposition 1, an attempt to overturn mandatory fingerprint-based background checks for Uber and Lyft drivers in the city. Here’s how a Snapchat made some interesting moves this week. The messaging company revealed the . You’ll now see image and headline previews of the content inside Discover channels and Live stories on the Stories page, instead of just logos for the publishers or events they capture. We also learned that , a computer vision startup that lets you take 3D selfies. Here’s a look at Seene’s tech: This is the tech behind Snapchat's secret acquisition http://tcrn.ch/2891kDQ Posted by on Friday, June 3, 2016 We went from Lenovo. Up close and hands-on with Lenovo’s new augmented reality Tango phone http://tcrn.ch/1sxSaAe Posted by on Thursday, June 9, 2016 Microsoft launched . The team collaboration software lets you visually organize plans, assign tasks, share files and chat. As virtual reality materializes, filmmakers are diving in. Singe Brewster wrote a feature about . Fiat is dreaming of self-driving cars. We learned that .
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Andreessen Horowitz officially closes its newest fund with $1.5 billion
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
, we told you that was targeting $1.5 billion for its fifth and newest fund. This morning, the seven-year-old Sand Hill Road firm is confirming that it has closed on that amount, having secured the capital commitments from its previous investors. The announcement comes a little more than two years after the firm closed its fourth, multi-stage venture capital fund with . The money also comes on the heels of a $200 million fund that the firm called the AH Bio Fund, a vehicle that’s being used to invest in mostly early-stage startups at the intersection of computer science and life sciences. (We featured its newest bet, , yesterday.) Altogether, Andreessen Horowitz has now raised a somewhat stunning $6.2 billion. Managing partner shared more about the fundraise and what’s changing (and not changing) in a chat earlier this morning. Our conversation has been edited slightly for length and clarity. SK: It was a great raise. It took a relatively short period of time; we were oversubscribed. It’s consistent with our last funds in terms of size, based on the opportunity set we see in VR and artificial intelligence and core enterprise infrastructure, among other things. SK: No, we’ll still do multistage investing in software companies, with about 70 percent of our bets going into early-stage stuff and the rest going into later-stage stuff. SK: We’re still doing seed investing. Earlier on, we did a lot of small seed investments where we’d put in $50,000, but we realized that a better approach for us would be to take bigger positions and do fewer of them . . . so a lot of our deals today range from $500,000 to $1.5 million where we’re not just part of a party round but a major investor and those companies become part of the full Andreessen Horowitz family, meaning they can [take advantage] of our [internal] service and networking groups. SK: Yes, if there are greater opportunities or later-stage becomes more attractive. I’m not smart enough to know how to forecast it. SK: We have eight GPs. As you know, Scott Weiss is . In the meantime, we’ve brought aboard and . We told our LPs that we might hire one to two more GPs over the course of this fund, but we have enough capacity and expertise and domain knowledge [to continue as is]. SK: We don’t have anything planned right now. SK: Skype, which to Microsoft for $8.5 billion; Nicera, which to VMware [for $1.2 billion]. We had later-stage positions in Facebook and Twitter [before their respective IPOs]. We were a second-round investor in Oculus, which a few months later to Facebook [for $2 billion]. We invested in Bebop, which sold to Google for . Oh, also Instagram [which to Facebook for $1 billion]. In terms of the vintage of our funds, we’re ahead of where other firms are from a liquidity perspective. SK: The IPO market hasn’t been great but we think M&A will be a major contributor [to the industry’s exits going forward]. SK: They like the way we’re positioned strategically. We’ve been very transparent with our LPs; they also like our broad kind of operating services strategy. What’s maybe [problematic] for more the whole industry is that liquidity isn’t where LPs would like it to be. It’s not just the IPO market but there hasn’t been that steady stream of M&A opportunities. SK: I think the Kauffman data isn’t a good set and they haven’t named the firms [that they included in their report]. But what we believe is that we have to get into those few companies that drive all the returns and that we’re set up well to do that. There’s nothing inherently bad about bigger funds unless you’re putting your money into lots of other places [merely to deploy all your capital] and we won’t do that. If it takes us longer to invest, we’re perfectly comfortable doing that. I think people have demonstrated bad behavior as they’ve gotten big owing to fee streams. But our deal with our LPs is that, because we’re using fees to support our [125-person] infrastructure, our partners are heavily invested in [producing returns] instead of taking obnoxious amounts of cash compensation.
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The future of the IoT job market
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Zach Supalla
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Since the dawn of technology, we’ve been afraid of technology eliminating our jobs. Look at the birth of the steam engine. When it was invented in the late 1700s, people believed its arrival signaled the end of manual labor and thousands of hardworking individuals would be out of jobs. Instead, the steam engine created completely new jobs in new industries like railway systems and high-productivity factories. While the steam engine did eliminate some manual labor jobs, it created new jobs like machine operators, engineers and maintenance workers. Nearly 250 years later, in a world defined by technological change, we see the same fears and concerns. As of September 2015, Amazon had 30,000 Kiva robots automating its warehouses, increasing efficiency and reducing the need for pick-and-pack labor. And at the same time, demand for software developers continues to rise, as Marc Andreessen’s famous 2011 that “software is eating the world” becomes ever more true. Over the next decade, we’ll see this pattern play out once more in the nascent Internet of Things ( ). With an industry defined by “bringing physical things online,” many business models are predicated on improving efficiency by eliminating labor. We see companies connecting garbage cans to the internet to improve the efficiency of deploying waste collectors — which means we’ll need fewer waste collectors. Drones are dramatically reducing the time it takes to survey a plot of land — which means we’ll need fewer surveyors. Every industry that involves electronics or equipment can expect to be disrupted in this way over the next 10 years. So the same question that was asked in the late 1700s remains: Will this new technology eliminate jobs? No. Take Target, for example. Just last month the retailer posted a opportunity on Indeed for Lead Engineer, Internet of Things. The of the says that the hire will “…be building innovative solutions for consumers.” Required skills include experience with programming languages, code and the ability to take an iterative approach to work. In addition to the posting from Target, technology consulting firm Janco Associates, Inc., in its latest handbook of corporate IT jobs, identified the Manager as a one of three new positions added to the handbook. A senior-level position, it calls for a manager to oversee the “implementation and maintenance of technical systems support as well as data transmission and retrievals from field controllers.” In a nutshell, will do exactly what technology does everywhere — it supplants low-skill jobs with high-skill jobs. Eventually, the Internet of Things will lead to widespread replacement of simple and repetitive jobs in areas such as manufacturing, administration, quality control and planning. But more importantly, will lead to the creation of new jobs that will help organizations champion and pioneer not only their personal success with , but the success of the business as well. So what are these jobs, and how should you rework your resume to be prepared for them? Many of these opportunities are new enough that they don’t even have titles yet. But don’t worry, we made some up. So without further adieu, meet your next: I bet you thought that C-level titles couldn’t get more obnoxious. 2016 will be the year that the Chief Officer (CIoTO) is born, with Machina Research that “at least one Fortune 500 company will appoint a Chief Officer” this year. Additionally, studies have shown that more than half of U.K. businesses plan to employ a (CIoTO) in the next 12 months and will invest in a CIoTO, especially in the education, retail and telecom industries. This comes as 94 percent of all businesses polled claim to be investing in initiatives to prepare for the , spreading those investments across infrastructure, security, R&D, skills and personnel. So what is a CIoTO? The CIoTO will be responsible for driving the technology decisions that in turn steer the direction of the business. This person will develop the company’s strategy, tying the adoption of new technology to clear business results. They will oversee the development of products or initiatives and they will be responsible for gathering data from devices, analyzing and identifying insights and ultimately taking action based on that data. Effective communication will be paramount for this position. The CIoTO must be someone who can effectively communicate with other C-suite level executives to justify and drive the company’s budget when faced with opposition and push-back, and they must collaborate closely with the CTO/CIO as well as the engineering and manufacturing teams. When you hire new positions to help build out initiatives, who will oversee them? Some companies are hiring technology-driven “ experts” who are looking at new cheap radios and sensors and figuring out how to apply them to the business. But this approach is a bit backward; the adoption of technology should be driven by business need, not the other way around. Instead of hiring supposed “ experts” to oversee projects or employees, we’ll see the advent of the Business Designer, a creative thought leader who will search for business opportunities that can be addressed through then assemble a tech solution to address the opportunity. At the end of the day, technology means nothing if it doesn’t serve the business. You know who doesn’t have an Business Designer? Companies who develop BLE-connected toothbrushes. When looking for someone to fill this position, companies should focus on two key characteristics: Someone with a clear vision of how your company will look 10 years out, and who can define and execute on an initiative that will be your first step down the road. Someone who understands technology well, but is not enamored with it, and will only bring in new technology when it solves a real problem. Hiring someone who has the vision to start with the business problem first and the solution second will set up your company for success because it will take them a lot fewer attempts to build a product that knocks it out of the park. The companies that will succeed will be the ones who pursue the right business models and create the best user experiences — all by thinking creatively about the business. We’ve all heard the term “full stack developer.” It embodies developers who are comfortable working with both back-end and front-end technologies. To be more specific, it means that the developer can work with infrastructure, databases, back-end code (Ruby, Python, Java, etc.), and front-end code (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc.). But in the Internet of Things, that’s not enough. products include the same front-end and back-end systems as web and mobile apps, but they also include hardware, which is usually custom-built. That means that your full stack is fuller — it includes embedded systems (i.e. firmware), and often electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Therefore, you need a Fuller Stack Developer. This person might sound like a unicorn, but these types of software engineers do exist. Many people who have computer engineering and embedded systems degrees have transitioned into web and mobile development because over the last 10 years those jobs have paid better. Fortunately for , the pendulum seems to be swinging back. In recent postings from for an developer, hardware engineering and UI/UX design are listed as desired skills. For engineers who know hardware and web, they’ve been able to increase their marketability and salary thanks to many new opportunities developing in the Internet of Things. Over a short-term horizon, technology and labor markets are at odds with one another. But while advances in technology may displace certain types of work, over a long-term horizon technology has been a net creator of jobs. As a society we adapt to these changes by inventing entirely new types of work, and by taking advantage of uniquely human capabilities. The advent of is no different, and much like the industrial and technological revolutions that preceded it, we’ll find that instead of fearing for our jobs, we should embrace the fact that will take the mundane activities out of our work lives and offer new, unique opportunities to evolve and expand our skill sets.
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Mozilla’s multi-process architecture project cleared for takeoff
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Attention. Project code-name is a go. Mozilla’s long-running project to bring multi-process architecture to hundreds of millions of Firefox users has finally met release criteria for a full-scale rollout. Nearly every other browser on the market has adopted multi-process architecture, splitting tabs and extensions into separate processes. For the average non-technical Firefox user, the end result will be a snappier browsing experience. The hope is that in the future, the failure of one tab will no longer drag the entire program down. Firefox 48 beta, which launched earlier this week, includes Electrolysis (E10S). While some beta users have had access to E10S since December 2015, this week’s launch will bring the new features to a larger testing pool. Google Chrome, for example, divides up processes by tabs and extensions. Try not to judge, today is a good day. I’m just barely cracking 75 and already admitted to having tab issues. In contrast, the old Firefox runs within a single process. With E10S, a separate process is created for web content. However upon initial download of the beta, “Multiprocess Windows” was disabled. According to the Mozilla Wiki, users can enable E10S by going to within Firefox. Step one is to find and set it to true. You can check to see if this worked by going to about:support and seeing if multiprocess windows have been enabled. If you are still having trouble getting your browser to run E10S, go back to about:config and right-click to request a new preference. You can add as a boolean set to true. Once E10S is enabled, you can check activity monitor to view the additional “Web Content” process. For right now, all tabs run aggregated in a shared process, separate from the core Firefox process. Over the past six years of development, users have expressed anxiety over the potential uptick in memory usage that comes with a multi-process architecture. “We’re starting from a good place,” said Asa Dotzler, Director of Firefox at Mozilla. “Firefox uses less system resources than the other major browsers so we have some headroom. Our engineering team has been laser focused designing and implementing an architecture that doesn’t cost a lot in terms of memory usage.” Mozilla has decided to start converting E10S from beta to release on August 2nd with Firefox 48. The update will include E10S for a lucky one percent of users. These users will be isolated and compared to a beta population. This process is estimated to take ten days. Assuming all goes well, all users will be given the new features in a staggered release. “We have a great beta community and I expect we’ll find any issues before we roll out but it’s possible that our beta population differs in some way from our release population that causes us to miss out on something,” added Dotzler. Mozilla also plans to add security sandboxing and process isolation for individual tabs and extensions to Firefox. For those less technically inclined, security sandboxing can be thought of like adding gatehouses to an estate. In the past, Firefox operated just like a normal house with doors on the street that could be catastrophically breached at any time. What the E10S team is essentially doing is adding gatehouses to a previously vulnerable home. The gatehouses will have restricted access to independent parts of the estate. This way even if a gatehouse is breached, the entire home is not in jeopardy. Now that E10S has met all of Mozilla’s release criteria, the Firefox team is all hands on deck keeping an eye out for stability regressions and changes in user engagement.
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What to expect at Apple’s WWDC keynote
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Apple is about to kick off in San Francisco on Monday. As usual, the company will get things going with filled with secret and not-so-secret announcements. Here’s what I expect to see. A good chunk of the conference should be about iOS and OS X updates. Usually, Apple showcases some of the most significant features at WWDC. Developers then get access to beta versions, and the final versions ship in September. Let’s start with . Rumor has it that Apple could unveil for default apps as well as a way to hide built-in apps. There could also be to control all your HomeKit-enabled apps (like the Health app for HealthKit-enabled apps). Following over the iPhone encryption system, Apple wants to avoid other cases like that. In order to do that, Apple could increase the security of iOS so that Apple wouldn’t even be able to help the FBI when it comes to unlocking iPhones. Among other changes that would make sense, Apple could improve the Phone app as it basically hasn’t changed for years now. Maybe there could be a way to see if your contacts are available and didn’t activate ‘Do Not Disturb’. Maybe Apple is looking at ways to sync your voicemails with your other iOS and OS X devices. Talking about communication features, a recent rumor has suggested that Apple could bring . That could be a big deal for families that want to create iMessage groups but one or two people are using an Android phone. It’s long overdue if Apple wants to stay relevant against Facebook’s messaging apps, Messenger and Whatsapp. Also, please Apple, I’m begging you, we need previews in the Messages app for links, tweets, YouTube URLs and more. Now that we got all the low-hanging fruit out of the way, let’s talk about the big changes, starting with . If you have an Amazon Alexa at home or have been playing with Google Now, you know that Apple has been lagging behind on this front. Apple was the first company to introduce a personal assistant in its phones, but it hasn’t changed much since then. First, with iOS 10, Siri should be much more capable than before when it comes to understanding what you’re saying, answering quickly, and using context as much as possible. The company has bought called VocalIQ to power its next generation Siri. And Siri should now be able to remember what you were looking for five minutes ago and use that to refine its answers. Second, third-party developers will finally be able to using an SDK. Imagine asking Citymapper for directions, paying back your friend on Venmo and buying a concert ticket. In other big changes, Apple is on a . Apple unveiled Apple Music last year at WWDC. While there are millions of subscribers, the interface is confusing as hell. Nobody uses Connect, it takes too many taps to do something, you can like songs but you can also add them to your library. And I could go on and on. If Apple wants to convince another tens of millions of people to subscribe to Apple Music, it needs to be redesigned. Let’s switch gear and talk about OS X 10.12, or . Yes, you read that right. Releasing iOS 10 and another version of OS X was starting to be confusing. So Apple , and unify its naming conventions. Other than that, we don’t know much. Apple should be . It could live in your menu bar for example. Maybe the company will add support for Apple Pay for web purchases too. Rumor has it that Apple finally wants to do a big iTunes update. The good old iTunes hasn’t aged well and is now crippled with bugs. So the new iTunes and be unveiled at WWDC. Finally, Apple will let you unlock your Mac using TouchID on your phone. Why now? Because Apple could be working on a MacBook Pro with a TouchID sensor… Talking about , Apple is working on something interesting. will get the latest Intel processors, but that’s not all. Apple could use this opportunity to make the MacBook Pro slimmer and lighter. Most of the ports should be replaced with USB-C ports as traditional USB, HDMI and MagSafe ports are too thick. And Apple wants to add a tiny touchscreen bar above the keyboard and use it as a customizable shortcut bar. But don’t get your hopes up as the MacBook Pro shouldn’t be ready for WWDC. Similarly, the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini badly need updates but WWDC should be all about this year. So if you were also waiting for an with a retina resolution and an integrated graphics cards, it’s not for now. Let’s mention for a minute. Don’t expect an Apple Watch 2 just yet, but Apple could unveil a new version of watchOS with a refined interface and more powerful native apps. watchOS 2 to make the Apple Watch an app platform. But let’s be honest, watchOS still needs more work. Raise your hand if you still use the side button to call up the Friends screen. As for tvOS 10, we don’t know much except that it would be logical to add the new version of Siri to the Apple TV. As always, Apple could be hiding a few surprises. Apple already unveiled ahead of WWDC because the keynote is already . So Monday’s keynote could be interesting, and we’ll be there to cover it live.
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Slack is down, so enjoy your three-day weekend
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Chat and collaboration app Slack is experiencing serious outages today, but we’re not sure of the nature or extent of the disaster, because status.slack.com is also inaccessible! What? This is like a fire station burning down! Slack did tweet that there are “connectivity issues for some teams,” hilariously accompanied by a smiling Slack app icon saying “All’s good under the hood, boss!” One TC staffer who was able to access the service found that it gave a less mixed assessment of the situation: Slack’s web servers are being overwhelmed at the moment and we’re working to restore full capacity and get everyone back to using Slack. API requests may respond in error and chat may behave quite slowly in the meantime. Another short outage occurred on the 8th. We’re used to this stuff happening, so we’ll be on IRC (#techcrunch on Esper) if you need us. The outage has been resolved. Back to work! We believe we’ve addressed the cause of the terrible Slack outage this morning. We’re very sorry for the interruption to your days and we’re taking steps now to address the problems uncovered during this incident. We will continue to monitor the situation to ensure our changes completely fix the problem before closing this incident.
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See you next week in Warsaw and Krakow
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Looking forward to seeing you all in Warsaw and Krakow. There will be much rejoicing and smalec. It is my understand that you all are watching “football” matches in the “Eurozone Cup” (Americans know nothing about “soccer”) but I think it’s a great opportunity to network in Polska and practice your pitching. The will be held on June 13 at Campus Warsaw 27/31 Ząbkowska. It starts at 8pm and we’ll have five startups pitching on stage. The Krakow event is on Five different startups will pitch. Please RSVP to one or both. If you want to pitch please fill out the form below and let me know about your startup. Don’t email me. I’ll contact you if you’re chosen. The winner of each pitch-off will get a table at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, second place will get two tickets. You can . See you soon!
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Facebook forces its photo-sharing app Moments to the top of the App Store
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Facebook is continuing its heavy-handed push to get users to install its private photo-sharing app Moments. The company’s latest move – warning people some of their photos will be deleted if the app isn’t installed – has managed to make Moments the number one app in the App Store. Users are being given a deadline of July 7th to move to Moments or download their Synced albums, Facebook warns. After that date, Facebook will delete the album containing their Synced Photos, it says. Facebook is using notifications to spread this message, and further details can also be viewed from the Synced album’s page on Facebook (if Moments is not yet installed). The company has also taken the step of actually users and telling them to install the app, which is unusual, but necessary now that it has plans to delete their data. Many Facebook users probably forgot they even had a Synced album, however. Photo-syncing was an optional feature Facebook which allowed users to automatically copy all their photos from their smartphone to a private album on Facebook. The idea was that by having photos already uploaded to the social network, it would be easier to later find and share them with friends. These photos are stored in an album called Synced (in the app) or Synced from Phone (on the desktop). This is the album that’s going away on July 7th – not all your Facebook photos uploaded from your phone, and certainly not all your photos. Of course, some Facebook users may not understand this, having long ago forgotten about the photo sync feature. It’s possible that a portion may think that Facebook is actually threatening to delete their photo archives if they don’t install Moments. Others are simply angry that they’re being forced to install yet another Facebook app after being pushed to install Messenger. https://twitter.com/lexxmarsella/status/740955116056903681 https://twitter.com/flakron_shkodra/status/741009604591640576 facebook told me we will delete ur photos if u don't download moments by 7 july I replied Go Ahead. — Rishabh Gusain (@RISHABHrpg) I'm gonna delete from my phone before I install Messenger AND Moments! Facebook is the new MySpace. — Ray Ulrich (@ulrichray) Forced adoption is a tactic that clearly works for the company, though. Facebook pushed all users to download Messenger back in spring of 2014. This soon made Messenger one of the top apps in the App Store. The move came at a critical time, too – the messaging app explosion was upon us, with Facebook battling standalone apps like WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, and Kik. And it had just bought its way into the market via the $19 billion . But some people continued to resist installing Messenger. They had been using messaging in Facebook’s mobile web app instead. Now – this month, it began telling mobile web users that “your conversations are moving to Messenger.” For now, you can dismiss this notice, but the feature will be entirely disabled this summer. This has been working. Messenger, which had historically been ranked as the #1, #2 or #3 application throughout the year, had seen the occasional bad day where it has dropped in ranking a bit…even down to #9 or #10 at times. Today, however, it’s back to #3. Now it’s Moments’ turn. Facebook has long since known it has its next potential hit on its hand with Moments – it began and it used Messenger to send automatic notifications when you’ve received photos from a friend. Notifications appeared in Facebook’s main app, too. At the end of the year, in January, and suggested they move to Moments instead. That suggestion is turning into a harsher deadline: move to Moments or your photos will be deleted. As expected, this big shove has worked, as well – Moments has shot up from being ranked in the 90’s to the number one app on the iTunes App Store where it has remained for the past couple of days.
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Gawker files for bankruptcy
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy today, according to documents filed in a Southern District of New York court. The filing comes as Gawker’s with the wrestler Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea) drags on. Hogan sued Gawker after the site published a clip of his sex tape and a blog post analyzing it; his lawsuit, as well as others against Gawker, have been funded by investor , whose backing was . A jury awarded Hogan $140 million in March, a decision . Gawker asked the judge in the Hogan case to allow the appeal to progress before forcing the company to pay up, but the judge denied the request today, . The judge’s ruling likely prompted the bankruptcy filing. Gawker Media’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing says that the company’s assets are worth $50 to $100 million and that it faces liabilities (including the payout to Hogan) of $100 to $500 million. The bankruptcy proceeding means the media company, which owns the publishing platform Kinja and runs the Gawker, Jezebel, Deadspin and other sites, will be auctioned. Gawker Media planned to sell a minority stake to Columbus Nova Technology Partners in January, in an effort to secure funding for its legal fight. Even with his billions, Thiel will not silence our writers. Our sites will thrive — under new ownership — and we’ll win in court. — Nick Denton (@nicknotned) Gawker Media already has an interested buyer — publisher , which runs PC Mag, reached an agreement to acquire the company, though other bids are expected through the bankruptcy process. “Ziff Davis has entered into an asset purchase agreement to acquire all of these properties (free of GMG’s liabilities), subject to the outcome of a Court-supervised auction. Under the Chapter 11 process, the Bankruptcy Court will soon set a schedule for other potential bidders to enter the sale process. There will then be an auction, which will likely take place at the end of July,” Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah wrote in a memo acquired by . In a press release about the purchase agreement, Gawker founder Nick Denton said, “We have been forced by this litigation to give up our longstanding independence, but our writers remain committed to telling the true stories that underpin credibility with our millions of readers. With stronger backing and disentangled from litigation, they can perform their vital work on more platforms and in different forms.”
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The PlayStation 4 ‘Neo’ is real, but Sony won’t show it at E3
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
In an interview with , Sony Interactive Entertainment president and global chief executive Andrew House confirmed that the PlayStation 4 ‘Neo’ is real. But don’t expect to see it next week at the E3 conference in Los Angeles. House has said Sony doesn’t plan to unveil it at E3. Rumors of a more powerful PlayStation 4 codenamed ‘Neo’ started emerging in March . The new console is supposed to be much more powerful than the existing PlayStation 4 in order to support more demanding games, and especially for the headset. Virtual reality is quite demanding when it comes to computing power. If you want a smooth experience, you need to run a game at a consistent frame rate above 60 frames per second. And because the screen in your VR headset is so close to your face, you want a good resolution as well. That’s why the PS4 support the PlayStation VR, but the PS4 ‘Neo’ is the console you want for virtual reality (at least if you don’t have a beefy computer). House basically confirmed all of these rumors and also said it would be a good console for people with a 4K TV, as the new PlayStation should be the first 4K-enabled console. Now, let’s talk about the disappointing parts. First, rumor has it that Sony will launch this new PlayStation 4 before the holiday season. E3 seemed like a good opportunity to unveil the new device, but House gave this interview to the Financial Times just before E3 so people don’t get disappointed when Sony doesn’t talk about it during its press conference on Monday. Second, the PS4 ’Neo’ is going to be more expensive than the existing $350 PlayStation 4. Both devices will remain in stores as the new console won’t replace the old. And that brings us to the last point. Many gamers have been wondering what it means if you already have a PlayStation 4. Are you going to be left behind? House wants to be reassuring and said that all games going forward are going to be compatible with the old PlayStation 4. They’ll just be more beautiful on the PS4 ‘Neo’. Microsoft is also working on updated Xbox One consoles. The company could announce a slimmer, cheaper Xbox One at next week’s E3 conference. And next year, rumor has it that Microsoft will release — even more than the PS4 ‘Neo’.
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The quest to cure loneliness
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 |
and Facebook Nearby Friends failed to change the way we all meet up. That’s because intent, not location, is the most important thing when connecting people offline. If we want to meet up for food, coffee, drinks, the gym, a party or just to chill, it’s tough to know who else does too. It doesn’t matter if a friend is a block away if they can’t or don’t want to hang out. Always-on location sharing still freaks some of us out, and can drain battery life. But the typical approach of calling, texting or posting on social media to see who’s available is broken too. You look desperate constantly badgering friends or broadcasting too widely asking to get together. The silence is deafening when no one responds. You feel uncool. Spraying push notifications at too large an audience or painstakingly choosing who to ping is discouraging. And like chat apps, products dedicated to aiding us assemble friends offline only really work if they achieve a level of ubiquity. If a few of your best buddies aren’t there, it’s pretty useless and you might as well resort to direct messaging. That’s what kept Free from gaining traction, and fast-growing has been criticized for . Because people are often only available to get together with friends a few times a week, it’s hard to achieve consistent use of a standalone app that drives growth instead of churn. Plus, if we’re not already looking there for another reason, people undecided about whether they’re trying to congregate can’t be seduced. Facebook Nearby Friends The ideal product for helping us gather offline will likely have three attributes: . It’s an extraordinarily tough product to design right. But they have the reach (at least amongst the most social age group), style of product and sociology savvy to nail it. The question is if either can. Down To Lunch app The only time I ever tried to build a company, it was to build this. The app was called Signal. We failed and shut down. There was too much friction to showing intent with wordy plans, it was impractical to constantly be annoying friends with pleas to see them and we couldn’t get people’s whole offline social graph to sign up. I’m not the only one who gave it a shot. There was Y Combinator president Sam Altman’s original startup Loopt. Facebook acquired both Gowalla and Glancee, two more attempts. Oh, and then there’s Banjo, Sonar, FacesIn and a dozen more that imploded. Imagine if instead of just an online availability indicator, we had an “I want to meet up” offline availability indicator. Tap a button, and your friends in your city or a subset of them could see you’re interested in socializing in the physical world. It’d last a few hours or until you turned it off, and could optionally include what you’re in the mood for. Your closest friends might get notified, but you wouldn’t necessarily have to alert them. Facebook Messenger has a whole People tab that’s hardly put to use. It shows your “favorite” friends to chat with, but they’re probably already near the top of your home tab list of chat threads. Yet its role as the top Western messaging app means people are opening it dozens of times per day. Messenger’s People tab could display your intent to hang out and you’d be one tap away from starting a chat thread to plan your rendezvous. And since it would just need general location and your explicit approval to function, not always-on exact location that is implicitly broadcast, it wouldn’t need the scary privacy opt out that cut down usage of . It’d be a little tougher to shoehorn the feature into Snapchat. There could be room on the Chat or Stories pages. Snapchat’s intense usage amongst teens and college kids with tons of free time to spend with friends could give an offline intent indicator enough visibility. Both social networks want you to share more of your on their apps. Creating content that’s compelling and doesn’t seem awkward is a lot easier when you’re with friends. They’re your co-stars, your muses and your guides to experience. Becoming the app that fuels these offline meetups might make them the place to share the results. I believe this space is eventually destined for a winner, whether it’s Facebook, Snapchat or some startup like Down To Lunch. We get too much joy out of being with friends for the problem of separation to go unsolved. And online networking has gotten so effective that we crave true human connection. Maybe one day virtual reality will simulate in-person interaction. Still, there’s no substitute for a friendly touch. An app called Free College is seen as the pinnacle of social life because the condensed geography, flexible schedules, similar demographics and outgoing energy enable people to overcome the barriers to assembly. When all you have to do is walk down the hall of open doorways with a six-pack of beer, hanging out is simple. But even being just a building away reduces the transparency and gathering gets harder. As we age, the distances grow to blocks or miles, and schedules fill up. We spend more time alone or just with our significant other. We miss out on laughter, inspiration, culture and collaboration. We sit in our houses or apartments and wish we were together, while our friends sit in theirs wishing the same. We’re social creatures. It’s time our apps brought back what that really means.
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Join us at TechCrunch Shanghai 2016 next week
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
TechCrunch returns to Shanghai next week! We are hosting , in association with our local partner , from Monday June 27 until Wednesday June 29 at the West Bund Art Center. The schedule — — is packed with insightful interviews and panel sessions. It includes representatives from a range of top firms from China and beyond, such as: We’ve shaped the agenda to look at the future of tech, so you can expect the content at the show to be as diverse as fintech, logistics, e-commerce, travel, robotics, drones, broadcasting, media and even housing. Indeed, is entirely dedicated to VR and AR, two hugely influential and upcoming sectors that China is very much a part of. On the final day of the show, arranged in collaboration with Formation Group, we’ll show you how and why. No TechCrunch event would be complete without startups, of course, and they will be there in large numbers, too. TechCrunch Shanghai 2016 will include a startup alley featuring over 150 young companies while, for those who love the early-stage best, will run the Saturday and Sunday immediately prior to the event. More than 170 hackers have signed up to take part, and you can add your name if you want to join them. Investors are an important component of the startup ecosystem, naturally, and more than 90 VCs have signed for our startup dating sessions which will run on the afternoons of Monday and Tuesday, and most of the day on Wednesday. Anyone with an attendee badge can schedule time with investors for free — that’s a neat alternative/addition to catching the attention of the many more VCs who will be at the show. You can check out the full agenda in English . We have an allocation of tickets for latecomers, so you can go right to get them if you haven’t already done so. See you next week!
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The next wave in software is open adoption software
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Jake Flomenberg
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
Open Adoption Software
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France’s Convargo wants to connect shippers with truckers
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
A new startup from one of the founders of Rocket Internet’s beauty and wellness marketplace is de-cloaking today. , launching in France, is the latest attempt to bring Uber-like convenience to the shipping industry, by connecting shippers with truckers. The young company is also announcing that it’s raised €1.5 million from a very long list of investors. They include Xavier Niel (Free and Kima Ventures), Rocket Internet’s own Oliver Samwer, Jacques-Antoine Granjon (Vente Privée), Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Olivier Mathiot (PriceMinister), Jean-David Blanc (Allociné and Molotov), Marc Menacé (Menlook), Clément Benoit & Benjamin Chemla (Resto-In & Stuart), and Thibaud Lecuyer (Dafiti). In addition, Convargo has perhaps smartly picked up support from a range of transportation industry folk, including Roger Crook (former CEO of DHL Global Freight Forwarding) and François Bourgeois (founder of French leading freight exchange Teleroute and 3617 LAMY). Phew. But back to what exactly the startup does. Operating a model that sounds similar to U.S.-based and , Convargo’s platform connects shippers with local carriers, including facilitating the booking process. It claims to let you get a quote and book a shipment in just 3 clicks, while giving you access to thousands of local carriers. Through the app you can track the position of your goods in real time, and receive immediate proof of delivery upon arrival. For the carriers themselves, the startup promises to send them more business and reduce overheads as it’s effectively a cheaper middle person, with lower overheads itself. The usual online marketplace play, you might surmise. Interestingly, I’m told that 90 per cent of carriers in Europe have fewer than six trucks, so it’s a highly fragmented industry. Maxime Legardez, co-founder of Convargo says, “with scale, and using an algorithm, we aim to fill the trucks so that carriers can operate up to 100 per cent capacity. Right now, about 25 per cent of European trucks drive nearly empty. It’s an evidence of the enormous amount of blatant inefficiency in this industry, which has direct collateral impact such as excessive exhaust emissions.” Asked why he quit Vaniday, Legardez told me he started thinking about Convargo at the end of last year and that after dozens of meetings with key people from the industry he became convinced “this was simply an opportunity I would never see again and a huge opportunity to add value to a key sector of the economy”. Now, along with a number of other , he’s attempting to make that opportunity count.
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Workspace utilisation and scheduling software Condeco scores $30M led by Highland Europe
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
Highland Europe’s new €332 million fund promised to help , and, true to its word, the VC firm’s latest invest sees it lead a €27 million ($30m) Series A round in London-based . The startup offers what is calls workspace utilisation and meeting room scheduling software to blue-chip clients. The company recently added another string to its bow too, U.S.-based unified communications company myVRM, to enable Condeco clients to manage their virtual communication resources as well as their bricks-and-mortar offices. Today’s funding round, which is significantly high for a Series A outside of Silicon Valley and in Europe in particular, will be used by the startup to consolidate what it claims is its leading position as a provider of workplace management technology. “This investment comes at the perfect time for Condeco, as it will fuel our growth as we pursue further strategic acquisitions across North America, Europe and APAC. We will also invest in our solutions for the vitally important SME market,” says Paul Statham, founder and CEO of Condeco Software, in a statement hinting to where the startup’s growth may come from. The startup’s blue-chip clients include multinational brands, such as Barclays, Reuters and Unilever. Its workplace management software tools helps with things like ensuring meeting runs smoothly, and managing and providing staff with spaces to collaborate, both physically and virtually. The company has a presence in 12 locations around the world, with operations in the U.S., EMEA and Asia Pac, and a headcount of over 250.
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In defense of the Uber-ization of everything
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Sameer Patel
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
I recently posted on Facebook a short rant about digital transformation for established enterprises. The skinny is that there are endless amounts of and barely no opining on the or when it comes to executing any kind of digital transformation of your business or industry. Here’s to the Facebook post if you want some context. Not surprisingly, Uber got caught in the crossfire and became the subject of the comments. Folks declared how Uber is an overused example of a digitally disruptive business. I disagree with the assertion that Uber is overstated. Vehemently so. Look, I get it. It’s popular to rage against Uber. And “ ” is even a legitimate and extremely rational argument. The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo and Homebrew VC Partner, Hunter Walk, sum it up well: “Investors saw Uber’s success as a template for . The industry went through a period where we said, let’s look at any big service industry, stick ‘on-demand’ on it, and we’ve got an Uber.” The fundamental flaw in citing Uber that has led to, well, Uber-esqe fatigue, has been the notion that Uber’s model can be simply forklifted into another domain or industry. Instead, what businesses need help with in fact is the polar opposite: not the forklifting but the unpacking of Uber to identify the two or three most applicable elements from its operating machinery and growth execution that can spark transformative opportunities in your industry. I lead a business that helps our customers transform how they connect with employees, partners and customers. Our learnings from building a subscriber base of more than 30 million subscribers are very consistent: Beyond euphoric chitchat about popular buzzwords, it is the elements of successful execution witnessed by the Ubers of the world that every board and C-Suite member must ask, if they are to understand what it takes to play and win in the digital economy. Here goes. My Uber driver used to leave her holding spot outside the San Francisco Airport when the ride was confirmed, making it a 7-9 minute drive to the curb. The other day it took her just 4-5 minutes. Uber is figuring out how to predict demand, presumably based on flight schedules, and can dispatch the driver before a passenger even requests a ride. What is the required adaptability in your business applications and the predictive nature of your data management systems to give you similar levels of agility? And, even if it’s all that, does your work culture encourage your employees to learn and adapt in near real time to improve the customer’s experience? Uber generates $1.5 billion in revenue from a total of roughly three taps that you and I make on our mobile devices. $1.5 billion! How can you also learn to shield your customer from extremely complex backend technology with the simplest, utilitarian user experience that takes your customer from consideration to purchase to advocacy at a ridiculously fast pace? Uber that it is now profitable in developed markets, but back in January of 2016, Uber lost close to $1 billion in the first half of 2015, up from $671.4 million the year before, according to . Uber is one of the many marketplaces that has emerged . And whilst the final cost of a ride may not end up being exactly where today’s rock bottom prices lie, the approach offers a clear example of how you can unhinge heavy cost structures in an established industry by eliminating layers of operating cost and bureaucratic fat built up over decades. You’re used to going in the opposite direction — raising prices. And, likely adding complexity. The essential question becomes this: What would a brutally honest, stripped-down cost structure and operating version of your industry look like? And, can you learn how to exploit such structures to spark the creation of a new, digital version of your markets? Uber wouldn’t be anywhere without influencing government policy to reshape personal transportation. Corporate affairs as product management or marketing or sales if Uber is to be a viable entity for years to come. Will your management team elevate what is often a reactive or passive communications function to a first-class citizen? And do your employees have the discipline to keep adapting the product and commercial model every time you face a policy win? Or a blow? In a natively digital business such as Uber, is digital. The good stuff — availability of rides, estimated fare, pick up and drop off location, the driver’s ETA. And the not-so-good stuff — knowledge of the passenger’s whereabouts, her typical travel patterns and her intimate phone or in-person conversations. Can you embrace and adopt an entirely new code of conduct that is likely the exact opposite of what your conservative culture has espoused for decades? Uber’s aspirational growth rate also has it trying really nifty tricks inside its app, who might make great developers. How are you experimenting with all the creative tricks that high-growth companies employ to recruit the best and brightest before you do? I could go on, but you get my drift. Street-smart executives certainly want to know the so they have rapid-fire responses to their CEO and board when asked to explain digital transformation in the elevator. But those who consider it their fiduciary responsibility to play offense against known and unknown competitors want to truly peel back the natively digital onion, layer by layer. Digital transformation and it’s here. Whilst it might look neatly packaged when you whip out your phone and have a car show up , the real transformation to make this happen “automagically” occurs in the guts of the operation machinery — the people, the process, the flexibility of the technology stack and the speed at which you can respond to the customers’ needs. And this discussion is mostly absent. We need to get past the euphoric discourse if we truly want to digitally transform. We saw big, seemingly revolutionary ideas such as social business simply peter out because we never looked under the hood to see what truly needs to change. This time around, we need to land the plane and have it stick, quickly. Failing this, efforts to digitally transform established enterprises will end up redlining to nowhere.
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INNOVATE2016: Candidate Erin Schrode harnesses tech and positivity for a new political generation
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Andrew Keen
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
Enough pessimism. Even in politics, we have reason to be cheerful. Take, for example, , a 25-year-old woman who ran for in Marin County. Seeing herself as a “tech candidate”, this self-styled “rabble rousing optimist” believes we are just at the “dawn of the revolution” when it comes to political innovation. Schrode’s campaign to become the youngest representative in Congress really caught fire on social media. Over the memorial day weekend, for example, she hosted a day-long “Snapchat takeover” for the account @WomenInPolitics. A soldier stationed in Korea was so moved by her message and responded in a series of seven, 10-second videos. And Schrode’s response was recorded and shared via Facebook Live to her 14,000 followers. Yes, she acknowledges, the 2016 election is “poisonous” and “crippling”. But that’s no reason to stay out of politics. Indeed, in contrast with many other entrepreneurial types of her generation, Schrode is committed to a career of public service. “I just can’t stand by and watch anymore,” she says. Focusing her campaign on public health, human rights, environmentalism and tech innovation, @erinschrode () built an innovative campaign on digital media platforms like Medium, Instagram and Snapchat. As always, thanks to the folks at for their help in the production of this interview.
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Why a global threat sharing program is vital to protect global infrastructure
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Daniel Riedel
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
We live in a time where the global sharing of threat intelligence is not only possible; it’s vital to the security of our global infrastructure, and the public and private sectors have been working tirelessly to create these programs. So far, the biggest challenges have revolved around technology, laws, and cost — but still, over the past year, there has been a major push toward making this process more approachable and globally-impactful. Many organizations such as IBM, Soltra, Lockheed Martin, Splunk, and Bluecoat, are spearheading these efforts. Today, thanks to the (CISA), enterprises now have the ability to share threat data with the Department of Homeland Security in a legal framework that protects good samaritans. To address the high-level technological needs of this endeavor, the DHS recently to revamp, standardize, lower the cost, and expand the reach of — data-sharing frameworks that now allow both humans and machines to exchange threat intelligence across borders in an automated fashion. Further, the U.S. government is also Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs) to be developed — diverse communities of private-sector companies that collaborate to share intelligence and help thwart cyber attacks. The momentum is building toward a global threat sharing program. More and more businesses and governments across the globe are seeing the value of this collaborative approach, and it’s only a matter of time before this is something the whole industrial world uses. With the rapid advance of the — or “Industry 4.0” — innovation and connectivity are sweeping through the world like a freight train. Industries across all categories are pushing to connect every object they can, collect as much data as possible, and thus boost their operational intelligence. This is a trend that shows no signs of slowing down. So, instead of putting our heads in the sand for fear of change, we need to devote our brainpower toward creating methods that build and sustain this new world as safely as possible. Cyber attacks pose true physical threats to society; we’re not just talking about individuals’ credit cards getting hacked. We’re talking more along the lines of getting shut down, being robbed of millions of dollars, and or even being commandeered from remote locations. Being proactive about threats like these has always been a top priority, but up until now, it’s been a rather cumbersome process. Efficiently extracting intelligence from traditional threat analysis reports — typically gigantic PDF files that utilize confusing codes and notations — has been a nearly impossible undertaking for any human or machine. As a result, it takes the average company approximately to discover that its data has been compromised. And by then, the hacker has likely already done further damage to other entities. “It has only been six months since CISA was signed into law, and while there has been a rapid fire of activity in that time, more work certainly remains to be done,” Mark Clancy, , said when addressing the United States House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security on June 15, 2016. Some of the ‘more work’ he’s referring to involves boosting the overall accessibility of threat sharing platforms. Widespread involvement across all industries and sectors is pivotal to the program’s success. “Historically, sectors only shared information within that sector,” Clancy said in that same address. “While important and effective to do, it also stovepipes the fact that the attackers are using the same tactics, techniques and procedures against [other] sectors.” Emerging cross-sector platforms and solutions, such as Clancy’s own , don’t just automate the threat discovery process; they’re offered free of charge, and they’re simple to incorporate into an existing IT infrastructure. “The Soltra Edge platform sends, receives, and stores messages of cyber threat intelligence in a standardized way,” he said. “It hides the complexity of the underlying technical specification so that end users can setup and start receiving threat information in under 15 minutes in most cases, changing the paradigm where it could take months or millions of dollars to change internal systems if companies wanted to do it on its own.” Thanks to software products that streamline the sharing process and reduce the financial and time burdens that typically accompany it, we’re well on our way to a multi-sectoral global threat sharing program that sparks unprecedented levels of proactivity in security. Once a global sharing program hits its stride, companies can rest assured that hackers will face more resistance than ever. For example, if Nike experiences an attempted breach, it can use STIX and TAXII to immediately report all the relevant details to the rest of the sharing ecosystem, and businesses across the globe will instantaneously have the ability to strengthen their defenses. If these same hackers try again at another location later on, they’ll have no such luck. And further, a global sharing program provides obvious safety benefits to the world as a whole. Aside from the direct lives that could be saved by limiting physical mayhem, there are also indirect safety implications of global magnitude. The industrial internet has the potential to create better, stronger, more innovative companies across all industries — which would undeniably improve the world as a whole. But, Industry 4.0 will only reach this lofty potential if businesses feel confident that their data is secure — and a crucial part of making that happen is encouraging widespread participation in a global threat sharing program. Get involved today by joining an and keeping up with the latest developments in this crucial endeavor.
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Blue Origin launches, lands the same rocket for the fourth time
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
has successfully completed the fourth launch and landing of their New Shepard rocket and crew capsule. With another nominal flight test, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company is marching toward their goal of becoming the first private company to send tourists into space. And along the way, they’re perfecting the ability to reuse suborbital rockets over and over again – a feat that’s never been done before. After four successful launches and landings with the same New Shepard vehicle, Blue Origin is starting to make this whole suborbital rocket reusability thing look easy. The purpose of today’s uncrewed mission was to test the scenario in which one parachute fails to deploy during the descent of the New Shepard crew capsule. Blue Origin is using launches like these to test out their New Shepard system before using it to bring humans into space. A failed parachute is a possible, although unlikely scenario, and the company needed to test their capsule’s robustness to a failure like this. Jeff Bezos has previously the credibility of such a scenario, pointing to the Apollo 15 mission when one parachute failed during descent. Failed parachute during Apollo 15 / Image courtesy of NASA Unlike the three previous launches of New Shepard, Blue Origin changed things up a bit and provided their first ever live webcast of the launch and landing. Within eleven minutes, the New Shepard system launched into space and both the booster and the crew capsule soft-landed back on Earth. The New Shepard booster brought the crew capsule, filled with science experiments for this particular launch, on a suborbital flight profile into space where the experiments inside felt four minutes of weightlessness. Shortly after, the booster separated from the capsule to begin its automated journey down to the landing pad. New Shepard upon descent, slowed by circular fin on the top and smaller fins along the outside / Screenshot of Blue Origin webcast New Shepard’s ring fin on the top of the rocket (where the crew capsule was connected) and deployed fins along the circumference helped stabilize the rocket on the way down. The booster slowed to about five mph as it hovered slightly, just over the launch pad. Landing gear was deployed and the rocket softly touched down. Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle touches down as the crew capsule begins its descent / Screenshot of live Blue Origin webcast As attention shifted to the crew capsule, we could see that only two of the three parachutes deployed for the crew capsule, as planned. During a nominal crew capsule landing, three parachutes would deploy to slow the falling spacecraft. A few seconds before touchdown, retrorockets on the bottom of the capsule would fire, slowing the spacecraft to just one to two mph. This nominal landing would result in a “soft, pillowy” landing for the astronauts inside, according to Blue Origin. Interestingly, the Blue Origin co-hosts stated that, while three parachutes are ideal, the capsule was designed to keep humans alive in the rare case that only one parachute deploys successfully. New Shepard crew capsule descent with two parachutes deployed / Screenshot of Blue Origin webcast The co-hosts noted that today’s crew capsule landing test appeared to go well and looked exactly as expected. During the live webcast before the launch, Blue Origin explained that if there were any issues or anomalies detected on the crew capsule, all three parachutes would deploy and the one-failed parachute test would be aborted. Because the company wants to maintain the capsule hardware for future flights, they didn’t want to have problems stack on top of each other and risk irreparable damage to the capsule. The capsule itself is designed with paying human passengers in mind. Blue Origin’s near term goal is to bring tourists into space. Catering to that experience, the New Shepard capsule will contain the largest windows that have ever flown into space in order to give humans the best possible view. The capsule used in these initial tests, however, does not have any windows (they’re only painted on), but the next iteration of the capsule will include windows that make up as much as 1/3 of the capsule surface area. New Shepard crew capsule / Image courtesy of Blue Origin With today’s mission, Blue Origin has successfully flown the same rocket booster and crew capsule into space four times with plans for even more flights with the same equipment. Earlier this year, Bezos that they are working to bring their first humans into space as early as 2018. If tests continue to go as well as the last four New Shepard flights, the company could soon become the first private company to send tourists into outer space.
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Financial technology matures as government steps in
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Caitlin Klevorick
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
You would be hard pressed to read the news and not know that fintech is seemingly at a crossroads — from ‘s CEO resigning to reports of other peer-to-peer lending platforms to headlines that state that, after a boom in funding, venture capitalists are looking to other sectors out of fear. Indeed, some are already declaring financial technology dead as a space for the near-term. Not so fast. Here’s what we know. These signals are actually the chaotic realities of a space that is maturing. Yes, government regulation is on its way, but that doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Compliance and transparency within markets are good things. Consumer protections are good things. So while many have focused on the role that regulations may play in the industry — with clear fears that government may stifle innovation in the face of this turmoil — the truth is much more complicated. At heart, the competitive advantages in fintech are the same as the rest of the startup world, with the same power and purpose of “disruption” — better technology, faster iteration and more empathy for users. Regulatory arbitrage, if it ever truly existed within finance, is not a defensible business strategy: product quality, customer outreach and lower cost structures are. Clear, more specific regulations are forthcoming, but to think it will be the downfall of the industry is naïve. In fact, there are many companies in the fintech space that will have champions on both sides of the aisle in Washington, DC. As a category, fintech has more than 60 million users. Many startups are focusing on millennials; with 60 percent thinking big banks are not designed to serve their generation, it is not surprising that 73 percent are more likely to be excited by a new financial service from a tech company than a nationwide bank. Simplicity, transparency and consumer-focused experiences are key. Many companies have taken advantage of this opportunity, helping to make financial services more accessible — ranging from payments to student loans and savings to remittances. These are the companies government regulations need to help protect and in which they should encourage greater investment. Doing so not only benefits the consumer, but also the market. The government has shown willingness to support continued innovation in the space, including the , the and the . The increased scrutiny by the political establishment and the press needs to focus on more than the headlines and questionable actors. Recent trouble at some of the larger companies should not taint the government’s view on all fintech companies. The future of our vibrant economy and the reformation of the financial services industry depends on striking a balance between growth and citizen protection. How do we find the path forward (and upward)? And how do we make sure the path does not simply focus on the big banks, but understands the importance and value of newer and more specialized companies? Regulators can start by being more open to experimentation and alternative business models. And open to coordinating among themselves. Too often guidance from a department will clash with a project in another part of the government. The end result tends to be a fractured, unnecessarily complex and (likely) unintentional hampering of innovation. Talking about problems without identifying possible solutions or processes that can lead to concrete ideas is too often the bureaucratic death of a shared conclusion. So what can be done? It might help to look at how other countries are not just allowing fintech companies to explore new areas, but are encouraging and helping fund them. Several countries have created a regulatory sandbox. The purpose is to let companies push the boundaries of the current regulations in pursuit of new ways of doing business. It is not about circumventing rules, but rather acknowledging that it is impossible to know what could be done if we box companies in and hold them accountable for rules that never contemplated new technologies. This is what the CFPB is aiming to do through . While not perfect, in part because of the limited authorities granted to the bureau, the protection is rather thin, but it is a positive and perhaps aspirational step. The U.K., through the (FCA), provides an array of tax incentives for innovation in fintech, including R&D tax credits, the Patent Box (a way for companies to pay a lower rate of corporation tax on profits earned from patented inventions) and more under their . In India, with the goal of increasing financial inclusion, the established two new categories of banks: “small” and “payment.” For example, payment banks can issue debit cards, but cannot issue credit cards because they are not licensed to carry out lending activities. Payment banks are particularly beneficial to low-income households and small businesses. They also launched a contest to find solutions to prevent financial fraud, reduce the cost of transactions and develop an e-payment infrastructure. By comparison, America is a bit behind. It was somewhat inevitable. The government is simply not built for the dynamics of fintech. Instead of years perfecting a system of moveable parts, now it can take only days to upend established business practices. And when innovators, engineers and investors do not take the time to help the public, and especially the policy makers, understand new products and developments, it becomes even harder for them to catch up. That seems to be one of the issues emerging in fintech. The policy makers, whether on the Hill or in an agency, are continuing a status quo that discourages innovation in some areas that could benefit the underserved. Conversations should be informative and collaborative. They can’t play out on a stage that only produces political division. Not only because it is not productive, but also because many of these companies, like , , , and , make financial services easier to understand and engage.
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London-based Thriva offers a home finger-prick blood test to quantify your bad self
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
When the ‘quantified self’ involves stabbing your little finger with a sharp object and collecting the resulting blood, it feels like the real deal. Enter Seedcamp-backed , a new London-startup that offers a home finger-prick blood test that lets you track a range of internal blood markers associated with good or bad health. Out of the gate, this includes cholesterol levels and tests for liver and kidney function. “Everyone knows prevention is better than cure. In reality though, getting access to some of the most impactful and motivating information there is — data about how you’re really doing on the inside — is broken,” Thriva co-founder and CEO Hamish Grierson tells me. “The NHS is an incredible institution and is ‘free’ but because it’s so challenging to access, people wait until they’re sick before lifting the lid on their bodies. The consequence? We’re locked in a reactive health paradigm. Until now, people haven’t been able to access the tools that enable them to take control; to own and to make better decisions about their health”. The test I was sent prior to public launch seemed straight forward enough. The home finger-prick kit comes with a set of clear instructions and several spare lancets in case you have trouble drawing enough blood. However, as an ex-gigging musician and now living the lifestyle of a tech journalist, I wasn’t about to let a new fangled-startup get an insight into my inner bodily health (or lack thereof), so I roped my housemate into trying out Thriva instead. He bled a little too easy. I felt kinda bad. Once you’ve taken the home test, you mail the blood sample back to Thriva’s partner lab. The results are then analysed and uploaded to the Thriva platform where you receive a bespoke report and recommendations created by a healthcare professional that explain what lifestyle changes you may need to make to improve your health. Or, in a worse case scenario, you’re advised to seek medical advice from a doctor. The example report I saw was pretty detailed but not overwhelming, and with help tips provided inline to enable you to make better sense of the available data. “We’re making it super easy for anyone to quickly, conveniently and accurately find out what’s going on inside their bodies,” explains Grierson. “In the coming months, we’ll be launching a range of tests designed to service very specific customer needs. Our first test is designed to help our customers understand what impact their lifestyle is having on their body which is why it focuses on three specific areas: cholesterol levels, kidney function and liver function”. It’s what Grierson calls a “reactive” health paradigm that he and his co-founders, which include a practicing GP, want to challenge. For those that can afford it, the test costs £49.99 and you’re encouraged to schedule follow up Thriva tests, presumably once you’ve made the advised lifestyle changes or to track any changes, good or bad. Regardless of cost, which might otherwise be covered by the NHS, the home kit is far more convenient than queuing up at blood clinic. Future planned Thriva tests will focus on energy levels, vitamin D deficiency and fertility. People suffering with symptoms related to bloating or possible IBS/IBD will also be a potential target, which is a huge market where their is a tendency already to self-diagnose. “There are a range of customer segments we’re targeting here from hard working City folks worried about their health, to men and women who’ve hit an age milestone and have become more acutely conscious of their health and don’t want their bodies to let them down, to tech enthusiasts and quantified self enthusiasts,” says the Thriva CEO. Noteworthy, the startup is also about to launch a corporate product for employers that want to offer employees something different, and are looking for something more affordable than many of the current employee health benefit products available. “We’re also developing a range of relevant services such as access to specific expert be that dieticians, personal trainers or GPs,” adds Grierson. In addition to Seedcamp, Thriva is backed by a number of angel investors, including Ricky Knox and Michael Kent (founders of Azimo), Will Neale (founder of Grabyo, Fonix and early-stage investor in Property Partner) and Peter Jackson (former CEO of Travelex and current Head of Innovation at Santander). That list reflects the fintech background of Grierson, and two of Thriva’s other co-founders, Tom Livesey and Eliot Brooks, having previously worked at Travelex, Droplet Payments, and Tandem Bank. A number of readers have asked how Thriva compares to U.S.-based Theranos, as, on the surface, both companies employ a finger-prick blood test. However, the two companies tests are in fact very different. In short, unlike Theranos’ pitch, Thriva isn’t using its own tech (or claiming to have invented any new technology) to collect or process the tests but relies on a very bog standard blood test and the results are processed by a large third-party lab on-site. In the Thriva CEO’s own words: Thriva and Theranos have fundamentally different models. Thriva works with pre-existing, heavily validated and CE accredited partners and equipment whereas Theranos uses its own proprietary testing technology. Unlike Theranos, we collect more than a single drop of blood because it requires more blood to run the tests we run at the level of accuracy we demand. The partner lab we work with is the largest private path lab in the UK and count the NHS as their largest client. They process 40,000 tests per day.
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 10 | null |
Startup spending guide: When freebies will do
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Ryan Angilly
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
This is the second installment in the series, where we are exploring how early-stage startups should spend their non-payroll money. In we defined “early-stage ” and enumerated areas where early-stage startups need to spend money. In this installment we’re going to cover areas where free tools are not only available, but preferred. In the final installment we’ll cover areas where startups should not spend money despite common advice to the contrary. Free is rarely better than paid. If you spend enough time watching people discuss new products on Product Hunt or Hacker News, it’s easy to see this sentiment echoed: People would rather pay a small amount of money for something they can count on than integrate something for free that may disappear in a few months. For certain categories, though, a mature tool with an ample free tier and a clear path toward scaling your usage as you grow can not only be good enough, but preferred. Herein are the categories from which you should be using free products — and why. Website monitoring is one of those things that every website should have. Even if your product is “just a WordPress site” and you have no tech team, the last thing you want to is find out that your site is down from . To solve this, check out something like or . When things go bad, you’ll want to have a way to communicate the problem to your customers. With a quality product and an entry price of $29/month, something like is a steal and totally worth it — but for a completely free option, just point status.[yoursite].com at and use that to update people when your site is down. For more information on how to run your status page, check out our on the topic. Exceptions are what happens when things go wrong and you see pages . Lots of sites out there don’t have exception monitoring, and instead rely on users reporting issues. This is not how you build a successful product. is a great way to monitor exceptions. They support web apps, JavaScript apps, “simple” websites and mobile apps. As of writing this, they have a generous free tier: up to 3,000 exceptions for free per month, forever. Your code has to live somewhere. is clearly the winner in this field, and if you’re developing any open-source software, having your repository on GitHub has become the status quo. For your private repositories, however, you need to pay. Instead, you can host your private repositories on or and save more than $300/year. This is going to get me in hot water with some folks out there, but my experience is that early-stage startups should not use traditional CRM software. Instead, use , or for CRM. The reason is relatively simple: In the early days, you don’t know enough about your sales cycles to warrant going all in on a tool. You may start off closing a few monthly customers after weeks of negotiations, but after six months you may realize there is more money in simply offering your service as a self-service SaaS. In the beginning, use the flexibility these simple, free tools allow, pay attention to where efficiencies can be gained and once you step out of the “early-stage” go find a tool that really solves your needs. In the early days, you might not have much usage of your product, and your incoming support tickets be even lower — but that’s no excuse not to set up a great help-desk system. It’s easy to let tickets slip through the cracks when the volume goes up, but it’s just as easy to forget about a ticket when you’re not used to answering them. I made this mistake once, and it cost me a huge customer. Don’t repeat my mistakes. There are many great free tools out there for support. We like because they not only offer a forever-free tier, but they also offer an in-app support widget called a “beacon,” which is very handy for giving users a way to contact you while they are using your website. As you grow, you can pay to host a Knowledge Base and manage multiple help inboxes. I see lots of companies get overly concerned about data-driven marketing in the early days, but the hardest of getting started with email marketing is getting into a rhythm of emailing your customers/subscribers regularly. Until you that, it’s not worth money on more advanced products. Whether you’re starting out announcing blog posts, sending updates to investors or notifying people of new features, is the way to go. They offer up to 2,000 subscribers for free and have all the extras you’ll need, like open tracking and templating to give you the data to know when it’s time to graduate to something more mature. Some kind of system to get customer feedback is a requirement; there is no shortage of tools out there, each with their own focus. For the founders, marketers, customer success managers and product managers out there, you might want to check out the behavior-driven-questions product that my company (Ramen) has created. In addition, you may also find success for heatmaps or for in-app chat. From my experience, social media for an early-stage company is great for three things: showing off your culture, providing an outlet for customer support and — most importantly — simply showing you have a pulse. Everyone thinks they need to get really serious about analytics and tracking so they can see how effective their social campaigns are going, but your mileage vary greatly. Case in point: Ramen gets 5x the signups from comments we make on Disqus threads than we from social posts. With all this in mind, it’s key to use a social media management tool that does its job — sharing posts on social media — and gets out of your way. is that tool. The free tier lacks some of the analytics and bulk publishing functionality of more advanced tools, but for making sure your social media game is on point, it is the best place to start. By “team communication” I mean group chat. There are established products like , and new products like the rocket ship that is . I’m a huge fan of Slack for one reason: It lets me funnel different types of notifications to different channels, then fine-tune how I’m notified on a per-channel basis. In some channels (like #errors) I get notified on every message. In some channels (like #support) I get notified on every message until I’m taking a day off, then I can mute that channel for 24 hours. I’m sure other tools like HipChat have similar capabilities, and both offer substantial free tiers. That’s it for this installment of the . The final of this series will cover some common “gotchas” when it comes to money. Spoiler alert: It includes things like not money on that premium domain everyone is telling you is critical to your success.
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No man is an island, which is why London’s tech community needs Europe
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Harry Briggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
First let’s clear up this myth about red tape. When I hear politicians rage about European red tape, I wonder whether any of them have actually run a business. I even believed the myths myself — until I started a business. When I co-founded Firefly Tonics, a health drinks company, the only interactions we had with Europe were, frankly, helpful… European labeling rules meant we could sell right across Europe and European trademarks meant you completed one form and it protected you everywhere. When I invested in GoCardless, we were excited about the harmonisation of banking regulations across Europe, because it meant we could expand rapidly across the continent, and challenge the entrenched, over-priced incumbents. So these rules small businesses like mine break into new markets. The standards us a tonne of time. That doesn’t mean I’m not instinctively sceptical of centralised Brussels decision-making. Like many entrepreneurs, I don’t flow easily with the unaccountability, the wasteful Common Agricultural Policy and the farce of upping sticks to Strasbourg once a month to appease the French. I worry particularly that big corporations – including UK PLCs – spend increasing time in Brussels lobbying. There’s a danger that Brussels is becoming more like Washington DC: a giant federal government protecting big established corporates from competition. But so far, mostly, the EU is not the problem. The EU has shown that it can stand up to corporate giants like Google and Microsoft much better than our own government. They’ve stood up to big TelCo’s, prevented giant mergers (that our government wanted to wave through) and forced down tariffs. Let’s hope they keep at it. Then there’s a broader question. There are big problems in Europe. Economic catastrophe in Greece. Appalling youth unemployment in France, Spain and Italy. Unaffordable welfare time-bombs as well as the massive movement of migrants and refugees crossing into Europe from Syria and North Africa. Are we best to shut ourselves off? Two years ago Donald Trump said that the solution to the Ebola crisis was to stop all American flights to West Africa. Try to remember the rising panic and tabloid headlines shrieking “close the borders”. But just imagine where we’d be today if the rest of the world had simply shut off West Africa. We were bigger than that. The international community risked lives to help solve the crisis – making us all safer. It’s a big leap from Ebola to Europe, but the message is the same. We have a track record of being an involved nation. We sit on the world’s leading governmental bodies, from NATO to the G7 to the UN. We do that because as one of the richest nations in the world we feel our responsibilities keenly. But let’s not forget it is also in our interest. In the EU, we play our part, we contribute money and expertise – and we nudge it in the direction we want to go. By helping to solve problems and increase prosperity, ultimately we help ourselves. So there’s a moral case for not shutting ourselves off. But there’s also a massive selfish case for it. It’s the same with immigration. Trump stirs up US voters with talk of Mexico sending its “drug dealers” and “rapists”. But in Europe, the dirty secret is that the people are coming to the UK. Where are the brightest young Italians, Germans, French, Spaniards and Swedes? They’re in Queens Park and Battersea and Kentish Town. They’re working for Shoreditch start-ups and Soho advertising agencies and, yes, Canary Wharf banks. They’re studying at Imperial or LSE or St Martin’s. They’re choosing to spend the best years of their lives here, and making London the most buzzing, international, thriving city in the world. As a start-up investor, I meet smart, ambitious European entrepreneurs every day, and one of their biggest decisions is where to base their company. They want a business-friendly climate, but most of all they want access to the best talent – the best computer scientists, the best designers, the best business brains. They weigh up San Francisco – but that means months of visa applications. So they choose London. London was just ranked by Ernst and Young as the second best place , after Silicon Valley, to start a business. Every other city in the world would kill to have London’s pulling-power right now. Why would we shut that off? In the last couple of years I’ve invested in Gousto – run by a German, based in West London; Toucanbox – founded by a French lady, in Putney; Lyst, founded by a half-Spanish Brit and a Slovenian, in Hoxton; Peoplegraph, founded by a Brit and a Romanian, in Bristol. They’re here because they can find the skills they need here, from a pool of nationalities. Just look at the top teams of the UK’s leading startups right now: you’ll find Italian CTOs, Danish sales directors, Bulgarian data scientists, Swedish product managers, German operations experts. And, of course, the best British talent too. That’s why London has leapt over other European cities since the mid-1990s. Today it is the undisputed leader in venture capital raised in Europe – and now other British cities – Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh – are building significant tech communities too. We’re building the next generation of great global pioneering companies right here on British soil. Yet right now London’s tech founders and entrepreneurs are sending panicky emails asking what they should do if Brexit wins the day. They want to know should they flee to Berlin, to Barcelona, to Dublin or anywhere that is safely in Europe. When you’re a small company that employs 40 people and only 12 are British, staying in a closed-off Britain could threaten your very existence. It’s not so difficult to move a business somewhere else. These guys know, because many have already done it. Quitting Europe now wouldn’t just cause untold damage – it would be deeply out of character. We’ve never been small-minded. Our horizons have always been bigger. As John Donne wrote 400 years ago: No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less. If we turn our back on Europe and vote Leave on 23 June, I’m afraid the bells will toll for us.
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Signs point to a contraction, but no one’s bursting venture capital’s bubble
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Bill Maris
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
In March of last year, our GV engineering team to assess whether or not the tech industry was experiencing a bubble. That question was being asked a lot at the time (it’s less prevalent now, in light of some changes in the market). During our research, we uncovered ample evidence to argue both sides of the coin. And even with a great deal of number crunching, we didn’t arrive at a definitive answer. The most we could verify is that if we were in a bubble, it was a very different bubble from the . One important difference is that in 2000, individual investors in public equities bore the brunt of the dotcom bubble burst. If there’s a bubble today, private capital investors and institutions likely stand to lose the most. That includes GV. Have things changed? More than a year later, our engineering team has repeated the exercise, looking at data from a variety of sources to answer this persistent question of whether or not we’re in a bubble. The evidence still doesn’t point to a definitive answer. Here’s what we found: Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley talk anecdotally about a Sure enough, the data show that venture capital dollars deployed in Q1 are down 11%, and the number of deals dropped 5% compared with last year. As we’ve all seen, companies are . The first quarter of 2016 was the slowest for IPOs since 2011, and the average time between first funding and IPO is now eight years. Later stage companies that may be contemplating IPO have seen their valuations We’ve seen data that suggest late-stage valuations as a whole have dropped more than 43% since their peak at third quarter of last year. Venture capital funds raised $13B in the first three months of 2016, the largest quarter and a full 59% higher than the same period last year. And it’s worth noting that the that the VC industry deployed more capital in 2015 than any year since 1995. Despite the valuation decline, later stage companies continue to raise additional rounds at an enthusiastic pace. In Q1 2016, investments in later stage rounds increased 10%, representing 22% of the total deal volume. The IPO slowdown isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. In the first quarter of this year, there were 25% fewer M&A exits quarter over quarter, but the deal value was double year over year. Exits through acquisitions seem to have taken the place of some IPOs. The underscores the M&A environment in the public markets. So… is there a bubble? What is a reasonable conclusion from this less-than-conclusive data? Data more often lead to solid conclusions rather than predictions, which is what makes this difficult. I think a bubble that suddenly goes “pop” is less likely given the data from the last few quarters, but caution is still warranted. It’s on my mind as I review potential investments. Like most venture investors, the companies we invest in stand a chance of failing, and unbridled success is rare. Spectacular failures, while unfortunate, are part of our reality. Regardless of the economic climate, the real job of any investor is to help entrepreneurs build meaningful companies and technologies. The best investors that we know don’t try to time the market, and neither do the best entrepreneurs. We have to keep at it.
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A quick look at the state of hardware technologies in China and beyond
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Jonathan Shieber
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
In the past few years hardware investment has come into its own as a major force in the tech world beyond the walls of medical devices (where it had been relegated for years). A from , the hardware accelerator backed by shows just how far the movement has come in a relatively short time. According to HAX partner Benjamin Joffe, China has become the epicenter for hardware in the world. Foreign companies have flocked to the country, while domestic giants like the upstart hardware manufacturer and handset and drone companies like and take their place on the global technology stage. A on Shenzhen illustrates just how far China’s star has risen and how dominant the country has become in the world of technology hardware manufacturing, development, and innovation. And the physical impact of these products is only just beginning to shape the direction the tech industry will take in years to come. When it comes to the Chinese hardware scene a few categories dominate. The aforementioned DJI is the clear leader in drone technology and new entrants like Yuneec and eHang are nipping at their heels. Robots are another area where the Chinese market is beginning to outpace its Western counterparts. Consumers have gone wild for social robots and toys and the Taiwanese tech giant, Foxconn wants to and would need cheaper industrial robots to make that a reality. Indeed, robots for factories, stores, and shopping centers are beginning to show promise and HAX portfolio companies like the inventory robot Simbe (now ), and delivery robot are good examples, said Joffe. It’s undeniable Chinese hardware manufacturing has been metaphorically blowing up, with consumer facing products being embraced by crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter. Joffe said his accelerator has backed — as well as a few over $1 million babies. But there’s still a quality problem that persists. In no category is that more apparent than in personal mobility where stories of devices literally blowing up have cast a pall over the market. Joffee said that there are still opportunities for upstarts to remake the image of the hoverboard, but contenders like , who acquired Segway. avoid using the term “hoverboard” in the U.S. It’s getting hot in here, according to investors. Luminaries like Jenny Lee, a Managing Partner at (who is a very active investor in hardware — and a former drone engineer) point to the incredibly compressed time it takes a Chinese hardware company to bring their product to market as a source of excitement among investors. Hardware startups in the country can go to market in 6 months instead of the typical two years it takes to get a product out the door in the U.S. (but see above for some problems with that model). For investors like Fan Bao, the chairman of , the problem is an overabundance of companies — with varying degrees of quality. The easy money available in the country, and more broadly across Asia, means that Chinese startups that shouldn’t be funded are still getting funding. Joffe thinks the problem is one of perspective. “Startup founders in China tend to think investment is the best way to reach the next milestone, which is often simply more investment, rather than making sure they deliver something unique and sustainable,” he wrote. Compounding the stiff competition from well-funded early stage competitors there’s another issue as well. Giants looming in the market that are waiting to pick up a good idea and run with it at a scale startups could find it hard to compete with. Indeed, companies like Xiaomi are commoditizing “easy” things very fast so investors are looking at either products with high technical barriers of entry, a recurring revenue component, or the ability to build a brand very quickly. As Joffe looks away from China’s shores he points to opportunities around 3D printing, health technologies and even the coming reality of cyborgs in the world. “The rise of health tech is very exciting – we are now well beyond step counters. There are devices to monitor, prevent, diagnose, coach, train and even heal. They cover physical and mental conditions,” said Joffe in an email. He pointed to startups focusing on , , and . Then come the cyborgs. There were that went public in 2014, including Japan’s , now worth about $5b, that are bringing a vision of enhanced humanity to the world. (Cyberdyne however is a ). Finally, while 3D printing still has yet to live up to its promise, with Makerbot-style printers becoming commodities (and the company is after being a “made in USA” champion) and the tool still very much in the hands of hobbyists, a shift is beginning to happen, according to Joffe. “New technologies are coming to market to print faster, better or in new materials including . New desktop and smart tools are coming to market able to work with a wide variety of materials with , or even ,” Joffe said. “The possibility of micro-factories and mass customization are getting closer.” These days, according to Joffe, AR and VR are in a class by themselves. VR was one of the stars of the show at E3, and the first devices are coming to market now. However challenges, persist and there will be new hardware entrants that will look to help solve them. Everything from creating engaging content – new 360 cameras from amateur like to pro like are going to help – to interacting in the VR space will require hardware tools to help.
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Uber positions its China app as more than a ride-hailing service
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
Uber China is repositioning itself as an all-in-one solution for transportation, food and entertainment. At TechCrunch Shanghai, Uber China VP of Operations and Regional General Manager of Central China Kate Wang showed off Uber’s new vision for China — one that includes two new offerings, UberLIFE and Uber + Travel, which will roll out across China this year. All-in-one solutions are something the Chinese market demands. That’s what WeChat, the hot messaging app that sees 697 million active users worldwide every month, . In addition to messaging, the app offers voice and video calling, payments, shopping, games and more. It seems that Uber, , is taking a page or several from WeChat’s playbook. It’s worth noting that WeChat is owned by Tencent, which is an investor in Uber’s biggest rival, Didi Chuxing, formerly known as Didi Kuaidi. In an analysis of data, Uber figured out that people still look at the Uber app for an additional 90 seconds when they’re in the car, so Uber wants to give people more to do when they’re inside the app. With Uber Life, passengers will get served up a digital magazine of sorts to connect them to sports events, art events, plays and other things going on in their local cities. Uber Life is intended to help people “live a better a life” and ultimately spend more time within Uber’s app. With Uber+Travel, the idea is to connect people to everything they might need while traveling internationally — from boats to air balloons. In a promo video shown at TC Shanghai, we saw new services like UberBoat and UberBalloon, as well as logos for all of Uber’s partners in local cities. “This reminds us that Uber is a global service serving global citizens,” Wang said. “It is rooted in each of the cities.” With Uber+Travel, Uber can tap into its network of partners throughout the world to offer more of a seamless travel experience. Last year, , which recommends travel itineraries. Wang also spoke about UberPASS, a package of rides that you can buy to use in different cities. Earlier this month, . Uber first entered China about two years ago, while Didi has been operating in China for four years. Since launching in China, Uber’s footprint has expanded from ten to 60 cities. Now, Wang said, Uber’s goal is to transform itself from a player in the car-hailing market “to a commerce service that understands life and a proper life.”
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The future of 3D-printed prosthetics
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Jon Miller Schwartz
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
The recent ubiquity of printers and innovations in prosthetic design, manufacturing and distribution offer a viable solution for the millions of people living with limb loss around the world. In the United States alone, close to 200,000 amputations are performed each year, yet, with priced from $5,000-$50,000, having one can almost be considered a luxury. Traditionally, the process of getting a prosthetic limb can take anywhere from weeks to months. Because are such personal items, each one has to (or should) be custom-made or fit to the needs of the wearer. However, as printers become more affordable, with some available for , the possibility of anyone being able to design and print a prosthetic limb in their home or local community is rapidly becoming a reality. To fully appreciate the cost of prosthetic limbs, we can look at the economics of a family with a child in need. On average, each prosthetic has a lifespan of five years, and when considering younger children who are growing every day and are prone to breaking things, more frequent replacements are required. Once you calculate the price of the prosthetic and its subsequent replacements, the total lifetime cost could place a considerable amount of strain on a family’s finances. Not to mention, it is also almost impossible to get insurance companies to cover that cost annually — a new Medicare proposal that would limit access to limbs (currently, there are 150,000 amputees in the system). The democratization of prosthetic design and creation through printing enables millions of people around the world to reap the benefits of the newly popularized manufacturing technology. Open-source initiatives such as let anyone with a printer customize and create a prosthetic hand. Those on the Enable team, a global network of passionate volunteers, are using printing to give the world a helping hand, and it only costs $50. Enable’s “Raptor Reloaded” prosthetic hand in action. With printing, kids can create a prosthetic based on their needs, such as an extendable arm that allows him or her to items off the floor. Akin to printing a document, printing a prosthetic is quickly becoming as easy as pressing “print” and watching the printer build layer upon layer. In the near , will be seamlessly integrated into people’s everyday lives with minimal effort. New scanning and body modeling technologies from companies such as enable people to scan their limbs and have modeled after them, making for more natural fitting and appearance. A 3D laser scanner allows for the creation of a digital 3D model that can be used to design and 3D print a prosthetic limb. Technological developments from innovators such as Hugh Herr of MIT have introduced new abilities, including , integrated sensors and sophisticated algorithms that work together to automate more natural joint movement. The development of for will make it so people won’t have to think hard about controlling the device. Soon, will move with more fluidity to mimic natural movement, and people will be able to control them in part with their brains and bodies through direct natural touch input systems. MIT’s Hugh Herr, demonstrating his prosthetic legs’ ability to simulate an in-place running gait. Furthermore, printers are becoming compatible with many new materials, like lightweight , increasing durability and strength. will also become more comfortable by using multi-material printing methods to create more natural sockets that better interface with the human body. Imagine if wearing a prosthetic felt like wearing that horribly uncomfortable pair of shoes that now lives in the back of your closet… A custom-built machine within Hugh Herr’s lab that measures the “tissue compliance” of a limb. This enables the design and 3D printing of a prosthetic socket that can be both soft and hard, making for a more natural and comfortable fit.
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The opportunities Silicon Valley doesn’t see
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Sebastiaan Vaessen
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
Silicon Valley is justifiably seen as the geographical center of digital innovation. From Google and Facebook to Uber and Netflix, the Valley is home to many global technology leaders. However, when searching for the next big startup, the time has come to look beyond Silicon Valley. It seems that most Western startups are focused on “assisted living for rich hipsters” rather than solving some of the “big” needs the world is facing. In the next five years, 2.5 billion new smartphone users will come online — 80 percent from emerging markets. This will inevitably lead to growing numbers of local entrepreneurs creating innovative solutions bespoke to the needs of their region and, in the process, building highly successful businesses. It’s highly likely that, in the future, some of the biggest digital innovations will come from markets outside of the West. This trend has already started; an example can be found in our portfolio company in India. Before redBus, travellers in India had to negotiate myriad bus companies with conflicting timetables, resulting in immense confusion when working out the various connections needed for cross-country trips. redBus aggregated this complex market onto one simple bus ticketing platform for all of India. It is now being rolled out to Malaysia, Singapore and other international markets. is another shining example. This company has mobilized more than 200,000 motorbike riders in 10 major Indonesian cities to solve a number of logistics requirements, from couriering to food delivery. Similarly, , another Naspers investment, began as a small venture that displaced physical advert boards at petrol stations using a mobile app. Now, more than 350,000 Brazilian truck drivers bid for more than a million truck loads on TruckPad every month. These businesses would never have been created in Silicon Valley because they address problems that simply do not exist there. But they did solve problems that billions of people in high-growth markets face every day. Opportunities to solve local challenges in high-growth markets are abundant across a range of industries. Globally, 1.2 billion people still do not have access to electricity. More than one-third of the world’s population doesn’t have proper access to healthcare or education. There are unbanked people in the world and 2.2 billion live in high-growth markets such as Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. These are profound social issues, but also large commercial opportunities. The 2.5 billion new smartphone users in emerging markets offer a powerful platform for local tech entrepreneurs and their businesses. Businesses like Jumo and M-KOPA. is a money marketplace offering mobile users in Sub-Saharan Africa access to loans, by-passing the traditional banking system. Meanwhile, offers Kenyan households an affordable solar energy solution enabled by a pay-as-you-go mobile billing solution. The world still faces some enormous challenges when it comes to social mobility and economic prosperity, and necessity is the mother of invention. The stage is now set for new digital innovation hubs to rise up in high-growth markets across the globe. The next billion-dollar entrepreneurs will likely come from São Paulo, Bengaluru or Shenzhen, and they won’t be serving rich hipsters.
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Announcing the agenda for the TechCrunch Meetup in Tel Aviv
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016 | 6 | 19 |
It’s happening. The TechCrunch team landed in Tel Aviv and we’re in the starting blocks for the on Wednesday June 22. And it’s going to be an awesome event. As TechCrunch doesn’t come to Tel Aviv often enough, we wanted to do something special for our meetup here. In addition to the usual networking part and pitch-off competition, we lined up a few great speakers to tell us more about what’s happening in Israel when it comes to tech startups. And we’re looking forward to having a drink with all of you.
Doors open, networking
Opening Remarks
Fireside Chat: , the ninth President of the State of Israel Israel, a diverse ecosystem ( Panel): (KamaTech founder), (Nurami Medical co-founder and CTO) and (Pitango Venture Capital co-founder and Managing General Partner)
Driving the self-driving car innovation with (Mobileye co-founder and CTO)
Beyond ads with (Taboola president and COO) and (Wix CMO)
Pitch-Off: TechCrunch selected to compete and pitch in front of (JVP’s Gadi Tirosh, Nautilus’ Merav Rotem Naaman, Viber’s Michael Shmilov, LeumiTech’s Yifat Oron and TechCrunch Editors)
Judge deliberations, TechCrunch announcements and crowning the winner
Networking Date: June 22
Time: 5:30 PM — 10:00 PM
Venue: Trask – טראסק, Tel Aviv
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A new sales technology stack is coming
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Karan Mehandru
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
Perhaps the greatest revolution in the modern go-to-market model was not actually a revolution at all, but simply the easiest thing we could do with all the new data being generated by our systems. I’m talking about inbound marketing and demand generation, the process by which marketing as a function becomes a quantitative effort to buy units of value (leads) at a predictable price and hand those off to a sales team that can convert them at a predictable rate. This is where the light has been shining, operating under the philosophy that long as lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratios work, we’re in business. Sales has always been about building 1:1 relationships, understanding the customer and creating the compelling event to buy. Before, the process of cold calling customers, positioning products, creating collateral, taking a lead from first meeting to close, carrying a quota, closing deals and building meaningful relationships with customers — in short all of the pieces that inform one’s understanding of its target audience were incredibly difficult to quantify and manage. Photo courtesy of Flickr/
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Accessibility was all around this year’s WWDC
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Steven Aquino
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
From , there was one overarching theme that emerged — from watchOS 3’s conceptual simplification, to Siri coming to the Mac, to the “app store” in Messages, it became clear that Apple is focused on making its software more accessible than ever before. These features, among others, were built with the intent of giving users — and especially developers — greater access to Apple’s platforms and the apps users love. This underscores the idea that accessibility, conceptually, is much more than just the discrete “accessibility options for people with disabilities”. At its heart, accessibility is about just that: access. . At the same time, the accessibility community has tons to look forward to this fall. Across Apple’s four software platforms there are many new things to be excited about — like a new pronunciation editor in VoiceOver on iOS 10 and tvOS; and Taptic Time in watchOS 3, which uses Apple Watch’s haptic feedback to tell a VoiceOver user the time in environments where audio alerts are inappropriate, like in meetings. The purpose of any accessibility feature is to enable someone with a disability to partake in as much of the core experience as possible, which Apple has succeeded in doing . The difference this year is it seems Apple has put increased emphasis on a cohesive, consistent experience across its platforms. One great example is the new “Control other devices” option in the Switch Control menu on iOS. It’s a feature whereby someone can control their Apple TV (which supports Switch Control, new to tvOS) with their iPhone, provided both devices are signed into the same iCloud account and on the same Wi-Fi network. , Apple dedicates several sessions and labs to explain its new assistive technologies, suggest best practices for inclusive design, and help developers ensure their apps are accessible to everyone. That continued at Moscone this year, to be sure, but the vibe was different. Apple brought me back to WWDC again this year, and it felt like they put even more focus and energy into making accessibility a star attraction of the conference. There are three new accessibility features I believe will have the most impact. . When Apple’s Director of Fitness & Health Technologies, Jay Blahnik, revealed the wheelchair-focused feature of the Activity app, it was a pleasant surprise. As I during the event, this feature strikes me as the most Apple-y thing Apple announced. That the company went to such lengths to study wheelchair fitness, develop algorithms for measuring movement, and implement it into the watch is so quintessentially Apple. It’s also a testament to Apple’s seriousness at improving its health tech, something that’s a cornerstone of not only the Apple Watch but of the company’s ethos to create products that enrich people’s lives. From an accessibility perspective, what makes “wheelchair mode” so noteworthy is it opens up the watch to more people. It makes Apple Watch a more diverse and inclusive product (many wheelchair users may have previously felt the watch had limited appeal in terms of fitness tracking). Now, they can benefit from the watch’s Activity app like anyone else. Overall, “wheelchair mode” (and especially the “Time to roll!” notification) is an incredibly thoughtful addition to watchOS. . In iOS 10, there is a magnifier option for iPhone and iPad. It uses the camera, along with filters and the LED flash for lighting, to magnify objects.< I got a hands-on briefing of the magnifier by folks from Apple, and it’s the feature I’m most looking forward to in iOS. In so many situations — reading medication labels or price tags in the grocery store, for instance—I struggle to read the information because the print is so small. I often use the flashlight on my phone to give me more light while reading, and the magnifier is going to be even more indispensable. And I’m sure I’m not the only one with low vision who’ll get lots of practical use from it. . In iOS 10, Apple has added support for a software TTY feature so that someone who’s deaf can make and receive phone calls right from an iPhone. It obviates the need for a . Transcripts are saved in the Phone app, and there’s even a special keyboard that includes keys for TTY-based etiquette such as “GA”, or “Go Ahead,” which prompts readers that it’s okay to reply. This is a game-changer for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Aside from eliminating the need for extra hardware, Software TTY gives the deaf community another compelling reason—the other being FaceTime—to buy an iPhone. \It makes the iPhone an even more viable communication tool for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. What’s more, it saves (like me) from needing a real TTY to talk to loved ones, because the iPhone does it. Photo courtesy of . WWDC 2016 marked the second straight year Apple recognized an app for not only superb design, but superb design. was . in that category is , from German development studio Algoriddim. What’s special about djay Pro is the app is fully compatible with VoiceOver, despite the fact that the majority of the app uses custom user interface elements. This matters because apps that utilize standard UIKit controls get full VoiceOver support “for free.” That the folks at Algoriddim built their custom UI did the work to ensure labels and such are fully accessible is awesome. At a macro level, where Workflow’s VoiceOver support helps the blind and visually impaired be more productive, djay Pro helps them be more creative. You need not look any further than to see this in action, as a blind member of Apple’s Accessibility team, himself a DJ, demos djay Pro’s capabilities. (Skip to around the mark. There are other apps, of course, but Workflow and djay Pro prove that for an app to have great design, it needs to have great accessible design to boot. Design and accessibility are not mutually exclusive, so it’s great to see Apple pushing the idea in sessions and recognize it with honors like its Design Awards. The new deserves mention here because I think it best represents the abstract nature of accessibility. As Tim Cook said on stage, the sole purpose of Swift Playgrounds is to make coding accessible to everyone, particularly school-age children. But it isn’t only suitable for kids. can benefit from using Swift Playgrounds. Swift Playgrounds is Apple’s attempt to bring coding, at least on a basic level, to the masses. Cook also mentioned that software development should be a core part of schools’ curriculum, and the introduction of Swift Playgrounds is a push to get more people thinking about software development and computer science. In this context, then, Swift Playgrounds is all about accessibility. It’s Apple’s way of shepherding the next generation of developers by making a fun, easy to use tool that makes learning Swift easy and accessible.
As I wrote at the outset, the vibe around WWDC exuded much enthusiasm for accessibility. From the sessions to deaf-blind accessibility & inclusion advocate Haben Girma’s to an accessibility-centric party I attended mid-week, accessibility had a larger presence than ever this year. And that’s not counting , which is bound to have ramifications for the visually impaired. A big reason for the attention accessibility received, I think, is Apple’s ever-apparent evolution in Tim Cook’s image. Apple has been very socially conscious under Cook’s leadership (cf. the moment of silence at the start of the keynote for the tragedy in Orlando, FL), and their focus on accessibility at WWDC—and — are manifestations of that ideal. In WWDC’s case, so much revolved around accessibility in 2016 that I can’t wait to see what Apple is planning for 2017.
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How the ‘insecurity of things’ creates the next wave of security opportunities
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Mahendra Ramsinghani
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
More than 5 billion IoT devices were installed in 2015. Gartner this will grow to 20 billion by 2020. Unfortunately, experts agree that security is not only an afterthought, but often is actively resisted and circumvented. IoT devices are attractive to hackers because they have very weak login credentials, are “on 24/7” and have little to no secure communication channels. Hackers have started using these compromised devices to launch DDoS attacks, and even sell Instagram and Twitter robo “likes” for the vain. Data from an shows that 80 percent of IoT devices failed to require passwords of sufficient complexity and length. As much as 70 percent of the devices did not encrypt communications. And 60 percent of these devices raised security concerns with their user interfaces. In an 23 percent of respondents said they have no mitigating controls to prevent unauthorized device access in their company’s networks. In an IoT security by Yokohama National University, researchers created an IoT honey pot, or an IoTPOT, to attract the bears. They found that Telnet-based attacks on IoT devices have rocketed since 2014. Telnet is a communication protocol that has no encryption or authentication. All data is transmitted in plain text. Yet a large number of industrial and scientific devices have only Telnet as a communication option. Secure Shell protocol, or SSH, is a better option, but it increases bandwidth overload. And worse, some IoT devices cannot be configured to SSH, unless the interface appliance can be re-configured. With 70 percent of devices communicating in plain text, breaking in becomes easy. Katsunari Yoshioka, who conducted the IoTPOT study, says, “Using an over-30-year-old insecure remote access service like Telnet for global access is technically simple and easy to fix. But the mass infections shows how many manufacturers do not really care, or do not know how to secure their products.” Once hackers gain access to devices, the next step is infection of the device; the last step is monetization. Five distinct DDoS malware families targeting Telnet-enabled IoT devices have been invented. Your DVR has already being hacked and used as a botnet — you just don’t know it! DVR as a botnet: IoT devices compromised. Source: Gartner. Enterprise IoT includes energy: Yokohama National University Study, January 2016. In fact, more than 56 “types” of devices, such as wireless routers, DVRs, IP Phones, web cameras and even heat pumps were found to be compromised. Spreading infection to other IoT devices with worm-like behavior often helps hackers build their DDoS botnet army quickly. And as much as 83 percent of binaries identified are new — in other words, new malware is being developed to target IoT. The range of IoT insecurity challenges already identified include Belkin Wemo Home Automation Devices and LIFX Bulbs (both had keys embedded in the firmware), refrigerators turning into a botnet for sending spam and, every parent’s nightmare, a baby monitoring camera hacked by remote viewers. Wearables are equally lousy when it comes to security. An smartwatches often send data to multiple backend destinations (often including third parties). Smartwatch communications are trivially intercepted in 90 percent of the cases
and 70 percent of watch firmware was transmitted without
encryption. Indeed,
30 percent of watches and their applications were vulnerable to account harvesting, allowing attackers to guess login credentials and gain access to user accounts. While these are consumer “things,” the enterprise IoT playground is where the money is bigger. Industrial, building automation, energy, transportation and healthcare are a verticals in which we will see a proliferation of these devices. IoT will play an active role in equipment monitoring, maintenance, troubleshooting and automation. The money gets staggering — currently spent on maintenance of industrial machines ($10 billion on aviation, $ 7 billion on utilities/oil & gas, $3 million on locomotives and $250 million on healthcare). This maintenance adds up to 330 million man-hours. In other words, lots of data to optimize the parts and processes and reduce such maintenance costs and downtime. Other giants, like Siemens, Bosch and Honeywell, and others, are leaping in to grab a slice of the IoT market. Combined, Gartner expects as many of 20 billion IoT units will be sold by 2020. Internet of Things Units Installed Base by Category (Millions of Units), : Gartner November 2015) The IoT management layer is being tackled by the likes of and , while has tackled connectivity for an entire “smart city.” along with a $350 million IoT fund. Samsung wants to . Startups focused on IoT security, like (backed by Bessemer), look for RF signatures, while and are taking a shot at cloud-based analytics and device behavior anomalies. (backed by Shasta, Trident) recently to strengthen its energy management offerings. A newcomer to this space, , wants to take a different approach and catalog all devices and be a “Google Street View” for the internet. The company, which announced a $20 million Series A round led by NEA, was seeded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Trae Stephens at Founders Fund says that Qadium’s ability to look at an entire network combined with speed and scale made it a compelling opportunity. Qadium CEO Tim Junio says that Qadium’s cataloging approach will give its customers an edge as the attack surface widens. “There is no a priori ability to identify what parts of the global internet are relevant to customers. To solve this, we need an internet-scale approach. We have created a dataset to answer questions that customers often do not know to ask. In our research, we did not expect to see misconfigurations in critical infrastructure that, if compromised, could cause literally tens of billions of dollars of global price fluctuations in certain markets.” The IoT landscape is vast and challenging. For one, the complexity of hardware designs and memory/battery limitations cause constraints. Managing OS variants, communication protocols and application areas will be no easy task for any enterprise insurance underwriters who are each year in premiums. Yet underwriters need visibility in the IoT fabric. Underwriters Laboratories (UL) has already launched a for a variety of devices, offering its stamp of approval. “For underwriters, real-time visibility at the device layer is essential to develop a robust risk premium pricing models” says Trae Stephens. Where human lives may be at risk (healthcare devices/insulin pumps/power plants), regulatory forces may step in to ensure security no longer remains an afterthought. As the IoT market evolves, acquisitions have started to heat up. . . acquired and . and to bolster its offering. As the number of devices grows rapidly, acquirers will step in to strengthen their own security posture. And that should be music for IoT security startups.
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Will the rich get richer with Apple’s new app store ads
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Oren Kaniel
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
Apple’s reveal of sponsored search ads on the App Store was overshadowed by its simultaneous opening up and improvement of its subscription offerings. But for the average developer or publisher, the ads will have a much more immediate effect on their business. Paid ads won’t begin until Apple has completed a period of free testing. In the interim, App Store publishers should be watching carefully to predict how paid ads will affect their acquisition strategy. With one more channel to spend in, will big publishers dominate even further? Could indies find a new toehold? Is Apple just trying to bolster revenue, or is it working harder on improving the long-moribund App Store experience? There’s a cynical view that holds that Apple is just creating paid ads for revenue: in iOS9 Apple enabled ad blockers, and just months later, with sales of iPhones and Macs decreasing, it’s now enabling sponsored ads as a powerful new revenue stream. Other cynics will decry that the App Store is now a pay-to-play environment, forcing developers to bid even on their own name or app title unless they want to see competitors kidnap traffic clearly meant for them. But these views are simplistic and counter-productive. Regardless of Apple’s intention, we know that sponsored ads will be a benefit and opportunity for some developers. The question is: which ones? Based on what we know of user behavior, a user seeing a large ad (initial mockups ) on top of a list of other search results may simply click through the ad, never seeing the organic results. This behavior could be intensified on the App Store, which is mainly displayed on phones with extremely limited screen space. Unless more customers suddenly enter the App Store, it’s hard to imagine that ads won’t decrease organic traffic to some degree. So search ads may be another lethal blow for those relying on organic traffic as a growth strategy. The vast majority of developers now face a situation in which paid marketing is practically essential in order to grow. Developers with money to invest in acquisition campaigns can just put money toward sponsored ads. From Apple’s perspective, favoring large developers even more may not be a bad thing. With two million apps available, the market is simply too saturated. And often, the better products will be those with higher revenue, which can in turn be invested into App Store search. When all is said and done, paid ads may help boil down the overcrowded App Store to fewer, better products. On the other hand, from a user perspective the highest-earning apps aren’t always the best apps. This is particularly true of free vs paid apps — well-monetized free will always win, even if paid is a better deal. While the acquisition budgets of large companies look intimidating, indies have already been struggling. A new ad format won’t hurt the acquisition efforts of small and medium companies, and may actually help. One problem indies have long had is the feeling that Apple isn’t doing much to support them or improve the App Store. But sponsored ads are just part of a trend. Not only has Phil Schiller moved over to head the App Store, review times have dropped , and Apple is working harder to communicate with developers, as shown by the announcement of ads. For small developers, App Store ads may also be a place that they can compete better than 3rd party ads run through Facebook and others. Outside forces like brand advertisers won’t be present to drive up prices, and small developers should be able to focus on competing within their own sub-categories, since the ads are served based on search terms. Finally, ads for both indies and big publishers will be automatically generated by Apple from App Store creatives. Without the need to focus on creatives, indies will be on equal footing with their larger competitors — the only requirement to compete will be the ability to track and measure the users arriving from sponsored search, and whether those users have a high lifetime value. And as with Google, per-user prices are likely to be lower for small volumes. For those with a good product and minimal budgets, if they invest smartly in paid search and constantly measure their results — then double-down on the strategies that prove ROI positive — they can still be successful. The very nature of app store searches involves strong user intent, so smaller developers can still capture an audience of valuable, loyal users, even as the rules of the game change. But the most optimistic view is that neither large nor small companies will win over each other. The App Store doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Today, it just happens to appear zero-sum, dominated by large developers who have massive budgets for sophisticated advertising and ASO and hold top grossing ranks for years. Stagnancy is not in anyone’s interest, as shown just a few years back by Zynga’s dominance of Facebook and the subsequent plateau of that platform. Whether or not stagnancy is at fault, studies already show that . Injecting money into the App Store should give Apple a powerful motivation to increase the number of users opening the App Store, alongside other improvements it has already undertaken, like improving Featured listings, adding back categories and more frequent refreshes. So for developers, the only sensible reaction to Apple’s new ads is optimism and intent to buy in. Google Play with no major fallout; in the more lucrative App Store, most developers should be able to find a way to test, measure and ultimately benefit from the new ads. And the increased attention from Apple into its store will be good for all parties, users included.
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OK, Europe: It’s your move
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
first Warsaw TechCrunch Meetup in 2007 at a pub called Lolek. We were visiting my wife’s parents and I figured I would post on the site and get a few people together to see the first iPhone. Five wary people came and three left when they figured out the meetup was a dud. Two weeks ago I visited Krakow for . The event was an effort to bring together politicians, big business, and entrepreneurs. Hundreds of people milled in a massive auditorium across from Wawel Castle where, centuries before, a dragon menaced the countryside. It was clear that things had changed. In less than a decade the entrepreneurial spirit exploded in Poland and Central Europe. From Gdansk to Ljubljana, from Vienna to Budapest the old cradle-to-grave corporate mentality and the offshoring so prevalent in these countries for the past twenty years went away. Why? Because things got better all over thanks to the EU and the potential benefits of entrepreneurial activity outweighed the risks… because of the EU. Now as the Brexit vote is quickly swallowed by the news cycle (and will probably be remembered as a polarizing but ultimately impotent squib), it’s time for Continental Europe to step it up. Some countries are already trying. Poland, for example, just announced a and similar efforts have sprung up throughout Central Europe. Continental Europe has its age-old problems, prejudices, and arguments. The governments – but not the people – of Poland and Hungary are turning hard towards a nationalism that has become a joke at dinner parties. The Brexit points to the sort of xenophobic and backwards-looking tendencies that got gutted Europe in two World Wars. But that’s the macro level. On the micro level, on the ground, businesses are blooming everywhere. Amazing technology is coming out of European incubators and universities and cities that were once factories for producing cookie-cutter engineers. The idea that a young person in Estonia could build a new global communications platform would have been ludicrous in 1980. Now it’s not so far-fetched. Here are a few points on which Europe should focus in order to keep growing and show the UK that a united Europe is stronger than any one nation. The Kafka-esque days of deep European bureaucracy are over. It’s getting easier and easier to grow in Europe. E-identitiy, for example, is exactly what will make the aforementioned Estonia a powerhouse in the next decade. Other countries would do themselves a great favor and follow its lead. Easy on-ramps for entrepreneurs to plug into the EU market is essential. Many would argue that Europe replaced one byzantine bureaucracy with another, I would argue that the current regulatory environment is improving. Further, I believe, fintech is the way forward for many smaller European countries who should now take over for the UK as leaders in the financial space. One of the most visible uses of EU money has been the immense and amazing improvement of Europe’s architecture and art. Places that just are now outdoor museums. Cities crushed by bombs and misrule are now fairy tale towns that tourists visit en masse. This same attention to detail and care must be taken with small businesses. What is a startup but an engine for change just as education is an engine for growth and art is an engine for cultural expansion? Europe needs to build to last. The theater of entrepreneurship is alive and well in Europe and that has to change. Europe has to build real tech businesses. The European tendency to give small amounts of capital for huge chunks of equity has to stop and valuations have to go up. VCs in Europe say they have to take on a lot of risk but I would argue the unique aspects of the European educational system helps build scalable and salable enterprise technologies that could, with investment and encouragement, reach the wider world. In the end the EU has done more good than harm. Arguments abound whether Greece should get Germany’s largesse or Hungary should fund a Portuguese highway but this much is true: when the cultures and nations of Europe were aligned against each other all hell broke loose. That can’t happen again.
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After oil, Norway looks to startups for economic growth
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Dennis Mitzner
| 2,016 | 6 | 26 |
With oil prices plummeting, countries blessed with natural resources are feeling the heat and Norway is no exception. Politicians responding to the oil troubles are heeding calls for a new way forward, centered around startups. And the efforts to foster a new approach are led by an ambitious ex-business exec, the Crown Prince of Norway and a handful of contrarian entrepreneurs. Norway has seen the value of its state-owned oil and gas fields fall by more than $50 billion, or nearly a third, in the last two years, Over 36,000 oil jobs have disappeared — not a small number for a population of 5.1 million. Anita Krohn Traaseth, the CEO of , the Norwegian government’s instrument for innovation and development, says that it’s time for Norway to look beyond oil. “Norway needs to develop and build several growth sectors to contribute to a more diversified and sustainable national economy.” Norway has produced some industry leaders, such as and , but most, if not all of them, are offshoots of the country’s energy sector. Compared to its — Sweden ( ), Denmark, Finland, and even Iceland — Norway is faring poorly. In 2015, the country’s share of investments was a meager 8.85% – or 30 investments – of the entire pie of 339 investments. The total amount of investments in 2015 was $1.82 billion, with Norway taking home $85.4 million, finishing dead last.. While Nordic countries top most lists that measure the attractiveness of different regions for startups, . “One of the main challenges for the local startups is the lack of private capital towards for startup and growth companies,” said Karen Elisabeth Ohm Heskja, Chief Startup and Growth Officer at . Perhaps a sign of its oil and gas worries coupled with a sense of urgency, the in Norwegian startups is up by 300% in 2016. In this year alone, Norway has seen 28 investments, two shy of the total number in 2015. One of the central players driving Norway’s startup scene , headed by Krohn Traaseth. The fund invests on behalf of the government and its ministries, with a total value of 25.3 billion NOK ($3 billion) and in 2015 distributed 6.1 billion NOK ($729.5 million) to Norwegian businesses of which 30 percent were startups. Anita Krohn Traaseth speaking at Startup Extreme. Image by Dan Taylor. “The fundamentals in Norway to make a successful transformation are solid. We still have low unemployment rate, we still have a huge capital reserve to make necessary investments for the future, we have a strong growth of entrepreneurial focus and companies. This is all about how we prioritize, reposition investments, build competence and have the guts to make important, and maybe radical political decisions today, to secure .” Although the pace of change is slow, the shift from oil to new industries is happening. “In the last year we have seen new initiatives emerge that fuel alternative technology such as (Smart City), (Space industry) (transfer of knowledge from oil and gas to health care) and others,” said Ohm Heskja. High wages in the oil industry have also played a role in attitudes toward other industries. “Many industries have been starved of expertise in technology-based careers, because they have been unable to compete with wage levels in the oil industry That has changed, benefiting technology-dependent industries outside of oil and gas, as well as the public sector,” Ohm Heskja says. In addition to the government’s investment activities and new promising initiatives, the country’s most popular monarch, the Crown Prince Haakon has taken an active role in leading Norway’s transition by supporting the creation of a viable startup culture. Visiting Silicon Valley in 2013, Prince Haakon about Norway “constantly trying to foster a culture of innovation.” Prince Haakon has lent his name to support Norwegian startups by visiting local events. In mid-June he kicked off the second annual event in Bergen, a city on the west coast of Norway. Prince Haakon speaking at Startup Extreme. Image by Dan Taylor Although the country’s government and royalty seem to have local startups’ back, problems remain. “Regulations remain an issue. The cost of raising a new seed or venture fund as a first-time manager is simply too high for smaller funds. This means we’re are losing out on important competent capital,” said Rikke Eckhoff Høvding, the CEO of . “Secondly, in the earlier stages, we’re hoping the government will follow the lead of the UK and Australia and introduce tax incentives for investments in early-stage companies.” The problems are exacerbated by an investment mentality that favors the old (gas and oil) at the expense of the new (emerging tech). “The government is still to reluctant to take the necessary steps in the tax and regulatory systems to enable us create generations of successful entrepreneurs, employees of startups and Angel investors. We need more people exposed to starting, working for and investing in startups – and failing or succeeded at it,” said Johan Brand, cofounder and the CEO of , an educational gaming platform headquartered in Oslo. “This is the only way to create generations that are good at it. They (the government) are scared to take unpopular decisions now, that will benefit us long in the term. We currently lack people who are visionary on behalf of the nation.” Brand is also deeply skeptical of the Norwegian government’s willingness to publicly support initiatives that are not oil related. With all the criticism, Brand believes that Norway can create successful companies outside of the energy sphere and in spite of the government. “I believe there is a huge untapped potential in the Norwegian economy with the highly skilled industrial sectors serving the oil industry once applied to other consumer sectors,” said Brand. Frode Jensen, another local entrepreneur, the founder of and another skeptic would would like to see changes on a larger scale. “Programs like Innovation Norway will not have a significant impact. But it’s a good start but we need bigger, systematic changes,” he said. “It has been debated in Norway for decades that we should not grow dependent of the oil industry, yet we did. Of course it’s been a hugely important sector to enable our society to become as prosperous as it is today,” said Brand. “However, we still let ourselves grow dependent at the expense of investing and taking on the costs of building up other sectors.” When it comes to natural resource rich countries and oil-dependency, Norway is an anomaly. Compared to OPEC countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, Norway has a rich democratic tradition similar to its equality-obsessed neighbors in northern Europe. But even for a country like Norway, the overabundance of natural riches might hinder its development into a startup nation. Although Norway continues to be a strong player in oil and gas, many Norwegians have embraced the most truthful cliche ever uttered: nothing lasts forever. The country will continue to dominate as an oil and gas nation in the short run, but this might not be enough to support a generous welfare system that offers fathers a paid four month leave from work.
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Kwik raises $3 million to take on Amazon Dash buttons
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
And the team is announcing that Norwest Venture Partners is leading a $3 million seed round to help Kwik fulfill their vision. The startup hopes that this capital will help them move beyond their beta-testing in Israel and expand to the U.S. “Consumers like the convenience and simplicity of smart buttons,” said Sergio Monsalve, partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “This market is too big for only one player.” Monsalve also believes that Kwik’s approach, which lets brands choose their delivery and payment partners, will encourage more companies to sign up for Kwik. “Their open ecosystem will enable the growth of many businesses, all along the supply chain.” Perhaps we are reaching peak laziness, but Klein insists that “people would like to just not think” and see their pizza and beer arrive.
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