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NIH grants $2.3M to development of FeverPhone, a portable disease diagnosis kit
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
Quick diagnosis of bloodborne diseases can very much be a matter of life and death, but bouncing results off a hospital can take hours or days — so the National Institutes of Health and Cornell University are working on a device called the FeverPhone that could cut that time to as little as 15 minutes. “Imagine a glucose tester for your smartphone, where you can test for dengue instead of measure glucose,” said Cornell engineering professor David Erickson . Easy to deploy, quick to diagnose, and operable without expertise, the FeverPhone app would work with the breadbox-sized “Tidbit,” a largely automated machine that would take blood samples in and send the data to the phone for analysis. Erickson is working with Saurabh Mehta, a Cornell professor of global health, to develop the device. It attracted the attention of the NIH’s Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, which wrote the team a grant for $2.3 million over four years. That grant was just formalized yesterday in an announcement from Senators Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). The researchers will be partnering at the Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral in Ecuador; field validation will occur in the country’s most populous city, Guayaquil, alongside extant infectious disease monitoring infrastructure. “A common feature of neglected tropical diseases, such as dengue, malaria, chikungunya, Zika and other viral and non-viral diseases, is its disproportionate burden on resource-limited countries,” explained ESPOL’s Washington B. Cárdenas, “where technology for surveillance, basic biomedical research, diagnosis and treatment are constrained.” A cheap, quick, and reliable test for such diseases would be of incalculable value; as Cárdenas points out, countries like Ecuador are the main ones stricken by them and the resulting cost, in lives and other measures, is immense. For the record, Zika was not mentioned as part of the grant, but the technology should be adaptable to detect it. The four years of the grant also indicate the proposed timeline for the device; the team hopes to have a final device ready for FDA approval by the end of that period.
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Crunch Report | Tesla Offers to Acquire SolarCity
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
Tito Hamze,
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Resolving homelessness in the digital era
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Jonathan Sposato
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
The explosion of tech companies setting up headquarters in major cities has encroached on the homeless population, but the mentalities around this issue differ. Twitter in the Tenderloin district, a highly underdeveloped area of San Francisco, in an attempt to help rejuvenate the community. More recently however, on the opposite spectrum, called for the removal of the homeless in San Francisco, describing it as a burden on the wealthy. Like San Francisco, the tech industry is growing rapidly in Seattle, and we, too, have the same dilemma — our city has the third largest homeless population in the nation, and it’s only growing. According to the latest One Night Count results, there are in Seattle. But unlike San Francisco, we have the opportunity to get ahead of this issue and truly make a difference. While we are in a tech bubble with regards to the market, I’d say we’re also in an even smaller bubble — one that causes us to look away or avoid interacting with the homeless, especially while we’re traveling to and from work. Consider this scenario — you’re racing to get to work, laptop bag in tow, coffee in one hand and likely your phone in the other. You see a homeless person on the street and you know you have spare change, but that entails shifting your belongings around, reaching for your wallet and handing out the change. Also, in the back of your mind you wonder if they will use your money for drugs or alcohol, rather than clothing, shelter or food. The sad truth is that most of us wouldn’t disrupt our routine to help out in this situation, even though it would only take 30 seconds. I think it is time to reflect; “Now, how can we change this?” What’s missing is the notion of “us.” “Us” as a community, society or nation isn’t part of a national conversation of betterment. It’s not a part of our daily lives. Stemming from Tocquevilleian and Jeffersonian philosophies, we’re focused on gaining assets others have, instead of helping others gain what we have. We’re failing to measure society by how we treat the disadvantaged class. However, there are a few housing initiatives already in place that we can look to for inspiration, which leverage a company’s influence to better the community. For example, the program by Zillow works with local landlords and property managers to modify their standard tenant screening process to help applicants with low incomes or unemployment to be able to obtain housing. Aggregating these options eases the search for those individuals who are financially strapped but eager for a fresh start. Easing the housing process through a service like Zillow is also a key step in helping others build the right foundation to long-term stability. Amazon recently with Mary’s Place to turn a building on campus into an emergency family shelter until the spring of 2017. The partnership also created an Amazon Wish List where anyone can donate to the families served by Mary’s Place. Providing a temporary solution shows we have opportunities all around us to capitalize on for future initiatives. Even more, combining Amazon’s services with the families in need not only helps financially support those in need, it creates a channel for aid through a convenient tech service most of us already use. As members of the Seattle tech community, we need to use our ideas, technology and resources to help the homeless. If we pool our resources, we can fundamentally change our interactions and involvement with the homeless. We’ve all seen homeless individuals or families in our community — now’s the time we begin to interact with them, not avoid them. When I go out at night to distribute blankets or clean socks, I am told that more than any material item, a friendly human connection that offers someone dignity is what keeps someone from giving up. Let’s not forget they are humans just like you and me, and they need our help now more than ever.
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Tesla gets more than solar panels with offer to acquire SolarCity
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
News of an came mostly unexpected to traders earlier this afternoon. In a rapid “knee-jerk” reaction, traders bid up SolarCity by 13 percent and sent Tesla tumbling down 12 percent. It is typical for the stock of an acquisition target to spike while the acquirer’s stock falls according to Michael Morosi of Avondale Partners. SolarCity has a debt-to-equity ratio of . Tesla has a ratio of 3.215 as of the same date. Tesla is in a unique position as an automaker because its market is still largely undeveloped. Competitors in the space like Fiat Chrysler and General Motors have much lower ratios in the and . Ford is a notable exception, but for the most part, Tesla has an elevated debt to equity ratio. The good news for Tesla is that most of the debt held by SolarCity is project-level debt. Morosi noted that such debt is consolidated on the SolarCity balance sheet but is all set against cash flow producing assets. This means the debt behaves much more like mortgage debt than credit card debt. SolarCity does have an outstanding convertible note and it is out-of-the-money, added Morosi. SolarCity also has a highly visible burn-rate and has yet to achieve cash-flow breakeven. Tesla will have to attend to SolarCity’s debt and cash-flow as the deal gets closer to reality. Tesla and SolarCity have long been intertwined companies. Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias have both recused themselves from any decision-making on the acquisition given their overlapping roles in the two companies. Morosi added that an acquisition of SolarCity will complicate Tesla’s financial reporting. SolarCity can only recognize a fraction of its yearly revenue from a GAAP perspective which could reflect poorly on Tesla’s side. It’s also going to be harder to separate growth of the company’s core automotive business from more speculative investments in the future of energy. The has largely been erased by markets. If that deal was made based on the current price of SolarCity stock, the premium would be closer to 8 percent and 15 percent. [graphiq id=”1OC6iSFF5NH” title=”Solarcity Corporation (SCTY) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”628″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/1OC6iSFF5NH” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/15984994/Solarcity-Corporation-in-San-Mateo-CA” link_text=”Solarcity Corporation (SCTY) Stock Price | FindTheCompany”] Most analysts expect SolarCity to continue operating as normal even after the transaction date. Tesla largely has its hands full with the rollout of the Tesla Model 3. The role of SolarCity in the Tesla ecosystem will ultimately be a play for the future. There is also agreement that the Tesla move is bold. Tesla is still four years away from its target to More details over time should help ease worries that Tesla acted too brashly with the acquisition. The decision could be as simple as seeing a good price and taking the opportunity regardless of timing. “Tesla doesn’t view this as a reaction to GE breathing down their necks,” said Troy Ault, Director of Research at Cleantech Group. Tesla looks at the battery side as a commodity play added Ault. Tesla is likely hedging a bet toward future battery innovation. Time will tell how it will integrate into vehicle technology.
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An excerpt from Eliot Peper’s cyberpunk novel Cumulus
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
has been lauded as the heir to William Gibson’s throne. He is a writer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco and is latest book, , has become an online hit. The energy of his writing and the strength of his characters is palpable throughout the story — a world in which surveillance is constant and inescapable is fast coming true. What follows is an excerpt from the novel in which a dangerous character plans his next move. Take care of them. Graham went over to the side table and poured two fingers of bourbon. Swirling the golden liquor in the glass, he stepped out onto the balcony of his San Francisco apartment. The cool evening air raised goose bumps on his arms. This had been a long time coming. Most operations failed before they had even begun. Success required meticulous preparation, plus a healthy dose of luck. He took a sip and leaned on the railing. The culture of Silicon Valley had surprised him. From afar, it seemed that the region’s success in developing and commercializing advanced technology must stem from intellectual and procedural rigor. Up close, it felt like the modus operandi was, “Ready, fire, aim.” It was a bunch of geeks playing with technology like the whole exercise was an improvisational jazz ensemble. But this jam session had vast implications for the wider world. Graham sometimes felt like a visitor from a parallel dimension. His universe played by different rules. People who vied for geopolitical influence were nothing if not calculating. Every contingency had to be accounted for. Every box had to be checked. Perception often counted for just as much as actual achievement. The hill below his apartment building descended straight into downtown San Francisco, where towering skyscrapers were packed together like travelers in a Tokyo subway. Lights were just starting to flicker to life. The last rays of the setting sun made the Bay Bridge appear to glow from within. On the other side of the water, the Slums smoldered behind the derelict cranes of the Port of Oakland. The bourbon painted a fiery line down his throat, and a strong sense of déjà vu saturated his consciousness. Graham’s first assignments had been in Mexico, Brazil, and Bolivia. He had actually shuttled between them for a few years before someone further up the Agency food chain had seen fit to shift him over to postings in sub-Saharan Africa and then Southeast Asia. But his virgin destination as a rookie agent had been Mexico City. He had plied the fraught waters of the VIP cocktail circuit, schmoozed with up-and-comers in La Condesa, and slowly but surely mapped out the intricate web of narco influence and corruption within the federal government. Upon arriving in Mexico City, Graham had expected he would suffer from bouts of homesickness or cultural disorientation. But those feelings had never materialized. He had immediately caught the rhythm of the place and established a comfortable routine. It was only when he came back stateside that things got weird. Graham came from a long line of proud civil servants and military officers. He grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in northern Virginia where he played Little League baseball, went to summer camp, and couldn’t get enough of Call of Duty. His friends in town were in pretty much the same boat. That wasn’t to say he was sheltered. His parents dragged him on various road trips to DC, New York, and even Los Angeles. In college, he went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and road-tripped around the country to camp in various national parks with his roommate. Obviously, there was poverty, sometimes quite severe, in the different American states and cities he visited. But it just seemed like the way it was. Some people had money, and some struggled. A wealthy family meant easier and additional opportunities. If you didn’t speak fluent English or if you didn’t have much of an education, it would be a lot tougher. But if you worked hard enough and got lucky, you could fight your way up the ladder, and eventually retire in the Virginia countryside. The countries Graham was assigned to were different. There were two groups of people. An overwhelming majority of people lived in abject poverty with no path to bettering their lot, while a tiny minority controlled virtually all the nation’s political and financial resources. The wealthy minority had every incentive to defend the status quo and established an impenetrable moat around themselves to guarantee their fortunes. Privilege was a matter of birth and family. Poverty was deplorable but inevitable. Wealth justified itself. Of course, it was somewhat more complicated than that. Any sociology or economics professor would layer on all sorts of fancy intellectual models. But Graham’s job was extremely practical. Understanding and influencing an organization or society required a bracing dose of pragmatism. Graham had investigated, and occasionally collaborated with gangsters, terrorists, and mercenaries. On the whole, he found them fairly indistinguishable from their legitimate counterparts in business and government. You could find desperate bottom feeders, ambitious climbers, and bureaucratic gofers pretty much everywhere. That wasn’t surprising. He always studied the socioeconomic profile long before touching down in a new capital. The surprising part was returning home. Every time he came back to the United States, the country seemed to have shifted in his absence. Public roads fell into disrepair as private gated communities sprang up everywhere. Neighborhoods self-segregated and became more homogenous. Police departments went through forced layoffs and were replaced by contractors like Security who served only paying clients. Young people were either accelerating along astronomical career paths or stuck in a cycle of low-paid contract work. You were either a rock star or a peon. None of his friends or family seemed to notice. It was like trying to track weight gain by looking at yourself in the mirror every morning. The changes were too incremental. But Graham would live overseas for months or years at a time. To him, the changes were dramatic. The country was stutter-stepping into a new order. Every time he landed at an American airport, the boundary between the first and third world seemed to dissolve a little more. DC felt more and more like Nairobi. Miami felt more and more like Rio. New York felt more and more like Mexico City. San Francisco… The city sprawled out under his balcony was a cookie cutter of Slum and Green Zone separated by tense sections of Fringe. It was simultaneously the hub of techno-utopian imagination, and a wasteland of half-forgotten dreams and frustrated ambition. It was a living, breathing paradox. White fingers of fog rushed alongside his building, and startled Graham as they wove themselves into a soft, cold blanket that entirely obscured his view. In less than a minute, he was completely surrounded. The entire process unfolded in complete, eerie silence. He shook his head. Enough with the philosophical head trip. The world was as it was. And Graham knew how to handle situations like this, knew how to operate in countries like this. That was why he had decided on forging his own path here in the first place. Take care of them. Here in San Francisco, he was a wolf among lambs.
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Austin police are now impounding drivers in the peer-to-peer ridesharing group
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
Austin’s transportation saga just keeps getting more interesting. Last week, that had formed in Austin to help facilitate ride requests in the absence of Uber and Lyft. Riders posted requests, drivers responded, and people got where they needed to go. One problem – the drivers and riders were not using an official service to facilitate the trips…it was entirely peer-to-peer, lacking any safety mechanisms or government oversight. Now, the in a sting operation for driving without appropriate documentation from the city. Yesterday, a driver had two undercover officers get into her vehicle for a ride, and upon arriving at the destination was met by additional officers waiting to issue her a citation and impound her vehicle. The city that “companies and individuals providing transportation services and charging more than the federal reimbursement rate without appropriate documentation are illegal in the City of Austin”. Essentially, anyone charging more than a paltry 57.5 cents per mile needs to be documented by the city of Austin, a process that Uber and Lyft found so laborious that they decided to just leave the city instead of complying. While the citation was issued directly to the driver, the ticket reportedly listed “Arcade” as the employer on the ticket. This is probably because is name of the ride sharing startup that created the ad-hoc Facebook group. But Arcade City didn’t employ the driver, who was acting on her own when accepting the fare. That being said, the company does a ride sharing app, but for now just is the administrator of the Facebook group and isn’t actually involved in any transactions. But Arcade City understands that Austin police could continue targeting drivers even once they are working directly on the company’s platform, since the startup doesn’t plan on adhering to Austin’s ridesharing guidelines (like Uber and Lyft). So, the company plans to launch a verification system that lets fellow users vouch for you before being “verified”. Presumably, the startup hopes this will prevent further police action by preventing “unverified” Austin police detectives from using the platform and issuing citations to drivers. But this is an unsustainable solution. As anyone who has ever gone up against a state or federal government knows, pushing back against police enforcement is probably the worst way to get what you want. Just ask Uber or Lyft’s defunct Austin team. At the end of the day, the only thing that is going to fix the problem is if Austin and ride sharing companies can agree on a fair working relationship. And while this ad-hoc Facebook group has alleviated the strain on Austin’s economy that came from Uber and Lyft leaving, it is simply too risky for unregulated drivers with no background checks to be the long term solution to the city’s transportation problem.
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ISS installs networking tech that may soon connect the whole Solar System
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
When you really need to get a signal in from Pluto, a direct connection isn’t always possible. Oh sure, when it’s a big project like New Horizons, you can make sure the line is clear and someone’s listening — but for routine updates from a Neptune orbiter or power-starved comet lander, there’s Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, which just on the International Space Station. What’s DTN? Glad you asked. It’s a protocol suite made to be resilient even in the face of huge interruptions of connectivity — for example, when an entire planet or star passes between two nodes on a network. That’s not a big problem today, but eventually it will be, as more and more probes, satellites, orbiters and so on begin to crowd the big empty. A DTN-powered network uses a “store and forward” technique that breaks down communications into chunks that can be transferred independent of each other and then reassembled at will once they’ve all arrived where they’re going. It’s a bit like bittorrent, which gets whatever pieces it can whenever it can, compared with traditional downloads, that start at the beginning and end at the end. It’s a useful tool for situations where connectivity is unreliable for one of the myriad reasons that may occur in space: radiation, power failure, obstruction, and so on. If a lander only gets 5 minutes of sun a day, it could still send data packages out piecemeal, instead of waiting for the batteries to charge enough that it can stay online for the hours it might take to send the whole thing. How about a video illustration? The ISS recently added DTN to its Telescience Resource Kit, making the satellite the first piece in what NASA says may eventually form a Solar System-scale internet. DTN even has a little star power. NASA has collaborated with none other than Vint Cerf, who is optimistic about the possibilities for the protocol suite. “Our experience with DTN on the space station leads to additional terrestrial applications especially for mobile communications in which connections may be erratic and discontinuous,” he said in the NASA news release. “In some cases, battery power will be an issue and devices may have to postpone communication until battery charge is adequate. These notions are relevant to the emerging ‘Internet of Things’.” Yes, the Internet of Things has reached beyond the boundaries of our small planet and is now at large in the Solar System. DTN has been a major collaboration among several organizations, and many of its implementations will be available as open-source code. , or scroll to the bottom of the , where the many contributors are listed.
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A federal safety board just OK’d the first CRISPR trial to genetically alter humans
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
In the spring of 2015, a group of Chinese scientists of 54 embryos using CRISPR/Cas 9 technology. Twenty-eight of those embryos were successful, but 26 — nearly half of them — failed, setting off a heated debate throughout the scientific community on the ethics of altering human genes. Regulators don’t currently allow the use of CRISPR on human DNA in the United States, but researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have proposed the first human study using the technology. The proposal would allow these researchers to make T cells with the ability to attack three inherited types of cancer. A federal biosafety and ethics panel gave Penn the go-ahead earlier today to conduct research on human patients, but the idea will still need approval at the proposed medical centers where the research will potentially be conducted, and will need the OK from the Food and Drug Administration. The proposed early trial will involve up to 15 patients and help researchers determine the safety and viability of the technology on humans. It will also get solid backing from the , tech billionaire ‘s organization, which formally launched this spring to collaborate with research institutions to obliterate cancer. Scientists are still hotly divided on the ethics of manipulating human DNA. The technology works by snipping out strings of genes to do all sorts of crazy things like or eliminating DNA that causes fatal diseases. On the one hand of the argument, use of CRISPR could mean babies born today never have to inherit a debilitating illness from their parents and the possibility that we could one day simply cut out any traces of genetically inherited cancers. The flip side of that means messing with our genetic makeup without currently knowing the whole outcome. The Chinese experiment produced a bunch of other unintended effects on some parts of the genome, causing almost half the embryos to die. Penn’s lead on the proposed study, Dr. Carl June, acknowledged in a webcast earlier today the technique to cut out the undesirable genes is not perfect — some PD-1 and TCR genes, the lack of which have been shown to help reduce lung tumors, remain. However, what’s left is at a low enough level, according to the data, that it helps particular T cells called CAR T cells better attack cancer cells. But the proposal from Penn is a leap ahead of what many thought would be happening in the field. Gene-editing company Editas (which went public earlier this year) said it would hold the first human clinical trials using CRISPR .
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Columbus, Ohio rumored to secure a total of $140 million in grants as the U.S. DOT Smart City winner
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Jay Donovan
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
The this afternoon that Columbus, OH is the winner of the for transportation innovation. The paper is stating that Columbus beat out San Francisco, Austin, Portland, Kansas City, Denver and Pittsburgh for the honors, and will receive $40 million from the DOT and another $10 million from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. as a result. As part of their commitment to the project, Columbus’s local business community early on agreed to match those numbers by nearly 2 to 1 to add an additional $90 million to the total. I reached out to the offices of Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther and also Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown for confirmation, but have not received comment at this point. The DOT also could not comment or confirm the win, and instead sent me the their official press release, which doesn’t specifically name Columbus as the winner. Instead that release states that: “The Department of Transportation (DOT) today announced that it will collaborate with government and private sector partners to help all seven finalist cities in the Smart City Challenge — not just the challenge winner — move forward with ideas that each city developed over the past six months.” That’s good news for the non-winners, I suppose. As background, the DOT press release further states that: “The original Smart City Challenge was launched in December 2015 by U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Vulcan President and Chief Operating Officer Barbara Bennett as an innovative competition for cities to reshape their transportation systems harnessing the power of technology, data and creativity to reimagine how people and goods move throughout cities. Seventy-eight cities submitted entries to the competition, and in March, seven finalists were selected. Each finalist then prepared a full proposal, and the mayors of the seven cities presented their final pitches at a live event in Washington, DC in early June.” Ultimately — according to — the mission of the Smart City Challenge is to “pledge up to $40 million (funding subject to future appropriations) to one city to help it define what it means to be a ‘Smart City’ and become the country’s first city to fully integrate innovative technologies — self-driving cars, connected vehicles, and smart sensors — into their transportation network.” While it is unclear to me at this time where Columbus’s burgeoning startup community would fit into this potential opportunity, it’s not hard to imagine many of the logistics and machine learning startups in town being able to get involved, since autonomous vehicles appear to be a big output focus of the competition. An official update is planned for Thursday. I’ll update as this story develops.
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These guys built the ‘World’s Largest Nerf Gun’ and it shoots massive darts at 40 mph
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
Bigger isn’t necessarily better when it comes to Nerf battles — but… well, this one wins. It’s a re-creation of the Nerf N-Strike Maverick — one of the greatest Nerf guns of all time. Oh, and it works. It shoots massive darts* at around 40 miles per hour. Built by along with , the mega-Maverick uses a 3,000 PSI air tank to fill an 80 PSI reserve cylinder. Come for the hilariously oversized Nerf gun, stay for the glorious shot-by-shot comparisons between the standard Maverick and its bigger, badder, considerably less-portable brother.
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DFJ Growth is targeting a new, $500 million fund
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
, the 10-year-old growth-stage arm of the 30-year-old Sand Hill Road firm, is raising a new $500 million fund, suggests an first flagged by Fortune. The timing fits the narrative of many Silicon Valley venture firms, many of which have been returning to their LPs in two years’ time, rather than a more traditional three or four years. Indeed, the firm raised its last growth fund, a , in May of 2014. Among other firms to announce fast follow-on funds this year are DFJ’s early-stage group, which raised for its 12th fund back in February. It had raised its previous fund almost exactly two years earlier (a vehicle). , , and have also raised new (and very big) funds this year, after closing on their previous funds in 2014. VCs say they’re raising money right now because it’s a good time to invest, as well as because the fundraising pace was accelerated in recent years as startups raised rounds in faster succession than they have historically. (Because VCs invested more quickly, they also depleted their capital more quickly.) However, there are skeptics, including Benchmark’s , who has suggested VCs are raising faster than ever because the industry has “ ” — meaning investors’ markups have not been turned into cash-on-cash returns just yet, and they don’t want to wait for those markups to fall before reaching out to their investors. DFJ Growth is led by five general partners. We talked with co-founder Randy Glein about what the firm looks for, which he said are “companies [that] are generating low tens of millions of dollars in annual bookings, growing more than 100 percent a year, and playing in a market that’s big enough to support a large company. That can be $1 billion to $100 billion dollars, depending on the market opportunity.” Glein also explained that DFJ Growth sometimes invests in the same companies backed previously by DFJ but that there’s been “less overlap” over the years. Some of DFJ Growth’s biggest exits to date include the IPOs of Twitter, Solar City, Box and Tesla Motors, along with sale of Yammer, which was by Microsoft; the sale of Tumblr, by Yahoo; and the sale of AdMob, which was by Google.
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Hardware Battlefield competitor Foobot wants to reduce pollution in your home
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Samantha O'Keefe
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
The last we heard from , the company was presenting an indoor air quality monitor called Alima in the . In the two years since that event, the company has rebranded the Alima as the , raised €2 million and shifted focus from simply monitoring air quality to improving it. When Foobot released a direct to consumer product back in April 2015, it performed quite well, boasting a retention rate of 90 percent of its users after three months across the U.S. and Europe. Today, the company is announcing some handy integrations that will help your smart home become a little smarter. The works with Nest and IFTTT so your home’s ventilation can be regulated based on the indoor air quality. Perhaps most interesting is Foobot’s integration with Amazon’s Alexa platform on the Echo, Tap and other devices. Alexa can provide indoor air quality readings whenever you ask, give you tips based on pollution sources and set rules between smart home devices connected to other Alexa-connected devices. For example, users will be able to ask Alexa to have the Foobot turn on the humidifier when humidity levels are under 35 percent, or cycle air through the air vents when you burn dinner… again. with the outdoor air quality data platform to add information on outdoor pollutants to the Foobot platform. Now, Foobot users can see what’s happening both inside and outside their homes, and make adjustments accordingly. Yet, the company sees the B2B and B2B2C markets as its biggest potential customer base. This isn’t surprising. Despite having a huge impact on public health, indoor air is often overlooked by consumers, deemed as “nice to have.” Even slightly elevated levels of VOC, CO2, CO and particulate matter can cause fatigue, headaches and congestion. Businesses, on the other hand, have a lot to gain from improving the performance of their workforce. To enable large-scale monitoring, Foobot has established partnerships with manufacturers to connect their appliances to Foobot’s cloud platform. Manufacturers also access Foobot’s data processing expertise to enhance their hardware performance. Foobot sees itself as “a game changer for the HVAC industry.” Founder Jacques Touillon explains, “We provide professionals with the analytic tools for the retrofit market and the automation tools for new products.” And it all got started with the Hardware Battlefield at CES in 2014. Foobot CEO Jacques Touillon tells TechCrunch that participating in the first Hardware Battlefield was a really unique experience for the company. “Though it was the first run for both TC and us, this was the most intense competition we’ve ever made! The impact was tremendous, because we were part of the very first batch and got a lot of attention! This helped us emerge from the crowd and contribute to the hardware scene.”
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Elon Musk’s Tesla offers to acquire Elon Musk’s SolarCity for $2.8B
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
The great Elon Musk empire is uniting. Today his electric car and battery company Tesla to acquire his solar panel installation company SolarCity. Together the companies could allow you to outfit your home with solar panels that power a giant battery for everything inside, as well as your electric car. The deal still has to be approved by SolarCity and its board. If it goes through, it would see SolarCity stock exchanged for Tesla stock. The deal would pay a premium of 21 percent to 30 percent on top of SolarCity’s value of $2.14 billion, so Tesla would be buying SolarCity for between $2.59 billion and $2.78 billion worth of its stock. Source: SolarCity has been bleeding money Recently SolarCity had its value downgraded because it’s been bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars, making it an easier acquisition target. SolarCity’s share price skyrocketed 20 percent in after-hours trading as soon as the announcement hit. That means the premium on SolarCity’s value has been instantly cut much smaller in after-hours. Musk will recuse from voting on the acquisition, as will Tesla and SolarCity board member Antonio Gracias. However, Tesla says it only wants to make the acquisition if it’s friendly, not a hostile take-over. The Tesla Powerwall could store energy from your SolarCity solar panels to keep your house powered when there’s no sun On closer inspection, the synergies between the companies might not pan out. Tesla’s sky-high demand for its vehicles means it doesn’t need much of a sales force, while SolarCity is constantly doing door-to-door and telesales. Everything happens inside Tesla’s factories until the cars ship, while SolarCity has armies of contractors driving around on trucks installing panels. But Musk is a crafty one and could have plans we can’t foresee. The Tesla team writes, “It’s now time to complete the picture. Tesla customers can drive clean cars and they can use our battery packs to help consume energy more efficiently, but they still need access to the most sustainable energy source that’s available: the sun.” Tesla outlined the reasoning behind why the acquisition makes sense: “We would be the world’s only vertically integrated energy company offering end-to-end clean energy products to our customers. This would start with the car that you drive and the energy that you use to charge it, and would extend to how everything else in your home or business is powered. With your Model S, Model X, or Model 3, your solar panel system, and your Powerwall all in place, you would be able to deploy and consume energy in the most efficient and sustainable way possible, lowering your costs and minimizing your dependence on fossil fuels and the grid.” Whether or not it’s a fiscally sound deal for each company’s shareholders, it’s certainly bold. A thousand years from now they’re going to be speaking the name “ELON MUSK.”
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See Jane Go is bringing women-only ride hailing to the West Coast
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
Earlier this spring, (the ride-hailing service formerly known as Chariot for Women) established itself in the Boston area as a safer service for women drivers and passengers. Now is starting a similar service for women in the greater Los Angeles area this summer. Its public launch is today, with a commercial launch coming at the end of July. William Jordan founded the company in January of this year when his teenage daughters expressed interest in riding with or even driving for companies like and . That sparked a conversation about the safety and personal comfort issues in taking rides from — or giving rides to — strange men. Jordan noticed there was an unmet opportunity for a service that catered to women and used women drivers. See Jane Go isn’t worried about competition from Safeher; besides the sheer distance between the two services currently, “it validates that there is a market,” said CEO Kimberly Toonen in a phone interview. See Jane Go used focus groups to determine that if there was a women-only service that wasn’t radically more expensive or had much slower response times than established services like Uber and Lyft, women would select See Jane Go “all day long,” Toonen said. Toonen said See Jane Go was surprised to learn that only about 15% of people have used a ride-hail service, despite how ubiquitous Uber and Lyft seem. She was less surprised to learn that only about a quarter of these services’ drivers are women. “They’ve shied away from this business opportunity,” she said. See Jane Go drivers go through criminal background checks and a driving history review before being brought on board. Drivers must supply their licenses with their applications, and the self-identified gender on the license is all the validation the company requires. LGBTQ+ drivers and riders “will absolutely be able to use this service,” Toonen said. The company also aims to create “stickiness” for drivers so that they’ll drive more and pick up more rides. To that end, See Jane Go is working to partner with an as-yet-unnamed manufacturer on its 30 Rides program. Any driver who provides 30 rides in a month in their new car has their car payment covered to the tune of about $300, according to Toonen. “Drivers get a really nice deal on a brand-new car,” she said. “And it might help those women who don’t have a car currently, or they are sharing a car in a one-car household, or they have a car that needs replacing.” (See Jane Go requires that vehicles be less than 11 years old.) Like most apps, the See Jane Go app includes a 5-star rating system for users. But it also gives drivers and passengers the ability to favorite each other. The feature increases the chances that someone will be paired with her favorite rider or driver. “It’s not a guarantee that you’ll get Sally instead of Betty,” Toonen said, “but it’s a smart algorithm so that your favorite driver will come up in the queue. They’ll get the hail before anyone else.” See Jane Go has big plans for the future, including tapping into the networking potential of so many women giving and taking rides across the country — and eventually around the globe. “We want to emphasize the fact that women, by the nature of the sharing economy, have largely been excluded. This is an opportunity to participate in the gig economy. We’re creating a community of women helping women to achieve goals, whether they’re personal or professional.”
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Aphex Twin commissions 12-year-old YouTuber to direct first video since 1999’s ‘Windowlicker’
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
If you follow your dreams, and film it, and put it on YouTube, there’s a chance Richard D. James will see it and commission you to direct the first Aphex Twin video in 17 years. That’s the lesson learned by young Ryan Wyer, of outer Dublin, who was not even close to being born when the seminal “Windowlicker” came out in 1999. Watch and be amazed: Wyer is 12 and, if is any indication, loves electronic music, memes and games rated for players well above his age. This isn’t his first foray into Aphex Twin territory, either. Among the dozens of videos he’s uploaded are reviews and videos for AFX and other artists. He even recorded the famous hidden in the mathematically named track on the “Windowlicker” single. I like and the two-second “banned” videos, myself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebZ32Nt8DgU Richard D. James is a prolific musician, but not since the glory days of Chris Cunningham has he released a video. Is this the beginning of a new visual era for Aphex Twin? Has he found his muse? And if so, how? No idea. Warp told me that James simply ran into Wyer’s videos online and enjoyed them, so he commissioned the kid to do an official video. I asked for more details, but that’s pretty awesome on its own. It’s not groundbreaking news, exactly, but I like Aphex Twin and I love this example of how services like YouTube flatten the creative world so that collaborations like this can happen. Be sure to subscribe to so you don’t miss Wyer’s next GTA V playthrough or drill & bass remix. “CIRKLON3 [ Колхозная mix ]” is from Aphex Twin’s , out next month.
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Gradifi partners with Radius Bank to offer MasterCard to ease student loan debt
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
founder doesn’t have an outbound sales team. That’s how big the student loan problem is. When Boston-based Gradifi first launched its student loan paydown plan, 456 companies reached out wanting to sign up for the benefit. Employers want to attract and retain employees and, unfortunately, one of the best ways to do that right now is by offering student loan assistance benefits. Small businesses and enterprises can use Gradifi to contribute money toward the student loan debt of employees. Gradifi has 20 companies registered and another 80 scheduled for on-boarding through Q4 2017. PricewaterhouseCoopers signed on to Gradifi in January. Nearly $150 million in student loans are registered on the Gradifi platform. Today, Gradifi is launching a partnership with to allow MasterCard Debit Card users to earn 1 percent cash back for student loans. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but if someone spends $2,500 a month on their debit card they will earn back $25 a month. Over the life of a 120-month student loan, users will earn $3,000 to be paid toward student loan debt. Gradifi is exclusively backed by angel investors and has expectations to be cash-flow positive by the end of 2017. The company signed a partnership with MasterCard for 1.1 percent cash back and uses the difference between the 1 percent offered to pay overhead and operational expenses. The team has expanded from three to 30 employees over the last year.
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Verizon buys Telogis to drive deeper into the connected vehicle market
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
With a lot of tech companies and automakers staking their claims in the connected car space, now there are signs that others are looking to move in, too. Today, telecoms giant Verizon that it is acquiring , a California-based company that develops cloud-based solutions for mobile workforces, and specifically telematics, compliance and navigation software used by Ford, Volvo, GM and other car companies, as well as Apple and AT&T. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, although we’ll try to find out. (Note/disclaimer: We are owned by Verizon, by way of AOL. This gives us no inside track whatsoever when it comes to news.) Considering that Verizon in 2015 reported , the price would have to be very high to be considered “ ” and may not be made public for some time, if ever. Telogis in its time as a startup raised a substantial amount of money, just in all, including in 2013, supposedly ahead of an IPO, all from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Back in 2013 when KPCB made its investment (which was the first from a VC firm in the company), Telogis told TechCrunch it was profitable and forecasting revenues of $100 million annually for the year. It’s not clear what size those revenues are now, but if it was on the same growth trajectory as before the funding, sales would be around $150 million annually, with profitability, at the moment. Other investors include some very notable strategics: the investment arm of General Motors, and Fontinalis Partners, which also invests in Lyft and was co-founded by Bill Ford, the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company. Before the acquisition, Verizon actually had a business in fleet management and telematics; in fact, the two companies for business from the trucking and other industries. Verizon Telematics, as the business is called, is active in 40 countries. But in a way, Verizon buying Telogis is a sign that the latter may have proved to be the more superior, and the one with the key customer deals. “With a comprehensive enterprise product portfolio and partnerships with some of the world’s leading vehicle and equipment manufacturers, Telogis brings a world-class software platform and new distribution relationships to Verizon Telematics’ already expansive suite of connected vehicle solutions for consumers and enterprise customers,” said Andrés Irlando, CEO of Verizon Telematics, in a statement. It’s not clear how and if some of those pre-exisiting relationships, in particular with Apple and AT&T, will be impacted by the Verizon acquisition. “The combined strengths of our two companies’ unique assets better enable us to deliver best-in-class mobile enterprise management services to customers globally, while building scale and accelerating market share. I’m confident that the passion and talent of our collective employees will continue to drive revenue growth and product innovations to shape and lead the industry for years to come.” It’s not clear why Telogis never went ahead on its IPO a couple of years ago. More generally, the consolidation in the space in which it works, and the fact that it’s Verizon doing the acquiring, points to other bigger trends in the industry. Driven by the rise of outsized “startups” like and that are reimagining transportation and (the into) logistics; moves made from big car companies and tech giants; and the emergence of a new class of startups that are specifically pinpointing things like telematics and the , autos are seen by some as the next big platform for connected services. Or, at least one key piece of hardware that is ripe for disruption. So it’s no surprise to see that Verizon also wants a seat at the table, not least because telematics and in-car enterprise services, which tap into Verizon’s own mobile data network, are already an area where it is active. “Verizon provides the brand equity, strength in the market, broad infrastructure and expansive global reach to take Telogis to the next level,” said , CEO, Telogis, in a statement. “This strategic acquisition positions our collective technologies and services uniquely in the market while also enabling Verizon Telematics’ industry-leading business to benefit from Telogis’ unmatched strength in the enterprise market, innovative Mobile Enterprise Management software platform and our strong OEM and ecosystem partnerships.” The acquisition is expected to close in the second half of 2016, Verizon said. In connection with the transaction, PJT Partners and Wells Fargo Securities, LLC acted as financial advisors and Debevoise & Plimpton acted as legal advisor to Verizon. Barclays and J.P. Morgan acted as financial advisors and Paul Hastings LLP acted as legal advisor to Telogis.
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The Apple App Store graveyard
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Alex Austin
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
People just don’t seem to have the same excitement lately about Apple’s App Store or the Google Play platform. The air of hopelessness that surrounds the mobile app ecosystem is obvious and demoralizing. When I published my first app on both platforms (an app that automatically monitored fuel economy while driving), I spent the first week obsessively checking its download counts with dreams of grandeur. Those dreams, of course, never came to fruition. Why take the time to publish it if it will never be discovered? I echoed this sentiment in a post last year about the , the harms for developers and the things that can help. But that post only captured how low the odds are for an app to achieve success, not the genuine impact that broken app discovery has on the mobile ecosystem. To illustrate the ecosystem impact, I dug around in some Apple App Store data, provided by our friends at and , to put together some charts. First, to set the context, let’s take a look at the average number of apps released each year. The first complete year of the App Store was 2009, when about ~3,000 new apps were released per month. Fast-forward to 2016; more than 50,000 new apps have been released per month so far, and it seems to be accelerating. Despite more and more apps being released each month, nothing is being done to help surface new apps. This means that developers are having a much harder time getting their app found, which directly translates to fewer downloads. You can see this if you plot the average number of ratings per app against the year it was released. Historically, ratings are a good proxy for the number of downloads.
In 2009, the average number of ratings per app was as high — which means that apps released in 2009 were downloaded about 10 times as often as they are today. Ouch. What’s the impact on developers? Well, it’s not much easier to build an app today versus the early days. For a similar amount of work, the reward just doesn’t exist anymore. This drives a dramatic increase in app abandonment. If an app has not been updated in the last six months, chances are that it’s not actively being worked on, so I categorized it as abandoned. For abandoned apps, I took the time difference between last update and first release date to determine how long the app was actively worked on, which gives us the app lifetime graph. As you can see above, on average, developers who released an app in 2009 actively worked on it for more than two years before abandoning it. Meanwhile, apps released in 2014 and 2015 were abandoned after only about three months. Developers are churning out of the App Store faster than ever, and leaving their abandoned apps behind. It’s easy to see how the graveyard fills up by using this abandonment rate and applying it to the quantity of new apps being released. By this estimate, the App Store had accumulated more than 1.5 million abandoned apps at the end of 2015. The quick two-three month turnover of developers, combined with the rate of app launch, has made the App Store a graveyard of hopes and dreams. I know Apple is aware of the issue, and that they’re doing everything they can to help developers rise above the noise. Let’s cross our fingers that hope is on its way in the form of and the rumored results.
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Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau wins $250,000 award for exoplanet research
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 |
, a Harvard astronomer known for multiple “firsts” in the field of exoplanet research, has been as one of three recipients of the for Young Scientists. The annual award, which comes with $250,000, is the largest unrestricted cash award given to early-career scientists. The two other recipients include from the Scripps Research Institute, who was selected for his research in the field of natural product synthesis, and from U.C. Berkeley, who was selected for his discoveries related to “ubiquitylation,” which could enable scientists to come up with next-generation therapies in oncology, immunology and inflammation. “The Awards, given annually by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, honor the nation’s most exceptional young scientists and engineers, celebrating their extraordinary achievements and recognizing their outstanding promise.” The New York Academy of Sciences Charbonneau was recognized for a long list of firsts, including the first observation of a transiting exoplanet and the first study of an exoplanet’s atmosphere. Those methods have now become the standard in the field and used by astronomers all over the world. Illustration of an exoplanet transit / Image courtesy of NASA The three scientists were selected from a pool of nominations submitted by 148 universities and research institutions in the United States. A jury made up of distinguished scientists and engineers narrowed down the nominees to 31 and, ultimately, the three winners. David Charbonneau / Image courtesy of Stephanie Mitchell / Harvard University Charbonneau’s ability to detect an exoplanet transit was a notable accomplishment because it demonstrated that this was, in fact, possible to do. It also proved that there was a wealth of information that could be derived from a transit, including the exoplanet’s size, mass and ultimately what that exoplanet is made of. “What that detection did was to show that it was possible; that these planets really did pass in front of their stars. Once people saw how much information we were getting, it was a big shot in the arm of NASA to pick the Kepler mission and fly it.” Dr. David Charbonneau While the concept of the had been around for decades, Charbonneau’s work confirmed that detecting and analyzing exoplanet transits would be worthwhile and lead to fruitful results. Launched in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope is used to detect planets around other stars by searching for periodic dips in a star’s brightness, indicating the possibility of an exoplanet passing in front of it. In the seven years since it left the Earth, Kepler has the existence of a couple thousand exoplanets in a single batch of sky in the Milky Way Galaxy. “It’s impossible to overstate how important Kepler was. It revolutionized the field.” Dr. David Charbonneau Once the Kepler data started rolling in, Charbonneau worked with his graduate student at the time, , on his next big milestone in the field of exoplanet research: determining how common habitable Earth-like planets are in the galaxy. Through their work, Dressing and Charbonneau that nearly 1 in every 6 cool stars have Earth-like planets in their habitable zone. “We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet. Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted.” Dr. Courtney Dressing One of the next big steps for exoplanet research is to begin analysis of potentially habitable exoplanets’ atmospheres. Based on an exoplanet’s atmospheric composition, scientists could make a prediction as to whether life exists on the surface. “I think this is the way to go and look for life. If you were an alien astronomer looking at our solar system, you’d be able to see that there was something very different about the Earth’s atmosphere. You’d see that the Earth has a lot of oxygen, it has methane: a lot of things that are only made by biology.” Dr. David Charbonneau Exoplanet astronomy is a field that is helping scientists understand whether or not Earth and the life that inhabits it are common in the universe. Astronomers like Charbonneau are making strides on the journey to answer the question, “Exactly how rare are we?” On receiving the award, Charbonneau noted that it was an incredible honor, saying “It’s an acknowledgement that if you take risks you’re going to be rewarded. And that young scientists, despite being young, can often make the most important contributions in science.”
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Opera’s power-saving mode lands in its stable release channel
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
A few weeks ago, Opera a new feature for its browser on Windows and OS X that aims to make the batteries in your laptop last longer. Until now, this feature was only available in Opera’s beta release channel; today, it is graduating . The company claims that this new feature (together with Opera’s built-in ad blocker) can extend your battery life by up to 50 percent over using Chrome. I’ve used the beta version of Opera on my MacBook Air for the last few weeks and it definitely feels like using Opera over Chrome does result in better battery life, though I don’t think it’s 50 percent. In all fairness, though, Opera cites this number for tests with a Windows 10 laptop, so your mileage may vary. How does Opera manage to achieve this? The company says that when active, this mode limits the activity of background tabs, wakes the CPU less often by scheduling JavaScript timers differently, reduces the frame rate to 30 frames per second and tunes your video playback parameters by forcing the use of hardware-accelerated codecs. It’s worth noting that Opera did not publish any benchmarks against Safari on OS X, which makes sense, given that Apple uses similar techniques to extend the battery life on its laptops, too, so the difference is probably not quite as remarkable.
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Amazon will pump $3B more into its Indian marketplace as it competes with Snapdeal and Flipkart
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
plans to put $3 billion more into its , said founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. The investment was announced Tuesday evening at the U.S.-India Business Council’s 41st Annual Leadership Summit in Washington D.C., where Bezos and other business leaders met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This brings the total amount Amazon has invested in Amazon India, which it , to $5 billion. It back in July 2014. In a , Bezos said Amazon “has already created some 45,000 jobs in India and continue[s] to see huge potential in the Indian economy.” India’s e-commerce market is now the and is expected to be , according to Morgan Stanley. Amazon India’s main rivals are marketplaces and , both of which have significant venture capital banking. According to CrunchBase, so far from investors including Naspers, Tiger Global, DST Global, and Accel; Snapdeal has received from backers such as Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, SoftBank, and eBay. A February report by Morgan Stanley , with 45 percent market share in 2015. Snapdeal came in second with 26 percent, and Amazon India took third place with 12 percent. Both Flipkart and Amazon India, however, have claimed to be the largest e-commerce marketplace in India by user traffic. At the end of last year, comScore released data showing that Amazon India had more than 30 million unique visitors to its site during Diwali holiday sales in October, which . Flipkart then responded with data that claimed its main marketplace and clothing site Myntra (which Flipkart acquired in 2014) , compared to 15.86 percent for Amazon India, and 13.84 percent for Snapdeal. But Flipkart is now and ability to continue competing with Amazon India. Morgan Stanley, an investor in Flipkart, , down from it claimed last year after a $700 million funding round. The heated competition comes at a high cost for all of India’s largest e-commerce players. For example, all three have , a weak point in India’s commercial infrastructure, and also have to balance tight margins with offering competitive prices.
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Rakuten to exit the UK, Austria and Spain as global retrenchment continues
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
Rakuten is downsizing its international presence once again after Japan’s top e-commerce firm plans to shutter its e-commerce businesses in three countries in Europe. The move to close Rakuten.co.uk in the UK and Rakuten.es and Spain, as well as Rakuten’s offices in Cambridge and Barcelona, , when the company pulled out of Southeast Asia, restructured its presence in Brazil and wrote down $340 million in assets. These latest closes also include the shutting of Rakuten’s operations and office in Austria, although customers in the country will continue to be served out of neighboring Germany. The changes are slated to happen by August, after which Rakuten will focus on France ( ) and Germany in Europe because its presence in those countries has “the scale and potential for sustainable growth.” “In [the] UK and Spain, the cost of growth relative to the size of the businesses has led to plans to close these operations,” Rakuten added in a statement. A Rakuten spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the shutdowns will not affect a number of the companies other business interests in Europe, including its video platform, messaging app Viber, and Fits.me, which has an office of its own in London. (It remains to be seen how Fits.me, which is based in Estonia, will feel about the UK exit since presumably much of its ambition was centered around piggybacking Rakuten’s e-commerce business.) “Subject to consultation processes, approximately 100 employees are expected to be impacted across the region by the current plans to close three marketplaces. Rakuten will offer staff alternatives where these are available,” the spokesperson added. While the company is contracting in Europe, it also played up new initiatives in France and Germany, which include a membership loyalty program in the former and new low-cost commission program for merchants in the latter. Rakuten entered the UK when it . , but it wasn’t able to compete adequately enough for Rakuten to justify putting more resources into the business. Rakuten CEO and co-founder Hiroshi Mikitani announced in February this year and removing the deadwood of the group’s less promising businesses has been the first step. Mikitani is putting faith in a number of Rakuten’s more recent acquisitions — Viber ( ), video site Viki ( ), and U.S. discounts store Ebates ( ) — which he believes can unlock e-commerce and customer opportunities on mobile.
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Astronauts have entered an inflatable habitat on the space station for the first time
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Emily Calandrelli
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
This week, astronauts successfully the International Space Station’s first inflatable habitat. . enters for first time to collect air sample and set up sensors. — Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) Wearing a mask and a headlamp, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams opened the hatch to the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM). Williams, joined by Russian cosmonaut, Oleg Skripochka, collected air samples and downloaded data from sensors embedded in the expanded module. After checking the sensors, temperature, air samples, and condition of the inner surfaces of BEAM, Williams reported that the expanded module was in “pristine condition.” Once all initial inspections were completed, all crew exited and BEAM’s latch was closed. Space station crewmembers will reenter the module a few more times this week. BEAM, a product by , was to the ISS on April 8 in the trunk of a SpaceX Dragon capsule. About a week after its arrival, the compacted module was robotically taken from Dragon and attached to Node 3 on the space station. We're about to have another module on . Arm attaching inflatable module to the Node 3 aft port. — Tim Kopra (@astro_tim) Expansion of BEAM, however, did not go exactly as planned. The module was originally scheduled for inflation on May 26 . On that day, Williams opened a valve to allow air from the ISS to gradually inflate and expand the module. Unfortunately, while the air flowed into BEAM, cameras mounted on the outside of the ISS showed that the module was not growing as quickly as it should have been. After an attempt that lasted two hours, NASA halted the expansion, reporting that the module only grew 5 inches axially when it was designed to expand 68 inches. “We’ve been assessing all the parameters here from the ground, and due to our set of ‘no go’ conditions and not seeing any noticeable movement, we are going to have to reassess further from here.” – Astronaut Jessica Meir from the ground at Mission Control Two days after the first failed attempt, NASA tried to expand BEAM a second time and was Representatives from NASA that the original issues were likely related to the “memory” of the BEAM material from its time being compressed. They believed that the fabric of the module required additional time to bounce back to its expanded configuration after being folded up for so long. High-res photos taken during the successful expansion of BEAM on — Bigelow Aerospace (@BigelowSpace) Williams expanded the module slowly by opening the air valve 25 different times over the course of seven hours. It was important to inflate BEAM slowly because the time in between the bursts of air allowed the module to stabilize. NASA Astronaut Jeff Williams floating outside the entrance to the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) While inflated modules may seem more susceptible to ripping or tearing from impacts from micro-meteoroids or other debris, this is not necessarily the case. Bigelow Aerospace has stated that BEAM can resist high velocity impacts from small particles just as well as rigid alternatives. BEAM was designed to protect from such impacts with multiple layers of soft goods including a bladder and a micro-meteoroids and orbital debris (MMOD) shield. Expandable habitats like BEAM are new and could be a key technology for future space missions. On space missions where humans are involved, mass and volume are especially limited and expandable habitats are likely to be lighter and smaller than existing alternatives. The fact that they can be compacted for launch and inflated once in outer space offers an attractive option for future crewed missions. The benefits of expandable habitats certainly sound promising. However, more research needs to be done, and it starts with BEAM. Bigelow’s module will remain attached to the ISS for two more years to allow NASA to test its durability and inform future expandable habitat designs.
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The battle for the post-digital world
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Tari Haro
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
Marketing in a – was a major theme of 2016 Forrester Research Marketing Forum held in New York recently. At event . In that context, he described evolution of marketing: pre- marketing meant using mass media in a one-to-many approach; marketing was about data-driven, one-to-one personalization; and – marketing means one-to-moment marketing. One-to-moment marketing has been on agenda of major brands and thought leaders for past few years. Forrester’s Julie Ask opened conversation about one-to-moment marketing when she urged brands to think of mobile marketing as an opportunity to create content that matters to consumers based on context of their moment. then rolled out a large body of research around , or times when consumers use their mobile devices to decide on things to buy, things to do and places to go. Since 2015, has been updating its research with examples of brands that understand how to create contextual content, such as mobile wallet offers that make themselves relevant during those crucial moments of decision making. As , Americans check their smartphones collectively 8 billion times a day. key for brands is to be present during those moments with content that helps them figure out where to go and what to do instead of serving up intrusive ads. According to Doty, “Marketers must win in customers’ moments. These moments are your opportunity to deliver your brand promise no matter when or where that customer is.” In his view, one-to-moment marketing means anticipating what a customer wants and being present with right information — for instance, a motorcycle dealer such as Harley-Davidson being present with useful location information when a customer searches for “dealer near me” or “compare bike models.” big four — Amazon, Apple, Facebook and — intend to embed themselves in every moment. Here are some examples of how they’re doing it. In 2012, took a big step to own micro-moments by launching Now. is significant because it anticipates our search behavior and proactively offers suggestions on what to do, where to go and what to buy (based on what knows about our search habits). With Now, has become a more helpful utility for both consumers (by assisting in their decision making) and brands (by serving up information about them, such as suggestions for where to buy coffee based on data that brands share with ). Now made it even more important for businesses to share their location data with in order to be found. In 2015, Apple upped stakes for predictive search with launch of . With iOS 9, a simple swipe of your home screen results in Apple Spotlight search offering moment-based suggestions that change depending on time of day. Apple suggests results for coffee near me in morning, lunch near me in afternoon and dinner near me in evening. iOS 9 has increased Apple’s importance as a critical data publisher for brands. Amazon was embedding itself as a utility in its own day in 2015. On , Amazon rolled out button, which makes it possible for consumers to order products such as detergent on demand literally by pressing a smart button that you place in your home. , Amazon had rolled out more than 100 buttons for major brands ranging from Tide to Red Bull. With Dash button, Amazon has not only turned our homes into smart appliances, online retailer has also engineered its own micro-moments in home. Amazon has also created an incentive for customers to join its premium program (Dash has been limited to customers who pay extra to join Prime). In July, Amazon made its device widely available — thus beating Google with a voice-activated device that makes the home a more powerful hub for entertainment, utility and search through voice-activated commands. Months later, . Facebook made a major bid for micro-moments by introducing bots to its platform in 2016. At F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg positioned bots as an easy way for consumers to order what they want from brands instantly via Messenger (sort of like having Dash buttons embedded in Facebook). He demonstrated a bot that makes it possible for you to order flowers without talking to a person. “You never have to call 1-800-Flowers again,” he said. With bots, Facebook wants to make ‘s largest social network platform for micro-moments to happen. But does not intend to give up ground to anyone. On May 3, launched , which turns your keyboard into a rich discovery tool. ‘ve been actively using Gboard since Day One. Its appeal became evident from first moment tried it. can use my iPhone to conduct searches for things to do and share results with anyone without leaving my keyboard. can also easily search emojis to send via text or email. Gboard removes all friction from searching and sharing — essentially turning something as prosaic as a keyboard into a more powerful discovery platform. And, oh, Gboard is also a slap in Apple’s face: Suddenly my iPhone has become a branded product. / upped ante for utility. During / keynote, unveiled a number of products that are coming either this summer or fall: With Assistant, seeks to leapfrog voice-activated interfaces such as Siri and provide answers to more complicated questions — answers that change as your context changes. And with Assistant powering new products such as Home, Allo and (a competitor to FaceTime that also announced at / ), clearly wants to redefine utility as a smarter, more contextual experience in – . Amazon, Apple, Facebook and are all relying on utility and natural human gestures to steal consumers’ attention from each other: Amazon with press of a button, Apple with swipe, Facebook with a click of a bot and with typing and texting. Why? Because more they embed themselves into natural consumer behaviors, more they become go-to platform for businesses that want to win in micro-moments. At same time, big four are collecting valuable consumer data that they can use to serve up more relevant content to their users — based on searches, purchases, check-ins and social media activity. big four all face challenges and questions. Will Gboard become next Gmail or become another +? Will Assistant outperform Siri? Can Apple fight ‘s encroachment as iPhone sales stagnate? Will Dash become another loss leader for Amazon? Is there enough of a critical mass of people who want to use Facebook to buy things in addition to posting their personal status updates? Ultimately, consumers will decide who wins based on who gives them most utility. And brands that form strong relationships with big four (for instance, by sharing their location data with Apple, Facebook and ) will position themselves to win micro-moments.
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Celonis takes $27.5M led by Accel, 83North to grow the market for big data process mining
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
How do big businesses optimize IT-driven processes? Often by hiring management consultants to cast an expert eye over digital traceries and deliver recommendations for improving core operations like logistics and production. But Munich-based B2B SaaS startup reckons software can do a better job of flagging up areas where there’s room for business optimization. Its software integrates with around 60 existing enterprise-level business management IT systems — including systems from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow — processing customers’ data in real time to generate recommendations for enhancing business performance. It can also plug into legacy systems, typically using a partner company to do the implementation in those instances. The only requirement is that a customer is using IT systems to manage their business processes. Celonis describes what its software does as a new sub-set category of big-data mining, called process mining. “It’s a new kind of big data analytics,” says co-founder and CEO Alexander Rinke. “We didn’t invent it, we just found out about it very, very early.” One example he gives of the kind of business process intelligence it is generating for customers could be that sending a particular standard customer service response frequently results in callbacks — therefore implying the answer is not clear enough and that process needs to change. Celonis customers are also using the tool to optimize procurement processes — perhaps identifying invoicing problems with particular vendors, or problems with outsourcing costs in particular locations. Accounting, customer service and e-commerce are other areas of focus for applying the tool, he adds. “What we do is we figure out these are the processes, these are the orders which went well. And then these are those that took longer, which had more interactions — so more people worked on it etc. So what’s the difference in the structure? Is it the vendor? Is it the customer? Is it the branch office? Is it the country that produced the goods?” he says. “In order to point the company to — out of these 15 million cases [for example], these are the five areas where you can improve. Because we see a big number of transactions going the wrong way.” Celonis claims it’s been able to improve operational efficiency for its customers by between 20 and 30 percent. It trains its customers to use the tool but is not offering consulting services on top of its SaaS — rather, it delivers them with the software that generates a dashboard view of how their business is functioning so they can figure out what to do to improve overall business efficiency. The tool also provides a sub-set of focus area recommendations, based on the data it has crunched. “Supply chain is [another] big area,” adds Rinke. “It depends a little bit on the industry but I would say supply chain, production, procurement. I would never have believed before starting this how big of an issue the whole procurement operation is, especially for larger companies.” Celonis was founded back in 2011 after the three co-founders, who met at the Technical University of Munich, had been working on a university project with a local media company that wanted help optimizing the efficiency of its IT help desk operation. “They gave us the data. All the logs, everything, and said… okay tell us how to improve. What we did is we used visualization technology, we used data mining technologies, we used everything we could find on the market to crunch this data — and what we really missed out on is okay we have 20 teams in this IT service operation, how do they work together, where are they losing time… We lacked a real insightful analysis of the process,” he says, explaining how the idea for the startup was born. Fast-forward to today and Celonis has more than 200 customers across 15 industries in 25 countries — including global Fortune 500 companies such as Siemens, KPMG, Deloitte, Bayer and Vodafone, plus a range of mid-sized customers. signed a global reseller agreement with SAP, which is combining its process mining tech with its own in-memory database, SAP Hana. Celonis is also working with some management consultancy firms, according to Rinke, who sees it not as killing off the traditional management consultant but perhaps shifting what those people do. “There will be some projects they won’t do anymore because we can automate so much of it,” he suggests. “However there will be new things that they will do — probably even more. We are even collaborating with some, so have a lot of the consultants, like Deloitte, KPMG, Roland Berger, McKinsey, are even our customers. And use our product.” Areas where Celonis’ software can’t help business efficiency are aspects of a business where there’s no step-by-step IT process involved, such as creative processes. “Everything where it’s rather creative than transactional” is how Rinke sums up what’s outside its reach. “I wouldn’t say that we replace anything, I’d say that we give customers new possibilities — it’s like before you used Google, you went into a library. But Google doesn’t really replace the library… it just offers you a new way to get information. And what I like to think of Celonis is we offer companies a new way to understand how they can improve,” he adds. Celonis been revenue-generating and profitable for multiple years — although it’s not breaking out revenue at this stage (but will say it grew around 4,000 percent over that period) — but is now announcing its first external funding, pulling in a $27.5 million Series A round led by and . It’s planning to use the financing to ramp up its operations in markets such as the U.S. Its main markets at this stage are Germany and Europe, according to Rinke, with what he dubs a “growing presence” in Benelux and the U.K. “Especially in the US we want to invest a lot in building the market out there, and also making our technology even better and growing the value for our existing and new customers even further,” he tells TechCrunch. “Our main focus is really creating the category and building our marketing and sales operation worldwide.” So why take VC funding now, having successfully bootstrapped the business to profitability since 2011? Rinke flags up what he dubs the “important opportunity” to get expertise and knowledge from the investors in question on scaling an enterprise tech company globally as one key motivation, along with eyeing the wider opportunity he believes is accelerating down the process mining pipe. “We grew 4,000 percent in the last four years, and are very profitable, so we could have continued that path however we think that this funding provides us with two things: 1), a lot of expertise, because the investors have repeatedly been involved in companies that became pretty big and went IPO,” he says, adding: “The second aspect is we believe it adds a lot of strategic flexibility and we see… the virtue of process mining accelerating a lot.”
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Silicon Valley shows its primary colors
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
senators battled it out during the Democratic primaries. However, several Silicon Valley CEOs and investors poured early financing into one particular candidate – Hillary Clinton. Chris Sacca, an early investor in Twitter, Uber and Instagram, also bet early on Clinton, contributing to her campaign in July 2006. Bill Gates and Sheryl Sandberg both contributed to Clinton in 2007 before becoming major donors to President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. And Carl Icahn, the investor who has Billionaire investors have a habit of playing both sides and plenty donated to Obama’s 2008 campaign as well as Clinton’s. But Silicon Valley seems to have cooled on Clinton since her last presidential campaign. Clinton has yet to net donations from many CEOs and investors in the Valley, even a few who backed her 2008 campaign, according to a TechCrunch analysis of political donations from more than two-dozen well-known investors and entrepreneurs. Sacca, who donated $100,000 to Clinton’s campaign in March 2016, is a notable exception, as is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who began contributing to Clinton’s campaign in May 2015 after initially backing Marco Rubio. But other donors to her 2008 campaign, such as Gates and Vinod Khosla, have yet to reopen their checkbooks. It’s possible that Clinton is suffering from the compression that’s hitting the tech industry. The funding market is frothy and investors aren’t giving as freely to startups as they were a few years ago. It’s also possible that Clinton isn’t wowing Silicon Valley as much as she did in the run-up to the 2008 election. Even though Clinton hasn’t received many donations from tech investors early in the race, money is starting to trickle in. In addition to donations from Musk, Sacca and Sandberg, Clinton’s campaign recently received $298,000 from Sean Parker, the Napster founder who has also backed the Marco Rubio and Rand Paul presidential campaigns. (The Federal Election Commission can lag up to 30 days in its publication of campaign finance data, so contributions made in the last month may not be reflected here.) Clinton has also rallied support from the tech industry at several recent fundraisers. In February, Joyus CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy hosted a fundraiser for Clinton at her home, asking for donations between $500 and $2,700. Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist and early Uber investor, hosted a at his San Francisco home in April at which guests could pay $353,400 to sit at a table with Clinton, George Clooney and his wife, Amal Clooney. (Clooney later called the fundraiser’s price tag “ ” during an NBC interview.) Venture capitalists haven’t given the same warm welcome to Clinton’s opponent in the primary. At the top tiers of tech, Bernie Sanders seems as untouchable as Trump — none of the donors reviewed by TechCrunch gave to the Sanders or Trump campaigns. Sanders may not have appealed to VCs, but he continued to rack up small dollar donations from workers. According to an analysis conducted by and confirmed by TechCrunch, Sanders received contributions from 5,319 supporters in Silicon Valley zipcodes, compared to Clinton’s 766 donors and Trump’s measly seven donors. The Bay Area is filled with idealistic, young progressives who support Sanders’s messages of reform on campaign finance, banking and housing. But Silicon Valley also has a strong libertarian streak. Tim Draper, an investor known for his libertarian beliefs, told TechCrunch he does not see a candidate who supports his interests in the current race. Draper gave heavily to the right in past years but said he didn’t see a worthy candidate in the 2016 field. “I am looking for a free market candidate who also wants an efficient e-government. Perhaps one who will both cap taxes and give a basic income to citizens, based on what is left after government spending. Maybe one who recognizes that the Blockchain is the perfect bureaucrat — fair, honest and incorruptible,” Draper said. “Not seeing one running for president this time.” But yesterday afternoon, the that Clinton had clinched enough superdelegate support to secure the nomination, so perhaps Sanders supporters in Silicon Valley will shift their financial backing to her. Today’s primaries in New Jersey and California are expected to earn Clinton the final votes she needs for the nomination. Although Trump has yet to generate financial backing in Silicon Valley, several investors have voiced support for the unusual Republican candidate — they just haven’t backed up their words with cash yet. Many long-time Republican supporters in the Valley seem unsure of who to bankroll this election cycle. A handful of tech billionaires have given heavily to Republican candidates and causes over the past decade, but Trump wasn’t the first choice of many right-leaning investors whose donations were reviewed by TechCrunch. Several titans of capital instead gave to Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina. Rubio seemed to be the favorite before he dropped out of the race, pulling in millions from Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and other tech donors. Before pledging to back Trump as a delegate at the Republican National Convention, Peter Thiel poured $2 million into Fiorina’s failed presidential bid. The investor isn’t shy about donating to his favored candidates. In 2011 and 2012, he gave a total of $2.6 million to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. Icahn, another vocal Trump supporter, has yet to financially back him. Nor has Ellison, a frequent financial backer of conservative causes, opened his wallet for Trump either. Instead, he dumped over $5 million into Rubio’s campaign. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich was poised to break the drought on Trump donations last week when he planned to host a fundraiser for the presumptive Republican nominee at his home. However, after it garnered attention in the press. An Intel spokesperson told TechCrunch that Krzanich is not endorsing any candidate in the presidential race. Like Sanders, it seems that most of Trump’s financial support in the tech industry is coming from rank-and-file workers. Trump managed to scrape together $30,556 from San Francisco and Silicon Valley donors, according to FEC data, the majority of whom work in real estate or are self-employed. TechCrunch counted a grand total of seven tech-industry Trump donors in Silicon Valley, including a software engineer in Palo Alto, an administrative assistant at Genentech, one VP of engineering at Yahoo and a tech manager at Uber. From these donors, Trump has been able to pull in $1,020 to his campaign, according to the FEC — peanuts compared to Sanders and Clinton. Although investors have been cautious about jumping on the Trump train, at least two investors have funded an anti-Trump campaign. Keith Rabois, a former PayPal executive and investor whose political donations tend to lean right, has put $50,000 into an anti-Trump PAC called Never Means Never. Rabois previously backed Rubio’s presidential campaign. needs to morph into . — Keith Rabois (@rabois) eBay founder Pierre Omidyar also contributed a total of $250,000 to Never Means Never. So far, Never Means Never has launched a #NeverTrump campaign, asking Republicans to pledge never to vote for Trump. The pledge has . “Leaders across the spectrum, including in tech, are simply acknowledging that the uncertainty and chaos brought about by Trump is detrimental to our economic security and a pro-growth and entrepreneurial environment,” Rory Cooper, senior adviser to #NeverTrump, told TechCrunch. Cooper added that the ideals powering Silicon Valley seem like a natural fit for conservative politics. “I think Silicon Valley and the conservative movement share a distaste for bureaucracy and want to get things done to improve people’s lives, whether our frontrunner demonstrates that or not,” Cooper said. “Tech leaders should continue to engage with conservative thought leaders and policy makers, because many of us on the right want to take advantage of open platforms, digital ingenuity and decentralized thinking to make government more efficient and effective.” But this is a crazy presidential election with a nominee in which many in the GOP aren’t confident. It took a reluctant Paul Ryan weeks to endorse Trump – a decision likely based solely on an effort to prevent another Democrat from taking the White House. But now the right in Silicon Valley — and throughout the nation — seem more willing than ever to lean a little left to ensure Donald J. Trump doesn’t end up running the free world. We’ve reached out to the Sanders, Clinton and Trump campaigns to ask how they’ll work on bringing in donations from Silicon Valley workers and leadership in the future but have yet to hear back from all three. We’ll be sure to update you if we hear back.
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Is Formula E the future of racing?
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
There are only two races left in ’s second season, making this as good a time as any to review whether electric racing is the future of motor sports. I tend to think it is the future, but there are some definite growing pains to be worked through. Some good reasons for Formula E to be the future of racing: Some reasons Formula E is not the race series of today: Depending on who you talk to, the lack of roaring engines is either a plus or a minus. There are other pluses, like the design possibilities for a car that doesn’t need to exhaust any gases, and there are other minuses, like holdover rules from the FIA governing body that don’t apply to electric cars and frustrate officials. But the 2016-17 season is already a go, so things can only move forward from here.
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Secret’s founder returns with Bold, a Medium for enterprise
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
learned just how much goes unsaid inside companies while he was running . Blasting private information out publicly causes harassment, which led Secret to flame out and give investors back some of their money. But now Byttow is channeling his insight into a new startup called , which he tells me is a “platform for writing long-form content at work. Use cases include things like engineering tutorials, product specs, memos, onboarding docs, etc.” Bold’s bots and bot platform can help you write better, a Discuss on Slack button lets posts instantly start internal conversations and you can even write in code. Polished pieces can be flipped to become publicly visible. Bold’s writing canvas, Ambient sound and Hemingway bot One surprise: There’s no anonymity. Byttow tells me, “It’s incredibly important that people feel like they have a place to share their thoughts, but anonymity is not the answer because it’s polarizing and can skew toward negativity. Positivity and optimism are key, especially in growing companies. So we decided not to add anonymity as an option.” For now, Bold is in free private beta as a publishing and editing platform, but will eventually charge on a per-use, per-month basis. You can for early access. Byttow was originally funding Bold, but his four-person team pulled in $1 million from this summer. That’s despite Byttow for himself during Series B less than a year . You’d think VCs would be a bit more skeptical. Secret had amassed 15 million registered users before flaming out. The problem was that with little info about them, they were tough to monetize. This time around, Byttow tells me, “we want to build a product that companies will want to pay for because it’s the best and provides functionality that nobody else is doing.” Bold will have to battle with Google Docs, Dropbox, Paper, internal WordPress installations and other places to keep company text. And if businesses want to speak to the world, they can always hop on . But Byttow is betting on bots to give Bold an edge. These “Assistants” live on the otherwise clean writing canvas, and give you advice or keep you calm. He says the move was inspired by when “A long time ago, I worked on a Google Wave robot system.” Bold founder David Byttow , “The Hemingway assistant makes your sentences more concise and active by suggesting changes as you type. The Ambience assistant helps you think by playing ambient background noise, such as sounds reminiscent of sitting at on a rainy day.” Bold is also planning a third-party platform so devs can build their own assistants, which could make the startup more defensible. Without the protection of anonymity, employees might be apprehensive to change behavior and post their thoughts instead of more quietly telling their managers. The challenge will be for to prove it’s necessary. Yes, “Everyone has opinions and ideas, yet they often go unshared,” as Byttow writes. But there are plenty of good-enough ways to distribute them that don’t cost a monthly fee.
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Review: Leica’s X-U is a pricey adventure camera
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Stefan Etienne
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
time for everything, even for the German camera manufacturer of fame: . In this case, it’s their first waterproofed camera capable of shooting underwater. Some compromises were made here and there to make this possible, but at the end of the day, it still looks — and for the most part, shoots — like a Leica should. My personal experience with Leica cameras goes back to the launch of the Q, then the SL, where I found out there’s just something irresistible about the quality of one of these German cameras: both image and aesthetic. Indeed, my experience with Leica cameras doesn’t go back decades, but three years — I am 19, after all — but anyone who has had experience with other full-frame or crop-sensor cameras the difference. All that being said, the Leica X-U is not going to replace your SLR or your mirrorless. In fact, it’s not suited to take the spot of any of your other cameras — it’s sort of an action camera, with its waterproofing and dust resistance. It also doesn’t have the fastest autofocus and shutter when used, and really is the only con of the X-U that gives me the most strife. Also, with no viewfinder, your photographer’s eye is left in favor of the 3-inch screen, which isn’t what you’d want when shooting a subject photo (for this I’d suggest getting an optical accessory). It also doesn’t shoot in 4K for the price, and isn’t a full-frame camera either, so it truly is a specialty item. You must really like pool shoots to need a camera like this. Now, taking the X-U for what it is — an adventure/action camera — I can be more forgiving toward its shortcomings as a Leica camera. But in reality, the X-U is more of a service to the Leica community, mainly because the existence of such a camera type was non-existent for the brand’s fans. However, the flip side is that the X-U might be seen by everyone else as “just another expensive camera” — they wouldn’t be wrong. All that being said, below are unedited (with exception to size) photos from the X-U: [gallery ids="1333215,1333217,1333216,1333218,1333219,1333220,1333221,1333222,1333223,1333224,1333225,1333226"] The image quality is great, considering the X-U is really an X type 113 camera in waterproof housing. When the autofocus locks it makes a great impression in images, despite the lack of focal point precision controls. The X-U’s auto white balance also shines during most conditions. 35mm is always a nice focal length, and it definitely helps when shooting wider stills or simply trying to better frame your subject with the LCD’s shooting grid. Video is another story: This camera is much better suited for stills, so you won’t necessarily be on the path to becoming the next Jacques Cousteau. I’d use the video function sparingly, only because it’s not particularly remarkable and is limited to 1080p quality at 30 frames. Giving the X-U a final verdict is a tricky thing. It’s overpriced as a camera given the specs, but the quality, durability and brand rescue the X-U, in some instances. A difficult-to-open battery door, what feels like a slower-than-I’d-like autofocus system (without the ability to manually adjust the focus point), and a small battery make it a tougher sell than it should be. Offerings from Olympus and Pentax offer similar or better performance for a fraction of the cost. Of course, competitors in the adventure camera space might not have that “Leica feel,” but then again, the X-U never felt like a fully equipped Leica to begin with. Still, it does come in handy.
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Questions you need to ask your VC
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Roger Lee
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
Most entrepreneurs focus on the hard economics of the deal when they negotiate with investors: percentage ownership, valuation, preferences and other terms. Those things are all important — but so is the soft stuff, especially in today’s volatile market. Think about it. Taking venture capital funding is the beginning of an intimate, complicated and usually long-term relationship. It’s easier to get divorced from spouse than get rid of investors. (Seriously. And investments usually outlast the average time people stay married before a divorce — eight years in the U.S., according to .) Particularly as valuations drop and markets churn, it’s tempting to grab whatever funding can, from whatever partner can. But a well-funded nightmare with the wrong partners can become disastrous. What should to figure out if ’re partnering with the right investor — one that will stick with through good markets and bad? Put another way: How can reciprocate all the detailed due diligence this person and his or her firm is doing on before both tie the knot? Some of the are obvious: Has this firm done deals in particular sector? Do they have a record of exits and a good reputation in the community? But there are also less obvious — and telling — probably don’t realize should , particularly in today’s market. Here are a few. Inevitably, companies hit bumps along the way. When the hard times come, will investor grip the steering wheel too tightly, freak out completely or help steer clear of a jam? Are they a yeller or a contemplative presence in the boardroom, no matter how tough things get? It’s easy to be a great investor when times are great, but seeing how investors operate through adversity is probably more valuable information for . to walk through his or her philosophy on dealing with adversity, with specific examples. Connect with these people independently — don’t just call names potential investor offers. Key issues to examine are: What exactly happened to relationship when hit that speed bump? Did the investor stop coming to board meetings — perhaps hand off to a junior person at their? Was he or she slower to return phone calls, or just as involved in company as before? In my experience, communication between an investor and a CEO should increase when times get tough. Ideally, the should be talking to the CEO multiple times a week and focusing on taking decisive action. Under no circumstances should the step back and let someone else (such as someone junior) handle the situation. investors highly specific operational or finance relevant to business. If ’re a B2B software company, one might be, “My VP of product and my VP of engineering don’t agree on product roadmap. How should I handle this?” Or, “I’m having a hard time creating urgency in my sales pipeline — getting customers to feel like they to buy now. How can I do this?” could also talk about resource allocation, and for advice on how to grow business faster without burning more capital. VCs also can offer advice about structuring future financing rounds (even though they’ll be self-interested, obviously). All of these probing can give a foretaste of future investor’s philosophy about tackling important business issues. And if don’t wind up choosing this particular , at least ’ll get some great free advice. Don’t become so enamored with a high-profile that forget to figure out if they can actually support through various stages of growth — which may take longer than think if the company under-performs, or the economy is not doing well. Don’t pick a seed-stage specialist, for example, if that investor to pony up $20 million of capital over the life of company. That’s simply not a seed-stage ’s business model; these super early-stage investors play a vital role in the ecosystem, but they do not have the cash to do very large, follow-on rounds. Over time ’ll probably deal with multiple VCs, who often invest in rounds together in a syndicate. Make sure ’re in alignment from the get-go as far as how much each one will be willing to invest in subsequent rounds. specific about how much money this has to invest now and plans to keep in reserve for future financing founds. Are pitching a consumer or mobile app to investors focused on SaaS and cloud computing startups? This is a bad idea — the lesson here is, know audience. investors are ruled by their brains their guts, but gut instincts — whether acknowledged or not — are strongly colored by individual experiences. Get would-be investors talking frankly about their own experiences and challenges with specific space, whether it’s e-commerce or cloud computing. Investors want confidence that bring relentless curiosity to understanding industry, particularly when it seems ’re on the wrong track. Expect the same of . Also, talk to about whether are both in alignment on key business milestones and definitions of success. Find out which metric the would use to determine if this investment is successful: a 3X return, a 10X return or a 100X? Only an IPO, and not a sale to a larger acquirer? ’ll be a part of a specific fund, so want to make sure ’re all on the same page. I’m a firm believer that great companies can be created in any market environment. Now is no exception. But before take the plunge and accept venture financing, I’d encourage to potential investors these and other detailed ake sure relationship gets off on the right foot and, like a great marriage, matures into a successful and robust partnership.
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Google’s new app makes your iOS Live Photos less shaky and more awesome
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
Apple’s Live Photos are, by design, something most people don’t really think about. You just take your still photos as you always would, and iOS automatically captures a bit of footage from before and after the photo was taken and turns it into a little animation. Sometimes these animations are – little coincidental gems that you never would’ve nabbed otherwise. Often, though, they’re blurry, shaky messes that you won’t want. Google just released an app to try and fix this. Called “Motion Stills”, the new app exists pretty much solely to improve your Live Photos. Borrowing much of what Google has learned from its video stabilization efforts on YouTube and other projects, the app analyzes your Live Photos and does a bunch of crazy stuff in no time flat: The app only exists on iOS for now — which makes sense, given that Live Photos are pretty much exclusively an iOS thing. Third parties have been working on their own alternatives to Live Photos for Android, but none really reign supreme. With that said, this further propel the idea that Google’s engineers are becoming more and more interested in iOS – it’s the second Google app in recent history to land on iOS first, following of their (rather friggin’ good) iOS keyboard, Gboard. While Gboard borrows much from the Android keyboard, it also does quite a bit that the built-in Android keyboard doesn’t yet — things like GIF search, or emoji auto suggestions. You can find Motion Stills in the
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Good for PoC launching to identify inclusive tech companies
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
It’s hard to know which tech companies will be good to work for, until you’re actually there. Sure, there’s Glassdoor, but that doesn’t let you see what it’s like to work somewhere if you’re a person of color — especially since most tech companies are predominantly white. Enter . Founded by Amélie Lamont, , Catt Small and Jacky Alciné, is an online database that identifies good and safe tech companies for people of color. Good for PoC defines safe as “knowing your job won’t be in jeopardy because of your skin color or looks” and inclusive as “knowing you’re a welcome member of a community,” . The team started accepting feedback from people of color in tech , asking about things like benefits, how included you feel at the company on a scale of one to five, how the company ensures employees of color are happy and how someone would apply to work at the company. Today, Good for PoC is officially launching its database. There are currently no plans to list bad companies to work for, though, “as the database grows and if your company isn’t on the list, concern is of warrant,” according to Lamont. All that said, there’s a relatively new company called Comparably, . But, at the end of the day, the more information that is available, the better. That’s because, there are far too many examples out there of people of color and/or women being discriminated against at the workplace. Unfortunately, it matters where you work if you’re someone from an underrepresented group of people. If you’re a person of color, you can .
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Google’s VR prototypes give you charming and strangely expressive googly eyes
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
How best to represent a person in virtual space? A square with their avatar picture on it? Too Slack. A custom face crafted with a million sliders? Too Second Life. A 3D scan of their face? Too “Lawnmower Man.” Then perhaps… a cartoon representation of the headset the user is wearing, with giant googly eyes on the front? You, my friend, are crazy like a fox. Google’s Daydream team (that’s the new VR brand, not the screensavers you have on your phone, also called Daydream) about some fun they’ve been having prototyping virtual experiences. The social aspect of VR is, if anything, the most underplayed aspect of the whole thing. The possibilities for storytelling are interesting, but the possibilities for changing how distant people interact are profound. But with the limitations we’re working with now, how can you create a convincing presence without dipping into the uncanny valley? Daydream developers found that going in the opposite direction from trying to visually replicate reality, unexpectedly, allowed the important part of reality to shine through. Disembodied headsets with big googly eyes on them may not exude charisma, but in motion they are instantly recognizable as a human presence, and, counterintuitively, the lack of details is, if anything, an improvement — sometimes inadequate detail is worse than none at all. The eyes, I think, just point in the direction your head is turned — a surprisingly effective shortcut. I could do without the bone-like appendages in the puzzle video, though. There are little things you can add, as well, like relative height so that someone you know is taller than you will appear so in VR, or dumb little personal details like that hat clipping through the mask. There’s much more on this topic in the from which those videos are taken. Yes, that means it’s old news, but it’s still fun.
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T-Mobile thanks customers with a new freebies app that hasn’t worked all day
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
Hey T-Mobile, this is how you go about thanking your customers! Yesterday, the mobile operator announced its latest “un-carrier” move – this time, its latest gimmick involves and the launch of an app called “ ” that’s full of freebies. Unfortunately, that app has been down all day as T-Mobile’s servers couldn’t handle the load from the incoming traffic. Well, that’s a promising look for a company that wants you to rely on it for your mobile voice and data needs, isn’t it? In case you missed it, is a customer rewards app that launches new giveaways and deals every week. The app wasn’t immediately available following T-Mobile’s on Monday morning, but launched later in the day. Its rewards are not Oprah-sized, of course, but rather practical and fun things. For example, free movie tickets to via Fandango, a free small Frosty at Wendy’s, and a free pizza from Domino’s, were among the first. (Domino’s, in fact, has an “evergreen” deal with T-Mobile, the company tells us – meaning there’s free pizza to be had weekly. Just not today, I guess). Rewards partners lined up for the future include Buffalo Wild Wings, Condé Nast, Lyft, MLB, MGM Resorts, Samsung, StubHub, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, JackThreads, HotelTonight, Gilt, Shell, and others. The idea is that T-Mobile will surprise its customers with a “thank you” gift every week from its partners, as a perk that comes with being a T-Mobile customer. But as those customers quickly found out, the app just didn’t work. While you could download and install T-Mobile Tuesdays on your smartphone, and then complete the sign-up process, accessing the deals would simply time out. On the screen, a message displays saying: “This is awkward…There was an error attempting to contact the server.” Meanwhile, T-Mobile’s Twitter account is blaming the problem on both “massive demand” which led to “equally massive latency issues.” However, it is promising users they’ll still get thanked. (How is unclear.) We're working on getting that fixed, the massive demand has created equally massive latency issues, but you'll *TeriM — T-Mobile (@TMobile) Some users are complaining they’ve been , without any success. Many are disappointed about missing out on the free pizza, too. got to Dominos for lunch and ended up paying for pizza. I feel so rewarded. — Davorin Stajsic (@mrbrowncoat) To make matters worse, T-Mobile’s Twitter account seems to be blowing off concerns from users who lost access to their prizes when the servers crashed or who missed out on those they would have otherwise been able to use. When asked if the company would extend the rewards given the issues with the downtime, that the great thing about this program is that it’s an ongoing thank you and there will be many more Tuesdays and rewards to come in the future. That response – – is not the appropriate one from a carrier whose brand hinges on putting the customer first. Of course, we had some hope that the customer service team may not be aware of how T-Mobile is planning to officially address the problem, and is responding as best it can with limited information. However, when we asked T-Mobile for more information on the app’s downtime and how it plans to handle these issues – including the whether or not the company would extend the program to Wednesday – we were directed to follow the T-Mobile Twitter account for updates. . This is actually a pretty “carrier” move, T-Mobile. Thanks a bunch. : T-Mobile at 4:25 PM ET on June 7 that the app was functioning again. Customers who signed up were also alerted via text.
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 21 | null |
Software is still eating the world
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Jeetu Patel
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
penned his famous “ ” essay in The Wall Street Journal five years ago. Today, the idea that “every company needs to become a software company” is considered almost a cliché. No matter your industry, you’re expected to be reimagining your business to make sure you’re not the next local taxi company or hotel chain caught completely off guard by your equivalent of Uber or Airbnb. But while the inclination to not be “disrupted” by startups or competitors is useful, it’s also not exactly practical. It is decidedly non-trivial for a company in a non-tech traditional industry to start thinking and acting like a software company. This is why the companies we most associate with “Why Software Is Eating the World” now are startups, with a few notable exceptions (like GE). Ultimately, there is no blueprint for how to make this transition, but I do think there are two principal lessons or starting points that can be learned from companies that have succeeded most over the last five years: timing and focus. It’s important to appreciate just how prescient Andreessen’s idea was in 2011. At the time, the internet was pervasive. Amazon had been around for a decade, the iPhone was four years old and the App Store was three years old, doing in revenue for millions of developers. Facebook had , and Netflix was streaming of content each quarter. Most people would have said we were finally fully immersed in the technology era and that the internet had changed everything. In other words, the future was here. And, as Marc predicted, they would have been very wrong. As he put it: was founded in 2009 and launched its service in 2010. Outside of a small but loyal community of riders and the local airport limo drivers in San Francisco, few people knew what Uber was in 2011, and no one was participating in endless conversations about “Uber for X.” Similarly, Airbedandbreakfast.com (later to be renamed ) was founded in 2008, but only reached . Today, it’s hard to imagine getting around in busy cities without these two services. What Uber and Airbnb — like Andreessen — understood about “software eating the world” was that incredible innovations often emerge at just these moments when it looks like everything has been changed and we’ve reached the new normal. Uber and Airbnb saw the world of the cloud, the iPhone, the App Store, AWS and Google Maps, and said to themselves, “it’s not about what can we do now, but better; it’s about what can we do now that was simply not possible until today.” It’s that discontinuous leap — supported by the rise of new platforms — that led to a company dismantling the transportation industry or reimagining hospitality. — while far from a startup in 2011 — is also an interesting case. They started by shipping DVDs to people’s homes so that people could watch movies without having to live through the hassle of making a trip to Blockbuster, then evolved into providing streaming movies in the comfort of people’s homes. Like Uber and Airbnb, Netflix looked around at the platforms and infrastructure available to them (first the USPS, then broadband internet) and asked what they could do on top of those platforms that either no one had thought of (shipping DVDs) or had previously been unfeasible. In 2013 they took the discontinuous leap from technology provider and service to content creator. Now they think of themselves far more as a movie studio like HBO that creates original programming, albeit one with a vast and unique understanding of viewing behavior derived from the analytics of its subscriber base. This is a recurring pattern of innovation. Smart players do not necessarily build out their entire vision of the future from top to bottom. They look around for inspiration on the problems they can solve for people (getting a ride, finding a place to stay, killing time) and then leverage the platforms available to them to come at the problem in an entirely new way. Sometimes, like Netflix, the process is more incremental (or, as Ben Thompson would characterize it, ); other times, the infrastructure is in place for a more dramatic, discontinuous shift. Of course, having the vision is one thing, making it real is another challenge in its own right — hence lesson number two… For a traditional industrial or service company, making the transition to acting like a software company is a massive undertaking. You need to hire new people in every part of your organization; restructure around different economics; reestablish customer, partner and supplier relationships and expectations; overhaul infrastructure. The list is long and full of terrors. If you have a healthy business with revenue streams locked in for years, that’s great. It means you can start on this problem now and know you may have a few years to get it right. That’s a great circumstance, but even in that situation, speed and the ability to test and iterate are going to be required; to move fast, you need to focus. As Steve Jobs once famously said, “Deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do.” A good way to illustrate the power of focus at the practical level is going back to Uber, which has enjoyed tremendous growth by solving a very real problem of providing to the masses a service to transport people easily, comfortably and relatively affordably. How has Uber been able to grow so fast and scale so quickly? As we just discussed, they saw the new reality of mobile — with every person, both driver and rider, having a connected computer in their pocket — and leveraged that new normal as a platform to bring people together in a way never before imagined or realized. Uber doesn’t own their cars. They also don’t directly employ their own drivers. So, one might ask, what do they own exactly as a core asset? The core application and ecosystem around the Uber experience is their primary asset and differentiator. But to deliver that experience, they apply rigorous focus. At the practical level, when you look at the technology components of Uber’s world-renowned app, they decided to rely on other core platforms and technologies to power many of the key elements. They run on infrastructure provided by , so they can be up and available all around the world. Their mapping technology is provided by in the form of an API, so drivers take the fastest routes and you always know where you are. Their messaging stack is provided by , ensuring you get that text message right when your driver has arrived. And their email service to send out things such as receipts to passengers is built on APIs. Uber leaves all of this to specialists who focus on these elements as their respective core businesses. What Uber instead focuses on is curating a world-class experience for their customers and solving the problem of transportation for the masses, one ride at a time. This laser focus allows them to put all their energy on the main problem they are trying to solve, and rely on specialists for other essential aspects that are critical to their app, but that don’t qualify as areas Uber needs strategically to build up as a core competency. The benefit of this approach is not only in getting the initial application built, but freeing resources from the ongoing maintenance of these non-core elements of the stack. Notably, it also creates an innovation boost in the wider ecosystem, because each of these non-core elements is core to the supplier providing the service. These suppliers — or platforms — need to innovate very rapidly in their areas to always make sure they’re indispensable to their customers. It’s a virtuous cycle where Uber automatically gets the benefit of those innovations in its apps. Every company should apply this calculus to its digital strategy. The next question centers around precisely how you determine which elements are core or non-core: Focusing on your core when it comes to technology makes it easier to focus on your end-customer experience — and that’s what makes a great software company. According to , more than 52 percent of companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 were no longer on that list in 2015. It would be safe to assume that the new entrants will all have created meaningful digital differentiation in their core business model. The central question, therefore, is not whether every company will have to embark on some sort of digital transformation journey depending on their business, but rather how they will go about making it happen. By looking at the lessons of Uber, Airbnb and Netflix, we can learn a lot about the value of both being keenly aware of the technology ecosystem around us that makes the world ripe for disruption and the advantage of focus when there is so much to do and speed is so important. In reality, most companies embarking on this journey will fail. As Andreessen said, “No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult.” Of course, that’s also why it’s worth doing.
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Google launches new certification program for software development agencies
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
Google today announced a for development agencies. The idea behind the program is to recognize agencies that “have undergone the required training and have demonstrated excellence in building Android applications,” a Google spokesperson tells us. In total, in India, Russia, U.K. and U.S. have already been certified since Google first its plans for this program last December. These agencies work with both large enterprise clients and startups. While Google that it does “not endorse, or offer any warranty, regarding the certified agencies,” the idea here is obviously to highlight some of the agencies that Google itself considers among the best in the ecosystem (and that use Google’s technologies, too). While the focus here is on Android apps, Google tells me that the program also includes support for agencies that work on web apps, too. “The is an effort by Google’s Developer Relations team to work closely with development agencies around the world and help them build high quality user experiences,” Google’s global lead for the agency program Uttam Kumar Tripathi writes today. Google will provide certified agencies with personalized training, dedicated content, priority support and access to the company’s developer relations teams. Certified Agencies will also get early access to upcoming developer products and help with UX reviews.
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Tivoli Audio’s founder launches a Kickstarter campaign for his new company’s internet radios
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
Over the past several years, Massachusetts-based Tivoli Audio has made a name for itself with high-end internet radios, combining classic aesthetics with online connectivity that lets users, say, listen to region NPR stations from around the country, among other things. Back in March, the company’s founder Tom DeVesto (who also helped lead Cambridge Soundworks, once upon a time) launched , which appears to share many aesthetic and technological characteristics with its predecessor. Today in New York, the company showed off a pair of new internet radios – the Solo and Duetto – which look to be at home among Tivoli’s offerings. The specs are pretty similar on the devices, though, as the name implies, the Solo is the smaller of the two, featuring 2.8-inch color display to the Duetto’s 3.2 inches. The former also promises to do a better job filling a larger room. The radios include a number of audio sources, including on-board Spotify compatibility, internet radio (with access to 20,000 stations and podcasts), Bluetooth syncing and good old Fashioned FM, courtesy of an antenna located on the rear. Both also, predictably, look quite nice, featuring a number of different colors and finishes. The radios feature six musical presets, a three-inch woofer, 60-watt amplifier and connect with the company’s Android/iOS app for control. The Solo is set to retail for $299, with the Duetto running $100 more. They’ll initially be available through the company’s newly launched Kickstarter campaign, with delivery set for the fall.
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The unsexiest trillion-dollar startup
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
ballistic when public shipping manifests leaked the existence of the iPhone 3G. That’s about the only time something exciting happened in the freight forwarding business. The circulatory system of the global economy is a trillion-dollar industry, yet no one really talks about it, or builds tech for it. Each of these dots is a freight shipment currently on the move with Flexport. Yellow = ocean containers, Red = air freight (few because they arrive so fast), and white = truck. Over time, Flexport’s routing decisions are becoming more and more automated. But it also has humans on hand to fill the gaps when necessary, like with the Chinese trucking industry that’s resistant to modernization. Meanwhile, competitors are betting on hunches about the best routes because they don’t have complete data. Flexport CTO Amos Elliston and CEO/Founder Ryan Petersen (from left) The biggest risk to Flexport could be changes to regulation since the company has to stay compliant across the world. Petersen also notes his concern about Donald Trump’s potential to become President and slap a huge tariff on goods coming out of China. Flexport could invade other parts of the freight ecosystem, but for now it’s trying to concentrate on its unique strengths. Petersen is giddy about the idea of creating “Amazon One-Click for the enterprise”. By using AI to monitor re-order cycles and plan future shipments, Flexport could allow businesses to instantly replenish their inventory when they run low. Petersen calls it “an operating system for global trade” “They’re taking on automating shipping” Paul Graham extols. “Just imagine the potential energy to be released there. It’s 15% of the global economy. And it’s much of the back-pressure constraining the other 85%. The potential energy is all the greater because this domain is currently so backward. And Flexport has it all to itself, because schlep blindness has prevented everyone else in the startup world from even seeing it.” That term is something Graham came up with to describe the inability of innovators to spot potentially big ideas if they inherently involve a painful — the Yiddish word for a tedious journey. Flexport is the perfect example of what can happen if entrepreneurs attack seemingly boring businesses. Petersen embraced both the literal and figurative schleps necessary to build something new in freight forwarding. Kissing the frog, no matter how unsexy, may end up turning him into a prince.
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Crunch Report | First Project Tango Phone
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Samsung Pay sets launch date for Singapore
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
After months of , Samsung Pay has finally for Singapore, its first market in Southeast Asia. The mobile payment service will debut there on June 16 for people who have a Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Samsung Pay has rolled out in South Korea, the United States, China, and Spain so far. In Singapore, it will be available for Visa, MasterCard, and American Express card holders, as well as customers at banks including Citibank, DBS, POSB, OCBC, and Standard Chartered Rivals Apple Pay and Android Pay are already available in Singapore, one of Asia’s most important financial and business hubs. As in most other markets, Samsung Pay’s main advantage is that it can be used at almost all existing payment terminals. Unlike Apple Pay and Android Pay, which only work at contactless terminals, Samsung Pay has a technology called which mimics the magnetic strip on bank cards and can therefore be used almost anywhere that cards are accepted. While Samsung Pay is currently only available for Samsung smartphone users, it has a local partner in Singapore that may help expand its reach. In its announcement, Samsung said it “will be exploring potential collaborations in the mobile payment space” with Singtel, Singapore’s largest telecom. Singtel already has its own for iOS and Android.
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Why transparency would have saved us from the 2008 financial collapse
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Perry Rahbar
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
From my desk at Bear Stearns, where I’d traded mortgage-backed securities for years, I watched as the and housing markets crashed in 2008. A few months later, there was no Bear, and my new desk was at J.P. Morgan. It’s easy to think the crisis was a result of “Wall Street got drunk,” as George W. Bush . But I saw a different cause: the sector’s failure to keep up with innovation. What really happened in ? In short, innovation without checks and balances. If you’ve seen , you know some of what led to the was the rise of mortgage-backed securities (MBS). But the real problem wasn’t that those securities existed. MBS was an innovation in its own right, after all, created by the industry as a way to modernize mortgage lending and allow investors to lend directly to homeowners. On its face, it was a positive change. The problem was the industry didn’t keep up. As new offerings like MBS hit the market, the tools and processes investors used to make decisions didn’t change. The result? Investors didn’t always know what they were buying. When it’s too hard to run the numbers, you start believing the guy on the phone, the news cycle, the hype. And then everything crashes. By the time I left J.P. Morgan in 2013, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending had erupted. Companies like , and were originating loans in greater numbers, using proprietary risk-analysis tools and distributing smaller, niche loan amounts. Consumers saw P2P lenders as a more transparent and modern option compared to the traditional banks they blamed for the mess. P2P lenders, in turn, created attractive websites and apps that made getting a loan from your bed as easy as selecting a playlist on Spotify. As P2P lending grew, so did its investor base. With high demand for loans, P2P lenders turned to the institutional investors, hedge funds and institutions they once replaced. And as the business model evolved, so did the name. “P2P” became “online marketplace.” While marketplace lending is still a small component of the market, it’s growing rapidly. A recently issued by the Treasury Department projected marketplace lending will eventually be worth $1 trillion, and estimated that loan origination volumes reach $90 billion by 2020. That means more involvement by the capital markets, both in financing and purchasing assets. So the question becomes: Has innovation for consumers been matched by innovation for investors? While innovation for consumers has evolved, the back end of lending and investing is just as opaque now as it was prior to . Worse yet, investing in marketplace assets is even more complex than traditional loans. With less regulation than banks and no consistent reporting practices across lenders, it’s extremely difficult for investors to figure out what they’re buying and how it’s performing. It gets even more complicated when you think about marketplace securitization, which is essentially marketplace loans bundled into bonds. Sound familiar? Despite a lack of new tools, securitizations are occurring with greater frequency. According to the Treasury, marketplace securitization has reached more than $7 billion in volume since the first transaction in 2013, with more than 40 deals in just three years. So what should be done to ensure the newest wave of innovation is safe? We need a system of checks and balances that ensures responsible lending by originators and responsible investing by capital markets. A focus on data versus profits is key, as is the goal of providing impartial data to all stakeholders. It starts with surfacing previously inaccessible data and sharing it with everyone involved in a deal. By making the truth too obvious to ignore, we increase smart decision-making and decrease the possibility that our newest innovations will lead to the next . Post- , perhaps the strongest criticism leveled at Wall Street was its lack of . Unless we innovate quickly, we risk this again — this time as it relates to marketplace lending. Two of the Treasury’s key recommendations for marketplace lending focus on increasing . The Treasury suggests consistent reporting standards for loan-origination data and portfolio performance, and into the loans included in securitizations. Both recommendations can be addressed with the right technology. Current market trends created the right environment to bet big on and third-party software and services. Today’s “do more with less” mantra means Wall Street is much more open to non-proprietary solutions than ever before. And while marketplace lending isn’t going away, neither is capital market involvement. Without innovative solutions to new problems, we risk reverting to decision-making. Or, worse, we risk creating an investor pool bearish on investing in marketplace assets, which will kill liquidity and raise rates for the rest of . So let’s support innovation. But let’s also do our part to innovate responsibly.
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How a 30K-member Facebook group filled the void left by Uber and Lyft in Austin
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 |
Exactly 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. With almost a million residents of the 11th largest city in the United States now void of the reliable transportation option that is Uber and Lyft, no one really knew what would happen. And while a few law-abiding apps sprung up to take Uber and Lyft’s place, it seems that a good deal of demand has shifted to an unlikely provider – an unregulated, peer-to-peer Facebook group. The group is called , and now has over 30,000 members. So how does it work? Riders post their requests, which is typically a pickup and drop-off destination as well as desired time (most as ASAP). Then, literally within minutes, potential drivers will respond with an ETA, price, and phone number to call to confirm the pickup. Riders are then instructed to delete the post after confirming a ride, as not to clutter the page. Drivers have even starting posting custom “brochure” graphics, that typically have a picture of their car, screenshot of their Uber or Lyft account (showing they have been through a background check), and phone number. Although it operates totally peer-to-peer, the group was created by , a new ride-sharing app that while not yet launched, hopes to eventually provide a totally decentralized ride-sharing solution that includes payment, identity, and reputation management. What exactly does this mean? Well, Arcade City will allow riders and drivers to decide on a cost and process the payment on their own – whether that is cash, Venmo, or hugs. While the app will process credit card payments as a convenience feature, this isn’t a necessary or even encouraged method of payment. While this seems like it may work, decentralization gets trickier when you start trying to figure out background checks and identity verification. But Arcade City is confident they have a solution that will protect riders, while still remaining decentralized. The startup explained that each driver will have a profile that can embed a Facebook or Twitter profile, background check, FBI check, driver’s license, proof of physical address, and more. Each driver can attach as few or as many of these verification options as they like, and the app will use these to compile a score that summarizes trustworthiness for each driver. Essentially, since riders will always be able to pick their driver, drivers who choose not to verify should be weeded out of the platform. The decentralized model also means they company won’t provide commercial ridesharing insurance, but will show users if their driver carries it personally, so they can make their own decision before getting in the car. This of course leaves the door open for major safety liabilities, like the potential that a rider may choose a driver that wasn’t verified or insured. Even though Arcade City is shifting responsibility to the rider, their PR would still suffer if there was ever an incident. Not to mention the huge liability that this Facebook group is. Even though drivers post images of their Uber app to show they were approved and background-checked by the platform, these images can easily be faked. There will always be a definite risk that you are getting into the car of a literal stranger, someone who never had a background check or may not even hold a valid license. But for now, the group seems to be working. By creating the Facebook group Arcade City was able to capitalize on the void in transportation that Austin has faced over the past month, and now had an eager customer base of over 30,000 that it hopes to migrate to its app once launched.
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Forge locks down $4.5M Series A to help gamers capture awesomeness
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Sometimes entrepreneurship is about starting battles and other times it’s about finishing them. Jared Kim has been on a mission to cut the frustration out of sharing gameplay with friends since he was 19. , his second play in the space, closed a $4.5 million Series A yesterday led by True Ventures. This round matches a $4.5 million seed his company received back in March. Forge runs in the background, capturing an entire PC gaming session. Players can pull up a window at any point and share a 5- to 30-second clip from the previous 60 seconds of game play. If players are caught up in a one man battle for freedom in Counter-Strike and don’t have the time to share a clip, they can simply bookmark their quad kill and return to it after they finish playing. Forge makes it easy to share content with Twitch and YouTube integration. “Using the exciting tools out there, it’s not easy — even for me as someone who has built this technology for my entire adult life. I scratch my head sometimes figuring out how to do it,” said Jared Kim, Forge CEO. When Kim began his work nine years ago, Forge would have been a nearly impossible endeavor. His initial solution, WeGame, also aimed to help gamers share content. and but couldn’t record an entire gaming session. As a result, gamers could easily miss out on spontaneous clips they would want to share with their friends. “We couldn’t do always-on recording because at the time only like 30-40 percent of gamers had dual-core CPUs. Now it’s completely flipped where 90-plus percent, almost 100 percent of people have dual-core CPUs,” added Kim. Kim says he learned how to run a lean company by driving WeGame through the 2008 recession. He is determined to keep burn-rates low with Forge, which has a mostly decentralized development team. He says he also learned to disdain ads in his previous venture and now rules out banner ads, pre-roll and post-roll ads in Forge. This is important because Forge is currently pre-revenue and has not yet settled on a monetization strategy. While customers do not pay for the free service, investors have dropped a cool $9 million over the last three months on the growing platform. Social Capital Partner Arjun Sethi will be joining the Forge board. Sethi himself nearly acquired WeGame back when he was head of Lolapps. “Any company aggregating content is competitive in some way but the focus of Forge is on building a community,” said Sethi. Over the last three years, Forge has driven average time between sharing down from 200 to 80 minutes. The company is focused on creating the easiest experience possible for everyday gamers and doesn’t want to weigh down its platform with more complex tasks like sharing subscribers. Forge supports nearly 5,000 games and can add support for most new games in seconds. The company is also working on a companion app to improve the experience for users who want to watch clips on their mobile devices. According to Kim, initial users have been requesting the ability to stitch clips together from different moments in time before sharing. The company is toying with this possibility as a future feature.
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Jake Winebaum explains how cutting his teeth as a serial entrepreneur led him to launch Brighter
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Navin Chaddha
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
, founder & CEO of , a Saas-enabled dental marketplace, has been a serial entrepreneur for 35 years, with many pivots and adventures along the way In an interview with Mayfield Partners, Jake takes us on a journey from his first startup in college to his idea to disrupt the healthcare industry with Brighter, a provider of information and services around dental benefits. The company’s investors include Navin Chaddha at Mayfield, Bill Gurley at Benchmark, Stewart Gollmer at Tenaya and Gabe Ling from General Catalyst. Jake himself, is a self-proclaimed accidental entrepreneur who co-founded LA-based incubator ecompanies, which resulted in successful startups such as Jamdat, Boingo Wireless, and , where he served as the chief executive. In this podcast, Jake shares his key learnings, how hiring the right people is critical and why it’s necessary to have three careers. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/265595626?secret_token=s-fzZCy” params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
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How Twitter secured accounts after user credentials were sold online
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Rumors of a started circulating yesterday afternoon, fittingly, on Twitter. Security researchers cautioned users to change their passwords and enable two-factor authentication, a feature that requires a user to verify their identity at login with a pincode sent to a trusted device. But the rumors were wrong — at least partially. Although millions of Twitter handles and passwords were popping up for sale on the dark web, Twitter hadn’t suffered a breach. , a site that posted the data, speculated that the login credentials were harvested using malware, a plausible theory supported by Twitter’s own security team. “The purported Twitter @names and passwords may have been amassed from combining information from other recent breaches, malware on victim machines that are stealing passwords for all sites, or a combination of both,” Twitter trust and information security officer Michael Coates wrote in a about the incident. Twitter moved relatively quickly to secure its users’ accounts — the social media platform forced all users whose information was leaked to reset their passwords today. Twitter is the latest in a string of social media companies to have millions of its users’ passwords dumped online — and went up for sale in May. In an interview with , one of the hackers selling users’ login information said that he or she had initially offered the data privately to spammers and others targeting specific individuals’ accounts before putting it up for public sale. The individual told Wired that the LinkedIn data alone sold for roughly $20,000. Coates says Twitter has been examining the stolen data from other sites and cross-checking it with Twitter’s own records to determine which accounts may be vulnerable and securing them with extra protection, including forced password resets. “Attackers mine the exposed username, email and password data, leverage automation, and then attempt to automatically test this login data and passwords against all top websites.If a person used the same username and password on multiple sites then attackers could, in some situations, automatically take over their account,” Coates wrote. Coates also noted that some of the passwords supposedly linked to Twitter accounts are not valid. Some hackers “bundle old breached data or repackage accounts from a variety of breaches, and then claim they have login information and passwords for website Z,” he explained. Twitter recommends two-factor authentication, a strong and unique password, and a password manager to keep your account secure.
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Hands-on with Moto’s modular Moto Z and a few of its crazy accessories
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
The wasn’t the only crazy phone on display at Lenovo’s Tech World today. Joining it on stage was a new handset from Lenovo’s sister company, Motorola: that can use backpack-like accessories to double as everything from a small boombox to a portable projector. We only got a few minutes with the device, so we’ll hold our deeper impressions until we get a chance to give it a proper review… but at first glance: , it feels nice. Even ignoring the crazy accessory/modular stuff*, it’s a damned slick-looking and feeling phone. The OS is as speedy as you’d expect from a modern smartphone, the screen was bright and clear, and… really, it just felt damned nice in the hand. The projector accessory wasn’t mindblowingly bright — but even in a room that was about as bright as your average office, you could make out the image. In a properly darkened room, it should be just fine. The “fashion-focused” cases seemed… well, like cases — but they do a pretty good job of covering up the phone’s only real aesthetic shortcoming, which is the big ol’ rear camera hump that is becoming oh-so commonplace… so you might end up wanting one. The rest of the accessories, such as the JBL Boombox and the battery extender features, weren’t really built to be tested in a noisy conference hall in just a few minutes — so no comments there, yet.
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UNU set to forecast tech trends after accurate Oscars, Kentucky Derby predictions
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Can AI outpace the expertise of vaunted futurists like or ? The is slated to answer questions tomorrow about technology and its long-term impact on humanity via a Reddit AMA (“ask me anything” interview). The same system accurately predicted Oscars winners, and the top four horses to win at the Kentucky Derby previously. UNU CEO Louis Rosenberg placed a $40 bet on the horse races and took home a $12,700 prize after putting his faith in his own technology, he told TechCrunch. UNU employs crowd wisdom to deliver its forecasts, but it differs from familiar crowdsourcing technology, surveys and polls. Instead, it uses “swarms,” or the hive mind to derive forecasts and conclusions. Rosenberg explained why a swarm can better solve difficult problems or determine likely outcomes better than polls and surveys: “A poll finds the average opinion of a group. It takes the temperature of a crowd. A swarm focuses a group together, in real time, and has them work together as a system to answer a question instead,” he said. With UNU, the “swarm” involves human participants who log on to UNU to answer questions through an interactive, graphic user interface that feels like a Ouija board. UNU is accessible via the company’s mobile app or Web browsers. On their monitors or touchscreens, users pull a round “lens” toward one of six corners of a hexagon, where each corner can be labeled with an answer. Questions are written, obviously, in a multiple choice format with two to six answers each. “Swarm intelligence is like a brain of brains,” Rosenberg said. “Nature creates natural swarms. UNU uses networking technology and algorithms to take advantage of the knowledge, wisdom and insights of a large group of people by allowing them to think as one.” To-date, UNU has more than 20,000 registered users. People can enter and exit into open swarms any time. Some swarms have lasted for a full week, but the population of respondents can turn over as frequently as every hour. In a earlier this month, UNU predicted that “in the unlikely event of a three-person race” involving Trump, Clinton and Sanders this election, Sanders would win. In a two-party race, it predicted a Clinton win. UNU also depressingly predicted a great war would break out within the next 15 years. Participants’ names are not shown to each other during a swarm. But users can see which way a crowd is leaning as they mull an issue. Keeping user names out of it helps eliminate “social bias,” said Rosenberg, of the sort that happens on Facebook, Hacker News or for that matter Reddit, when users may be easily persuaded to “like” or “upvote” the things that they see their best friends or bosses do. From the company’s perspective, making appearances through popular online forums like Reddit helps UNU amass participants for its “hive mind” initiatives ongoing. Rosenberg said UNU queries “enthusiasts” around more niche and specialized topics, such as horseracing. It will be querying enthusiasts who are users of the “futurology” subreddit for this next AMA.
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Up close and hands-on with Lenovo’s augmented reality Tango phone
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Earlier today, Lenovo unveiled the world’s first smartphone fueled by Google’s Project Tango (or just “Tango,” as it’s now known) computer vision efforts. The big new thing? Really, really awesome augmented reality capabilities, all based on the phone’s ability to recognize what’s around it. Think video games that come to life in your living room, bouncing around on your furniture and hiding behind your walls. We got to check out a handful of demos running on the device — and, well, they’re pretty damned cool. It’s still early days for Tango; there were glitches, with demos crashing a few times even within Lenovo’s keynote. But Tango — or, at the very least, the broader concept of complex, hardware-driven augmented reality — has legs.
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Larry Page has dueling flying car companies, but it’s self-driving tech that will get them off the ground
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
part of the car generally sits in the driver’s seat. And that’s doubly true if the car is a car. The notion of such aerial vehicles has always fascinated, but the pesky need to pilot the things has generally grounded it — as if the engineering and legal challenges weren’t enough already. But autonomous driving technology may be the missing piece that leads us to the place where, yes, we won’t need roads. reveals that Larry Page has been funding a pair of flying car companies for, I’m pretty sure, exactly the reasons you’d guess. has been around since 2010, quietly prototyping fliers at its headquarters deep, deep in the South Bay. Bloomberg reports that it has nearly 150 employees, and that Page has put more than $100 million into it. Patent drawing for a flying passenger vehicle that, believe it or not, they’ve actually built one of. Kitty Hawk started up last year, with former Google self-driving car wizard Sebastian Thrun at its head. The implication in the report is that it’s the smaller, more agile team put together to nip at the heels of the other. The specifics of their flying car projects, however, are of little interest. People have been trying to make flying cars for a long time, and so far the only design that really works is ‘s, which is just about the ugliest, most prosaic “flying car” one can imagine. It’s really more of a rolling plane. (Not like I could make a better one, of course.) The Terrafugia Transition. Not pictured: your childhood hopes and dreams. On that note, we really should stop saying “flying car” altogether. Passenger drone, perhaps, or flier, or bandit or personal airborne transport. A name will appear sooner or later, but you’re not going to say, “Sure I’ll be there in 15 minutes. Just about to get into a flying car.” Dozens of companies and designs have come up over the decades, and with ultralight composites and better battery tech we may actually be drawing near a basic functional design. But it has always seemed to be a hollow promise, because, really, how the hell did you expect to fly the things? It was always the part we seemed to gloss over in our imaginations. We skipped over the preflight checks, restricted airspace, air traffic control, lessons in aerodynamics and, of course, the eight-figure price tag, visualizing only flying peacefully above the countryside and landing, somehow, at Uncle Kent’s farm. The reality is that the necessity of having a trained and licensed pilot at the helm of this imaginary flying car is as great a challenge to the dream as the actual creation of the vehicle itself, or the 10,000 miles of red tape that will prevent its takeoff. Fortunately, self-driving cars are here to change that. When you think about it, autonomous vehicle tech and flying cars are like peanut butter and jelly. One is sort of incomplete without the other. Self-driving vehicles seem practical but feel somehow lazy (after all, you can more or less do what they do), and the idea that humans could fly cars around without every one of them crashing and dying is optimistic to say the least. Self-driving cars need to fly in order to be more than ordinary, and flying cars need to be self-driving to be less than lethal. This may seem rather obvious now, but until a few years ago autonomous cars were just as much a fantasy as flying ones. It speaks much of the work put in by the developers of self-driving vehicles that the concept has gone from science fiction to banal reality in the space of a decade. Once something is boring, it’s ready for the mainstream. These children, one of whom is actually dressed as an Enderman from Minecraft, will grow up thinking self-driving cars are boring. The biggest beneficiary of self-driving research has to be the burgeoning field of computer vision, once a niche for industrial robotics and academics, now a critical component in vehicle AI. Anyone in the field will tell you how much things have changed in the last few years. Multiple independent projects are building enormous libraries of visual data and techniques that will inform the collective unconscious, if you will, of future AIs. The other missing piece is drones: The emergence of quadcopters with sophisticated stability and pathfinding software has accelerated the space in several ways. Not only are the basic routines for keeping a multi-rotor craft aloft and stable getting better and better, but we are also seeing critical safety features like safe emergency landings, protection from signal hijackers and awareness of other nearby drones for mutual avoidance purposes. Add these up and a flying passenger vehicle that pilots itself from place to place seems a natural addition to the increasingly dense and varied connective tissue of a modern city. Certainly no human — not even Elon Musk — could do what a flier would have to, tapping into the data streams of 10,000 other vehicles, sensors and libraries, crunching the metadata of a living city while maintaining flight stable enough that its passengers’ coffee doesn’t spill. Even if there were such a human, there’s just no way the FAA will let people fly their own cars around the city. In a few decades it may seem absurd that we drove our own cars for a century, with the dead from traffic accidents totaling in the millions. But transportation is in the process of changing from something you do to a service you access. And as part of that change, autonomous fliers (or whatever we’ll call them) actually just make sense — for rich people and emergencies at first (as with just about everything) and then, eventually, for everyone. We have rapidly switched from thinking of Google’s little buggies less as a science project and more as a practical part of a near-future transportation infrastructure. Over the next decade, fliers too may suddenly reach that level of believability, where you stop dreaming about doing barrel rolls on the way to work and start worrying about how noisy they’ll be and how you can avoid having a landing pad on your block.
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Venture capital pioneer Tom Perkins dies at 84
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Thomas Perkins, who co-founded venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, . He was 84 years old. Before becoming an investor, Perkins founded a laser company called University Labs, and was the first general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s computer division. He co-founded Kleiner Perkins with Eugene Kleiner in 1972, helping to lay the foundation for venture capital in Silicon Valley. During his career, Perkins served on the boards of a number of well-known companies, including Compaq, Genentech and News Corp. Perkins was also on the HP board, but resigned in 2006 because of to a board investigation of press leaks. Outside of tech, Perkins also wrote and , and he called the Maltese Falcon. In recent years, he attracted criticism for comparing the “rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent” to Nazi Germany. (The letter was, in part, a response to negative coverage of Perkins’ ex-wife Danielle Steele.) At our Disrupt SF conference in 2013, , where he paid tribute to his mentor David Packard and talked about his career’s highs (like investing in Genentech) and lows (like passing on Apple). He also noted that Kleiner Perkins backed AOL, which now owns TechCrunch. “There’s always been a debate of what’s the best investment: Do you invest in an idea or in a person?” he said. “And that debate goes on forever. I feel you invest in the idea because bad people don’t have good ideas. So it’s a very simple formula.” Kleiner Perkins sent us the following statement from co-founders Frank Caufield and Brook Byers: As a cofounder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Tom was a pioneer in the venture capital industry. He defined what we know of today as entrepreneurial venture capital by going beyond just funding to helping entrepreneurs realize their visions with operating expertise. He was there at the start of the biotech industry and the computer revolution. Tom was our partner and friend, and we will miss him.
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Predicting the next Slack: Finding sticky cloud apps with cult-like followings
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Jamie Barnett
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Slack has become at a remarkably quick rate one of the most popular cloud apps used across businesses. , the app added more than two million daily users who collectively spend more than 320 million hours connected to the app, sending 1.5 billion total messages. Seemingly overnight, Slack emerged as a household name (OK, maybe that’s a stretch if your household isn’t in the 650 area code, but you get the picture). This rocketship-like growth trajectory is even more impressive when you consider that each of those figures is more than triple where the company was at this time last year, which was in and of itself incredible progress. In fact, in my nearly three years monitoring usage trends across more than 20,000 cloud apps, I’ve never seen growth at this rate. How did it happen? While it seemingly came out of nowhere, Slack’s meteoric rise was no coincidence. Between its early focus on winning over developers who quickly became incredibly effective evangelists for Slack throughout their respective organizations, and its aggressive moves to integrate with other popular business apps for a more connected experience, Slack provided a distinct model for other business apps to follow. So who is following such a model right now, and what does their growth look like? My team analyzed more than two billion instances (i.e. any activity a user undertakes on a given app — from sharing to downloading to syncing) across more than one million users and 20,000 different cloud apps to answer that question. Before digging into our top five, it’s important to note that while none of these apps yet have the public profile of Slack, they’ve all achieved strong initial traction: Each of the following apps have user bases of at least one million (and in some cases, much higher). With this baseline in mind, it’s all the more impressive to see the four-digit growth each of these apps has experienced in the past year. Odds are, each of these apps will become more well-known over the next year. (1,792 percent growth). When you consider that TeamViewer, a remote support and online meeting app, is already used on more than 200 million computers worldwide and by 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies, the fact that it experienced four-digit growth over the past year is even more impressive. Initially favored by IT and customer support teams for its reliable remote support functionality, it has more recently gained popularity in marketing and engineering departments, as well. Impressive growth aside, though, it will be interesting to see whether this growth trajectory holds: TeamViewer was also the medium on which the earlier this year. To its credit, the company was quick to acknowledge the infections and advise its users how to safeguard against them. (1,510 percent growth). Bolstered by a large and growing list of integrations — including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte and Evernote — this collaboration app has seen a surge in adoption over the past year. Smartsheet has a solid support base from engineering, and has also spread rapidly in IT, marketing and customer service departments. With more than five million people using it, and an ever more mobile workforce in need of collaboration tools capable of integrating with different apps, Smartsheet is a safe bet for even further growth in 2016 and beyond. (1,433 percent growth). Reports of the password’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. While great strides have been made around other types of authentication in recent years, the password is still at the core of identity management. It’s thus no surprise that a dedicated password manager app like LastPass would see such strong growth as businesses . Even more noteworthy here is the fact that LastPass continued to realize a strong adoption rate even after falling victim to a data breach last June. (1,082 percent growth). This video hosting and viewer analytics app is unique on this list because it’s the only app of the top four that has not explicitly targeted engineers/developers as part of its core audience. Instead, the app has largely been championed by marketing, and more recently, sales and customer support. Given its tight integrations with the likes of Salesforce, HubSpot and WordPress, though, the strategy is clearly paying off, and Wistia seems poised to continue its strong growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. (1,005 percent growth). While it’s by no means “new” (it has a total install base of 16 million), Mindjet, a collaborative app for capturing and organizing information, has experienced impressive, Slack-like adoption rates over the past year. Like Slack, Mindjet has made a specific effort to target engineering departments, in particular, and has been making inroads with IT, customer support, sales and marketing. Integrations with popular apps like Excel, Google Drive, Dropbox and Salesforce haven’t hurt, either. Businesses across the board are finally acknowledging that, like it or not, today’s mobile workforce is increasingly gravitating toward cloud apps for the added productivity they afford. Is there a “secret sauce” to designing and marketing the next killer cloud app for the enterprise? In a word, no. But there’s absolutely a pattern that has emerged in the aforementioned business apps, as well as Slack — and even Box and Dropbox before it. To design a truly effective app that will achieve broad adoption, you should focus early and often on integration — especially for a collaboration app. Finally, a word on methodology. To define the key growth factors, we developed a handy, five-point framework: Usage (average app sessions per customer) growth exceeding 1,000 percent : The most measurable attribute, this tells us whether the app’s usage (measured in sessions, or each time a person engages with the app, averaged across the number of enterprise customers in our cloud) has grown more than 1,000 percent in the past year (fourth quarter of 2015 compared with that of 2014). Adoption across multiple business units within the enterprise: It’s one thing to have an app that makes everyone in a specific business unit breathe easy. What marketer could live without Marketo, for instance? Integrations with key enterprise applications like Customer Relationship Management and/or Cloud Storage (Enterprise File Sync and Share): CRM and cloud storage are the “granddaddies” of cloud apps. Any up-and-coming rock star app will need to integrate with them in order to fully take advantage of the cloud. The development of RESTful APIs that enable enterprise workflows: Does the app make it simple for other apps to integrate with and share data with it in a standardized way that’s not disruptive to the operations of the app? We are looking for evidence of other apps or enterprises using these RESTful API to enable valuable business workflows. A cult-like following: Here we are looking for evidence of uptake in not just usage, but also ecosystem partners. This means we look for ecosystem “buzz” and evidence that important enterprise apps, like Box, Salesforce and Office 365, are seeking out these new apps for integration and partnerships.
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Jennifer Lawrence tapped to play Elizabeth Holmes in new movie about Theranos
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Out of all the federal regulations turmoil, questionable test results and threats to oust her from her own company, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is getting a silver screen lining — Jennifer Lawrence will play her in an upcoming movie. reports “The Big Short” director Adam McKay will be making the film about the 32-year-old founder and her one drop medical startup once valued at $9 billion. Forbes Holmes’ portion of the company from $4.5 billion to zero after a series of unfortunate events (read: false advertising about its technology and a few government investigations) left the company on shaky ground and valued it closer to $800 million — including the $724 million of capital raised. It might seem too soon for Theranos to get some Hollywood screen time, but movies have been made out of much less before — and this is one company that seems to have plenty of drama with the kind of strong female lead JLaw is keen to play. The film project is in the very early stages — no other actors have been attached to the film yet, and there’s no title or release date either, according to reports. But we’re looking forward to how this movie comes together and we’ll be sure to update you with more details as they unfold.
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What autonomous driving is — and isn’t — in 2016
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
When announced that its latest Civic sedan would have a full suite of state-of-the-art driver assist features for $20,000, called it a self-driving vehicle. While the Civic can do a lot, it cannot drive itself. Yet. So what are we even talking about when we talk about autonomous or self-driving vehicles? Lucky for us, engineers are on top of this. In January 2014, issued a standard defining exactly what we’re talking about. They gave us six levels, numbered 0-5, and a definition in plain, non-nerd language of what each level means. Here’s a breakdown: Most of the new cars we’re seeing now, in 2016, have level 2 systems available. That includes things like lane keeping and adaptive cruise control — the car can do some steering and speed work, but the driver is still in complete control. But the more advanced vehicles available have level 3 systems, which are more autonomous. “When you buy a car today, you have the steps toward autonomous driving,” said Paul Rivera, VP of , an engineering consulting company, during a panel at the Faraday Future Long Beach ePrix in April. “There are about 35 things that make a car autonomous.” Looking at the SAE standards, Chris Boroni-Bird of said during the same panel that features of fully autonomous vehicles will be entering the market very soon. Automatic emergency braking, for example, “is autonomous for a few split seconds.” The goal is to have fully autonomous vehicles, like Google’s , completely take over all driving tasks. Google’s test car doesn’t have a steering wheel or pedals; a human cannot take control even if they want to. There are two basic ways to get to fully autonomous cars: jump in with both feet, which is Google’s strategy, and wade in slowly, which is the major manufacturers’ strategy. Jumping in with both feet requires a small fleet of specially built cars that must go through millions of miles of testing in controlled environments before they’re ready to sell to the public. Wading in means slowly adding to cars being sold proven autonomous technologies as they become available so you can sell cars while ramping up the automation factor. With companies working both ends of this spectrum, vehicles will only get closer to full autonomy faster. We may not get the flying cars we were promised by science fiction decades ago, but who cares, since we’ll be able to read sci-fi while the car drives us to work.
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OpenVote launches a publishing platform, crowd-voting tool for political debate
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
OpenVote, from early Facebook designer Bobby Goodlatte and Sean McCann, is unveiling a larger publishing platform where people can debate policies and pledge their votes. Before becoming a prominent designer at Facebook, Goodlatte grew up with politics in his family. For almost all of Goodlatte’s life, . While he and his father don’t necessarily align on every political front, Goodlatte ended up having an inside seat for seeing political discourse and policymaking evolve over the last generation. comes out of the concern that political communication hasn’t really evolved or been fully translated into online or social networking mediums. People see news stories, they get enraged, but that doesn’t exactly translate into votes or political commitments. Youth voter turnout in presidential elections between 1964 and 2012. Today, Baby Boomers outvote millennials by a full 30 percentage points “The idea is to amplify your own impact and commit to a vote, then recruit friends,” he said. “We’ll track that number and see how many people you brought to a campaign.” With today’s launch, the startup is adding a self-publishing interface. Think Medium, but centered around politics and with widgets that let you pledge and recruit votes. Goodlatte brought on different political bloggers to do hot takes on issues like marijuana legalization or the 2016 presidential race. “Hopefully we can get this drummed up enough so we can get people active on OpenVote. We’ll have an opportunity to guide a system where evidence-based and fact-based work rises to the top,” he said. So far, much of the content involves pretty short, fast takes. The top articles are pieces like, or Goodlatte said he found interesting the model of Bleacher Report, which relies on user-generated sports content to grow a large-scale media network. However, that company eventually and trainings to surface higher-quality writers. Goodlatte said OpenVote will eventually add quizzes to figure out who a person aligns with politically. He said they also wanted to promote more neutral content beyond the opinions and hot takes the platform will inevitably attract. “What our goal long-term is to have you come here, find out everything on a ballot and read everything on both sides,” he said. OpenVote’s seed investors include Greylock Partners, Upside Partnership, Adam D’Angelo, Brian Armstrong, Zak Williams, Aaron Sittig and Justin Shaffer.
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Facebook now lets users comment with a video
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Facebook launched today, a feature that acknowledges the meteoric rise and continued growth of online video creation and consumption. By 2020, internet video traffic will represent 82% of all consumer internet traffic, according to forecasts from the It could also help Facebook catch up, yes catch up, to Snapchat in terms of daily videos viewed on the social media platform. As per Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report, video consumption on Snapchat outpaced video consumption on Facebook in the first quarter of 2016.
The new feature was developed at Facebook’s 50th Hackathon, according to a company blog post. The team that built what would become the video comments feature included core hackers: Bob Baldwin who led the initiative with Hermes Pique and Sameer Madan working on iOS, Muhammed Ibrahim focused on the Web, and Billy Ng on Android. Baldwin previously led teams at Facebook Hackathons who developed features that allowed Facebook users to include photos or stickers in comment threads. If this feature had been live during the Ice Bucket Challenge, the viral video meme launched to help raise funds to cure ALS, it could have resulted in the world’s longest comment thread.
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Modular phones are here, like it or not
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Call me old fashioned, but I like my phones in one piece. But that’s not the future according to LG. Or Motorola. Or Google’s Ara team. These companies see consumers swapping widgets and gizmos on and off their phone like it’s some sort futuristic communication device. That’s crazy. I don’t like it. Get off my lawn. Lenovo just introduced the . Want a bigger speaker? Snap the gigantic JBL speaker onto the back of the phone. There’s also a projector and battery backpacks and Motorola is opening up the platform to developers in the hopes other companies will build accessories, too. Let’s chat about that camera bump for a minute. It’s serious. When the phone is used as designed — that is, with a Moto Mod, the camera bump is minimized, reminding owners that they’d better buy a Moto Mod or their phone will have a massive camera bump. LG was the first out with a modular smartphone. Small accessories dock to the bottom of . These are called Friends by LG. There’s a speaker friend made by Harman Kardon and a camera pack that adds a physical shutter button to the phone. They work, but these aren’t friends you want to take out on the town. They’re stale and boring. Google has a much more radical approach with the Ara. Here, most bits of the phone can be swapped out, creating a Voltron of sorts. Need a better camera? The phone can have a better camera. Want your phone to have a kickstand? Slide in a kickstand. Want your phone to have a little container to hold a single breath mint? , that’s an option, too. As a practical matter, modular phones do not feel like something that will become the next big thing. I can’t lose the camera out of my iPhone. Or my speaker. It’s all-in-one and that’s fantastic for everyone. As for extra accessories, there’s a thriving marketplace of cases, batteries, speakers and more that seems to suggest consumers are happy with the current options. A standard is needed for modular phones to work and right now that doesn’t exist. The owner of Moto Z cannot use an LG Friend as a Moto Mod. Proprietary hardware is a tough sell in the long run. But as a gadget, these three devices are a lot of fun to look at. They make me smile with enthusiasm. They offer something new and that’s great, even if this new trend was born out of desperation. It’s hard to see a market leader like Apple or Samsung trying something radical. They don’t need to. But LG and Motorola have been for years to Samsung. I once argued that the electronics industry needs to further . That is, engineers and designers and marketers need to be given the opportunity to create something wild and then present it to the public. Car companies have done this for decades. It gives ordinary people the opportunity to see into the future. That’s what we’re looking at here with the Moto Z, LG G5 and Project Ara — concepts of the future. Sure, the companies behind these devices are hoping you buy their latest creation, but trust me, they’re not worth your money. Before committing to a proprietary platform, let the market and companies figure out if modular phones are a viable product that can be supported for several iterations. Boring advice? Yep. I’m getting old and cranky and don’t like seeing people waste their money.
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Lollicam is a real-time mobile video tool for adding cinematic effects to selfies
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
When will teens get tired of taking selfies? Probably never given the myriad ways they can augment what nature gave them thanks the power of the smartphone in their pocket. To wit: since last fall, after teen-beloved multimedia-focused social sharing platform Snapchat , the startup darling has been making hay with a face-detection powered lens feature that lets users recompile their features in new configurations, such as faceswapped with a friend, or morphed into a zombie, or vomiting a rainbow, and so on. More recently, last week, Snapchat snapped up 3D photo app Seene — positioning itself to further flesh out its face-morphing lenses with support for 3D selfies. 3D rainbow vomit? Prepare thyselves people; it’s coming. And Snapchat is not alone in this facial faddishness either. In March , with the intention of integrating the latter’s face-morphing tech into its messaging platform to inject a little more fun into the online space where kids’ parents prefer to hang out. Bottom line: Keeping younger users engaged and communications flowing is priority number one for social platform giants. Which means coming up with a pipeline of new features to fuel continued use. And means startups with cool mobile video-augmenting tools are prime targets for acquisition. Which brings me to YC-backed , the maker of the mobile video editing app . An exit to a larger entity such as a messaging giant is a distinct hope for Seerslab, given the clear need for novelty among platform giants to keep their services sticky, coupled with the converse challenge of being a small startup trying to defend cool ideas from being copied by hungry platform giants… If you can’t out-resource them, you can at least exit to them, right? “It is not that easy to protect our ideas and technology because we are small,” admits Seerslab co-founder and CEO Michael Chong, when asked about the app’s defensibility. “In terms of the image processing world, there’s a lot of hard work and real work to optimize or to add some special feature. And as a small startup who has the lack of resource we couldn’t put [so many] engineers to work on our image processing technology. “So we are just going faster in terms of our idea. That’s what we can do. It’s really tough to protect a new concept and new technology in this space… That is our competitive energy… Of course, in terms of a corporate strategy, we hope to be acquired by the big guy who has a lot of user base. “But as a small startup only thing you could do is initiate a new concept in this video creation area and then validate some business model with existing brand and content holder.” Last summer Seerslab launched its real-time mobile video-editing tool for augmenting selfies. Since then the Android and iOS Lollicam apps have racked up more than four million downloads, mostly in Korea and Japan so far. Active users are around the two million mark at this point, says Chong. It’s apparently especially popular with teenage girls. Growth has been organic, with no marketing spend as yet. Although Facebook took a shine to Lollicam recently — touting the app as one of its partners for a at its F8 conference back in April. Lollicam’s features include face-tracking stickers, such as the big cat mask pictured at the top of this post; cinematic effects; and real-time filters such as a beautification lens that airbrushes skin in real-time or changes your face shape to make it less of a chore to snap the perfect selfie/film a selfie video message you’re willing to send. The app also lets users augment their selfie/s videos with a wide range of additional effects that can be added via a relatively simple tap to include interface — such as a blizzard of feathers or a rain storm or some animated characters. (If you think all this sounds weird, prior to Lollicam the team’s first idea was to create a dating app using their facial recognition engine to try to match ssingles who look similar — based on the theory that we’re attracted to people who look like us… “Accuracy rates for facial recognition in the mobile environment” scuppered that plan, however. Which was probably for the best.) There’s no editing after the fact with Lollicam. It’s all done before you snap a selfie or in the middle of recording a video, with effects applied in real-time as you select and tweak them. The processing is also done on the phone, not in the cloud. So use Lollicam for a while and don’t be surprised to find your phone feeling a little hot. The co-founders’ backgrounds include 10 years working in mobile video and camera services, according to Chong. One big push for Seerslab at the moment is working with content partners like Disney and Warner Bros to enable users to include animated movie characters in their selfie videos — blending into a sort of user-generated marketing space. This could also see it push towards a revenue share model for users in future, says Chong — assuming it manages to scale up its user base to command a sizable platform of its own. “Snapchat are following us!” he jokes with a laugh. “We have launched branded sticker before Snapchat’s sponsored lenses. We have worked with some brands with the characters from movies before Snapchat. We have already found this kind of viral tool is very strong for promoting brands.” Albeit Snapchat of course has the huge advantage of already having a sizable and growing userbase; this month pegged at … David and Goliath indeed. Talking of cool new features, the Seerslab team is not standing still, with Chong talking about another interesting idea it has up its sleeve for Lollicam which he’s not willing to talk publicly about yet. But let’s just say they’re looking to expand how they can augment mobile videos beyond the core facial-tracking tech. Chong says they are also interested in the potential offered by streaming video, and might add a livevideo feature to the app to expand how people can make use of the VFX. Meaning they could be not just for creating selfies/selfie video to share to their other social platforms, but for streaming broadcasts too. Becoming a pro tool for YouTubers to augment broadcasts in real-time is another option for the tech, reckons Chong. The team is also investigating working with camera makers. “Lollicam will evolve to be not only for selfies but to include some creation environment by power users,” he tells TechCrunch. “We are talking with [a maker of a 360 degree camera] that is thinking of using our Lollicam app as a controller for their stationary camera. So what will happen in future is some power user, YouTube star, could easily put some Lollicam cinematic effects on their video. In real-time.” Music stickers are also in the Lollicam arsenal, to add another layer to selfie videos. Chong says it’s talking with a K-pop music star management firm about adding content from the artists they represent — adding that that could be a future route to charging users for branded music stickers, should the team end up needing to flick the monetization switch. “YouTube is losing the power of a viral platform to promote the music because simply they are too big at this time,” Chong argues, describing how Lollicam users might be able to add music and animated content from their favorite K-pop band to their selfies in future if the talks go to plan. Prior to getting onto YC’s program, Seerslab raised $1 million in pre-seed funding, including funding from several Korean angels plus some government grant money. It’s since taken another $1 million, including YC’s backing. And is hoping to close a seed round by the end of this year. The intention now is to focus spending on marketing and product, according to Chong — hoping, ultimately, to prove out the mantra that if you build it the users will come. Or maybe if you beautify and amuse them enough, the users will keep coming back. Followed, perhaps, by an Asian messaging giant acquirer — like, for example, Kakao Talk — keen to augment its app experience with yet another fun tool. “Many people are trying to build something like YouTube in the mobile. But it’s not easy,” adds Chong. “There’s still something painful for general people to edit the video on such a small screen, so pain means opportunity — so we decided to try to tap such an opportunity.”
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 7 | null |
Lenovo shows off a pair of Intel-powered smart shoes
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Believe it or not, today’s Tech World isn’t the first time has shown off a pair of smart sneakers. Just about this time last year, the company revealed a pair of kicks with the unique ability to determine and display their wearer’s mood. How the concept wearable actually worked and why anyone might possibly want to do such a thing weren’t entirely clear, but hey, look, a happy face. It’s not likely to get as much notice as the Lenovo showed off , but the company’s latest take on connected sneakers does appear to be a fair bit more subdued than the product it showed off last year. We’re still awaiting specifics, but the smart shoes seem to have the sort of fitness data collection one would expect from such a wearable, tracking users’ distance and calories, etc. There‘s also some gaming functionality built into the product — motion tracking, perhaps? — along with LEDs embedded in the soles. Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang presented a pair to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, “so [he] can walk in the cloud.”
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Motorola’s new Moto Z line features swappable modular smart backs
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 |
Anyone else starting to get the feeling that all of these modular smartphones are becoming interchangeable? Not in the sense that you can swap products cross-platform, of course. That’s not how proprietary hardware works. The latest take on the compelling (though far from mature) space are , which were introduced practically concurrently with Lenovo’s long awaited , another twist on smartphone modulation from Motorola’s parent company. The Moto Z and Moto Z Force will be the company’s first two devices compatible with the new Moto Mods, swappable backs that bring a slew of additional features to the phones, including JBL speakers, a projector and external battery packs from TUMI and Kate Spade, of all places. Motorola will also be opening up its Moto Mod Development Kit to third-party developers, so they can get your back, as well. As for the phones themselves, the Verizon Droid-branded Moto Z is an extremely thin and light handset that packs in a Snapdragon 820 processor, 32GB of storage (plus a micro SD slot), and a 2600 mAh battery. The display is a 5.5-inch Quad HD and the pronounced rear-facing camera bump measures in at 13 megapixels. Oh, and the headphone jack has officially gone the way of mini-USB here, no doubt to help shave off precious millimeters on the razor (RAZR?)-thin device, so users will need to listen via USB-C adapter or Bluetooth. The Moto Z Force, meanwhile, sports a number of the same specs, but adds a 3500 mAh battery and a 21-megapixel camera to the mix. Both products are arriving from Verizon at some point this summer, with pre-order coming next month.
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Zoox raises $200 million at $1 billion valuation for its self-driving cars
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
Sources tells us that Zoox is more than a car that simply steers itself, but that every aspect of the car has been reinvented. They think that they have proprietary technology that could help them compete with Tesla.
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Capitalizing on foundations of innovation
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Lenny Grover
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
Two of the most important technological advances that helped fueled much of the country’s record economic growth in the post-WW II era were ubiquitous computing devices and modern communications technologies. Indeed, most of the companies covered on TechCrunch certainly would not exist if not for the development and commercialization of microprocessors and the internet. In my opinion, insufficient attention in the current ideological debate taking place in Silicon Valley and around the country has been given to the important role that government played throughout the lifecycle of these technologies. Understanding how these relatively mature technologies and industries were initially spawned and encouraged is critical to developing a strategy to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs in capital- or R&D-intensive industries with high growth potential. ENIAC was the first “programmable, general purpose, electronic digital computer,” and is widely regarded as the first modern general-purpose computing device. Its construction was . Only after the government’s investment in the research and development of the first ENIAC did similar vacuum tube-based computers find their way into industry. These machines were enormous, however, and the microelectronics we take for granted today would not have been possible without subsequent innovations. The modern integrated circuit (IC) was developed by Jack Kilby while at Texas Instruments. He was working on a to develop a way to use smaller transistors as a replacement for the bulky vacuum tubes; he developed the integrated circuit as an alternative approach. However, the cost of Texas Instruments’ early integrated circuits were high; . As a result, . After reading the paragraphs above, it may seem less surprising that , and many of the basic protocols and technologies at the foundation of the modern internet were invented by researchers working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As Isaac Newton wrote, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” In the case of the tech industry, it is not only past innovations, but the cumulative investment in developing and commercializing those innovations that provide both inspiration and a platform for future innovation. The smartphone owes its existence to the early research on ENIAC, the IC and the microprocessor. Some tech entrepreneurs may have a visceral reaction to Elizabeth Warren’s assertion that “you didn’t build that alone,” but the tech industry owes an enormous debt to the government for its early sponsorship of the predecessor and enabling technologies that make the modern high-tech economy possible. The innovations that are likely to be responsible for substantial economic growth for the next century include enabling technologies for clean, efficient energy production and personalized medicine. In fact, government investment in basic research, such as its expenditure of over the more than decade-long Human Genome Project, and commercial subsidies, such as federal and state renewable energy tax credits, have already played a critical role in kick-starting these industries. While some argue that we can cut our way to long-term growth by lowering taxes, it is worth noting that between 1943 and 1980, when most of the innovations described above were developed, marginal federal income tax rates on the highest earners were . It is also worth noting that government investment in research and development, and renewable energy tax credits, are “subsidies” that have allegedly been the target of (the Koch Brothers). Other countries are not hamstrung by ideological opposition to clean energy investment. In fact, China, not the U.S., . The stakes could not be higher; nothing short of America’s long-term economic competitiveness is at stake. In my opinion, the choice is clear: We can either come together to reinvest in growth and maintain our leadership in an increasingly competitive global economy — or we can take profits and fall behind.
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IBM’s Cognitive Social Media Command Center is bringing Wimbledon to you
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Mark Lelinwalla
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
Most tennis fans would salivate over the chance to witness Serena Williams attempt to win and tie Steffi Graf’s 22 Grand Slams, pulling within two of Margaret Court’s 24 for the most major singles titles in women’s tennis history. But for those unable to make the trip to London to witness the tournament, which is currently in full swing, IBM now offers a new way to experience the event via Wimbledon’s official smartphone apps and website. In addition to improvements made to Wimbledon’s for iOS and Android and a new Apple TV app — all of which IBM designed, built and hosts via its iX hosting team — the company is also powering this year’s tournament with its new Cognitive Social Media Command Center, which was built with the company’s and hybrid cloud technologies. Backed by Watson’s ability to read and understand natural language, the Cognitive Command Center ingests feeds across several social media platforms. It separates conversations about Wimbledon from conversations about other sports going on right now — like the Euro 2016 soccer tournament — and pinpoints and highlights trending topics about Wimbledon itself. Across roughly two weeks of the tournament, IBM will capture 3.2 million data points from 19 courts with an accuracy target of 100 percent and a sub-second response time. How? Well, the Command Center uses Watson’s APIs, including its Natural Language Classifier and Alchemy Topic Analysis services, to review social media comment across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Those same APIs are trained to recognize what’s relevant to Wimbledon. Once it hones in on those sticking points via real-time conversations, the Command Center is able to identify emerging topics, geographic locations, key sources of information and who key influencers are, according to Sam Seddon, IBM’s Wimbledon and RFU Client and Program Executive. The deluge of information gives Wimbledon’s digital team of editors insight into how to tune their approach, giving them a first-mover advantage around where to focus. “It’s all for getting Wimbledon in front of as many people around the world as possible,” said IBM Technology Manager John Kent. “Watson analyzes volumes of information in the world of social.” He added: “Our primary role is to work with the club, help them really take the tournament and bring it to the world in concert with their brand. Whatever experience we create needs to be done the Wimbledon way, if you will. Their ‘in pursuit of excellence’ mantra is something that’s not just a tagline, but something they live, breathe and feel.” To accomplish that under Wimbledon’s standards, IBM beefed up its mobile applications, allowing fans to pick the players, events and countries they want to follow with the help of curated content that’s catered to their selections. So if you choose Serena Williams, for example, you’ll get alerts when she takes the court, her real-time match information, results and stories about her — both on and off the court. Fans at the event will also get to participate in the “My Wimbledon Experience” via the mobile app. Part of that includes the “Create My Story” feature, which allows fans to check off their customized bucket list, whether it’s being at Centre Court or checking out Wimbledon’s famed Henman Hill. Photos they take are pre-fitted with a social media-ready Wimbledon border.
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Zenefits halves its previous valuation to $2B to head off investor lawsuits
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
is executing a change in its current ownership structure that will increase the overall ownership of the company for late-stage investors; it’s a move that revalues the company’s Series C round at $2 billion and looks to placate investor concerns over the company’s regulatory investigations. As part of accepting the new ownership changes, the investors participating will sign a release of claims against the company. It’s another move that new CEO David Sacks is doing in what’s been a massive cleanup effort of the company following report after report of the company skirting insurance regulation. Since all those regulatory issues came to light, the company has and parted ways with its former CEO Parker Conrad. The biggest issue stemmed from a program called “The Macro” that would aid in circumventing state licensing requirements. “Since shortly after becoming CEO, I have been in discussions with a number of our major investors about how we can reset our relationship in light of the fact that they (like I) were never informed about the Macro before investing in the company,” Sacks said in a memo released today. “We have been working on a new basis on which they can re-commit to the company and get fully aligned with the new Zenefits.” It’s not surprising that investors, who have a big stake in the company’s success, would also want some kind of guarantee that their investment is still in decent shape given the company’s problems. The hope here it would seem is that Zenefits — and Sacks — can quickly put all this in the past and start rebuilding the company and placate investors, rather than having to face off against them. Here are the details: Investors in the company’s Series C round, where it raised $500 million at a previous $4.5 billion valuation, will have their ownership stake upped from around 11 percent to 25 percent. A source tells us this amounts to a change in the share conversion rate upon a liquidation event. That change now effectively values the company at $2 billion in its Series C round, and earlier investors will receive small adjustments to offset the dilution. The company’s common stock will be diluted by around 20 percent. Now, here’s the big question: What happens when it needs to raise money again? Zenefits, even with its skirting of regulations and growth proclamations, reached $60 million in ARR in 2016, Sacks said in an email detailing the layoffs of 250 employees in February. Former CEO Conrad previously said, when the company raised its $500 million round, that Zenefits . This was certainly a miss, and raises a lot of questions as to whether Zenefits would be able to control its burn in the wake of missing those targets. At a $4.5 billion valuation, and with all the issues the company has had, that certainly could scare away investors. But it’s now going to be a bigger question as to whether they’ll buy in even at a lower valuation. “At some point, this company will want to sell its shares again, and future prospective shareholders will look closely at how we treated our current shareholders,” Sacks wrote in a note coinciding with the announcement. All this is basically a way to reset expectations for investors, as well as try to retain employees following the changes in the company’s ownership structure. Shareholders were kept in the dark in relation to the existence and use of “The Macro,” which required a reset of the relationship. Zenefits grew like a rocket ship, in just about two years after the company started. That, at the time, labeled the company as one of the fastest-growing SaaS startups ever — but, obviously, there was a bunch of shady stuff going on behind the scenes to pad that growth. Sacks has made other moves to try to restructure the company, which was being torn asunder by investigations, a and the break-neck growth that Conrad went after in its earliest days. Zenefits offered its employees a buyout package that equaled two months’ severance in an effort to effectively reset the culture of the company, of which Sacks said around 10 percent of employees accepted. It also open-sourced a new application that provides licensing controls to companies in what seemingly amounts to a mea culpa to the industry. “We are becoming the Compliance Company,” . And, of course, this is yet another instance of companies finding themselves resetting expectations for investors in the wake of a changing financing environment. If Zenefits wants to raise capital again, it’s going to have to deal with two issues: controlling its burn as it continues to try to grow, and resolving its regulatory issues. One footnote to the announcement: The agreement does not include a release of claims for the $10 million in stock Conrad sold. “I hope that issue will be resolved in the near future,” Sacks said in the memo. Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, TPG and Insight Venture Partners all agreed to the new investor agreement. “I want to thank our investors for reaffirming their confidence in us. We take our commitment to you seriously to build value for all shareholders,” Sacks said in the memo. “As a result of The Offer and Investor Settlement, all of our employees and investors will be aligned, committed, and focused on what’s next, which is the launch of Z2 in October.” Here’s the full memo: As you all know, I became CEO of Zenefits in February after it was discovered that the previous CEO/founder had written a software program (or “Macro”) that was widely disseminated in the company to circumvent a state licensing requirement. He resigned, the Board asked me to step in, and since that time, we have been working to remediate the situation and reset our relationships with all of our key stakeholders. These include regulators, industry partners, customers, employees and investors. Our efforts have included self-reporting the Macro issue, bringing our licensing into compliance, changing our leadership and governance, instituting new company values, and transforming the culture so that compliance is a top priority. We announced plans with Salesforce to open-source our licensing controls so the rest of the industry could benefit from our technology. We also offered a generous voluntary separation package (“The Offer”) for any employee who did not agree with the new direction. I’m proud that roughly 90% of employees chose to stay and re-commit to the new Zenefits. Today we are announcing something similar for our investors. Since shortly after becoming CEO, I have been in discussions with a number of our major investors about how we can reset our relationship in light of the fact that they (like I) were never informed about the Macro before investing in the company. We have been working on a new basis on which they can re-commit to the company and get fully aligned with the new Zenefits. We are announcing that agreement today. This agreement will increase the ownership of our Series C investors, who invested approximately $500 million in May 2015, from about 11% of the company to about 25%. This effectively revalues the Series C at a $2 billion valuation. The Series A and Series B investors will receive small adjustments to offset their dilution. The common stock will be diluted about 20% from its current level — about the same as a typical financing round. In my view, that is well worth it to realign our existing shareholders with the company. At some point, this company will want to sell its shares again, and future prospective shareholders will look closely at how we treated our current shareholders. We do not want employees to be negatively impacted by this agreement. So each non-executive employee of Zenefits will be “trued up” through a special stock grant equal to 25% of their current number of shares. This new grant will vest 100% . It will consist of RSUs rather than options so that employees don’t have to pay a strike price. Our executive team will also receive additional 4-year grants to incentivize them. However, co-founder/CTO Laks Srini and I have offered not to participate in this true-up in order to ensure that there are enough shares for employees. We will be diluted to the same extent as any other common stockholder. As part of this agreement, each participating investor will sign a release, which will allow the company to move forward and put the past behind us. This agreement does not include a release for the $10 million of stock that Parker sold personally; I hope that issue will be resolved in the near future. The agreement also contains a few provisions to foster good governance, such as the creation of a permanent seat for the Series C on the Board of Directors (which is already occupied by TPG’s Bill McGlashan) and the creation of a Compliance Committee on the Board. Both the company’s management and its investors believe these are wise things to do. The investor agreement has already been approved by a number of the company’s major investors including Fidelity, TPG, Andreessen Horowitz, and Insight Venture Partners. We will be offering it to all our investors shortly. I want to thank our investors for reaffirming their confidence in us. We take our commitment to you seriously to build value for all shareholders. As a result of The Offer and Investor Settlement, all of our employees and investors will be aligned, committed, and focused on what’s next, which is the launch of Z2 in October. David
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Apple might buy Jay Z’s Tidal music app
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em. Apple is in discussions with Tidal about acquiring its music streaming app, which offers exclusives and early releases from big artists like Beyonce and Kanye West. reports that the talks are still early and might not end in a deal, but Apple wants those exclusives to bolster its Apple Music streaming app that’s currently in hard-fought competition with Spotify. Apple has been pushing to score exclusives of its own, like the release of Drake’s most recent album. But Tidal has been winning on that front. Rapper Jay Z bought Tidal for $56 million in March 2015, then with some of the biggest names in music, including venture as co-owners: Alicia Keys, Calvin Harris, Arcade fire, Chris Martin from Coldplay, Beyonce, Daft Punk, Jack White, J. Cole, Jason Aldean, Kanye West, Deadmau5, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Usher. In a pompous declaration-signing ceremony, Tidal made these stars co-owners in exchange for them giving it first crack at releasing their music. While that arrangement seemed unlikely to pan out at first, Tidal was the only place to stream Kanye’s new album “Life Of Pablo” for several weeks, and is still the only place you can stream Beyonce’s visual album “Lemonade”. Apple sees music as a big part of the future of mobile, and as a way to encourage sales of its flagship iPhones. Even if it had to pay a steep price for Tidal, its exclusives could give it a big edge over Spotify, which has concentrated on listening features like Discover Weekly instead. If Apple does buy Tidal, it could be good for listeners, who are facing a balkanized music catalog divided between the different streaming apps. To listen to the new Drake and the new Kanye, you’d need two almost entirely redundant $10 per month subscriptions. If Spotify gets serious about exclusives thanks to the hire of former Lady Gaga manager and tech investor Troy Carter, things could get even worse. Apple Music now has 15 million paying subscribers, compared to Spotify’s 30 million paying subscribers and 100 million active listeners. While Apple Music has been growing fast, the company might want to buy Tidal to accelerate user acquisition of people who’ve never really used streaming services. That could be easier now than going it alone without Tidal and having to wrestle listeners away from Spotify later when they’ve become entrenched with playlists and personalization. Apple is already criticized for using its ownership of the App Store and iOS operating system . Apple owning Tidal would certainly give listeners fewer options. But if it puts the best new music all in one app, even loyal Spotify users might switch to a Tidal-powered Apple Music.
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NFL star Martellus Bennett on his new children’s book and app, Hey A.J.
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
It’s not everyday that a 6 ft. 7 in. NFL star says he is going to spend his offseason designing and launching a new interactive children’s app. So to learn more, we sat down with , tight end for the New England Patriots and founder of , a multimedia production company designed to bring Martellus’ ideas to life. The first product out of the studio is ., a children’s book with an accompanying interactive mobile app. The app lets you read along with different narrators and play a game where you help A.J. make breakfast. It’s certainly unusual for an NFL star to be creating children’s characters and stories in his spare time. But as Martellus explained, it’s something he’s done his whole life. But now, using proceeds from his football career, Martellus is shifting his focus from creating characters to actually putting them to work inside content like books, apps and animated film. While Hey A.J. is the only project released so far, Martellus explained he has “hundreds of characters in his head” just waiting to be turned into a story. And it seems that he’ll get his wish, as his startup is planning to release two more apps and books over the next year, as well as upcoming animated TV and film projects showcasing Martellus’ creativity. Watch the above video to learn more about Martellus’ vision for The Imagination Agency, how he thinks technology like virtual reality will change entertainment and what it’s been like trying to start a new company while playing in the NFL. Hey A.J. is now, and the app is available in both the and .
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Trulia can now help you find a place to rent near public transport
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
, the online real estate search engine , an interesting new feature today that allows you to quickly find rental homes and apartments that have good public transport access. , as the new feature is called, is essentially an additional search filter that removes all houses that are more than a 15-minute walk away from a major transit station. For now, those major stations include the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system around San Francisco, the Boston ‘T,’ Chicago’s ‘L,’ New York’s subway lines, Philadelphia’s SEPTA system and the D.C. Metro in Washington. Yardley Ip, GM of Trulia Rentals, tells me that the company is looking to add support for other cities and additional transit systems over time. Using this new feature, renters can also compare the average rental prices around different stations to help narrow down their search even more. By focusing only on a few select transit systems, this new feature may be a bit too limited, though. There are, after all, other ways to get around on public transit than just the six systems the company currently supports. Ip acknowledged as much and noted that this new feature is the result of an internal hackathon and that the company still has lots of ideas for how to improve it over time. If you’re specifically looking for a place close to a BART station though, this is definitely worth a try. This new feature is now available on Trulia’s desktop site and on the mobile web.
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Facebook throws out the news Paper
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
Facebook Paper could have given publishers , but no one wanted the standalone news reading app. Facebook has pulled the Paper app from the app store and will discontinue support for existing downloads of it on July 29th, according to a message show to all user. Despite it’s eye-catching, progressive design, the experience proved unnecessary for most and too unfamiliar for those that tried it. Part of the app will live on, though, as design elements and features in Facebook’s Instant Articles. For example, Facebook pioneered the tilt-to-pan method of exploring wide landscape images in Paper when it was launched in 2014. being used by a Facebook employee a full year before it was released. Upon its debut, it let readers browse full-screen tiles of different news articles in categories like sports, world news, and business, plus a stylized version of their News Feed. But almost immediately, Paper began to tumble down the app download charts. It fell from the top 300 US apps in a month, and hasn’t been in the top 1500 since the end of 2014. Few talked about Paper, though there was a small but loyal audience who preferred its design to the white-space heavy main Facebook app. According to third-party research firm SensorTower, Paper is estimated to have only seen roughly 119,000 downloads in the past year, and between 1.2 million and 1.6 million total since launch. Late last year Facebook canned several other standalone apps built by the Creative Labs team that initially spawned Paper. And just this morning, , one of Paper’s core engineers, left Facebook after 3.5 years working. He exited with a post of this video showing a variety of Paper screenshots showing how it evolved into Instant Articles. And now Paper is gone, as first reported by .
Here’s Facebook’s message to Paper users about the shut down. In 2014 we launched Paper, a standalone app designed to give people a new way to explore and share stories from friends and the sources they care about. Today we’re announcing that we are ending support for the app and users will no longer be able to log into the app after July 29. We know that Paper really resonated with you–the people who used it–so we’ve tried to take the best aspects of it and incorporate them into the main Facebook app. For example, the same team that built Paper also built Instant Articles—a fast and interactive experience for reading articles in News Feed—using many of the same tools, design elements, and fundamental ideas as Paper. Our goal with Paper was to explore new immersive, interactive design elements for reading and interacting with content on Facebook, and we learned how important these elements are in giving people an engaging experience. We know not all the features you love will move over to Facebook, but we hope you’ll continue to notice elements from Paper improving the Facebook experience for everyone. We can’t thank you enough for using the app and exploring Paper with us over the past couple of years. Now with no dedicated place to read news, and the , news publishers may find it tougher to pull referral traffic from Facebook. The whole media industry is sneering at Facebook for supposedly screwing them over. But users demonstrated that they just don’t need non-stop links to the latest shallow gossip, political stunts, exaggerated tragedies, and mundane industry news (yep, that’s us sometimes). Both their behavior and surveys said there were too many blathering news outlets in their feed. Many publications grew too big for their britches, posting non-stop to social networks when there are really only a few truly important news stories each day that people require to stay informed. We need information about the future of government, the struggles for justice by the disempowered, true art, and the businesses that will change our world for the better. Frankly, a lot of what may disappear from the News Feed didn’t fall into those categories. Facebook rebalancing the mix of content to focus on the unique stories about the people you care about shouldn’t be seen as the apocalypse for news. Instead, it should be a rallying call for publishers to concentrate on telling the stories that matter in compelling ways. That’s what people will still read and share.
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New York’s longstanding Apple retailer Tekserve is closing up shop
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
After nearly 30 years of dutiful serve to New York City’s Apple community, Manhattan-based retailer will be closing its doors for the last time later this summer. It’s yet another sign of the times for a computer market that has shifted dramatically since Apple took computer selling into its own slick and well-lit hands back in 2001. “This is a cultural shift,” company head Jerry Gepner this week in a story that broke the news. “It’s not a failure of the business. It’s like this giant wave finally crashed down upon us.” The company started life as a repair shop on the same block in the Flatiron District where it’s continued to operate for 29 years, eventually occupying a 10,000-foot storefront and the title of the largest Apple Reseller as the computer company’s products once again returned to fashion. The reseller had managed to hold on courtesy of a loyal customer base and a rental service, but between the six Apple stores currently open on the island and a big Best Buy setting up shop across the street, it ultimately couldn’t compete with the changing climate. Tekserve broke the news to employees this week. It will continue to operate its service center through the end of July and will officially close the doors on its retail shop August 15 .
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How Mexico went from telecom laggard to mobile trailblazer
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Ira Brodsky
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
Twenty years ago only one out of 10 people in Mexico had a telephone of any kind. Today, more than 100 million people (out of a population of roughly 125 million) have cell phones and, more amazingly, . To keep up the torrid growth, scrappy competitors are offering smartphones for every budget and plans that let users choose right from their handsets which services they want and how much they want to spend. Three factors have catapulted Mexico’s mobile industry into the 21st century. First, Mexico has grown into the world’s 11th largest economy (in terms of purchasing power) in just the last two decades. Second, millennials are Mexico’s largest demographic group (they make up more than half of Mexico’s online population) and they want and expect what their counterparts in developed countries have. And third, the towering presence of a company that Mexico’s government considers a monopoly in both the landline and mobile markets has spurred its smaller (though not unsubstantial) competitors to be more inventive and aggressive. That monopoly is the creation of a man who for four years in a row was ranked the world’s wealthiest individual, . His flagship business, , is one of the largest telecom concerns in the world, with operations in nearly 30 countries. The telecom titan controls roughly 80 percent of Mexico’s landline market and 70 percent of its mobile market. The Mexican government has been trying unsuccessfully for years to break up Slim’s empire. However, his mobile competitors aren’t waiting for that to happen. Instead, they are challenging the status quo that America Móvil is struggling to preserve by bringing innovative technology and business models to Mexico’s mobile market. Mexico’s second largest mobile operator, , is shaking up the market by offering users a more modern solution for purchasing and managing mobile services. As the fifth-largest mobile operator in the world, Telefónica has the financial assets and know-how to give America Móvil serious competition. The company introduced a new service, branded as Movistar On, in response to the rampant confusion and frustration among consumers that it discovered through intensive market research. Telefónica partnered with Silicon Valley-based to build Movistar On around that firm’s cloud-client platform. “Cloud-client” is the architecture of choice among internet phenoms like Amazon and Uber. The cloud component enables the operator to quickly introduce new services, while the client piece gives users the self-service functionality that millennials crave. The combination enables Telefónica’s marketers to engage subscribers directly, presenting them with timely offers and closely tracking their choices. While traditional mobile operators force users to purchase data by the megabyte or gigabyte, Movistar On gives users , such as “1 day of YouTube,” “3 days of Netflix,” and “30 days of Spotify.” Users can see exactly what they’ve used at any point in the billing cycle and make adjustments right from their phones. This appeals to millennials who prefer self-service over calling customer service and being put on hold, and who feel they have a right to know exactly what they are getting for their money. Such are the expectations of young people who have grown up with the internet and smart devices. Mexico’s third-largest mobile carrier, , holds the remaining 10 percent of the market. The company is leveraging its operations in the U.S., Canada and Mexico to provide seamless service throughout the North American Hispanic community. With smartphones, subscribers can keep in touch with friends and family just by participating in the same social networks, and by using over-the-top services that make voice and even video calls more affordable. The shift to smartphones in Mexico has been nothing short of spectacular. Smartphone penetration soared from 17.9 percent in the second quarter of 2014 to . That means the number of smartphone users tripled in little over a year. Why are so many Mexican users making a relatively big investment in their phones? Because a smartphone gives them all of the capabilities of telephones, TVs and personal computers in a single device that is loaded with intelligence and goes wherever they go. Despite America Móvil’s dominance, which is very real, Mexico’s mobile users have compelling choices, and the way that operators are competing for their business is a case study for mobile carriers everywhere. Mexico’s millennials did not grow up in a wired world with its physical limitations and bureaucratic practices. They are flocking to smart devices that add new features almost on a weekly basis. They demand mobile operators find new ways to engage and empower them — and Mexico’s mobile operators are advancing to make it happen.
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Government regulators are looking into fatal Tesla crash involving Autopilot
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
Tesla announced today that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into a recent fatal crash of a Model S with the company’s activated. The accident took place on May 7th in a small West Florida town called Williston. The Florida Highway Patrol is also conducting its own investigation of the accident, according to a public affairs officer there. The same officer reported that Tesla has, since the fatal accident in May, sent engineers down to Ocala, Florida to assist investigators in accessing data they needed to evaluate the causes of the crash. Tesla offered an account of the event in that went up today, detailing the crash, an “extremely rare circumstance,” which occurred on a divided highway. According to Tesla, Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S. According to the carmaker, the vehicle’s crash safety system would have been activated had the Model S collided with the front or rear of the trailer, rather than the side. It also took great pains to reiterate the safety procedures it has set out for the Autopilot feature, which is still in the public beta phase. Our condolences for the tragic loss — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) The company isn’t offering much more in the way of details about the incident or driver, though it did note that he was “a friend of Tesla,” who has been involved in the EV and technology communities in general. According to traffic crash records reviewed by TechCrunch, the victim was, in fact, a veteran of the U.S. Navy and famous fan of Tesla, . Forty-year-old Brown also founded the customer fulfillment technology startup Nexu Innovations. He made news back in April when he posted of a near collision with a merging truck, which Autopilot effectively steered clear of. When he died, Brown was driving the same black, 2015 Tesla Model S, the roof of which was torn off in a collision when a tractor-trailer turned at an intersection. The driver of the other vehicle, a red, 2014 Freightliner Cascadia, was not injured. According to the crash report, the Tesla ran off the road after the collision. The NHTSA’s investigation could ultimately prove the first step toward a larger recall request from the organization, should the vehicles be deemed unsafe. According to the agency
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How the VW diesel settlement breaks down in dollars
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
On Tuesday, June 28, Volkswagen finally announced an agreement with US federal regulators (including the ), private plaintiffs in the United States, and 44 states to settle its TDI diesel case to the tune of about $15 billion. In case you need a refresher, in fall of 2015, researchers discovered that VW had engineered the software governing its TDI diesel engines to behave differently when being tested for emissions than they do when being driven normally. When the car detected a testing situation—steering wheel straight, certain speeds or rpms held for certain times—the engine ran cleaner, which sacrificed performance but passed the test. When driven normally, the performance increased, and so did the tailpipe emissions. Here’s how the numbers break down in the settlement: This only affects vehicles with the 2.0-liter TDI engines. There’s more resolution to come—and more money to be paid out—for the 3.0-liter TDI-engined vehicles. If you’re a TDI owner, you’ve got a couple of choices. You can take a buyback or lease termination plus cash, or you can have your car modified to meet emissions standards. In the first case, the value for the buyback will be based on the Clean Trade-In Value published in September 2015 of the . In the second case, you keep the car (though the performance will likely suffer, if that’s a factor for you), and you get some cash from VW. The modification option is waiting on approval from the EPA and CARB before it can be implemented in customers’ cars. Since the software dodge affects cars from 2009 through 2015, it’s possible that you may have owned a TDI and already sold it on or traded it in. Don’t fret—you may still be able to get some cash. There aren’t details on the yet, but it’s worth keeping an eye on that provision if it applies to you. No matter which option you may be eligible for or want to take advantage of, the paperwork has to be filed and approved by the court over the summer. Action can be taken by TDI owners to get some money or some modifications in fall 2016.
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NASA and Apple enlist Weezer and Trent Reznor to make music about Jupiter
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
With the set to arrive at Jupiter on the Fourth of July, NASA did what any reasonable space agency would to celebrate the momentous occasion, teaming with Apple to release a short film and enlisting artists like Weezer and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor to celebrate.
A short film, , has been released through iTunes, featuring some stunning visuals and celebrating connections between space exploration and music making. Space! — Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) Reznor and frequent collaborator Atticus Ross have crafted a soundtrack for the short, a nine-minute chilled out ambient tune inspired by electromagnetic sounds emitted by the solar system’s largest planet.
Weezer, meanwhile, has opted to go a more charged up, patriotic route, in honor of the Independence Day timing with the extremely unsubtle track, “I love the USA.” As a wise man once said, “We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!” Congratulations Juno. Keep on rockin’ in the free world.
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Come out to TechCrunch’s Summer Party at August Capital
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
The is a thing of tradition and we hope you can make it out this year. Like in years past we’ll gather on the spacious grounds of August Capital in Menlo Park and enjoy an evening of cocktails and the spirit of entrepreneurship. Tickets are very limited and released on a rolling basis. It’s $85 to attend and $1000 to exhibit your startup at a demo table. About the Summer Party at August Capital TechCrunch parties have a history of being the place you want to meet your future investor, acquirer or co-founder. Case in point, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington used to hold these events in his Atherton backyard, Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith met one of their first investors, DFJ. And in 2010, we spotted 500 Startups’ Dave McClure writing a check to then-stealthy startup Tello, which was bought by Urban Airship. Hope to see you all there this year!
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 9 | null |
500 Startups tries its hand at a startup studio, 500 Labs
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
500 Startups, known for its work as a startup accelerator, now hopes to incubate its own ideas in-house and spin them off into new companies. Called 500 Labs, it’s a new attempt at finding interesting ideas that might turn out to be good investments. 500 Startups essentially brings in developers and entrepreneurs in residence, giving them the resources to play around with ideas until they find one that sticks. It’s not a particularly new model — there are others like Betaworks and Andy Rubin’s hardware-centric Playground. 500 Startups hopes to differentiate itself as a startup incubator by giving founders and developers the ability to lean on its large growth marketing team. McClure argues that it has one of the largest growth marketing teams in the VC community, giving it the ability to help spark an initial seed audience for projects that will hopefully start taking off on its own in addition to paid acquisition. You can think of it as a sort of extension of the entrepreneur-in-residence program that many VC firms have in the Valley. 500 Labs pairs up potential candidates based on their qualifications — a developer with a general manager, for example — and gives them room to try out a bunch of ideas. They’re salaried, which means it carries less risk than running off to start a new company off an idea that may be destined to fail, and gives creators room to rapidly try new ideas. 500 Startups expects to be working on around 10 projects at a time, with 3 or 4 of them being spun into companies if they exhibit some potential and high growth. 500 Labs candidates have the benefit of leaning on the 500 Startups infrastructure to handle difficult early-stage tasks like recruiting and marketing, and creating paid acquisition campaigns, Selcuk Atli — one of the leads on the program, along with Dom Coryell — said. That marketing team is also constantly looking for new avenues, like potentially AR and VR in the future, 500 Startups co-founder Dave McClure said. “As much as startups have high attrition rates, founders have experience in a particular domain have a higher success rate,” McClure said. “It’s a different model, it’s model has been proven to work in other scenarios. I think if you [mess] it up enough times you’re going get good at doing it.” For creators, the bar for potential investments will be even higher than the one startups face when looking to apply to the firm’s accelerator program, McClure said. That’s partly because the founders that are working on these projects are expected to have the experience and skills to help cultivate strong ideas and grow them. For example, for an app-based model to be successful, McClure said the firm expects something in the tens to hundreds of thousands of downloads before it’s considered to be spun out into a new company. A couple of example projects that 500 Labs might spin up would be e-commerce or marketplace services, and other online software-based services that have a natural growth arc that can be supplemented by 500 Startups’ growth team. The firm is also looking into enterprise productivity tools, as an example of potential ideas it might explore in the enterprise space. “We have a pretty broad area, but we’re trying to confine all these things under the mobile umbrella so we can tactically share resources,” Selcuk said. “If you’re working on the mobile, you’re working on app store optimization for example. We feel that’s an advantage to have not so much of a narrow focus but a broad enough focus so we can share resources.” Those founders don’t necessarily have to be the original creators of successful products — they could also be top-level lieutenants at those companies, Atli said. “I think we’re probably looking at core disciplines in engineering, design and marketing areas we’re going after,” Atli said. “That might not have been the founders of previous companies, it could be senior principals. Kind of like the Facebook and PayPal mafias, we’d like to find successful companies with a second level of experience who might want to start things.” The concept was always in the back of McClure and his team’s mind, but it was over a round of drinks and hookah that Selcuk and McClure finally sealed the deal. McClure said he was basically waiting for the resources and the right personnel to finally roll the project out. Initially, the Labs model will focus on remote locations like Waterloo and Toronto — places with a bevy of tech talent that would have otherwise been recruited by the now-dead (or basically dead) BlackBerry — but the idea is to constantly give them a presence in Silicon Valley. “When companies get funded they can move anywhere,” Atli said. “We found pockets of talent in interesting and amazing places. Vietnam, Waterloo, Berlin, Istanbul, there’s talent all over the world but there isn’t always much access to capital. Combining a Silicon Valley HQ with access to other communities all over the world, we think we can be really effective.” Of course, all this would be moot if it weren’t a successful outcome for the firm as well. 500 Startups is aiming that founders will have double-digit point ownership of the companies that are spun out of the incubator, but the overall ownership structure is still being worked out between the team and founders. McClure and Atli shy away from comparisons to other accelerators and incubators, though it’s hard not to draw analogies between a program like 500 Labs and Betaworks. But McClure argues that with its network of thousands of founders, it can lean on that network for potential candidates for 500 Labs that those other firms might not have access.
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Google Maps gets multi-stop directions and vacation memories on mobile
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
Google is bringing long awaited multi-stop directions to mobile with its new summer update. Travelers can now hit as many tourist traps as they want on their cross country treks. Just like in the web version, users can swiftly rearrange the order of stops. Android users will get the feature first, followed by iOS in the near future. The summer update caps off an active week for Maps. Earlier this week, Google also . Google also wants to help travelers remember everything from rural to giant Adirondack chairs with its new Timeline feature. Your Timeline is for those moments when you just can’t remember that definitely fun memorable thing you did last Wednesday to tell your friends and family. Users can drop notes right next to activities. Unfortunately this feature seems to be only rolling out for Android users at this time. All we need now is an update for multi-planet directions and a nifty feature to track time dilation.
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Digi.me bags $6.1M to put users in the driving seat for sharing personal data
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
There is a lot of noise in the privacy space, says serial entrepreneur and . founder Julian Ranger. And cutting through that noise is one of the big challenges he reckons stands in the way of his current startup. But the concept behind is so intriguing that you really have to hope the team manages to make themselves heard. Today the UK startup is announcing a £4.2 million ($6.1M) Series A round of funding, led by global re-insurer Swiss Re. That’s right; the lead investor here is not a tech-focused VC firm but a global reinsurance giant. Getting corporate partners in place who see the value of Digi.me’s data exchange vision — and are thus persuaded to buy in to helping achieve it — is one key plank of a strategy for bagging the critical mass of users needed to deliver on a radical rethink of how personal data is collected and shared online. We’ve seen a few other startups (e.g. ) seeking to make mileage out of the notion that users are currently getting a bad deal when they trade personal data online in exchange for access to free services. But Digi.me claims it’s pushing to go broader and deeper — aiming to build a data-sharing platform that gives users total control. Ranger has been formulating this grand plan for more than five years now, biding his time, he says, until the industry especially caught up with the thinking — and Swiss Re’s investment now suggests that’s starting to happen. Digi.me wasn’t always so ambitious. Originally it was launched as a social media back-up service back in 2009, funded with £20,000 of Ranger’s own money. And at this point the app — which has some 400,000 users across 140 countries — still bills itself as a photo search utility to lets users trawl multiple social services and (re)share content they’ve previously posted to their networks. But that’s now just phase one of a much grander plan. The big vision is to rethink the data value exchange, tipping the control scales back in favor of users while simultaneously helping businesses gain access to higher quality user data. And the key to getting there is letting people choose who and how to share their data. So informed consent rather than disingenuous data-harvesting. That’s Digi.me’s big bet. It is deliberately structured so it’s not handling any of its users’ personal data itself. Nor is there any centralized pot of all users’ data to pose an attractive target for hackers. Data remains stored on individuals’ own devices (there will also be a personal cloud option for people to choose from in future, should they wish, such as Dropbox or Google Drive; and Digi.me plans to offer users their own free virtual PC for more demanding data processing tasks). Data is also encrypted locally. And Digi.me does not hold any encryption keys. Ranger couches Digi.me’s envisaged role as equivalent to being both a librarian and a postman; so affording users access to all their information by connecting it within an architecture that allows searches and other processing functions to be performed. And also by providing people with tools to selectively share data — when and where they see value in doing so. Each of these data exchanges will involve an explicit contract — in digital certificate form — between the individual and the company in question. This will specify what data the company will get; what will they do with it; what will they give back in exchange for it; what data they will retain if any; what data they will they share with third parties if any; and whether they will implemented the European ‘Right To Forget’ (coming in the new GDPR so a regulatory compliance requirement for companies operating in Europe). “Towards the middle end of 2010 I suddenly realized what we were doing,” says Ranger, describing how the idea evolved from basic app to a radical rethinking of the data value exchange. “I realized that what we were actually doing was bringing data together for the individual and we were doing it on the individual’s own devices — which is the key thing for Digi.me is that we don’t see, touch, nor hold any data ever; it’s all only held by the individual — and that’s when the whole idea for [the current business vision] came about. But it was also clear to me that… it was far too early.” Why is now the right time? Ranger notes in passing developments such as the reformulated European data protection directive (i.e. the ), as well as general rising awareness of data privacy and security issues, but argues that the really pressing demand now is actually coming from businesses wanting better quality data than they’ve been able to acquire by the current (i.e. non-transparent) data acquisition methods. “There’s a frustration that despite all the things that go on to get personal data behind our backs and do everything else, when you’re a business, actually the data you get today isn’t all that good,” he tells TechCrunch. “You’re not able to provide the sort of quality and services that you want to provide. And you are… pissing off the customer in the way you’re getting the data.” Add to that, users of digital services also aren’t seeing huge benefits from all the personal data their digital activity has been generating. So it’s a two-sided problem that Digi.me is positioning itself to fix. “That is what brings it together,” he continues. “You as an individual can now first of all use your data for yourself, understand yourself, search, find everything that’s available. And now businesses can by asking you — and that’s the really key thing — for a specific purpose get this what we call ‘rich data’.” Rich because the idea is this is not just Facebook posts of baby photos and tweets about what you ate for lunch being connected together within a common data processing architecture. Rather Digi.me intends to let users plug in their banking data and even personal health data, at least in countries where digital medical records are available to do so (so not currently in the UK). So, in other words, this is going to be about tapping into really powerful data sets — which could ultimately be used as the foundation for personal credit checking, for example, or to generate personalized health advice. The grand vision then is enabling businesses to tap into the data sets of their dreams in order to serve users with more relevant and powerful apps. Ranger likens the overall idea as akin to what SAP did for business data in the 1980s. “They brought together all the business data, gave them an app to do more with it, and then allowed the businesses to bring new apps into their own infrastructure to process the data or to share that data outside… We’re doing the same. You can think of us as… an SAP for the consumer. We help you get your data together then process it.” If the idea of sharing your medical data with commercial entities like insurance companies fill you with abject horror — and let’s face it there are some pretty dystopic scenarios already sketched out on that front — Ranger argues that’s not the direction businesses are going to want to be pushing in. After all, on the Digi.me platform, the user will remain in control and get to choose who to share their data with and what to share it for. Rather he says companies partaking in this data value exchange could, for example, offer Digi.me users apps that run locally on their devices, and which draw from their locally stored treasure trove of personal data — never taking their medical data, say, off to the cloud but performing all the processing locally — allowing them in turn to serve up personal health recommendations without actually having visibility of the individual’s medical history. (Although the devil will clearly be in the detail of each proposed value exchange.) Another example he sketches could be a banking app that can perform credit checking locally by drawing on a user’s entire financial history, based on data being pushed to the app from their linked banking data also stored locally. So again, without the user actually having to share details of their incomings and outgoings directly with that third party. Those are the sorts of potential user benefits Ranger envisages Digi.me being able to deliver by putting users in the driving seat when it comes to sharing their personal data. So really, the potential could be a new generation of exceptionally intelligent/useful apps powered by properly robust personal data. “A lot of people are concerned with insurance for example that now they’re going to want to ask all these things to help people get lower insurance and if I’ve got problems I won’t get insurance at all. Actually they’re not interested in that at all right now. Because that’s all covered by all sorts of legal frameworks,” he argues. Instead he says insurance industry users of Digi.me are going to be more interested in things like streamlining onboarding claims — so rather than people having to manually fill in forms, this could be done automatically by linking to the Digi.me data cache. “Then the transaction could happen instantaneously,” he adds, arguing this will lead to efficiency savings — some of which will be passed on to consumers (so, yes, potentially lower premiums). The second industry push here is it’s in the best interests of insurance companies to promote health — and therefore opening up people’s access to and understanding of their own medical data is one way to potentially achieve that. He points to a US health data-sharing initiative called which he says has shown that sharing medical data can boost understanding and in turn help people be healthier. “So what Swiss Re and others want to do is — you’ve now got your health data on your device, what if they gave you a health app that sat on your device, didn’t share data with anybody else… which is what you can do with the Digi.me environment where you own the data, so you’re sharing data with an app on your device, that data is not being sent anywhere else, now you can really understand your health,” he adds. “And you can bring in the wearables and see how that works together. You can start to get decision support from other apps that will come in. So if you’ve got diabetes it will link out to advice and other things. That will make you healthier. That will keep you healthier. And that of course is an advantage to you, but it’s also an advantage to the insurance company because it will reduce claims.” The structure here is somewhat similar to Apple’s Health app, which also creates a local health data repository. Except Apple also allows users to contribute data directly to the app if they wish (whereas Digi.me does not let users create data; it pulls direct from trusted data sources like their medical records to ensure robust data). Apple also allows third parties to access users’ Health data provided they have user consent. However Digi.me is doubling down on the rules for sharing; so not just consent but the how, what and why of the data exchange, bound into a one-to-one contract. Plus of course, Digi.me is not just aiming to create just a health data silo — it wants to link everything you’ve got, in digital data terms. So far grander ambitions. Ranger is counting on industry pull to help scale up Digi.me’s user base, leveraging large partner entities that see the potential value they could derive from the envisaged data exchanges if enough users can only be persuaded to sign up. But it’s not only thinking in terms of serving corporate giants’ data acquisition needs. It plans to open up the platform to smaller developers who could also build apps that tap into these valuable data stores, locally stored. (Although it’s starting its push with corporates in order to help with app distribution and to build user momentum. And on the distribution front it’s announced partnerships with Toshiba, Lenovo and Evernote in the past year.) “The API we’re creating — it’s not an API in terms of you pull data from the user, the way it works with our certificate system is the data is pushed from the user to the app or whatever that’s requesting the data… but think of it as an API — we will open that up for anybody to use in Q2 next year,” he notes. “But we have to build a community of users before the smaller startups will want to use us.” And the aim is to “start” to launch the data exchange element of the app in Q4 this year, he adds. On the technical side, Ranger says the new funding is going towards completing the tech stack for sharing permissions access and widening the data feeds Digi.me has access to. But it will be also going towards tackling the really big challenge: “noise and confusion” in the privacy space — by proving out the team’s thesis with “concrete examples” to convince people and businesses to buy in. “It is to get to the point where the world sees that this new way of operating where the individual owns the data is a better way of dealing with personal data. So the aim is that by the middle of next year you will have absolute concrete examples in health, finance, telco and FMCG with multinationals proving the value proposition for both sides,” he says. “You’ll have an open API where any business can now start to use this. And we’ll also have proved that this doesn’t only work for individuals and businesses, but also for governments and society as a whole. We have a Living Lab [set up in an undisclosed location to test public sector use-cases]… The aim is to have all of that proved out by the middle of next year.” “There’s no one else who is attempting to help you bring all of your data together as we are doing… It’s an unproven business model,” adds Ranger. “There’s a similar thing called unified managed access in the US, through the . And there’s some people like who are saying let us hold the data and we’ll give you some rewards from selling it… So we’ve got some [rivals] but at the moment there’s no one else doing what we’re doing in terms of giving you back all of your data and controlling it on your own devices.”
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Google Wallet vets get $19M more for Index, which helps offline retailers be more like online ones
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
As companies like Apple, Google and PayPal continue to home in on virtual wallets for consumers who dream of using phones or watches to pay for everything in person without fumbling around for a plastic card or cash; a startup called is focusing on how to make the experience better and more connected for the brick-and-mortar retailers selling to them. After opening for business in 2013; racking up a list of customers that includes American Apparel, The Fresh Market and Fairway; and processing some $3 billion in sales, Index has now has now raised $19 million in a Series B round of funding to take its business to the next level. Led by General Catalyst, the round also includes investment from Rob Gierkink, founder of consumer data giant Datalogix, as well as some of the world’s biggest cross-merchant loyalty programs. The Series B comes nearly three years after Index raised its first and only other funding, a , from investors that included Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Khosla Ventures, AIMCo and 819 Capital. There are a lot of startups and larger companies in the market today building software for physical retailers who lack a lot of data about their customers, as well as those building payment systems. There’s also been some , , and generally of what the bigger potential of this market might be, especially in the four years between Index first forming its business and today. What’s interesting about Index its background, the approach that it takes, and the success it has had so far. The startup was founded by Marc Freed-Finnegan and Jonathan Wall, respectively the product lead and the co-founder of Google Wallet (and now Index’s CEO and CTO), who left Google as part of the to strike out on their own. Wall tells me that the pair left the company partly because they believed that the technological development needed to be happening on both sides of the register, and they did not feel Google was the right place to develop the merchant side of the equation. As its name implies, Index takes something of a big data approach to the business of commerce, and specifically offline commerce, with a mission of essentially giving stores that are primarily offering physical experiences to consumers the same kinds of information troves that online businesses like Amazon can pick up about their customers, and use to drive more business. (Interesting and telling that before Wallet, Wall was the technical lead on Google File System, the company’s big data infrastructure.) Yes, a company like American Apparel has an online presence but the thinking here is that the customer that comes into the physical store can have a different profile and may never shop online, and so you need to figure out how to court her (or him). And the same goes for grocery and many other retail categories. Index’s products and services include things like unified databases to market to in-store customers online through email and other channels; personalisation tools to help stores figure out who is shopping, what she or he is buying, and how to get them offers on things they actually want; and secure payments services that link into both of these to (of course) feed them more data, as well as help with transactions. Index so far has focused only on larger retailers, Wall tells me. While that means longer sales cycles — the company has been essentially head-down and quietly working for the last four years — it also means higher volumes when deals are finally signed. Index is not disclosing revenues or current valuation, but it says that its $3 billion processing run rate is 20 times higher than a year ago. It also says that it’s sending some 25 million emails each month. And it’s adding more features into the mix. The company recently signed on as one of the first integration partners in Facebook’s recent big push to .
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Furby gets updated again for the smartphone era
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
A good Furby doesn’t die, it just runs out of batteries. And maybe, if you’re lucky, it evolves every few years or so. Back in 2012, Hasbro brought the cuddly little iconic monster back from the toy grave with an electronic update. A few years on, the company is to the line, aimed at an even more tech savvy consumer. Heck, it’s right there in the name. The Furby Connect relies on a smartphone app, connecting via Bluetooth to a mobile devices for an assortment of content, including videos, songs and games. The animated stuffed animal sports an antenna that lights up when new content arrives on the app. As with the last version, its eyes are LCDs, though this time out they feature more complex visuals that respond to the Furby Connect app, coupled with animatronic movements and sensors to offer up a fuller range of emotions and reactions. The new version, which features an updated redesign for 2016, also, mercifully, can be put to sleep at will, thanks to a sleep mask accessory. Furby Connect is up for , priced at $100. Pink and teal versions will arrive in stores this fall.
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Spotify and Apple are staring each other down while flipping the bird
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 |
The companies are at it again, and this time it’s not only bothersome to the businesses themselves, but to the end consumer. Going to the next level in an ongoing spat over Apple’s subscription rules, it would appear that Apple has rejected Spotify’s latest update to its app in late May, citing business model issues. Shortly before that, Spotify turned off billing within the Spotify iOS app altogether, cutting off free users ability to upgrade and even shutting off existing premium mobile users payments, forcing online upgrades. With it, Spotify cut off Apple’s full source of revenue from the Spotify service. Obtaining a letter written from Spotify’s general counsel Horacio Gutierrez to Apple’s legal team, that Apple rejected the new Spotify update because of billing. The letter said that if “Spotify wants to use the app to acquire new customers and sell subscriptions” it needs to use Apple’s billing system. Spotify and Apple have been fighting over this for quite some time. Back in 2014, Spotify , automatically accounting for Apple’s 30 percent revenue share on what is normally a $10/month service. In July of last year, a month after the launch of Apple Music, Spotify began to end their mobile subscriptions and upgrade to premium on the web, where it would cost just $10. Upgrading on the web circumvents any involvement from Apple on the billing side, while still allowing users to listen to Spotify premium on their Apple devices. The company has since discontinued the campaign, but it has also shut off in-app purchases on Spotify iOS. Under the section: 3.1.1 In-App Purchase: If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: , in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), . buttons, external links, or . Any credits or in-game currencies purchased via IAP must be consumed within the app and may not expire, and you should make sure you have a restore mechanism for any restorable in-app purchases. Please remember to assign the correct purchasability type or your app will be rejected. Apps should not directly or indirectly enable gifting of IAP content, features, or consumable items to others. Apps distributed via the Mac App Store may host plug-ins or extensions that are enabled with mechanisms other than the App Store.
3.1.2 Subscriptions: and may only be used for periodicals (e.g. newspapers, magazines), business apps (e.g. enterprise, productivity, professional creative, cloud storage), media apps (e.g. video, audio, voice, photo sharing), and other approved services (e.g. dating, dieting, weather). These subscriptions must last a minimum of 7 days and be accessible from all of the user’s devices where the app is available. You may offer subscriptions that are shared across your own apps, but these subscriptions may not extend to third party apps or services. While some could read that as a violation on the part of Spotify, which can turn off and turn on in-app purchases without update approval, others might consider this latest update rejection as a retaliation on the part of Apple. After all, if Spotify isn’t making money off of iOS in any way, it may not be subject to these guidelines, despite charging for subscriptions elsewhere. Not unlike , this battle comes in the midst of a much larger war, with the involvement of many parties, each harboring their own specific grievances and plots for vengeance. In fact, just yesterday Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was potentially sent a copy of this specific letter from Guitierez, for restricting competition in their designated fields. She specifically called out Apple for having “placed conditions on its rivals that make it difficult for them to offer competitive streaming services.” Though neither Apple nor Spotify have offered comment on this particular story (the App Store rejection and subsequent letter), Spotify was happy to provide comment alongside Senator Warren’s claims yesterday. Spotify’s head of communications and public policy Jonathan Prince had : Apple has long used its control of iOS to squash competition in music, driving up the prices of its competitors, inappropriately forbidding us from telling our customers about lower prices, and giving itself unfair advantages across its platform through everything from the lock screen to Siri. You know there’s something wrong when Apple makes more off a Spotify subscription than it does off an Apple Music subscription and doesn’t share any of that with the music industry. They want to have their cake and eat everyone else’s too. Which brings the artists themselves into the equation. On one battlefront, Spotify is fighting with Apple for the full rights to its profits, without the additional cut for the App Store. On the other side, to the sea, Spotify is digging trenches against the artists themselves. Taylor Swift has waged all out war against Spotify, teaming up with Apple Music instead. She’s written her own about Spotify’s low cuts for artists, wages that can’t be increased on an already-low-margin business. And then there’s Jay-Z and his cohort of ultra-popular musicians who have committed themselves to , a high-fidelity streaming service that competes with both Apple Music Spotify. Spotify can only afford to hold siege against Apple for so long. Spotify’s European home base, which has stronger laws to protect smaller players from being crushed by giants, may prove helpful in the war to come. But even so, Spotify is a service whose ‘entry point’ — the place where it is likely to gain new subscribers — is increasingly on mobile devices. Unlike Amazon Prime or Netflix, whose subscriptions likely still begin their life on the web, Spotify’s , and it needs them at a lower intermediary cost. Streaming music offers razor-thin margins, and limiting the amount of people who can pay for it based on device isn’t a feasible option. Then again, neither is coughing up 30 percent of mobile revenues, especially if Spotify’s eventual goal is IPO.
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Passwords for 32M Twitter accounts may have been hacked and leaked
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
There is yet another hack for users of popular social media sites to worry about. Hackers may have used malware to collect more than 32 million Twitter login credentials that are now being sold on the dark web. Twitter says that its systems have not been breached. , a site with a search engine of leaked login credentials, said in that it received a copy of the user information from “[email protected],” the same alias used by the person who . Other major security compromises which have hit the news recently that involved over 360 million accounts, possibly making it the largest one ever, and . LeakedSource says the cache of Twitter data contains 32,888,300 records, including email addresses, usernames, and passwords. LeakedSource has added the information to its search engine, which is paid but lets people remove leaked information for free. Based on information in the data (including the fact that many of the passwords are displayed in plaintext), LeakedSource believes that the user credentials were collected by malware infecting browsers like Firefox or Chrome rather than stolen directly from Twitter. Many of the affected users appear to be in Russia—six of the top 10 email domains represented in the database are Russian, including mail.ru and yandex.ru. Even though Mark Zuckerberg hacked this week, including Twitter, his information wasn’t included in this data set, LeakedSource claims. Zuckerberg was , but results from LeakedSource’s data analysis shows that many people are much less creative. The most popular password, showing up 120,417 times, was “123456,” while “password” appears 17,471 times. An analysis of the VK data also . In a statement to TechCrunch, Twitter suggested that the recent hijacking of accounts belonging to Zuckerberg and other celebrities was due to the re-use of passwords leaked in the LinkedIn and Myspace breaches. “A number of other online services have seen millions of passwords stolen in the past several weeks. We recommend people use a unique, strong password for Twitter,” a Twitter spokesperson said. Twitter suggests that users follow the in its help center to keep their accounts secure. Twitter also posted on its @Support account that it is auditing its data against recent database dumps. To help keep people safe and accounts protected, we've been checking our data against what's been shared from recent password leaks. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) LeakedSource said that it determined the validity of the leaked data by asking 15 users to verify their passwords. All 15 confirmed that the passwords listed for their accounts were correct. However, experts cautioned that the data may not be legitimate. Michael Coates, Twitter’s trust and information security officer, tweeted that he is confident the social media platform’s systems have not been compromised. We have investigated reports of Twitter usernames/passwords on the dark web, and we're confident that our systems have not been breached. — Michael Coates (@_mwc) “We securely store all passwords w/ bcrypt,” Coates added, referencing a password hashing function considered secure. “We are working with LeakedSource to obtain this info & take additional steps to protect users,” he continued. Troy Hunt, the creator of a site that catalogs breaches called , also expressed skepticism about the authenticity of the data. Hunt told TechCrunch that he’d heard rumors of breaches at Twitter and Facebook for several weeks but had yet to see convincing proof. “They may well be old leaks if they’re consistent with the other big ones we’ve seen and simply haven’t seen the light of day yet. Incidentally, the account takeovers we’ve seen to date are almost certainly as a result of credential reuse across other data breaches,” Hunt said. Whether or not the leaked Twitter credentials are authentic, it never hurts to change your password — especially if you use the same password across several sites. Turning on also helps keep your account secure, even if your password is leaked.
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Lending Club’s site goes down
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
[Update: As of 6:40 p.m. PST last night, the site was back up and running, but it appears to be down again this Thursday morning, as of at least 6:10 a.m. PST.] Lending Club’s has gone down tonight, prompting at least one nervous investor to tweet out his concern that “[a]s a long time investor there, I am worried that they have closed down.” ‘s site + phone down! As a long time investor there I am worried that they have closed down. Please investigate? — Eric Fader (@efader) An automated voicemail message states that the company’s customer service is now closed, per its usual business hours, which end at 5 pm PST. But the company itself tweeted at roughly 4:30 p.m. PST that it’s working to resolve a data center outage. We’re working to resolve a data center outage & our website is currently down. Sorry for any inconvenience- we’ll be back up & running soon! — Lending Club (@LendingClub) The outage comes at a strange time for the publicly traded company. Its shares rose today after Reuters reported that recently ousted CEO and founder Renaud Laplanche may be with the help of unnamed private equity firms and banks. Likely, the online lending company is a takeover target either way. Less than a month ago, the company revealed in an SEC filing that in the wake of Laplanche’s departure, investors who “contributed a significant amount of funding” for loans are now examining that performance “or are .” On Tuesday, the company for nearly all borrowers in a bid to “boost the attractiveness of the asset to investors,” it said in a new SEC filing. Whether that move is enough to assuage growing concerns remains to be seen. In the meantime, Lending Club — worth at the time of its late 2014 IPO and $1.5 billion today — remains in a compromised position, one that may have more traditional banks with older and less agile technology wondering whether they should take advantage of it.
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Crunch Report | Big Apple App Store Update
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
Tito Hamze, Jason Kopeck
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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The fintech world beyond Silicon Valley and Europe: Emerging market contenders
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Alexander Dunaev
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
According to a recent by Accenture, investments in fintech hit $5.3 billion in the first quarter of this year (having grown 75 percent in 2015, exceeding $22 billion). These are staggering figures for a still nascent industry, which can have a monumental impact on all sectors, from lending and investments to savings and payments. Hitherto, most of the investments have occurred in the U.S. and Europe, with a marked exception this year when China’s completed a staggering $4.5 billion raise at a $60 billion valuation, making it one of the highest-valued private companies in the world. This recent raise may draw to emerging markets attention from the world beyond London, New York and Silicon Valley, which importantly house more than 90 percent of the world’s under-30 population. Countries other than the U.S. and U.K. have collectively spawned a range of visibly successful companies in search ( , ), e-commerce ( , ’s portfolio) and media ( ) by mostly applying tried and tested Western strategies to the local know-how. Reviewed below are some of the emerging market contenders across the fintech space. The field drawing perhaps most of the press attention in the West is undoubtedly alternative lending. Marketplace consumer lending ( , , ), SMB lending ( , , ) and merchant installment plans ( , , ) have all generated traction by rapidly growing loan books and raising large funding rounds. There has been no similar traction in emerging markets (excluding China, which has a mature marketplace lending industry) as the companies frequently have limited access to capital (alternative lending is highly capital-intensive), low-quality data (low penetration of credit histories) and scarce infrastructure, while the level of consumer sophistication is not on par with the U.S. or Europe. Nonetheless, there is a roster of very successful companies in the field. These include Philippines-based (the first online pawn shop in Southeast Asia), which is addressing the issue of expensive credit in a country where only 20 percent of the population have bank accounts and less than 5 percent own a credit card. There is a range of balance sheet lenders across Eastern Europe, including , and , which are solving the issue of credit access for the underbanked using innovative data sources. There is Brazilian (with from Tiger Global and Peter Thiel), which has brought a mobile-first bank to a country with 90 million WhatsApp users, complex regulations and one of the highest APRs on credit cards in the world. No emerging market payment discussion can avoid talking about . This Kenyan company has created an enormously successful phone-based payment network, which has taken over East Africa like wild-fire. The company tapped into the local availability of mobile phones (not surprising, given that it was incubated at ) and virtual complete lack of banking infrastructure, enabling consumers to pay for services and transfer money. This is clearly one of the best examples of combining the limitations of the emerging markets with a fundamental consumer need to bring a market-shifting solution. Russian addressed the issue of high cash usage in the country by rolling out a franchise-based system with kiosks to process cash payments for telecom, credit utility and e-commerce payments. The company grew to become the largest payment service provider in Russia, added its own e-wallet and expanded across other emerging markets to address similar needs. Contrariwise, companies that tried to blindly replicate Square’s mobile POS processing have faced headwinds driven by low credit card penetration, high interchange charged by the largest PSPs (read Visa and MasterCard) and thin margins. The new crop of tech companies is meant to transform the world of investments for millennials. We see companies that promise commission-free equity trading ( ), robo-advisory ( , ), saving yield optimization ( , previously SavingGlobal) and social-based investments ( ). Emerging markets’ concerns with investments in general include very low savings rates driven by low incomes, lack of a social safety net and developed institutions, frequently arcane legislation, limited liquidity in both equity and credit capital markets and associated high transaction fees. One of the most striking examples is obviously the previously mentioned Ant Financial with its money market fund, Yu’e Bao. The company has accumulated more than US$110 billion in assets under management in only three years, becoming the fastest growing mutual fund in the world. Among other issues, this ascent was driven by the cap imposed by the People’s Bank of China on the deposit rate that the local banks can offer their clients. A much smaller example is , which is trying to solve the liquidity issue in frontier markets like Nigeria and Bangladesh by offering a simple solution for asset managers in monitoring equity flows. In the world of financial technology, simple replication of the proven Western winners does not work. As opposed to e-commerce, which may have more ubiquitous business drivers, successful fintech companies in the emerging markets will have to address local legislation, which vary radically country to country; work around structural macroeconomic issues; tackle sometimes complete lack of infrastructure, from credit bureaus to bank accounts; and address consumers with limited financial literacy. Successful companies will blend the advanced technology with the local know-how. The base is still very low, but the upside is significant, with much yet to be achieved.
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‘Solar Voyager’ autonomous boat looks to make history in sun-powered journey across the Atlantic
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
About 200 miles due east of Boston, a robotic boat is putting along at a walking pace on what could be an historic journey across the entire Atlantic. built by two friends in their spare time, would be the first autonomous vessel to cross that ocean — and the first one to cross any ocean using solar power alone. Isaac Penny and Christopher Sam Soon have been tinkering away on the project for four years now and, while the craft, which they launched on June 1, still has a long way to go, it’s safe to say it’s already a success in many ways. “We’re sort of saying, look what you can do with a small group of people who are passionate about what they do,” Penny told me on the phone. “It’s not like Christopher and I are super-geniuses or something. We’re not even marine people. I grew up in Kansas!” Nevertheless, the two built Solar Voyager from scratch, with only the solar panels and some standard motor parts taken off the shelf. The 18-foot boat is slowly making its way between GPS waypoints and, if all goes well, it should arrive in Portugal this fall. The craft isn’t the first autonomous boat to cross an ocean — Liquid Robotics and its Wave Gliders were the first to do that back in 2012. But those harvested wave energy to move, not solar, and, as Penny pointed out, the project was funded and staffed by a major, experienced company and the resulting technology was patented. “Only Liquid Robotics can build a Wave Glider, but anyone can do what we did. We don’t even have a garage!” laughed Penny. Over the last four years, the boat evolved from a jury-rigged plastic kayak to a full-on custom aluminum hull with home-made, home-tested propulsion and electronics. It has a 280-watt solar array, a specially made fouling-resistant propeller, a barnacle-resistant coating and a whole lot of small design tweaks to keep the thing running for the four months it should take to get where it’s going. “Durability is the obvious problem, but there isn’t an obvious solution,” Penny said. “Designing something that runs for a day is one thing — designing something that will run for months in such harsh conditions with no one there to fix it is different.” They have to get it right the first time, because it’s their only chance. Unlike Liquid Robotics, they can’t build a fleet or set up a waypoint halfway to Lisbon where the craft can be serviced. If the motor breaks down or the batteries fry, that’s four years and somewhere north of 10 grand down the drain. And that’s if a shark doesn’t attack it or an oceanliner doesn’t smack into it — the boat is radar-visible and painted to be highly visible, and it avoids shipping lanes, Penny noted. Once it arrives in Portugal, Solar Voyager will circle its final waypoint until Penny and Sam Soon can go collect it. “We’re actually looking for people in Lisbon who own a boat. That’s probably not something people want to read about in tech news,” he added. But it’s a charming reminder that this is the work of a couple of guys in their spare time, not a sponsor-studded XPRIZE entry or Navy-backed prototype. So, Portuguese TechCrunch readers out there, get in contact with the Solar Voyager guys if you want to help them out. More than anything, the project is aimed at promoting the suitability of solar power for this sort of endeavor. “We always think about solar as this alternative energy thing, but you just couldn’t do this with fossil fuels — you couldn’t build something that will run forever,” Penny said. “Whether it’s long endurance drones, or data gathering for maritime security, or monitoring wildlife preserves — solar isn’t just an alternative form of energy, it’s the best solution. It brings something to the table that nothing else has.” You can track the progress of Solar Voyager ; it updates its location and vital statistics every 15 minutes. Check back in October when, hopefully, Penny and Sam Soon will be celebrating the craft’s successful transit — and a little bit of history being made.
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Uber and Fiat are in discussions to form a self-driving car partnership
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
Uber and Fiat Chrysler are in talks about a partnership involving self-driving car technology, according to several reports. first published earlier today about a possible deal between the two companies, confirmed by sources. According to a person familiar with the matter, the discussions are in the very early stage and Uber is in conversation with a number of other carmakers. There’s always a chance the deal could fall apart. Uber declined to comment about the possible partnership at this time. The deal seems part of a growing trend among automakers and tech companies focused on transportation and Uber has been chatting with several automakers lately, according to the reports. But it’s not the first to strike a deal with an auto manufacturer. In fact, several Uber rivals have started to make a play in the self-driving space – Volkswagen invested $300 million in Gett, Apple, which , invested a billion in China’s Didi Chuxing last month and Lyft announced a half-billion dollar investment from GM in early January to help create the infrastructure for a fleet of self-driving vehicles. Many traditional car makers have started forging a path to a self-driving future. Volkswagen, as mentioned, as well as Daimler, BMW and now Fiat Chrysler want in on the autonomous tech race. Fiat is the third-largest car maker in the U.S. and may be feeling left out of the game. A merger deal between GM and Fiat Chrysler last year, right before GM’s investment in Lyft and now the major car maker may be setting its sights on ride-hailing company Uber as a way in. Uber is working on building a fleet of self-driving vehicles and poached a bunch of Carnegie Mellon roboticists last year to work on the project. Uber then as a way to make amends and create the Uber Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh. Uber also confirmed it had formed an , which has become a major player in self-driving innovation, in May. According to a source close to the matter, Toyota and Uber are not planning on a partnership around self-driving technology. Fiat is also making inroads with other tech firms in Silicon Valley around autonomous tech. Alphabet’s Google agreed to partner on building a fleet of 100 in May.
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Making contrarian bets in adtech
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Rob Hodgkinson
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
It has become fashionable of late to see adtech as a dirty word in the world of technology investment. With the growing threat of online ad blocking and the much-debated issue of click-fraud, many investors struggle to see the upside of backing businesses involved with the seemingly murky world of advertisement technology. Combined with the lower exit multiples seen over recent months, it is understandable that adtech businesses are feeling the squeeze when trying to raise venture capital funding in the U.K. and U.S. And yet, the market opportunity is undeniably big — and still growing. Market commentators expect global digital advertising to grow by more than 10 percent in 2016 — to almost $160 billion (compared to less than 5 percent growth for the $500 billion global ad market). Agencies now expect digital ad spend to surpass TV ad budgets at some point in the next 18 months. A lot of money is going into digital advertising — so why aren’t VCs on both sides of the Atlantic flocking to get involved in this market again? I want to make the case that now is precisely the time for venture investors to break away from the herd and think about making that contrarian bet on adtech. The digital media market is growing at a rapid pace, and — crucially for investors — there is still significant growth potential. Ad dollars per time consumed per medium is still low for digital media compared to radio and TV. Advertising has not yet caught up with the increased time spent online. Mary Meeker’s 2016 shows that Americans spend 25 percent of their time on media via their mobile, and yet only 12 percent of all advertising is on mobile. By comparison, they spend 4 percent of their time reading print media, which makes up 16 percent of advertising spend. This creates a major opportunity for entrepreneurs and investor alike. The vast majority of digital ad spend has historically been focused on direct response adverts because of the potential for rapid iteration and superior methods of measurability compared to offline media. The development of similar tools for branding advertising means we are at the beginning of the journey for increased spend of branding dollars via digital channels. We should expect to see a marked shift of spend from traditional TV into digital, particularly as TV and video become increasingly indistinguishable. Indeed, Google just announced to give TV broadcasters more control over ad experiences across screens. The difference between TV advertising and digital media advertising (currently an additional $30 billion is spent on TV advertising) will disappear faster than it will take George R. R. Martin to complete the next tome of This growth continues in spite of the poor quality of advertising in the digital media space. Lazy banner ads irritate consumers. But ads don’t have to be annoying. The TV ad format, where advertisers pay more than $4 million per 30-second slot at the Super Bowl, has become a compelling art form in itself with (at least some) engaging and memorable narratives. Indeed, we believe that mobile and video ad formats are yet to be cracked. And that’s before we even think about VR/AR. Better advertising will accelerate the growth of the market as each new platform creates new opportunities for innovative advertisers. Despite such a large and growing market, VCs continue to move away from adtech, which has been characterized as an industry with a campaign-driven business model with high levels of fraud and poor margins, leading to ever-lowering exit multiples. Smart adtech entrepreneurs are adapting accordingly, dropping the adtech label to reposition themselves as “data” businesses. Indeed, greater ingestion of data enables adtech players to experiment with more attractive recurring revenue models by controlling access to real-time data and analytics. The more innovative adtech players are utilizing increasingly diverse sets of data to deliver new forms of advertising. Take the example of location-based technologies that enable omni-channel marketing solutions as brands recognize they require a “single customer view” that combines a customer’s online and offline behavior. U.S. location-targeted mobile ad spend is expected to be worth . This sector is attracting significant VC dollars, including into , and . It is possible to take this argument further. By ingesting data sets from other sectors (such as transportation and financial services), a virtuous circle can be created whereby data-led insights from advertising can inform business models in other sectors, and vice versa. If you can see where and how people are moving around a city, an airport, a tube station or a shopping center, you can better plan these infrastructures and better plan advertising. Advertising is simply the tip of the iceberg for this new breed of adtech data businesses, for whom advertising is often just the first sector to which they’re applying the technology. Where there is strong and interesting data, there are possibilities to use this data in wonderful ways. We are undoubtedly at the beginning of the journey of working out what could happen next for these businesses — and I for one am confident VCs will start taking this sector more seriously again.
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Olly has built a breakout brand in a crowded space: Here’s how
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
Vitamins and venture capital might not seem like the most natural fit, but a number of related companies have attracted capital from tech investors in recent years, including SmartyPants, which makes a , and Elysium Health, a supplements company that counts a as a co-founder. Still, competitors may have trouble catching up to two-year-old , a 30-person company whose sweet vitamins, delivered in gummy form and packed in playful, eye-catching containers, are flying off a growing number of shelves. Indeed, the profitable startup, which began as an online subscription service, now derives just 3 percent of its revenue from online sales, with the rest coming from retail stores Target, CVS and GNC. (Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons will feature Olly vitamins before the end of the year, too.) To understand how Olly vitamins have managed to become so ubiquitous so quickly, we caught up with CEO Brad Harrington, who co-founded Olly with Eric Ryan, a co-founder of the cleaning-products company (acquired in ). For anyone interested in creating a new brand, it’s worth a read. BH: Eric was interested in the category from a merchant perspective. He has spent a lot of time in mass merchants like Target, looking at different categories that might be ripe for disruption, and you could walk down aisles and be like, “Well, that’s obvious.” There aren’t a lot of brands, and most products are ingredient driven, so you didn’t know what to choose. In fact, I was with Eric in Boulder, and we were standing in an aisle of a store, and strangers would just come up to us and ask how many milligrams of zinc they should take, and we were just as dumbfounded as they were. So we thought, let’s simplify this and make everything about the end benefit versus the individual ingredients. BH: Actually, I gag on pills, and here I was working on this company where the whole form of nutrition was larger pills. And it got to the point where it became difficult for me to take my own product. Meanwhile, we wanted to develop something that people would want to [ingest] every day. Things came together as we were going through development, and we launched 20 different products last year, including 16 that were in gummy form and four others that were swallowable soft gels. And when the numbers started to come in, we watched the soft gels fall to the bottom, so now we [produce only] gummies. BH: It’s hard to scale. You have to factor in your acquisition cost for a new customer and how long you keep the new customer, and it tends to be that acquisition prices are extremely high right now given the online ad world. So you’ve got to be able to withstand [those costs] while you’re building a brand. After it’s built, it’s easier. But it requires longevity. BH: We first launched in Target, which was an exclusive for a year. Doing channel exclusives has been our strategy. Right now, we’re doing a specialty [store] exclusive with GNC, for example, and what’s really cool about GNC is you have these storefronts with windows and passersby, so it’s been great from a branding standpoint. We also have an exclusive with CVS, which is our current drug [store] channel. GNC and CVS came to us, which is exciting. But we’re basically trying to control our growth, to ensure that we’re hiring the right kind of people and not expending our funds too quickly. BH: We’ve raised $11.5 million from Obvious Ventures, Base Ventures, [Yahoo’s first CEO] Tim Koogle, [former Peet’s coffee CEO] Pat O’Dea, and a bunch of other high-net-worth individuals. We’re trying to raise more funding. We [landed] broad distribution right out of the gate and we were profitable in our first year and that cash flow and success continues. BH: We’re keeping everything digital and in store in 2016, but we want to turn on marketing in a big way in 2017, though we’re still trying to figure out what our awareness play is going to be. We really want to create an iconic brand that connects lifestyle and millennials. BH: They’re made in Indiana largely, and at a couple of facilities in Florida. We have a chief medical officer who was an internist at , which makes Airborne and was [in 2012 for $1.4 billion]. He sort of brings the pragmatic physician’s perspective. Our VP of Innovation is a naturopathic doctor; she brings the Eastern medicine perspective. We also have a Ph.D. in nutrition. It’s a small team but they develop our products quickly. We have 25 products and we’ll have 35 products by September. BH: About 80 percent of our customers are women. BH: It’s an art for sure. Our women’s [berry-flavored] multivitamin berry does very well, for example. It’s our second-best selling product. What we did to [avoid impacting its sales was] developed a line centered on the phytonutrients that people are missing in their diets from vegetables and fruits. The multi makes up for a lot of those deficiencies, but it doesn’t address the phytonutrient side of things, so we produced a “super food” multi that has components of watercress and kale and papaya and that comes out at higher price. So you create a distinction between those two things, and you [see] different buyers. BH: It’s our sleep product. It’s actually Target’s best-selling product in the category, too. Its base ingredient is melatonin, which puts you to sleep, and it’s blended with the amino acid L-theanine, which helps calm the brain, so the combination puts you to sleep and keeps you asleep. Everything we do is blended so that one plus two is greater than three. BH: Each dose contains two grams of sugar. If we made a chewable without sugar, that probably wouldn’t be such a great experience either. We’re looking to establish good habits and if you have to put a bit of sugar to create those habits, I don’t see anything wrong with that.
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Tinder discontinues service for users under 18
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
is discontinuing use of the app for everyone under the age of 18 starting next week, according to a statement from Tinder VP of Communications Rosette Pambakian. The dating app has allowed everyone 13 years of age or older to use the app since it launched back in 2012. Anyone between 13 and 17 years old was only allowed to match with others in that pool. However, that is all changing with today’s announcement, which requires that users be over 18 to sign on and start swiping. Here is Tinder’s official statement: On a platform that has facilitated over 11 billion connections, we have the responsibility of constantly assessing our different user experiences. Consistent with this responsibility, we have decided to discontinue service for under 18 users. We believe this is the best policy moving forward. This change will take effect next week. “We’ve been reviewing this policy since early this year and believe it’s the right thing to do,” said Pambakian. This follows an earlier announcement from Tinder promising a new (though the company has yet to elaborate on what that might look like). That said, Tinder’s massive and growing user base requires even tighter specification and enforcement of policy to keep the dating app safe for its users. Tinder said that this impacts less than 3 percent of the global user base. “A number of factors go into making a decision like this, but we’re confident we landed on the right policy,” said Pambakian.
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Warning: Do not let a drone equipped with terrifying robo-scissors cut your hair
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
What happens when carefree hackers Simone Giertz and Samy Kamkar get together for a lazy afternoon? A lunatic plan to and a pair of automatic scissors. That the plan is doomed to fail from the start doesn’t deter Simone and Samy, and why should it? As you can see in the video, the plan isn’t to put stylists out of work but to have fun trying to do something ridiculous and new. The downdraft alone from the drone would probably make a decent haircut impossible, and then there is, of course, a serious risk of being stabbed in the ear by robo-scissors — almost certainly a first, but one of dubious merit. Giertz is no stranger to , but Kamkar’s hacks are often — and I mean this in the best possible way — borderline criminal. It was he, for instance, who made a , and a . You really should follow and on YouTube.
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Meet the newest AngelPad startups, and the tech they built to cure business headaches
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
Yesterday in San Francisco, held its 10th Demo Day, a graduation of sorts for the enterprise startups admitted into and backed by the accelerator. The accelerator, run by husband and wife team and , has realized at least one solid exit already in the adtech startup , which sold to Twitter for $350 million in stock in the fall of 2013. Companies that have raised significant rounds of venture funding after completing the AngelPad bootcamp include: , the delivery service; (formerly known as Crittercism), which provides app analytics, including crash reports, to developers and brands; and , which lets app makers put video ads in their apps to monetize them. Although AngelPad is known for funding notable marketing and adtech startups, companies in its latest batch ranged widely, including hardware makers, pure guts-of-the-internet tech companies and marketplaces that serve both consumers and corporations. Six-year-old AngelPad is smaller than peer accelerators and seed funds like 500 Startups, TechStars or Y Combinator, making it something like the elite, small college versus their large state schools and universities. It only admits 12 companies per batch. The program takes place in New York, but startups travel to San Francisco for a Demo Day and networking with Silicon Valley investors. AngelPad typically invests $60,000 in seed funding into each company in its program for 7 percent of common stock. Korte said, “We are always changing our funding formula.” Every company in a cohort has exactly the same terms, however. Here’s a list of all the startups in the newest batch, listed in the order that they presented before investors at the Demo Day. – Uses natural language analysis to extract insights from unstructured data, specifically to help customer support and customer service teams work more efficiently. – Software-as-a-service to help businesses manage their partnerships with integrators, API providers or users, resellers, brands, co-marketers and others. Outwork includes social network-like features to help businesses discover and connect with new, potential partners. – Creators of a software development kit that lets consumer electronics, or any hardware, connect and communicate even where Wi-Fi and cellular networks aren’t working. – A marketplace that connects small businesses with aspiring entrepreneurs who want to acquire them. – Provides open source tools to help developers build, distribute and manage APIs automatically, so they can focus more on coding their own products. – Makers of internet-connected surveillance cameras, including a new one designed for stores and small businesses vulnerable to crime. – An app that helps people prepare for a move and set up all the services they need in their new home. – Software-as-a-service that helps guide new users through an app’s various free features, and then convert them into paying customers. – Trains students online and in-person, to help them become IT engineers in networking, cybersecurity, automation, and cloud technology. – A mobile marketplace where users can buy or upload and sell videos captured by the newest cameras, from iPhones to 360 cameras or drones. – Optimizes wireless connectivity for telecomm operators, so people have a good internet experience, even at crowded sporting events or on a crowded subway platform. – A reviews site and online marketplace that connects college students or their families with providers of mostly non-dormitory student housing in major college towns.
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NHS memo details Google/DeepMind’s five year plan to bring AI to healthcare
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
More details have emerged about the sweeping scope of Google/DeepMind’s ambitions for pushing its algorithmic fingers deep into the healthcare sector — including wanting to apply machine learning processing to UK NHS data within five years. has obtained a between DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust in London, which describes what the pair envisage as a “broad ranging, mutually beneficial partnership, engaging in high levels of collaborative activity and maximizing the potential to work on genuinely innovative and transformational projects”. Envisaged benefits of the collaboration include improvements in clinical outcomes, patient safety and cost reductions — the latter being a huge ongoing pressure-point for the free-at-the-point-of-use NHS as demand for its services continues to rise yet government austerity cuts bite into public sector budgets. The MoU sets out a long list of “areas of mutual interest” where the pair see what they dub as “future potential” to work together over the five-year period of collaboration envisaged in the memorandum. The document, only parts of which are legally binding, was signed on January 28 this year. Potential areas of future collaboration include developing hospital support systems such as bed and demand management software, financial control products and private messaging and task management for junior doctors. (On the private messaging front, NHS staff informally using messaging apps like WhatsApp to quickly share information has as a risk to patient data confidentiality.) They also say they want to work together on real-time health prediction — which is where the pair’s first effort (an app called Streams) has focused — involving a range of healthcare data to try to identify the risk of patient deterioration, death and/or readmission. Reading medical images, and even monitoring the foetal heartbeat when a pregnant woman is in labour are other listed areas of interest. Here’s the relevant portion of the MoU: The MoU begins by referencing DeepMind’s ability to build “powerful general-purpose learning algorithms”. It goes on to state that one of DeepMind’s hopes for the collaboration with the Royal Free NHS Trust is to gain “data for machine learning research under appropriate regulatory and ethical approvals”. The pair have said their first co-designed app, Streams, is not utilizing any AI. Nor indeed is it powered by algorithms created by DeepMind but instead the core software was written by NHS. But the scope of the MoU makes it clear that applying machine learning to public healthcare data is exactly where the ambitions lie here. Back in February DeepMind announced it was working with the Royal Free Trust — to “co-develop” an app to targets a particular kidney condition, called AKI. It the app, Streams, would present “timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury”. Few details about the data-sharing agreement between the Google-owned company and the Royal Free Trust were made public at that stage. But it subsequently that DeepMind was being given access to a very wide range of heathcare data on the 1.6 million patients who pass through the Trust’s three London hospitals each year. The data in question is patient identifiable (i.e. non-anonymized, non- pseudo-anonymized). Under the agreement, DeepMind is also getting access to patient data from the Trust’s three hospitals dating back five years. Critics, such as health data privacy group , have questioned why so much patient identifiable data is being shared for an app targeting a single condition. “Direct care is between a patient and a clinician. A doctor taking steps to prevent their patient having a future problem is direct care. An organisation taking steps to reduce future events of unknown patients (e.g. fluoridation) is not,” argues Sam Smith of MedConfidential. The Royal Free Trust and DeepMind have continually maintained that access to such a wide range of data is necessary for the Streams app to perform a direct patient care function, given the difficulty in predicting which patients are at risk of developing AKI. They have also continued to assert the app is being used purely for direct patient care, not for research. This is an important distinction given that conducting research on patient identifiable data would likely have required they obtain additional approvals, such as gaining explicit patient consent or (neither of which they have obtained). But because they claim the data is not being used for research they argue such approvals are not necessary, even though it is inevitable that a large proportion of the people whose data is being fed into the app will never directly benefit from it. Hence the ongoing criticism. Even if you factor in the medical uncertainties of predicting AKI — which might suggest you need to cast your data collection net wide — the question remains why is the data of patients who have never had a blood test at the hospitals being shared? How will that help identify risk of AKI? And why is some of the data being sent monthly if the use-case is for immediate and direct patient care? What happens to patients who fall in the gap? Are they at risk of less effective ‘direct patient care’? Responding to some of these critical questions put to it by TechCrunch, the Royal Free Trust once again asserted the app is for direct patient care — providing the following statement to flesh out its reasoning: The vast majority of our in-patients will have a blood test and Streams would monitor the kidney function of every one of those patients for signs of deterioration, alerting clinicians when necessary. DeepMind only has access to data that is relevant to the detection of AKI. In addition to analysing blood test results, the app allows clinicians to see diagnostic data and historical trends that may affect treatment, and in doing so supports effective and rapid patient care. The patient’s name, NHS Number, MRN, and date of birth must be used to allow the clinician to positively identify the patient, in accordance with the HSCIC’s interface guidelines. This will be used to allow comparison between pathology results obtained within the hospital. Monitoring patients at risk of developing AKI for signs of AKI so they can be treated quickly and effectively falls well within the definition of direct care. Any in-patient coming into our hospital has at least a one in six chance of developing AKI. For the app to be effective this data needs to be in storage so that it can be processed when a patient is admitted. With any clinical data processing platform it is quite normal to have data lying in storage and it is nonsense to suggest that these platforms should only hold the data of those patients being treated at that very moment. Given the envisaged breadth of the five-year collaboration between DeepMind and the Royal Free, as set out in their MoU, the fact the Google-owned company has been afforded access to such a wide range of healthcare data looks far less surprising — owing to the similarly wide range of products the pair envisage collaborating on in future. For example, if you’re planning on building a software system to predict bed demand across three busy hospitals then access to a wide range of in-patient data — such as admissions, discharge and transfer data, accident & emergency, pathology & radiology, and critical care — going back for multiple years would obviously be essential to building robust algorithms. And that’s exactly the sort of data DeepMind is getting under the AKI data-sharing agreement with the Royal Free. However it would of course be necessary for DeepMind and the Royal Free to gain the correct approvals for each of the potential use-cases they are envisaging in their MoU. So unless there are any other, as yet unannounced data-sharing agreements in place between the pair, then the wide ranging personally identifiable healthcare data which DeepMind currently has access to must specifically be for the Streams app. The pair’s MoU also states that separate terms would be agreed to govern their collaboration on each project. “The Parties would like to form a strategic partnership exploring the intersection of technology and healthcare,” it further notes, going on to describe their hopes for “a wide-ranging collaborative relationship for the purposes of advancing knowledge in the fields of engineering and life and medical sciences through research and associated enterprise activities”. The current framework for handling and sharing personally identifiable NHS patient data was created after a review conducted in 1997 by Fiona Caldicott, and updated by a second review in 2013, following concerns about how patient confidentiality might be being undermined by increasing amounts of data sharing. NHS Trusts are supposed to take the so-called Caldicott principles into account when making decisions about sharing personally identifiable patient data (PID). Originally there were six principles, all focused on minimizing the amount of PID being shared in an effort to allay concerns about patient confidentiality being undermined. But a seventh was added in Caldicott’s second report which seeks to actively encourage appropriate data-sharing in what she described as an effort to re-balance the framework with the potential benefits to patients of data-sharing in mind. The six original Caldicott principles state that: the use/transfer of patient identified data should be , and , as well as regularly reviewed if use continues; that personally identifiable data should ; the personally identifiable data be used; that access to personally identifiable data should be on a ; that everyone handling the data is vis-a-vis patient confidentiality; and that every use of personally identifiable data must be . The seventh principle adds to this that: “ “, with Caldicott writing: “Health and social care professionals should have the confidence to share information in the best interests of their patients within the framework set out by these principles. They should be supported by the policies of their employers, regulators and professional bodies.” While the seventh principle might appear to be opening the door to more wide-ranging data-sharing agreements — such as the one between the Royal Free and DeepMind — Caldicott’s March 2013 of healthcare data does specifically note that direct patient care pertains to the care of specific “Only relevant information about should be shared between professionals in support of care,” she writes [emphasis mine]. While her report describes “indirect patient care” as encompassing “activities that contribute to the overall provision of services to a population as a whole or a group of patients with a particular condition”. The phrase “a group of patients with a particular condition” suggests an app like Streams, which is targeting a medical condition, appear to be more obviously categorized as ‘indirect patient care’, based on this framework. Health services management, preventative medicine, and medical research all also fall under indirect care, according to Caldicott’s definition. “Examples of activities would be risk prediction and stratification, service evaluation, needs assessment, financial audit,” her 2013 review adds. Despite Caldicott’s examples of direct vs indirect care, the Royal Free’s own Caldicott Guardian, Dr Killian Hynes, who is the senior person responsible for patient confidentiality and appropriate data-sharing at the Trust, still claims to be satisfied the Streams app constitutes direct patient care. In a statement provided to TechCrunch Hynes said: As the senior trust clinician responsible for protecting the confidentiality of patients and ensuring that information is shared appropriately, I have extensively reviewed the arrangements between the trust and DeepMind. I am satisfied that patient data is being processed by the Streams app for the purpose of direct patient care only and that the arrangements around the storage of encrypted patient data within the secure third-party server are in line with the Caldicott Principles and our responsibilities as data controller. This is pioneering work that could help us identify and treat the significant number of patients who suffer acute kidney injury within our hospitals. The Royal Free Trust has repeatedly declined to answer whether Dr Hynes reviewed the data-sharing agreement with DeepMind to any patient data being shared. The Trust has only said that its data protection officer — the person who signed the data-sharing agreement with DeepMind on behalf of the Trust — did so. If the Trust’s own Caldicott Guardian (CG) did not review such a wide-ranging data-sharing agreement prior to data being shared with DeepMind the question must be why not? Given that the Caldicott principles also urge a process of scrutiny on Trusts at the point of sharing personally identifiable data. The DeepMind/Royal Free data-sharing agreement is currently being investigated by the UK’s data protection watchdog, acting on a small number of public complaints. In a statement provided to TechCrunch this week the ICO confirmed it is continuing to probe the arrangement. “We are continuing to make enquiries in relation to this matter. Any organisation processing or using people’s sensitive personal information must do so in accordance with Data Protection Act,” it said. Meanwhile, TechCrunch learned the Streams app was no longer in use by Royal Free clinicians — which had said it had only run a handful of “small user tests” so far. it also emerged that the UK’s medicines and healthcare regulator, the MHRA, had contacted the Trust and DeepMind to initiate discussions about whether the app should be registered as a medical device. The MHRA had not been informed about the Streams app prior to it being trialled. It’s also worth pointing out that the , which was completed by DeepMind last October after it signed the data-sharing agreement with the Royal Free, is a self-assessment process. DeepMind has said it achieved the highest possible rating on this IG toolkit, which the NHS provides for third party organizations to assess their processes against its information governance standards. DeepMind’s self-graded scores on the IG Toolkit have not yet been audited by the HSCIC, according to MedConfidential.
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E-Trade plays its cards in evolving automated investment space
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
E-Trade recently rolled out its new aimed at young professionals just beginning to face the financial struggles of adulthood. Adaptive Portfolio combines previously offered active and passive management with risk classifications that automatically rebalance to accommodate market changes. Users will also have the option to connect with financial consultants. Competing players, Wealthfront and Betterment, exclusively offer passive portfolio management because it is less costly. In the past, E-Trade has combined this widely adopted form of investment management with optional active portfolio management. Passive management aims to match market returns by aggregating exchange traded funds (ETF) to simultaneously maximize diversification and reduce costs. ETFs come in many shapes and sizes but typically follow industry verticals or specific asset classes. These investment vehicles are great because they are relatively inexpensive and provide investors with exposure to many corners of the market without assembling thousands of stocks individually. E-Trade and its competitors use the concept of risk tolerance to assign weights to ETFs within user portfolios. Freshly employed users without a mortgage or family can opt for a more risky portfolio consisting of more volatile ETFs. Similarly, users with a lot to lose can opt for a safer track with more stable ETFs. Active management, on the other hand, involves making calculated investments with the goal of beating the market. Active strategies are more effective when trading narrow asset classes. E-Trade has offered active and passive management of assets since early 2015. However, in its latest offering, the optional active management will map on top of personalized risk tolerance models and give investors automated exposure to both mutual funds and ETFs from well-recognized financial services firms like State Street and Vanguard. With Adaptive Portfolio, every client will be assigned one of 12 possible portfolios that match up with six investment profiles. Drift rebalancing will be automated for each investor to account for changes in asset volatility. Each model portfolio will be reviewed by a dedicated investment committee. The new hybrid investment service will require an initial investment of $10,000. The minimum balance is largely in place to ensure enough capital exists for thorough diversification. In addition to the minimum balance, users will pay an annual net advisory fee of 0.3 percent with no separate trading commissions. In return, investors will have access to financial consultants. Unfortunately, the rise of automated trading has done little to automate the process of sifting through fine print. In addition to explicit fees, E-Trade will also require 1 percent of all portfolios to be held in cash. This cash is handy for portfolio rebalancing. In the event of a rebalance, users might not initially need to sell existing holdings but can use the cash. E-Trade plans to invest cash balances . Clients can receive 0.01 percent interest on cash if they have in the platform. Recently, Charles Schwab launched an with a similar, but larger-scale, cash-holding requirement. The company is offering a cash incentive program for new accounts. Accounts with a starting . Accounts with over $500,000 in starting capital will pay out $1,500.
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 6 | 30 | null |
Announcing the startups pitching at the Austin and Seattle Meetups
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
In less than a week, TechCrunch is hitting the road to visit Austin and Seattle on June 14 and June 16, respectively. And with us, we bring the TechCrunch Pitch-offs. We’ve just selected 10 startups to pitch their wares in front of a live audience and a panel of expert judges, including local VCs and TechCrunch writers. Today, we are proud to announce our startups: For everyone else, we hope you can make it. There will be ample time to network with our judges and TechCrunch staff, and it’s a good opportunity to have a few beers with the local tech scene.
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Hourly employee scheduling startup When I Work secures $15MM from Drive Capital
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Jay Donovan
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
It’s been some time since I worked hourly (mostly in restaurants) but I do remember that scheduling my shifts was a real hassle and involved a paper sheet on a cork-board in the shift room. I’m sure organizing those schedules for multiple employees was an even bigger hassle for the manager. As of 2014 there are that work hourly and a new crop of businesses out there are using mobile technology to minimize this hassle for these “desk-less workers” and their managers. Competing businesses like , , , and , among others, are taking on this challenge. This last one in particular, the Minneapolis-based startup , just secured $15 million in a Series B round led by . and also participated. This follows a $9 million Series A led by e.ventures, Greycroft Partners and Arthur Ventures, bringing the company’s total financing to date to $24 million. When I Work is not only for scheduling because employees can also use the service to “clock in” with their smartphone. Mangers can also integrate the tools into their payroll mechanism. It definitely seems easier than the hodgepodge of paper schedules phone calls that I remember and therefore seems interesting to me. Continued venture backing also seems to indicate the efficiencies of businesses like this are palpable. The company’s platform now reaches 2 million employees at 50,000 workplaces including some 15,000 nurses and on-demand services like , and community service team. The company is planning to used the additional funding, according to founder and CEO Chad Halvorson, to “double-down on communication and collaboration tools purpose-built for the hourly workforce” and “to aggressively acquire engineering, product, and sales and marketing talent.”
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Underrepresented founders, apply for Include office hours with Pejman Mar and ffVC
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Samantha O'Keefe
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
TechCrunch Include are happening on June 16th and startups have 48 hours left to apply! Pejman Nozad, Mar Hershenson, Ajay Kamat and Neda Blocho from , along with Adam Plotkin from , will join TechCrunch to provide valuable advice and feedback to startups. Launched in 2014, Include is TechCrunch’s diversity program, aimed at facilitating opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech to take their startups to the next level. The Office Hours program is part of that effort. Once monthly, TechCrunch works with VC partners to provide mentorship to early-stage companies. To be considered for a meeting in our June session with Pejman Mar in San Francisco or ffVC in New York City, by Friday, June 10th at 9am PT. Underrepresented groups in tech include, but are not limited to, Black, Latino, Native American, LGBT and female founders. Preference will be given to teams that can meet in person. Startups should at least be at the prototype stage. Let’s learn more about our co-hosts. Pejman Nozad is a co-founder and a managing partner of . Pejman has been named by Forbes as “one of the most successful angel investors,” with over 15 years of experience investing in early-stage high-tech startups. He’s invested in over 100 startups and has seeded several multi-billion dollar companies, such as Dropbox, Lending Club, SoundHound and Gusto (formally Zenpayroll). He is also an investor in industry defying emerging startups, such as Doordash, Guardant Health and Branchmetrics. Pejman was a 2014 Ellis Island Medal of Honor Award recipient, given by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations (NECO), an award that pays homage to the immigrant experience and the contribution made to America by immigrants. If you’re interested in attending Office Hours with Pejman Mar or ffVC, by Friday June 10th.
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Would-be Apple Pay rival CurrentC closes beta, future uncertain
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 8 |
, a mobile payments app that once aimed to take on Apple Pay, Android Pay and others, is shutting down its beta program, deactivating users’ accounts, and not yet commenting on if or when it will return to the market as a consumer-facing payments application. The news, announced on the CurrentC website this week, follows earlier signs of troubles for the retailer-backed app which , while also announcing that it was postponing its plans for a nationwide launch. The app was backed by a consortium of big-name retailers, (MCX), and was originally meant to rival other mobile payment systems like Apple Pay. MCX partners had included Walmart, Target, CVS, Best Buy and many other national retailers. But the app had not been well-received. As competitors launched tap-based mobile payments that took advantage of NFC technology, CurrentC was designed to rely on QR codes. It later said it would aim to be .” CurrentC’s service was also during testing and users’ email addresses were stolen, which did not help matters. Then the company that powered the CurrentC application, Paydiant, was acquired by another payments rival, PayPal, last year. Plus, some of MCX’s retailer partners moved away from CurrentC – Walmart, for example, rolled out its own Walmart Pay solution in its own app. Others, like Best Buy, opted to enable NFC on their terminals in order to accept the more widely used mobile payment technologies, like Apple, Android and Samsung Pay. And let’s not forget that mobile payment adoption is still slow for even these more popular solutions – the majority of consumers are still swiping credit cards, not tapping. In other words, CurrentC had a host of issues to contend with, before today. According to the company website, the CurrentC beta ends on June 28, 2016, at which point all active accounts will be disabled and stores will no longer accept CurrentC payments. However, MCX is not yet claiming that this is the end of CurrentC. In a FAQ, the company that “we have not yet determined the future timing of CurrentC but we will keep you posted.” Previously, that it would focus more on its partnerships with financial institutions, like Chase, to enable and scale its mobile payment solutions. That could mean that CurrentC, while closed for now, could re-emerge as a different type of product in the future.
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