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Microsoft makes some moves to lift Dynamics CRM marketshare
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
Microsoft has been searching for ways to strengthen its flagging Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and it made a couple of moves this week (one quite significant) with an eye toward making life easier for sales people and enhancing its marketshare in the process. For starters, you might have heard that for a cool $26 billion. Microsoft indicated part of the thinking behind the deal was transforming sales to what it’s calling “social selling.” What that means is taking advantage of the data in the core LinkedIn social networking database and combining it with LinkedIn’s tool to uncover lots of information about customers and leads that could help drive more sales. When you link all of that information to Dynamics CRM, it has the potential to be a powerful combination. Brent Leary, co-founder and partner at CRM Essentials, who has followed the market for many years says it could give Microsoft Dynamics a significant boost. “If they leverage the data in LinkedIn alongside the other data sources they have through their systems and run it through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), it could be potentially game-changing,” he said. One thing to watch is whether Microsoft decides to open the LinkedIn APIs to third party developers, which would also make it available to rivals like Salesforce. Leary believes it will because it will increase the value of the LinkedIn data. Boosting Dynamics is probably not the only reason Microsoft paid $26 billion for the company, but it’s certainly one good use for it. Once you’ve identified good customer targets and reached a point where you need to share a quote, sales people need to build sales documents quickly. That’s where this week’s partnership announcement with comes in. It may not be up there with a $26 billion acquisition, but it provides a simple way for sales people to build quotes and get electronic signatures to close the deal. Up until now, PandaDoc, which boasts 5000 paying accounts, had worked with Salesforce and some other CRM tools, but it hadn’t worked with Dynamics. The product enables reps to build a quote quickly from a library of approved custom content and pricing information that updates automatically for reps as they change the numbers. It links to Dynamics, so a rep can add recipient information right from the database and track quotes they’ve sent automatically in the customer record. Leary points out that having a tool like this enables Dynamics to keep up with Salesforce, which at the end of last year and Oracle which offers its product. ( , an enterprise configure-price-quote product). Dynamics CRM currently sits way back in the pack with 4.3 percent market share, putting it well behind Salesforce, SAP and Oracle, from May this year. Category leader Salesforce has a healthy lead with 19.7 percent, but 54.4 percent of the market is made up of “other,” slices that are too small to measure. Chances are that means there is still plenty of market left to capture and Microsoft is trying hard to get some of that (but of course so is everyone else). Leary believes these moves should help increase Microsoft’s marketshare, but it could take some time to have a significant impact. It also depends greatly on how well Microsoft connects LinkedIn with the Dynamics products, but word is they are working on Beta connectors as we speak.
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TechCrunch has gone HTTPS
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Nicole Wilke
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
At TechCrunch, we value our readers’ privacy and want them to trust our work. Now that we’re HTTPS, readers can feel confident that our content hasn’t been tweaked by anyone (except our diligent editors) and that their browsing history isn’t tracked. HTTPS also makes our more secure, so tipsters can feel confident that their notes to us can’t be read by someone surveilling their Wi-Fi connection.
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Sony discusses its virtual reality play in a market full of like-minded headsets
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
Between Oculus, HTC, Samsung and a slew of smaller hardware manufacturers, 2016 is the year that VR presence played out like a hockey stick graph at E3. To say it’s the story of the show is to greatly under represent just how big a role it’s played over the course of the last few days here in downtown Los Angeles, serving as the focal point for a majority of big companies exhibiting at the show. Even Microsoft capped of its big pre-E3 event by teasing an upcoming console upgrade designed specifically to tackle the rigorous hardware requirements that VR presents. Sony’s certainly got its chief competitor beat on that front. The hardware giant first unveiled Project Morpheus back in 2014, giving the project the much more straight forward PlayStation VR title last year. At this year’s event, the company show off a selection of the titles PlayStation will be seeing by year’s end, along with the announcement of the headset’s pricing and availability. The $399 price tag will undoubtedly be one of the device’s top selling points, undercutting the Rift and Vive by $200 and $400, respectively. Vice-President, Marketing at Sony PlayStation John Koller added that the company’s VR push is about a lot more than just price. “We do have a $399 price point on the core unit,” he told TechCrunch. “I think that gives us a nice opportunity in the market. I think the games give us the bigger opportunity. [We’ll have] 50 games by the end of the year and 150 in development. And something like 230 developers. It’s an incredible amount of content.” And while gaming is, at present, far and away the technology’s primary driver, the company is naturally looking beyond that industry, working with content developers to create other immersive experiences with its headset. “We are talking and looking at non-game options,” he added. “We have to. I think the biggest thing that’s interesting is that style. The story’s going to take on many different threads.”
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What are leveraged loans and why does Uber want one?
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
Uber, fresh off , is in talks to close Over the last 24 hours, the term “leveraged loans” has been thrown around a lot, but few in the startup world have seen this term before. The bankers and finance professors I spoke to were quick to proclaim their hatred for the term because ordinary debt is already leveraged. The idea of leveraged loans is that they are taken by companies already relatively leveraged. Leveraged loans are given a higher interest rate to accommodate for the additional risk to lenders. Every startup is faced with a decision of how much equity financing to accept. Whenever possible, debt is preferable to equity because it prevents dilution. Private companies like Uber can’t issue bonds like traditional public companies because the bonds would be considered a securities offering by the Securities and Exchange Commission requiring disclosure. All the hype around Uber raising such a large leveraged loan might be overstated. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company . This appears ambitious but let’s assume that it is accurate. While not completely applicable, Apple issued $12 billion in bonds at a 3.22 percent blended interest rate excluding floating rate debt. Yes, 4.5 percent is greater than 3.22 percent but junk bond references by and should be taken lightly. Junk bonds can generate upwards of 7 percent interest. Plenty of well-known publicly traded companies have issued bonds at rates higher than 4.5 percent and survived to fight another day. Yes, both leveraged loans and junk bonds have higher-than-normal interest rates. Unlike junk bonds, a 4-4.5 percent interest rate for Uber shouldn’t invoke images of the subprime mortgage crisis. Professor Jarrad Harford of the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington maintains that companies like Uber have to contend with the fact that their assets walk out the door every day and that cashflows are not predictable. As a result, banks can claim very little in collateral. Concerns over liquidation in the event of an Uber firesale are also likely overstated. Debt as an asset class is paid before equity. However, this is only relevant to Uber in the case that the company is acquired at a valuation drastically lower than their current valuation. At this point, Uber is too large to be acquired. The company’s last valuation is larger than that of or . Even if Uber’s valuation were to be suddenly and unexpectedly cut in half, it would still be too large for any automaker and nearly any technology company to acquire. While a risky early-stage startup might want to fund itself with debt, it can’t go to a bank and ask for a $10 million loan to finance expansion. Startups always want to give up as little as possible but are limited by what financiers will offer them. Finance in general is more art than science. It is possible that a leveraged loan might include prioritization within the debt schedule halting Uber from taking on future debt at a higher priority. However, it is impossible to know what Uber’s terms look like. One clear benefit to Uber is that private debt is not subject to public information disclosure requirements. Uber’s loans are likely a benign way of raising capital. The caveat would be if the company’s financials were worse than anticipated and the company needed cash so badly that they were willing to accept relatively poor terms. This doesn’t appear to be the case given the the company closed two weeks ago.
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 23 | null |
Blavity’s Morgan DeBaun is speaking at Disrupt SF 2016
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
Blavity is the bee’s knees — the cream of the crop media platform and community for black millennials in the digital age. Founded by Morgan DeBaun, Aaron Samuels, Jonathan Jackson and Jeff Nelson, ultimately aims to become a lifestyle brand with both online and offline experiences geared toward underrepresented millennials. This year at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, DeBaun, the CEO of Blavity, will be joining us to discuss what it’s like running a bootstrapped media site with content written by and for millennials of color. I imagine we’ll also discuss issues relating to social justice, as well as the state of diversity in tech. Since launching in 2014, Blavity has become known for producing viral content like and As of September 2015, Blavity was receiving nearly 1 million unique visits a month. In May, Blavity hosted its first-ever conference about technology and creativity, ,” which featured Black Lives Matter activist and . Before starting Blavity, DeBaun spent a few years at tech company Intuit, where she worked on business development and strategy. DeBaun joins the likes of Shervin Pishevar, co-founder of Sherpa Capital and Hyperloop One, Apoorva Mehta of Instacart, Emmett Shear of Twitch and Sebastian Thrun of Udacity. This is all going down at Pier 48 in San Francisco, from September 12-14, and extra early bird pricing is ending soon. Be sure to get your tickets soon. Holla!
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Fixed, the app that helps you fight tickets, gets acquired by a law firm
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
Sometimes the government, not the startup, wins. Case in point: , the company that began as a tool to help drivers , has been acquired. Fixed had struggled to get cities to accept its submissions, having faced everything from being blocked from cities’ ticket websites to agencies simply so Fixed couldn’t reach them. In fact, the company to focus on traffic citations instead, due to pushback from local government agencies and its lack of resources to fight back. The idea for Fixed was ingenious. It automated users’ ability to contest parking tickets, just by having drivers snap a photo of their ticket with their smartphone camera. Then, Fixed’s mobile app would check for a variety of common errors and craft a customized letter to the city on the user’s behalf. It even tapped into Google Street View to see if the city had the proper signage in place in the area where the ticket was received. And if the ticket was legit, Fixed could also help automate its payment so users could avoid the drudgery of having to use the city’s often outdated website. But local government, which relies on parking fines to fill its coffers, didn’t care for an app whose aim was to help users get out of paying their fines. Thus, Fixed’s “win” rate was fairly low – around 20 to 30 percent of tickets it contested were adjusted to the user’s favor. (Fixed once that the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency wouldn’t always dismiss tickets even when it found an issue that should have made the ticket invalid). Fixed was eventually blocked in October 2015 in San Francisco, Oakland and L.A. even though it knew how to work around the blocks, . That’s when it began to focus on traffic citations. The company built a system that would analyze a traffic ticket, then help explain to the customer what the impact of that would be, financially. This was useful because most customers only think in terms of the fine amount, not the long-term damage due to the points that tickets added to your license and subsequent increases in insurance. It could then connect customers with attorneys who could help, and at reduced rates because Fixed was automating a lot of the onboarding process for the law firms. It was working with some 20 attorneys in a dozen states. This ended up attracting the attention of , a multi-state law firm that’s actually part tech company. (The person running the tech side of the business, , also knew of Fixed due to having been in the same Y Combinator class). Fixed was processing around 500 tickets per week, and the lawyers it referred customers to could help with points removal in roughly 90 percent of cases. They also helped reduce fines about half the time. Lawgix had built technology systems for the backend of the litigation process – like those that handled court dates and processed the results of court actions. Now it will tack Fixed’s technology onto the front-end, to onboard new clients and expand the reach of Fixed’s app to 17 states. The acquisition, however, is for the technology, not the talent. And while it’s good to know the tech will live on, it’s not really the sort of outcome Fixed founder David Hegarty desired. Fixed was in the process of fundraising in September, but when the cities blocked the app, a new round was no longer an option. Though Uber has had some impact on investors previously skittish to fund services that take on current regulations, many are still cautious about getting into this sort of business. And fighting regulations introduces another piece of friction to growing a startup, Hegarty says. “It’s hard enough to get a business up and running when it’s plain sailing,” he notes. Plus, after pivoting to traffic tickets, Fixed then began to bump up against the Bar Association, too. “We started rubbing up against the existing attorneys in that system, and they would file complaints to the Bar Association about us,” Hegarty says. “We had worked with an ethics attorney in L.A. to stay in compliance with all these rules and regulations, but it just became really hard. It was another stranglehold on the business,” he says. Lawgix won’t deal with those same issues, as it won’t have to worry about things like putting in disclosures that the information Fixed offers isn’t “legal advice,” for example. People could no longer argue that Fixed’s help with tickets is like practicing law, and therefore is a problem. Lawgix is a law firm, which makes it okay. And being part tech company may make it a perfect fit for Fixed, too. Fixed had raised $1.8 million in seed , including from , Dave Morin’s , , , rapper , and others. Hegarty declined to comment on deal terms.
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Boom, bubble or bust for fintech?
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Howard Lindzon
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 |
The term “fintech” has become all the rage; investors and media . Many people also have been talking about the “bubble” in the tech industry, but could there be a “bubble” in fintech, as well? The definition for financial technology is pretty daunting, and states global investment for fintech has increased from $930 million in 2008 to $12 billion in 2014. It even mentions Bitcoin and startups like , , , and . The signs of a bubble are everywhere as banking executives like Sallie Krawcheck are . Even . While fintech seems to booming, there appear to be some cracks developing in specific sectors like P2P lending and robo advisors. The P2P lending space has been under attack recently. The stocks of Lending Club and have plummeted and are trading at all time lows. The lending industry is under intense scrutiny by investors and regulators as the CEO of was forced to resign in a scandal. has launched an investigation, which has people wondering if there are other cases of fraud associated with the management of the loans in the lending industry. The other problem in the lending space is the lack of capital available to lend out. The normal supply of capital from hedge funds, banks and other investors has dried up as they can find the same rate of return elsewhere. When interest rates were low, P2P lenders offered a great return. Now that rates have gone up, there are many other attractive investment vehicles like corporate bonds offering similar rates of returns. Investors have also become concerned about the transparency of the loans, and they are afraid these loans could have issues similar to the housing loans in 2008. The P2P lending space will need to convince everyone that the Lending Club scandal is an isolated incident and that lenders have proper checks and balances in place to prevent fraud and toxic loans. This fear of 2008 is preventing large banks from buying lenders like Lending Club, Prosper and On Deck Capital until they can absolutely verify the quality of the loans. The robo adviser industry is also starting to have some challenges because customer acquisition costs keep increasing while margins keep decreasing. For the last couple of years, startups like Wealthfront and found success with the “set and forget” model of asset management. However, this success has caught the attention of financial giants like Schwab and Vanguard, which have launched competing products that pushed down fees and commoditized this new business. Now with growth flattening out, these robo advisor startups will look to add new products to try to justify their high valuations. The large banks are not immune to the issues facing startups; their stocks have been declining, as well. Here is a chart that shows how they have performed relative to the S&P: S&P Financial Index However, not all FinTech charts are bad as the price of bitcoin has been trending up while the number of blockchain transactions keeps increasing. Bitcoin had its bubble burst in 2014, but it seems to have found stability as its popularity starts spreading globally. Bitcoin rose nearly 20 percent in May and was up 35 percent in 2015 making it the best-performing currency against the dollar. Bitcoin price 2016 Number of blockchain transactions Exuberance in the startup community continues to grow as new financial incubators are launching globally. and incubator. Barclays teamed with Techstars to launch the and Yodlee just finished their second batch for their . Even . After spending the last decade investing in startups like , and , and from our experiences at StockTwits and BitPay, we know startups are going to have a hard 7-10 year journey to find success. Like every other industry, there are no shortcuts, but fintech is even more challenging because of all the existing regulations and incumbent banks. Indeed, in the last year, the CEOs of the banks have gone from defensive to aggressive. Earlier this year, — and it won’t get any easier as large banks like JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs remain in a very strong position, making it hard for startups to grow. However, all these challenges won’t deter the irrational exuberance of new founders from trying to disrupt the sector. As long as the money keeps flowing, investors and entrepreneurs are going to flock to fintech. Unfortunately, it won’t be as easy or as quick as they thought it would be… but then, it never is.
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Insurance firm China Life puts $600M into Didi Chuxing months after backing Uber
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
Can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That appears to be the thinking of China Life, Asia Pacific’s highest valued insurance firm, after it backed Chinese taxi app Didi Chuxing barely months after investing in fierce rival Uber. Didi announced today that it has scored $600 million in fresh financing from the insurance company, half of which will go towards its latest funding round which a spokesperson confirmed has now exceeded $3.5 billion but is still to close. That’s likely to value Didi around the $25 billion mark and will include that was announced one month ago. Last summer, China Life invested in Uber Global last year although it has nor invested in Uber’s China business. (not to mention a “no comment” from Uber China), a China Life spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that its investment is within the global entity of Uber only. Nonetheless, now it is covering its bases and providing capital to Didi in two ways: via an equity investment of $300 million, which will go towards the aforementioned round, and a separate “long-term debt investment” of RMB 2 billion (around $305 million). Didi, which claims 14 million daily rides on its service and counts Tencent and Alibaba as investors, said the strategic investment will see the companies work together on a range of initiatives that will include new insurance and financial services. That’ll also include “investment opportunities in mobile transportation and related sectors in China and beyond,” the company said. It’s often hard to decode the generalities in media announcements, particularly with Uber and its rivals, but China Life is grappling on to Didi, which claims 300 million users of its taxi, chauffeur, bus and other services, to unlock new opportunities. Didi claims it works with 15 million car owners which is obviously very appealing to an insurance company. Did has already aligned itself with Ping An, , but that’s not where the alliances end. Uber China, which , counts Hong Kong-based China Taiping Insurance among its investor list, which also includes Baidu, airline firm HNA Group, , and investment bank CITIC Securities. The two companies share two other investors beyond China Life. Both China-based Hillhouse Capital and New York’s Tiger Global have invested in Didi and Uber although, unlike China Life, both firms backed Didi first before investing in the U.S. firm.
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Playing around with a smart rubber duck
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
Some things you should probably know about me before we dive in here: This is . He’s been through a lot. In 2014, his creators at PI Labs attempted to bring him to life courtesy of Kickstarter, eventually cancelling the bid when he fell short of his $85k goal. But he persevered. Edwin, you see, is a plucky sort of duck. He even back in January. He just happened to be in town. Huge Celine Dion fan. Back during that interview, we understandably raised the question of why, precisely, the world needs a smart rubber duck. And I’m still not entirely sure it does. There are, however, some places in which connected functionality kind of makes sense for a rubber duck. For one thing, there’s the built-in thermometer, which allows Edwin to monitor bath temperature. Here’s the rub, though – while that’s almost certainly destined to be one of the duck’s top selling points, it’s still relegated to the product roadmap. It speaks to one of the issues of being an early adopter for hardware startups. Features are often still a ways down the road at launch. And that can be an issue when its functionality is as central as is the case here. But while he’s still lacking in certain respects, Edwin does have some interesting functionality at present. The rubber ducky’s current best feature is the fact that it doubles as a completely waterproof Bluetooth speaker. I can’t really say why, but even as a grownup, there’s something appealing about the idea of a floating, ducky-shaped speaker in a bathtub or pool. It’s science, probably. Of course, there’s a caveat here – namely the fact that sound needs to project through a rubbery membrane. So, you know, not really for the audiophiles out there. And you’ll probably want to avoid anything that requires making out human speech. So, no podcasts in the tub, kids. The thermometer function is built into the hardware already, which means you can get some use out of it. Among the three apps currently available (two of which are still iOS only) is Temp Time, which turns Edwin into a big, squishy health thermometer when you rest him against a forehead. I tried own head, but had a tricky time getting a good reading – or else I’m a constant 92 degrees and should probably see a doctor. Jury’s still out. One of Edwin’s more engaging features is designed for outside the tub (assuming that you’re not looking for your kid to dunk your iPad), using the little duck to animate an on-screen version courtesy of the default Edwin app. Using different gestures, the duck will help read stories, play, games and sing songs. There’s also a separate Sleepy Time app, wherein Edwin sings lullabies and doubles as a nightlight. It’s easy to see where the product is going, as the company continues to add features piece by piece. But at the moment, Edwin feels a little less than the sum of his parts, likely unsurprising for anyone who’s ever jumped on board a hardware startup early on, but with the addition of a few missing pieces, the little duckling just might transform into a rubbery swan.
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Walgreens formally cuts ties with Theranos
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Sarah Buhr
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
Walgreens has terminated its three-year partnership with blood analysis startup Theranos, citing the myriad bad test results and an ongoing federal investigation as the reason for ending the relationship “effective immediately.” Theranos promised the drugstore chain it could detect hundreds of diseases using just one drop of blood – a promise which turned out to be too good to be true after an inquiry from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and an FDA inspection cast doubts on its technology. The startup is also under a by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California and faces a couple of mounting lawsuits. Walgreens started looking into the inquiries and use of the company’s Newark, California lab in January, following news from CMS that the lab posed “ ” to patients. Walgreens officials released a statement late Sunday saying it had told Theranos it was now severing the partnership and shutting down lab testing at all 40 Theranos blood draw locations within Arizona. “In light of the voiding of a number of test results, and as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has rejected Theranos’s plan of correction and considers sanctions, we have carefully considered our relationship with Theranos and believe it is in our customers’ best interests to terminate our partnership,” said Walgreens’ senior VP and chief healthcare commercial market development officer Brad Fluegel. The end of the partnership is a huge blow to Theranos, which relies on its Walgreens test sites as a crucial source of revenue. It also helped the startup compete with bigger labs like Quest Diagnostics and Lab Corp. Forbes recently from $9 billion to about $800 million, in light of all the issues. The loss of its major revenue partner may further drop the value of the company. Of course, Theranos is still under investigation, which could affect it even further. CMS is expected to inform Theranos of its decision on whether it will place sanctions on the company in the next two weeks. The government agency had earlier suggested the ousting of founder Elizabeth Holmes from the industry for at least two years. “Quality and safety are our top priorities and we are working closely with government officials to ensure that we not only comply with all federal regulations but exceed them,” said Theranos spokesperson Brooke Buchanan. “We are disappointed that Walgreens has chosen to terminate our relationship and remain fully committed to our mission to provide patients access to affordable health information and look forward to continuing to serve customers in Arizona and California through our retail locations.”
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TechCrunch is at E3! But why?
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
These are strange days for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The (ostensibly) trade-only event draws immense attention, but it has long been fraying at the edges. Yet we’re here anyway because this year E3 comes at an auspicious time for technologies that could represent a major change to the industry: virtual and augmented reality. The consumer release of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, troubled and content-starved as they may be, indicate that VR is no longer a fantasy tech about which wild promises can be made. It’s here, it’s real, and it has a lot to prove, because god have people been talking it up for the last few years. Brian and I will be meeting with both Oculus and HTC (and/or Valve, whoever shows up), as well as game producers and creative types, and asking probing questions about how they plan to follow through on the promise of VR. And of course we’ll be donning the headsets ourselves and looking like fools on camera while checking out the latest experiences, because has to do the hard work around here. But what about all those games, you ask, those beautiful, beautiful games! Well look, my proposal to pivot TechCrunch to a gaming site got shot down in like 2010 (R.I.P. CrunchArcade), and instead we continued to cover startups and the tech industry in general (look where it got us!). So as much as I’d like to flood the front page with screenshots of “The Last Guardian” and my thoughts on the new “Mass Effect,” we’re going to be looking for the more TechCrunchy stories scattered around the convention center. For instance, I think the process of developing an indie game is a lot like bootstrapping a small startup. I look forward to speaking with crowdfunding beneficiaries and driven game designers who have had to put their lives into their work with a limited runway just like any Silicon Valley success story. Brian, for some reason, thinks cheap Android-based set top consoles are going to make a big splash. I look forward to hearing him justify that fantasy! (But there will also be “lots of interesting hardware” in general, he made me add just now.) And just like everything else these days, the gaming industry runs on tech, and the tech that powers these games and the teams behind them is always changing — and frequently very interesting. Not to mention all that juicy industry chatter you overhear while pretending to work in the press lounge. Keep a close eye on the site this week: Brian and I will be doing live video while we wander the show floor, talk with strangers, and dilute our troubles with whiskey as soon as they kick us out of the convention center. Oh also, we get to play the new Zelda. Jelly?
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Cyberterrorism and the role of Silicon Valley
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Brian Michael Jenkins
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
For the moment, at least, cyberterrorists have not harnessed the technology they would need to destroy Western civilization from a basement lab in some remote corner of the world. Although Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said is unlikely any time soon, new technological developments have the potential to allow terrorists to move from low-tech killings aimed at gaining attention and creating fear to high-tech sabotage aimed at disrupting the sinews and social tissue of society. While defense budgets are declining in much of the developed world, the threat of terrorism has elevated homeland security concerns. Terrorists make no distinction between front lines and home fronts, between combatants and civilians. Fear of terrorism, sometimes exaggerated, has put governments under pressure to prevent terrorist attacks before they occur, which means intervening before intentions become actions. One way to know what evil lurks in the heart of potential terrorists is to monitor what people say and write. Police states do that all the time, but democracies have strict rules about when and under what conditions that may be permitted. That is where developments in information technologies are redefining relationships between citizens and their governments and creating new tensions. Governments now possess unprecedented capabilities to collect, store and analyze vast amounts of information about our private communications and individual lives. Some would argue that the mere possession of such files in government hands represents a potential for control and intimidation that is alien to the American form of government. As national security and war are being redefined for the digital age, Silicon Valley will need to be on the front line of counterterrorism. Its inventors and entrepreneurs are driving the information revolution, and they must figure out how to protect vital systems against malevolent intrusions. It lies at ground zero of the battle between government efforts to protect society and individual rights of privacy. Terrorist tactics have been employed for centuries, but technological developments in the late 1960s created new vulnerabilities and capabilities. Modern jet air travel gave terrorists worldwide mobility and provided what amounted to nationally labeled airborne containers of hostages and victims. Local terrorist campaigns could easily go international. Small arms and explosives had become widely available commodities. Most importantly, communications technology — radio, television and communications satellites — gave terrorists access to a global stage. Terrorism is theater, violence choreographed to create an atmosphere of fear and alarm that, in turn, causes people to exaggerate the importance and strength of the terrorists and the threat they pose. The actual victims of terrorism are irrelevant to the terrorists. Our terrorist adversaries understand that communications are half the struggle — it is not simply what they do, but how it is perceived and portrayed. In the late 1970s, analysts like me tried to figure what new weapons terrorists might try to acquire and adapt to their struggles. We worried about precision-guided surface-to-air missiles and, of course, chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, but we missed the most important development of all — the beginnings of the modern internet, which would become a critical weapon in the terrorist arsenal. As a propaganda platform, the internet has enabled terrorists to communicate directly with vast audiences, without editorial or effective government interference. It also allowed terrorists to communicate more easily with each other, creating virtual communities of like-minded fanatics. And it provided information about targets and instruction in bomb-making and other techniques of violence. Social media takes things further and gives today’s terrorists the ability to communicate directly in a mode embraced by millions of young people. The so-called Islamic State effectively exploited social media to advertise its exploits and attract recruits. However, the internet also allows vicarious participation without outright radicalization. One does not have to join a group. Participants can have a virtual yet real-life experience: Psychological satisfaction can be obtained by merely pretending to be a terrorist online. In the pre-internet 1970s, the United States was dealing with an average of 50-60 terrorist bombings a year — a number that in retrospect seems astounding. In the nearly 15 years since the 9/11 attacks, there have been about two to three terrorist bombings a year, with almost no fatalities, in the United States. These attacks were carried out by a variety of groups motivated by extremist ideologies and quarrels related to ongoing conflicts abroad. Since 9/11, however, two-thirds of the approximately 60 jihadist terrorist plots in the United States have involved a single individual. There is no real membership in a group, no institutional learning. New plotters are almost always amateurs. The threat posed by today’s terrorists is still primitive, manual and low-tech, but contemporary terrorists are becoming savvier navigators of the internet, with the potential to become high-tech adversaries who can threaten economic sabotage. Instead of holding individuals hostage, they might hold systems hostage. In the 1970s, “red teams” of terrorism analysts, trying to think about how this might be done, found that it required immense resources to significantly disrupt society. The growing network of the Internet of Things may change that. The capacity to destroy, disrupt, alarm and force society to divert vast resources to security is descending into the hands of ever-smaller groups with grievances that will not always be possible to satisfy. How democracies deal with this trend, and remain democracies, is one of the major challenges of our technological time. Silicon Valley is up for the challenge, if my recent experience at , an annual conference in Santa Clarita of innovators and entrepreneurs, is any indication. Some of the participants already have created technologies currently being used to assist in security. Others have exciting new concepts or ideas already in development. These represent new approaches to physical security and information protection; the detection of weapons, explosives, radioactive material and other dangerous substances; analytics; and other countermeasures. With these potential advancements, Silicon Valley may already be placing itself at the heart of the terrorism battle.
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Spark fragmentation undermines community
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Vinod Iyengar
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
The Hadoop distribution war comes down to a final battle between Cloudera’s CDH and Hortonworks’ HDP. That wasn’t always the case. At the peak of the market’s fragmentation, many companies offered Hadoop distributions in one form or another. These included Amazon (AWS), Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR, Pivotal, Teradata, Intel and Microsoft (Azure). Competition is a natural part of business, and the tech industry is no exception. Indeed, it’s competition that leads to end users getting the best possible products in their hands. However, the picture gets a little muddy when it comes to open source. Unlike proprietary products, which are expected to operate as their own little islands, the open-source community is supposed to be play nice. One of the advantages cited by those trying to sell open-source products to the enterprise is the degree to which they are “plug and play” — there is no vendor lock-in. If you’re not happy with an open-source product’s performance, it’s supposed to be a relatively painless process to rip out the product and replace it with something else. The problem with that argument for the Hadoop ecosystem is that not everyone is referring to the same thing when they say “Hadoop.” Hadoop isn’t a single uniform product — it’s a framework that includes a series of modules, such as HDFS and MapReduce. The term can also be used to refer to the wider ecosystem of additional software packages that work alongside Hadoop, such as Apache Hive, Pig, Spark, etc. What that means for customers is that what they think of Hadoop isn’t likely to be as easily replaceable as they may think. HDP and CDH don’t cover the exact same package, and even when they do, they’re often not the same versions. In June of last year Derek Wood, a DevOps Engineer at Cask, wrote a showing which versions of various software packages were supported by which versions of HDP and CDH. Suffice to say, it’s a lot to keep track of. At some level, this “versionitis” is a betrayal of what open source in general, and Hadoop in particular, are supposed to stand for. Over the course of the past year I’ve become increasingly concerned that the Apache Spark ecosystem will go the way of Hadoop before it. Although Apache Spark is just four years old, we’re already at the point where a few vendors are looking to sell Apache Spark to customers in different formats. Despite their protestations otherwise, these companies are essentially dividing the Apache Spark community by forcing customers to leverage their particular Apache Spark version and components. For example, while CDH 5.5.1 supported Apache Spark 1.5.0, the concurrent HDP 2.3.2.0 supported Apache Spark 1.4.1. Even worse, there is an increasing trend toward building features for particular distributions that are never committed back upstream. People can, and should, build companies on top of open-source products (I work for one that does). However, we have a responsibility to our community and our customers to make sure that we stay true to the promise of open source. When commercial distributions are offered to customers, they should stay as close to the core as possible, contribute everything back upstream and support the latest module versions. Problems inevitably arise when open-source projects built in academic settings (UC Berkeley’s AMPLab in the case of Apache Spark) or for internal use (think Hadoop at Yahoo) become the domains of large publicly traded companies, or VC-funded companies looking to make their way onto public markets. Open-source ideals are frequently sacrificed on the altar of creating an easily packaged product that can be sold to generate short-term profits. But in the long term, that’s not defensible. Software is becoming a commodity that will only become cheaper to produce as time goes on. Apache Spark itself is under attack from new open-source technologies that threaten to eat into its value proposition. offers a new way to analyze stream data, offers a new framework for “big data” and unifies stream and batch processing. Only a large, growing and dedicated community can keep Apache Spark relevant in the long term. Engineers will move on to something else if they find Apache Spark too much of a pain to use because of the difficulty inherent in navigating the balkanized environment that vendors have created. And it will be the vendors themselves that suffer. Let’s not let that happen.
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David Fine talks smart cities, the future of IoT on Technotopia
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
is the author of a three part series about the future of “Civic Technology” and the . His theory – and it’s a good one – is that “as Moore’s Law continues apace, cities will continue to blanket themselves in all sorts of cheap, reliable, and (we hope) meaningful sensors. Sensors generate data, and data will serve as the first of many building blocks to realize the pie-in-the-sky notion of a ‘smart city.'” I spoke with fine about his ideas on and asked him – in multiple ways – how the heck our cities were going to go from dumb to smart in this century. He pointed out that bigger cities around the world are already building an internal nervous system and the real challenge is getting the smaller towns on the network. “The idea of technology companies working with governments to bring innovative solutions to citizens is nothing new. It’s how they’re doing it today that makes civic technology so different. To understand the difference, let’s explore how governments would traditionally deliver technology to citizens,” he wrote. It’s a fascinating exploration of the future of smart cities and one that points to a brave new world of connected streets, sidewalks, and people. Check it out. You can download the or .
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Apple’s App Store at the end of the app era
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Matthew Panzarino
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
frozen in amber, the App Store’s fundamental deal has remained unmoving since its inception. As an enormous ecosystem swelled around it, crystalline structures of new rules and avenues of customer interaction have also grown — but not nearly fast enough for most developers. Especially the “long tail” of independent app makers which account for the most vociferous and loyal segment, if not the majority of downloads. Then last week, Apple made three big announcements about changes to the App Store. It would bring search ads to the store, make review times much faster for developers and allow any category of app to use subscriptions — paying those developers an additional share of the revenue if people stayed subscribed more than a year. Why those changes were announced before Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which begins tomorrow, is a matter of who you ask. People inside the company with knowledge of the keynote tell me that it was simply too crowded to spend the time talking about these changes and the nuances that go along with them. People outside the company who are generally well-informed have suggested to me that Apple wasn’t sure how violently the developer community would react to changes that are controversial to some. Whatever the reason, the past few days have given developers time to think about them, people time to complain about them on Twitter and journalists time to generate a hundred hot takes. I have some thoughts and some additional details about the announcements now that I’ve spoken to people who know how they’re actually going to get executed, so I thought I’d put them down before we get swept up in the week ahead. I’ll just take them one at a time. App reviews were always supposed to take five working days. They often ended up taking far longer, especially during the busy weeks or months before Apple ships new versions of iOS. It’s been a constant source of friction between Apple and the community. Now, the goal is to have 50 percent of apps approved in 24 hours and 90 percent approved in 48 hours. Apple is so confident in these new times that it has removed the chart that told developers what review times to expect from its site entirely. I’ve been tracking the times and they seem in line with claims so far. An that tracks times is also in line. Apple has increased staff, changed policies (how strenuous it gets with known developers) and improved procedures and tools used to evaluate apps in order to make those times happen. The changes to review times mean that developers can think about what kinds of features to roll out, bugs to fix and updates to make on a far different time scale. It could now take as little as a single day to roll out a bug fix or a major update to your app from the minute you had it locked internally. Though review times are getting a lot less play than other changes, I feel that this could have a significant impact on how often apps get updated and iterated on. As an independent developer, you may not be able to launch a major new version every month like Facebook, but you now have more options. From the beginning, developers who sell on the App Store get 70 percent of the revenue from an app, and Apple takes home 30 percent. Last week’s announcement cracked that amber for the first time, allowing a tiny fly foot to wriggle free. Now, developers who institute a subscription fee will see their profits swell to 85 percent in the second year of that subscription. If they keep customers around, they’ll see more money. And to facilitate that, Apple also allows any app category to take advantage of subscriptions. There are now 200 pricing tiers, though those won’t be revealed until later this year. The revenue split changes this week. Developers will now be able to allow users to upgrade, side-grade and cross-grade from one package to another very easily, and Apple is looking at ways to make the interface easier than it currently is. There is a notification when a subscription is going to be renewed and renewal is , rather than opt-out. You’ll have to say for sure it’s working for you. The widening of subscriptions to all categories isn’t an exact replacement for a free-trial situation, but it offers a much better situation than before. Any app that decides to roll out a subscription can now offer its wares for free for a time until it requires a subscription, or to a subset of options. These already existed in some apps like news and music, but games developers — who occupy the biggest App Store category — will now be able to play with these tools. The logic behind the subscription model and the split changing from 70/30 to 85/15 in the second year is simple: It incentivizes developers to continue to maintain and develop apps, which results in fewer dead-end apps; and it provides a boost in revenue as apps with back-end services scale up and retain users, allowing them to offset costs. This is why I found Google’s the day after Apple’s a bit less than fully considered. By increasing the cut from day one, you’re encouraging every app to be subscription-based, whether that’s actually the best model for that app. There are, and will continue to be, thousands upon thousands of utility apps that you need to buy once and use either regularly or occasionally. They don’t live on your home screen, but they’re there when you need them and they accomplish a simple task without any ongoing maintenance beyond updating for new versions of iOS. MileIQ, an app Barnard points out already does well on subscriptions. Yes, from here on out, the biggest apps will likely all be subscription-based or free with other sources of revenue. But the long tail of interesting capsule apps, whether games, productivity, business-related or just utilities — those apps will disappear or they will have to make up for revenue they would otherwise lose by being forced to adopt a subscription when it makes little to no sense. I think a lot of developers (and other industry folks) who don’t follow the App Store super closely would be surprised at how many apps are already doing quite well with subscriptions, even ones that don’t have killer services and/or content,” says David Barnard of . “I think a lot of people are freaking out prematurely. Subscription fatigue has already set in for many with Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, etc. But that’s quite different from paying $3-$5 for an annual subscription to an app like Launch Center Pro. I doubt enough apps will go subscription for the average user to notice much difference. Maybe $10/year total. And the thing is, subscriptions necessitate some sort of free trial or free tier, so people will get to check out a few apps before subscribing to the one that works best for them. With paid apps, you end up spending $10 trying a few apps, and only ever use one.” “I do think the onus is on Apple to help prime the pump for this transition,” continued Barnard. “Developers who choose subscriptions need to make sure their apps are truly delivering value over time and worthy of a subscription, but it would help substantially if Apple worked to normalize and validate the idea of subscriptions (and the value of software in general) in some sort of public facing way. Something like the Your Verse ads, but with some more direct hints at the of apps to our lives.” Apple is making a couple of changes to the App Store’s discovery mechanisms, in addition to adding ads that appear in searches for apps. It’s bringing back the Categories tabs, for one. It’s also beefing up the Featured tab with better intelligence, filtering out apps you already have installed. Some iOS software betas, by the way, filtered the top charts, as well, but that is a , not an intended feature. Top charts will always show apps you have installed as well as those you don’t. Here’s another fun one: If you 3D touch (hard press) on any app on your home screen, it will soon, by default, have an action that allows you to suggest that app to someone. This is a nice addition that will boost discovery via word of mouth and also provide a basic action anyone can take using 3D Touch, which many developers have yet to implement. Now, about those ads. There’s a public stat quoted by Schiller that 65 percent of downloads come from searches on the App Store. I’ve clarified, for what it’s worth, that this is 65 percent of iOS downloads, and not some subset that only includes downloads originating on the store. That’s a pretty big target. And this is why Apple went after search ads first — it was the biggest possible target for revenue and for developer promotion. Apple’s ad system is heavily based on relevance above all other factors. Relevance begins with an app’s metadata, which is used to automatically create the ad. The resources for the ad also come from an App Store’s pre-approved listing, which makes it tougher to game the system. This relevance setting means that if you’re searching for a racing game, a word search game will never ‘win’ in the ad auction process for that term. Apple is also attempting not to penalize new apps in categories for not having a lot of ratings, giving them a chance to win ad auctions and appear in categories. And all apps, of course, pay only on tap not on sight. Apple is exploring things like re-engagement ads for the store as well — so you could be able to direct people to a specific point in your app even if they already use it. The relevance metric, though, is the one to pay attention to. Specifically, something Apple calls the “minimum relevance threshold.” If your app does not pass this threshold for the search that you’re trying, the app will not even get into the auction. Apple will average out the relevance scores across ads for that term, and if your app doesn’t pass a certain mark of relevance based on keywords, reviews, downloads and other factors, it won’t be allowed to clutter up “non relevant” categories. A few privacy notes: Apple’s existing ad products like iAd, which didn’t work out so great, will still contribute technology, data and findings to this new effort. So even though it failed the first time, Apple still gets to use the tech to build this out. Apple’s search ads program is available during beta. So if you’re an App Store developer, you should do yourself a favor and try it out during this period, which starts Monday. The ads may be tests (that Apple is watching to prevent gaming), but the downloads are real. The program launches for real in the fall. Apple is doing its best to minimize the complexity for indie developers. Apple’s behind-the-scenes tool will build your creative automatically, select your keywords and set up the auction for you. All it asks for is a credit card and budget. The big players have more tools available to them, but this ease of use means that developer should be able to try the system, regardless of how much ad experience they have. No developer, no matter how big, will never be able to buy exclusivity or a ’blackout’ in a category or search. And there are no minimum bids in the Dutch auction system. Developers I spoke to seemed optimistic about whether Apple’s search ads would move the needle for them. The current temperament among developers is that if this is “it” for the App Store in 2016, then it is not enough. Many indies, especially, are hoping to see a re-energized Apple now that control over the App Store has moved under SVP Phil Schiller and away from Eddy Cue. Cue, Apple’s content deal-maker and broker of the Beats deal, has become a hugely polarizing figure among developers. Many feel that Cue was not giving the appropriate amount of attention to pushing the store forward, focusing instead on deals with content makers, celebrities and other power players. There is a cautious optimism among the community that Schiller will right the ship and shatter the stasis that the App Store has endured over the past few years. “Overall, it’s not like I think there’s some magic bullet that will make everything okay for indies, so I’m glad the person in charge is thinking about us and trying a bunch of things,” says Phill Ryu of . Everything I’ve been hearing is that this is the “first of many” changes to the App Store. Some of those changes will come this year and some will come later, because there are many structural challenges in rolling out major changes to a store that serves hundreds of millions. In my mind, the changes are linked. Subscriptions add much more flexibility across the board to enormous categories of apps that cannot be defined specifically as “subscriptions to services.” Improvements to discoverability (as long as they continue) aid in the long tail still being a place where business are built. And shortening review times creates a faster moving and more iterative App Store mentality. But I think that’s just the beginning. And Apple needs to acknowledge that these improvements are, frankly, just table stakes in comparison to many of the things that Google has announced on the Play Store. There is a new era on the horizon: the era of the distributed app. I’ve written which offer benefits to the user without being on the home screen, being opened or even having a “home” on the phone. Recent years have shown that this is the way things are going. People and keep the ones they use more. But they use more services than ever. We’re headed for a point at which people use more “invisible,” distributed services on iPhones than they do “apps you launch via an icon.” That’s a given. So Apple has two choices — either it can milk the last drops out of the capsule app ecosystem as we know it, or it can start building App Store tools to support these kinds of apps and services and to help developers monetize them. Subscriptions and services, of course, go together hand in hand. What if a developer could craft software that provided a truly useful service but had no icon, and was paid for out of an all-in-one App Store subscription that was based on usage? What happens when virtually and augmented reality are ubiquitous and phones are small again and the home screen means nothing? That’s going to happen. It is happening already with bots. Whether Apple is flexible and attentive enough with the App Store to allow it to capitalize on this new era is the only question. So, these changes are baby steps, but they’re baby steps with the right fundamental mindset. Developers should hope that the trend continues.
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The operating systems of the 2016 elections revealed!
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Andrew Keen
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
New media maven has always been particularly good at explaining the operating systems of contemporary life. In his controversial new book So what about politics, I asked him when we met at the ? What is the operating system of the 2016 election? It was the wrong question. What I should have asked about are the operating Rushkoff explains that Bernie Sanders is the candidate of the radio age, Hillary Clinton of the tv age and Donald Trump of our internet age. Trump’s “ideology” is digital, Rushkoff notes. He is, to coin a Rushkoffian term, a “digigenic” candidate. “Rather than Occupy, Rushkoff concludes rather depressingly, “We have Trump.” As always, many thanks to the folks at for helping produce this series.
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Toronto is poised to become the next great producer of tech startups
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Josh Guttman
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
I’ve spent more and more time in over the past few years and learned there’s more to this city than Drake and the recent successes of their professional sports teams. We made one investment there in 2015 and the experience — with the company specifically and the city generally — has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s been so positive, in fact, that we’re actively looking for more high-caliber founders to fund. The city has all the markings of a world-class hub for technology and reminds me a lot of how New York City felt in the early 2000s when I moved back from the Bay Area — simmering with entrepreneurial talent, opportunity and a strong foundation to support it. I think is to contend as one of the biggest North American hubs for technology startup activity over the five-10 years. On a recent visit, a native entrepreneur explained why she thought I may be picking up on these undertones: “ always had the talent, but it was historically recruited away. Today, the city is recapturing more of those people who left to work in the Valley or elsewhere, and they’re coming back to build businesses back home.” Here are few reasons why is well positioned to make this transition. Most people don’t realize is the fourth-largest city in North America (only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are larger) and produces the most engineering-focused university graduates each year. There are 150,000 full-time students enrolled in universities throughout the Greater Area, al es of the city center. Two schools — the University of (which has a world-class technology and engineering program) and Ryerson (a dedicated technical university) — are located in the heart of downtown and boast 80,000 students between them. There’s also nearby York University with another 65,000 students, Queens College with more than 16,000 students and, of course, the widely acclaimed University of Waterloo (which in many ways, launched the local movement), with a few thousand highly sought-after students 90 minutes west. Both the Canadian federal government and Ontario’s provincial government offer strong support, encouraging technology innovation in many ways. The two government bodies have set up several grants, matching contributions and financial assistance programs specifically designed to encourage and support technological development. Some of these include: Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SRED): This federal tax incentive program was developed to encourage Canadian businesses of any size to conduct R&D that will result in new, improved or technologically advanced processes or products. FedDev Ontario: FedDev Ontario delivers programming to help create, retain and grow businesses, cultivate partnerships and build strong communities. Financial support is available through 14 programs and initiatives. Some are delivered directly by FedDev Ontario, while others are delivered by organizations that have received funding through FedDev Ontario. International Science and Technology Partnerships Program: Small and medium-sized businesses with R&D programs in science and can receive additional financial support to partner with foreign researchers. Conservation Fund: This is a program designed to fund new energy conservation technology and programs for businesses. This could be grouped under the “supportive local government” heading, but the Canadian universal healthcare system means that everyone is entitled to free healthcare benefits, lifting the financial burden for employers. Because everyone gets equal free healthcare, workers don’t feel pressured to settle for jobs solely to secure coveted benefits, but instead feel encouraged to take risks and follow an entrepreneurial path. Without the burden of paying for healthcare, can operate more leanly and reinvest those dollars into growing their businesses. With government support programs and universal healthcare, dollars invested in businesses provide the possibility of going much further. Taking into account the benefits described above and the typical benefit package afforded a startup, investment there has the opportunity to extend 1.2X-1.4X further versus investment in American companies. What’s more, for the past three years, the U.S. dollar has enjoyed strength versus the Canadian dollar. The exchange rate (at the time of writing) is 1.30 CA to 1.00 U.S., a 30 percent change from where rates were as recently as 2012. For financings denominated in Canadian dollars — as they often are for seed-stage Canadian companies — U.S. investors enjoy a 30 percent advantage (for the time being). With ‘s (BlackBerry) continual transition from a large technology leader of approximately 10,000 employees to a significantly smaller outfit, many talented engineers and technologists in the area have begun to disperse and launch businesses of their own or team up with local entrepreneurs. As a result of “the RIM diaspora,” significant talent has been unleashed on the Greater ecosystem. Torontonians are a creative and entrepreneurial people. The culture of the city lends itself to the field, particularly with the backstop of the Canadian government behind them. is already home to a number of successful venture-backed businesses, such as , , , , Assurex Health, , , , and . There’s also a strong network of emerging local venture capital supporting the ecosystem, firms such as , , and . Finally, there are more incubators and accelerators hatching every month, including Ryerson’s , MaRS, Highline, and . There’s also a strong community developing with lots of weekly events; the is one of the largest, with more than 11,000 members, playing a role very similar to the one the NY Meetup served for New York City five-10 years ago. Similar to the way some New Yorkers think we’re the center of the universe, is, in fact, the center of Canada. Not only is the city the center of commerce and industry in the country, but it has an exciting and diverse urban core that’s focused and invested on development and infrastructure. is the epicenter of Canada’s construction boom, claiming the most high-rise construction projects (and cranes) of any North American city with 130 projects underway. The city itself exudes creativity, especially the Queen West neighborhood, which serves as the de facto center of startup activity with its abundant restaurants, cafes and flexible creative workspaces (it reminds me a lot of the east village of New York in the 1990s). The neighborhood was recognized by Vogue as having the in the world. The proximity of Queen West from the downtown core — a five-minute taxi ride or 20-minute walk — means have easy access to large corporations, enabling natural collaboration. The international community has long regarded Canadians as being a kinder, friendlier and a more accepting culture; in my experience, it’s true. Softer and less aggressive both socially and in business, Canadians are pleasurable to work with, which is worth a lot in my book. is also ranked one of the cities in the world, with half the population being foreign-born. In addition to making for a diverse and interesting population, it sets a good precedent for the birth of startup businesses, because we know there’s a strong correlation between immigrants with the sense of adventure to relocate and entrepreneurial activity. Where else can you walk from the airport to the office in 10 minutes? Porter Airlines and Billy Bishop Airport make this possible. Launched in 2006, Porter is a regional Canadian airline that serves Eastern Canada, as well as New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington, DC. The company has a vision of returning aviation to its former prestige, with flight attendants dressed in vintage attire and guests treated to complimentary beer, wine and snacks. Billy Bishop Airport, located on Island, serves as the airline’s hub and is literally a few blocks from downtown. My favorite thing to do when traveling to is walk to my hotel from the airport, just because I can. is perhaps the only city in the world where this is possible (particularly on an international flight) and it makes traveling there a joy. If you haven’t noticed, I’m bullish on and plan to continue spending time there hunting for our investment.
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Ping shapes new identity after $600 million acquisition
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
When I walked into a conference room last Tuesday at the in New Orleans to interview Ping Identity CEO Andre Durand, it was my first chat with him since the week before for $600 million (as ), a tidy exit for the 14 year old company. I had questions, lots of questions. After all, in conversations with Durand and CFO Michael Sullivan over the last 12-18 months, the two painted a rosy financial picture of the Identity as a Service company. There was even talk of an IPO down the road. They weren’t looking for a buyer, they were looking to keep growing — at least that’s what they told me. It was a company that made a successful transition from a traditional licensing model to a subscription model. It was reporting that customer growth from “new products” had grown from 5 percent the previous year to almost a third of new business in October, 2015 . What’s more, Ping was a mature startup averaging 40 percent annual growth and was on its way to $100 million in subscriptions. It was fully funded and wasn’t looking for capital. The future seemed so bright, it had to wear shades. Then came the surprising news that , Vista Equity Partners. It didn’t add up and I was anxious to ask Durand why he sold the company. Durand looked a little weary when I spoke to him — and with good reason. The acquisition came together right as he was in the middle of gearing up for his company’s annual Cloud Identity Summit conference. Trying to balance the final preparation for the company’s showcase customer event, while steering his company through acquisition talks was no doubt a tall order. Durand said things began to change over the last several months. He had offers before of course, but there are fishing expeditions, and there are serious offers, and quite suddenly the offers felt more serious, he explained. Durand also had to balance the needs of several different constituencies including investors who came in as early as 2003, and a second set who came along more recently. He also had 1500 customers and 400 employees to think about. While the early investors said they were in it for the long haul, he hinted they had put at least some pressure on him that they couldn’t wait forever. Given the current state of the public markets, and the chances of IPOing anytime soon, the payout horizon was getting longer on a process that had already proven to be quite long to start. “I had to align the interests. I had short interests and long interests,” he said. Then he suddenly had some serious attention, and it was serious enough that he had some leverage — a couple of interested buyers. There was a strategic buyer he wouldn’t identify, but guessing on the likely suspects looking to add identity as a service, it could have been IBM, Cisco, Akamai, Oracle, SAP or Salesforce. Any would have made sense actually, but going down that road was taking a big chance with the company he had built. A big company could take the tech and perhaps the engineering talent and deprecate the brand. He was reluctant to do that. In the end, it came down to pragmatism, execution and big pile of money. Vista gave him an offer he simply couldn’t refuse — a big fat offer — one that would satisfy his various constituencies. It would pay back early investors who stuck with the company and later ones who came on board more recently. It would take care of his loyal employees and perhaps most important of all, it would allow the brand to live on. Vista also presented well. “They came on like nothing we’ve ever seen,” he said. They showed up, and within a week they had an offer and a few weeks later the deal was done. It didn’t hurt that they were a private equity company with an enterprise software pedigree, and they wanted Ping. They really, really wanted it. Durand couldn’t say what this all means just yet — the deal won’t close until the third quarter. Like all of us, he has to wait and see what happens, but he sees a buyer with deep pockets that will accelerate the growth of the company much faster than he could have done alone, and perhaps even provide an avenue for acquisitions that would have been much more difficult before. There will be change. It’s the nature of acquisition. Undoubtedly there are stock options to pay and some folks will move on, but one employee said nobody is talking about leaving. After the big pay day, that is subject to change of course. At one point, I asked Durand how many employees he thinks he will have next year at this time, and he really couldn’t say. He doesn’t know how fast this will accelerate, but he’s pretty clear, given the way Vista operates, that’s it’s going to put the pedal to the metal. Photo Credit: Courtney on Flickr. Used under CC by SA 2.0 license. I talked to one customer, who said exactly that. He was hoping the influx of money means that the company can move more quickly than it has previously. Hard to know if he was echoing the party line or if he really saw it that way, but it appears to be the reality moving forward. The company will get bigger, and that will in all likelihood change its identity to some degree, moving from a small community of people to a larger organization and all that entails. Durand, assuming he stays around (and all indications are that he will), will have to guide his company through that growth phase into whatever it’s going to become next. Ping’s sale could also signal the beginning of more consolidation in this space. There are other modern identity service options out there like Okta and OneLogIn and buyers who missed the boat here, could come looking. “There are a bunch of big vendors and a scarcity of vendors to acquire. That makes it worse for strategics and makes for interesting opportunities [for vendors],” OneLogin CEO Thomas Pedersen told TechCrunch. As for Ping, in some ways Durand sees this process through a moral lens that he took care of business and operated the right way. “I have returned well for everyone who has ever come in contact with Ping, I’ve done right by them,” he said. And that’s all any startup CEO can hope for.
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P2P mobile payment app Tapp raises $9 million to tap into the cash economy in Southeast Asia
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Dennis Mitzner
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
Finland-based mobile payment app has raised $9 million to expand its operations in Southeast Asia for users without a bank account or credit card. Mobile phones have emerged as the dominant alternative payment method to cash for buying and selling goods and services in emerging markets. And with a service akin to alternative payment providers like M-Pesa and Pagatech in Africa and a in Southeast Asia, it’s a technology that the region understands well. Headquartered in the Finnish city of Turku, with product development in Helsinki and offices around Asia, Tapp’s Series A round was raised from Australia-based — an early-stage investment network — and brings the total amount invested in the company to $12.9 million. With the new funds, Tapp will strengthen operations in Indonesia and expand to new markets. The company currently employs a staff of 77. “Tapp will use the funding to expand faster into Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, with an eye to also open up Myanmar by the end of 2016. Funds will also be used in consumer acquisition efforts and continuing to build platform services which continue to reward for participation and create stickiness in our end user value chain,” said Warren Sample, the CEO of Tapp. Tapp Commerce’s consumer app, , allows people without bank accounts or credit cards to upload cash on the app to buy goods and services online via a network of sellers in emerging markets. With Tapp, users can prepay for electricity, tuition fees, microinsurance, airtime and music. Anyone can become an agent — someone who can accept cash in exchange for digital currency — with data and some cash. Again, this is a market that’s already fairly crowded. , backed by and other local venture capitalists; in Vietnam; and all aim to provide payment services for the underbanked. On the street level, Tapp wants to emulate existing — cash-based — consumer behavior in local markets. The company’s sales strategy is to onboard trusted local shop owners to give shoppers an option to convert their coins and bills — through the app — into digital currency in order to expand their buying options. For businesses, Tapp’s main partners are merchants, such as insurance and electricity companies. Tapp has 134 merchant partners in Indonesia and the Philippines. In April, the company partnered with Indonesia-based insurance company a member of ACE Group, to provide microinsurance customers in Indonesia. The app currently works only on Android and is used by more than 30,000 vendors with 3 million buyers in Southeast Asia, according to a press release. The in 2015 was $450 billion, and is expected to surpass $1 trillion in 2019. , 2.5 billion adults worldwide — of which 2.2 billion live in the developing world — do not have a bank account. Couple this with the fact that smartphone adoption is increasing at a rapid rate in the emerging markets. With the mobile phone becoming a popular payment vehicle across the globe, countries like Indonesia and the Philippines are in dire need of independent payment solutions that do not require credit cards or bank accounts. “P2P mobile payments and mobile wallets are a great way to enable digital financial inclusion in these developing countries,” said Smrithi Konanur, a Global Product Manager for Payments, Web and Mobile at . Most mobile payment alternatives to bank accounts and credit cards are SMS-based. Tapp is competing for the market share against local players such as Kudo and Cyrusku in Indonesia and LoadCentral in the Philippines. Tapp’s most formidable competitor is Vietnam-based which recently from Standard Chartered (SCB) and Goldman Sachs. One of the reasons why Google, Apple and Samsung — popular in the West — will remain less attractive to users in parts of Asia or Africa is their need for a credit card and reliance on existing banking infrastructures. That’s why companies you’ve never heard of, except for Alipay in China and M-Pesa in Africa, have a fighting chance. Platforms and apps that tap into the existing cash economy without involving banks or credit card companies can be expected to thrive. “The basic issue in the developing world is that more people have a Facebook account than a bank account. Credit cards are actually irrelevant as only basic banking services are required. We learned that only 23 percent of people in the Philippines have a bank account. Most transactions today are carried out in cash,” said Ron Hose, the CEO of , a mobile wallet in the Philippines. Although there’s plenty of hype around a cashless future, , some countries are bucking the trend. In Indonesia alone there are 250 million people, but only 7-8 percent have a credit card and the amount of credit cards will likely reduce because of the .
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Nura headphones are custom fit to the listener’s frequency
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
Your parents were right, dear reader. You are a precious, unique snowflake. Your ears, at least. I can’t really speak for the rest of you, but, hey, you seem great. Of course, your special, unique snowflakiness presents a challenge to our friends in the headphone industry — even more so than the standard one-size-all approach of gadget makers. You see, there’s more than just size issues to contend with; there’s shape, hearing loss and a whole slew of tiny, weird bones to take into account. A few bigger names have attempted to address the situation. Harman’s rolled out an ear-scanning technology on a number of its headsets, aimed at adjusting its frequencies to the contours of a wearer’s ear canal the way a Sonos system does a living room. Melbourne-based startup Nura is looking to take things a lot further with its peculiar new headphones, with a hardware/software combo designed to give wearers playback perfectly equalized to meet each wearer’s unique earprint. The company agreed to bring a pair by our New York offices because, well, hearing, as one or two people have probably said at some point, is believing. (Though try telling that to the nearly 3,000 backers who have put up more than $640,000 . And Nura has added a 30-day money guarantee, so users can take them for a spin.) The company brought a mockup of the final version of the headphones — which is what you see up top. The working prototype, on the other hand, looks like this: The two headphones share one key feature at this stage — one that’s admittedly a little off-putting at first. They’re both earbuds and over-ear headphones. It looks weird, and frankly is weird, but don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. The inside pair is a bit springy, with enough articulation to position themselves into your ear. Though, I have to admit that with the prototype version, this took some doing. You’ve got to create the perfect seal before the company’s app can do its thing. Once the app recognizes that both earbuds are in place, it begins the scanning process, which unfolds a lot like a hearing test, sending a spectrum of different frequency sounds and measuring the response. According to Nura’s press material: Nura uses a microphone to know exactly what sound went in, and also uses the same microphone to listen to the faint sounds that return from the ear. This makes Nura very different from any other type of calibration. It actually knows the response of the inner ear. The whole process takes around 30 seconds and only needs to be performed once per user. That setting is then saved locally onto the headphone hardware, so wearers can plug the headphones into a different device (via a Lightning port in the case of the ones the company was showing off) and maintain their unique equalization. There’s also an option to save multiple users via the app, for those who like to share. The demo consisted of toggling back and forth between a calibrated and non-calibrated version. Honestly, the non-calibrated version sounds pretty crappy. No doubt Nura avoided fine tuning it so the difference would be that much more pronounced. I will admit, however, that after the little ear checkup, the newly equalized version did sound great. Everything comes through with great balance, and the instrumentation is extremely clear. I was suitably impressed — but naturally wished I had gotten a little more time with the things. There’s also a special bass setting — the primary reason the company opted for the dual earbud/over-ear style. While the buds do most of the heavy lifting, the over-ears deliver a fairly intense amount of bass — like an on-the-face woofer that avoids muddying up the main channel. It was an impressive demo. And then there’s the price. Prepare to pay $399 for the headphones at retail — though if you’re looking to save a bit, and don’t mind a leap of faith, you can secure them for significantly cheaper through the aforementioned Kickstarter campaign.
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Twitter chairman: Even painful political tweets have a place
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Twitter chairman Omid Kordestani says that even the harshest, most painful political tweets have a place on Twitter — whether we like it or not. “How do you personally react to that, it’s painful to read these tweets — that’s our society, you have to have room for all these voices,” Kordestani said at the Bloomberg technology conference. “The discourse is important for democracy; instead of tanks and troops rolling in the streets you have this discussion happening.” That comment was a response to questions about a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric tweeted out by many throughout the U.S. presidential election. Kordestani, as the chairman of Twitter’s board of directors, himself said he is directly in contact with the executives at Twitter helping guide the future of the company. He says his role is to be “helpful” to the company and go there several days a week, advising on “tough decisions” and other processes like recruitment, he said. So, naturally, he has to keep to the party line of the company — which is to be a place where public discourse can happen freely, much to the chagrin of many Twitter observers. Throughout its existence, Twitter has seen itself serve as a launchpad for discussion around international events like the Arab Spring and other large-scale events (including the 2008 presidential election). Twitter has also constantly had issues with users dealing with harassment and threats on the platform. “In our case, we are already seeing this, it’s happening live every day,” Kordestani said. “It’s wonderful to see the dialog that happens between them, between them and our citizens, commentary from around the world. Our focus is to do a better and better job of that. To integrate live video, take advantage of Periscope, be at these events, bring our expertise from the media teams, our team on the moments team, bring out the best of the dialog that’s happening. A lot of it is about, how this engaged audience interacts with each other. we’re already seeing the candidates use the medium to comment on each other.” Still, he has a duty to stick to the company’s — and new CEO Jack Dorsey’s — vision. Kordestani, who was at one point considered for the CEO position before the board finally decided on Dorsey, previously served as the chief business officer of Google. Kordestani said he wanted to be around to help Dorsey and the company following his long tenure at Google, which is why he took the chairman job. One particularly interesting note was his stance on whether Twitter could be an acquisition target, given the news today that Microsoft bought LinkedIn — another huge professional social network — for $26.2 billion. Kordestani, much as expected, gave a sort of non-answer but left the door open for potential discussions. (After all, a “no” may seem final and he’d have to contradict himself later if Twitter did decide to sell itself.) “As a board you have to be accountable to shareholders and evaluate every opportunity,” Kordestani said. “As a management team and leadership team you’re focused on doing a great job every day. The focus of the company is gonna be innovating and refining the product.To focus on creators and developers. All that is something you have to have a religion around every day. Whatever may play out, be it partnership or other opportunities, we’ll evaluate.”
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Crunch Report | Apple WWDC 2016
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 15 | null |
The Last Guardian is definitely (probably) coming to PS4 this October
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Several times, year after year. But Sony kicked off this year’s big pre-E3 press conference with yet another glimpse at the long awaited game, The Last Guardian. But the company had a little something extra up its sleeve this time: an honest-to-goodness release date. After years of delays and general vagueness around the long awaited fantasy game, the company offered up the briefest of hopeful glimpses, followed by the date October 25th, 2016. The game, which centers around the friendship between a young boy and a giant dog/cat/bird monster, has been in development since 2007, with an initial planned release of 2011 for the PlayStation 3. And while it’s not quite Duke Nukem, constant delays have led to much speculation about whether the title would ever see the light of day. In 2012, development shifted to the PS4, and if things go according to plan, eager fans will finally get their hands on the thing in time for Halloween.
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Behold the Xbox One S and Design Lab controllers in all their glory
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Earlier today, they were but flashes on the big screen at Microsoft’s big E3 kickoff event. Now they’re pieces of metal and plastic in the same venue that hosted the aforementioned event (presently the site of an Xbox mixer with, mercifully, with an open bar). The is, of course, noticeably more svelte than its predecessor – 40-percent so, in fact. The first thing you really notice about the device, however, is that bright white coat of paint, the starkest of contrasts from its much darker predecessors. The company calls it “robot white.” I might have gone for “undriven snow.” Either way, it’s the kind of color you’d constantly worry about getting scuffed if your sneakers were made out of it. Unless you’re Steph Curry. He’s got bigger things to worry about. Other notable architectural features include the IR blaster and shifted USB port, which are located just under the lip, up front. Balanced precariously up top is the new controller, which also sports a sleeker design (not 40-percent sleeker, but sleeker, nonetheless), along with redesigned, textured grips for a better feel. For those who want to stand out from the robot white crowds, Microsoft is also showcasing its , which lets users customize the peripheral for a starting price of $80 (a $20 premium over the standalone controller). The , featuring fifteen color options for customizing the front, back, bumpers and triggers, thumbsticks and buttons. It also features a 3D view, so you can check it out from all possible angles. [gallery ids="1336639,1336641,1336640,1336643,1336644,1336642"]
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Data breadlines and data brawls
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Tomasz Tunguz
| 2,016 | 6 | 12 |
When I think about the behavior of many business people today, I imagine a . These employees are the -poor, waiting around at the end of the day on the . The overtaxed analyst team prioritizes work for the company executives, and everyone else must be served later. An employee might have a hundred different questions about his job. How satisfied are my customers? How efficient is our sales process? How is my marketing campaign faring? These cause three problems present in most teams and businesses today. First, employees must wait quite a while to receive the they need to decide how to move forward, slowing the progress of the company. Second, these protracted wait times abrade the patience of teams and encourage teams to decide without . Third, inhibit the team from achieving its full potential. Once an employee has been patient enough to reach the front of the , he gets to ask the analyst team to help him answer his question. Companies maintain thousands of databases, each with hundreds of tables and billions of individual points. In addition to producing , the already overloaded teams must translate the panoply of figures into something more digestible for the rest of the company, because with , nuances matter. The conversation bears more than a passing resemblance to one between a third-grade student and a librarian. Even expert analysts lose their bearings sometimes, which results in slow response times and inaccurate responses to queries. Both serve to erode the company’s confidence in their . Overly delayed by the strapped team and unable to access the they need from the supply chain, enterprising individual teams create their own rogue databases. These shadow analysts pull from all over the company and surreptitiously stuff it into database servers under their desks. The problem with the segmented assembly line is that errors can be introduced at any single step. A file could be truncated when the operations team passes the to the analyst team. The analyst team might use an old definition of customer lifetime value. And an overly ambitious product manager might alter the just slightly to make it look a bit more positive than it actually is. With this kind of siloed pipeline, there is no way to track how errors happen, when they happen or who committed them. In fact, the error may never be noticed. fragmentation has another insidious consequence. It incites , where people shout, yell and labor over figures that just don’t seem to align and that point to diametrically different conclusions. Imagine two well-meaning teams, a sales team and a marketing team, both planning next year’s budget. They share an objective: to exceed the company’s bookings plan. Each team independently develops a plan, using metrics like customer lifetime value, cost of customer acquisition, payback period, sales cycle length and average contract value. When there’s no consistency in the among teams, no one can trust each other’s point of view. So meetings like this devolve into , with people arguing about accuracy, the definition of shared metrics and the underlying sources of their two conflicting conclusions. Imagine a world where is put into the hands of the people who need it, when they need it, not just for Uber drivers, but for every team in every company. This is democratization, the beautiful vision of supplying employees with self-service access to the insights they need to maximize their effectiveness. This is the world of the most innovative companies today: technology companies like Uber, Google, Facebook and many others who have re-architected their supply chains to empower their people to move quickly and intelligently.
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PlayStation VR is arriving October 13th, priced at $399
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
I mean, I’m as excited about The Last Guardian as the next unwashed blogger, but you didn’t really think we were going to get out of tonight’s pre-E3 Sony press conference without a little hardware news, did you? And it’s 2016, after all, so it’s time for Sony to join the Oculus Rifts and HTC Vives of the world with its own VR offering. Tonight the company went hard on virtual reality, kicking things off by announcing that the PlayStation VR headset will be hitting retail October 13th, priced at $399. And hey, what’s a little bit of gaming hardware without some, you know, games? The company also showed off a slew of those, adding that there will be 50 games available for the platform before the end of the year. We got glimpses of a number of titles, featuring some gigantic names franchises, including VR experience offerings like Star Wars Battlefront: X-Wing VR Mission, Batman Arkham VR and Final Fantasy XV. The company will likely be showing off a few of these in more detail, so we’ll be sure to report back as soon as we get some quality hands- or head-on time with the hardware.
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With the LinkedIn sale, Frank Quattrone notches another win
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
While the tech industry digests the news that LinkedIn is becoming an independently run subsidiary of Microsoft in exchange for in cash, one renowned figure in Silicon Valley is already publicly celebrating the deal: Frank Quattrone. The legendary investment banker tweeted earlier today that Qatalyst, the boutique bank that he founded eight years ago, served as the lead advisor to LinkedIn on its sale, noting that it’s the “largest sale” of an internet company “ever,” and stating its acquisition price at $28.1 billion. Qatalyst serving as lead advisor to LinkedIn on proposed $28.1B sale to Microsoft, largest sale of Internet co ever — Frank Quattrone (@FrankQuattrone) Maybe that was the price before Qatalyst and Allen & Co., which also advised the company, took their fees, along with Microsofts’s advisers — Morgan Stanley and law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. (We’re half-kidding. The fees were more likely in the tens of millions of dollars, though some top M&A firms charge upwards of 5 percent of a transaction’s value in fees. Qatalyst didn’t respond to our request for clarification.) Either way, it’s a coup for Quattrone, who was the most prominent banker of the go-go ’90s tech boom and who helped take public Amazon, Cisco, Netscape and other high-fliers before coming under investigation by federal prosecutors. As longtime industry watchers will remember, Quattrone of obstructing an investigation into whether the equity salesmen were doling out hot IPO shares to favored clients in exchange for inflated commissions during the same period that Quattrone was head of CSFB’s tech banking business. Two trials and one overturned conviction later, Quattrone — who previously headed up Morgan Stanley’s technology group, as well as served as the CEO of Deutsche Bank’s technology group — reached a settlement with the government in which he admitted . Soon after, he launched Qatalyst. While LinkedIn is now the bank’s biggest win to date, it has been involved in a string of high-profile deals. Among them is OpenDNS’s sale to Cisco for last year; HomeAway’s sale to Expedia last year for ; and the of Ping Identity, a firm that manages employees’ digital identities, to the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. (Terms of the deal, which was announced just last week, aren’t being disclosed, though a report in TheInformation pegs the amount at .) In a deal that Qatalyst might be less eager to advertise than others, it also advised Autonomy on its to Hewlett Packard for $11 billion. HP later took an $8.8 billion on the deal. The company accused Autonomy of improperly reporting $709 million in revenue over two-and-a-half years before the purchase. HP has since split into . Quattrone stepped down as CEO of Qatalyst Group back in January, becoming chairman of the firm and turning over the reigns to George Boutros, who worked closely with Quattrone at Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and CSFB before re-joining him at Qatalyst in 2010. Quattrone at the time that he retains a hand in Qatalyst’s strategy while spending more time as a client-focused banker. Certainly, he takes plenty of pride in his work. Last year, in a about Quattrone’s singular career, he told the WSJ of Qatalyst’s success to date: “You can’t create the Sistine Chapel using paint by numbers. Every deal we do is a custom piece of art.”
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The new world order for open-source and commercial software
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Dave Hillis
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
We have been living through another cold war. Not geo-political — digital. Open-source software versus commercial software has long been on the brink of going nuclear, fought in the shadows with enormous stakes and conflicting ideologies. But suddenly… perestroika! The wall quietly fell. It did not end in absolute victory, or a stalemate; is a more apt term. Just to be clear, I am talking specifically about enterprise applications. Things like enterprise content management databases, CRMs, operating systems or, my industry, portals and web experience software. While no one would argue there aren’t some differences between open-source and commercial software, there is very little difference between the cost and quality of the software. I know this article will run contrary to some closely held beliefs, but it is time to stop thinking about open-source software and commercial software as being different. The cloud completely changed open-source and commercial software. Indeed, most businesses are moving applications into the cloud. Software is becoming a service and IT infrastructure a metered utility. While software distribution can be almost free, services always cost money. Both commercial and open-source software companies need to adapt to the new tech economy and move to service-oriented business models. In fact, in the cloud economy open-source and commercial software essentially have the same business model. Open source largely succeeded in the old tech economy because it offered a new distribution model — a way to sell enterprise software without needing a “briefcase on a plane.” But now the cloud and SaaS are more efficient distribution channels. Open-source companies are providing SaaS licenses, and commercial vendors are abandoning expensive upfront licenses, support and maintenance agreements. The idea that open-source software is free has always been a myth. Everyone knows enterprise open source requires implementation, maintenance and operational costs. Most open-source costs are not even hidden. Most businesses ultimately end up buying enterprise open-source licenses and support. is the commercial arm of the open source Web CMS Drupal. , the original creator of the Drupal project, famously said, “I want to build a billion dollar company.” You do not make a billion dollars giving software away. You make a billion dollars by selling software licenses and service contracts. Every viable open-source project now has a commercial entity and these businesses charge a lot of money for their certified software and support. Yes, commercial software companies also want to make money. But that’s the point. There is no shame in making money for providing great value and service, or spending money on software to help grow your business. Whether you want to invest your time and resources supporting an open-source project, purchase licenses and support contracts or use a software-as-a-service subscription, you will invest. is one of the most proprietary software companies in the world. You are tethered to their business model, platform and service agreements. Yet Salesforce.com has one of the most active development ecosystems in the industry. Thousands of applications have been built on top of Salesforce.com. is completely open source. Are there more applications and integrations in the Sugar ecosystem than Salesforce.com? Not by a country mile. Is Sugar a better CRM than Salesforce.com? It depends on what you need. What about Open Shift platform compared to ? One company is an open-source vendor and the other is a giant online retailer. Is one platform more open than the other? Most people would not see a difference. It’s Coke versus Pepsi. Today “open” means more than open source. Open means that a platform can easily be extended and integrated with other applications. Web services, frameworks and APIs are application specific, not license-model specific. Believe it or not, it’s true. The new version of Microsoft is completely open source. It even runs natively on Linux. So did open source win? Absolutely. But you know who else wins? Commercial software vendors. If you look at any commercial software application, there are many source components and libraries. Commercial software companies have the resources to develop the code, provide quality assurance and deliver professional support and maintenance. Commercial software has not been consumed by the open source “Borg.” Commercial vendors happily converged. Open source is not a philosophy or a business model: open source is a software feature. Whether the feature of modifying source code is important to you depends on your requirements. Selecting enterprise software requires balancing a lot of considerations: software features, viability and support model of the vendor, total cost of ownership, capabilities in your company and your business strategy and growth expectations. Success takes investment. You will pay for your software whether you use open-source or commercial applications. All software has become much more open, has shifted toward the service economy and provides powerful capabilities. Open-source vendors provide technical support; commercial software vendors provide communities. Let’s stop the myths. There are wonderful commercial and open-source software options. Simply choose the software that works best for your organization and enjoy the peace.
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Here are the most well-designed apps of 2016, according to Apple
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Once a year, Apple stops its Worldwide Developer Conference to recognize a handful of apps for being particularly well designed. The prize? A shiny statue, a full suite of Apple hardware, and the right to say that one of the most respected companies in the world thinks a good designer. For app developers and designers, it’s one of the finest honors that money can’t buy. Previous winners include Fantastical, Crossy Road and Yahoo Weather. A simple, minimalist app for creating electronic music on the go. It’s what a lot of people expect electronic music creation to be before they open FruityLoops for the first time and have a panic attack. Working on video can be a pain, especially with a big team. Frame.io is video collaboration for groups. You can find our A todo list for forming good habits. Pick good habits you want to pick up, then mark it on a calendar each day you’ve done it. It tries to learn when you usually accomplish certain tasks and when you go to bed, and only reminds you at the appropriate times. I initially thought it was an app called “Steaks” and now I’m hungry. Tomb Raider is a legendary franchise… but it doesn’t really translate directly into a good mobile game. Lara Croft Go turns Tomb Raider into a turn based puzzle game. A complete, layer-by-layer view into the human anatomy. Used by students to study, doctors for explaining medical issues to patients, and by people who like looking at bones for looking at bones. It’s pinball, mashed up with a puzzle game, mashed up with.. paint? It’s weird, but super pretty. As you smash into bumpers on any of the hundreds of puzzle-tables, paint sprays across the board A super pretty forever runner game with a twist: while dodging obstacles and landing huge jumps, you’ve got to tweak your character’s color to match the platform you’re about to land on. It’s simple enough to get started with, but it gets crazy hard fast. Fitness training for AppleTV by way of short, high definition training videos. They’ve customized their video player with workouts in mind, with small touches like providing uncluttered stills when a video is paused to give you a better view of what you’re supposed to be doing Distraction free writing. Once you start writing, the UI fades away to provide a clutter-free view of your work. A professional grade for performing DJs. It hooks into your media library or Spotify and lets you jog, crossfade, and mix from an iPad. Prior to the main awards, the first two recognitions were for student developers. Apple gave 350 students scholarships that covered the cost of their WWDC ticket. To be selected, students either had to build an app specifically for their sponsorship application, or submit one they’d built previously. Of the 350, Apple highlight two: A puzzle game that has the player rotate and reorient lines You’re a ball, falling ever upwards toward the edge of the screen, attempting to navigate your way through the gaps without colliding. Remember Falling Down on the TI-84? It’s like that… but with a twist: when you tap the screen, your ball splits in two. The harder you press, the further the two balls will be pushed apart. What do you think: any 2016 favorites that went unmentioned?
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Cyber insurance is changing the way we look at risk
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Yoav Leitersdorf
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
If, or more accurately, when your company is hit by a cyber attack, do you have what you need to recover? Do you know what kind of losses you can afford to absorb in your bottom line? How do you manage your risks? Have you thought about whether you need cyber insurance? Back in 2011, Sony’s PlayStation network was breached; attackers compromised more than 77 million personal accounts, costing Sony an estimated . They thought their general liability insurance policy covered them, but they were wrong. Sony took their insurers to court, where the courts confirmed Sony’s policy didn’t cover the damages of the cyber breach. It was a painful lesson for Sony, one they were determined to not repeat. When they were breached in 2014, they had a cyber insurance policy in place that experts predict will cover most, if not all, of their estimated in losses. Sony Pictures’ CEO confirmed the costs to recover from the latest breach “shouldn’t be anything that is disruptive to our budget.” Sony learned to assess the risk a cyber attack posed to their business and took steps to mitigate its potential impact. While your company may be smaller, and lower profile than Sony, the risk of a cyber attack is still very real and needs to be considered in your business context. The confirms that companies large and small, across all industries, in all geographies, are at risk of being targeted by a cyber attack; in fact, it is estimated that . The average total cost of a breach, according to the , is now at $3.79 million. They are expanding their efforts to put as many safeguards as possible in place. Beyond deploying breach prevention controls in the infrastructure or beefing up managed security services, one of the safeguards gaining popularity to help companies manage their risks is cyber insurance. found that 59 percent of organizations incorporate cyber insurance into their strategic plans to manage cyber risks, with the highest rate among large corporations. Cyber insurance is a sub-category within the general insurance industry, offering products and services designed to protect businesses from internet-based risks. Although forms of cyber insurance policies have been around for the past 10 years, market awareness has recently increased exponentially, in part because of the headline-grabbing cyber breaches that have hit almost every industry. In addition, demand for cyber insurance has been fueled by governments, which are becoming more actively involved in policing corporate responses to cyber attacks. There are now mandatory data breach notification laws in many countries; we are seeing organizations buy cyber insurance policies to help them cover the notification costs they will incur in the wake of a cybersecurity breach. In just a couple of years, the U.S. cyber insurance market has grown from about 10 insurers to 50 that provide stand-alone cyber insurance policies. In 2015, these providers generated $2.75 billion in premium revenues in the U.S. According to , this number is set to triple to $7.5 billion by 2020. Most cyber policies currently on the market offer a combination of two types of insurance coverage: Besides financial coverage, insurers also provide risk management and post-breach services, including loss-prevention measures and remediation tools. Unlike other types of insurance, there is no standard form for a cyber insurance policy on the market. Today, before insurance companies can offer a cyber policy, they must understand the prospective client’s risk profile. To determine the premium, they look at the scale of the business, the sensitive nature of the data it handles and stores and its overall security posture. It is difficult, however, to quantify an organization’s posture and risks. There is not a lot of credible historical data on losses and very little visibility into a prospective client’s ability to handle past and future cyber incidents. This has made insurers cautious, resulting in some insurers offering high premiums and low policy coverage or demanding clients incorporate new technologies before they can be insured. Even when purchased, there’s no way to really know if it’s enough — some believe the attack on Anthem, the second largest health insurer in the U.S., could end up costing them upwards of a billion dollars, which means their cyber insurance coverage, which , may not be enough to cover the final costs. With this backdrop it’s easy to see how hard it is for insurers to determine what the policy’s premium should be and for businesses to determine how much coverage they are going to need. Both need a way to more accurately assess risk and determine a company’s risk profile. The uncertainty in the cyber insurance market presents opportunities for risk assessment tools, which can help both insurers and insured companies determine a company’s risk posture. There are automatic tools that help with risk assessment and scoring that can bring a little more transparency to the insurance market. Companies in this space include , and . We believe we will be seeing more vendors enter this market, perhaps even more specialized startups operating in the cyber insurance industry exclusively. For example, , a U.S.-based startup, is already operating in this field, helping underwriters set premiums for cyber insurance policies based on a predictive cybersecurity risk analysis. We may also see insurance companies open cybersecurity departments and offer pre-breach and post-breach services, such as security architectural analysis, monitoring, incident response, forensics and more. If this happens, we will likely see insurance companies start hiring cybersecurity specialists and even “acqui-hiring” cybersecurity startups. This can bring interesting opportunities for the cybersecurity startup ecosystem as a whole, especially for those companies that offer products and services that can be incorporated into cyber insurance strategies. One thing is certain, the way we look at risk is evolving and cyber insurance has a role to play in a company’s overall risk mitigation strategies. The extent to which it will enable us to better assess and ultimately combat the rising threat landscape we are facing is still to be seen.
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Spotfund makes micro-donations easier with social-first mobile app
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Pouring a bucket of ice-cold water over your head, or liking or sharing a charity online might help raise awareness, but what campaigns that go comprehensively viral need is cold, hard cash. Launched this week, has created a site and that makes raising $1-$3 donations far easier than before. Donating to a cause you believe in is as simple as dragging $1, $2, or $3 into the fundraiser’s story. “Making an impact isn’t about the size of your wallet,” says Spotfund CEO and co-founder Sanford Kunkel. “It’s about the power of your social network.” The fundraising platform is different in that each of the fundraising efforts are based around stories – and once you’ve made your own donation, you can share it — and encourage your followers to do the same — through the usual suspects in terms of social media platforms. The app further gamifies the process, tracking an “Impact score,” summing up the amount of money you’ve donated, plus the cash raised from the campaigns you shared with your friends; nothing like a spot of competition to get people’s generous juices flowing “Spotfund is changing the perception of what it means to be civic minded,” Michael Marian, COO and co-founder of Spotfund explains, adding that the stories model helps potential donors connect and engage with the causes they believe in.
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iOS 10 beta finally lets you remove all those built-in apps
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Raise your hand if you have a folder on your iPhone or iPad filled with all the built-in apps from Apple that you never use but can’t delete. Oh, all of you? Then you’ll be interested to learn that will finally allow you to and reclaim the space they’ve occupied for years. And if you get the beta, you can do it today! There’s no special process. Just long-tap and wait for the icons to dance, then hit the X on any of the following apps: It’s not like deleting critical system files or anything; you just won’t be able to, say, sync with an Apple Watch if you don’t have the Watch app. And anything that relies on News, Stocks, or Weather to provide headlines or local conditions won’t work properly. Actually, you can’t remove News yet — it appears on the list but won’t be removable until a later version of iOS 10. All told, you’ll get back something under 150 megabytes if you were to delete all of them. Reinstalling is as easy as opening up the App Store, searching for whichever one you want and hitting the re-download button.
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Ubisoft is bringing Star Trek to VR this fall
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Well, this just rocketed to the top of our list of most eagerly anticipated VR games in warp speed. At its big pre-E3 press conference, Ubisoft unveiled , a new title set to arrive on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR this fall. The title was unveiled courtesy of a trailer featuring Trek vets Levar Burton, Jeri Ryan and Karl Urban playing the game together as members of the same crew, all of whom seemed visually impressed with the cooperative gameplay — particularly Burton, who also joined host Aisha Tyler to gush about the title. Gameplay involves up to four players, all filling a different role, from captain to helm, each with its own unique set of responsibilities in helping to complete the mission. Users can also play solo, with the computer filling in each position, save for captain. From the looks of it, it’s less full-on space adventure than it is a piloting simulation, involving a lot of onscreen control. And the graphics in the trailer aren’t exactly cutting edge. Even still, it will no doubt scratch a longstanding itch for those who have been waiting to command a Starfleet vessel since Leonard Nimoy first donned a pair of rubber ears. We’ll be demoing it for ourselves later this week – and will hopefully have one-one-hundredth as good a time as Lieutenant Commander La Forge.
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Branding Brand acquires conversational commerce company WaySay
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
E-commerce giant announced today that it acquired , a company specializing in customer engagement tech like marketing automation, in-app messaging and other technologies to help big brands engage and communicate with its customers. Examples of the assistance include offering shopping advice and post-transaction support. You may never have heard of Branding Brand; but chances are good you’ve used one of its products. The company is usually behind the scenes, in the shadows, powering the mobile platforms for more than 200 bigger brands, including , , and many others. The Waysay deal is Branding Brand’s first ever acquisition. It helps extend the company’s breadth of coverage and services it is able to offer to its rapidly growing list of customers.
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Apple’s latest foray into the enterprise involves deeper integration with Cisco
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Ron Miller
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Lost in the hubbub of today’s two hour-plus was an announcement of deep integration between Apple and Cisco in the upcoming release of iOS 10 — yes, you read it correctly, Cisco. When it comes to enterprise partnerships, IBM . More recently, SAP of its own, but last August . Apple has been working closely with Cisco engineers and interface designers ever since to help create an more intensive co-mingling between Cisco software and networks and iOS devices. Today, the announcement involved Cisco Spark, Cisco’s cloud collaboration platform and some advanced networking too. The iOS integration, which will be available in iOS 10 later this year, makes Spark’s Voice over IP services an integral part of the phone, giving users access to contacts, recents, and favorites. Users can also answer calls directly from the lock screen and ask Siri to make calls using contacts in their address book. The latter is part of the announced today. They also set it up so that iOS can find the fastest available Cisco wireless network to give users the “best available” connection, as well as “fast lane” capability, which, according , lets your IT department prioritize business-critical apps, giving them priority on a Cisco wireless network (sort of a private kind of internet throttling). Of course this all assumes your company is all Cisco all the time, and most companies probably won’t be. The good news is that the Spark integration will work regardless. All of these enterprise agreements have been designed to let both parties get something from the deal. The vendors get access to Apple’s keen design sense, while Apple can take advantage of the enterprise smarts of the partners and sell more Apple devices inside large companies, where Apple has traditionally had a tough time gaining traction.
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With changes to price-matching, Amazon and Walmart usher a new era of retail
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Richard Hui
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
and both recently changed their price matching policy, and the changes may be a harbinger of things to come in the retail world. Walmart would match a competitor’s price if a shopper showed an ad for the same product, while Amazon’s shift is in regards to a price drop for a recently purchased item. If the price of a product dropped within 7 days…the customer would receive the difference. The assumption is that third party applications that track refunds have made an impact on how Amazon adjusts its pricing algorithm and has resulted in lowering margins retroactively. As a former retailer who has matched pricing from Amazon, I was able to see Amazon dropping at cost or even below cost at times and offer some of the lowest prices around. As a former competitor to Amazon, I saw long ago the need to “get out of their way”…but that’s another story. While this policy made it hard on competitors to compete, lower prices helped Amazon build a loyal customer base and grow its business. The change in the refund policy addresses this “hole” third party applications exposed, enabling Amazon to continue their pricing fluidity without retroactive harm. In fact, Amazon has managed to build their business into one of the most searched upon properties on the web, rivaling even Google in that regard. Amazon’s growth in search has been well — pegging them at taking 44% of all direct searches for products, over search engines at 34% and all other retailers at 21%. With the billions spent on ads on properties like Google, Facebook et al., Amazon’s “control” in this space equates to billions in savings on advertising and a massive competitive advantage. The shift in the Walmart’s refund policy is also interesting. Walmart feels they no longer need to price match competitors, which signals that they feel they have a strong enough brand to support the elimination of the perceived “lowest price guarantee policy”. Over the years, Walmart has also managed to establish itself as a retailer with a powerful physical and online presence. With continued investments in logistics, which help support lower prices, they are in a unique position to compete with Amazon and have done a superb job transitioning from a traditional retailer in the face of technology changes this past decade. But shifting their refund policies in the face of competitors who maintain their “lowest price guarantee” goes against what consumers have come to expect from retailers for decades. The only conclusion we can make from this change is both Amazon and Walmart must feel comfortable enough with their brands to the point where they feel they won’t easily lose customers. In the evolution of the retail industry, this change signals a shift in what both retailers believe to be the threshold for consumer abandonment. Amazon and Walmart feel that their competitors have been weakened to the point where they are no longer a credible threat — and their customer base is loyal to a point where both retailers have established themselves in the marketplace as THE places to shop. For Walmart and Amazon, it is now time to begin increasing margins in a calculated way. And the adjustments in their refund policies are a small first step in that direction. With Amazon’s ancillary services like Prime, Echo and efficient logistics, they’ve got great complementary components that competitors can’t match. And Walmart’s physical presence, size, matching logistics and continued innovation they are the only real rival to Amazon. Any slight price “increases” will likely outweigh the benefits of shopping elsewhere. With the already strong perception of great prices, selection and service, consumers know they can get what they want, at a good price efficiently. Why should they take a chance on any other brand? In the grand scheme of things, it appears we have just reached the point of a new evolution in retail.
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Why Apple wants to be the smart home’s nerve center
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
On Monday, Apple announced that it would make an app called Home available to users soon, allowing them to connect and control all of their HomeKit-enabled smart home devices from their iPads, iPhones or even Watches. Per an earlier live from the event, the Home app will let users control a Fantasia-like orchestra of smart gadgets from one place, including everything from smart doorbells and locks, to thermostats, light bulbs, humidifiers and entertainment systems. And the app will let users engage Siri to tweak the settings on those devices, of course. But why is Apple intent on becoming a universal remote, or a nerve center, for the smart home? Frankly, consumers are not yet buying IoT devices and services with the fervor hoped for by consumer electronics and appliance brands. According to an of 28,000 tech consumers aged 14-55 in 28 different countries, which the consultancy published in January, about half of consumers have serious security concerns about smart home and other IoT devices, and a quarter of consumers have deliberately postponed buying an ioT device or subscribing to an ioT service. And despite the absolute flood of smart home devices into the market, only 20% of all European households and 35% of all North American households are using these now, according to , an industry research firm in Gothenburg, Sweden. So far, the most commonly used smart home devices are: internet-connected and smartphone controllable thermostats, security monitors, audio and entertainment systems, cameras and lightbulbs. Will smart, , or be next? Or are we heading more in the direction of and internet-connected ? It’s hard to say where the hits and flops will be. Positioning the Home app for end users at the center of this universe can keep Apple essentially involved in every rising trend within the smart home market, no matter where Tim Cook and company place bets on building hardware. And Home, if it measures up to Apple’s best user experiences, will help keep Apple competitive with , and , in part by keeping end-users enthralled with the iOS ecosystem Even if developers see huge market opportunity in the Android or other platforms, if a good chunk of consumers want Home-controllable hardware, they’ll find reasons to master design for iOS. Finally, Home has the potential to bring Apple a front row view of what’s working– and not– in the smart home. The Home app would ostensibly know which smart home devices users are accessing and adjusting the most, and how.
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Apple launches Swift Playgrounds for iPad to teach kids to code
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Apple today announced , a new project that aims to teach kids to code in Swift. When you first open it, Swift Playgrounds presents you with a number of basic coding lessons, as well as challenges. The interface looks somewhat akin to Codecademy, but it’s far more graphical and playful, which makes sense, given that the target audience is kids. Most of the projects seem to involve games and fun little animations to keep kids motivated. To make coding on the iPad a bit easier, Apple is using a special keyboard with a number of shortcuts and other features that will make it easier to enter code. With Swift, Apple introduced a new programming language (which is now open source) and hence needs to get people to learn it. And the earlier they get comfortable with Swift, the better for Apple. Swift Playground clearly isn’t meant for experienced programmers who want to learn Swift but instead is meant for kids who want to learn some of the basics of coding. These kinds of lesson-based services can provide some useful introductions to a language, but in the end, a project-based approach typically works far better than working your way through lessons. , by the way, was a project that also aimed to teach kids to code. It was started by Stefan Mischook back in 2014 when Apple first announced Swift. As far as I can see, the two projects are not related, but it is interesting that Apple essentially used the same name as this project. The developer preview of Swift Playgrounds is launching today, and the final version will ship with iOS 10 in the fall. The app will be available for free.
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Apple launches iMessage Apps so third-party devs can join your convos
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Jordan Crook
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
At today’s , Apple swung open the gates for developers. Not only has the company opened up , but it’s also letting third-party devs into sacred space: messages. With iMessage Apps, users can simply open up an app drawer from right within the Messages app to interact with others (and apps) at the same time. This ranges from silly sticker apps like Mickey Mouse gifs to more sophisticated integrations, like paying friends through Messages with Square Pay or collaboratively ordering food from DoorDash. iMessage Apps are the biggest addition to Messages in iOS 10, but certainly isn’t the only new thing to look for. For one, users can now send each other rich links, with music and videos playing directly within the conversation. Messages now offers emojification, letting users spot words that come with an accompanying emoji and translate those real words to emojis with a single tap. [gallery ids="1336174,1336173,1336170,1336167,1336166,1336162,1336159,1336151,1336139,1336144"] Users can also use different bubble animations for their messages, adding a gentle touch to the delivery of their message or adding a ‘pow!’ to the message. In fact, there is an “invisible ink” option that you can use for both text and photos that hides the message until the recipient swipes their finger across it to reveal the content (not unlike Confide). These animations are not just for the chat bubbles, but can also go full-screen, with options for balloons, confetti and more. Plus, users can add Slack-like reactions to a single message, as well as Digital Touch (the same drawing feature that has been available on the Apple Watch since launch). Apple also announced upgrades to QuickType. With iOS 10, the keyboard will understand when a friend asks for someone’s contact info and proactively serves up options to send them. The keyboard can understand when someone asks where you are and proactively let you send your location on a map. With all these upgrades to the Messages app, our conversations will likely look very different after the launch of iOS 10.
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Apple unbundles its native apps like Mail, Maps, Music and more, puts them in the App Store
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Sarah Perez
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Apple today has made a big change to its suite of native applications for iOS devices, like Mail, Stocks, Compass, Calculator, Watch, Weather and others: . What that means for end users of iOS devices is that the majority of the stock apps that come pre-installed can be removed. This puts users in more control of their devices. Yes: . Previously, Apple’s apps were only updated when the company issued an iOS update. That slowed Apple’s ability to add new features, fix bugs, address security issues, or make other changes. This has been a massive headache for Apple’s internal development teams. However, not all of Apple’s apps have been subject to this limitation. The company already made many of its apps available as standalone downloads, including iTunes U, iMovie, the Apple Store app, and those in the iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, Numbers.) Now it’s adding the following to that list with the following: Podcasts, Maps, Compass, Tips, Calculator, Watch, Voice Memos, Contacts, Stocks, Weather, iCloud Drive, Calendar, Mail, Music, Reminders, Videos, FaceTime, Notes, Find My iPhone, Find My Friends, Music, and its new Home app. By making these apps available in the App Store, Apple could begin to release updates to the apps at a faster pace, if it chose to do so. However, we understand from sources familiar with the matter that the main reason Apple decided to unbundle apps is so users could delete apps from their devices. Apple at this time doesn’t have plans to update its apps at a faster pace. Apple quietly these apps to its iTunes website on Monday. spotted in iTunes thanks to a from Owen Williams, leading to speculation that Apple’s other apps will be made available through the App Store, as well. As it turned out, they . This news was not announced during the WWDC keynote on Monday morning, nor in . We’ll know more after the iOS 10 beta is installed. : After installing iOS 10’s first beta build, we found that users are able to remove Maps, Videos, Watch, Reminders, Contacts, Weather, Podcasts, FaceTime, Calculator, iCloud Drive, Voice Memos, Tips, Mail, Compass, Stocks, Calendar, Music, and Find Friends. Apps that remain include Health, Activity, Clock (why???), News, Find iPhone, Messages, Photos, Wallet, Phone, Camera, Safari and Settings. in this first beta. Not all the apps have been published to iTunes, but shows which will be available on the App Store in the future.
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Apple Music’s redesign makes it feel like a familiar iPod
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 |
Today Apple showed off a brand-new version of Apple music, which the company said was built “from the ground up” with simplicity in mind. The company also boasted that the service now has 15 million paid subscribers. While most are happy with the content provided by Apple Music, the confusing UI has always been a sore spot for the service, something today’s update hopes to fix. The new update is bright and simplistic, getting rid of the clutter found in the last version, something that should make it much more delightful to use. Instead of shoving a million songs in your face, the new version steps into the background, letting you actually interact with your music. The redesign actually feels like the old iPad app – simple and inviting. In an effort to make things less confusing, the first screen that shows when you open Apple Music is your library. This library tab will be broken up into two sections – music locally stored on your phone, and streaming tracks. Currently, Apple Music opens to the “For You” tab, which makes it hard to find the music you actually want to listen to. The “For You” tab will remain, but is now broken up into Discover, Recently Played, and a new daily curated playlist. One fun feature – the app will now automatically fetch lyrics for each song you are listening to so you can sing along. [gallery ids="1336076,1336080,1336072,1336081,1336082"]
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MAUs be damned: Kik proposes new user engagement metrics for chat apps
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Measuring the success of your app via the number of monthly active users is dubious at best. The metric may have become the standard but, when it comes to daily use apps such as messaging services or social networks, the data point becomes all the less illustrative. humans are social beings and we generally communicate with friends, family and loved ones on a daily basis. If I’m just opening your chat app once a month or once a week, you don’t have the right to label me an “active” user. Doing so is lazy at best or deliberately misleading at worst. These habits take time to shift, of course. To date, the industry has stuck with its fuzzy data point: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and even Snapchat (internal data only) are among the many that convey their traction by listing how many people have opened their app at least one time per month. They also track messages sent and received (which are crucially not the same due to groups), messaging frequency and other large numbers that don’t really provide much context into how apps are actually being used. Even time spent inside an app is misleading considering chat apps are typically used alongside other apps as users multitask on the device. One chat app firm that trying to change the status quo is Kik. The Canada-based company, which was recently , has adopted a more qualitative approach to measuring engagement. Kik, which only provides total registered user numbers ( ), is squarely focused on the U.S. youth market — it claims that 40 percent of U.S. teens use its iOS or Android app. With a focus on a particular group not a mass audience, it is perhaps unsurprisingly that it is pushing this kind of measurement. “As we have seen chat behaviors evolve, at Kik we’ve become less interested in how many messages are exchanged or how many times an app is opened, and more interested in how people engage in chatting. Put more simply: we care more about attention than app taps,” Kik CEO Ted Livingston (pictured above) . Within this measurement structure, Kik put out a few interesting snippets about its young userbase: To really benefit from these new metrics it would be useful if Kik did share common industry metrics — that would help emphasize the relevancy of its new metrics — but don’t expect that to happen any time soon… well, actually, ever. “Existing metrics tend to favor feed-based consumption rather than chat,” , Kik’s head of data, told TechCrunch in an interview. “Everyone can make up their own rules for [measuring monthly active users] — we could’ve gone down that route but didn’t. The U.S. teen market is not 600 million users in size so we prefer to focus on engagement.” Of course, going public with MAUs would also make Kik look a lot smaller than the competition. Facebook Messenger and Facebook-owned WhatsApp both claim over one billion active users, Line has 212 million, WeChat has over 697 million, and Snapchat has — — over 100 million daily users. Nonetheless, as someone who had to deal with companies peddling bullsh*t user data for far too long, I applaud the qualitative focus. Sadly, I doubt others in the industry will follow Kik’s lead.
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Deleting Apple’s pre-installed apps in iOS 10 doesn’t actually ‘delete’ them
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
One of the most talked about features in Apple’s upcoming iOS 10 is on your iPhone or iPad. But it turns out that deleting the apps doesn’t delete them. That’s according to Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, who confirmed the facts at hosted by Federighi, who was joined by colleague Phil Schiller, explained that deleting the apps does remove them from the home screen and trash associated user data but, because these pre-loaded services are baked into iOS, the application binary remains present. The apps are part of the binary for security signing reasons and that structuring also explains why built-in apps only receive feature updates when iOS itself is updated. Apple's Federighi clarifies that you're not actually deleting default apps when you delete them. Just removing hooks, user data etc. — Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) I'd heard this but hadn't confirmed. It's because they're part of apples signed binary. Re "downloading" them just adds associations back. — Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) That’s a detail that is very much under the hood, and almost all users who do delete the apps won’t know any different. Those who have a change of heart and want to ‘reinstall’ Apple apps can find them in the App Store after they were . Reminder: these are the apps that can be removed in iOS 10, although you’ll have to wait for the new software to get a public release before you can remove that folder of ‘Apple junk’ apps. Initially, iOS 10 is available for those with an Apple Developer account only.
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Samsung Pay launches in Australia to take on “tap-and-go” credit cards
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Samsung Pay has expanded its reach in the Asia-Pacific region with yet another country launch. This time , where Samsung smartphone owners can now use the service. Its launch Down Under–where tap-and-go credit cards are already popular–comes the day before . The service is already available in South Korea, the United States, China, and Spain. In a press release, Samsung Pay global vice president Elle Kim said, “In the first six months of launching in Korea and in the U.S., Samsung Pay has surpassed more than five million registered users and today has processed more than $1 billion of transactions in South Korea alone. This success indicates a tremendous opportunity in Australia, a market where contactless payments are already in strong demand.” According to a May 2015 survey by research company RF Intelligence Group, 53 percent of Australians . Mobile payment providers are eager to tap into the market, where Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Square are already available. For Square, its Australian launch in March 2016 . Just because contactless payments are already popular in Australia, however, does not mean mobile payment apps will have an easy time. Many consumers are already , so Samsung Pay and its competitors may have a hard time convincing new users to sign on. In Australia, Samsung Pay will be available first to customers of American Express and Citibank. As in other markets, the service is compatible with smartphones in the Galaxy S6 and S7 series.
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Facebook’s suicide prevention tools will now be available to all users
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Catherine Shu
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
has updated its suicide prevention tools and is now making them available worldwide. The tools, which let people flag posts from friends who may be at risk for self-harm or suicide, were previously available only for some English-language users. Other users could , but the new tools make the process quicker and less complicated. Users everywhere will soon be able to flag a friend’s post from a drop-down menu if they are worried about self-harm or suicide. Facebook gives them several options. For example, a list of resources, including numbers for suicide prevention organizations, can be shared anonymously, or a message of support can be sent (Facebook suggests wording). The post may also be reviewed by Facebook’s global community operations team, which may then “reach out to this person with information that might be helpful to them,” . If someone is at immediate risk of hurting themselves, however, Facebook warns that police should be contacted. In , Facebook said its suicide prevention resources will be available in all languages supported by the platform. The company’s global head of safety Antigone Davis and researcher Jennifer Guadagno wrote that the tools were “developed in collaboration with mental health organizations and with input from people who have personal experience with self-injury and suicide.” The tools were first made available to some users in the United States . Facebook said it will continue to partner with suicide prevention and mental health organizations in different countries. Facebook’s suicide prevention tools may help save lives—or at least raise awareness of an important issue. means that it has become public health crisis in many countries. In the U.S., , particularly among men of all ages and women aged 45 to 64. The company, however, has to balance suicide prevention with the privacy concerns of its —especially since . Facebook itself for conducting psychological experiments on users. In fall 2014, United Kingdom charity Samaritans , which let users monitor their friends’ Twitter feeds for signs of depression, just one week after its launch, following concerns about privacy and its potential misuse by online bullies. TechCrunch has contacted Facebook for comment on how it will balance helping people with respecting their privacy.
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Crunch Report | New Legend of Zelda Announced
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Tito Hamze, Joe Zolnoski
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Ninja Dude vs Zombies game review
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Felicia Shivakumar
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Ninja Dude vs Zombies is an endless tap’n’slash arcade. You are a brave ninja trapped on a tower surrounded by hordes of bloody zombies. So of course, as with all things zombie related, the only way to survive is to kill those pesky zombies, who somehow have learned to climb the sides of your crumbling tower. The controls are simple. Just tap to play. Your weapon at first is a ninja star, which you tap to throw to the right or left. You slowly start racking up your multi-tap combos, earning ninja cred and unlocking new characters as you earn money. There are more than one hundred cute ninja heroes each with their own features and settings. Then, there’s the whole deathline thing. Your weapon is only effective in short range, which is marked by a line across your tower. Killing zombies above this line keeps your tower afloat. I never really had issues with my tower sinking. At the rate the zombies come at you, you are way less likely to become a zombie snack than crash to your doom. But, the moving tower does add some dynamics to the game. Now let’s talk zombies, there are a few different types: your basic climbing zombie, your money zombies which are orange, some supped up fuzzy zombies, and then there are these green guys jump around unexpectedly making them harder to hit. Overall, I found the game to be fun to play. The music is as silly as the concept and it’s mindless enough to play for a few rounds on the go or when you just want a quick break. Ninja Dude vs Zombies, which is currently a top 50 Action Game on iTunes, is a free download on .
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Facebook content and brand strategies that win in a silent autoplay world
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Zane Vella
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
A new reports the slightly astonishing statistic that fully 85 percent of videos are played with the audio turned off. The business of native video is relatively new, with the company switching on its own platform only about 18 months ago. Not incidentally, the company also began advantaging native video in the News Feed over posts with outbound links to YouTube and other sites. And recently, the company further enhanced its video focus, rolling out a series of initiatives that should vastly increase the amount of on the site. So it’s safe to say this gigantic video platform is still substantially Under Construction, as creators evolve best practices for success on . As brands and creators focus on what works with , it’s insightful to see what is happening with all those videos. Development of this playbook is similar to what happened over the past decade with YouTube as its ecosystem built out. There, creators learned to use YouTube Cards to overlay text to entice viewers, as well as extensive annotations that helped drive views through YouTube’s powerful search and suggestion capabilities. Now creators are adapting their playbook for demands of the SVOD platform YouTube Red, YouTube Gaming and YouTube’s live-streaming and virtual reality offerings. And creators and brands are adapting to similarly, modifying their approach to the demands of this new platform. Consider that each video autoplays for three seconds (that’s an official “view,” even), allowing a brief chance to convey why a viewer should watch longer. And the News Feed algorithm then pushes popular and relevant video even higher in the stream if the creator can effectively get people to watch. has so far resisted pre-roll advertising (on its own site, anyway), which it deems “interruptive” to viewers. But creators and brands both should consider those first three seconds as their own version of pre-roll, a chance to at least silently tease key points and pull in viewers for the rest of the video. This means smart video publishers are packing that brief window of opportunity with more onscreen captions, interesting titles, brand messages and eye-catching imagery. I love seeing how brands and creators are adapting to this new platform. And the tricks learned here can help on several other big platforms, too. Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and many standalone websites video silently until a viewer clicks the audio button. It’s an opportunity to use visuals to tell a story, connect with audiences and engage them willingly for a longer conversation. Just as importantly, these findings once again force brands and publishers to think about what counts as a view on and on other video-playback platforms. Know what you’re getting from each platform, and know how you’re telling your story in a way that’s truly native to that platform. As video, especially audio-free , becomes increasingly prominent across and elsewhere, taking advantage of the treatment can be the key to success.
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Apple’s iOS 10 finally, truly begins the mobile messaging war
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John Koetsier
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Yesterday will be remembered as the day that the . In the immense game of thrones that mobile became , the first war among technology giants was for mobile devices. The second was mobile platforms: iOS and Android. The third mobile tech war will be fought over messaging. And it will be fought everywhere. WeChat has done amazing things in China. Facebook’s Messenger and its “10,000 bot developers” are on the cusp of doing similar things everywhere else. But only last month did we see a response from the most powerful mobile platform on the planet: Google. And only yesterday are we seeing Apple’s initial unveiling of its own strategic alignment on this new battleground. The messaging war is a different kind of war. Mobile’s first war was about who can profit from selling the most devices. Apple won that war, capturing more than 90% of the profits. The second was about who can build the most complete and powerful platform, from device to operating system to apps to what I call “smart matter” compatibility: interoperability with TVs and cars and homes and appliances and tools and toys. Arguably, Google won that war, capturing 70% of the users. But the third mobile conflict will be different. Most obviously, it’s taking place at yet another abstraction layer … not device, not OS-specific, not just a mobile app, but a platform that includes apps, includes other devices, and lives on multiple platforms. Additionally, instead of a fight for sales of devices or installs of apps — both of which remain important, of course, as all three wars continue to be fought simultaneously — the messaging battle is a struggle over time, attention, connections, and payments. Time and attention we all know: the web and apps are all about both. But connections and payments are a little different. Connections seems obvious for messaging apps: you are, after all, messaging your friends and family. But as WeChat has demonstrated and Facebook is drooling all over, messaging is also about connections with retailers and brands and businesses. Monetizing your connections with your friends might lead to $100 annual value for Facebook — the company’s fiscal 2015 average revenue per user in the U.S. and Canada is $50/year. Monetizing your connections to all the companies you eat with, dress with, play with, heal with, travel with, and live with is probably worth ten times more. Add payments to the puzzle — mcommerce, mpayments — and there’s a very, very, very attractive pile of loot waiting for any company that achieves WeChat status in North America and Europe. Google sees this, of course, and Allo is its most recent response to the messaging wars. However, Allo is a from-the-ground-up construction project. Google has not jumped right into the deep end by adding features to an existing product that might have some scale. Allo is only one of four messaging apps Google offers, with Duo, Hangouts, and Google Messenger. And given antitrust concern in Europe, Google could have real challenges making Allo a default app in the standard Android stack. Interestingly, where Allo and Facebook Messenger are apps that are built natively on the internet and when used on mobile require data connectivity, Apple’s approach has been and continues to be to work with existing SMS technology and supplement it with a data layer. That’s smart Art of War, buying Apple continued universal compatibility at a low level, and not requiring either the global scale of a Google or the near-universal social clout of a Facebook, neither of which Apple can replicate. On top of that, Apple can layer data, device, and platform-level benefits, such as sharing songs, sharing locations, and, thanks to a more open API, ordering food or ordering a car. All of which are just the beginning, of course. Right now both Apple and Google are playing catch-up. While Facebook is the clear leader in capturing users, with several billion-user-scale platforms, including Messenger and WhatsApp, both Google and Apple have significant advantages. Google’s edge is its strong machine learning, artificial intelligence, and personal assistant technology in the form of Hey Google. Apple’s advantage is its device integration and design chops, and a unmatched war chest with which to continue buying AI companies and any other missing pieces. The winner(s) of this war will using AI, deep learning, bots, integrations with third-party apps and platforms, and connections to companies to deliver richer, more powerful experiences for users. And will profit handsomely as a result.
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Apple will require HTTPS connections for iOS apps by the end of 2016
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
During a security presentation at Apple’s , the company revealed the deadline for all apps in its App Store to switch on an important security feature called App Transport Security — January 1, 2017. “Today, I’m proud to say that at the end of 2016, App Transport Security is becoming a requirement for App Store apps,” Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture, Ivan Krstic, said during a WWDC presentation. “This is going to provide a great deal of real security for our users and the communications that your apps have over the network.” App Transport Security, or ATS, is a feature that Apple debuted in iOS 9. When ATS is enabled, it forces an app to connect to web services over an HTTPS connection rather than HTTP, which keeps user data secure while in transit by encrypting it. The “S” in HTTPS helpfully stands for secure and you’ll often see it appear in your browser when logging into your banking or email accounts. But mobile apps often aren’t as transparent with users about the security of their web connections, and it can be hard to tell whether an app is connecting via HTTP or HTTPS. Enter ATS, which is enabled by default for iOS 9. However, developers can still switch ATS off and allow their apps to send data over an HTTP connection — until the end of this year, that is. (For technical crowd: ATS requires TLS v 1.2, with exceptions for already encrypted bulk data, like media streaming.) At the end of 2016, Apple will make ATS mandatory for all developers who hope to submit their apps to the App Store. App developers who have been when the hammer would drop on HTTP can rest a little easier now that they have a clear deadline, and users can relax with the knowledge that secure connections will be forced in all of the apps on their iPhones and iPads. In requiring developers to use HTTPS, Apple is joining a larger movement to secure data as it travels online. While the secure protocol is common on login pages, many websites still use plain old HTTP for most of their connections. That’s slowly changing as many sites make the arduous transition to HTTPS (Wired has been particularly good at ).
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Bed Bath & Beyond acquires One Kings Lane for undisclosed sum
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Katie Roof
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Bed Bath & Beyond is a public company, so that means it needs to announce acquisition prices if the purchase is considered material. That could be up to about 15% of the company’s $6.5 billion market cap. “We are excited to be part of the Bed Bath & Beyond family,” said Dinesh Lathi, Chief Executive Officer of One Kings Lane, in a statement. “This is a tremendous opportunity for our customers, as well as our employees and business partners, to benefit from additional support and resources and gain exposure to new customers. We look forward to being able to continue to differentiate our product offerings and refine our point of view to further delight our current and future customers.”
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Twitter tunes up SoundCloud with a fresh investment
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Jonathan Shieber
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
has invested in the audio streaming company , according to multiple reports. The investment, , unites the two companies roughly two years after a botched buyout would have joined SoundCloud’s audio armory to Twitter’s social media platform. Both companies have fallen on hard times, with Wall Street punishing Twitter’s lackluster growth and SoundCloud saying earlier in the year that it needed the cash infusion to stay alive. According , Twitter’s venture arm made a $70 million investment at a $700 million valuation. SoundCloud did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication, but sent the following statement. “We can confirm that Twitter has made an investment in SoundCloud. Both companies facilitate and inspire contemporary culture to happen in real time while reaching millions of people around the world. This investment will enable SoundCloud to remain focused on building value for creators and listeners alike, and to continue the global rollout of many company initiatives such as our recently launched subscription service, SoundCloud Go. The audio streaming company has been hard at work signing licensing deals with music labels as it tries to drum up interest in its $9.99 monthly subscription service. For many emerging artists, SoundCloud has become a popular vehicle for self-promotion, but the company has struggled to turn that popularity into cash. Meanwhile, Twitter, which may be taking a beating on Wall Street hasn’t been shy about spending cash through its relatively new . The company’s corporate investment arm has backed the android-based operating system developer Cyanogen; VenueNext, which is angling to improve the event experience for the millennial set, and Swirl, which provides in-store marketing tools.
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Crunchyroll-owner Ellation announces Vrv, a multi-channel, streaming video service
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Digital media company is announcing a big push into streaming video with , which will offer a variety of channels aimed at gamers and other geeks. Ellation is best known as the parent company of anime service Crunchryoll. Otter Media, the joint venture from Chernin Group and AT&T, in the company back in 2013 and last year. Ellation CEO Tom Pickett (who was previously vice president of content at YouTube) said that one of the main reasons for raising the funding was to launch Vrv. That won’t happen until later this year, but the company is unveiling the service with Microsoft today at the E3 gaming conference — Vrv will be available on the Xbox One (plus other, yet-to-be-announced devices) at launch. Much of this information leaked early through , which positioned Vrv as a competitor to Amazon’s subscription video offerings. “We don’t view ourselves as going head-to-head with Amazon,” Pickett told me. “We’re taking a different approach because we’re focusing on a particular audience segment … While most of the big, broad platforms are really focused on delivering video in a more one-dimensional experience, we’re trying to expand beyond the video in different ways to super serve that audience.” In other words, instead of trying to create a video subscription that serves everyone, Vrv is trying to create something more targeted, with social features that allow viewers to feel more involved and part of a community. Who is that audience? Pickett said that when Ellation surveyed its viewers, it found that the most common identifier was “gamer”, and he described Vrv as trying to serve “this broader gamer ecosytem.” At the same time, he suggested that there’s “a whole cluster of different content categories” that could be relevant to them. Crunchyroll (which has more than 750,000 paying subscribers) will be the “anchor” for the new service, with other channels including Rooster Teeth, Seeso, Nerdist Alpha and Geek & Sundry Alpha. Many of these partners already have a big presence on YouTube, but Pickett said Vrv gives them an opportunity to experiment with a premium, subscription offering (including, but not limited to, Vrv-exclusive content). Viewers will be able to watch free, ad-supported videos on each channel. Then if they want full, ad-free access, they can buy subscriptions to different channels individually, at prices set by each partner. If you’re worried that those a la carte subscriptions could add up, Ellation is also working to create what Picket called “a core bundle” of channels that will be available for “a single price point that will be very competitive.”
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Andy Rubin explains his $300M bet on the future of hardware
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Andy Rubin, the creator of Android — arguably the widest distributed operating system in the world — left Google a few years back to start a hardware incubator with a $300 million fund called Playground. Since then, he’s been pretty busy trying to envision the future of hardware. And that doesn’t just include robotics. At the Bloomberg technology conference he showed off two pieces of hardware: a transponder for drones and a backpack that basically provides haptic feedback alongside music. Both of them represent some kind of new, novel way that the real world can interact with the internet and data — and that’s where Rubin thinks the next big bets in technology should happen. “I think the new opportunity is to bring that data from offline sources, not the cloud,” Rubin said at the Bloomberg technology conference. “That’s where robotics comes in. Robots are walking, mobile sensors that can sense their environment, interact, and learn from those interactions. In computer science we call that sense, plan, act. The act part, from a historical perspective, if you were doing stuff in the cloud you were trapped in the cloud. If you can’t interact with the real world you’re stuck in a jar. The robotics is the act part, once you sense and plan you can send it back into the real world.” At Playground, Rubin and his team — a bench of around 15 engineers that are experts in fields like computer science and mechanical engineering — are incubating around 15 companies, Rubin said. The way it works is that companies that are basically envisioning new ways of how computing can interact with the real world come up, they’re given the resources — and financing — figure it out and then head off into the real world. The applications of what Rubin and his team are working on aren’t necessarily in hardware. Rubin mentioned that he’s also incubating a quantum computing company that he wouldn’t name. But even then that is a play on rethinking the underlying architecture behind computing that will figure out how to take AI applications to a new level — while still using the standard manufacturing processes, he said. “When the opportunity comes, this is like aligning the stars,” Rubin said. When everything is perfectly aligned boom, you should start it. Speaking of quantum computing: While he spent a lot of time talking about how AI could become a new foundational layer of the internet, he said that we shouldn’t be worried about AI turning around and taking over the world. At least, not yet. The ability to do high-level pattern matching at an extremely efficient level is what AI is good at, but it’s not good enough to apply expertise in one domain to other domains, he said. “What AI is good at is pattern matching, that’s what quantum computing is good at,” Rubin said. “Those two things combined in hundreds of years might get us to a point of this conundrum of who is the master and who is the servant. If you think just about quantum computing without AI and how that type of architecture could eliminate all known forms of encryption, you have different problems. You shouldn’t worry about Skynet coming online, you should worry about what does it mean to compute at the magnitude of [quantum computing].” Rubin and Playground aren’t just making bets on inbound interest, or companies that are already out there, either. He said that there are plenty of opportunities to “hatch” new companies within the company using its resources of engineers. And he — the founder of Android — said he still isn’t quite done with the smartphone space. “Remember, the thing that really keeps me going and gets me awake is when a new product is created that many people use,” Rubin said. “One thing playground does well is we have the bench of engineers, a lot of capital to invest, we act as a traditional Venture Capital firm. We wait for people to come through the door, like the quantum computing company, and say yes we’ll invest in that. Every now and then we’ll do our pattern matching. We’ll notice that someone isn’t walking in the door. So we the notion of hatching companies out of Playground using the resources that are the bench of engineers, funding it and setting it free. I do have one actively being hatched in the mobile space.”
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Uber in talks to close up to $2 billion in leveraged loans
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Rumors from the that Uber was in the process of finalizing terms for a $1-2 billion leveraged loan began spreading just after noon PST. This comes just two weeks after the company closed a $3.5 billion equity round from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. If the deal goes through, it would mean the company has added $5.5 billion to it coffers in the amount of time it takes a typical startup to initiate discussion of a funding round. One benefit of Uber raising money as debt rather than equity is that it can avoid additional dilution for its employees. The company has raised $12.51 billion in equity financing since 2009. The company has also previously brought in close to $2 billion in debt financing from what is effectively a Wall Street credit line. This is the first time Uber is considering higher risk leveraged loans. Leveraged loans typically have higher interest rates than traditional debt financing. It is also common for such loans to have variable rate interest. According to the Wall Street Journal, Uber is looking to secure a 4-4.5 percent yield. Uber is and is going to need a lot of capital to accomplish that. The company has a notoriously high burn rate despite reports that company is profitable in the North America.
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Net neutrality withstands legal challenge
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Net neutrality won yet another legal victory today when a federal appeals court upheld Federal Communications Commission rules that prohibit data throttling online. But the fight for net neutrality isn’t over yet — representatives from service providers like AT&T have already suggested that they’ll appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. Net neutrality has pitted the FCC and civil society groups against internet service providers, with the former arguing that data throttling must be prevented and the latter claiming that the FCC’s rules are choking the development of network infrastructure. Net neutrality has also split supporters and opponents along party lines — President Barack Obama and other Democrats have backed net neutrality while Republicans have opposed it. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals supported the FCC’s rules in a 2-1 vote, reports. After a decade of debate & legal battles, today’s ruling affirms ’s ability to enforce the strongest possible internet protections. — Tom Wheeler (@TomWheelerFCC) Today’s ruling will ensure the internet remains open, now and in the future for both fixed and mobile. — Tom Wheeler (@TomWheelerFCC) Wheeler has championed the cause of net neutrality at the FCC. Several senators also celebrated the victory, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said the ruling would “help ensure we don’t turn over our democracy to the highest bidder.” “Today’s ruling is the biggest win in our fight for the open internet,” Sen. Ron Wyden said in a statement. “It’s a win for Americans, for free speech and education, and for our start-ups and economy. This win comes as the result of years of hard work and advocacy, and the FCC listening to the constant drumbeat of millions of Americans demanding the strongest net neutrality rules ever.” AT&T told Politico that it would continue to fight the decision, taking its case before the Supreme Court if necessary.
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Expect a lot more M&A, says Marc Andreessen
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen spoke at the Bloomberg Technology conference this afternoon, and he said he expects far more M&A than the tech industry has seen in recent years. The conversation stemmed in large part from questions about LinkedIn’s announced acquisition by Microsoft, which disclosed yesterday that it is paying for the business networking platform. Asked his opinion about the deal, Andreessen — who was interrupted by the clang of a falling tray (“I hope that was not a symbolic sound effect,” he joked) — said the deal “eliminates the guesswork about how much [a company is] worth when someone pays $26 billion in cash ” for it. But he also said that, on a higher level, it conveys something about the industry right now. “We see more M&A happening in the pipeline – meaning companies in consideration or negotiation — than in the last four years.” There are a few reasons for it, he suggested, saying that in recent years, a lot of “public companies sat back and watched the drama play out in the Valley . . . and the constant drumbeat of ‘bubble, bubble, bubble.'” Now, with many private company valuations down from their peaks last year, along with public companies that “now have to go shopping to fill in gaps in their portfolio,” Andreessen said to expect a “run of M&A the rest of this year and next year.” The buyers won’t necessarily be Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, he noted. “A lot more nontraditional buyers — Fortune 500 companies outside [of tech are] going shopping, [including] the car industry, other consumer products companies, clothing companies.” (Andreessen didn’t say so, but also plainly see an opportunity to do some shopping right now.) In fact, Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is trying to prep its portfolio companies for an exit by establishing what he described as an IPO preparedness team that’s working with founders on what’s required to go public, from accounting and legal, to building a governance team, to selecting the right CFO. Andreessen said the firm is doing this in part because it thinks the “pendulum has swung too far” in the direction of companies not wanting to IPO. But he also suggested that the coaching is whipping the startups that “take it seriously” into more attractive acquisition candidates, too. Before the talk wrapped up, Andreessen was asked whether he thought Twitter was made more or less attractive as an acquisition candidate in the wake of LinkedIn’s purchase. (Though fairly far apart from Twitter, some have focused on LinkedIn’s social network aspects as a reason for Microsoft to buy the company, while others have focused on the acquisition as a way for Microsoft to boost its Office software suites.) Andreessen said the New York view is probably “yes” — Twitter is now more likely to be acquired — while in Palo Alto, it’s “more the opposite” view. He quickly added that the “positive is there are big companies thinking about it and Twitter is thinking about it.” Twitter can “survive” “just fine” on its own, said Andreessen. But he admitted that he doesn’t know what will happen next in terms of its product offerings. While the world has seen “glimmers” of new things that Twitter is working on, “I’m not on the inside any more,” he noted. Though an early investor in Twitter, he hasn’t been privy to any privileged information since he joined the board of Facebook in 2008. “For some reason, they don’t want me in the room anymore,” he said to laughs.
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Scala is the new golden child
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Chris McKinlay
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Tooling in the data science community evolves quickly, and picking the right tool for a job — not to mention a career — can often be divisive. Which tools should you try to master? What is the proper balance between difficulty, relevance and potential? If it’s not already, deserves a place at or near the top of your to-learn list — something I saw definitive evidence of last fall when I was coming off a post-doc position and considering leaving academia for the tech industry. At the beginning of my job search, I decided to cast my net wide and speak with a large number of companies before making any kind of career decision. My original idea was to work my way through the MIT Technology Review’s list of the of 2015 and apply for data scientist positions at each one. I ended up speaking with 54 companies and doing technical interviews with 24 of them. The tech screenings I did generally lasted an hour and involved two to four coding problems, which I implemented in a while the interviewer watched. Probability and statistics problems were either reserved for the on-site interview or dispensed with entirely (though I may have gotten a pass on this because I have a PhD). With a few exceptions, Python was clearly frowned upon. Of course, no one ever explicitly told me I couldn’t use Python to solve a problem. The coding environments always had a Python interpreter, but the interviewers would usually suggest that I use “a compiled language” (read: Java) and they would pose data structure problems that are hard to solve in Python. For example, one problem I saw a lot was: This is a classic heap problem. However, Python doesn’t have a proper collections library, so to solve it I would try to import a specialized module like heapq, which usually wasn’t included in the interview environments. This made for an awkward situation. Even when I definitively solved a problem, the feedback was lukewarm. The effect was notable enough that after my first week, I decided to try doing my tech screens in Scala. I did this contrary to the advice of several friends, who suggested that I suck it up and use Java. I’d been playing around with a Scala side project ( ) and I strongly prefer Scala to Java, especially in a live coding context. I figured that since I wasn’t trying to get a job immediately, I could afford to disqualify myself a few times. What I found surprised me. First, the interviewers actually encouraged me to use Scala even when they weren’t familiar with the language. They would trust the REPL to audit my code and use the time to address more general points. Second, the tenor of the screenings changed entirely — they became distinctly more upbeat and discursive. The screeners would get chatty about programming languages and later follow me on Twitter. I began to enjoy the process. I added Scala and Spark to my LinkedIn and AngelList profiles. This resulted in a distinct uptick in the number of inbound interest I was receiving, especially from recruiters. The technical screens became more Scala-centric. At first, I thought the effect was an example of Paul Graham’s about programming languages (which, interestingly, was referring to Python back in 2004 when he wrote this): There is plenty of evidence that developer interest in Scala is on the rise. Stack Overflow’s listed Scala as one of the most loved languages: However, in many cases, the more proximal reason for their interest turned out to be Spark, which has recently surpassed Hadoop to claim the title of most active open-source data processing project. Spark is essentially distributed Scala; it uses ideas (closures, immutability, lazy evaluation, etc.) throughout. The Java and Python APIs are semantically quite far removed from the core design innovations of the system. Moreover, unlike Java, Scala makes it painless to experiment with Spark. Vladimir Rokhlin once said that your comfort level with your toolchain is the major determining factor in your ability to debug code. The harder it is to check something, the less likely you are to check it. The same goes for exploratory data analysis and modeling: It is very difficult to take a rapid, iterative approach to analyzing and modeling terabyte- and petabyte-scale datasets using Hadoop. On the other hand, the productivity boost you get from working in Spark using the native implementation language is difficult to overstate. You can use the same API — and often the same code — for small tests and large jobs, for batched data or streaming data, for ad hoc analyses or production machine learning models. Scala and Spark will also teach you useful abstractions — particularly in regards to modern functional programming, the most powerful programming paradigm in general-purpose distributed data analysis. And in an era of increasing parallelism and abstraction, failing to understand these will put you at a competitive disadvantage. Conversely, if you can wrap your head around relatively deep ideas like monads, you will be well-situated to be solving hard problems in distributed data science for many years to come. You could, in theory, learn these abstractions in Python or R — they are by no means Scala-specific. For example, Hadley Wickham (chief scientist at RStudio and nerve center of the R data science community) has lately taken to . But in practice you probably wouldn’t, because monads and are practically non-existent in Python or R — two languages that were not designed for scalability either in regards to SLOC or bytes processed. By contrast, in order to get anything significant done in Scala, you will be forced to absorb a whole host of ideas that are going to help you professionally for years to come, even if you move on to other languages. This helps you avoid getting stuck in local optima — you can use a wrench to hammer nails if that’s all you’ve got. But you’d be better off spending some time learning how to use a hammer. This is a good educational strategy — it’s essentially the same one that MIT used when teaching their in Scheme. Educational strategies like this are important for data scientists because tools come and go relatively quickly in our field; ideas less so. Therefore, the tools you want to learn are the ones that are rich vessels for forward-thinking ideas. Scala and Spark are precisely that; furthermore, they are in a sweet spot now where they have been thoroughly de-risked as best-in-class industrial tools, but are not yet dominant. This actually does create an applicant’s market — Scala and Spark are , both generally and in data science roles specifically. In the end, my Scala knowledge landed me at a startup in Los Angeles where I use it, in addition to Spark, on a daily basis. And I’m not alone: Scala is already in heavy industrial use by the likes of Netflix, LinkedIn and Twitter, and it’s being embraced by . So if you’re looking to grow your knowledge and job prospects, now is a good time to pick up some new tools — ones designed for scalability.
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Golden Gate Ventures closes new $60 million fund for Southeast Asia
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
Singapore-based has closed a new $60 million fund for Southeast Asia’s rapidly-growing startup ecosystem. last summer, when it had closed an initial $35 million in capital from investors including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek and Naver, the Korea-based owner of . Now it has surpassed its original target of $50 million having added a range of new backers that include Korea’s Hanwha Life Insurance, Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank, and Germany’s Hubert Burda Media. Founded by ex-Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Vinnie Lauria, Jeffrey Paine and Paul Bragiel in 2012, Golden Gate Ventures began as a $10 million seed fund. It has since invested in via two funds, this latest being the second which has expanded its focus from seed into Series A, too. “This is like we’ve done our Series B, we’ve matured as a fund,” Lauria, who with Bragiel before moving to Asia, told TechCrunch in an interview. “There’s more confidence in ourselves in terms of the check sizes [and] we’ve gotten mentally stronger in terms of how we are approaching things. That’s just us growing up alongside the ecosystem,” he added. Southeast Asia has gained increased exposure over the past year or so thanks to a series of deals that include , , and reports which show that the region — which has a cumulative population of over 600 million, 250 million of whom are currently internet users — is . Yet, Lauria — who — insisted that raising this fund was no easy task, despite it being over-subscribed. Most of the fund’s LPs are Asia-based, and Golden Gate Ventures founding partner Lauria said there had been little interest from U.S.-based entities although European organizations were more aware of the region. Some family offices in Europe “see this as a region with good financial returns and want to plug in with someone who can help,” he said. While others like Hubert Burda Media, which has put money into and , are “actively looking and keen to invest with someone who shares their philosophy,” Lauria observed. Golden Gate Ventures has cut checks from the fund since announcing the first close, and the focus will continue to be on marketplaces, e-commerce and other internet services with “a consumer feel to them,” as was previously described to us, with capital split between seed, and larger deals and follow-on rounds. Lauria said the additional $10 million raised will help Golden Gate Ventures write a few more larger checks than it had originally expected to, but there aren’t plans to massively ramp up further down the line. “We love the early stage. If we do awesome, we’ll raise another fund that is in line with the market. But I want to be a small fund [that’s] nimble like a boutique [and attracts] startups because we are early stage and work much closer with them,” he said. There’s much momentum for investing in Southeast Asia, where other new funds include , which is backed by BCG and targeting a $250 million close, (which is also ), and , but Lauria doesn’t see fierce rivalries at this point. “It isn’t so competitive that we are losing deals, but the landscape is large and competitive enough to invest in different ways,” he said. “If you’re a global investor thinking early stage internet, you’re not thinking Southeast Asia yet, but that will change, it’s a few years away.” Last summer, around the time of the fund’s first close, that looked closely at Southeast Asia’s potential as a startup ecosystem. is focused on M&A and exit potential in the region. The latest data from the firm suggests that startups in Southeast Asia have attracted $1.7 billion in investment capital this year alone, with VC funding doubling year-on-year. Though a large chunk of the 2016 to date cash came from Alibaba-Lazada, Golden Gate Ventures believes it is a sign of a hugely positive future. “Despite the perceived difficulties in China affecting investor sentiment in the country, investment continues to flow into Southeast Asia,” it said in a statement.
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At an investor panel, disagreement underscores broader uncertainty
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Connie Loizos
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
During an investor panel at the Bloomberg Technology conference in San Francisco today, one thing was fairly apparent: the panelists, which included partner Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital; Aspect Ventures cofounder Jennifer Fonstad; and Samsung Electronics President and Chief Strategy Officer Young Sohn, didn’t agree on much, somewhat underscoring wider uncertainty right now about the next big opportunities for investors, startups, and big companies alike. When it comes to what the three see as the next giant opportunity, for example, Botha suggested gene editing. Sohn suggested it was sensors, which are poised to have “huge implications about the way we live.” Meanwhile, Fonstad suggested that she’s most passionate right now about security, given that companies have lost control over the devices “hanging off their networks,” and that IoT presents a host of other new challenges and opportunities, including to keep hackers from breaking into home networks. Asked what’s currently “overhyped” by moderator Emily Chang, Fonstad suggested that Aspect is less interested in e-commerce companies, which do well at the beginning of a boom, and more in companies that do better toward the end of a long economic cycle, including those that have “positive unit economics,” or produce goods or services that “people are willing to pay for” and are a “must have.” Botha meanwhile offered up security as overhyped, saying the “opportunities are tremendous, but a bit Malthusian,” in that there are now “too many niche products that don’t deserve to be standalone companies.” (Fonstad later joked that Botha was welcome to send her his security deals.) As for where to expect the most innovation going forward, again, there was little consensus. While Samsung is investing heavily in virtual reality, Botha noted that its promise has gotten ahead itself in many ways and that it will likely take until 2018 for the tech and demand to fit together in a meaningful way. In fact, Botha was frank about not knowing what the next big platform will be. He posited that there will likely be another large social network that succeeds Snapchat, saying, “I think we’ve all been surprised by Snapchat’s rise . . . Part of why it took off is I think adults didn’t understand it, and it provided a safe place for young people to communicate. And I think the same will happen again.” He added later in the conversation that this current period reminds him of the “fog that hung over Silicon Valley in 2003, when everyone talked about the dot-com crash and kept asking, What’s next? What’s next?” We should note that there was a point on which Fonstad, Sohn, and Botha all agreed, and that was the opportunity created by connected devices, from cars to refrigerators, almost all of which will be connectivity enabled soon. Indeed, Sohn said that “every one” of Samsung’s appliances will be a connected device going forward, suggesting there are plenty of service opportunities alone that the trend will create. (Think of having more of your devices repaired remotely.) Botha meanwhile noted that voice — as with Alexa — could open up a “very interesting” channel. That is, assuming startups can find a way to compete with — or else complement — and , both of which look very interested in dominating that channel themselves.
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Google Fiber is buying high-speed internet provider Webpass
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Jon Russell
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
Google Fiber is bulking up its business after it announced a deal to acquire ISP Webpass, a 13-year-old company that provides high-speed internet for business and residential customers across parts of the U.S. Alphabet-owned Google Fiber is present in five U.S. cities, but to be grow to more than 20 in the immediate future. San Francisco is one city that Google Fiber has earmarked, and this acquisition will help that expansion. Webpass has a strong presence in California, with its service running in San Francisco, Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley and San Diego. Beyond that, it is also in Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Chicago, and Boston. In an email to existing customers announcing the deal — which is expected to close in the summer — Webpass said that “nothing will change in the foreseeable future regarding the day to day operation of our business, your service or pricing.” Charles Barr, the President of Webpass, added more in . “Joining Google Fiber will be a great development for our users because the companies share the same vision of the future and commitment to the customer,” he said. “Google Fiber’s resources will enable Webpass to grow faster and reach many more customers than we could as a standalone company.” Great news! We look forward to welcoming to the Google Fiber team once the deal has closed: — Google Fiber (@googlefiber) Webpass operates its own gigabit network and, aside from boosting the presence of Google Fiber’s network, it will also help the company get into the business and residential markets where taking on established and incumbent competitors is hugely challenging.
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Matt Burns
| 2,016 | 6 | 13 | null |
And the winners of our first-ever Meetup and Pitch-Off in Tel Aviv are…
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
We at TC have had an amazing time this week in Israel, meeting founders, hearing about crazy new technology, and probably eating too much food. Yesterday our time here was capped off with the big thing we came here for: our Meetup and Pitch-off in Tel Aviv. More than 900 people came together by the seaside at Trask to mingle and see with the likes of ex-Prime Minister and President ; leading entrepreneurs from some of the (many) break-out startups being born and growing in Israel; and some of the VCs who back them. AND! We also held one of our famous Meetup + Pitch-offs! We had ten amazing companies pitching on the night, but only three could be crowned winners. Huge congratulations to first place winner , second place winner , and audience choice ! As first place winner, Arbe will get a table at the TC Disrupt Startup Alley in London this December, along with two tickets to the Disrupt conference. Second place 6over6 gets two tickets to the event, and Fieldin will get one. Read more on them below! is hoping to make some waves — literally, radio waves — in the drone industry with a new sensor that will help drones and other autonomous flying objects not only see but avoid things in their path. Think bats, but controlled by gadget enthusiasts (or, err, Amazon). As CEO and founder (and ) Kobi Marenko explained in his pitch, the sensors that Arbe is developing are not only a fraction of the price of those that are being developed based around image processing, but they are actually more energy efficient, meaning Arbe’s tech will keep your drone flying for longer. If you’ve been following any of the news about these new flying contraptions, you’ll know that safety and accidents are some of the biggest problems that need solving, so we think this is one to watch. , coincidentally, is another startup (ho ho! sorry… was up late last night) on vision, but from a totally different (okay, I’ll stop now). This company has developed an app it hopes will disrupt the way we get our eyes checked when we’re figuring out which glasses or contacts to buy. 6over6 uses a series of geometric pictures that look only a little like hypnotising charms, along with accelerometer and other sensors on your smartphone, to measure how near- or far-sighted you are, and can even check for degrees of astigmatism. The company — which was founded by and staffed by vision experts who have sold previous startups to companies like Bausch & Lomb — is currently working with online eyewear stores to offer the product. And it is also in the process of getting its regulatory approvals ready for those launches later this year. With eye exams in countries like the U.S. costing consumers potentially hundreds of dollars, 6over6 is posed to try to disrupt this. is coming from a completely different part of Israel’s startup landscape: the company has developed an analytics and business intelligence platform that combines in-the-field sensors, proprietary information, and third-party agronomic data to provide the agriculture industry with more accurate information about how their crops are performing — and, more specifically, how their pesticide programmes are working. The problem that Fieldin is solving is the fact that — despite a wave of people who now buy pesticide-free, organic produce — there is still a gigantic industry based around spraying crops, and many in the latter group overdo it with too many chemicals. These can ruin crops, harm the environment and harm consumers. Armed with more accurate data, Fieldin — which for now is concentrating on orchards and vineyards — believes that farmers can save money, and we can eat our fruit with more confidence. Thanks again to our judges for the night — JVP’s Gadi Tirosh, Nautilus’ Merav Rotem Naaman, and LeumiTech’s Yifat Oron — who took to the stage with Mike Butcher and me to listen to all the great pitches and make the tough choice of selecting the winners. And thanks again to the audience for getting involved and helping us pick a third! The full list of pitching startups: See you all again really soon! Next up on TC’s Big European Summer Meetup Adventure…. Berlin!
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The Car Hacker’s Handbook digs into automotive data security
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 |
In the coming age of autonomous cars, connected cars, and cars that can communicate with each other, the city’s infrastructure, our phones, and the entire internet of things, data security is going to be paramount. That’s why Craig Smith, who has spent 20 years working in banking and healthcare digital security, wrote . Which is just as intimidating as it sounds. Smith first published a version of the book in 2014 as a companion to a one-day class on car hacking. He offered it for free online, and it was downloaded 300,000 times in the first four days. There was a larger interest in this subject than he realized in teaching one-day classes at Virginia Tech and the . And his ISP shut down his website. When he started the online community, Smith figured it would be a bunch of security professionals who showed up. That was not the case. “It was a bunch of mechanics and performance tuners,” he said. “I was the only security person. It was a nice expansion, but it shows there’s a much bigger issue here.” When owners and mechanics are locked out of the data, they’re locked out of how their own cars work in a way people weren’t before vehicles became computers on wheels. And with data being so important to our driving experience, Smith asks, “Who owns the vehicle? After I pay $30,000 or more for a car, do I own it, or does the manufacturer?” Not that every car owner needs to know how to hack or secure their own vehicle. “The expectation is that the manufacturer has done proper security tests,” Smith said. “But you need some method for third party review.” He brought up that was betting on the fact that no one could check the data in its diesel-powered vehicles during emissions tests. “When you have more independent review, whether it’s a mechanic or the owner, things come to light quicker,” Smith believes. At nearly 300 pages, covers a lot of potential security risks, and as autonomous systems become more ubiquitous and sophisticated, there could be even more risks. So is Smith worried about the potential for bad guys to take over our cars? “The car has multiple sensors, and they don’t trust each other always,” Smith said. “The design architecture of sensors is hard to hack; it’s hard to fool senses and sensors. Unless I can get to the core, decision-making piece, I would have to fake out every sensor. You’d think they would be easier to hack, but self-driving cars don’t have a trusted space for data the same way that a corporation that keeps its data behind a firewall would.” The worst-case scenario for Smith isn’t the demonstrated last summer. “Unless they’re a sociopath, a doesn’t want to drive the car,” he said. “It’s not that useful. The real value is in stealing data. Information is more valuable than physical damage.” Does this leave us with the choice of never driving again or reverting to a vintage Model T to keep our data safe? “Being a security guy, I’m pessimistic and extra paranoid,” he said. “There’s been a lot of change in the past five years, but [the automotive industry is] an old industry. We’re ahead of malicious activity, but I don’t know how easy it will be to fix legacy systems.” The pessimistic, paranoid security expert leaves us with this ray of hope: “I don’t think we’re in a bad spot.”
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Kabbage partners with Scotiabank to provide small business loans in Canada and Mexico
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
Small business lending platform announced a partnership with Scotiabank today to make it easier for residents of Canada and Mexico to take out small business loans of up to $100,000 in minutes. Kabbage has historically worked directly with business owners. The company offers rapid evaluation and a line of credit. The company has relied on partnerships with banks like Silicon Valley Bank to supply the capital to small business owners. and Yelp reviews to maximize loan de-risking. Small business owners still pay a large interest rate premium to borrow but don’t have to deal with predatory loan sharks or slow and conservative traditional banks. Scotiabank is the third international bank that has partnered with Kabbage. The company has already signed deals with ING and Santander. Kabbage supports banks by providing them with valuable data on businesses seeking capital. Kabbage offers workshops for institutions and implementation staff to help them onboard the platform. The partnership between Scotiabank and Kabbage moved incredibly rapidly. Kabbage first contacted the bank in January and finished the integration in less than six months. A suit of APIs integrate directly into the existing backend of banks like Scotiabank. Kabbage also integrates on the front end to streamline the customer experience while retaining aspects of Kabbage’s direct offerings. “We want to grow beyond small business lending,” said Pete Steger, Director of Business Development at Kabbage. Kabbage is in late stage conversations with six more banks. Depending on the deal, Kabbage charges a one time implementation fee as well as ongoing usage fees. While Kabbage has recently been making moves in the platform space, they have no plans to slow their core direct lending efforts.
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Circle takes $60M to grow its social payments biz globally, as it steps into China
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
How do you compete with China’s homegrown social payments giants? Veteran entrepreneur Jeremy Allaire, co-founder of U.S.-based social payments app , reckons you don’t; not like for like in the domestic Chinese market. Which is really the sensible view, given that was already seeing some $50 billion in monthly transaction volume back in March. Meanwhile the older Alipay service was doing some $520 billion annually as far back as 2013. The opportunity to crack into this market as small fry seems sizzled to a non-existent crisp. It’s the Chinese startups who are the pioneers here, not vice versa. Despite that, Circle is now stepping into China — revealing today it’s set up a separate company, called Circle China, with the aim of serving Chinese consumers. Also today it’s announcing a $60 million Series D, including from a syndicate of Chinese strategic investors, to fuel growth of its global business as a whole. The round is led by existing investor and Beijing based VC IDG Capital Partners, along with Breyer Capital, General Catalyst Partners and what it dubs “a powerful syndicate of major strategic partners” in China, including Baidu, CICC Alpha, China Everbright, Wanxiang and CreditEase. Also investing in a personal capacity: Sam Palmisano, former chairman and CEO of IBM, and Glenn Hutchins, co-founder of SilverLake and also a private equity investor. Circle China has been funded by a separate seed round, of a few million dollars raised some six months ago, albeit with that funding also coming from many of the same investors backing Circle’s global business. So what’s going on? How is Circle planning to circumvent huge local rivals in China’s personal and social payments space and square a very competitive circle? The link is its starting point as a U.S. and now European player, which gives it something it argues that local social payment giants don’t yet have: a foothold in key markets outside China, and therefore the chance to offer Chinese consumers the ability to make payments into international markets. “There is an opportunity to connect Chinese consumers to the rest of the world and to connect to consumers around the world and to bridge the RMB with the dollar, the Euro, pound sterling,” says Allaire. “As we went in and spent a lot of time in China it became clear that that was a unique opportunity.” He asserts that Circle’s intention has always been to establish a global business, albeit the startup wet its feet in the Bitcoin wallet space before morphing into what it is now: a p2p payment entity that lets users pay friends via a text message (complete with emoji if they wish) — having taken liberal inspiration from the existing success of just such services in China. (Circle doesn’t really talk about Bitcoin these days, but rather points to underlying blockchain tech as the enabler for its vision of a future of open and interoperable global digital payments.) But while WeChat Pay, for example, is perfectly positioned to serve the domestic Chinese market given its huge scale there, Tencent’s ambitions are more hamstrung on the international front where its messaging app has not scaled to the vast size achieved in China. So enter Allaire & co, spying an opportunity to tap into the giant Chinese market without having to directly compete with local social payment giants. At least, not yet. “We don’t have any illusion about competing with the large existing players in China,” Allaire tells TechCrunch. “Alipay, WeChat Pay, as broader platforms have huge penetration. For Circle to try and compete in the domestic social payment market in China would be not smart. “What we really found was that one of the most challenging things for Chinese consumers is how can they use their RMB around the world, over the Internet? And it’s hard. And how can — if I’m a parent and I have a child studying in Europe or the US — how can I easily share money with them? And it’s cumbersome and costly.” So specifically it’s this cross-border payments piece that Circle is aiming to tackle in China. And Circle’s investors are impressed enough with this thinking to stump up another large funding round (it last raised a ). Although the funding is for the global business as a whole, not specifically for Circle China. (The latter will need to raise more funding off its own in order to launch products, says Allaire.) “What we bring to the table [in China] is we’ve gone and done all of the ‘heavy lifting’ of becoming a licensed financial institution in the US and in Europe. With the ability to seamlessly and frictionlessly move currency value around in a consumer experience in those markets and if we can connect Chinese consumers to that that can be very powerful,” he says, adding: “It’s a huge need.” Circle China is therefore a necessary stepping stone in an ‘East to West’ strategy for Circle (although really it’s more fully a circle aspiring to go West to East and back West again). And to facilitate that it has been set up as an independent Chinese company, with local companies as its partners, to meet the regulatory demands of the Chinese government. “Circle China is an independent company. It’s a Chinese company. Almost all of its investors are Chinese companies and investors — and that’s really important to the Chinese government that we’re building a real asset for China,” notes Allaire. But of course the staggering size of the local Chinese market remains an attractive opportunity, in and of itself. “We set [Circle China] up that way because we knew that that was going to be important from a regulatory and government relations perspective. But also because the market is so big there that it’s not inconceivable that in five years that business could be materially larger than the US/European business. It’s not inconceivable that business would list on the Shanghai stock exchange.” That’s the ambition but right now Circle China cannot yet launch any products because it does not yet have the licenses to do so — with Allaire unwilling to put an exact timeframe on any future product launches, saying only that it could be as long as a year out. But whatever (and whenever) Circle China does launch, the products will not be the same “full stop social payment” product that Circle offers in the US or Europe. It could even, suggests Allaire, exist as a feature inside one of the dominant social payment apps. “We want to make sure that the user experience is the right user experience for Chinese consumers. So that involves building a different product,” he says. “Chinese consumers expect… that a lot of the things that they use to just be features that they can add within things like WeChat. And so it’s not inconceivable that Circle could be a feature inside WeChat.” Not inconceivable to Circle but that is assuming Tencent would allow such a thing to happen on its platform. And so it remains to be seen how that strategy (if applied) would play out. WeChat’s owner Tencent could also try a similar strategy to Circle by setting up its own payments operation in the West (although it would also need to secure regulatory approvals). Or by acquiring a U.S. rival like PayPal — as has been rumored — to get a foot in Western markets that way. Either way, Circle is banking on being in the driving seat for this approach, pushing first and fast to get all the necessary international links in place. Its US rival Venmo, for instance, remains US only for now. And while various local European p2p players exist, like France’s , they remain just that for now: local. “I don’t know what they’re going to do,” adds Allaire of Tencent when I suggest they could try the reverse of Circle’s strategy. “They absolutely could look at these markets. But we haven’t seen any indication of that to date.” One of Circle’s strategic partners in China — Baidu — does already have a digital wallet product in the market, though usage of this is dwarfed by usage of WeChat Pay and Alipay. Which presumably gives Baidu an incentive to strategically align with Circle, although Allaire says he can’t comment on specific commercial aspects of any of Circle’s investment relationships. “Certainly there’s an interesting opportunity for Circle with Baidu,” he says carefully. “They’re very interested in blockchain, they’re very interested in these cross-border use cases. And hopefully Circle can do something significant with them.” Allaire will say one thing: that it’s the first time “major” companies in the various categories that make up the roster of Circle’s strategic Chinese investors — namely investment bank CICC Alpha, commercial bank China Everbright, FS services company Wanxiang and p2p lending platform CreditEase — have invested in the digital currency space, dubbing this “significant”. “It underscores how this market — blockchain-powered applications — is becoming important globally but it’s also becoming quite topical in China as well,” he adds. “Indirectly the bet we’ve made as a company is that open protocols for value exchange are going to connect every currency and every digital wallet and every merchant service in the world, over time. So we’re betting on an open Internet model. “All of the existing players, whether it’s Venmo in the US or WeChat Pay in China or anything else, they’re all closed networks, they’re all built on their own proprietary, centralized closed models. That works to a certain point but it doesn’t unlock the kind of vision of money working the way the Internet works — which is open and interoperable — so we’re taking a more open approach than other players in the market. “But we hope that they all embrace this too. It’s not interesting if just one or two companies use open protocols; it’s interesting if the whole world does.” Circle’s desire to drive interoperability for digital payments is understandable, given its reality of being later to market with its p2p product than some very big rivals. But of course its ambition for openness will not necessarily be shared by larger competitors which are minting money now via their own closed networks. Their incentives (and power) to block may be greater than their need to unlock — at least in the short term. The short term reality for Circle, then, is swimming in a pond with some very large sharks. So it will be interesting to see how its strategy plays out. It’s not breaking out any user numbers at this (still) early stage, a year after launching its US beta, but will only say it’s grown its transaction volume on a dollar basis by “more than 300 per cent”. And is “on pace” to do well over a billion dollars in transaction volume this year. Its customer base has also grown at a similar rate (300 per cent), according to Allaire. Circle also only rolled into Europe , making its first international expansion moves by partnering with a UK bank to support pounds sterling as its second fiat currency after the dollar, and opening up a feeless cross-border payments offering between the two currencies. It’s not breaking out any metrics for Europe yet either. Today it’s announcing that its first Euro-using European market will be Spain — where’s it hoping to launch shortly. Allaire says it’s aiming to be live in all 28 European Union Member States by the end of this year, so it’s clearly driving hard and fast to get all the pieces in place for a US-Europe-China p2p payments play. “Lighting up Euro on Circle’s platform is critical in our effort to enable consumers everywhere to share value, and is also important to our efforts in China,” note Circle’s two co-founders in a blog post today. “Between the US, Europe and China, there are 2+ billion consumers who will share value, and we want to enable that experience in the same way that these consumers share messages and content today.” Allaire says Circle has customers in around 100 countries at this point, using Bitcoin to join the dots and settle payments where it does not yet have local banking partners. Although he notes that 70 per cent of its users are in the US, UK or Europe — i.e. where it does have boots and banking partners on the ground to support settling into fiat. And with the seeding of its Far East outpost Circle is clearly hoping to be able to add China to that list of major markets in the not too distant future.
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Slither.io is snaking its way on to homescreens
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Felicia Shivakumar
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
is not new, but it is crazy popular. The game has been sitting at number one on the iOS gaming charts for some time. Slither.io has been available for just over three months now and, according to the most recent ranking, the game still holds the number one game, action game, and simulation game spots in the U.S. Apple App Store. It’s also the number six free app overall, which means this game currently ranks higher than Google Maps, Uber, Netflix and a variety of other free apps that you likely use on a daily basis. Clicking into the game description, it looks and sounds a lot like the old desktop game Snake or Atari’s Centipede, and it is. Slither.io is loosely based on these classic arcade games, but refreshed with a modern two-dimensional design, instead of a flat one. In the game, you are a cute, doe-eyed worm looking for snacks. You maneuver through the void by avoiding crashing into other worms who may cross your path. To grow and gain points, you gorge yourself with glowing light.
When you first start, you are a small, skinny little thing which makes you nimble and easy to maneuver. But as you get bigger, you expand in both length and width. The bigger you get, the harder it is to make a quick turn or get out of the way. If another worm crashes into you, you can gobble up their life force and save yourself a ton of work. There are two ways to play: online against other players or local against the game’s AI. For both, the gameplay is basically the same. However, if you are on spotty Wi-Fi, playing AI is the way to go. After playing both ways, I noticed that you bump into many more bigger worms when you play online. Also, since you are against an actual human in the online mode, you often find yourself up against smart, strategic players who will trap you to eat you up. The AI seems to be slightly less aggressive. Now let’s talk controls. There are three modes. Arrow mode, for me, was the easiest. You just drag your finger along the screen to guide your worm. Then there is Classic mode, where you tap to change directions. Classic definitely requires more patience and skill. It’s harder to make quick dodges when other worms are headed your way. Your third option is Joystick, which, skillwise, is somewhere in between. There is a small gray circle in the bottom corner that you use as a touch control in a similar way to a traditional joystick. It’s not as intuitive as Arrow mode, but easier to to get out of a sticky situation. On the customization side of things, you can personalize your worm by changing skins. I was pleasantly surprised by all the free character options. Many other free games make you pay or earn a cooler look, but Slither.io lets you mix it up with a ton of fun designs from the start.
According to , Sither.io has been downloaded more than 68 million times across mobile devices and averages 67 million daily players on web browsers. The rags-to-riches story behind that app is also quite interesting. The WSJ reports that, prior to the popularity of Slither.io, the game developer could barely afford rent. Now he makes an estimated $100,000 daily, largely from players paying $3.99 to play the game ad-free. I personally am not super into the game, but tons of folks are. So it’s me, not you. Slither.io is a free download on the and . You can also play online on your desktop at .
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Crunch Report | A Giant Nerf Gun
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
Tito Hamze, Jason Kopeck
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Apple confirms iOS kernel code left unencrypted intentionally
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Kate Conger
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
When Apple released a preview version of iOS 10 at its annual developers conference last week, the company slipped in a surprise for security researchers — it left the core of its operating system, the kernel, unencrypted. “The kernel cache doesn’t contain any user info, and by unencrypting it we’re able to optimize the operating system’s performance without compromising security,” an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch. Apple has kept the inner workings of the kernel obfuscated by encryption in previous versions of iOS, leaving developers and researchers in the dark. The kernel manages security and limits the ways applications on an iPhone or iPad can access the hardware of the device, making it a crucial part of the operating system. Although encryption is often thought to be synonymous with security, the lack of encryption in this case doesn’t mean that devices running iOS 10 are less secure. It just means that that researchers and developers can poke around in the kernel’s code for the first time, and any security flaws will come to light more quickly. If flaws are revealed, they can be quickly patched. Leaving the kernel unencrypted is a rare move of transparency for Apple. The company is so notoriously secretive about its products that some security experts speculated in the that the lack of encryption in the kernel was accidental. But such a mistake would be so shocking as to be practically unbelievable, researchers said. “This would have been an incredibly glaring oversight, like forgetting to put doors on an elevator,” iOS security expert Jonathan Zdziarski told the MIT Technology Review. Apple has begun to shift towards greater transparency, particularly on security issues, in the wake of its battle with the FBI over unlocking an iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter. When the FBI attempted to compel Apple to unlock the phone, CEO Tim Cook penned a rare to Apple’s customers, explaining his decision to resist. “We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government,” Cook wrote. (The FBI eventually after paying a third party to break into the device.) Opening up the kernel’s code for inspection could weaken the market for security flaws like the one the FBI is presumed to have used to get into the San Bernardino iPhone. If flaws are revealed quickly and widely, it will reduce the prices law enforcement and black markets will pay for them — and it could mean quicker fixes for Apple’s customers.
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Invesdor raises another $1.4m to expand equity crowdfunding in Europe
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
Equity crowdfunding continues to be a hot topic around the world, with a number of players new and old re-doubling their efforts to capture the hearts and wallets of investors everywhere. The most recent example is , a platform focusing on Scandinavia, who used its own platform to raise its fourth round of funding. This time, the company raised €1.2m ($1.36) to expand growth, especially in the UK. Reading is a fascinating insight into the crowdfunding market. How delightfully meta. Equity crowdfunding is accelerating rapidly in Europe as the market is maturing. Companies like (who to expand in the US), , (who to fuel its expansion) and ( ) are already extremely active in the UK market, so Invesdor is facing a terrific challenge in trying to make way; it remains to be seen whether the relatively modest round will be enough to put a dent in the new market. “We are facing a period of both high growth and heightening competition,” admits Lasse Mäkelä, the company’s CEO, who speculates that the the equity crowdfunding market might be moving towards a period of consolidation: “The inevitable time of mergers and acquisitions looms ahead.” The company is currently active in Finland, Norway (where it claims it is the only platform licensed to run equity crowdfunding campaigns), Denmark, and the UK. Investdor anticipates it will use the funding to strengthen its presence in these markets, rather than expand to additional countries in the short term. The company raised the current round from a total of 300 investors spanning 19 countries.
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How will Israeli innovation play into the global robotics industry?
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Mor Assia
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
In the last few months, a Singaporean University hired as a secretary, a Boston Dynamics employee pushed over his colleague who was moving boxes at a factory and , a San Francisco Target employee, began checking to make sure all the products in Aisle 3 are fully stocked. Nadine, Atlas and Tally may live in different cities and industries, but they have several peculiarities in common. None of them need sleep, food or exercise to operate efficiently. Imagine employing your own secretary who optimizes your schedule, plans your weekends, reminds you about deadlines and iteratively adapts to your preferences and behaviors at a fraction of the cost of a human. Imagine a factory with no humans, no downtime and no errors. Imagine a retail store without checkout lines or items out of stock. Humanoid robots have entertained us on the big screen for years as “science fiction,” with films like “I, Robot,” “WALL-E” and Steven Spielberg’s “AI” capturing our collective imagination and spirit. In the last five years, however, the number of VC dollars (see chart below) invested into robotics technologies implies that tens of thousands of engineers, data scientists and management teams are now building robots and robotic technologies that will drastically alter our lives over the next few years. Many of these advances will come from Israel. In healthcare, we see helping brain and spine surgeons, empowering radiologists to improve accuracy and results and enabling the disabled to walk again. In industrial applications, we see and enhancing welding capabilities, developing autonomous drones and using robotic technology to develop a sophisticated, self-aware warehouse for an industry expected to grow to . NUA is the world’s first that can follow its owner around and avoid obstacles, and is part of a consumer robotics market that is estimated to . We also see applications for the government and military, such as , which enables ground troops to minimize contact with targets by sending in robots that scout, report and eliminate threats. These examples only scratch the surface. Just a few months ago, the signed a $20 million agreement with a coalition of Chinese investors and the city of Guangzhou, one of China’s biggest industrial centers, to develop robots to serve as workers in China. Israeli researchers will develop the technology, and the Chinese will mass-produce mechanical waiters, cleaners, security guards and construction workers. Likewise, robotics startups will need large capital investments to successfully bring their products and solutions to market. Israel’s contribution to the global robotics industry need not be limited to the robots themselves. , the world leader in advanced driver assistance systems has already started software development to power autonomous vehicles, while provides them with state-of-the-art security. , , and all provide BI and predictive analytics for industrial robots and IoT, while companies like provide their docking stations. Unfortunately, other than $100 million fund, few Israeli VCs can afford the risks and timelines associated with financing the R&D of hardware companies. The deep pockets typically come from corporations whose operations and products benefit the most from robotic innovation, e.g. Toyota, Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Siemens and GE. Many of these corporate investors have R&D centers and/or accelerators in Israel, but often will require their investments to relocate and be geographically closer to their production partners. VC dollars are coming from blue chip funds like , DFJ, , and robotics-only funds. Although Israeli companies may share Intel’s vision of a domestic, “Blue-and-White” hardware production line, Israeli companies will need to partner with major players in the U.S., Japan, Korea, Germany and China in order to grow significantly and secure contracts as design partners before the companies are fully operational. Intelligent robots are no longer science fiction. They are real. They are here. And powered by advances in Israeli technology, they are only getting smarter.
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Being open to open source and creating a new business category at VMWare
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Elisa Schreiber
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
In the age of developer-defined infrastructure, where developers have decision making power in application and cloud infrastructure technologies, open source has proven to be a powerful go-to-market and distribution method for both startups and enterprises. Developers are always looking for new technologies to improve their productivity. For example, Docker has emerged as the enabling technology to build and scale cloud applications. But for many incumbent software companies, open source wasn’t necessarily the obvious strategy. Jerry Chen, a partner at Greylock Partners, remembers a key meeting at VMware in 2010 when they were discussing open source as a potential developer distribution path for Cloud Foundry. At the time, the team coined this as the “nuclear option” because of it’s potentially massive impact on the company. They wanted to be an application platform, but as Chen recalls, “open sourcing a strategic product was not part of the company culture at that time.” However, as the team dug into the idea, they realized opening up Cloud Foundry would quickly boost adoption, moving economic value down not only to their virtualization platform, but also to a bigger ecosystem of players. With open source projects, if a technology or product has merit – whether it’s a new version of Linux, language or container technology – developers will quickly find it and adopt it. If VMware was the platform for the last 15 years, then companies, like Docker, could be the platform for the next 15. Creating a new platform was one of the most challenging things Chen has ever had to do in his career. “It’s a big rock to push up the hill because you’re motivating not just yourself but also an ecosystem of partners that are outside of your control.”
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Review: HP’s Spectre shows a great ultrabook can suffer from being thin
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Stefan Etienne
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
will most likely be thinner than the one you have now. That’s because some Windows PC makers like HP aren’t keen with the thinness of even their own offerings. So, their designers and execs have gone all-out to design (with some compromise) an ultrabook so thin, it beats the MacBook by 0.1 an inch — I wasn’t keeping track of decimals, either. At that level of thinness — 10.4mm to be exact — long battery life and ports are the first things to get axed. But HP’s Spectre tries to beat the odds and, as it turns out, comes pretty close. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mwTzjZE1ic&w=853&h=480] The HP Spectre is by default, a unique experience. For the first time in a while, an ultrabook has come along that is mildly different in aesthetics, but also beautiful to look at. While showing the Spectre to people I mostly heard praise for the sleek design. After all, 10.4mm is pretty thin, and the contrast of the copper and grey/brown aluminum is worth the extended glance. Once you pick it up, the Spectre immediately falls between a precious item and a good tool. A carbon fiber underside, with unibody aluminium everywhere else, ensures that the Spectre really does feel polished and premium, without being gaudy. You don’t have to question HP’s design chops: they’re quite real. [gallery ids="1342173,1342171,1342172,1342170,1342169,1342176,1342177,1342178,1342179,1342182,1342183,1342185"] HP even finessed the hinges, which use pistons and are reminiscent of kitchen cabinets, but also some expensive furniture. There is a con with this however, and that’s not being able to push the screen too far back; however this con is subjective to your viewing angles. So now, we get it: The Spectre has a great screen despite its numbers, a keyboard that’s probably one of the best in class and B&O speakers that do an alright job for watching a YouTube video. Plus, despite the limited port selection, the three all-purpose USB-C/Thunderbolt ports are open to expansion via multiple USB-C port docks that HP sells. What could be the one thing I can’t stand about the Spectre’s performance? Its battery life. The sheer thinness shaved two or three hours off of what could have been an ultrabook that lasted 9 hours on a charge (see: MacBook Air). Between six and seven hours of continuous Chrome and Spotify usage isn’t bad, but it’s not the best at all — as with most laptops, your mileage can (and will) vary. Side note: the trackpad is accurate, smooth and entirely usable, but much too small. In fact, it’s nearly stifling. If it couldn’t be taller, I’d have appreciated if it was at least wider. The HP Spectre is plenty of good things, but being perfect isn’t one of them. Firstly, the heat generated by the Core i7 processor is not a major issue, but here’s the deal with the Spectre: it has to be kept ventilated through the bottom, where the intakes bring in air, so that the positive pressure cooling system can do its job. That means using it on tables, avoid laying it flat on a bed and probably always ensuring it’s always well-ventilated. That’s a chore, yet one that usually takes care of itself given that laptops are great on tables, but that just isn’t the usual scenario in the real world. What if the Spectre does get hot? If it happens, it’s not unbearable: the palm rests stay cool, while the area near the power button and the carbon fiber underside can become toasty, including fan noise. Ultimately, I think heat dissipation that works this well on a real Core i7 in a system this thin has to be commended. It would have been perfect if it actually stayed cool to the touch, but it doesn’t — thermodynamics can be tricky. The takeaway here: An ultrabook being too thing for its own good is possible, especially with current-generation processors. For a “premium device,” HP’s Spectre 13 is designed well and priced fairly. Though it might get toasty on its undersides (if under strain), it’s a great first effort at making an ultrabook of this quality. In terms of marketing, it In short, a laptop like the Spectre could be the right fit… for some of us.
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National Science Foundation allots $1.5M to kid-focused maker projects
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
To celebrate (don’t tell me you forgot!), the National Science Foundation has to five small projects looking to get kids involved with STEM topics, creative play and generally making stuff. It’s not just funding a new gadget or tool library, though — there’s quite a variety of approaches here. University of Maryland researchers note that maker spaces, while touted as valuable community resources and good entry paths for STEM fields, are often inaccessible to the likes of inner-city youth: Even if they had a maker space nearby, many may not have the time or money to engage with it. The researchers propose that will be run by local high school kids. The shop will, hopefully anyway, keep a few kids engaged with a passion they might otherwise be unable to pursue — and careful evaluation of the products and kids involved will help set a standard for future projects along these lines. On a similar note, another project aims to delve into why certain maker spaces successfully attract and integrate various groups underrepresented in STEM fields — women, people of color, people with disabilities — and why some don’t. of several inclusive organizations and spaces, with an eye toward finding a few best practices. “Our study will give a rich description of the practices and artifacts employed to establish and maintain environments that are diverse, inclusive, and liberatory,” Virginia Tech’s Donna Riley told the NSF. Two projects will create focused maker experiences to share with kids of the proper ages. The will be for high school kids who want to dabble in synthetic biology. You read that right. Participants make their own DNA — gene by gene — and then grow their designs into real applications by inserting them into microorganisms to develop different traits and characteristics provided by the genes. Now, I did a little cloning of my own in college, but this is pretty advanced stuff. If you’re in Philadelphia, watch out for mutants spawned by disgruntled teenagers given the power to control life. The device high school kids will use to create nightmare creatures. Another program, in Newark, will make a that can be deployed in “local science museums, parks, zoos, or libraries” (zoos?) not only to let kids play creatively and teach them about physics and engineering, but at the same time will be studying how those kids engage. No sense wasting that valuable data. Lastly, and I must admit I harbor a certain level of skepticism toward this one, there is a Utah State project that will as they take part in various maker-type activities, in order to track “psychophysiological indications of heightened engagement.” Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but that seems a bit over the top. Pulse and skin conductivity don’t strike me as valuable indicators that a kid is interested in what they’re doing. As a scientist, I would fear confounding variables. As a teacher, I would worry they’re barking up the wrong tree to begin with. But the fact is I’m not actively either of those things, I’m just a guy. So I look forward to their results. Each project will receive approximately $300,000 over two years; the grants are part of a program .
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Twilio prices its IPO at $15 per share, above its previous target
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Matthew Lynley
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
Twilio today said it would price its initial public offering at $15 per share, which would value the company at around $1.23 billion. That would value Twilio above its previous $1 billion valuation from its last financing round. With the pricing, the company expects to raise around $150 million, with an option for another 1.5 million shares to be purchased. It’s also a higher price than the $12-$14 per share price that the company previously targeted. Twilio’s IPO will be an important one given the drought of tech IPOs this year. Anxiety has gripped many startups that have hit unicorn status given the complete lack of tech IPOs for 2016 (Twilio will only be the third of the year). The hope, for many startups, is that with a strong showing after trading begins tomorrow. If that happens, it might convince investors that many startups that have hit frothy valuations have come back in line with reality, and these companies could be good investment targets if they choose to go public. Twilio is not profitable, with the company reporting a net loss of $35.5 million on $166.9 million in revenue last year. But it’s showing strong revenue growth, with the company bringing in $88.8 million in revenue from 2014. Investors have been very careful about investing in growth companies given that valuations have either stalled out, or even declined, among startups that focused heavily on growth over profitability. We’ve seen a big shift in mentality among startups that are now facing the reality that they can’t simply burn venture capital funding and expect public markets to respect their endless focus on growth rather than making money. For all intents and purposes, IPOs are about building a war chest in order to continue expanding and building new businesses. Twilio has built out a strong one with its developer tools, with other entire businesses being built on top of its infrastructure. But it’s also going to be at the whims of those businesses, and whether or not they decide to stick with Twilio. That’s a risk that investors are going to have to assess, as well, when they decide where to value Twilio once it goes public. In total, Twilio has raised more than $200 million in venture financing, with Bessemer Venture Partners owning the largest chunk of the company at 28.5 percent per its last IPO filing. Twilio is expected to start trading tomorrow, and we’ll see whether or not the appetite for tech IPOs will be coming back with its performance.
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Sevenhugs bets on smartphone-free connected home future with $14.6M Series A
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John Mannes
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
French startup closed a $14.6 million Series A today led by Xerys on a quest to better integrate smart home technology. Sevenhugs has already developed a sleep tracker and is nearing completion on development of a universal smart-remote. Sevenhugs joins , , and others with its hugOne sleep-tracker. When it launches, the remote will let users simply point to control a wide array of connected-home devices. From coffeemakers at college hackathons to TVs at your local Best Buy, everything is smart these days.
Sevenhugs wants to put a spark back into internet-of-things by enabling smart-devices to interact with each-other. With the Sevenhugs remote, users will be able to just point at their television and control it while dimming lights with the and warming the room with a . The Sevenhugs hugOne smart sleep-tracker also integrates with these same devices to enable a more connected, reactive, sleep experience. It makes intuitive sense that the smartphone be the hub of the smart-home but Sevenhugs is betting otherwise. “There are hundreds of applications that allow you to control your TV from your smartphone but I have never found anyone that uses smartphones to control their TV,” said Simon Tchedikian, CEO of Sevenhugs. Once you take the time to evaluate your own life, it starts to make sense. My phone is consistently either dead or charging. When I do have it, I am forced to go through a myriad of steps to put it to use controlling my television. First you have to unlock the device while managing not to get distracted by notifications from Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Snapchat, Twitter, iMessage, GroupMe, LinkedIn, NYT Now, CNN, and the half dozen other things that turn my phone into the human version of the old Rat Park experiments where lab mice become so chemically dependent they forget to feed themselves. Then you have to navigate to the right app, since each smart device typically comes with its own interface. Sevenhugs is making a bold move by opting for a hardware solution to better integrate smart-devices. Moving forward, Sevenhugs wants even more devices from disparate ecosystems to be able to talk to each-other in an intuitive way. Nest acquired smart-hub manufacturer Revolv only to . Strategic partnerships are going to be key for Sevenhugs as the company prepares to launch in the United States and brush up closer with cash-rich well-connected companies like Alphabet and Microsoft. Today Sevenhugs is also opening a US office in San Francisco. “Devices must be able to make decisions based on our habits without us telling them. The future of the smart home is when people don’t see it anymore,” added Tchedikian. SevenHugs is preparing to launch in the United States and will be using the new capital to generate brand awareness.
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Twilio’s IPO festivities will include live coding from the New York Stock Exchange
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
There are plenty of reasons to keep an eye on ‘s initial public offering, like whether or not it will . Here’s a small-but-fun one: The company has organized a live coding event from the New York Stock Exchange. Tomorrow morning, Twilio will bring three developers to the NYSE floor, where they’ll be trying to build as many apps as they can using the company’s voice and text messaging platform. Three people doesn’t quite add up to a full hackathon (the company’s calling it a “code jam”), but hey, it sounds a lot more interesting than just ringing the bell. Plus, it’s pretty on-brand for a developer platform like Twilio — in fact, developer evangelist told me via email that “cutting code is the way we celebrate everything at Twilio.” “Every time we have a new office, a new product or any other milestone along the way, we invite developers from our community over to make a bunch of new stuff,” he said. “It’s what we do. We had to do the same thing on Wall Street.” Spectre will be one of the coders participating, along with Dropbox developer advocate and fintech developer . You’ll be able to watch the event, which starts with the opening bell at 9:30am, . When will it end? Spectre said, “Whenever they kick us out.”
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WowWee’s got a new coding robot and a dead-simple drone
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
, the Hong Kong-based manufacturer behind that old RadioShack stalwart, RoboSapien, showed off a couple of promising high-tech toys due out in the fall. COJI is one of the company’s more compelling products in a while. The little robot, which made its first public appearance at ToyFair earlier this year, is designed with the noble task of making coding more accessible for little ones. The bipedal ‘bot’s name, a combination of “coding” and “emoji,” should give you a pretty clear picture of where the company is going with the product. COJI utilizes an emoji-based coding language controlled via a connected mobile device. The app features several different games, whereby kids enter emoji-based commands that the robot carries out through movements and via its LCD face. The company’s app features a number of different coding games, and the robot also responds to motions like tilting and shaking, interaction aimed at roping in younger users. The most compelling bit, however, may be the price point — COJI will run $60 when he starts shipping this fall. WowWee’s also got a simple drone arriving right around the same time. The aim of the LUMI is to make autonomous aerial vehicles as simple as humanly possible, with control as easy as pressing a button. The drone utilizes the same proximity technology as the company’s upcoming dog robot, CHiP, keeping the vehicle close to home base. Using the app, players can select from a variety of different aerial maneuvers and sequences, and can choreograph air shows to music by dragging and dropping movements onto a timeline. The battery only lasts about 10 minutes on a charge, but at least they’re swappable. As with COJI, the toy’s certainly got the right price, running $80 when it arrives this fall.
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 6 | 14 | null |
Vitrima is an add-on that turns a GoPro into a 3D camera
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Brian Heater
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
Here’s a neat little add-on for folks looking to get a little more out of their GoPro. The Vitrima is a big metal add-on created by Chicago-based startup Fantem that brings 3D video capture to the action camera. The device features a plastic GoPro case affixed to a big lens with mirrors that split light, creating separate images for the left and right eyes. Two stereoscopic videos are combined into one that can be viewed through a VR headset like Google Cardboard, adding a sense of depth to the proceedings. I tried out a couple of videos shot by different action sports videographers, and the effects were pretty impressive. Not the best 3D video I’ve seen by any stretch of the imagination, but still, pretty good for a low-cost camera add on. You can check out some of the footage (snowboarding, skydiving and the like) yourself on , if you have a headset handy. Fantem is currently offering up lenses for . The lens kit will retail for $129. It’s set to start shipping next month.
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NASA app brings live ISS views and latest space media to Apple TV
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
Space fiends who are also couch potatoes, rejoice! NASA’s all-purpose app for finding and watching content from the cosmos . You could previously use it on any other iOS device, watching launches and press conferences live or getting the latest imagery from the International Space Station — but this lets you do so without even getting up to go find your phone. “Now, users with the latest Apple TV can explore and enjoy our remarkable images, videos, mission information, NASA Television and more on the big screen with the whole family,” said NASA associate administrator for communications David Weaver in a press release. Sounds wholesome! Mainly, though, this opens up the possibility of having your TV be a constantly on, live view from the ISS, which is probably the greatest thing any TV could possibly do. Grab the app from the Apple TV app store — or .
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Hands-on with a compact medium-format camera, the Hasselblad X1D
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Stefan Etienne
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
unique location — the Absolut Elyx house — in the Meatpacking District for me to meet their reps and play with the new X1D. For a quick refresher, it’s the world’s first compact medium-format camera, . Given that the X1D is still in pre-production until its launch in August, I wasn’t allowed to shoot my own 50MP images and upload them here. However, I can say that the X1D has the clarity, focus and image quality you’d expect , and to top that off, with Hasselblad’s own glass, the shots I took were nothing short of dreamy. The moment you switch the camera on, it becomes obvious that Hasselblad took design cues from the just-launched H6D medium-format camera, simply tweaked it for the screen size and controls and kept it user-friendly. Plenty of touch options work alongside the button interface to give the shooter options. What’s it like to hold? It’s so light considering the seriousness of the electronics that it’s silly. Milled from a single block of aluminum and weather-sealed, it also means it feels great, smooth and is ergonomic. Personally, I think the first thing that amateur photographers will find interesting about the X1D is that it offers (at least on paper) the quality that a huge medium-format camera does, without the associated size and weight. For pros and intermediates, the X1D is probably going to fall between either an ultimate creative tool or a risky investment, especially coming from rival lens systems from Sony, Canon and Nikon, whose catalogs eclipse the two lenses Hasselblad will offer at launch. [gallery ids="1342233,1342231,1342230,1342229,1342226,1342223,1342222,1342221,1342219,1342218,1342217,1342215,1342214,1342213"] The X1D will retail for $8,995 come its ship date in August, for the body only. The two native XCD lenses available at launch include a 45mm and 90mm for $2,395 and $2,695, respectively. Support for Hasselblad’s older, H series lenses will be possible through an adapter, and that will retail for $329 around the camera’s ship date. Of course, I’ll know more about how this camera behaves in the review, closer to August.
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Tend.ai trains your robot to operate dozens of 3D printers and laser cutters at a time
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 6 | 22 |
If you’ve got more than a handful of 3D printers or other devices running at a time, it’s a full-time job keeping them going — removing and packaging products, tweaking settings, pushing “OK” after minor errors, that sort of thing. Why not have a robot do it for you? is a new company that helps you train collaborative robots to perform machine tending, something generally reserved for bots serving heavy industry. “This whole thing started because a friend of mine down the street literally has 20 3D printers, and his wife was having to run out every three minutes to keep them running,” said Mark Silliman, co-founder and CEO of Tend.ai, in an interview. Silliman’s company Smartwaiver was acquired in December, and his co-founders have also had a few recent exits. Security head James Gentes sold his analytics company The Social Business last year, as well, and backend engineer Robert Kieffer was part of Zenbe, which Facebook bought in 2010. From left: James Gentes, Mark Silliman, and Robert Kieffer So the whole thing began in February as something of a lark, perhaps to fill the rainy winter days of Bend, Oregon, where the company is based. Instead of employing a beleaguered spouse, why not use one of those fancy new collaborative robots meant for operating with and around people? Turns out they’re not especially easy to configure, since right now the industry is more focused on factories and assembly lines, not DIY operations. Working with an “integrator” to customize the platform, and getting the special hardware for computer vision or web monitoring can cost tens of thousands on top of the robot itself. “We basically spun up this system that moves all this data to the cloud,” said Silliman. “Now you can use a $100 webcam to do OCR and the whole nine yards, AI and machine learning, without having any of these resources in-house. And you can do it without modifying the machines or voiding their warranties. You can use any robot, any webcam, and it’s just plug and chug.” The Tend.ai system consists of a small computer, provided for free, that acts as a thin client, passing data to and from the robot and webcam, which you attach to its arm. All the configuration data and instructions are stored in the cloud. Training the robot is an entirely physical process. “Users never write code,” Silliman said. “They literally take the robot and pull it around by hand — these are collaborative robots, you can touch them — and train it, this is where the buttons are, this is where the screen is.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5WYLnOcggY For instance, a laser-cutting machine may indicate that it’s done on its touchscreen; you can teach the robot which part of the screen to read, then follow-up actions like dismissing the “job done” notification, opening the lid, removing and placing the product, then closing the lid and selecting a new job. The physical actions (XYZ translations, grip widths, etc.) would be learned by the robot’s own operating system, but managed and deployed by the Tend.ai box. It could also, say, react differently if there was an error or cancel the next job if there’s not enough material. Of course, if you are using a well-known machine like a common 3D printer, you won’t need to train it at all — Tend.ai’s database will already have that data. If not, your training data will be generalized and used to help others set up their own shops, who in turn add to the knowledge base for that model. The business model is a standard SaaS one, with a subscription model that Silliman said they’re still working out the details of. But if it works as advertised, Tend.ai’s system could allow machines to run 24/7 without human intervention — lowering costs, increasing productivity or both. Of course, there are a couple of objections worth addressing. “People say all the machines should be networked,” said Silliman. Printers and robots naturally aware of each other would not require an abstracted organizational layer like Tend.ai. “I would absolutely love that. But the truth is, people stay with machines for 20, 30 years. Because they work great! So waiting for the IoT dream isn’t always possible.” Besides, a humanoid robot using a system like Tend.ai’s is fundamentally flexible. “You could design a machine to do something really well, and faster than a robot with a webcam. But the point of the robot is that it’s agnostic, it can quickly adapt,” Silliman pointed out. “You can retrain the thing in 30 minutes.” There’s also opportunity for a big data or machine learning play. If you’re operating hundreds or thousands of these devices, you’re building quite a database of things like uptime, part wear, material usage and preference, and also video of operation that can be used to improve industrial computer vision systems. That’s all pie in the sky right now, of course, but an interesting prospect nonetheless. The company is only a few months old, and just now appearing in public. A beta with “10 to 20 customers” will go live in July, on the strength of which Tend.ai hopes to raise perhaps $2 million to fund further hires and development. Full operations should be a go toward the end of the year or early 2017.
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The hungry consumer and the software pivot
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Ben Schippers
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
The internet has become a lonely space, and are for something new. We don’t talk much anymore about new processors, video cards and faster dialup modems — at least not like we used to. Gone are the days of zip drives, bigger zip drives, faster DVD writing, ripping and pirated versions of Windows 95. The technology industry, specifically the internet, continues to become further standardized and isolating, which makes it harder for new players to get an edge. New railroad wars have already been fought and the major players are largely defined. This type of definition is good and bad. The ease of use for and its relationship with hardware is much better understood — fewer blue screens of death. Also, the shift to the mobile world is understood in most industries. Most , aside from some of the older generations, are comfortable with their technology. We are no longer an exclusive hobby community of nerds. Not all standardization is good, however, and we’ve seen this shift before. With a handful of companies controlling 95 percent of the pie, the ability to innovate is increasingly difficult. How long has it taken us to come up with a new car company? When was the last time we saw a new computer company take shape? If you really want to hammer the nail in the coffin, when was the last time you rode on Amtrak and arrived on time? Innovation is hard, and it’s only getting harder as saturates the market at the expense of any focus on hardware. In recent years the biggest change has come from Apple — we all know this. The smartphone should have gone to BlackBerry, but, well… let’s save that for another article. There have been a few very notable movements over the past 10 years, but biggest, far and away, was the introduction of the iPhone. Apple forced Google’s hand to get in the game, and so from 2007-2012, apps have dominated venture capital, programmers have become rock stars and have been amazingly satiated. But when we look closer, what’s really happened over the past few years is there’s been a huge amount of . Platitudes of the connected home, wearables, VR, bots and, most recently, live video have surfaced, and hopefully there will be more. The big companies are creating hope and hype for the . for new hardware, we long for the next big movement. We were teased with the Apple Watch. Nest and Dropcam got us close, but have potentially faded, and the recent focus on the pure play is maybe interesting but not anything new. The big companies are forced to innovate, but innovation at scale is hard. The current type of innovation happening feels cheap and a bit trivial. Are bots cool? Does anyone really care? We’ve been building bots for years, why are they being hyped now? Live video is interesting, but it’s an incremental step for companies like Facebook. Where’s the new hardware? The magic comes from marrying new hardware with — think Tesla, iPhone, iPod, AWS, Beats Headphones and Roomba, just to name a few. I don’t mean white label controlling bad, generic hardware. I mean an end to end thoughtful solution built with a single purpose in mind under one roof. We need to shift our thinking from clouds to clients and think more holistically. The majority of innovation over the past 10 years in the startup space has been around ; I believe it’s time for entrepreneurs to think differently structurally for innovation to continue at this pace. We need to get back to a time where we were building and hardware together, but in a more modified and cohesive model. We need to take the learnings from the early days and bring that into the future. New coupled with new, modern hardware, provides a broader relationship with the to the product. The challenges are different when you’re building and hardware cohesively. As we know, few companies can do this well. Low-level programming at the hardware level is a much different craft than facing, fancy graphical interface development. This newer style of development requires an understanding of how to get functionally different thinkers to play nicely together. Apple versus Microsoft. Tesla versus Ford. Nest versus Samsung. It generally requires more money to get started, but with the ever-impressive Raspberry Pi building , the playground is becoming friendlier. Smaller companies owning the end to end experience are where much of the next disruption and investment will come from. I’m spending a lot of my thinking time there, as are other entrepreneurs I deeply admire. We’re all thinking about areas to evolve. Here are some of my thoughts: The home router is wide open. A well-designed router, coupled with innovative IP, enabling new sharing capabilities over Wi-Fi, is prime. I also believe there’s room for a new type of computer company. A company that’s focused on a forked version of Chromium with a sophisticated ad-driven business model. Furthermore, there’s big opportunity for a “pre-smartphone” device for children. This device could do everything from communicating location to parents, to acting as a digital allowance and basic communication platform for chosen friends. To get any of those ideas to truly work means considering owning the entire experience, not just . Again, this is a fundamental shift from where the majority of time has been, and is being, spent. Have we reached saturation in most sectors? Yes. Are the markets reacting because of this? Yes. The next best products will take the learnings from the recent years and evolve them into a single, more impactful experience for the . The companies that do this the best will open up totally new revenue streams that will be far more defined than the era of the app — and more money will be made.
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Telecoms open shop on Madison Avenue, but will brands buy?
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Adam Cohen-Aslatei
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
Many companies have transformed and realigned their focus with great success. Avon transitioned from peddling books door-to-door to marketing beauty products. Wrigley started as a soap and baking soda company. IBM originally sold massive mainframe computers and calculators. Now, telecom companies are making similar pivots into a lucrative industry. The battle is about customer data and powering the $100 billion global mobile advertising business. Wireless carriers are in a great position to provide mobile ad services because of their intimate connections to hundreds of millions of customers. They might be able to finally fulfill digital advertising’s promise of delivering the right ad to the right person at the right time. Wireless carriers have troves of personalized data, powerful distribution platforms and many of them produce their own content. Also, telecom is one of the largest ad spend verticals. The industry understands the challenges that big brands face on mobile because it shares many of them. The next powerhouse digital ad platforms may come from telecoms. The race to vertically integrate will challenge industry players like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and niche players. However, deep pockets do not guarantee success. Large and bureaucratic companies may find it especially challenging to innovate, pivot their focus and develop new competencies. In fact, history is littered with failed transformations: Saatchi & Saatchi with management consulting, Cosmopolitan with yogurt and Allegis with its foray into travel. Through recent acquisitions, aggressive product development and wider industry partnerships, telecom companies are building sophisticated adtech products. Will brands respond favorably to the new big box shops on Madison Avenue — or shut them out? Competition in wireless is fierce. The U.S. oligopoly is dominated by Verizon and AT&T, with 33 percent and 34 percent market share, respectively. Sprint and T-Mobile each have approximately 16 percent, according to . Market saturation is inevitable with more than 207 million Americans already using a smartphone. Growth rates in the U.S. are expected to be in the low single digits for the rest of the decade, . As the industry has matured, innovation has withered. Wireless carriers have launched, but have yet to realize runaway success in connected home products, smart watches or virtual reality devices. While some players like AT&T look for success in the content distribution space (e.g. through its streaming content service U-Verse and by purchasing DirectTV), others are making a play for an even loftier prize — monetizing the customer data profile. Traditional adtech companies are presumptively in the best position to satisfy brand demands for better mobile ads. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all been in the adtech space since the inception of online advertising. However, according to a recent study, more than 73 percent of respondents said that digital ads do not match their personal interests or preferences. This finding highlights a big opportunity for wireless carriers because the data they possess is hyperpersonal, available in real time and geo-tagged. The mobile phone has become life’s remote control. From mobile banking, appointment scheduling and bill paying to meal ordering, video watching, online shopping and photo sharing, no single device in a person’s life knows as much about us as the smartphone. But carriers have traditionally been more of a utility and not an application innovator — they did not have inherent competencies to monetize content. If a wireless carrier can capture just a fraction of the U.S. mobile ad market, it could outperform the competition. The opportunity is massive and brands are taking notice. Many global wireless players have already invested in mobile adtech. from Singapore, from Australia and from Europe have been building adtech capabilities for some time. Global brands have been responding favorably. Brands can utilize SingTel’s mobile ad solutions to connect with their global audience. “The digital advertising business is about scale,” said Mark Strecker, chief executive officer of , a SingTel company, in a interview. Through acquisitions, the company is enlarging and expanding its mobile advertising footprint. However, there is potential for conflict of interest in the industry. Competing brands may need to transfer customer information and other data to telecom platforms in order to run campaigns. As a result, telecom ad platforms would control the distribution and messaging for another brand. American telecom companies have now entered the fray. Verizon recently started building its own mobile adtech stack with AOL as the centerpiece. AOL and mobile ad network provide Verizon with a robust mobile video ad solution. This is synergistic, as Verizon makes a large proportion of its revenue from data plans, and video is the largest source of data usage. According to a Juniper , mobile video currently accounts for about 60 percent of IP traffic in the U.S., with this figure expected to catapult over 70 percent in the next few years. Verizon will benefit from an increase in mobile video consumption regardless, but it will also benefit from the ads it runs and sells alongside video content. There is a clear business case for Verizon to monetize mobile video. Verizon also has top-quality user data that brands can leverage for enhanced mobile engagement. But will brands be open to running ads on a network that is controlled by another brand? Specifically, telecom and related industries might be wary because, unlike other media, on mobile, vast amounts of customer data is transferred between platforms. As a result, some advertisers might proceed with increased caution to ensure that their customer messaging and anonymized data is fully controlled. Verizon has already started walling off its garden in a bet to go head-to-head with Google and Facebook. According to a source, “Verizon has been notifying partners that they are cutting off agreements for their precision insights product.” By restricting third parties from its data trove, and instead using the data to power AOL’s ad platform, Verizon will funnel more dollars into its coffers. Despite the promising outlook, telecom companies could still face an uphill challenge. For example, Verizon was recently reprimanded for using “supercookies” without customer consent. Supercookies can be used to track and store personal data even if a consumer has deleted their traditional, browser-based cookies. Many e-commerce publishers use supercookie data packages and uniquely tailor messaging, onsite ads and content to wireless carrier customers. This recent occurrence brings to light some privacy challenges that telecom companies will face and issues that brands must consider when working with them. Sprint also has made an important play in mobile with its acquisition of mobile ad platform . The company focuses on processing and uncovering consumers’ insights and behaviors in order to provide enhanced branded experiences. Sprint is now able to monetize hundreds of apps while layering on data about Sprint subscribers to propel performance. The company combines demographic data with social and mobile interests and behavioral insights. More proof that wireless carriers are advancing in mobile adtech can be seen in their launch of various content services. Wireless carriers are vertically integrating to control not only data and ad platforms, but content and content distribution, as well. These content services provide an entry point for wireless carriers to enhance their clout in the mobile ecosystem. Verizon launched “go90,” an ad-supported app geared toward millennials. T-Mobile launched “T-Mobile TV,” a subscription service content portal. Sprint launched “SprintTV,” a free premium content service focused on mainstream entertainment properties. These services highlight new ways that wireless carriers are attempting to create new content offerings to then monetize. Other examples of wireless carriers expanding into mobile advertising include the emergence of online/offline programmatic video buying AT&T, together with its DirectTV unit, partnered with to offer cross-screen programmatic video ad solutions. AT&T’s goal is to take some of the precision from online advertising and inject it into the traditional television market. It remains to be seen if cross-platform programmatic commercial buying will make the leap to the mainstream. Some agencies have just started to purchase certain types of television inventory programmatically, but if agencies can achieve scale with online and offline bundled solutions, this approach may prove to be more appealing than siloed ad buying platforms. In addition to investments and services development, wireless carriers are forming major global partnerships with each other in order to own a piece of the mobile ad ecosystem. Sprint and Telefonica started a joint venture to provide advanced ad solutions for global brands. The partnership is unique in that it spans across Europe, the U.S. and Brazil. The venture can be leveraged by brands for large-scale global access to customers. Many global telecom partnerships are fluid and subject to change. This is especially true given industry consolidation, and the complexity of global data usage and associated privacy laws. Many big brands have shied away from partnering with companies that have the potential to generate controversy regarding data privacy. Other mobile-centric industry partnerships focus on content acquisition and ad distribution. Verizon has been acquiring new, high-quality video inventory to bolster its “go90” app. Through its partnership with Hearst, Verizon has added content from AwesomenessTV, Rated.com, SeriouslyTV and recently acquired Complex Media. Despite a recent deal with Publicis Groupe to run $50 million of go90 inventory, it is unclear if brands will consider this new digital-first content as premium. It also remains to be seen if go90 will attract enough users to make the app viable in the long term. Verizon is also expanding its mobile footprint through its global partnerships with Microsoft. The telecom titan will monetize much of the tech giant’s display and mobile inventory across top destination sites, including the MSN Homepage, Outlook Mail and Skype. Given dwindling opportunities for further industry consolidation in mature markets, many telecom companies in these markets are looking for new revenue streams to bolster growth. Brands see mobile adtech as the key to closing the loop on mobile data and targeting, and Google and Apple already benefit from cross-device capabilities. Wireless carriers may have an even greater capacity to provide value because of their intimate relationship with customers. For brands and agencies, more competition in the space may mean better pricing and more advanced targeting, but perhaps less brand control. How comfortable will brands like Comcast, Disney and Dish be, running their brand campaigns on a wireless carrier’s ad network? This remains to be seen. Brands and advertisers are cautiously optimistic. Adtech heavyweights, have, for some time, promised an environment in which the right person is targeted with the right ad at the right time. So far, the industry has not achieved its goal — but there is a big opportunity for wireless carriers to improve the state of mobile advertising. If they do, this could be a win-win-win. Consumers win because they get ads that are better suited to their interests and are hopefully less intrusive. Brands win because they can connect with customers in a more individualized and organic way. Finally, wireless carriers win because the revenue potential is massive, and they can drive further rapid innovation and potentially provide better inventory at varied pricing. Telecommunication companies may be opening up shop on Madison Avenue, but it remains to be seen if their presence will improve the industry and propel brands on mobile.
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How Seesaw accidentally became a teacher’s pet at 1/4 of US schools
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Josh Constine
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
It began as just another photo sharing startup founded by a Facebook exec. It ended up in 200,000 classrooms from kindergarten to 12th grade in 25,000 schools across 100 countries. All because of one truism: When a student’s audience is the world, they want their work to be good. When their audience is only their teacher, they just want it to be good enough. Seesaw founder Carl Sjogreen Carl Sjogreen started teaching coding at a summer camp while he was still in middle school. “I’ve had two passions my entire life, one is technology and one is education” the Seesaw founder tells me. But tech took over. After working at Google, Sjogreen founded a travel startup called Nextstop that he sold to Facebook, where he became the director of product management. “When I left Facebook, my #1 goal was to start an education technology company, but I was really sad because I thought I didn’t know how to do it” Sjogreen remembers. He’d never been a full- time teacher. So he slipped back to what he knew, building But Shadow Puppet flopped. “It was pretty clear 9 months in that it wasn’t going to be a business. I think we had one of those moments like, ‘Well, we better come up with something else.'” Sjogreen and his co-founder Adrian Graham pivoted Shadow Puppet towards the one audience who seemed keen on it: teachers. With just word of mouth, Seesaw took off. It was like “snatching success from the jaws of defeat”, Sjogreen says with a smile. Thanks to smart design, Seesaw sidesteps trouble that prevents other education apps from working right. First, the basic version is always free for students, teachers, and parents, so there’s no risk giving it a shot. It’s available for iOS, Android, Kindle, Chromebook, and web. Second, kids don’t need to fiddle with typing in an email address and password to sign in. Instead, they just hold the app up to a QR code poster in their classroom and select their name from the roster. Sjogreen explains that typically “20% of lesson time is spent just getting kids signed in to education apps. why teachers are reluctant to adopt tech in the classroom”. Third, everything they submit has to be seen and approved by the teacher before it shows up in Seesaw. Sjogreen chuckles, “that cuts down on the shenanigans you might imagine.” If teachers want, students can peer review each other’s work, but that gets moderated too to thwart bullying. “Instead of that mean comment going to the kid and hurting them, the teacher goes to the kid that wrote it and says ‘How would this make you feel?’ It’s a learning opportunity” the founder says. Seesaw also substitutes for managing huge stacks of paper. Beyond tracking each student separately, the new $120 per year Seesaw Plus premium version includes a skills view where teachers can rate students as green, yellow, or red on each lesson. A chart view both identifies students falling behind, but also which topics are giving the whole class trouble and might need a better lesson plan. Seesaw Plus isn’t the startup’s main business model, though. It’s more of an infiltration technique for bottom-up sales to school districts. The Seesaw For Schools paid version gives administrators a dashboard to monitor each classes’ workbook and integrate the data into their grading software. Seesaw is following the Dropbox playbook. Instead of top-down cold calling superintendandants, Seesaw aims to get a bunch of teachers in a district raving about it. That way administrators know if they pay to equip all their teachers with Seesaw, they’ll actually use it. There are other education software competitors in the market, though most focus on simply tracking grades or contacting parents with basic announcements. Remind, Canvas, Instructure, Pearson, and Blackboard make a few. Seesaw differentiates with its focus on what students create. Yet Seesaw’s challenge will be making the experience so simple that it becomes part of the natural teaching process, not an extra chore. If it distracts students or bogs down teachers, they’ll revert to the status quo. School districts are notoriously stingy too, so Seesaw will need to prove it boosts academic performance. Luckily some places like California now tie funding to parent involvement, which Seesaw can boost. Perhaps the biggest opportunity for Seesaw is assisting shy kids that fear raising their hands and asking for help. Seesaw could reveal who needs extra attention without embarrassing children in front of the class. Instead of bringing their teacher an apple, tomorrow’s students could bring them .
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Governments must embrace the Information Age or risk becoming obsolete
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Kaspar Korjus
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
Thirty-six years ago, American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler wrote his famous , outlining the inevitable transition from a “Second Wave,” characterized by an industrial society, to a “Third Wave,” characterized by what he calls the “Information Age.” The Information Age, as Toffler described, is defined by the shift from traditional industry that the brought through industrialization, to an economy based on computerization or digital revolution. Though written years ago, we can clearly see Toffler’s predictions come to life today, through the digitalization of our lives and the globalization of business. And yet, archaic “industrial society” systems of personal identification, economic transactions and business registration still fiercely limit the opportunities of governments and the citizens they serve. In today’s digital world, a global economy defined by state borders and the citizenship of its participants no longer makes sense. Many small companies have a desire to market their goods and services across continents, small countries seek larger consumer populations, digital nomads roam the world freely and one business transaction can involve a contract signed by people located in multiple countries. Individuals who want and need to participate in this global economy require a secure way to verify themselves online, run a business from anywhere in the world and trade in multiple markets freely. Governments must be up to the task of providing digitally oriented services for these individuals or risk becoming obsolete — “increasingly out of date, unable to cope with today’s complexities,” as Toffler phrased it. When Estonia regained its independence in 1991 from the Soviet Union, it immediately identified the difficulty of physically serving a small population spread across a large territory (Estonia has a bigger geographic footprint than the Netherlands or Switzerland). It is not realistic to put a bank branch in every small town, or have a full-service government office in each village. As a result, both the private and public sectors decided to bet on the development of digital solutions and e-services. The country also recognized that in order to compete economically as a small country in a new digital world, it needed to seek a competitive advantage by fostering a business climate that produced innovative technology. One of the ways Estonia was able to successfully achieve this goal and produce companies such as was for the government to offer technology-driven services that empowered the innovation taking place in the private sector. Today, 25 years since independence, Estonia has one of the most developed national digital infrastructures in the world. The Estonian government has put digitalization at the center of public services, including digital ID cards for all residents, online voting and the online submission of tax returns, which takes two minutes to complete on average. In 2015, more than 800 institutions offered around 1,500 public e-services in Estonia. As an Estonian citizen, I use my digital identity to log in to government services and digitally sign any contract, meaning that I can feel closely connected to the country as a citizen even when I am not physically in the country. In 2015, the Estonian government took its Government as a Service approach to another level by opening up its digital ID program to people around the world, regardless of their citizenship. This experiment of expanding digital government services beyond the boarders of the nation-state and providing access to people internationally that may otherwise be digitally or financially excluded from the global economy resulted in the establishment of the Estonian e-Residency program. Just a year since launching into beta, the program has grown Estonia’s economy like immigration never could — enabling people around the world to register an Estonian company online within a day, open an Estonian bank account, have access to payment service providers and digitally sign documents and contracts. As of May 2016, 558 new companies have been created by e-Residents, and 1,150 e-Residents use e-Residency to administer their company. The more people and companies engaged with the Estonian business environment, the more clients there are for Estonian companies. For example, when an e-Resident establishes a company, that company will likely start using the services offered by Estonian companies, like banking, payment services, accounting support, legal advice, asset management, investment advice, etc. As Estonia’s experience demonstrates, establishing what is essentially a state-run app store can redefine how governments around the world interact with people, and vice-versa. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, an American think tank headed by Robert Atkinson, recently highlighting the positive effects, as well as barriers to government, of embracing digital infrastructure and taking advantage of the economic opportunities that come along with it. Atkinson and his team list the effects of such an initiative as: Atkinson concluded that, “Information technology is creating a smart world — from smart enterprises to smart schools to smart cities. It’s time for societies to accelerate the creation of smart infrastructure.” He goes on to say, “But without a clear and articulate goal of transforming traditional infrastructure into digital infrastructure, and the associated policies needed to do that, this needed transition will lag.” I couldn’t agree more, and this has certainly been something the Estonian experience confirms. We are now firmly in Toffler’s “Third Wave,” a future where individuals can conduct business in a digital world in which physical location matters little. Now is the time for governments to stop dragging their feet and fighting progress. It’s time for entrepreneurs and capable developers to gather their efforts to help digital government programs reach their full potential.
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Novelist John Sundman talks CRISPR, genetics, and logic bombs
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John Biggs
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
Novelist is a national treasure. His best work, Acts of the Apostles, predicts CRISPR, advanced genetic engineering, and chip-based Trojan Horses and his writing is at once dense and thrilling. I got the chance to talk with him this week for the podcast. Sundman lives on Martha’s Vineyard and has been a tech contractor as well as a volunteer fireman and carpenter. He’s not exactly down on the idea of a better future, you’ll find, but he is worried. He expects we’ll see very powerful DNA control systems in the future. “This offers all kinds of interesting promise for curing all sorts of genetic diseases,” he said. “But it also opens up a Pandora’s Box for all kinds of other applications.” Sundman also expects VR and feedback loops for examining and controlling genetic material. You can download the episode or .
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Seoul’s new traffic signs warn of the dangers of texting while walking
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Lucia Maffei
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
The traffic and pedestrian signs alerting the danger of using smartphones while walking on the street, soon to be installed in five areas of the South Korean capital. The safety campaign, implemented together with the National Police Agency, specifically targets kids, teenagers and young adults, the main users of smartphones in the country. “The five areas where the pilot project will be implemented are Hongdae, City Hall, Yonsei University, Gangnam Station, and Jamsil Station, where there are many accidents and pedestrians in their 10-30s,” the Seoul Metropolitan Government website states. Here is what those signs will look like: Seoul safety signs for smartphone users. (Source: Seoul Metropolitan Government website) of 50.8 million, South Korea has the highest smartphone ownership rate worldwide, according to statistics in 2016. The fact that the country is also one of the most active smartphone manufacturers in the world is not a coincidence – it’s the headquarters of LG Electronics, not to mention Samsung Electronics in Suwon, south of the capital. “I saw many people using smartphones while walking and commuting, but I don’t think it’s just Korea,” said Jenny Lee, who had been living in Seoul for the past five years before enrolling in a university in Illinois. “People in the U.S. are also similar,” she added. The phenomenon of walking and texting, sadly, is probably nothing new to anyone who regularly uses public transportation. To prevent accidents, other cities in Asia, in Europe and in the U.S. launched similar initiatives. In 2013, mobile phone carrier NTT Docomo all over a staircase in Tokyo, reading “Walking while using a smartphone is dangerous.” German city Augsburg embedded in the sidewalks, designed to be easily detected by people looking down at their smartphones. Utah Valley University, south of Salt Lake City, introduced a designated lane for texting while walking in its gym. Back in South Korea, the administration said it hopes “the message is made simple and clear, so that the pedestrians who are mostly looking down at their smartphones can easily see it.” Let’s hope.
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You can help stop human trafficking with the TraffickCam app
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
In a world where the phrase “oh god, not another app” often springs to mind, along with “Yeah, yeah, I’m you want to make a world a better place” is a blast of icy-fresh air. TraffickCam is an app developed by the , an organization fighting back against sex trafficking. The goal of the new app is to build a national database of photos of the insides of hotel rooms to help law enforcement match images posted by sex traffickers to locations, in an effort to map out the routes and methods used by traffickers. The app will also be useful to help locate victims — and the people who put them in their predicament. Available for both and , the app is unlikely to win any design awards, but that isn’t the point; the app makers are solving a tremendous problem and any tools available to help resolve some of this will be welcomed with open arms by the organizations fighting the good fight. Sex trafficking is a form of modern day slavery that forces children and adults to engage in sexual acts, for money, against their will. Which is bad enough in itself, but ; at least 300,000 American children, and more than 1.2m children worldwide are trafficked each years. And when we say children, that’s where the horror deepens: most victims are recruited between the ages 12-14. The app, then, is a crowd-sourced data gathering tool which can be used to match known locations to photos confiscated from or shared by the perpetrators. Features such as patterns in the carpeting, furniture, room accessories and window views can be analyzed, and according to the app’s creators, testing shows that the app is 85 percent accurate in identifying the correct hotel in the top 20 matches. “Law enforcement is always looking for new and innovative ways to recover victims, locate suspects and investigate criminal activity,” said Sergeant Adam Kavanagh, St. Louis County Police Department and Supervisor of the St. Louis County Multi-Jurisdictional Human Trafficking Task Force. Today, the organization’s database contains 1.5 million photos from more than 145,000 hotels in every major metropolitan area of the U.S., a combination of photos taken by early users of the TraffickCam smartphone app and from publicly available sources of hotel room images. Personally, I think this is a great opportunity for the travel industry and the accompanying startup ecosystem to work together to help. Room 77, for example, are of hotel room images, and companies like , , and could easily leverage their app install base to encourage its customers to take photos of rooms as they check in. Come on, guys, let’s put that big data treasure trove to good use. The idea for the app came up when the organization found an image of a motel room, knew what city it was taken in, but had no way of knowing which motel the photo was taken in. “We connected the vice squad with our associates in that city, but it took three days to find the girl,” said Molly Hackett at the Exchange Initiative. “That seemed way too long, given today’s technology.” So, if you do a lot of traveling, install the app and. You can help make the world a better place, one potential crime scene at the time.
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The dredge report: being an account of an expedition into the hyperreality of the California Delta
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Jon Evans
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
It has occurred to me that perhaps TechCrunch pays insufficient attention to slurry, sediment, silt, sludge, mud, and muck; to canals, earthworks, levees, dikes, dredges, and the Army Corps of Engineers; to the vast engineering works, with lifespans measured in decades, that literally reshape our world. So last weekend I boarded a bus hired by the Dredge Research Collaborative. This wonderfully obsessive and obscure group of infrastructure aficionados, guided by writer and Rhode Island School of Design professor , has held an annual “DredgeFest” event every year since 2013. This year it was a tour of that vast artificial just upstream of San Francisco and the Valley — the . “We own the only high-rate offloader west of the Mississippi,” Jim Levine says at our first stop, the massive megaproject called the Montezuma Wetlands, with some justified smugness in his voice. “Slurry it up to 15% … pump the sediment 4 miles at 20,000 gallons a minute … last year we took in about a million [cubic] yards … probably half of all the dredging in the bay.” “Wow,” an awed student breathes in reply, “that’s a lot of dredge.” The entire Delta is, basically, a lot of dredge. Once it was a huge wetland carved by a network of intertwined, constantly shifting waterways. Then came the 19th-century gold rush. Miners upstream in the Sierra washed away entire rock faces with high-pressure water, creating a gargantuan “pulse” of sediment that filtered downstream, its traces still visible in the San Francisco Bay today. Meanwhile, settlers began to cultivate the Delta. Chinese laborers built the first delta megaproject; a colossal array of levees to (aspirationally) hold back floods. The descendants of those levees wall the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers today — and the peaty land of the islands behind them has subsided to a depth which in places hits 26ft/8m below sea level. On Sherman Island, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin meet, we stood in those depths, looking what felt like up to the riverbanks, jokingly advised to look for cracks in the levees. Of course what really worries Californians is earthquakes. Sherman Island, and its levees, keep the brackish Bay water out of what’s sent south by the . If it were to be inundated by a levee breach, salinity would increase so much that “we’d have to shut down the pumps” carrying water south, said an engineer from Ducks Unlimited ( ) as he showed us around the site. If this doesn’t seem like a tenable long-term solution to you, you’re not alone. Governor Brown and co. are currently promoting a to carry water the Delta to Southern California, courtesy of two giant tunnels. This is, to put it mildly, . Others have proposed . Which is of course even controversial. There is no such thing as a megaproject without fierce opposition. Even the Montezuma Wetlands project — which, elegantly, tops up subsided lowlands with dredged sediment, to regenerate the kind of wetlands which originally existed — attracted enormous hostility and resistance. The project was birthed in 1991: it did not launch until 2003, after 12 years of legal battles. Now, in the shadow of a massive wind farm (its existence perhaps prompted by the project’s $150,000/month PG&E bill) a slow restoration of two thousands acres of wetlands is underway, and should continue for at least another decade. In an era when “tech” usually means something obsoleted within a few years, there is a certain grandeur to projects with this kind of scale and lifespan. Even outside of cities, most of the population of California lives in a fundamentally artificial environment, courtesy of what can be considered an ongoing engineering project that dates back more than a century: the transformation of the Delta and the Central Valley into some of the world’s most productive farmland, while keeping the South alive with water from the North, the , and the . Some of this history has been captured at the (no, really) in Rio Vista in the Delta. (Sorry, hacker tourists; they’re open by appointment only, and prefer groups of 10 or more.) There I learned that the clamshell dredge was one of the cutting-edge world-changing technologies of its day. It’s still in wide use, but of course it’s not “tech” any more. As technology ages, it becomes infrastructure, and grows deeply boring to most. The friend who invited me out to DredgeFest is a professional infrastructurist himself — except that his is in . One day the descendants of his satellites will be both as unsexy, and as crucial, as the dredges you might glimpse from BART or the bayside from time to time, without really noticing. And why should you? Like most infrastructure, they are much too important to be allowed to be interesting.
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The app boom is not over
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Anshu Sharma
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
There’s a new wave of reporting focused on the post- era. Recode announced “ .” Quartz points out how most users . Let me be very clear: The a b is n o . The reporting on this topic made me think of an imagined Yogi Berra quote: “Nobody downloads anymore, it’s too crowded.” Let’s start with the facts. The real numbers are amazing — we are in an unprecedented era of growth when it comes to revenue from . Revenue is hard to manipulate because it ties back to financial filings by Google and Apple and needs to be audited. App revenue is growing and is expected to reach $100 billion dollars by 2020. : Annie Take download news as an example. It talks about how downloads have stalled by pointing out the numbers for top . In truth, the newer like Uber, Airbnb and Snapchat are all growing fast, while, expectedly, most top that have been there for a while and have saturated the users, like Facebook, are growing any more. To use this data to point to the end of an is somewhat misleading. There has never been a better time to be an developer. Billions of users have access to cheap new smartphones, data plans are becoming available globally and the store owners like Apple and Google are being more generous than ever. Apple is supporting lower fees on subscription revenue — going from 30 percent to 15 percent in year two onwards. As a SaaS guy, let me tell you this is an amazingly insightful decision by Apple — if most developers can be nudged to think subscriptions, in turn making consumers pay more per month, you end up with a very long-term, sticky revenue base. Even more importantly, this revenue is cheaper and results in a virtual lock-in as consumers with more subscriptions are much less likely to switch ecosystems. Go forth and multiply — your .
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Latin America’s chronic inefficiency could drive more O2O commerce growth
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Romero Rodrigues
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
After 45 minutes on the phone with a travel agent, I’ve grown too frustrated with trying to figure out different alternatives for an international flight to the Maldives that stops in Paris on the way back. Within seconds, I’m compelled to pick up my mobile phone where and can help me much more efficiently. Tired and hungry, I find the refrigerator is empty. When I call in my order to my favorite Italian restaurant, the representative on the line doesn’t recognize me and asks how she can help me. Yet, it’s so obvious why I’m calling. Then she asks me for my phone number and address, and has no record of what I typically order when I call in for food delivery two to three times a week. The truth is that Latin America is extremely inefficient and its technology is behind North America. Yet, in Brazil, one of the world’s largest economies despite the current crisis, e-commerce sales are expected to reach more than $22 billion this year (up more than 13 percent over 2015), and m-commerce in Brazil continues to rise at a fast pace, according to recent data from . The mobile market opportunity is massive: more than 100 million people in Brazil are already online today, and there are nearly another 100 million more to go. There are numerous daily tasks that can be solved with ease in the U.S. In comparison, the lack of training, standardization and process in Brazil creates chronic inefficiencies in the service sector that push consumers to prefer and use mobile applications that provide everyday services in a standardized manner. In many cases, the experiences between online and offline service in the U.S. can be marginal. However, in Latin America it can be a significant and annoying difference. When you try to buy auto insurance with a broker by telephone, for example, the time you can expect to waste is much higher in Latin America. The lack of visibility into your options is huge. The bureaucracy in terms of the number of necessary documents and data required is exponentially higher. After headache-causing calls, the chances of getting only one quote without a comparison are big. The broker will likely just push their favorite insurance company. Intense traffic in big metropolitan areas have helped create a new market for on-demand delivery by couriers on motor bikes. Crossing the city at high speeds while dodging cars and buses, they deliver documents and small parcels. \ There are now nearly one million “motoboys” in Brazil, and more than 200,000 of them work in the city of Sao Paulo alone. To make this fleet more efficient, motoboy hailing apps such as Rapiddo and Loggi are growing fast. On-demand pickup and delivery of laundry is another fast-growing O2O commerce service offering in big cities. Based on subscription fees, on-demand laundry operators are becoming an important service for the always-busy, always-late “Paulistas” (those born in Sao Paulo). ALavadeira is one example of a stand-out company in this new laundry service segment. With unemployment reaching a record high in Brazil, , which is similar to DogVacay or Rover, is having no problem finding new hosts for its popular pet-sitting platform. Whoever loves dogs with available time can apply to become a DogHero host for “man’s best friends.” In Brazil’s larger cities, there is a huge shortage of hotels for dogs or kennels, making it difficult for dog owners to travel because they have no one to take care of their pets while they’re away. In addition to new consumer offerings, the O2O commerce trend is helping reduce bureaucracy for small business owners. A new phenomenon is occurring in Brazil in response to the high unemployment rate: the number of individual micro-entrepreneurs (MEIs) are skyrocketing. More than 5.5 million of them now operate in Brazil. They offer a variety of services and goods from plumbing to manicures. In response, a government program was introduced at the end of 2009 to track and formalize them as business owners and to collect taxes. Prior to that, the MEIs never paid taxes or social security before. To help them navigate though it, is a new mobile app and service that helps MEIs manage taxes and finances. It also controls and automates access to social benefits. Qipu has grown fast with more than 200,000 active users. The current experiential difference between the U.S. and Latin America creates two huge opportunities for O2O commerce growth. The first is the rapid adoption of new services that will balance it with the U.S. experience by creating more efficiencies where they’re badly needed, led by fast mobile app adoption. T he second is we’ll probably see new models in Brazil that didn’t necessarily work as well in the U.S. Imagine a model like the instacart, in which you can use a mobile app to make grocery shopping that’s delivered to your place in just a few hours. When you analyze the unit economics, Brazil could actually be an even better market than the U.S. for new on-demand businesses. Delivery person salaries, for example, are much lower in Brazil. There are fewer comparable services for the Brazilian to choose from, which provides an advantage for early-mover brands. Plus, the Brazilian consumer would likely have to travel more kilometers to find the products, most likely through heavy traffic or using poor public transport in large cities. For these reasons in particular, a Brazilian is even more likely to pick up a cell phone and request through a mobile app for a bicycle deliveryman do this work instead. It wouldn’t be the first time that a model that did not work as well in the U.S. would work here. This happened in comparison e-commerce, for example, Buscapé for many years represented a large share of the domestic e-commerce. And the price-comparison model has never been more relevant in any other e-commerce market than Brazil. Thus, new eServices led my mobile innovation and rapid consumer adoption will fuel a growing on-demand economy in Brazil and Latin America through increased consumer convenience, the third most important vector driving consumer purchases after selection and price, by creating more efficiencies and less work. For this reason, I predict that innovative startups and larger companies that see the potential of solving inefficiencies will push growth of more than 50 percent year-over-year, even despite the current economic crisis in Brazil. This growth rate is already occurring today with for food, for insurance, for airline tickets, with credit cards, to name a few examples of which I am very familiar with today. But be sure: the eServices revolution is coming soon for your plumber, your babysitter and your bank manager. Some more Brazilian startups that are disrupting inefficiencies with eServices include:
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Former TechShop CEO Mark Hatch joins Network Society Ventures as General Partner
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 3 |
Early-stage venture firm has snagged TechShop’s former CEO and co-founder Mark Hatch as general partner. Hatch is recognized as a pioneer of the maker movement, is a current entrepreneur in residence at UC Berkeley, and is a former Green Beret. For those who don’t know it, bills itself as “a membership-based DIY workshop.” The company charges its members a monthly fee to access work space and a bevy of hard-to-get, large or expensive manufacturing machines that are a designer’s dream, from the latest and greatest laser cutters, to CNC mills and 3D printers. During his tenure at TechShop, Hatch says he grew the company from one to eight U.S. locations with many others in development, and increased its memberships and revenue by a multiple of twenty in just five years. Hatch also helped TechShop raise over $20 million in venture funding, including $3.4 million from investors online at a time when so-called equity crowdfunding was only newly permitted by U.S. regulators. Hatch resigned from TechShop in July this year as TechCrunch . We have reached out for additional details about what Hatch’s immediate plans are for the firm. Generally, the fund has identified certain areas where it seeks to place a lot of small bets, making investments of $100,000 to $500,000 in very early stage companies around the world. The industries or technologies it has expressed interest in are energy, manufacturing, food, health, finance, security, policymaking and learning or non-traditional education tech. Founded in 2015 by David Orban, Network Society Ventures is an investor in . Through that relationship, the firm’s portfolio includes some companies working on some futuristic and fun technologies. Examples include: makers of an electric, elevated transit system that aims to leave as much of the natural view possible while moving people; which is making nutritional additives from fruit waste that could help ; and whose robots aim to help keep shelves stocked, and customers happy at retail stores.
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Students are demanding the facts about coding bootcamps
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Darrell Silver
| 2,016 | 6 | 25 |
It’s been a remarkable rise so far, but for coding bootcamps to become mainstream they must prove that the outcomes they advertise are real. In 2012 coding bootcamps began offering courses in software development and promising graduates new careers in technology. The schools, now backed by hundreds of millions in VC funding, will educate about 30,000 students in 2016, and rake in just shy of half a billion in tuition fees. Most schools claim nearly 100% graduation and placement rates. But these claims are mostly unverified and just how schools arrive at them largely undisclosed. Prospective students look to outcomes statistics because it’s the only way to gauge their chances for success — bootcamps don’t have decades or centuries of reputations like colleges. Students, so far, have been the early adopters, open to risk for the chance of being early. But as with any product wider market adoption depends on continually improving clarity, trust, and proof. This is even more true in coding education where services promising to teach the same skills vary from a $25 per month subscription to Code School to an average tuition of $14,000 at a bootcamp. The only way for students to make a wise decision about how to learn is to understand the types of outcomes, peer groups, and time commitment each type of learning offers and promises. But most of the industry still isn’t doing that. The majority of schools market with one-off achievements like the one graduate who got into YCombinator, or the tiny percentage who get hired by Google. These claims make a good email subject line but fail to set any reasonable expectation for students. In the end, they eat away at consumer’s trust exactly when companies need to be building it. This is why the industry is starting to see a backlash against bootcamps. Zed Shaw the most flagrant examples of bootcamp overreach, Basel Farag (a mentor for Thinkful) that “while many coding bootcamps are legitimate and care for their pupils, an even greater number are run by modern snake-oil salespeople tapping into the average American’s desperation.” The industry is also starting to see stories about with their own promises — even to The White House. This is what happens when marketing trumps education, and it hurts every company operating in the market. Some schools are beginning to taking transparency seriously. Lighthouse Labs, HackReactor, and Turing School are among the schools that report student outcomes. Over the next few months General Assembly and others will also likely come around. There are forces pushing for transparency, too. Lenders like Skills Fund now fund about 20% of coding bootcamp students and as a result collect limited but very high quality outcomes data. Skills Fund is trying to get bootcamps to agree to a common set of standards and categories so it can (anonymously) better report on the industry. The government’s pilot EQUIP program may have a similar side effect. Course Report, the independent bootcamp review site, has started adding student outcomes data alongside individual student reviews. While standards bodies seem inevitable the efforts so far aren’t gaining traction because the market is still innovating too quickly to pin down a single definition of student success. There’s also valid reasons schools may use different methodologies, like if there’s an admissions policy, or if students who take a break while enrolled count as having failed. For the next year or two the right goal is that schools define and publish their own data alongside clear methodologies for arriving at the numbers. This will force schools to debate in public and let students decide. Two years ago several bootcamps in California for being out of compliance with regulations covering postsecondary schools. At the time it was seen as an aberration. The schools were small and years later it hasn’t happened again. But today there’s ten times as many students enrolled in bootcamps, millions who take coding courses, and hundreds of millions of VC dollars invested. Without transparency mainstream adoption will slow, or worse, the next round of padlocks on schools’ doors will cause permanent damage to coding schools’ nascent reputation. If schools continue their lax approach to reporting the facts the only option remaining will be for regulators to start imposing burdensome and expensive restrictions – and that’s if we’re lucky. Building trust with students will, in the long-term, change the direction of massive economic forces like exploding student debt and nagging underemployment – achievements every bootcamp should work together to achieve.
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Bots that work everywhere
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Tom Hadfield
| 2,016 | 12 | 3 |
Bots made big headlines in 2016. They’ve been hailed variously as the future of commerce and a revolution in customer service. It seems likely that, just as the web and the cell phone once did, the messaging interface will transform how we interact with the world around us. To do so, however, the bot community must tackle head-on the same issues of interoperability and cross-platform standards that plagued the early days of the web and the cell phone industry. We take it for granted that we can view any website using any browser, and we can send SMS messages to any friend regardless of their phone carrier. It wasn’t always this way, and it wasn’t that long ago. Twenty years ago, it was common for Netscape users to be blocked by an “optimized for Internet Explorer” icon. Similarly, there was a time when a Verizon customer and an AT&T customer could only text with friends on the same network, but not with each other. American Idol even had to display two numbers for voting by text: one for Verizon customers, and one for AT&T. Two decades on, it’s tempting to assume that these “walled gardens” — to use a phrase first used to describe the likes of CompuServe and AOL — have been consigned to the history books. Not so. Today, in 2016, you can only communicate with Domino’s Pizza on Facebook Messenger. You can only chat with H&M on Kik. You can only use Troops on Slack, not HipChat. The walled gardens are back. The concept of a “Facebook bot” or a “Slack app” doesn’t make any more sense than a website “optimized for Internet Explorer” or “optimized for Netscape.” Why does this matter? Tens of millions of users of enterprise messaging platforms like HipChat, Flowdock or Microsoft Teams are unable to make use of Slack’s rich ecosystem of third-party integrations. Similarly, hundreds of enterprise bot developers need to rebuild their bots if they want to reach new customers on Cisco Spark or Salesforce Chatter. The same is true in the consumer space. Companies such as Sameroom and Slackline are beginning to connect these APIs to create a more unified messaging system. Here’s the good news: If you look back through human history, every communication technology that has survived (e.g. postal mail, telephone, email and the web) has trended toward interoperability. There’s no reason to think bots/messaging will be any different.
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Apple reveals autonomous vehicle ambitions in letter to US regulators
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Lora Kolodny
| 2,016 | 12 | 3 |
Apple has publicly revealed its ambitions to play in the emerging market of self-driving vehicles with to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. first broke news of the communique. Precise details of Apple automotive products were not revealed in the letter. But it did state that: “Apple uses machine learning to make its products and services smarter, more intuitive, and more personal. The company is investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation.” Written by Apple Director of Product Integrity Steve Kenner, the letter calls for policies that will bring about: a clear understanding of who is liable for problems that occur when cars drive themselves; the maintenance of users’ privacy, cybersecurity and physical safety; and ensuring that the impact of self-driving cars on the public is as positive as can be. The impact of any new regulation on a burgeoning industry could be chilling or make room for new brands, jobs and technological breakthroughs, of course. Apple strongly calls for policies that treat newcomers in the automotive industry the same as incumbent leaders. A new automaker should not have to disclose more information about their autonomous vehicles, the letter suggests, before they test them on public roads in a safe and controlled manner. This recommendation has the internet abuzz with the idea that Apple will make its own brand of self-driving cars, after all, not just the software or operating systems within them. The letter also admonishes to form policies that will protect drivers’ individual privacy. Kenner writes: “Apple agrees that companies should share de-identified scenario and dynamics data from crashes and near-misses…By sharing data, the industry will build a more comprehensive dataset than any one company could create alone… [But] Data sharing should not come at the cost of privacy. Apple believes that companies should invest the resources necessary to protect individuals’ fundamental right to privacy.” Rumors of an Apple car have long been swirling online, and were renewed when the company reportedly enlisted to head its auto division. Mansfield was formerly the leader of engineering teams behind products like the MacBook Air and iPad. Following his appointment though, the Cupertino tech juggernaut its teams to focus on developing the “brains” within an autonomous vehicle, reportedly. If Apple stays true to its winning playbook of owning both the hardware and the software within to make its entrance in transportation, we will one day see a self-driving car in its name.
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WTF is AI?
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016 | 12 | 4 |
We’ve all heard that famous assertion, foundation for a modern philosophy of self, consciousness, and individualism. But Descartes had it easy: for him, thought was self-evident — he didn’t have to define it. What is thought? What is intelligence? And can a machine be said to possess either? The field of artificial intelligence, it turns out, is as much about the questions as it is about the answers, and as much about how think as whether the machine does. By way of illustration and introduction, consider this brief thought experiment. Picture a locked room. Inside the room sit many people at desks. At one end of the room, a slip of paper is put through a slot, covered in strange marks and symbols. The people in the room do what they’ve been trained to: divide that paper into pieces, and check boxes on slips of paper describing what they see — diagonal line at the top right, check box 2-B, cross shape at the bottom, check 17-Y, and so on. When they’re done, they pass their papers to the other side of the room. These people look at the checked boxes and, having been trained differently, make marks on a third sheet of paper: if box 2-B checked, make a horizontal line, if box 17-Y checked, a circle on the right. They all give their pieces to a final person who sticks them together and puts the final product through another slot. The paper at one end was written in Chinese, and the paper at the other end is a perfect translation in English. Yet no one in the room speaks either language. This thought experiment, first put forth by computing pioneer John Searle, is often trotted out (as I have done) as a quick way of showing the difficulty of defining intelligence. With enough people, you can make the room do almost anything: draw or describe pictures, translate or correct any language, factor enormous numbers. But is any of this intelligent? Someone outside the room might say so; anyone inside would disagree. If instead of people, the box is full of transistors, you have a good analog for computers. So, the natural question is can a computer ever be more than just a phenomenally complicated Chinese Room? One answer to this, which as often is the case in this field, spawns more questions, is to ask: what if instead of transistors, the box is full of neurons? What is the brain but the biggest Chinese Room of all? This rabbit hole goes on as far as you want to follow it, but we’re not here to resolve a problem that has dogged philosophers for millennia. This endless navel-gazing is, of course, catnip for some, but in the spirit of expedition let us move on to something more practical. These days, AI is a term applied indiscriminately to a host of systems, and while I’d like to say that many stretch the definition, I can’t, because AI doesn’t really a proper definition. Roughly speaking, we could say that it is a piece of software that attempts to replicate human thought processes or the results thereof. That leaves a lot of wiggle room, but we can work with it. You have AI that picks the next song to play you, AI that dynamically manages the legs of a robot, AI that picks out objects from an image and describes them, AI that translates from German to English to Russian to Korean and every which way. All of these are things humans excel at, and there are vast benefits to be gained from automating them well. Yet ultimately even the most complex of these tasks is just that: a . A neural network trained on millions of sentences that can translate flawlessly between 8 different languages is nothing but a vastly complicated machine crunching numbers according to rules set by its creators. And if something can be reduced to a mechanism, a Chinese Room — however large and complex — can it really be said to be rather than calculation? It is here that we come to the divide between “weak” and “strong” AI. They are not of AI, exactly, but rather ways of considering the very idea at the heart of the field. Like so many philosophical differences, neither is more correct than the other, but that doesn’t make it any less important. One one side, there are those who say that no matter how complex and broad an AI construct is, it can never do more than emulate the minds that created it — it can never advance beyond its mechanistic nature. Even within these limitations, it may be capable of accomplishing incredible things, but in the end it is nothing more than a fantastically powerful piece of software. This is the perspective comprised by weak AI, and because of the fundamental limitations proposed, those espousing it tend to focus on how to create systems that excel at individual tasks. On the other side are the proponents of strong AI, who suggest that it is possible that an AI construct of sufficient capabilities is essentially indistinguishable from a human mind. These are people who would include the brain itself yet another Chinese Room. And if this mass of biological circuits inside each of our heads can produce what we call intelligence and consciousness, why shouldn’t silicon circuits be able do the same? The theory of strong AI is that at some point it will be possible to create an intelligence equal to or surpassing our own. There’s just one problem there: we don’t have a working definition of intelligence! It’s difficult to say whether we’ve made any serious progress in defining intelligence over the last 3,000 years. We have, at least, largely dispensed with some of the more obviously spurious ideas, such as that intelligence is something that can be easily measured, or that it depends on biological markers such as head shape or brain size. We all seem to have our own idea of what constitutes intelligence, which makes it hard to say whether an AI passes muster. acts rather like a marksmanship target in which no single definition hits the bulls-eye, yet their clustering suggests they were all aiming at the same spot. Some are too specific, some too general, some clinical, some jargony. Out of all of them I found only one that seems both simple enough and fundamental enough to be worth pursuing: That, after all, is really what is at the heart of the “adaptability,” the “generalizing,” the “initiative” that alloys alternately the “reason,” “judgment,” or “perception” abundant in the intelligent mind. Clearly it is important that one is able to solve problems, to reason one’s way through the world — but more important than that, one must be able to turn the ability to solve some problems into the ability to solve other problems. That transformative nature is key to intelligence, even if no one is quite sure how to formalize the idea. Will our AIs one day be imbued with this all-important adaptable reason, and with it slip the leash, turning to new problems never defined or bounded by their creators? Researchers are hard at work creating new generations of AI that learn and process in unprecedented detail and sophistication, AIs that learn much as we do. Whether they think or merely calculate may be a question for philosophers as much as computer scientists, but that we even have to ask it is a remarkable achievement in itself.
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