tech now |
- A Handy Guide For Comparing Spying Vs. Terrorism Disaster Scenarios
- Sciencescape Wants To Solve Academic Research Discoverability, Deal With The Noise Problem
- Up Close With Casio's Latest Edifice Surf Watch
- The Curse Of The Network Effect
- For Some Reason, Square's Hiring Page Listed Chirply And SeatMe As ‘Potential Acquisitions'
- The Secret Science Behind Big Data And Word Of Mouth
- Hampton Creek Foods Shows Off Its Egg-Less Scrambled Eggs
- Tristan O'Tierney, Square's Co-Founder And Early iOS Engineer, Leaves For Destinations Unknown
- Blue Apps Are All Around But Blue Tones Get Less Of A Role In iOS 7′s Psychedelic Redesign
- Doing Mobile Monetization The Right Way
- CrunchWeek: Path's $1B Valuation, Google's Waze Buy And The WWDC Recap
- Silicon Valley Real Estate Update: The Craziest Market In The U.S. Just Got A Little Less Crazy
- Security Psychology And Why Even Messy Numbers Of Government Data Demands Are Valuable
| A Handy Guide For Comparing Spying Vs. Terrorism Disaster Scenarios Posted: 16 Jun 2013 09:19 AM PDT  The week’s news has been a fear-mongering marathon between civil libertarians who are convinced we’re on the road to becoming North Korea, and security hawks who are building bunkers for the inevitable post-cyberattack hell scape. Unfortunately, because the most important facts about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs are top secret, the entire debate has consisted of fear-driven hypotheticals. We can’t change that fact. But! We can make NSA disaster scenarios easier to compare by detailing the relative harms of privacy invasion vs. terrorist threats in a handy guide on their probability and scope. In ascending order of paranoia, I compare privacy vs. security trade-offs, and conclude with a section that makes sense of why some people fear surveillance more than terrorists.
Cost Comparison: $85 Billion Vs. $75 Billion We know for sure that both defense and fear of terrorists is burning a hole in America’s pocketbook. Terrorist-driven aversion to flying and tourism has resulted in an estimated $85 billion in lost revenue, according to Eli Berman, an associate professor of economics at University of California, San Diego. In a bit of delightful parity, the combined cost of the U.S. intelligence apparatus is $75 billion, including $1.7 billion for the NSA’s massive new 1-million-square-foot Utah campus, which houses all the servers it needs to retain America’s vast collection of porn, Justin Bieber tweets and cat videos. Paranoia Level: Has Purell on a keychain - Stealing Company Secrets Vs. Self-Censorship Cost: Innovation Vs. Open Dialogue "Surveillance inclines us to the mainstream and the boring," wrote Washington University law professor Neil Richards, who argues that the watch-tower effect of omnipresent government spying throttles open dialogue. Personally, I do find myself avoiding the word “terrorist” in emails because I have a vague sense I’ll get flagged by some government agency. On the security side, some are reasonably worried about theft of company secrets. We know that Chinese hackers are fans of corporate espionage; in one instance, stolen data from Coca-Cola preceded their failed $2.4 billion acquisition of the China Huiyuan Juice Group. According to security firm Mandiant, the Chinese top-level hacking unit, was "busy rummaging through their computers in an apparent effort to learn more about Coca-Cola's negotiation strategy." It’s just as possible that the Russian and Middle Eastern terror cells being tracked by the NSA are also stealing corporate secrets, which could cause more widespread piracy and throttling of innovation.
Cost: Hundres of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars vs. Hundres of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars For the most part, the NSA only targets terrorist suspects — the rest of the data collects cobwebs on a faceless server. But civil liberty critics worry that nefarious middle managers at the NSA could blackmail whistleblowers or policymakers that threaten their agenda. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly worried:
To get a handle on how bad this kind of blackmail could be, the greatest email scandal ever uncovered outed Army General David Patreaus after the FBI found saucy messages between him and a mistress. Arguably the largest whistleblower was Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Both Patreaus and Ellsberg had major impacts on two foreign wars — Petraeus executed the successful Iraqi Surge and Ellsberg accelerated public pressure to pull out from Vietnam. Taken together, it’s reasonable to assume that without their contributions, hundreds of more soldiers might have been killed and hundreds of millions of dollars more would have been wasted. On the other hand, NSA hawks claim that Internet and phone snooping foiled “dozens” of terrorist attacks, including Najibullah Zazi’s failed plot to bomb the New York subway. All told, that’s probably hundreds of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars in infrustructure repair saved.
Costs: A life not worth living vs. actually not living If you hold survivalist training in your end-of-days bunker, chances are this next category feels like home. The libertarian op-eds are rife with insinuations that America is on the fast track to a perpetual 1984-style tyranny — or what they call Tuesday in North Korea. “This isn’t an argument about how tyranny is inevitable. It is an attempt to grab America by the shoulders, give it a good shake, and say: Yes, it could happen here, with enough historical amnesia, carelessness, and bad luck,” warned the very sharp and otherwise level-headed resident libertarian at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf, in a (popular) post titled, “All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama.” If you think government monitoring Instagrams of quinoa waffles at Manhattan brunches is a one-way ticket to Orwellian dystopia, then the cost of the NSA’s spying program is the end of self-government as we know it. On the other hand, if you’d like to see the TSA conduct more cavity searches, you probably think a police state is the only way to stop a real-life Jack Bauer plotline from happening. 4th-Amendment fanclub president Dick Cheney predicted a “high probability” of a nuclear or biological attack that kills “hundreds of thousands of Americans” unless programs like the NSA keep constant watch over Americans. But we think Cheney’s being modest: if we did suffer a nuclear attack, we’d have to retaliate against someone, and that could spark an armed conflict between the entire Middle East and their Asian supporters. So as long as we’re wearing a tinfoil hat, let’s just go ahead and admit that we’re talking about all-out thermonuclear war. The Psychology Of Which Scenario You Think Is Plausible Ultimately, skepticism is a visceral reaction: there’s no purely fact-based way of thinking about the future. Without sufficient information, we reasonably fall back on our assumptions about the way the world operates. For instance, we know that free-market enthusiasts are more fearful of government regulation than climate change. While there isn’t any good evidence about why some people fear the NSA more than others, Yale’s Cultural Cognition lab has my favorite political typology for predicting what kinds of programs we support. They divide political worldviews into four categories:
If you have individualist or egalitarian tendencies, chances are the NSA freaks you out. This helps explain why the traditional rivals, Glenn Beck (Individualist) and Michael Moore (Equalitarian), have found rare common ground in opposition to government surveillance. If you tend to be more collectivist, either because you have a compulsive need for stability (Authoritarian), or you think everyone has an obligation to contribute to the public good (Communitarian), chances are that you don’t fear invasions of privacy (Disclosure: I have very strong Communitarian tendencies). To be sure, we have no other choice but to go with our political instincts. The debate over the NSA is entirely hypothetical; the public has no evidence on how surveillance has been abused or leveraged to stop terrorists. So what’s the lesson? Be respectful and open-minded. Without evidence, we’re all equally irrational. [Images: Flickr/thematthewknot/Carolyn Tiry/Kelly Teague] |
| Sciencescape Wants To Solve Academic Research Discoverability, Deal With The Noise Problem Posted: 16 Jun 2013 08:30 AM PDT  Toronto-based startup Sciencescape came about because of a problem that was significant enough to lure co-founder Sam Molyneux away from a bourgeoning career as a cancer researcher, and into a new venture that wants to tackle the bigger picture issue of fixing the entire system of academic, medical and scientific research. It’s a system that’s incredibly outdated, the Sciencescape team believes, and one that’s ripe for change. Sciencescape is trying to tackle the massive uptick in scientific research, which has exploded since the advent of the computer, in order to make it once again manageable for researchers, students and academics working on furthering their disciplines and making real breakthroughs. The startup wants to become the “plumbing” for academic and medical research, by making sense of the massive influx of data from new studies being published every day by the huge number of peer-reviewed journals out there. The total volume of papers published each year has reached a staggering 22 billion according to a recent count, Sciencescape says, and the dollar value of the business of academic research is in the $45 billion annual range. There are tools designed to help researchers sift through all that volume already, including Pubnet.org, but these are pretty universally regarded as insufficient by the people who use them. There are still so many chances to miss crucial bits of information, or entire tracks of research that re-cover ground. Academics place an emphasis on breaking new ground, Molyneux says, and students and researchers are constantly running the risk of reinventing the wheel or missing landmark papers because of sheer volume. To get around that, Sciencescape wants to apply intelligent sorting algorithms to incoming new publications, in order to build intelligent feeds that researchers can subscribe to, around subject matter areas, specific researchers, genes, disorders and more. The Sciencescape engine uses natural language processing exclusively to funnel content in real-time, and is starting out with biomedical fields of study. But Molyneux says that they’re going to work quickly to expand to other fields, with specifics like law on the roadmap for upcoming additions. The system would make it easy to not only collect key research, but also visual it via graphs and charts that can show you exactly when key breakthroughs in the field have occurred, and also provides sharing options for broadcasting to other like-minded researchers via standard social network channels. Sciencescape is emerging at a very good time in terms of drawing interest from investors and a community beyond just the academic silo; others with similar aims like ResearchGate are raising big rounds ($35 million) or achieving big exists (Mendeley to Elsevier). Sciencescape has already secured initial funding of $1.1 million, and hopes to move quickly to expand its business. |
| Up Close With Casio's Latest Edifice Surf Watch Posted: 15 Jun 2013 11:30 PM PDT  With summer coming and surf season in full swing, I thought I’d take a closer look at the Casio EMA100-1AV Edifice watch with tide graph and moon-phase data. Casio is best known for its G-Shock line of beefy (and some would say ugly) plastic sports watches, so this steel-cased model is a departure for the brand. Casio announced the watch in April and it is on sale now for $250. So what’s special about the EMA100? First, it is surprisingly staid and classic for a “water watch.” The face is quite dark and the two LED registers — one at 6 o’clock and one at 2 o’clock — are reflective and nearly invisible in low light. Even the blue LED backlight is better at lighting up the luminous hands than the actual registers. The Edifice line uses polished metals to great effect, giving what would be a normal, albeit rugged, quartz piece a bit of class. The watch has a number of basic features, including stopwatch, timer and alarm. It also has a built-in thermometer that can usually take an acceptable ambient temperature reading (although it will be thrown off if it’s worn on the wrist.) It also has support for 29 time zones and 48 cities, which makes it a nice travel companion. Most important for the water-bourne among us are the tide indicators that show the time to next high tide as well as a high/low tide indicator at 11 o’clock. There is also a moon-phase graph at four o’clock. The built-in calendar is accurate to the year 2099 and the battery lasts three years. I rarely write about watches here unless I think the timepiece is particularly noteworthy or unusual. I think this piece is both. The Edifice line is Casio’s reaction to Seiko’s classier Sportura line of metal and rubber sports watches and so it is aimed at a different, more refined market. The Edifice is made of steel and is water-resistant to 200 meters, making it acceptable wear for both the office and the beach. The heavy rubber band is quite long, so it will fit a bigger wrist, and the 46mm case, while a bit small for my taste, is boldly styled with a unidirectional bezel and heavy-looking “bolts” in place of the 12, 3, 6, and 9 pips. Even the lack of LED visibility is an asset because it makes the watch look far sleeker than it is. Rather than looking like you’re wearing a helicopter cockpit on your wrist, this Casio leaves a bit to the imagination. I’ve seen plenty of multi-sensor watches that can tell you your altitude, geographical position, and blood sugar readings (not really). However, it’s refreshing to see a classically styled sports watch focus specifically on a niche — in this case the surfing crowd – with a watch that is both water-resistant and doesn’t look like a plastic hockey puck. At $250 I’m more than willing to recommend this watch to folks who need to know the tide charts and, more important, want to get a little ocean time in between meetings. |
| The Curse Of The Network Effect Posted: 15 Jun 2013 09:00 PM PDT  Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business for Dashboard.io and on his blog NirAndFar.com. Follow @dashboard_io and @nireyal. Ethan Stock lived the Silicon Valley dream. He had recently sold his company to eBay and emanated the tanned skin and relaxed composure you’d expect of someone who just cashed a big corporate check. But as we sat across from one another in a Palo Alto coffee shop, I was surprised by what he said next. “Mediocrity is worse than failure, you know?” For seven years before the acquisition, Stock served as the founding CEO of Zvents, an online guide for local events. Though he was successful by anyone’s standards, I could tell he was a guy who, like me, had learned some hard lessons. “Zvents grew incredibly well,” Stock told me. “We were the largest events site of its kind, providing local listing in hundreds of markets and attracting over 14 million monthly unique visitors.” Zvents had done what so many tech companies dream of doing, they cracked the network effect and built a business that increased in value with each new user. The more event organizers posted to the site, the more useful the site became to people looking for things to do. Both parties loved the site and Stock's company was in the middle, connecting visitors to events they otherwise wouldn’t find. “But I learned the network effect isn't everything. In fact, it became a liability.” Stock’s words confused me. How could being in such an enviable position of creating a valuable marketplace be a bad thing? “Getting paid was a bitch,” Stock said, and he began to unravel how certain marketplace businesses like Zvents can succeed themselves to death. The Expectation of CompletenessMarketplace businesses exist to connect two or more parties, typically the buyers and the sellers. Investors love these businesses because they tend to grow quickly and spawn winner-take-all companies. A long line of successful Silicon Valley startups have found success providing a place for people to connect and transact. Examples of these kinds of companies include industry titans like eBay and LinkedIn but also include some of today’s web darlings like Uber and Airbnb. “Marketplace businesses are great,” Stock told me. “But there is a fatal flaw in some businesses that can hogtie their ability to make money — the expectation of completeness." Stock explained how Zvents had planned to charge event organizers to list on their site. “Once we reached critical mass and it was clear we were becoming the market leader, we expected event organisers would start paying.” Unfortunately, reality fell short of expectations. Like many marketplace businesses, Zvents was catering to users who expected to find a comprehensive listing of all local happenings. To keep users coming back, Zvents had to ensure it was displaying everyone’s events — an incomplete list would send visitors looking elsewhere. "When we asked event organisers to pay up, they said 'what for?'," Stock said. But threatening to remove a listing was not possible, Zvents needed them all to keep site visitors happy. So Stock's team offered event organizers better ways to reach users like sponsored placements, which displayed the listing more prominently on the site. But the attempt to finally get paid largely fell flat. "We certainly created value for them." Stock said. "We were sending people to their events. We just couldn't capture very much of that value. I guess it’s the old saying, ‘why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?’” Just Like Google"Google is similar if you think about it." Stock told me. The comment surprised me given the tremendous success of the search giant juxtaposed with the Zvents story. "They also create much more value than they capture." He was right. When searching on Google, users also have an expectation of completeness. They come to the site to find all relevant results, every time. If Google decided to only display listings from paying advertisers, we'd all switch to Bing. When considering the collective value of all the clicks on un-sponsored links, the company does give away the vast majority of the value it creates. Indeed, Google appears to be "giving away the milk for free." The difference is that Google's market is not limited to local happenings as was the case for Zvents. Google's market is much, much bigger. In fact, it's everything. By organizing "the world's information," Google skims a proportionally tiny amount of value from a tremendously huge marketplace. The absolute number of people who buy a sponsored placement is large enough to keep the company humming, even though it only monetizes a tiny proportion of the value created. ImplicationsThe Zvents story should give pause to marketplace businesses going after niches. The expectation of completeness, and the resulting inability to monetize, may help explain the challenges faced by companies like Foursquare, RedBeacon, and many industry-specific job listing sites. One way around the problem of completeness is to facilitate the transaction itself. Companies like oDesk, Etsy and Uber, ensure they are in the middle of the money by processing the flow of cash. It's much easier to justify taking a cut when you hold the gold, particularly when doing so adds convenience and security to the transaction. Without the ability to collect a share of each transaction, marketplaces serving users who expect completeness face a difficult challenge. Two options remain: either cater to a very large market, a la Google, or monetize a large share of the value created. The network effect alone just isn't good enough. TL:DR
Photo Credit: shutterstock |
| For Some Reason, Square's Hiring Page Listed Chirply And SeatMe As ‘Potential Acquisitions' Posted: 15 Jun 2013 08:08 PM PDT  So, this is weird. Earlier today, if you visited Square’s hiring page on Jobvite, there were two unusual job listings, one for “Chirply — Potential Acquisition” and another for “SeatMe — Potential Acquisition.” If those were accurate statements, well, that’s a pretty strange way to announce a pair of pending deals. But before you start sending out those congratulatory tweets and emails, I should note that a source with knowledge of the matter told me that Square is not pursuing an acquisition of those companies at this time. (A company spokesperson declined to comment.) So how did their names end up as “potential acquisitions” on a Jobvite page? Well, probably the same way they would have shown up if there really were talks — someone, somewhere in the company, screwed up. Regardless of the reason, that screwup has been corrected — after I reached out to Square, the listings disappeared. (You can see them in the screenshot below.) As for what those startups do, Chirply is a crowdsourced card design site (at least, that’s what it did when I wrote about it two years ago — the current website is one of those cryptic beta pages.) And SeatMe is a reservation startup trying to take on OpenTable. (I emailed both companies for comment and will update if I hear back.) It doesn’t seem totally out there to believe Square might be vaguely interested in these companies, particularly as talent acquisitions. But that’s a long way from having serious talks. Thanks to Amin Issa for the tip. |
| The Secret Science Behind Big Data And Word Of Mouth Posted: 15 Jun 2013 06:00 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School and author of the New York Times bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Follow him on Twitter @j1berger. Why do some companies, products and services get more word of mouth than others? It's not luck. There's a science behind it. Social media gurus always preach that no one talks about boring products or boring ideas. So you would think that more interesting products and brands get talked about more. Surprisingly, they don’t. Startups live and die by word of mouth. Whether it's a new website, a revolutionary recruiting service, or B2B play, consumer awareness is always low at the beginning. No one realizes you exist, so you have to get the word out. But most new ventures don't have a big advertising budget. They have to grow organically: Get existing customers or fans bringing in new ones — one at a time. Why, then, do some companies, products and ideas get talked about more readily than others? People often think getting word of mouth is like capturing lightning in a bottle. You have to get lucky. The market has to be just right. Or you need the right combination of three or four indescribable qualities that combine in some inexplicable way to create magic. That's a great theory. Except it's completely wrong. People often think getting word of mouth is like capturing lightning in a bottle. You have to get lucky.There's a science behind word of mouth. It's not random and it's not luck why people talk about some things rather than others. Just like behavioral economists have studied why people make certain choices, or statisticians have pulled out insights about human behavior from "Big Data," researchers have been hard at work analyzing the human behavior behind our decisions to talk and share. In one recent investigation, for example, my colleague and I looked at word-of-mouth data on almost 10,000 products and brands from Coca-Cola and Walmart to small startups. Everything from technology companies to services, from B2B to consumer package goods. In another project, we analyzed the virality of almost 7,000 pieces of online content. Everything from politics and international news to funny pieces, sports, and style. But the focus of these studies wasn't just documenting which products get talked about more, or what types of online content go viral. Rather, it was about understanding the motivations behind those outcomes: the underlying human behavior that drives some things to get talked about more than others and some things to go viral; how different emotions (e.g. sadness versus anger) shape what people share; how communicating online versus offline impacts whether people talk about what is top-of-mind; the psychology of talk; the science of social transmission. Take Triggers. Disney is more interesting than Cheerios. It's a really engaging emotional experience. But the problem is that people aren't triggered to think about it very often. Sure, people talk a lot about the brand right after they go to one of the theme parks, but unless they're reminded to think about that experience in the weeks and months that follow, they don't keep bringing it up. Cheerios is less interesting, but people eat breakfast once a day, 365 days a year. Even if they don't buy Cheerios, they still see it once a week when they wheel their grocery cart through the cereal aisle. This makes Cheerios more top of mind more often, increasing the chances it gets mentioned. A product or idea might be really interesting, but if people aren't triggered to think about it, they'll never bring it up. Top-of-mind means tip-of-tongue. Triggers are only one of the key word of mouth drivers my colleagues and I uncovered in our research. Again and again, I've seen the same six principles driving what people talk about and share. These six principles can be arranged in an acronym (STEPPS: Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories). Social Currency. Just like the car we drive and the clothes we wear, the things we say affect how people see us. So the more something makes someone look good, the more likely they'll be to pass it on. Triggers. If something is top-of-mind it will be tip-of-the-tongue. Just like peanut butter reminds us of jelly, the more we're triggered to think about a product or idea, the more we'll talk about it Emotion. when we care, we share. Whether positive (excitement or humor) or negative (anger or anxiety), high arousal emotions drive us to share. Public. People tend to imitate others. But as the phrase “monkey see, monkey do” attests, the easier it is to see what someone is doing, the easier it is to imitate. Public observability drives imitation (e.g. iPod's white headphones). Practical Value. People don’t just want to look good, they also want to help others. So more useful equals more shared. Think articles about 10 ways to raise capital or five key negotiating tips. Stories. No one wants to seem like a walking advertisement, but they will talk about something if it’s part of a broader narrative. So build a “Trojan horse” story, a message that carries your brand along for the ride. These six principles comprise a formula for getting more word of mouth. They’re a recipe for crafting contagious content and for getting more people talking about any product or idea. Will following this formula guarantee a viral hit? No. But it will increase the batting average. No one hits a home run every time, but by understanding the science of hitting, people can raise their average by hitting more singles, doubles and even home runs. The same is true with word of mouth. By understanding the science behind why people talk and share, companies and organizations can get more word of mouth for their products and ideas and help those products and ideas catch on along the way. [Image via Shutterstock] |
| Hampton Creek Foods Shows Off Its Egg-Less Scrambled Eggs Posted: 15 Jun 2013 04:40 PM PDT  Hampton Creek Foods, a food tech startup backed by Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, is getting ready to expand beyond its initial product Beyond Eggs — though it’s not leaving eggs behind entirely. The company recently released the YouTube video embedded below, which gives a brief glimpse of its upcoming scrambled egg replacer. And founder/CEO Josh Tetrick told me that he just got off-stage at TEDxEdmonton, where he gave the full demo. Hampton Creek’s larger mission is to move the world away from animal-based foods by developing replacements that are cheaper, healthier, and tastier. Its first product, Beyond Eggs, is supposed to replace eggs in baked goods and other food products (the cookies with Beyond Eggs that I tasted earlier this year were delicious). Tetrick told me that the response to Beyond Eggs’ launch in February has been better than expected, with “more of an interest in the mission/purpose of our work than we anticipated.” But Beyond Eggs doesn’t replace eggs as a standalone food. That’s what the scrambled egg product is supposed to accomplish. In Tetrick’s words, it’s “the whole damn thing – not an element in other food products.” And he’s hoping to start selling it in the next six months. “We’re just using one plant to make it happen… and this one plant has awesome coagulation, texture, and springiness properties,” he added. In a preview video for his TEDxEdmonton demo, Tetrick also offered some thoughts on the broader vision:
Hampton Creek has raised a total of $4.5 million from Khosla, Founders Fund, Kat Taylor, and the Collaborative Fund. |
| Tristan O'Tierney, Square's Co-Founder And Early iOS Engineer, Leaves For Destinations Unknown Posted: 15 Jun 2013 03:11 PM PDT  Tristan O’Tierney, a co-founder at payment company Square, announced via tweet that yesterday was his last day at the company. O’Tierney is less well-known than his co-founders, particularly the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey, but according to his LinkedIn profile (where he describes himself as an iOS engineer), his accomplishments include building the original iPhone app, as well as being a “large contributor” to its first iPad app, the first Pay with Square product, and the Register app. In a Quora post (answering the question, “Why does Square have so many co-founders?”) O’Tierney writes that he joined with Dorsey and co-founder Jim McKelvey in January 2009. (His prior experience includes working as an iPhone programmer at Tapulous.) Apparently, in those early days the trio worked on Square in Dorsey’s apartment, and Dorsey had to flip up his Murphy bed every morning to make room for his co-founders. In his tweet, O’Tierney says he’s not sure what’s next, “except for a bit of traveling!” In a tweet directed at The Next Web’s Jon Russell, he added, “I left on good terms. I just want to do something different. Square's still in a lot of brilliant hands!” I’ve emailed O’Tierney and Square for comment, and I’ll update this post if I hear back. Update: Square declined to comment. |
| Blue Apps Are All Around But Blue Tones Get Less Of A Role In iOS 7′s Psychedelic Redesign Posted: 15 Jun 2013 03:00 PM PDT  Why are so many app icons blue? The obvious answer is that so many tech brands contain blue in their logo or elsewhere in their tradedress. But why? What’s with the love of the blue tones people? I ask because the number of blue icons on my phone has reached a kind of tipping point where I’m often firing up the wrong app because I reach for the (wrong) blue one. And then I’m heading to Glide rather than Rdio, or the App Store not Dropbox, or Skype not Shazam. I don’t normally arrange this blue collection on a single page but curious about how much of the stuff is hanging around on my homescreen I created a colour-co-ordinated arrangement (left) which serves to emphasise that it’s both big name apps, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and newer-comers like Glide and Rdio going for blue. Many of Apple’s native apps (in iOS 6) also rock similar blues, be it Safari, the weather app, stocks, the mail app and so on. Initially this ‘blue period’ homescreen made finding apps even more confusing but I found that amalgamating all the blue tones actually tends to normalise them, making it easier for their distinct symbols and signs to stand out. So I’m tempted to stick with it. In the mean time, I’m still intrigued as to why tech companies are so hot on blue? It’s possible there’s some deliberate mimicry going on, on the part of some startups. In seeking to establish their services, they want the user to think about other established tech services they know and love so they feel more confident about using a (similarly blue-coloured) alternative. Thinking of the likes of Skype for messaging and Facebook for social, say. In other words startups are hoping a resonating shade of blue will help them build a strong brand too. Or they might be hoping to accidentally pass their app off as another the user is used to using; a sort of social engineering of where the user sticks their fingertip to steal taps meant for other apps. That’s risky, since the user didn’t meant to click on your app so may just get annoyed and delete it. Still, a swathe of startups clearly think it can’t harm if they project a similar visual aura to other established apps and services. It’s like the old adage ‘no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft’. Apparently no app icons ever offended by being painted blue. There are other colour factors to consider too. Various colour preference surveys put blue on top, as the most popular shade for men and women globally. It’s certainly not a Marmite shade that polarises opinion — with so many natural instances of blue (sky, sea, flora) keeping things tranquil. Blue also apparently travels well, being more culturally neutral than certain other colours. Or so the theory goes. Colour theory also says that dark blue shades generate a feeling of reliability and stability (Facebook does have trust issues, after all), while lighter blues are apparently relaxing and calming (Apple’s native iOS 6 apps seem to fall into this category), or uplifting and energising depending on how bright the shade is (the bright blues of Skype and Shazam, say, or Twitter’s bird logo). It’s notable that even when some tech brands’ logos don’t actually have that much blue in them, their app icon can often make blue tones far more prominent (like Glide’s icon for instance, right). Meanwhile Twitter, which has its trademark bright blue bird online, switches to a white bird silhouette on a more muted and steady looking blue background for its current iOS app icon. Perhaps the relationship between a mobile device and its user necessitates an extra injection of trust, being as these gadgets are so personal. Therefore developers reach for more muted blue tones when designing their app’s phone icon. iOS 7′s coat of many coloursApple’s iOS 7 redesign ushers in a new, more neon-colour palette which deliberately ramps up the energy level of the native apps’ colour tones. (You could say they’ve been turned up to Ive.) Apps that were a relatively relaxing shade of blue before now positively pop out — with undertones of teal green/turquoise creeping in. The result is definitely uplifting in the sense that the apps appear to float against the background (a parallax effect Apple is encouraging via other features in its redesign, such as translucent layers and subtle shading effects as you move the phone). The new look iOS also replaces the blue undercoat on toggle switches with green, and paints some native apps a new shade (like the stocks app now a fittingly bleak shade of black rather than a calming mid-blue), to further highlight how Apple is creeping away from its old mid-blue comfort zone. At a glance, there’s definitely a greater colour range to how Apple is painting the iOS 7 icons, and a lot less blue jackets than there are in iOS 6. Cupertino has been under pressure to refresh the iOS interface, thanks in part to the accelerated speed with which Google has been driving Android’s look and feel forward. iOS is also now a six-year+ old OS, with more new-look competition crowding in than ever before, whether it’s Windows Phone or BlackBerry 10. One way for Apple to create an impression of change — without having to do radical restructuring which might upset its existing user-base – is a new lick of paint. The iOS 7 palette, including its blues, is certainly far more energetic than the old one — and that’s likely aimed at generating a feeling of renewal, without having to shift too much core furniture and functionality. The other issue is that perhaps Apple has realised its old favourite blues are becoming a bit stale/invisible because they’ve been so widely adopted. The new iOS 7 palette repaints the goal-posts in more rainbow tones in the short term but, ultimately, app makers will likely fall in step by tweaking their own app shades to harmonise with Apple’s neon brights. So their mid-blues will probably also get dialled up and/or tinged turquoise and green. And before you know it the colour spectrum of apps on the homescreen could be falling in step again. Whether Apple stepping away from blue will help other developers to kick the coat off their own apps remains to be seen. Apple’s influence will count for something but there’s no reason to think the human eye’s long-term love affair with blue tones is about to be overthrown, no matter how idealistically psychedelic Jony Ive’s redesign. |
| Doing Mobile Monetization The Right Way Posted: 15 Jun 2013 02:00 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Chris Moore is a partner at Redpoint Ventures where he focuses on making investments in consumer Internet, online marketing and SaaS companies. Follow him on his blog and Twitter @Moorski. This year alone, there is an $11.4 billion mobile advertising opportunity, which means there is tremendous upside for nimble and innovative startups with disruptive mobile-first models. As we saw from Facebook last year, the company was able to turn around and actually make something of its mobile business – a business that didn't exist at the time of IPO. However, despite the potential of the market, and Facebook's early success, we're still a long way from realizing the promise of the mobile medium. When looking at the opportunity, it's clear there are a few core challenges that need to be addressed quickly in this nascent market. The startups that address these challenges first will be the companies to watch. The Problems That Need SolutionsIn many ways, we're at the same juncture with mobile advertising as we were with the desktop web circa 1996-97. At that time we were limited by basic ad-serving capabilities, browser cookies to track visits and boring, static display ads. Search keyword advertising, the most compelling ad format and targeting method the web has seen, was only in its infancy (at Goto.com, which eventually became Overture) at the time. Right now, the two most obvious hurdles to overcome are what smart companies are focusing on: developing a reliable and privacy-safe method for user targeting across apps, and developing smartphone native ad formats. Cross-App User Targeting. On the traditional desktop web, browser cookies became a reasonably reliable and standardized method for recognizing and storing attributes of any given user in between visits to a site. Today roughly 80 percent of online ads leverage cookies or some other form of a user-targeting mechanism. In the mobile app world, an analogous, reliable and standardized mechanism has not yet emerged across either iOS or Android, and until it does, relevance-based targeting will be less effective in the mobile environment and remain a giant missed opportunity for advertisers. Currently there isn't a robust way to track users across applications after Apple deprecated UDID as a targeting mechanism. In order for cross-app user targeting to be fully realized, the tracking of users in a privacy-focused environment must be solved. Smartphone Native Ad Formats. The first ad formats utilized on smartphones were borrowed from the web. As a result, users are inadvertently clicking on too-small-to-read banner ads, thus ensuring annoyed users. Instead of a fluid and seamless experience, users are pulled out of their task at hand and brought to un-optimized web landing pages in the mobile browser. The only way mobile ad monetization will flourish is when smartphone native ad formats that enhance the immediate app experience are developed. The good news is that we're starting to see a few promising native smartphone format candidates with notifications and Facebook's Sponsored Stories. There is still plenty of room for innovation, as these formats aren't 100 percent where they need to be. Users and marketers alike can't wait for some savvy startup to develop innovative and reliable ad formats that fit within the app experience and engage the user without disrupting the task at hand. The Winner's CircleOnce the dilemmas of cross app user targeting and smartphone native ad formats are solved, there are some very promising areas within the mobile environment that are poised for the taking: Online-to-Online Ad Tech Providers. The ad-tech player who can get the ambient context digital wallet and in-app context right for the Walmarts and Coca-Colas of the world will be a really big deal. There will be several winners in this area, each focused on a particular vertical of offline-to-online. Cost-Per-Lead Advertising. Yes, cost-per-lead advertising. The web performance stepchild to cost-per-click could emerge as a first-call citizen in the smartphone medium. Why? Well, the medium happens to be attached to a phone, and guess what leads perform the best: phone calls. The smartphone promises to connect this intent to buy to a live person more seamlessly than any other medium to date. This will lead to higher conversion rates and thus higher monetization rates. Inadco, a Redpoint portfolio company that started in the web CPL space, is one startup helping these advertisers take advantage of the mobile phone. Ambient Context and User Analytics Providers. The fundamental problem of user targeting and analytics within the mobile world must be solved. This solution will come from a clever startup, not the underlying platform players Apple and Google. Just as Omniture emerged to be an important platform company in web analytics, there will also be similar companies built within the smartphone medium. Native mobile app analytics companies like Flurry are promising, as are the emerging players in audience targeting like BlueKai (a Redpoint portfolio company). While we are a far way from identifying the smartphone equivalent of paid search, it will absolutely exist (it has to) and it will leverage ambient targeting, the digital wallet and smartphone native formats that interrupt but don't disrupt the user from the task at hand. The market is big and the current players are just starting to crop up, which means the challenge is for the taking. The next two years will undoubtedly be exciting years to see it all unfold – not only to see who the winners will be, but also to see the innovations that make it happen. |
| CrunchWeek: Path's $1B Valuation, Google's Waze Buy And The WWDC Recap Posted: 15 Jun 2013 01:08 PM PDT  It’s that time of the week for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days. Colleen Taylor, Greg Kumparak and I chatted this week about private social network Path’s rumored $1 billion valuation and the company’s growth to 12 million users, which has been questioned over the past few months. Next up with Google’s purchase of Waze, the reported price tage of $1.1 billion, and why the search giant spent so much on the social mapping startup. And we talked briefly about the big news from Apple’s developer conference WWDC, including iOS 7, and iTunes Radio. |
| Silicon Valley Real Estate Update: The Craziest Market In The U.S. Just Got A Little Less Crazy Posted: 15 Jun 2013 12:00 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker backed by Madrona Venture Group and Greylock Partners. He previously co-founded Plumtree Software. His last TechCrunch essays were The Maximum, Beautiful Product and Searching for Beasts in Silicon Valley's War for Talent. Follow him on Twitter @glennkelman. Well what do you know! After writing on TechCrunch for the past year about how Silicon Valley's Gatsbyesque wealth couldn't find much real estate to buy, Bay Area inventory is up. Bidding wars are down. And rising rates are squeezing buyers who have to borrow money. Below is Redfin's quarterly rundown of what's happening in Silicon Valley real estate. Bidding wars are less intense. Bidding wars are still common, with Redfin agents facing competition on 95 percent of all homes in May 2013, the highest of any of the 21 markets Redfin serves. For example, Redfin Silicon Valley agent Brad Le reports that this nice-enough $2 million Cupertino listing got 12 offers, and likely went under contract in June for well above $2.4 million. But fewer bidders are competing. Since Redfin publishes competitive dynamics for every offer our agents write, we measure the average number of competitors in a bidding war, which has declined from a peak of 16.3 in January to 7.8 in May. As agents, we know that demand is waning not because buyers no longer want a home but because they’ve despaired of ever being able to get one. About one in four of our Bay Area homebuyers have told us at some point in the last three months that they’re taking a break from their search out of sheer frustration. Also-rans are left behind. The decrease in competition hasn’t changed the pricing of the most sought-after properties. But occasionally, close also-rans languish. Redfin Silicon Valley agent Mia Simon noticed that two nearly identical Mountain View homes, one slightly better looking, sold at the same time last week: The beauty queen sold for $200,000 over asking, drawing all the attention away from its neighbor, which got only one offer and sold for $150,000 less than comparable properties in the area. Flash sales. The fact that homes are still selling very quickly may reflect a fundamental change in consumer behavior rather than simply a hot market; the median days on market for Bay Area homes that sold in May was 12 days; last year at this time it was 18. Mobile instant alerts triggered by the debut of new listings have been behind this trend, with 302 listings in May going under contract in less than 24 hours. Some of our buyers don't even like to go into a Costco for too long if it will block the cell signal they need to get instant alerts. This has also put pressure on real estate websites to get inventory quickly. On average, brokerage sites like APR.com, ZephyrSF.com, and Redfin.com get new listings days earlier than national portals; the reason is that the brokerage sites employ real estate agents with complete, direct access to the Bay Area's four local Multiple Listing Services. More homes for sale. Higher prices, and perhaps the fear that higher interest rates could dampen demand later, have at last drawn would-be sellers into the market. Bay Area inventory began the year down 59 percent from 2012, but has now improved to the point that it's only 28 percent down from this time last year; by year-end we expect 2013 inventory to be up year-over-year for the first time since 2011. Redfin's own Bay Area listing business has increased more than 100 percent over last year. In 2013, real estate's spring may come in summer, and summer may come in fall. Sales volume will increase, and price increases may lose steam.
More new construction coming in the East Bay and in San Francisco: Builders are often slow to respond to inventory crunches, in part because it takes time to finish projects, in part to drive profits from a run-up in demand. This is why we've seen line-ups, lotteries and camp-outs among buyers competing to get units as they're released by builders. But four new projects are releasing units this summer in San Francisco, where the total number of homes has barely budged since World War II: 300 Ivy in Hayes Valley, One Rincon Hill Phase Two near the Bay Bridge, The Icon in the Mission, and Linea-built projects in the Mission like Nove. More inside jobs: We hear more reports of pocket listings, where the listing agent sells the home to one of his own clients or to one of his partner's clients, without offering the property to the broader market. The actual data suggests that this is common only for homes priced above $5 million. Few sellers at lower prices would ever bypass the larger market, which can draw in enough buyers to spark a bidding war. But there are other types of inside jobs. "Some Redfin clients are trying to get creative," reports Landon Nash, Redfin San Francisco agent. "I just closed one deal with a client who asked his landlord to sell, and I have another two — which may or may not close — in the works." Interest-rate anxiety: With interest rates increasing since May 1, and sharply since May 22, Bay Area homebuyers have felt more pressure to buy a home soon. On June 4, interest rates exceeded 4 percent for the first time in a year. "You know how analytical we can be in the Bay Area," said Redfin agent Brad Le. "Some of my clients know down to the dollar how much more their mortgage is per month with the current rates, and others already stretching to afford a home have been priced out by the rate increase. The buyers who remain are even more motivated to find something." Buyers are withdrawing money from retirement accounts to compete with more cash in bidding wars. In the past week, three different Bay Area buyers did this, despite the penalties associated with withdrawals from 401(k) accounts. Bay Area sellers continue to have a strong preference for cash buyers, to avoid a second price negotiation if an appraisal comes in low from the buyer's lender. Buyers are also getting help from their parents. Just last month, Redfin clients living in a one-bedroom San Francisco apartment with two small children needed extra dough to avoid being priced out of the Oakland Hills market, so the parents — who were already tired of staying in hotels during visits from the East Coast — just became a party to the purchase. Virtually every Redfin agent in the Bay Area has a story about this. Surprisingly, fewer for-sale-by-owner listings: Of the Bay Area sales closed in May, 89 percent had been listed by an agent. By comparison, 85 percent of May 2012 sales were agent-listed. Usually, when the market makes it easier to sell a home, more sellers try to do it themselves. But the Bay Area is in such a frenzy that people here are hiring an agent in even greater numbers to play the game to perfection, and to get top dollar. Of course, as real estate agents ourselves, Redfin benefits from a decline in for-sale-by-owner sales. Nonetheless, Redfin's website is the only one I know of that shows both all the agent-listed homes for sale as well as for-sale-by-owner listings. A decline in commissions offered to buyers' agents, from 2.65 percent for Bay Area listings that debuted in May 2012, to 2.56 percent in May 2013. Sellers have been emboldened by the market to offer the buyer’s agent less, with no fear of steering. A still-exclusive club: Booms usually bring an increase in the number of agents. Not in the Bay Area. In May 2012, 6,008 Bay Area agents represented homebuyers on 9,456 transactions. By May 2013, 5,540 Bay Area agents represented buyers on 8,295 transactions. Because the market here has been inventory-gated, 2013 sales actually declined 12.3 percent, whereas the number of active agents declined 7.8 percent. What does it all mean? The Bay Area real estate market is getting back to its own version of normal, which still isn’t that normal at all. |
| Security Psychology And Why Even Messy Numbers Of Government Data Demands Are Valuable Posted: 15 Jun 2013 10:24 AM PDT  People assume the worst. So when it comes to counting government “requests” for private data, disclosing a number, even a high number, is far better than the fear of infinity. That’s why tech giants are fighting to show they aren’t open books surrendered to the NSA. They want to prove only the suspicious are being spied upon. “Direct access” were the words that drummed up the fear. The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had attained direct access to the data of nine of the world’s largest tech companies. Many of those companies aggressively denied this, saying they only provide specifically requested data when legally obligated to. Unfortunately they were heavily muzzled regarding the specifics of what they could say. The vagueness combined with their initial inaccurate reports of direct access left the public shaken. Many innocent citizens got the sinking feeling they were being spied on. Desperate To DiscloseOver the last week, the companies have been fighting for more freedom to disclose exactly how many government requests for data they’ve been receiving from the NSA. The hope was that that would quell the speculation. Yesterday Facebook and Microsoft both cut deals to disclose numbers. Not hard numbers, but at least a narrow range of numbers of requests they’ve recieved from the government for private user data on criminal as well as potential terrorist threats over the last six months. For Facebook, that range was nine to ten thousand requests on between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. For Microsoft, it was six to seven thousand requests affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 users. Previously, all companies were completely gagged when it came to requests from the National Security Agency, legally required to keep the number of requests for data on potential terrorist threats a secret. The deals let them disclose numbers…but only in aggregate with local, state, and federal criminal data requests, and only in bands of one thousand to obscure the specifics. Numbers, Even Obscured Numbers, Fight FearWhy Facebook and Microsoft wanted this was that these numbers establish a worst case scenario. Rather than allow conspiracy theorists and panicked journalists (which I was guilty of being) to speculate that hundreds of thousands, millions, or everyone was under the watchful eye of the NSA big brother, it capped the number of people possibly monitored at 19,000 for Facebook and 32,000 for Microsoft. That is a lot more reassuring than people being scared the surveillance extended to all users. Facebook needed a number to point to more than anyone. It’s business model lives and dies by private data. When users feel comfortable, they volunteer the fuel for Facebook’s content relevance and ad targeting engines. If they feel paranoid, they’re not going to deactivate their accounts, as Facebook has become too crucial a utility for most. But they will be subtly weary of sharing their more personal information and content. That hurts Facebook. But Google and Twitter immediately criticized the social network. Why? Because they cut a bargain rather than hold out for exact numbers of NSA requests and the volume of people affected. Facebook settled for giving the public something rather than nothing, even if the data on the NSA is obscured by being combined with non-NSA requests for more traditional criminal cases. That could make it harder for other companies to get the NSA to loosen up even further. Facebook didn’t want to keep the public in the pitch dark, and couldn’t risk not getting to disclose anything. If the government does what’s right, this disclosure will just be a stepping stone to the data Google and Twitter want to provide. True transparency. That’s what the public deserves. But regardless of the criticism, what Facebook and Microsoft won for the public yesterday will go a long way to reassuring us that these companies aren’t knowingly spilling the beans on everyone, and the government might not be as powerful as we suspected. |
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