tech now |
- Rapiro Kit Robot For Raspberry Pi Gets Funded On Kickstarter In Two Days
- The Technical Interview Is Dead (And No One Should Mourn)
- Here's The Security Breach Email Facebook Is Sending To 6M Users
- CloudUp Is A Fast, Dead-Simple Way To Share And View Files On Any Platform (Without The Folders)
- Old Ideas Are Better Than The Idea You Just Thought Of
- Meet Cody, The Casual Fitness Coach And Social Discovery Tool For Everyone Else
- Thanks To A Six-Figure Purchase By Reputation Changer, Brand.com Is A Thing Now
- Microsoft And Oracle Will Announce Major Cloud Computing Partnership Next Monday
- France's Dailymotion Finds Stateside Tech Partner In Video Editing Service Givit
- Edward Snowden Charged With Espionage
- Ask A VC: Mayfield Fund's Navin Chaddha On The Consumerization Of Digital Health Care
- Facebook Security Bug Exposed Personal Account Information, Emails And Phone Numbers, Six Million Accounts Affected
- Google Makes Google News In Germany Opt-In Only To Avoid Paying Fees Under New Copyright Law
- Gillmor Gang Live 06.21.13. (TCTV)
- Tobii And Synaptics Partner On Ultrabook Prototype With Eye Tracking Tech
- Snapchat Has A Patent That Could Help It Become The Defacto Camera App
- Aiming To Disrupt Payday Lending, a16z-Backed LendUp Now Offers Instant Online And Mobile Loans
- Instagram Hit 5 Million Video Uploads Within 24 Hours
- Scrooser Is A Motorized Scooter From The Future
- Thankful Registry Is A Wedding Gift Registry For Thoughtful Couples
| Rapiro Kit Robot For Raspberry Pi Gets Funded On Kickstarter In Two Days Posted: 22 Jun 2013 07:33 AM PDT  Meet Rapiro, the kit robot with a space inside its kawaii head to accomodate the Raspberry Pi microcomputer. The gizmo is the creation of Shota Ishiwatari, the Japanese gadgeteer who came up with a brain-wave controlled cat-ear headband and a heart-rate controlled wearable wagging tail, among other ‘only in Japan‘ creations. Rapiro is just as cute as these prior creations but may well have wider appeal — not least because it allows Raspberry Pi owners to make their Pi mobile. Indeed, it’s just two days since Rapiro went live on Kickstarter and it’s already exceeded its original funding goal of £20,000, with close to 140 backers making pledges — and still 57 days to run on the campaign. Clearly Pi owners have a big appetite for cute home-assembly robotics. The bot brings to mind the (now defunct) Nabaztag Wi-Fi rabbit. Except, instead of trying to be a plug-and-play consumer-friendly gizmo, Rapiro is a self-assembly, hackable, programmable, mobile variant of that sort of connected companion device. Its creators say the aim is to be a “catalyst between robotics and Raspberry Pi”, noting that its price will be at around a quarter of “current aesthetic robot kits” and a tenth the price of the price of “current linux-powered humanoid robot kits”. “We want to start a revolution in cute, cool, affordable, customizable, and programmable robots,” they say on the campaign page, adding that they plan to publish Rapiro’s 3D data (.stl) on their website so owners will be able to further customise the design using a 3D printer. Rapiro’s kit includes 12 servo motors, allowing for a range of movements such as walking and gripping objects when the bot is assembled. It also has a pair of full-colour LED eyes. As well as a space (in its head) for the Pi to be installed (Pi is obviously not included in the kit), Rapiro can also incorporate the Raspberry Pi camera module to add computer vision capabilities — so it could, for instance, be used as a in-home security robot that can wander from room to room. Other Pi-powered ideas Rapiro’s creators suggest the gizmo is good for include:
Rapiro can also be used without any Pi inside too, being as it incorporates a programmable servo control board that’s compatible with Arduino. “Using the documentation on website you can program its range of motion by yourself,” the creators note. Power for Rapiro comes via four AA batteries inserted into its back-mounted battery box. The basic cost for the full Rapiro kit is £199, although all 50 pledges at that price-point have been bagged. Estimated delivery for the device is this December. As well as appealing to Pi owners who want to hack around with robotics, Rapiro could also clearly be put to use in educational settings, helping to get kids excited about technology (the Raspberry Pi Foundation plans to use one for schools and teaching workshops, for instance). |
| The Technical Interview Is Dead (And No One Should Mourn) Posted: 22 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  Allow me just a little self-congratulation. Two years ago I wrote “Why The New Guy Can’t Code,” about my contempt for the standard industry interview procedure for software engineers, condemning Microsoft and Google in particular for their brain-teasing riddles and binary search questions. And lo and behold, this week Google’s head of HR admitted: “Brainteasers are a complete waste of time.” But wait. Let’s just unpack that interview a little further:
You know what else is an artificial environment that doesn’t translate at all well to the real world? That’s right: the entire technical interview process, as traditionally performed. It’s not just brainteasers: it’s the fundamental concept of being brought into a room, grilled on the spot with technical questions that must be answered without any of the usual resources, and then being made to write code on a whiteboard. All this on the nonsensical pretext that it’s a decent measure of whether the candidate is a good software engineer. I’m lucky: I’ve always been quite good at this arbitrary and ridiculous skill — but at the same time, its requirement has always seemed so obviously wrong to me. Nowadays, though, finally, more and more voices are being raised against this madness. I give you Jeff Atwood, Udo Schroeter, Nelly Yusupova, Josef Assad, and especially Treehouse’s recent post on how to hire developers. Oh, and, er, me, a year ago, saying much the same thing. Many of the comments on that year-ago post were very angry. Nobody likes to be told that they’ve been screwing up the most important part of their business (and recruitment is almost certainly the most important part of your business) since Day One. But the sooner people realize that the traditional “come in, answer random quiz questions, and write code on a whiteboard” model is horribly broken, the better off they’ll be. If you click through to and read the above, you’ll find that they’re mostly minor variations of a much-improved process:
This process is better for everyone. Employers learn far, far more about potential employees; waste less time in interviews; and get them an excuse to pay people to do all those little beneficial things that would otherwise be back-burnered indefinitely. The only real problem is that it doesn’t scale. Google, for instance, would need to find literally thousands of one-week audition projects every year for its candidates, which is probably not realistic. The process has to be attractive to developers, too, in this seller’s market. (I sometimes wonder how many good engineers have been put off by Google’s previous, rather insulting, hoop-jumping interview process; me and most of my techie friends, for starters, but that’s probably a self-selected group.) Fortunately, “better than the old way” is a very low bar, and most good developers casting about for a new gig would far rather work on a real paid interesting project for a week than spend a day regurgitating code on a whiteboard. My headline here is more aspirational than descriptive, I admit: the technical interview isn’t dead yet…but it should be, and soon enough it will be. What baffles me most is why it’s taken so long. The whole purpose of an interview was to serve as a proxy for actual performance, because we didn’t have the tools and infrastructure to easily observe and measure the latter: but now that we do, it is the height of cargo-cult stupidity not to use them. Stop quizzing people, and start finding out what they can actually do. |
| Here's The Security Breach Email Facebook Is Sending To 6M Users Posted: 22 Jun 2013 02:27 AM PDT  Facebook has started sending out warning emails to users whose personal information has been compromised by the security bug it confirmed yesterday, confirming which pieces of data were exposed. The bug exposed some six million Facebook users’ email addresses and telephone numbers to other site users because Facebook had “inadvertently stored [it] in association with people's contact information as part of their account on Facebook”. Facebook says it uses this data so it can generate friend request recommendations. The notification email — we’re embedding a copy of an email sent to one Facebook user below — echoes what Facebook’s security team said in a blog post about the data breach yesterday. It explains the scope of the bug and goes into the same level of technical detail as to how it happened. It also confirms which specific piece (or pieces) of personal data were exposed for that particular user. In the below email, two pieces of data have been compromised (a phone number and an email address). In another sample letter sent to TechCrunch by a tipster the user has had six pieces of data compromised (one phone number and five email addresses). That user, Jeisson Neira, who works for IT company IQTHINK, said the breach is unlikely to make him change his behaviour towards Facebook — but only because he already takes care with the data he posts to the site. “Given I tell my clients to trust and rely on the cloud, I don’t think I’ll change my behavior towards Facebook. My general stance on online security is that if I don’t want information of mine ever getting out, well then don’t post it in the first place. None of the things that could have possibly been exposed are that secret,” he told TechCrunch. ”Having said that, I do have many high profile clients who would not be at all happy having their numbers and personal emails leaked and so it would be a completely different story if it was their account.” Another tipster told TechCrunch she had one email address compromised but noted she cannot figure out how the email was even obtained by Facebook as it appears to be for a former work place, is no longer valid and was never directly associated by her with her account — suggesting Facebook is automatically harvesting contact data from other Facebook users and associating it with other accounts. That sort of action, while creepy, would certainly help Facebook expand its network of contact information so it can generate new friend recommendations. We’re reaching out to Facebook to confirm how it gathers this data and will update this story with any response. If Facebook is harvesting data on its users from other site users then not personally posting a piece of your contact information does not guarantee it won’t end up in Facebook’s databanks — and therefore be at risk of being exposed via this type of security breach — because Facebook might simply be harvesting your contact data from someone else you have corresponded with. All three emails seen by TechCrunch state that the data was “inadvertently accessible by at most 1 Facebook user”. The bug had apparently been live since last year, before being brought to Facebook’s attention last week. Its security team then fixed it within 24 hours of it being flagged, according to the social network. |
| CloudUp Is A Fast, Dead-Simple Way To Share And View Files On Any Platform (Without The Folders) Posted: 21 Jun 2013 11:49 PM PDT  In today’s world of email, social networks, SMS, chat applications and cloud services, there are plenty of ways to share share a file, folder, photo or video. And as intelligent devices and cloud computing infrastructure proliferate, and processing power and capacity improve, we expect file transfer and sharing to be speedy — and simple. Everything is about “realtime” and accessibility these days (not that we’re complaining, but thanks Twitter). Yet, file-sharing still isn’t quite there. Even with all the options — whether it be the Skypes, Facebooks, Google Drives, WeTransfers and YouSendIts of the world or the Dropboxex, etc. — we’ve still got one eye out for a better way. (Here’s xkcd putting a fine point on it.) The file sharing service to end all file sharing services. Dropbox has gotten the closest, gobbling up a ton of mindshare as a result, but its layout and presentation are more storage service than simple sharing tool. In other words, you may store your photos there, but it’s probably not where you’ll go if you want to show them off. This week, CloudUp became the latest to join a younger group of services that are pushing the conversation forward when it comes to speed and simplicity — and nibbling at the heels of the incumbents. Sharing the mantle (most closely) with services like DropLr, CloudApp, Ge.tt and perhaps biz collaboration and sharing services like Dropmark, CloudUp aims to a new spin on file-sharing by creating a tool to make sharing images, links, documents and videos as simple as humanly possible for both the sharer and the viewer. In practice, that means that CloudUp has a clean, minimalistic look that makes it feel like it’s made for designers, yet is easy enough to use that your mom could get excited about it. CloudUp enables users to share files by dragging them and dropping them into their browser, automatically generating a link which they can then share on email, Twitter, Facebook and so on. Like Dropbox, the link-centric service is available for free on the Web or as a native OSX app, the latter of which puts CloudUp in your menu bar for easier drag-and-drop sharing. However, CloudUp wants the similarities to end there. Although the service is offering up to 1,000 uploads for free — that’s the equivalent of about 200GB of storage — CloudUp doesn’t want to just be a storage locker or a quick way to share URLs with your homedawgs. What’s cool about CloudUp (and distinguishes it from most apps out there) is that it focuses on converting the design of file transfer from one that makes it clear that “THIS PRODUCT IS JUST A UTILITY” to one that’s elegant and minimalist, Jony Ive-style. But the minimalism isn’t there for the sake of itself (sorry hipsters), it’s meant to bring more of the focus to consumption — to make the content the focus, not the app itself. For more than one file, many services use folders, which look and act like the same folder icons you’ve been seeing on desktops since the Apple IIGS. Instead, when you drag-and-drop multiple files into CloudUp in succession, it automatically collects them in a “Stream.” It functions similarly to folders one would find anywhere else, with a more Pinterest-style layout. Nothing is opaque, the app puts it all right there, making things easier to find. (Personally, I can never find files in Dropbox, but that could be because I was dropped on my head as a child.) CloudUp also does a lot of cool stuff around conversion. The app creates thumbnails for “nearly every kind of file you can imagine, camera RAWS, office documents, code snippets, images, videos and many others,” Cloudup Engineer TJ Holowaychuk wrote on Medium last week. It’s kind of a small thing, so if you don’t share docs or images that much, it probably won’t matter to you, but if you do, this small stuff matters. So, beyond just thumbnail rendering, CloudUp has applied some nifty conversion and rendering voodoo on the back-end so that everyone can see them, even if they’re still running IE6, like video transcoding, office doc PDF conversion and image compression so that images appear actually appear on your device. User streams are also updated in realtime, synchronously, so that even if an image you’re downloading from a friend hasn’t fully transferred yet, you’ll still see it — on mobile, too. And not only that, but you can share a link to a Stream even if it hasn’t finished downloading. Of course, how instantaneous and “realtime” all this is tends to depend on the speed of your browser, but when it works, it’s another big point of differentiation — even if it’s not the one reason you’d download CloudUp. The team also designed the app not just to be useful when sharing among friends and family, but to facilitate collaboration and productivity among teams as well, CEO Thianh Lu tell us. That, in particular, is something Lu and the rest of the team had been wrestling with for a long time — in other words, this ain’t their first trip around the block. All the EdTech homies in the house know them as the same team behind LearnBoost, a suite of free classroom administration apps for teachers. While LearnBoost raised $2.87 million from Charles River Ventures, Atlas Ventures and others for its beautifully designed product and its mission to rethink the gradebook, Lu says that teachers were more interested in its Lesson Plan-sharing feature than grading. Teachers were still looking for new ways to share their content, and the more the team fought against the slow sales cycles in K-12 education, they kept coming back to the fragmented sharing problem. Each member of their team had their own workflow, setup and preferred method of communication and sharing. There wasn’t a single solution out there that let them share and consume files quickly and easily that didn’t offend the eyeballs, so they built CloudUp. And that’s the same reason that CloudUp’s OSX app attempts to remove the extra steps from the team collaboration process by letting users share files by dropping them on the CloudUp status icon in the menu bar, which automatically copies the Stream’s link to your clipboard so you don’t have to take any other steps. The app also supports automatic uploading of screenshots, which you may or may not think is awesome depending on how frequently you do the ole “shift+command+4″ dance. All in all, CloudUp has a lot going for it and, at launch, it’s already competitive in a crowded space, which is saying a lot. That being said, it still has a long way to go. CloudUp doesn’t yet do simultaneous photo uploading, it doesn’t have native apps, premium tiers or actual team/business collaboration features — it’s more of an idea than a reality. However, all these are on the near-term roadmap, Lu says, and should becoming to CloudUp experiences near you in the months ahead. Going forward, the company thinks that its take on file sharing can act as a complement to the Big Storage Kahunas in the space. That’s a smart and completely understandable position to take, but not sure anyone is really buying that. CloudUp is an alternative. Some might think of it as a sexier, frictionless-sharing-focused Dropbox skin and some may get enough use out of their familiar apps that needing an alternative file service sounds superfluous. But it doesn’t take long to see that CloudUp has nailed the design and user experience. There’s no doubt that this looks better the majority of apps out there. It’s easy to use, and the stream function, instant viewing and link-sharing and the work its doing on the back-end (and front, for that matter) to make conversion and rendering easy pretty much blow Dropbox out of the water. CloudUp isn’t for the enterprise, and it’s not a place you’re going solely for file storage — in that sense, the “complementary” analogy does make sense. Yes, CloudUp will add premium tiers, but it remains to be seen whether the more casual, file-sharing crowd it’s going after is going to be regularly uploading more than 1,000 files. That means, like LearnBoost, monetizing may be a long, bumpy road for CloudUp, at the same time, as Dropbox moves to scoop up other awesome, sexy mobile apps like Mailbox and photo tools like Snapjoy, a service like CloudUp could become very attractive. But, in the end, you’ll just have to check it out for yourself to decide. |
| Old Ideas Are Better Than The Idea You Just Thought Of Posted: 21 Jun 2013 11:30 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Jake Knapp is a design partner at Google Ventures where he helps startups with product strategy and design. Follow him on Twitter @jakek. It drives me crazy every time I hear about Mailbox, the fancy-pants email app that Dropbox bought for a gazillion dollars. I mean, come on, it's such an obvious idea — the app's killer feature is “email snoozing.” It's basically organized procrastination, and it's been around since David Allen's Getting Things Done, if not longer. There's even been a plug-in called Boomerang for years that allows you to snooze your email in the browser. I could have taken that old idea, quit my job and made my own beautiful email-snoozing iPhone app. And then I would have been rolling around atop piles of thousand-dollar bills in Dropbox's fancy headquarters. It's aggravating. You can probably spot the flaw in my thinking: It’s a ton of hard work to take an old idea and make it amazing. And the older an idea gets, the less motivated one might be to do that hard work. Some ideas are stacked up on shelves because, for one reason or another, they’re just bad. Others are set aside because, while they might be good, they’re either really hard to execute or the team isn’t ready to pursue them. Or maybe the timing isn’t right or the person who had the idea doesn’t know how to convince others of its merit. Regardless, once an idea begins to age, it can be difficult to tell whether it has potential. All old ideas are then sullied with the bad-idea funk and people forget how promising those good ideas once were. After a while, it's hard to tell them apart. All old ideas are then sullied with the bad-idea funk and people forget how promising those good ideas once were.This is a pattern I've seen a lot. In the last year, I've worked with more than 50 startups on design projects at Google Ventures. Our design team comes in to help when a company is stuck on a big problem. And it often turns out that the company has a good solution somewhere on that idea shelf, collecting idea dust (which is practically impossible to get off your clothes, by the way). So while I'm happy to help teams look at new ways to solve a design problem, I always encourage them to bring old ideas out first. It makes sense: The team has probably been thinking about the problem for weeks, months and maybe even years. They've had endless hours of opportunity for inspiration to strike: sitting on the train, standing in the shower, or waiting in line for the bathroom at a San Francisco Giants game. Time and again, buckling down on an old idea yields impressive results. For example, a few months ago our design team worked with the designers and founders of CustomMade, a company that connects people looking for anything from custom woodworking to custom jewelry with the makers who can actually build it. We were trying to figure out how to help more people successfully post their custom projects. We had a great new idea that we carefully designed, refined and prototyped. But we also decided to pursue something else – an old idea that CustomMade already had but never implemented. We took that old idea, worked out some of the kinks and prototyped it, as well. Then we recruited some real customers and tested the two prototypes, head-to-head. Guess what? The old idea was better. It was easier to understand and more straightforward. It just hadn't ever been executed all the way. Now CustomMade buckled down, hammered out the details, and built and launched it. In the real world, the old idea performed even better than in our tests, boosting CustomMade’s monthly project posts by 300 percent. Making the decision to double down on something old — especially something that hadn't worked yet — can be difficult. New ideas are fun, and they've got that new idea smell. It's easy to get excited about them. As CustomMade CEO Mike Salguero said, "Building something new is far more tempting." But even famous inventors got famous with old ideas. Take Thomas Edison and the light bulb. Greatest invention of all time, right? And the universal symbol for having an idea. But wait. The light bulb was invented in 1840 — seven years before Thomas Edison was even born. So while he didn't invent the light bulb, he figured out how to make it commercially viable. How? By creating a vacuum with the recently introduced Sprengel pump, invented by… you guessed it, some dude named Hermann Sprengel. The light bulb wasn't a brand-new idea for Edison. It was an old idea that was difficult to execute on. It was the Mailbox of the 1800s. So the next time you're stumped, the next time you don't know how to proceed, the next time you're tempted to invent new ideas, take a good long look at your old ones. There might be a light bulb in there somewhere. |
| Meet Cody, The Casual Fitness Coach And Social Discovery Tool For Everyone Else Posted: 21 Jun 2013 06:00 PM PDT  Today, there’s a long list of apps and services that sit at the intersection of fitness and mobile technology and leverage everything from social dynamics and behavioral economics to Quanitifed Self-inspired tracking to motivate us to be more active and drop a few pounds. There’s Lift, Nike+, Basis, RunKeeper, Runtastic, Fitocracy, Endomondo and MyFitnessPal — the list goes on and on. Rather than simply adding another me-too product to an already-crowded space, two former Microsoft product managers launched Cody earlier this year to offer an experience they think has been missing from the world of mobile fitness. Co-founders Pejman Pour-Moezzi and Paul Javid tell us that the majority of fitness apps today tend to cater to hardcore fitness enthusiasts, who get a lot of mileage out of wearable gadgets and obsessive data-tracking. By nature, many of these products revolve around activities where GPS and accelerometer-based tracking and metrics really come in handy, like running and cycling. Of course, not everyone wants to track every second of their day or exercise routine, is wearing a Fuel Band (or some alternative thereof) or is an avid runner. Rather than targeting hardcore Quantified Selfers or focusing on running, Cody is going after casual fitness enthusiasts by emphasizing sharing rather than tracking and by building an experience that’s more reminiscent of Instagram and Vine than RunKeeper and Nike+. On Cody, users can add photos, videos, tag their location and leave status updates — actions aimed at making it easy to share the story of their daily fitness routines, rather than the metrics. Users can log and share workouts across a range of categories, like Crossfit, Yoga, Barre, weightlifting, walking, running and cycling, and 70 percent of the workouts logged fall outside of running and cycling, the co-founders tell us. “One of the things we want to tap into is the group-fitness movement,” Javid says, “which happens to be one of the fastest growing segment in fitness.” The goal instead is to create a mobile experience that people don’t just open when they have something to track. Since launch, Cody has seen a lot of activity around group-fitness categories, like CrossFit, Yoga and Barre, but 85 percent of user sessions on Cody don’t even include a workout, he explains. By allowing users to describe their workout, follow their friends and top users — along with commenting on their status updates — and by recommending articles and offering tips, Cody is building a social fitness experience that centers around consumption. The app also incorporates some familiar tracking features, allowing users to review past performance and view personal highlights in graphical layouts and swipe through a calendar of each of your activities, while filling out their personal profile that is shown to others in the network. While there’s value in being able to browse through a shared workout feed to check in on what your friends are doing, a key part of creating a social fitness experience and a “fitness graph” like this is discovery. And up until now, that’s largely been missing from Cody. But today, Cody is adding a new feature called “Explore,” which makes it easier to discover people and workouts, and browse through other Crossfitters, yogis and weightlifters with one tap. Explore intends to make it easier to find and follow people by grouping them into categories, so that you can search and discover workout pals by activity, Featured Users or Featured hashtags, like “#5K,” for example. Like Edomondo and other apps, Cody has also set out to add value to its fitness network by acting as a virtual coach.
It’s a similar path to the one followed by Twitter and Foursquare — the more data it has on you, your friends, your favorite workouts and workout spots, the better it can help you find people you’ll enjoy meeting, following or working out with, and content that better helps you meet your goals. By providing a familiar Instagram-like feed and Twitter-inspired Hashtags in a clean, simple design, Cody is reducing some of the friction less hardcore fitness enthusiasts might experience at the thought of downloading another fitness app. If Cody can successfully strike content deals with top fitness publications to offer quality fitness content and offer support for various fitness-tracking health gadgets, there are plenty of ways for Cody to incentivize potential customers. Furthermore, Cody hasn’t yet settled on a business model, but by, say, offering top yoga instructors the ability to post five-minute instructional videos in an activity feed that users can access for a fee or by allowing local gyms to create profiles and target in-stream ads (a la Twitter) at local exercisers, it has some potentially cool opportunities to begin monetizing, while adding value for local businesses and instructors. However, with Fitocracy already offering a popular, fitness-dedicated social network and with the bevy of fitness apps out there that have a running head-start, Cody has its work cut out. Apps like Runkeeper already have sizable user bases and data pools to work with, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine them putting that to use to enhance the discovery experience at some point down the road. Cody is off to a great start, and while the road ahead is a steep one, by targeting more casual exercisers, focusing on adding value to the social, mobile fitness experience and catering to a wider range of activities, it may be able to find its niche in a crowded market. |
| Thanks To A Six-Figure Purchase By Reputation Changer, Brand.com Is A Thing Now Posted: 21 Jun 2013 05:03 PM PDT  My boss Alexia Tsotsis is going to love this one. With a name like Reputation Changer, you can imagine that an online reputation management company would be stuck in the shadow of Reputation.com (which itself was formerly known as Reputation Defender). The solution? It’s changing its name, and purchasing a memorable URL of its own — Brand.com. The URL supposedly cost six figures, and you can see that the company has already taken it over to promote a product called “Brand.com by Reputation Changer.” President Michael Zammuto said the plan, ultimately, is to completely switch over to the Brand.com name. It will become the highest trafficked website in the reputation industry, he said, based on an analysis of Google search volumes: “Brand.com and the term ‘brand’ have much greater recognition with potential clients and with the general public than the term ‘Reputation’ or ‘Reputation.com’.” And as much as people like Alexia might complain that the word “brand” doesn’t mean anything, the company says the URL captures the idea that “online reputation is a critical component” of the brands of Fortune 500 companies, governments, and celebrities. And hey, there’s already another startup in the industry that calls itself BrandYourself. Reputation Changer/Brand.com says that even prior to the name change, revenue has grown 1,500 percent in the past two years. Now it has revenue growth and a sweet, sweet URL. |
| Microsoft And Oracle Will Announce Major Cloud Computing Partnership Next Monday Posted: 21 Jun 2013 04:20 PM PDT  Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, its Azure chief Satya Nadella and Oracle’s president Mark Hurd are holding a joint press conference next week, just two days before Microsoft’s Build developer conference is scheduled to kick off in San Francisco. The press event follows Oracle’s earnings call that featured remarks by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about a series of major partnership announcements next week, including one with Salesforce.com. “Next week we will be announcing technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS companies (software-as-a-service) and infrastructure companies in the cloud,” Ellison said during the call. With this press conference slated for Monday, questions are bubbling about what these companies have planned. Adding to the speculation: Oracle is starting to promote its 12c database technology, which the company announced last October and which Larry Ellison said today that companies will use for years to come. 12c is a pluggable in-memory database, which sounds strikingly similar to SAP HANA. Industry observers I talk to say that it’s possible the two companies are planning their own big data initiative to compete with Pivotal and its mega-partnership with GE. Would that emerge as a separate company? That’s the path that EMC followed when it spun out several of its product groups and those from VMware. Cloud Foundry was part of that spin-out. But the SAP angle has interesting possibilities. SAP has aligned closely with Amazon Web Services. Oracle could be looking to Microsoft to be its partner for big data, in-memory computing. For Pivotal, its effort is as much about big data as it is about application development. They also face SP as a competitor in the space. In any case, it’s going to be an interesting week. |
| France's Dailymotion Finds Stateside Tech Partner In Video Editing Service Givit Posted: 21 Jun 2013 04:20 PM PDT  In other video news this week, the video editing app Givit has announced its integration with Dailymotion, the second largest social video site globally after YouTube. It is the first U.S. app to be built into the France-based Dailymotion's API. This comes after news in late April that the French government struck down Yahoo's bid for a $200 million majority stake in Dailymotion in order to prevent a U.S. company from taking a controlling stake in one of France's leading technology companies. Carrier France Telecom / Orange has put between 50 and 60 million Euro into Dailymotion as it waits for someone else to bite. The Yahoo shutdown sent a bad message to the French marketplace and to foreign investors. This Givit integration is a way for Dailymotion to reach out to U.S. partners from a different angle, tech, while growing their American user base. When I spoke with Dailymotion's US Managing Director Roland Hamilton and Givit CEO Greg Kostello today, the two emphasized the commonality of their platforms with respect to fostering creative communities. Givit allows users to stitch together videos of any length, add music and special effects, and "give it" away on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. Hamilton called Dailymotion a "young, hip community" that supports independent filmmakers. This is a push by Dailymotion to scale up stateside and is especially strategic given recent grumblings from YouTube creators about the site's revenue shares. "Dailymotion is becoming a true alternative to YouTube," said Hamilton. "From articles over the last few weeks, people are looking for another platform, and we want to be there." Dailymotion has a public API, and it’s looking for more U.S. mobile and social developers to tap into it. The site is currently reporting 20 million unique monthly visitors for the U.S. versus 112 million globally although a spokesman would not give numbers on Givit’s traction. Even though the Yahoo deal fell through, it seems Dailymotion is still fighting for a bigger toe-hold in the U.S. video scene. |
| Edward Snowden Charged With Espionage Posted: 21 Jun 2013 04:04 PM PDT  According to the Washington Post, the U.S. government has brought the hammer down on NSA leaker Edward Snowden, charging him with one of the most serious offenses: espionage. Snowden, who is holed up in Hong Kong, is currently searching for asylum with the help of fellow leak-enthusiast, Julian Assange of Wikileaks. Ironically, The Post and USA Today report that charging Snowden with a heavy political crime could make it harder to extradite him. “The treaty, however, has an exception for political offenses, and espionage has traditionally been treated as a political offense. Snowden's defense team in Hong Kong is likely to invoke part of the extradition treaty with the United States, which states that suspects will not be turned over to face criminal trial for offenses of a “political character,” explains The Post. The extradition process could drag on for months. “Prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment, probably also under seal, and can then move to have Snowden extradited from Hong Kong for trial in the United States… Any court battle is likely to reach Hong Kong's highest court, and could last many months”. The harsh indictment should worry those who fear Snowden will face the same treatment as Wikileaks source Bradley Manning who was reportedly driven to suicidal thoughts from “extreme” 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement. In an interview with Charlie Rose, President Obama refused to comment on how Snowden would be punished. For good measure, we’ve included a screenshot of live Google search results that show the world still has its priorities straight with regard to the most important “bradley.” |
| Ask A VC: Mayfield Fund's Navin Chaddha On The Consumerization Of Digital Health Care Posted: 21 Jun 2013 02:40 PM PDT  In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Mayfield Fund Managing Director Navin Chaddha sat down in the hot seat to answer reader questions. In particular, Chaddha addresses a trend he calls the “consumerization of health care,” in which technology is empowering patients to become consumers of their medical and health care. Mayfield has invested in a number of startups in the space, including dental services marketplace Brighter, wearable health tracking device developer Basis, and health network HealthTap. Chaddha also talks about the next innovations in mobile marketplaces, and more. Tune in above! |
| Posted: 21 Jun 2013 02:03 PM PDT  A Facebook security bug exposed users' personal contact information (email or phone number) to other users who were connected to them; the bug has affected 6 million accounts. "When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try to match that data with the contact information of other people on Facebook in order to generate friend recommendations," the security team wrote in a blog post published today.
A Facebook spokesperson tells me the bug has been live since last year, and was discovered last week. Facebook says the security team fixed the bug less than 24 hours after it was brought to their attention. The social giant says six million users had email addresses or phone numbers that were included in the downloads. Additionally, there were non-Facebook users’ email addresses and phone numbers included in the downloads from tools to invite contacts to join Facebook; a Facebook spokesperson tells me that this information wasn’t tied to any Facebook accounts and “wasn’t structured and wasn’t identifiable.” Facebook says the bug has not been exploited maliciously, and the company is reaching out to the affected users. “For almost all of the email addresses or telephone numbers impacted, each individual email address or telephone number was only included in a download once or twice,” the post said. “This means, in almost all cases, an email address or telephone number was only exposed to one person. Additionally, no other types of personal or financial information were included and only people on Facebook – not developers or advertisers – have access to the DYI tool.” |
| Google Makes Google News In Germany Opt-In Only To Avoid Paying Fees Under New Copyright Law Posted: 21 Jun 2013 01:34 PM PDT  Google News in Germany will soon change. Starting August 1, it will only index sources that have decided to explicitly opt-in to being shown on the search giant’s news-aggregation service. Google News remains an opt-out service in the other 60 countries and languages it currently operates in, but since Germany passed a new copyright law earlier this year that takes effect on August 1, the company is in danger of having to pay newspapers, blogs and other publishers for the right to show even short snippets of news. Publishers will have to go into Google’s News tools page to agree to be indexed by Google News. Publishers who don’t do this will simply be removed from the index come August 1. Many of Germany’s publishers had hoped to force Google to pay a licensing fee for their content, but today’s announcement does not even mention this. Instead, Google notes that it is saddened by the fact that it has to make this change. On its German blog, Google argues that Google News currently gets 6 billion visits per month and that, if anything, it’s providing a free service for publishers that brings them more traffic. One of the main issues with the “Leistungsschutzrecht” (how’s that for a good German word?) — the ancillary copyright law that the German government passed after large protests earlier this year — is that it’s not clear when a “snippet” becomes a snippet. The law doesn’t feature a clear definition of how long a snippet actually is (140 characters? 160? 250?). Google always argued that the new law was neither necessary nor useful and that it wouldn’t pay for links and snippets. A number of major German publishers have already said that they will opt-in to being featured in Google News, but there is a good chance that quite a few will decide that they don’t need the traffic. |
| Gillmor Gang Live 06.21.13. (TCTV) Posted: 21 Jun 2013 01:05 PM PDT |
| Tobii And Synaptics Partner On Ultrabook Prototype With Eye Tracking Tech Posted: 21 Jun 2013 12:59 PM PDT 
The notebook will incorporate Tobii’s eye-tracking tech with Synpatics’ touch sensitive input methods to preview how the two can be used together to further the cause of new input methods. The purpose of the project is to showcase to OEMs how they might be able to use the same tech in their own products. Tobii and Synaptics will be touring with a roadshow of the prototype devices throughout July and August, showing off exactly how the two technologies work in tandem. For Tobii, which has been showing off its Tobii Gaze technology since its introduction last year (and which was in development for many years before that in some form or another), this is a chance to finally start getting eye-tracking built-in to more mainstream devices. There’s been a lot of attention paid to how gaze tracking is a part of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 device, and other startups like Umoove are trying to market their own products to other consumer electronics makers, so the time is right for a major sales push. Partnering with Synaptics is a good way to hitch Tobii’s wagon to a player with strong existing relationships with virtually every Windows PC manufacturer, as well as makers of mobile devices. The touchpad company has been in business for a long time, and survived the transition from cruder, simpler pressure-based input mechanisms to the more sensitive capacitive and hybrid systems now in place in most modern devices. Synaptics will be using the prototype to shop around its own ForcePad solution, a new product offering that incorporates per-finger pressure detection into the mix for even greater sensitivity. The jury’s still out on whether any one company will dominate gaze detection and eye tracking the same way that Synaptics has done for touch-based input on PCs, but clearly Tobii (which raised $21 million from Intel last year) is making a play for the crown. “We expect consumers will start seeing product options like this one in stores as early as sometime next year,” Tobii VP of Business Development told us via email. This push likely means we’ll see a lot of familiarly named PC makers trot out this kind of tech (or some kind of motion detection) in their prototype products and concepts at CES next year, so keep an eye out for that, and for the Tobii name. |
| Snapchat Has A Patent That Could Help It Become The Defacto Camera App Posted: 21 Jun 2013 12:55 PM PDT  While larger competitors struggle to differentiate themselves with different video lengths, Snapchat could use a different weapon to be the first camera app opened: speed. And unlike filters, this one will be more difficult to copy. Snapchat has a patent, "Single mode visual media capture," on its technology that allows the user to take a picture by tapping the camera button and a video by holding down the same camera button. Photos are simply taken by the tap, and videos end when you release the camera button, or after 10 seconds. The app always opens directly to the camera screen, and this single camera, single button for both photo and video makes capturing moments simple and very fast. Vine's recording interface is most similar, and is also quite quick, but it only does video. By comparison, to move from photo to video in Instagram, you have to hit the video button, wait for the camera to shutter for a few seconds, move to a new screen, then press and hold to record. In Poke, Facebook's Snapchat clone, you have to select camera or video camera before you see the capture screen; and, again, there's loading time for the camera to open before you can capture something. Even in the standard iPhone camera app, you have to slide the dial from camera to video, wait for the camera to shutter for a couple seconds, then shoot. Figure 2 of the patent shows the processing operations behind Snapchat’s photo and video taking apparatus. This might seem like a trivial difference, but waste a couple seconds to switch to video or to wait for your camera app to load and the moment you were hoping to capture could be over. The patent could also help Snapchat settle a pesky lawsuit. Frank Reginald "Reggie" Brown is currently suing Snapchat and co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy; Brown claims he was a co-founder of the company and was forced out by Spiegel and Murphy. In a lawsuit filed in February 2013, Brown alleges:
As I wrote in March, this original patent led to a major argument:
Nearly a year later, in August 2012, Spiegel and Murphy filed this patent. Until recently, patent searches for Brown, Spiegel, Murphy, Snapchat, and even the company's early names like Picaboo and Toyopa Group, came up with nothing. A representative from the United States Patent Office tells me an "inventor can ask for an application not to be published at all until the patent is actually issued." The patent eventually gets abandoned if it is never issued. The representative noted that if an application has multiple inventors, any of them can file a non-publication request. A lawyer from the firm Lee, Tran & Liang, Brown’s representatives, confirmed the statement in the February 2013 complaint, but could not comment further due to the nature of the ongoing case. |
| Aiming To Disrupt Payday Lending, a16z-Backed LendUp Now Offers Instant Online And Mobile Loans Posted: 21 Jun 2013 12:30 PM PDT  Y Combinator-incubated LendUp launched in October with backing from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Kapor Capital and others, to bring a fresh solution to an old problem: You have to pay your bills now, but you don’t have the money to pay them. Rather than turn to predatory lenders and banks, with their high interest rates, borrow money from friends or cover your eyes and hope they go away, what do you do? It may seem like a situation that only befalls the chronically irresponsible, but in fact, 15 million Americans turned to payday lenders to borrow money last year. Instead of ending up saddled with long-term debt from hidden fees or wrestling with Draconian terms and costly rollovers, LendUp wants to give those looking for a speedy fix to a short-term financial conundrum a way to borrow money without hidden fees, costly rollovers and high-interest rates. The lending space at large has begun to brim with startups — like BillFloat, Zest, Think, Kabbage, On Deck and Lending Club — each of which is trying to make it easier for consumers and small businesses to get access to capital without having to jump through a million hoops. LendUp, in contrast, is positioning itself as a direct lender, using technology and Big Data to allow consumers with poor or no credit to get access to small-dollar, short-term loans (of up to $250 for 30 days) and build their credit while doing so. Unfortunately, most credit agencies turn their backs on payday loans, so even if people are able to pay them on time, it doesn’t help their credit scores and the cycle of bad credit keeps on spinning. Most banks won’t touch these kind of loans because they’re high-risk, but like On Deck Capital (which is attempting to streamline the lending process for small businesses), LendUp uses Big Data to do instant risk analysis and evaluate creditworthiness, weeding out those who have bad credit for a reason from those who may have become victims of the system. Along with eschewing hidden fees, rollovers and high interest rates, LendUp streamlines the application process for loans — which traditionally takes forever — by customizing the process. In other words, rather than make everyone submit bank statements, credit reports and so on right from the beginning, it crunches available data and approves those with good credit instantly. It only requests more information from you if questions arise, approving or rejecting as soon as it has enough information to make an informed decision. Co-founders Jacob Rosenberg and Sasha Orloff tell us that they’re able to build a dynamic application that changes in realtime based on customer risk profiles and segment with a higher level of accuracy by utilizing data sources that most banks or credit bureaus don’t consider. That could be data from social media or other lesser-used credit institutions. With its foundations in place, today the startup is taking its formula one stop further, offering instant online loans. This means that LendUp now has the ability to deposit money in your account in as little as 15 minutes, so that consumers not only can apply for and get approved quicker than than they normally would, but they now have near-instant access to that loan. LendUp loans are also available on mobile, so unlike its aforementioned lending competitors, LendUp deposits that money into your bank account, which you can then access from your laptop or while you’re on-the-go. Orloff, who has nearly 15 years of experience working in credit analysis at the World Bank, Citigroup and others, says that the biggest problem inherent to the current lending process is that it can take up to four days for people with good credit to be approved for loans. When you need money right away because of impending deadlines, when it’s an emergency, that’s too long to wait. By depositing loans directly into your bank account and making that capital available while you’re on the go, the founders believe that they’re removing one of the last advantages of going to a payday loan store rather than borrowing online. Participating banks offer instant direct deposits and loan decisions through LendUp, while users with non-participating bank accounts will receive loans the next business day. It also hopes to incentive users by offering financial education through its “LendUp Ladder,” which aims to help borrowers with poor credit improve their credit scores by using LendUp to pay their loans on time. With its new announcement today, LendUp is removing one of the last barriers that stands in the way of short-term, payday lending that actually offers fair terms to the consumer. So, while the word “disruption” is overused in Startup Land, LendUp has begun to create a service that seems like it could have real disruptive potential in the predatory world of payday lending. Find LendUp at home here. |
| Instagram Hit 5 Million Video Uploads Within 24 Hours Posted: 21 Jun 2013 11:44 AM PDT  Judging by the massive spike in selfies (and response selfies) and lunch shots in our Instagram feeds following the debut of their new video functionality, it certainly seemed like a successful launch. Now, thanks to some stats that the team just shared with us, we know exactly how well it did right out of the gate. In the first 24 hours after the switch was flipped, Instagram saw 5 million videos uploaded. That’s a jaw-droppingly huge number for any day one feature, but remember: Instagram does have 130 million users. Even if we assume that each of the 5 million videos came from a unique user (an absolutely wild assumption, of course), that works out to around 3.8% of Instagram’s userbase giving the new feature a spin. In the first 8 hours alone, Instagram saw roughly a year’s worth of content uploaded. Curiously, their biggest spike in traffic didn’t come right after launch — instead, it was a few hours later, when the Miami Heat won Game 7 of the NBA Finals. At that point, they were seeing almost 40 hours of videos uploaded per minute. For comparison’s sake, Vine’s 13 million users reportedly upload a collective 1 million videos per day. |
| Scrooser Is A Motorized Scooter From The Future Posted: 21 Jun 2013 11:40 AM PDT  The unfortunately-named Scrooser (the creators are from Dresden so maybe it sounds better in German) is actually surprisingly cool. It looks like a standard, two-wheel kick scooter but actually has a motor built in and it can go about 15 miles per hour on a good day. The Kickstarter project has been running for 19 days and is already at $43,000. The Scrooser itself can be yours for $3,950. It’s obviously quite pricey but it looks like it could be a fun way to get around town. It has a range of 20 miles. The design of the Scrooser is quite unique and compact. The batteries are under the footboard and the motor is in the rear wheel. Quoth the creators: The engine (48 V; 1000 W; electrics 48 V; 20 Ah) is a direct drive motor integrated into the rear wheel rim, which means that there are no gear belts, linkages or any other additional elements that could break. The system is nearly maintenance free and very quiet. Characteristics of the custom-built brushless electric hub motor feature electric controls using high quality neodymium magnets. Brushless hub motors create the hinge moment where it is needed – exactly at the spinning rim and in the wheel, so no additional space is required on the frame body. Also, thanks to the brushless hub motor design, you will have to worry about any shortages that usually appear among back-geared motors like noises from the gearbox, oil loss, etc. Furthermore, the operating distance increases significantly because a gear or a mechanical differential does not influence the efficiency of the engine. While seeing grown men on scooters is always comical, this powerful hybrid could make scooting cool again… maybe. |
| Thankful Registry Is A Wedding Gift Registry For Thoughtful Couples Posted: 21 Jun 2013 11:30 AM PDT  Registries present an etiquette quandary for engaged couples. Open one at a major retailer, fill it with suggestions from a checklist and you end up looking greedy (how many newlywed couples really need a gravy boat?). Skip the registry, and you risk receiving multiple toasters. Thankful Registry tackles that problem by re-imagining registries as a way for couples to sign up for a thoughtful selection of items while connecting with their guests. Bootstrapped by founder Kathy Cheng, Thankful Registry launched three months ago. Cheng worked with Web design studio Crush + Lovely to set the tone of the site. Each wedding registry features a full-bleed photo of the affianced pair and a personal message. Instead of the sterile lists seen in most wedding registries, photos of potential gifts are arranged like a catalog into categories such as “delicious,” “play” and “nest.” Items can be chosen from different vendors, separating the registry from big-box retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond that derive a large portion of their sales from the $10 billion wedding gift market. Once shoppers select an item, they are taken to the vendor’s order form pre-filled with the couple’s shipping information. Though there are other sites, like NewlyWish and Registry Love, catering to couples who want to avoid retailer registries, Cheng says she drew on her design background to set Thankful Registry apart from its competitors by honing its elegant and simple user interface. “I focused less on adding a bunch of features just for the sake of having features and more on the tone of the brand because I feel that in the wedding space, people are looking for something that draws them in emotionally,” says Cheng, a senior copywriter for consulting firm Smart Design. “Everyone else is about creating a wishlist and convenience.” Cheng, who started brainstorming Thankful Registry three years ago, says she likes to take her time finding the perfect present and found shopping her friends’ wedding registries frustratingly impersonal. “I consider myself a pretty okay gift-giver and it wasn’t cutting it. I was disappointed. I also felt that couples felt obligated to add things to their registries,” says Cheng. “Our site looks modern, it doesn’t look greedy. I thought, gifts are as much about the giver as they are the couple.” “Couples put so much time into their weddings, but the true touchpoint that guests see outside of the actual wedding day are invitations and wedding registries,” she adds. “We don’t say things like ‘register for whatever you want’ because you don’t want guests to spend their time and heart picking out a gift that ends up just being returned for cash.” With their gift registries independent from major retailers, Thankful Registry’s couples can add items from any site, allowing them to support smaller vendors. One couple, for example, registered for handcrafted Japanese cutlery. “I am surprised at the retailers they pick sometimes. They are usually not retailers who are heavily represented in the wedding registry sector,” says Cheng. Though Cheng expected almost all of the site’s users to come from the U.S., couples from different countries, including the U.K., Norway and Australia, have signed up, and she plans to make the site friendlier for international couples by making the content less U.S.-centric. Thankful Registry is free for a one week trial, after which couples pay a $30 fee, and Cheng says it currently has a 24% conversion rate. The site also makes revenue by participating in Amazon’s affiliate program. Cheng’s next step is to create a baby gift registry with the same low-key approach as Thankful Registry, as well as versions of the site for other life milestones, including birthdays and graduations. |
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