tech now |
- New Facebook Patents For Colocation, Business Recognition, Photo Ranking Tease Future Of Sharing
- Is Your Enterprise Software Company Ready To Sell?
- Dekko Debuts An Augmented Reality Racing Game Playable From The iPad
- PlayJam Sticks It To The Video Game Giants
- We Asked For This
- 3D Printer Manufacturer Stratasys In Acquisition Talks With Makerbot
- CrunchBase Adds 13,689 Companies And 1,462 Venture Rounds In May
- EFF's Peter Eckersley On ‘Clever' PRISM Denials, Fighting FISA, And Why Privacy Matters [TCTV]
- Snapchat Hiring Massive Sales Team, Said To Be Raising $100M At A Near $1B Valuation To Pay Them
- Director Of National Intelligence Tries To Downplay PRISM Paranoia, Says The System Doesn't Mine Data
- Zazzle Pulls Fake NSA PRISM Program T-Shirt For Intellectual Property Infringement
- Windows Phone 8 Reportedly Gained A Notification Center Before Losing It Again
- The Zen of Entrepreneurship
- Girl Loses Friends Because Her Phone Is Too Big To Carry
- Senate Candidate @CoryBooker: What We Know And What We Need To Know
- Gillmor Gang: Back in the USSR
- CrunchWeek: Zynga's Big Layoffs, OMGPOP Gets The Axe, NSA Spying Emerges With Verizon
| New Facebook Patents For Colocation, Business Recognition, Photo Ranking Tease Future Of Sharing Posted: 09 Jun 2013 04:35 AM PDT  Facebook’s empire was built on photo tags and sharing, but it’s a grueling process many neglect. Luckily, new Facebook patents give it tech to continuously capture video whenever your camera is open, rank and surface the best images, and auto-tag them with people, places, and businesses. They tease a future where pattern, facial, and audio recognition identify what you’re seeing for easy sharing. The patents are for Automatic Photo Capture Based on Social Components and Identity Recognition (’80), Preferred images from captured video sequence (’00), and Image selection from captured video sequence based on social components (’65). The were filed for in October 2011 and granted over the last two months to Facebook and its employees Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, David Garcia, and Soleio Cuervo (who now works at Dropbox). The patents cover some colocation technologies similar to that of failed startup Color, who came out of stealth in March 2011 a few months before Facebook filed for the patents. That may be no coincidence, and Color’s ideas for using every available sensor on a phone to tell who someone is with may have inspired Facebook to brainstorm in the space. Soon after Color emerged from stealth, I called on Facebook to develop its own colocation technology to help it forge an “implicit social graph” of who you spend time with. What it came up with could redefine the way we share. As we look at what the patents include, I’ll be referencing the last two digits of the patents number and their PDF page numbers so you can follow along. Shooting Video While You Take PhotosThe foundation of the patents is the idea that Facebook can capture video of everything you see in the viewfinder while you use the camera in its main smartphone apps or its standalone Camera app. It’s like an infinite “Zoe” video that some Android cameras take surrounding a photo:
Basically, Facebook could let you take traditional photos while dicing up continuously recorded video into still images. As camera lenses, storage capacity, and wireless connections improve, these images will increase in quality. Knowing What You SeeWhat’s special is what Facebook could do with these videos and images. The patents describe the ability to scan the frames for important things like public figures via facial recognition, brands or products via image matching, and landmarks or businesses via pattern and text character recognition plus location:
You might not want to formally tag these things, but the tags would be pre-filled for easy sharing. Whether or not you display the tags, recognition of he presence of these objects and locations can tell Facebook what the most important frames of your video are, exactly where you are, and what types of businesses might want to reach you. Colocating You And Your FriendsFacebook’s patents also give it exciting ways to figure out who you’re with. Instead of manually tagging friends, or even using facial recognition through the Face.com technology it acquired, Facebook could put to work all the sensors in the phones of you and those around you:
That last capability, matching the audio recorded by the microphones of two users to identify that they’re right next to each other, was one of Color’s most exciting features. Identifying What’s importantSo Facebook knows who and what’s around around you. Then it wants to rank which frames of your video are the most interesting to you. To do that, it looks at your affinity to these objects (which friends, locations or brands you interact with most), and how popular they are to the public. It combines this data with extra audio and image cues of importance:
Honestly, the idea that an app could hear you say “This is beautiful” and know the photos and video you take at that time are important is sci-fi brilliant. Choosing Your Best MomentsAt this point, Facebook can make well-educated guesses about what you want to share. It imagines splaying them out in what it calls a “media wheel” and showing the best frames as thumbnails when you share to the news feed:
Essentially, Facebook would rank all the frames of your video, show you the best ones, and you could select your favorites to represent your video when you share it. When people want to watch the video, they can click on one of the thumbnails, and instantly view the video starting 10 seconds before that frame. As quality of the still images ripped from video improve, Facebook could likely even allow you to share the frames as photos. Assisted SharingThese patents could redefine how we share. You wouldn’t need to search for people, locations, or things to tag. They’ll just be there waiting for your approval. That’s a big win on mobile where you want to share and get back to your life. Your content will contain so much structured data that Facebook could better route it to the people who’ll find it most interesting. And when we consume video, an opaque medium that’s classically tougher to skim than photos, there’ll be anchors and highlights pointing us to the most important moments. These could all encourage sharing and expose us to more enjoyable content. Facebook could even use colocation to create collaborative photo albums and carry on Color’s mission to let you “Take photos together”. There’s also huge implications for Facebook’s business. Likes are a terribly inaccurate graph of what businesses and places you care about. Today, recommendations of what to Like are scattershot, and it’s a chore to key them in. By recognizing businesses and brands in photos and videos, it can add them to its treasure trove of information about your preferences. That will help it fill out Graph Search, and target you with increasingly accurate ads and ecommerce opportunities. Imagine if Coca-Cola could target ads to people frequently seen with cans of Pepsi in their photos — high potential customers who specifically don’t like them yet. A restaurant could show push real-time ads to people shooting videos of a landmark next door. Facebook could open up ads APIs to surface characteristics like “currently with three or more friends” that a bar could take advantage of to advertise to nearby groups. The war for ad dollars will be won with data. Facebook already sees over 300 million photos uploaded each day. These patents could be a diamond drill, allowing Facebook to mine much more business information out of every piece of user generated content it imports. The world’s premier social network is 9 years old now. In some ways, that’s actually a disadvantage. People have forged connections with too many people and things they don’t actually care about. Facebook doesn’t know much about your offline life, or whether someone is a close friend or a distant acquaintance in that realm. That leads to a boring news feed — a huge danger to Facebook’s engagement-based business model. Facebook has spent years trying to get people to put in work to explicitly prune and classify their relationships with Friend Lists and news feed filters, but most still don’t. Implicit colocation and business identification could bring new richness and detail to its social graph, so your meatspace experience enhances your world of ones and zeros. |
| Is Your Enterprise Software Company Ready To Sell? Posted: 09 Jun 2013 01:00 AM PDT  Editor’s note: Ted Summe is the founder of Discoverly, an enterprise tool that puts social data to work. Earlier in his career, he worked with enterprise software companies at Morgan Stanley and bought them at Salesforce.com. You can follow him on Twitter @tsumme. Having slung enterprise software companies at Morgan Stanley and bought them at Salesforce.com, I've got some perspective on what it takes to sell an enterprise software company. It’s no secret that before you even get started, there are a number of things to consider. Who will fund your mission? Who will join your tribe? And how will you price and distribute your product? While these are all important factors to examine early on, there might come a time when you will start to plan for your exit. When the time comes, you’ll need to take into consideration your location, stack, uptime, how lean your team is and, of course, the legal stuff. Of course there's nuance to all these considerations, but they're the main themes to consider when positioning yourself for acquisition success in the future. For those building toward a thriving standalone business, this information can be a helpful part of your contingency plan. Location Matters Surprisingly, location might be the single most important factor in engineering acquisition success. The fact is most acquisitions fail due to poor integration and location can be a big part of that. If you're acquired as a small company or acqui-hired, you'll likely be expected to relocate. But if you're acquired as a larger, more established company, location can become more of a challenge. For the integration to be successful, leadership from the buyer is going to have to make frequent trips to your office location. That means you want to be headquartered in a city that is either convenient, strategic, or particularly desirable – executives will volunteer for the work trip to Paris but not to Topeka. Stack This is pretty simple. You want to build your software in the same language as your potential buyer(s). If a company's software is written in Java, and yours is written .NET, you're not appealing because they don’t want to support another language and don’t have the engineering talent to do so. You might as well move to Topeka. Uptime One of the major differences between consumer M&A and enterprise M&A is driven by the SLA (Service License Agreement). SaaS enterprise software companies make uptime commitments to their customers, and if they fail to maintain them, they incur significant costs. Big companies already have fat; they don't want to pack yours on, too.When YouTube went down occasionally after the Google acquisition, users would say "bummer" and come back later. When MSFT sells Yammer to its customers and it goes down, customers say “WTF, I'm running my business on this and you’re screwing me.” As a result, the buyer will need to invest in your product to meet the SLA requirements you're contractually obligated to fulfill. The amount they have to invest can vary. If your technology is reasonably hardened, the buyer will likely maintain your stack and invest to get it up to their standards. This investment increases their calculation of the cost of the acquisition and thus reduces the amount they're willing to pay. Say your technology is young and your codebase is relatively light. The buyer will possibly just rewrite your code on their stack to reduce the uptime risk. This costs money and slows their time to market and thus reduces the amount they're willing to pay. The worst case is that your codebase is heavy but not hardened because then the buyer will have to invest significantly to either rewrite or harden. This will make your company a risky acquisition and thus significantly reduces the amount they're willing to pay. Strong And Lean Team Whether its an acqui-hire or a straight acquisition, the composition of your team is important. Startups are able to recruit talented, driven employees, and buyers love to pay them extra money to stay around after the deal. But only if the team is strong and lean. Big companies already have fat; they don't want to pack yours on, too. Don’t Forget The Legal Stuff Big companies aren't nimble like startups, and that is in some part because they have deep pockets weighing them down. Because people can come after those deep pockets, the big companies have to be bogged down with worries about IP and whether other companies could have patent-infringement claims against them, now or in the future. Many startups overlook this piece, since few companies will sue a startup based on IP, but those liabilities will become real upon acquisition. As such, monitor your IP exposure as you grow. |
| Dekko Debuts An Augmented Reality Racing Game Playable From The iPad Posted: 09 Jun 2013 12:31 AM PDT  Dekko, a San Francisco-based startup that just closed extra funding to build a platform for augmented reality apps, just brought its first title to market with a racing game that has players drive virtual cars across tabletops. OK, so augmented reality, which overlays virtual items or information over the real world through a phone or tablet’s viewfinder, hasn’t really come into its own yet. There have been plenty of companies like Layar, which built one of the very early augmented reality browsers for the iPhone, which have been around for a few years. That’s partially because the user experience is still a bit unwieldy with people having to take their phones or iPads out and pan their built-in cameras around. But it’s possible that Google Glass could change all of this. Dekko, which recently took an additional $1.3 million in funding, is betting that augmented reality’s moment could be around the corner. Other startups are making this bet as well; another company Daqri just picked up $15 million in a Series A round for augmented reality as well. “We wanted to solve many of the basic user problems with augmented reality. We had a compulsion to at least show something that’s real and fun,” said co-founder and CEO Matt Miesnieks. “We wanted to build an experience that is kind of magical.” The game, which you can demo below, has players hold up their iPads over a table. On the screen, you can see cars racing across a virtual track. It can turn any kind of flat surface into racetrack that’s visible on the iPad. The app is also multiplayer, allowing between one and four people to race each other, do stunts and crash into each other’s cars. The multiplayer mode can show a single, real-time shared view. Tabletop Speed Trailer from Dekko on Vimeo. To me, it sounds like a proof of concept that demonstrates Dekko’s platform, which was built by the startup’s in-house team of computer vision experts. Eventually, they’ll bring their platform to wearables like Google Glass. “One thing we know about Glass is that our tech will work on it,” Miesnieks said. Dekko’s backers include Echo Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Venture 51, Blumberg Capital, Launch Capital, Thomvest, Eniac Ventures, and Zig Capital, as well as angels like Howard Lindzon, Erik Moore, Dan Conway, and Raymond Tonsing. |
| PlayJam Sticks It To The Video Game Giants Posted: 08 Jun 2013 11:00 PM PDT  Editor's note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin. It's been six months since PlayJam's GameStick started its off-again, on-again Kickstarter campaign that netted it nearly $650,000 — well beyond its $100,000 goal. While it attracted less than a tenth of the funds that its predecessor OUYA nabbed for its Android-based home game console, things have moved apace with the two-piece, controller-hosted console that plugs directly into the HDMI connector of a TV that should be shipping to backers next month. "Thirty days felt like thirty months. We were so unprepared for it," said PlayJam CMO Anthony Johnson, who notes that stretch goals such as a charging dock were conceived out of thin air in a matter of hours before they even knew if they were feasible. The GameStick straddles worlds with different rules. Traditional consoles fix a platform essentially in stone typically for five or more years. The stability of the platform itself is a response to PC gaming where configurations are all over the map. This has been the inspiration for NVIDIA's GeForce Experience addressing the issue from the PC side and Valve's Steam Box(es) on the console side. On the other hand, its ARM processor and Android operating system hail from the world of smartphones where updates are an annual occurrence in a state of constant leapfrogging. PlayJam plans to take advantage of the rapid progress in chip architectures. The company wryly notes that one of the few advantages of being based in the UK helps enable it to have a close working relationship with ARM. In this respect, the GameStick is kind of a no-frills vanilla equivalent to NVIDIA's pricey Shield handheld, which costs $349 and which PlayJam characterizes as "a reference platform for Tegra 4," a laudable but niche attempt by a chip company to get into the consumer device business. GameStick, on the other hand, will be profitable at $79 while yielding a palatable retailer margin. And since the primary electronics are in the stick and not the controller, the former can be updated independently, and the company plans to keep offering new sticks to enable richer game experiences. Which, in some cases, it could use. PlayJam's 12-year history is in super-casual TV-based games distributed through cable operators and moving into smart TVs. That understanding of the power of distribution has helped lead to an agreement with GameStop, although GameStick, of course, lacks any way for physical distribution. The scaling up of smartphone-quality games to the bigger-than-tablet screen results in games that may be fun to play but don't necessarily impress graphically. And like so many Android apps, the quality varies widely. That said, GameStick, OUYA and another similarly inexpensive entrant from BlueStacks have some opportunity to capitalize on the pick-up-and-play home gaming market that the Wii resurrected only to stray from with the more complex and disorienting Wii U. In fact, the company is hoping to stand on OUYA's shoulders; unsurprisingly, developers have found it a relatively easy port from that Android-based game console to PlayJam's CMO Anthony Johnson. "It's a new category. You need to validate the market." Compared to the platform variation in designing for smart TVs and pay TV operators, Android's level of fragmentation is pure bliss to PlayJam. GameStick may be cheap. But its success will depend on if they are willing to come back to the TV for gaming experiences that may not be significantly more engrossing than what they can already get on their mobile phones or tablets. This will be particularly true if TV manufacturers and handset companies can better communicate the ability to project phone displays onto televisions via standards such as Miracast (which GameStick supports) in order to play the games that they've already downloaded or purchased. In that case, PlayJam will be happy to move its store to other platforms. GameStick will launch with 100 titles and the company promises it will ramp quickly from there. For consumers who value the tactile controls or may not want to drain down their phone battery as they play on the big screen as well as for the company's equally embryonic competitors, it's game on. |
| Posted: 08 Jun 2013 09:00 PM PDT  There is a certain jollity in the reactions of the webby class to news that the NSA has been, first, spying on Verizon communications for years, and second has approached multiple information-gathering startups, hat in hand, asking for access to their data stores. It is indeed funny: faceless bureaucrats who, we are certain, can barely click the Start menu, are horking down data from America’s Can You Hear Me Now Network while browsing our Facebook profiles over lunch. Now that the truth has come to light, we’re positively giddy. All of our worst fears have come to call and it’s hilarious. I had heard the refrain for years from the conspiracy-minded: “Google/Facebook/Twitter/Apple will sell you out in a second.” Well, they have. Every word written by RMS (“I refuse to have a cell phone because they are tracking and surveillance devices”) was true and every time Doctorow incited us to run Ubuntu with an encrypted root partition we should have listened. But who cares? We’re not building bombs in our kitchens, we’re playing Farmville. Their jeremiads only reminded us of what sticks-in-the-mud the privacymongers are and how clever we are when it comes to routing around damage. Maybe we should have listened. We asked for this. We asked for this when we traded password protection for single sign-in. We asked for this when we chased social network after social network, creating a deer trail that could lead a hunter to our crushed-grass bed, still warm. We asked for this when, almost a decade ago, we traded some privacy for some security and got neither in the bargain. I’m as guilty as you (unless you’re Cory Doctorow.) I dumped my photos into someone else’s hard drive. We use a publishing platform that will roll over to plagiarists and lairs thanks to the DMCA. We have no expectation of privacy (nor do we particularly need it, I’d imagine) and so we upload our work to the “cloud” where it sits, potentially unmolested, in DropSugarGoogleBox’s servers. We give Amazon a list of things we like and do not like and are amazed when it offers up a slew of products that will strike the perfect chord of our fancy. We are like a drunk blundering through a crowd of pickpockets. That we are not poor and naked already is a testament to either the goodness of humanity or the ineptitude of the criminal class. In short, we didn’t trade privacy for security. We traded privacy for convenience. And the government, seeing a hole, took advantage of this. This era of absolute trust is fading, at least in certain circles. Facebook is boring and Twitter is a firehose so people late to the game probably won’t even bother with those services. It will take a few good Google crashes to wean us off of cloud services but as the price of storage falls precipitously and the ability to connect to a home network becomes increasingly easy I could see a time when Yahoo’s promise of a free terabyte is vaguely seedy. This breach itself will probably encourage millions of programmers to use harder encryption. And so it goes. A bad sysadmin can get away with typing “chmod a+rwx .” for years. Then some hacker discovers that little peccadillo and hides a rootkit in his server. Then that sysadmin learns his lesson and moves on. I’d like to think we’re going to be the same way, but I doubt it. We love our ease-of-use, our single sign-ins, our constant pings and instant access. We will not trade that because someone, somewhere, may be reading our private correspondence. And so we’ll ask for it again and again. The crypto-lovers will cry wolf, then the real wolf will come and we’ll laugh it off, confident in our abilities behind the keyboard to outsmart a bureaucratic apparatus so outdated that they still require us to file our taxes on paper. Slowly, steadily we will watch this crisis erode and the next one will build itself in the old one’s stead. By that time we’ll be lifecasting what we see and hear 24/7 using wearables, perhaps, but we web savvy users will laugh that off as well. We’ll smirk at some lumpen NSA agent hunched behind a computer watching us spoon sugar into endless coffees and talk about movies and TV shows. It serves them right, we’ll say, for wanting this data in the first place. As Schneier writes: “Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.” When apathy is our defense we deserve what we get. But apathy breeds another kind of insecurity and makes us bigger targets still. We forget this at our peril. |
| 3D Printer Manufacturer Stratasys In Acquisition Talks With Makerbot Posted: 08 Jun 2013 07:44 PM PDT  Makerbot, the Brooklyn-based 3D printing company, is in talks with Minneapolis/Israel-based Stratasys regarding a possible acquisition by the latter, according to a source close to the matter. While Makerbot founder and CEO Bre Pettis refused to comment on speculation, and in fact told reporters “We’re not going anywhere” at a factory opening on Friday, persistent rumors of a sale or new funding have followed the company this year. Stratasys makes high-end, professional-grade 3D printers for industrial applications. For example, the Liberator 3D-printed pistol was built on a Stratasys machine. Stratasys does not yet have an entry-level model for average users, a niche in which Makerbot has generated $50 million in revenue this year. The company also appears to be chatting with investors to raise $25 million on a $300 million valuation, according to a WSJ report. We had also gotten the information that the company had been raising, but at a valuation quite beyond that. With 3D printing technology all the rage, and considerably less-hyped startup Shapeways recently raising a $30 million Andreessen-led round, why wouldn’t Makerbot want to maximize its own momentum? Note: That image above is not of a Makerbot, but a random 3D Printer in SkyMall magazine. Signal of lack of consumer utility? Or a sign of mainstream acceptance? |
| CrunchBase Adds 13,689 Companies And 1,462 Venture Rounds In May Posted: 08 Jun 2013 07:00 PM PDT  This week, CrunchBase released the May Excel Export Sheet, which includes charts and graphs that illustrate recent U.S. investments, acquisitions, IPOs and more. Though the charts and graphs focus on May’s data, the spreadsheet includes historical data on all U.S.-based companies that have received funding. Nearly 10K users made more than 43K edits to CrunchBase in May, and data keeps flowing in from the CrunchBase Venture Program, which now includes more than 160 venture firms, angel groups and incubators. Last month alone, the San Francisco Bay Area received $1.25 billion in investments spread over 22 angel, 22 Series A, 14 Series B, 17 Series C+, and 25 venture rounds. Compare that to May 2012, when the San Francisco Bay Area pulled in $1.06 billion and in 2011 $931 million. By contrast, New York companies earned $233 million in May 2013, $355 million in May 2012 and $267 million in May 2011. My good friend the SV bubble at its finest. There is no doubt that the New York startup scene is growing, but the $120 million decrease in funding from May 2012 to May 2013 shows some instability in the area. The San Francisco Bay Area has been steadily growing and has more than four times the investments than New York, which is equivalent to 17 $60 million Lyft deals or 102 $10 million TubeMogul deals. The SV bubble has nothing to fear — it won’t be popping anytime soon. If you find information that is incorrect or missing, please submit updates to CrunchBase — any registered user can make changes. Download the Excel spreadsheet here. |
| EFF's Peter Eckersley On ‘Clever' PRISM Denials, Fighting FISA, And Why Privacy Matters [TCTV] Posted: 08 Jun 2013 03:00 PM PDT 
Now those issues have come to the forefront of the mainstream’s consciousness, with a series of revelations this week that the NSA has reportedly been secretly working together with major tech companies to give the government access huge amounts of private user data through a classified project called PRISM. So it was a massive pleasure to have Peter Eckersley, the EFF’s Technology Projects Director, in TechCrunch TV’s San Francisco studio yesterday afternoon to speak about all that’s going on. It was a relatively long conversation, but I think it could have gone on much longer and continued to be fascinating — Eckersley is an expert on this subject and clearly passionate about the cause, and there were lots of bases to cover. What’s interesting is that I spoke to Eckersley just one hour before the New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller reported that the technology companies named in the leaked PRISM slides were indeed complicit with the NSA’s data mining, contrary to their cleverly worded public denials. As you’ll see above, he expected that was exactly the case — that the tech companies involved in PRISM have been issuing clever “deniable denials” about what is going on, rather than telling the full truth. The reason they’re doing so, Eckersley said (and the NYT reported), is FISA. We discussed the history of FISA, how the EFF is fighting for more transparency (and why it matters), why this news of companies like Facebook and Google working with the NSA is a surprising disappointment even to the folks at the EFF, what people who care about their privacy should do now, and much more. |
| Snapchat Hiring Massive Sales Team, Said To Be Raising $100M At A Near $1B Valuation To Pay Them Posted: 08 Jun 2013 02:22 PM PDT  Snapchat is aggressively recruiting sales people from Stanford as well as USC for its impending debut of a monetization scheme, we’ve discovered. Meanwhile it’s raising $100 million at a valuation as high as $1 billion to pay them, as well as buy more servers and hire other talent to power its rapidly growing self-destructing messaging app, sources say. Earlier this week Om Malik of GigaOm reported Snapchat was raising $100 million but at a valuation “in excess of a half a billion dollars”, that one source pegged at $700 million post-money. Many of us at TechCrunch had heard rumors of the round, particularly tied to a push in the company’s hiring and monetization. Malik reports that the “founders have settled on an unnamed non-tradition investors (read: hedge-fund)” for this round. However, we’ve heard that’s not totally accurate. Several sources have told us Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy are shooting for an even more ambitious valuation near $1 billion. That matches speculation of a higher valuation from Fortune’s Dan Primack. We’ve also heard the company may be in talks with its $13.5 million Series A round leader Benchmark Capital about joining the Series B. We’ve also heard that this round has already closed, but can’t confirm that yet. Some might call the valuation too high, but it’s fueled by Snapchat’s surging popularity and intense engagement, especially amongst young people. Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends report said that Snapchat has eclipsed Instagram in volume of photos shared. While Facebook’s acquired photos app sees people share the occasional photo publicly and browse its feed, Snapchat hosts incredible time-in-app as users privately send photo after photo while carrying on multiple conversations with friends. These photos (and videos) delete themselves less than 10-seconds after being viewed, encouraging users to create and send more “Snaps”. The push notifications these ephemeral messages generate lead to frequent return visits. Curiosity about what funny face, current surroundings, or racy imagery their friends have just sent them creates goads people to check Snapchat as soon as their pinged, keeping conversations moving along briskly. Selling Self-Destructing PhotosAll that engagement creates an enormous opportunity for monetization. Snapchat sees this, which is why the Stanford-schooled co-founders of the Los Angeles-based startup have been recruiting at their alma mater, and to a lesser extent their LA neighbor the University Of Southern California. And we’re not talking about just a few salespeople. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit we’ve heard is that the company has been hiring a veritable army of ad sellers. Snapchat is currently at a lean headcount of 12, but has outgrown its Venice beachfront office and will move to a larger office, still in the Los Angeles area. Spiegel told us in our very first interview that the company had plans for monetization, and told us in December that the company was prototyping monetization features. And at the D11 conference, Spiegel said "There will eventually be several revenue streams. He didn’t go into more detail but noted that he thinks ads can "work very well on mobile" and Snapchat’s been playing around with early prototypes. Now, with new funding and new hires, revenue can’t be far behind for the young company. Snapchat has had a strong, loyal user base among high school and college students. I (Billy) remember watching friends at Stanford beta test the app and thinking what a novelty it was that it spread beyond snapping pictures of Palm Drive and Cardinal football tailgates. Now, I look at the “Find Friends” feature of the site and its filled with older family friends, friends’ moms (thankfully not my mom…yet), and more. The explosion in growth the app has seen–users now send 150 million images per day–cannot simply be high school and college students. Snapchat has tipped and is seeing adoption in other age brackets. Josh confirms a recent spike in older, late twenty-something users getting into the irreverent spirit of the app. Meanwhile, after a short honeymoon for Facebook’s ephemeral messaging app Poke, usage of the Snapchat-clone has dried up to mostly just the Facebook employees in his network. Spiegel and co-founder Murphy have carefully selected their media outreach, from exclusives in The New York Times to appearing on The Colbert Report, to reach beyond the classroom types. They want their app to become a household name. While many wrote off Snapchat as just a novelty, it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s actually an important new medium for communication. Posting to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can seem like stale pandering for Likes and favorites, or a vain declaration of accomplishment. “I was there then.” But Snapchat feels like a shared moment in time, an urgent window from one person’s life into another. Snapchat means “Be With Me Now.” More TechCrunch coverage of Snapchat: Snapchat Launches v5.0 With Revamped UI, Swipe Navigation, And In-App Profiles Snapchat Accounts For More Photo Shares Than Instagram As Pic Sharing Set To Double In 2013 Taco Bell Asks Twitter Followers To Add Them On Snapchat, Users May Soon See Snaps From Brands The Snapchat Lawsuit, Or How To Lose Your Best Friend Over $70 Million Snapchat Raises $13.5M Series A Led By Benchmark, Now Sees 60M Snaps Sent Per Day No, Snapchat Isn't About Sexting, Says Co-Founder Evan Spiegel |
| Posted: 08 Jun 2013 02:16 PM PDT  There have been plenty of juicy (and unsettling) PRISM details making the rounds these past few days, and unsurprisingly the Office of the Director of National Intelligence doesn’t think the NSA’s surveillance practices have been cast in the most accurate light. In an effort to help do away with some pervasive misconceptions, the ODNI has issued a statement explaining why it thinks people are blowing this out of proportion. “The surveillance activities published in The Guardian and The Washington Post are lawful and conducted under authorities widely known and discussed, and fully debated and authorized by Congress,” Director James R. Clapper pointed out in a widely emailed missive. “Their purpose is to obtain foreign intelligence information, including information necessary to thwart terrorist and cyber attacks against the United States and its allies.” Some of the arguments that ODNI throws out there will sound pretty familiar. It states that PRISM can’t be used to “intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person” (which President Obama pointed out the other day), and that the U.S. government can’t just collect information all willy-nilly — it needs judicial approval and oversight from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court. Perhaps most importantly, the ODNI says that PRISM isn’t “a data mining program,” which dovetails nicely with reports from a slew of publicly outed tech companies, including Google, Apple, Yahoo, PalTalk and (TechCrunch owner) AOL, that say they don’t give the NSA (or any body of the U.S. government) direct access to their servers. Still, the prevailing sentiment in certain privacy-sensitive corners of the web is that these companies are basically arguing over semantics: They may not be giving the NSA direct access, but it’s become clear that the information is winding up in the hands of those intelligence agencies anyway, and that has raised more than a few people’s hackles. Of course, the timing of the statement isn’t exactly ideal. While the ODNI carefully laid out its arguments regarding the need for and efficacy of the PRISM system, The Guardian’s Glen Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill just recently published new information on yet another surreptitious snooping tool: the NSA’s so-called Boundless Informant. If PRISM is the system that harvests all of that ballyhooed metadata about your calls and communiques, Boundless Informant is the system that lets the NSA ascribe that metadata to different countries and drill down accordingly. Don’t expect this rigmarole to end any time soon, folks. You can read the entire ODNI fact sheet below: |
| Zazzle Pulls Fake NSA PRISM Program T-Shirt For Intellectual Property Infringement Posted: 08 Jun 2013 02:00 PM PDT  Turn on your radio-activated tooth fillings and cover your windows in aluminum foil because someone – no one knows who, for sure – has asked that Gawker writer Max Read’s homemade NSA PRISM T-shirts be removed from the Internet. Read created the t-shirts as a joke, selling a grand total of three items before Zazzle shut down his store after citing “infringement claims.” The T-shirt uses the NSA PRISM logo which itself was stolen without attribution from a photo made by a British television host named Adam Hart-Davis. The logo originally appeared in the Powerpoint made by NSA spooks to explain their exciting new project to potential software partners. It is technically against the law to make merchandise bearing federal logos (but the law is laxly applied) so Read is technically in the wrong. But really? What shadowy cabal of intellectual property holders contacted Zazzle to have the t-shirt pulled? What’s to stop a mild-mannered reporter from creating his own NSA shirt? Does our nation’s security apparatus really have so little else to do than pull rank on Zazzle? I’ve contacted Zazzle directly but I suspect their press office is currently being muzzled by threats on their lives and the lives of their families (or is enjoying a nice Saturday afternoon). Either way, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” UPDATE – Zazzle wrote: Zazzle provides an open marketplace where user-generated content can be used to create a wide variety of products and apparel. By its very nature, the platform thrives on creativity and the opportunity for people to share their designs with the world. When a product is brought to our attention that violates our terms of service, we take swift action to remove it. We encourage the Zazzle community to use our platform to share their creativity, and we ask that they continue to maintain an open dialogue with us to ensure Zazzle features only the highest quality merchandise for our customers. |
| Windows Phone 8 Reportedly Gained A Notification Center Before Losing It Again Posted: 08 Jun 2013 12:38 PM PDT  When I buy gadgets off of eBay, I’m lucky if half of them haven’t previously been gnawed on by dogs. Meanwhile, this redditor who picked up a second-hand Nokia Lumia 920 from the auction site seems to have gotten much more than he bargained for — he’s been posting screenshots from the device for the better part of a day, because the thing appears to run a previously unreleased build of Windows Phone 8. The big tip off? Well, there’s a handful of UI changes (including the newfound abilities to kill apps from the multitasking screen and sort them based on frequency of use), to say nothing of a slew of curious pre-installed test apps that seem tailor-made for internal development use. Really though, the most notable addition to the device is a notification center, one of the features that’s notably missing from current versions of Windows Phone. As the story goes, the notification center was being considered for inclusion in the initial Windows Phone 8 release but there just wasn’t enough to time to complete it, prompting the company to play up its ever-updating Live Tiles as a sort of replacement. Those sorts of sentiments certainly jibe with other accounts of WP8′s last frenzied days of development — one senior Microsoft official told me last year that the whole Windows Phone team was “coming in hot” just prior to the OS’ official reveal in October 2012. Sadly, a centralized spot for app notifications may not be in the cards for Windows Phone after all. According to a follow-up from WPCentral, Microsoft’s WP team was indeed working on that notification center until it was removed in later builds for reasons that haven’t been made clear yet. Meanwhile, The Verge leaned on some unnamed sources to determine that these screenshots are actually from an early build of the Windows Phone Blue update (released on May 9 or thereabouts), so if the notification center really did get the axe, that decision should have been made very recently. |
| Posted: 08 Jun 2013 11:09 AM PDT  Rizwan Virk is an entrepreneur, author, investor, and film-maker. He was co founder of Gameview Studios, maker of the popular Tap Fish mobile game, which was downloaded over 30 million times, and was an angel investor in Tapjoy, Pocket Gems, Funzio, Telltale and Iddiction. The second edition of his book, Zen Entrpereneurship: Walking the Path of the Career Warrior, was just released and can be bought on Amazon. Follow his blog here. In Silicon Valley, it's easy to find lots of advice on what I call the "external" how-tos of startups, including: structuring your company, building a minimum viable product, negotiating a term sheet with investors, selling your company, and on and on! This post, on the other hand, is about the less publicized "inner side" of the entrepreneurial journey. In this journey, there are no ready made prescriptions. Every company, entrepreneur, and market is unique. Rather, it's about developing a "clear mind" to see what's really happening, trusting your "gut" to find a path through uncharted terrain, and recognizing and transcending your personal patterns to find your calling in life. Do any of these things really help in building a successful startup? When I started my first software company fresh out of MIT, I didn't think so. Imagine my surprise when, a few years later, the issues I was struggling with in my path of personal growth turned out to be the same issues that would determine life or death for my startup! I wrote my book, Zen Entrepreneurship, to share some of the lessons I learned. Here are some highlights: 1. Stay Calm and See Clearly.Running a startup can be like having several firehoses aimed at your from different directions, each one trying to knock you off balance. How can you retain a calm mind and not panic with every burst of the unexpected? Taking a little time away from your startup to develop focus and clarity of mind is an essential practice that I highly recommend. In Eastern traditions (and increasingly in the west), this means meditation or yoga. While these practices provide practical benefits like increased concentration, calm and endurance, the real goal of these practices is something else entirely: awareness. In the yogic traditions, our mind-body consists of a several clear sheaths (called kosas), and as we experience stress in our lives and our work, we build up imperfections in these sheaths (called samskaras) to the point where they become muddy and don't let light shine through. Ultimately this blinds us to seeing the results of our actions clearly, and we get caught in repetitive patterns. Unlike exercise, which is primarily a physical activity, meditation and yoga practices helps to clear these sheaths, like cleaning a dirty windshield, which allows us to perceive more clearly what we're dealing on the road around us, and then take appropriate action. As entrepreneurs, we are so busy convincing investors, employees, advisors and customers of our vision of the future, sometimes we're blinded to the underlying reality of the market around us until it's too late. In Silicon Valley, the blogs are full of reasons why companies and products fail after the fact. Unlike the famous (fictional) Japanese blind swordsman, Zatoichi, who often saw the results of a particular sword swipe in his mind before he acted, it's never possible to predict the results of an action completely. It is, however, possible to perceive those results more clearly as soon as they happen, if we're in the right state of mind. Rather than seeing how we would like a product to perform, we can see what's really happening in the market – and then take appropriate action. 2. Entrepreneur, Know Thyself! Your Patterns are like Dragons.If there's one thing I've learned from starting multiple companies and investing in dozens of entrepreneurs, it's that sooner or later, your personality affects the trajectory of your startup – whether you want it to or not! In my book Zen Entrepreneurship, my mentor uncovers a pattern in my life that I was only barely consciously aware of at the time: I was always looking for something new and exciting, and would end up doing too many things at once. Eventually, I'd be forced to drop some of the activities I was juggling in order to salvage the rest. To qualify as a pattern, something has to happen at least 3 times, and it had – in high school, in college, and now in my first startup after school. When we raised VC money for this rapidly growing startup, this pattern got worse, not better! It crystallized into what I now call the "Acting vs. Singing" issue ("In Hollywood, all actors want to be singers, while all singers want to be actors"). Every one of the startups I've been involved with since have faced a core issue like this in some form. We couldn't decide whether we wanted to be a product company or a service company, so we kept doing both, which almost led to disastrous results. To make my company succeed, I had to recognize and deal with this internal pattern that was unconsciously driving my business. As another example, I know one entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who always finds himself in a similar situation with new investors and advisors. There's always a honeymoon period when the "new guy" can do no wrong in his eyes and he wastes no time boasting about this to the rest of the team. Sooner or later, one of the decisions they make doesn't turn out so well. Then the entrepreneur starts to blame the "new guy" entirely for the failure, rather than taking any responsibility himself. Eventually, the new guy gets fed up with the entrepreneur, and they part ways, never wanting to have anything to do with each other ever again. The remarkable thing about this pattern, which I only recognized after it had happened several times, was that the entrepreneur had no idea this was happening. Like Bill Murray in GroundHog Day, that he was caught in a ever-repeating drama of his own making. Only by consciously recognizing this pattern as a reflection of his own issues, which he was unwilling to do, would he be able to transcend the pattern. Think about your own patterns, or those of entrepreneurs that you know. Like some young men (or women) who find themselves in similar relationships with different people, the more I invest in Silicon Valley startups the more I see ambitious entrepreneurs repeating their inner dramas outwardly in their startups. Your internal patterns are like dragons. There's an old Chinese proverb about dragons: "Ignore the dragon and it will eat you. Confront the dragon and it will defeat you. Learn to ride the dragon and you will take advantage of its might and power." The key is to recognize and learn to utilize the strengths that are hidden in your patterns, not to be consumed by them. 3. Learn to use your intuition and follow the clues.As you learn to clear your mind, you will also be able to tune into your intuition much more clearly. Sometimes, a little hunch, gut feeling, a funny feeling, an unexpected coincidence, synchronicity, or even a particularly vivid dream can lead you out of a troubled situation to a whole new level of success. I call these forms of intuition clues. Like a good treasure hunt or mystery, clues are only revealed one at a time and we have to be able to both recognize them individually, and assemble them into a larger pattern. A few years ago when I was starting an XML-content management company, we couldn't find a name that we liked. I happened to be visiting my parents in Michigan, and was driving on I-94 near Ann Arbor when I noticed a vaguely familiar name on the side of a building: Arbortext. I had a funny feeling when I saw it, the kind that stays with you even if you don't know why, sort of like a déjà vu. Taking this feeling be a clue, I decided to follow it. Initially, it provided a simple answer to our naming problem. The founders of Arbortext had named their company after their college hometown. We decided to do the same and named our company CambridgeDocs. But that wasn't all. Following the clue further, I did some research on this company an realized they were in an adjacent market space, so I got in touch with one of the founders of Arbortext to tell him about our product. To make a long story short, they became our biggest customer and gave our little startup a ton of credibility in our market – all because I followed the clue to see where it would lead. Whether they admit it or not, most investors rely heavily on their gut feelings and intuition when making investment decisions. They then add the logical justification that's necessary to get their partners to agree that it's a good investment. A few years ago, when I was at Stanford Business School, a well-known Sand Hill Road VC told us something about his process that would've made my analysis-oriented professors run for the hills. He said that in addition to the usual factors (market size, management team, competition), he looked for "signals" in the environment around him as confirmation before making an investment. Basically what I would call clues. Once, when he was agonizing over whether to invest in a multimedia streaming company, he went to a ballgame. While there, he co-incidentally overheard a child whose vision wasn't great tell his father that he wished he could watch the game on his phone because their seats were so far away. This clue was enough confirmation and the VC decided to go ahead with the investment. That's how clues work — if you or I had overhead this kid, it might not have meant anything to us — they're highly personalized messages from our unconscious telling us to pay attention to something. So where are they leading? 4. Connect the dots and find the larger Pattern.Sometimes, following our intuition will lead to individual dots that won't connect to reveal a larger Pattern until many years later. A famous example of this is Steve Jobs quitting all his college classes and falling in love with calligraphy instead. The implications of this weren't clear until years later, when they were building the first Macintosh computer. If it weren't for his passion for typefaces from that calligraphy class, it's possible that you'd be reading this on a black and white or green screen in courier! What are you intrigued by that you've never followed up on? This relates not just to your current startup, but your calling in life, the larger Pattern. I used to love the idea of being a film-maker, playing out whole scripts in my mind during junior high school. Years later, after I had started investing in and mentoring entrepreneurs, I was approached by a different kind of young entrepreneur that no one wanted to fund: a fresh graduate from film school. Connecting the dots, I started mentoring film-makers and it has become as personally rewarding for me as tech startup investments. True success and fulfillment come not just from selling a company or making millions of dollars, they come from feeling aligned what you were meant to do in this life. I call this your unique Warrior's Path – the contributions you are here to make, and the lessons you are here to learn (which usually have to do with dealing the kinds of patterns and issues that I mentioned earlier). Once again, in the words of the ever-quotable Zen Master of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs: "You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." Follow the clues. Connect the dots. Find the larger Pattern at work in your life. That's what the Zen of Entrepreneurship is all about. |
| Girl Loses Friends Because Her Phone Is Too Big To Carry Posted: 08 Jun 2013 11:07 AM PDT  Somewhere on the dance floor, she vanished. It would have a been no problem, except her smartphone was so large she left it at coat check. In the pursuit of a big, beautiful screen, she’d sacrificed why people carry phones in the first place. We had no way to find her in the massive nightclub, and we never saw her again. This was my eye-opening experience in Singapore this week. Smartphone innovation has focused on power and pizazz rather than efficiency, and that has its downsides. With today’s technology, we could surely have small, lightweight, long-battery, nearly indestructible phones capable of calling, SMS, and perhaps that even run Android so they could use messaging apps. They wouldn’t need a big screen or heavy processing power. They’d be portable and reliable above all else. Our lost little friend certainly could have benefited from such a device. She spent the night at the club alone, and we spent it distracted and frustrated looking for her. A little phone could have fit in the waistband of her skirt or her bra, and we could have rendezvoused and resumed our evening under the disco lights. Sales of Mophie juicepacks and the common refrain of “my phone was dead” show demand for some solution to our battery woes. If you knew you didn’t need to save that last 20% of life for essential communication later in the evening, you wouldn’t have to ration your electrons so diligently. With the current trend of tighter men’s jeans, guys could make use of smaller phones too. A basic, hosted music app could make them a nice alternative to working out with a weighty chunk of glass in hand. These devices could also serve as great emergency devices. At a low-cost you could throw one in your glove compartment or earthquake kit along with a solar or hand-crank charger. The idea might not be popular with carriers who subsidize handsets to rake in data plan revenue, but perhaps an independent manufacturer could step in to the fill the void. Many laughed at the idea of Path founder Dave Morin having two iPhones, one for day and one for night because he blows through battery so quickly. But maybe what some of us really need is one large, full-featured media consumption mobile computer, and one tiny, basic communication tool. There are plenty of feature phones out there, but they’re bare bones out of concern for price. A purposefully limited but high-tech handset could find a market. Not smart, but not dumb either, the world could use a Simple Phone. [Image Credits: Anniken Hannevik / Trigger Happy TV] |
| Senate Candidate @CoryBooker: What We Know And What We Need To Know Posted: 08 Jun 2013 10:20 AM PDT  Democratic celebrity Newark Mayor Cory Booker just announced his candidacy for Senate, to be decided in a special election on October 16 to replace the late Senator Frank Lautenberg. We named him one of our Most Innovative People in Democracy because there’s a lot to like: he has pioneered constituent responsiveness through Twitter, he’s a startup founder, he rescues people from burning buildings, and he’s one of the most gifted political orators of our time. His penchant for digital innovation and speaking skills has led to a non-stop comparison to President Barack Obama. Now for Booker, an obvious future presidential candidate, this comparison is both a blessing and a curse. Like then-Senator Barack Obama, we don’t know a lot about his positions (detailed below). Additionally, Obama promised to reform the culture of Washington, but has been as partisan as every other president in recent memory. We’ll need more than soaring rhetoric to be confident he can accomplish this monumental task. The Positions We Know That Somehow Differ From The Stock Democratic Platform
What We Don’t Know
Campaigning and Senate Innovation There are high hopes that Booker, like his mentor, will break new ground on the campaign trail. The president’s first Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, and current candidate for Lt. Governor of Virginia, disclosed his campaign contributions on the software developer social network, GitHub, adding a new level of real-time, trackable information. We await whether Booker will do anything different. Booker has also promised to “hack the Senate,” but we really have no idea what that means. Does he support more participatory technologies, like Congressman Darrell Issa’s crowdsourcing legislative platform, Project Madison? (Note: We’ve integrated Project Madison into our website. If you’re an expert on Immigration or Tax reform, contribute your ideas here.) Republican Majority Leader, and fellow Most Innovative Person in Democracy, Eric Cantor, released a Facebook app, Citizen Cosponsor, that allows citizens to show support and track legislation online. Congress and the Executive branch’s budget is still mostly opaque. There’s no way to track all federal spending online. Last year, the House unanimously passed Darrell Issa’s Data Act, but it failed in the Senate. Would Booker champion the Data Act, or some version of it to make spending transparent? What about legislative reform? Senator Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade: A) supports a new strategy for legislation, wherein states are exempted from complying with new laws if they can find more innovative ways to accomplish the same goals. I’ll update this post as we learn more; if I’ve left something out, please tweet at me. |
| Gillmor Gang: Back in the USSR Posted: 08 Jun 2013 10:00 AM PDT  The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — view the world through PRISM glasses. We, or me, couldn’t help wondering what part of surpised we are at the idea we’re being monitored and scraped within an inch of our metadata. It’s hard to tell whether we’re worried about losing our individual freedoms, or having to do the hard work of balancing the tradeoffs in a dangerous world of drones and the streams that feed them. Still, the stakes couldn’t be higher as we sell our digital identities for the price of free access to the flow of information. And what about the cost of our freedom to share the music that defined the creative revolution of the 60′s and the video revolution of Mad Men and Netflix? From Richie Havens on the stage at Woodstock to Obama’s politics of the personal, we can’t afford to sit back and ignore the costs, and the value, of swimming in the social waters. Ben Franklin may not have anticipated Twitter, but Paul Revere did. Honey, disconnect the phone. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina CHase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
| CrunchWeek: Zynga's Big Layoffs, OMGPOP Gets The Axe, NSA Spying Emerges With Verizon Posted: 08 Jun 2013 09:07 AM PDT 
I’d be amiss if I didn’t acknowledge that this episode is missing a big, huge, massive story. We taped this late Thursday afternoon, one day earlier than normal, so that Leena Rao and I could say our proper CrunchWeek goodbyes sayonara to Drew Olanoff, who is departing TechCrunch for the purple shores of Yahoo. The story that the National Security Agency has been cooperating with some of the web’s most significant Internet companies to mine personal user data — almost certainly the dominant news of the week — broke as we were in the studio. We did, however, talk about the NSA secretly tapping into all the call data from the Verizon network, which was clearly just the tip of the iceberg of these revelations. We also talked about Zynga laying off nearly 20 percent of its workforce and its pretty shocking shuttering of Draw Something maker OMGPOP, just a year after it was acquired for some $200 million. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment