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that drew
drew olanoff is a geek. he beat cancer...by blaming it. also brained up "Social Good", Gmail4Troops, BlogAbroad, and other stuffs.
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Tweets
- RT @jherskowitz: @drew Flying Screaming MonkeysJun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @jherskowitz OMG. Dude I forgot. Thank you.
- my desk is still super boring, i need to buy a bunch of @thinkgeek stuff.Jun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @mattlynley :P
- tweet.Jun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- my shoulder decided that it didn't really want to hang out in its socket today.Jun 18, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- I'm at Yahoo! - Building D - @yahooinc (Sunnyvale, CA) http://t.co/9Bcg97xeEX
- RT @viticci: Had PET scan today. It came back negative again. I’m still kicking cancer's ass.
- RT @CNBC: BREAKING: FBI's Sean Joyce says one case thwarted by NSA program was plot to bomb NYSE. (via @eamonjavers)
- RT @AlexsLemonade: Today is the last day to help fill your local @RitasItalianIce's paper lemon Wall of Hope for #ChildhoodCancer! http://t…
- ZzzZzzzzz
- FaceTime over cell means more opportunities to not use FaceTime.
- I'm at The Cookie Crisp (San Mateo, CA) http://t.co/R64Fl377rQ
- I should eat something today.
- RT @TechCrunch: Yahoo! Becomes Exclusive Partner Of 49ers Online Content http://t.co/rAMHVzlNlX by @bartozone
- RT @YahooInc: Our Commitment to Our Users’ Privacy http://t.co/nv6PZaZuJ0
- Calpain.
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Checkins
- Yahoo! - Building D701 First Ave
- Yahoo! - Building D701 First Ave
- Fernando's Mexican Restaurant63 37th Ave
- Starbucks3790 S El Camino Real
- AMC Loews Metreon 16135 4th St, Ste 3000
- Peet's Coffee & Tea370 4th St
- Antone's Cocktail Lounge32 37th Ave
- Yahoo! - Building D701 First Ave
- URL's at Yahoo!721 First Ave
- Yahoo! - Building D701 First Ave
- Yahoo! - Building D - Bean Trees Cafe701 First Ave
- Yahoo! Sunnyvale701 First Ave
- Gorilla Barbecue2145 Cabrillo Hwy
- Starbucks3790 S El Camino Real
- The Saloon1232 Grant Ave
- Bar Basic510 Brannan St
- AOL TechCrunch HQ410 Townsend St
- AOL TechCrunch HQ410 Townsend St
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Google+
- Drew on Google+
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Posts
By Jay Rossiter, SVP, Platforms
Over the last few months, we’ve made exciting changes to some of your favorite Yahoo! products, like Flickr, Mail, Weather, the Homepage and Search. Today, I’m excited to share with you our next big push: we want to give our loyal users and new folks the…
By Marco Wirasinghe, Director of Mobile and Emerging Products
Today Apple announced the 2013 Apple Design Award Winners at WWDC, and we’re beyond thrilled that the Yahoo! Weather for iPhone app has been chosen as one of this year’s recipients.
Apple has built their legacy designing…
By Ron Bell, General Counsel, Yahoo!
We want to set the record straight about stories that Yahoo! has joined a program called PRISM through which we purportedly volunteer information about our users to the U.S. government and give federal agencies access to our user databases. These claims…
How much is a dinner with SV Angel’s co-founder and managing partner, David Lee, worth? When you put it into the context of where the money will be going, the answer should be “it’s almost priceless.” Today, I got to sit down with Lee, and a special new friend of TechCrunch
Heading To Yahoo! And No! I Can’t Do Anything About The Exclamation Mark! http://tcrn.ch/131GILJ
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Info
- Summary
My name is Drew Olanoff, and I have over 10 years of marketing, PR, customer service and support, relationship building and management, product management, and technical support experience in multiple verticals. Online, including mobile.
I coined the phrase "Social Good" for online charitable movements, and invented the online "donation by action" charity model. I founded #BlameDrewsCancer
I pride myself on being a connector. Connecting people, stories, information. I have worked under some amazingly talented and gifted PR pros while working for startups as a "Director of Community", "Community Manager" and "Technology Evangelist". I have the knack of working stories both mainstream as well as online. Bridging that gap is my passion.
I am a leader AND a team player, and strive for nothing short of success. My life motto is "failure is not an option".
Specialties: podcasting, videoblogging ,blogging, community management, social networking, technology evangelist, tech, technology, marketing, pr, outreach, customer service, social media, product development, UI, UX, mobile, user acquisition, technology trendsExperience- Jun 2013 - PresentPR Manager, Corporate Communications / Yahoo!
- May 2009 - PresentFounder / BlameDrewsCancer.com
During my personal fight with Hodgkins Lymphoma, I created a website that leveraged tweets to raise money for charity. During my treatment, I was able to:
- Participated in official LIVESTRONG events as a Global Envoy
- Appeared on both national and local news (CNN, Fox Philadelphia) to talk about our mission
- Held a 24 hour livestreamed marathon to raise money for LIVESTRONG
- Worked with Drew Carey to raise money by auctioning off the Twitter handle @drew
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Interests:travel, music, creativity, technology, gadgets, games, management, training, mentoring, leading, new media
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Tweets
- Moneyball got robbed. So gonna kick that artsy fartsy dog's ass.
- Happy anniversary @thatdrew and @Melbellie. I promise I won't tell anyone who my favorite is. If it makes you feel any better, it's close.
- Running for president.
- I'm thankful for whipped cream from @starbucks. Oh and for @Melbellie @thatdrew too. And @adrianbellie I guess.
- @Alyssa_Milano right back atcha! <3
- I'm dog tired. Long flight. But I got some bacon!
- Why does @Melbellie and @thatdrew get to pick pumpkins? I like pumpkins. Jerks.
- Sorry @thatdrew. I'm so damn cute, I make everyone want to talk to you. If it helps any, they're dumb.
- I get to fly and see @Melbellie tomorrow. Not a happy visit though :(
- Both of my parents work from home. This sucks. Can't even lick my junk in privacy anymore. I need a break. #rufflife
- Fan of @bifnaked's music even though I don't understand the words. Well, I don't understand ANY persons words really.
- I want to move to Ohio.
- Where the frig am I. What is this Ohio????
- you should feel how soft I am right now.
- sometimesmytweetsdonthavespacescuzigotnothumbs.
- oh and don't forget to do number one AND number two, even if the ground is wet. #hurricaneirene #wooftip
- to all of my furry friends out there on the right coast, please stay safe and take care of your people #hurricaneirene #woof
- come home @adrianbellie :(
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Posts
- Jun 18, 13
The NSA surveillance controversy continues this week, and TNW would be remiss to keep you out of the loop. However, instead of shipping a number of short posts on the most recent news, what follows is a short compendium of what you need to know. For full coverage of PRISM, and the phone records program, head here. Let’s begin.
The LIBERT-E Act
As TNW previously reported, a bipartisan bill under the name of the ‘LIBERT-E Act’ is in the works. That awkward name breaks down in the following way: the “Limiting Internet and Blanket Electronic Review of Telecommunications and Email Act.” As reported in Politico, the bill’s backers, Republican Rep. Justin Amash and Democrat Rep. John Conyers, stated the following:
We accept that free countries must engage in secret operations from time to time to protect their citizens. Free countries must not, however, operate under secret laws. Secret court opinions obscure the law. They prevent public debate on critical policy issues and they stop Congress from fulfilling its duty to enact sound laws and fix broken ones.
Their bill would increase the amount of disclosure provided to both Congress and the wider public. It’s chances of passage are unclear. It has attracted 31 co-sponsors thus far. The views of the two were articulated in a Huffington Post editorial: “[t]he government has no business stockpiling so much of our data.” We’ll track the bill and keep you informed.
50 Plots
Today General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, stated that surveillance efforts have stopped “over 50″ potential terror threats in the last decade. That is a bold claim. This comes after the General had stated that, as TNW wrote at the time, “the two previously secret programs have, as Reuters reports, ‘helped to prevent ‘dozens’ of potential terrorist events.’”
The claim is a bit suspect as when it has come to specific events that are discussed as perhaps defused using data collected from the phone record program, or PRISM, they have been circumspect. Please allow me another short quote:
Before, President Obama had indicated that a terrorist attack had been thwarted by PRISM. That attack, it came out, was a 2009 plot in New Yorkin which PRISM played a role. However, others have stated that PRISM’s role in that incident was superfluous, making the argument specious.
Thus, to state that 50 events were disrupted or avoided using NSA surveillance feels perhaps a bit high. This leads us to our next topic.
New York Stock Exchange
Sean Joyce, FBI deputy director, today pointed to Khalid Ouazzani as someone that had been stopped. The mentioned effort was the exploding of a bomb at the New York Stock Exchange. “Ouazzani had been providing information and support to this plot,” Joyce said.
As reported by Wired, Ouazzani’s lawyer disputes that, claiming that he pled guilty to money laundering, and that “Khalid Ouazzan was not involved in any plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.” It’s also worth noting that his plea deal mentioned no such plot.
In a real way, this appears to be another somewhat hollow example of how recently uncovered NSA programs have proved critical to national security, which is the stated reason we should allow elements of our privacy to be eroded in the face of physical danger.
Three Experts Praise Snowden
The USA Today recorded an incredible interview with three whistle-blowers who were all formerly employed at the NSA. The video is worth your time. Here’s the nub of the discussion, in the paper’s words:
They say the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former NSA contractor who worked as a systems administrator, proves their claims of sweeping government surveillance of millions of Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing. They say those revelations only hint at the programs’ reach.
That final segment mirrors what the AP reported over the weekend, that the NSA’s overall reach into the data streams of the world is far greater than what PRISM and the phone program are capable of.
Google
Breaking now is a report from the Washington Post that Google will challenge gag orders associated with Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court data requests. The company will base its arguments on the First Amendment.
That’s what you need to know now. More as it unfolds.
Top Image Credit: Andrew Malone
- Jun 18, 13
Google has filed a petition with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court citing its first amendment rights as it asks for permission to disclose controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests.
The company revealed in a Google+ post that it is seeking to separate out federal criminal requests from those related to national security:
We have long pushed for transparency so users can better understand the extent to which governments request their data—and Google was the first company to release numbers for National Security Letters. However, greater transparency is needed, so today we have petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow us to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately. Lumping national security requests together with criminal requests—as some companies have been permitted to do—would be a backward step for our users.
The Washington Post obtained a copy of Google’s motion, which referred to the first amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and the high value that the company places on transparency.
According to the Post, Google is specifically asking to reveal the number of national security requests it receives and how many user accounts are affected.
Last week, Google sent an open letter with a similar request addressed to the US Attorney General and the head of the FBI. The company cited a need to defend itself from inaccurate claims that suggest it is giving the government “unfettered access” to its data.
Facebook announced last week that it would begin publishing national security orders in its transparency reports. Apple and Yahoo have followed suit as well.
The National Security Agency has come under scrutiny this month after a series of reports revealed a massive surveillance apparatus that was believed to have the cooperation of the technology industry’s biggest players. President Obama has spoken out in defense of the NSA programs, noting that citizens aren’t getting the “complete story”. The FBI has pointed out that the data collection programs helped the agency thwart bomb plots against the New York Stock Exchange and the New York subway system.
Photo credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
- Jun 18, 13
Adobe today announced that publications created with its Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) have surpassed a total of 100 million publication downloads. DPS is Adobe’s software collection designed to help publishers create content for tablets and mobile devices.
The company noted that the number of brands and corporations using DPS has jumped 30 percent over the past six months.
Adobe marked the milestone as it announced its second quarter earnings. The firm beat expectations with revenue of $1.011 billion and earnings per share of $0.36.
The company released a major update to its Creative Cloud offerings on Monday as it navigates away from a software purchase model toward cloud subscriptions.
Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock
- Jun 18, 13
Microsoft’s efforts to promote the Xbox One on Facebook have devolved into an old-fashioned ASCII art flame war.
Xbox One and PlayStation 4 faced off last week at E3, and by most accounts, the Xbox took a bruising. Massively unpopular policies regarding used games and persistent Internet connections have left Microsoft with a significant public relations problem on its hands.
After Microsoft changed the cover photo on its Xbox Facebook page on Monday, Sony fans took to the comment thread to post hundreds of ASCII Sony logos, middle fingers and face palms. Microsoft loyalists have responded with the occasional thumbs up, but they appear to be vastly outnumbered. The thread has attracted over 14,500 comments.
Microsoft is taking it all in stride. The company has posted several pieces of ASCII art of its own, dedicating them to all of its “ASCII loving Facebook fans and followers”:
Header image credit: Wavebreak Media
- Jun 18, 13
The arrival of the first Ubuntu OS-based smartphone took one step closer today with the formation of the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group – a collection of operators around the world that want a say in the ongoing development of the Ubuntu smartphone OS.
Canonical, the company behind the open source operating system Ubuntu, first outlined its plans to have essentially the same version (using the same kernel, at least) of its platform running on PCs, TVs, smartphones and tablets at the beginning of the year but little progress has been seen in the interim months.
However, with the formation of the Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), we can at least rest assured that the industry is considering the possibility of rolling out Ubuntu smartphones at some point in the future.
Among the initial founding members are EE, Deutesche Telekom, Korea Telecom, telecom Italia, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, SK Telecom and “the leading Spanish international carrier”.
The aim of the CAG will be to discuss various aspects of development of the platform and will cover things like ways to differentiate it for operators and OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers – device makers), which HTML5 standards it should support and how best to establish marketplaces for apps, content and services.
Canonical said the group will also aim look at things like platform fragmentation, revenue share models and payment mechanisms and standards.
The company also noted that other national or internation operators are still welcome to join the CAG, adding that only the group’s members will have access to early information about device manufacturer plans to support the OS, as well as the opportunity to be a launch partner when the first devices do indeed start rolling off the end of the production lines.
Exactly when that will be is unknown, but in the past Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, has said that the first smartphones should arrive from around January 2014.
Image Credit – Thinkstock
- Jun 18, 13
Poutsch, a service which we likened to Quora for polls earlier this year, is launching on the iPhone.
With this move, the startup is clearly pushing the social aspects of its network. Instead of serving as a polling tool, it’s more of a network for asking and answering questions with friends.
As with any social service, it’s going to be difficult to use if your friends aren’t already on it. To keep your feed from utter emptiness, Poutsch recommends active users to follow. You won’t know them, but given how low-friction polls are, it’s pretty easy to get wrapped up in answering random questions like: “Is Tumblr still cool?” and “Dailymotion or YouTube?”
After experimenting with the service on the Web, we found it to be quite good — not perfect, but still one of the best around. On the iPhone, our opinions remain unchanged; the app is impressive, but comes with a few glitches and random slow-loads that likely won’t make or break your experience.
As far as the design goes, Poutsch has continued its decision to embrace a decidedly flat design with an almost-pastel color scheme. In other words, it’ll fit right at home on Apple’s upcoming iOS 7.
If you’re actually searching for a polling solution, Poutsch is definitely worth a try — although you might not be able to pronounce the name. But even if you’re not actively searching for this sort of tool, you might find Poutsch an entertaining way to spend a few moments answering quick polls in your downtime.
➤ Poutsch for iPhone (free)
Image credit: Thinkstock
Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service.
- Jun 18, 13
The team behind the Dublin Web Summit are nothing if not ambitious – every year this event in the Irish capital gets bigger, and for 2013 they’re aiming at making it more of a SXSW-style festival than simply a tech conference.
Among the changes this year, the Web Summit is boosting its offering for startups. As usual, the centerpiece for this is the startup competition, which this year will be called PITCH. The exact judging panel hasn’t been firmed up yet, but last year’s included YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim and Michael Birch of Bebo fame and the 2013 panel will be drawn from the Summit’s speaker lineup, so you can expect to pitch in front of some well-known names from the tech scene if you make the grade.
PITCH will have two tracks, meaning that two overall winners will be crowned on the main stage at the end of the Web Summit. Meanwhile free exhibition space will be offered to selected startups, which should be a good way to boost your visibility when you’re there, whether or not you make it into the competition.
Big-name speakers lined up for the 2013 Summit include Di-Ann Eisnor, VP Community Geographer at Google’s latest acquisition, Waze; Digg founder turned Google Ventures VC, Kevin Rose; angel investor Esther Dyson; Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote; Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and a partner at Formation8, and Niklas Zennstrom the founder of Skype and Atomico.
The Summit will also welcome Tony Hawk – a name that gamers and skateboard enthusiasts alike will instantly recognize. He’s not just focused on his Ollie Airwalks and 360 Spins, though. The Tony Hawk Foundation has donated over $5m to help fund hundreds of skate parks across the US, and he’s authored a best-selling book – ‘How Did I Get Here: The Ascent of an Unlikely CEO’.
As a media partner for the event, The Next Web looks forward to doing a Nosehook Impossible and Railstand as we cover the Dublin Web Summit on 30-31 October 2013. Tickets are available now.
Image credit: Thinkstock
- Jun 18, 13
Huawei launched the Ascend P6 today, the world’s slimmest Android smartphone with some robust mid-to-high end specs.
The handset was unveiled at Huawei’s ‘Beauty’ event in London, just days before Samsung debuts a number of new Galaxy and ATIV devices at its dedicated ‘Premiere 2013′ event in the city.
The Ascend P6 is just 6.18mm thick and comes with a 1.5GHz quad-core processor in a sleek, metallic body. It offers a 4.7-inch high definition display – no word on the resolution for now – and what the company describes as an “industry-leading” 5-megapixel front-facing camera.
It’s joined by an 8-megapixel snapper on the front, capable of shooting at an aperture of just F2.0 and a 4cm macro view. It also supports 1080p video recording and playback, which is the staple for high-end smartphones these days. Huawei revealed today that the device also uses its new IMAGESmart Enginge with Auto Scene Recognition to help casual smartphone users shoot better images on Auto.
The device runs on the latest version of Android, version 4.2.2, with Huawei’s custom Emotion UI slapped on top. There are over 1,000 pre-generated themes to choose from now, alongside three designs created specifically for the Ascend P6′s new colors. The handset is also powered by a 2000 mAh battery, which is competitive but not industry-leading by any means.
“Building on the success of our Ascend P series of fashion smartphones, the Huawei Ascend P6 provides unsurpassed technology and a design that is simply stunning,” Richard Yu, Chief Executive Officer, Huawei Consumer Business Group said.
The device isn’t a huge surprise though. Huawei confirmed its existence in May, using a number of teaser images and a post that revealed very little in terms of detail or specs. The @HuaweiDevice Twitter account then posted a high-resolution image on June 14 teasing the Ascend P6 in its black color variant.
It was followed with a second image yesterday, however, that showed a white version of the smartphone with an unusual metallic case:
Huawei is yet to make any real impact with a high-end Android smartphone, in part because it’s always focused on building devices at the lower-end of the price scale. Samsung currently dominates this space with the Galaxy S3, Note II and newly launched Galaxy S4 – which passed 10 million global sales in its first month – and it will take something rather special to knock it from its lofty perch.
HTC, Sony and a number of other competitors have tried to differentiate themselves, but their efforts are yet to resonate at anything like the same scale. Huawei is still a fairly unknown brand in Western markets, but an eye-catching device such as this one – especially if it can boast the title of the world’s thinnest smartphone – would help it stand out from the crowd.
The Ascend P6 has a recommended retail price of €449 and will be available in black, white and pink with matching color cases. It will launch in China later this month before being sold in Western Europe in July through Vodafone, Telefonica, Orange, H3G, O2, Carphone Warehouse, TalkTalk, Media Markt & Saturn, TIM and online with Amazon and CDiscount. A wider international release hasn’t been detailed yet, although Huawei added that “other markets” would soon follow.
- Jun 18, 13
The rumored upcoming HTC One Mini smartphone, previously all whispers and hearsay until now, will ship to customers with that name and include a 720p resolution display, according to one of HTC’s own websites.
The company inadvertently confirmed the existence of the HTC One Mini’s name by posting its User Agent Profile to the HTC-owned Taiwanese domain htcmms.com.tw.
There’s not a lot of info to be gleaned from the pages in terms of the expected specs of the device, but it does confirm that it should arrive running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and will have a 720p (1280 x 720 pixels) screen resolution. Judging from the page, we’d expect the model number of the HTC One Mini to be PO581. Similar information surfaced ahead of the release of the original HTC One, which can also be found on the site with its model number of PN071.
Official information about the HTC One Mini is thin on the ground, although Engadget said last week , citing tipsters, that the device will arrive with a 4.3-inch display of lower resolution than the original HTC One’s 1080p offering.
The device is also expected to keep the same design as its larger sibling, meaning dual front-facing speakers. Other details such as camera specifications or processor power are still unknown but with the leaks becoming more frequent and HTC likely wanting to ride the wave of popularity its One device is currently enjoying, we’d expect to see official details sooner rather than later.
Naturally, TNW asked HTC for comment on the One Mini, but a spokeswoman for the company simply told us that “HTC does not comment on rumor or speculation”.
The introduction of smaller versions of flagship handsets has also been seen in Samsung’s product lineup with the imminent launch of the Galaxy S4 Mini. However, where Samsung has a broad range of devices at a variety of price points, HTC’s One Mini will play a more key role in its range as it looks like it will essentially fill its mid-range handset slot for the forseeable future. Last year, HTC released a number of HTC One-family devices including the HTC One X, S and V.
Image Credit – AFP/Getty Images
- Jun 18, 13
Adobe has released major updates to its flagship products – the only difference now is that instead of a new Creative Suite, the updates are being released under its new Creative Cloud umbrella.
The company said in a blog post that hundreds of new features have been released in new versions of the apps – including Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, Adobe Muse CC, Dreamweaver CC, Edge Animate CC, Adobe Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC, and more.
A new Creative Cloud app for the desktop has also been introduced, in which users can download and manage the latest product updates, keep tabs on their work, connect with their followers on portfolio-sharing network Behance, and more.
Adobe users can also sync their workspace settings to Creative Cloud now – including things like preferences, presets, brushes and libraries – which removes the hassle of re-setting them on another computer. All one needs to do is log in to Creative Cloud, sync and retrieve the settings.
There will also be integration with New York-based Behance, which Adobe acquired late last year for an undisclosed amount. Creative Cloud members get a Behance Prosite, which enables you to create a website to display your work.
Adobe’s new cloud-based color theme app (for the iPhone) Adobe Kuler will be included as well, for users to share color themes and access thousands of others on the Kuler website. Syncing your favorite themes will allow them to be accessible immediately in Illustrator CC.
Creative Cloud members can get all the new apps and services today, available on a redesigned app center on the website. Enterprise and education customers will get their updates on June 21, while government customers will see the updates in July.
Adobe announced last month during its MAX conference that it was leaving behind its Creative Suite to focus entirely on a new suite of Creative Cloud-only apps and services. This is the first move it has taken to introduce a slew of new apps and services via its new platform.
The Creative Cloud pricing structure has already been unveiled previously - anyone with a CS 3 or later serial number will get their first Creative Cloud year for $29.99 per month. For everyone else, complete Creative Cloud access will set you back $49.99 per month, or you can purchase a single app subscription for $19.99 per month.
In its latest blog post, Adobe also teased some new features and functionalities for the Creative Cloud that will be released “as soon as they are ready” – including file syncing on the desktop, Typekit fonts on the desktop, and a Creative Cloud app for iOS.
Headline image via Thinkstock
- Jun 18, 13
Amid the furore over the PRISM data-leaking saga in the US, President Barack Obama has insisted that Americans aren’t getting “the complete story” on the program – which reportedly enables the US government to tap directly into the central servers of US-based Internet companies.
Obama told Charlie Rose in a PBS interview that the debate has become cloudy, given that there are tradeoffs in any given program that the US takes on for security purposes.
“To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom; I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports,” he said.
The gist of the interview has been covered due to the release of a partial transcript by Buzzfeed several hours ago, but one thing notable in the aired interview is that Obama noted the US has to “make decisions about how much classified information and how much covert activity we are willing to tolerate as a society.”
Obama said that because the NSA programs are classified – as they are set up to track down suspected terrorists by culling US phone records and mining data from the servers of major Internet companies – “the public may not fully” understand how they work.
The president emphasized that they have put in place a whole system of checks and balances, and that NSA cannot listen to US citizens’ phone calls and emails, by law and by rule, unless an agency such as the FBI goes to a court and obtains a warrant. There has been “no evidence” that the program has been abused so far, he added.
“What I’ve asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program,” the president said. “And they are in that process of doing so now so that everything that I’m describing to you today – people, the public, newspapers, etc., can look at. Because frankly, if people are making judgments just based on these slides that have been leaked, they’re not getting the complete story.”
Following the news of PRISM, all of the major tech companies involved have denied involvement – and spoke up on the number of requests made by the US government for data.
Earlier today, Yahoo disclosed that it received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests for user data from US law enforcement agencies between December 2012 and May 2013, while Apple revealed yesterday that the firm received 4,000-5,000 requests in the same period of time. Microsoft revealed Friday that it received 6,000-7,000 requests implicating 31,000-32,000 accounts in the last six months, and hours earlier Facebook revealed its FISA numbers, claiming that up to 19,000 user accounts were queried by the US government.
In the Charlie Rose interview, Obama also said the case of whistleblower Edward Snowden has been referred to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation, as well as possible extradition.
You can find our full PRISM coverage here
Image Credit: Paul Faith via WPA Pool/Getty Images
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Posts
- Jun 18, 13
It happened to me. Yes, I once uploaded a pic of my friend to Facebook from my phone, forgot to change the setting from “Public” to “Friends” and had the friend get told that day by a random person: “Hey I just saw a picture of you on Alexia from TechCrunch’s wall!” So now I’m circumspect.
Apparently this social media disaster was happening to more people, because Facebook just fixed it — at least on iOS. Android has apparently had the new feature for over a week.
Now iPhone users too are able to easily edit Facebook’s photo privacy settings — by selecting the drop-down arrow on the status update and selecting “Edit Privacy.” Though you still can’t edit the update text or any comments themselves from your iPhone, this is pretty useful. The last time I messed up on a photo privacy setting, I had to access Facebook’s Mobile Web page on a foreign connection to fix it. Not pretty.
In addition to this nod to paranoid people, Facebook iOS Version 6.2 allows users to post the emotion and action updates they’ve come to know and love on the web, including Happy, Sad, Wonderful and, my favorite, Loved.
You can also now start a new conversation with a photo sent to you in messages in Version 6.2, though I don’t think this feature will be remembered enough to see that much traction, unless teenagers are exhibiting some novel group photosharing behaviors on Facebook Message that I don’t know about.
And speaking of Facebook Message, let me take this post about an app update to let you know that a standalone Messenger for iPad is likely not happening, though a trial app was in the works when we reported on it. Basically Messenger was not seeing the growth Facebook hoped for (turns out people don’t want a messenger app PLUS a Facebook app) after Facebook’s primary app became less buggy and slow. So, nixed.
PSA: Update your apps periodically, people.
- Jun 18, 13
More and more jobs deal in the virtual realm, and are done by people sitting down at desks at computers. Desk work can be made interesting in its own ways, but it’s always fun to visit a company that’s actually making physical stuff.So for this episode of TechCrunch Cribs, we jetted over to New York City to check out the headquarters of Quirky, a startup founded back in 2009 with the aim of “making invention accessible.” Quirky is a company that crowdsources ideas for unique physical products — gadgets, kitchenware, furniture, and the like — and manufactures them at large-scale production so that they can be actually sold in stores.
This process entails lots of prototyping, so Quirky’s downtown Manhattan office is full of fun stuff like 3D printers that help them bring invention ideas to life. It all made for a really fun tour, led by Quirky’s co-founder and head of people and culture Nikki Kaufman, and you can see it all in the video embedded above.
- Jun 18, 13
As it promised it would, Google is fighting the government’s gag order on releasing how many users are monitored by the National Security Agency. Unlike Facebook and Microsoft, Google and Twitter publicly rejected a government deal to disclose the total number of spying warrants for user data, which would include (but not detail) the number of requests coming from the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA).
“Lumping national security requests together with criminal requests—as some companies have been permitted to do—would be a backward step for our users,” explained a public statement following the petition.
Unfortunately, as both I and the Washington Post have suggested, even if Google is successful, the most pressing concerns would remain a mystery. Google’s transparency report discloses the number of court orders and users affected, but not what data was given up. Can the government read emails, monitor Gchats and Google Voice phone calls, as leaker Edward Snowden has claimed?
Additionally, if it’s true that the government can demand broad swaths of data, like search logs, the number of affected users could number in the millions. Releasing the total number of users affected would be tantamount to revealing vital sources and methods of surveillance.
Citing their 1st Amendment rights, the petition notes that “Google’s reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading reports in the media…Google must respond to such claims with more than generalities.”
There is reason to be optimistic that allowing Google to detail the FISA requests would help repair its reputation. Facebook reported that between the 9,000-10,000 government requests, only 18,000-19,000 users have been affected. This seems to cast doubt that a single government request permits wholesale monitoring of an entire population’s activity. So, while we wouldn’t know what was being given away, most users could breathe easy that they aren’t a target.
I’m sympathetic to Google’s position; certainly they probably want to disclose everything, or just stop the snooping altogether. But, even under the best case scenario, the public is still in the dark.
Read Google’s full petition below.
- Jun 18, 13
Editor’s note: Jeff Jordan is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and is on the boards of Airbnb, Belly, Fab, Circle, Crowdtilt, Lookout and Pinterest, as well as Wealthfront and Zoosk. Previously, Jeff was president and CEO of OpenTable, which he took public in 2009. Before OpenTable, Jeff was president of PayPal, and he was previously the SVP and general manager of eBay North America. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @jeff_jordan.
The venture industry is awash with talk of the “Series A Crunch”, where it’s getting progressively more challenging for seed companies to land follow-on financing. In my short two-year tenure as a full-time investor, I’ve seen this crunch hit very hard at a number of quality, early-stage consumer companies. Why is this happening? A number of factors are coming together to create this crunch.
A significant supply/demand imbalance has emerged between seed and Series A financings coming out of the economic near-meltdown of 2008-2009. In 2009, there were about the same number of seed and Series A financings, but the number of seed deals have exploded since then while the number of A rounds grew only modestly. In 2012, there were 2.5x as many seed financings as A-round financings, whereas historically these were more in balance. This suggests something like 60 percent of seeds could be stranded.
A number of our recent Series A investments built multi-million dollar revenue run rates on their seed rounds. We’re getting spoiled.
Investor expectations have expanded substantially. It’s become steadily less expensive to launch many consumer-oriented Internet businesses over the years due to things like Moore’s law, improving programming tools, the cloud and the ability to access users from multiple large platforms. Now we often see the kind of traction that we used to expect from Series B companies in Series A companies, and from Series A companies in seed companies. For example, a number of our recent Series A investments built multi-million dollar revenue run rates on their seed rounds. We’re getting spoiled. Combine this with the above supply/demand imbalance and you’ve got a situation where the bar is being raised exactly when the competition for the A round is becoming particularly fierce.
The source of seed capital has been changing. In recent years, the amount of seed investment from non-traditional institutional sources has increased dramatically. More and more seed capital is coming from sources like angels, “super angels,” micro-VCs and incubators. To under-score this point, we have close to a thousand separate angels as co-investors in the consumer companies in our less-than-four-year old portfolio. This influx of new capital has arguably had an inflationary impact on seed valuations, which obviously has an initial attraction to many entrepreneurs but can create challenges in a “crunch” scenario. These non-institutional sources of capital are not inclined or structured to potentially help a company secure additional capital in a crunch. And the higher valuations provide a higher hurdle that must be overcome by potential new investors in a crunched company.
The number of potential Series A investors appears to be contracting. The venture business is showing early signs of a significant consolidation. The amount of capital invested has trailed the amount raised for a number of years, and the capital that is being raised is increasingly consolidating among fewer, larger firms. The number of investors who can write that Series A check is starting to fall.
The impact of these factors is playing out before our eyes. We’re seeing more and more potentially promising companies who have spent much of their seed rounds to generate solid early traction, but not the kind of traction that sets them up well for a Series A financing these days given the higher bar. These companies face a brutal situation. They are running low on money. Prospective new investors want more proof, particularly given the higher seed valuations. And many of the existing investors, particularly on the angel side, become “tapped out” or “want to stay diversified” when approached for bridge financing. These companies’ futures are rapidly called into question. It’s been very painful to watch.
So here are a few suggestions for entrepreneurs who are trying to start consumer-oriented Internet businesses:
You should consider suffering a bit more dilution early on…
Raise more money in the seed round to give yourself runway to make the progress you’ll need for a Series A, along with some contingency if things don’t go perfectly along the way. The size of seed rounds has increased substantially in our firm’s short history, from under $1 million a few years back to almost $2 million this year.
But I’d argue that even these larger new rounds are often too small given the rising Series A bar. Increasingly, a $1 million to $2 million raise requires absolute perfection on the part of the entrepreneur. You should consider suffering a bit more dilution early on to secure the resources to deliver the metrics that will attract the more demanding Series A investors: things like up-and-to-the-right user and revenue results, deep engagement, compelling cohort economics, and a proven ability to acquire users with a positive ROI on their marketing spend.
Structure your round differently. I’d suggest getting more institutional participation in your seed round, as institutions are more likely to support a high potential but not-yet-ready-for-Series-A company in the event it encounters the crunch. That in no way suggests that follow-on financing from institutions is a certainty or even more likely than not, but my observations suggest the odds are higher. Similarly, consider structuring your seed deal in a way that doesn’t scare off potential new investors in the event that you’re facing a potential crunch. Obviously these recommendations can be interpreted as self-serving given my role as an institutional investor, but my motivation for writing this is in the hopes of helping even one entrepreneur avoid the pain and suffering I’ve been witnessing by those who have been caught in the crunch.
Raise from multiple institutional investors. This can help accomplish a few things. First, it brings more deep pockets to the table that can fund a Series A or a bridge if needed. Second, it can fire up the competitive juices of the participating VCs who don’t want to risk losing out to a rival on the A round at a hot seed company in which they’re both invested. Lastly, having multiple VCs can diminish any potential negative signaling issues down the road if an institutional investor in your seed round does not do the A.
Cultivate these institutional investors as you launch the company, updating them periodically on your progress and learning. Some entrepreneurs do this extremely well, managing to stay top-of-mind with investors and building a relationship, a track record and credibility. These can come in very handy with investors if you find yourself potentially entering crunch territory.
Resist the temptation to raise too early. We often encounter companies that come to us saying that they had inbound interest from another/other firm(s) and elected to use this as a signal to start broader fundraising conversations. But there’s interest and then there’s interest. One of the jobs of a VC is to network broadly with potentially interesting companies, and their “interest” more often than not does not result in funding. And if you swing and miss at an early round, it can be much harder to create positive momentum behind an A round once you go out again. You need to be disciplined. Wait until you have multiple months of metrics moving in the right direction before you start fundraising. Resist the temptation to talk to every prospective investor who calls when you’re not fundraising. Ironically, nothing piques the interest of an investor more than an entrepreneur who remains relatively inaccessible.
There are signs that the startup ecosystem is already correcting to mitigate the crunch going forward. The number of new seed financings is down meaningfully so far in 2013, which would help to correct the supply-demand imbalance. And capital is starting to be attracted to the gap between seed and traditional A rounds, which some term “mango seeds.” But higher investor expectations earlier in a startup’s life are here to stay, and the smart entrepreneur will take steps to mitigate follow-on financing risk. On each and every financing, they should ask themselves one key question: What do I need to prove in this round to get the next round?
I’d like to thank my partner Chaz Flexman for his many insights on this post!
- Jun 18, 13
Android home gaming consoles are nearly arriving for the consumer market, but one at least needs a little more time in the oven to bake. It’s the GameStick, the super portable USB-stick style device that plugs into an open HDMI port on your TV to turn it into an Android-powered gaming machine, and its release schedule is being pushed back another month until August, with a retail launch to follow after that, because of a need to gather more feedback related to the GameStick UI so that it can be refined prior to wide release.
GameStick wanted to nail the user experience strikes me as a familiar refrain; another company, Leap Motion, which also achieved lots of support from the community for a novel idea, said something very similar when it delayed its own product recently. In both cases, the apprehension about getting things right the first time around is understandable, since these are products that have few if any antecedents with demonstrated success in the wider consumer market.
The GameStick delay, though another one on top of its first ship date slip, isn’t yet one that should really raise any eyebrows – projects typically underestimate how long it will take to go to market on Kickstarter. The Ouya was also delayed from its original planned launch by three weeks, owing to “demand” on the retail side. BlueStacks’ GamePop hasn’t been delayed as of yet, but it’s targeting a more open-ended end of year launch, and that gives it some flexibility to make sure the experience is just right before putting too fine a point on things.
All of these companies are venturing into relatively uncharted territory, so delays are fine; you can’t hold them to the same standards as an Apple or a Samsung, and even those giants sometimes encounter problems shipping exactly on time. One, two, or even three small delays isn’t surprising; but once the months start to fall away and you don’t hear much, that’s when it’s time to worry.
- Jun 18, 13
Tired of your friends texting on their phones while they should be getting schnockered? This clever hack is called the Offline Glass and it’s designed to ensure that you and your friends don’t sit at the bar checking Wikipedia for who starred in The Greatest American Hero and whether Tabitha will totally come out tonight oh my god she won’t she and Christian just broke up oh god she’s with Raul and Paula and maybe she’ll come in an hour! In fact, you can’t hold your phone because of the unique shape of the glass’ bottom.
The glass has a notch cut out of it so it will only stand if it’s situated on top of a phone (an iPhone works best) and you can only use your phone if you’re also holding your beer. Knowing the average drunk person I suspect a) this will destroy hundreds of iPhones a night and b) this will result in lots of spilled beer, but by gosh if it isn’t a clever idea.
The glass is being used in the Salve Jorge Bar in Sao Paolo and was created by the Fischer & Friends ad agency in Brazil. You can’t buy one but, with the right tools, you could probably make a few. I’d like to see someone 3D print a few of these for house parties.
Whenever I go out with the TC team I make everyone play the phone game which consists of piling up all the phones in one place so no one can reach them. It helps encourage conversation and, unless they’re wearing Google Glass, the pained expression after the first few minutes of the game is mesmerizing. Here’s to anything that helps recreate that experience.
The Offline Glass from Mauricio Perussi on Vimeo.
- Jun 18, 13
Adobe just reported earnings for its second financial quarter of 2013. The company reported revenue of $1.011 billion and non-GAAP operating income of $247.3 for an earnings per share of $0.36 (though diluted GAAP earnings were only $0.15). That’s a little bit better than most analysts expected, especially with respect to the company’s earnings per share.
The Wall Street consensus was that Adobe would report revenue of about $1.01 billion and earnings per share of $0.34. These numbers, it’s worth noting, are very much in line with Adobe’s last quarter, when the company announced revenue of $1.01 billion and earnings per share of $0.35. In the year-ago quarter, however, Adobe still reported revenue of $1.12 billion.
“Our Q2 results reflect our leadership position in Digital Media and Digital Marketing,” said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s president and chief executive officer a canned statement today. “Creative Cloud is revolutionizing the creative process, and Adobe Marketing Cloud is quickly becoming the platform of choice for the world’s leading brands, advertising agencies and media companies.”
Adobe is clearly betting the company on its Creative Cloud subscription service, which is set to almost completely replace the company’s offering of shrink-wrapped software. Just yesterday, Adobe launched its latest offering of all of its major Creative Cloud apps, and today, the company announced that Creative Cloud now has over 700,000 subscribers. That’s up from 479,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2013. The vast majority (92 percent) of its subscribers, Adobe says, are on its annual plan (vs. paying a slightly higher fee for a month-to-month subscription).
Adobe itself expects to hit over 1.25 million Creative Cloud subscribers by the end of the year and a number of analysts believe this is actually a very conservative number.
Besides Creative Cloud, Adobe’s second main group of services is its Marketing Cloud, which includes services for social marketing, media optimization, analytics, testing and targeting. Last quarter, Marketing Cloud achieved quarterly revenue of $215.4 million, a 20 percent year-over-year increase. This time around, Adobe reported Marketing Cloud revenue of $229.9 million.
- Jun 18, 13
It’s that time of the year again for us nerds to infiltrate Sand Hill Road, let loose, and enjoy some good food and libations. We’ve been hosting the TechCrunch summer party with VC firm August Capital since 2006. This year, as in years past, we’ll be partying on August Capital’s beautiful, sunny Sand Hill balcony on Friday, July 26. The party starts at 5:30 p.m. and goes til 9:00 p.m.
Tickets, which you can buy here, are $80 each and include drinks and food. We also have a number of sponsorship opportunities available and inquiries can be sent to sponsors@techcrunch.com.
TechCrunch parties have a history of being the place you want to meet your future investor, acquirer or co-founder. Case in point, back when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington used to hold these ragers in his Atherton back yard; Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith met one of their first investors, DFJ. In 2010, we spotted 500 Startups’ Dave McClure writing a check to then stealthy startup Tello (which was recently bought by Urban Airship in December) at the August Capital party.
Hope to see you all there this year!!
About the 8th Annual Summer Party at August Capital
- July 26, 5:30 – 9:00 pm
- 2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park CA 94025
- Get Tickets here, $80 based on availability. Tickets will be released in batches. Stay tuned to TechCrunch for releases as they sell out quickly.
- Jun 18, 13
Hardware is so hot right now. So hot, in fact, that another European hardware startup is formulating an attack on the smartphone hardware space — joining the likes of Finland’s Jolla and Spain’s Geeksphone to have a go at handset making. The newest comer stepping in with a plan to shake up the “status quo” is called Kazam: a startup co-founded by a pair of former U.K. HTC execs, Michael Coombes and James Atkins.
Coombes, who spent just over a year and a half as a U.K. head of sales for HTC, according to his LinkedIn, is Kazam’s CEO. Prior to HTC he apparently worked for mobile and telecoms companies including Nokia and Vodafone. While Atkins, Kazam’s CMO, spent just over a year as HTC’s head of marketing for U.K./Ireland, and has previously worked in U.K. marketing roles for freesat, LG and Panasonic. The pair’s professional network is clearly tied tightly to the local market, hence, presumably, Kazam’s focus on Europe first.
“Kazam will focus on Europe at the outset,” Atkins tells TechCrunch via email, adding with some typical marketingspeak embellishment: “We are currently establishing a network of regional sales and marketing offices to ensure we deliver outstanding products and customer service.” The startup has a U.K. base in Mayfair, London.
Details of how exactly Kazam plans to assault the Samsung and Apple smartphone duopoly were not forthcoming when I asked. Atkins declined to answer the bulk of my questions — including such specifics as whether Kazam’s planned smartphones will run Android and be skinned with a custom UI or keep the experience familiarly stock. Instead, he trotted out a repeated PR mantra: “Today we are just announcing that the Kazam brand is here, for the rest you will have to wait and see.”
It’s notable that this startup has already engaged a PR company (Noire) — and talks about creating a mobile brand — even before having a great deal to talk about. Which does serve to underline how smartphones have become a game of who can shout the loudest. A game of brash tones (as I have previously described it).
What did Atkins say? Not a whole lot. He declined to reveal how much funding Kazam is backed by at this point, or whether it is currently looking to raise a round. He did at least confirm it has backers, and that those backers have links into Asian mobile manufacturing companies — which suggests it’s following Jolla’s manufacturing playbook.
“Kazam Mobile has been set up by a group of private equity investors, who have previously launched and operated successful mobile telecommunications companies and technology businesses. Some of their current investments include NF Technology Limited, an R&D company specialising in developing and customising mobile phone devices and tablets and Nichefinder (S’pore) PTE Limited, a proven technology procurement and supply company,” he told TechCrunch.
He also confirmed Kazam’s plan is to launch “a range of smartphones at different prices point/specs” later this year. Asked whether it will look at other types of mobile devices, such as tablets, he said only that its initial focus is on smartphones. He added that he and Coombes left their roles at HTC earlier this year “with the desire to build a new brand that really stands out in the mobile space”.
He also declined to be drawn on the differentiation question but in Kazam’s inaugural press release today Coombes said: “We believe your smartphone is a digital reflection of who you are, and since we are all different, it’s important that we don’t adopt a one size fits all approach. Kazam’s dynamic structure and focus on local markets means we can react quickly to the ever evolving and diverging needs of today’s consumer. We aim to provide quality smartphones that are accessible to everyone.”
The release also includes a statement from Atkins hinting that aftersales service might be how Kazam attempts to stand out in a crowded market: “There is a real opportunity for a new mobile brand to disrupt the status quo. We are passionate about delivering a truly positive mobile experience that doesn’t just stop once you’ve bought the phone. Kazam is about stunning design, robust hardware and intuitive technology, underpinned by outstanding customer service.”
Further details about exactly what kind of customer service opportunity Kazam reckons it has identified were not forthcoming.
The size of Kazam’s team at this point is just Atkins and Coombes — a few more if you count the hired help from their external PR company. But Atkins also said the startup has already “established an R&D centre”. Hopefully with some staff in it, but presumably no permanent headcount yet.
Should Kazam get off the ground with its grand status quo shaking plan it will need to significantly boost its body count — if only to staff the network of regional sales and marketing offices it is currently establishing. It will also need to make decent smartphone hardware — hardware that’s worth shouting about. Whether it will be able to deliver that is clearly something to file under “wait and see”.
Asked how a startup with inevitably bounded resources can succeed in such a fiercely competitive space — when veteran players such as HTC are having such a tough time standing out despite making cracking handsets like the HTC One — Atkins’ said only: “The mobile market whilst competitive, seems to have stagnated.”
Stagnation is one word for it. Saturation is another. Smartphone hardware and software has achieved a very high quality bar, with Android OEMs like Samsung pushing high-end features lower and lower down the price-point range to pull up the capabilities of mid- and even budget handsets. This has resulted in a surfeit of great phones, across a very broad spectrum of price-points. Which means precious little room for anyone new to elbow in. Or stand out.
So there are huge question marks over any startup entering such a fiercely competitive space, especially with so many better resourced former mobile giants continuing to struggle. Disruption often starts small but in a market so beholden to carriers, where the bulk of phones sales occur, it’s especially hard for an upstart to get traction. Carriers tend to be risk averse and have established distribution partnerships and (incentivised) relationships with the smartphone giants so have disincentives to push anything too new. Going it alone with online retail distribution is the alternative, but that route requires a sizeable marketing budget to even get noticed.
Creating handsets for an underserved niche may be one way to carve out a business, as Geeksphone has been. Securing carrier distribution agreements to carry your hardware is another strategy, as Jolla has with Finland’s DNA. For now, it’s unclear whether Kazam has any similar moves up its sleeve, but it will certainly be hoping it has enough local telco connections — and financial backing — to give it a regional chance of inching in. To say it has its work cut out to make any kind of impact is an understatement.
- Jun 18, 13
Waze’s big exit to Google proved one thing: if companies can harness the power of the crowd to deliver real-time, granular data, big tech corporations will be watching them closely as potential acquisition targets. There’s another category ripe for the picking, even if the problem being solved isn’t as apparent or immediately useful as traffic and navigation data: weather. A few apps are trying to harness the crowd to provide accurate, ground-level forecasts and conditions, and they’re catching on with consumers, too.
Montreal-based startup SkyMotion is one such firm, and it recently launched its 4.0 update, which not only harnesses crowdsourced weather reports, but also allows other businesses to plug into that data using a public API, to integrate real-time reporting data from SkyMotion’s users into their own products. That provides an up-to-the-minute forecast, one that probably won’t show you weather conditions completely dissimilar from the ones you’re actually feeling outside at any given moment, as can still be the case with apps that pull weather data only from specific weather monitoring stations.
SkyMotion has had considerable success harnessing the crowd to populate its real-time forecasts, with over 200,000 people currently submitting observations according to the company. Over 50 percent of those who download the app actually keep it and use it, and 65 percent of all users are active between 15 and 200 times per month. The company is now close to reaching 500,000 total downloads, and anticipates being well over 1 million by the end of the year should the pace remain near its current rate.
SkyMotion isn’t alone in crowdsourcing weather data. There’s also Weddar, the “people-powered” weather service and mobile app that encourages location-based reporting with a very human element, since it asks people how conditions generally feel on the ground, instead of seeking out specifics. The Weddar team, which is based in Portugal, launched its app back in April 2011, and where once you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone using it outside of its home market, now you’ll probably see results just about anywhere you open it up.
Crowsourced weather data could appeal to big tech companies for the same reason that crowdsourced data does; it greatly improves the quality of consumer-facing products. But it also offers a lot more besides, by providing services that can be combined with other local data including maps and traffic, as well as shopping and advertising information, to give a much more accurate, much more complete snapshot of any given location at any given time. Weather affects everything from the average user’s day planning, to marketing, to budgeting, and companies that are improving the quality of that data will no doubt be on the radar of anyone who makes those things its concern.
- Jun 18, 13
At the end of last year, Google introduced a new design for some local search results on tablets that put a carousel with the top results at the top of the page. Today, it’s bringing this design to the desktop, too. This new feature can be triggered by searches for restaurants, bars and other local places, Google says, and it’s currently rolling out in English in the U.S. and should roll out for other languages in the future.
A typical search to see this feature would be something like “Mexican restaurants in nyc.” Google will then put the carousel at the top of the page, including a photo, the standard Zagat ratings, price class and cuisine. A click on these places will bring up their Google+ Local sites with more information.
Users can click on an arrow in the right to see more places and they can use the map in the sidebar to zoom in and the carousel will automatically restrict your searches to this specific area.
Google, of course, also uses a similar design for some of its Knowledge Graph results. As a number of bloggers noticed recently, these Knowledge Graph carousel results seem to be popping up more frequently now than ever before. Given today’s addition of the local search carousel, chances are that Google’s stats show that this is a very effective way of presenting search results. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company continued to expand its use of this design element for other kinds of queries in the near future.
- Jun 18, 13
Stealing a page right out of a startup called Aggregift’s playbook, Amazon today launched a new feature called “Amazon Birthday Gift,” which allows a group of Facebook friends to go in on an Amazon.com Gift Card together. That gift isn’t posted to the recipients’ Facebook Timeline until their big day arrives.
To get started with the service, a user buys an Amazon.com gift card, then invites other mutual friends to donate using the Birthday Gift website here. When the birthday arrives, the recipient is tagged in a Facebook Timeline wall post, receiving the digital card and everyone’s birthday greetings.
The new addition is a further expansion of Amazon’s deepening integration with Facebook, as the company last December launched a “Friends and Family Gifting” feature just ahead of the holidays to generate Facebook-enabled gift suggestions, send out reminders, and enable gift list sharing via both email and social networks. Online competitor Walmart, too, had previously launched a similar Facebook-based gift recommendation service in 2011, which was added to the Walmart.com site ahead of the 2012 holiday season.
Social gifting is still very much in the experimental phase, despite the support from e-commerce giants like Walmart, Amazon and others. For instance, Facebook has also dabbled in this area with the fall 2012 debut of Facebook Gifts (built on top of former social gifting startup Karma). The service is meant to tie into one of Facebook’s most regular draws — its birthday reminders. The idea is that users could visit the site, and in addition to wishing their friend “happy birthday,” they could also add a gift to accompany that message. The social network offers gifts like iTunes digital Gift Cards and physical goods, and it even launched its own self-branded “Facebook Card” earlier this year.
However, even with Facebook’s broad reach, its Gifts service has been struggling to generate serious revenue, and certainly falling short of earlier projections and estimations regarding its potential. Meanwhile, some startups like Sincerely (with Sesame) and recently funded Wrapp, carry on in this space, while others head off in new directions. Giftly, for instance, exited to GiftCards.com this March, while Boomerang has turned its focus to the B2B market instead in recent months.
That being said, Amazon still has a shot at winning the social gifting space with its new Amazon Birthday Gift feature, since it can be argued that users don’t associate Facebook’s brand with spending or shopping the way they do with Amazon. (See also: various f-commerce struggles). Plus, Amazon’s cards are the go-to for the “generic” gift option, which people buy when they don’t know what to get, or when they need something last minute.
However, the new service is still limited today to smaller gift amounts ($1, $5, $10 and $25), which can be a challenge for those attempting to raise funds for a larger present like an electronics purchase. Plus, being tied only to birthdays eliminates the big holiday, graduation or wedding presents users may want to go in on together. Often these larger presents are led by a close family member or friend who puts in a big chunk of change, to which others pile on. Not supporting these other types of gifting narrows the already potentially narrow market for digital, social gifting even further.
Amazon Birthday Gift is live now here for interested users.
- Jun 18, 13
The world of alternative browsers is littered with also-rans like Rockmelt, but there are also companies that have managed to make a name for themselves in the shadow of Microsoft, Mozilla and Google. One example of this is Maxthon, but another browser that’s quietly gaining a following is Torch, which the company tells us just passed 10 million monthly active users on Mac and Windows after about year on the market.
Torch just launched the latest version of its Chromium-based browser, which now includes a download accelerator and a large update to the Torch Music service, which uses YouTube and Vevo as the basis of its music catalog. Torch Music now offers customized recommendations based on your listening history, location and your Facebook friends’ tastes. Currently, the service has about 5 million songs in its database.
While Torch previously included a version of this service, it has now integrated this service deeper into its user interface with the help of a widget that allows you to search, pause and skip songs.
Torch now also features a built-in download accelerator. While download accelerators were very popular in the early days of (slow) broadband, today’s fast and stable connections have mostly pushed them aside, and the vast majority of Internet users probably doesn’t even remember them. There are some advantages to using a download accelerator, however, especially if you are on a slow or unreliable connection.
The browser also features a built-in BitTorrent client and a media grabber for downloading embedded video files. It also features a smart drag-and-drop-activated search and sharing tool that pops up large boxes for sharing links to services like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest and for initiating searches on Google Search, Wikipedia and other services.
Torch Browser only launched on the Mac about a month ago, so most of its users are currently on Windows, the company tells us. If you’re currently a Chrome user and interested in the browser’s features, switching is about as easy as it gets, as Torch just imports all your bookmarks. As it’s based on Chromium, all of the usual Chrome extensions and apps should also work, though Torch seems to be about a generation behind Google’s own release cycle.
- Jun 18, 13
Rounds, the video chat app and Israeli startup backed by $5.5 million in funding from Verizon Investments, Rhodium and DFJ’s Tim Draper among others, has been slowly expanding across platforms. Originally built as a Facebook-centric experience, Rounds expanded to the desktop last summer, launched Mac and Windows apps to allow its users to send and receive video calls without using their browser or signing into Facebook. A few months later, Rounds went mobile, officially debuting its first native apps for iOS and Android.
For those unfamiliar, the app essentially gives users the ability to not only participate in realtime video chat with their friends — from any media — but do so while watching YouTube videos together or simultaneously play interactive games, doodle on whiteboards, browse the Web together or send virtual gifts to each other and more.
However, up until now, most of those features have existed solely for Rounds users on Facebook, desktop and the Web, but an update to its iOS and Android apps today now allows friends to surf the Web together during live video calls. Rounds claims it’s the first hangout network to enable mobile co-browsing during video conversation.
A product of a partnership with Dutch startup Channel.me, the startup’s new co-browsing functionality synchronizes your mobile device’s touch screen with that of your video chat partner, allowing both parties to surf the web and navigate the same webpage at the same time.
Both users can click on links and type in new URLs, the company says, while each person sees the other’s live video stream in thumbnail form. This allows them to see each other’s reactions FaceTime-style, while giving you illusion that you’re actually there, together, and not staying at a Motel 8 on a business trip.
While users aren’t subject to any limitations when they co-browse during live video calls, and users can type in any URL, it would be impossible for Rounds to beta test every site on the Web. Instead, at launch, the startup is offering a handful of sites that it “stands behind technically” and fully support its synchronized experience, including Google, Wikipedia, Preen.Me, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Amazon, eBay, ESPN, The Huffington Post, wanelo, Imgur and TheFancy. Going forward, Rounds will continue to add support for the most-requested sites, based on user feedback.
The company also tells us that, in terms of security, the co-browsing experience displays usernames and email addresses but not passwords, and users must share a pre-existing Facebook friendship before they can participate in video chats together. Once they do, they can chat, browse, play games and watch videos together and add filters and doodles on top of their videos.
While some of these features may sounds particularly appealing to older readers, since the beginning, Rounds’ target audience has primarily been teens, who eat these kind of features up. As mobile devices proliferate, retailers and eCommerce players have been looking for more ways to capitalize on the fact that our mobile devices are always with us. Not only that, but considering the offline shopping experience is inherently social, they want to emulate that social experience on the Web and on mobile.
Rounds’co-browsing and synchronized navigation inherently offer a more social experience when visiting sites like eBay or Amazon, allowing young users to video chat while surfing, browsing for new clothes, gadgets or products — or even while doing their homework. Don’t be surprised if Rounds’ new functionality catches the attention of the big retail players or if social platforms like G+ (and Hangouts) expand to include more of these co-browsing and synchronous user experiences.
Today, Rounds has over eight million registered users, 500K of which are on mobile, with a fairly even breakdown between male and female users (52 percent female, 48 percent male) and teens representing the largest demographic. The company also says that 43 percent of its video calls are “meaningful,” meaning that they’re longer than the industry standard, and, on mobile, users are currently making 13-minute calls on average, for example.
Since its inception, Rounds has seen over 100 million hangout sessions across its networks, which include its destination site, (formerly) Wave, Chrome, Facebook and now mobile).
For more, find Rounds at home here.
- Jun 18, 13
As startups compete for the best talent, Homejoy is announcing a way for companies to offer employees an additional perk — a clean home.
Home cleanings may not be a standard perk yet, but they’re not an entirely new idea, either. Last fall, The New York Times wrote that in Silicon Valley, “the employee perk is moving from the office to the home,” with both Evernote and the Stanford School of Medicine experimenting with offering housecleaning to their employees. That can be especially appealing when startups ask teams to work long hours, so they don’t have time to clean their homes themselves.
There are, of course, other cleaning services, but Growth Manager Jeffrey Pang said that as with the company’s consumer product, the goal of Homejoy’s perks program is to make the process as convenient as possible. The company works directly with office administrators to set up Homejoy accounts for employees. Then, when an employee logs in, they should see a credit for their monthly cleaning, and they schedule a cleaning just like any other user. They can also see user ratings for their cleaners and offer their own feedback, and all of that data is also fed into Homejoy’s analytics system.
Homejoy charges the same as it does in the consumer version, $20 an hour — that’s significantly cheaper than most other cleaning services.
Pang said he’s already been testing the program out with some tech companies, such as Heyzap, and he anticipated that it will be startups that are most willing to adopt the program. At the same time, he said larger companies that don’t want to offer this to all employees (at least not initially) could also use it on a more limited basis, for example as a perk for the employee of the month or for expectant mothers.
“I think other industries have been slower to adopt something like this, but I could see it becoming more and more popular outside of tech,” Pang said.
Homejoy is now available in 19 cities, including he San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C. and Seattle. The perks program is available in all of those cities, and interested companies can sign up here.
The company is also promoting the program with a “dirtiest desk” contest, where people can submit a photo of, yes, their dirty desks. The winner will get a month of free home cleanings for their entire company — they’ll be selected via random drawing, but apparently getting people to like and tweet about your photo improves your chances.
Since I had Pang and Homejoy CEO and co-founder Adora Cheung on the phone, I also asked about something I’d been noticing as a Homejoy customer — so the wait times for a cleaning seem to be getting longer. (Maybe I was really just being a grumpy customer complaining about having to schedule cleanings several weeks in advance, but in my head, at least, it was a more substantive question about balancing supply and demand.)
“We want to bring on high-quality cleaners as fast as possible but not so fast that bad cleaners who don’t clean well come through our system,” Cheung said. “We’ve gotten better in recent weeks. We’re trying to balance supply and demand as much as possible.”
Pang added that the Bay Area is the only region where Homejoy has experienced “wait time issues.”
Also, in case it wasn’t clear, Homejoy is a startup itself, having been incubated at Y Combinator and raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others.
- Jun 18, 13
The mobile wave has been cresting for several years now, so when a decade-old web company is only now debuting its first ever native mobile app, it’s a little late to the game. The folks at TheLadders, which is launching its first iOS app this morning, understand that — but they are angling to make their “mobile last” strategy work in their favor in the long run.It is indeed a beautiful app, and you can see it demonstrated by TheLadders’ co-founder and CEO Alex Douzet in the video embedded above.
First, though, a little bit of a background on TheLadders. The company was founded in New York City ten years ago in the summer of 2003 with the initial aim of being a job search site for professionals earning $100,000 and above. The company enjoyed solid growth in those early years, at one time having more than 300 employees serving an international market.
But TheLadders hit a few stumbling blocks amid a more competitive job search landscape, and has since expanded its purview beyond the six-figure salary market while cutting staff and axing its international businesses. And in the past 18 months, TheLadders, which had thus far been focused completely on the traditional web, has decided to shift much of its energy into rebuilding itself as a force on mobile devices.
The journey of TheLadders has been a varied one, and if anything it’s a testament to the benefits of how keeping some power and autonomy as a business allows you to be more flexible to change course. TheLadders is currently profitable, and has taken on only one round of venture capital funding, a $7.25 million series A back in 2004. If the company had taken on more investors or not focused on profitability, things might have come to a different end by now — it’s refreshing in a way to see a company that’s taken some hits to be still standing independent and adapting to changes on its own terms.
That leads us to today. The new app really re-thinks the way that people search for jobs in several interesting ways: There is no option for entering text, for example, and the “scout” feature that allows you to see details about who else has applied for the same position really plays nicely on the smaller screen. Once again, you can see a full demo in the video embedded above, as well as in a video produced by the company here.
TheLadders is certainly late to the mobile game, but Douzet says that has allowed it to really observe the landscape and create an offering that’s truly different. That argument makes sense, once you see the app. There is something to be said for getting something right the first time, rather than coming out of the gate with a mobile app early and then making users wait through several initial iterations. It’ll be interesting to see how this strategy ultimately plays out, and what kind of traction TheLadders is able to pick up in the crowded mobile space.
- Jun 18, 13
Google just added a new service to Google Cloud Storage that will allow developers to send their hard drives to Google to import very large data sets that would otherwise be too expensive and time-consuming to import. For a flat fee of $80 per hard drive, Google will take the drive and upload the data into a Cloud Storage bucket. This, Google says, can be “faster or less expensive than transferring data over the Internet.” The service is now in limited preview for users with a U.S.-based return address.
Platforms like AWS and Google’s Cloud Platform are obviously great for analyzing large data sets. As Google software engineer Lamia Youseff notes in today’s announcement, however, “transferring large data sets (in the hundreds of terabytes and beyond) can be expensive and time-consuming over the public network.” Uploading 5 terabytes of data over a 100Mbps line could easily take a day or two and most developers may not even have these kinds of connections.
Amazon, it’s worth noting, already offers a very similar service. It, too, charges $80 per hard drive, but in typical Amazon fashion, the company also charges a per-hour fee for importing the data. Importing a 5 terabyte hard drive to S3, Amazon calculates, will cost an additional $45 for an eSATA drive, which makes Google’s flat-fee service significantly cheaper. While Amazon also allows you to export your data using a hard disk, though, Google doesn’t currently offer this service.
- Jun 18, 13
Second-screen TV app startup GetGlue just keeps on trucking. Originally launched as an app for checking in to your favorite TV shows and collecting stickers, the company has been steadily expanding its business to include content discovery for shows on the iPad or on your TV. Now it’s hoping to better monetize its mobile and tablet apps, and has hired long-time digital media exec Evan Krauss as president to help with that.
Krauss has spent the last 18 years at a variety of entertainment companies, including Yahoo!, AOL, Excite, JumpTap, Looksmart, and Agency.com. His last big position was as EVP of ad sales for Shazam where he helped build out that company’s second screen ad business.
In addition to Krauss, GetGlue also recently hired Shelby Houston Haro as its EVP of sales, coming from Fandango and Flixster. In an email, GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold wrote, “Evan is joining us a President to lead all the aspects of the business, particularly focusing on revenue… With these two hires, we are now serious about building out and scaling our business.”
The hiring of its new sales leaders follows an attempted — and failed — merger between GetGlue and rewards-based TV companion app Viggle. The deal was first announced last November but called off earlier this spring.
Since then, GetGlue has continued to operate independently, trying to boost monetization along the way. No doubt the startup hopes that its new president Krauss will be able to expand its own business with advertisers. The company has been making a bigger push on that front with recent updates to its mobile apps.
That includes the introduction of a new advertising product for brands, networks, and studios called Promoted Entries. That enables networks and advertisers to highlight their products and shows in users’ Guides. Launched with Pepsi during the Super Bowl, the Promoted Entries offering is designed to boost engagement with viewers who are using the app while watching TV. It allows users to share promoted products with friends who also use the app, as well as on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
GetGlue now says it has 4 million registered users, and has accrued more than 800 million data points about what they’re tuning into. The company has worked with more than 75 TV networks and 10 movie studios to promote their content. It’s raised about $24 million since being founded in 2007, with investors including Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures, Time Warner Investments, and Rho Ventures, among others.
- Jun 18, 13
Filepicker.io, the Y Combinator-backed “filesystem as a service,” is today rebranding itself as “Ink File Picker,” a name that, CEO Brett van Zuiden explains, stands for something much larger than the former, more product-focused title. In addition, the company is announcing a $1.8 million seed round of funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Highland Capital Partners.
Others in the round included SV Angel, Google board member Ram Shriram, Geoff Ralston (La La Media), Aaron Iba (Y Combinator), Pejman Nozad (Amidzad), Facebook VP of Business Development and Monetization Dan Rose, Ullas Naik (Streamlined Ventures), Hamid Barkhordar, Bobby Yazdani (Saba Software), Niall Browne (Workday), and Data Collective.
Founded just last year, Ink File Picker was created by four MIT grads, Anand Dass, Brett Van Zuiden, Liyan David Chang, and Thomas Georgiou, as a way to make cloud services interoperable. With tools for both web and, as of last summer, mobile developers, the company enables applications to connect to over a dozen of the most popular online services, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Box, GitHub, SkyDrive, Gmail, Instagram and more, as well as to the end user’s computer or device, and elsewhere.
Over the past year, Ink has seen increasing demand for its service, having hit 1 million files in November. Today, it sees just under 400 million files per month (over 10 million files per day). There are also 20,000 applications using the service from around 17,000 developers, including many well-known names like SurveyMonkey, Scribd, Livefyre, Fitocracy, Udacity, Haiku Deck, Crowdtilt, Urbanspoon, PlanGrid, RapGenius, Vidcaster, WeVideo, Funny or Die, TED, and others.
Van Zuiden says that the move to rebrand as “Ink” has to do with the company’s now larger vision, which is no longer just about a product that allows for uploading of files, but is instead more of a file management platform for developers. ”It does everything from connecting to all the 19 sources we work with, doing the image processing, and the further operations people want to do on this content, storing this content, and serving as this whole layer that deals with all the different types of content work that you want to do,” he says.
For example, in the new cloud-based word processor called Draft, Ink lets the app’s users import their files from elsewhere on the web (like Dropbox), then as they’re writing and editing those files, the updated versions are saved back to the service where those files originated.
“It’s sort of this notion of ‘what does a file system for the web look like?,” explains van Zuiden. “What are those APIs, what is that capability?” Originally, the answer to that was a file picker toolset (as the earlier name implied). Today, it’s about “helping applications and services work together,” he says.
With the seed investment, which actually closed back in September, the company has grown its team from four to eight and plans to reach 15 by next year. It will also continue its product development, with a specific focus on investing more resources on mobile, which has its own set of challenges.
On mobile, release cycles are different from the web, screen sizes are smaller impacting the user interface design, plus versioning is an important area to address. Longer-term, the startup plans to focus on the international market as well, in terms of not only localization, but also the services popular in other regions worldwide, as determined by customer demand.
Today, Ink File Picker offers a freemium platform where pricing is based on the number of files handled per month. Under 5,000 files is free, and a Pro plan for $99/month offers up to 50,000 files per month. Enterprise customers have custom pricing available. Around 5 to 10 percent of Ink’s customer base is on a paid plan, van Zuiden estimates.
The newly rebranded Ink website and Ink File Picker are now live for interested developers.
- Jun 18, 13
iZettle, the mobile payments company that has been described as a European version of Square, is today making a move that places it one national boundary away from the U.S. mobile payment company’s own backyard: iZettle is launching its iOS and Android service in Mexico. This is the Swedish company’s first move outside of Europe, and comes in the wake of a $6.6 million funding round from the Spanish financial services behemoth Banco Santander, announced just last week and made specifically to build out the solution into more markets globally.
Yes, the mobile payments market — like those chilies being sold by the small merchant pictured here, who probably only accepts cash payments today — is heating up.
To coincide with the launch, iZettle is also appointing a new MD for Mexico, Luis Arceo, who had been with Visa.
Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO of iZettle, tells me that of the many markets where Banco Santander is active — the bank has operations across Latin America, the U.S., Portugal, Germany and Poland, in addition to the UK and Spain, with $1.86 trillion in managed funds, 102 million customers and 14,392 branches — it chose Mexico first for three reasons.
For starters, he notes that nearly all (99.8%) of the businesses in Mexico are small and medium enterprises, iZettle’s target market because, compared to bigger chains, they may be more likely to lack enough turnover to justify the investment needed for more tradition card payment processing services.
Similar to Square’s dongle and those of Here and many other competitors, iZettle’s smartphone accessory lets merchants and other businesses process credit cards using an app on a smartphone or tablet. iZettle’s particular service works on iOS and Android devices, and the company today is launching a new device that is all-in-one for all platforms and payment methods, be they chip or mag stripe. Interestingly, though, it looks like iZettle will be hiking up fees in the country. In Europe, the company charges a flat 2.75% fee, while in Mexico the fee for chip-based transactions will be 3.75% and for mag-stripe 4.75%. On top of that, merchants need to pay $499 (MXN) — about 40 U.S. dollars — for the reader, but Banco Santander customers will get a discount.
De Geer notes that 95% of cards in Mexico are chip-based. That, in fact, may be one reason why Square, whose dongle reads the magnetic stripe for transactions, may have yet to make a move here. (It’s thought that this is one reason why it has yet to launch in Europe as well.)
There is also the Santander angle: the bank is the third largest in the country and “growing rapidly,” deGeer notes.
And the third is perhaps the most contentious of all from a competitive standpoint: “Mexico is an interesting bridgehead given its geographical location,” deGeer notes. “With our new Chip & Mag reader that we’re launching, we could theoretically continue expanding north or south with the current infrastructure.”
Them’s fightin’ words, I think. iZettle, prior to today’s news, had operations in the UK, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. More specifically, in the past, deGeer has made a point of saying that it would not be looking to tussle with Square in any of the markets where it currently operates, which include the U.S., Canada and most recently Japan.
When iZettle picked up $31.4 million in June 2012 (it’s now raised $66 million in total), the intention was to be the biggest player of its kind in Europe.
“Our priority is to get the UK fully launched, and then look at other major markets like Spain, Italy, France and Germany,” de Geer told TechCrunch at the time. “We’re not interested in the U.S. They’re doing really well with Square and others.”
That tune has changed quite a lot in the last year. Rather than ruling out the U.S., now deGeer says, “Time will tell” when and if that move gets made.
Given that iZettle already has services in Spanish because of its operations in Spain, this will make one of the challenges of entering a new market a little less complicated. The backing of Santander will also help with connecting with and marketing to local small businesses. “The biggest challenge for us in any market we want to enter is always to localize the service in terms of language, currency, sign up process as well as finding the right distribution channels,” de Geer notes. “We live in a globalized world but to be successful you still need to act local. For those reasons, we believe our strategic partnership with Santander will be very valuable.”
For Santander, it will be one more way of picking up and locking in customers at a time of disruption across the financial services industry, as behemoths like Visa find themselves disrupted by much smaller startups, with everything else in between. “This partnership extends our offering of payment methods available on Banco Santander’s platform globally, and strengthens our position as the leading bank for SMEs,” noted Jorge Alfaro Lara, deputy general director of payment systems at Banco Santander Mexico, in a statement. “We are pushing the boundaries of banking with relevant technological innovation that helps small and medium businesses.”
Image: Flickr
