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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 @JoshConstine: Google slowed by excessive traffic, haha. Our friend commandeered one of their buses to take us to her east bay Bday http…
- I'm at Starbucks (San Mateo, CA) http://t.co/1wdyByscFQ
- I'm at Antone's Cocktail Lounge (San Mateo, CA) http://t.co/FhwBCFigtk
- RT @Horse_ebooks: I enjoyed eatingMay 17, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- ,
- RT @big_ben_clock: BONG
- @mdjperez not me. Overheard is OH
- @garrytan you're on a roll, man. keep going! #grumpycat
- RT @ryanlawler: According to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, 82% of respondents said sponsored content is the absolute fucking best http:…May 17, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- OH "I hate the physical world"May 17, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @Horse_ebooks: him, but not nearly
- RT @TechCrunch: Look back on the top stories for this week by checking out our TC Weekly on Flipboard - http://t.co/Zpnhyza4IQ http://t.co/…May 17, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Apple Boots Bang With Friends From The App Store http://t.co/XOQWxUrI9K via @techcrunch
- @backlon <3
- I'm at AOL @TechCrunch HQ (San Francisco, CA) http://t.co/h0DDcZRBap
- Goodbi/o
- RT @TechCrunch: Facebook's Growth Since IPO In 12 Big Numbers http://t.co/8yPwh04Men by @joshconstine
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- how would you "fix" email?
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Posts
New Tumblr is nice on android.
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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- Sept 2012 - PresentCommunity Director / TechCrunch
- 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
- May 18, 13
Autodesk is doubling down on easy-to-use 3D design software after it announced the acquisition of Tinkercad for an undisclosed sum. The deal secures the long-term future of the Web-based 3D modeling tool less than one month after its founders announced plans to close it.
Tinkercad’s tag line is ‘mind to design in minutes’ and the browser-based 3D modeling removes technical barriers to allow anyone — designers and non-designers alike — to create prototype designs or professional-looking renders. The software takes a focus on helping to create ‘fun and meaningful’ things using 3D printers — which, of course, are a hotly talked about topic today.
Autodesk says it will add the service to its existing 123D family of apps and services which, like Tinkercad, are designed to remove hurdles that put non-techies off of using CAD software. It will also integrate elements of the Tinkercard technology across its 123D range, to help simply the services for users.
Last month, Tinkercad Founder and CEO Kai Backman revealed that the two-year-old service would close in a phased initiative culminating in a June 31 2013 switch off. The decision was made in order to focus engineering resources on Airstone, the company’s new interactive simulation product.
Now, the Autodesk deal, which is expected to close in 30 days, will keep the service open to its many users — which include corporates, academic — and end the freeze on the creation of new accounts. That’s an outcome that delights Backman:
We are excited to have reached an agreement with Autodesk that will provide a solid home and bright future for Tinkercad. We found in Autodesk a shared vision for empowering students, makers and designers with accessible and easy to use software, and with their global reach and expertise in democratizing design, we’re confident in their ability to introduce Tinkercad to new audiences around the world.
Autodesk VP of consumer products Samir Hanna also emphasized the synergy between the company and its incoming acquisition:
Tinkercad is a natural extension of the Autodesk 123D family as well as our other apps and services for consumers, as it is already used alongside Autodesk products. We look forward to welcoming the Tinkercad community to Autodesk and to continuing their mission of accessible 3D design for all.
Tinkercad raised $1 million in seed funding in November 2011.
Headline image via Thinkstock
- May 18, 13
Google has started to ramp up the selection of apps available for Google Glass after official apps for Facebook, Twitter, CNN, Elle, Evernote and Tumblr were released at Google I/O on Friday, but now there’s an easy way for almost anyone to create a dedicated Glass app.
New York-based developer Chris Maddern, who runs Applaunch and works for video startup Animoto, has released an open-source code that is effectively a template to create basic apps for any Web-based service, and with minimal fuss. In fact, Maddern says 15 minutes is all that it takes.
The code uses the Mirror API and is available from GitHub (here). It requires merely a few database tweaks — each of which Maddern spells out in the description — before an app that connects a Web service and Glass is born. From there, those with a spirit for adventure (and coding experience, of course) can add new features and advance the app as they see fit.
Importantly, all apps created will run Google’s Glassware system. That gives them full access to and interaction with Glass, unlike some other hacker creations, such as this cool app which takes photos using winks, which can only be deployed as APKs.
There will be more and Maddern tells TNW that, with version 1.0 now out, he is working on adding “more complex features”, which will include replying to and updating items, as well as including timelines.
Beyond that, he is aiming to make things even easier for code-averse folk. He has plans for a Web app that lets users create and edit Glass apps “without ever writing a line of code or seeing a Heroku terminal”.
The Glass development community is small (but dedicated) since just 2,000 devices have been sold at this pre-consumer launch point. Maddern is jumping in early, hoping that his efforts will allow people and companies to “kickstart” their focus on the spec-tacular new hardware from Google.
Google ran a number of ‘Glass Foundry’ developer events which have helped get a number of apps out into the world already, while others have sprouted from enthusiasts.
We may not all be in a position to be full-time Glassholes right now, but the barriers to creating apps are dropping to allow more people and businesses to bring content to the platform. Many will likely wait for Glass to go mainstream before devoting resources, but this code is an interesting and easy way to experiment early on.
The code is fresh out thus there are no apps built from it yet. But those seeking an example can check out this unofficial Facebook app that Maddern developed while working on the code last week.
➤ Google Glass Mirror Ruby Sinatra Scaffold on Github
Related: Google’s Glass fireside chat: Ugly prototypes, privacy and its potential to go mainstream
Headline image via Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
- May 18, 13
How much would you pay for lunch with Jack Dorsey, one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs in recent history? One anonymous person is forking out $31,600 for a date with the Twitter and Square founder, after scooping a charity auction. It ended on Friday after 24 bids. The money will go to benefit the BUILD organization, a group that helps foster education in the entrepreneur space for low-income students.
Ten days ago, BUILD began the auction with its culmination taking place prior to the group’s annual Gala in San Francisco. Dorsey has been a supporter of BUILD for the past several years, hosting mentoring sessions with students, auctioning off Square internships at its event, and helping to bring in $60,000 for the cause.
Dorsey says that “BUILD represents one of the best ways to tackle educational challenges — through entrepreneurship and pride in ownership. BUILD’s method gives kids the toolkits they need to build the futures they want — and it is inspiring to see what they create.”
The winning bidder is only identified by eBay as o**d, although looking at the individual’s bidding history, they placed five bids in the auction. According to a BUILD spokesperson, the bidder is a venture capitalist from Belgium, but not much else was revealed. They now have a unique opportunity for them and seven of their friends to have lunch with Dorsey.
Additionally, at the annual BUILD Gala on Friday night, another anonymous bidder placed a $40,000 bid to have lunch with Dorsey — in total, for two auctions, the serial entrepreneur has helped raise more than $70,000 for BUILD. That amount helped play a big part in the charity’s record $1.4 million that it brought in from that single event.
All proceeds of the auction are going to benefit those students who have a desire to become an entrepreneur, but need additional support. The group believes that student ideas in action will help drive students to success not only in school, but in their later years. It’s a four-year high school program helping students in four schools in the US: Redwood City and Oakland in California, Washington, DC, and Boston, Massachusetts.
The conclusion of Dorsey’s auction follows another high-profile charity one. Earlier this week, a winning bid of $610,000 was made to have coffee with Apple CEO Tim Cook. In this case, the money given will go towards funding the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights. There were 86 bids in that auction.
Photo credit: Brian Harkin/Getty Images
- May 18, 13
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on East-West Digital News, a leading English-language resource on Russian digital industries and related venture activity.
Russian iPhone users can now experiment with social banking – an entirely new concept in the country – thanks to an app launched last month by Instabank, a Moscow-based startup. The iPhone app allows clients to transfer money to Facebook friends who also use Instabank, get notifications of new account activity, and add geotags and photos to their transactions.
At present Instabank is limiting the number of new users through an invitation-based system. Yet the company has to date received far more invitation requests than expected, marketing and communications manager Yelisey Zakharov told East-West Digital News.
“We are already working on issuing bank cards for the first users and expanding the functionality,” he said.
There is still a long way to go on the Instabank roadmap. The list of features to implement includes virtual credit/debit cards, individual Instagram-based card design, a personal home banking system and more. Zakharov also emphasized that the still-to-be-introduced function of transferring money to Facebook friends who are not using Instabank is the startup’s know-how and a potential killer feature.
Mobile first
Before creating Instabank, the co-founders — Dmitry Feofanov, Roman Potemkin and Valentin Kravtsov — had been involved in mobile software development for several major banks, including Home Credit, Unicredit, and Tinkoff. The idea of creating Instabank came as a result of frustration with what they saw as the sluggishness of large financial organizations.
“At a certain point the founders realized that over the past few years the whole world had changed,” said Zakharov. “It became obvious to them that behind the nice mobile applications then in use there still stood huge, clumsy banks – a situation not in line with the current evolution of society.”
Zakharov reckons that a “bank in a mobile phone will revolutionize the banking sector the same as Instagram has revolutionized the photography world.”
Yet the team does not stray too far from conventional banking institutions. While Instabank offers users a slick mobile banking interface and customer support, the actual bank infrastructure is provided by a partner, Russian bank VPB. Another partner of Instabank is Masterbank, from whose ATMs the social banking service’s users can withdraw funds without charge.
In October 2012 Instabank received $4 million in funding from Life.SREDA. Established last year with an initial capital of $10 million, this venture fund is part of the Russian financial group Life, which comprises eight sizable Russian banks.
An untapped market
Even though several similar projects have been launched over the past few years, including Simple and GoBank in the US and Fidor Bank in Germany, mobile and social banking is new in Russia. Rocketbank, a Russian startup that intended to disrupt the banking field, was announced in June of last year but is still working on an invite-only basis.
Instabank presents its focus on mobile and social functions, relating in particular to Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare, as a distinct advantage in Russia’s social banking market – which, according to Zakharov, is “very ample and almost untapped.”
Another source agreed. “Nowadays smartphones are becoming one of the most important channels for financial services and the main interface for social networks. Sooner or later these two segments had to be combined, and it is very promising,” noted Viktor Dostov of the Russian Electronic Money Association in an exchange with EWDN. “On the other hand, customers tend to be very conservative when it comes to bank services; this is why such projects, in my opinion, should be considered marketing instruments rather than core bank services.”
Although Instabank’s Russian service is not fully launched yet, the startup already envisions expansion to the US.
Among other plans are apps for Android and Windows Phone, though focus will be kept on iOS in the short term, Zakharov said.
Image credit: Thinkstock
- May 18, 13
Is there too much hype around ‘big data’? Kenneth Cukier thinks so, and yet he remains passionate about what we can achieve with it.
Cukier is the Data Editor at The Economist and co-author of the book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. At The Next Web Conference Europe 2013, he gave a keynote talk detailing just how much impact ever-growing big data sets will have on the world. Grab a coffee, sit back and watch…
Catch up with all our coverage of The Next Web Conference 2013.
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.
- May 18, 13
Editor’s note: Craig Le Grice is a member of BIMA‘s Executive Committee, and Chair of the organisation’s Silicon Roundabout group, he is an industry advocate for entrepreneurship and next generation talent. Follow him on Twitter: @craiglegrice.
Silicon Roundabout, Tech City, Old Street Roundabout – whatever you call it, the still-gritty area of East London has been getting a lot of attention recently. Cited as the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley in California, it’s bustling with technology startups and attracting a lot of focus from both in and out of the UK. Indeed, the Government invested £50m earlier this year to continue developing the area’s prominence as David Cameron attempts to make the area globally renowned for digital innovation.
But the area has its critics too. Despite there being more than 600 companies based there (according to Government funded TCIO), most of the products, tools and services that make it to consumer, critic and investor acclaim still come from the San Francisco Bay Area – Silicon Valley.
For me, Silicon Roundabout has five major areas of development to continue trying to crack in order to match its West Coast USA rival:
- Investors
- Infrastructure
- Community
- Talent
- Identity
Investors
It takes much more than just money to build a centre of excellence, but it’s a vital place to start. Silicon Roundabout has attracted many great venture capital firms, private equity experts and dedicated banks (with the likes of Silicon Valley Bank arriving in 2012). But it needs more. Major funders have to properly understand the sector, and start investing. The UK, as a whole, still lags behind its US friends when it comes to funding startups.
Our government has injected millions of dollars into the technology sector but the majority has reached the large, established firms – often structured as tax breaks rather than the physical cash required for growth.
Private investment is there. But much of it is spectrumised – designed to support very small companies at seed stage (with deals at the sub £250k level) or large established businesses exiting the startup stage, if not yet fully mature. The mid-level space – where companies raise the money that catalyses real ‘growth’ – A rounds and B rounds – is still vastly under catered for when we compare Silicon Roundabout to Silicon Valley.
It’s this acceleration stage that creates the early success stories associated with the startups emerging from California that we read about.
Infrastructure
Every company needs infrastructure, but startups especially so. One element of Silicon Valley that delivers a specific and unique DNA is its migratory effect. It’s exceptionally easy to bring people to the area – with hundreds of companies moving from other parts of the US to call it home each year.
Silicon Roundabout is still a cool part of East London. It now needs to connect in a deeper and broader way to the rest of London and other technology pockets of the UK such as Manchester, Croydon, Newcastle, Edinburgh etc.
Logistically, compare getting from Palo Alto to SFO international airport to the journey from Old Street to LHR. Much has to be done in this space – including better linkage to London City airport – to connect non-UK people and companies to the area efficiently.
Community
Tech startups are unlike most other companies, in most ways. As such, people working in technology need to be surrounded by peers and a real community of equals, experts and comparative disciplines.
It is imperative that we continue to support the communities and sub-communities (like Silicon Drinkabout, TechMeetups, TechHub, Google Campus etc.) around Silicon Roundabout that foster and nurture relationships, building a united ecosystem. Support for these must come from individuals, corporates and government bodies equally.
Talent
One of the most frequent grumbles from within the technology community is the scarcity of great talent. And, while the UK is catching up with the US, it’s still a real issue. Great events like Silicon Milkroundabout have made headway in attracting talent to the industry but collaborative efforts from education, government and industry alike is now needed to find, shape and embrace future talent.
We have more than just the movie ‘The Social Network’ to remind us that platforms of tomorrow are potentially being created in student dorms today.
Identity
I started this piece by using several terms for the same area. To replicate the ‘brand’ value of Silicon Valley, we will have to adopt one and stick with it. Whether we call it Silicon Roundabout, Tech City or Old Street Roundabout, creating a consistent destination brand is crucial. Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Canary Wharf, Brooklyn DUMBO etc… They’re all renowned spaces for their specialist skill sets.
We have the opportunity to build a world-class centre for digital technology. Showcasing the best of British, developing global products of tomorrow and introducing ‘new news’ to the world.
Let’s put London (and the UK) firmly on the map.
Let’s build a sustainable startup scene.
Let’s forget about trying to be ‘as good’ as Silicon Valley – and just do it.
Image credit: Getty Images
- May 17, 13
According to Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka of AllThingsD, Yahoo’s board will meet in two days time on Sunday to vote to approve a $1.1 billion cash offer for Tumblr, the popular blogging service and social destination.
That the offer is to be all cash is surprising, given that Yahoo’s stock has enjoyed a renaissance in recent months following the installation of Marissa Mayer as its CEO; the value of its shares have risen, which could have made them a more useful, or attractive bargaining chip.
AllThingsD previously reported that Yahoo had its eyes on Tumblr, citing sources that detailed discussions between the companies.
Today TNW, along with other publications, was invited to a Yahoo product news gathering on Monday, the day after the board is said to vote. Certainly Yahoo wishes to unveil its purchase of Tumblr.
Marissa Mayer is confirmed to be speaking at the event, which is only appropriate given the size of the deal. Yahoo is also said to be vetting video giant Hulu as another potential target for acquisition. The $1.1 billion cash offering represents around one-third of Yahoo’s available cash and short-term investments.
TNW reached out to Yahoo for comment on the report, but isn’t optimistic regarding receiving a reply.
The $1.1 billion figure is only a 37 percent premium on the company’s last round of funding, which is said to have valued Tumblr at $800 million. That rate of return will not be attractive to its late-stage investors, though the liquidity event might be welcomed by its older money.
Yahoo is up over 1 percent in after-hours trading.
Update: Yeah, Yahoo isn’t saying anything.
Top Image Credit: Yahoo! Blog
- May 17, 13
Today a court filing made it known that MetroPCS has dropped its lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding net neutrality. The comes following MetroPCS’ acquisition by T-Mobile, a company that had not been part of the legal proceeding.
Verizon, and until recently, MetroPCS contend that government rules regarding network neutrality – the requirement that all data served by an ISP must be treated as equal – is unconstitutional, arbitrary, and outside the bounds of the FCC’s authority.
Proponents of net neutrality – supporters of which include Google, Twitter, and Facebook – argue that the practice ensures that free speech can persist; if an ISP can slow content of a certain variety, it can unilaterally block its customers from having unfettered access to the Internet.
This has commercial and political implications. Some ISPs are also content-producers. This means that they would have a material interest in boosting their content, perhaps by speeding its delivery, and slowing that of their content-competitors.
Even more, the decision by an ISP to slow, speed, or block certain forms of content online is tantamount to having an unelected censor in place; in many locations there might be but a single ISP that can provide broadband, granting that firm a natural monopoly over the local population; to then grant that company the authority over what that population can read, view, and say, is troubling.
For a much longer dive in Verizon’s arguments, and a common sense grappling with their worth, head here.
The loss of MetroPCS is unlikely to deter Verizon. But it has lost an ally, publicly, and that cannot do anything but lessen its momentum.
Top Image Credit: Eric Hauser
- May 17, 13
As you may know, we’re big fans of single-purpose tools that make your life easier. This is especially true when it comes to design, because sometimes a simple, straight-forward solution can solve the worst headaches.
We’ve given plenty of attention to apps of this category in the past, highlighting services like SnapRuler, Sip and Icon Strike. Now, we’d like to draw your attention to Red Pen.
Red Pen is a super basic Web app that lets you upload a file and share it with clients and team members for feedback. Yes, we know, there are tons of solutions out there that make this process easy, including Layervault, Shipment, MockVault and even Creative Cloud. All of these services are worth a look, but if you’re searching for an extremely light-weight solution (with zero setup time) and don’t want to resort to emailing large files back and forth, you’ll want to check out Red Pen.
The site’s tagline — “effing fast feedback” — says it all. After uploading your file, share your short link with your client. All they’ll have to do is click your design and leave their thoughts, as shown in the image below.
Red Pen is free and you can give it a try via the link below.
➤ Red Pen
For getting feedback on an entire site, be sure to take a peek at ZURB’s Bounce.
Image credit: Fang Guo
- May 17, 13
Mozilla has announced that it will hold off on blocking third-party tracking cookies in the latest version of Firefox. The browser developer says that there is “a little more work” to be done before it was going to become available. It is believed that this feature will become a default setting for Mozilla’s browser, which will then enhance its Do Not Track enforcement protocol.
The company began testing the cookie blocker at the same time as it released Firefox 21 earlier this month. As part of its efforts to put users in control over their own Web experience, Mozilla unveiled Do Not Track. The idea was to provide Firefox users with a greater understanding and control with what information is being transmitted and what they want protected.
Delaying the launch of Firefox 22 may be considered to be a bit of a setback for Mozilla, but it could also be viewed as a way for the company to bolster its offering. In fact, the company said that it was delaying implementing it as a default setting so that it can “collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies.”
Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO, wrote in a blog post that the company is testing a patch created by Stanford student Jonathan Mayer for Firefox. Mayer’s solution allows cookies from sites a user has previously visited and blocks those from new pages. He believes that through this methodology, users will feel more comfortable with cookies from sites they have a relationship with versus unknown ones.
However, two problems have caused Mozilla to delay implementing this patch:
False positives. For example, say you visit a site named
foo.com, which embeds cookie-setting content from a site namedfoocdn.com. With the patch, Firefox sets cookies fromfoo.combecause you visited it, yet blocks cookies fromfoocdn.combecause you never visitedfoocdn.comdirectly, even though there is actually just one company behind both sites.False negatives. Meanwhile, in the other direction, just because you visit a site once does not mean you are ok with it tracking you all over the Internet on unrelated sites, forever more. Suppose you click on an ad by accident, for example. Or a site you trust directly starts setting third-party cookies you do not want.
Eich says that Firefox 22 will have the cookie blocker “on” by default, but only after additional work has been done. Mozilla will run an engineering test to add “privacy-preserving code” to measure how the patch affects real websites.
Those using the beta version of Firefox 22 have a version of the patch installed, but it is not turned “on”. Users within its Aurora channel have the service enabled by default, which Mozilla says will give it better ongoing test coverage and A/B testing.
Photo credit: JOSEP LAGO/AFP/Getty Images
- May 17, 13
On May 18th, 2012, Facebook went public at a per-share price of $38. The company experienced a brief gain, spiking into the 40s, but ended its first day of trading just a few cents above the set $38 price.
The following days saw the stock decline, under its listing price. The stock would fall as low as $17.55 before it began a period of recovery. As Facebook has grown its income from mobile users, and proven that its desktop market share isn’t transitory, investors have warmed to its shares.
Facebook has since recovered from its lows, and is now closing its first year as a public company at $26.25. That’s a 30.9 percent decline from its IPO price, but is up essentially 50% from its historic, 52 week low. Facebook investors that bought the company when it was mired in the doldrums have done well. Folks who bought on day one have endured nothing but decline, of varying degrees, since their purchase.
In its most recent quarter, Facebook bested revenue expectations, with top line of $1.46 billion. However, it missed forecasted profit by reporting just $0.12 per share in earnings. Facebook price-earnings ratio is remarkably high.
Today, Facebook closed regular trading worth $63.47 billion. When it went public, the company was valued at over $104 billion.
In retrospect, Facebook is now a much larger company, with stronger profits and revenues. And investors are valuing below the price that the market bore when it went public. It’s a lesson worth remembering; what the market will allow in an IPO doesn’t always fully reflect the value of a company.
Zynga and Groupon investors can confirm the idea.
Facebook finds itself in a strong posistion, with plenty of cash, profits, and growing revenues. It’s work in mobile is also to its benefit, at once expanding its core offerings in the space, and also enjoying the quick growth of Instagram, which it wholly owns.
A final note: Instagram’s final purchase price was $715 million. Why not the oft floated $1 billion figure that was offered? The deal had a huge stock component. And as Facebook’s stock fell, so too did the value of the deal.
Market declines regardless, in the past year Facebook’s usership, incomes, user activity are all up and to the right. Botched IPO or not, Facebook is healthy.
Image EMMANUEL DUNAND for AFP / Getty Images
All relevant data via Google Finance.
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Posts
- May 18, 13
Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here.
One of the memories that sticks with me most about the launch of the Xbox 360 was a silly analogy about inhaling. I can’t remember who said it, but the general idea was that it had a concave body to convey breathing in, perhaps a precursor to exclaiming joy. It was as daft as it sounds, but for a while there the 360 was indeed a breath of fresh air.
Xbox 360 had a lot going for it, from online connectivity to a much simpler architecture that developers preferred over the PlayStation 3. In its first few years it maintained the position of being a very games-focused console. Xbox 360 was the home of indie games, for example, and digital distribution. It widely popularized the notion of achievements.
But three, maybe four, years ago Microsoft started to push bigger ideas. It left a lot of the gamer-ish stuff behind and redesigned the console’s dashboard toward a media focus. Over a series of updates, Xbox slowly went Metro, became about Netflix, avatars and Kinect. Most of these innovations didn’t stick so well, and the cost they incurred was significant. Xbox 360 went from being a clear proposition to a complex and all-over-the-place machine.
Many Kinects were sold, but few people actually used them for long. Many channels of TV content were brought into the fold, but finding room for them essentially killed its indie games market and lost a lot of credibility with that group. Ultimately, the successes of these divergences were generally mute. (18 billion hours of video sounds like a big deal until you break it down per unit over a year.)
This is the problem with long hardware cycles (Xbox 360 is 8 years old). Lacking annualized releases of better technology (for some reason the console industry still believes it has to carry on this way), the platform story grows old after a couple of years, leading to the urge to accessorize. Often in so doing it loses itself in the ensuing cruft, and then needs a big reset. All of which leads up to Tuesday’s news: the big event in Redmond to unveil the next Xbox. And boy does the company need it to go well.
Perception-wise, Microsoft has had a bad couple of years. Windows Phone may have won a number of plaudits for its looks, but nobody really went for it. Windows 8 sold a ton of copies, but most users sort of hate it. Surface had a glitzy launch, but people are still buying iPads. That leaves Xbox as Microsoft’s one remaining big consumer push. This one has to go right, or lots of talking heads will start to ask if there’s any market that Microsoft can get right any more.
The reason the company has had a lot of these issues, I think, is that it’s bad at listening. Microsoft consistently gets lost in grand visions, visions that only it can afford to develop, and produces super-complicated propositions that nobody loves. All those years spend trying to convince the public about Windows Live services. All that time spent trying to bring us around to using Bing. All that wasted effort trying to unify user interfaces with Metro (which at its heart is just a bit broken, as has been said over and over) and who really cares? Grand visions that lose the plot are Microsoft’s forte.
Yet, gaming folks are pretty excited about the next Xbox. Will it feature new horsepower? Guaranteed. Will it have Kinect baked into the box itself? Probably, but they don’t care. Will it require an Internet connection? Maybe, and they’re not sure what they think about that. Will it have lots of content partnerships? Undoubtedly. Will it copy Sony’s idea of a Share button on the joypad? Perhaps. Will there be a Halo game on it? You know it.
Will it actually be anything fundamentally different, though? It doesn’t sound like it, but that may not be a bad thing. There is often an assumption in tech blog circles that the audience wants permanent revolution, but often it doesn’t. Often it just wants the thing that it knows works, and if that thing gets that job right then it’s happy. The console gaming audience generally doesn’t want consoles to do anything fundamentally different. It tends to embrace features that are additive to its core desires, like online multiplayer or achievements, but all it wants are big TV games with joypads and mad graphics. Everything else is optional.
There are maybe 150 million console gamers around the world, judging by platform sales over the last few generations, and they love their expensive splashy videogames. They’ve never particularly cared for the frilly extras, like avatars, but that doesn’t stop them buying in. They like that their consoles have ESPN on them, but those are not crucial purchase decisions. They’re not convergence customers in the way that some PowerPoint deck in the depths of Redmond probably drew a few years ago to justify unified interfaces, but again they don’t mind as long as it’s not going to get in the way of playing Dishonored. For those people, the next Xbox is exciting because of the prospect of an even more-lavish Call of Duty and an even more-next-generation Skyrim. All they really want is a box that they believe can deliver that experience.
The risk for Microsoft is if it screws that message up.
When videogame platforms live too long, their platform holder often loses sight of its core competency. When the PlayStation 2 was over it had explored so many areas of the market that it was impossible to convey all of them in one coherent story. Sony tried, with the PlayStation 3, but the result was so confused that developers only really heard “it’s over-complicated” while consumers heard “it’s $599 for Ridge Racer.” This is a business built on razors-and-blades thinking.
A similar thing is happening to Nintendo with the Wii U. The Wii was a wonderfully simple device with a couple of very smart accessories (like the Wii Fit) and a raft of dumb ones. By the time the Wii U came around Nintendo seemed to have lost its sense of focus that drove Wii, instead releasing a very confusing machine. Now it’s paying the price.
The biggest risk for the next Xbox is if Microsoft departs so far from its core audience that the audience feels turned off. If the company comes out only talking about transmedia, television tie-ins, movies on demand, instant messaging, Internet Explorer, phone syncing, emailing from your couch, holographic avatars, Spotify subscriptions, Twitter integration, Facebook integration and party gaming then I fear for Xbox’s survival. The gamers will ask “Yes, but, where’s the games Steve?”
At its heart, the next Xbox needs to simply be about the games the games the games. Will Microsoft actually listen this time?
- May 18, 13
The idea of a VC having its own news aggregator was a bit outlandish in 2007. But Y Combinator was in an unusual position in those days anyway. Startup incubators had been a highly visible part of the dot-com crash, and Silicon Valley was still skeptical of the concept nearly a decade later. So YC set out to be something different — a community of hackers building companies on their own terms.
Hacker News was initially built by YC co-founder Paul Graham as a demonstration of Arc, a new programming language he’d been working on. He quickly realized that it could help bring together the companies he was supporting and the rest of the folks who wanted in. With 1.6 million page views and 200,000 unique visitors on a given weekday, it’s now a key part of the venture firm’s success.
But the site quickly took off, as former Redditors flocked to it to talk about tech and startups (the site was then known as Startup News).
Having a big audience isn’t really the goal. In comparison, Hacker News’ inspiration and the first big YC exit, Reddit has seen as much as 4.4 million page views in a given day.
A Community For Ex-Redditors
As Graham explains, as the site started seeing traction immediately, he realized this wasn’t just a way to test Arc. He wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit felt in the good old days, when most of its community was made up of hackers. As Reddit drew more traffic, the hacker focus of the site evolved. The community’s user base became diluted as it grew, and Hacker News was a new home for some of the early Reddit hackers.
Graham writes in February of 2007:
Reddit used to have a good concentration of startup-related links, but that was because so many of Reddit’s initial users were connected in some way to Y Combinator. Now that Reddit is so much more popular, the top links tend to be images, or videos, or political news.
Another goal of Hacker News, says Graham, was to be a place where founders could share ideas and communicate. In the spirit of Y Combinator’s own incubator, Hacker News was focused on being a community for entrepreneurs and founders in the tech community: a place where they could freely post and where Y Combinator could also get to know potential founders and leaders in the tech world.
“From the beginning we had a real community, and some of the core group of refugees from Reddit are still prominent on Hacker News today,” Graham explains. Part of what attracted many to Hacker News was its simplicity and voting system. The product’s UI, design and color scheme have remained relatively constant over the past six years.
Thomas Ptacek, one of the site’s first users, explains that he was a Slashdot user and then a Reddit user, and flocked to Hacker News (at the time Startup News) because it was more relevant to the technology and startup community. He found Hacker News to be a refreshing change from past forums where the quality of commenting was declining.
Here’s how Hacker News works: Users submit links to stories, and stories are ranked according to a voting system, similar to Reddit. The difference between Hacker News and Reddit, however, is the voting system. While you can vote stories up, you cannot vote stories down (but you can flag stories). According to Graham, 100 upvotes will get a story to the top of the front page of the site. You can only downvote a comment if you have enough “karma” on the site, which is another compelling element of Hacker News. The Karma factor is determined by the number of upvotes on a user’s submission and comments minus the number of downvotes.
In terms of the design, Graham says he wanted Hacker News to look like your list of processes in a terminal window. The look and feel of the site was aimed at hackers themselves who are familiar with tabular data.
Graham will occasionally add new features, some of which are on the backend of the site. For example, as comments get more deeply nested and heated in terms of exchange, the reply link takes longer to appear. There is a purposeful drag implemented on this, says Graham, because deeply nested discussions are rarely interesting.
Another subtle feature addition: a flame-war detector. Graham has been consistently deploying and updating proprietary software that determines whether there is a flame war, where people argue heatedly. When these flame wars take place (which Graham says can often get ugly and personal), the story in which the commenting is taking place is moved further down the page.
Graham has also created sophisticated spam-detection software, which was just updated with new code six months ago. With the update, Graham says that it’s rare for spam to last on the site for more than 10 minutes. If a user does spam the site or engages in personally vicious behaviors, they run the risk of being banned. But in an interesting twist, called “hellbanning,” the user may not actually know they are banned.
On the backend, Hacker News runs on one core, and Graham calls this a “remarkable feat of scaling.”
In terms of human moderation, Graham himself had been spending three to four hours per day simply moderating the site. And that’s in addition to all of his duties running Y Combinator. While a number of other YC alums have moderating abilities, Graham has been the main human element of the site. “It was becoming my life,” he says. Around six months ago, Graham brought on someone else, who he chose not to name, to moderate the site. He says the individual is affiliated with Y Combinator and is a “prudent and thoughtful guy,” and has been doing a great job ever since.
Hacker News has a strong affiliation with Y Combinator, as well. Graham explains that founders usually all create a Hacker News account when they apply, and that user name is the founder’s identity at Y Combinator. Hacker News also features a jobs page that shows any jobs available at Y Combinator companies. He adds that this jobs portal is very useful for Y Combinator, as the majority of the site’s audience is made up of programmers and engineers.
If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC founders to enable these entrepreneurs to recognize and meet each other.
Graham says that Hacker News gets a lot of complaints that it has a bias toward featuring stories about Y Combinator startups, but he says there is no such bias. Instead, the culture at the incubator is to use Hacker News, and with more than 1,000 YC alumni who have graduated from the incubator, many of these founders are still active on the news site and post links to their fellow founders’ launches and news.
“It was a small intellectual village and now it is a giant city.”
Growth has its downside. What keeps Graham up at night is worrying about the dilution of quality of the Hacker News. He explains that the site was community of insiders in the hacker world, and it has gradually been getting diluted. “That is what I spend all my time thinking about,” he says.
He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.”
“The community has been in a perpetual but slow decline because the site is growing,” he says.
Ptacek agrees that the value of Hacker News has changed a bit. “I don’t get a community feel as much, whereas in the beginning it was a small group of people who all know each other,” he says. “It’s less likely now to see the same people from thread to thread.”
One of Graham’s biggest pain points is the “schoolyard quarrels” he finds on the site on a daily basis, and wishes “users would stop misbehaving.” He cites the example of users organizing voting rings to purposefully vote up stories, which caused Graham to develop additional software to detect this. He adds that more users are trolling under newly created accounts, and are deliberately starting flame wars on the site.
“I wish I could get people to stop posting comments that are stupid or mean,” he says. “It takes only one or two negative comments and a discussion turns into a flame war.”
Graham adds that he gets a lot of vitriol from users personally with accusations of bias or censoring. He clarifies that he, and the other human editor, rarely take links down unless they are dupes. Even with tabloid or gossip stories that surface, Graham will not take them down. Users with high karma points tend to flag these stories, he adds, and they can then be taken down.
“Hacker News makes me sad a lot,” says Graham. “I wish the community would behave the way they did when it was a little village.”
Users are noticing Graham’s frustrations. Ptacek says that he observes that Graham is careful not to tell people what to say or think, but it’s clear that he wants people to treat each other better and he gets more sad over time.
Could This Be A Business?
While Graham is open about not wanting to be the next Reddit, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Hacker News could be a business. Reddit is reportedly raising cash at a $400 million valuation. While Hacker News has a fraction of the traffic that Reddit does, the smaller site could actually have an impressive valuation as a business without any funding or employees.
Graham himself uses the site as his primary source of news. He’s even found Y Combinator companies through Hacker News. A user in the community posted a link to Watsi, a non-profit that allows people in dire need of medical care to raise money for procedures and health care. He noticed Watsi the second time it was posted on Hacker News and thought it was an amazing idea. He cold-called the founders and convinced them to be the first ever YC-backed nonprofit. And Graham recently took a first board seat at Watsi, his first board position ever.
But Graham is adamant that Hacker News is not a business and would not become a business. There are no ads on the site, and he has no interest in making money from ads. He admits that through the jobs page he indirectly makes money, as he is an investor in Y Combinator companies and will inevitably profit if the company’s hires help the business. Nor would he be interested in selling the site.
While it’s clear that Graham has his frustrations with the community, when he talks about the site’s defining moments, he sounds like he is speaking about his own child. One of his most distinct memories about the site is the day following Steve Jobs’ death, when every story on the front page was about the Apple founder.
“Users did it collectively as a tribute, and I found this a really remarkable way to show the power of a community. I thought this is really a living, breathing thing. It was like a bunch of birds flying through the sky forming themselves as an S.”
“There are really good reasons to engage with Hacker News,” says Ptacek. “There is no better place to stay engaged with the hacker community…At the end of day it is a message board. Having a place where you can reach and talk to groups of people is an important concept.”
As for the future of Hacker News, it’s clear that Graham is focused on maintaining quality and making sure that the community treats each other with respect and kindness. “I hope that most Hacker News readers know that I am doing this for their sake,” he says.
- May 18, 13
It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show where a few of us writers chat up the most interesting stories from the past seven days.
Ryan Lawler, Drew Olanoff (clad in his Google Glass), and I discussed all things Google I/O, including Larry Page’s keynote, Google+’s new photo features, and the latest Google Glass apps and more. We also chatted about Square’s new hardware, Stand, which is a $299 card swiper and stand for iPad registers.
Tune in above for more!
- May 18, 13
Did Google’s conference succeed? It launched dozens of products and services in its 205-minute keynote, but did the world understand them? I saw some of the smartest journalists in technology struggling to handle the information density. But what’s the alternative? Break it up across multiple days, or even multiple conferences? Google’s breadth presents it with a challenge unique among the tech giants.
Apple? Its launches center around a discrete set of devices. That’s why WWDC works. There might be one radically new product, but then just a set of iterations on what we already know. The screen is bigger, the tablet is thinner, the software gets a new sheen. And since Apple is all about hardware you need to touch to believe, it has to do it all in-person. Journalists and pundits can easily digest the news and offer their insights to the world.
Facebook? It prefers the rolling thunder approach that works because it’s mostly a software company. Releasing things when they’re ready rather than waiting months for an event embodies its “move fast and break things” ideal. It reaches out to journalists almost daily about new updates. When it has something big, it throws a laser-focused, dedicated event like it did this year for content-specific news feeds, Graph Search, and Home. Even when it threw its last f8 developer conference 20 months ago, it kept it tight to just Timeline and Open Graph. The media could wrap its head around the social network’s plans.
Those conferences serve their purposes because they align with the identities of producers. Some see Microsoft’s events as a fragmented mess as they too embody their producer. Microsost has Build for Windows and developers, TechEd for enterprise, a partner conference, a management summit, and a whole event for SharePoint. By splitting them all up, it never feels like there’s one day where Microsoft rules the world.
But Google has its own identity and it’s causing I/O growing pains. The conference certainly captures the spotlight. The problem is that Google’s vast ambitions have left I/O bursting at the seams. This year’s mega-keynote tried to combine search, maps, Google+, YouTube, Google Now, Google Play, music, games, Chrome, Android, and a new phone. And that was just the consumer facing stuff! Then there were a huge set of developer announcements like a native client for C++, location APIs, game services APIs, cloud messaging for notifications, and a suite of mobile app building tools called Android Studio.
Did you watch the keynote? If so, did you remember all these things? Did you have time to read insightful analysis about them? Did journalists even have the bandwidth to write intelligently about it all? It could take a while to unpack everything from I/O. I know I have at least five stories I want to write. And inevitably things will fall through the cracks as a new week will bring new news from elsewhere.
And it’s only going to get more intense. Google employees I’ve talked to say Larry Page is really pushing his 10X innovation mantra and speedier product cycles. They explain that Google could have saved some stuff for another conference later this year, but by then it’ll already have whole slew of new things ready to show off. Plus, developers and futurists might not be willing to come from around the world for two events a year.
The single, 3+ hour keynote with no intermission did symbolized Google’s big theme of unification. Google wants to show it isn’t just a grab bag of different products. They all piggy-back on each other. Android ties mobile together. Google+ ties people together no matter what other Google products they’re using.
But I/O may be too dense and rich. Like a chunk of chocolate fudge, it overwhelms the senses and leaves you struggling to chew up Google’s vision. It was so mind-boggling it put Wired’s Mat Honan into a psychedelic trance.
The three days of developer sessions that followed the keynote were a success, in that they helped developers develop. But perhaps splitting the keynote into two bite-size sessions would make it all easier to swallow. One consumer keynote (Search, Maps, Google+, Hangouts, Music, phone) and one developer keynote (Android, Chrome, APIs, developer tools). They could be split across two days. Alternatively, it could be one keynote with announcements sorted into these two categories with an intermission in the middle. Either would go a long way to making I/O more comprehensible.
But for now, sticking with a single, epic conference may be the best route for Google to create momentum, convey unification, bring its community together, and impress the globe. Google is determined to innovate faster and deliver the future. The duty falls on us to keep up.
- May 18, 13
It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its five million registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200 million+ monthly active users, and some 600 billion in and outbound messages – but Hike’s growth is impressive when you consider it’s only just over four months old. WhatsApp, of course, has been around for almost four years.
Mobile messaging is hot property right now, with tech giants like Facebook and most recently Google bent on owning the messaging space. The reason for all this interest in cross-platform chit-chat is that mobile messaging looks poised to steal social networking’s crown jewels: aka the cool factor, and thus the user engagement (Hike incorporates social status updates and emoji-based moods into its messaging app, to hang on the social chain). But the idea that there can be one ultimate mobile messaging winner — or one player as dominant as Facebook in the full-fat social networking space — seems unlikely. And that’s what Hike is banking on to disrupt WhatsApp and keep Facebook Messenger and its ilk from crashing its just-getting-started party.
There’s no doubt that local market realities intercede much more on mobile than on the traditional social networking playground of the desktop, especially in emerging markets where device, network and carrier variations influence how people communicate based on how they can afford to communicate. Those complexities provide an opportunity for local app makers to triumph over goliath outsiders if they build fixes for the local market, argues Hike.
“Given how competitive this market is we do feel that in about 3 or 5 years from now you will have somewhere between three to five players globally that own parts of the messaging space in the world. You’re already seeing it right now, you have Line in Japan, you have Kakao in Korea, you have WeChat in China, you have WhatsApp in South America and Europe, you have of course Facebook message or iMessage dominating in U.S. and WhatsApp growing there too. In India of course WhatsApp is the dominant player but we’ve come on to be a very strong number two in just four months,” says Hike creator Kavin Mittal.
“We can see that with communication if you solve local problems in the market there is room for a local player to win the market completely.”
Hike is one of the latest contenders to jump into the mobile messaging space, albeit with a few neat tricks up its sleeve that it’s confident will allow it to grab significant share in its chosen markets — namely India, and other similar emerging markets in place like Indonesia, the Middle East and Africa. Some 60% of Hike’s registered users are in India, 40% globally led by the Middle East and Germany (despite its emerging markets focus, Germany was actually the first market to spike an interest in Hike — which its creator puts down to it having 128bit encryption over Wi-Fi and Germans looking for a “much more secure solution to WhatsApp”).
On the neat tricks front, Hike has baked a patent-pending SMS conversion tool into its app to take advantage of fragmentation in the Indian market caused by low distribution of data-capable smartphones. So this is not just about incorporating SMS messages into a unified app — as Google plans to with its Hangouts app – but about making sure a data message can still reach someone who doesn’t have data, via the SMS channel.
Mittal explains that in India, even where people own smartphones they may not have data enabled, or may sporadically turn data off to save money. SMS is therefore still a key comms channel that needed to be brought into the loop. This fragmentation was the problem the app’s creators were setting out to solve with Hike. They have also done this in as low cost a way as possible by building a system that ensures it does not send cross-network SMSes (which incur a termination fee in India) but routes same network to same network.
“The idea behind Hike… is it works free globally. Hike is available on iPhone, Windows, Android S40, S60, very soon BlackBerry now as well. But in case you don’t have a phone than can install Hike, or let’s say you have a phone but you don’t have data, I can still message you from Hike for free. We convert the IP message into an SMS and it’s free for me as a Hike user, to which you can reply back to – and the reply comes back straight to my inbox making messaging very seamless. So I have one app for all my friends,” Mittal tells TechCrunch.
Another future trick — due to launch on June 10 — is something that will allow users who have turned off their data to still be notified that they have a message waiting for them, presumably so they know to turn data back on. “At this point in the market there’s no way to notify you when you have a message waiting on one of these applications. So we’re launching something on June 10th that’s going to solve this problem, so no matter where you are – no matter if you’re online or offline – you’ll be able to communicate via Hike with your friend all the time,” he adds.
Hike is funding the conversion cost of sending the SMSes itself — in the Indian market, with a view to extending it to other emerging markets with similar dynamics — so that is one of its largest sunk costs at the moment, according to Mittal. But its monetisation strategy is based on building off that base in another way. The shift Hike’s creators are ultimately calculating on is the movement of consumer spending in its target emerging markets away from carrier ‘value add services’ — paid for infotainment SMSes and so on — to data-based content and entertainment.
That’s where Hike sees its future profits, by fleshing out its messaging offering to supplement the bread and butter of social comms with “content that’s very relevant to the local market” – much as the Line messaging app is already doing with entertainment content such as stickers and games.
“India is a country of 20 countries. There’s so much diversity, cultural differences, dialects, languages that one has to cater to and given that this is a big entertainment market there is no doubt we’re going to go down the route of enriching messaging around content,” he says. “If you look at why you message it’s around a piece of content, topic, video, something new you’ve found, something funny. And India it’s much more prevalent than other markets so we’re definitely going down that route, there’s no doubt about it.”
Hike is also looking to work with carriers to share some of the SMS conversion cost, with the benefit for carriers being that Hike is acting as an IP pusher, turning mobile owners into data drivers — and data is ultimately where carriers in these emerging will be making their future revenues from too.
“Given the traction we’ve had in the Indian market we’ve seen a lot of interest from the operators who want to work closely with Hike and figure out how to expand and grow the traction with Hike because what we’re doing for the operators is we’re introducing a lot of people to data,” says Mittal. “What one can also do over SMS is send photos, videos and so forth, so if I’m on Hike and do SMS I can send you a picture and you get a link on SMS so you can open it on a browser, so we’re striking deals in the Indian market and the emerging markets like Middle East and Africa where the cost is not only bourn by us but by the operator too.”
Hike is starting out with more resources than most startups, being created by BSB, a 50:50 Bharti Softbank joint venture, that acts as a “quasi-strategic incubator”, as Mittal puts it. Bharti Softbank invested $7 million into Hike about a month ago — a measure of how much traction the app had managed to achieve in a few short months. BSB projects get their first round funded by the parent companies if they achieve enough traction.
Going forward, Hike will likely look outside for funding, says Mittal — assuming it can keep on growing, and reach its goal of at least 10 million registered users (“our internal critical number”), which it views as the baseline required before starting to think seriously about monetisation.
“By the end of the year we’ll be in a positon to raise money from the external market. The reason we’re doing that is the VC market in India has less of an appetite for taking massive risk. Because one of the first questions to ask is ‘hey guys why are you building another messaging app?’ And we were pretty certain that if we did what we did we’d get the traction and so far we’ve proved it,” says Mittal. “We’re in a point where we have the $7 million but we will look outside, even possibly the West Coast for funding.”
Mittal won’t put a figure on Hike’s active user base but says it’s “amongst the highest we’ve seen in the industry and definitely way above 50%”. ”We feel there is a room for a local player to dominate markets like India, Africa and China and so forth, and take care of the local needs, and that is something we’re working on. That’s the big philosophy we have at BSB,” he adds.
India’s technology-adoption stratification poses a huge challenge when you’re trying to build an app that lets people talk to whoever they want. A challenge that, ultimately, gives the local kid a toehold over global mobile messaging players, argues Hike.
“The market kind of splits India into three sort of broad demographics, the top part really mimics the U.S. population — 30, 40 million people – they’re really switched on, they know about the Internet, they have smartphones and so on and so forth; there are about 150 million people that are experimenting with the Internet, but they have a lot of churn there because the Internet is still not a utility for these guys; and then you have a billion people at the bottom of the pyramid that have no clue whatsoever the Internet even is,” says Mittal.
“As you go further down in India, how do you tackle the one billion people? No one knows but we’re in India here, so we’re the guys to figure it out.”
- May 18, 13
This Gillmor Gang was recorded live at betaday, the betaworks annual gathering in New York. The Gillmor Gang included John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Davison, and Steve Gillmor. Enjoy.
@stevegillmor, @Borthwick, @scobleizer, @rushkoff, @pdavison
The Gillmor Gang is produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
- May 18, 13
Google is prepping… something. An announced Google media streamer was recently found in the FCC’s testing database. Details are nearly nonexistent as most are held under a confidentiality agreement for the next 45 days. However, the documents released to the public call the device several times a “media player” and that it features WiFi connectivity.
The H840, with a model number of H2G2-42 (a clever nod to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), could be a Nexus Q replacement. After all, Google’s new music streaming service does not work with the ill-fated Nexus Q, nor does Google have a mass-market way to get it into living rooms. Google essentially needs its own Apple TV device.
Mass consumption is the only way Google Play Music All Access is going to be successful. Google needs to follow Pandora’s lead and get its service onto as many platforms and screens as possible. A native Google TV app will likely debut shortly. But Google TV is far from successful enough to do this job alone.
It’s rather strange Google didn’t announce this device at I/O last week. This device will launch within the coming weeks. The FCC will release the rest of the details including the device’s user manual in 45 days, giving Google a rather small launch window.
A $99-ish Roku/Apple TV clone is a no-brainer for Google. Call it a Nexus streamer. It would be a media consumption device, able to serve up Google Play and likely several staple streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu. Use an Android device for the remote. Profit.
- May 18, 13
Editor’s note: Tolga Ozuygur is the co-founder of Overdose Caffeine, an indie game-development company from Turkey that develops cross-platform, real-time multiplayer games. Follow him on Twitter @tolgaozuygur.
We at Overdose Caffeine had previously announced that Pocket Fleet, a real-time multiplayer space dogfight game developed for mobile devices, would be available soon on OUYA. Our players were looking forward to it. Even we were excited about the prospect of bringing the game to the platform, as we loved the device and thought TV was a great medium for fast-paced multiplayer gaming.
However, we have decided to end development for it and switch to GamePop. I know many people were looking forward to playing the game on OUYA, so I thought I’d explain why we made this decision.
Pocket Fleet Is A Cross-Platform Game
Pocket Fleet works on Android, iOS and any computer with a browser. We are also about to release the game on Samsung with the 100 percent revenue share indie deal we struck with them. Gamers can also play the game on their PCs and keep playing on their mobile devices, battling players from any other platform. The game runs the same way on every platform, which is why we wanted to add support for a TV console to expand our PC-Mobile combo, and were going to do it with OUYA.
But We Are a Small Indie Development Team With Limited Bandwidth
We don’t have a separate “design group” to rework menus. We focus all of our energy on building the best possible game mechanics and providing new fancy features to our fans. This has paid off so far, as Pocket Fleet has exceeded our wildest expectations, having reached downloads in the seven figures in just a few months and a feature in Google Play. We don’t have time to mess around. If we had a larger team, things might have been different.
Developing For OUYA Became A Lot More Work
While it might seem we would only need to map the controls in Pocket Fleet to the OUYA controller (a job of only a few days), it turned out to be much more than that. The biggest surprise was what they required in terms of new menu design. We assumed the user could move a cursor around to select things on our main menu, but this was not the case. The company required that we redesign the main screen so that people could move around it by highlighting different buttons. This may sound simple but certain circumstances meant that it was anything but. Their ODK was also pretty shoddily thrown together and updates didn’t note what had changed. It began to get very onerous very fast.
GamePop Had a Much Simpler Proposition
We still loved the idea of bringing Pocket Fleet to TV. Recently, we were contacted by someone from BlueStack, which was about to launch their GamePop subscription service and console. They asked for no menu changes or controller mappings, there’s no SDK, no nothing. Seriously, it was about the easiest onboarding we’ve ever had to a platform, since they basically use our stock APK.
We Wish It Weren’t This Way
We were (and still are) fans of Ouya and have been rooting for them since the start. We wish them the best. For independent developers however, we just can’t do so much work for such an uncertain benefit. We’re taking the Occam’s Razor approach and going with GamePop for now. Pocket Fleet looks awesome on its prototype and we can’t wait to release the finished product.
- May 18, 13
I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not most–homes.
I was skeptical to begin with: after all, I thought, Chrome is acceptable when you’re online, but I’ll be spending much of my travel time offline, which probably makes it a non-starter, right? — So I devoted most of my Chromebook’s (bizarrely spacious) 320GB hard drive to an install of Ubuntu. Which I then never used even once.
I suppose I would have if some kind of critical work emergency had come up: after all, I’m (mostly) a software developer by trade, and ChromeOS isn’t much of a developer platform. But that didn’t happen. Good thing, too, because Linux-on-the-desktop seems as ugly and frustrating as ever for someone, even a deeply techie someone, who just wants to get things done.
ChromeOS, though, is both very pretty and almost painless. Its biggest problem is that out of the box it naively insists that you’ll be online all the time–even though it can be perfectly serviceable while disconnected. You may not have known that nowadays both GMail and (most) Google Docs can work just fine offlne.
And if you didn’t, well, Google sure isn’t about to proactively tell you. You actually have to make a point of seeking out, installing, and then activating Offline Gmail and Offline Google Docs from the Chrome Web Store. Why ChromeOS doesn’t prompt you with this option as part of the onboarding process is truly beyond me. Similarly, why on Earth are “Gmail’ and “Offline Gmail” two separate apps? Google may be full of incredibly smart people, but they can also be insanely myopic when it comes to end users.
Once those were up and running, though, my Chromebook was a charm to use under almost all circumstances. Offline, I could write documents, check old email, and even play a few free games from the Chrome Web Store, although most Chrome games still seem to require an initial server connection to start up. And online, of course, the world was my oyster.
Did I have access to all the features of, say, Word or Excel? Hell, no. (You still can’t create a Google Docs spreadsheet when offline, either.) Was it an all-guns-blazing gaming experience? Again, no, although Chrome’s rapidly evolving Native Client ought to keep matters improving here. What I could do, though, was email, play a few games, surf the Net, communicate (via GChat or Google Hangouts, which worked excellently), and write documents — which unless I’m much mistaken is pretty much everything that most people use their computers for at home.
ChromeOS still needs better, and simpler, offline support; and I’d like to see more diversity of available hardware; but once those two things are addressed, which shouldn’t take long, I would happily recommend a Chromebook to my parents the next time they upgrade. In fact I’d happily recommend one to anyone who wants a small second laptop for travel, or who doesn’t need to do serious work on their home computer.
Long ago Neal Stephenson, when comparing operating systems to vehicles, described MacOS as a hermetically sealed day-glo VW Beetle; MS Windows as a clunky two-tone station wagon; and Linux as the product of a horde of dreadlocked hippies who spent their time building M1 battle tanks and giving them away for free. Which sounds great at first, but who actually wants to drive a tank?
Well, if I may extend that a little, ChromeOS is like a sleek, shiny Airstream trailer built around that same M1 engine. There are many things it can’t do, and a bunch more at which it’s very clumsy, but within its bailiwick, casual exploring, it’s both very attractive and awfully comfortable.
I don’t think Stephenson’s original analogies quite hold any more, though. Nowadays OS X is more like a Porsche…and Windows is a gas-guzzling pickup truck, or a cube van that makes disturbing noises whenever it corners. Still suitable for work, but not particularly great for either road trips or sub/urban living — and nowadays looking nervously over its metaphorical shoulder at the flotilla of drones and self-driving cars on the horizon.
Image credit: Dan McCullough, Flickr.
- May 18, 13
Google is facing another competition investigation, according to the Financial Post. The Canadian Competition Bureau has informed Mountain View of its plans to launch a formal investigation of its Canadian operations. It has not yet requested any information or documents from Google but has informed the search giant of its intention to launch a probe.
The Bureau declined to comment on the scope of the investigation, noting that it is obliged by law to conduct investigations confidentially. Asked for comment on the probe, Leslie Church, Google Canada’s head of communications and public affairs, told the Post: “We will work co-operatively with the Competition Bureau to answer any questions they may have.”
The Canadian Competition Bureau administers and enforces Canada’s Competition Act, among other laws. Among the types of behaviour it investigates are abuse of a dominant position involving anti-competitive practices that “substantially lessen competition in the market, or are likely to do so”.
Google’s search engine is by far and away the dominant player in Canada. According to StatCounter data for April 2012 to 2013 Google’s share has declined over the past year but only very marginally, from more than 90% last year to just under 90% in April this year. The second largest search engine, Microsoft’s Bing, took less than 7% of the market in April 2013.
Competition investigation is well-trodden ground for Google. Mountain View has been the subject of a string of investigations for a range of business practices, including a 20-month FTC antitrust probe in the U.S. and a two-year+ European Union antitrust probe into its search and advertising operations that’s still ongoing, pushing into its third year.
The FTC probe ended with Google agreeing to make some voluntary tweaks to its search and ad business and without any fine being levied. In the European antitrust case, Google submitted proposals for changes to its practices back in April. Yesterday Reuters reported that EU antitrust regulators had extended the review period for Google’s rivals to study its proposals after complaints that competitors were not being given as much time to formulate their responses.
If Google is found to have breached EU competition rules it could face a fine of up to 10% of its global revenue.
- May 17, 13
Tumblr employees feel that Yahoo’s $1.1 billion offer is “too low” and view it as “only a first offer,” according to sources close to acquisition talks. Yahoo may have to increase the offer to close the deal. An acquisition by some tech giant is likely in the cards for Tumblr, though, as sources say the company only has a few months of cash runway left.
The news comes after AllThingsD reported Yahoo was in advanced talks to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion cash, and the portal’s board of directors are set to meet on Sunday night to discuss the potential deal. Forbes reports that Facebook and Microsoft have also expressed interest in acquiring Tumblr. However, Forbes says that Yahoo has lock-up agreement arranged with Tumblr that prevents the blogging platform from holding a “bake-off” or bidding war for the right to buy it.
If Yahoo comes to the table with an insufficient offer, which our sources say $1.1 billion may qualify as, Tumblr could reject it and shop itself around some more. A frothy M&A market could give it plenty of options. Others might not offer as much as Yahoo, but could offer a more appealing working environment. Take a chance turning Yahoo around? Or go somewhere more stable and relevant?
A few months ago Tumblr let several companies know it was interested in possibly being acquired. Yahoo was the first to come to the table with a firm number, says one of our sources. They say Tumblr is apprehensive about accepting the $1.1 billion cash offer, though. Considering the much smaller, younger Instagram’s acquisition price was supposed to be $1 billion (in cash and stock, though, which would eventually make it worth less), it seems reasonable that Tumblr would view $1.1 billion cash as a lowball.
Tumblr employees have been told that the company only has enough funds to operate for a few more months, as its costs far exceed the limited revenue it earns. Tumblr pulled in $13 million in 2012, but has accelerated its advertising offering in hopes of hitting $100 million in revenue this year. The money’s not coming in fast enough to support its expenses though. Employees were recently told not to be concerned, though, because the company is expecting to be bought.
Of course, Yahoo might be able to push the deal through for $1.1 billion or just a little more depending on how the acquisition is structured. If it promises Tumblr’s CEO David Karp he can retain control of the company, provides the right retention bonuses, or won’t force Tumblr to shoehorn in integrations with Yahoo’s other properties, Tumblr may be more receptive.
In the end it will be Tumblr’a execs and board who make the decision who to sell to and for how much. They could certainly ignore grumbling from employees.
If the deal goes through, it might not be so popular with Tumblr’s users, who range from young hipsters to diehard Internet aficionados. Many thought Instagram’s user base would balk at its acquisition by Facebook, but the photo sharing service has continued to grow, offering some hope to Yahoo and Tumblr if their deal closes.
If Yahoo successfully buys the startup, it could inject some much-needed “cool,” youthful energy, and design sense into the aging tech giant. That’s why Tumblr may not necessarily be worth more than $1.1 billion, but it’s worth more than that to Yahoo. The giant desperately needs to bring in as much talent as possible to replace or at least reinvigorate the ranks of uninspired employees. But if Yahoo pays more and Tumblr doesn’t help turn things around, it could be disastrous. Unfortunately, dialysis doesn’t come cheap.
- May 17, 13
Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems.
As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we’ve hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that “arch rivals” GrubHub and Seamless are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of course, any potential deal could fall through.
Furthermore, it’s not yet clear what kind of synergies would take place, how management of the new entity would be structured or even what the new business will be called. The two companies would not confirm on the record on any of the above. But as far as the name goes, we’re hoping for Grubless. Or Hubless GrubSeam. But they have a nice ring to them, don’t they?
If these rumors are true, the merger comes at a good time for the arch rivals, who have been seeing mounting competition of late from a laundry list of new startups entering the space, including increasingly popular alternatives like Delivery.com, ChowNow, Munchery (meals from local chefs), Campus Special, eat24 or the bigs of Europe, like Food Hero and Just-Eat.
If the online food-ordering and delivery market is roughly where daily deals were three-plus years ago, then the deal essentially creates the Groupon of food delivery. Like the daily deals market, food ordering has traditionally had a fairly low barrier to entry, which helps explain why we seem to see a new startup pop up every week.
Plus, the business model isn’t particularly complicated, making it replicable. That being said, innovation and tech adoption have been slow to come to the food industry, and, at scale, this model (taking a slice of transactions) has the potential to be able to generate a lot of cash.
This is just one part of why the “food tech” business has been so hot lately. Just ask venture capitalists who collectively poured $350 million into food startups over the last year. (Compare that to 2008, when it was less than $50 million.) Plus, when you get right down to it: People need to eat. And, as it turns out, people are pretty busy. Uh, and lazy.
Of course, for those who remember the spectacular failure of online food companies like Webvan, Kozmo and HomeRuns, this whole “tech in your kitchen” and online ordering jibber-jabber probably sounds familiar — and not in a good way. But this time it’s different. Research from Cornell University recently found, for example, that over 40 percent of adults in the U.S. have ordered food online, and 10 percent of restaurant orders now originate online — and these numbers continue to head north. GrubHub and Seamless have built successful businesses on this very idea.
Both GrubHub and Seamless have been around for some time: The New York City-based Seamless was founded in 1999, while the Chicago-based GrubHub got its start in 2004. And for the most part, the two companies have catered to two different markets geographically. While both now have fairly expansive coverage, GrubHub has naturally developed a firm foothold in the Midwest, while Seamless focused its early attention on NYC, before moving into cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. From that perspective, a merger would make sense, allowing the new, consolidated entity to gain penetration into markets where they lacked a major presence.
Writ large, the companies, while having some fundamental differences, do seem to have a lot of synergies on paper — at least “nominally,” depending on who you ask — likely why they’ve increasingly become rivals over the years. Both are of fairly comparable size, as GrubHub has more than 18,000 restaurant partners across more than 500 cities, while Seamless has over 12,000 restaurants and serves nearly 5,000 businesses and more than 2 million users. As of February, Reuters reported that Seamless was on track to generate more than $100 million in revenue this year as it expands into new cities and focuses more aggressively on mobile.
The company reportedly generated $85 million in revenue last year, growing its consumer business by 60 percent year-over-year and “will soon be processing $1 billion worth of food orders a year,” Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky told Reuters at the time. For the majority of its history, the company focused primarily on New York, but launched a major expansion effort last year, bringing its service to 10 new cities. According to the report, Seamless saw its transaction volume quadruple in Los Angeles during 2012, with transactions tripling in San Francisco.
Another interesting point to note: GrubHub was reported to be considering an IPO last fall. The company denied the rumors at the time, and if this merger is true, then they’ve been given the proper perspective. Certainly, it would seem that this wouldn’t take a potential IPO off the table, instead, likely making an opening price that much higher.
The IPO rumors for GrubHub came at a time when the company was reportedly doing about $60 million in revenue (this was in 2012) — a little less than half that of Seamless. Furthermore, Crain’s reported in December that GrubHub’s revenue has been doubling every year and, as the company reported $30 million in revenue in 2011, that revenue estimate would make sense and put the company on the path to crossing $100 million well before the end of this year.
That is all to say that, although the terms of the potential deal are unclear, these are two sizable businesses that are growing relatively fast, so any potential valuation has got to be fairly high. After all: The two companies were fairly comparably capitalized and staffed, with GrubHub growing to over 250 employees and Seamless over 300, while GrubHub raised about $84 million from a mix of venture and growth equity firms (including Benchmark) and Seamless raised $51 million, $50 million of which came from private equity firm Spectrum Equity.
While both companies have made a couple of acquisitions, this would be the second big M&A deal for Seamless, as the company was acquired by food services giant, ARAMARK, in 2006. Five years later, Spectrum bought a minority stake in Seamless from ARAMARK, and about a year later, the food services company spun-off its remaining interest in Seamless to its shareholders. Free from its corporate ownership, Seamless proceeded to go out and buy MenuPages for $15 million, showing up GrubHub, which MenuPages had initially targeted as its acquirer. When GrubHub and MenuPages couldn’t agree to a deal, and it seems that GrubHub was instead in the process of buying Dotmenu/Allmenus, Seamless swooped in — according to BetaBeat.
So, as you can see, the companies have a long history of jostling. While GrubHub had been out acquiring restaurant partners fast and furiously, Seamless stagnated a bit under ARAMARK, but since becoming an independent company (again) and with a new board/investors, the company seems to have been compounding its growth. Together, that growth could be exponentially higher.
Finally, if this deal is in fact a go, it’s worth looking at this quote from GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney from back in 2011. In it, he shares his opinion on GrubHub’s top competitor, a little company called Seamless. He told BetaBeat:
I typically don’t talk this much about Seamless because we don’t view them as incredibly strong competition for what we’re doing … Seamless fundamentally is a corporate catering business. They were founded years and years and years ago to do just that. And they’re still best in the business for corporate. They recently got into the consumer and residential pick-up and delivery. And they do it well in New York, but they really have zero business anywhere else. We don’t even consider them competition anywhere other than Manhattan specifically.
So, there you go. A match potentially made in heaven, and one that’s sure to shake up online and mobile food ordering if it happens.
Find Seamless at home here and GrubHub here.
- May 17, 13
Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change.
FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the company’s North Asia president, noted that this month’s production capacity for the flagship device is twice that of April, and that surge will only continue into June.
Sounds pretty yawn-worthy, right? Normally I would spend too much time dwelling on the finer points of production capacity, but here’s a device that was launched to widespread praise by an underdog smartphone company some people have written off, and HTC has basically been getting screwed thanks to part shortages for the One’s Ultrapixel camera and a brief injunction due to the HDR microphone it uses. It’s like a perfect storm of headaches for a company that really, really doesn’t need it — one look at its Q1 financials and it’s clear that HTC needed this launch to go as smoothly as possible. It didn’t.
For what it’s worth, HTC hasn’t disclosed how many Ones it’s shipped since it launched earlier this year. Meanwhile, rival Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has become the Korean electronics giant’s fastest moving smartphone — Samsung shipped 6 million units in just over two weeks, and it hopes to cross the 10 million unit threshold by the end of this month. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that Google’s Hugo Barra showed off a version of the S4 at the company’s I/O developer conference that runs a version of Android that’s unfettered by the software bloat that many a reviewer took umbrage at. Company representatives were careful not to call it a Nexus — even though it seems to harbor many of the advantages inherent to the Nexus line like a clean Android build and access to frequent software updates.
As I noted towards the end of my HTC One review, the wireless industry isn’t a meritocracy — the well-executed device doesn’t always wind up saving the day. Hopefully now that some of these production woes have been ironed out we’ll see HTC live to fight another day, but that’s still far from a given.
- May 17, 13
Google made a relatively quiet announcement today regarding how it’s pushing the developer ecosystem forward around Google Now, its intelligent personal assistant for Android devices. The company has begun extending mark up tools for emails from select partners, which help highlight flight schedules, hotel bookings and various types of reservations, to make sure that Gmail can spot that information and use it to auto-generate helpful reminders in Google Now.
The extension of the platform tools available to Now partners was announced by Google’s Baris Gultekin, who was one of the creators of Google Now, which sprung out of a project he came up with in his so-called “20 percent time.” He spoke with Google’s Louis Gray on the Developer Live video stream which ran throughout the I/O conference this year.
Gultekin was talking about ways in which Google is working to improve the quality and relevancy of the recommendations and data it surfaces. The project sounds like it’s fairly limited for now, but asking for help from the input sources of data seems like a smart way to supplement Google’s own data detection algorithms that are working to flag interesting data for Now’s use on their own data center side. Doing all the heavy lifting themselves might be more impressive, but if reaching out to partners can help improve user experience, then there’s no reason not to extend that hand.
No word yet on whether Google will eventually make those mark up tools available for different types of data or open them up for public use, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where that happens, allowing developers and startups to provide the option of delivering all kinds of relevant information to users from their apps and services on Android. Then again, that has the potential to become overwhelming for users, so we might see a more metered, gradual approach.
- May 17, 13
Just about six months ago, Uber won a big battle with D.C. regulators to have its on-demand car service approved for operation within the nation’s capital. But new regulations from the D.C. Taxi Commission could severely hamper the company’s ability to offer low-cost services in the district.
Last December, the D.C. City Council voted to approve a legal framework that legitimized mobile e-hail applications there, as long as those applications followed certain rules. It defined a new class of for-hire vehicles (taxis and sedans) that could use mobile apps as a way to connect drivers and passengers.
The unanimous City Council vote followed a year of negotiations with local regulators to get its services approved for usage within the district. (The very public fight even included a sting operation by D.C. Taxi Commissioner Ron Linton in which he took an Uber and then handed over a variety of fines to the driver.) Still, after a whole lot of back-and-forth, it seemed like Uber was finally in the clear.
New regulations approved by the D.C. Taxi Commission last week could be a setback in the progress that Uber has made there, however. Among other things, those regulations would require mobile e-hail applications to integrate with the payment processor that is used within local taxicabs. That’s a non-starter for Uber, which currently has its own payment processor for in-app payments, and it could mean the end of UberTAXI in the city.
Another set of rules, which is being considered now, would ban cars that weighed less than 3,200 pounds. That would keep Uber from offering fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, which would affect its ability to offer its lower-cost UberX service there. With the possibility of UberTAXI and UberX being shut down, the company would only have its legacy black car and SUV businesses in the city.
Other regulations that Uber disagrees with would require Uber and other e-hail providers to hand over data related to rides that were booked using mobile applications. According to Uber, another rule could give the Taxi Commission the ability to choose whether or not apps are approved for usage in the city, and unilaterally keep Uber and other services from operating there.
For its part, Uber has tried to once again mobilize its users to reach out to D.C. officials and petition the local government. It’s asked users to email and tweet at Mayor Vincent C. Gray, and has put up a petition on Change.org. That petition has already received more than 2,500 signatures, with 5,000 needed.
- May 17, 13
Zynga has apparently told the makers of the dating website CupidWithFriends that they need to change the site’s name, because it allegedly infringes on Zynga’s trademarks.
CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7 (which also released the dating apps Flock and Wednesday Night). The site launched a couple of months ago, allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their friends.
Apartment 7 co-founder Jared Tame just forwarded me a copy of the letter from Zynga’s lawyers. I’ve pasted the full letter at the end of this post, but the gist is that users are likely to think that CupidWithFriends is associated in some way with Zynga (which acquired the developer of the With Friends mobile gaming franchise, a franchise that recently expanded with the launch of Running With Friends). So the social gaming company is demanding that CupidWithFriends change its name by May 24.
Tame said he has “no plans to change the name of the product,” adding,”At the end of the day, we’re busy trying to innovate in the dating space and dealing with Zynga would be a major distraction to us. I think they should be more focused on innovating rather than targeting month-old startups like us.”
I emailed Zynga for confirmation and details, but a spokesperson declined to comment. When I ran a search on the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website (direct links to specific filings don’t seem to be working for me), I did find a trademark filing for “With Friends” in relation to computer game software and entertainment services.
Tame isn’t the only one building an app named using a “with friends” name. There’s also Bang With Friends (which has other problems, as it was recently booted from the Apple App Store) — I asked the company whether it has received a similar letter from Zynga, but it declined to comment.
Here’s the full letter to CupidWithFriends:
Dear Sir or Madam:
We serve as intellectual property counsel to Zynga Inc. (“Zynga”). Among other things, Zynga publishes and owns intellectual property rights in the ‘WITH FRIENDS™ family of social games, which includes Words With Friends®, Chess With Friends®, Scramble With Friends®, Hanging With Friends™, Matching With Friends™, Gems With Friends™ and Games With Friends®, as well as other ‘WITH FRIENDS games in various stages of development (collectively the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks). Each of Zynga’s games using the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks is published and played by millions of users on various social networking portals, including Facebook, Android and iPhone.
Zynga has consistently used and promoted the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks together as a family and, as a result of Zynga’s extensive marketing efforts and commercial success, the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks is strongly identified by consumers with Zynga’s reputation for quality.
It has come to our attention that CupidWithFriends has developed and launched an application called “Cupid With Friends”. CupidWithFriends’ use of the name “Cupid With Friends” for an online application is confusingly similar to the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks owned by Zynga, and users are likely to believe, erroneously, that CupidWithFriends’ application is published, sponsored, endorsed by or associated with Zynga. CupidWithFriends’ use of “Cupid With Friends” also dilutes the distinctiveness of Zynga’s famous ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks.
Zynga has invested substantial time and resources in developing and promoting the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks, and it vigorously protects its rights in its marks, both collectively and individually. Zynga hereby demands that CupidWithFriends immediately cease use of the name “Cupid With Friends” in connection with its online application, and refrain from further exploitation of the goodwill that Zynga has developed in its ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks.
We anticipate that you will accede to this demand, and ask that CupidWithFriends confirm by Friday, May 24, 2013 that it has ceased use of the name “Cupid With Friends” in connection with its online application. Nothing contained in this letter constitutes an express or implied waiver of any rights, remedies, or defenses of Zynga, all of which are expressly reserved.
Very truly yours,
/s/Dennis L. Wilson
Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP - May 17, 13
Mozilla today bumped up Firefox Aurora, the pre-beta release channel of the popular browser, to version 23. With this, it is introducing a number of new tools for developers that will now slowly make their way into the stable release channel over the next few months. Sadly (or maybe not), this is also the first version of Firefox that does away with the good old <blink> element, a former staple of the horrid GeoCities websites of the 90s.
On the user-facing side of things, this Aurora release also includes support for Firefox’s Mixed Content Blocker, which should keep users a bit safer when sites contain both HTTP and HTTPs resources. For Mac users, it includes new animations for swipe navigations and — finally — support for OSX 10.7′s new scrollbar style.
The focus of this release is clearly on developers, though. Firefox Aurora now features a new network monitor that provides a standard waterfall timeline view of network activity on any given page. This data has always been available, but only through the Web Console, which wasn’t very easy to interpret.
Also new in this version is a Remote Style Editor, which allows developers to test their web apps over a remote protocol in real time. Mozilla says the Editor should be compatible with Firefox for Android 23, which is also coming to the Aurora channel soon, and the team is working on incorporating some aspects of this technology into the Firefox OS simulator.
Other new tools include a new preference menu dedicated to the developer tools, as well as a first implementation of SourceMap Support and changes to the Object Inspector.
You can find a full list of changes here.
- May 17, 13
Google’s Vikram Aggarwal, a software engineer working on the Android platform, revealed today that Gmail and Email, the native Android client that still ships on Android devices as well, now has a combined user base of more than 100 million across the Android install base. It’s an interesting stat, because although Gmail and Email only represent two of a multitude of email clients available on Android, it’s likely that those two represent the email clients of choice for a wide swath of Android users.
This means that a 100-million-strong active user base for those two combined is probably a pretty good reflection of the total active user base of Android itself, give or take a few million users. That’s a good figure to get, since we usually see more about total activations, which is a far less accurate measure of how many people are currently using devices. Activations occur whenever there is a full device reset, for instance, and people often upgrade to new phones, meaning their previous activation is no longer an active one.
Google has passed 900 million Android activations, the company revealed at the I/O keynote earlier this week. Put in context of a 100-million-strong active user base for the core email apps operating on the platform, however, we get a picture of Android users which is much more down to earth. Estimates of active Apple devices have to take into account the 500 million sold to date, with over 300 million now on iOS 6. Updated to that version or being sold with it installed indicates there’s a good chance a lot of those are still in active use.
Divining the total number of active users on either platform is one part magic and one part science, and the 100 million is likely shy of the actual total of active Android devices out there, but it’s still another piece of the puzzle.
- May 17, 13
Uh oh.
Less than ten days after Bang With Friends made its mobile debut on the iOS App Store, Apple has seemingly changed its mind and given it the boot.
As I noted in the post at the time, I was actually a bit surprised to see Apple green light this one to begin with. The guys behind the app tried to chaste things up a bit for Apple, changing the name for the iOS version of their app to the slightly more inconspicuous “BWF” (The Android app, meanwhile, is still just “Bang With Friends”. Google don’t give no damns.)
Alas, it seems that wasn’t enough for an extended stay. Apple has reportedly pulled the app without notice or explanation, with requests for the app in iTunes being met with the error below:
So what happened here? Did someone higher up at Apple get word of the app and decide to drop the ban hammer? Or could it be… something else? Note, for example, that Zynga just went after dating site CupidWithFriends for using their “With Friends” trademark, requesting that the name be changed. We’re looking into what happened.So is the Bang With Friends team, it would seem; a page put up by the team says they’re “working with Apple to get BWF back in the App Store shortly”.
- May 17, 13
This week, we hosted Accel Partners’ Rich Wong in the studio for our Ask A VC show.
Wong, who has invested in Angry Birds (Rovio), Dealer.com, Mobilespaces, Atlassian, MoPub, talked about where he sees the next wave of disruption in mobile technologies. He believes mobile security is a huge opportunity mobile, especially at the enterprise level.
We also chatted about whether entrepreneurs can build a great tech company outside of Silicon Valley. Wong has some interesting perspective on this considering that Atlassian’s headquarters are in Sydney, Australia and Rovio is based in Finland.
Tune in above to hear what Wong’s favorite Rovio game is and more.
