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When it comes to the strength of the tech industry, the sector can sometimes obsess about funding (who has raised what) or talent (who has gone where). This summer, Tech City UK and Stripe worked together to research other indicators to evaluate the underlying strength of tech and its ability to benefit other sectors of the economy.
The joint survey identified the startup stack, a set of around 200 cloud-based tools helping to transform every sector. Indeed, 89 percent of respondents said these tools had made starting and scaling a business easier, and 85 percent said they had made it cheaper. Even more striking was that 70 percent believe some startups wouldn’t exist in their form today without the stack of tools underpinning their business.
According to CB Insights, it used to cost $5 million to launch a startup; now it costs less than $5,000, thanks to open-source software and cloud-based tools (e.g. AWS). Also, it used to take startups twice as long to reach 100 million users and to expand internationally. The evolution of the startup stack has driven much of this change by providing the flexibility for startups to focus on refining and scaling the core product, rather than being sucked into dealing with peripheral, historically resource-intensive business functions.
Startups trust other startups with handling some of the most fundamental parts of their businesses.
Startups no longer want to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the basic building blocks of their business: less than 10 percent of startups surveyed built their own payment infrastructure; less than 12 percent invested in building their own CRM system; and less than 13 percent built their own servers. Respondents estimate that early-stage startups are typically using between 6-15 startup stack tools.
Interestingly, these popular startup tools are new startups themselves: More than half of the tools named in the survey were founded after 2006, and a quarter of them were only launched in the last five years, including recruitment platform Greenhouse and business dashboard provider Geckoboard.
Startups trust other startups with handling some of the most fundamental parts of their businesses, and today’s tools are nimble innovators themselves that share a similar mentality with other startups. This is consistent with what we see at Stripe, with the vast majority of startups using Stripe’s platform to power their payments and experiment with new business models. This is in stark contrast to how more established businesses could think about their payments stack, although they are attempting to catch up by adopting more of these tools.
The stack is not yet complete. According to the survey, startups could grow faster if there were more tools in legal & compliance and cybersecurity. Dealing with overwhelming paperwork and mundane admin tasks can be solved by tools doing things as simple as providing e-signatures. For example, DocuSign was the only legal & compliance tool people mentioned in the survey.
According to CB Insights, legal tech companies raised just $739 million in aggregate funding since 2011. Compare that to the recruitment and HR tech space, which is already much better funded, raising a total of $2.4 billion in funding and growing at a rate of 62 percent across 2015. We’ve seen more activity in this space recently with VC-backed companies like Onfido and Darktrace bringing sophisticated background checking and security technology to the internet economy.
The steam engine became the universal source of power in the industrial revolution, and in today’s digital revolution, the startup stack is emerging as the steam engine for our age. But, coming at a much lower cost and being available globally via the cloud, the democratization potential of this is much stronger. Industrial revolutions have tended to benefit the few at the expense of the many. With the startup stack, maybe this latest revolution will be a lot more distributive than previous ones.
Today, Microsoft Research is publicly releasing its effort to tackle just one of the problems plaguing natural language understanding — knowledge. The company believes that background knowledge is one of the key separators between the way humans and machines understand language.
Probase, a knowledge database Microsoft has been working on for quite some time, is serving as the base for a new public tool called Microsoft Concept Graph. Probase brings 5.4 million concepts to the table, beating other knowledge databases like Cyc, which offers 120,000 concepts.
Microsoft Research’s distribution of concepts in the Concept Graph.
The goal of all the connected information is to support text analysis by mixing interpretations with probabilities — this is very similar to the way humans use rapid process of elimination to accomplish the same task.
For example, if I were to say “the man ran from the stranger with the knife,” you would most likely interpret that to mean that the man is running from an armed stranger. But of course the sentence could also mean that you grabbed the knife from the stranger and are now running away. However, running implies fear and knives are associated with fear so the simplest, most direct, interpretation prevails — even though it may not be accurate.
Microsoft’s Concept Tagging Model builds on this to map text categorically with the same probabilistic idea. Continuing the example, the knife could also be referring to a utensil or a weapon, but in context, it is most likely to be a weapon and not a 17th century butter knife stolen from a museum.
Utensils and weapons are both relatively common categories, but museum artifacts is a bit long tail. By sheer size, Microsoft’s model considers both the highly probable and the exceedingly unlikely to account for attributes, sub-contexts and relationships.
The version released today can rank categorical relevance for any text entry. Microsoft’s basic-level conceptualization will be provided to preferentially rank efficient and appropriate categories alongside other measures like MI, PMI, PMIk and Typicality.
Future versions will be able to account for what they call “single instance conceptualization with context,” which would essentially mean that “stranger” and “knife” could be connected to denote meaning. Even farther out, the team hopes to solve “short text conceptualization,” even further broadening the scope of applications within search, advertising and AI.
Featured Image: Daniel Grizelj/Getty Images
In a rare move, Battery Ventures,Andreessen Horowitz and Ribbit Capital, investors in a number of Silicon Valley’s fintech startups, have backed the bank enabling many of their investments to lurch forward. Cross River Bank, the obscure financial institution that seemingly everyone in fintech has heard of but doesn’t really know, originated more than $2.4 billion in loans for companies like Affirm, Lending Club, and Upstart in 2015 alone.
Today’s $28 million round is set to strengthen CRB’s capital base and support new business lines for companies reliant on the bank for loan underwriting. This investment round closes amid ongoing concerns from regulators that the financial instruments of Silicon Valley could spread contagion to the fragile banking system.
The bank’s value proposition to marketplace lenders is access to payment rails and wire systems — the idea being that instead of jumping through financial hurdles, startups can instead focus on customer acquisition and growth. Cross River collects fees between 0.02 percent and 0.05 percent from loans across its entire portfolio. With the new capital, the bank wants to grow its asset base to between $260 and $300 million over the next 12-24 months.
Gilles Gade, CEO of Cross River, told me that his bank is considered tier-one capital — regulator speak for “deemed unlikely to become insolvent.” Gade added that Cross River keeps twice as much capital on hand as is required by regulators. “Regulators expect us to be a lot more than a pass through.”
Cross River also sees itself as having a responsibility to maintain an active role in its companies. The bank takes an on-book financial stake in every loan it originates. Amounting to roughly 10 percent, the stake is enough to show commitment without tipping the scales of risk, Gade explained.
Maintaining such high exposure in a single industry could be seen as brash, but Gade really does believe that fintech is here to stay. He explained that the economy is now dependent on fintech and, like it or not, people have come to expect it.
Scott Tobin, a partner at Battery Ventures, pointed out that the deal creates a lot of synergies. “They already hold the keys to our clientele,” said Tobin, who will be joining the Cross River Bank board of directors.
While this could be construed as a conflict of interest, Tobin believes it is in line with Battery’s history of investing in fintech.
One of the benefits of Cross River Bank being a highly regulated financial entity is that its investors had easy and transparent access to layers of financial diligence materials. Tobin said that Battery’s due diligence process began almost a year ago and Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz joined shortly after.
Featured Image: Ben Miners/Getty Images
After losing mobile gaming to iOS and Android, Facebook is making a big push into playing on PC with today’s developer launch of its Gameroom Windows desktop gaming platform. After months of name changes, beta tests and dev solicitation, Facebook opened up the beta build for all developers and officially named it Gameroom. The app is openly available for users to download on Windows 7 and up.
Gameroom let users play web, ported mobile and native Gameroom games in a dedicated PC app free from the distractions of the News Feed.
Gameroom will have to fight a steep uphill battle again Valve’s Steam platform, which has well over 125 million active users, with millions actually playing at any given moment. Facebook will need to convince developers that Gameroom will share its social network’s massive reach and is therefore worth their while. Then it will have to persuade gamers that a more social experience is worth diving into a new platform. If Facebook succeeds, there are plenty of potential benefits to owning a gaming destination.
It can earn a 30 percent revenue cut on payments in games. It can tie users deeper into the Facebook identity layer, making it harder for them to ditch the social network. It could drive ad sales as developers seek to promote their games in Facebook’s News Feed or potentially with sponsored placement in Gameroom if Facebook allows it. And it could generate Facebook Live content from players streaming their gameplay.
Back in the 2009 heyday of Facebook on desktop, it built a massive business on game payments thanks to developers like Zynga. That empire crumbled as users ditched casual web games for mobile, but now Facebook wants to win them back with a PC app.
Export games from Unity directly into Facebook Gameroom
Facebook announced the launch and name change from “Facebook Games Arcade” today at Unity’s game development platform conference. Unity 5.6 shipping next year will allow devs to export their games directly to Facebook Gameroom, as well as to the WebGL standard. Facebook’s director of global games platform, Leo Olebe, touted how Facebook will feature new games in the Gameroom to give developers a leg up.
Facebook first revealed it was working on Games Arcade back in May alongside a global open beta roll out, then revealed more details about its Unity partnership and how the desktop app would work in August. But now Gameroom is out in the open, with a plethora of shooters, strategy titles, puzzlers and casual games for people to try. The official consumer launch will come next.
Steam might be the favorite of hardcore existing gamers, but Facebook is betting there’s a huge untapped swath of the mainstream ready to play, too.
There’s a clear disconnect between what Facebook’s leadership team says about diversity and inclusion and how it plays out in the office. The most recent example is the presence of a series of posters that describe the average characteristics of software engineers, product designers and other tech positions.
The photo above, which was posted in Facebook’s Menlo Park office and subsequently shared via social media, implies that there’s no talent in places like Africa and South America. Then there’s the language used in the poster for content strategist, which describes people in that role as “meek and unassuming.” The one for UX researchers describes them as “dry, dour, humorless beasts.” As a colleague of mine noted, those are the only ones that have Africa as part of their native range.
It’s problematic that the posters emphasize certain geographical areas over others, and overlook the broad swaths of the globe where people — and presumably engineers, data scientists and content strategists — live.
I have obscured the name of the person who posted the photos on Facebook, but I will say that they work as a product manager at Facebook, according to the person’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages. The person, who posted these photos on Aug. 26, 2016, said they love their “HILARIOUS colleagues.” When someone asked where in the building those photos were located, the person replied, “behind my desk.” The photos were located in one of Facebook’s Menlo Park buildings.
It’s not clear if the intention was to show where Facebook employees hail from or where Facebook has its offices, but either way, the information is not correct. Facebook has offices and engineering positions in Latin America, for example, and also recruits talent from all over the world.
This begs the question of why were these posters up at Facebook. I reached out to Facebook, but the company declined to comment. These posters are reminiscent of the time when employees were crossing out “Black Lives Matter” and replacing it with “All Lives Matter.”
Facebook is currently 52 percent white in the U.S., compared to 55 percent white last year. That should’ve been good news, but it was bittersweet because there was no increase in the two most underrepresented groups at Facebook: black and Hispanic. Facebook’s employee population in the U.S. is still only 2 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic, 1 percent other and 3 percent two or more races. There was, however, an increase in Facebook’s Asian population, which went up from 36 percent to 38 percent this year. Globally, Facebook employs slightly fewer men; as of June 2016, Facebook is 67 percent male compared to 68 percent male last year.
There’s clearly still a lot of work to be done on both the diversity and the inclusion front at Facebook.
Several of my colleagues consider smartwatches to be a dying trend: they aren’t always good value for money and people’s interest seems to already be declining (there was never great interest shown beforehand anyway). This is only their opinion, but the concrete statistics do prove it.
Generally (and very simply) speaking, the development and commercialization process is basic: manufacturers create their devices (for example Samsung created their Samsung Gear), send the devices to their suppliers (for example FNAC) who then sell the goods to the end clients. The number of devices sent from manufacturers to suppliers has decreased by 51.6% in one year: it was 5.6 million in quarter 3 of 2016, today it’s only 2.7 million.
These statistics are presented by the International Data Corporation (IDC for those who are familiar with it), an American website dedicated to market research. As of yesterday, you can find these results online on IDC’s site which, we’ll point out, has a reputation as being a reliable source. The article explains that the market leader, Apple, has fallen from its pedestal: in one year, Apple’s market presence has fallen from 70.2% to 41.3% (but it’s still far ahead) and the number of devices sent to suppliers has also decreased considerably (from 3.9 million in 2015 to 1.1 million). With the new smartwatch, these new sales could well increase but that’s just a theory for now.
Smartwatches have many uses and this is one of its weaknesses as we will read below. To stay with the statistics, it’s important to note that the brand Garmin is the only brand to see a huge increase (+324%). The most obvious question is “why?” and the answer is simple: unlike other manufacturers, Garmin aims at a specific market because it has a theme of preference.
Garmin is interested in outdoor activities which we associate (perhaps too much) with GPS and sports/fitness. Are these themes the reason why people are turning to Garmin? There are probably other reasons, namely the brands (good) reputation, but this factor highlights the trend of specialized watches rather than multi-use watches.
One of IDC’s analysts explained that “it has also become evident that at present smartwatches are not for everyone”. The major problem with smartwatches is that they don’t provide anything more than what a smartphone can provide, technically speaking. Of course, you can wear it on your wrist and it can be practical in some situations but as far as I’m concerned (and I think that it’s the case for many people) I would rather lose 2 seconds by taking my smartphone out of my pocket than invest in a device that I wouldn’t use for anything else.
It has also become evident that at present smartwatches are not for everyone
In other terms, smartphones and smartwatches must have different features and functions to distinguish themselves from one another because, if not, manufacturers are heading for a fall. What direction will the market go? As explained above, the juiciest sector seems to be the health and fitness market. These devices are better known as ‘Fitness Trackers’ rather than smartwatches. They allow us to follow our sporting activities and can even analyze our heart rates among other things.
What do you think of smartwatches? Are you interested in them? Or are they useless gadgets that cost too much for all that they are?
Twitter’s former VP of product Michael Sippey seemed to be building a service that might challenge his former employer: his Talkshow app allowed anyone to exchange text messages in front of an audience; the idea was to get other people talking.
Now it’s gone quiet. In a letter to users sent earlier today, the company writes:
“Six months ago, we launched Talkshow in the App Store, with the goal of giving people an easy way to have simple, uncluttered conversations in public. Today we have some tough news: on Thursday December 1, we’re shutting down the Talkshow app and website. While we have enjoyed the conversations that have happened on Talkshow, and are grateful for the community that has formed around the product, we don’t see it getting big enough to have the impact we had hoped for. We’re sorry, and we’re going to try to handle this transition in the right way.”
The nascent company generated a good deal of buzz when it first launched. With Talkshow, each conversation could be followed via the app or through embeds on any site. Starting a show was as easy as sending a message ; users picked a co-host (or hosts) and a title for the show and their friends received a push notification letting them know it was go time.
Users could also share pics and GIFs in shows, post stickers and so forth.
Talkshow officially launched in April. That it wound up stagnating seems to suggest that users aren’t terribly interested in seeing 1:1 messaging turned into a broadcast medium.
Then again, Talkshow’s limited growth may have centered more on execution. App store optimization startup Sensor Tower estimates that Talkshow’s app was downloaded roughly 62,000 times over its short run, with roughly 70 percent of the downloads coming from the Apple’s U.S. App Store and the remaining 30 percent coming from Australia, Great Britain, and Canada.
Either way, here’s what happens now, says the company, which never publicly announced any kind of outside funding yet appears to have raised $2.3 million last year (so may have money leftover to try something new):
As of today we are removing Talkshow from the App Store. If you have the app installed you can continue using Talkshow for the next week; we want to give the community an opportunity to wind down their shows. However, we have turned off the ability for users to create new accounts or create new Talkshows.
On Tuesday November 8, we will end all currently active Talkshows. When that happens, Talkshow hosts will no longer be able to send messages to their shows, and audience members will no longer be able to submit Q&A messages. Effectively, every Talkshow will be in “read only” mode, in the app and on the web.
Also on Tuesday November 8, we will make export tools available for every show. On the the web view for each show, we will prominently feature a “Download” link, which will allow any user to download a zip archive of that show. That archive will include an HTML file, CSS and all the images that were sent to the show. We’re making these export links available publicly, because Talkshow was literally designed to be “texting in public.”
If you were a fan of a particular show, and want to keep it for posterity’s sake, you can go ahead and download a zip archive of that particular show.
On Thursday December 1 we will be turning off Talkshow. As of that day, the app will no longer function (even in “browse” mode), and requests to Talkshow profiles and show pages on the web will no longer work.
R.I.P. Talkshow. At least it lasted longer than Peach, another social app that had everyone talking at its launch . . . then sank, within four days, to the bottom of the iPhone downloads chart.
Roku’s rolling out an update to its TV streaming operating system that brings a pair of important updates to its entire line of streaming players and TVs.
Most notable for Roku OS 7.5 is the long-awaited addition of live TV pausing. So long as a Roku TV is connected to an antenna and a USB storage device with 16GB or more, users can pause live digital TV broadcasts to their heart’s content — or, rather, for up to 90 minutes.
The update also brings mobile private listening to all Roku TV models. Previously only available on limited Roku players, the update lets users stream audio on mobile devices, so they can listen to shows at ear-piecing volumes through the iOS or Android without bugging the people around them.
The point upgrade brings some other (slightly less exciting features) to the system, including the ability for friends to share photos on the set. The 7.5 roll out officially kicks off today, and Roku expects it to be fully completed by the time the holidays roll around. You can find the full rundown of features here.
Even if self-driving cars aren’t part of our daily lives yet, vehicles are becoming internet-connected at a rapid pace.
Gartner predicts that one-fifth of all autos on the road, and a great majority of new vehicles being produced worldwide, will have wireless network connectivity by 2020. Yet, few organizations have access to use the data generated by these vehicles today.
That’s where Otonomo, a startup based in Herzliya, Israel comes in.
The company’s systems gather driver and vehicle data from disparate automakers and original equipment manufacturers. It then normalizes the data, so different organizations can use it to learn more about drivers collectively, or reach them with new products and services.
Otonomo has raised $12 million in venture funding to scale its technology and business. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, joined by StageOne Ventures, Maniv Mobility and LocalGlobe.
Along with the venture funding, Otonomo announced that Steve Girksy, a former vice chairman of GM, and Mary Chan, a former general manager of OnStar, have joined its board of advisors. Andy Geisse, who previously ran AT&T Business Solutions, joined Otonomo’s board of directors, as well.
Bessemer Venture Partners’ Vice President Amit Karp said what Otonomo is doing today will help bring new products and services to automotive and adjacent industries like insurance, smart cities, transportation and travel, or finance.
Otonomo CEO and co-founder Ben Volkow illustrated many examples where data from vehicles could be useful now that developers and corporations can get their hands on it more easily.
A mayor’s office could study driver behavior at major city intersections to optimize signage or traffic lights for better safety. Companies like Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s could deliver a coupon to drivers who have been on the road for a long while already, and whose vehicle is approaching one of their stores. And insurance adjusters could attain data directly from a vehicle, rather than waiting for a driver to self-report it, in the event of an accident in order to process claims faster.
“If a company or developer wants to build a service for connected cars, today they will have to deal with all the original equipment manufacturers, attain the data, normalize it, and strike all kinds of commercial agreements with automakers. Otonomo, is a neutral third party they can go to instead,” Karp said.
He compared Otonomo to Stripe for payments online or Twilio for communications.
Otonomo intends to use its newly raised capital for hiring, product research and development, and to continue building relationships with critical auto makers and original equipment manufacturers, the CEO said.
One of the keys to making data from connected cars accessible to other businesses is making sure that it is disclosed only as local, state and national laws, and different business policies will allow.
“Inside our policy engine we have hundreds of rules configured. We work with lawyers and know all the different regulations and rules. If a car maker shares data with whoever, they know we check all the parameters, then blur, anonymize and otherwise make sure they can share the data without violating anyone’s privacy or rules,” Volkow said.
The CEO said automakers are eager to work with Otonomo because the company is helping them monetize data that they were shoring up, but Otonomo is not a competitor to their core business the way that other tech firms like Google or Apple may appear, given their initiatives to build self-driving cars and related systems.
Featured Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunchThe new series “The Down Round” is a six-episode look at what many are considering the burst of the Silicon Valley bubble. While Silicon Valley has boomed for most of the past decade, funding has become harder to come by and unicorns are having trouble proving their worth. Companies that have raised huge funds are folding. However, venture funds are richer than ever, but are just not investing. Why is this happening? Is it the Silicon Valley bubble really bursting? What will happen next?
The first episode examines the balance between fear and greed that investors are experiencing in the uncertain market. The second episode explores the process that startups go through to raise funding and whether or not this funding has dried up in Silicon Valley. The third episode shows the perils of the startup world and their effect on founders and investors. Episode four looks at the effect that the uncertain funding market has on the job market. Episode five examines one of the hottest topics in Silicon Valley: real estate. What are the effects of the booming real estate market on the dried-up tech market, and vice versa? The sixth episode examines the future implications of the softening market and how the entrepreneurial spirit and determination to build success out of failure defines Silicon Valley.
All six episodes will be released on Thursday, November 3 on TechCrunch.com. The series will also be available on our YouTube channel by November 6.
If you’re like me your inbox is a mess of hundreds of promotional emails from different sites across the web – many of which I’ve only actually shopped at once or twice. But once they have your email address it’s over – you can expect to receive a weekly (or daily!) email ad infinitum.
Companies that get your cell phone number are even worse because those are harder to figure out how to unsubscribe from. And what about merchants that get your credit card info and charge you each month even though they didn’t make it clear it was a reoccurring charge?
The moral of the story is that unless you proactively work to use one-time email addresses and debit cards when you shop online, you’re going to eventually have a problem on your hands. But doing this is hard, and typically requires too much effort and technical knowledge for the average consumer to do.
Enter SudoApp and SudoPay. The duo of apps created by Anonyome Labs allow users to create and delete temporary (or permanent) identities. Each of these identities come with a customizable name, email address and phone number.
All communication happens inside the app – each persona you create will have an inbox with emails and threaded SMS messages – just like you were checking them on your own phone.
The app also has a web browser with built in ad-blocking and private browsing in case you want to go the extra mile to maintain privacy.
And if you’re worried about credit card fraud the company’s second app, SudoPay, allows you to create one-time or multi-use prepaid debit card that you can use along with any of your identities. SudoPay lets you load these cards with Apple Pay, so your real credit card isn’t at all connected to the prepaid cards.
Steve Shillingford, founder and CEO of the company, explained that SudoApp is targeting two main types of customers. The first is what you’d expect – someone very interested in technology that cares about their privacy. These may have been people that had previously used disposable email addresses and phone numbers but were attracted to SudoApp because of how much easier it is to use then managing identities on your own.
The second type of user is a little more interesting. Shillingford described them as a “chief household officer” – essentially a mom or dad that has many different parts of their life they need to organize and keep separate. So these users create a different identity (all with their real name but new email and phone numbers) for the soccer team, work, school mailing list…etc.
As mentioned earlier disposable emails, phone numbers and prepaid cards aren’t new. But Sudo does a good job at bringing them all together two easy to use apps.
It’s also very affordable – users can create 9 identities for free, which includes unlimited calling and texting and 1 GB of email. The prepaid card services charges a dollar each time you reload a virtual card, depending on the amount of the reload.
So far the company has been entirely self-funded, but the founders expect to raise their first round of outside funding sometime in 2017.
Uber has announced that it will be teaming up with GM’s car-sharing company, Maven, allowing drivers to rent GM vehicles on a weekly basis in a 90-day pilot program to see how the arrangement works. This is separate from, but similar to, GM’s Express Drive program, wherein the carmaker makes vehicles available to Lyft drivers on an all-in short-term rental basis when they lack their own vehicle to qualify for use with Lyft.
The pilot project with Uber is debuting in San Francisco, and will operate only in that city for the time being. Maven expanded its own services (which primarily focus on providing Zipcar-like short-term rentals to members) to San Francisco residents earlier this month.
Per-week fees for use of the GM vehicles provided for use by Uber drivers is set at $179 for the pilot project, plus taxes and fees. Drivers also can use the cars for their own personal trips, in addition to the time they spend using them to ferry Uber passengers. This is in line with what Lyft drivers pay for GM cars via Express Drive, per GM VP of Maven and Urban Mobility Julia Steyn, according to Automotive News.
GM’s move isn’t surprising, given how much time and effort it’s investing in exploring alternatives to individual ownership in its future-focused mobility programs. It is interesting, however, in light of the closeness of the company’s relationship with Lyft before now, and rumors that circulated previously that GM may have suggested to Lyft it was interested in purchasing the smaller company, though Lyft has since denied that any formal acquisition talks took place.
Maven branching out into car sharing services that extend beyond the direct-to-consumer model is interesting, too — it suggests that the GM subsidiary could become far more than just a GM-vehicle exclusive Zipcar or car2go alternative. Business-to-business in addition to B2C offerings will make Maven a far more versatile tool in GM’s utility belt.
What have you done, Apple?
You took an entire visual lexicon used by millions of people every day, and changed it. You destroyed iconic images and needlessly tweaked perfectly good ones. Why? Why would you do this? I want my peach butt. I want my cartoon moon. I want my candy heart. I want my emoji back. But you’ll never give them to me.
I actually have to admit I was never a fan of the Apple emoji in the first place. To me they screamed tacky clip art, all color gradients and faux depth. I liked Google’s gumdrop faces, Microsoft’s bold lines, Samsung’s strong characterization.
But the fact is, most people used Apple’s because they were early to the game and the iPhone was the most popular single brand. Most of my friends have iPhones, but I use Android, so I switched emoji sets rather than guess at what others might be seeing. The threat of misinterpreting emoji is real!
So although I never liked the style, I made use of it, as you do. Like writing in a restrictive meter or shooting in monochrome, the limitation makes the process of expression interesting in itself. They grew on me, as I know they grew on countless others, and we developed shared visual vocabularies.
Emoji are interesting to me because they are a mobile-native language — deliberately visual, distinct and glanceable — that both embraces and subverts the intentions of its designers. The language of emoji, as insipid as it sometimes seems, is actually a mountain of context and very human metadata that makes it, like so much visual communication, richly expressive.
The foundation for all that is the images themselves. Redesigning the basis for this incredible and popular form of communication is an act of destructive cultural revisionism.
Okay, yeah, that’s putting it a little strongly, since it’s just a bunch of icons people use to chat with online, but it really does erase a huge amount of context and history, and the gains are slim to none. The changes Apple made to the emoji — I’m not talking about Unicode’s welcome and long overdue gender and skin color modifiers, by the way — are pointless at best and often damaging.
Dang. The ancient Apple emoji — which were never really meant to be seen bigger than 32 × 32 — are redrawn quite well in iOS 10.2! Good job! pic.twitter.com/X6WskExq1D
— Cabel Sasser (@cabel) October 31, 2016
What was the rationale behind, for example, changing the shading on the fruit? What about adjusting the portions in the curry? Changing the perspective on the wine glass? Why have some items gained gloss, while others lost it? Why invert the burrito? Why censor the peach? Why darken the fish cake?
There’s no reason for any of these things. It’s as if Apple told its designers, “go through every emoji and change it a bit, doesn’t matter how.”
Design without purpose isn’t really design. If the replacement isn’t better than the original, why are they replacing it? And if they don’t understand what made the originals valuable — the familiarity and shared symbolism of those exact images — doesn’t that make them poor caretakers of this cultural capital?
Apple won’t roll back these changes, of course. I know this is basically “blogger yells at cloud.” But it’s disappointing to me because I’ve genuinely enjoyed the emerging phenomenon of emoji use, and this move is, like so many by Apple lately, a tone-deaf and user-unfriendly one.
It would be nice to have an open messaging framework where we could choose how our emoji look on other devices, but I’m not holding my breath. But perhaps these new emoji will provide a blank slate on which to build another visual lexicon. I guess they’ll have to — it’s not like we have a choice.
The man versus machine dichotomy has been a staple of pop culture for decades. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner to Terminator to The Matrix and beyond, film makers have envisioned what the world would look like if artificial intelligence took over.
However, a new mindset is taking shape — the era of AI-human hybrid intelligence. This combination of a human brain and a computerintelligence is known as a centaur. The centaur model sparked the growth of freestyle chess, a context in which Garry Kasparov concluded that “weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkable, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”
Kasparov’s statement regarding the centaur model is no longer relegated to the world of chess. As AI innovation continues to grow, we should carefully review the centaur model in terms of the workplace and consider how combinedhuman and computerintelligencewillredefinejobs.
In 1800, farming accounted for nearly 75 percent of the U.S. labor force. However, the Industrial Revolution introduced a number of inventions that led many to believe there would be massive unemployment rates throughout the country.
The applications for the centaur model in the workplace are potentially endless.
The Industrial Revolution resulted in a 25 percent decrease in farming labor by 1890 — but we didn’t see the unemployment that the general public feared.
Instead, jobs moved to factories and eventually white-collar jobs like stockbrokers and business consultants emerged to further stabilize the workforce. Now, as we enter the Intelligence Revolution, it’s important to realize that technology won’t create historic unemployment rates.
Like in the 1800s, technology will result in the decline in certain types of jobs, but new positions that we haven’t even envisioned will give people an opportunity to fill in the gaps that machines can’t — seeing the big picture, thinking creatively and connecting seemingly disconnected ideas.
Thinking of technology as a means of reshaping the workplace rather than a means of replacing any and every job, you can see where the centaur model can redefine employment.
Being a centaur in tomorrow’s workplace means combining your own emotional intelligence with the analytical power of AI-enabled technology. Google’s Deep Dream Generator is a good example of how this will work.
The Deep Dream Generator turns vision algorithms inward to display what neural networks see when analyzing an image. Now, Deep Dream is being used to create intricate artwork — but it can’t create images from nothing. The Deep Dream Generator relies on human input, a seed from which it can create art.
Being a centaur in the workplace means taking advantage of the vast analytical capabilities of AI-enabled technology and adding human thinking. The applications for the centaur model in the workplace are potentially endless, but here are a few example fields that are well-suited for the combination of deep analysis and human creativity:
Film and television: There are enough test cases for us to truly understand what a well-framed scene looks like. Teaching a machine how to essentially direct means filmmakers can set up scenes in VR and focus more on storytelling and creative connections than the minute details of production.
It’s easy for a conversation about AI to devolve into a philosophical discussion about consciousness, because that’s what we bring to the table — a sense of consciousness and intuition that machines don’t possess.
But there’s no way around it; AI is going to redefine the workplace. However, machines are terrible risk takers and have no capacity to make leaps of faith. Rather than thinking about whether or not machines will rule the world, let’s think about how we can become workplace centaurs that creatively redefine the jobs of tomorrow.
Featured Image: YuLi4ka/iStock/Getty Images
Score one for the consumer against the indefatigable force of growth hacking. Ever, the photo storage app that we called out in September for spamming SMS contact lists (it rebranded from Everalbum shortly after), has found its way back into Apple’s App Store after getting temporarily banned for its practices.
Ever has had a lot of negative feedback — and even a couple of lawsuits — over how it leads you into sharing your contacts with it, and then subsequently messaging them with its marketing. Despite that — or rather, largely due to that — the app has been on a popularity tear. In the last month, it has consistently ranked No. 1 or within the top 10 among all Productivity apps in both the Android and iOS U.S. app stores, according to App Annie figures.
In Apple’s iTunes App store, however, there’s been a blip: it disappeared, along with its billing function, used by paying “Plus” users ($9.99/month) or those who want to purchase physical photo books (which start at $19.99). From what we understand, this was squarely down to how it misled users into providing access to their contacts list and then spamming them to use the app.
According to a number of consumer complaints, Ever (then Everalbum) had duped them into spamming their friends with invites to try the service. The app’s user interface used a variety of techniques to get users to agree to this invite spam. This included a tricky button that heavily emphasized the option to “get free storage,” which then prompted you to let the app access your contacts). The following screen would show all your contacts checked by default, while the option to “Deselect All” was grayed out to make it less obvious.
But it’s unclear whether users were just confused about what they were agreeing to, or if Ever had actually used different, and less transparent, onboarding flows at other times.
The end result, however, was that many of Ever’s users felt they had been tricked into sending out SMS spam.
In addition, Ever also sent out a number of different and misleading SMS text messages that implied your friend had given you access to view photos in their album, or threatened a link would expire if you didn’t click it soon. But users hadn’t necessarily shared albums — they were just navigating their way through the set-up process.
Apple removed the app from its iTunes App Store for its bad behavior — specifically SMS spam and for being misleading. It was only allowed back in when the “invite via text” feature was removed. Google, however, never took any action, despite its recent claims of clamping down on apps that try to manipulate their rankings.
In the new version of Ever, now back on the App Store, the app no longer prompts you to sign up your friends, and it has a much clearer interface for its in-app upgrades:
Now, the options for starting a free trial are clearly labeled, and the trial only begins after you enter your TouchID and confirm your commitment to the subscription terms ($11.99/mo after the trial period.)
When testing, however, we found a new problem: after choosing to upgrade, but then cancelling before you continued to the trial, the TouchID prompt kept popping up. We had to hit “Cancel” on its repeated prompts to get it to go away for good. This could be a bug with the new app, or a new means of confusing the user — it’s unclear. (The new app does appear buggy, though — the album sharing button wasn’t working during tests, for instance.)
However, when sharing photos (or presumably, an album), you have to explicitly type in a contact’s name or select from your “recents.” The app doesn’t indicate it’s sending a text on your behalf, but at least only the recipient — and not your entire address book — is being bothered. The text will point your friend both to a mobile web version of the app and to the App Store to download Ever via two included links.
While Ever may have cleaned up its act, it’s clear that its growth hacking techniques gave it an advantage, given its continued high ranking. That, sadly, could still encourage other nefarious app developers to use similar techniques in the future.
Unfortunately, the courts have not been on consumers’ side, either. Previous lawsuits related to SMS marketing citing the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), which specifies consent requirements for marketing, have been dismissed. These include cases brought against WhisperText (Whisper), Shopkick, Life360, Lyft and others, over the years. The suits against Ever are still pending.
The first whole human genome sequencing cost a whopping $2.7 billion. That didn’t bode well for making any breakthroughs on genetic disorders. Luckily, the cost has dropped dramatically since then, leading to a new breed of consumer genetics startups taking a deeper dive into all the double helix’s that make up you.
Genos is one of those startups using a next-generation sequencing process to both give you a good idea of your heredity on a deeper level and give researchers a crowdsourced genetic map to help with disease discovery.
The startup says it will sequence your whole genome in the near future, but is starting by sequencing your exome — or all the genes that translate their information into proteins in a genome. The exome is especially important in discovering diseases caused by rare genetic variants.
So instead of giving you information in SNPs (or “snips”), you get a voluminous amount, adding richer detail to your genetic makeup.
23andMe recently halted this type of next-gen sequencing and founder Anne Wojcicki called it “the hot, shiny object” of the industry at the WSJD Live conference last week. “But what you’re going to do with all that information is extremely complicated,” she said, adding that her company doesn’t want there to be any ambiguity in the results.
Next-gen sequencing could tell you there’s a very slim chance you’ll get a certain form of breast cancer, for instance. But, as Wojcicki pointed out, it’s not clear what you might need to do about that information — if anything.
However, there are plenty of others working on ways to offer up deeper data, should you want it. Like Genos, Color Genomics, Helix and Veritas are all betting on the newer and more liberal sequencing techniques to fish out information and give us a better understanding of our chances for disease.
Each of these newer genetics startups has a different approach to gathering and implementing the data. Genos is creating a map by encouraging individuals to aid the research process. 23andMe and other genetics startups do this to some extent by asking participants to voluntarily take a quiz or opt-in to a certain study. But, instead of asking people to sign a blanket consent form, Genos plans to incentivize people by paying for their information each time.
Will the economics work? That part is unclear. How much Genos will pay is up for debate at the moment, though the company says it will be revealing how much participants could expect to make closer to its official launch a few months from now — it’s also worth noting that plenty of genetics companies are currently getting voluntary information for free.
Other genomics startups have raised more and are further along in deploying their products, but Genos’ approach to gathering data by paying for it seems an interesting one, and the company has a good team behind it. We’ll just have to see how it goes.
Featured Image: MIKI Yoshihito/Flickr UNDER A CC BY 2.0 LICENSE
While Jack Dorsey’s other company Twitter might be struggling, Square continues on a roll that’s keeping Wall Street happy.
There’s going to, as always, be a big question mark for Square because of Dorsey’s tenure at Twitter — which is hardly going well. While the company’s latest quarter showed a flash of optimism, the company’s efforts to close a sale with Salesforce and other potential bidders fell through for a number of reasons (trolls included). There are questions of Dorsey’s ability to navigate Twitter’s complex problems, and that could easily extend to Square.
Still, things at Square seem to be going well. The company reported another solid performance in the third quarter, beating Wall Street’s expectations. It reported revenue of $439 million and a loss of 9 cents per share, compared to estimates of a loss of 11 cents per share on revenue of $431 million. Shares were up as much as 6% when the report came out, and are up around 4% right now.
A lot of the other key metrics for Square continue to rise. Gross payment volume — a measure of how much money is flowing through the company — was up 39% year-over-year in the third quarter to $13.2 billion. The company also said it processed more than 35,000 business loans for a total of $208 million, which was up around 70% from the third quarter last year. Square also said it had margins of around 7%.
The company’s hardware revenue also hit $8 million this quarter, and Square said “sales of our contactless and chip reader remain strong.” As a lot of standards shift to chip-based EMV cards — and potentially Apple Pay — Square is going to need to keep that hardware rolling out to keep up with other point-of-sales systems. (Though, the transition to chip-based card readers in the U.S. isn’t going spectacularly well at the moment.)
Last quarter, Square got a much-needed bump when it reported better-than-expected results. In particular, the amount of funding Square Capital extended more than doubled year-over-year in the second quarter. That’s going to be increasingly important for Square, as it would seem that with the oomph the company is throwing behind it Square Capital could evolve into a tentpole service for the company.
That’s not without challenges, however, as in recent months — especially following the Lending Club CEO exiting fiasco — institutional investors have become more wary of alternative investments. If it becomes more difficult to gather capital to extend as loans, that means Square will have to dip into its own pool and take a big risk on its potential clients. That kind of capital is important to continue growing quickly, and Square needs to build additional services beyond the company’s point-of-sale system.
In the past year, Square is down around 15%. It has had a rocky path for the past twelve months, and while its last quarter showed some positive signs, it’s going to have to keep doing that to convince Wall Street to leave it — and potentially Dorsey — alone.
With the upswing, Square once again pushed up its guidance for the fourth quarter and the full year. The company expects $438 million to $443 million in revenue for the fourth quarter, which fell around where Wall Street was expecting.
Featured Image: TechCrunch / Matthew Lynley
Roli wouldn’t say much before our demo. Just that the company was showing off something new, and that we would probably want to bring a camera. So when we arrived, expecting the latest take on the company’s flexible Seaboard instrument, we weren’t quite sure what the make of the thing.
It’s a small, wireless square that has little in common with the London-based startup’s prior output. Its face is made up by a 5 x 5 grid of light up squares that respond to touch. A few minutes into the presentation, I found myself asking how, precisely the device was different than a Kaoss Pad, Korg’s popular effects processing MIDI interface.
“It’s a instrument in and of itself,” explained the rep demoing the device. And indeed, like the Seaboard, the Blocks system is as much about music creation as it is control. It’s an attempt by the company to offer up a device that lowers the barrier of entry significantly from its other offerings, both in terms of price and ease of use. Roli is calling the system its “first truly mass market consumer device.”
Here’s a quote from Grimes about the system. “Roli Blocks will democratize music production. It’s so intuitive and versatile. I’m always on the go, and Blocks is the most powerful mobile production tool I’ve ever used.”
So, she’s a fan. The RZA was also kind enough to give us a quote about the system as well, “If I ever have writer’s block in the studio, I reach for Blocks. It brings whole new levels of expression to my music.”
The price point is certainly right. The base Lightpad runs $179. Players create music through a series of swipes and pushes on a semi-malleable surface made from the same material as the Seaboard’s bendable surface. The parameters of the 25-square surface is determined on the company’s Noise app, including genres, instruments and scales – making it impossible for the player to hit a “wrong note.”
The company will also be making artist sound packs available from the above musicians and more, including electronic musician Steve Aoki. Here’s a quote from him, “I’ve been a fan of Roli for years and so I was honored to create signature Aoki sounds for the new highly expressive Block system.”
Roli will also, naturally, be building a social network of sorts around the app, so users can share their creations. And the Noise app will be usable even without the hardware. Additional Live and Loop blocks will be available as well for $79, snapping onto the base Lightpad to create a full system.
I played around with Blocks a bit during the demo and can confirm that it’s a fun little system with an intuitive interface that require a lot less in the way of knowledge than Korg’s offering. I could easily see losing a few rainy afternoons to music creation on the thing – and it will certainly be interesting to see what actual professional musicians (of which I am certainly not one) are able to do when they get their hands on it.
The rest of us will be able to try to system out today at a select number of Apple stores.
“401k? Stock options? Freelancers get none of this. We want to make it more like working for a startup to freelance for Gigster,” says founder and CEO Roger Dickey. His startup Gigster turns clients’ ideas into full-fledged apps by coordinating freelance product managers, engineers and designers. Today it’s launching an innovative way to retain its best contractors and align incentives so they work harder for their clients.
Gigster is launching the Gigster Fund, comprised of $700,000 raised from Bloomberg, Felicis and China’s CSC as LPs, plus 1 percent of Gigster’s own equity. Each month it will invest $50,000 cash in one of Gigster’s top clients in exchange for 1 percent of that company at a $5 million valuation. Gigster will also provide them with advice, connections, fundraising help, priority access to its top talent and the option to hire their freelancer squad to come in-house.
Dickey touts that Gigster Fund’s arrangement charges startups 3X less equity per dollar than Y Combinator and 2.5X less than 500 Startups, though without a bootcamp program. Some of the portfolio companies so far include a Stanford-backed medical device company, a Techstars-funded startup called AdHawk staffed by ex-Googlers, a developer tool created by the founder of a public company and a dating app called Ishqr for Muslims.
But what’s special is that Gigster isn’t keeping all the potential carry from the fund. The first $700,000 in returns pays back the investors. But after that, investors and Gigster split the surplus carry, with Gigster giving its share to its freelancers.
Each month, a share of Gigster’s future proceeds from the Gigster Fund is distributed equally among all Gigster freelancers active that month. So if the fund runs for a year, eventually it earns Gigster a carry of $12 million (beyond what the investors get), and therefore allocates $1 million in proceeds each month; then, if 100 freelancers were active, they’d each receive $10,000 for that month.
Essentially, Gigster’s freelancers could possibly receive what Dickey calls “A little bit of a retirement benefit” if they help their clients succeed and stay active with Gigster for a while. “Every successful company compensates their employees via equity,” Dickey explains. The SEC won’t let Gigster give freelancers equity in itself directly, so “the best way to replicate that is to give them equity in the clients they’re working with.”
This all, of course, depends on Gigster and its clients making it big. Gigster’s on the right path, having launched in July 2015 to let bigger companies and entrepreneurs alike outsource the entire app development process rather than having to manage individual freelancers themselves. It saw $1 million in sales its first two weeks, and Gigster raised a $10 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz just four months later. Now it’s seen enterprise sales grow 9X quarter over quarter while signing clients like MasterCard, IBM and PepsiCo.
Gigster co-founders (from left): Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan
That rapid growth can also cause a bit of chaos. I’ve heard stories of Gigster vastly underestimating the cost of projects, and clients getting pissed when they have to up their budgets. Clients also have to go back and forth with their Gigsters to continue maintaining and updating their apps. If those processes prove too bumpy, it could discourage future Gigster customers.
But demand is still through the roof as software eats the world and every company becomes a tech company. Businesses who need apps but don’t know how to develop them are turning to Gigster for its well-vetted talent and low-hassle solutions.
Built with Gigster
Beyond the potential benefits for clients, freelancers and Gigster, the fund could also spark conversations about what other companies could do to support their contract workers. “A lot of startups are afraid of doing this because they’re afraid of getting ‘paid for work’ classification issues. It does make startups a lot more weary of doing anything that could approach employee status,” says Dickey.
Many startups in the on-demand gig economy space like Uber are either fighting or actively trying to avoid lawsuits that might force them to treat “1099” independent contractors as full-time employees entitled to expensive benefits. Since Gigster’s freelancers are white-collar knowledge workers, Dickey thinks it can get away with providing this perk. Despite that risk, Dickey says, “We made the call that we wanted to do what we thought was right.”
If the scheme works, Gigster could marry the best of freelancing’s independence and flexibility with the best of full-time employment’s potential upside through equity compensation. That might convince the best PMs, coders and pixel pushers to cast off the shackles of the 9 to 5 and gig with Gigster. Then it could dangle that talent in front of clients who wouldn’t be able to hire so well on their own.
