April 2015 ~ Tech Support

Thursday, 16 April 2015

Biddulph And Coates Launch Thington, A New Super-Angel-Backed IoT Startup

Smart Lock Pioneer UniKey Raises $10m And Looks Outside The Home For GrowthEvery day there are more appliances and devices coming out that have network components. For instance, by 2017, “all Samsung televisions will be IoT devices, and in five years, all Samsung hardware will be IoT devices”. That’s a quote from BJ Yoon at Samsung at CES this year. Samsung is betting on openness as a key to IoT. Why? Because almost every hardware manufacturer is looking for integrations because none of them create enough smart objects to ‘own’ the ecosystem, and much of the value from them comes from them working together.
Within five years most devices will have a networked component of some kind, and in ten years they probably all will. The components to embed in the devices are cheap and becoming established. The network connectivity is pervasive, and our phones now have good screens to interact with them.
The problem is that at the moment, although the hardware is really good, the software sucks – particularly the service layer stuff.
Now, a San Francisco-based company, founded by Dopplr founder Matt Biddulph and ex-Yahoo Brickhouse Head of Product Tom Coates is building out a new consumer-facing product that combines Smart Home technology with their expertise in location, social networks and the web of data.
They previously formed Product Club as a way to find a product to build, while doing some consulting along the way. Now they are launching their new startup: Thington.
To do it they have raised Angel funding from some pretty well known tech people and investors, including Ray Ozzie, Stewart Butterfield, Eric Wahlforss, Joi Ito, Marko Ahtisaari, Saul Klein, Loic Le Meur, Matt Rolandson and Samantha Tripodi. Terms were undisclosed.
“We’re making a better user interface and service layer that is respectful to manufacturers and open and we’re trying to be a couple of generations beyond what other people are doing,” says Coates.
“Think of it this way: Zipcar at the hardware level is just the ability to lock and unlock cars. But Zipcar as a service is so much more than that because it’s about what you can do with that hardware, what service you can create around it. Our sense is that everyone’s been building remote controls, and we think we can go much much further in building that service layer around the connected objects in people’s lives.”
“We’re bringing together a lot of our interests here – connected devices, the web of data, location and more.”
Based on their previous history and ability to launch great products, this is going to be a team to watch.

By: Unknown On 07:13

Dormi Turns Android Smartphones Or Tablets Into A Video Baby Monitor

Biddulph And Coates Launch Thington, A New Super-Angel-Backed IoT StartupA number of companies today leverage the ubiquity of smartphones in order to offer parents “connected” baby monitoring systems that can be accessed from anywhere. Often, as with devices like NapTime or Evoz, these include a monitor and camera of some sort and an accompanying mobile app. But a startup called Dormi has historically offered a different take – instead of selling new hardware, the company allows you to re-use old Android smartphones or tablets in order to remotely monitor your baby’s room.
Now its system has received a long-anticipated update, with the much-requested addition of video monitoring.
Previously, Dormi’s system was audio-only. Using an app that worked over Wi-Fi or cellular connections or even WiFi Direct/WiFi Hotspot, you could listen in on baby while out of the room, much like traditional baby monitoring systems allow for today. You could also press a button to speak into the app which would transmit the sound of your voice to the other device in the child’s room.
The devices you use with Dormi could be an extra Android phone or tablet you had lying around the house. Or you could use your current Android device as the primary one, if you chose.
In addition to the simplicity of the system, the app has been priced compellingly – perhaps even too cheaply considering its hardware-based competition sold through baby superstores and other retailers is often exorbitantly priced.
While technically a subscription-based app, Dormi offers lifetime usage for just $7.00. It’s sort of a no-brainer for those looking for simple and affordable alternative to traditional baby monitoring systems, or just wants a solution that’s easier to carry around when traveling, for example.
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That price point remains in effect today, despite the new feature set. You can also pay $1 per month for Dormi or $5 per year. The company is, however, considering the introduction of in-app purchases later on when it enables high-quality video – support for which is already built into the app but not yet available.
With the just released update, the app now supports real-time video streaming with hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding (even on old 2.3 Gingerbread devices). Explains co-founder Pavel Kryl of Sleekbit, the Czech Republic-based company that makes Dormi, extending support to older devices took a lot of work on their part, including reverse engineering low-level Android libraries in order to interface with them for hardware-accelerated video encoding. The implementation promises minimal CPU usage and battery usage.
Dormi’s app has also been visually updated to match up with Android’s new “material design” philosophy, the company says, which includes animated transitions to and from full-screen video, for example. There have also been improvement’s to Dormi’s intelligent noise level monitoring, including a new manual sensitivity control, which should address some users’ earlier complaints about the app’s sensitivity, which increased on hard, flat surfaces.
Another more major addition is support for Chrome OS, which means Dormi’s system can now be accessed from a Chromebook computer. It will also soon become available by way of the Chrome browser on all platforms, too, the company says.
And there have been a number of other ‘under the hood’ updates that improve battery usage, reliability and reduce latency.
As an Android-only application, Dormi is doing well enough with around 120,000 active users following 250,000 downloads, and steadily rising sales. However, because of its rather low pricing, the company is only generating $6,000 per month we’re told. That’s concerning because for Dormi to stick around, it will need to figure out how to scale that revenue. (Though Sleekbit does have a number of other apps on the market, which does help.)
One thing that may help increase Dormi’s sales is that the app just a few weeks ago has managed to score the second position in Google Play when users search for “baby monitor.” That could give Dormi increased visibility, and ultimately more downloads and paying customers.
Dormi is a free download on Google Play.

By: Unknown On 06:58

Home Automation System Seed Labs Launches Silvair Control To Make Your Lightbulbs Smart

Dormi Turns Android Smartphones Or Tablets Into A Video Baby MonitorAs our homes becoming increasingly wired (or unwired) it’s important for our teakettles to talk to our fridges and, potentially, for both to gang up on our vacuums. But how? They can now use something called the Silvair Control from Seed Labs.
We last met up with Seed Labs last November when they showed me a working system to control electronics in the home using an open and very usable chip interface. That interface is now commercially ready and we can expect to see the product inside of appliances before too long. The Control, however, is something else entirely. Shaped like the Nest thermostat, the Control is actually a removable button/dial that you can carry from room to room to control lighting and appliances.
“Silvair Control is the world’s first fully configurable, gesture-driven, wireless controller that lets customers manage their everyday appliances whether that be lamps, shades, and garage doors or other household and commercial products,” said co-founder Rafal Han. His cofounder, Szymon Slupik, is an expert in “connected technology.”
The Bluetooth-powered device can stick to your wall or you can put it on any surface. You can tap it, slide it, and spin it to activate various parts of your home automation system and you can dock it when not in use. They’ve raised $3.3 million to build out the product and they are already placing their specialized chips in OEM products around the world including Freemont, CA-based Soraa who is using the technology in their connected LED lamps.
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“We’ve built the unique architecture where devices form a native, flexible system and are capable of talking directly to each other,” said Han. “The devices can be easily configured with just a smartphone app. The separation of the control plane from the power plane makes a foundation for fully configurable ecosystem.”
When I saw the product a few months ago I was impressed by the fire-and-forget nature of the connection software. Each object connects to the controller app automatically with no pairing, a feature that will impress folks who have tried to connect to Bluetooth light bulbs in the past

By: Unknown On 06:43

Wikipedia’s New iOS App Sees An Improved Design, Adds Social Features With Shareable “Fact Cards”

Home Automation System Seed Labs Launches Silvair Control To Make Your Lightbulbs SmartThe Wikimedia Foundation has been steadily rolling out updates to the Wikipedia mobile experience in recent months, and today that trend continues as the organization rolls out a brand-new iOS app. This release is focused on improvements to the visual design of Wikipedia’s app, better search, and includes the addition of social features that allow you to share facts and images with friends on social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and elsewhere.
While Wikipedia today sees nearly half a billion monthly visitors accessing its online encyclopedia’s over 34 million articles that span 288 languages, its deep integration into the iOS operating system is both a blessing and a curse. While it’s great to be able to quickly access Wikipedia content by way of Spotlight search and Siri, that also means that users have less reason to visit the native app directly when there’s something they need to research. And with an ever-growing number of mobile applications available for download from the App Store, it can be difficult to make the case for something as utilitarian as Wikipedia to remain on your phone’s homescreen…or second screen…or third.
To some extent, that’s why the Wikimedia Foundation has been rolling out these updates to its mobile application, with the goal of making its native version more attractive, easier to use, and generally more engaging. The idea is to make the app something that’s compelling enough to pop into from time to time, even if you’re not actively searching for a topic.
Things like the app’s “Random” feature, which suggests an interesting article for reading, and the app’s “Nearby” option, which includes articles that suggest content related to your current location, have for some time offered different ways to interact with Wikipedia, for example.
With today’s update, the app has been improved to make accessing its content easier and quicker than before, with consideration to mobile users’ limited time and smaller screens. The app now sports a cleaner design with a short descriptor of the topic right at the top of the screen that makes it possible to get a simple answer within seconds. Many articles are now also preceded by a large image, giving the app more visual interest.
Meanwhile, the app’s search functionality has been improved with a higher contrast search bar and support for showing your recent searches.
Once immersed in the app, Wikipedia has made changes subtly designed to keep you there – specifically, to keep you exploring topics and reading more. To that end, each article will now have a section at the bottom that encourages this behavior, connecting you to other information on the topic at hand. And an enhanced image viewer helps visual learners swipe through all the article’s images more easily.

The app is also now going social with a feature that lets you create images overlaid with text from an article that can be shared with anyone via social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, email or text, and more. Previously released on Android, this clever addition lets you share a fact with your friends. It’s an attempt at making Wikipedia something that’s more fun and social – a toy of sorts, not just a tool.

It’s actually a handy tool to use when having those sorts of arguments that can be won by way of Wikipedia searches. Instead of just texting or posting a link to the article and citing the factoid that proves your point, you can build these “fact cards” using the main image from the article and your highlighted text. Now, not only have you won the point, you’ve won with style, it seems.
The updated app is rolling out now on iTunes.

By: Unknown On 06:28

On-Demand Food Delivery Service Sprig Has Raised $45 Million

Wikipedia’s New iOS App Sees An Improved Design, Adds Social Features With Shareable “Fact Cards”Sprig, a food delivery service that specializes in healthy on-demand meals in San Francisco, has raised $45 million in a funding round led by Social+Capital and Greylock Partners.
The company plans to expand to the remainder of the Bay Area and Chicago in the coming months, and then more cities by the end of 2015. Sprig’s menu is limited, but is supposed to arrive no later than 20 minutes after someone places an order, and usually costs around $10. Sprig prepares all the food in its own kitchen run by several high-profile chefs.
Many on-demand services, such as Sprig, have seen intense interest in recent months from the venture capital community. Shyp is raising $50 million at a valuation greater than $250 million. Postmates is expected to raise a large funding round. And Instacart, an app that lets users order groceries and delivers them, raised $210 million in December.
For the most part, on-demand delivery is still a new industry where many startups are experimenting with business models. So it would make sense for venture capitalists to make multiple bets until the most successful model emerges. Even Uber is experimenting with on-demand food delivery.
“It wasn’t possible to do what Sprig was doing 5 to 10 years ago,” Sprig CEO Gagan Biyani said. “If you look at companies like Dominoes, what they were doing was a logistical nightmare. Today we can orchestrate that much more beautifully with the technology and data science we use to route drivers more efficiently.”
But the company is not the only one focusing on food delivering that’s attracting interest. SpoonRocket last year also raised $10 million, and DoorDash reportedly raised $35 million earlier this year.
To its credit, Sprig began expanding its delivery service to the southern San Francisco Bay Area earlier this year.
“[Expanding to new cities is] how a lot of on-demand services show successful growth,” Biyani said.
“With Sprig, we’ve shown we can grow to a large amount even within one market. If you look at the most successful companies, they’re growing within their existing markets and adding. New customers are still finding sprig today in San Francisco.”
For now, Biyani says the company’s biggest focus will be finding and adding new team members in San Francisco and Chicago. Sprig raised $10 million in financing in a round led by Greylock Partners last year. The company launched in November of 2013.

By: Unknown On 06:13

As Mozilla Prepares Firefox Fightback, President Li Gong And Mobile VP Rick Fant Leave

Boomerang Commerce Launches A/B Testing Platform For PricingMozilla and its Firefox browser have been hurting badly in the stakes for browser market against Google Chrome, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari, and now the company is preparing a bigger restructuring as it looks to tackle this. TechSupport has learned, and confirmed, that Li Gong, the president of Mozilla, and Rick Fant, its VP of mobile, are both leaving the company.“Li Gong and Rick Fant are stepping down and leaving Mozilla to pursue other opportunities,” said Chris Beard, Mozilla’s CEO. “We thank them for all of their contributions and wish them well in their next adventures. As part of this transition, we are hiring a VP of Firefox OS to focus on the next phase of Firefox OS development and we’ll have more to share soon.”Gong has been with Mozilla since 2007, when he joined from leading Bessemer Venture Partners’ China office. Before that he was an executive with Microsoft in China and before that a longtime employee of Sun Microsystems. Fant, meanwhile had been with Mozilla for two years, before that in roles with European carrier Vodafone, Volantis and Microsoft as well.For an organization that saw a very short-lived CEO depart last year after his controversial support of the California proposition that would repeal gay marriage, Gong and Fant had decidedly less colorful profiles, although both were in very senior and critical roles.We first heard of the two departures by way of a tip that also hinted at a bigger restructuring by Beard — although Mozilla has not commented on that.Separately, we’ve also been passed a leaked presentation that points to a major “fightback” marketing campaign that Mozilla has been planning starting in Q2, likely May, to try to bring more users to Firefox. Mozilla has also confirmed the authenticity of that document to us.The campaign will include not just increased marketing spend — separately and with its new search partner, Yahoo — to try to educate users on how Firefox is the “independent” option and different from Chrome, IE and the rest, but product launches as well.Specifically, Mozilla is planning finally to release a version of Firefox for iOS, and focus more users on its privacy controls as they sit in contrast to other browsers like Chrome. Mozilla internally describes Firefox as having entered 2014 in an “alarming decline”. In the time since then it’s launched other, smaller marketing campaigns that have proven successful, and it has also tried to pick up speed on its mobile strategy.Most recently, in March Mozilla announced low-end Firefox phones that would be coming to the U.S. for the first time.This idea is to use the foundation’s 10th anniversary to try to claw back more market share again to grow its user base, which currently stands at around 300 million.

By: Unknown On 05:43

The Rise Of Micro Startup Acquisitions

As Mozilla Prepares Firefox Fightback, President Li Gong And Mobile VP Rick Fant LeaveEditor’s note: Amit Paka is a co-founder at Parable, a Creative Photo Network for iOS. Previously, he founded Flockish (bought by StubHub-eBay), led Product for Mobile Payments at PayPal and held Product Development roles at Microsoft.
Recent news of Pinterest acquiring a two-person startup was probably a head scratcher for most of you. It shouldn’t be. Along with Kosei, Hike Labs was a focused micro acquisition intended to bolster Pinterest’s content-discovery efforts. More companies should be following their lead.

Technology companies have historically targeted startups with established products, proven revenue streams and, thereby, hundreds of employees for billions in capital. The past few years, however, have seen a significant shift toward investments in increasingly smaller teams, a trend away from pure-play acqui-hires, that is accelerating.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, LinkedIn and even eBay have been trailblazers. A reinvigorated Microsoft recently jumped into the fray with its purchase of LiveLoop, Sunrise and Accompli after years of focusing on multi-billion-dollar deals.

Costs to release software products have been diminishing rapidly while more distribution channels are being constantly added. The Apple-featured Parable app, for example, was bootstrapped by our team of two in just a few months for a global audience — an impossible task just a decade ago. Companies have also begun to proactively assess complementary products earlier in their roadmaps resulting in bets on teams whose product isn’t even ready.
Consequently, we are headed into an exciting era of micro team acquisitions. I call these booster acquisitions, after their intent to boost an established product line with upcoming, perhaps unproven, products and their founding teams.
More companies should jump in.
Product
Although building a product is easier, building the right product is harder. Try building new products in a big company. Even though companies experiment, they might be late to market, lack the know-how to succeed or double down on the wrong idea. Remember Google Wave?

Enter a micro team with a product that is a great extension of a company’s portfolio. This team of subject-matter experts with execution momentum is better than an intracompany bootstrap. It makes more business sense to instead bring the team in-house and supplement it with further resources.
Both of Twitter’s notable acquisitions — Periscope and Vine — were made prior to their product launch. With the Twitter network as a launchpad, the three-person Vine and 10-person Periscope teams found success for ideas others had tried before. In return, Twitter expanded into creative video and live-streaming with blockbuster apps at a bargain.
Talent
Talent wars in the Valley are legendary. It’s well-known that the right person with the right skill at the right time can accelerate corporate business needs, e.g. I expanded mobile ticket bookings tenfold from an annualized $30 million soon after eBay purchased my startup, Flockish. Micro teams can further amplify this talent proficiency exponentially. Since they’re already ramped up in the domain while working on their product, you avoid the learning curve that is typical for new hires. This productivity multiplier commands a premium. Now imagine this team’s throughput with all the resources an acquirer has to offer.

When Instagram bought Luma, it got a tiny 3 person team with nascent video stabilization technology. This team was critical in launching Instagram’s best new complementary app, Hyperlapse.
Cost
Startup acquisition targets with sizable teams are generally post Series B with $40 million-plus of funding – at those valuations, they don’t come cheap by any means. Their size also brings increased business and integration risks.
Micro teams are generally pre-Series B with an average funding of under $10 million, with seed-stage ones running a tab of just a few million in raised capital. Their small size simplifies product and team integration. You can even rationalize booster acquisitions from a corporate strategy standpoint – it’s a bargain if you can keep it from falling into the hands of a competitor or even becoming one in the future.
Worse case, the acquirer writes off the cost of the product if it fails, which would be no different from building it in-house; but they still get to keep a great team.
Attitude
Finally let’s talk about the intangible benefit of attitude. The first few people in a startup are the quintessential risk takers who inherently think differently; no goal is unattainable, no obstacle is insurmountable. That mindset is precisely what jaded teams need at regular intervals.
This healthy jolt of inspiration can do wonders for morale and productivity in acquiring teams. Who can forget Andy Rubin and his indomitable team of eight from Android that Google bought for $50 million? Andy’s never-say-never attitude from his experiences at Danger was instrumental in mobilizing Google against OEMs that catapulted Android’s dominance.

One thing is certain: acquisition teams will keep getting smaller. The only question is how quickly companies add booster acquisitions to their M&A strategy toolkits and start cultivating promising deal flows before their competitors.

By: Unknown On 05:28

Netflix Adds 4.9M New Members In Q1, Sending Shares Up More Than 10%

The Rise Of Micro Startup AcquisitionsFollowing the bell today, Netflix reported its first quarter financial performance, including revenue of $1.57 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $0.77, with GAAP profit per share of $0.38. The market had expected the company to earn and $0.69 per share on revenue of $1.57 billion.
Following its earnings, the company is sharply up in after-hours trading, after a decline of just under a percent in regular trading. So why’s the market so excited about flat revenues and an earnings miss?
The company reported that its subscriber base grew to a total 62.3 million. That figure includes 2.3 million new domestic subscribers, and 2.6 million non-domestic subscribers. Those figures represented record subscriber growth and were well above company estimates. Netflix’s shares largely trade on its earnings date based on those two figures.
Netflix, like other companies, said weaker revenue and earnings came as a result of headwinds from the increasing strength of the dollar. As the company noted, the dollar’s power cut its international revenue by $48 million, using 2014 exchange rates. That’s a material impact.
Meanwhile, Netflix’s still-a-thing DVD-by-mail business contributed $85 million to its quarterly profit.
The company had negative free cash flow in the period of $163 million due to, in Netflix’s words, its “growing original content investment.” Netflix has $3.0 billion in cash and equivalents, giving it more than enough space to maneuver its short-term investments into new content.
In its letter to investors, Netflix reiterated a commitment to “strong net neutrality across the globe,” likely in an effort to tamp down criticism that the company was walking back its position following new regulations in the United States.
In all, a strong quarter from the company, and one that investors are rewarding with a sharp rally.

By: Unknown On 05:13

Google Launches Handwriting Input For Text And Emoji On Android

Netflix Adds 4.9M New Members In Q1, Sending Shares Up More Than 10%Google Research today launched its latest project: Google Handwriting Input. Besides their voice and favorite keyboards, Android users using Android 4.0.3 and up can now also simply use good old-fashioned handwriting to input text into any Android app.
The new tool recognizes 82 languages and 20 distinct scripts.
My own handwriting is notoriously unreadable, but Google’s new tool even managed to handle most of my squiggly cursive without too many issues. It had virtually no issues with print.
One cool gimmick here is that Handwriting Input also knows how to render your hand-drawn emojis (and yes, it immediately recognized my attempt to bring up the pile of poo emoji).
It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t Google’s first foray into handwriting recognition, but it’s the first time it is bringing support for its handwriting tools to all of Android. Previously, Google already featured handwriting recognition in the Google Translate app, as well as on mobile search and through the Google Input Tool.
How useful this will be in daily use remains to be seen. Thanks to modern swipe keyboards, text input has become pretty fast and accurate on Android at this point. As Google rightly points out, though, there are plenty of languages in which it’s challenging to type with a standard keyboard. Google specifically points out South Asian languages with complex scripts and ideographic languages like Chinese as examples where handwriting input can be easier for many users. Google already offered special handwriting input for many of these languages, but as the Google Research team notes, this new app combines these efforts and allows both on-device and cloud-based character recognition.
The new app is available in the Google Play store now.

By: Unknown On 04:58

Nestdrop Goes Back To Delivering Weed, Adding 9 Locations Along The West Coast

Google Launches Handwriting Input For Text And Emoji On AndroidMarijuana delivery startup Nestdrop is back in operation today, this time in 9 cities spread across the entire West Coast, including in Seattle, Portland, and 7 California locations. This now makes Nestdrop the only weed delivery service currently operating across multiple states.
But things were not looking so good a few months ago for the startup. L.A. city attorney Mike Feuer filed an injunction against Nestdrop back in December and ordered it to cease operations, claiming the startup was illegally delivering pot to residents and places of business, in violation of the city’s Proposition D. This was a serious blow to Nestdrop, which only delivered to L.A. at the time.
Nestdrop co-founder Michael Pycher tried working with the city to lift the injunction and started a crowd-funding campaign to raise money for legal fees to fight the order. Pycher maintains that the on-going dispute with L.A. city officials has more to do with a lack of understanding of how his business operates.
Nestdrop started out as an alcohol delivery service in L.A., much like Saucey. It added marijuana delivery later on. Pycher maintains Nestdrop acts a delivery service that makes things easier for those with medical issues who need marijuana, not an actual marijuana business that should be regulated under Proposition D.
It’s kind of funny. Our competitors probably thought we were dead and that’s what we wanted them to think while we were going about this other option.— Nestdrop co-founder Michael PycherL.A.’s Proposition D deals with proper registration for medical marijuana businesses in the city limits. The L.A. Marijuana Farmer’s Market recieved a similar injunction for allowing suppliers to sell directly to those with a weed I.D. card last July.
“Our stance is that the patients really needing medical marijuana the most are the ones who can’t get to a dispensary and would need it brought to them safely and easily,” Pycher said.
It should be noted that Nugg, another weed delivery service about to launch in L.A., looks like it operates in much the same way as Nestdrop but has not been given the same order. Nugg has not started operations yet, but co-founder Alex Milligan believes his weed delivery startup will not fall into the same problems as Nestdrop.
“We’re operating in full compliance with Prop D, meaning we don’t permit deliveries within the boundaries set forth by the measure, and are working closely with a legal team to ensure we’re adhering to all laws within the local municipalities we’re operating.”
In the meantime, Nestdrop has tried to work with L.A., all while quietly seeding plans to deliver in other cities, including San Francisco where there are a more than abundant supply of on-demand weed startups promising fast delivery straight to everyone in Silicon Valley’s door.
“It’s kind of funny. Our competitors probably thought we were dead and that’s what we wanted them to think while we were going about this other option,” said Pycher.
Nestdrop is now blazing ahead on scaling operations in the 9 new locations. It will continue delivering alcohol and working on the injunction in L.A., as well as deliver marijuana to those with a licensed medical marijuana card to the following cities:
Seattle
Portland
San Francisco
Stockton
Pasadena
Glendale
Select parts of Orange County
Oceanside
San Diego
The Nestdrop iOS app will still allow the purchase and delivery of alcohol in L.A. The marijuana delivery portion is not on the app due to App Store rules. However, those with an iPhone who would like to order marijuana in the cities in which Nestdrop now operates can do so either on the Nestdrop website or by texting “smile” to 27126 to get a link to download the separate on-demand weed delivery app. Those with an Android phone can order either alcohol or marijuana via the same app on Google Play.

By: Unknown On 04:43

WeWork’s Adam Neumann To Join Us At Disrupt NY In May

Nestdrop Goes Back To Delivering Weed, Adding 9 Locations Along The West CoastWeWork is just about five years old, and in five years has grown to be one of the biggest real estate companies in the world, with a valuation north of $5 billion.
Given the tremendous growth of the company, alongside WeWork’s ability to combine technology with physical space, made CEO Adam Neumann a perfect fit for the Disrupt NY Stage. We’re very pleased to announce that he’ll be joining us on the main stage for an interview during the conference, going down May 4 – 6.
WeWork started out as a service that allowed startups and entrepreneurs to rent a very small amount of physical space to use as an office. Over time, they’ve grown to 31 locations across the globe, servicing cities like New York, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, alongside a number of international locations in England, the Netherlands, and Israel.
But the WeWork folks would be the first to tell you that they don’t measure success by square footage, but rather by the number of people that are part of the WeWork community, which has now topped 20,000 people.
Part of this success is due to the fact that WeWork integrates technology, such as an internal social network for community members, that not only helps with user acquisition but leads to retention of those users even after they’ve outgrown WeWork. Plus, with 20k members, WeWork has the ability to negotiate benefits with large corporations as if they themselves are a 20k person company, as opposed to a company with a few hundred employees and 20,000 tenants.
We’re thrilled to have Neumann joining us in a few weeks on stage.
Adam Neumann will join other notable Disrupt NY speakers, including Tinder’s Sean Rad, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, and Vine’s Jason Mante.

By: Unknown On 04:28

In Latest Deals Brazilian Investor Kaszek Ventures Doubles Down On Women Entrepreneurs

Announcing The Agenda For Disrupt NY 2015Editor’s note: Julie Ruvolo is a freelance writer and editor of RedLightR.io and RioChromatic.com. Latin American powerhouse investors Kaszek Ventures have kicked off 2015 with back-to-back investments in startups founded and run by Brazilian women — Dress & Go, a luxury apparel rental site, and Love Mondays, an employer review site.Prior to these investments, Kaszek had only one female-founded company in their portfolio of 28 — OQVestir, a Brazilian luxury ecommerce site that closed a Series A in 2011.There are no official stats on the proportion of male versus female entrepreneurs in Brazil, but everyone interviewed for this story agreed the gap is probably greater than in the US. And while female entrepreneurs in the US are benefiting from networks like Girls in Tech, #changetheratio and the Lean In phenomenon, it’s a culture that is only starting to take root in Brazil.
Add that to the relative dearth of venture capital available to Brazilian entrepreneurs, and the Kafkaesque tax bureaucracy that makes it particularly difficult to start a startup — and you can start to get a sense of what a big deal it is for Dress & Go and Love Mondays, both run by a Brazilian woman with a finance background, to secure their first institutional financing.
Each company bootstrapped its way to Kaszek, and both of the founders have unique take on the opportunities in the Brazilian market.
Dress & Go: A Brazilian Take On Rent The Runway
Dress & Go is a Rent-the-Runway style service that allows women anywhere in Brazil to rent clothes, primarily dresses, by top Brazilian and international brands. Barbara Diniz, 29, and Mariana Penazzo, 27, who met studying Economics at Insper in São Paulo, launched the business last year with their own capital after respective careers working in finance.
“The point was to do something that was online and interested us,” Penazzo told me on a Skype call from São Paulo with Diniz. Penazzo had left her job a year and a half earlier so she could tinker with new ideas, while Barbara was still doing equity research for an investment fund. “We always joke that I’m the poor one and Barbara is the rich one,” says Penazzo. “I had to go to a wedding and said, ‘Can I look at your dresses and borrow one?’” The next thought: Could they rent them?
Neither woman had heard of Rent the Runway, which by then had amassed over $80 million in venture capital, until they had lunch with Endeavor’s Institutional Relations Director, Fernanda Antunes. “She was like, ‘Calm down, do you want to open Rent the Runway in Brazil?’”The undisclosed Series A from Kaszek Ventures (Kaszek is reticent to share exact numbers) follows a seed investment of R$1 million [$320,000] in 2013 from Brazilian firm A5 Internet Investments. Kaszek’s Nicolas Berman will join the board along with Penazzo, Diniz and Paulo Humberg of A5, and Brazilian fashion heavyweight Marcella Kanner and former President of Louis Vuitton Brazil Carlos Ferreirinha are set to join the company as advisors.The co-founders say the financing will primarily go towards growing the team and expanding the inventory, which currently sits at 2,500 pieces (Rent the Runway has over 65,000). “We talked to the Rent the Runway girls early on,” Diniz says. “They said the business is more capital intensive than people imagine, and it really is, because you are always buying new dresses. The business grows proportionate to the dresses.”
In addition to relying on a heavy investment in inventory, the rental model is a logistically demanding one, requiring partnerships for fulfillment, delivery and cleaning. “Logistics in Brazil surprised us, and not in a positive way,” says Penazzo. “We don’t have the same logistical capacity as the US, and had to organize ourselves around it in a lot of ways, including expanding the amount of time we allocate for the dress to arrive and come back. Logistics was our first big challenge.”
Dress & Go is currently over a thousand dresses per month, mostly by Brazilian designers, at a price point of R$150-R$800 [US$50-$260], and expects to close 2015 with sales in excess of $R8 million [US $2.55 million]. And while the price point may seem to peg Dress & Go as a service exclusively designed for Brazil’s elite, or “A” class, Diniz and Penazzo explain that renting is a more affordable option than purchasing for a socio-economic range of Brazilian women.
“The dry-cleaning fee alone is over R$100 [US$35] here,” explains Penazzo, “and we include that in the price of the rental, whether it’s a dress for R$200 [US$70] or R$5,000 [US$1,600].”“In the US you have a lot of outlets and incredible sales,” Diniz adds. “You can get a great dress at a good price.” That doesn’t exist in Brazil, where foreign goods get hit with a hefty import fee that doubles the price on everything from Kind bars to imported cars.Pair pent-up demand with what Diniz and Penazzo describe as “the best clients on the planet for renting brand dresses” to understand the implications of the Rent the Runway model in Brazil.“Brazilian women are party girls. We’re vain, we lead the world with plastic surgery, we love to look good and make ourselves up, and rare are the women who will leave their house without putting at least some blush on,” Diniz generalizes. “Another point – Brazilians love brands. We love buying fake Louis Vuitton, fake Chanel, because we love to show we have the brand. On the other hand, the majority of Brazilians don’t have the acquisitive power to buy them, so renting is a way for them to be wearing the latest fashions at an accessible price. We are even shipping dresses to favelas.”Diniz and Penazzo say there are over one million weddings per year in Brazil. According to research they conducted for their business plan, the number of women who can pay R$350 [US$110] or more to purchase a dress in Brazil represents a market opportunity of over R$3 billion [$960 million] per year.We are even shipping dresses to favelas.— Barbara Diniz“There’s weddings in the rest of the world, and there’s weddings in Brazil,” explains Penazzo. “Brazilians invest surreal amounts of money in their weddings. So we have a lot of events for women from the A and B, even C [working middle] classes, where instead of going to have a dress made, they can rent a super-stylish one for the same amount. We don’t have the pretense to segment social clients. The big brands are the big point, but you can find more economic dresses by the same brands. Our dream is to not worry about social class.”Love Mondays: Love Your Job
If Dress & Go is improving access to fashion beyond one’s purchasing power, Love Mondays, an employer review site dedicated to helping Brazilians forge their career paths, also has accessibility as a core value.
With anonymous employee reviews and salary disclosures of over 20,000 Brazilian companies, the company is announcing an undisclosed seed round with Kaszek Ventures.
“Our mission is to help professionals like you make good career decisions,” says the Love Mondays, which receives over 650,000 visitors per month from Brazilians considering a jump or seeing how they stack up against their peers. “Feel free to share what you like or don’t like about the company you work for, share your salary, and help other professionals negotiate fair remuneration.”
While employer review sites are well-trodden for the TechSupport audience, from TheFunded and Glassdoor to new players like Memo, Love Mondays co-founder and CEO Luciana Caletti says it’s a radical concept in Brazil.“Most people outside of Brazil don’t realize that Brazil has a very hierarchical work culture,” she tells me on a Skype call from São Paulo, referencing the Hofstede Power Index ranking Brazil above Japan in its belief that hierarchy should be respected and inequalities amongst people are acceptable.“It’s surprising for someone who looks at Brazilian culture from the outside and sees that it’s very informal and relaxed, in terms of leisure time. But in corporate culture, people are much more careful with what they say and what they do in front of their workmates and bosses,” Caletti says. “I get calls from HR directors who tell me they aren’t getting real feedback from their internal surveys and ask how we can get them to post to Love Mondays.”
Caletti started Love Mondays in 2013 with co-founders David Curran and Shane O’Grady after a non-linear career trajectory that is atypical for Brazilians, but not uncommon for tech entrepreneurs.
A week after completing law school in Brazil, Caletti decided not to become a lawyer and moved to London. “I’ve wanted to live abroad since I was fourteen,” she explains in impeccable English, “and worked as an English teacher on the side through school so I could travel abroad.”
After odd jobs as a waitress, call center attendant, and sandwich vendor, she got a job with the Brazilian Consulate, helping Brazilian citizens who were in trouble in the UK. Then she moved into management consulting and traveled globally for four years before getting an MBA at Oxford and joining Johnson & Johnson to lead new consumer product launches and slowly work her way out of grad school debt.
In corporate culture, people are much more careful with what they say and what they do in front of their workmates and bosses.— Luciana Caletti“I was getting to a point of my career where I’d have to give up too much,” Caletti recalls, “So I thought, either now or I won’t do it later.” She jumped to a “kind of investment fund” in Dubai to run “a kind of advertising startup”, where she shot the first TV commercial in post-war Iraq. Then she was ready to move back to Brazil with Dave Curran, her fiance who she met at Oxford, and Shane O’Grady, a longtime friend of Curran’s and the company’s CTO.“I noticed a huge difference from the Brazil I’d left almost ten years ago,” Caletti says. “People were looking for a job that made them happy. In early 2004, unemployment was high, around 12%, and people who had a job that paid the bills at the end of the month considered themselves very lucky. Over the last ten years, the unemployment rate has fallen steadily, and with lower unemployment comes the choice of where to work. That’s a huge shift.”The observation is not just anecdotal. Caletti cites a recent study by Robert Half International indicating Brazil had the highest turnover rate in the world in 2013, for all kinds of jobs from factory floors to corporate suites.The trend has slowed in recent months with Brazil’s economy on the brink of disaster, thanks to a corruption scandalof surreal proportions with federally owned oil giant Petrobras. The turnover is shifting from employees hopping to bigger offers, to employers replacing poor performers, but that may be a momentary blip on the radar. A 2014 report by the Boston Consulting Group says Brazil’s talent gap is only growing, and will reach over 40 million people by 2030 — prime conditions to support a cultural shift towards an employee’s market. And LinkedIn has already taken root in Brazil, with over 20 million members. “That’s great for us,” Caletti says.“That’s where we saw the opportunity,” Caletti explains. “If there’s that demand for qualified professionals, who now have a choice of where to work, how do they make that choice?”After initial funding from the three co-founders, R$200,000 [US$64,000] from Startup Brasil, a R$45 million [US$15 million] federal program to foment startup culture, and entry into the Aceleratech accelerator in São Paulo, the co-founders struck out for seed capital. Kaszek’s Nicolas Berman will join Caletti and Curran on the board.If there’s that demand for qualified professionals, who now have a choice of where to work, how do they make that choice?— Luciana CalettiThe seed capital will be spent towards growing the team and community, and then to explore monetization. A mobile launch in January doubled the site’s traffic to 650,000 visitors per month.The site closed out March with 160,000 reviews and salaries for over 20,000 companies in Brazil, with IT professionals leading the content seeding. Most of the growth is coming through social media or news stories citing data Love Mondays is aggregating on items like the biggest drivers for employee satisfaction (a good work environment) and dissatisfaction (a weak boss).“We released a Happiest States report, which shows Brazil’s southern states are happiest,” Caletti explains. “That was inspired by Lulu, the app where women rate their dates. They did a map of the most popular man in each state.” (Lulu is banned in Brazil.) Caletti also cites Glassdoor and TheMuse as inspirations.As to the finer process of cultivating good community and honest content, Caletti tacks off some of the basics, like requiring users to register before they post, reviewing content before it goes live, and snooping around LinkedIn to check questionable posts to verify the poster’s career history. To encourage people to post content as well as consume it, Love Mondays requires visitors to register and post their own review to access past the first page of content.Plans to monetize are not far off. Caletti says they want to allow companies to attract talent through Love Mondays. “Posting jobs, but more than that,” she explains. “We want to get employees to tell the story of the company and build the brand, and enable companies to attract talent that way.” As for the now-maligned Petrobras, 88% of its 345 anonymous Love Mondays reviewers would recommend the company to a friend.

By: Unknown On 03:58

Jawbone’s New $200 UP4 Doubles As An American Express Card

In Latest Deals Brazilian Investor Kaszek Ventures Doubles Down On Women Entrepreneurs
After a few delays, Jawbone’s UP3 fitness tracker is finally set to hit the delivery trucks early next week.
And yet… it already has a successor, of sorts. Meet the UP4. It does everything the UP3 does, and you can buy things with it.
Rumors trickled out earlier this week that Jawbone was working on a partnership with American Express — and sure enough: Jawbone has exclusively partnered with AmEx here. As a result, the UP4 can act as your AmEx card at hundreds of thousands of NFC-enabled merchants around the country. Note: only AmEx, for now.
The idea: add an AmEx card (just one card is supported at a time) to the UP4 through Jawbone’s UP app. Then just tap the UP4 against an NFC-enabled card reader, and you’re set. Purchase made!
If your phone is dead or you left it at home for a run, it shouldn’t be an issue — the authorization token is stored on the band itself.
And if the band gets stolen? Just pop into the app and deactivate the card, and the authorization token will be rendered useless. Your band will still be stolen, but hey — your credit card is safe!
Beyond the new payments voodoo, the UP4 is pretty similar to the UP3 that came (just) before it. Here’s the UP3’s feature set, borrowing much of what I wrote from when the UP3 was first announced:
A new band/clasp design. They’ve ditched the original Jawbone UP’s slip-on design for a bit more like a watchBioimpedance sensors… which, in normal people speak, means the UP3 can use a veeeeery slight electrical current to gleen all sorts of data about what’s going on in your body. At launch, that means it’ll be able to tell you your heart rate when you wake up. In time, that’ll expand to include things like hydration levels, heart rate throughout the day, and more.A new tri-axis accelerometer lets the device intelligently guess and graph when you’re doing things like running, playing tennis, or hikingThe UP bands have long tracked sleep — particularly, how much of your sleep was “light sleep” vs “deep sleep”. By combining the aforementioned bio/accelerometer sensors, the UP3 can now graph how much of your night was spent not just in “deep sleep” (which basically means you’re not moving much), but in full-blown REM.Splash resistance. Jawbone initially aimed for the device to be waterproof up to 10 meters, a move which they blame for much of the UP3’s repeated delaysJawbone pins the battery life at roughly 7 days per charge
The UP4 will cost $200 at launch — or about $20 more than the payments-less UP3. As for when it’ll launch: Jawbone is only getting as specific as sometime “this summer”.

By: Unknown On 03:43

Jawbone Replaces The UP24 With The $100 UP2

Jawbone’s New $200 UP4 Doubles As An American Express Card
First came the Jawbone Up. Then the UP24. Then the UP3.
And now… the UP2. Because numbering things in the order they came out is for schmucks!
We found out back in November of last year that Jawbone was planning to sunset the UP24, and now we know what it’s being replaced with.
The UP2 is very much the UP24’s spiritual successor. They’ve made it a bit smaller, shaved $30 bucks off the price, and ditched the slip-on style design in favor of an adjustable clasp like that of the UP3, but the rest of the UP24’s feature set remains.

At $99, the UP2 is meant to be Jawbone’s “mid-range” device — it’s snazzier and more feature packed than the $50 Jawbone Move, but lacks a few things (like the heart rate sensor) that the $179 UP3 has. It also doesn’t have the built-in American Express-only NFC payment support found in the just announced $200 UP4.
So what’ll it do?
Step countingSleep tracking (Measuring total sleep and how well you slept based on your movement patterns)Through the companion iPhone/Android app, it’ll help you track distance, idle time, calories burned, and even things like meals if you’re willing to do some data entryThe “Smart Coach” software will monitor your exercise trends, and try to intelligently nudge you to do just a little bit more each day.Stay alive for a week, with an estimated 7 day battery life
The naming might seem a bit confusing, given that they’re launching something called the “UP2″ right as the UP3 begins shipping (after pretty significant delays) — but if you don’t pay attention to those sorts of things (and, lets be honest, most people wandering around Best Buy don’t), the name works just fine. It works to position the UP bands based on feature set/price, as opposed to chronology.
Seemingly having learned from their mistakes with the UP3 delay debacle, Jawbone held this one until it was ready to ship immediately. It’ll hit Jawbone.com and Amazon tonight, and should be showing up in Best Buy on April 19th.

By: Unknown On 03:28

Ola, Uber’s Big Rival In India, Raises $400M To Grow To 200 Cities This Year

Jawbone Replaces The UP24 With The $100 UP2Ola, the largest rival to Uber in India, has announced that it has raised a $400 million Series E round to fuel further expansion in India.
The company, which was found to have raised $310 million last week according to filings, is aiming to grow its network to 200 cities in India before the end of the year. It currently serves over 100 cities, but it covered just 10 locations a year ago. (For comparison, Uber is in 11 cities in India, at this point.)
Ola’s Series E round was led by DST Global, and it included participation from new investors GIC, Falcon Edge Capital, and and existing backers SoftBank, Tiger Global, Steadview Capital and Accel. It values the company at $2.5 billion, and takes Ola well beyond $600 million from investors to date.
Anand Subramanian, director of marketing communication at Ola, told TechCrunch in an interview that the company plans to reach smaller towns in India where it believes its services can have a significant impact.
“The next wave of growth will come from smaller towns and cities where personal transportation is none existent. [These cities have] smaller populations, but there’s a genuine need,” Subramanian said.
In those smaller locations, Ola’s challenge is two-fold: enticing existing taxi drivers on to its platform and also convincing people to take up driving as a career. To that end, Ola has struck deals with car makers and loans companies to help make the cost of vehicle ownership palatable for its drivers. (Subramanian said 70 percent of Ola drivers own their vehicle outright or are paying it off.)
Related to that, Ola has set an ambitious target to reach 1 million drivers on its platform within the next three years. Currently the service has over 100,000 drivers, having grown that number from 10,000 one year ago.
Despite its quick progress in India, Ola is not looking overseas at this point.
“The opportunity in India is very, very large, we have a huge problem to solve,” Subramanian said.
And it’s easy to see that Ola’s vision is still very much in progress since, with a network of 200 cities under its belt, the company would have real potential to introduce other logistics-related services.
Food on-demand service Ola Cafe is its first move beyond taxis. The service covers four cities and is currently in “beta.” Subramanian declined to discuss more details about Ola Cafe or other services, but with Uber and Uber rivals moving into such spaces, it seems like a future for Ola too.
A $100 million portion of the new funding will also go towards TaxiForSure, the company which Ola acquired for $200 million. Like Ola, the plan will be to expand its network into more cities in India.

By: Unknown On 03:13

Number26 Grabs $10.6 Million To Bring Its Bank Of The Future To Everyone

Ola, Uber’s Big Rival In India, Raises $400M To Grow To 200 Cities This YearIt feels like Number26 opened its doors yesterday, but the young startup just raised a $10.6 million Series A round (€10 million) from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with Daniel S. Aegerter and existing investors Earlybird and Redalpine also participating. This represents Valar Ventures’ second investment in a European fintech startup — the VC fund also participated in TransferWise’s impressive $58 million round.
“We didn’t actually start fundraising — it was all inbound requests,” co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. “A lot of people contacted us, but these guys were actually the perfect match.”
As a reminder, Number26 participated in our Battlefield competition and told us that it wanted to create the best banking experience in Europe. Creating an account takes minutes and everything happens on your phone. After that, will receive a MasterCard that works particularly well with Number26’s app. For example, when you use your Number26’s MasterCard, you receive a push notification to make sure that the transaction was approved and there is no fraudulent use. You can also disable features or set limits so that you don’t have any surprise. For example, you can disable online payments if you don’t plan on using this card for your favorite ecommerce websites.
And even more important, opening and maintaining an account is free and lets you pay anywhere in the world without any foreign transaction fee. Instead, the startup makes money from MasterCard’s tiny cut on every transaction. While Number26 only accepts German and Austrian customers for now, 8,500 people signed up already and 15,000 others are waiting for an invite.
I opened a Number26 account to test it out, and was really impressed by the overall experience. Opening an account takes minutes, push notifications are incredibly useful and being able to pay in other currencies without any fee is a killer feature.
Until now, the company didn’t do any marketing to attract all these customers. Number26 wants to spend a part of this round on marketing and build a solid brand to compete with banking heavyweights. For instance, Number26 could boost its growth by giving a bit of cash for user referrals.
Today’s round is also essential when it comes to growing the team, and in particular Number26’s customer support team. The startup is slowing down its growth with invites on purpose so that it can provide a solid customer support experience. The team of 30 employees should double in the next 12 months.
Existing customers can also expect a few new features. “We are going to work a lot on bringing more intelligence into the account,” Stalf said. “Currently, if you look at the timeline of your transactions, it’s completely static. Going forward, we want to inform you more actively when important transactions come in.”
Other new features include a better fraud management system by comparing the geolocation of your smartphone and the geolocation of the transaction in real time. The MasterCard will also be compatible with Maestro ATMs in the coming months. Budgeting features should get an upgrade as well as the company is working on a more precise automatic clustering system.
When asked about European expansion plans, Stalf told me that his company is really focused on Germany and Austria for now. But Number26 should come to other countries eventually. “With this round, we will open up one or two other countries in Europe,” he said. “But we are actually not sure what country, and it’s probably not happening in the next 6 months.”

By: Unknown On 02:58

Rocket Internet Acquires Restaurant Delivery Service Volo

Number26 Grabs $10.6 Million To Bring Its Bank Of The Future To EveryoneWell, what do we have here. Just a couple of days after participating in European restaurant delivery service Take Eat Easy’s €6 million Series A funding round, ‘startup factory’ and e-commerce behemoth Rocket Internet has acquired Germany’s Volo, a startup playing in exactly the same space. If I was Take Eat Easy’s CEO I might be slightly puzzled to say the least.
Similar to Take Eat Easy, and a number of other direct competitors, such as Deliveroo in the U.K., and DoorDash in the U.S., Volo lets you order food online from restaurants that don’t traditionally offer a take-out and delivery service.
This differentiates it from Rocket Internet’s own Foodpanda, Delivery Hero, and Just-Eat, which operate a pure marketplace model that relies on the restaurants themselves to handle delivery.
A graduate of Telefónica’s startup accelerator Wayra (and first exit for the telco’s Munich-based academy), Volo originally launched in October 2014 in Munich, but has recently expanded to Berlin, and Frankfurt, with the German cities of Hamburg, Cologne, and Duesseldorf up next. It’s also talking up aggressive international plans — 9 counties, apparently — including Italy, Spain and Sweden.
The fact that Volo operates in Germany, with Spain seemingly imminent, appears to put it on a path to directly compete with Rocket Internet investment Take Eat Easy, which says its immediate expansion plans include the two countries. Plans can change of course, so we will have to wait and see. Rocket Internet declined to comment.
Terms of Rocket Internet’s acquisition of Volo also remain undisclosed, so it’s hard to tell if this is a home run for the young startup, or its backers, including Telefónica.
“Together with the founders of Volo, we have devised an exit strategy and are very proud to have implemented this so successfully,” says Garan Goodman, Managing Director of Wayra Deutschland, in a statement. “The team at Volo have made some fantastic achievements. We are more than impressed by the potential for success presented by the teams currently at the Academy”.
Meanwhile, whatever the subtleties (or not) of Rocket Internet’s strategy, it’s clear that it continues to see food delivery, or moving convenience food online in all its various guises, as a massive growth opportunity. The e-commerce giant has been aggressively building out its Global Online Takeaway Group, a roll up of all its food delivery companies, which include online take-out ordering service Foodpanda, and a significant stake in rival Delivery Hero.

By: Unknown On 02:43

Gaming Startup Code Kingdoms Exits Beta On A Quest To Get Kids Coding

Rocket Internet Acquires Restaurant Delivery Service VoloChanges to the computing curriculum in England, which arrived last September requiring schools to teach bona fide programming skills to kids as young as five, are shaking out into increased opportunities for edtech startups in the U.K.
Making learning to code accessible, fun and engaging is the jumping off point of London-based startup Code Kingdoms, which has today launched out of beta, after trialling its game for the past year with around 25,000 kids and 700 schools.
Its educational JavaScript teaching software targets the six- to 13-year-old age-range, and can be played either as a web app via the Code Kingdoms’ site, or as an iOS app.
There are actually two versions of Code Kingdoms: one that’s free for schools to use, which strips out the gameplay element entirely so it becomes purely a simplified educational tool for teaching JavaScript; and another version that kids can play at home in their spare time which is first and foremost a game, albeit one that includes sporadic puzzle elements where kids have to use code elements to solve problems in order to progress in the game. So a sort of learning ‘lite’.
“Code Kingdom is a game that teaches kids how to code but in a way that is really fun for kids,” says co-founder and CEO Ross Targett. The premise being, he adds, that if you’re trying to entice kids digitally, your game has to be fun enough to wrestle their attention away from Minecraft — since you’re inevitably competing in that same “entertainment space”.
Using a game and game mechanics as a wrapper for teaching coding also brings native stickiness to the learning experience, says Targett, explaining that the team began by building a learn to code tool that “wasn’t really a game” and finding usage dropping off after what looked like good initial engagement.
“Those core things that games have — so these basic loops that mean you want to come back daily to collect your rewards, earning a currency or working towards a goal… we didn’t have those — so what we were having is really good engagement for a few hours and then no one coming back because it didn’t really have the mechanism to do so. So we went back to the drawing board and made sure the game was actually very powerful. But the original coding tool we built to get kids coding is still a fundamental part of it.”

The idea for building Code Kingdoms followed on from Targett and his co-founder spending time volunteering in schools teaching kids programming, as part of corporate social responsibility programs when they worked for Intel and ARM. In schools they were using the MIT graphical programming language Scratch, but spotted what they saw as an opportunity to update Scratch’s approach — and teach a real programing language, rather than a pseudo-language.
“Most things out there are designed for teachers, or for how adults perceive kids to be learning — nothing’s really designed to make it really fun for kids, so we wanted to make it super fun for kids so they get excited about learning to code computer science, and then hopefully go on because they’re excited to actually explore it as a career, or look at it in other subjects,” says Targett.
He argues that Scratch is no longer up to scratch for England’s schools as it does not teach a real programming language — which is a requirement of the new curriculum. He also reckons it’s pretty dated now, having being built for an earlier, desktop computing world, rather than the modern mobile-focused space.
Other relatively new entrants in the ‘teach kids coding’ space include U.K. startup Kano, which involves both DIY hardware and learn to code software, and similarly offers a graphical interface to simplify programming. But Targett argues Kano is a platform on which the Code Kingdoms product could happily sit. So doesn’t seem them as like-for-like competition.
He says Code Kingdoms is also working with various other learn to code outreach organisations, such as Code Club and Teach First, to get its product into kids’ hands. “We find we complement more people than compete with them, and Kano’s a really good example of that,” he adds.
Of course it is also possible to learn Java coding via making Minecraft mods, but Targett reckons that’s “quite a step up” in terms of ability required. “We want to bridge that gap, enable anyone to get excited, learn the skill without that massive aptitude you need to really get started,” he adds. “And Minecraft was never designed to teach kids to code.”
While Targett and the team are undoubtedly evangelical about teaching kids coding, they are also entrepreneurs with dreams of building a big, profitable business so Code Kingdoms is not a not-for-profit. There is very much a business plan here.
So, while it’s giving its software to schools for free, it’s aiming to monetize via the play-at-home game version of the product — using schools as its low-cost distribution mechanism to get in front of lots of kids’ eyeballs. In future it plans to sell premium content for the non-schools version of its software to kids’ parents, says Targett.
“We see schools as a channel to acquire users,” he notes. “The kids will discover the product in their class and then they’ll go home and play… We thought this was a really good way to acquire users very cheaply that are very engaged. And use schools as a promotional channel. Because it’s free we get more schools, more teachers engaged. We get a lot of goodwill from our teacher community.”
It’s also a pretty delicate balancing act when free educational software at school morphs into a money-hungry parent pesterer at home. But that’s the balance Code Kingdoms is aiming to strike. “We plan to have premium content in the app which is non-educational, it’s more entertainment focused, so a kid that doesn’t want to spend money can still learn,” adds Targett.
The startup has raised around $410,000 to date, including from Korea’s SparkLabs Global Ventures, which Targett dubs pre-seed funding — given the large amounts required to fuel a gaming startup. He says it will be looking to raise a larger round in June.
Its short term focus is squarely on the U.K. market, with educational content tailored to the U.K. curriculum, but the aim is to expand the product to the U.S., South Korea and then elsewhere in Europe down the line.

By: Unknown On 02:28

Sunday, 12 April 2015

Diary Of A Cord Cutter In 2015 (Part 6: HBO Goes Over-The-Top)

Breaking Media, Publisher Of Above The Law And Fashionista, Raises $1.5MHBO’s “Game of Thrones” is the world’s most pirated show, according to new data from anti-piracy solutions provider Irdeto out today. So it’s not surprising that the network has now moved to make watching its content more easily accessible to those who don’t want to pay for cable or satellite television. Instead, thanks to deals with Apple, Cablevision, Sling TV, and likely others in the future, HBO is finally a (legal) option for cord cutters.
Note: This is part 6 of an ongoing series of articles about cord-cutting in 2015. You can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5 here.
In 2015, I finally cut the cord with cable TV, dropping down from a combination TV, phone and Internet package with Verizon to one which only includes broadband. As a result, my monthly bill has dropped as well. I currently pay for Netflix ($7.99/mo for me; new subscribers pay $8.99/mo), Hulu Plus ($7.99/mo), and Amazon Prime Instant Video – and, let’s be honest, I’d pay for Amazon Prime ($99/year) anyway, so the streaming titles are just an added benefit.
HBO Goes Over-The-Top
But this month, I’ve had a bigger decision to make: do I want to add a new service into this mix? At $15/month HBO is nearly double the price of its competitors. For those cutting the cord for financial reasons, it’s an option that will likely be carefully considered. After all, “Games of Thrones” is a great show, but eventually you could just buy the season on iTunes or Amazon or get the Blu-ray, right?
Oh, who am I kidding? I’m a cord cutter. I haven’t even hooked up my DVD player since I moved in to my new home…in December. And I don’t want to wait. HBO over-the-top it is.
The popularity of HBO’s shows is remarkable, and in part why HBO can charge a premium for its content. But it’s “Games of Thrones” that’s truly driving much of the demand for the new standalone service for cord cutters, HBO NOW.
To give you some perspective on the momentum behind this program alone: episodes from the first four seasons of “Game of Thrones” were pirated more than 7 million times from February 5 through April 6, 2015, Irdeto says. And those illegal downloads were up more than 45% year-over-year ahead of the Season 5 premiere taking place this weekend.
Meanwhile, the forthcoming season along with news of HBO NOW’s debut has been increasing demand for HBO’s service as a whole, according to Amobee Brand Intelligence. HBO consumption has been up by 85% since Apple’s announcement, and accounted for 19% of all HBO-related consumption, as well as 34% of HBO NOW-related consumption since March 9, it said.
According to HBO Chairman and Richard Plepler, speaking with Charlie Rose in an interview airing this weekend, the network’s decision to offer an over-the-top option had a lot to do with the changing nature of the TV audience, and the TV consumption behaviors of younger viewers.
“There are 10 million homes in the United States that only have broadband subscriptions and previously, before the introduction of HBO Now this Tuesday, those people were not able to get HBO,” he said. “You know, there are a lot of millennials in the country who are not subscribing to cable, satellite, or telecom services and we want to go after those young people. We think this is, as we’ve said, a millennial missile, an opportunity to attract them to our service and then get them into the house and we hope include them for many years to come.”
But while Apple apparently was first out of the gate with access to HBO NOW, its “exclusive” deal turned out to have some fine print that wasn’t initially disclosed. That is, Apple device owners aren’t the only ones who can get HBO content legally without a cable or satellite TV subscription, as it turns out. Two other companies have since announced similar deals.
Which option is right for you? Below are details of the three options currently available:
1. HBO NOW for Apple TV, iPhone And iPad Owners
As of April 7, the HBO NOW app became available to Apple TV and iOS device owners, providing access to HBO’s entire streaming content library and new shows live as they air for $14.99 per month, with one month free for those who sign up in April.
To be clear, this a second, standalone app. The HBO GO app that was previously available in the App Store and on Google Play remains the way for cable TV subscribers to authenticate using their pay TV account credentials in order to watch HBO from their mobile at any time.

With access to HBO NOW through Apple, customers can watch HBO content via their Apple TV or iOS device, as well as through supported browsers on desktop and laptop computers.
Apple’s announcement was confusing, because it was initially pitched as the “exclusive” way to access HBO NOW. But in reality, it’s becoming one of several ways to watch HBO content without a cable TV subscription. Apple is technically the “exclusive” device maker (at present) offering HBO NOW access, while Cablevision is the first pay-TV provider to do the same. But for Cablevision customers, that distinction may be splitting hairs.
2. HBO NOW for Cablevision Subscribers
The Cablevision deal announced in March, is much like the Apple option. Instead of having to buy HBO through a cable TV package, Cablevision is selling the service to its Optimum Internet service (broadband) subscribers. This service is available in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
But beyond who’s selling the service, there isn’t much difference between Cablevision’s offer and Apple’s.

Cablevision customers also pay $14.99 per month and have the free trial option. And they can also stream the content to their Apple TV, iPhone, iPad or via the web. This service option makes sense for those who are already Cablevision broadband users (and cord cutters), or those cord cutters looking to sign up for broadband in that area. It may be easier to just add it on through Cablevision’s website itself. It also makes sense for those without an Apple device, but who want to stream over the web. Or, as the HBO NOW FAQ hints, to “additional devices soon.”
3. HBO with Sling TV
Dish Network’s Sling TV is the third option for over-the-top HBO, but to be clear, it’s not offering HBO NOW. Rather, the streaming service provider is offering HBO content for a flat $15 per month, which includes three stream of HBO, and HBO’s Video-on-Demand library.
Sling TV, in case you’re unfamiliar, is a streaming service that’s positioning itself as an alternative to pay TV for cord cutters. In reality, what it’s doing is offering à la carte programming options – basically breaking up big cable package into smaller pieces – and then delivering them online and through apps on connected devices. The benefit is that you can watch a number of traditional TV networks, including ESPN, A&E, AMC, TNT, History, TBS, HGTV, Food Network, Travel Channel, IFC, Disney, CNN and more, without having to pay for cable.

Instead, you start with the $20 “Best of Live TV” core package with Sling TV, then you add on other, optional packages like “Kids Extra” or “Sports Extra” for an additional $5 per month each. HBO will be one of these new extra packages, but priced at $15 per month instead.
The downside to accessing HBO through Sling TV is 1) that you can’t just buy HBO if that’s all you’re after – you have to buy Sling TV’s core package as well, then add HBO to it. And 2) Sling TV has been having some growing pains.
The service is still relatively new, and it buckled under the load of those tuning in to watch the Final Four games of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament on Turner’s networks. Some viewers saw error messages and ended up missing out on the games. Sling TV has since apologized, explaining that it received “an extremely high volume of concurrent streams,” at the same time as it saw a “high number of new customer signups just as the first game was beginning.”
The company says it has made several adjustments to improve its service and better balance traffic surges like this in the future. As”Game of Thrones” premieres this weekend, Sling TV will have a chance to prove whether or not those changes have actually addressed the issue.
I could also add a third concern about Sling TV – to some extent, you’re jumping out of the pan and into the fire with this service. Instead of changing your relationship with TV entirely, you’re basically paying for the same ol’ cable networks delivered through a new medium and to more platforms.
In my personal cord cutting experience, I’ve found I rely less on live TV (delivered for free over-the-air and accessed with an antenna) or even “current” TV, and spend more time binge-watching my way through programs that have already wrapped or have several seasons under their belt, as well as those that are exclusive to the “new networks” of Netflix and Amazon – like award winners “Orange is the New Black” and “Transparent,” for example. These shows are often dropped as entire seasons at once, which is how many today prefer to watch.
Pirate or Pay?
At the end of the day, cord cutters will have to decide for themselves if HBO’s content is worth the somewhat hefty price tag of $180 per year.
For the time being, HBO hasn’t yet cracked down on account sharing – a practice it basically endorsed – so users who have been logging in with a friend or family member’s account aren’t being locked out yet. But that is likely to change in time.
HBO got its audience hooked. Now it’s rolled out a convenient way to pay for its streams without cable. The final step will be terminating the practice of account sharing for good. When that gray area of legality is closed off, HBO fans will then have to determine if they want to pirate or pay. You may as well start thinking about where you stand, because that day will come soon.

By: Unknown On 03:48

Ex Machina’s Stars Talk About Cinematic Robots And “Bro Billionaires”

Diary Of A Cord Cutter In 2015 (Part 6: HBO Goes Over-The-Top)FacebookLinkedInEx Machina Is a Modern Sci-Fi Take on Consciousness
A new science fiction movie called Ex Machina opens today in limited release — it’s a tense, thought-provoking story, and one that should be particularly interesting to TechCrunch readers for its depiction of artificial intelligence and the way the characters struggle to understand the consciousness of the movie’s robot, Ava.
Earlier this week I interviewed Alicia Vikander, the actress who plays Ava, as well as Oscar Isaac, who plays Ava’s inventor Nathan. Both of them recalled long conversations with Ex Machina‘s writer and director Alex Garland (who I also interviewed) about AI, but Vikander said that what really stuck with her was a book about brain function, which made human brains seem particularly machine-like.
“With great sci-fi, that’s the whole point,” Isaac added. “It’s never really about the robots or the aliens or whtaever it is, it’s always about humans.”
Isaac’s character Nathan is also the founder of a search engine company BlueBook. Asked whether he based his performance on anyone specific from the tech world, Isaac said he relied on the script, which he praised for “capturing the language of these bro billionaires”: “You know, the dude talk and this whole idea of like,
‘I’m going to disarm you, I’m on your level, give me all your privacy, give me all your rights, give me all that — hey dude, we’re cool.'”
For that reason, Isaac said he didn’t feel the need to research someone like Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, he looked at “darker geniuses” outside of tech, for example chess champion Bobby Fischer.
And yes, I also (awkwardly) asked Vikander about that Tinder stunt at South by Southwest, as you can see at the end of the video above.

By: Unknown On 03:33

PSA: Sorry, Those Apple Watch Band Swapping Sites Aren’t Going To Work Like You Thought

Ex Machina’s Stars Talk About Cinematic Robots And “Bro Billionaires”Sorry to disappoint you, recent Apple Watch buyers, but you’re not going to be able to use one of those brand new Apple Watch strap trading sites to get a whole new, extra watchband when your Apple Watch arrives. In case you missed it, a couple of Apple Watch band trading sites recently popped up, reportedly offering owners the ability to swap out the included extra watchband with someone else’s for a small fee. Unfortunately, you don’t actually get two full watchbands with your purchase, despite what Apple’s website seems to claim.
The larger of the two sites, BandSwapper, has been getting some recent blog coverage for what initially sounds like a brilliant idea. The site says it aims to help Apple Watch Sport owners switch out their unused strap by exchanging it for one of a different size and/or color. BandSwapper would collect a $6 fee then send back the new Sport Band the customer requested.

The idea for band-swapping came about because you it would allow you to order combinations of watch and straps that wouldn’t otherwise have been available. (Some straps are only sold with certain watches, that is.) But it became even more attractive an option when it appeared that Apple Sport Watch models actually shipped with two bands: one for smaller wrists and one for larger wrists. The confusion came in because Apple’s website reads “two bands” when listing what its Sport Watch package included.

After receiving your Watch, you would, in theory, only end up using one of the bands – whichever was the correct size for your wrist. The other you could swap!
Another website, StrapSwap, is offering a similar swapping service. But there, buyers and sellers connect directly and mail each other unused straps or agree to meet up locally.
The idea, frankly, seemed genius.
Sadly, it’s not going to work exactly like that.
You see, Apple Sport Watch models technically do come with two bands, but in practice, it’s not two full bands, but rather three pieces. There’s one piece that attaches to one end of the watch with the fastener, and then two additional bands (the side with the holes) that attach to the other side of the watch. These two bands come in two different lengths – a S/M size for smaller wrists and an M/L size for larger wrists.
In other words, you won’t have an entire extra band to swap.
Now, I guess you could start a new fashion trend and swap your extra half band for a half band of a different color. (I bet this look would have really taken off back in the 80’s!). But that’s not what people thought they were signing up for, in many cases. You could also swap out your current band (the two pieces) in case you have buyer’s remorse over your original selection, or just get bored with the band after some time.
Or, as noted above, you could swap for a band that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to order because it only comes with a particular watch model.
But BandSwapper is adding to the confusion by misleading potential customers who are questioning whether or not there are two full bands included with Sport Watch purchases by referring to those claims as “speculation.”
Speculation is not confirmation. #AppleWatch #BandSwapper #SpeculationIsNotConfirmation
— BandSwapper (@bandswapper) April 10, 2015
.@earthTOmitchel thanks for the article. Your update mentions “readers have pointed out..” Please note that speculation is not confirmation.
— BandSwapper (@bandswapper) April 10, 2015
However, we have definitively confirmed – with very good authority – that the Sport Watch comes with 3 pieces, and not 2 full bands.
Plus, you can look at the picture here and see it for yourself.
I know, I know. I’m sad too.

By: Unknown On 03:18

A Guided Tour Of The Apple Watch Retail Experience

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I went to the Apple Store in downtown Toronto’s Eaton Centre today to try on the Apple Watch with a retail specialist. It’s a new way of shopping for Apple, and one that will clearly take some getting used to both for retail staff and for customers.
Close PanelList ViewPrevious of NextMore galleriesThe Apple Watch Display Case
Apple Stores now feature this long display case as a central feature. The 42mm Apple Watch, Watch Sport and Edition collections are featured on the side closest to the camera, while the opposite side holds the 38mm versions of each.
The Apple Watch Display Case
This is the same case that Apple used to show off the Apple Watch at both of its press events around the device. Here I’m checking it out with a group of local journalists ahead of the general opening of the store to the public this morning.
The Apple Watch Display Case
The display case serves a few purposes, separate from demo stations with Watches not under glass on the wings – the main one is showing off the various band styles and Watch combinations available for order.
Apple Watch Display Case
This is the Watch display section. You can see the various band combinations available for the stainless steel edition here.
Apple Watch Edition Display Case
The Edition models are on display right alongside the less expensive versions in that long display case. A software demo is running in a loop on all the watches held within, timed so that the animations on-screen cascade down the line from right to left.
Apple Watch Testing Station
These consoles feature an active, fully operational Apple Watch fixed to a plastic display case on the right, and a screen explaining what’s happening on the left. Playing with the watch provides more context for your actions on the big screen.
Apple Watch Try-On Station
This is where you get your individual guided appointment. That interactive console is at each station, and there’s also a navy blue leather placemat of sorts that the Apple rep (Kevin, in my case. Hi Kevin!) uses to lay out the various models you’re interested in. In noticed customers kept approaching these tables, and a dedicated staff person had to continually direct them to the non-staffed demo stations in the wings.
Apple Watch Try-On Drawer
To retrieve the actual Apple Watch models, the Apple rep uses their mobile terminal device on the right to talk to a receiver via RFID in the drawer, which unlocks it and allows it to open in response to triggering mechanisms hidden away underneath.
Apple Watch Try-On Drawer Open
Here’s that drawer again, now open. You can tell Apple probably spent a lot of time on making sure even this seemingly small part of the experience was up to their standards.
Apple Watch Try-On Drawer Open
Here’s a zoomed out look at the whole personal try-on appointment station, complete with those live demo displays, the leather mats, and the band/watch combinations.
Apple Watch Drawer
Here’s a close-up of that drawer. The watches are housed in little scooped out grooves, lined with a soft finish fabric probably to help ensure their cases definitely don’t suffer any dings.
Try-On Console
During my appointment, the various Watches Kevin had me use on my wrist didn’t have active software – they were running demo loops that do things like show the taptic engine. If you want to test a specific feature, like swapping watch faces, these physically embedded units are what you used.
Try-On Console
These active unit displays also let you find out more about each collection if you’re not actively running any software or providing any input to the Apple Watch paired with the screen.
Try-On Console
Here you can see how the Apple Watch used for the active interaction displays are half-encased in the console – this might help prevent the risk of theft, with the units not anchored that store personnel handle locked in demo loops, they might not be able to be activated once you leave the store.
Try-On Drawer
Kevin opened the drawer at the beginning of the appointment and asked me which bands I thought I wanted to try. The bands appear to be organized, with steel link at the top left, leather in the middle and milanese loop at the bottom right.
Stainless Steel Apple Watch With Leather Loop Bracelet
The Leather Loop bracelet was actually my favorite based on the try-on appointment. Here it is on a stainless steel Apple Watch. You can also see the sensor array located under glass on the back of the watch.
Stainless Steel Apple Watch
Here’s the front of a 42mm stainless steel Apple Watch. These are turned off by default, and a double tap of the side button activates the demo loop, as Kevin showed me.
Apple Watch Leather Loop
Here’s a close-up of the Leather Loop band. You can see that it has a quite pronounced textured grain pattern, which contrasts with the fine texture on the leather of the Modern Buckle band.
Black Aluminum Apple Watch
This is the black anodized aluminum finish. Here you can see the digital crown and side button. It’s darker than the space gray finish of the iPhone.
Apple Watch Steel Link Bracelet
This is the Steel Link bracelet, which is very, very nice, but which is also quite pricey. It’s heavy, too which is why I’m personally leaning towards the Leather Loop.
Steel Link Bracelet Release Buttons
These are the release mechanisms for individual links in the steel link bracelet. They are far, far easier to use than traditional link bracelets for watches, letting you adjust sizing without any special tools or a trip to the department store.
Apple Watch Modern Buckle
Themodern buckle is very cool, with that button releasing it. It’s kind of like a deployment clasp, for those who know watches, but the band itself is quite small.
Milanese Loop Band
Here’s the Milanese Loop band. It’s not my style, but it’s surprisingly comfortable when worn.
Apple Watch Digital Crown
Here’s the digital crown. This controls zooming and scrolling in many of the software’s interactions, and it’s amazing how good it feels to use. The movement truly feels hardwired to what’s happening on screen.
Apple Watch Aluminum Digital Crown
This is the aluminum black digital crown. There’s no coloured top piece on this one, but it still feels just as nice to use.
Apple Watch Side Button And Crown
Here’s the side of the Apple Watch, with button and crown. Kevin explained how you can use the companion app on your iPhone to adjust whether the button faces away from or towards your body.
Try-On Complete!
The try-on was over surprisingly quickly, leaving me wanting more hands-on time with the watch itself, but perfectly confident in my strap choice. The most interesting part of the experience might be how Kevin noticed I was wearing a Withings Activité and used that to launch a discussion about the Apple Watch’s fitness powers to start us off. Clearly, they’re taking a very personal approach.
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By: Unknown On 02:48

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