Category: Tech news

Slowly but surely, Microsoft is making up for shipping the unfinished console that is the Xbox One.

In February, they shipped an update that brought many an earth-shattering feature, from “Being able to tell how much space you have left on the hard drive” to “An icon that tells you if your controller is about to die.”

Another update is coming in March. Here’s what it looks like: Read More

Typing using any kind of remote control that doesn’t include a full QWERTY keyboard is a nightmare, and everyone knows it. I still enter text into my Xbox One using the gamepad, despite its support for external keyboards and despite the availability of the Xbox SmartGlass app, because I enjoy punishing myself. But there could be a better way coming to your smart TV devices soon. Above, you… Read More

Today Box announced that it has picked up another Adult In The Room, increasing its leadership depth as it ramps towards a widely leaked, forthcoming initial public offering. Former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem will take on the role of Special Adviser to the growing company. Read More

Motorola held a decided low-key press conference today at Mobile World Congress. It was a snoozer. But! But Rick Osterloh, Motorola SVP, confirmed that the brand is still working on smartwatch development and there is another one on the way. Motorola was in fact one of the first firms to attempt a smartwatch. Way back in the balmy days of 2011, Motorola released the Motoactiv GPS and fitness… Read More

Google today added a couple of new locations to its underwater Street View imagery collection, including a number spots around Cancun and Isla Mujeres. Read More

You grow old, you slow down, and you die. That is, unless you can inject some fresh blood. After watching the last generation of tech giants wither or stagnate, today’s juggernauts are relying on acquisitions to keep them young and relevant. Check out the interactive infographic within to compare the size, frequency, and focus of acquisitions by Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. Read More

When I started looking into the Bitcoin startup ecosystem in early 2013, there was something that was just off about half of the founders I met. “I consider myself psychologically unemployable,” BitInstant CEO Charlie Shrem told me in a phone interview last year. He described how he built BitInstant with an autistic Welsh hacker named Gareth Nelson whom he had never met in real-life.… Read More

Almost a year ago, Microsoft announced its plans to expand Windows Azure to Asia, with data centers in China, Japan and Australia. Today, the company announced that its two regions in Japan (Japan East and Japan West) have now hit general availability, and Azure users in Japan will now be able to store their data locally. As Satya Nadella noted a year ago (when he was still the president of… Read More

Sony’s new flagship Android, the Xperia Z2, risks being overshadowed here at MWC by Samsung’s latest electronic tub-thumper, the Galaxy S5. But not on the show floor at least — where a phalanx of Z2 are massed in Sony’s booth, ready for the masses to fondle. Read More

Samsung is making a big push with its enterprise market appeal today, thanks to the introduction of the new Samsung KNOX Marketplace. This is a special mobile-focused digital software storefront that offers up business apps, IT provisioning and tools for tech managers working within large organizations. Samsung and partner AppDirect, which powers the marketplace, are aiming to give companies… Read More

In this morning’s Mt. Gox “Crisis Strategy Guide” there was one page that was completely redacted. It dealt with Mt.Gox’s projected financials and was a mass of black bars over the text. Thanks to reader Blake Commagere, that’s no longer the case. Read More

Apple faced a considerable security threat with its SSL flaw, present in both iOS and OS X devices over the past few days. The iOS bug was plugged late Friday via the iOS 7.0.6 update made available to iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, but Macs with 10.9 went unpatched until now. The fix is out, however, so grab it and get your Macs updated to v10.9.2 as soon as possible. Read More

It’s that time of week for an episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to chat about the most fascinating stories of the past seven days in tech.

This week, Colleen Taylor, Aex Wilhelm and I sat down to talk about this week’s biggest story: Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of messaging app WhatsApp. In the video above, we discuss why Facebook shelled out the mega-bucks for WhatsApp, Sequoia’s massive windfall from the deal, the incredible story of WhatsApp’s founders, and how and if Facebook will use WhatsApp in the future.

We also touched upon the latest news from Y Combinator, with Paul Graham stepping away from his leadership role at the incubator and Sam Altman taking over as president of YC.

Editor’s note: Beth Seidenberg, M.D., is a general partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, focused on life science and digital health investing. Before joining the firm in 2005, she worked at a number of pharmaceutical businesses, mostly recently as chief medical officer at Amgen.

Spurred by the Affordable Care Act, the American healthcare system in 2014 has entered a period of titanic change. The process will be messy and disruptive – it already is. While challenging for consumers of healthcare services, the shifting landscape provides tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs, setting up the potential for an accelerated shift in healthcare delivery in the U.S.

This inflection point for healthcare in part reflects the way the Millennial generation – those born between 1980-2000 – manages information. It is a tech-savvy group, connected and collaborative. They want instant gratification and recognition. And they want – and expect – to have a different kind of interaction with physicians and the healthcare system than their older brethren have historically experienced.

Millennials have at their disposal a new wave of technological tools that track, analyze and respond to their physical condition in real time. Can physicians and the healthcare system deliver this generation what they want from the healthcare system? I believe the answer clearly is “no.” Instead, they will build it themselves.

My theory is that this population segment will drive huge changes in the practice of medicine. I’d expect relatively few to sign up for insurance coverage under the ACA, for instance. But I do think this generation’s entrepreneurs will reimagine and rebuild the country’s sclerotic healthcare system.

Entrepreneurs in this area must start by navigating around some core issues.

Medicine is hyper-local, with providers protected from outsiders by state law. And it is hyper-personal, with strong regulations governing information privacy.

On the other hand, Millennials tend to believe that data access should be ubiquitous and free. They have fewer privacy concerns than the Baby Boomers, living their lives publicly on Facebook and Twitter. Millennials want to hold e-visits with their doctors; they want to text medical providers for quick advice; they want portable insurance, transferable between jobs and across state lines; and they want clear visibility about what they are personally paying for and why. Today, in short, there is a massive divide between what Millennials expect and what the current healthcare system can deliver.

The opportunity here is gargantuan. The U.S. health-care sector generates annual revenue of close to $2.1 trillion a year, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau report. It’s an industry that employs nearly 17 million Americans (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012). And neither of those figures includes the health insurance industry, which has more than 450,000 employees (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jan 2014), and annual revenue of more than $850 billion (Annual Report on the Insurance Industry, 2013). In short, this is an industry practically begging for revolutionary change. And the ACA has lit the fuse.

Let’s take a look at five big entrepreneurial ideas on changing the healthcare landscape. Some of these areas – touching on insurance and patient care – offer the potential to build big businesses. While they may be lacking in some of the pizzazz of social networking or cloud-based software or other buzzy areas, no industry offers a richer environment for disruption.

Information wants to be free – especially when the government has it

Under the leadership of Todd Park, chief technology officer of the U.S., the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) has released vast amounts of de-identified Medicare performance data. Dabo Health, a San Francisco-based startup, is taking a big-data approach to mining that information, saving lives in the process. In a recent talk, Park drew a connection between the release of aggregate health information and the approach the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) took a decade ago in liberating weather and GPS data. That move sparked an avalanche of innovation from companies like Garmin, Wave, Google Maps and many others.

Rethinking The Insurance Business

While most of the discussion around Obamacare has focused on the role of the large legacy insurers, there’s a need for new players. For instance, there’s Oscar Health, a company that has launched a next-generation health plan that intends to leverage the public exchange market in New York City.

Unencumbered by traditional health plan thinking and structures, Oscar launched a plan that leverages recent advances in big data analytics, alternative site options including telemedicine, and the best in mobile and web user experiences. From the Oscar website, for instance, you can click on a link and receive a call from a board-certified doctor within an hour, 24 hours a day. Everything on the site reflects a kinder, friendlier and more engaging consumer experience. If they can provide competitive pricing, Oscar has a chance to take business from the incumbents.

Building New Primary Care Physician Groups

Just as Obamacare opens the door to new insurers, so does the law create incentive for the creation of new ways to deliver medical care. Case in point: Village Family Practice, an independent primary care physician group based in Houston. The group’s goal is to provide the best possible care at the lowest total cost. The idea is to change medical practice in the U.S. so that consumers will feel good about their experiences – and physicians will be empowered to deliver quality, cost-efficient services.

The ACA, for instance, has provisions covering annual wellness visits and obesity counseling. Diabetes education has been around for years, but few have figured out now to cost effectively provide that service. Village Family Practice has figured it out, and is helping physicians deliver better care to their patients.

Make It Easier To Find The Right Coverage

Several new companies are focused on helping consumers find the right insurer – and the right physician.

Covered*, based in San Francisco, is the first data-driven consumer recommendation engine for health coverage. Likewise, Fuse Insurance, of Cambridge, Mass., has built sophisticated calculators to help consumers find health plans that meet their specific needs.

Help Employers Focus On Prevention And Wellness

The ACA allows large employers to offer workers rewards of up to 50 percent of the cost of coverage for participating in a wellness program and meeting certain health standards. That’s good news for Redbrick Health*, a health engagement and behavior change company. RedBrick combines financial accountability, clinical insight, behavior design, social and game mechanics and powerful data analytics to create a personalized and persuasive experience delivered through web, mobile and live interactions.

Redbrick’s open consumer engagement hub integrates apps, devices and services, and creates a cornerstone for more effective wellness and population health management initiatives delivered through employers as well as employee benefit exchanges.

This is the beginning of the revolution. Tech-savvy entrepreneurs are moving quickly to fix our troubled system, empower people with elegant and engaging tools and disrupt healthcare as we know it today.

* Covered and Redbrick are KPCB portfolio companies. 

Update: WhatsApp experienced an outage for around 210 minutes today from 11am to 2:30 pm PST. Users around the world reported that they were unable to send messages, and WhatsApp confirmed these problems at 12:16pm PST with a tweet stating “sorry we currently experiencing server issues. we hope to be back up and recovered shortly.”

https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640

WhatsApp started to work again for some users at 2:30pm PST after around 150 to 210 minutes of downtime. Some users reported  that “last seen” stamps vanished from their conversations when WhatsApp first came back online, but now some say they’re appearing again.

At 2:48pm PST, WhatsApp confirmed it was back up with this tweet

https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640

Around the same time, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum apparently told the Wall Street Journal via email that “we had a server outage, should be OK now.”

WhatsApp users flocked to Twitter asking “Is WhatsApp down?”. They were met with memes joking that Facebook was shutting WhatsApp down, that its founders went on vacation, that there was a party in the server room, or Zuck himself was meddling with the app

In reality, it’s more likely that WhatsApp’s $19 billion acquisition by Facebook announced Wednesday led to a surge of signups and usage that has overloaded its servers. We’ve contacted Facebook and are awaiting a response.

When users (including me) tried to send messages or check their existing chat conversations, WhatsApp got stuck, showing an endless loading asterisk and the alert “Connecting…”

The “WhatsDown” reports started flooding in around 11am PST, but there were some troubles last night as well. We received tips from frustrated users in the US, India, Israel, and many places around the world. The outage could stoke fears that Facebook will screw up WhatsApp if the acquisition gets regulatory approval.

The down time may have pushed users to other chat apps, as Telegram tweeted:

This is crazy. We'are getting 100 new registrations every second. Trying hard to prevent connection issues in Europe.—
Telegram Messenger (@telegram) February 22, 2014

In a testament to the global popularity of the 450 million user service, condom brand Durex’s Kenyan branch capitalized on the WhatsApp problems by doing some marketing:

Whatsapp is down. You know what's up? Durex. You can now buy Durex online here. =====> jumia.co.ke/intimate/—
Durex Kenya (@DurexKE) February 22, 2014

As I wrote Thursday, being acquired by Facebook could give WhatsApp the engineering backup to be able to fight outages in the future. But today, being the biggest venture-backed acquisition in history worked against the messaging startup.

WhatsApp has suffered short downtimes every month or two for the last half-year. Stumbles like this are somewhat common for fast-growing apps, and users aren’t likely to permanently switch away since it was fixed relatively soon. Still, Facebook bought the startup for the astronomical sum in part because it is many people in the developing world’s first taste of the Internet. Now, their first taste of the Facebook-owned WhatsApp has been soured.

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More Big WhatsApp News

Facebook Buys WhatsApp For $19 Billion

Why Facebook Acquired WhatsApp: International Reach

WhatsApp Won’t Start Showing Ads

WhatsApp Founders Rejected For Jobs At Facebook In 2008 But Get The Last Laugh

For all our Facebook/WhatsApp stories, click below