Category: Tech news

Early this month, Microsoft declared that ”government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat,’” a statement that became ironic this weekend, given that, early this month, Microsoft likened government surveillance to “sophisticated malware and cyber attacks.”

New NSA revelations out this weekend detailed precisely how the NSA’s methods lean on malware and employ cyber attacks in their “snooping,” to use Microsoft’s term. Thus, the NSA’s surveillance efforts are not a potential advanced persistent threat, as Microsoft first published.

The term “advanced persistent threat,” by the way, isn’t a casual colloquialism that Redmond invented. According to the Wall Street Journal, the phrase “carries special weight in cybersecurity circles and is often used to describe hacker teams backed by the Chinese government.” That comparison is striking.

As TechCrunch covered yesterday, Der Spiegel has reported new NSA capabilities, much of which were presented in a catalog-like format, with price points and implementation times for the various tools listed along with diagrams indicating how the tool in question works. Need to get into an iPhone? Doable. Get past Juniper and Cisco security? The NSA claims that it can do that, no sweat.

It has become interesting to learn how holistic the NSA’s spying capabilities have become. The phone metadata program in the United States is perhaps (and perhaps wrongly) the most public piece of the NSA’s efforts. Through PRISM it can force user data out of American technology companies. Through MUSCULAR it can tap data cables between foreign data centers of American companies. And through the freshly disclosed ANT team and its book of secrets, it can break the security of American technology hardware companies.

What this means is that the NSA has not only shot the privacy of individual Americans full of holes, but has also broken the spine of security claims of American companies.

Microsoft’s comments were included in a post stating that it was working to bolster its encryption to prevent government incursion. But with the NSA working to harm encryption and backdoor hardware, it’s far from clear that even a concerted effort by large American technology companies can provide peace of mind to their customers.

Now, much of what Der Spiegel unveiled would be incredibly useful for foreign surveillance that would raise no eyebrows. But the fact that the NSA has managed to so pervasively penetrate security raises a follow-up question: Who else? That’s not an indictment of the NSA but more comment on the current technology environment.

The NSA can hack and track your phone. XKeyscore allows it to read your email. And programs as broad as tapping the core fiber cables of the Internet or a toolset to crack a single server of American provenance also allow ways in. What sort of threat to security could be more persistent than that?

Top Image Credit: Flickr

In this three-part series, we hosted Medallia, an enterprise company that offers customer experience management software, and Sequoia partner and board members Doug Leone in the studio. Co-founder and President Amy Pressman talked about why she founded the company after being a consultant for a number of years.

Medallia essentially helps companies track how they are doing with customers on a day-to-day and even minute-by-minute basis. Further, Medallia allows companies to act on that feedback continuously (and track the outcomes). The company measures customer feedback through all channels (web-based, social phone, call center, SMS, social, mobile).

After staying bootstrapped for a number of years, Medallia raised $35 million last year from Sequoia Capital. Pressman talked about why she decided to raise money from institutional investors, and Leone revealed how he found out about Medallia and his persistence in pursuing Pressman and Medallia.

Check out the video above for more, and stay tuned for our next part in this series, which addresses how Pressman and Leone work together.

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just published a blog post about what he did and didn’t say during a widely-discussed interview with The Information (if you don’t have a subscription, you can read the relevant quotes in Valleywag). He also makes an announcement, of sorts, that the incubator is planning an event for female founders later this year.

As many of you have probably read, Graham attracted lots of controversy for his remarks about getting women interested in programming and hacking. (TechCrunch’s Colleen Taylor weighed in here.) However, Graham claimed in a tweet, and reiterated in the post, that his meaning had been distorted.

Specifically, while he was quoted as saying, “We can’t make women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years,” Graham said there was a crucial word that had been edited out, and it should have read: “We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes …” In other words, he said he wasn’t talking about all women, but rather the ones who “who aren’t programmers.”

To be honest, the language in the new post can still be a bit confusing to parse (for example: “I didn’t say women haven’t been programming for 10 years. I said women who aren’t programmers haven’t been programming for 10 years.”), but Graham’s position, whether or not you agree with it, becomes a little clearer once you see the question he was answering. It was about whether YC should be more “proactive” about recruiting women by “lowering standards or something like that” (I’m not sure that’s the most helpful way to frame the issue, but moving on …).

If I’m reading Graham correctly, his basic argument is that Y Combinator is happy to admit female “hackers,” but he’s resistant to the idea that it should accept women who aren’t hackers and “then somehow make up the difference ourselves during YC.”

At the end of the post, he also says that YC has reached “a quorum of female founders who are doing well,” so it’s been planning to hold a Startup School-style event focused on female founders. (Startup School is a popular event with big-name speakers like Jack Dorsey talking about their experiences and offering advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.) It sounds like this new event is in the very early stages of planning, but Graham said he felt obligated to announce it now because otherwise it might seem “that we’re only doing it for PR reasons.”

I asked YC co-founder Jessica Livingston for more details about the event, and she said she doesn’t have a firm date yet, nor has she invited any speakers:

The rough plan is to have female YC founders give quick talks (a la Startup School) sharing their stories, giving advice and talking about what they’d wish they’d known when they were getting started. I imagine it will be focused mostly on practical startup advice (and inspirational stories) for women who are interested in starting a startup or have already started one.

By the way, if you’re wondering about which female founders are part of the aforementioned “quorum,” Graham’s post cites Adora Cheung of Homejoy, Elizabeth Iorns of Science Exchange, Kathryn Minshew of the Muse, Elli Sharef of HireArt, and Vanessa Torrivilla of Goldbely. (He also mentions an “Ann”, but when I asked who that was, Livingston said she’s from a startup that has yet to be announced as part of YC.)

Anyway, you should probably just read Graham’s post for yourself.

Twitter has had a rough few days in the markets, slipping from north of $74 to just over $60 at the end of trading today. That’s not even half the story, however: Twitter’s December is one for the record books.

If dropping almost 20 percent in a few days of trading is dramatic, so too is Twitter’s epic run from December’s opening price of $40.76 to its high in the month of $74.31, a rise of more than 82 percent in just 18 trading sessions. The massive rise in Twitter’s value far outstrips the ensuing minor correction.

Put another way, Twitter is still up around 50 percent in the month, a huge rise in its value that no one seems to understand. Twitter has yet to report earnings as a public company, so we have essentially no new information that we can use to vet the firm. The rise in its stock price is therefore hard to attribute to any specific thing other than exuberance.

As TechCrunch reported earlier today when Twitter’s slide was underway, investors currently do not expect the company to report positive earnings per share until 2015. Therefore, the public will likely value Twitter on its ability to grow its revenue, a financial metric that is slowing for the company.

However, Twitter itself remains, presumably, as strong as it was when it went public at $26 per share. Therefore, the saga of its stock price can be essentially discounted until we have more data on the firm.

And that investors are willing to take profits after a huge bull run is about as surprising as the sun deciding to rise tomorrow. So keep in mind that Twitter’s rise is likely mere speculative earnest. The real report comes with earnings.

But let’s have some fun. The New York Times:

Netflix has informed TechCrunch that it is indeed testing a $6.99 single-stream plan to new users as part of a test. The option appears to some new users after selecting the streaming option as a free trial.

Unfortunately for those of you excited for a dollar-off discount on a standard definition stream, a Netflix spokesperson also told us that not all users may see the option and that it may never offer it generally.

The plan was first noted by Adweek this morning and we confirmed it as an option when we began signing up for the $7.99 streaming-only plan with a 30-day trial.

Offering a standard-def stream to one device might as well be called ‘the smartphone plan’, as that’s what it seems most suited to. Though many smartphone screens are above HD resolution, the smaller real-estate means that it can be difficult to discern a standard-def stream from a high-definition one.

Netflix analyzes a junk ton of data about user viewing habits including locations, devices and times of day that people view stuff. If that information was telling them that people view Netflix a lot on smartphones while traveling, then a single stream in SD rather than HD might actually make a lot of sense for a certain subset of users. Of course, a buck off is a nice ‘sale price,’ and if people get utility out of it they might feel inclined to expand the plan further down the road.

Image Credit: Taro the Shiba Inu/Flickr CC

Facebook may be currently facing question marks over how well it’s faring with younger users, but among those over 18 in the U.S. it remains the social network king. According to figures out today from the researchers at the Pew Research Center, the percentage of adults using the social networks of Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter or Instagram to communicate with each other is now at 73%, and Facebook — the world’s largest social network with 1.19 billion users — remains the most popular in the U.S., with 71% of U.S. adults using it.

In other words, nearly all adults that responded that they are on a social network are using Facebook. That’s four percentage points up from last year’s 67%, Pew notes. It comes at a time of heightened competition: partly thanks to the rise of mobile apps — the number of people on multiple networks is now at 42%.

Among the top five networks (as charted by Pew), there is a lot more wiggle room for who comes in second after Facebook. LinkedIn — site that bills itself as the “professional” social network focused on networking, job hunting and professional information and news — is hanging on at number-two, with 22% of U.S. adults using it — up 2% on last year. Close behind it is Pinterest — which has vaulted over Twitter to number-three position with 21% usage.

Twitter — despite the different services that it has launched to increase engagement like Twitter Music other discovery services; and despite the increased attention around its IPO — has only grown by two percentage points to 18%. Hot on its heels is Instagram at 17%.

Google+ does not make it into the top-five mix — not because of its lack of popularity; but because Pew says it did not include it in its survey questions.

Indeed, Pew’s numbers reveal a bit, confirm a bit of what we might have already guessed, but also leave a few blind spots. While there is a 42% overlap of usage across multiple sites, some 36% of respondents said that they only used one social network, and Pew notes that “22% did not use any of the five specific sites we asked about.” That could mean they used services like Google+, Snapchat, something else entirely, or nothing at all.

How many versus how often

For these sites, which are constructed in large part around advertising-based business models, critical mass is crucial: you won’t visit a site if no one else is using it. Similarly, on the commercial side of the equation, one of the key metrics that the sites, and their advertisers, like to focus on is engagement.

It’s interesting, therefore, that when it comes to frequency of use, the rankings change. Facebook continues to remain at the top in the daily rankings, with 63% of people accessing it on a daily basis. Instagram — last in the general rankings — is not far off and in second place, with a 57% daily use. Similarly, its weekly and “less often” rates are also close, respectively at 22%/20% and 14%/22%. (This goes some way towards explaining why Facebook was keen to acquire it: their usage patterns are very close.)

Twitter may overall be seeing less usage in general than Pinterest but those who are on it appear more engaged: some 46% of Twitter users are on it daily for their quick fix of quips made and received. Pinterest, in contrast, has a fairly low rate of daily usage, with 23% of its users visiting on a daily basis.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also are generating a significant amount of mulitple-times-per-day use, with 40% at Facebook, 35% at Instagram and 29% at Twitter, Pew says.

LinkedIn, meanwhile, has a lot of work to do, with only 13% of its users going there daily. Are those the ones looking for work? In any case, this is another way of explaining why it is that LinkedIn has tried to overhaul its whole content operation, to create something that will attract people to visit it more frequently than just “less often.”

Pew notes that for now it looks like Facebook is partly winning because of how it has managed to appeal to a wide range of users — a pretty impressive turn for widening its reach, considering that it started out as a network restricted only to university networks.

The demographic data for other networks stands in contrast to this: Pinterest “holds particular appeal to female users”, with women four times more likely as men to be Pinterest users; LinkedIn is “especially” popular among college graduates and internet users in higher income households. Twitter and Instagram resonate with urbanites and younger adults, and non-whites. (Facebook has over 70% usage among whites, Hispanics and black users, Pew notes.) All of them, excepting LinkedIn, has its highest proportion of users in the 18-29 age bracket; LinkedIn is more popular with the 30-49 group.

Among those who say they use only one social networking site, Facebook is a clear winner with 84% selecting it as their sole site, with the others lagging behind by a very far stretch: 8% solely use LinkedIn, 4% solely use Pinterest, and Instagram and Twitter each picked up only 2% — positioning them as firmly secondary in the U.S. market today.

Fitbit has just released a major update to its iOS app for iPhone 5s, allowing the smartphone itself to track steps, distance and burned calories.

These are basic features, and just a fraction of the metrics provided by one of Fitbit’s own hardware devices, such as the Fitbit handheld or the Fitbit Flex wristband. With a Fitbit Force, for example, you can track all the basic information as well as flights of stairs climbed and sleep. Plus, it acts as a watch feeding you the information on a digital screen.

Still, the accompanying app has always been an integral part of the Fitbit hardware experience, as it offers a dashboard for every metric as well as a log tracking nutritional intake.

In other words, the app gives a robust outlook of overall health over time, which has made Fitbit a big contender in the space against Nike and others.

With the launch of the M7 motion coprocessor in the iPhone 5s, Fitbit has decided to offer “basic” tracking from the phone itself, likely with the intention to entice an upgrade.

The update comes just in time for New Years, as the pudgy masses resolve to lose the holiday weight.

Business Insider’s Joe Wiesenthal today published an interesting piece on Bitcoin, partially responding to Paul Krugman’s somewhat inscrutable recent blog post that called the cryptocurrency “evil,” and partially answering the question of why Bitcoin has value. It’s been a topic we’ve been discussing for months, making Wiesenthal’s argument worth digging into.

He breaks Bitcoin into three interrelated characteristics that support one another: It’s a currency, equity, and a social network.

Bitcoin acts as a currency because you can use it as a generic exchange medium in lieu of dollars and other traditional currencies in a growing number of places. Bitcoin also at least behaves as an equity, because the more people who use and accept it, the more the value of each coin — at least thus far — generally rises.

Interestingly, Bitcoin’s ability to act as a currency and an equity are both predicated on its network effects. Wiesenthal puts this succinctly: “Strong, robust network effects are crucial for making the whole thing work.” He links to Antonis Polemitis who makes the same argument: “If people stop using bitcoin, its intrinsic value is zero. Its value is 100% derived by the fact that it is a network.”

If we view Bitcoin’s value as a currency and an equity as supremely predicated on its strength as a network, we can then state that its value rises and falls with the strength of that network. This means that Bitcoin’s value is something that we can therefore better understand.

The gist is that it’s been frakking hard to explain to anyone why Bitcoin makes more sense at $700 than $800 or even $300. However, if we can consistently point to an expanding network, we can presume that Bitcoin’s value should therefore be rising.

This does not allow us to say that Bitcoin’s current price, and its requisite swings, match its inherent value. In fact, I think that we can presume that they do not. According to Coinbase, Bitcoin spiked from $208 at the start of November to $1,049 on the first of December. If we assume that Bitcoin’s network effects gave its exchange rate (currency) or asset value (equity) a proper valuation at the start of the month, we can either argue that its network became (roughly) five times as valuable in the month, or that investors overbid Bitcoin. Its ensuing price slump would point towards the latter.

I’ve correlated the price of Bitcoin to its current news volume a few times, and it’s a connection that I think is quite plain. That’s not a bad thing, of course, as Bitcoin needs the public to become better informed about its existence so that it can grow its buying class and bolster the cohort of sellers willing to accept it.

But if the growth of the network is the growth in Bitcoin’s value, does it not have a risk of negative reinforcement? That’s to say that a strong negative correction in Bitcoin’s price would harm both sides of the table, skewering the positive impacts of network effects by flipping them around.

Does Bitcoin’s reliance on its network make it less stable than a traditional currency? I think so, but not necessarily fatally. Krugman quotes Brad Delong on the things you can’t do with Bitcoin:

Underpinning the value of gold is that if all else fails you can use it to make pretty things. Underpinning the value of the dollar is a combination of (a) the fact that you can use them to pay your taxes to the U.S. government, and (b) that the Federal Reserve is a potential dollar sink and has promised to buy them back and extinguish them if their real value starts to sink at (much) more than 2%/year (yes, I know).

You could argue that paying your taxes with dollars is a form of network effect, but that feels like a stretch. What this means is that Bitcoin’s value is less moored to things that we can jokingly call offline.

What is important to take from the above is that Bitcoin’s ability to expand its network is critically important as the supply of coins continues to grow. There is a hard cap of Bitcoins that will be released, but we are not there yet. So, Bitcoin fans want expanding utility (network) to grow at a higher rate than new coins are introduced.

There is another issue involved with the long-term utility of Bitcoin that is worth discussing, which is that its price volatility makes it hard to sell tangible goods (as opposed to non-tangible digital services, etc.) with the stuff. If I sell you a Tesla with Bitcoin, and the next day Bitcoin falls 25 percent before I can cash out my coins, that’s a pretty big deal. So Bitcoin needs a more stable price, which can only come to fruition after its network becomes large enough to have validated the price of Bitcoin at a certain level. And for that it needs to attract more retailers, which are kept out by its price swings.

This is all simple in summary: The utility of Bitcoin as a currency and its value as an equity depend on its network, which provides the market opportunities for Bitcoin to behave as either.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

There are already quite a few drones in use in U.S. airspace, but given that commercial drone usage remains off-limits, most of them are either operated by government agencies or for research purposes.

Today, however, the FAA has taken another step in its congressionally mandated process of integrating drones into the U.S. air traffic system. The FAA today announced six test sites in six states (out of 24 that applied) where it plans to test and develop systems for the safe integration of drones into the airspace system.

The focus here is clearly on testing. While the official plan is to integrate drones into the national airspace by 2015, it’s unlikely that the FAA will make this deadline and that we will see commercial drones flying alongside the usual Boeing 737s and Cessna 152s in the very near future. The idea here, after all, is to integrate them into the so-called “NextGen” air traffic control systems that are more famous for their false starts and budget overruns than anything else.

But before drones can be integrated into the current air traffic control system, the FAA wants to create standard procedures for things like lost links to the drone (which is somewhat akin to a plane losing radio contact with the air traffic control) and best practices for setting up ground-control stations, avoiding other traffic and how to certify and deal with the humans that actually operate the machines.

Among the six sites is Griffiss International Airport in Rome, New York, which will handle test and evaluation processes and focus on integrations drones into the heavily congested northeast airspace. The site will be operated by an alliance of 40 public and private organizations from New York and Massachusetts. The alliance will also host a test site at Joint Base Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

The University of Alaska will develop standards for state monitoring and navigation, using test site range locations in seven climatic zones ranging from Hawaii to Oregon (though it’s unclear which airports exactly the university plans to use for this). Nevada, which is already and the vanguard of allowing driver-less cars on its roads, will work on air traffic control procedures and the integration of drones into the regular airspace system.

Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi won support for its plan to develop procedures for handling airworthiness testing and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Virginia Tech (who submitted a joint plan) will work on failure mode testing and risk evaluation.

Of course we’re not quite sure how the Amazon Prime Air drone delivery project fits in with the FAA’s plans just yet.

It may be the holiday season, but Gavin Newsom, California’s tech savvy Lieutenant Governor, is as mad as hell. And he’s not going to take it any more. The fury of California’s second most powerful state politician is, ironically, directed at government itself. After what Newsom called “the debacle” of Obama’s Healthcare.gov roll-out, he says that we now know how fundamentally useless government is when it comes to what he calls the “procurement” of technology.

That’s the really big deal about 2013, Newsom told me when I interviewed him at one my FutureCast salons at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto. In what he identifies as a “Code Red” alert, the incredible incompetence of government has finally been exposed to everyone. It’s both a federal and state problem, Newsom insists, reeling off five outrageous screw-ups of Californian government procurement of technology which has cost the state billions of dollars.

“This is serious,” the Lieutenant Governor insists. “We need to wake up to this.”

So what is to be done in 2014? According to Newsom, the “good news” is that “government is on a collision course with the future.” And it’s government that going to get “run-over” by digital natives. So perhaps Newsom’s advice is to have lots of babies in 2014. After all, that may be the best way to make sure that the government does, in fact, eventually collide with the future.

In mid-December, Microsoft’s Surface 2 inventory became extremely tight. Now in the post-Christmas period of the month as we move into 2014, Surface 2 inventory continues to be heavily constrained: Microsoft’s own online store remains sold out, Best Buy won’t ship you one of the Windows RT 8.1 devices, on Amazon you can only snag one for around $100 greater than list price, and so forth.

Every Best Buy store near me lists the Surface 2 as unavailable. Only Staples from the online portals I checked claimed to have any stock on hand. So, if you don’t live near a Microsoft Store, you could be out of luck if you want to snag a Surface 2. Naturally, your mileage will vary depending on your location and retailer mix.

Microsoft is in the best bad situation you can be in as the seller of a physical good: When underestimated demand outstrips produced supply. It’s great that your device is in demand, but bad that you don’t have enough to sell. At a moment in which Chromebooks are starting to make waves, Microsoft doesn’t want to cede a single device sale that it doesn’t have to.

As I noted earlier this month, low Surface 2 inventory could hamper Microsoft’s ability to respond to critics unsure of its strategy to become an OEM. The lower its current-quarter Surface revenue is, the less doubt it can clear. And if Microsoft lacks inventory, it can’t sell units, and its revenue number has a ceiling.

According to the Huffington Post, the usual cadre of analysts indicated that they expected Microsoft had reduced its production of the Surface line of devices this year compared to last, and that it had simply run into higher demand. That is the most reasonable answer. Production mishaps could be at play as well, and so forth.

Annoyingly, the best indicator of Surface demand is the precise number being skewed by this shortage: revenue. It would have been far more convenient if Microsoft had very slightly overbuilt Surface units, so that every person who wanted one could have bought one and we would have a full-sales figure for Surface revenue. We won’t get that. So whatever revenue number that is reported will be a percentage of that theoretical maximum. You get to guess what the percentage is.

As we move into the new year, we have to ask when Microsoft can get more inventory online. I did not expect that this many days post Christmas, Microsoft’s Surface inventory would remain this low. You begin to worry that the company has a kink in its supply chain. That or they went far too conservative on their production run, period. Microsoft was not immediately available for comment.

Still, compared to the Great Surface Writedown of 2013, things are far better for Microsoft this time around than last.

Archos just dropped a huge smattering of CES news in advance of the huge annual tech show, which kicks off next week in Las Vegas. Among the various announcements, tucked away near the bottom, is the revelation that it will be introducing a “selection of smartwatches” for 2014, which will start at under £50 (roughtly $82 U.S.).

Archos doesn’t go into much detail about its smartwatches, saying only that they’ll have a “pebble-like” design and will work with both Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. The “pebble-like” seems like a blatant shot across the bow of Pebble, the Kickstarter-backed hardware startup that began building smartwatches under that name this past year, though it’s probably meant on the surface to indicate the things will look somewhat like rocks.

The Pebble is arguably the current leader in the smartwatch space, having sold somewhere around 300,000 units to date according to the latest official figures released by the company. Archos, the French company behind a line of moderately successful media players, and subsequently many Android-based tablets and gaming gadgets of questionable quality, looks to be trying to exploit the opportunity exposed by newcomer Pebble with cheaper devices in a range of options to suit the needs of various consumers.

Archos is targeting “simplicity and function” with its smartwatch designs, the company says, which could actually seem to be at cross-purposes. Maybe they’ll have some feature heavy designs, more like the Samsung Galaxy Gear, and some that are essentially just streamlined data delivery devices, more like the Pebble itself. Either way, I highly doubt Archos will find a red-hot seller in any smartwatch design – but that doesn’t mean it can’t meddle with the grand plans of Pebble and other startups.

Pebble is currently running a lot of sales and promotions, and giving away a good number of devices. This means that either A) it’s finding interest is dropping off after initial demand has been satisfied; or B) it’s gearing up to release second-generation hardware. Regardless, I still think we’ve yet to see any proof that watch-based computing is something that’s feasible as a mainstream device, and entrants from Archos are unlikely to provide said evidence.

U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has today taken up the battle cry of numerous legislators before her, calling for wireless carriers to enable new anti-theft technology on handsets.

According to the Senator, one-third of robberies involve cell phone theft, resulting in an estimated $30 billion in lost or stolen phones.

That said, Klobuchar has written a letter to the heads of the major wireless carriers, including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular.

In the letter, she requests an explanation as to why “the most advanced security features” haven’t been provided to consumers.

This comes on the heels of Apple’s iOS 7 launch, which included an Activation Lock feature inside Find My iPhone. This essentially worked as a kill switch, requiring the owners passcode to reactive an account, wipe the device, turn off Find My iPhone, or sign out of iCloud.

The NYT reported last month that Samsung was trying to bring a similar technology to handsets but that it was rejected by carriers.

After all, the carriers make a pretty penny from insurance policies protecting against lost or stolen phones, which has become a huge issue in major cities. Cops have even lovingly given iPhone theft a name: Apple picking.

Meanwhile, carriers have made light of phone theft with stupid commercials. All this while people get hurt.

Here’s the full text of Senator Amy Klobuchar’s letter:

Dear Messrs. McAdam, Stephenson, Hesse, Legere, and Meyers:

I am writing to express my concern regarding the increase in crimes involving the theft of mobile devices across the country. As a member of the Senate Commerce Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, I understand that consumers are utilizing more mobile technology and this is spurring growth in our economy. Unfortunately, more and more consumers are also at risk of being targeted by criminals looking to steal cell phones and other devices for illegal resale. I appreciate the work the industry has done in creating a database to keep stolen phones from being reactivated, but more action is needed.

According to the Federal Communications Commission, almost one-in-three robberies involve phone theft and the cost to consumers of lost or stolen phones is more than $30 billion each year. I’ve heard from local law enforcement officials about the continued call for the wireless industry to engage with them further and to adopt “kill switch” technologies on devices. Additionally, state Attorneys General have suggested that wireless carriers have not taken adequate steps to fight cell phone theft.

As Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, I expect wireless carriers to compete against one another to ensure consumers are offered the most advanced security features and offerings. Your five companies are the nation’s leading wireless carriers, collectively serving more than 90 percent of the nation’s wireless subscribers. With that market share comes an obligation to do all you can to utilize technologies available to protect consumers.

While I understand your companies are continuing to work with law enforcement on the stolen cell phone database, it is clear that consumers want and deserve a comprehensive strategy to prevent mobile device thefts. That is why I respectfully request that each of your companies provides my Judiciary Subcommittee detailed information on the following issues by January 9, 2014:

· Information explaining whether you have had offers by handset manufacturers to install “kill switch” technology, and, if so, why your company has or has not adopted such technology.

· Information about whether you have considered including this solution on handsets made by manufacturers now competing with Apple’s activation lock technology that operates as a “kill switch” on iPhones. If not, please describe your reasoning behind the decision made by your company.

· How your company will include such technology options at no cost to consumers in the future and how your phone security offerings differ from your competitors.

Identifying ways to curb mobile device theft is a top priority of mine and I will continue to advocate for the American wireless consumer. I also believe additional action to protect wireless consumers is necessary and that’s why I am asking you for this information. The status quo is not acceptable.

Sincerely,

Amy Klobuchar

Yahoo put of lot of effort and investment toward presenting a new Yahoo to the world in 2013, and a lot of that has hinged on improving its mobile business. There have been significant updates to old apps; over a dozen (out of a total of 28) mobile-related acquisitions to pick up talent, technology and products; and tests for what Yahoo should focus on next. But even as it has managed to grow its mobile audience this year, Yahoo is exiting 2013 on a mobile low note: not one of its apps is in the top 100 chart on the iTunes App Store.

This dearth of winners is a sign of how, despite all the effort, Yahoo has not (yet?) managed to tap into a ‘breakthrough’ app that has remained a perennial favorite, with the downloads to prove it. Nevermind the new-look apps, and the out with the old, in with the new logo: Yahoo! remains Yahoo!

As a point of comparison, consider how other app publishers are faring in Apple’s top 100: Google has five apps (Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube and Chrome). Facebook has three (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram). Twitter has two (Twitter and Vine). And a number of companies like Microsoft (Skype), Netflix, Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, Snapchat, Uber — “even fucking Groupon,” as one observer noted to us — have one apiece.

(Tumblr, acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion and with its own recent update, also failed to make the cut. According to AppAnnie, it’s currently at No. 110.)

So what’s going on here? You could argue Yahoo has yet to tap into a blockbuster on the platform it has chosen as its primary one, and as a result is finishing 2013 not with a mobile bang but a whimper.

“It is very clear that whatever they are doing over there is not working because people have spoken and they do not want Yahoo’s apps on their mobile,” our observer notes.

What is worth pointing out, though, are a couple of important caveats, which either will help Yahoo buy time, or may prove to be a strategy in its own right.

While Yahoo may not have a single bona-fide hit on its hands, what it is doing is spreading its bets, doing alright (if not brilliantly) on Android, and continuing to get repeat usage among those who have already downloaded its apps.

Comscore, according to its latest U.S. smartphone usage statistics from earlier this month (October 2013 figures) notes that Yahoo is the third most-popular property behind Google and Facebook on smartphones, with a reach of nearly 78 percent, some 11 percentage points behind Google. Yahoo has managed to hold on to that No. 3 spot for a while now, although its reach has declined compared to the previous few months (eg September: 82.2 percent reach; August: 83.2 percent).

Although Yahoo has long been making efforts to streamline its presence on mobile, Yahoo currently has 15 apps in the U.S. App Store (16 if you count Tumblr).

Using App Annie’s historical data, you can see that within individual categories like Weather, News and Sports, Yahoo has been consistent at the top of the rankings, even as its overall standing for each app has fluctuated with spikes around updates. I’ve included the figures on Android where they are available.

Yahoo Mail:

(iOS)

(Android)

Yahoo (News):

Yahoo Weather:

(iOS)

(Android)

Yahoo Sports (formerly Sportacular):

Flickr:

Less successful (and a sign of how video will need a lot more focus if Yahoo indeed makes this a core focus of its revenue and audience growth) is Yahoo Screen:

Yahoo Screen:

Most-downloaded versus most-used

Interestingly, none of these apps make it to the most-used app rankings as detailed by comScore.

Instead, its most recent figures note that Yahoo Stocks (a widget perhaps, since there is no standalone app by that name, unless comScore means Yahoo Finance), and Yahoo’s Weather Widget (not app) are the company’s most popular smartphone apps at the moment, respectively ranking 9th and 11th, with reaches of 29.9 percent and 23.6 percent. They are separated by Instagram, which has a reach of 25.5 percent.

What this also implies is that installed usage may not always correlate to downloads, too. But it also muddles something: monetizing something like Snapchat or Instagram is likely to be a whole lot bigger of an opportunity than monetizing a weather widget.

In November 2013, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer said the company had 400 million monthly active users on mobile, compared to the 390 million the company noted a month before, and the 350 million Mayer noted during the TC Disrupt conference in September. This points to an audience that continues to increase, if slowly.

Can Yahoo sustain that growth with its current mobile portfolio, and is it enough to translate to wider financial success for the company? Mayer has said in the past that getting to where Yahoo would like to be could take another three to four years.

The question is whether its lack of popularity so far is simply a premature red herring, or a sign of more lacklustre things to come.

Mobile analytics and ad platform Flurry has released its annual report on the state of app downloads over Christmas for 2013, and as is usually the case, consumers clearly went crazy for apps this year. Unwrapping a new iPad will inevitably prompt a spike in software downloads, but Flurry is finding that spike is starting to diminish year to year.

App downloads broke records yet again for 2013, with an 11 percent improvement over total Christmas Day downloads in 2012. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to past year-over-year increases. Between 2011 and 2012, for instance, download growth on Christmas exploded by 90 percent, while it increased 97 percent during the entire month of December year-over-year. This year, as mentioned, growth was only 11 percent between 2013 and 2012 for the holiday itself, and 25 percent for the month of December.

Flurry interprets this slow down in growth as a sign that the smartphone and tablet markets in developed markets might be reaching a maturation point – they avoid calling it a ‘saturation’ point, but it’s undeniable that that’s a fear many market watchers have had regarding the potential growth ceiling on device sales from leading smartphone and tablet makers in markets where those devices have been selling and selling well for nearly a decade now.

Christmas Day downloads were up 91 percent vs. an average day earlier in the month, Flurry found, so there’s a sizeable bump on the day of gift-giving itself. Still, even that is down vs. previous years. In both 2012 and 2011 there was a more than twofold increase in the number of downloads of apps taking place on Christmas Day vs. other days in the first three weeks of December.

This mild plateauing of downloads isn’t necessarily a sign that smartphone growth is slowing, however. It’s possible that there’s simply less discrepancy between Christmas Day and the rest of the year because people are more used to the concept of app stores, and more likely to buy mobile software throughout the year than on a single day when surrounded by more tech savvy relatives who can guide them through the process. New device activations also still spike on Christmas, however, but it’s a less dramatic increase than in previous years.

It’s still likely worth the effort on the developer side to discount apps and offer sales that last through the holiday period, but the difference in volume between that period and the rest of the year might not justify such dramatic dips in software price anymore. It’ll be interesting to see if this continues, or if there’s a levelling off point where the Christmas app download spike stops decreasing year-over-year.