Category: Tech news

Today at market opening, Twitter shares (NYSE:TWTR) dropped once again. Shares were at $60.27, down 5.46 percent compared to Friday’s closing price of $63.75. This nosedive marks the end of the honeymoon between Twitter and the NYSE as many analysts stated that shares are overpriced. Until now, the stock held strong amid those reports, but that seems to be coming to an end.

It is not the first drop as shares were already down 13 percent on Friday, shaving $5 billion off Twitter’s market capitalization. It was a big correction of Thursday’s good performance — on Thursday, shares popped 5 percent for no apparent reason.

Many analysts find that Twitter is an expensive company. With a market cap of $33.6 billion, the company has yet to turn a profit — analysts don’t expect to see any profit before 2015. But this pessimistic trend on the analyst’s side seems to be increasing. On Friday, Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter downgraded Twitter.

According to Bespoke Investment Group, the average price target stands at $44.27, around 37 percent below today’s trading price.

But why is the stock price dropping today? The Twitter IPO was a great sign for the entire tech industry. Private companies saw that the stock market could be friendly again with tech companies — and now, everyone wants to IPO.

When Twitter became a public company on November 7, the company priced its IPO at $26 a share. Shares popped 74 percent on that day. After this very good IPO performance, the stock price has been relatively flat.

Many commented that the IPO was underpriced on purpose to make a big splash on the NYSE. Leaving money on the table was a way to improve the longterm prospects and overall image. Shares are still up around 135 percent compared to the IPO price.

Yet, there was a recent turning point for Twitter shares. When the company introduced retargeted ads in early December, the advertising industry was very enthusiastic. Ads would soon be more relevant thanks to browser cookies and more user information. And shareholders voted with their wallets.

Shares went from $44.95 on December 6 to $73.31 on December 26. It represents a 63.1 percent increase, or a $15.7 billion increase in market capitalization. But it wasn’t sustainable on the long run. This 3-week honeymoon was great while it lasted, but it’s time to come back to reality.

Update at 9:45 am (ET): Shares are now down 7.22 percent to $59.15 a share.

Amazon may have had one of its best Cyber Mondays in reported history, but it doesn’t mean that the holiday shopping season went off without a hitch.

The company had some trouble getting all of its orders delivered on time for Christmas, after promising customers the same speedy delivery as usual. Amazon Prime members, in particular, are promised two-day shipping on Prime-eligible products, whether it’s Christmastime or not.

Unfortunately, last-minute shopping and overloads at UPS left Amazon customers waiting by the window on Christmas morning.

To make up for it, Amazon announced last week that they would offer $20 gift cards to customers who didn’t receive their presents on time. UPS is also issuing refunds.

Long story short, Amazon certainly doesn’t want to deal with this (or lose money issuing refunds) again.

It’s been mere weeks since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the idea of delivery drones, which would offer half-hour delivery to Prime customers. We’ll clearly have to wait a while for this to be fully implemented, but perhaps the drone experts at Amazon are hearing the crack of the whip after this debacle.

For now, Amazon relies on UPS and USPS to deliver packages purchased through the service, which proved difficult this holiday season.

According to the WSJ, UPS originally expected to ship around 7.75 million packages on Monday, the 23rd. Though it’s unclear how many packages actually went through UPS systems that day, the company did admit that “the volume of air packages in its system had exceeded its capacity.”

Amazon is clearly on the road to taking shipping into its own hands. Setting aside delivery drones, the company has implemented Sunday delivery in big cities like New York and San Francisco, thanks to the U.S. government, with rollouts expected in Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix.

Plus, Amazon already has its own mini-fleet of delivery trucks and contractors for its AmazonFresh service, which delivers fresh produce and other foods on a same-day or next-day basis in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

It’s simply a matter of time before Amazon controls delivery entirely, perhaps even in time to avoid this situation next Christmas. Maybe that’s Bezos’ New Years Resolution?

Keeping cats interested in any one toy for any length of time can be difficult, at least in my experience. Plus, most of them require a lot of manual input on the owner’s part. The Egg is a Kickstarter project that aims to keep things interesting for the cat, and save energy for the owner, with a smart toy that moves on its own and can be programmed via a laptop.

The Egg looks like its namesake, but contained within its plastic enclosure, it holds an offset weight and gearmotor, along with a printed circuit board. The Egg can detect floor type and even obstacles, like a cat’s paw or person’s foot, and rotate its weight using the gearmotor to change direction. The result is a ball that can continuously roll and keep a cat’s interest without any human intervention.

Or, with limited human intervention, I should say. The Egg still needs to be charged up, using a microUSB port on its side, and it can be plugged into a computer to switch it to various interaction modes using a desktop software interface.

Speaking from experience using an iPhone-controlled Sphero robot, this seems like a design that will indeed appeal to furry friends. Egg’s creator Jason O’Mara says that it isn’t designed to withstand the rougher brand of abuse that can come from dogs, however, so limit the Egg to feline pals only. O’Mara is an electrical engineer based in Portland, Oregon who previously worked for electronics industry vet TDK, among others.

Egg has managed to get within spitting distance of its $15,000 Kickstarter funding goal, so it’s highly likely it’ll reach it before long. O’Mara anticipates shipping the first production run by June, 2014, and backers can secure a pre-order for $31. That’s a small price to pay for what could potentially provide eternal enjoyment for your bored domestic animal.

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Accel Partners’ Partner Ping Li joined me in the studio to talk about big data companies, enterprise IPOs and more.

Li, who focuses on early-stage growth software and data-center investments for Accel and is also responsible for the firm’s Big Data Fund, talked about the impact that data driven software has had on how entrepreneurs. He also explained where he sees new areas of innovation in the large-scale data analysis space.

Check out the video above for more!

A U.S. District Judge ruled that the National Security Agency’s phone-record-collection program is constitutional [PDF]. “The right to be free from searches and seizures is fundamental, but not absolute,” New York’s Judge William Pauley wrote.

This stands in direct contrast to a decision earlier this month declaring the very same program is likely unconstitutional. “We are pleased with the decision,” said Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr.

In essence, Pauley was convinced that countermeasures to investigate terror plots justified mass collection of data.

The government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the world. It launched a number of counter-measures, including a bulk telephony metadata collection program — a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data.

He went a bit further, arguing that collection from private firms was likely more invasive, yet few consumers care. The government, moreover, has only had isolated instances of abuse.

Every day, people voluntarily surrender personal and seemingly-private information to trans-national corporations, which exploit that data for profit. Few think twice about it, even though it is far more intrusive than bulk telephony metadata collection. There is no evidence that the government has used any of bulk telephony metadata it collected for any purpose other than investigating and disrupting terrorist attacks. While there have been unintentional violations of guidelines, those appear to stem from human error and the incredibly complex computer programs that support this vital tool. And once detected, those violations were self-reported and stopped.

As I’ve noted before, ultimately, these decisions will likely have to be decided by the Supreme Court. Or Congress could decide to end bulk collection sooner.

The short of it is that, practically speaking, this decision won’t mean much, but could provide compelling arguments for the Supreme Court, should it decide on the controversial practice.

Until then, please have a wonderful holiday weekend and feel free to enjoy this joke.

[Image Credit]

Apple’s new Mac Pro is a sight to behold: In black aluminum with an eye-catching cylindrical design, there’s little chance you’ll ever mistake it for any other computer. The previous Mac Pro was iconic too, of course, but this one is also just slightly larger than a football and dimpled on the top with a recess like a jet engine. But the true power lies under the hood, and what’s contained therein will satisfy even the most pressing need for speed.

Video Review

Basics (as reviewed)

• 3.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5 processor
• 16GB 1897 MHz DDR3 RAM
• Dual AMD FirePro D300 graphics cards with 2GB of RAM each
• 256GB SSD
• 6 Thunderbolt 2.0 Ports, 4 USB 3.0
• 802.11ac + Bluetooth 4.0
• MSRP: $2,999
• Product info page

Pros

• No faster Mac exists under the sun.
• It’s like having an exhibit from an industrial design museum in your house.

Cons

• It’s super expensive.
• Bring your own screen/everything.

Design

Few would argue that Apple’s design for the Mac Pro isn’t unique. It’s been compared to Darth Vader’s iconic look from the original Star Wars movies, and in a less flattering light, called the “trash can” Mac. But when you actually have one sitting on your desk, it’s a very different story. The aluminum surface is cool to the touch, reflective without being shiny, and – somehow – astoundingly reassuring.

It’s the modern monolith of desktop computing, and indeed it does harken forward to a future age where the amazing engineering contained within is required for your everyday computing needs.

As it stands, of course, the computer housed within that sleek black shell will obliterate any task thrown at it by all but the most extreme and demanding of professionals. Apple might not be as fond of the so-called ‘moonshot’ as competitors like Google, but it gives great immediate futurism with the Mac Pro in terms of both design and performance.

The modularity of the new Mac Pro is not the same as it was with the older versions. You won’t be swapping 3.5mm HDDs out of bays, for instance. But the outer shell slides off easily once you’ve unlocked it, and you get full access to the RAM bays (upgradeable to a maximum of 64GB via four 16GB modules), as well as to the SSD units (which, while Apple-specific, are upgradeable too) and the GPUs (also theoretically replaceable with future Apple-specific hardware). But the real modularity comes via the external I/O: Thunderbolt 2 can theoretically display 4K video while simultaneously transferring it thanks to a unified 20 Gbit/s throughput rate, and there are six ports on the back, combined with four for USB 3.0.

This, combined with the unique thermal core Apple has created, makes for an incredibly small, quiet professional workstation machine. In testing, I couldn’t hear it unless I put my ear up close, and even then it’s a relatively quiet hum, not even close to the fracas my Retina MacBook Pro makes when it’s doing heavy lifting. It breathes a light exhaust of air through the top, too, which is actually a nice refresher if you’ve been slaving away in Final Cut Pro all day.

Performance

For the layperson or everyday computer user, the new Mac Pro will seem like a thought-based computer, where virtually every input action you can think of results in immediate response. Whether it’s the Xeon processor or the super-fast PCIe-based SSD or those dual workstation GPUs, everything seems slightly but impossibly faster than on any other Mac, even the most recent iMac and Retina MacBook Pros. To be honest, it’ll be hard to go back even for everyday tasks like browsing the web and importing pics to iPhoto.

But that’s not what the Mac Pro is for: It’s a professional machine designed to help filmmakers create elaborate graphics, 3D animations and feature-length films. It’s aimed at the most demanding photographers, working in extreme resolutions and doing batch processing on huge files. It’s for audio producers, creating the next hit album using Logic Pro X and low latency, high bandwidth I/O external devices.

For me, Final Cut Pro was bound to be the wrench that would otherwise throw my existing Mac setup some trouble. On the Mac Pro, FCP X ran like a dream, rendering and publishing in the blink of an eye. I had to pinch myself to prove that I wasn’t dreaming after it took fewer than 10 seconds to render and publish the final edit of a 1080p video a little over two minutes long. And again, nary a peep from the Mac Pro itself.

For the super nerdy, you can check out the Geekbench scores of the new Mac Pro we tested here and here. Remember, this is the baseline, entry-level version without any customization options, so it’s the bottom of what you can expect in terms of performance.

Features

The Mac Pro has some unique abilities that you won’t find in any other Mac, including the ability to power up to six Thunderbolt displays at once. I ran two Thunderbolt Displays plus a 21-inch iMac, as well as a Wacom 13HD through the HDMI port, and Apple’s premium machine didn’t even break a sweat. This is definitely the computer for the video producer who wants to be able to monitor output in real time while working on some raw video at the same time, or the information addict who feels they just aren’t getting enough with the two or three displays that represent the maximum possible output with a MacBook Pro or iMac.

Another great feature is the upgradeability, which ensures that, as futuristic and ahead-of-the-curve as this Mac already is, it’ll be even more future-proof thanks to the ability to swap out components down the road. Apple hasn’t revealed any details about later upgrade kits, but it’s reasonable to expect that RAM, SSDs and even GPUs will be available for those who feel they need even more out of their maxi Mac.

One final subtle but very nice feature is the auto-illumination of the ports that happens when you move the Mac tower itself. It’s extremely useful for helping you plug the right device into the right port when you’re looking to add new devices, and likewise when you’re looking to unplug something. This kind of attention to detail only reinforces that if you have $3K to spend on a Mac, your money’s in good hands with Apple.

Bottom Line

The Mac Pro is almost absurd in terms of its abilities. It’ll blow away any ordinary computer user, including one with even slightly advanced demands like myself (occasional video editing, plenty of Photoshop, some digital graphics and podcast production). But in reality, my Retina MacBook Pro wasn’t straining under the demand of my needs, either – the Mac Pro merely makes it all seem effortless.

That said, it’s rare that a computer is an investment; mostly these days, you buy one with the expectation that you’ll probably need another in two years’ time. The Mac Pro, somewhat like the iPhone 5s, is designed with the future in mind, so that video producers who aren’t working on 4K but will be expected to in a few years don’t have to reinvest.

For anyone who’s been looking forward to a replacement for their aging gray tower Mac Pro, and for anyone who has the money and is willing to spend it, the Mac Pro is a no-brainer, but for the rest of us, we needn’t reach quite so high to touch the sky when it comes to Apple’s line of OS X hardware.

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today.

After some serious drubbing in two of the world’s largest countries during past few weeks, the Bitcoin ecosystem may have found its biggest individual backer yet in Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man.

Li is now an investor in Atlanta-based BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal for the virtual currency world. He has made this investment through his venture capital company, Horizons Ventures, an early investor in companies such as Facebook, Waze, Skype and Summly, which manages $150 million in 3 different funds.

A BitPay spokeswoman told me that Horizons Ventures and the Founders Fund are among a group of investors including Shakil Khan, Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland, Roger Ver and Ben Davenport, who have put around $2.7 million in the startup so far. Founders Fund is the VC group run by people who founded and were early employees at PayPal. In May this year, BitPay raised $2 million from the Founders Fund.

The South China Morning Post reported earlier today that Li has invested in BitPay through Horizons Ventures, but didn’t give any specific details on the amount invested.

Li’s investment in BitPay comes at a time, when regulators in India and the People’s Bank of China, have issued advisories against the virtual currency, and even questioned the legitimacy of Bitcoin.

Overall, the environment for Bitcoin seems more conducive the in U.S. where Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently said that despite risks, there are areas where virtual currencies hold long-term promise.

Indeed, BitPay said earlier this month that it has processed over $100 million in transactions this year, and has increased its merchant base to over 15,500.

It’s been a very busy month for Bitcoin, mostly filled with bad news in two of the world’s biggest countries. While China’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, BTCChina, stopped accepting deposits in Chinese Yuan earlier this month, exchanges dealing with the virtual currency in India are shutting down after a warning from the country’s banking regulator, RBI.

The 85-years old Hong Kong-based billionaire, who is also the chairman of Hutchison Whampoa, is buying into Bitcoin growth in the U.S. amid uncertainties in Asia.

John Greenwood, the chief economist of London-based Invesco, told the South China Morning Post that Li’s strategy of investing in a startup that provides enabling infrastructure for the virtual currency, offers lessons for investors looking to make money from Bitcoin.

This is what Greenwood told the newspaper:

“Just like investors in days gone by made more money out of selling shovels and picks to gold-diggers than anyone ever made out of the gold mine, he is investing in the peripheral activity that bitcoin has generated.”

Clearly, Li seems to have made a smart move by avoiding any direct investments in Bitcoin.

[Image: Flickr/Stanford EdTech]

It’s only been six months since Rdio launched its video-streaming platform Vdio to the world, but it appears that the company has already decided to give up on that experiment. In an email sent to customers today, the streaming media startup announced that it has decided to discontinue the service.

While Vdio was only just introduced over the summer, it followed nearly two years of speculation that Rdio would compete against Netflix and Amazon with a streaming video product. When it finally launched, Vdio was less of a Netflix clone, and more of a competitor to traditional on-demand video rental services like iTunes or Google Play.

The shutdown of the service follows a layoff that affected 35 people at the company. At the time, Rdio didn’t comment on how the layoff would affect the video service.

In an email sent out to customers, the Vdio team said it was not able to “deliver a differentiated customer experience,” and is offering users Amazon gift cards as reimbursement for purchases made on the platform.

According to several reports on Twitter, Vdio sent the following statement:

Hi [NAME],

We are writing to inform you that we have decided to discontinue the Vdio beta service.

Despite our efforts, we were not able to deliver the differentiated customer experience we had hoped for, and so Vdio is now closed. For more information, please read the Vdio FAQ.

As reimbursement for any content you purchased and any rental content that has yet to expire, we’d like to give you an Amazon gift card. To redeem your gift card, please visit Amazon.com/redeemgift and enter the following gift card claim code:

We want to thank you for trying Vdio, and we wish you a very happy New Year.

The Vdio Team

We’ve reached out to Rdio for comment and will follow up once we learn more.

The idea of marketplaces as a business model for technology startups isn’t new. We saw some marketplaces go belly up in the bubble, and saw a few, like eBay, grow into massive businesses. However, the marketplace model has experienced a renaissance of sorts lately, with companies like Airbnb, Uber and others gaining serious traction and becoming billion-dollar-plus businesses.

Greylock Partners held a conference in mid-November devoted to talking about design, product development, the economics and more around marketplaces, spearheaded in part by the firm’s newest partner and former eBay Motors creator, Simon Rothman.

As part of its new $100 million commitment to investing in marketplaces, Greylock assembled Reid Hoffman, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Nobel Prize Laureate and marketplace expert Alvin Roth, and many others to discuss the rise of marketplaces and much more. I was able to sit down with some of the speakers to talk about their thoughts on why marketplaces are hot right now.

Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook, sees many parallels between networks and marketplaces. On the similarities in both models, he says: “There’s a question of how do you identify people? What reputational systems underlie it? What kinds of information and signaling? What kind of transactions go public? There’s some differences, too, but it’s essentially a similar brain activity.”

As for why marketplaces are getting more attention now, Hoffman believes that it’s in part due to mobile and the progression in human behavior. “Now everyone is comfortable with the notion of, ‘Oh, I could actually find someone I don’t know and transact with them, either as travelers, hosts, sellers, buyer.’ Those that can actually work mean that I have some trust in these mechanisms,” he explains further.

Rothman agrees with Hoffman, and told me that trust is a huge element of why marketplaces have evolved, as well as the biggest challenge for these marketplaces. “They’re really selling trust. And until the web adds social identity, I think creating trust at scale is really hard. As we’ve heard, marketplace is about influence, and if you can’t control the experience, if you can’t control the product, you can’t control the fulfillment. All you can control is trust and you need to have that. And then mobile is an accelerant to that. If you are a local market, or a local business, you have to have mobile. There’s just no way Uber works without mobile,” he says.

Reid Hoffman

So how do marketplaces add trust? Hoffman advises to look at mechanisms by which you can essentially borrow some trust and add it to the product, such as using social networks or identities. He recalled a product development from his PayPal days, where an engineer developed a better way to authenticate bank accounts.

For years, in order to authenticate a bank account you had to send in a voided check, and a copy of your drivers license. PayPal realized that if they wanted to get to scale, the company would have to make it easier to create accounts. “If we can’t solve this problem, we basically don’t have an interesting business model,” he said. One of the early engineers developed a way to send two sub-dollar transactions to the account, to create a PIN of sorts for instant verification.

While friction is something most marketplaces want to remove, Rothman argues that some should consider “the concept of strategic friction” when it comes to trust and safety. He thinks it’s one of the only places where friction is not only tolerable but kind of desirable.

Of course, one of the marketplaces where trust and safety have been of the utmost importance is Airbnb. Hoffman recalled when he heard Airbnb’s pitch, he was in immediately. “When Brian and his cofounders pitched me, I stopped them a couple of minutes in, I said look I’m interested in investing. I want to hear the rest of the pitch and talk about it, but I get this already.”

Hoffman says that Airbnb was creating liquidity out of space. Even if the hosts didn’t own their real estate, the liquidity involved is “hugely valuable and motivating to them.” So, they’ll adopt mobile products, and go through hoops to make that happen. “There was no question that this is going to work,” he says.

But Hoffman recognized that there have been bumps in the road when it came to trust and safety–but he said that what made the difference was Chesky and his team’s hard work is setting things right. “Brian motivated the entire company within six weeks, and said We are revamping trust and safety, in the same kind of pattern he was talking about in terms of developing for mobile,” Hoffman recalls.

Separately at the conference, Chesky talked a bit about design, and how he approaches designs at the company. Airbnb launched a complete redesign of its mobile app in November, and Chesky was involved in every part of the three months it took to implement and create the new design, even forgoing hiring efforts. While it took three months end to end to launch a new version of the app, the actual design took place in a matter of three weeks.

Brian Chesky

When doing the design, the company put up a huge wall where they printed every single screen in the app and placed it on the wall. It amounted to around three hundred separate pages. Chesky learned at art school that you need to draw the whole canvas before rendering because you lose perspective. People tend to get stuck on one page in a design or redesign, and I didn’t want that to happen.

And because the design has to cater to two groups, the host and the guest, one team would design the pages from the guest point of view and another from the host point of view. Chesky also met with the designers every couple of days or even every day and that was really, really critical to the speed of design and overall success of the project, in his opinion.

One speed bump that many of these marketplaces hit is regulatory pushback. Every large marketplace of late, including Uber and Airbnb, have had challenges dealing with local regulatory agencies. In fact, Rothman says that “any interesting marketplace will hit regulatory issues…largely, if you’re not hitting a regulation issue, the likelihood that the marketplace is interesting is very low. Not zero, but very low.”

Hoffman is familiar with this, as even networks hit regulatory challenges. He explains:

“I think the simplest way to understand regulation is, there’s a bomb, there’s a fuse, you’ve lit the fuse. And you have to figure out how long the fuse is and how fast it’s burning. And you have to pay attention to that. And then depending on what you think the dynamics are, and there’s certain things you think that can accelerate this fuse or not.”

He advises that in the early stages of any marketplace that may hit regulatory snags, founders should figure out what their engagement strategy is. “You don’t want to pre-sell [regulators] on the benefits. You want to get to where they just look around at host sipping coffee and say, “Oh, how was it being a host? How was it being a traveler. Oh, great.” He says you shouldn’t stick your head in the sand, and ignore regulators but also going to them early may be futile as most regulators don’t want change.

“So you want to keep that in play to the point where you can build it out and make them go, “Oh, I get this.” And by the way, then, at that point you have a large constituency, if you’re being successful, that also is arguing in your favor and then that allows for regulation change. The regulators, legislators, other people need to figure out what the thing should be.”

Now that Greylock is allocating some of its new $1 billion in funding toward the marketplace model, we’ll be looking to see where the firm will be placing its bets. Rothman thinks that in the next five years there will be more $1 billion dollar marketplaces than there were in the past 20 years, and we already have quite a few that are rising fast. Stay tuned.

[Photo modified from Shutterstock]

Wouldn’t it be awesome if heavy metal icons Iron Maiden leveraged data about which regions of the world pirated their music to plan a multi-million dollar global concert tour? Yeah, it’d be awesome, if it were true.

So awesome to my anarchistic ears that I was halfway through reblogging the reblog of a Rolling Stone story before I learned that I couldn’t actually verify any of the facts.

In the last 48 hours, tech and music outlets have heaped praise on the supposed the tech savviness of the 80s metal band, who allegedly analyzed Bittorrent data to plan a concert tour in South America. Bittorrent, a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing client, can often reveal hidden fan bases around the world, since the traffic and contents can be analyzed in aggregate.

Musicmetric, an entertainment forecasting startup that analyzes bittorrent and social media data, was quoted in a Guardian piece on November 29, arguing that bands could potentially leverage the wealth of online information to plan their concerts.

Then, on December 20, a tech blog, citeworld, ran this click-delicious headline “How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates — then went and played for them.” The piece implied that MusicMetric directly advised Iron Maiden to plan an otherwise unscheduled concert tour in South America.

“[The] CiteWorld story is sadly not substantiated,” a spokesman for MusicMetric wrote to me in an email. “We never stated or implied that Iron Maiden had used our analytics to plan its tours.”

“Once someone writes it and someone tweets, there’s not a lot that anyone can do,” said the MusicMetric spokesman, who preferred to remain anonymous. Despite the glowing press coverage, MusicMetric worries about taking credit for something they clearly didn’t do.

In fairness to my fellow writers, I was part of the hype machine. I retweeted the story before I had the chance to fully read it. In the course of writing this post, Citeworld has issued an apology and correction, but that hasn’t stopped the Internet rumor machine from cranking out more stories today.

After all, it seems like a plausible story. Indeed, beloved science fiction writer Neil Gaiman has become a full-fledged piracy supporter, after finding out that regions that pirated his books also bought more of them.

“Places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia, where people were translating my stuff into russian and spreading it out into the world, I was selling more and more books,” he gushed.

I suppose it’s possible that Iron Maiden has, in fact, used Bittorrent data to plan their South American tour. I reached out but haven’t heard immediately back. But, I wouldn’t bet any Bitcoin that they do.

This isn’t the first time that the Internet rumor machine has come to the wrong conclusions. During the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, amateur sleuthing wrongly suggested that missing student, Sunil Tripathi, might be the culprit. The rumor eventually spiraled out of control into front-page headlines implying that Tripathi was enemy #1.

I really wish MusicMetric had advised Iron Maiden on how to make millions of dollars from music pirates. It’s such a good story. Too good, evidently, to be true.

[Image Credit: Lee McLaughlin]

Jonathan Teo?, ?a General Catalyst managing director whose most notable investments included Snapchat?, ?has left the venture capital firm?. ?The news is confirmed on? ?Teo’s LinkedIn profile and his General Catalyst page?, ?where Teo is? ?now listed as a venture advisor instead of a managing director?.?

It might seem surprising that Teo would leave General Catalyst when it’s just closed a massive? $?675? ?million venture capital fund?. ?During his two years there?, ?Teo was a personal investor and led the Series A round in Snapchat?, ?and his investments also included? ?Chloe? + ?Isabel?, ?Couchsurfing and HeyDay?. ?

When I contacted him?, ?Teo said he isn’t ready to comment on his future plans?, ?but I was told by a source close to him that he’s been planning to leave General Catalyst for a while and focus on Asia?. I also learned he’s been approached by other Silicon Valley firms but hasn’t shown an interest.

Though Teo is still based in San Francisco?, ?Asia makes sense for him because he has strong personal and professional ties to the continent?. ?Teo was born and raised in Singapore and?, ?while working at Google?, ?he set up its research and development center in Shanghai?. ?After leaving Google?, ?Teo joined Benchmark Capital?, ?where he originated its investments in Instagram and Twitter?. ?His track record in consumer mobile means he’d be able to provide valuable guidance to startups in Asia’s emerging markets?. ?

In many of the continent’s? ?fledging? ?startup hubs?, ?including Seoul?, ?Taipei and Hong Kong?, ?there is plenty of talent but a lack of mentors who know how to help companies navigate the challenges of securing early funding and gaining traction?. If Teo heads East he? ?will probably be busy fielding calls from founders who hope to replicate the success of Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.

If he does focus on Asian startups?, ?Teo will likely work with his friend Robin Chan?, ?an early Xiaomi investor who? ?helped convince Hugo Barra?, ?Google’s former head of Android?, ?to join the fast-growing Chinese smartphone maker?. ?

Chan told me that he’s excited about the potential of partnering up with Teo?. “?Jonathan is one of the most talented early stage? ?investors that I know?,” ?Chan said?. “?He has great intuition about consumer mobile?.” ?

Vkontakte, a social networking site known as the “Facebook of Russia”, is facing legal action from nine music labels including EMI, Sony and Warner over what they claim is the unlawful distribution of some 6,000 tracks of licensed music on the site from artists like Madonna, Linkin Park, Metallica and Beyonce. The lawsuits are being prepared for filing after the holidays, according to the Russian newspaper Izvestia.

If the suits go ahead, they look like they may be some of the first big moves from music rightsholders to go after a major site in the wake of a new anti-piracy law in the country designed to protect copyright better.

That law originally focused more on video content but was being extended to include music in August of this year. The law enforces improved communication by requiring site owners to provide easy-to-find contact details, including real-world addresses, and forms for rightsholders to file complaints faster. If a site fails to comply with an infringement complaint, it faces a block at the ISP level.

Leonid Agronov, the head of Russia’s National Federation of the Music Industry (Russia’s RIAA), told Izvestia that his organization has long been trying to negotiate with Vkontakte over music distributed through its site. The NFMI claims that Vkontakte does not pay for streamed plays, neither by charging users directly nor by paying the licensing fee directly. But that does not mean that the social network is not profiting. “[Vkontakte] shows ads while people listen to music. So they make money on it,” he said.

In the case of removing these tracks, it puts Vkontakte in a double bind, where it’s damned if it doesn’t and damned if it does: on the one hand, it risks legal action from larger companies and potential ISP blockage; on the other, it faces backlash from its users, who look to it as a content portal.

We have reached out to Vkontakte for a comment and will update this story when and if we learn more.

This is not Vkontakte’s first brush with copyright holders. Izvestia notes that in June of this year, the site — which has become a go-to place for users in Russia for music and other digital content sharing (including a lot of legal content) — took down some 7,000 music tracks. Then in August, Vkontakte signed a deal with UK monitoring company Muso to track and remove illegal music from the site.

In January 2012, Vkontakte lost a case against Russian label Gala, which said the site was allowing users to upload and share tracks by Russian artists in breach of copyright law. It was fined $7,000. It has won other cases, such as a case against Russian label Soyuz this past October, again over copyright.

It is also not Vkontakte’s first brush with Russian legal forces. In May this year, the Russian regulator Roskomnadzor blocked the site. Although it claimed to have done this by mistake, the move was a bit close to the bone, considering that the site has been a strong advocate of free speech, including content critical of the government. One of the social network’s investors, United Capital Partners, has ties to the Kremlin. It picked up its stake in Vkontakte in a secondary sale.

Russia is Europe’s biggest internet market with over 61 million users. But it also has the more dubious distinction of being one of the worst repeat offenders globally when it comes to digital content copyright infringement. That has been one of the big gating factors for legit services to enter the market — not least because those businesses may actually find it hard to find paying users, when free (but illegal) content is so easy to get.

But with companies like Apple finally launching iTunes in the country, the tides are slowly shifting — something regulators have been hoping to encourage with anti-piracy legislation.

According to analysts at TNS, Vkontakte is one of the most visited sites in Russia, overall coming in third after portals like Mail.ru and Yandex (which each account for some 30 aggregated URLs). Looking specifically at Moscow, Russia’s biggest and pace-setting market, Vkontakte is the leader among under-24s and third in the 25-34 age bracket:

In this particular case, which will be filed in court in St Petersburg (where Vkontakte is based), the plaintiff group includes a mix of international and Russian labels: Sony, Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI, Gala, Navigator, Studio Soyuz and Nikitin Media. The case could last between a couple of months and two years, Izvestia writes.

Bitcoin exchanges in India are shutting down days after the country’s banking regulator warned users of virtual currency against security and financial risks associated with them. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had remained silent on Bitcoin over the past few weeks, even as China started clamping down on the exchanges, sending the virtual currency into a downward spin earlier this month.

A week after India’s small but growing Bitcoin community organized its first conference, and made an appeal to the country’s banking regulators for recognizing the virtual currency, the RBI said the Bitcoin users have not obtained any regulatory approvals yet, which poses several risks to anybody associated with them. This is what the RBI said:

There have been several media reports of the usage of VCs, including Bitcoins, for illicit and illegal activities in several jurisdictions. The absence of information of counterparties in such peer-to-peer anonymous/ pseudonymous systems could subject the users to unintentional breaches of anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) laws

However, the wording of the announcement from RBI leaves a question mark over the legality of not just the exchanges but also of the people who trade on them.

As we had reported earlier this month, India was just beginning to see a rise in Bitcoin exchanges, and the country’s 1,000-member strong Bitcoin community was hoping to get more merchant endorsements.

BuysellBitco.in, an Indian website offering Bitcoin exchange in the local currency, has already suspended its operations. The founder of BuysellBitco.in, Mahim Gupta, who had previously mentioned that his monthly turnover was around $200,000, could also not be reached for comments. Other Bitcoin traders, perhaps cautious that the RBI’s statements threw their own legal situation into question, were also unavailable.

Earlier this month, The News Lens, an independent media startup in Taiwan, announced that it had received angel funding from Marcus Brauchli, whose resume includes top editing positions at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and Sasa Vucinic, who helped launch the non-profit Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF). In addition to their investment, Brauchli and Vucinic are also working closely with The News Lens as advisors.

The involvement of these two journalism veterans is a sign of how quickly The News Lens, which launched just five months ago, has gained traction as a trusted source for information in Taiwan’s crowded media landscape. The site’s growth strategy, which balances idealism with a solid business plan, offers a look at how independent news organizations can leverage multiple channels and organic marketing to build readership without sacrificing the quality of their content.

Though the amount of funding was undisclosed, Joey Chung, the founder and chief executive of The News Lens, says it will enable the startup to hire more staff, access photo wires and databases to create in-house content and launch video content. The site currently aggregates content from different media outlets in addition to publishing original columns and analysis.

“Sasa and I are hugely impressed with the vision and energy that Joey Chung, [co-founder and editor-in-chief] Mario Yang and their team bring to The News Lens. Both of us have spent time with them in Taipei,” Brauchli told me in an email. “Their use of social media, aggregation and user-centric design, their awareness of the importance of fresh voices in the mix of content, their political and commercial independence, and their commitment to smart, relevant content for a younger audience made the company an especially attractive project for us.”

Balancing idealism and business

Since launching in July, The News Lens has grown to 1.5 million unique visitors a month, a sign that Taiwanese readers are hungry for a politically independent news site. For English-speaking readers, the most obvious site to compare The News Lens to is the Huffington Post (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by AOL).

But Chung says there are several key differences in strategy between the two publications. For example, The News Lens is already aiming for expansion into international Chinese-speaking markets, including Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Malaysia. The site is available in both traditional and simplified Chinese characters and has translation widgets for English-speaking readers.

The startup also launched with a multi-platform strategy that includes a mobile-optimized site, a content partnership with HTC and videos with news summaries that will play on TV screens in public places like airport terminals and shopping centers.

The News Lens wants to be a platform where a wide range of readers can engage in informed debates about important social and political issues, but it balances its lofty philosophy with Chung’s business savvy.

Chung wrote six Chinese-language books and was a reporter at the Taipei Times, an English-language daily (disclosure: I also worked there, though not at the same time as Chung) before going to Harvard Business School. After graduating, he oversaw Sanrio’s China operations. At the end of 2012, Chung began discussing the possibility of launching an independent news site with Yang, who was then working for Business Weekly, a Taiwanese magazine.

Taiwan’s media industry has grown rapidly: when martial law was lifted in 1988, there were only 31 newspapers, but within 20 years that number had grown to more than 2,000. But a highly-competitive media industry comes with problems like endless articles about C-list celebrity sex scandals and silly food fads. To be sure, these articles are the kind of mindless fluff that draws readers looking for a quick diversion, but more serious problems identified by non-profit media watchdog Freedom House include defamation laws that have sparked concerns about censorship and highly polarized political coverage.

The United Daily and the Liberty Times are seen by many readers as mouthpieces respectively for the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s currently ruling party, and the opposing Democratic Progressive Party. The Apple Daily has managed to establish a reputation for independence, but that is arguably because the tabloid’s voyeuristic celebrity- and crime-obsessed coverage is equally offensive (and titillating) to readers across the political spectrum.

Chung is careful to point out that The News Lens isn’t out to topple Taiwan’s leading newspapers. In fact, the site often aggregates content from those publications. Instead, he says The News Lens’ role is to identify important stories and then offer readers analysis to put it into a wider context.

“For my generation, people don’t read newspapers because they don’t want to be affected by bias, or they read three newspapers, the Liberty Times, United Daily and Apple,” says Chung.

“We want to be the one-stop shop so we can give you that service already. We screen out the junk. We tell you this is what blue is saying and this is what green is saying, and this is what you should know about the issues behind it,” he adds, referring to the party colors of the KMT and DPP. “We try not to judge and we try not to lean toward any perspective.”

Recent headline topics on the site have ranged from gay rights in Taiwan to U.S. foreign policy. Though The News Lens target audience is between the ages of 25 and 35, the site hopes to reach people across a broad range of demographic niches. Columns penned by The News Lens’ own contributors currently focus on tech, startups and education. The News Lens now has seven full-time employees, most of whom have previous journalism experience, and 11 part-time staffers.

Chung says the site is open to having employees who are “extreme blue or green,” but while they are allowed to express their opinions, they have to keep a “calm, rational and respectful” tone. Another way that The News Lens hopes to build trust is by being honest and pragmatic about its coverage.

“I would say we are independent and we’re fair, but since our inherent ideal is to promote as many viewpoints as possible, it’s easy to imagine that we might be a little bit more liberal-leaning,” says Chung. “As long as an idea is not harmful, we’ll put it up there.”

Growing readership and monetizing

The News Lens has focused on word-of-mouth marketing since its launch instead of paying for ad campaigns, partly to prevent overexposure and partly to establish credibility as readers share links with friends on their social media accounts.

To reach a wide readership, the News Lens cross-platform strategy includes a mobile-responsive main site, a Flipboard account and a partnership with a digital marketing group that will place videos produced by The News Lens onto public screens. It also landed a deal with HTC which means that The News Lens is one of the sources Taiwanese smartphone users can select for push notifications about breaking news.

“From early on, we didn’t want to be another Web site with an afterthought app. We wanted to be on social media, on TV screens in public places, on Flipboard, as fast as possible,” says Chung.

This strategy has worked well for The News Lens. Chung says that startup originally hoped to reach a target of one million unique visitors around Q2 2014. Instead, The News Lens hit 1.5 million visitors last month. Within five months of its launch, it had already racked up 50,000 Facebook followers. To put those numbers into context, Taiwan’s population is 23.3 million.

Before venturing into other markets, Chung says the startup wants to be profitable in Taiwan. Ideally, that means the site will be considered “one of the top sources of where you get your news,” he says. “We’ll be happy and comfortable once we’ve spent six months as one of the top Web sites that our generation goes to for news, columns and perspectives in different industries.”

The News Lens currently earns money with banner and video ads and direct sponsorships. It also hopes to start organizing events and perhaps sign licensing partnerships.

Chung says Brauchli and Vucinic have worked closely with The News Lens’ team, providing guidance in weekly Skype chats. For the two news veterans, The News Lens is the first of several investments they hope to make in independent media organizations around the world.

“We’re building out a portfolio of investments in journalism-related media and technology companies in Asia and other key emerging markets in the world,” Brauchli tells me. “We’ll bring our experience running or building successful media companies to bear and draw on the expertise of other people we know who are leaders in their areas to bolster our partners.”

“We believe fundamentally that good content and a good user experience are pathways to success,” he adds. “This is an exciting time to be involved in media. In many markets, there is an extraordinary opportunity to re-imagine and reshape media, and we want to be part of that.”

Chung says that the company’s future projects, including its marketing campaigns, will add value for busy people while getting The News Lens’ brand in front of more eyeballs. He is especially excited about short video summaries of each day’s top news that will play on advertising screens in shopping centers and other high-traffic venues.

“It goes back to the idea of why we have media and why we have news, the idea of being better informed. You don’t have to agree with the opinions you see, but it’s our job to put different perspectives out there,” says Chung. “The better informed you will be, the more curious, open-minded you will be, the more tolerant, the more curious about the outside world.”

Photo by Luke Ma on Flickr