Category: Tech news

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah works on product for Swell, is a TechCrunch columnist, and an investor. He blogs at Haywire, and you can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

‘Tis the season to reorganize the apps on my iPhone. With iOS 7 and the shift from spotlight search to swipe-down-to-search for apps, I’ve noticed my app behavior has changed a bit, as it’s become easier to search for apps with the new UI and therefore less important where the app is located on my phone. For instance, the Amazon app is buried in my Shopping folder (on my second page of apps), but if I need the app, I just swipe down to search.

This shift got me thinking about other ways I’d like to search for, launch, and interact with mobile apps, so I came up with this list — let me know what you think and if I’m missing any:

Launch apps with Siri. I didn’t realize this until yesterday. I’ve kind of given up on Siri, but maybe I missed the memo here, so I’ll give it another whirl.

Folders aren’t perfect. I’ve been using folders on my second page of apps, and as a rule, don’t keep any more pages of apps. As a result, my second page is all folders, sorted by category, and some of those folders contain nine or more apps. This isn’t perfect but confines my iPhone to two screens of apps and becomes less important as I search for apps and/or enter them via push notifications.

Speaking of push, notifications is how I launch and enter many apps. Again, “where” an app sits on my phone becomes less relevant if the app’s push notifications are engaging and/or require me to do something inside the app.

iOS Control Center changes placement of Apple’s native apps. Now that I can launch the camera, alarm clock, and a few others via Control Center, I’ve bunched all of Apple’s native apps into one folder on the second page, as I don’t use them often.

This is just for iOS. Certainly, there is more creativity and innovation happening around contextual presentation of apps on Android.

Dynamically sorting apps based on high-frequency usage. I have two pages of apps: My home screen, which has 20 apps plus the bottom bar, with no folders, and then the second page, which is all folders. I’d like a control in settings to have the OS dynamically arrange apps on my home screen which I spend the most time in based on my usage data.

Contextually presenting apps in lock screen based. What if the OS could predict, based on my location, time of day, usage patterns, and other inputs what apps I wanted to use at specific times, or even by what angle I was holding the phone at? On the lock screen, much like a push notification, it could present a floating row of apps it may think I’d like to use. (This is akin to what companies like Cover are creatively doing on Android today, where such advances are currently possible.)

Larger-format push notifications. Right now, push notifications are like tweets, short messages. Some of them, like native SMS with a picture, preload the images. What if push notifications increased in format size? For instance, consider a push notification from Twitter which points to a tweet that contains a picture, but in this new UI, the picture is presented in the lock screen alert. This is one area I’d like to see Apple conservatively open up so developers can become more creative about the format of a notification, even though they ultimately want users to be inside their apps.

Deep-linking between apps. I really hope this happens sooner. App silos mean productivity can take a hit without seamless multitasking. A simple example is toggling between mail and calendar. There are more apps I’d probably visit if they were integrated with complementary apps, though I realize developers don’t have full control here its hard to identify a few apps to integrate with, as those integrations cost precious development time.

More interaction in lock screen. I’ve been thinking it would be convenient to interact with some apps just through the lock screen, without having to dive into the app. SMS is the best example. I often just want to reply to a text with a one-word letter or emoji, but I have to swipe it open, launch the app, and then reply. Why not just allow me to type in the lock screen from the push?

I don’t know what Apple has in mind for iOS, but gestures like swipe-down-to-search give me confidence they’re thinking about their UI and keeping tabs on what folks are experimenting with on Android right now. While all of the suggestions I’ve laid out sound nice, none of them are deal breakers for me to switch. I need to be clear about that distinction. And, while some of them may be better experiences for me, as a user, some of them could present issues for app developers. For instance, if some of these changes happened, users would potentially go inside apps less, and for apps that are based on addressable minutes and other attention-based metrics, these types of changes could present harsh realities about just how much time someone needs to spend in an app.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons / Slack Picks

JBL’s latest portable Bluetooth speaker is small, but has a huge battery that lasts 12 hours and can charge your phone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer a lot in the way of audio quality.

The CrunchBase dataset has now captured more venture exits than ever, so we decided to take a closer look at what successful startups can tell us about venture investing and the startup landscape.

We found that the average successful US startup has raised $41 million and exited at $242.9 million. We also found that there is a strong correlation between larger exits and companies that raised more money, but no such relationship between the amount of time between founding a company and being acquired or taken public.

Between the two types of exits, we found that the average successfully acquired U.S. startup has raised $29.4 million and sold for $155.5 million, for investor profits of about 7.5x (if you assume 100 percent investor ownership of the company, which is never the case). Startups that went public in an IPO raised significantly more funds, but also took substantially more venture funding, and thus more dilution.

The average IPO-bound startup raised $162 million before going public. Thanks to a few recent large IPOs, the average raised amount soared to $467.9 million, for a 2.9x investor return (of course, venture investors will never sell all their shares on the IPO date).

The analysis includes all funded startups in CrunchBase that had an exit since 2007. As with most analysis dealing with startups and venture investing, it’s worth noting that some company information from CrunchBase may be incomplete or inaccurate, even if it’s the largest free source for startup information in the world.

Facebook both took the most pre-IPO money, $2.3 billion, and raised the most through going public at an estimated $18.4 billion. Twitter raised an estimated $1.8 billion in their IPO, but also took almost $1.2 billion from venture investors before going public. Mouse over the dots below for more details.

Company age did not seem to factor into a successful exit. Acquired companies were an average of seven years old, while IPO companies went public around 8.25 years, on average. However, there was no clear trend between age and the value of either type of exit.

The venture investors with the most successful exits were led by SV Angel, one of the most active investors in the last few years, along with perennial heavyweights Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Accel Partners and Benchmark.

We compared our dataset to CB Insights Venture Capital Data Comparison. Not seen below is that CrunchBase has since captured 255 additional exits through Q3 and Q4 and continues to add more data points every day.

To follow the trends with startups and investors, use the latest CrunchBase data set to take a look for yourself. Download the November 2013 Data Export and let us know what you find.

Why does Google need robots? Because it already rules your pocket. The mobile market, except for the slow rise of wearables, is saturated. There are millions of handsets around the world, each one connected to the Internet and most are running either Android or iOS. Except for incremental updates to the form, there will be few innovations coming out of the mobile space in the next decade.

Then there’s Glass. These devices bring the web to the real world by making us the carriers. Google is already in front of us on our small screens but Glass makes us a captive audience. By depending on Google’s data for our daily interactions, mapping, and restaurant recommendations – not to mention the digitization of our every move – we become some of the best Google consumers in history. But that’s still not enough.

Google is limited by, for lack of a better word, meat. We are poor explorers and poor data gatherers. We tend to follow the same paths every day and, like ants, we rarely stray far from the nest. Google is a data company and needs far more data than humans alone can gather. Robots, then will be the driver for a number of impressive feats in the next few decades including space exploration, improved mapping techniques, and massive changes in the manufacturing workspace.

Robots like Baxter will replace millions of expensive humans – a move that I suspect will instigate a problematic rise of unemployment in the manufacturing sector – and companies like manufacturing giant Foxconn are investing in robotics at a clip. Drones, whether human-control or autonomous, are a true extension of our senses, placing us and keeping us apprised of situations far from home base. Home helpers will soon lift us out of bed when we’re sick, help us clean, and assist us near the end of our lives. Smaller hardware projects will help us lose weight and patrol our streets. The tech company not invested in robotics today will find itself far behind the curve in the coming decade.

That’s why Google needs robots. They will place the company at the forefront of man-machine interaction in the same way that Android put them in front of millions of eyeballs. Many pundits saw no reason for Google to start a mobile arm back when Android was still young. They were wrong. The same will be the case for these seemingly wonky experiments in robotics.

Did Google buy Boston Dynamics and seven other robotics companies so it could run a thousand quadrupedal Big Dogs through our cities? No, but I could see them using BD’s PETMAN, a bipedal robot that can walk and run over rough terrain – to assist in mapping difficult-to-reach areas. It could also become a sort of Google Now for the real world, appearing at our elbows in the form of an assistant that follows us throughout the day, keeping us on track, helping with tasks, and becoming our avatars when we can’t be in two places at once. The more Google can mediate our day-to-day experience the more valuable it becomes.

Need more proof? Follow the money. Robotics is big business and analysts estimate that Boston Dynamics could be a $5 billion company in the next few years. With the right contracts and the right product mix, almost any of member Google’s current robot horde can hit nearly any market, from consumer robotics on a large scale to massive installations in manufacturing – not to mention those lucrative DARPA contracts.

Will we see RoboGooglers wandering through Palo Alto this year? No way. It’s far too early. But with a bit of smarts from Google Chauffeur, the software running the company’s self-driving cars, and some better bipedal robot designs I could see Sergey and Larry standing beside their robotic assistants within the decade. Now all they have to do is make them sentient.

According to a report by Intermedia, Apple continues to dominate the mobile device market among small and medium-sized businesses. During the first 10 months of 2013, Intermedia customers activated 190,000 Apple devices, 29,000 Samsung devices, and 13,800 Motorola devices.

All told, Apple controlled 76% of the market in the period. As Apple Insider points out, the above data is sourced from Intermedia’s hosted Exchange service which claims around 700,000 business users, meaning the relevant sample size large enough to make the data interesting.

Microsoft ended the period with vanishingly small market share, and a large percentage jump in its device volume: 93% in the first 10 months of the year. That’s somewhat good news for Microsoft, a company that is desperate to grow its share of the mobile device market.

It is not hard, however, to grow your unit volume percentage when you sold few devices in the preceding period.

Among small and medium-sized companies, aggregate Android market share can’t rival Apple’s popularity, totalling to under 25% of unit volume.

The computing market changes as companies scale, or course. Contrasting the above is survey data from Bernstein Research out earlier this week which Barron’s covered. That study found that

of CIOs issue/plan to issue Windows tablets, up dramatically from 56% six months ago, and nearly in line with iPads. Plans for Android tablet issuance lags meaningfully, and fell to 15% from 23% in our last survey.

Apple remains atop the mobile pile, Windows is doing better over time, and Android remains a viable rival to Cupertino’s hegemony, but not one that can yet challenge its unit volume.

Among smaller businesses, Android spanks Windows’ mobile device volume, but among enterprise-scale clients, Microsoft is collecting market momentum that could see it best Android. The dynamics of this are somewhat simple, I think: Larger companies more require new machines to slot into their existing IT infrastructure, something that Microsoft has stressed as a feature of Windows 8.1-based tablets.

However, the Intermedia data paints a somewhat dire picture for Microsoft among smaller firms, a corporate demographic that it cannot afford to ignore.

So the picture is somewhat plain: Apple’s iOS line of mobile devices is tectonically strong among small firms, and attractive even to large-scale companies. I’m sure your anecdotal experience confirms that. This leaves second place in the mobile device market up for Android and Windows to fight over.

Just another day in the platform wars.

The weather outside is frightful, but CrunchWeek is so delightful. So since we’ve no place to go, why don’t you watch the show… that brings three TechCrunch writers together to dish the dirt on the most interesting tech news stories from the past week?

In this episode, Leena Rao, Alex Wilhelm and I talk about the launch of Instagram’s first ever messaging feature called Instagram Direct and the impressive new usage figures announced by Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, Twitter changing how its blocking feature works (and reverting back to the original block system after a swift public outcry), and Snapchat confirming that it has closed $50 million in a Series C round of funding from New York hedge fund Coatue Management, leaving out the usual Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

The Melody’s biggest high point is its superior 20-hour battery life. But the sound isn’t up to snuff, especially for its high price tag.

Out this morning in the New York Times is a stark tale: The United States’ intelligence apparatus has little idea what Edward Snowden took, despite spending half a trying to find out.

As the full scope of what Snowden absconded with likely can’t be known, the government is forced to operate on its toes, unsure of what might be coming next. And that could be anything. From the phone metadata program, to PRISM, to work on ending everyday encryption, to the pervasive XKeyscore, to MUSCULAR, the Snowden revelations have been as broad as they have been deep.

The facility that Snowden worked in was behind in its update cycle to better protect government information, an effort that kicked off following the WikiLeaks episode.

That the government can’t assess what Snowden did or did not take has led to internal division inside the NSA: Is it better to buy Snowden off with a shot at amnesty? It depends, it would seem, on whether Snowden has any documents in reserve.

As quoted by CBS News, current NSA boss General Keith Alexander views giving Snowden amnesty in exchange for concessions similar to hostage taking:

This is analogous to a hostage-taker taking 50 people hostage, shooting 10 and then say, “If you give me full amnesty, I’ll let the other 40 go.” What do you do?

Also quoted by CBS News in the same article is Rick Ledgett, an individual currently working to prevent another Snowden-like leak from happening, concerning the offering of legal reprieve in exchange for return of information:

So, my personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about. I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.

Ledgett went on to note that his view is not “unanimous” among the agency.

Does Snowden have more documents on his person or in his care that he could return in exchange for amnesty? As the Times reported today, maybe:

[I]n October, Mr. Snowden said he had given all of the documents he downloaded to journalists and kept no additional copies.

In recent days, a senior N.S.A. official has told reporters that he believed Mr. Snowden still had access to documents not yet disclosed.

So, its a muddle. If Snowden is lying about what he has, he could be limiting his ability to come home, something perhaps similar to cutting off his nose to spite his citizenship. However, the idea that he has more documents could be simple spin from the government to give it moral and legal freedom to pursue Snowden as an active threat. Without the documents, the importance of his person greatly declines, which could irk the government if it wishes to continue its aggressive pursuit of the man.

Like the government, we’ll find out more of what Snowden took as Glenn Greenwald, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel and others report on the revelations.

The folks that claim they are smart enough to determine just how much privacy we need and deserve can’t keep their own house in order. That’s something to dwell on.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

This week President Barack Obama rekindled a couple of the Internet’s favorite debates: whether it’s appropriate to take selfies at funerals, and whether everyone should learn to code.

As part of Computer Science Education Week, Obama delivered a YouTube address titled “President Obama calls on every American to learn code.”

“Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future, it’s important for our country’s future,” he said. “If we want America to stay on the cutting edge, we need young Americans like you to master the tools and technology that will change the way we do just about everything.”

The last time we went through this was when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted that he would learn to code as part of Codecademy’s “Year of Code” in 2012, which earned a certain amount of backlash.

“I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing,” Discourse co-founder and CTO Jeff Atwood wrote, suggesting that communication skills were at least as important to a well-rounded education as programming. Many other critics complained that you don’t need to learn to build an engine in order to drive a car.

This time around Slate’s Matthew Yglesias complained that far too many people in the U.S. don’t know how to read English, and that spreading actual literacy should be a higher priority than spreading code literacy.

I’m still on the side of pushing code literacy to as many people as possible. If everyone in the country were likely to spend a significant portion of their waking hours using faucets, and Congress was likely to debate bills that had great ramifications for the future of faucet users, then I probably would say that everyone should at least learn the basics of plumbing. And I agree with Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or be Programmed, that not knowing how to code is more analogous to not only not being able to drive, but being blind folded while you ride. And while we don’t teach all of our high schoolers how to build engines, we do generally teach them the basics of physics and internal combustion as freshman. Likewise, we can’t expect to teach everyone enough programming to build Facebook, but we can make sure as many people as possible have a general idea of how it was built.

But I think we can all agree that learning programming shouldn’t detract from other educational objectives, like reading, writing and math. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to. In fact, it can be combined with other skills.

Mathematics is the most obvious subject to combine with computer programming. Conrad Wolfram — Stephen Wolfram’s brother — is one of the most radical proponents. His organization, Computerbasedmath.org, calls for students to stop doing rote memorization of steps and focus instead on using computers to explore the concepts that underpin those steps.

“Why get students emulating what computers do so much better (computing) rather than concentrate on imaginative thinking, analysis and problem-solving that students ought to be able to do so much better even than today’s computers?” he wrote in a blog post announcing a partnership with Estonia to rewrite the country statistics and probability coursework. But you don’t need to go that far to add a few programming exercises to an algebra or geometry course.

Meanwhile, economics is an elective at most high schools, but it’s probably something more students should learn and it’s another subject that could incorporate some programming lessons. There are already books on programming for college level biology and physics courses, and they could be adapted to fit high school level courses as well.

But it’s not just math and science that can be combined with programming. A class that used SuperCollider or PureData to teach music theory could be a fun and interactive way to learn both programming and music. And Adam Parrish at New York University already teaches creative writing through programming (yes you read that right). He teaches students a bit of Python, and then sets them to work doing stuff like creating algorithmic poetry using the Twitter API.

Where things could get really interesting is combining multiple subjects. My dream course would be one that taught programming, electronics, mathematics, physics and music by having students build, program and play Arduino-based synthesizers.

The big idea here would be to give students early, accomplishable projects. One of the most interesting posts of the week was one by an anonymous blogger titled “People Feel Dumb: That’s Why They Don’t Code.” It’s a big problem: there’s research showing that students who think they can make themselves smarter do better in school. Those who think that they just aren’t smart get left behind. I know from experience that people feel the same way about writing, drawing and other creative endeavors.

One of the best ways to combat the “I’m not smart enough” or “I’m not talented enough” phenomena would be to give students early victories, showing them that they can program or that they can make music or that they can do math — preferably while teaching them something else important along the way.

The hardest part of such a scheme, though, will probably be teacher training. Estonia designed a curriculum to teach computer science in elementary school last year. The first step in bringing the program to life, though, is teaching training. We’d do well to remember that in the U.S.

Photo by Michael Himbeault

 

Netscape founder and VC titan Marc Andreessen famously wrote back in 2011 that software is steadily eating the world, disrupting industries like music, retail and more. Now large corporations in these industries are starting to eat startups.

Over the past year or two, non-tech corporations have begun to actually open their wallets to arm themselves with talent and technology that can help them enter the digital and data-focused world we now live and work in. It’s no longer Google, Facebook and Yahoo that are competing to acquire the best and the brightest startups in Silicon Valley. There are plenty of corporations in retail, health, agriculture, financial services and other industries that are sending their corp-dev talent to scout out possible acquisitions in the Bay Area and beyond.

Let’s take a look at some of the examples. Earlier this year, Monsanto, a multinational chemical, and agricultural biotechnology corporation, bought big data weather tech company Climate Corporation for $1.1 billion. Insurer UnitedHealth Group bought health data analytics company Humedica for hundreds of millions of dollars. A few weeks ago, fitness clothing retailer Under Armour bought fitness tracking app developer MapMyFitness for $150 million. Office supply retailer Staples bought e-commerce personalization company Runa. Payments processing giant First Data has acquired mobile loyalty startup Perka and mobile payments startup Clover in the past year. Retail giant Target has picked up a number of e-commerce companies. Ford Motors bought in-car music app startup Livio. The list goes on.

Exitround, the website that launched earlier this year and lets startups anonymously seek acquirers, has been seeing a strong uptick in non-tech, corporate acquirers joining the marketplace to find potential talent and startups.

“Their main motivation is realizing that software is eating the world, and they have to add software talent and technologies to their products,” explained Exitround founder Jacob Mullins. On the marketplace, Mullins says that 10 percent of buyers are Fortune 500 companies and 20 percent of acquirers are publicly traded, with a good percentage of the group being non-tech companies.

For many non-tech companies, Exitround is providing a compelling service by which to find startups early. Mullins says that there are increasingly more and more corp-dev execs joining the marketplace to scout for talent. But traditionally the mechanism by which acquirers found acquirees was done either through word of mouth and networking or through investment banks. But Silicon Valley is seeing more and more executives from corporations and non-tech companies visit the region and VC firms to potentially network with startups. Many Sand Hill VC firms are now holding regular events with representatives from some of these non-tech acquirers in the areas of health, retail, financial services and more.

“Walmart was the earliest traditional non-tech company to figure this out,” says Jon Sakoda, NEA Partner and VC. Walmart famously bought Kosmix in 2011 and set up a Labs group in Silicon Valley, far away from the retailer’s Arkansas headquarters. The retailer has steadily acquired more companies and technologies in its fight to compete with Amazon, including four startups this year alone.

Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures and Partner at Kleiner Perkins, believes that retail will continue to be an industry where you are seeing large companies eat software.

“A lot of physical retailers saw soft foot traffic in their stores in Q3 and they are more nervous about how e-commerce is eating into their sales,” she explains. Companies like TJ Maxx, Urban Outfitters and others can easily make a $100 million to $400 million acquisition in the current market, she adds. In fact, earlier this year, Urban Outfitters reportedly did try to buy NastyGal, a fast-growing e-commerce site for young women.

“Lots of these retailers have no commerce strategy, but startups have the potential to expand consumer reach to a younger demographic,” says Lee.

David Blumenfeld, SVP of Westfield Labs, the innovation arm of shopping mall developer Westfield, tells us that the company is definitely evaluating potential acquisitions that they can bring into their Labs groups.

“While Westfield itself is not a tech company, we believe that there is not a delineation between online and offline shopping, and we have to be a part of that,” he says. “We believe tech is core to the future of how products are bought even in malls.”

He adds that with the company’s malls, they have the distribution (to potentially 1.1 billion people, he says), and they are actively looking for technologies they can integrate into their malls.

Hunter Walk, the co-founder of VC firm Homebrew, explains that developing a deeper relationship with the customer online is a strategy that more corporations realize they need to be working on. Part of this is actually being able to connect with a potential customer where they are interacting and spending time. “Movie theaters have no idea what their customers are watching at home, and there is no personalization,” he says. He adds that he sees many of these acquisitions being under $200 million.

In Under Armour’s case, the company didn’t have much of a direct relationship with the customer beyond purchase. And as a wholesaler, the clothing manufacturer needed a better way to engage with their customers. MapMyFitness is now going to be the foundation on which it plans to build a new digital training experience and mobile fitness platform.

The other benefit to buying platforms where there is engagement is the data collected, which can help potentially boost sales and personalize experiences. “It shouldn’t be surprising that a mattress company may buy a sleep app,” Lee says.

Sakoda agrees that data, and the technologies behind mining this data, are big tipping points for acquisitions from non-tech companies. “These companies have fallen so far behind when it comes to data collection and analysis and seeing how customers think and what pricing should be,” he adds. In the case of Monsanto buying Climate Corporation, the large agricultural giant was accessing massive weather data processing and collecting technology that could help in optimizing farming globally.

“Big companies are finally waking up to fact that they needed to embrace big data yesterday,” says Zach Bogue, the founder of Data Collective, a fund devoted to backing startups in the big data space. “Now every single large company has massive amounts of data, and figuring out how to use that is complex.” This is why many non-tech companies are sniffing around big data startups.

Data is a key area for content owners and publishers as well. Barin Nahvi, who works with emerging tech and new product development at Hearst Corp., says the company is looking to make more acquisitions in core technologies around data. “We’re thinking about how do we resemble a technology company more, and part of this is building platform and core capabilities,” she explains. “How to use data as a driver of content is something we are evaluating.”

Nahvi says that video technologies and mobile are other key areas for a potential strategic acquisition for Hearst. E.W. Scripps, the storied owner of 19 local television stations and daily newspapers in 13 markets across the U.S., just bought Newsy to give the media company access to an audience that consumes their news (and video) on devices like tablets.

Of course buying startups in Silicon Valley is just one part of the challenge for non-tech corporations. The next is actually being able to keep talent happy. The cultures of these companies are vastly different from Google, Facebook and the startup culture in Silicon Valley. The true test is being able to retain talent and ensure that they feel they are part of an innovative team.

To that point, many of these companies have created “Labs” groups to house these acquisitions. As mentioned above, Walmart founded its own Labs group, WalmartLabs – which has grown to over 1,200 engineers and staff – when it acquired Kosmix. Live music giant Live Nation, which just bought mobile startup Meexo and acquired two others in the past year, has also set up a Labs group for technology acquisitions.

Walk explains that these companies are not just buying technologies, but also talent, and they have to be mindful of how to manage and foster that talent. “Just adding small pieces of technology doesn’t commit an organization to a new path,” he says. Adding to that, Halle Tecco, founder of health-focused seed fund Rock Health, says that many challenges come from not being able to actually deploy the technologies successfully.

Ethan Kaplan, the VP of product and technology for Live Nation Labs, explains that the labs group was created to house technical talent and acquisitions. He says that the labs group itself was structured to make it feel like less of a conglomerate and more of a startup. There isn’t a deep hierarchy, and Kaplan and others at the group have worked to make the engineers and other staff feel unencumbered, fast-paced and not beholden to a strict road map.

Mullins says that retaining talent is now at the top of mind for most non-tech acquirers. “Most of these companies want to make sure the transition is successful and are talking with potential acquirees early on where a startup will live and who will own the technology once it is placed in-house.”

At the end of the day, non-tech companies infiltrating Silicon Valley gives many startup founders additional exit options beyond a potential acq-hire from Google, Yahoo or Facebook. But the continued success of these acquisitions (and founder interest in being acquired by an outsider) will depend on how these companies pursue and view innovation and culture. And that’s easier said than done.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter is testing a new service called Nearby, which will display geographically local tweets to users, whether they are following the progenitor of the update or not.

The potential privacy impact of Nearby appears to be constrained. As the Journal notes, “Twitter has allowed users to add their location to tweets since 2010. But that feature is turned off by default and must be turned on by the user.” It seems doubtful Twitter would be foolish enough to make location opt-out instead, and then display everyone’s tweets with a Nearby-like fashion sans their explicit permission.

Nearby appears to be a test for the moment, meaning that the chance you can access it is low. But, do take a look, and post screenshots in the comments.

Recent moves by Twitter to change how its blocking feature worked unleashed a monsoon of complaints from users regarding the potential impact to their privacy, and ability to get rid of those users that they found repugnant. I suspect those same folks would balk at being automatically opted-in to a program such as Nearby.

However, potential foibles aside, the feature could find resonance with local marketers, providing Twitter with a fresh revenue stream to bolster its now-public financials.

It should be noted that the further Twitter strays into the local space, the more pressure it brings to bear on competitors in that area, such as Foursquare, and perhaps Path. Twitter is a huge player in social, and if it were to throw that heft into local, it could siphon advertising dollars from smaller, less well-funded competitors.

And of course, not all experiments live, meaning that Nearby could find a seat on the shelf, and not in your phone.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Keith Teare, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor — take the edge off of a slow week with a relaxed conversation about Instagram and Twitter direct messages, online anonymity, its effects on the brain, and Google’s reasons for cacheing Gmail images. Occasionally Farber disappears to throw another log on the fire.

In the chatroom, Moe Glitz asks the musical question: Do Hells Angels use Facebook? Keith does the entire show from China (where he’s more than almost famous) in his underpants. The budget deal is set, the Pope outpoints Snowden, and no one complains about a little political analysis. It was that kind of week. Life surprises even when it’s not trying.

@stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @kteare, @dbfarber

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Live chat stream

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

Google announced that they’ve acquired Boston Dynamics, creators of quad- and bi-pedal robots like Big Dog and PETMAN. This is Google’s eighth robotics acquisition.

The company did not disclose the details of the sale.

The announcement appeared in the New York Times where Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert said they would honor their DARPA military contracts although Google will not officially be a military contractor.

The company, founded in 1992, has been working on standalone, gas-powered robots for the past decade. The robots are self-righting and very resilient. Robots like Big Dog can throw cinder blocks, handle rocky terrain, and run at 16 mph.

The man behind the acquisition, Andy Rubin, stepped down as head of Googe’s Android business in march after turning a little-known mobile OS into a juggernaut. “His last big bet, Android, started off as a crazy idea that ended up putting a supercomputer in hundreds of millions of pockets,” wrote Larry Page on his Google+ page. “It is still very early days for this, but I can’t wait to see the progress.?”

The car service Uber has quietly rolled out a new version of Uber Lost, the system that helps riders locate items they’ve left in drivers’ cars. The system allows you to quickly reference rides you’ve taken in order to locate it as fast as possible.

After we saw some Uber service reps tweet out a link to the system aimed at riders looking for lost items we did a bit of digging. The service is now live on Uber’s site and there’s a link provided on receipts emailed to a rider after their trip is completed. That seems like a good choice as that’s likely where they’ll be looking for a support number to call about their item. Now, they can just tap the link.

The system is nothing complex, it just provides you with a simple list of your recent trips, with beginning and end points to help you figure out where you were when you lost the item. Each ride entry contains the driver’s name and phone number so you can ring them up directly to ask them if they’ve found your item.

The new system isn’t anything earth shattering, but it’s a nice addition to the service’s tools for riders. Having recently watched someone attempt to locate a piece of luggage left in a cab, I know just how annoying the process can be. It’s bad enough when you know the cabbie’s medallion number but it can be a real nightmare when it was a quick jaunt in a busy part of town and you have to track down the ride by time and location through the dispatcher.

With the Uber system you’re presented with a way to call the driver back directly, rather than wading through the call center of a cab company and trying to cross reference time, location and cab availability.

This follows on the heels of Uber shipping a series of small enhancements to its service including fare splitting, map and ETA sharing with friends and PayPal support. Recently, numbers from Uber’s internal dashboard were leaked which pointed to the company being in pretty decent shape, business wise.

As a drone hipster — I wrote an entire novel about a drone apocalypse a full five years ago — I watched the techosphere’s reactions to Amazon’s announcement that it was experimenting with drone delivery with a mixture of amusement and despair. Almost everybody is thinking so small. Jeff Bezos must feel like Butch Cassidy: “I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”

The naysayers were out in force. “Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon’s Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense,” bleated Wired‘s Marcus Wohlsen. Dan Lyons reacted to the piece with a condemnation of “the credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes,” again complaining that drone deliveries are “years away.” The Guardian‘s James Bell dismissed it as “little more than a publicity stunt,” and added: “what happens when next door’s kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle?” And Slate called it “hot air” and compared it to an April Fool’s joke.

What is wrong with these people? Do they moonlight as stock analysts who only care about the next quarter’s results? Do they have no vision at all? Do they not care about anything unless it will directly interact with them tomorrow, or at the absolute latest, next year? They’re the same ilk who, I’m sure, claimed that credit cards would never work, that merchants would never adopt them, that people would not use them, that fraud would make their use untenable.

I’m choosing that as the analogy because drones lost to birds and BB guns will be treated in exactly the same way credit-card providers treat fraud today: as an acceptable loss in the context of that enormous business. Yes, drone reliability will need to improve, and bad weather will be a problem. Yes, regulatory roadblocks need to be hurdled. Yes, the logistics of drone delivery need to be fine-tuned. No, you won’t see drones arriving at your doorstep anytime soon; Amazon drone delivery will presumably begin with small pilot projects delivering to organizations that own their own buildings. To quote Bezos himself:

The hard part here is putting in all the redundancy, all the reliability, all the systems you need to say, ‘Look, this thing can’t land on somebody’s head while they’re walking around their neighborhood,’

But at the same time, “Technically it is totally feasible,” according to MIT aeronautics professor R. John Hansman. Which may explain why DHL and UPS are testing drone delivery too. (But remember; nonsense! hot air! nothing but a publicity stunt! Sigh.)

Yes, the cost to Amazon will be extremely high, to begin with…but in the long run, this isn’t merely about delivering the goods you buy. In fact that service might wind up as a mere loss leader. As usual, John Robb — you might remember his DroneNet idea, which I wrote about a year ago — has a more clearly farsighted view of what’s really going on here:

Amazon's long term vision re: drones — to build a drone "cloud." A platform that millions of businesses can build on.—
John Robb (@johnrobb) December 02, 2013

This isn’t about supplementing UPS; in the long run, this is about supplanting them — and FedEx, and the Post Office — with Amazon Delivery Services. After all, once you’ve got an Amazon Skyport on the roof of your business, or your apartment building, and once their reliability has been established, why would you only use it to receive packages? Why would you ever go to the post office or wait for UPS pickup again?

On the other hand Bezos’ dream might well be delayed, or even quelled, by an outright ban on drones in private hands. No, really.

I’m not talking about drone surveillance, although that will be a problem. What I’m worried about (and have been for some time; it’s what my drone novel is about) is drone terrorism. Because after a drone packed with Semtex targets its victim’s GPS coordinates or license plate and blows them up, you’ll have one hell of a time trying to trace it back to its sender. Oh, and drone crime, too; you can expect fleets of them to be flying north across the Rio Grande in the next decade, full of drugs. And if many of them are intercepted, well, that’s just acceptable loss, again.

Drones will decouple criminals from their crimes, and there’s precious little that the authorities can do about that. I expect the widespread rollout of Amazon’s delivery drones to be delayed not by fundamental technical or logistical problems but by an inevitable backlash. One which, some would argue, politicians of all people should have seen coming, for “as ye sow,” it is said, “so shall ye reap…”

Boy, if only everyone talked about drones this much when they killed children.—
David Weiner (@daweiner) December 02, 2013

Goddamn hippies. RT @AmazonDrone: Deliver books, not bombs. #AmazonDrone4Lyfe—
Drunk Predator Drone (@drunkenpredator) December 02, 2013

Image Credit: Wikimedia