Category: Tech news

“Life changing,” “amazing,” and “shockingly wonderful” are not often terms that are typically used to describe industry conferences. But that’s exactly how people talk about the Grace Hopper Celebration, an annual four-day event dedicated to bringing together women in computing to talk about technology and their careers.

It makes sense that Hopper is a unique kind of gathering, since it is dedicated to a very unique kind of person: Grace Murray Hopper was a pioneering technologist who was one of the first computer programmers, and she had a real knack for being able to explain computer science in an accessible and tactile way. Hopper passed away in 1992 at the age of 85, and two years later her first namesake conference took place. In the years since, it has grown to become the world’s largest gathering for women in computing.

Most anyone who has gone to Hopper will tell you that there’s just something very special about the event — and that the reasons for that go far beyond gender. So this week, TechCrunch TV producer/shooter/editor extraordinaire John Murillo and I headed out to Minneapolis where the 2013 Hopper Celebration was held to see what it’s all about.

Check out the video embedded above to see what the scene is like, and hear women like the Hopper celebration’s co-founder Telle Whitney, Harvey Mudd president Maria Klawe, Facebook engineering director Jocelyn Goldfein, and others talk about what exactly it is that keeps them coming back year after year.

And be sure to check back in, as we’ll have more videos and coverage of Hopper in the days ahead.

I have all my money under a mattress in fear of a debt ceiling collapse, and people are buying stock because they think an S-1 means the company has started trading.

Let’s rewind: Twitter has filed to go public. Its stock symbol, when it commences trading, will be TWTR. Another firm, Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, which is out of business following bankruptcy in 2007, currently trades as TWTRQ. You can see where this is going.

Blitzed with excitement about Twitter’s impending IPO, folks managed to think that TWTRQ was TWTR itself, or that Tweeter was Twitter if you prefer, and bought the living hell out of its stock.

The price should have been an early warning sign: TWTRQ is a penny stock, trading at less than a cent per share at the end of Thursday, hours before Twitter released its S-1 document. Today, the stock lost its collective marbles and managed to peak at $0.15 per share.

That’s a high price for a dead company. The simple explanation is that there are enough farking moronic retail investors in the world who, in their delirium to buy Twitter shares, managed to convince themselves that the defunct, penny-per-share firm that had a similar name and ticker symbol was the real deal. All before Twitter actually is even public.

This bodes well for Twitter. If there is this much dumb money stoked for its flotation, it could be set for a very strong first day of trading indeed.

The question that rested on the markets following Twitter’s S-1 was simple: Would investors, both institutional and recreational, bite? The answer, at least partially, is yes.

Trading of TWTRQ was halted. TechCrunch boss Alexia claims that she is shorting it. That’s just free money.

The kicker is this: People who invest are often no smarter than your neighbor, the one who can’t keep his dog inside. And that horde apparently has its eyes on the little social service that could. Twitter’s accelerating losses are apparently no cause to fret to those who can self delude into bouncing a penny stock 1,400 percent in a day by accident.

Top Image Credit: mkhmarketing

Pinterest has made a point of discouraging the many social media companies that riff on Pinterest in their own brand names, with some of the more prominent of these going so far as to rebrand their services. And as for the rest? Get ready to go to court.

Today Pinterest filed a suit against Pintrips, a personal travel planning startup, accusing it of trademark infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition and trademark dilution. “This action arises from Pintrips’ decision to adopt a social media brand that is confusingly similar to Pinterest’s, and its refusal to recognize, discuss or remediate the confusion it causes among consumers,” lawyers for Pinterest write in the complaint.

This comes in the same week that Pinterest won a $7.2 million case and an injunction against a cybersquatter called Qian Jin, who had registered more than 100 names that sounded a bit like Pinterest. (This is the same person who has also filed for trademarks that sound a lot like Quora.) And these are not the only trademark scuffles Pinterest is involved in: Path has filed for an extension of time to oppose Pinterest’s U.S. trademark application as it relates to its scripted P — the issue here is that it looks too much like Path’s “P.” We understand that this could get resolved without any court actions, however.

We wrote about Pintrips back in April of this year, when it launched a “collaborative trip-planning dashboard for tracking flights and prices across destinations in real-time.”

To be fair, if you look at the functionality of Pintrips, there is a lot there specific to planning travel that is not related to what Pinterest currently does. Pinterest’s Pinboards are essentially image-led collections of links from around the web that users can share with each other, with the ability to follow specific Pinners or particular topics. Pintrips, meanwhile, is an online dashboard where users can track price changes for flights they may be interested in taking. Users collate flights by way of a browser plug-in. When installed, a “Pin” button appears next to different flight offers (those who support the service so far include American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, United, U.S. Air, Virgin America, as well as searches on Google, Expedia, Kayak, and Orbitz). By clicking the button they get added to your Pintrips dashboard.

Indeed, for Pinterest it is less about the functionality and more about the name attached to it. The full complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (and embedded below), appears to rest on a few key points:

First and foremost, if you say both names out loud, they really do sound a lot alike, more than many of the brands (like Pinfluencer) that have opted to un-pin themselves entirely from the trademark.

There is also the issue that Pinterest has a lot of content on its social network that is related to travel. “Pinterest has made a particularly big splash when it comes to travel,” the complaint notes. “Pinterest users have posted more than 660 million PINS in Pinterest’s ‘Travel’ category to date. Many people use Pinterest as a travel-planning tool.”

It goes on to note how many airlines and hotels, among others, use Pinterest as a marketing platform for their services. (A platform that, incidentally, will soon start to generate money with the introduction of paid ads, which is another reason why sitting alongside a similar sounding service is not sitting right with Pinterest.)

Perhaps most-eye-catching is the fact that certain mechanics on the sites are similar, and have similar names. Specifically, Pinterest believes that Pintrips’ “Pin” button is “confusingly similar” to Pinterest’s “Pin it” button. (They’re pictured up above)

In some regards, the buttons could be one of the more damaging aspects of the case. It is the “Pin it” button that Pinterest relies on to disseminate its service all around the web and to get people to keep using it from whatever other site they visit. Those little buttons also effectively act like little bits of advertising for the service. Pintrips is very much a David to Pinterest’s Goliath in this story, but the worry if it grows, its Pin button on travel sites may be mistaken for a Pin-it button. Moreover, if Pintrips is allowed to keep its button, what’s stopping others from following in that path? All of that spells brand dilution for Pinterest.

We are reaching out to Pintrips for a response and will update this as we learn more. Pinterest is not commenting for this story.

If you use Skype on your phone and desktop, you know how annoying its inability to effectively keep your chat message status in sync between different machines can be. After you start Skype on your phone, for example, it downloads and alerts you of all of the sometimes hundreds of messages you’ve received since you last shut it down, even though you’ve long seen them on your desktop. Sometimes, this also means the app will be unresponsive for quite a while (or just crash).

Thankfully, it looks like those days will soon be over, as the Skype team today announced that it plans to roll out chat message status syncing across devices over the next few months.

“We are working to synchronize chat message status across all of your devices so you will know the current status of all of your chats on every device you use to interact with Skype.”

This news was buried deep in a summary of Skype’s most recent (and previously announced) architecture changes and releases.

As the Skype team notes, people now use Skype across multiple devices, so it has decided to finally make syncing a priority. It’s unclear when exactly this capability will start rolling out beyond Microsoft’s vague statement that it’s coming “over the next few months,” however.

Microsoft has recently poured a significant amount of resources into the Skype platform. Not only has it rolled out a new backend architecture that de-emphasizes the peer-to-peer nature of Skype in favor of more centralized services, but it’s also added a number of new features based on these changes.

For example, the company added web-based Skype support to Outlook.com and launched improved push notifications for Windows Phone 8 (even when the app isn’t running) and similar features that its more centralized architecture now enable. It’s also working on connecting the more consumer-focused Skype with its Lync communications suite for businesses.

When it comes to acquisitions, it’s clear that Twitter had been spending more money on acquiring technologies and talent in 2013 than in the past few years.

According to the company’s recently filed S-1, Twitter spent $52.2 million in cash and stock on acquisitions in 2012. In the first half of 2013, Twitter spent double that, $112.5 million on acquisitions. Note, this does not include the company’s largest acquisition to date, MoPub, which was purchased in September for $305 million in stock.

Other acquisitions made after June include Trendrr and Marakana (it’s unclear how much the company spent on these acquisitions). Even without these numbers included in the tally, Twitter has spent over $417.5 million on acquisitions this year (which isn’t over).

That’s a 700 percent jump in acquisition spend over the past year.

According to the filing, Twitter spent $52.2 million on 10 acquisitions in 2012, which include Dasient ($19.1 million), Summify, Cabana, RestEngine, Vine, Nclud, Posterous, Hotspots.io, Clutch.io  and one other unnamed acquisition. Together, Twitter spent $33.1 million on these acquisitions (minus Dasient). Twitter also agreed to put up as much as $28.5 million of cash and equity consideration (i.e. bonuses) contingent upon the continued employment of some of the employees of these acquired companies.

In the first half of 2013, Twitter spent $112.5 on acquisitions. These include Crashlytics ($38.2 million in stock), Bluefin Labs ($67.3 million in stock), an unknown acquisition that could be We Are The Hunted ($2.5 million), and three others that could be Ubalo, Spindle Labs, and Lucky Sort ($4.5 million altogether). It’s unclear if Spindle is a part of this group because the acquisition was made in mid-June of this year, and it may not have been complete by June 30. In addition, Twitter says it agreed to pay up to $54.9 million of equity to employees from these acquisitions on the conditions of staying at the company.

What’s not listed in the acquisitions note in the filing is the $305 million purchase of MoPub (though Twitter did add this in other sections), and the separate acquisitions of Trendrr and Marakana, which were both announced in August. It’s unclear how much Twitter paid for the latter two companies, but counting MoPub, it’s safe to say that Twitter has spent at least $417.5 million on acquisitions this year.

In 2011, Twitter spent $20.4 million (in cash and stock) for TweetDeck. The other acquisitions from 2011 include Julpan, Whisper Systems, BackType, Bagcheck, and AdGrok. The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $18.5 million in mostly stock, but a small amount of cash. Twitter also greed to pay an additional $15.5 million in cash and equity for employment. There have been other acquisitions prior to 2011,  (Fluther, Smallthought Systems, Cloudhopper, Atebits, Mixer Labs, Values of n, and Summize) but the filing doesn’t elaborate on these in the note.

While Twitter has made a number of acquisitions for talent, the company’s biggest acquisitions add core functionalities to Twitter’s advertising platform. Twitter sees MoPub as potentially being a key foundation of the company’s mobile advertising efforts. Adding Bluefin’s technology is key to providing analytics to advertisers, especially when it comes to providing marketers with information about what people are saying about their brands from TV.

Dasient added anti-spam and malware security features and talent to Twitter, and Crashlytics brought app crash report tools to the company. Twitter’s purchase of search engine became the foundation for its own search. According to this Business Insider report, Summize’s acquisition could be worth around $800 million with the current value of Twitter’s stock.

As Twitter’s vision broadens, expect the company to continue to be aggressive with its acquisitions, especially with some of the billion dollars it raises in an IPO.

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we welcomed Battery Ventures’ general partner Brian O’Malley into the studio to talk about his perspective on the latest topic du jour, AngelList Syndicates.

O’Malley, who leads Battery’s Seed & Early Stage practices, explained how he thinks AngelList Syndicates will effect the investment ecosystem. We also talked about the importance of having an involved lead investor for an early stage startup, the next big opportunities in e-commerce and more.

Check out the video above for more!

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken to the company blog today to talk about a Tesla Model S fire that caught the attention of the news media this week. Musk says that the fire was caused by a piece of a tractor-trailer that punctured the battery compartment of the car with a “peak force on the order of 25 tons.”

The owner of the car, says Musk, was able to pull off of the road safely and exit the car. The fire began in the front module and was “contained to the front section of the car,” Musk writes, and never entered the passenger compartment.

“Earlier this week, a Model S travelling [sic] at highway speed struck a large metal object, causing significant damage to the vehicle,” Musk said. “The geometry of the object caused a powerful lever action as it went under the car, punching upward and impaling the Model S with a peak force on the order of 25 tons. Only a force of this magnitude would be strong enough to punch a 3 inch diameter hole through the quarter inch armor plate protecting the base of the vehicle.”

Musk was also careful to point out statistics that show that gas vehicles are just as susceptible, if not more so, to a similar kind of impact. “Had a conventional gasoline car encountered the same object on the highway, the result could have been far worse,” the Musk letter says. “A typical gasoline car only has a thin metal sheet protecting the underbody, leaving it vulnerable to destruction of the fuel supply lines or fuel tank, which causes a pool of gasoline to form and often burn the entire car to the ground.”

Musk quotes statistics that he says point to the fact that you are 5 times more likely to experience a fire in a gas-powered car than a Tesla. Musk notes that a gas tank is typically only protected by a thin sheet of metal, not the quarter-inch “armor plate” that’s featured in Teslas. Musk also trots out numbers — a move reminiscent of his mostly successful campaign against a negative NY Times review — related to car fire safety. Over 150,000 car fires per year, one vehicle for every 20 million miles and one fire in over 100 million miles driven for Teslas equate to the “5x” figure that Musk notes.

At this point it’s probably important to note that Tesla has only been around for a few years, while conventional gas vehicles have had a lot more ‘miles driven’ to have an opportunity to catch on fire. Still, the track record of the company with regards to road safety and fires does pull a stark contrast.

This is in obvious response to the media attention the fire got, and the fact that some of the stock pullback that Tesla has experienced in the last few days was attributed to a viral video shot of the fire on a Washington highway. That pullback was likely more about convertible notes and a downgrade by Baird, but the timing of the fire has to be seen as brutal by Tesla PR and company watchers.

Musk also published correspondence between the company and the owner of the car, Robert Carlson. In the correspondence, Carlson seems satisfied with the explanation of the fire.

“I guess you can test for everything, but some other celestial bullet comes along and challenges your design,” Carlson’s letter says. “I agree that the car performed very well under such an extreme test. The batteries went through a controlled burn which the internet images really exaggerates. Anyway, I am still a big fan of your car and look forward to getting back into one. Justin offered a white loaner–thanks.”

Carlson goes on to note that he is an investor, and says he expected something like this to happen to Tesla at some point, perhaps just not to him. “But now it is out there and probably gets a sigh of relief as a test and risk issue-this “doomsday” event has now been tested,” Carlson concludes, “and the design and engineering works.”

Image via Jalopnik

In an interesting post-mortem release by the creators of the defunct anonymous marketplace Atlantis there is information that the former admins and users of the Silk Road are planning to resurrect the service. User RR writes: “We have SilkRoad v2.0 ready to launch and is now in its final testing stages. Our site has all the features of the original one and we have kept the same style of forum for your ease.”

The new SilkRoad will be sending out anonymous invites to former vendors and then open to the Tor-using public soon after.

The representatives of Atlantis write:

Users are already planning ways to keep the new site secure. This includes the creation of something called BitWasp, an “open source, anonymous bitcoin marketplace specifically built for use in conjunction with Tor or I2P via the hidden services such as .onion websites and eepsites.”

What does this mean for law enforcement and fans of the original Silk Road? First SR won’t be dead for long and I suspect that hackers, now emboldened, will produce many more SR-like sites than any government can police. While the last mile problem of shipping products to and from vendors and clients can still be controlled by customs and postal authorities, I doubt it will be as easy to take down these variegated new services.

“What’s striking to me as an outside observer is there seems to be no shortage of well educated American males in their late 20?s (Manning/Snowden and now Ulbricht) willing to sacrifice bright futures and their own personal liberty to highlight the draconian laws and downright totalitarianism being inflicted by their government on the populous,” writes the Atlantis representative. “History will show it’s the will of the people that’ll win in the end and not that of the dictators in power and I thanks to the actions of DPR and others like him I believe I am now witnessing a full revolution in progress and I for one will be sticking around to document it.”

In order to put our money where our hype is we like to take a closer look at Kickstarter products we’ve talked about on the site. Today we have the Bohemian Guitar Company’s “oil can” guitars, a Kickstarter project that raised $54,000 – $20K over their $32,000 goal. The company, based in Georgia, just started shipping their cleverly-designed gitfiddles and I got the chance to try one out.

The guitars have a single pickup controlled by a set of volume and tone dials. A wooden bridge at the bottom and a nice maplewood neck that continues into the oil can body. The body itself is ostensibly recycled and repainted and adds an excellent bit of twang to your picking. The machine heads are serviceable – the ones I tested were a little tight – and the pickup, while simple, seems to be nicely placed for resonance and sound quality.

How does it sound? Take a listen. Excuse the quality here – I’m not a good guitarist.

Generally you will get a twangier sound out of this guitar and it resonates enough to even act as a sort of steel acoustic. I’m positive a superior guitarist can use the unique body to positive effect. I showed it to Charlie Appicella of Iron City Jazz who found it playable and light, if a little too cute for his purposes as a professional jazz guitarist. That said there’s no shame in bringing this thing out especially if you’re a surf or country band and want a little Bo Diddley-like authenticity.

The guitars now cost $299 and a portion of the proceeds go to charity to help spread a love of music in children. It’s a noble goal and it looks like the team, Adam and Shaun Lee, have succeeded in building a business with the Kickstarter push. Most of the models are currently sold out and they’re working on their Boho line – complete with hipster-ish can designs – as we speak. It’s an interesting end to a compelling and surprisingly cool project.

Welcome to our continuing series featuring videos of robots that will, when they become autonomous, hunt us down and force us to work in the graphene factories of Mars. Below we see Wild Cat, a fully untethered remote control quadrupedal robot made by Boston Dynamics, creators of the famous Big Dog. This quadruped can run up to 16 miles an hour and features a scary-sound internal gas engine that can power it across rough terrain. Wild Cat was funded by the DARPA’s M3 program aimed at introducing flexible, usable robots into natural environments AKA introducing robotic pack animals for ground troops and build flocking, heavily armed robots that can wipe out a battlefield without putting humans in jeopardy.

Next up we have ATLAS, another Boston Dynamics bot that can walk upright on rocks. Sadly ATLAS is tethered to a power source but he has perfect balance and can survive side and front hits from heavy weights – a plus if you’re built to be the shock troops of a new droid army. ATLAS can even balance on one foot while being smacked with wrecking balls, something the average human can’t do without suffering internal damage. I can’t wait for him to be able to throw cinder blocks!

Finally we present these charming self-assembling robots from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory which we covered earlier today. The robots exert an internal force to spin and then connect with each other using magnets, allowing them to fly into the air for a second and then fall down next to their brothers and sisters in exactly the right spot. This allows these completely featureless squares to form any shape they want and, like autonomous LEGOs, they can build complex devices out of a few simple shapes.

“There’s a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air,” said researcher Kyle Gilpin. “And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That’s something that’s totally unique to this system.”

They may look innocuous but imagine these things self-assembling into, say, a wall, a door, or even a plate of explosives. They could sneak through pipes into your home and create a robotic assassin to destroy you in the sleep, thereby freeing up your “Schlafplatz” for other humans who have been reduced to sleeping out of doors after the robots took over most habitable locations for the storage of fermenting human slurry. Stay frosty, humans!

Before you buy a used vehicle, it’s always a good idea to take the car to a mechanic. Knowing what’s wrong with a car before you buy it could save you a lot of headaches down the line, and it could help you negotiate the price of the vehicle. Disrupt Battlefield winner YourMechanic now wants to make it easier for used car purchasers to get vehicles checked out, with the launch of Pre-Purchase Car Inspections.

For those who might have forgotten, YourMechanic runs a marketplace that connects car owners with on-demand mechanics who come to them. All mechanics are certified to check out and repair vehicles at the drivers’ homes, meaning no more taking your car to the shop and waiting days for a fix to be made. YourMechanic also does all the work of figuring out which parts need to be ordered and installed. It’s like Uber for car repair.

Since last year, the company has been growing steadily — about 25 percent per month — and attracting a number of return customers along the way. It’s also been expanding over time: YourMechanic started out just offering service in the San Jose area but has grown to service pretty much the entire San Francisco Bay Area.

That said, it hasn’t always been easy-going. YourMechanic co-founder Abhas Art Agrawal said that, at the outset, the company had a fair number of problems with its part-matching algorithm. In March, for instance, about 40 percent of the parts it was shipping to its mechanics were wrong, which led to repairs not being able to be completed or on time.

Agrawal says that there are about 27,000 vehicles in its database, along with about 200 different jobs for each of those cars. That’s a lot of different jobs and parts that were necessary to clear up. Things have drastically improved since then, with mistaken parts down to about 5 percent now. That’s still not perfect, but the company continues to improve with time.

Anyway, so now that we’ve caught up, what about that new inspections service? About 10 percent of clients already request inspections, but the company wanted to standardize the ability to make that request. Car inspections cost about $100 each, but can save clients a ton of money in being able to negotiate the cost of a car.

For YourMechanic, the car inspections service also acts as a new way to sign up clients. After all, once a car buyer knows what work needs to be done, it’s pretty easy to sign up and have one of the on-demand mechanics show up and take care of things that should be fixed.

The company was a Y Combinator alum and has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from YC, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Ventures, Launch Capital, Jeff Clavier, CrunchFund (which is owned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington), Paige Craig, A-Grade Investments, Jawed Karim, Justin Waldron, Joshua Schachter, and Kevin Freedman.

An anonymous, underground drug trafficking web site Silk Road has been busted and the founder has been arrested, effectively shutting down a $1 billion+ revenue business after two years. And in softer tech news, Instagram has revealed plans to put ads in the stream over the next couple months. Meanwhile, BlackBerry continues to be in shambles, with BBM for Android and iOS delayed and the Z30 reportedly not going on sale in the company’s home country of Canada on Rogers.

We discuss all this and more in this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, Darrell Etherington, and a special guest appearance by Chris Nesi.

Enjoy!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right here.

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

In the near future, anyone with an Internet connection and some lunch money will be able to invest in one of Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies. But after big brother Facebook’s IPO debacle, should America’s armchair investors pin their hopes and dreams on Silicon Valley’s younger sibling? We help you compare in one easy chart.

The difference between the two is Twitter’s glaring negative sign on its net income. That’s right – Twitter is losing money, where at least Facebook was turning a profit at their IPO.

Other than the sheer size of Facebook’s user base, the companies are wildly divergent: Facebook went public at a valuation in and around $100 billion, and Twitter is expected to price its shares at a level that will value it at under $20 billion.

Facebook, quite simply, was much larger at the time of its IPO. In fact, looking at Twitter’s filing documents, you almost wonder why it is going public now. It has ample cash reserves but accelerating losses, as it invests in its research and development budget and builds out its sales team.

The reason, we think, is that investor pressure has built to the point that Twitter needed a large liquidity event to break free from some of its oldest invested capital. For a company of its scale, there were only two options: sell or IPO. And for Twitter, that meant it only had one option. Hence its S-1. We do not say all that to indicate that Twitter is not a valuable, interesting company. It is both. But the bent of its filing docs feels more like a company heading toward an offering and not the numbers of a firm ready to enact one.

Notes: Twitter’s full-year data is 2012. Facebook’s full-year data is 2011. Facebook two-quarter revenue figure is not listed in its S-1, and so was calculated by deducting its third-quarter 2012 revenue from its nine-month tally that was provided in that release. The initial Facebook S-1 had a lower monthly active user count, but the quoted figure is the number listed in its amended S-1. 

After three years of offering co-working spaces to young startups and entrepreneurs, General Assembly has decided to shut down the co-working brand of its business in 2014, according to multiple sources as well as a blog post.

According to the post, it simply makes more economic sense to shut down the co-working branch of the company and shift complete focus to the educational arm of General Assembly, which provides classes on things like Digital Marketing, Business Fundamentals and Tactics, and Back-end Web Development.

As it stands now, General Assembly already has 3,000 alumni students who have taken a longer term class with them, and 70k students who have step foot inside one of GA’s worldwide offices looking for mingling space and/or a class to enroll in.

The General Assembly building in New York’s flatiron district is a 30,000 square foot space, 11,000 square feet of which have been dedicated to the co-working area, with tenants like Neverware and Alphapipe taking up the space. While the GA space itself will be expanding to 45,000 square feet in the next few months, the dedicated co-working space will soon be occupied with GA staff while the communal space will be used as an alumni hang-out/event space.

Here’s what Jake Schwartz, CEO and co-founder, said in the blog post:

Over the past two and a half years, our community has grown much larger than our amazing co-working members. It now encompasses the tens of thousands of students who’ve come through our doors and the more than 3,000 alumni of our long-form courses, not to mention the hundreds of instructors and the 2,000 hiring partners who come to GA in search of top talent. Similarly, support once meant desks and space, but has come to also mean instruction, opportunity and talent for our students and hiring partners.

It is in this context that we have made the decision to stop offering our coworking services in 2014. It is not a decision we took lightly – but it is a necessary one as we work to expand our global network of students and alumni.

“I’ve been at GA since the beginning and will be sad to leave,” said Avi Berkowitz, AlphaPipe’s co-founder. “However, our team has grown significantly in recent months and so the need to move was something already in the cards for us.”

Luckily for Berkowitz and other tenants, there are a number of co-working spaces in the NYC area that have open arms. The landscape has changed quite drastically from when General Assembly first opened its doors as one of the only collaborative working spaces in the city.

However, with the pivot in the business at GA (now focused predominantly on education) and the soaring price of real estate in the Flat Iron district, this seems to be a decision that makes the most sense for General Assembly.

So confirms Schwartz in the blog post: “For a long time now, coworking has been a small part of the “business” of GA, even as it has remained important as a reminder of community as a founding an ongoing value of our company.”

You wait ages for a lost-item tracker hardware startup, and then loads and loads pile on at once. There have been a spate of such startups cropping up on crowdfunding sites in recent times — notably Tile, which raised $2.6 million via Selfstarter back in July, although it won’t be shipping product until next year. Others hoping to attack the space with similar Bluetooth-powered tags include the likes of Button TrackR, Lapa and Protag (with its next-gen Elite offering), to name just a few. And now Locca has just kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for a pair of item trackers, the Locca Phone and Locca Mini (pictured above left), that incorporate a range of tracking tech to offer longer distance real-time item tracking.

The latest low-powered flavour of Bluetooth, colloquially known as Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE, is undoubtedly encouraging more startups to try their hand at item tracking. But Bluetooth has its drawbacks for an item-tracking use case — notably it has a pretty limited range of around 30 meters.

Tile is hoping to get around that by leveraging a community of uses to create a distributed network effect, so that the proximity of your lost Tile to another passing Tile user can be used to cast its item-finding net wider. But that’s only really going to happen if its product takes off in a big way. In the meantime, all these Bluetooth trackers can only really offer a limited use-case scenario of finding stuff you’ve lost in your own house, say, or sounding an alarm when you stray a few meters away from your bag.

That’s why Locca reckons there’s room for another player in this space — one that can track items over much greater distances. Unlike its Bluetooth tag-touting rivals, it’s sticking a SIM card inside its trackers so it can draw on a range of location pinpointing technologies, including GPS, to boost tracking range and enable live tracking of lost items even across international borders (its service will initially cover the U.S., Canada and Europe and expand to more countries in 2014).

“Locca locators have integrated five of the best locating technologies: AGPS, GSM cell-triangulation, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low-energy and FSK. Therefore the positioning is very accurate and fast, and tracking is possible worldwide, e.g. your lost luggage with a Locca is in Madrid, and you can see where it is from London,” the startup tells TechCrunch.

Items are viewed on a corresponding Locca app that displays the real-time position of tracked items on a map, and offers additional functionality such as setting up different zones where you might want the system to behave differently toward tracked items.

However there’s a cost to Locca’s more comprehensive coverage: Locca plans to charge buyers a monthly service fee for the data they’re using. Both Locca’s forthcoming devices — the smaller, lower-cost Locca Mini and the full-fat Locca Phone (which can also be used to make and receive calls) — come with a built-in SIM. The monthly cost of keeping each tracker active is €9,90 ($13,50) per month for the Locca Mini; and €14,90 ($20,30) per month for Locca Phone.

Battery life is another cost of this type of tracking option. Locca says it’s developed its own energy-saving algorithms to help improve this but while the larger and more expensive Locca Phone will have a guaranteed ‘more than one month’ longevity, the smaller Locca Mini looks to require a lot more juicing. Locca says the Mini’s battery is good for “7 days active time”, perhaps longer depending on your usage.

“Depending on which technology is used the battery lifetime is shorter or longer. E.g. a Locca is fixed on your dog. At home the device is connected to FSK, when the dog enters the garden GSM is turned on and when the dog runs away you could even switch on in addition the APGS to see the exact position,” it says.

An item tracker with a flat battery is no longer an item tracker — which does give the Bluetooth tracker startups an edge in some respects: for instance, Tile boasts a year-long battery life. In fact, Tile owners will never have to charge the device — instead, they get an email reminder towards the end of the battery’s life to send Tile back and purchase a replacement (costing $25). That yearly fee for Tile is still cheaper than a year of Locca’s service (albeit, you can start and stop the Locca service whenever you like within the app, with no contracts required).

There are other GPS trackers on the market, but Locca claims its Mini device is “the smallest with so many locating systems.” It’s also relatively lightweight (23g) — affixing it to your dog’s collar is one use case they envisage. Other use cases could include fixing it to car keys, putting it in your handbag or tagging your bike.

The larger Locca Phone tracker, which can also make and take calls, thanks to a built-in microphone and speaker, is being marketed as something to give to an elderly relative or your kids. (Locca co-founder, Albert Fellner, is also founder and owner of Austrian mobile maker Emporia, which makes mobile phones for older people — likely explaining this portion of Locca’s focus.)

Calls can be put through to the Locca Phone via Locca’s app, giving parents an alternative channel to speak to their kids or check in on elderly relatives. Another use for the Locca Phone is as an in-car safety device, as it will incorporate crash sensors and can be set to automatically make a phone call in the event of an accident.

Locca is offering Indiegogo backers a variety of options to bag its hardware. The Locca Mini can be picked up from €99, with six months of service included in that price. And the Locca Phone from €149, also with six months of service. It’s also offering a range of accessories, such as cases to fix the trackers to your pet’s collar or a bike kit to mount it on your bike.

The startup is focusing on getting the Mini delivered first, with an estimated ship date of December, while the Locca Phone is slated for February next year. Locca said it has been bootstrapping the project up to now — and is hoping to raise €75,000 via Indiegogo – although it has also previously taken in an angel investment of €150,000.