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Welcome to a brand new episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few of us writers together in front of the TechCrunch TV cameras to dish on some of the more interesting stories from the past seven days.
In this week’s episode, Greg Kumparak, Ryan Lawler and I talked about Apple’s no-growth Q3 (and recent DevCenter hack), Facebook’s mobile growth and financials from its earnings reports, and Google’s new $35 streaming device, Chromecast.
Tune in above for more!
Traditionally photography is about preserving a moment in time; you take a picture literally because it’ll last longer. The entire art is built around a quest for permanence, and archival desires. But with Snapchat, you’re casting off those things you photograph almost as soon as you take the picture – in many cases it’s less permanent than just continuing to look at something. For a an avid hobbyist photographer, it’s somewhat counterintuitive, but also very liberating.
Part of the appeal of Snapchat seems to be that people don’t have to be too concerned about how they take a photo; the communication is more important here, and since no one’s framing any of your pictures, there’s no reason to sweat composition, lighting or anything else. But I do find myself thinking about those things, resulting in an entirely different kind of art compared to traditional, camera-based photography.
Taking photos for Snapchat is, in many ways, much more about audience than is traditional photography. You’re creating a moment for another person specifically in most cases, and you’ve got constraints including your immediate environs, a limited smartphone camera and a camera interface that’s simple to the point of being like a blunt instrument, even compared to the stock iPhone camera app. Best of all, you’re creating for momentary consumption; the photo has to convey what you need it to in a very brief window of time.
But the best part is the absence of pretense around taking these photos. The snaps aren’t trying to be something they’re not; they’re pictures, and all the fun and the art is uncomplicated by questions of legacy, or of long-lasting quality and memorability. You’re making something without having to worry about how making that thing will potentially cast you in the eyes of history. Not that most people are consciously thinking about what kind of museums their work will appear in later, or how it will be judged by future generations, but the act of capturing, writing down or recording something is deeply entangled with those concerns, conscious or not.
Being free of that allows for more genuine enjoyment – Kurt Vonnegut Jr. comes close to describing how that feels in his novel Galapagos when he talks about the narrator writing the book you’re reading with this finger, in the air: In other words, taking a very long view reveals that both Snapchat and traditional photographic tools are equally ephemeral, as both are of no consequence on a cosmic scale. But having that temporariness brought home and made understandable makes all the difference.
We’re strongly conditioned to believe that if you’re going to make something, it’s worth making something that will last. But Snapchat is a good reminder that sometimes. it’s just fine to make something fleeting, too.
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — celebrate Google’s gift to StreamTV. ChromeCast is cheap, small, simple, and extensible, just in time to kickoff the run up to Apple’s big move to the Big Screen. It’s a win-win for everybody involved, except maybe Microsoft and its XBox offering. Suddenly 3 screens and the cloud has shrunk to 2, or maybe 1.
It’s no cakewalk for Google, who must navigate and resolve desktop and mobile OSes and native hardware only seen briefly held to the ear of Eric Schmidt. But Chromecast altering the landscape, making the new Nexus 7 into a peripheral controller for the TV rather than the other way around, will shake up Hollywood’s world view just as Netflix is reprogramming our kids’ attention from channels to apps.
@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
Although blogging is nearly as old as the Internet, it still feels like something is amiss.
From Dustin Curtis’ Svbtle to Ev Williams’ Medium, there is a feeling afoot that existing platforms for blogs and long-form content still need a lot of improvement. Five years ago, early platforms like Blogger gave way to micro-blogging and networks like Tumblr.
Now we’re seeing the pendulum swing back with platforms for longer-form stories and media.
SETT is a blogging platform that’s looking to emphasize community, so that new users can find a right audience immediately and long-time bloggers can interact with higher-quality commenters and contributors.
Aside from features that are now standard these days like a news feed of content and WYSIWYG editing, SETT has a top bar where it’s easy for bloggers to track comments or even private messages from others in the SETT community.
From the start, when new users sign up for an account, SETT refers readers to your site. It has a word-matching system internally that compares posts to one another. If a reader happens to like a post about one topic, the platform will recommend other similar ones to them.
The site is the brainchild of a long-time blogger named Tynan (who declines to use his last name online ever) and Todd Iceton, a developer who worked for Nutshell Mail, the company that was acquired by e-mail marketing giant Constant Contact.
Tynan has been actively blogging for six years but found that it was a bit of a slog for any new user.
“For people who are just starting out, their biggest hurdle is just getting that community first,” he said.
There are other features meant to enhance a reader’s relationship with a blogger like a simple, one-click e-mail subscription system. Subscribers get notified of new posts and new comments on posts they’ve decided to individually follow.
Readers can also start their own independent discussions about posts in a community section, where they can see who is online and which posts are being actively read by a lot of users.
The site has had about 100 or so active blogs in beta form, but they’ve opened it up since. Some of the more popular voices on the platform are entrepreneurs like Dick Talens, who co-founded 500 Startups-backed Fitocracy and blogs about how to stay in shape.
The bootstrapped startup earns revenue through premium or subscription accounts that range from $12 to $99 per month in cost. At the higher-end of the range, users get more image-hosting space, subscribers and customer support.
As for the competition, Tynan and his co-founder Todd say that, while they have respect for the other platforms, Svbtle doesn’t encourage commenting. In any case, they agree that something needs to be done to update outdated blogging formats — even if starting a web-first blogging platform in 2013 seems a bit anachronistic.
“Both are expressing frustration with the standard format. The WordPress model hasn’t changed in 10 to 12 years,” Tynan said. “Their model is kind of broken.”
In preparation for TechCrunch Disrupt Europe I’ve been running around the Continent for more than a month, hitting the Balkans for a huge tour and Warsaw for an amazing meet-up. Now I’m back for a meet up+pitch-off with our own Mike Butcher and the rest of the UK team. Tickets are free so grab yours now.
There will be great networking opportunities, and a battle to the death to see which entrepreneurs can dazzle and excite in under 60 seconds.
PitchOff details:
ONLY FILL OUT **ONE** APPLICATION.
Office hours details
Pitch-off winners
Venue in London
Remember we are holding our Berlin meetup later this week so if you don’t want to wing your way North we’ll come to you. Application form for Berlin is here.
Questions about the events? Please contact: [email protected].
How To Become A Sponsor
And whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, dreamer or tech enthusiast, we want to see you at the event, so we can give you free beer and hear your thoughts. Come one, come all.
“Power tends to corrupt,” said Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
The sexism needs updating but the sentiment remains true. That’s been all too obvious this week, during which the powers that be did their damnedest to protect their once-secret surveillance programs…while the NSA responded to Freedom Of Information Act requests with the claim “There’s no central method to search [internal NSA emails] at this time.”
@rezendi In related news, NSA says it's never come across the term "dogfooding" in any of its data trawling, & doesn't know its definition.—
Lun Esex (@LunaticSX) July 24, 2013
The black-comedy message is clear: surveillance is something that the powerful do to the powerless, in their own perfect secrecy. Two-way transparency is but a pipe dream in the minds of civil libertarians. Which puts me in mind of science-fiction guru Charles Stross’s recent blog post A Bad Dream:
Is the United Kingdom a one party state? […] I’m nursing a pet theory. Which is that there are actually four main political parties in Westminster: the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Ruling Party. The Ruling Party is a meta-party…it always wins every election, because whichever party wins is led by members of the Ruling Party, who have more in common with each other than with the back bench dinosaurs who form the rump of their notional party […] Any attempt at organizing a transfer of power that does not usher in a new group of Ruling Party faces risks being denounced as Terrorism.
Of course in America this is old news. The one thing that the Tea Party and the Occupy movement have in common is their desire to throw the Ruling Party bums out of Washington. It’s an accepted axiom in American politics that anyone who has been in Washington too long is suspect and probably corrupt. (More than 75% of Americans think their political parties are corrupt.)
The wave of hope that drove Obama into office was fuelled in part by the belief that he wasn’t a member of the Ruling Party. Well, even if he wasn’t then, he sure is now. That’s what usually happens to successful politicians:
The GOP establishment: Obama is a tyrant, except in the areas where we want to give him sweeping unilateral power to exercise in secret.—
Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) July 26, 2013
Nancy Pelosi in 2005: Patriot Act "a massive invasion of privacy" 1.usa.gov/1bOHdyZ Today, she voted to let that invasion continue.—
Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) July 24, 2013
Similarly, the recent spate of antigovernment street protests in Turkey, Brazil, etc., are–arguably–protests against the various international incarnations of the Ruling Party. As Slavoj Žižek writes in the London Review of Books:
What we first took as a failure fully to apply a noble principle (democratic freedom) is in fact a failure inherent in the principle itself. This realisation – that failure may be inherent in the principle we’re fighting for – is a big step in a political education. Representatives of the ruling ideology roll out their entire arsenal to prevent us from reaching this radical conclusion.
Žižek’s a Marxist, and I’m a staunch capitalist, but even I have to admit that he may be on to something there. it’s possible that multiparty democracy suffers from an inherent and fundamental flaw: the eventual installation of an entrenched, parasitical Ruling Party.
So of course, as a techie who instinctively thinks in terms of hacking and fixing systems, of course I immediately find myself wondering: is there a technical fix? Can better technology save us from the Ruling Parties, or at least alleviate some of our governments’ more glaring flaws? Or, alternately, will technology further entrench and empower them?
These days it’s hard for Silicon Valley to look at Washington with anything other than dismay trending towards horror, along with a powerful sense of “there has to be a better way.” I expect that’s why people have seriously called for Google to buy Detroit. I suspect that’s what Larry Page had in mind, at least in part, when he mused aloud about the desirability of a mad science island untrammeled by antiquated laws and politics, where we could experiment with new and better systems:
We’re changing quickly, but some of our institutions, like some laws, aren’t changing with that. The laws [about technology] can’t be right if it’s 50 years old?—?that’s before the Internet. Maybe more of us need to go into other areas to help them improve and understand technology.
Google is, after all, the apotheosis of the Valley; a company that muses about offering eternal youth to its employees somewhere down the road, a company that oozes scientific method. Doesn’t that sound a whole lot better than the Ruling Party? Doesn’t it seem like the best thing we could do is import the Google Way to Washington, and turn our government into a genuine technocracy?
Sorry. No. Silicon Valley thinks of itself as built on merit, innovation, iteration, and rational thought, and to some extent it is, but its worldview can be even more blinkered and bubble-bound than that of the Ruling Party. Technology does not solve all of the world’s problems, and it’s dangerous hubris to think that it might. Rational thought is a flawed tool in a world full of irrational people. And most of all, power corrupts; anyone who replaces the Ruling Party will probably eventually become a member.
But on the other hand, avoiding politics and/or pretending that it has nothing to do with us is no longer an option for the tech industry. Edward Snowden has shown us that much. We have become too important and too powerful. As I wrote here almost three years ago:
You probably don’t want to read about political idiocy here, and I can’t blame you. But it may be time for the tech industry to start paying much more attention to the political world, because as Wikileaks vividly illustrates, these days almost every political issue has tech aspects—and hence, down the road, tech repercussions.
Can’t help but think I wasn’t wrong. But that doesn’t mean the tech industry should be trying to directly shape what happens in Washington and Westminster. We provide tools; we don’t dig trenches. That’s not what we’re good at. (Witness FWD.us.) Instead we should collectively be trying to ensure that tomorrow’s technologies, and tomorrow’s networks, support individual authority (and privacy), rather than building centralized panopticons which increase and cement the existing hegemonies.
I realize that this all sounds simultaneously paranoid and naïve. But I believe we’re nearing a crucial point at which, depending on a myriad of separate decisions ultimately made by individual people, tomorrow’s technologies can–and will–either increase or diminish our individual and collective freedoms by a very significant degree. The direction we will take seems finely balanced, and could still go either way. So keep your fingers crossed, and your eyes wide open.
Postscript: I’ll be in Las Vegas this week to cover the Black Hat and DefCon security conferences. I’m not entirely sure yet what kind of reportage I’ll be filing, but if you’re interested in occasional sardonic tweets from Sin City, follow me on Twitter.
It is a point of pride and, to an extent, shame that I introduced the TC audience to minimal running shoes aka crazy monkey shoes. Since first reviewing odd shoes back in 2009 I’ve tried to keep up with the trends. The latest stop in my exploration? Adidas Springblade.
Why is this on TechCrunch, you ask? Because these are some high-tech shoes, friends, and I suspect some of you out there in the Valley/Alley enjoy a spot of running now and again, in between complaining about things being on TechCrunch and coding.
While the bright, blaze orange upper alone is enough to turn heads, these shoes have plastic springs instead of a sole. These springs add a bit of “lift” each time you step, essentially springing your foot back into the air after each footfall.
I’ve been a minimalist runner since 2009, first using Vibrams and then trying various models from Brooks, Adidas, and most recently Skora. After a fairly complete and debilitating injury during marathon training, my long-distance running days are pretty much shot, but I still try to get at least 10 miles in a week. It’s not much, but hey, I’m not running for Miss Blog USA. I’m also fairly slow.
That said, running with the Springblade has been, if not a revelation, then quite surprising. I’m a bit more tired running in these than in minimalist shoes, which is normal. These are about 12 ounces and those 16 springs on each foot add just a bit of weight. However, I’ve seen my maximum speed increase from 8 minutes per mile to about 7:50 per mile – a measure taken at my peak speed using a Nike+ GPS watch – an improvement that is fairly important for a slowpoke like me. I also felt less pain in my shins and ankles and a distinct difference in the tiredness I felt after my three-mile runs.
Do I think it’s the shoes? Sure. The soles are far springier than I’m used to and I honestly enjoy them over the last pair of full running shoes I bought, the New Balance M1080v2. They also wore me out far faster and I definitely felt a distinct soreness in my calves that I hadn’t experienced in a while. In short, at the very least these shoes changed my stride slightly.
Would I recommend them over minimalist shoes? I’m not sure. Vibrams helped me out of a bout of plantar fasciitis, which has not flared up to this day. I have fought shin splints and other knee issues that I believe are weight related and I know I could use a more solid pair of shoes to perhaps take some of the strain off the ankles and joints. These could do the trick.
These shoes expel energy forward and work best while running on concrete and less well on soft surfaces like sand or trails. I was worried they’d get caught up in the buckling Brooklyn sidewalks but I noticed no issues. Apparently these are extensively tested to ensure the springs don’t break or buckle and, if anything, they look wild.
The shoes are available for pre-order for $180 – quite pricey for their weight – but they are a fascinating improvement to the standard, mushy thick-soled running shoes that I’ve eschewed for a number of years.
I’ve yet to see many experts weigh in on these shoes, and even Runner’s World is still mum about their opinion. I’m under no illusion that these shoes are more than an interesting gimmick that may shave off a few seconds at your fastest pace. But as a sheer feat of technical improvement to the tired running shoe, I applaud Adidas for attempting something so bold. I would expect these to rise to the level of the Nike Free over the next few months as people try them out simply for the novelty of the design. While I’m not exactly sure if I’ll stick to these over the long run, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
For small businesses, managing health insurance and payroll services can be a huge pain and time-sink. They probably don’t have someone on staff dedicated to these issues, and they themselves would rather be dedicating that energy to building a company. Zenefits launched out of Y Combinator this winter to remove the friction of setting up and managing group health coverage and payroll by automating the process and bringing it online — for free.
As a testament to how much demand there is among startups and small businesses, since expanding its service at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in April, Zenefits co-founder Parker Conrad tells us that the company has signed on over 110 clients (ranging from 2 employees to over 100) and is now bringing on an average of 10 customers each week. Today, as it looks to continue expanding operations beyond California, Zenefits is announcing that it has raised $2.1 million in seed capital from an impressive roster of venture firms and angel investors.
The new round, which includes the initial $372K chunk of capital the startup raised out of Y Combinator from Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, General Catalyst, Garry Tan, Justin Kan and Alexis Ohanian, was led by Venrock and Maverick Capital. A big reason why Zenefits was keen to bring these two investors on board in particular, Conrad tells us, was that Bob Kocher, who led Venrock’s investment, was a key player in helping to write the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) when he worked at the White House.
As Greg explained in April, at its core, Zenefits is essentially a digital insurance broker, meaning that they help startups automate insurance, benefits and payroll but they also get paid a commission by insurance companies each time a company opens a new plan through its system. Over the next two years, as Obamacare goes into effect, the new regulations and provisions mean big changes for health insurance companies and brokers.
These health players are not only being forced to move operations online but will also see the amount of commissions they can take drop — among other things. Many health insurance brokers are going to drop their small-group clients to focus on bigger-ticket customers as a result — and, as premiums could go up for businesses — Zenefits could stand to benefit big-time by offering their services for free. Plus, having someone who’s intimately familiar with the complex and nuanced provisions and regulations in Obamacare (because he helped write them) is huge.
Maverick Capital is also familiar with the healthcare and health insurance industries itself, having backed some of the bigger startups and players in the market, like OneMedical, Castlight Health and SeaChange Health, for example. On top of its lead investors and the Y Combinator partners (like Sam Altman, Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, Alexis Ohanian, Paul Bucheit and Justin Tan — who all invested personally), Zenefits also saw a number of recognizable names contribute as angels, including Box co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, former Googler and Twitter VP of Corporate Strategy Elad Gil, former Googler and Badoo COO Ben Ling, Google’s Head of Spam Slamming Matt Cutts and Inkling co-founder and CEO, Matt MacInnis.
With the new capital under its belt, Zenefits has expanded its team to 12 and will look to add more in the coming year. Because the company is considered a broker, it is paid a commission from insurance companies for each new employee and employee added (every month), which is great for its bottom line. But this also requires that it be approved by the government on a state-to-state basis. Currently, regulations limit it (and others like it) to a few states.
But with the changes Obamacare will bring, Conrad expects that digital insurance brokers of its ilk will be allowed to expand to more states beginning in January, at which point, Zenefits will look to move quickly beyond California and New York.
In the meantime, Conrad tells us that, according to BenefitMail, the company has already vaulted into the top 5 percent of insurance brokers (in terms of number of clients) in California, primarily as a result of new company submissions to Blue Cross — not bad for a startup five months from launch.
For those unfamiliar, Zenefits has been growing fast in California by turning a paper-heavy process into a digital one, allowing users to create new plans, while serving up quotes for group coverage across health, dental and vision insurance. The company’s system makes it easier for companies hiring new employees to add coverage for each employee, or, if a company fires someone (or they leave), they can click a button to remove their coverage and take them off the payroll, while starting them on COBRA coverage.
It works for companies regardless of whether they don’t have existing coverage or already are set up, syncing employee coverage data and taking over as your insurance broker for those in the latter camp. The company also recently added payroll services, so that startups and small businesses can just tell Zenefits about a new hire and give them the employee’s information, at which point Zenefits will take care of generating offer letters, IP agreements, onboarding details and then add them to its payroll system. They can also do the same for that employee’s benefits.
As part of its payroll services, Zenefits also sets up deductions employees pay for health insurance and other benefits, which employers would usually have to set up themselves. This is a pain, because salary and pricing can be different for each employee and whenever deductions change (which happens a lot when employees move, get married and so on), the price changes. Traditionally, the price of deductions change every 10 years, but with Obamacare, this will happen every year. This could be a huge boon for Zenefits, as it takes care of this stuff for startups and small businesses, who would be seeing a lot more paperwork as a result.
Furthermore, while services like Zenefits may seem familiar or not particularly disruptive to some, it’s hard to over-state just how old-school (and offline) most of the big, old school health insurance brokers are in the U.S. Some of them are multi-billion-dollar market cap companies, but may have little or no software or online-based solutions for their customers. So many startups and founder say “we’re disrupting and old offline industry” to get you excited about your company, and in a lot of cases that’s only half-true.
Health insurance brokerage is definitely one of those industries that qualifies as ripe for disruption thanks to its archaic procedures, practices and infrastructure. Many are aware of the changes that are coming, but they’re limited in how quickly they can react by responsibilities to shareholders, quarterly earnings and so on. Easier to preserve and protect the current state of things than re-build from the ground up. Zenefits won’t be the only one to benefit — many new companies are going to spring up in this space — but it’s definitely off to a good start.
As Inkling CEO Matt MacInniss (who personally invested in this round) told us:
Zenefits has identified a huge opportunity in the shifting landscape of benefits and healthcare among growing companies. Incumbents aren’t going to move as quickly as smaller, nimble companies — and they’re not technologists — so I think there’s a huge opportunity for new digital health insurance brokers to quickly move out front to take the pole position in what’s essentially a new category
DoorDash, a Y Combinator summer ‘13 company, delivers food from restaurants in Palo Alto and Mountain View in an average time of 45 minutes.
Sound familiar?
It’s a crowded space, but while competitors like Seamless and GrubHub offer users an app to order food from any restaurant that has its own drivers and delivery-system setup, DoorDash hires and manages its own drivers, so it can bring you food from restaurants that don’t have their own delivery drivers. That may not seem like a big difference, but for the suburbs and college campuses, it’s a welcome change from having just pizza and Chinese food places offering delivery.
DoorDash charges $6 per delivery with no minimum order size, and currently delivers lunch (11:45 a.m.-1:30 p.m.) and dinner (5:30 p.m.-9:00 p.m.) every day. The company currently delivers to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Mountain View from 50 restaurants in the area.
Fluc, another startup we recently covered, is doing something fairly similar, but is more expensive–Fluc charges $5.95 per order and inflates menu prices a bit, whereas DoorDash charges $6 per order and doesn’t inflate menu prices. DoorDash partners with the restaurants they deliver from, so they take a cut from the restaurant’s side of things, not from the consumer.
DoorDash was founded by four Stanford students: Evan Charles Moore worked on the founding team of Vevo; Tony Xu was at Square and Red Laser/eBay; and Andy Fang and Stanley Tang spent a summer together at Facebook. Moore and Xu were friends in Stanford’s business school, and Fang and Tang are undergrads. Moore and Tang had worked on a project together in a class in the spring of 2012, and later decided to work together on DoorDash, bringing in the other two.
In February, they built a prototype, Palo Alto Delivery, in one day to gauge demand. Half an hour later, they had their first order and soon they were delivering food every day around campus. The four of them did the first 200 deliveries by themselves; they say they learned so much as drivers that they have new team members start as drivers.
I used DoorDash (then called Palo Alto Delivery) several times in the spring and really liked it. On campus at Stanford there aren’t a ton of options for delivery, so I was very willing to pay $6 to get better food delivered every once in awhile.
One of the new features I’m most excited about is Group Order, in which you can split the bill with a group of friends through DoorDash but still have all the food come in one order.
“Our ultimate goal is to enable merchants to deliver locally,” Tang says. He notes that restaurants are a good place to start, as the company has been able to grow really quickly (they doubled total deliveries in the past two weeks), and they hope to grow both geographically and, eventually, beyond just food delivery.
Disclosure: I’m a rising senior at Stanford. Fang and Tang are the same year as me. I’ve meet Fang a couple times, and I haven’t met any of the other co-founders at DoorDash. This doesn’t affect my ability to report on DoorDash.
For whatever reason, this week has felt particularly long. It might be some astrological reason like Mercury in retrograde. Or it might just be the emotions that are a package deal with being a woman at the end of any month.
Or it might be that burrito haven Chipotle fake-hacked its Twitter account on Sunday, and the stunt has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Brands who stage fake hackings as an attempt to #winthemoment, does the world really need more Internet mistrust post-NSA PRISM?
Is fake hacking really something you’d like to have forever associated with your brand? Do you really want Pete Cashmore sopping up pageviews debunking your lame attempt at garnering publicity?
For that matter, is using twelve people to “position” a tweet really the best use of your precious time left on the planet? I mean, doing anything on Twitter nowadays is lauded as being cool and fresh. Even if the content itself is not cool and fresh. We’re on to you, Oreo.
The only reason I’m bringing this up is because the world is in the middle of an economic Cold War: On one side, over a billion people who make less than $1.25 per day; on the other, a class of overprivileged digital natives like myself who get paid to spend their lives on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, thinking up new ways to “go viral.””What if we faked a hack …?!”
The only way this will end is with my head on a spike. Let them snap chats!
Hit send too soon!—
Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets) July 21, 2013
Mittens13 password leave—
Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets) July 21, 2013
Image: Jillian Fleck
Over the last several years, we’ve seen a new group of digital media companies emerge in Los Angeles, driven by the growth of YouTube as a platform for distribution of video content. What started out as a cottage industry built around YouTube is becoming a pretty massive business, with L.A. at the center of it all.
Companies like Machinima, Maker Studios, and Fullscreen were founded with the idea of helping creators to expand their audiences by improving their production value, collaborating with other YouTubers, and adopting a series of best practices.
That said, not all YouTube networks are created equal: While some focus on providing creators with tools for high-quality production, others have developed technical tools to help them succeed. Some are focused on specific verticals, like gaming or food, while others are built around aggregating channels with massive audiences and growing them through collaborations.
TechCrunch TV spent several days in L.A. meeting with a number of digital media companies, including Machinima, Fullscreen, Tastemade, ZEFR, Big Frame, Maker Studios, and Funny or Die. During those visits we met with executives and creators, toured production facilities, and got to know the people building this whole new ecosystem of video content. We also visited YouTube Space L.A., a huge facility filled with equipment for shooting, editing, and other post-production activities that is free and open to YouTube creators.
On Mondays and Wednesdays over the next four weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of videos showing off all the best from our meetings at those companies, giving you a better feel for what each has to offer and what creators can expect when they sign up for a multichannel network.
Apple’s Developer Center is finally back online, after taking a break for over a week. The developer site went down after a hacking attempt mid-week last week, and stayed down without any kind of return for multiple days. The hack was reportedly one that only affected developer accounts, after an intruder attempted to secure personal information.
Apple said at the time that it was possible personal information including developer names, mailing addresses and email addresses could have been accessed, but no credit card data was leaked. Apple offered no time-table for return at the time, but did create a system for tracking the status of the site after a week of downtime, and started bringing things back online slowly.
A researcher reported that he’d possibly prompted the down time after probing the dev center and reporting bugs regarding vulnerabilities in it and the iAd Workbench site, but we’ve reached out to Apple for more specific information about the return and what steps led to it, and will update with a response if we receive one.
Update: Here’s the full text of the email sent to developers by Apple about the outage.
We appreciate your patience as we work to bring our developers services back online. Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, software downloads, and other developer services are now available. If you would like to know the availability of a particular system, visit our status page.
If your program membership expired or is set to expire during this downtime, it will be extended and your app will remain on the App Store. If you have any other concerns about your account, please contact us.
Thank you for bearing with us while we bring these important systems back online. We will continue to update you on our progress.
It looks like Google is about to unleash a new wave of more powerful applications for Google Glass. Currently, Glass developers can only build apps that are essentially web-based services that talk to the user’s hardware through a set of relatively limited APIs. At its I/O developer conference earlier this year, Google announced that it would soon release its so-called Glass Development Kit (GDK), which would let them build Android-based apps for Glass that can run directly on the device.
So far, however, Google hasn’t launched the GDK. Instead, Google today encouraged developers who are waiting for the GDK to start working on Android apps for Glass using the standard Android SDK (API Level 15) to try out their ideas.
As Google notes, developers can use the SDK to access low-level hardware to render OpenGL and use stock Android UI widgets, for example. Developers can also access the accelerometer of Glass through the SDK.
Glass, after all, runs Android 4.0.4, so it’s a pretty well-known platform for many developers. To help newcomers get started, though, the company also released a number of sample apps (a stopwatch, compass and level) today that highlight some of the things developers can do with Android on Glass. Over the next few weeks, Glass team member Alain Vongsouvanh writes on Google+ today, the team will also use these sample apps to “demonstrate the migration path between a traditional Android app and a full Glass experience.”
For Glass to reach its full potential, developers need better access to the device’s hardware, so it’s nice to see Google moving ahead with this. It’s still a bit of a surprise that Google hasn’t released the GDK yet. And the fact that it made today’s announcement indicates that it could still be a few weeks out. If you’re a Glass developer, though, now is probably a good time to start thinking about how you would use Android on Glass.
On this week’s Ask a VC show, Lightspeed Ventures’ Partner Bipul Sinha joined us in the studio to field reader questions and talk about enterprise investing.
Sinha, who has led investments in Nutanix and PernixData among others, talked about how the enterprise sales model has changed over time. Sinha has an interesting view on this topic, considering he advises startups now on how to structure their sales operations and has an insider experience on how incumbent sales worked while at Oracle.
Sinha also discussed what the most interesting niche is within the software defined datacenter space. Tune in above for more!
Before being acquired by Dropbox for $100 million, before its app became one of the buzzier startups of 2013, the team at Mailbox had been known for Orchestra, a simple to-do list app with tasks you could assign to others, or pull in via email. Now that app is shutting down, and will be removed from the App Store on September 6th, the company says.
The move to shut down the app shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to its users. In order to build the email management application Mailbox, development efforts on Orchestra had stopped. In fact, the company was a case study in what a well-executed pivot should look like – it realized early on that the product wasn’t breaking out to become a mainstream hit, so the team took their initial learnings and applied them to a new area. Orchestra, the App Store’s 2011 Productivity App of the Year, inspired the team to treat emails basically like to-do’s when they moved on to building what then became Mailbox.
Now at Dropbox, the work on Mailbox continues, the company explains in an announcement about the app’s impending closure, but they need to now discontinue the app and move on.
Users are advised to copy the tasks they have within Orchestra elsewhere before it shuts down, noting that while the app will still launch on your phone if installed after September 6, all cloud services, including sync, task delegation, and access to the web app and customer support, will become unavailable. These, of course, are some of the main reasons why users chose Orchestra in the first place, so there’s little need to keep the app once it’s disconnected.
Though Orchestra was certainly a well-built to-do list application, there’s certainly no lack of task list managers in the iOS App Store ready to step up and takes its place – including some of my personal favorites like AnyDO, FetchNotes, Wunderlist, Evernote, Clear and more.
The full announcement is below:
The next chapter for Orchestra
Back in September 2012 we announced that we were pausing development on Orchestra To-do to build Mailbox. Since launching Mailbox in February we’ve been thrilled and overwhelmed by the reception. By all accounts, Mailbox has been a success so far, and we continue to develop it in earnest.
To help us focus, we’ll be discontinuing Orchestra To-do and removing the app from the App Store on September 6. If you’re still using Orchestra we recommend you copy any tasks that remain on the app and save them elsewhere. After September 6 the app will still launch, but all cloud services including sync, task delegation, access to the web app and customer support will be unavailable.
There is much about Orchestra that we love, and it’s hard for us to say goodbye to it. You may feel the same way. But we believe Mailbox offers a simpler and more direct approach to our mission of solving the problem of using email as a to-do list, and it’s important that we devote all our resources to Mailbox going forward.
As always, we’re grateful to have you with us as we journey to transform how people work together. And if you haven’t yet tried Mailbox, you can grab a copy here.
Thanks so much,
Gentry and the Mailbox team