Category: Tech news

Last week, peer-to-peer ride-sharing startup Lyft announced that it had raked in a huge amount of new funding, raising $60 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Along with that funding, the company said it would be looking to aggressively expand its peer-to-peer ride service with launches across the country and even globally. The first new market to bear the fruits of that expansion is Boston.

The launch in Boston will put Lyft on the East Coast for the first time since the startup launched its ride-sharing service about a year ago. The company is now in five markets altogether, including its home city of San Francisco, as well as expansion markets Los Angeles, Seattle and, most recently, Chicago.

The company claims it is just at the beginning of a global expansion, and will be ramping up more launches over the coming weeks and months. That big funding round, as well as the acqui-hire of new COO Travis VanderZanden — try saying that three times fast — should help accelerate all that.

But the planned expansion is not without its challenges. Lyft, for those who don’t know, has a mobile app that connects passengers who need a ride with drivers who have a car (and some spare time). By doing so, the company is providing a service that is generally more reliable than calling a cab but slightly less expensive than booking an Uber.

At the same time, Lyft is operating a service that falls outside the regulatory structure of most local jurisdictions. “Community” drivers from services like Lyft and competitor SideCar aren’t licensed in the same way that taxi or black car drivers are — which, to put it bluntly, usually pisses off local taxi and black car drivers, not to mention their lobbyists and regulators.

That could be a point of contention in Boston, where local regulators have already had run-ins with Uber. Last summer, the on-demand car startup received a cease-and-desist letter from the Standards of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, apparently because the state had no guidelines in place for using GPS technology, which Uber relies on for picking up passengers and determining fares. The dispute was quickly resolved after a social media campaign by Uber and some intervention on the part of the governor’s office.

For what it’s worth, ride-sharing opponent SideCar has been operating in Boston since March, apparently without incident. That’s good news on the regulatory front, but could signal even greater competition in that market.

That’s because Uber, which has been operating its black car service in Boston for the last year-and-a-half, has committed to competing with Lyft and SideCar by rolling out its own peer-to-peer ride services through UberX in any market where local regulators have given “tacit approval” of those types of services. In other words, if regulators haven’t tried to crack down on ride sharing or community drivers after 30 days, Uber will enter the fray.

With all that in mind, Lyft could have its hands full in Boston. Nevertheless, the company continues to push forward, with a “friends and family” launch in Boston today, and a full launch to all users beginning Saturday morning at 9:00.

Hulu may be courting bidders right now, but in the meantime, the company is shipping a new Hulu Plus experience for the living room, with updates hitting today. The user interface on Samsung TVs and Blu-ray players, Roku set-top boxes, and soon Nintendo’s Wii, is being upgraded with a new look and feature set to help viewers better discover and search for shows.

The company launched Hulu Plus for living rooms a couple of years ago beginning with the PlayStation 3, and the latest big upgrade rolled out last fall. With today’s update, the company has made more improvements to the navigation, controls, search, and even the artwork — the latter which it touts as “larger and more vivid,” for example.

The new controls are designed to make playback easier, with up or down to display the playback menu, and left or right to fast-forward and rewind. Search results now appear directly beneath the search, and a tray-style format lets users scroll through personalized recommendations, popular TV shows and movies, top 100 clips, movie trailers, and a new “Shows You Watch” feature that lets viewers quickly access the latest episodes of their favorite programs.

There are also theme-based suggestions, like “Movies for Memorial Day” or “Time-Traveling Heroes.” And movie trailers, meanwhile, are organized in a new section with categories like “Opening This Week,” “In Theaters Now,” “Coming Soon” and “Popular Trailers.”

Another big feature is the addition of “Hulu Kids” to the living room experience. The company launched the kid-friendly section back in November as a way to find commercial-free children’s programming — similar to what Netflix already provided through its own “Just for Kids” interface.

Though maybe not as immediately noticeable when compared with the overhaul look-and-feel upgrade, the expanded access to “Hulu Kids” comes at a time when Netflix has dropped popular kids’ TV programming from its lineup due to negotiation issues with Viacom. Netflix has since lost top kids’ TV shows like “Dora the Explorer,” “Go Diego Go,” “Blue’s Clues” and “SpongeBob Squarepants,” for example. Hulu Plus at least offers SpongeBob to those streaming-only parents going without one of their kids’ favorites.

The upgrades to Samsung and Roku devices are rolling out now, and should automatically update within the next 48 hours.

LinkedIn today announced that it has added optional two-step authentication to its sign-in process. With this move, LinkedIn joins Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and numerous other services that have recently enabled two-factor authentication to make it harder for hackers to compromise their users’ accounts.

Unlike some of these other services, LinkedIn’s system doesn’t offer a smartphone app. Instead, it can only send codes via SMS.

Two-step verification ensures that just having a password (“something you know”) isn’t good enough to compromise an account. Instead, users also need a second factor (“something you have”) to log in to their accounts. Given the recent proliferation of hacked accounts on Twitter and other services, two-factor authentication is quickly becoming the new standard for thwarting unauthorized sign-ins. While it’s a bit of a hassle, it is miles ahead of the standard password-only approach.

LinkedIn will prompt users for this second factor when it detects that a user is signing in from an unknown computer or device. Unlike some of these other services, LinkedIn’s system doesn’t provide these verification codes through a smartphone app. Instead, it can only send codes via SMS.

Here is how to set this up:

For years, it’s been said that Internet use would cut into the time U.S. consumers spend watching television. Today, those premonitions are beginning to reach the tipping point. TV ratings have dropped by 50 percent over the last decade. Goldman Sachs recently called the decline “the sharpest pace on record.”

The firm found that ratings in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic – the key group targeted by advertisers – fell by 17 percent last winter compared with the winter before. ABC, NBC and Fox were most affected, with decreased ad revenues cutting into profits. (Fox had to get distributors to pay higher subscriber fees to pull a profit). But even highest-rated CBS lost 3 percent of its 18-to-49 audience this season, The New York Times reported in April.

Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne had released charts at the beginning of the year showing the ratings drop, claiming declines are a function of income level.

But it’s not just that.

The writing has been on the wall for some time.

Back in 2004, for example, studies indicated that television viewing would be one of the first leisure activities to be hit by Internet use and online socializing. (Other activities supposedly affected were sleeping and real-world socializing.)

Though today, TV continues to remain the dominant medium, the emerging generation of so-called “digital natives” – the first to have been born into a world where consumer adoption of the web was already mainstream – seem to prefer other behaviors. And it’s more than just splitting time between TV and video games, or TV and mobile apps, or TV and online video. That’s why it’s funny that the general assumption is that services like Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu and YouTube will eventually claim users’ time and eyeballs in the way that the “boob tube” once did.

That may not be the case. We just don’t know yet.

For a generation who grew up on the web, can we say for sure that watching TV-like content through other devices will be their preferred downtime activity?

TUMBLR AS THE NEW “TV”

Tumblr founder David Karp doesn’t seem to think so. Having built up an online community that Yahoo just acquired for $1.1 billion, he told Charlie Rose in an interview this week that Tumblr is part of a larger transition in consumer behavior.

“What regular people out there in the world do – right now, they spend a huge amount of time in front of their televisions consuming – sort of, what do you call it – ‘premium content’ – stuff produced by publishers, networks, studios,” Karp said. “If we’re not already there today, certainly five years from now, I expect the vast majority of the content that we enjoy not to be produced by a handful of creators who are selected and supported by those big studios.”

Five years from now. 

Indeed, we could be watching crowdfunded films, the likes of which Zach Braff and “Veronica Mars” have raised big money for in recent months over on Kickstarter. Or it could be something else entirely. Karp obviously hopes that creators will find their way to Tumblr, and then others will “tune in” to watch.

But will they? Look at Facebook. The social networking giant found its place among this young generation (and those that came before), but it has somehow garnered a reputation as a necessary evil among younger users. Story after story after story tell of teens and young adults who report feeling “addicted to Facebook” or “forced to” use it, rather than pleasantly consumed by it.

Can Tumblr be any different?

Well, if you think of television as a fairly passive activity involving content consumption, and that content is matched up with your interests, and can be humorous, informative, inspiring, educational, and more, then Tumblr’s network of interests comes closer to mimicking the same “feeling” that TV could once provide. This isn’t about connecting with friends like on Facebook, it’s about your own idea of entertainment.

The analogy makes sense, then, though it’s worth pointing out that, today, many of Tumblr’s fandoms still revolve around content still produced for “old media” like TV shows and movies. And Tumblr, of course, may not last. Much of its audience is young, wary of advertising, fickle, dramatic, and could potentially still flee.

TWITTER AS A TRADITIONAL TV COMPANION

Meanwhile, Twitter, too, is slowly heading in the direction of becoming a place for media consumption, not just communication. Its recent moves to support richer media like photos, videos, apps and articles within its stream is one example.

But Twitter is taking a different direction than Tumblr. Instead of betting against TV’s eventual decline, it’s betting big on being the TV companion app.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said this week at the D: All Things Digital conference that today’s television companies can become valuable partners for its service. Sure, the networks are clearly hungry to get a piece of the online action – it’s money for the taking. But at the end of the day, they’re still promoting “TV” – as in, flip a switch, power up your DVR, old-school television.

Twitter has been busy catering to the confused and scrambling TV industry. The company launched TV ad targeting for Promoted Tweets, powered by its acquisition of Bluefin Labs. It announced broadcast partnerships with BBC America, Fox, Fuse and The Weather Channel, allowing networks to promote TV clips. It has also struck deals with A&E, Bloomberg TV, theAudience, ESPN, Turner Sports, the NBA, Major League Baseball, Condé Nast, Warner Music, Clear Channel, Vevo, the WWE, VICE, PMC, Discovery, and others. It has partnered with Nielsen for Twitter TV ratings.

“Twitter is the social soundtrack for TV,” Costolo said at the D conference. “We’ve decided to invest heavily in that.”

No kidding.

The good news is that television – the concept, if not the medium and business model – will probably never go away entirely. But like books, or movies, or music, or games or any other entertainment medium, it’s going to change, and that’s happening right now.

It may not be as important going forward.

Some will say that the number of those truly abandoning television is still insignificant. That may be, but the number is growing. Nielsen reported this spring that there are now over 5 million cord cutters in the U.S., up from 3 million in 2007. In these “zero tv” households, almost half were under the age of 35.

As the older generations leave the market, the power will be in the hands of this new crowd. And they might not really care for TV like their parents did, no matter how many tweets you throw at them.

Whether they’ll continue spending their time on Tumblr or other networks, however, still remains to be seen.

While the name “Elasto Plastic” sounds like an 80s punk band, it is, in fact, a new material from 3D printing company Shapeways. The plastic is elastic to a certain degree yet maintains its shape after stretching or squeezing. It will break when pulled too hard and is still in the experimental stage on the Shapeways website.

The material is off-white and has a “grainy finish.” It’s laser sintered and a bit jagged because of the layer-by-layer requirement to build the model. Shapeways writes that it is “not ready for broader use” but can be used for personal models and experimental projects.

We recently featured Shapeways in our TC Makers series and they’ve begin printing this material on their nylon sintering machines in their US factory. It takes about eight days to print and ship and could be an interesting hinge material for 3D-printed projects. Considering it already looks like cartilage, I’d be curious to see how makers take the material to the next level.

via 3DPrintingIndustry

It’s a five-door compact from Ford. But it’s not made for grocery-getting. It’s made for face-melting.

It’s a five-door compact from Ford. But it’s not made for grocery-getting. It’s made for face-melting.

Between Disney axing LucasArts and Monkey Island’s creator waxing on about the sequel he thinks he’ll never make, the last few months have been a pretty big kick to the gaming crowd’s feels.

Here’s some feel-good medicine: the creator of 90′s nostalgia-factory Earthworm Jim is getting back into gaming, and he’s turning to Kickstarter to make his new game happen. Guhhhhhhroooovy!

While series creator Doug TenNapel lent his hand to at least eight games throughout the 90s, he’s best known for two: the aforementioned Earthworm Jim (and the resulting animated TV series, comic books, etc.), and the ill-selling but much-loved claymation point-and-click adventure game, The Neverhood. After his gaming company, The Neverhood, Inc, closed its doors in 1999, TenNapel shifted his focus to writing and inking graphic novels.

But he’s back! Or, at least, he’s probably back, assuming fans throw money at him.

TenNapel has teamed up with Pencil Test Studios, a new development studio lead by the animators behind both of TenNapel’s aforementioned games. Together, they’re trying to raise $900,000 to help them put together something new, having already put around $100,000 of their own funds into the project.

Called Armikrog, the new game is a sort of “spiritual successor” (read: a sequel that isn’t really a sequel… but is about as close as they can get before things get sticky, legally.) to The Neverhood. Much like The Neverhood, it’s a point-and-click adventure. Also like The Neverhood, all of its animations are arduously handcrafted, frame-by-frame, through good ol’ fashion claymation.

And they’ve pulled in some pretty crazy voice talent, just for good measure: they’ve got Michael J. Nelson, of RiffTrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000! And Jon Heder, of Napoleon Dynamite and Blades Of Glory! And Rob Paulsen, the voice of Pinky (of Pinky And The Brain) and Yakko! And Veronica Belmont, of Tekzilla and… the Internet!

While details of the plot are being kept pretty hush for now, here’s what they’ve shared so far:

Armikrog follows the adventures of a space explorer named Tommynaut and his blind alien, talking dog named Beak-Beak. They crash land on a weird planet and end up locked in a mysterious fortress called Armikrog. Then…the adventure begins!

Is it a bit risky to pursue a game so similar to The Neverhood, given that the original… didn’t really sell all that well? Sure! But remember: it’s been over 15 years. That’s forever in the land of game development. They’ve got indie-friendly game engines to build on now, like the Unity3D engine they’re using here. They’ve got Steam to distribute on, rather than hoping that a point-and-click game would sell at retail. They no longer have to try to compress a mountain of rich animation and textures down to a 750mb CD. Most importantly, they’ve got the advantage of the modern, wide-spread Internet to bring their fanbase together, spread the word, and to make something like this possible.

The Kickstarter page has been up for just over 12 hours now, and it’s already raised $70k of its $900k goal.

Former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and CTO Richard Tom are working on a new stealth startup, according to sources. While details of their plans are still a little fuzzy, the two have secured office space in Los Angeles and are actively hiring engineers for their new startup.

Kilar, of course, spent the last several years building and running Hulu, the “premiere spot for watching all your favorite broadcast TV shows on the web.” Joining early in the company’s lifespan, Kilar took the streaming rights from Fox, NBC and eventually ABC, and built the wildly popular TV catchup service. Prior to that, Kilar was an executive at Amazon, where he helped build the e-commerce giant’s online media business.

Richard Tom was also a long-running exec at Hulu, joining the company in 2007, as well. After former CTO Eric Feng left in 2011, Tom took over that role and helped expand the company’s Hulu Plus service, which allows viewers to watch shows on a wide range of mobile phones, tablets and connected-TV devices.

Both execs cashed out after Hulu parents News Corp, Disney, and NBC Universal bought out the 10-percent stake in Hulu that had been owned by private equity firm Providence Equity Partners last fall. That triggered a liquidity event that earned Kilar a reported $40 million for his years of service. Not surprisingly, both left Hulu at the beginning of the year, leaving interim chief Andy Forsell in charge while Hulu’s parents seek new owners.

Now the two are teaming up again, with plans to launch a startup of their own, without having to worry about all the rights issues and corporate politics that they were subject to as part of Hulu. While there, Kilar took a couple of stands against corporate parents, including a blog post in which he gave his views on the future of TV.

He and Tom will maybe get a chance to build an app or video service of their own. While we’ve heard that the two are still in whiteboarding mode, rumor has it that they are interested in working on a service that will be focused on the living room. That could mean building a company that complements today’s traditional TV or streaming media services, although people we’ve talked to say it’s unlikely that whatever they’re creating will involve licensing content directly.

While they’re currently based in L.A. and are hiring there, that doesn’t mean they’ll stay in Southern California exclusively. We’ve heard whisperings that Kilar could also consider opening an office in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.

Google unleashed a slew of updates to its Google+ social networking service at I/O earlier this month, and now a bunch of those new features are making it to the iOS app for Google+. The update follows the Android version, which arrived last week, and brings tons of new things to the version on Apple mobile devices, including Auto Backup, Highlight, Enhance and Awesome features for photos, hashtags that curate related content on posts in your stream, and new interactive Google Offers that will pop up in the mobile stream and that can be instantly redeemed.

The new photo features will probably be especially useful to mobile photographers, as they really do greatly improve the process of sharing online photos by automatically selecting your best pics using surprisingly accurate automated algorithms, and then applying various techniques to really make those photos pop. That could involve adding a slight vignette, enhancing contrast or correcting exposure, but it’s all done automatically using Google’s massive cloud computational power. In my experience with the desktop version at least, it does a job that’s remarkably similar to what the average enthusiast photographer might accomplish manually in something like Lightroom or Photoshop.

The other new stuff should help with content discovery, thanks to the introduction of Google’s smart hashtags, which are automatically assigned to posts based on both term recognition from the words used, and using image recognition to identify landmarks and other items in pictures. With that feature, Google seems to want Google+ to be more of an interconnected web than a place where friends share discretely with their circles and don’t venture much further afield.

There are a number of other features, such as the ability to edit comments and copy a post’s permalink to your device’s clipboard. But the Google Offer in-stream delivery is probably the most noteworthy in terms of how the average user’s experience will change. This essentially amounts to in-stream advertising, albeit of a kind that’s intended to give users instant access to offers relevant to their interests. The experience overall should be better, but it will still be interesting to see how people react to the arrival of Offers on the mobile browsing experience.

Microsoft is moving its botnet protection group to the cloud to provide near real-time information about known malware infections starting to surface. Microsoft is making the new program available to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and computer emergency response teams (CERT) who are responsible for monitoring malware and other threats in their organizations.

The new Cyber Threat Intelligence Program (C-TIP) will replace Project MARS (Microsoft Active Response for Security), which launched in 2010. Project MARS provided periodic email updates to ISPs and CERTs. With C-TIP, the network monitors the data and its abnormalities to detect and thwart malware threats spread by botnets.

Here’s the thing, Microsoft makes a big deal about protecting software from attackers who turn computers into a bot that the criminals can control and do malicious deeds.  TJ Campana, director of security for the Microsoft Digital Crime Unit (sounds kind of like something you would hear about in a TV crime drama ), said that, all too often, a malicious attack is an issue about people not updating their software.

No software updates — hmm…isn’t that the upside to the cloud?

This is news to keep old systems safe with new cloud infrastructure. It’s a legacy problem being addressed by the vast data-computing and analytics capabilities that come with the cloud.

But the real, more modern issue is not the desktop PC getting attacked. It’s the mobile device and how to protect it from the growing threat posed by cyber criminals.

Tens of millions of people use Microsoft software. Security has traditionally meant drawing a perimeter around the enterprise to keep software and its computers safe.

What people need are healthy practices and preventative measures to keep their data safe. This effort helps  protect the masses, but the new war is not on a desktop. It’s in the cloud and the billions of devices where the data flows.

Maybe Netflix’s original content isn’t quite ready yet, after all. Today, a spate of bad news for the streaming service: its “Arrested Development” reboot failed to impress TV critics, and shares fell 5 percent as a result this morning. Meanwhile, angry parents are giving Netflix hell for its decision to drop popular kids’ shows like “Dora the Explorer” and “SpongeBob Squarepants” from its network – a result of the company’s decision to end its licensing deal with Viacom, as previously announced.

For starters, you’ve been living under a rock if you hadn’t heard that Netflix was bringing back the one-time fan favorite and critical darling “Arrested Development” this month. The company had been promoting “Arrested” in every which way possible, with a series of goofy marketing stunts ranging from Easter eggs on Netflix.com to fake emails and even a frozen banana stand in New York, among other things.

The buzz was palpable. In the week ahead of the big May 26 debut, the show saw over 170,000 social interactions from April 26 on, 77 percent of which were positive, compared with just 51,045 (68 percent positive) for its Kevin Spacey-backed original show “House of Cards.”

Given that the “Arrested” relaunch fell over a holiday weekend here in the U.S., the new show should have been a runaway hit. People had plenty of free time to binge-watch Season 4, and many of them did just that.

According to early reports from network intelligence company Procera Networks, about 10 percent of viewers made it to episode 15.

The show, by the streaming numbers, was a hit. One of Procera’s DSL network clients saw 36 percent of devices watching Netflix on Sunday make it through at least part of one episode – three times the number it saw when “House of Cards” debuted (11 percent).

Another cable network saw a jump in Netflix traffic peak at volumes of 10 percent on Sunday compared with the Sunday prior, corresponding with an 8 percent jump in the number of subscribers accessing Netflix overall. Even though it was a holiday weekend, and a traffic jump could be expected, a large portion of that was due to the show’s debut, Procera says.

On one university’s network in the U.S., “Arrested Development” accounted for 10 percent of Netflix’s traffic. File-sharing activity around the show also increased, despite the show only appearing on a streaming-only, DRM’ed connection.

Peak usage for “Arrested Development” on Netflix on Sunday was twice that traffic seen on Monday, with a range of 2-7 percent of total Netflix traffic on various networks being directly attributable to “Arrested Development.”

But tuning in for a stream and actually enjoying the final product are two different things.

The closest analogy to what may be happening here is having a much-anticipated new show with big stars debut to strong premiere numbers on traditional TV, but then taper off in following weeks. It’s harder to tell whether the new “Arrested” is an immediate flop, however, because the initial streaming figures are good and all episodes are available at once.

But anecdotally, we’ve been hearing the show was just OK at best. Critics – the group who once lauded the program’s originality and humor – found the new season lacking. The Wall St. Journal commented, “At its worst, the new/old Arrested Development is reduced to doing a shaky imitation of itself: the characters and themes are there but the beats are slightly off, as is the tone.”

The New York Times goes even further, saying, “Chalk one up for the Internet: It has killed ‘Arrested Development,’” and “it’s hard to imagine being anything but disappointed with this new rendition.”

Variety reports Netflix shares fell 5 percent as a result on Tuesday morning.

Netflix Drops Viacom, Losing Top Kid Shows – Parents Enraged

Meanwhile, another storm is brewing on Netflix’s Get Satisfication consumer support site. Parents are losing their minds, as their iPad babysitter fails to deliver the shows their kids are demanding to watch, including big-name children’s brands like “Dora the Explorer,” “Go Diego Go,” “Blue’s Clues” and “SpongeBob Squarepants,” for example.

For those of you without young children, let me paint a picture of what it feels like to suddenly discover these shows are missing.

You’re trying to write an email/make a phone call/compose a thought/visit the toilet alone/read something/have a conversation with another grown-up/drink/etc., but all you hear is: Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, watch me, watch me, watch this, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy.

Now imagine hours on end just like that.

Close to a meltdown, you grab your iPad, type “D-I-E-G-O” in the Netflix search box, and see a message that reads, “your search did not have any results.”

And then you start to cry.

Got it?

Apparently buoyed by the success of “House of Cards,” Netflix announced it would let its Viacom deal expire this month, as it attempts to negotiate licenses to select Viacom programs à la carte. (Likely this includes the missing shows causing parents’ ire, but the two companies are playing hardball here).

In the meantime, Amazon Prime has the missing Viacom fare, and as PaidContent points out in a post about the enraged comments its earlier reporting saw, several of these shows are now in the top 10 most popular shows streaming on Prime today. Whether viewers will drop Netflix in favor of Amazon Instant Video, is of course, still unknown.

But if “Arrested Development” isn’t worth the viewing, the kids are all watching Amazon, the latest releases are in the Redbox kiosk, and the quality TV is on HBO, Netflix is taking a big risk in dropping some of its most in-demand content as a negotiating tactic. It squandered user goodwill once with “Qwikster,” then fought its way back.

As one parent comments, “I am really tired of Netflix and all of its shenanigans over the years. Don’t you people care what the customers what?”

The same thing might be said by the former “Arrested Development” fans out there.

Aviary, the photo editing platform that has become a developer darling through its straightforward ability to integrate into iOS, Android, Windows Phone and HTML5 apps, has crossed a major milestone — and is aiming for even more growth.

Today the company is announcing that more than 50 million people used Aviary in the past month, giving it an effective monthly active user (MAU) base of 50 million across its own app, as well as in the implementations of Aviary partners such as Flickr. Aviary is also gearing up for its first international presence, with an office in Japan slated to open next month.

According to a blog post published today by Aviary’s new-ish CEO Tobias Peggs, that MAU figure represents 100 percent growth over the past six months alone. In all, he says, the Aviary platform has been used to edit more than 4 billion photos to date (up by a third from just early March.)

The upcoming opening of the New York City-based Aviary’s first international office in Tokyo, Japan, next month shows that the company isn’t content to rest on its laurels just yet. According to Peggs, Aviary has seen strong demand from the Asia region in general, so this will act as a foothold to grow further there. I’m told that Peggs himself will be heading out to Tokyo next month to work on staffing up the outpost.

In his blog post, he said:

“This year, we’ve seen huge demand from users and partners right across Asia. Partners are taking advantage of our localized SDK for photos and stickers, and are also working with us to create custom content for their users. We already have fantastic partnerships with companies like Mixi, one of the biggest social networks in Japan, so it makes perfect sense for Aviary to put feet on the street in Tokyo and start serving the region from there.”

For all the talk in recent years about photo sharing “fatigue” in the tech space, it’s clear that creating images and sharing them with other people is one of the activities that human beings gravitate towards throughout history. And it seems like technologies that help us do that in a smart and intuitive way will never go out of style — and likely continue to grow in value. Aviary will certainly be one to watch as it looks to expand its platform worldwide.

Earlier this year, Philip Kaplan expanded Fandalism, his social network for musicians, with a service called Fandalism Distro, which allows musicians to bring their songs and albums to iTunes and elsewhere. Today he’s spinning out the distribution service as a separate site, which he’s calling DistroKid.

Kaplan, who previously founded or co-founded the blog FuckedCompany, the ad network AdBrite, and social-shopping startup Blippy, said he wants DistroKid to change the way people think about distributing their music. In the same way that Gmail taught people that they didn’t have to delete their email, Kaplan said DistroKid should convince musicians that they can always bring their music to online stores such as iTunes: “You shouldn’t have to think about it.”

Tools like GarageBand have made it easy for users (including many who wouldn’t consider themselves musicians) to produce their own music. However, Kaplan said it’s still “a big decision if you’re going to upload your album,” because other services can charge around $40 per upload (TuneCore, for example, charges $29.99 per album for the first year, and $49.99 per album per year thereafter) — maybe not an enormous cost if you’re a professional musician, but enough to give you pause if you’re a hobbyist who just created something for fun. As a result, a lot of music ends up sitting on hard drives.

With DistroKid, users just pay an annual fee of $19.99 and they get unlimited uploads. You can upload one song for free before you even enter any credit card information. The service includes uploading to iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play, with plans to add Amazon soon. Kaplan said it’s also much faster than competing services, which normally take three days to upload an album. With DistroKid, an album should be on iTunes within two to four hours, and users get emails updating them throughout the process.

When Kaplan discussed the service with me back in January, he described it as a way to drive users to Fandalism, rather than a major business on its own. Until today, he’s been running it as an invite-only service, and users have already uploaded more than 1,100 albums. However, Kaplan told me that his view on how people will use Fandalism Distro/DistroKid has evolved, as he saw that some users were only interested in the distribution, not the social network.

“I just sort of bit the bullet and said, ‘If I want this to be truly the best system in the world for uploading music to stores, it should be its own thing,’” Kaplan said. Hence the launch of DistroKid as a standalone site — Kaplan is demonstrating the service today at the SF MusicTech Summit.

That does mean Kaplan is now working alone to build and maintain two separate services — Fandalism and DistroKid. He said he still doesn’t plan to hire anyone else: “I have been building these companies that can be run by one person.” The key to making that approach work?

“I’ve automated absolutely everything,” Kaplan said. “Every now and then there will be a problem, and rather than just fixing a problem, I have to build a system to fix the problem.”

Quora famously doesn’t share its growth numbers. Due to this furtiveness, many people speculate that it is not growing. On Quora even: Has Quora as a business failed? is a Quora question that smacked me in the face right as I opened the site to research this article.

The first answer to the question brings up Quora investor Peter Thiel’s refutation of such short-term thinking and asks, “The more pertinent question is if Quora’s growth rate is accelerating, holding steady, or significantly decelerating over time?”

And, of course, there is a Quora question for that, as well: “The answer appears to be ‘no,’ if we believe Alexa, and we probably shouldn’t dismiss it.”

Well today, because of a promotional video the startup itself has released on its blog, we know that that growth is accelerating, with all user numbers up at least 3x from where they were last May, including DAUs, MAUs, users registered, questions answered and questions voted on. The startup is hockey-sticking, according to founder Adam D’Angelo who, no matter how much I beg him, won’t show me where the y-axis of any of their growth graphs was a year ago.

“Why are you choosing (and do you always choose) not to reveal actual numbers? Despite your users clamoring for them,” I asked D’Angelo, because, while 3x in a year isn’t to be scoffed at, 3x of 10K DAUs is significantly less impressive. ”We don’t see a good reason to,” he responded. “Usage numbers don’t reflect quality and user experience, which are what’s important to us.”

“What do you say to critics who bring up sites like Alexa and Compete as evidence of your traffic decline?” I also asked, because when a company is clandestine like this, people look for external cues of success. “Since I have our real metrics, I look at those and not external ones,” D’Angelo says. He does reveal that this growth spans beyond Silicon Valley, disputing the perception that Quora is singularly Valley-focused. “All of California is less than 10 percent of usage. New York City is the biggest city.”

In the question linked above, Thiel insists that focusing on hyper growth for consumer startups is an outdated and too-superficial heuristic.

“The focus, particularly in companies with exploding growth, is on next month’s, quarters, or, less frequently, years. That is too short a timeline. Old Economy mode works in the Old Economy. It does not work for thinking about tech and high growth businesses. Yet startup culture today pointedly ignores, and even resists, 10-15 year thinking.”

Thus I asked D’Angelo what the 10-15 year plan was for Quora: “You say you’re not planning on ever selling it in the video. What big opportunity will eventually justify the $61 million put in by investors 10-15 years from now?”

“Our mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge,” he says. “We believe that if we can deliver on that mission at scale, we will create a lot of value for everyone.” He brings up this robustly filled-out Quora question about the International Space Station as an example of that value. There are countless others like this one, this one, this one and especially this one.

As the video intentionally highlights, Quora is hiring aggressively to fulfill this mission “through whatever it takes” and looking to fill product-development positions in engineering, product management, data science and design. If you’re interested, you can find its Careers page here.