BIG DATA costs big bucks. Perhaps then, it should be no surprise to see ERN, the London-based startup that’s planning to use Big Data to enable banks and merchants to create loyalty-based offers for cardholders, has announced that it’s raised more funding before actually managing to launch. Following a $2 million funding round raised last December, the company has added another $1.6 million in seed funding to its coffers.

Once again, ERN is remaining tight-lipped on who its backers are, only to describe them as “high net worth individuals”, the majority of which I understand are new investors, and that the additional capital will be used to further develop its platform.

In addition to its headquarters in London, the Fintech startup has an office in Silicon Valley and Singapore, and currently employs a team of 14 people, a head-count that it’s planning to ad to. Two noteworthy hires earlier this year include former Mastercard executives Anant Patel and Brian Eagle-Brown. Patel is now ERN’s Head of UK Sales, while Eagle-Brown is the startup’s UK Merchant & Acquiring Sales Director.

ERP’s analytics platform, dubbed “Looop”, enables banks (or more specifically, card issuers) and participating merchants to boost customer loyalty by creating new products and offers based on the analysis of their card transactions. The idea is that by drilling into the Big Data around a customer’s transactional history — after they’ve opted in, of course — individually-tailored offers can be pushed to their smartphone via the Looop app, in the form of an e-coupon redeemable in-store.

From the merchants point of view, these offers can be segmented using the Big Data that the system is able to make sense of, as well as being based on things like time and location. So, for example, only push an offer when a customer who has previously bought a dress is within a certain radius of the participating store.

In addition to receiving highly targeted offers — the Looop system is designed to be non-spammy and is self-learning based on how a consumer interacts with the platform (i.e. which offers they take up) as well as their card transactions — the Looop smartphone app lets consumers track spending on their credit and debit cards in “real-time”. The pull being that they can budget more effectively — the trojan horse needed to push those enticing loyalty-based offers.

Meanwhile, although yet to launch, ERN says it’s now in a position to conduct wider customer trials, which have begun already. What banks or merchants it’s working with, the startup isn’t saying or can’t say. However, I understand them to be household names.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google just added a new service to Google Cloud Storage that will allow developers to send their hard drives to Google to import very large data sets that would otherwise be too expensive and time-consuming to import. For a flat fee of $80 per hard drive, Google will take the drive and upload the data into a Cloud Storage bucket. This, Google says, can be “faster or less expensive than transferring data over the Internet.” The service is now in limited preview for users with a U.S.-based return address.

Platforms like AWS and Google’s Cloud Platform are obviously great for analyzing large data sets. As Google software engineer Lamia Youseff notes in today’s announcement, however, “transferring large data sets (in the hundreds of terabytes and beyond) can be expensive and time-consuming over the public network.” Uploading 5 terabytes of data over a 100Mbps line could easily take a day or two and most developers may not even have these kinds of connections.

Amazon, it’s worth noting, already offers a very similar service. It, too, charges $80 per hard drive, but in typical Amazon fashion, the company also charges a per-hour fee for importing the data. Importing a 5 terabyte hard drive to S3, Amazon calculates, will cost an additional $45 for an eSATA drive, which makes Google’s flat-fee service significantly cheaper. While Amazon also allows you to export your data using a hard disk, though, Google doesn’t currently offer this service.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Be careful with the way you use Facebook’s tools. The minimum age function is great for filtering out teenagers from pages about adult topics like alcohol, but this is something you should decide when you first create your page and then never touch it again. For example, if you raise the minimum age of your page, you instantly wipe out your young fans.

Simply raising the minimum age cost this page 14,000, valued at nearly $14,980 (an average Facebook fan is worth $1.07, although some fans are worth more). Sure, they could buy more likes, but there’s no substitute for strategy.

If you change your minimum age, make sure you want to change it for good, because not only do you prevent new people below the specified age from liking your page, you kick off existing ones too, and changing the minimum age back to normal doesn’t add them back again.

Readers, have you ever gotten yourselves in trouble with a Facebook page feature? Let us know in the comments.

Special thanks to Sean McNulty of BlitzMetrics for assembling the data for this article.

Money image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Yahoo! has disclosed the number of government requests for data it has received over the past 18 months, becoming the latest tech company to do so after the fallout from the NSA spying scandal.

In a statement co-signed by CEO Marissa Mayer and Yahoo! general counsel Ron Bell, the company said that Yahoo! received 12,000 to 13,000 requests from FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and U.S. law enforcement agencies during the period between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013.

Like other tech companies that have recently disclosed the number of U.S. law enforcement requests for data they have received, Yahoo! used its press release to reiterate that its commitment to user privacy, despite being implicated in PRISM.

“We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it,” Mayer and Bell said in the statement.

Facebook said on June 15 that for the six months ending December 31, 2012, it had received between 9,000 to 10,000 requests for data from U.S. law enforcement agencies. During that same period Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 requests. Meanwhile, in keeping with its stance on offering more information about the types of data requests received, Google has asked the U.S. government to be allowed to publish more information about national security requests it has been given.

Google and Twitter (which have not yet revealed their data request numbers) have both criticized other tech companies for disclosing the number of data requests they received because their numbers do not break down the types of request made by type or government agency. Yahoo!’s statement noted that most of the requests concerned fraud, kidnappings and other criminal investigations, but “like all companies, Yahoo! cannot lawfully break out FISA request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified; however, we strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue.”

Yahoo! also said that it will issue its first “global law enforcement transparency report” later this summer, which it will refresh with current statistics twice a year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The tech industry has been buzzing about “big data” for years now. And according to venture capital firm Accel Partners, the excitement around the big data space is not set to die down any time soon — it’s just about to enter into a new phase.

Accel is announcing tonight that it has closed on $100 million for a new investment fund called Big Data Fund 2. The fund is the same size as Accel’s first big data focused fund, which launched with $100 million back in November 2011.

As part of the new fund, Accel is also adding QlikView CTO Anthony Deighton and Imperva CEO Shlomo Kramer to its Big Data Fund Advisory Council, which Accel has said is meant to serve as a “guiding light” to help think through investments and track entrepreneurs doing interesting things in the space.

Despite the nearly identical name, Accel’s Big Data Fund 2 will mark a definite shift in focus from the firm’s first big data fund, partner Jake Flomenberg said in a phone call today. “Over the past few years, we’ve focused a tremendous amount of attention on what people like to call the ‘three Vs’ of big data: variety, volume and velocity,” he said. “We now believe there is a fourth V, which is end user value, and that hasn’t been addressed to the same extent,” and that is where Big Data Fund 2 will be focusing the bulk of its investment and attention.

Specifically, Accel believes that “last mile” for big data will be served largely by startups focused on data-driven software, or “DDS.” These startups have largely been made possible through the hardware and infrastructure technology innovations that defined big data’s first wave, Flomenberg says. In a prepared statement from Accel, Facebook engineering VP Jay Parikh, who also serves on Accel’s Big Data Advisory Council, explained it like this:

“The last mile of big data will be built by a new class of software applications that enable everyday users to get real value out of all the data being created. Today’s entrepreneurs are now able to innovate on top of a technology stack that has grown increasingly powerful in the last few years – enabling product and analytical experiences that are more personalized and more valuable than ever.”

One example Flombenberg pointed to as an example of a “fourth V” DDS startup is RelateIQ, the “next generation relationship manager” software startup which launched out of stealth last week with some $29 million in funding from Accel and others.

Accel’s existing portfolio of big data investments also includes Cloudera, Couchbase, Lookout, Nimble Storage, Opower, Prismatic, QlikView, Sumo Logic, and Trifacta.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The most famous man on the lam, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, has answered reader questions in a live Q&A on the Guardian’s blog. Snowden skyrocketed to international fame/infamy after leaking a top-secret court order about the National Security Agency’s collection of all U.S. Verizon phone records.

After disappearing from his Hong Kong hideaway, Snowden resurfaced for the online Q&A. You can read the full transcript on The Guardian; we’ve summarized the best of it below (edited for brevity and clarity).

Passion, Righteous Passion

“All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”

On Tech Company Denials

“Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific language across companies….They are legally compelled to comply and maintain their silence in regard to specifics of the program, but that does not comply them from ethical obligation. If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?”

On Traitor Accusations

“I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target….I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists.”

“Further, it’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney…Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American”

Encryption Works, Kind Of

“Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.”

Context: There are several popular applications to skirt government snooping, but none are perfect. Apple claims, for instance, that because only the sender and receiver of an iMessage SMS can decrypt the data on their respective devices (end-to-end decryption), their service is NSA-proof. End-to-end encryption is far more difficult when the sender and receiver are using different services that may be tapped by the NSA. For secure Internet surfing, the popular anonymous web browser TOR has a thorough how-to blog post. But, if Snowden is to be believed, the NSA has ways of finding most people even with encrypted services.

Mainstream Media: Hot Girlfriend > Massive Surveillance

“Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”

Mandatory pat-on-the-back: TechCrunch has never posted pictures of Snowden’s girlfriend (and, no, we’re not going to link to them either).

Hope, We Believed In It. Now, not so much

“Obama’s campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.”

NSA and Warrant-less Monitoring
“NSA likes to use “domestic” as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis … “warrant” is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.”

No, He Really Isn’t A Spy

“Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the “ask me anything” format made famous by Reddit, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden returned to the Guardian’s website this morning to answer questions from the general public as part of a live event known as “AskSnowden.”

It was a fascinating exchange, and you can see the whole thing here — and we’ll have a rundown of the full event here soon. But there was one standout bit of good news from Snowden along with the disturbing details of the government’s surveillance of our web activity: Encryption works as a method to keep your personal data private.

A commenter named Mathius1 asked (typos included here), “Is encrypting my email any good at defeating the NSA survelielance? Id my data protected by standard encryption?”

Snowden responded:

“Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.”

Snowden doesn’t add more details, but in general some examples of well-reputed third party crypto systems would be the Gnu Privacy Guard, or “GPG,” and the Pretty Good Privacy program, or “PGP.” And a number of messaging systems even built by companies that have been implicated as part of PRISM have end-to-end encryption, as Apple highlighted in its updated response to the NSA news:

“…we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.”

And while these protections are all relatively solid, Snowden makes a good point about endpoint security being a different beast. Here Snowden likely means that there are ways that the government can ultimately read your emails and messages even if they’re not able to intercept them along the way, by accessing them somehow at either end of the delivery process. A real-world allegory would be that even if the entire postal mail system up until a letter is delivered to you is completely impenetrable, someone can still snatch a letter out of your unlocked mailbox — or, say, read it over your shoulder once it’s in your hands.

All of this underscores a larger point being discussed lately, that having any real power to control your privacy may increasingly depend on how tech-savvy you are. The folks at Codecademy are seeing this as a lesson to help encourage more people to become digitally literate, writing in a blog post today:

“Pretty much anybody who knows how code works was prepared for this sort of revelation. Because becoming code fluent is about more than simply knowing enough javascript to get a job. It’s a way to become familiar with the operating system on which the human drama is playing itself out.

Moreover, the better you understand the programs and platforms you use – and the permanence of almost everything you do online – the better equipped you will be to choose what the data watchers know about you, and what they don’t.

May the digitally illiterate proceed at their own risk. Once again, you have been warned.”

Of course, it’s a smart message to make if you’re a company whose business it is to teach as many people to code as possible, like Codecademy is. But even so, it’s hard to argue against the idea that knowledge is power — especially when it comes to technology.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple posted a press release on its site reaffirming its “commitment to customer privacy” and stating that it first heard of the Prism program when questioned by news organizations on June 6. The company also said that it received between 4,000 to 5,000 requests from U.S. federal, state and local law enforcement for customer data between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013.

“Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it,” Apple stated in its press release. Between 9,000 to 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in the requests and “included both criminal investigations and national security matters.”

The press release also states that Apple does not collect maintain personal details about customers: “there are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.” For example, the company says that iMessage and FaceTime conversations are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can read them, and Apple cannot decrypt the data.

Apple’s statement comes after other tech companies implicated in the NSA scandal also disclosed the number of government requests for information they had received in an effort to support their claims that they denied NSA special access to their servers and win back the trust of users.

Facebook said on June 15 that for the six months ending December 31, 2012, it had received between 9,000 to 10,000 requests for data from U.S. law enforcement agencies. During that same period Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 requests. Meanwhile, Google has asked the U.S. government to be allowed to publish more information about national security requests it has received.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As the PRISM scandal shows no signs of dying down in the public consciousness, Facebook just released the fullest account to date of the requests it has received from United States law enforcement and governmental authorities for the data surrounding its users.

To borrow a phrase from local news sizzle reels, the numbers may surprise you.

In a report issued today on Facebook’s company blog, general counsel Ted Ullyot wrote:

“For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.

With more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months. We hope this helps put into perspective the numbers involved, and lays to rest some of the hyperbolic and false assertions in some recent press accounts about the frequency and scope of the data requests that we receive.”

More information can be found here, and we’re updating the story as it develops.

But at first blush, those numbers may not seem as scary as the initial reports on governmental surveillance of web activity would imply. Though the government under FISA does have the right to request as much information as it would like in the name of national security, it seems that those requests have affected a relatively tiny fraction of Facebook users.

For a bit of background: Facebook this week joined several other technology giants including Microsoft and Google in publicly asking the government to change the restrictions prohibiting them from being fully transparent about the extent of their cooperation in the U.S. government’s surveillance activities.

Thus far, requests that Facebook has received from the National Security Agency (NSA) have been kept secret because they are by definition confidential orders executed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — the secrecy is mandated in the name of keeping American citizens safe from equally secretive terrorist organizations. In short, anything under FISA is just like Fight Club — the first and most important rule is that it isn’t discussed.

Facebook has said recently that one reason it has refrained from issuing public statements about its involvement with governmental authorities (such as Google does with its Transparency Report) is because the existence of FISA would make such statements incomplete. In many ways, these companies’ hands have been tied if they want to keep complying with the law.

Now, many of us would love to see whistleblowers within these tech firms flout the law and talk about what exactly is going on, as Edward Snowden has — FISA be damned. Michael Arrington, who I personally think has been nailing exactly how the tech industry should be viewing this issue from day one on his Uncrunched blog, has issued a some compelling calls for industry folks to do just that — but up until now, we’ve only had tech companies asking for a bit more leeway and permission to talk.

While staying within the confines of the law, Facebook today has made a significant stride toward really opening up the way that the government handles its information gathering and disclosures — it will be interesting to see how other companies follow suit.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today was the Extreme Startups Spring 2013 Demo Day in Toronto, and the cohort of five startups all delivered. The list this time included Brika, Instaradio, Koge, Polychart and Sciencescape. It was an incredibly diverse group, targeting verticals ranging from ecommerce to media to business intelligence, but it’s rare to see a group so focused and prepared on the day. That’s a credit to the Extreme Startups prep process, and to the general maturity of the companies involved.

Here’s a brief summary of all the companies involved:

BRIKA -This company is essentially a hybrid of Etsy and Fab, curating maker-created goods with a focus on tastemaking. The founders both have lots of experience in both retail and fashion, and came together because of a mutual love for unique goods and tailored fashion recommendations. The startup itself is based around the idea that what Etsy provides is a good start, but what the maker community really needs is a better way to tell the story of goods and their creators. The company uses a drop shipping model to make sure that it never has to carry on-hand inventory, reducing costs.

The company has been building its traction since joining Extreme Startups, and says that both members and total sales are up since joining. They’ve closed $500,000 of their $1 million round.

Instaradio – As the name suggests, to some extent Instaradio wants to become the Instagram of audio content. Heard that before? So have I. But this company’s focus on live broadcasts and instant sharing of otherwise closed off events sets it apart. A user, for instance a comedian can start broadcasting their set, and instead of just serving a small audience of around 50 people max, the startup says some of their early users have seen traction of upwards of 1,000 listeners for a single broadcast.

So far, the company has had its app live for only 10 days, with 4,000 downloads and 8,000 broadcasts from its users. Their ultimate goal is to build a PA network of as many devices as possible, leverages all the mics we have everywhere. Sounds like it might be right up Robert Scoble’s alley.

Koge – This is a vitamin ecommerce business that’s taking the monthly subscription approach to health supplements. It’s a business that has gotten a lot of traction already since joining Extreme Startups, with a new partnership bringing it into Loblaws, a leading Canadian grocery chain, which should help immensely with introducing the idea to new customers who are unsure of buying vitamins from the Internet.

Polychart – A business intelligent startup that wants to leverage visual charts and other easily interpretable forms of data delivery to let everyday users who aren’t necessarily data scientists take advantage of big data trends. It’s a startup that will face a lot of competition in this booming market, but it really does seem to have nailed the drag and drop mechanics of making a truly user-friendly solution, so long as it gets the data sources right.

Sciencescape – The Toronto-based Sciencescape is a startup that’s operating in the hot medical research space. ResearchGate just landed a $35 million investment from Bill Gates and others. And Mendeley was acquired for between $70 and $100 million in early April, bought by publisher Elsevier. But Sciencescape is doing something different from either of these, trying to curate and make sense of the various bits of academic research that are flooding knowledge networks these days. Journal publications have skyrocketed, the startup says, and there’s nothing good to deal with it yet, hence the market need.

All the companies involved had raised at least half of their initial seed funding, and each had a clear go-to-market strategy in place. The keynote address by SoftTech VC partner Charles Hudson was all about how Canada seemed like a tricky place to invest, but how strong companies and continued investment from a few early pioneers has helped the startup community explode, especially for SV-based VC firms. This crop of companies is a good example of why those investors are looking north, and why they will likely continue to do so.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch