Microsoft is about to unveil the next Xbox home gaming console, and they’re broadcasting the entire event live for all to watch. There will be thrills! Spills! Chills! And maybe some actual hardware, unlike at Sony’s PlayStation 4 reveal. Check it out above, or if you’re in an environment where you can’t listen in, or just prefer glorious words written by Greg Kumparak over these newfangled moving pictures, check out our live blog.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Larry Page thinks we are, as a population, too negative. Especially the tech community.
It’s a topic that he tackled a few times during his surprise Q&A after this morning’s Google I/O keynote, and it actually ended up being one of my favorite bits from the entire three hour presentation.
The solution? Amongst other things, Larry wishes the world had some sort of permanent Burning Man-esque place for crazy builders to just be crazy. A place with less societal pressure, and without antiquated laws makin’ things sticky.
Early on in his post-keynote speech, Page dug into the tech community for focusing too much on Company A vs. Company B:
“… We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.”
It’s something I’ve touched on before, and have been meaning to go back to for a while now. Even when something is quite clearly labeled as an experiment from day one — as with Google Glass — we collectively rush to lampoon it.
“No one in the entire world would want this!”, shouts one site. “It’s the next Segway!” shouts a dozens others. “But at least they’re trying something crazy,” shouts pretty much no one.
Is Google Glass a bit strange? Absolutely! It’s weird as hell. But it’s also a rare example of a company using their mountain of spare funds to try something crazy. It’s Sergey Brin gettin’ his Tony Stark on. It’s something we should absolutely be encouraging. It doesn’t have to win or lose. Few companies have the resources and talent to build crazy, real-world crap just to see what happens. Even fewer of those are willing to.
In response to a question on how we could change the tide, and make the world a more positive place for people to build weird new things:
Yeah that’s a really good question. I think people are naturally concerned about change. We’re changing quickly, but some of our institutions, like some laws, aren’t changing with that. The laws [about technology] cant 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.
We don’t want our world to change too fast. But maybe we could set apart a piece of the world .. I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
(If you think about it, this is exactly what Google is doing with Glass, constrained to limitations of not actually having a dedicated physical space to do it in)
Is it a bit Island Of Doctor Moreau? Sure, though it probably involves more rockets and robots than it does Leopard-Men and Beast Folk. But I’d buy a house there — or at the very least, I’d book myself an annual trip.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
When should an entrepreneur raise money, who should they raise from….and, well, should they even raise? These were some of the questions discussed on a morning panel at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, which included participation from Mike Abbott of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Aaref Hilaly of Sequoia Capital, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, and Box Group’s David Tisch.
Pitching A Partner Vs. A Firm
The VCs debated the various merits of pitching or working with an individual partner at a firm, versus considering what the entire firm could offer, in terms of guidance and experience. Abbott said that at KPCB, each partner has a different set of experiences to offer. Hilaly challenged that, while that’s true, the premise that it’s a single VC partner is most important to a founder, noting that individual partners are not as important as the collective partnership, like at Sequoia. There, everyone has their own specialities, but the entire firm gets behind the company, he says. (And yes, even Color, he admitted, responding to a question from the panel’s moderator, TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis.)
Ravikant, however, offered a different, more challenging answer to the question about who and how entrepreneurs should determine who to work with and pitch to: just use AngelList. “As a technology entrepreneur, I wanted to solve the problem with a product,” he explains, adding that he tells founders to use the product, and “call me later if you fail.”
The A Round
When an entrepreneur has moved beyond the seed stage, the next question that typically gets asked is who to raise the A round from? Tisch says that’s an impossible question to answer. The only data point you have is that someone has invested in another company like yours before, or has recently blogged about their interest in similar technology, he explains. When someone asks him about the A round, he replies, “just go meet with them all and see who’s interested.” The problem, he continues, is that VCs can’t really advertise their interests, because it would be limiting.
That being said, he admitted that being New York-based himself, he likes to send founders to area firm USV.
What Do You Want To Fund?
Then, the burning question that entrepreneurs are continually curious about: What areas do you want to invest in? Abbott responds with a fairly pat answer that KPCB is about investing in the technology that can enable the world-changing trends. Tsotsis wanted to know if Google Glass now fits that description, but he said he’s thinking more about sensors on the body, data and machine learning. Hilaly also seemed a little skeptical about Glass as a consumer device, saying that, though he loved that Google took these so-called “moonshots,” he foresees more commercial applications for Glass than the consumer apps people are excited about today.
Ravikant added that the best way to invest – like he does – is to look at companies that are an extension of your life to date, meaning those you have a personal connection and belief in. Tisch seemed to agree, talking about how he likes things that use the Internet to make his life easier.
Easier? asked Tsotsis.
“I can’t press a button had have food come out of the wall yet,” he joked, before offering deeper insight – that technology in the car and home will become more passive in the future, without users having to take some action first.
Entrepreneurs Have More Choice – But That Doesn’t Mean They Should Raise From VCs
The investors then discussed the biggest threat – or rather, disruption – to their own industry in recent months, and the agreement was that it has become significantly easier to raise early money. Entrepreneurs today even have far more choice in terms of who they choose to take investment from than these VCs did back when they were raising as founders themselves. But while it has gotten easier, there’s a flip side – cautions Hilaly, “don’t start a company because you can.”
The diffusion of talent because of this improved ability to raise may prevent talented folks from working at larger firms like Facebook or Google, where they may actually have a bigger impact, and which are a better use of skills.
Tisch, instead of dismissing these smaller-scale companies, says the larger trend at play here is the rise of a new class of technology businesses. He referred to these as lifestyle businesses, those with maybe a $10 million to $15 million upside, but aren’t venture-scale. There’s not an investor class to fund these companies yet, he says, but thinks crowdfunding will help these kinds of companies scale.
There’s nothing wrong with smaller businesses with smaller exits, but it becomes a problem when these kinds of startups try to force themselves to have a larger vision just to go after the VC money they need to scale.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Founded by Dan Gellert and Jeff Arena, Time Warner Ventures and Yahoo! alums respectively, GateGuru is second behind TripIt in terms of users and downloads. The app helps you build itineraries with simple input methods including selecting flights by number or even emailing itineraries into the program. Once you’ve set up your itinerary, the company makes money by pitching last minute car and hotel rentals on the fly – and unobtrusively – while you slog through the supreme indignity of modern travel.
Gellert sees the app as “day of travel” assistant. “We have a lot of unique data in our product such as airport amenity information, TSA wait times, airport tips, maps, etc. For these reasons, as a day-of travel solution, the GateGuru experience blows away that of any of these guys,” he said.
They have raised $1.3 million to date from Amol Sarva, Matt Daimler, Tom Glocer, and others. They are currently seeing 140,000 users per month with 1 million downloads.
The inspiration for the service came when Gellert and Arena spent most of their time traveling yet remained confused about where to eat in airports and which security lines were shortest. “Somehow there was a complete black hole of information for the traveler. Simple things like: ‘Should I eat before or after security?,’ ‘How long is the security wait time?’, ‘Is my flight delayed or on time?’ often couldn’t be answered. I felt like there needed to be a seamless solution to give travelers knowledge about this entire experience; to put the power back in the hands of the traveler.”
“From there, it has been off to the races in going from Yelp for the airport into our larger vision which is reinventing the entire day-of travel experience,” he said.
The team is planning further improvements, including a true “virtual assistant” feature that should make traveling a bit more bearable.
“We will get to the point in the next 12 – 18 months where we can say ‘John – we know you are driving out to SFO, and based on traffic, airport parking availability, security wait times, your walk to your gate and flight status, you should leave for the airport in 30 minutes’ – regardless of if that is 2 hours or 4 hours before your flight,” he said. “This is a big change from the anxiety filled experience of walking through the airport glass doors only to find the place mobbed, resulting in you potentially missing your flight.” The data comes from collections of information including TSA checkpoint wait times and airport maps.
Whether GateGuru becomes a key part of your travel process or just another app that sits in that little folder on my phone labelled Travel and contains Kayak, TripIt, (inexplicably) Shazam, and RideTheCity remains to be seen. However, these lads do have promise.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
As more developers are receiving their pair of Google Glass, the tinkering with the device is heating up. One developer found a very interesting easter egg within Glass itself, which introduces you to the entire Glass team.
The steps to reproduce it are fairly simple:
Settings -> Device info -> View licenses -> Tap the touchpad 9 times -> Tap Meet Team
Here’s a video demo, including the neat sounds that happen as you keep tapping:
The neat part about the photo is that you can see the entire 360-degree panoramic image by moving your head around. This was hard to show in the MyGlass screencast, since it lags a little bit. We’ve learned that Mike LeBeau, Senior Software Engineer for Google X, is the one who dropped the hidden gem into Glass’ software. He’s appeared on TechCrunch before in a “>hilarious Google blooper reel.
The team photo has Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, front and center.
I’m sure that more of these easter eggs will pop up over time, but this one is particularly cool since it’s the first time that I’ve seen a panoramic image on the device since I started using it. This functionality could be something that isn’t exposed in the Mirror API as of yet, but once it is, it’ll be a fun one.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, delivered a keynote speech at the she++ conference today, sharing what technology is exciting him right now, what he thinks about current startup culture, and how Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, affected his view of Silicon Valley.
Andreessen described Google Glass as “potentially transformative for the entire industry. ”
“You put it on and you’re like ‘Oh my God, I have the entire internet in my vision. Where have you been all my life?,’” he said.
“I like to tell people that I’m beta testing the new Google Contact Lenses,” he joked to moderator Ruchi Sanghvi, VP of operations at Dropbox.
He added that Facebook and Google are taking search in very different directions and opined “There’s a lot more to be done with search.”
“New Facebook Graph Search capability I think is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen…It makes me wish a little bit that I was single again,” he said to laughter.
Andreessen said he switches phones every six months (between Android and iPhone) and he’ll get Facebook Home next week.
Sanghvi turned the discussion to Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In.
“Before Sheryl’s book, for 20 years, the answer has been, ‘Be gender blind,’” Andreessen said. “’Be gender blind.’ It’s not important; in fact, it’s not to be discussed. It certainly should not be brought into the hiring criteria and certainly should not influence how people manage. And basically have a straight meritocracy and ignore gender. Sheryl has provided a very, very provocative set of arguments that 1) That’s not actually working and 2) That managers, both female and male, actually have to take gender on squarely.”
“We’ll have to completely retrain managers and executives of all kinds to be able to do this,” he continued. “[Sandberg] argues very persuasively that it’s necessary, but it’s like landmine central with the way employment law works these days.”
“I think her book has been a wake up call that the current approach to solving the problem of gender imbalance— number one it’s not working, which is fairly obvious, and number two, it requires a rethink of basic communication and basic management. I think it’s a very good thing to be talking about this and debating this. I think that it’s going to take quite a while,” he said.
“Startups as a general category are probably highly overrated,” he said, responding to Sanghvi’s question about Stanford students graduating and deciding between starting companies and finding jobs.
“Basically its an irrational act,” he said, explaining the right reason for starting a company. “This idea was so powerful and compelling that if I didn’t do it I’d hate myself for the rest of my life.”
“I think that’s the part that’s getting lost,” he continued. “I think the cult of startups, and of course Stanford’s ground zero for this…Those startups are miserable experiences.”
Andreessen argued that far too many entrepreneurs have an “incredible blind spot” to distribution, sales, and marketing in Silicon Valley right now, and shared his thoughts on immigration and innovation.
Sanghvi finished her scripted segment (before an open Q&A period) by throwing out words and getting Andreessen’s reactions to them:
“Mobile: under-hyped
Social: extremely powerful, and people underestimate how powerful it is
Enterprise: being reinvented
Silicon Valley: the world would be much better if we had 50 more Silicon Valleys but we don’t and we probably won’t for a long time
Genomics: largely a disappointment
Big Data: lots of social, cultural, political implications, not yet figured out
Aaron Swartz: tragedy. Absolute tragedy. Hopefully a future inspiration
2020: more people on the planet with smartphones than running water”
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
While the media continues to debate the severity of the denial-of-service attacks taking place across the web this month, they appear to have claimed another victim: payments startup Dwolla announced today that it, too, is now experiencing a distributed denial-of-service event (DDoS attack). The attack, which is still underway, began yesterday, resulting in either limited or no availability to the company’s website, Dwolla.com.
In a brief message posted to Dwolla’s blog, the company says that the event is still ongoing, and is preventing people from viewing the site and accessing Dwolla’s service. Also affected are third-party developers, who are using the company’s APIs to integrate Dwolla’s payment technologies into their own sites and services.
These developers were notified today, and Dwolla says that it’s working with service providers to resolve the issue.
Responding in the comments section of the post, the company told concerned users and developers that the consumer-facing API is unavailable at present, but as far as the company knows right now, actual fraud is not involved – that is, there’s no risk to users’ money, nor will this have affected transactions that took place before the attacks began.
“Funds are fine, and we do have our fraud team actively monitoring the entire situation,” wrote a Dwolla company representative, addressing a commenter’s complaint.
The company says that the attack is actually affecting its hosting provider, and they’re unsure at this time if it’s related to the SpamHaus situation.
One of the service providers that Dwolla is working with is CloudFlare, the Internet security firm that’s stepped in to protect a number of companies in the wake of these recent attacks. (You can see a CloudFlare message appear upon visiting the Dwolla.com domain at present).
The New York Times quoted CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince this week, who equated the DDoS attacks to the Internet’s version of a “nuclear bomb.” Gizmodo later followed up on this report and another from the BBC, downplaying the scale of the attacks – they’re not affecting the entire Internet, Gizmodo claims.
Full text of the Dwolla.com blog post below, in case you’re unable to pull it up yourself (or choose not to, out of kindness):
Dwolla.com updates
Yesterday afternoon, Dwolla’s service providers became the victim of a distributed denial of service event, resulting in limited or no availability to the website, Dwolla.com.
This advanced event, still persists today, and is preventing people from viewing the website and consequently accessing its services. We apologize for this inconvenience and are working hard with our service providers to resolve the issue.
In the meantime, we will continue to update this post with more details.
(UPDATE 1:50pm CT: Third-party developers have been formally notified of the service interruption. Our team continues to work closely with service providers.)
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Will Sasso, it is said, is an actor. If you were to, say, look for all of his Vines, you would also discover that this is the only man in the entire universe to use the medium correctly and, what’s more, you will laugh all day long at his tiny, tiny videos.
Sasso, who appeared regularly on MADtv when that was a thing, is now doing great 6 second videos including this charming rendition of Robert DeNiro ordering Chinese food.
However, the most important part of his oeuvre are his excellent lemon skits, reproduced below.
Seriously: these are some of the funniest Vines you’ll see today and they prove that maybe this goofy little service has legs as long as someone with Sasso’s genius can produce wild stuff like this. Two thumbs up. Thank me for sharing this next time you see me.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
What’s the matter with a little arbitrage between friends? ConcertIn.com is an interesting music discovery system that uses your Facebook social graph to find bands you and your friends like and, if you can’t make the concert, it lets you resell your tickets to your personal circle of buddies. It’s obviously a bit shady – some would call this a scalping site – but creator Jan Horna says that his service “brings a clear and transparent user identity to the marketplace,” reducing the chance of shady dealings.
I first met Horna four years ago in Prague where he pitched an early version of this product. Over time, it has grown from a social recommendation engine into a ticket sales system. A paid model will allow folks with lots of tickets to sell to pitch them across the entire ConcertIn network, but as it stands right now you can only buy and sell tickets with friends.
“Each ticket sales listing is accompanied by a user’s profile picture, name, location, and number of Facebook friends. This information helps to confirm that the ticket seller is a real music fan rather than a scalper located hundreds miles away or a fake person with just a few friends,” wrote Horna.
Horna bootstrapped the entire company, which is now seeing 18,000 visitors a month. Facebook is the driving force behind sign-ups. Concert data comes from BandsInTown.com, a band tracking website.
“Our new website serves two purposes: live music discovery and, more importantly, concert ticket reselling,” said Horna. “It is easy to use, no need to enter any data as we get your musical taste from your Facebook profile as well as your location. The user gets an instant result right after adding our application. Most of major competitors require some data entry and provide too complex user interfaces together with a lot of features.”
“It is really a tiny tool that makes a life easier,” he said.
The site is live now and already doing about $150,000 worth of business – not bad for an acorn of an idea that grew into an almost mighty startup oak.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
AgLocal, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed marketplace that connects farmers to meat buyers and distributors, is now launching in New York City with 20 celebrity, top-rated and otherwise widely known chefs on board. Currently in a private testing period, AgLocal introduces technology into an ordering system that, to date, has largely operated offline through phone calls, faxes and, yes, sometimes even Post-It notes.
It’s an industry ripe for disruption via technology, and though today’s focus is on connecting animal farmers to buyers, the platform itself has the potential to grow beyond that in the months and years ahead. The company raised its first million in venture funding before they had even recruited a full team to build the initial product, in fact, because of this potential, AgLocal CEO Naithan Jones tells us.
The system, an online marketplace for buyers, sellers and distributors, allows local farmers to set up LinkedIn-like profiles describing themselves, their farm, how their animals are raised, what they eat and more. It’s the kind of information that top chefs want to know when selecting the ingredients for their carefully crafted dishes. Some restaurants even put these kinds of details on the menu – noting that it’s “grass-fed beef” or “organic” or that the meat is purchased at a nearby, sustainable farm, for instance.
AgLocal’s system not only allows chefs access to this marketplace where they can search and sort through the various farms and cuts of meat offered, even more importantly, it gives them a new, more efficient way to have their orders fulfilled. Traditionally, these chefs’ orders are placed through late-night voicemails, emails, faxes or phone calls. “There’s a lot of mistakes that can happen,” explains AgLocal co-founder and CTO Mike Hsieh of the current methods. “There’s a lot of order inaccuracies when someone wakes up and checks their voicemail at 5:30 in the morning. It’s like, ‘I think he said 10 t-bone steaks. I’ll just write that down,’” Hsieh says.
The company’s first meat distributor partner, serving AgLocal’s top-rated restaurant customers in New York, is Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors – an $80 million operation that has yet to be automated. “They run their business on paper,” Jones remarks. “It’s complete chaos, and a perfect case for software. It’s voicemails, it’s a few emails, it’s sticky pads of notes and spreadsheets. They’ve got people calling farms to see what product they have on hand and matching that manually to restaurants via the phone.”
Now with AgLocal, the distributor has an online inventory management system, and a way to receive and fill the orders coming in from the chefs. The restaurants use the e-commerce side of AgLocal’s system to shop the cuts of meat and place items in a cart – a system that’s not all that different from buying an item on Amazon, except that they don’t pay at checkout. The meat is first cut and weighed to determine pricing. AgLocal takes a 4 percent transaction fee from the farmers, and again when the chefs order from the distributors.
Invoicing is also managed through the AgLocal platform, so instead of writing checks, AgLocal has integrated the new payments infrastructure from a Midwestern startup called Dwolla, a platform that enables bank-to-bank transfers in realtime. Though the startup now has people in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, we should note that it too was a Midwestern company; AgLocal got off the ground in Kansas City – a perfect example of a startup that took inspiration from a local industry, then leveraged technology to change it.
Jones himself grew up in a family of chefs and farmers and knew first-hand of challenges that face independent farmers today. “For us, the mission is to make sure these farms are more sustainable, that we’re actually creating more farms, and helping the farms that do exist not to go out of business,” he says.
He explains that so many animal farmers today are land rich but product poor. They have the capacity to scale up two, three or even four times, but don’t because it means more work and the margins aren’t very good, or they have to turn to mechanized farming techniques to really grow. So these farmers just sell off animals at half their weight and maturity to keep operations small. “But they could start doing full weight on pasture if they had spoken-for demand that had good margins in it,” Jones tells us. “Here’s where the transparency and efficiency of software comes in – because we’re delivering that to them,” he adds.
Technically speaking, Jones says AgLocal’s system could also scale up today very quickly by adding more distributors. But the company knew that it was important to first get some of the best chefs in the country on board, as they actually move the culture in their industry. That’s one reason why the early launch is limited to a “who’s who” lineup of celebrity chefs, Iron Chefs, Top Chef (TV show) winners, and Michelin-starred chefs.
The current chef list includes:
There are others, too, but those are the names which can be disclosed right now. For the company’s upcoming expansion to San Francisco, Michael Min and Dominique Crenn are already committed.
“What we’re going to get out of this is a software platform that the entire natural food industry relies on down the road,” says Jones. “Once we solve meat, it’s going to be very easy to add on byproducts, and add on more distributors…it will become a full-on suite for the entire market.”
The company will be raising another round soon to start making that happen.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch