JustFab, the subscription-based fashion commerce site, is putting the $109 million that it has raised so far to use: today it is announcing the acquisition of The Fab Shoes, a European e-commerce shoe club in France and Spain, to build out its global operations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The deal will give JustFab a stronger foothold in the European market: it already has operations in Germany, where it has a European HQ in Berlin, as well as in the UK; now it will be adding France and Spain, with the integrated site coming in July 2013. Growth in Europe has been coming at a fast pace for the company so far. In 2012, JustFab did $2 million in sales, CEO Adam Goldenberg tells TechCrunch. “This year we are on track to exceed $30 million.” The Fab Shoes has slightly more than 500,000 users; combining that with the 1.5 million across Germany and the UK, JustFab will now have over 2 million members, with 15 million worldwide.

Call it a funny coincidence, but this isn’t the first acquisition JustFab has made of a would-be competitor with the word “Fab” in its name. Earlier this year, the company acquired FabKids to spearhead a move into children’s fashion. “We have a running joke that whoever is called ‘Fab’, we’ll buy them,” says CEO Adam Goldenberg. (And indeed that may not extend to the biggest Fab of all, Fab.com, which apparently is now raising a $250 million round at a $1 billion valuation.)

More seriously, Goldenberg says that his company is not singularly focused on buying up so-called “clones” of its own service. Taking a lesson from some of the challenges companies like Groupon have had digesting large, inorganic acquisitions to scale up their services — from what we understand Groupon has yet to migrate many of its extensive global assets on to a single common platform with the U.S. operation — JustFab has a different approach.

As Goldenberg describes it, the company’s M&A policy is based on acquiring smaller businesses that complement JustFab’s and are also built on the same subscription model. This means that they can be easily integrated into the bigger company’s infrastructure.

There is another reason for this: it’s increasingly a challenge for e-commerce fashion companies these days to raise money, with much of it going instead to those that have proven to have the most scale. “This is part of the reason why we raised such a big round last year,” Goldenberg noted. The Fab Shoes, founded in early 2012, was raising financing — or trying to — when JustFab came knocking.

“Scale and infrastructure are key if you want to grow quickly in the fashion business,” said Pablo Szefner, CEO of The Fab Shoes, in a statement. “While The Fab Shoes has had a lot of early success, we are thrilled to take our core business to the next level. With JustFab, we can provide our existing members and potential new customers with excellent styles, quality and service for an outstanding shopping experience.”

“We met Pablo and Xisco” — Pablo Szefner, CEO of The Fab Shoes and Xisco de la Calle, its COO — “and we decided this would be a great talent acquisition as well.” De la Calle will become the VP of operations for JustFab Europe, while Pablo becomes General Manager for France and Spain, overseeing 12 employees in Barcelona and Paris.

While some have waved a red flag over subscription-commerce sites — the implication being that they are not transparent enough about how they charge users on a regular basis — Goldenberg is insistent that this is a model that works well and is a hit with its customers, and investors. “There is a subscription commerce funding craze right now,” he says. “But because it is so low-cost you have to have the scale to make the economics of it work. We have millions of satisfied customers.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In years to come, when we look back, it’s only then that we’ll know if Collaborative Consumption really is a movement or if history deems it to be the hollow marketing term that it sometimes appears to be. But in the midst of things, it’s hard not to think that something pretty interesting is happening, specifically relating to the issue of trust. Airbnb and its European rival 9flats, for example, got users used to the idea of inviting strangers into their home. Meanwhile, Housebites enables people to sell home-cooked meals as an alternative to a take-out.

Launching today is Cookening, a new French startup co-founded by Cédric Giorgi (previously co-editor of TechCrunch France) that combines elements of both Airbnb and Housebites. Starting with France first, a country known for its gastronomy, it enables locals to be matched with foreigners — tourists in particular — so they can invite them into their homes to experience an authentic, in this case French, home dining experience.

The pain-point that Cookening is targeting is that when traveling it’s not always easy to meet local people and experience authentic food. “As a passionate cook, it is impossible to easily invite new and relevant people to share a home cooked meal,” Giorgi tells TechCrunch. “This is what Cookening wants to solve.”

Hosts create a profile on Cookening, which includes a table page showing photos of their favourite home-cooked dishes, a preset menu/meal structure, and a price for the guests. The profile is manually vetted by Cookening. Non-locals then simply choose the host/table booking, and make contact. Like similar peer-to-peer marketplaces, payment is handled by Cookening in order to help establish and maintain trust between hosts and guests, and the host only receives payment the day after a successful meal. It’s also how the startup will make money, charging a 20% commission.

If it all sounds quite similar to an existing concept in France, known as “Table d’hôte”, where people host home cooked meals, that’s because it is. However, Giorgi says the practice was highly regulated. “We want to globalize and ease this concept so that everyone can experience the wonderful moment of sharing a meal with people you don’t know and that have different origins,” he says.

Another important element of the Cookening concept is that hosts dine with their guests. This adds further trust — both parties are in theory eating the same food — plus it’s as much a social as gastronomic experience, a cultural exchange, if you will.

To date, Cookening is bootstrapped but is looking to raise external funding. Alongside Giorgi, the startup’s other co-founder is Sébastien Guignot, previous head of development at French fintech startup Quanthouse that exited to Standard & Poor’s.

Meanwhile, Cookening’s potential competitors include Feastly in the U.S., which focuses on meals organised between locals, not locals and tourists specifically. Israel’s (and Disrupt NY nominee) EatWith is probably a closer competitor, but isn’t targeting France at the moment. There are also some local rivals in the “Table d’hôte” tradition, though Giorgi says they lack Cookening’s peer-to-peer model.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Expect a swathe of consolidation in the European e-learning sector in the coming months. Edxus Group, a new London-based corporate operating edtech company, is planning to plough in €50-60 million ($64-$77 million) over the next 18 months to develop and acquire European e-learning businesses and build out a single regional player with the scale to compete against U.S. edtech giants, it said today.

Edxus plans to execute the first phase of its “buy and build” strategy over the next three to four months, deploying an initial €15-20 million to “consolidate a handful of European e-learning companies”.

It did not specify which companies it has in its sights but said the target is those serving the K-12/primary and secondary school market. Northern Europe and the U.K. are the initial markets for the first wave of investment, with other European regions “under assessment for future plans”. The aim is to bring together “complementary expertise and products in curricula, data and instructional systems”, it added.

Edxus said its overarching aim is to rival similar U.S.-backed moves. In the U.S. edtech giants such as Pearson, Blackboard, Macmillan, Kaplan and McGraw-Hill top the list of acquisitive e-learning companies. The European market is more fragmented and ripe for consolidation, according to Edxus — meaning a local scale player is needed to ensure U.S. companies don’t end up dominating the region too.

“The US e-Learning market is already a few years ahead of Europe,” commented Edxus Group co-founder and CEO Benjamin Vedrenne-Cloquet in a statement. “Unless we can create scale and a fertile ecosystem, the European e-learning space will be dominated by American content and software. This buy and build strategy is designed to help foster the consolidation, scale and operational efficiencies required in Europe to help e-Learning companies to thrive.”

Edxus’ initial investment funds come from its partner and backer: specialist media investment and advisory firm IBIS Capital. It’s unclear whether IBIS will fund the full program of consolidation, or just the first wave.

“The European e-Learning industry currently displays both disruptive innovation and rapid growth but it is highly fragmented and lacks a dominant player. These are all characteristics of an attractive pre-consolidation phase industry so we expect our strategy to help the marketplace as a whole meet its enormous potential,” said IBIS Capital’s co-founder and CEO, Charles McIntyre, in a statement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jolla, the Finnish MeeGo startup composed of ex-Nokians building their own mobile hardware and Sailfish OS, has finally taken the wraps off its first handset, revealing what the hardware will look like on its website. The design is a clean-looking, elegant slab, with the most stand-out feature being the coloured shell on the back that wraps around half the sides of the phone to create a dual-tone sandwich effect.

The shell colours, which appear to be user-customisable, can also influence the theme colours of the Sailfish UI. This is a feature Jolla is calling “the Other Half”. “Attach the Other Half and your Jolla becomes alive and unique,” the text notes. “Magically, the software changes to match your selected colour and design. Your Ambience. Your Jolla.” It’s unclear exactly what technology is linking hardware and software but it sounds like it could be NFC.

The removable, customisable shells bring to mind Nokia’s Lumia 820 — a device for which Nokia has released the 3D print files so owners of 3D printers can  design and print their own custom shell. The Lumia 820 shells, however, do not have any link to the Windows Phone software.

Jolla’s handset will cost €399 ($513) and is slated to ship at the end of the year. Jolla notes:

Expected availability by end of 2013 subject to demand in your local market. Sales will start in European countries with more countries to follow. If you join the Movement and get the pre-order number to buy the phone when available, you’ll pay no more than 399€; including applicable VAT in Europe, but excluding shipping costs, duties and any local taxes.

Specs wise, the device has a 4.5″ Estrade display, a dual-core chip, 4G, 16GB internal memory plus a microSD card slot, an 8MP auto focus camera, a user-replaceable battery. The device is powered by Jolla’s Sailfish OS but can also run Android apps, giving it something of a leg up. Jolla is also encouraging developers to build native Sailfish apps too.

The hardware reveal is also the start of Jolla’s pre-order sales campaign, announced last month. Jolla confirmed it is taking pre-orders from today, with the first shipments due at the start of Q4 2013. It is accepting pre-orders of either €100 or €40 for a limited edition Jolla (plus exclusive Other Half for those making the higher payment). It is also accepting pre-orders without any down payment to be among the first to get a Jolla handset.

The big question for Jolla is has it done enough to sustain people’s interest in a device that won’t ship for at least half a year — during which time scores more Android-powered handsets will arrive, and companies like Samsung will continue to push the limits of flagship phone hardware.

Jolla is holding an event in Helsinki today — dubbed the Jolla LoveDay — to promote the handset and encourage fans to pre-order the device, having kept the design tightly under wraps up to now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google is under fire in the UK for its tax practices in the country, and a new key witness (who spoke to The Sunday Times) might put them in deeper hot water when he hands over a reported 100,000 emails and documents to the British Revenue & Customs (HRMC) services. Barney Jones, a former Googler who was at the company between 2004 and 2006, says he has material proof that Google’s London sales staff which would negotiate and close sales for the UK market, despite claiming its Dublin HQ handled finalizing all deals.

Jones was prompted to speak out by testimony given to the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last week by Google VP Matt Brittin, who said that London-based Google staff were never closing any ad sales deals, though some selling efforts were made there. Brittin had previously gone on record in November 2012 with statements asserting that no one in the London office was doing any kind of ad selling.

The matter of where the deals were finalized is especially important because if a sale closes in London, it’s likely they’d be taxable in Britain, rather than in the extremely low tax-rated Ireland. Jones told the Sunday Times that Google is fully aware of this, yet there are still records of Google staff closing major deals from companies like eBay and Lloyds TSB, but Google doesn’t seem at all certain that any of the documentation will absolutely prove that it has done anything strictly against UK tax law, according to a statement provided by Google Direct of External Relations Peter Barron to the Sunday Times.

“As we said in front of the public accounts committee, it is difficult to respond fully to documents we have not seen,” the statement reads. “These questions relate to Google’s business in the UK going back a decade or more. None of the allegations put to us change the fact that Google pays the corporate tax due on its UK activities and complies fully with UK law.” Google reiterated this statement to TechCrunch when we contacted them for comment.

Ireland uses its lower corporate taxation rate, which is 12.5 percent, or a little over half of Britain’s 23 percent, to attract big names who base their European corporate headquarters there, including Apple and Facebook in addition to Google. The search giant is currently under fire from UK parliament members for its tax practices, thanks to a Reuters investigation that revealed statements it made last November to the PAC about its London operations may not have been entirely accurate.

Amazon is next in the PAC’s sights for its UK tax practices, as Reuters has also recently uncovered evidence to suggest that it, too, is doing a lot of selling through an autonomous London-based unit, despite routing its sales on paper through a tax-exempt affiliate based in Luxembourg. In fact, for most on Google’s footing, avoiding taxes seems to be the exception, not the rule, and a recent piece by V3′s Madeline Bennett explains that even if this fresh round of hearings reveals that these schemes do run afoul of UK tax regulations, it’s unlikely we’ll see situations change all that dramatically. Governments are too dependent on the general economic benefits of hosting big corporations, and get too much out of awarding them contracts, she says, to risk doing long-term harm to those arrangements.

Still, what Jones claims to have would be incredibly embarrassing for Google, especially if it spells out in no uncertain terms that closing deals was regularly handled by Google’s London staff, in direct contradiction to what Brittin has told the committee, but until we see the goods, there’s no telling how deep down the rabbit hole his information actually goes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

VERSUS IO, the natural language-styled comparison engine backed by Dave McClure (amongst others), has closed a $2.8 million Series A round led by Earlybird Venture Capital. McClure’s 500 Startups also participated, as did Hightech-Gruenderfonds, Lars Dittrich, and Dario Suter.

This brings the Berlin-based startup’s total funding to $3.8 million, having already received seed backing from Hightech-Gruenderfonds and JMES Investments, followed by 500 Startups putting in $100k last December — McClure’s first investment in the Berlin startup scene.

Launched in July as a way to compare smartphones, VERSUS IO has since expanded to let consumers also compare tablets, cameras, and mobile apps, in addition to city comparisons, its first non-product vertical.

In fact, the startup claims its engine is able to compare just about anything using natural language processing, frequently talking its plans to expand to 640 verticals and the potential to even add people to that list, which is an ever so slightly creepy (but fun) thought.

VERSUS IO says there are now 25 million comparisons available via its site, which for a European startup gunning to be global has rather smartly been localised in 18 languages. Furthermore, it’s seeing 2 million unique visitors each month, claiming to have grown 35% month-on-month on average since launch in July 2011.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another funding raise for a collaborative consumption startup: Spain-based private sales club Privalia, which sells branded clothes and accessories at discounted prices to members in the five markets it currently plays in, has closed a new €25 million round ($32.3 million). The company did not specify which round this latest raise falls under but has previously raised a total of $218 million in two rounds, taking place in 2010 and 2011, according to Crunchbase.

The new financing brings Privalia’s total funding to date to $251 million. It also adds a new investor, with Belgian-based fund Sofina – also an investor in European online shoe retailer Spartoo – becoming a shareholder. Other prior investors include La Caixa Capital Risc, Nauta Capital, Highland Capital Partners, General Atlantic, Insight Venture Partners, Index Ventures, the founders of dress-for-less Mirco Schultis and Holger Hengstler, and José Manuel Villanueva and Lucas Carné, the two co-founders of Privalia.

Privalia currently operates in Spain, Italy, Germany, Mexico and Brazil. It said it plans to use the new funding to expand its growth in the Latam region, as well as to strengthen its financial structure and extend its leadership, noting in a press release that sales in Mexico grew by more than three digits in 2012, and that Brazil is its main operating company by sales volume.

Overall, Privalia said its business grew 32% in 2012, with total revenues of €422 million ($543.5 million), adding that it ended the first quarter of this year with positive EBITDA on a consolidated basis. It points to early investment in mobile as a key engine for growth, with €1 in every €3 spent via its mobile apps in Spain, while in Mexico the figure rises to more than 40% of sales — and up to 60% during holiday dates.

Commenting on the raise in a statement, co-founder Lucas Carné, said: “In the last three years we have invested heavily to consolidate as one of the first groups of e-commerce in Europe and Latin America. The current size of operations this year allows us to focus on operational efficiency and profitability growth. Only those electronic stores that are profitable or have strong support from investors, will able to survive in the next three years.We are fortunate to meet both conditions.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here’s some encouraging news for the European startup scene, and London in particular. TransferWise, the online currency exchange that uses the crowd to undercut traditional money transfer services, has announced that it’s closed a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures — the first investment in Europe by the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor’s international fund.

We also understand that Ron Conway’s SV Angel has joined this round, along with a small number of angels, and TransferWise’s existing backers IA Ventures, Index, Seedcamp, and TAG. This brings the total raised by the company to $7.35 million since its launch just two years ago.

Originally billing itself as the “Skype of money transfer“, TransferWise enables individuals and businesses to send money between countries for a fraction of the price that banks and others charge, using a peer-to-peer, “crowdsourced” model — where money destined for transfer doesn’t unnecessarily actually leave each country. It passes on these saving by charging a small flat fee per transfer.

(It’s the P2P element that playfully draws the Skype simile, as well as the fact that TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus was the Internet calling giant’s first employee, while other members of his team also worked at the company.)

The company also pitches itself as the preferred method of money transfer for European startups, recently garnering some decent PR with an offer to waive the fees for a total of $100 million worth of international money transfers for qualifying startups using the TransferWise platform. Interestingly, Thiel was one of a host of names publicly endorsing the campaign, so we probably should have known something was going down.

Hinrikus tell me that the new funding will enable TransferWise to continue expanding, both in terms of the number of currencies it plans to support, and in raw head-count. It started out offering British Pound and Euro transfers, and has since added support for the U.S. Dollar, Swiss Franc, Polish Zloty, and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Krone. In total, the company claims to have transferred over £125m worth of customers’ money, saving £5 million-plus in banking fees (though it isn’t without competition). Meanwhile, the team has grown to 33 members of staff.

“There’s another dozen currencies to be launched this year and 20 more people needed in the team,” says Hinrikus. “Also we need to launch locally in key European markets – Germany, France and Spain.” Hinrikus says TransferWise continues to grow between 20-30 percent a month, which to date equals roughly 10x year-on-year growth. “Doing what’s in the pipeline puts us on track to do another 5-10x this year,” he says.

Staying on message, London-based TransferWise (with an office also in Tallinn, Estonia) is now calling itself a Tech City startup. Tech City, headed up by Joanna Shields, ex-Google, AOL/Bebo, and most recently Facebook’s head of EMEA operations, is the UK government’s re-branding of the London tech scene and, specifically, East London’s “Silicon Roundabout” area.

Cue the now prerequisite statement from Shields: “Transferwise is a shining example of the successful businesses that make Tech City a thriving ecosystem. London has a real strength in financial services and technology, with many companies like Transferwise transforming financial services for consumers, for the better.”

That said, TransferWise’s HQ is on Shoreditch High Street, which doesn’t get any more Silicon Roundabout than that. And certainly, a $6 million series A is no mean feat for a European startup, and nor is attracting a top tier Silicon Valley investor like Peter Thiel.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

QFPay‘s card reader admittedly looks a bit clunkier than its U.S. or European equivalents Square or iZettle.

It looks like a wonky, old calculator. But that’s because Chinese consumers don’t trust merchants easily and a basic phonejack reader without a keypad makes them nervous, says COO Tim Lee. He says consumers are worried that their PINs will get stolen by unscrupulous merchants.

“Aesthetically, it’s not that beautiful,” he said. “Square is very Apple-like and we’d want to have good design, but we are practical for two reasons. We must have a PIN pad in China and secondly, we have limited money so we’d want to build a minimum viable product and then keep on improving.”

Because of these more practical modifications, QFPay is seeing traction that has it processing close to $400 million per year on an annualized basis.

They have 30,000 merchants all over China and recently picked up funding from Sequoia China, although the size of the round is still undisclosed.

Among their clients are better-known names like Groupon-like 55Tuan, which uses QFPay to collect fees from merchants all across China.

QFPay’s model is slightly different than Square’s. For one, they don’t give away their readers for free. They charge 899 renminbi or just under $150 for each one. Competitors like Lakala also charge for their readers at about 199 renminbi a pop.

QFPay’s transaction fees also legally have to be a lot lower than what U.S. and European companies can charge. They don’t charge more than 0.78 percent per transaction, which is one-third of the 2.75 percent that Square charges. That cuts the company’s margins on every swipe, although Lee says that R&D costs are substantially lower in China.  

QFPay also recently released an API that lets third-party developers create payment experiences. (Square does not currently offer an API.) It’s still early so there just 100 developers on the platform.

The Chinese market has myriad challenges, which could also be good opportunities for QFPay.

For one, penetration for point-of-sale terminals is still quite low. Lee says only about 5 million merchants out of China’s estimated 100 million have proper point-of-sale machines, so QFPay has to do a lot of education on why its products are valuable.

The country is also heterogeneous with different provinces having different business cultures.

“In the north, merchants just have a leisure life. They open the shop and go home at 5 of 6 p.m.,” he said. “But in the Southern provinces, they will stay open until midnight.” The Western provinces are also far less developed than the coasts, with many Chinese merchants still carrying feature phones.

Lee said they started working on the company about six months after Square launched. The company’s management team has experience working for Paypal, Mastercard, HSBC and Western Union; that breadth of experience spans the entire history of digital payments in the country.

They face internal competitors like Lakala and iBoxPay, but Lee says those are consumer-facing solutions. He says they basically target reader sales at consumers that want to pay for utilities and other services through their phones.

But QFPay is aimed at merchants and the company is working on all sorts of software tools to handle CRM, analytics and loyalty products.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Google And The World Brain” is a new documentary about Google’s plan to scan all of the world’s books, which triggered an ongoing lawsuit being heard today. The hair-raising film sees Google import millions of copyrighted works, get sued, lose, but almost get a literature monopoly in the process. It’s scary, informative, and worth watching if you recognize its biased portrayal of Google as evil.

The film is getting wider release as Google continues to fight the Author’s Guild in court today. The organization is demanding $3 billion in damages from Google for scanning and reproducing copyrighted books. Google is asking the court to not prevent the group from filing a class-action suit.

“Google And The World Brain” premiered at Sundance this year, which is where I saw it, but more people finally got to see the documentary yesterday at the Vancouver DOXA festival. From the second it starts, director Ben Lewis’ opinion is clear: Google Books is as an insidious plot for data domination. See, Google didn’t just want to make a universally accessible library. It wanted to use all the knowledge to improve its search and artificial intelligence projects.

The film opens with ominous bass and a high-pitched drones that lead into historic footage of futurist and sci-fi writer H.G. Wells describing the “world brain” as a  “complete planetary memory for all mankind.” But for all its benefits, Wells also warns that the world brain could become powerful enough to displace governments and monitor everyone.

Seemingly innocent, Google approaches university libraries, including Harvard, asking to digitize their books for free. They pitch it as a way to avert disasters like the burning of Alexandria or the flooding of Tulane University’s library during Hurricane Katrina. Gorgeous shots of some of the world’s most prestigious libraries position them as infinitely valuable. Head librarians appear in interviews, giddy with intellectual excitement, and they hastily agree to Google’s offer. Soon 10 million of their books were being fed into secret Google scanning machines.

Google began showing parts of these scans online, and that’s when the backlash started. Six million of the books were under copyright and Google hadn’t attained permission to scan or reproduce them. In 2005, The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed lawsuits claiming Google was essentially stealing the books. Libraries began to turn on the search giant.

Internet scholar Jaron Lanier explains “A book is not just an extra long tweet,” and others begin to speculate that Google wants to hoard the books primarily for its own purposes, not to democratize their information. The reveal of the film’s thesis would have been more shocking and perhaps better received if it hadn’t been so blatantly foreshadowed.

After three years, the plaintiffs settle with Google for $125 million, but within the 350-page court document are shady stipulations that Google now has the exclusive right to sell scans of any out-of-print book it’s digitized — even copyrighted ones. The film labels this as a “monopoly on access to knowledge.” It asks “do we want the universal library in the hands of one company that can charge whatever they want?”

The documentary’s climax centers around New York District Court Judge Denny Chin’s choice of whether to approve the settlement or not. The director does a remarkable job of making it seem exciting by positioning the outcome as one man’s decision about the fate of all knowledge.

[Spoiler alert if you didn't read the newspapers in 2011]: Scored by a barrage of victorious brass music, Judge Chin announces that he rejects the settlement, preventing Google’s supposed “monopoly,” and all the interviewed pundits rejoice.

Google And The World Brain ends on a harrowing note, though. Even if Google can’t reproduce or sell the copyrighted works it scanned, Google Search and its artificial intelligence initiatives have already sucked up all the knowledge. As a Google engineer told author Nicholas Carr, “We’re not scanning all those books to be read by people. We’re scanning them to be read by our AI.”

The film is a bit sensationalist, and takes several detours to explore things like whether scanning books in English is an assault to classical European languages in which classic works were originally written. Still, it condenses a fascinating question about who owns information and the long battle for the answer into quite a stimulating film. You might leave feeling a little more afraid of Google than before, especially if you don’t take the more heavy-handed fear-mongering with a grain of salt. But at the very least, you’ll stand up reaffirmed that Google is destined to change humanity in ways much larger than it does today.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch