Tinder Plus Will Launch On Monday

Tinder Plus, the dating app’s first step into the wonderful world of freemium monetization, will launch on Monday for $9.99, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Tinder Plus includes at least one highly requested feature and a few others that are meant to add broader functionality to the service, which essentially boils down the usual online dating experience into a simple location-based ‘hot or not’. Tinder has since added features meant to boost engagement, such as Tinder Moments (photo messages sent to all a user’s matches), but this is the first time Tinder has asked its users to start paying for a product.

Tinder has been testing pricing on the app in a number of markets over the past few months, with prices ranging from $.99 all the way up to $19.99/month. Though sources say that pricing will vary from market to market, they also say that they expect the service to hit the U.S. market at a price under $10.

So what will a Tinder Plus subscription do to up your smartphone-based dating game?

The most attractive and highly requested feature on Tinder Plus is the Rewind function, which lets users go back on the very last person they swiped left on. Instead of losing them forever, you can pay a little extra to bring them back and get a second look.

Tinder Plus also includes a Passport feature, letting users search for matches anywhere in the world instead of being locked into their actual location.

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But perhaps more interesting, from a business standpoint, is the fact that Tinder Plus will also remove ads from the network. That’s right. Get ready to see some good old fashioned native ads as you scope the virtual watering hole for suitors. Re/code reports that Tinder is already underway working on an ad product.

It will not be included with the initial launch of Tinder Plus, but will launch in March, sources say. Tinder has a unique opportunity to natively advertise at a potentially high conversion rate.

Take, Uber, for example. Uber has been talking to various dating apps with the hope to get a direct integration, and has already taken the step to hook up with Hinge as part of its API launch in August, 2014. Uber continues to have discussions with dating apps, including Tinder, about offering an actionable “next step” in the online romantic process.

But Uber is one of many services that could offer users’ real-life options other than “Wanna meet?”

Back in January, Tinder acquired an ephemeral messenger called Tappy for an undisclosed sum. Though Tappy’s product was very similar to Tinder Moments, Re/code reports that Tappy’s Brian Norgard is heading up Advertising at Tinder. This matches up with comments made by Sean Rad earlier this year:

We’re very good at connecting people, but there’s this ‘what happens after that?’ moment that we want to improve. We not only want to get better at the way we use criteria to connect people, but we want to broaden the reasons for connecting in the first place. The Tappy team will help us tackle both fronts, the pre-match experience of creating that first connection and the post-match experience of communicating with that person.

Tinder has the opportunity to serve local ads for bars, restaurants, coffee shops each time a user makes a match. Given the nature of Tinder itself — where the premise is to browse, then chat, then potentially meet — these ads may be more relevant and effectual than we’d expect, thanks to location and time and even intent based on the context.

But that’s just one type of new advertising Tinder could potentially introduce. The company also has the opportunity to serve up ads the same way they serve potential matches, asking users to swipe right or left to get better romantic matches or even unlock deals.

Of course, Tinder is still in the process of building out those relationships and we won’t know exactly what Tinder ads will look like until they arrive later in March.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/03wKwvoqtDU/

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Happy 3rd birthday Raspberry Pi!

Raspberry Pi celebrates its third birthday today. Well actually it doesn’t, as the super-affordable ARM GNU/Linux computer was launched on February 29 2012, in what was (obviously) a leap year, but it’s close enough.

In that time the Raspberry Pi has achieved staggering success. Two months ago it was revealed total sales had surpassed 5 million (and the Raspberry Pi Foundation says another half a million have been sold in this month alone), with new and updated models launched in the past year.

Eight months ago the Model B+ was announced, followed four months later by an improved and cheaper Model A+. And then, at the start of this month, the Raspberry Pi 2 appeared, promising 6x faster speeds and even the ability to run Windows 10 (if you’ve bought one of the new models you might want to check out my colleague Brian Fagioli’s getting started guide).

One thing has remained constant in all that time though -- the price.

While commercial companies look to charge as much as they can get away with for new models, the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation sells its devices for as cheaply as it’s possible to do. The Raspberry Pi 2 might be a huge step up from the Model B and B+, but it’s still just $35/£25.

We’re huge fans of the Raspberry Pi at BetaNews as you can tell from past coverage, and we’re thrilled by the success it. So much has been achieved in three short years we can’t wait to see what comes next.

Two years ago I chatted to Liz Upton, Head of Communications at Raspberry Pi Foundation (and wife of the foundation’s Executive Director Eben), about their eventful first year, and plans for the future and it's worth revisiting some of those early questions:

BN: How did the idea of Raspberry Pi come about?

LU: Back in 2006, when Eben was teaching at the University of Cambridge he started to notice a decline in both the numbers of kids applying to read Computer Science, and in the level of knowledge that those kids arrived at the university with. We talked about it with our friends in the pub, like you do. And plenty of them thought it was a real problem too -- some of them thought it was such a problem that we came together and decided we'd try to do something about it. We had a hypothesis: that the fall in numbers and skills had to do with the disappearance of programmable machines in kids' lives. Computers like the BBC Micro or the Amiga had been replaced from the bottom end by sealed-unit, black-box consoles, whose whole business model is that you shouldn't be able to program them. And from the top, there was the PC. Of course, a PC is a wonderfully programmable machine; but in most families it's also a very vital tool for family life. It's where you do your banking or your homework. And many kids aren't allowed to mess around with the family PC for fear of breaking it. We felt a very cheap, programmable unit that kids could buy with their own pocket money, so they had a sense of ownership, was a possible solution. It's still early days, but on seeing some of the kids who've had a Pi for some months now, I've a feeling we were on to something.

BN: Where did the name come from?

LU: "Raspberry" comes from the tech industry's fondness for fruit names (there are lots of fruit-named computer companies, like Apricot, Tangerine…those, of course, are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head). And "Pi" is for Python, which has always been our first choice of teaching language (it was even before we knew what the hardware would look like). We initially thought that using Pi rather than Py would make for a really nice logo in the shape of the Greek letter, but as you can see, we didn't actually end up going that way!

BN: You’ve just sold your millionth Pi. Are you surprised by its success?

LU: Around the end of 2011, just before we started selling Pis, we started to worry that perhaps we'd bitten off more than we could chew. We'd managed to raise enough capital among ourselves to produce 20,000, and the plan was to use the profits from those Pis to seed the next batch (which would have taken a couple of months to make), and so on. We realized that we might have a problem on the day when we made a pre-released OS available for the Pi, well before anyone actually had one -- all of a sudden 60,000 people arrived on our website and downloaded this buggy software for a platform that didn't even exist yet. It suggested that the demand was much, much bigger than we'd anticipated. We decided that we'd need to revise the business model, because there was no way we could make enough fast enough with the resources we had to satisfy the sort of demand we were seeing. So we approached RS and Farnell, two British components companies which already had world-wide distribution networks in place, to see if they'd be interested in manufacturing the Pis for us under license so we could build up to a workable level of stock immediately. That was an enormous help in trying to deal with the demand we were seeing, but as you're probably aware, we've still been running to keep up, even though there is currently one Pi coming off the production line in Wales every few seconds!

BN: Raspberry Pi seems like a very British project, a modern day BBC Micro, but it's been well received in America. Why do you think that is?

LU: I think that a need for access to tools is universal. And those problems of introducing kids to programming -- the ubiquity of the family PC and the games console -- are universal too, at least in the developed world. Industry is starting to notice a decline in standards in young people too; we work with a number of industry bodies in the UK and in the US which are also promoting proper computing for young people, because they don't want to see a situation where the skills base dries up and blows away either. Eben and I will be at Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix in a couple of months, to do some work with the kids there. I love doing this stuff; and it's always so much fun in the US, with the American tradition of science fairs (which we don't have a real equivalent of in the UK).

from BetaNews http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/XPebtGbs6zQ/

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Beware The Pretty People

The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked; needed to take them apart, make them better, and put them back together again. People who existed a little apart from society’s established hierarchy … and often saw that hierarchy as another machine to be deconstructed and improved.

That is no longer the case. Now that technology is the dominant cultural and economic force of our time, and startup execs have become rock stars, the establishment is flocking to the tech industry. Rap stars and movie stars want to be tech investors. “Tech firms and consultants both appeal to the growing number of students who want to gain the right experience to start their own business,” observes The Economist. “Elite Grads in Business Flock to Tech,” concurs the Wall Street Journal.

Tech is becoming the finishing school and springboard for the upper-middle-class, the way law and finance were a decade ago. Now that the tech industry is cool, the pretty people are taking over, flooding out of top-tier universities with MBAs and social graces and carefully coiffed hair, shouldering the misfits and weirdos out of the way. And often, paradoxically, despite their privileged backgrounds, they have much less appetite for risk.

Oh, many pay lip service to being weird and different. Our whole culture does these days —

— as long as you’re not dangerously weird; as long as you’re not a genuine rebel; as long as you don’t actually try to challenge anything important. The establishment scions pouring into tech take on the trappings of subversion, while remaining fundamentally conformist. Meanwhile, rampant success inevitably causes the former tech counterculture to morph into posturing “Prada revolutionaries,” as Klint Finley puts it.

There was a tech counterculture, and it mattered. The Internet didn’t have to be so free and open. Governments have been trying to impose their demands on it for many years. Consider the long-ago attempts to impose bizarre, unworkable standards such as X.400 instead of the simple email addresses we still use. Consider the crypto wars of the 1990s, the attempted crippling of SSL, and the prosecution of Phil Zimmermann. But the tech industry ignored, supplanted, and/or fought back — and won — against these attempts.

To be fair, it’s still doing that today. The post-Snowden growth in end-to-end encryption is heartening. Everyone fought hard for net neutrality, and won. But these aren’t examples of an underdog fighting back; these are examples of a new giant protecting its turf. Meanwhile, as Dan Gillmor says in Why I’m Saying Goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft, “We are losing control over the tools that once promised equal opportunity in speech and innovation—and this has to stop.”

It seems to me that as the establishment slowly infects and merges with the tech industry, and vice versa, the people who actually do think differently–“the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers”–will be, and are being, pushed out. (In some cases simply priced out.) It’s all too easy to imagine the American tech industry in ten years as a new Wall Street, a giant machine built largely to siphon yet more power and privilege up to people who already have too much.

This is why I like Bitcoin: say what you like about it, such as that you want it to “die in a fire” because it’s a libertarian conspiracy, it is genuinely weird, disruptive, and potentially dangerous to the status quo. This is why I have a soft spot for Travis Kalanick: for all of Uber’s flaws, someone needed to tear down the walls of the established taxi cartels.

Technology is, indisputably, the premier force for change in the world today. Every startup is an engine of change, and a potentially enormously powerful one. But we still tend to measure their success wholly in terms of millions raised, billions in valuation, revenues, profits, and timeline to IPO. That’s not genuinely subversive. That’s not truly disruptive. That’s establishment talk.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But then, so did the divine right of kings,” said the great Ursula Le Guin at the National Book Awards.

I believe capitalism is excellent … up to a point. (I don’t believe anyone who has travelled in the developing world as much as I have can reasonably think otherwise.) But is that inflection point at which capitalism offers diminishing returns still ahead of us, here in the rich world? Will we live in capitalism (as we know it) forever? It seems unlikely.

While we do, though, we need the weirdos, the rebels, the counterculture, to be gathering together and founding companies. Because while we live in capitalism, no art collective, no protest, will be as effective an engine of change as a successful startup.

What’s more, there has never been a better time to try to found a genuinely subversive company than right now. Consider Y Combinator’s new openness to not-for-profit startups. Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate. It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there. A huge audience. You might even call it a market.

Capitalism won’t be violently overthrown. Nor should it be. Whatever system(s) may one day supplant it will instead grow quietly in the shadows of its tallest towers, and coexist for years. But in order for that to happen, I believe we need our true iconoclasts, dangerous freethinkers, and weird subversives to flock to the tech industry — rather than recoil from it in disgust, now that the pretty people have invaded.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/glIX8iBYc5Q/

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Facebook lets you choose a custom gender, now it's time to drop real names

Facebook found itself under fire last year for imposing a real name policy. Drag artists, the LGBT community, musicians and other groups were among those who felt they should be able to use a name other than the one that appears on their birth certificate. The social network ultimately backed down, but the whole debacle left something of a bad taste in the mouth.

People are able to use "the authentic name they use in real life" to identify themselves on the site, and Facebook has opened up gender options further. There's no need to feel limited by the male or female labels, or even make a selection from a readymade list -- you can now specify whatever gender you want. But is this enough?

Facebook diversity heralded the feature and also announced that users can use up to ten different gender identities, and can choose the audiences they would like to share each one with. A choice of pronoun is also available, so when birthday time rolls around, friends can be invited to "wish him a happy birthday", "wish her a happy birthday", or the gender-neutral "wish them a happy birthday". The move came about after consultation with LGBT advocacy organizations.

Now, if you do not identify with the pre-populated list of gender identities, you are able to add your own. As before, you can add up to ten gender terms and also have the ability to control the audience with whom you would like to share your custom gender. We recognize that some people face challenges sharing their true gender identity with others, and this setting gives people the ability to express themselves in an authentic way.

But gender identity is just a portion of anyone's make up. It's time that Facebook offered the same flexibility for names. The social network has accepted the idea that some people find it difficult to share their gender identity with all of their contacts -- the same is true of names. The debate about Facebook's real names policy has a tendency to center around the LGBT community, but this is far from being the only group affected by Facebook imposing the rule surrounding names. Think victims of abuse, victims of crime and so on. These are people who might well want to use a different identity online -- it's not good enough to say that such people should not use Facebook.

One's name is no more or less part of one's identity than one's gender, and just as one may have more than one gender identity according to audience and circumstances, the same is true of names. It has been argued that people who find themselves using different name identity for different parts of their life should set up business pages, but this is not an acceptable solution.

There is the argument that one's real name need to be used to ensure that you are identifiable in case of illegal activity, harassment or the like -- but unless someone using a fake name does something to draw attention to themselves, or is reported by another user, who is to know? It makes as much sense as it would to force people to use a government-verified photo for this profile image.

Of course ultimately, Facebook is free to impose whatever rules and restrictions is likes, and anyone who disagrees strongly enough with them is free to avoid using the site. But that's not the point. Facebook is very keen to be seen as a company that is accepting of everyone -- something it was boastful of when talking about its diverse workforce -- but that's missing the point and giving Facebook too easy a time. The abomination that is Ello sprang to (minor) popularity in protest at Facebook's real name policy and it's clar that the real names policy is something that people care about deeply.

There's no getting away from the fact that Facebook's embracing of different gender identities is a positive thing, but there's still more that can be done. Logically, it makes no sense for Facebook to 'permit' users to express part of their identity in whatever way they wish, but not all of it. Just allow people to identify however the hell they like on the social network; there really is no good reason not to. Judging by the comments that appear beneath Facebook's announcement of the new gender options, I'm far from being alone in my view about the need to eliminate the real name policy. Who's with me?

Photo credit: fieldwork / Shutterstock

from BetaNews http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/hFM5Dvhu2IE/

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Xbox One selling badly in China

It was big news last year when Microsoft announced that it would officially start selling the Xbox One in China. The original September launch date came and went ("Despite strong and steady progress, we are going to need a bit more time to deliver the best experiences possible for our fans in China"), but eventually the next gen console made it on sale.

Although China gave the green-light for the sale of 5 million Xbox units, actual sales have been way, way below that. Launch numbers (including pre-orders) were just 100,000 units, and the company responsible for Xbox One sales in China has posted huge losses.

Techweb reports that the BesTV subsidiary lost 17.24 million yuan (US$2.75 million) in 2014.

While there are no current sales figures for the console, it’s been observed that Chinese online retailer Tmall shipped fewer than 200 units in January.

There are several reasons behind the lukewarm response to Microsoft's console including price (despite a post-launch price cut it’s still very expensive), the fact that only a limited number of games are available -- some of which have been censored -- and the console is region locked so games from elsewhere won’t play. Plus Chinese gamers simply aren’t used to paying for games.

Although the Xbox One was the first western games console to be sold officially in China since the ban on production and sales of such devices was lifted, it has been widely available through the gray market, so anyone interested in purchasing the console likely did so before it arrived officially.

It is of course too early to write off the Xbox One in China, but it’s far from an encouraging start for Microsoft which was banking on Chinese sales to help in its battle against Sony’s PS4. Recent predictions claim there will be 40 percent more PlayStation 4s in use than Xbox Ones by 2019.

from BetaNews http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/ijdTTbONe2E/

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Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital Raising $450M For New Fund, Filing Shows

Social+Capital Partnership, the investment firm founded by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, is raising $450 million for its third fund, dubbed “Social Capital Partnership III, L.P.,” according to regulatory documents filed today.

The new fund represents a significant boost in size from Social+Capital’s second fund, which targeted a $325 million raise beginning in early 2013. Social+Capital’s first fund, which began raising in 2011, was $275 million in size.

It’s important to note that Social Capital Partnership III seems to be in the initial stages of fundraising: While the offering amount is pegged at $450 million, zero dollars worth of stock have been sold as of today, the filing states.

Historically, Social+Capital has targeted a range of investments, with an especially notable focus on companies in the healthcare, education, and financial tech spaces. Its portfolio includes Slack, Wealthfront, OneLogin, and Ringly, to name a few.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/BTAxCQKPw9M/

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Twitter triples troll-tackling team

Like many social platforms, Twitter is often used by trolls to launch abusive attacks on people. It's something that Twitter has tried to tackle before, but now the company is stepping up its game. Having already made it easier to report abusive tweets, the same tools are being rolled out to simplify the reporting of content relating to impersonation, self-harm and doxing.

Dick Costolo had already promised that Twitter was ready to get tough on harassment, and now we know what he meant. The size of the team handling reports about abuse has been tripled, and this means that five times as many reported tweets are to be investigated.

It is no longer necessary to find yourself on the receiving end of abuse to try to do something about it. Anyone is free to report tweets which could be deemed abusive, as well as those which reveal personal information about people, or in which someone pretends to be someone else. But it is the changes that are happening in the background that Twitter will be hoping make the difference.

A new set of investigative tools and procedures means that Twitter is able to react to reported tweets faster:

While we review many more reports than ever before, we’ve been able to significantly reduce the average response time to a fraction of what it was, and we see this number continuing to drop. We are also beginning to add several new enforcement actions for use against accounts that violate our rules. These new actions will not be visible to the vast majority of rule-abiding Twitter users – but they give us new options for acting against the accounts that don’t follow the rules and serve to discourage behavior that goes against our policies.

Costolo had recently said "we suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years", and this appears to be Twitter's attempt to get back on track. The new features are rolling out globally over the next few weeks starting now, and victims of abuse and other problems will be keen to see what different they make.

Photo credit: Elisanth / Shutterstock

from BetaNews http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/D3t1w-9MG60/

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The top four places your data is at risk

We all worry about protecting our information, but how do we know which activities or locations are most likely to put it in jeopardy?

Digital rights management company Seclore has produced an infographic showing the four places where your data is most at risk. Unsurprisingly perhaps some of these are areas where you have the least control.

Third parties are a particular worry. The Home Depot breach in 2014 saw details of 5.6 million credit cards stolen. Yet it seems businesses still haven’t learned the lesson, with only 32 percent of vendors having security certifications.

Mobile is a risk too with 113 phones lost or stolen every minute in the US alone and 86 percent of mobile apps lacking adequate security. The cloud is also a worry with 71 percent of IT professionals believing their cloud service providers wouldn’t alert them to a breach involving customer data.

Email is a bigger threat than you might think too with 88 percent of companies having experienced some sort of data loss via email. Each email is copied an average of six times thanks to team collaboration increasing the risk of exposure.

You can view the full infographic below.

Photo Credit: D.R.3D/Shutterstock

from BetaNews http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/X1jdZfGbnIY/

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Boostcase For iPhone 6 Review: Modular Power Helps Save Face

The iPhone 6 charging cases are arriving, and Boostcase has returned with its modular design, offering additional battery life when you want it, and a slim protective shell when you don’t. It’s a clever take on the usual static bulky mass, and it does what it promises to, extending your device’s battery life by a non-trivial amount for those times when you need your smartphone to outlast a normal day’s worth of use.

Basics

• Six color options


• Two-piece design


• 2700mAh battery more than doubles iPhone 6 life


• LED strip charge indicator


• Pass through charging via micro USB


• MSRP: $99.95


• Product info page

Pros

Cons

• LED charge indicator hard to translate

Design

Boostcase is a product focused on modularity, which means that it hews pretty close to the standard sizeable lump when it comes to its battery case design, but there’s a twist in that your iPhone can also slide out of said case wearing only a close-fitting shell, with a design on the back that features some cut-out holes to add some stylistic flair to its trademark locking system. The docking design serves both form and function, giving you a better looking option without a complicated and cumbersome case removal process for the backup battery itself.

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The version I reviewed featured the matte black finish, which is a good standard look for people with more conservative tastes in accessories. The cutouts provide access to the camera, power and volume buttons and speakers/headphone/Lightning jack, and when you plug the slim case into the battery there are speaker redirect ports so that you don’t lose sound. When the cases are combined, the Boostcase feels very solid, as if it was one piece, but it also loses most of its design originality – at a glance, most would probably just assume you had a Mophie or something generic.

Still, the battery portion is mostly functional, so that’s not really a hit against it. The bottom of the device features a physical switch for turning the flow of power on and off, and there’s also an LED battery indicator to tell you how much charge is left. Unlike on competing devices, such as the Mophie series, this light is a continuous strip that actually wraps around the bottom edge of the device. While some may appreciate the unique design, I found myself missing the series of discrete LEDs used by others, since it provides a much easier way to accurately assess how much charge you have left in the tank at a glance.

Overall, though, the modularity of the Boostcase design makes up for the LED quibble, leaving this as one of the best options out there in terms of looks for those who don’t want to sacrifice fashion for the sake of power.

Performance

The Boostcase for iPhone 6 does indeed extend the life of your device considerably, and in my testing has more than doubled my usual usage time before requiring a charge. I’ve repeatedly managed to get more than two days of iPhone time without having to plug in, and I find that using it switched on even when the iPhone’s fully charged to continually provide a top-off adds maximizes your practical use time.

Boostcase’s modular snap-in design is sometimes a bit too good at keeping the iPhone 6 with the slim case in place – it requires a good bit of elbow grease to get it to slide out. This is mostly to the credit of the design, however, since it means there’s no wiggle at all between the two components, and no danger that the top portion will separate accidentally.

The iPhone 6 Plus’ best feature might be its extensive battery life, but with the Boostcase, you get very similar performance, with the accessory possibly helping the iPhone 6 edge out its larger sibling. I’m not a case fan in general, but in situations where extra power is needed, I appreciate having the option to pare down to something much sleeker in a pinch.

Bottom Line

The Boostcase for iPhone 6 is a smart take on the standard battery backup accessory design, with a unique feature that’s actually practical and well-executed. If you’re looking for spare juice, there are definitely cheaper options out there, including standalone external battery packs, but the Boostcase has MFI certification from Apple, and modularity that doesn’t altogether sacrifice the benefits of a slim iPhone design for spare power.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/96YOFGOQdns/

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Swiss Watch Makers Announce An Activity Tracking System Designed To Hide Inside Fancy Watches

If you’ve been wondering how Switzerland was going to react to the coming of the Apple Watch, ponder no more: two smaller luxury watch companies, Alpina and Frederique Constant, have added electronic components to otherwise staid analog watches, essentially turning a fancy timepiece into a sort of mechanical Fitbit.

The platform, called Manufacture Modules Technologies or MMT, is embedded inside Swiss-made cases and powers the hour and minute hands as well as, in the current version, a subdial that tracks your activity. The crown on the side of the watch is actually a pusher and everything is set from your smartphone rather than by turning the crown. The internal battery lasts two years and syncs via Bluetooth. The modules are made by MotionX, the same company behind the motion trackers in Jawbone’s products.

A separate app shows your health data as you saunter from meeting to meeting or nibble a madeleine.

The central face tells the accurate, quartz time while the subface can display various pieces of data. In its current incarnation the system is basically an activity tracker similar to the Withings Activité. The functionality has been simplified so that companies are able to hide the complexity behind a traditional dial, a feature that should please Luddite watch lovers.

But what about the rest of us? This solution is a far cry from the recharge-once-a-day smartphone expanders available for Android and iOS and the decision to avoid a on-wrist screen altogether is a bold one. As Ariel Adams at ABlogToWatch notes, “The question MMT is trying to answer is how the traditional watch industry will react to timepieces no longer being about only tradition, luxury, and style, but also (once again), functionality.” This attempts to meld style with function and I’m not quite sure it succeeds.

This will be a period of experimentation (and failure) for the Swiss watch industry. Alpina and Frederique-Constant are both owned by innovator Peter Stas and they are decidedly lower on the haute horology food chain than, say, a Patek Philippe or Rolex, allowing them a bit of room to try new things. However, these more expensive watches – expect them to cost in the $2,000 range or more – are a hard sell in the face of $200 activity wearables that the chic and traditional can hide under one French cuff while they burnish a mechanical watch with the other.

Furthermore, companies like Kairos and Montblanc are adding smart features to your band, allowing you to have your almond financier and eat it too.

This space is exploding and the fact that a traditionally mechanical watchmaker is embracing the equivalent of a microchip attached to a big battery is telling. While MMT is decidedly not for everyone, I wouldn’t discount interest just yet. There is still a subset of watch buyer out there that looks in disgust at the Apple Watch and is still wary of wearables. The overlap of that Venn diagram is still bracingly small but, to paraphrase P.T. Barnum, there’s a watch lover born every minute.

via ABlogToWatch

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/_hmsPN530Y8/

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A Chat With The Researcher Who Found Online Bystanders Won’t Stop Bullying

Kelly Dillon, a Doctoral Candidate at the Ohio State University School of Communication, found that people generally won’t act when the see someone bullied online. This news, while not surprising to anyone with a passing interest in technology, is worrying. In short, if you’re bullied online, don’t expect help.

I asked Dillon to clarify a few of her points including sample size and the generality of her research. More important, we talked a bit about how the study was conducted and what it really means to those of us who spend our time online.

---

TC: You studied a little over 200 students. What would happen if you increased the sample size?

Dillon: Scientifically, since I met the statistical threshold, we would expect the numbers to remain the same. I’m not certain of your comfort with statistical power, but these data would not have been published if I hadn’t collected enough data from enough participants. I actually have a second study I am currently writing up for publication, and the trends, results, and assumptions remain true with additional participants in a similar design. In short (without nerd speak), I would expect the results to be the same. These data are also on par with offline bystander intervention that have been replicated over and over again since the 1970s. Even television programs like What Would You Do? and Pranksters have replicated similar data in field experiments.

TC: What kind of bullying did you display?

Dillon: The attached manuscript (below) may describe the design a little better for you, but in order for it to be considered bullying (per experts) behaviors must be repetitive, intentional, and include a power imbalance. The bully was a research assistant who was supposed to help research participants. The victim was a research participant. This establishes the power imbalance. In real-life cyberbullying, this power imbalance is most likely social and the bullying can either establish this imbalance or perpetuate it. The cyberbully in my experiment was rude, impolite, and increasingly aggressive in their communication not once, but twice during the experiment (about 5min apart). This meets the intentional and repetitive thresholds. The research “participant” had a problem answering a question on a survey. The “bully” then got frustrated with the type of question, the participant’s lack of progress, called them “stupid” and questioned “how did you get into college.” Finally, the “bully” told them “I’m not trained to babysit subjects” and to figure it out themselves. It’s fairly mild as far as cyberbullying goes, which matches with the rates of intervention in offline studies (from the 70s, again). But, given it is online, we don’t have those non-verbal cues to help us understand how severe something is.

From the manuscript:

Each participant was lead to believe they would be piloting a new online support chat feature of the server used for online research surveys and studies. The purpose of this pilot was to test usability and whether undergraduate research participants would utilize such a support feature. A research assistant was available in the chat room for assistance with surveys while participants completed a series of personality assessments to test any interference with the chat application. All were told the research assistants (lead and chat monitor) involved in the experiment were receiving course credit for their work, and participant evaluations at the conclusion of the experiment would be sent direction the principal investigator as part of their grade.

At the 1/3, 2/3, and end survey points, participants were presented on-screen within the survey to write as such in the chat- room. These check-ins ensured the chat window remained on the screen so participants would have at least peripheral opportunities to see the conversations. A small sample of participants piloted the study without these prompts to observe how users interacted with this chat room (n = 15). During the debriefing, participants were asked how they interacted with the chatroom, and 87% (n = 13) reported they minimized the chatroom because it was “distracting.” Therefore, the prompts were kept in the experimental design to ensure the chatroom was kept visible.

The cyberbullying of the ‘other participant’ began after 3 min. The confederate stated difficulty with a survey question, which elicited a response from the chat monitor (bully). The conversation continued with the chat monitor answering the confederate’s questions in an increasingly aggressive manner. The chat monitor concluded the conversation with an insulting remark and wrote, “figure it out yourself.” At no point in the experiment did the confederate victim address the rudeness. After an additional three minutes had passed, the ‘other participant’ had a different problem, and the harassment again. Throughout the experiment, the confederate posted benchmarks within 2 min of the participants’ benchmarks to continue the ruse that each ‘participant’ was completing the same questions. After all data were collected, all partic- ipants were thoroughly debriefed. All participants provided informed consent prior to participating. All procedures first approved by the Institutional Review Board per Human Subjects Guidelines.

TC: What does this study say about general Internet use?

Dillon: While this wasn’t a main concern or goal of the study at hand, as a researcher I can try to make some connections. These data tell me most people notice when things are turning negative, which is a good thing. We cannot help change an environment without noticing what is wrong in it (or if something needs changing). The majority of individuals did not act directly, but they acted behind the scenes. This tells me more people, nearly 7 out of 10 people, wanted to help someone they didn’t know when they were being harassed. Said otherwise, the normative response was “this isn’t okay,” which is great as an internet user myself. It also says, most individuals, when they see something, want to do something, and search for indirect ways to do that something. Internet applications, platforms, or administrators, then, need to help users find ways to indirectly intervene. Are report buttons noticeable? Do people feel blocking or reporting to admins work? Dislike or down-votes are considered indirect interventions. Making these available will help others see what types of behaviors aren’t okay, and maybe to avoid doing those things.

These data also tell us that cyberbystanders prefer to remain anonymous in their intervention (direct intervention was still anonymous in my experiments, but they were still identifiable in the chat room themselves). The same anonymity or deindividuation of the internet that protects cyberbullies, trolls, flamers, or harassers can be used to help cyberbystanders intervene. Direct intervention may be most effective, but it’s not likely, at least not according to my data. Helping users identify ways they can intervene while remaining socially safe will help more individuals do more.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/3ZxoH956BRY/

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4 reasons why cloud spending is set to explode this year

The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast report predicts fiercer competition in 2015 between traditional on-premise software vendors, pushing expenditure up to $3.8 trillion. It says that spending in the enterprise technology market will reach $335 billion this year, increasing by 5.5 percent over 2014’s figures. Traditional vendors are now having to increasingly compete with cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, lower prices and vendor software consolidation.

These trends have pushed traditional on-premise software vendors to increasingly offer more discounted cloud services to counter the onslaught by the incumbent SaaS players.

Bimodal IT

Amidst this competitive environment, organizations are looking more strategically at their IT expenditure. They are no longer just seeing IT -- including the cloud -- as means of creating cost-efficiency gains.

Gartner’s research director for cloud computing, Gregor Petri, says that there is also a move towards bimodal IT, which is driving spending: "In Mode 1 companies are trying to renovate the core of their IT, and in Mode 2 they are exploring new things".

He believes that the first mode is about efficiencies and the second about improving the customer experience, culminating in growth for their own organizations. In the second mode organizations want to go after new customers, new products, new solutions and new opportunities. "Companies are investing in IT again -- that’s true, but many vendors are still in the mode of increasing efficiencies in existing processes using Mode 1 of cloud computing, and yet we now see most firms concentrating on Mode 2", he explains.

These two modes are challenging from an internal perspective because organizations often have to align themselves with both of them.

To find new opportunities in Mode 2 they need to be bold rather than afraid. This is because they will either need to change their approach, their goals or outcomes half-way through a project. Mode 1 is very different because organizations will often know from the outset what they want to achieve, and it’s all about doing that efficiently.

Spending ratios

In terms of the ratio of clouding spending versus traditional IT expenditure, Karl Deacon -- Chief Operating Officer at Canopy -- says that the Atos cloud, "has shown that the percentage of contracts requiring or including digital or cloud solutions in outsourcing deals more than doubled in 2014 compared to 2013".

The Atos cloud is a joint venture backed by Atos, VMware and EMC. Atos claims on its website that it doesn’t: "sell widgets, and we don’t theorize about the future…as business technologists with a pure client focus, we are orchestrators who can put your entire cloud puzzle together".

In Deacon’s view, this signals a more aggressive growth in demand for cloud solutions and services in comparison to previous years. "Clients are already spending about 20 percent of their IT budget on cloud technologies or services, and this spending sometimes falls outside of their organizations’ central IT budget", he explains.

Deacon expects this trend to continue, rising by about 10 percent of the overall IT budget per annum. This is due to factors such as the rising prevalence of shadow IT and digital transformation across departments.

Hybrid cloud matures

One other important trend forecast this year is the rise of the hybrid cloud, which is expected to reach maturity in 2015 and so it is being seen as the way forward. Cap Gemini is seeing this happen, and spending on it is already increasing.

Paul Hammond, the company’s senior vice-president and chief technology officer, says: "The underlying architecture required offers an option to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, etc…and when you get into some of the production systems, the security and data sovereignty elements you can see that it either drives the private cloud or it sits within an organization’s datacenter".

He adds that this doesn’t mean that an organization wouldn’t want to use the public cloud because even if it does sit within traditional IT architecture, the cloud may at some point still be used. This may not only involve a public cloud, but much depends on factors such as data criteria and security, which are two elements that are driving the hybrid option within the same architecture.

Buying a complete service

Regarding the threat that SaaS software poses to traditional software vendors, Petri says customers don’t just buy the application functionality from a cloud provider. They are in fact buying a complete service: the underlying middleware, operating systems, hardware and many other things that would traditionally be bought from other kinds of IT vendors.

"In most cases, if you buy SaaS from a SaaS vendor, you don’t have any choice about the underlying layers, so to some extent it offers less choice and it increases your dependency on the provider", he explains.

Third parties may also not be able to sell any additional software, hardware other tools for the underlying layers -- a market which he says has traditionally been bigger than the market for the application itself.

Lock-ins can limit customers’ choice about how and where they spend their budgets to just one vendor -- making it harder for traditional vendors to compete while in effect restricting customers’ choice about what systems they’d ideally like to purchase beyond what a SaaS vendor offers.

Cloud alternatives

Due to the large number of cloud providers locking in customers, many on-premise third party software providers are being forced to offer a SaaS alternative to their on-premise and traditional license-based solutions.

To what extent is this happening? "The impression I have, after operating in this field for the past 10 years, is that -- apart from the niche software providers who offer highly specialized applications -- most vendors are moving and many are already there in one form or another", claims Deacon.

He nevertheless feels that it’s hard to offer an exact percentage of how many vendors are making the transition towards offering SaaS products and services, and particularly as even Oracle and SAP tend to still operate using traditional software licensing models. Yet vendors like them are also heavily invested in cloud software businesses -- even if they haven’t moved towards adopting a cloud user licensing model as the bulk part of their business.

Predicting 2015

Hammond predicts that there will be a natural uptake because of the benefits of SaaS.

Hybrid cloud environments will pose some challenges that revolve around end-to-end operations. There is a need to tie them up with traditional models. Organizations will otherwise have no idea about reporting, SLAs and problem resolution.

"Some vendors will improve their ability to monitor, provide tools and report -- at the end of the day it’s about integrating the stack rather than just selling you a piece of software that does the analytics or something else", he concludes.

So there will be some challenges, but spending will increase and competition will too because, as Hammond puts it, demand is only getting harder and faster, and so the use of SaaS, public, private and hybrid clouds will increase to fulfill this requirement.

Bimodal IT will be the key driver of cloud spending over the course of the year because organizations are looking more strategically at how they spend their budgets. They now want to focus on delivering a better customer experience; to reduce the time to market of a product, application or service.

Ultimately what drives their spending is a need to increase their profitability rather than just focus on cost-efficiencies.

An improved perception of cloud security will also drive spending; and this why customers will increasingly spend more on SaaS -- and in particular on hybrid cloud.

Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved.

from BetaNews http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/uXmE-DolHv4/

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Google will allow sexual content on Blogger after all

Three days ago Google announced that any Blogger blog found to contain nudity or explicit content would be converted into a private blog that only the owner could see.

Unsurprisingly, this move wasn't well received by the Blogger community, and today Google has backtracked.

Writing on the Google Product Forums, Jessica Pelegio, Social Product Support Manager at Google, confirms the search giant’s change of heart:

This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy. We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.

Blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as “adult” so that they can be placed behind an “adult content” warning page.

Bloggers whose content is consistent with this and other policies do not need to make any changes to their blogs.

Thank you for your continued feedback.

This is a smart move from Google, as the response to its original plans went down about as well as a drunken nun lead balloon.

Image Credit: fotoscool/Shutterstock

from BetaNews http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/esUACL7vVkM/

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Creating advocates for SaaS and B2B products

One of the best ways of getting people to buy your product is to get your existing customers to recommend it. That’s equally true in the business world as it is for consumer products.

A new infographic from SaaS customer management specialist Bluenose looks at how companies can create more powerful advocates for their B2B and SaaS products.

Among the key points are that acquiring new customers can cost seven times more than retaining existing ones, so it’s important to focus on the customers you have. Satisfied users are more likely to become advocates for your business and can be worth as much as $500,000 each.

It's also useful to offer a rewards program for those who recommend your services to others. Some 84 percent of B2B decision makers start of the process with a referral and these leads are 36 times more useful than a lead from a cold call.

Employees are also an important part of the process. They are the face of the company and if they’re positive about the product it reflects well on the business. It's important that they know their product too, 67 percent of customers trust content provided by a company’s technical expert.

You can see the full infographic with other tips including promoting word of mouth and social media advocacy below.

Photo Credit: bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock

from BetaNews http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/63WM3QErDIo/

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LeadDesk , A SaaS Call Center Startup, Raises €5.5M In Series A Funding

LeadDesk, the Finland-based cloud call center software company, has announced its first funding led by Dawn Capital with participation from public fund, Finnish Industry Investment. This investment round is designed to drive LeadDesk’s growth in European markets with particular focus on UK/Ireland, Spain, and the Benelux region.

If you have not heard of them before it’s because it first appeared in 2010, and has become a main player in outbound call centers in Europe. It’s now expanding into cloud SaaS, operator services and integrated contacts data services.

LeadDesk is a cloud-based SaaS platform. It’s customers are internal and outsourced call centers, as well as buyers of call center services. It’s focused on the European outbound market, which has approximately one million contact center agents.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/sdK0PKoIuck/

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Grofers, An On-Demand Delivery Service For Indian Cities, Raises $10M From Sequoia And Tiger Global

Large marketplaces like Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Amazon are benefitting as India turns into one of the world’s fastest-growing e-commerce markets, but many brick-and-mortar stores are missing out on the boom. A startup called Grofers wants to help local shops by not only providing them with a mobile platform for their inventory, but also facilitating on-demand delivery within 90 minutes.

Grofers’ business strategy is ambitious, but the startup just got a vote of confidence in the form of a $10 million series A round led by Sequoia Capital (a returning investor) and Tiger Global. This brings its total raised so far to $10.5 million.

Co-founder Albinder Dhindsa tells TechCrunch that the capital will allow the service, which is currently available in Delhi and Mumbai, to expand into more cities, with Bangalore first on the list. Grofers will also improve its technology to make it easier for merchants to upload and manage their goods.

Dhindsa says Grofers takes the business model used by restaurant-delivery apps, a fast-growing and competitive sector in India, and applies it to other businesses. The company currently focuses on grocery stores, bakeries, and fresh produce, and plans to add other products, like electrical appliances, soon. While there are other online grocery stores, like BigBasket.com, Grofers’ main value proposition is its promise of on-demand deliveries, which are carried out by 200 staffers (the company will hire more people as it expands).

The Gurgaon-based company, which was founded in December 2013, currently works with 250 vendors and has a total of 500,000 SKUs (or individual items) available for order. Grofers claims to process 30,000 deliveries a month, with a fifth of those orders placed through its mobile apps.

Since many of the small merchants Grofers works with have never sold online before, the company sends a team to take photos of products and upload them to its platform. The process takes about three or four days, depending on large the store is.

The biggest challenge facing the startup as it expands into new cities is the labor-intensive process of adding shops, but Dhindsa says Grofers’ future plans include improving its technology to make it easier for stores to manage orders, track inventory, and upload new products by themselves. After Bangalore, it hopes to expand into other major cities soon, including Hyderabad, Chennai, and Calcutta.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/SuyWELhffgc/

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As Kleiner Trial Plays On, VC’s Upper Echelon Is Laid Bare To The Real World

The world of venture capital has generally long been cloaked in understated reticence and secrecy. That’s especially been true for the more traditional top tier Sand Hill Road firms, such as Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. After all, a big benefit of being in the private market is, well, the privacy. Deals can be done over handshakes. Salaries and bonuses can be confidential. Business strategies can be hashed out over drinks and dinners, and stay out of the spotlight forever. Off the record is the name of the game.

That is, unless you’re subpoenaed by a court. Then everything is out in the open. Your emails bashing coworkers and planning your all-male ski trips, your $500,000 salary as a junior employee.

And when viewed in the daylight, for the judgement of 12 men and women meant to represent a cross-section of society, the workings of elite VCs can seem to contrast especially starkly with the rest of the real world — and it’s anyone’s guess whose side the jury will ultimately take.

What’s old, what’s new

Much of what’s transpired at San Francisco’s Superior Court this week has been public since the first legal complaint was filed by Ellen Pao nearly three years ago. Pao’s detailed allegations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and professional retaliation are not new, nor are Kleiner’s counter assertions that Pao’s failure to advance at the firm were instead due to her alleged failure to measure up as a competent and cooperative employee.

But what is being revealed for the first time in court this week are a number of details around the events in question, from the legal teams’ opening arguments and the testimony of witnesses taking the stand. Some highlights of the rarefied world being shown here include:

• On Tuesday and Thursday, Pao’s lawyer Alan Exelrod detailed a conversation that occurred during a work trip about exploits at the Playboy mansion and the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, allegedly led by “boisterous” tech executive Dan Rosensweig along with Kleiner staffers. The conversation purportedly occurred over cocktails while aboard a private jet from New York City to San Francisco — which is, Exelrod said, a way Kleiner partners often travel.


• Also on Wednesday, former Kleiner partner Chi-Hua Chien’s testimony included details of an expense account-funded ski trip and a posh men-only dinner at the luxury San Francisco condo owned by Kleiner partner and former vice president Al Gore.


• On Tuesday, former Kleiner partner Trae Vassallo discussed her investment experience, which included having “thought leadership in connected devices.” The judge, Harold Kahn, interjected to ask her to explain what exactly both of those terms mean. (On Wednesday, a juror raised his hand and asked for further clarity on what it means to be a “thought leader,” as the term has come up repeatedly during the proceedings.)


• Pao herself made upwards of $500,000 per year in her role as a junior partner, it’s been revealed — significantly more than at least one of her peers at the firm, as testimony from one of her coworkers showed on Wednesday — and pulled in a starting salary of $600 per hour consulting for Reddit after she left her role at the firm.


• But six figures is just the beginning. Senior partners at Kleiner regularly earn salaries of four to five times more than junior partners, upwards of $2 million and beyond, Kleiner’s CFO Susan Biglieri testified on Thursday.


• Former Kleiner partner Ajit Nazre allegedly aggressively pursued both Pao and Vassallo romantically during his tenure at the firm, to the point of showing up at Vassallo’s hotel room on a work trip wearing only a bathrobe, according to her testimony. Rather than being shunned by the industry, Nazre was able to quietly leave Kleiner and secure another enviable job in technology.

All of this is apparently part of a day’s work for those in the upper echelons of venture capital, if you take Kleiner to be a sample size.

A high end, high stakes world

It’s become clear throughout the testimony of the past few days that all of the people involved in the Pao vs. Kleiner case move in a high end, high stakes, and often eccentric world. The spoils are rich, but the competition is fierce and confusing. It’s a world with its own lingo and signals and status symbols, and it often takes years for anyone to become fluent enough to make it to the top.

That’s part of why it’s so shocking that this case has made it to public trial at all. The legal teams for both Pao and Kleiner are tasked with first familiarizing the jury with all the particulars of how tech VCs work, and then with trying to sway the jurors to be sympathetic with their respective arguments.

It’s a case that’s on track to take weeks, racking up huge legal bills and exposing many flaws for everyone involved. Indeed, as many have pointed out, it seems like it would have been in most everyone’s best interests to have settled privately long ago (except, perhaps, those of us in tech journalism. And even that is debatable.)

But for now, only one thing is certain: It’s impossible to predict which side the jury will take. Three days in, it really seems like it’s anyone’s game. A high stakes game, of course.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/yIa-x_3T3Og/

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Citymaps Raises $6M As Its Mapping App Goes Global

Mapping startup Citymaps today announced a new $6 million funding round. The company’s app, which was previously available on iOS, also launched on Android, and it expanded its previously US-centric coverage to 80 million points of interest across the world.

So why would you need another mapping app? Co-founder and President Aaron Rudenstine came by the TechCrunch office to demo Citymaps for me, and it really does feel different from, say, Apple or Google Maps. The most obvious difference is a focus on points of interest — sure, the bigger mapping platforms include them too, but they’re front-and-center in Citymaps, with big logos representing the restaurants, bars, and stores on a given block.

Obviously, a map can’t always show you everything, but Rudenstine said Citymaps will focus on what’s popular and, over time, start emphasizing locations that seem to match your interests.

The other big selling point is the way Citymaps allow users to create their own collections, say of their favorite restaurants in a given neighborhood, either to share with friends or just for their own memory.

And yes, once you find a restaurant or bar or theater, Citymaps will also give you driving, walking, or mass transit directions.

Rudenstine argued that other local discovery tools, like Yelp, can’t be this “map-centric” because, well, they haven’t built their own maps. And even though Apple and Google seem to inching in this directiontoo, there are millions and millions of people who already rely on their existing mapping product: “For them to change their core interface and core experience to solve for something totally different, it would be very very hard for them to do that.”

The funding comes from Nokia Growth Partners, Coatue Management, Acadia Woods, and existing investors, with Nokia’s Paul Asel joining Citymaps’ board of directors. This brings the company’s total funding to $11 million.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Cg8bBqPe2cs/

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Source: Wearable Maker Fitbit Is In Talks To Buy Fitness App Startup FitStar

For the last several years, Fitbit has created hardware and software designed to help consumers keep track of their activity levels. But we’ve heard the wearable maker could soon acquire FitStar, a startup which makes apps that might help motivate Fitbit customers to actually be more active.

According to a source close to the matter, Fitbit is evaluating a purchase of FitStar for upwards of $25 to $40 million in a mix of cash and stock. A deal like this could always fall apart, of course, but if it goes through our source says the acquisition could close as early as next week.

Fitbit is one of the oldest and has some of the most popular activity trackers on the market. Founded in 2007, its devices accounted for approximately 50 percent of all wearable bands sold in 2013, according to one research report.

That said, the market has been flooded with a ton of new fitness tracking gadgets in the last year or two. Jawbone, Misfit, Mio, Basis, Garmin, and even Microsoft have released competing products. And that’s not even counting the upcoming Apple Watch, which the company reportedly expects to sell 5 million of during its initial run.

Fitbit’s hardware includes a variety of wristbands, clip-on activity trackers, and a connected scale. It also has mobile apps and an online dashboard through which customers can log their steps, weight, food intake, and other workout activities.

While Fitbit’s software provides an all-in-one platform for tracking all that data, it also recognizes not everyone will want to use its apps for all those functions. As a result, it’s partnered to share data with a number of third-party app makers, such as LoseIt!, MyFitnessPal, MapMyRun, Endomondo, and also FitStar.

Fitbit’s decision to pursue an acquisition of FitStar makes sense as the activity tracker market matures and more consumers are looking for practical applications that could help them get fit. That is, now that they have they data, what can they actually do with it?

FitStar makes a series of fitness and yoga apps that provide personalized workout programs for users. Those apps include high-quality video workouts led by celebrity fitness trainers to help motivate users to get in shape. Over time, its apps track the exercises users take part in and adapts to their strengths (and weaknesses).

The purchase has a number of benefits for each company. Beyond the obvious cross-pollination between Fitbit and FitStar user bases — i.e. Fitbit pushing its users to join FitStar and vice versa — an acquisition would give Fitbit an entree into the growing online fitness instruction market, while providing more resources for FitStar to continue producing instructional videos.

All of that is important as Fitbit pursues an IPO, which is reportedly planned for later this year. It would also make Fitbit’s platform a bit more defensible against “dumb trackers” that only provide analytics without actually helping users to get off the couch.

A small side benefit to this is an incremental revenue stream that would come from FitStar’s premium subscription user base and sales of individual workout programs on its apps.

Finally, the acquisition could be an integral part of Fitbit’s defense against the Apple Watch — a device which any number of fitness startups will soon begin making workout apps for. Fitbit is one of the few wearable manufacturers not to integrate with Apple’s HealthKit, due to competitive concerns around the release of the Apple Watch. We’ve heard that’s one reason why Fitbit devices were pulled from the Apple store late last year.

Representatives from Fitbit and FitStar did not respond to our request for comment.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/tHR9r8s7zQM/

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Study: Most People Won’t Stop Online Bullies

In 1964 a woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed and left for dead in Kew Gardens, Queens. She screamed for help over a half hour while bystanders and apartment-dwellers above apparently ignored her pleas. Her assailant had time to disguise himself during the attack. She died of her injuries, and experts at the time called the failure of bystanders to act “Genovese Syndrome.”

While the online world isn’t nearly as dire as Genovese’s tragedy, its clear from a recent OSU study that bystander syndrome that bears her name is still alive and well. The study watched 221 students as they interacted in a chat room. A bully would appear and berate other members of the group. According to the study, “only 10 percent of the students who noticed the abuse directly intervened, either by confronting the bully online or helping the victim.”

The bully and the victim were obviously part of the study and their goal was to get a reaction from the other people in the chat room.

“The results didn’t surprise me,” said Kelly Dillon, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at Ohio State. “Many other studies have shown bystanders are reluctant to get involved when they see bullying. The results disappointed me, as a human, but they didn’t surprise me as a scientist.”

According to the release, the bullying began three minutes into an online survey.

“We had the chat monitor say things like ‘How did you get into college if you can’t even take a survey?'” Dillon said. “Finally, after getting increasingly aggressive, the chat monitor tells the victim, ‘Figure it out yourself.'”

After three minutes had passed, the victim asked another question and the scripted abuse began again. In the script, the victim did not respond to the rudeness at all.

About 68 percent of participants said later that they noticed the cyberbullying in the chat window. Of the one in 10 who noticed the abuse and responded directly, more than half (58 percent) reprimanded the bully. One response, for example, was “How are you being helpful at all right now?” A quarter of those who responded insulted the bully, saying things like “I can smell the odor of loser from you.”

Was there an upside? Yes. After the study concluded, 70% of the participants reported or rated the bully in an anonymous review opportunity. This means that while participants didn’t stand up to the bully, they did try to prevent them from bullying again.

While this is cold comfort for the victims of online bullying, it’s clear that the medium does allow for some hope. Online bullying will become more and more common and it has real and often tragic effects. After the study, Dillon asked the participants what they thought.

“Many said they wanted to respond to the bullying, but weren’t sure what they should do,” she said. “We all do that occasionally. We’re all bystanders at some point.”

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Uzd-mDter_I/

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Pebble Launches A Preview SDK With Color Support For The New Pebble Time

The Pebble Time is still going strong on Kickstarter, but Pebble is already thinking about the device’s launch in May, and is accordingly making tools available early to help both existing and new developers target the platform. A new developer preview of the Pebble SDK 3.0 is now available, and it includes a software emulator that shows you how your apps will look on the Pebble Time’s new full color e-paper display.

Apps built with the new software will work on both previous Pebbles and the new Pebble Time, and the company says that only minor changes are required in order to help devs add color to their existing applications. Resolution for the apps doesn’t change, but developers can now code in up to 64 colors, and there’s a new animation framework, plus support for both static and animated PNG.

1. 
   

   block-world

   
   


2. 
   

   isotime

   
   


3. 
   

   test7

   
   


4. 
   

   fill-up

   
   

It’s just a start, but it’s a signal that the startup is moving full steam ahead with its launch plans. The Kickstarter portion of this project isn’t your typical crowdfunding campaign – after selling Pebble successfully for over a year with more than 1 million devices shipped, Pebble should know exactly what it takes to deliver this product on time, and early access to dev tools is definitely part of that.

One thing that might be a challenge: Getting developers to focus on building Pebble apps when the Apple Watch launch is right around the corner.

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3D Robotics Taps Qualcomm For $50M Series C And Mobile Tech

The race to build the best drone is on and 3D Robotics is today announcing its latest round of financing that it hopes will enable the company to keep its commanding position in the marketplace. As part of the funding, the drone upstart also found a new partner in Qualcomm. You know, the company that builds the chips and bits inside cell phones, because as CEO and co-founder Chris Anderson explained, the company’s drones are directly modeled after cell phones.

Qualcomm Ventures lead the $50 million Series C and also roped 3D Robotics into participating in the firm’s robotics initiative. The cash will be used to ramp up production of the firm’s upcoming consumer drone along with increasing development of its commercial products in light of the FAA’s recent ruling.

Anderson stated working with Qualcomm was a natural fit for 3D Robotics. The company designed its drones much like an Android cell phone. There are different so-called stacks to the hardware. Some of these stacks, like on Android, can be modified by the owner while others are locked. Since Qualcomm chips run most Android smartphones, the company’s chips fit well into 3D Robotics’ design scheme.

Plus the two companies are practically neighbors.

3D Robotics is based in Berkeley, California, but operate engineering facilities in San Diego, Qualcomm’s hometown. The drone maker’s manufacturing facility is just five minutes away across the boarder in Tijuana, Mexico. Company employees even has special boarder passes so they don’t have to stop at Customs.

3D Robotics plans to implement Qualcomm technologies in upcoming drones including the chip maker’s popular Snapdragon SoC. 3D Robotic’s consumer drone will use Qualcomm chips; none of the company’s current products use Qualcomm parts, though.

Along with Qualcomm Ventures, Foundry Group, True Ventures, OATV, Mayfield, Shea Ventures and additional investors also participated. This latest round is the largest single funding round of any U.S-based drone manufacturer to date, bringing 3D Robotics’ total amount raised to $85 million from three rounds and eight investors.

“True Ventures was the first investor in 3D Robotics when the company launched in 2012,” Jon Callaghan, founder of True Ventures, said to TechCrunch. “We shared Chris Anderson’s vision for the future of robotics and autonomous vehicles. 3DR is leading this next wave of the manufacturing revolution, using software, open source and networks to empower the hardware of tomorrow. We are thrilled to be a part of the 3DR team.”

Anderson laughed when I pointed out that the form 3D Robotics filed with the SEC showed the company set out to raise $40 million but ended up with $50 million. “This is just the first close,” he said, noting that the round was very oversubscribed and that more cash is on the way. It seems 3D Robotics is just getting started.

1. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ Propeller CU

   
   


2. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ GoPro CU

   
   


3. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ 03

   
   


4. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ 02

   
   


5. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ 01

   
   

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3D Robotics Taps Qualcomm For $50m Series C And Mobile Tech

The race to build the best drone is on and 3D Robotics is today announcing its latest round of financing that it hopes will enable the company to keep its commanding position in the marketplace. As part of the funding, the drone upstart also found a new partner in Qualcomm. You know, the company that builds the chips and bits inside cell phones, because as CEO and co-founder Chris Anderson explained, the company’s drones are directly modeled after cell phones.

Qualcomm Ventures lead the $50 million Series C and also roped 3D Robotics into participating in the firm’s robotics initiative. The cash will be used to ramp up production of the firm’s upcoming consumer drone along with increasing development of its commercial products in light of the FAA’s recent ruling.

Anderson stated working with Qualcomm was a natural fit for 3D Robotics. The company designed its drones much like an Android cell phone. There are different so-called stacks to the hardware. Some of these stacks, like on Android, can be modified by the owner while others are locked. Since Qualcomm chips run most Android smartphones, the company’s chips fit well into 3D Robotics’ design scheme.

Plus the two companies are practically neighbors.

3D Robotics is based in Berkeley, California, but operate engineering facilities in San Diego, Qualcomm’s hometown. The drone maker’s manufacturing facility is just five minutes away across the boarder in Tijuana, Mexico. Company employees even has special boarder passes so they don’t have to stop at Customs.

3D Robotics plans to implement Qualcomm technologies in upcoming drones including the chip maker’s popular Snapdragon SoC. 3D Robotic’s consumer drone will use Qualcomm chips; none of the company’s current products use Qualcomm parts, though.

Along with Qualcomm Ventures, Foundry Group, True Ventures, OATV, Mayfield, Shea Ventures and additional investors also participated. This latest round is the largest single funding round of any U.S-based drone manufacturer to date, bringing 3D Robotics’ total amount raised to $85 million from three rounds and eight investors.

“True Ventures was the first investor in 3D Robotics when the company launched in 2012,” Jon Callaghan, founder of True Ventures, said to TechCrunch. “We shared Chris Anderson’s vision for the future of robotics and autonomous vehicles. 3DR is leading this next wave of the manufacturing revolution, using software, open source and networks to empower the hardware of tomorrow. We are thrilled to be a part of the 3DR team.”

Anderson laughed when I pointed out that the form 3D Robotics filed with the SEC showed the company set out to raise $40 million but ended up with $50 million. “This is just the first close,” he said, noting that the round was very oversubscribed and that more cash is on the way. It seems 3D Robotics is just getting started.

1. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ Propeller CU

   
   


2. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ GoPro CU

   
   


3. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ 03

   
   


4. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ 02

   
   


5. 
   

   3D Robotics IRIS+ 01

   
   

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FCC votes in favor of Net Neutrality... just

The Net Neutrality debate has been rumbling on for quite some time now, but today something of a milestone has been reached. After the campaign gained the support of President Obama, Twitter, and many others, today was the Federal Communications Commission vote on a number of proposals put forward by chairman Tom Wheeler.

It is a victory for Net Neutrality and a great step towards ensuring that the internet remain open and free from controls by companies or government. The policy states, among other things, that ISPs may not charge for prioritization of web traffic. The vote was far from being a landslide. Two Republicans opposed to the policy changes kept the result to a 3-2 vote in favor of the proposals.

While the ban on paid prioritization has been the main focus of much of the net neutrality campaign, it is not the full story. The newly approved rules mean that broadband connectivity will be reclassified as a telecommunications service, introducing greater regulation, and there would be greater control of paid deals between content providers and broadband companies.

As well as being blocked from creating a two-tier internet where certain types of traffic is given greater priority over others, broadband providers would not be permitted to accelerate or block connections for a fee. The definition of broadband has been opened up, so the proposals will apply to mobile providers as well as to companies providing connection through landlines, fiber and the like.

The vote was well-received across the tech industry, and CEO of Xirrus Wi-Fi, Shane Buckey said:

The FCC's decision on net neutrality further validates its goal to provide more affordable and distributed Wi-Fi to the U.S. This foundational step supports IT infrastructure investment to provide more reliable Internet connectivity and improved quality of service for their users regardless of the internet service provider.

But not everyone is happy. The US Telecommunications Industry Association is planning legal action against the changes and Verizon denigrated the vote as "misguided", adding:

Today's decision by the FCC to encumber broadband internet services with badly antiquated regulations is a radical step that presages a time of uncertainty for consumers, innovators and investors.

Opponents of net neutrality have been left licking their wounds but, even in light of the vote, it's unlikely that we have heard the end of this debate yet. Nevertheless, history has been made.

Photo credit: mindscanner / Shutterstock

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YC-Backed Booktrope Rethinks Book Publishing

If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard horror stories about the publishing industry — books that are rejected by publisher after publisher, books that sit in submission piles for years, books that are published but basically disappear without publisher support.

At the same time, self-publishing has its risks for authors, too. You could end up paying a lot of your own money to an editor and/or a designer, and if you don’t, you could end up with a poorly edited book and a lame cover that looks, well, self-published.

So Booktrope, part of the current class of startups at Y Combinator, is taking a different approach — on one level, Booktrope is a publisher itself, but one that allows authors to go around the gatekeepers of traditional publishing while still working with a professional team.

Chief Marketing Officer Katherine Sears said that she and her co-founders don’t come from the publishing world, which she argued is a good thing: “We’re coming at this from an unbiased and fresh perspective, but all of us have a passion and a love for books.”

Now, as someone who’s published a book with a small press, and who’s met a number of smart publishing pros, that statement isn’t entirely reassuring — are these people who don’t understand the industry they’re trying to fix? But talking to Sears, CEO Ken Shear (father of TwitchTV co-founder Emmett Shear), and CTO Andy Roberts convinced me they may not come from the publishing industry, but they’re plenty knowledgeable about it — and they’ve also thought through the details of their model.

So if you’re a writer who wants to publish a book, you go on Booktrope and provide information about yourself and your work. Sears said Booktrope doesn’t accept every author, with a selection process mixing automation and human judgment.

However, the company is less focused on assessing literary quality and more on making sure an author will be a good fit for the Booktrope platform. After all, there are plenty of poorly written, badly reviewed books that still sell incredibly well and find a devoted audience.

“I really feel like literary snobbery is not what the public needs,” Sears added.

To be clear, she’s not saying that every title will be a huge success, but Booktrope’s approach is all about letting readers, rather than editors, provide that filter.

Anyway, if you’re accepted into the system, you then post your completed manuscript on Booktrope and try to attract a team of editors, designers, and marketers, who can then collaborate through Booktrope’s online tools. Authors aren’t paying other team members directly, but offering them a share of the royalties. That means the author doesn’t have to pay out of their own pocket for these services, and the team members will have an incentive for the book to do well.

Booktrope distributes both digital and print-on-demand copies of the books through a number of the standard channels, including Amazon, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and subscription e-book services like Scribd. Many of those books come from authors who’ve tried self-publishing but weren’t happy with the results, Sears said, while most of the other team members come from the freelance side of the publishing world.

The company takes 30 percent of profits while the team gets the remaining 70 percent, split in whatever proportions they’ve negotiated. (Shear also emphasized that when the company calculates profit and royalties for each title, it’s not including general company overhead, just production costs for a specific book.)

Sears and Shear said they’ve been working on Booktrope for the past three years, but they argued their real launch came later, after Roberts joined and built out the technology. Since then, they’ve published nearly 400 titles and distributed 2.5 million copies of those books.

Featured Image: Brenda Clarke/Flickr UNDER A CC BY 2.0 LICENSE



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