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This year, several notable apps that connect users with house cleaners have launched or gained traction. These include Homejoy, Exec and laundry service Prim. There are a lot of benefits to hiring a professional cleaning service but, unfortunately, I live outside the area covered by these apps. Letting people I don't know into my apartment also makes me feel exposed. I just don't like having strangers judge my lovingly curated collections of masking tape, dolls, and whiskers shed by my cats over the years. But I do enjoy living in an (occasionally) neat apartment and my New Years resolution is to develop chore routines that will make housekeeping easy and stress-free by using these iOS apps.
Thanks to a series of high-profile exits and a generally frothy financing environment, it's not unusual to see successful entrepreneurs spending money at will. But the story of MotionLoft founder Jon Mills could serve as a cautionary tale that things are not always as they seem, especially for unsavvy investors drawn to a big payout.
The fine folks at AdDuplex have provided Paul Thurrott with an early look at their final Windows Phone market data for 2013, giving us in the public a final look at the key statistics of Microsoft’s smartphone platform’s OEM and device makeup. The figures are much as they have been all year, only more so. Nokia continues to control the lion’s share of Windows Phone hardware, ending the month up a few points at 92.1 percent (this is a calculation of usage share, tracked through AdDuplex’s network). And the Lumia 520 handset continues to dominate its brethren, with a new high of 39.3 percent share. And that Windows Phone 8 grew against the now-fading Windows 7.x system, with record relative market share of 78.3 percent. Windows Phone’s 2013, if you had to put it into basic trends, would be that Nokia cleaned up, and its Lumia 520 was the weapon of choice. Thurrott well describes the current low-ending of Windows Phone (bolding original): Almost no high-end phones are popular. Worldwide, only the Lumia 920 makes the top 10 list for usage among all Windows Phone handsets, and if you look just at Windows Phone 8 handsets, only two high-end devices make the list: The Lumia 920 and the 925. In the US, there are three: The Lumia 920, 928, and 1020. All the rest are new low-end devices or old devices. The Lumia 1520 phablet doesn’t appear anywhere in this report. What this means is that the sales momentum that Windows Phone has comes at the cost of per-unit revenue. Margin pressure increases at lower price points. The list of sacrifices that had to be made to produce the Lumia 520 is not small. So, as we tally what could be the final month in which Nokia rules Windows Phone, it’s important to note that rising unit volume has come at a cost. The Lumia 1020 is a hit among a subset of the technology elite, but perhaps few else. Can you build a mobile empire on predominantly low-end phones? Apple managed the opposite, so perhaps this, too, is possible.
Teckler is a site where users get a share of the revenue for the articles, photos, and other media that they post. And with the recent launch of the Teckler iPhone app, users will be able to post from their phone too. When I discussed the platform with founder and CEO Claudio Gandelman (previously the Latin American president for Match.com), he pitched it as a way for people who don't have a website or blog of their own to share interesting content, particularly in areas where they have expertise. The site (and the quality of the content) seems pretty broad, covering topics like medicine, love/romance, and technology.
New NSA revelations out this weekend detailed precisely how the NSA's methods lean on malware and employ cyber attacks in their "snooping," to use Microsoft's term. Thus, the NSA's surveillance efforts are not a potential advanced persistent threat, as Microsoft recently decried.
In this three-part series, we hosted Medallia, an enterprise company that offers customer experience management software, and Sequoia partner and board members Doug Leone in the studio. Co-founder and President Amy Pressman talked about why she founded the company after being a consultant for a number of years. Medallia essentially helps companies track how they are doing with customers on a day-to-day and even minute-by-minute basis. Further, Medallia allows companies to act on that feedback continuously (and track the outcomes). The company measures customer feedback through all channels (web-based, social phone, call center, SMS, social, mobile). After staying bootstrapped for a number of years, Medallia raised $35 million last year from Sequoia Capital. Pressman talked about why she decided to raise money from institutional investors, and Leone revealed how he found out about Medallia and his persistence in pursuing Pressman and Medallia. Check out the video above for more, and stay tuned for our next part in this series, which addresses how Pressman and Leone work together.
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just published a blog post about what he did and didn't say during a widely-discussed interview with The Information (if you don't have a subscription, you can read the relevant quotes in Valleywag). He also makes an announcement, of sorts, that the incubator is planning an event for female founders later this year. As many of you've probably read, Graham attracted lots of controversy for his remarks about getting women interesting programming and hacking. (TechCrunch's Colleen Taylor weighed in here.) However, Graham claimed in a tweet, and reiterated in the post, that his meaning had been distorted.
Twitter has had a rough few days in the markets, slipping from north of $74 to just over $60 at the end of trading today. That's not even half the story, however: Twitter's December is one for the record books. If dropping almost 20 percent in a few days of trading is dramatic, so too is Twitter's epic run from December's opening price of $40.76 to its high in the month of $74.31, a rise of more than 82 percent in just 18 trading sessions. The massive rise in Twitter's value far outstrips the ensuing minor correction.
Netflix has informed TechCrunch that it is indeed testing a $6.99 single-stream plan to new users as part of a test. The option appears to some new users after selecting the streaming option as a free trial. Unfortunately for those of you excited for a dollar-off discount on a standard definition stream, a Netflix spokesperson also told us that not all users may see the option and that it may never offer it generally. The plan was first noted by Adweek this morning and we confirmed it as an option when we began signing up for the $7.99 streaming-only plan with a 30-day trial. Offering a standard-def stream to one device might as well be called ‘the smartphone plan’, as that’s what it seems most suited to. Though many smartphone screens are above HD resolution, the smaller real-estate means that it can be difficult to discern a standard-def stream from a high-definition one. Netflix analyzes a junk ton of data about user viewing habits including locations, devices and times of day that people view stuff. If that information was telling them that people view Netflix a lot on smartphones while traveling, then a single stream in SD rather than HD might actually make a lot of sense for a certain subset of users. Of course, a buck off is a nice ‘sale price,’ and if people get utility out of it they might feel inclined to expand the plan further down the road. Image Credit: Taro the Shiba Inu/Flickr CC
Facebook may be currently facing question marks over how well it's faring with younger users, but among those over 18 in the U.S. it remains the social network king. According to figures out today from the researchers at the Pew Research Center, the percentage of adults using the social networks of Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter or Instagram to communicate with each other is now at 73%, and Facebook — the world's largest social network with 1.19 billion users and a burgeoning international business — remains the most popular in the U.S. as well, with 71% of U.S. adults on it.
Fitbit has just released a major update to its iOS app for iPhone 5s, allowing the smartphone itself to track steps, distance and burned calories. These are basic features, and just a fraction of the metrics provided by one of Fitbit’s own hardware devices, such as the Fitbit handheld or the Fitbit Flex wristband. With a Fitbit Force, for example, you can track all the basic information as well as flights of stairs climbed and sleep. Plus, it acts as a watch feeding you the information on a digital screen. Still, the accompanying app has always been an integral part of the Fitbit hardware experience, as it offers a dashboard for every metric as well as a log tracking nutritional intake. In other words, the app gives a robust outlook of overall health over time, which has made Fitbit a big contender in the space against Nike and others. With the launch of the M7 motion coprocessor in the iPhone 5s, Fitbit has decided to offer “basic” tracking from the phone itself, likely with the intention to entice an upgrade. The update comes just in time for New Years, as the pudgy masses resolve to lose the holiday weight.
Business Insider’s Joe Wiesenthal today published an interesting piece on Bitcoin, partially responding to Paul Krugman’s somewhat inscrutable recent blog post that called the cryptocurrency “evil,” and partially answering the question of why Bitcoin has value. It’s been a topic we’ve been discussing for months, making Wiesenthal’s argument worth digging into. He breaks Bitcoin into three interrelated characteristics that support one another: It’s a currency, equity, and a social network. Bitcoin acts as a currency because you can use it as a generic exchange medium in lieu of dollars and other traditional currencies in a growing number of places. Bitcoin also at least behaves as an equity, because the more people who use and accept it, the more the value of each coin — at least thus far — generally rises. Interestingly, Bitcoin’s ability to act as a currency and an equity are both predicated on its network effects. Wiesenthal puts this succinctly: “Strong, robust network effects are crucial for making the whole thing work.” He links to Antonis Polemitis who makes the same argument: “If people stop using bitcoin, its intrinsic value is zero. Its value is 100% derived by the fact that it is a network.” If we view Bitcoin’s value as a currency and an equity as supremely predicated on its strength as a network, we can then state that its value rises and falls with the strength of that network. This means that Bitcoin’s value is something that we can therefore better understand. The gist is that it’s been frakking hard to explain to anyone why Bitcoin makes more sense at $700 than $800 or even $300. However, if we can consistently point to an expanding network, we can presume that Bitcoin’s value should therefore be rising. This does not allow us to say that Bitcoin’s current price, and its requisite swings, match its inherent value. In fact, I think that we can presume that they do not. According to Coinbase, Bitcoin spiked from $208 at the start of November to $1,049 on the first of December. If we assume that Bitcoin’s network effects gave its exchange rate (currency) or asset value (equity) a proper valuation at the start of the month, we can either argue that its network became (roughly) five times as valuable in the month, or that investors overbid Bitcoin. Its ensuing price slump would point towards the latter. I’ve correlated the price of Bitcoin to its current news volume a few times,
There are already quite a few drones in use in U.S. airspace, but given that commercial drone usage remains off-limits, most of them are either operated by government agencies or for research purposes. Today, however, the FAA has taken another step in its congressionally mandated process of integrating drones into the U.S. air traffic system. The FAA today announced six test sites in six states (out of 24 that applied) where it plans to test and develop systems for the safe integration of drones into the airspace system. The focus here is clearly on testing. While the official plan is to integrate drones into the national airspace by 2015, it’s unlikely that the FAA will make this deadline and that we will see commercial drones flying alongside the usual Boeing 737s and Cessna 152s in the very near future. The idea here, after all, is to integrate them into the so-called “NextGen” air traffic control systems that are more famous for their false starts and budget overruns than anything else. But before drones can be integrated into the current air traffic control system, the FAA wants to create standard procedures for things like lost links to the drone (which is somewhat akin to a plane losing radio contact with the air traffic control) and best practices for setting up ground-control stations, avoiding other traffic and how to certify and deal with the humans that actually operate the machines. Among the six sites is Griffiss International Airport in Rome, New York, which will handle test and evaluation processes and focus on integrations drones into the heavily congested northeast airspace. The site will be operated by an alliance of 40 public and private organizations from New York and Massachusetts. The alliance will also host a test site at Joint Base Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The University of Alaska will develop standards for state monitoring and navigation, using test site range locations in seven climatic zones ranging from Hawaii to Oregon (though it’s unclear which airports exactly the university plans to use for this). Nevada, which is already and the vanguard of allowing driver-less cars on its roads, will work on air traffic control procedures and the integration of drones into the regular airspace system. Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi won support for its plan to develop procedures for handling airworthiness testing and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Virginia Tech (who submitted a joint
It may be the holiday season, but Gavin Newsom, California's tech savvy Lieutenant Governor, is as mad as hell. And he's not going to take it any more. The fury of California's second most powerful state politician is, ironically, directed at government itself. After what Newsom called "the debacle" of Obama's Healthcare.gov roll-out, he says that we now know how fundamentally useless government is when it comes to what he calls the "procurement" of technology.
In mid-December, Microsoft’s Surface 2 inventory became extremely tight. Now in the post-Christmas period of the month as we move into 2014, Surface 2 inventory continues to be heavily constrained: Microsoft’s own online store remains sold out, Best Buy won’t ship you one of the Windows RT 8.1 devices, on Amazon you can only snag one for around $100 greater than list price, and so forth. Every Best Buy store near me lists the Surface 2 as unavailable. Only Staples from the online portals I checked claimed to have any stock on hand. So, if you don’t live near a Microsoft Store, you could be out of luck if you want to snag a Surface 2. Naturally, your mileage will vary depending on your location and retailer mix. Microsoft is in the best bad situation you can be in as the seller of a physical good: When underestimated demand outstrips produced supply. It’s great that your device is in demand, but bad that you don’t have enough to sell. At a moment in which Chromebooks are starting to make waves, Microsoft doesn’t want to cede a single device sale that it doesn’t have to. As I noted earlier this month, low Surface 2 inventory could hamper Microsoft’s ability to respond to critics unsure of its strategy to become an OEM. The lower its current-quarter Surface revenue is, the less doubt it can clear. And if Microsoft lacks inventory, it can’t sell units, and its revenue number has a ceiling. According to the Huffington Post, the usual cadre of analysts indicated that they expected Microsoft had reduced its production of the Surface line of devices this year compared to last, and that it had simply run into higher demand. That is the most reasonable answer. Production mishaps could be at play as well, and so forth. Annoyingly, the best indicator of Surface demand is the precise number being skewed by this shortage: revenue. It would have been far more convenient if Microsoft had very slightly overbuilt Surface units, so that every person who wanted one could have bought one and we would have a full-sales figure for Surface revenue. We won’t get that. So whatever revenue number that is reported will be a percentage of that theoretical maximum. You get to guess what the percentage is. As we move into the new year, we have to ask when Microsoft can get more
Archos just dropped a huge smattering of CES news in advance of the huge annual tech show, which kicks off next week in Las Vegas. Among the various announcements, tucked away near the bottom, is the revelation that it will be introducing a "selection of smartwatches" for 2014, which will start at under £50 (roughtly $82 U.S.).
U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has today taken up the battle cry of numerous legislators before her, calling for wireless carriers to enable new anti-theft technology on handsets. According to the Senator, one-third of robberies involve cell phone theft, resulting in an estimated $30 billion in lost or stolen phones. That said, Klobuchar has written a letter to the heads of the major wireless carriers, including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular.
Yahoo has put of lot of effort and investment in 2013 towards improving its mobile business -- significant updates to old apps; over a dozen (out of a total of 28) mobile-related acquisitions to pick up talent, technology and products; and even tests for what Yahoo might like like to focus on next. But even as it has managed to grow its mobile audience this year, Yahoo is exiting 2013 on a mobile low note: not one of its apps is in the top 100 chart on the iTunes App Store.
Mobile analytics and ad platform Flurry has released its annual report on the state of app downloads over Christmas for 2013, and as is usually the case, consumers clearly went crazy for apps this year. Unwrapping a new iPad will inevitably prompt a spike in software downloads, but Flurry is finding that every year, that spike is less dramatic than the year before.
Today at market opening, Twitter shares (NYSE:TWTR) dropped once again. Shares were at $60.27, down 5.46 percent compared to Friday's closing price of $63.75. This nosedive marks the end of the honeymoon between Twitter and the NYSE as many analysts stated that shares are overpriced. Until now, the stock held strong amid those reports, but that seems to be coming to an end.
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These Apps Will Help You Make 2014 Less Filthy
Dec 31, 7:10AM
This year, several notable apps that connect users with house cleaners have launched or gained traction. These include Homejoy, Exec and laundry service Prim. There are a lot of benefits to hiring a professional cleaning service but, unfortunately, I live outside the area covered by these apps. Letting people I don't know into my apartment also makes me feel exposed. I just don't like having strangers judge my lovingly curated collections of masking tape, dolls, and whiskers shed by my cats over the years. But I do enjoy living in an (occasionally) neat apartment and my New Years resolution is to develop chore routines that will make housekeeping easy and stress-free by using these iOS apps.Silicon Valley Hustle: Former Motionloft CEO Accused Of Defrauding Investors
Dec 31, 3:20AM
Thanks to a series of high-profile exits and a generally frothy financing environment, it's not unusual to see successful entrepreneurs spending money at will. But the story of MotionLoft founder Jon Mills could serve as a cautionary tale that things are not always as they seem, especially for unsavvy investors drawn to a big payout.Nokia Closes Out 2013 With 92% Of The Windows Phone Market
Dec 30, 11:48PM
The fine folks at AdDuplex have provided Paul Thurrott with an early look at their final Windows Phone market data for 2013, giving us in the public a final look at the key statistics of Microsoft’s smartphone platform’s OEM and device makeup. The figures are much as they have been all year, only more so. Nokia continues to control the lion’s share of Windows Phone hardware, ending the month up a few points at 92.1 percent (this is a calculation of usage share, tracked through AdDuplex’s network). And the Lumia 520 handset continues to dominate its brethren, with a new high of 39.3 percent share. And that Windows Phone 8 grew against the now-fading Windows 7.x system, with record relative market share of 78.3 percent. Windows Phone’s 2013, if you had to put it into basic trends, would be that Nokia cleaned up, and its Lumia 520 was the weapon of choice. Thurrott well describes the current low-ending of Windows Phone (bolding original): Almost no high-end phones are popular. Worldwide, only the Lumia 920 makes the top 10 list for usage among all Windows Phone handsets, and if you look just at Windows Phone 8 handsets, only two high-end devices make the list: The Lumia 920 and the 925. In the US, there are three: The Lumia 920, 928, and 1020. All the rest are new low-end devices or old devices. The Lumia 1520 phablet doesn’t appear anywhere in this report. What this means is that the sales momentum that Windows Phone has comes at the cost of per-unit revenue. Margin pressure increases at lower price points. The list of sacrifices that had to be made to produce the Lumia 520 is not small. So, as we tally what could be the final month in which Nokia rules Windows Phone, it’s important to note that rising unit volume has come at a cost. The Lumia 1020 is a hit among a subset of the technology elite, but perhaps few else. Can you build a mobile empire on predominantly low-end phones? Apple managed the opposite, so perhaps this, too, is possible.Revenue-Sharing "Knowledge Community" Teckler Launches Its First Mobile App
Dec 30, 11:12PM
Teckler is a site where users get a share of the revenue for the articles, photos, and other media that they post. And with the recent launch of the Teckler iPhone app, users will be able to post from their phone too. When I discussed the platform with founder and CEO Claudio Gandelman (previously the Latin American president for Match.com), he pitched it as a way for people who don't have a website or blog of their own to share interesting content, particularly in areas where they have expertise. The site (and the quality of the content) seems pretty broad, covering topics like medicine, love/romance, and technology.Microsoft Was Right To Worry That Government Snooping Constituted An 'Advanced Persistent Threat'
Dec 30, 11:02PM
New NSA revelations out this weekend detailed precisely how the NSA's methods lean on malware and employ cyber attacks in their "snooping," to use Microsoft's term. Thus, the NSA's surveillance efforts are not a potential advanced persistent threat, as Microsoft recently decried.Medallia's Amy Pressman And Sequoia's Doug Leone On Bootstrapping And Vetting Investors
Dec 30, 10:30PM
In this three-part series, we hosted Medallia, an enterprise company that offers customer experience management software, and Sequoia partner and board members Doug Leone in the studio. Co-founder and President Amy Pressman talked about why she founded the company after being a consultant for a number of years. Medallia essentially helps companies track how they are doing with customers on a day-to-day and even minute-by-minute basis. Further, Medallia allows companies to act on that feedback continuously (and track the outcomes). The company measures customer feedback through all channels (web-based, social phone, call center, SMS, social, mobile). After staying bootstrapped for a number of years, Medallia raised $35 million last year from Sequoia Capital. Pressman talked about why she decided to raise money from institutional investors, and Leone revealed how he found out about Medallia and his persistence in pursuing Pressman and Medallia. Check out the video above for more, and stay tuned for our next part in this series, which addresses how Pressman and Leone work together.
Paul Graham Responds To Critics, Says Y Combinator Is Planning An Event For Female Founders
Dec 30, 10:26PM
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just published a blog post about what he did and didn't say during a widely-discussed interview with The Information (if you don't have a subscription, you can read the relevant quotes in Valleywag). He also makes an announcement, of sorts, that the incubator is planning an event for female founders later this year. As many of you've probably read, Graham attracted lots of controversy for his remarks about getting women interesting programming and hacking. (TechCrunch's Colleen Taylor weighed in here.) However, Graham claimed in a tweet, and reiterated in the post, that his meaning had been distorted.Twitter's Recent Market Correction Doesn't Mean Its Sky Is Falling
Dec 30, 10:11PM
Twitter has had a rough few days in the markets, slipping from north of $74 to just over $60 at the end of trading today. That's not even half the story, however: Twitter's December is one for the record books. If dropping almost 20 percent in a few days of trading is dramatic, so too is Twitter's epic run from December's opening price of $40.76 to its high in the month of $74.31, a rise of more than 82 percent in just 18 trading sessions. The massive rise in Twitter's value far outstrips the ensuing minor correction.Netflix Says It's Testing New $6.99 Single Screen Streaming Plan, But It May Never Roll Out To Everyone
Dec 30, 9:44PM
Netflix has informed TechCrunch that it is indeed testing a $6.99 single-stream plan to new users as part of a test. The option appears to some new users after selecting the streaming option as a free trial. Unfortunately for those of you excited for a dollar-off discount on a standard definition stream, a Netflix spokesperson also told us that not all users may see the option and that it may never offer it generally. The plan was first noted by Adweek this morning and we confirmed it as an option when we began signing up for the $7.99 streaming-only plan with a 30-day trial. Offering a standard-def stream to one device might as well be called ‘the smartphone plan’, as that’s what it seems most suited to. Though many smartphone screens are above HD resolution, the smaller real-estate means that it can be difficult to discern a standard-def stream from a high-definition one. Netflix analyzes a junk ton of data about user viewing habits including locations, devices and times of day that people view stuff. If that information was telling them that people view Netflix a lot on smartphones while traveling, then a single stream in SD rather than HD might actually make a lot of sense for a certain subset of users. Of course, a buck off is a nice ‘sale price,’ and if people get utility out of it they might feel inclined to expand the plan further down the road. Image Credit: Taro the Shiba Inu/Flickr CC73% Of U.S. Adults Use Social Networks, Pinterest Passes Twitter In Popularity, Facebook Stays On Top
Dec 30, 9:16PM
Facebook may be currently facing question marks over how well it's faring with younger users, but among those over 18 in the U.S. it remains the social network king. According to figures out today from the researchers at the Pew Research Center, the percentage of adults using the social networks of Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter or Instagram to communicate with each other is now at 73%, and Facebook — the world's largest social network with 1.19 billion users and a burgeoning international business — remains the most popular in the U.S. as well, with 71% of U.S. adults on it.The FitBit App Now Turns The iPhone 5s Into A FitBit
Dec 30, 8:32PM
Fitbit has just released a major update to its iOS app for iPhone 5s, allowing the smartphone itself to track steps, distance and burned calories. These are basic features, and just a fraction of the metrics provided by one of Fitbit’s own hardware devices, such as the Fitbit handheld or the Fitbit Flex wristband. With a Fitbit Force, for example, you can track all the basic information as well as flights of stairs climbed and sleep. Plus, it acts as a watch feeding you the information on a digital screen. Still, the accompanying app has always been an integral part of the Fitbit hardware experience, as it offers a dashboard for every metric as well as a log tracking nutritional intake. In other words, the app gives a robust outlook of overall health over time, which has made Fitbit a big contender in the space against Nike and others. With the launch of the M7 motion coprocessor in the iPhone 5s, Fitbit has decided to offer “basic” tracking from the phone itself, likely with the intention to entice an upgrade. The update comes just in time for New Years, as the pudgy masses resolve to lose the holiday weight.Divining The Underlying Value Of Bitcoin
Dec 30, 7:46PM
Business Insider’s Joe Wiesenthal today published an interesting piece on Bitcoin, partially responding to Paul Krugman’s somewhat inscrutable recent blog post that called the cryptocurrency “evil,” and partially answering the question of why Bitcoin has value. It’s been a topic we’ve been discussing for months, making Wiesenthal’s argument worth digging into. He breaks Bitcoin into three interrelated characteristics that support one another: It’s a currency, equity, and a social network. Bitcoin acts as a currency because you can use it as a generic exchange medium in lieu of dollars and other traditional currencies in a growing number of places. Bitcoin also at least behaves as an equity, because the more people who use and accept it, the more the value of each coin — at least thus far — generally rises. Interestingly, Bitcoin’s ability to act as a currency and an equity are both predicated on its network effects. Wiesenthal puts this succinctly: “Strong, robust network effects are crucial for making the whole thing work.” He links to Antonis Polemitis who makes the same argument: “If people stop using bitcoin, its intrinsic value is zero. Its value is 100% derived by the fact that it is a network.” If we view Bitcoin’s value as a currency and an equity as supremely predicated on its strength as a network, we can then state that its value rises and falls with the strength of that network. This means that Bitcoin’s value is something that we can therefore better understand. The gist is that it’s been frakking hard to explain to anyone why Bitcoin makes more sense at $700 than $800 or even $300. However, if we can consistently point to an expanding network, we can presume that Bitcoin’s value should therefore be rising. This does not allow us to say that Bitcoin’s current price, and its requisite swings, match its inherent value. In fact, I think that we can presume that they do not. According to Coinbase, Bitcoin spiked from $208 at the start of November to $1,049 on the first of December. If we assume that Bitcoin’s network effects gave its exchange rate (currency) or asset value (equity) a proper valuation at the start of the month, we can either argue that its network became (roughly) five times as valuable in the month, or that investors overbid Bitcoin. Its ensuing price slump would point towards the latter. I’ve correlated the price of Bitcoin to its current news volume a few times,FAA Selects 6 Sites For Civilian Drone Testing
Dec 30, 7:09PM
There are already quite a few drones in use in U.S. airspace, but given that commercial drone usage remains off-limits, most of them are either operated by government agencies or for research purposes. Today, however, the FAA has taken another step in its congressionally mandated process of integrating drones into the U.S. air traffic system. The FAA today announced six test sites in six states (out of 24 that applied) where it plans to test and develop systems for the safe integration of drones into the airspace system. The focus here is clearly on testing. While the official plan is to integrate drones into the national airspace by 2015, it’s unlikely that the FAA will make this deadline and that we will see commercial drones flying alongside the usual Boeing 737s and Cessna 152s in the very near future. The idea here, after all, is to integrate them into the so-called “NextGen” air traffic control systems that are more famous for their false starts and budget overruns than anything else. But before drones can be integrated into the current air traffic control system, the FAA wants to create standard procedures for things like lost links to the drone (which is somewhat akin to a plane losing radio contact with the air traffic control) and best practices for setting up ground-control stations, avoiding other traffic and how to certify and deal with the humans that actually operate the machines. Among the six sites is Griffiss International Airport in Rome, New York, which will handle test and evaluation processes and focus on integrations drones into the heavily congested northeast airspace. The site will be operated by an alliance of 40 public and private organizations from New York and Massachusetts. The alliance will also host a test site at Joint Base Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The University of Alaska will develop standards for state monitoring and navigation, using test site range locations in seven climatic zones ranging from Hawaii to Oregon (though it’s unclear which airports exactly the university plans to use for this). Nevada, which is already and the vanguard of allowing driver-less cars on its roads, will work on air traffic control procedures and the integration of drones into the regular airspace system. Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi won support for its plan to develop procedures for handling airworthiness testing and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Virginia Tech (who submitted a jointKeen On… The 2013 Debacle: Why Gavin Newsom Says The Government Is On A Collision Course With The Future
Dec 30, 7:00PM
It may be the holiday season, but Gavin Newsom, California's tech savvy Lieutenant Governor, is as mad as hell. And he's not going to take it any more. The fury of California's second most powerful state politician is, ironically, directed at government itself. After what Newsom called "the debacle" of Obama's Healthcare.gov roll-out, he says that we now know how fundamentally useless government is when it comes to what he calls the "procurement" of technology.Microsoft's Surface 2 Shortage Persists, Will Likely Stretch Into The New Year
Dec 30, 6:05PM
In mid-December, Microsoft’s Surface 2 inventory became extremely tight. Now in the post-Christmas period of the month as we move into 2014, Surface 2 inventory continues to be heavily constrained: Microsoft’s own online store remains sold out, Best Buy won’t ship you one of the Windows RT 8.1 devices, on Amazon you can only snag one for around $100 greater than list price, and so forth. Every Best Buy store near me lists the Surface 2 as unavailable. Only Staples from the online portals I checked claimed to have any stock on hand. So, if you don’t live near a Microsoft Store, you could be out of luck if you want to snag a Surface 2. Naturally, your mileage will vary depending on your location and retailer mix. Microsoft is in the best bad situation you can be in as the seller of a physical good: When underestimated demand outstrips produced supply. It’s great that your device is in demand, but bad that you don’t have enough to sell. At a moment in which Chromebooks are starting to make waves, Microsoft doesn’t want to cede a single device sale that it doesn’t have to. As I noted earlier this month, low Surface 2 inventory could hamper Microsoft’s ability to respond to critics unsure of its strategy to become an OEM. The lower its current-quarter Surface revenue is, the less doubt it can clear. And if Microsoft lacks inventory, it can’t sell units, and its revenue number has a ceiling. According to the Huffington Post, the usual cadre of analysts indicated that they expected Microsoft had reduced its production of the Surface line of devices this year compared to last, and that it had simply run into higher demand. That is the most reasonable answer. Production mishaps could be at play as well, and so forth. Annoyingly, the best indicator of Surface demand is the precise number being skewed by this shortage: revenue. It would have been far more convenient if Microsoft had very slightly overbuilt Surface units, so that every person who wanted one could have bought one and we would have a full-sales figure for Surface revenue. We won’t get that. So whatever revenue number that is reported will be a percentage of that theoretical maximum. You get to guess what the percentage is. As we move into the new year, we have to ask when Microsoft can get moreArchos To Launch A Line Of "Pebble-Like" Smartwatches For iOS And Android At CES
Dec 30, 5:59PM
Archos just dropped a huge smattering of CES news in advance of the huge annual tech show, which kicks off next week in Las Vegas. Among the various announcements, tucked away near the bottom, is the revelation that it will be introducing a "selection of smartwatches" for 2014, which will start at under £50 (roughtly $82 U.S.).U.S. Senator Issues Letter To Top 5 Wireless Carriers Urging Kill Switch Adoption
Dec 30, 5:28PM
U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has today taken up the battle cry of numerous legislators before her, calling for wireless carriers to enable new anti-theft technology on handsets. According to the Senator, one-third of robberies involve cell phone theft, resulting in an estimated $30 billion in lost or stolen phones. That said, Klobuchar has written a letter to the heads of the major wireless carriers, including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular.Yahoo Ends 2013 With No Apps In Apple's Top 100
Dec 30, 4:19PM
Yahoo has put of lot of effort and investment in 2013 towards improving its mobile business -- significant updates to old apps; over a dozen (out of a total of 28) mobile-related acquisitions to pick up talent, technology and products; and even tests for what Yahoo might like like to focus on next. But even as it has managed to grow its mobile audience this year, Yahoo is exiting 2013 on a mobile low note: not one of its apps is in the top 100 chart on the iTunes App Store.Flurry Finds Christmas App Download Spike Continues, But Lessens As People Get Used To Smartphones
Dec 30, 3:04PM
Mobile analytics and ad platform Flurry has released its annual report on the state of app downloads over Christmas for 2013, and as is usually the case, consumers clearly went crazy for apps this year. Unwrapping a new iPad will inevitably prompt a spike in software downloads, but Flurry is finding that every year, that spike is less dramatic than the year before.The Twitter NYSE Honeymoon Is Over As Stock Price Takes Another Nosedive
Dec 30, 2:31PM
Today at market opening, Twitter shares (NYSE:TWTR) dropped once again. Shares were at $60.27, down 5.46 percent compared to Friday's closing price of $63.75. This nosedive marks the end of the honeymoon between Twitter and the NYSE as many analysts stated that shares are overpriced. Until now, the stock held strong amid those reports, but that seems to be coming to an end.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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A new report from China's GPC (link via Google Translate), an industry group for game publishers, shows that China's video game industry is now worth 83.17 billion RMB (or $13 billion), a 40% increase over the past 12 months (h/t Games In Asia). While the growth may not be surprising, the fact that most of that revenue came from PC-based games may be, especially considering the amount of attention that has been focused on the rise of mobile in China.
As console makers all present their refreshed products this year, Microsoft has led the pack with the ever-impressive Xbox One, complete with cable TV control, bumped up graphics, and an all-new Kinect. But is upgrading worth it?
Our devices have a never-ending hunger for power – it’s their single greatest failing, in a time when they can do incredible things but still only last around a day of solid use in the best-case scenario. But Mophie has made a name for itself providing extra juice for your devices, and now they’ve got a new Powerstation XL model that packs a crazy 12,000 mAh, which can charge some smartphones up to eight times over. Pros: Battery lasts and lasts Intelligent amperage for less power wastage Two ports for charging Cons: Price A bit on the bulky side Mophie’s Powerstation XL isn’t reinventing the wheel, it’s just making the wheel a lot bigger. Even design-wise, it resembles previous Mophie power pack devices, with a rubberized black top and bottom ‘sandwiching’ a silver wraparound rim. A button on the side will light up an LED indicator to tell you how much juice is remaining (to the nearest quarter), and two USB 2.0 ports on the top can charge up to two devices simultaneously, while a micro USB input is used to fill it back up once it’s empty. The sandwich look is simple, good and a nice fit with Apple products, with which I’m generally using the Mophie Powerstation XL. Plus, the whole thing feels terrifically well-built, and you can imagine that if you pop the lid, it’ll be tightly packed edge to edge with battery cell units. Mophie’s backup batteries feel like they can survive a fall, which is more than you can say for a lot of the lower-priced models it competes with. And the Mophie Powerstation XL also works as advertised. I used the partial charge it came with to fully reenergize a Nexus 5, HTC One and Nvidia Shield before it exhausted itself, and subsequent charges have managed to serve up multiple charges to my iPhone 5 while also topping up an iPad Air on the run. Plus, in terms of charge retention, you can easily have the XL in a bag for days without it losing a single dot of its energy meter to dissipation. Mophie does good retention, and good overall life of the bank itself, which is why they can get away with asking for $130 for a backup battery and someone like IOgear charges a lot less. The XL is brand new, so I haven’t had the opportunity to test its longevity
New leaks 
I love going to the movie theater. Seriously, I love it. I just hate all the other people that go. The talkers. The texters. It's just not worth it anymore. But this… this gives me hope. Hope for a next-best-thing. And man does it make me want an HD Oculus Rift like right now.
A smartphone app called 
The hardware hacker 
TechCrunch has obtained never before published metrics showing Facebook's international growth. Facebook sent some partners a playfully illustrated eMagazine called The Annual, but I've acquired a copy from a source and the stats inside are serious business. The report divulges user counts for some key international markets like Germany, which now has 25 million users, and 18 million mobile users.
The 
One of the most successful authors in the world, 
It's the end of the year, which is always a time for reflection -- 
Suppose you have a passion-project game. You want to develop it for iOS, to be "console quality". You want it to be cool. Given how everything has liberalized in the gaming market over the last few years, you would think that it would be much easier to get a project off the ground than it used to be. You'd be wrong. Games and investment are still weird.
Here's how it works when a big company believes that its power is in its girth: They enter this bizarre world that leads them to believe that what comes from their PR organs is enough to float their troubles away. It's all about denial and avoiding any potential shareholder backlash. And so we come to the sad state of affairs at RSA, the security division of EMC, one of the big-bellied enterprise kings that apparently made a deal with the National Security Agency (NSA).
At first, it was just an idea, but this bill is now very real — urban transportation services like Uber and LeCab will now have to wait 15 minutes in France before letting a customer in the car. Back in October, the French government mentioned this piece of legislation as these new services would hurt traditional cab drivers. But nothing was set in stone until the AFP spotted the new bill today — and this news comes as a surprise. In France, you have to pay a hefty price to get your taxi license. As a payback, the taxi industry is very regulated in this country, and drivers can expect to get a healthy influx of clients. Yet, when the young and fearless startups appeared, many taxi drivers protested against LeCab, Chauffeur-privé, SnapCar, Allocab, Voitures Jaunes and Uber. While the French law calls these companies “VTC” services (car services), taxi drivers think that they are direct competitors — and smartphones certainly make Uber and others act like taxi services. That’s why the government sided with taxi drivers and talked about creating the 15-minute rule. Shortly after that, Allocab, Chauffeur-privé, LeCab and SnapCar put together an online petition against the project. Then, nothing happened. It was like the government had forgotten about this idea. In November, French heavyweight LeCab raised $6.8 million (€5 million) in Series B funding. At the time, I wrote that it was “a good time for it to raise” with the impending changes. Last week, the Competition Authority (Autorité de la concurrence) even wrote that the 15-minute delay was a bad idea. “This competitive imbalance is not necessary to protect the taxi monopoly on this market. Moreover, it potentially contradicts the objective to improve free traffic flow,” the report says. But all of this was for nothing as the new 15-minute rule will be enforced on January 1st 2014. Without any warning, the new bill was published today. Chauffeur-privé CEO Yan Hascoet already reacted to news agency AFP, saying that the French startups will comply with the law but will immediately contest the government’s decision — according to him, the startups have a good chance of winning. On average, it takes 7 minutes for a so-called black car to come and pick you up in France. What will happen? Will the driver wait in the car on the side of the road? Drivers could spend hours waiting
It looks like Microsoft was right to worry about Google’s Chromebook project. According to the latest numbers from NPD, Chromebooks accounted for 21 percent of all laptop sales and almost 10 percent of all computer sales to businesses in 2013. That’s up from virtually nothing in the year before. Given that Apple is irrelevant in commercial channel sales (it commanded a whopping 1.8 percent of sales), Chromebook’s increased share is coming at the cost of Windows. A few years ago, Chromebooks were a bit of a laughing stock. They were underperforming single-purpose laptops that weren’t even good at the only thing they could do (that is, surf the web). Nobody really warmed up to them, despite their low price. Early sales were more than disappointing, and even Google’s few hardware partners looked like they were only doing this as a way to court Google’s favor. The whole project seemed doomed from the start. But somehow, Google stuck to its guns and over the last two years, Chromebooks somehow went from being irrelevant to actually making a sizable dent in the laptop market. And not just in the business market. Amazon this week reported that two out of its three best-selling laptops during the holiday season were Chromebooks. Two years ago, it seemed Chromebooks were only doing somewhat well in schools. Those were, after all, also the only numbers Google ever shared. Over the last year, however, something changed. Google created a more diverse ecosystem of hardware partners that now includes virtually all major laptop manufacturers, including the likes of Lenovo (though only for education), HP, Toshiba and Acer. With the $1,300 Pixel, Google even designed its own high-end Chromebook. My feeling is that Google gave away more free Pixels to developers at its I/O conference this year than it actually sold (that high purchase price is hard to justify for anybody who doesn’t regularly fly on a private jet, despite the Pixel being a great piece of hardware). What the Pixel did, though, was to show that Google was fully backing this project, which surely helped the ecosystem and potential business customers to warm up the idea, too. Over the last year, ChromeOS also went from a one-trick pony to something that’s more like a “real” operating system (in the sense that it looks and feels more like a regular PC and less than a laptop that can only run a
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Happy New Year!
I've spent the last week back in my wintry homeland in Canada, and here the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I have seen the light, and I have a message for all of you who live in America, a message of the utmost importance, inscribed in fire on the sacred stone of the Internet. And that message is: holy crap T-Mobile is awesome. If you travel internationally at all, you should switch to T-Mobile now. Yes, I know I sound like a paid shill. I feel awkward and embarrassed about that. I think 
Earlier this year I attended 
The once iconic video rental giant Blockbuster is shutting down its remaining stores across the country. Netflix, meanwhile, is emerging as the leader in video rental, now primarily through online streaming. But Blockbuster, Netflix and home media consumption (VCR/DVD/Blu-ray) may never have existed at all in their current form if the content industry had been successful in banning or regulating them.
The kids woke up, the parents got called out of bed and for a few hours, shockingly, it looks like the family put down their mobiles on Christmas morning, according to data from 
Following security researchers publishing a way to match Snapchat usernames to phone numbers, Snapchat has published a skimpy statement making the hack sound impractical and noting "We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse."
A U.S. District Judge ruled that the National Security Agency’s phone-record-collection program is constitutional [PDF]. “The right to be free from searches and seizures is fundamental, but not absolute,” New York’s Judge William Pauley wrote. This stands in direct contrast to a decision earlier this month declaring the very same program is likely unconstitutional. “We are pleased with the decision,” said Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr. In essence, Pauley was convinced that countermeasures to investigate terror plots justified mass collection of data. The government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the world. It launched a number of counter-measures, including a bulk telephony metadata collection program — a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data. He went a bit further, arguing that collection from private firms was likely more invasive, yet few consumers care. The government, moreover, has only had isolated instances of abuse. Every day, people voluntarily surrender personal and seemingly-private information to trans-national corporations, which exploit that data for profit. Few think twice about it, even though it is far more intrusive than bulk telephony metadata collection. There is no evidence that the government has used any of bulk telephony metadata it collected for any purpose other than investigating and disrupting terrorist attacks. While there have been unintentional violations of guidelines, those appear to stem from human error and the incredibly complex computer programs that support this vital tool. And once detected, those violations were self-reported and stopped. As I’ve noted before, ultimately, these decisions will likely have to be decided by the Supreme Court. Or Congress could decide to end bulk collection sooner. The short of it is that, practically speaking, this decision won’t mean much, but could provide compelling arguments for the Supreme Court, should it decide on the controversial practice. Until then, please have a wonderful holiday weekend and feel free to enjoy this joke. [Image Credit]
Apple's new Mac Pro is a sight to behold: In black aluminum with an eye-catching cylindrical design, there's little chance you'll ever mistake it for any other computer. The previous Mac Pro was iconic too, of course, but this one is also just slightly larger than a football and dimpled on the top with a recess like a jet engine. But the true power lies under the hood, and what's contained therein will satisfy even the most pressing need for speed.
Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today.
After some serious drubbing in two of the world’s largest countries during past few weeks, the Bitcoin ecosystem may have found its biggest individual backer yet in Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man. Li is now an investor in Atlanta-based BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal for the virtual currency world. He has made this investment through his venture capital company, Horizons Ventures, an early investor in companies such as Facebook, Waze, Skype and Summly. A BitPay spokeswoman told me that Horizons Ventures and the Founders Fund are among a group of investors including Shakil Khan, Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland, Roger Ver and Ben Davenport, who have put around $2.7 million in the startup so far. Founders Fund is the VC group run by people who founded and were early employees at PayPal. In May this year, BitPay raised $2 million from the Founders Fund. The South China Morning Post reported earlier today that Li has invested in BitPay through Horizons Ventures, but didn’t give any specific details on the amount invested. Li’s investment in BitPay comes at a time, when regulators in India and the People’s Bank of China, have issued advisories against the virtual currency, and even questioned the legitimacy of Bitcoin. Overall, the environment for Bitcoin seems more conducive the in U.S. where Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently said that despite risks, there are areas where virtual currencies hold long-term promise. Indeed, BitPay said earlier this month that it has processed over $100 million in transactions this year, and has increased its merchant base to over 15,500. It’s been a very busy month for Bitcoin, mostly filled with bad news in two of the world’s biggest countries. While China’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, BTCChina, stopped accepting deposits in Chinese Yuan earlier this month, exchanges dealing with the virtual currency in India are shutting down after a warning from the country’s banking regulator, RBI. The 85-years old Hong Kong-based billionaire, who is also the chairman of Hutchison Whampoa, is buying into Bitcoin growth in the U.S. amid uncertainties in Asia. John Greenwood, the chief economist of London-based Invesco, told the South China Morning Post that Li’s strategy of investing in a startup that provides enabling infrastructure for the virtual currency, offers lessons for investors looking to make money from Bitcoin. This is what Greenwood told the newspaper: “Just like investors in days gone by made more money out of selling shovels and picks to gold-diggers than anyone ever
It's only been six months since Rdio 
The idea of marketplaces as a business model for technology startups isn't new. We saw some marketplaces go belly-up in the Bubble, and saw a few, like eBay, grow into massive businesses. Of late, though, the marketplace model has had a renaissance of sorts for technology, with companies like Airbnb, Uber and others gaining serious traction and becoming billion-dollar plus businesses. Greylock Partners recently held a conference in mid-November devoted to talking about design, product development, the economics and more around Marketplaces, spearheaded in part by the firm's newest partner and former eBay Motors creator, Simon Rothman.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if heavy metal icons Iron Maiden leveraged data about which regions of the world pirated their music to plan a multi-million dollar global concert tour? Yeah, it’d be awesome, if it were true. So awesome to my anarchistic ears that I was halfway through reblogging the reblog of a Rolling Stone story before I learned that I couldn’t actually verify any of the facts. In the last 48 hours, tech and music outlets have heaped praise on the supposed the tech savviness of the 80s metal band, who allegedly analyzed Bittorrent data to plan a concert tour in South America. Bittorrent, a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing client, can often reveal hidden fan bases around the world, since the traffic and contents can be analyzed in aggregate. Musicmetric, an entertainment forecasting startup that analyzes bittorrent and social media data, was quoted in a Guardian piece on November 29, arguing that bands could potentially leverage the wealth of online information to plan their concerts. Then, on December 20, a tech blog, citeworld, ran this click-delicious headline “How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates — then went and played for them.” The piece implied that MusicMetric directly advised Iron Maiden to plan an otherwise unscheduled concert tour in South America. “[The] CiteWorld story is sadly not substantiated,” a spokesman for MusicMetric wrote to me in an email. “We never stated or implied that Iron Maiden had used our analytics to plan its tours.” “Once someone writes it and someone tweets, there’s not a lot that anyone can do,” said the MusicMetric spokesman, who preferred to remain anonymous. Despite the glowing press coverage, MusicMetric worries about taking credit for something they clearly didn’t do. In fairness to my fellow writers, I was part of the hype machine. I retweeted the story before I had the chance to fully read it. In the course of writing this post, Citeworld has issued an apology and correction, but that hasn’t stopped the Internet rumor machine from cranking out more stories today. After all, it seems like a plausible story. Indeed, beloved science fiction writer Neil Gaiman has become a full-fledged piracy supporter, after finding out that regions that pirated his books also bought more of them. “Places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia, where people were translating my stuff into russian and spreading it out into the world, I was selling more and
Jonathan Teo, a General Catalyst managing director whose most notable investments included Snapchat, has left the venture capital firm. The news is confirmed on Teo's 
