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Everlane CEO Michael Preysman On Keeping An Edge Amidst The Copycats [TCTV]
May 05, 9:01PM
Everlane has built a really unique business that straddles the tech and consumer spaces, by using technology to provide luxury quality apparel at much lower prices than traditional high-end designers. But with that success has also come copycats -- particularly abroad, where Everlane has not yet expanded its business (at the moment the company is operating only in the United States and Canada.)On Rekindling A Sense Of Mystery
May 05, 8:00PM
In the tangled web of digital social networks that we weave one thing is increasingly absent: a sense of mystery. We are so wrapped up in our digital social graphs there's rarely room for gaps. The challenge now is about piecing together the endless jumble of data that's being pushed at us. Instead of dreamers, we're policemen sifting through a bottomless box of evidence.Saturday Night Live Takes On Google Glass
May 05, 7:04PM
Aaaand the Google Glass jokes have officially gone mainstream. Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update — the bit that long ago became the best reason to tune into SNL — took on Glass last night… and, well, they kind of nailed it.6 Experts on Speeding Up Data
May 05, 7:00PM
Speed. That’s what it’s all about these days. The problem: it’s still more effective to use FedEx than trying to squeeze a data load across a network. It’s an absurd reality when it requires a plane to move data from one place to another. It’s not necessary to move terabytes of data all day, all night. Moving hard drives across the continent for a feature film is different from pulling in data to analyze and then presenting in an application. But the loads will have to get heavier with the connectivity of smartphones, the invisible geofence around your house, 3-D printers and the endless variety of data objects available to aggregate and analyze. In applications, the complexity of moving data is requiring new ways to use Flash and RAM. Hard drives are outdated, their mechanical parts not capable of keeping up with the volume and velocity of data that companies are analyzing. New databases are emerging. Startups and large companies like SAP are developing in-memory databases. NoSQL databases have become the darlings of the developer community. The need for speed in application performance and analysis has endless dimensions. Matt Turck, who recently joined FirstMark Capital as a managing partner, commented in an interview last week at their offices in New York that the Internet of Things (IoT) creates friction with data transfer. He cited the rise of MQTT, an IoT protocol for passing data that the New York Times says is ”not really a lingua franca for machine-to-machine communication, but a messenger and carrier for data exchange.” The MQTT inventor discovered the need for the messaging protocol when he started automating his 16th century thatched roof cottage on the Isle of Wight. That ball the child rolls across the floor? As I discussed with Turck, It’s not a ball but a data object with its own social identity, that could someday connect to trillions of other objects. It will become an avatar, known more as data object than the Spaldeen the child bounces on the stoop of his family’s Brooklyn brownstone. Now think of all the data that will pass from objects such as this ball and you can sense the scope of a world of zettabyte dimensions. To get some perspective, I asked some experts about the new reality of data that seems to be encompassing just about everything these days. Their views reflect less about the future than what is actually happeningChris Dixon On How Tech Can Turn NYC Into A Town That Makes, Not Takes [TCTV]
May 05, 6:06PM
Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon has been a big part of the New York City scene for years -- and finance has long been a dominant industry in the city. So when talking about the ascent of Bitcoin onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Dixon directly addressed corruption in Wall Street, we thought it'd be interesting to follow up and hear more.Iterations: A Youthful Rebellion Against The Permanence Of Facebook's Walled Garden
May 05, 5:00PM
Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected. Indeed, great things can come from this, and for many of its one billion users, Facebook isn't just on the web -- it is the web. It is where images, biographical data, and every speck of a connection to a person, place, or thing lives, both the dream of a doting family spread miles apart and a marketer close by. It is a place where generations of people now reside, hang out, fawn over public statuses and peek into the lives of others. Ironically, while Facebook's aim is to make the world more open, they themselves are building a new web within their own closed garden, inaccessible and (mostly) unexportable to all. As the saying states, "what goes on the Internet is written in ink," so what goes onto Facebook is etched in stone walls.
There Is In Fact A Tech-Talent Shortage And There Always Will Be
May 05, 4:11PM
For America to maintain its fragile role as the most innovative nation on earth, it must perpetually attract the world’s best and brightest. There will always be trailblazing engineers who stay in their home country, leaving the United States one notch below its potential. Yet, on the heels of comprehensive immigration reform, a new viral economic study claiming that there is no tech talent shortage has skewed the national discussion over why we need to aggressively attract high-skilled immigrants in the first place. An Economic Policy Institute study claims that there is a surplus of American engineers, and, as a result, has garnered national headlines in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic for busting “The Myth of America’s Tech-Talent Shortage”. It has fueled protectionist critics who rail against the high-skilled visa system for a being a low-paying indentured servitude scheme to trap vulnerable foreigners into low-paying, exploitative companies. While the study highlights important misconceptions about our less-than-pretty immigration system, let’s not forget that many major tech firms, from Google to Tesla, were founded by immigrants. Yet, as more and more household-names are produced abroad, from Skype to Spotify, it’s becoming clear that America is losing its grip as the sole source of pathbreaking innovation. There will always be a shortage to the extent that America has international competition Below, I explain the Economic Policy Institute’s argument, its methodological shortcomings, and why there will always be a shortage of great workers. What Critics Claim The Economic Policy Institute argues that two important figures prove there is no tech talent shortage: There is a surplus of American graduates with Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) degrees Wages for STEM careers are stagnant; if there was a dearth of applicants, wages would rise to attract more workers Both of these claims are true. Roughly half of STEM graduates never take a job in the field, and 52% of of those who ditch a technology career do so for reasons related to pay, promotion, and working conditions. “For STEM graduates, the supply exceeds the number hired each year by nearly two to one,” write the authors. Perhaps more importantly, since the early 2000s, wages for programmers have virtually stalled. Yet, we know when there is demand for programmers in the tech industry, wages rise. Indeed, just prior to the Internet bubble, wages sky rocketed. Moreover, in one at least career with significantTemptation
May 05, 2:00PM
Editor's Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him @nireyal. How do products tempt us? What makes them so alluring? It is easy to assume we crave delicious food or impulsively check email because we find pleasure in the activity. But pleasure is just half the story. Temptation is more than just the promise of reward. Recent advances in neuroscience allow us to peer into the brain, providing a greater understanding of what makes us want. In 2011, Sriram Chellappan, an assistant professor of computer science at Missouri University of Science and Technology, gained unheard of access to sensitive information about the way undergraduates were using the Internet. His study tracked students on campus as they browsed the web. Chellappan was looking for patterns, which not only revealed what students were doing online, but provided clues about who they were. "We believe that your pattern of Internet use says something about you,” Chellappan wrote in the New York Times. “Specifically, our research suggests it can offer clues to your mental well-being." Chellappan concluded that there was, in fact, predictive power in the data. He found students with early signs of clinical depression used the Internet differently and he could identify students most likely to face mental health issues simply by looking at how they clicked. "We identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression," wrote Chellappan. "For example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high e-mail usage.” Chellappan developed the technology in hopes of creating an early-warning system to identify struggling students. But his study raised another question, why do people with depression check email more? Alleviating Pain The answer may provide clues about why all of us use the products and services we do in our everyday lives. Psychologists believe people with depression feel negative emotions, like anxiety, more frequently than other people do. There is evidence that the depressed students in Chellappan’s study were using the Internet more because they experience negative mental states more often. To try and feel better, they turned to the web to boost their mood. Finding ways to make ourselves feel better is not something only depressives do. We all seek relief from feeling bad and the brain is primed to help us learn where we can find escape. Just as we might take a Tylenol to relieve a headache, we turn toThe Philosophy Of Game Development By The Numbers
May 05, 11:00AM
Editor's note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan. There are several metrics that game developers keep an eye on when tracking the performance of their games. Notions of creativity, novelty and fun are all confined within the prism of an analytics-centric approach: They have wiggle room as long as they improve analytics.Backed Or Whacked: Bridging Worlds Without Words
May 05, 8:00AM
Editor's note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. One of the hottest areas of tech interest right now is the Internet of Things, wherein everyday objects communicate with each other. As doorknobs and clothing learn to communicate, we can only hope that they will protect their language better than the humans who have seen English reduced to abbreviated gibberish in the face of texting and Twitter. If Kickstarter campaigns are any indication, though, objects have a lot to say without speaking at all.Sequoia's Aaref Hilaly Says Messaging Apps Are A New Kind Of Social Network
May 05, 4:00AM
Investor Chamath Palihapitiya's skeptical comments about the current wave of tech startups (comments that included a not-too-veiled dig at Snapchat), ended up fueling plenty of discussion at our Disrupt NY conference earlier this week. In fact, when I interviewed Sequoia Capital partner Aaref Hilaly backstage, Palihapitiya's remarks provided a springboard for Hilaly's take on messaging apps, including Sequoia-backed WhatsApp:Barley Aims To Be The Absolute Simplest Way To Create And Edit Websites
May 05, 1:00AM
Sometimes the simplest product demos can be effective. Take a new web editor called Barley. To show off the product, co-founder Colin Devroe opened me a regular old web page, then changed the wording of the page with just a few keystrokes. A small editing menu opened as he typed, but didn't have to access an admin dashboard, open a separate editor, edit any HTML, or anything like that. To be clear, there was more to the demo — but that was the heart of it. The point is to offer a web page editor with absolutely no learning curve.Facebook Blocks Path's "Find Friends" Access Following Spam Controversy
May 04, 10:04PM
Facebook's social graph went missing from yesterday's update to Path's smartphone app, and Facebook now confirms it has restricted Path's API access. Path can no longer look up your Facebook friends, which prevents it from sending them invitations or suggesting you follow them. The damaging blow to Path's growth may be in response to Path spamming user's contacts with invites last week.What Games Are: Ok Glass, Let's Talk Games
May 04, 9:05PM
It's a little bit sexy and a little bit dorky, but Google Glass has finally arrived. Beyond the initial productivity uses of the device, how important are games going to be for driving its adoption, and what kind of games might work for it?People Are Speaking, Markets Are Reacting, Fears Are Falling And Hackers Are Gonna Hack!
May 04, 7:00PM
Editor's note: Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. The markets are not changing so much as the technology that makes markets move. The technology has enabled machines to ping each other at speeds that give them an edge over humans (at least in the very short-term) and people are connected to other machines and people in ways that can't be quantified. The social web and the leverage from these connections have the media confused, and it seems angry, if not completely wrong.Napster For Pirated 3D Printing Templates?
May 04, 5:44PM
Buy it in a store, laser scan it at home, upload it to the web, print it anywhere. 3D printing is poised for the mainstream, but what happens when one person's finely hand-crafted designs can be pirated and reproduced by anyone? Will 3D printing piracy social networks arise? And how will manufacturers lobby to stop them?Salesforce Joins Datahug's $4M Series-A, While Valley VCs Love Its 'Who Knows Who' Platform
May 04, 5:05PM
Last October, Datahug, a 'business networking automation' startup, which is also being used by VCs, secured a €2.5 million Series A financing led by European VC DFJ Esprit. But it's now adding to that pot. We've confirmed Salesforce has decided to join that round in an "expansion" of its Series A, which includes original investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson (in the US), DFJ Esprit (UK), Oyster Capital and leading Valley investor Ron Conway. The full A-round is now $4m and brings the total raised to $5.5M over two rounds.Gillmor Gang: Glass Onion
May 04, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — well, we talked Google Glass. @scobleizer has certainly made the case for the life-altering shower-taking scenarios, but what the Gang got into was what happens next. Do we wait for the actual launch early next year, or is the die already cast with this alpha rollout? One thing for sure: there's plenty to unravel in this second Glass hour in a row.Celebrate Star Wars Day By Blinding General Grievous, Losing R2
May 04, 3:04PM
Beep boop boop bee squeee! Happy May 4th a k a Star Wars Day (say the date out loud and you'll figure out why). In celebration, quite a few hardware vendors have released special gear for the day, thereby allowing you to celebrate the magic of George Lucas in proper Mandalorian fashion.How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years
May 04, 3:00PM
Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how this was the year you had to quit your job. I gave the reasons why. It wasn't a gung-ho "you have to be an entrepreneur" article. It was more: bad shit is happening in the corporate world and bit by bit you're going to feel the urge to quit.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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