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State Machinery For State Machines
Jun 24, 1:00AM
My name is Andrew Auernheimer. I used to believe problems could be solved with criticism and discourse in our marketplace of ideas. Three years ago I incremented an integer on a public web API and analyzed the output for all to read. It was then demanded I apologize for abusive arithmetic. I disagreed that addition could be abhorrent, so now I write this from the Special Housing Unit of a federal prison.New iOS App Lets You Record What You Heard Five Minutes Ago
Jun 24, 12:00AM
Have you ever wished that you could record something that already happened? Your kid's first words. That perfectly timed comeback. The email address your boss told you to have those important documents sent to within the next 10 minutes. If only there was a way to record the important bits of your life, without having to record all of it. That's the idea behind Heard, a new app for iOS. Heard constantly records the audio around you into an ephemeral, self-destructing buffer, saving only those fleeting moments that you deem worthy.Instagram, Give Me A Photos-Only Stream Or Give Me Death
Jun 23, 11:00PM
You hear that? It's the sound of 130 million people closing the Instagram app. Ok, perhaps that's a bit hyperbolic, but I'm placing my bets right now: Instagram video is a big mistake. Huge. Instagram Wanted To Be "Instagram For Video" Before It Was Cool
Jun 23, 9:34PM
Calling Facebook a copycat isn't particularly creative; not only did Myspace, Friendster and Makeout Party have the whole social network thing down first, but Questions, Places, Poke, Messenger, Stickers and so on were all ideas What Games Are: Reinventing The Games Console Half Way Won't Work
Jun 23, 9:00PM
You've got to feel bad for Microsoft. After years spent trying to find ways to expand its Xbox idea, it's now having to revert some of them and go back to being a regular old games console. The company has run into a hard truth: In the minds of the market "console" means something specific, and the market is not inclined to expand its thinking.If The Government Can Access Our Facebook Data, What Happens When We Have Computers On Our Faces?
Jun 23, 8:00PM
Is wearable computing the future or a trend whose bubble is about to burst? From fitness trackers to smartwatches to computers you wear on your face, this emerging market, enabled by the increasing miniaturization of hardware components and lightweight materials, has been exciting investors and early adopters alike.Video Killed The Instagram Star
Jun 23, 7:00PM
Instagram, an app best known for photo-sharing, added video last week, as it sought to defend against the advance of Twitter's fast-growing video-sharing app Vine. It gave users a new way to share what is happening around them. But while it was an ambitious new feature for the company to add, the end result has been that Instagram has sacrificed the user experience for those consuming content.BuzzFeed Says New 'Flight Mode' Campaign Shows 'The Consumerization Of B2B Marketing'
Jun 23, 6:24PM
BuzzFeed always seems to be the first online publication that comes up when people want to talk about smart, creative approaches to "native" advertising, so here's a cool example of what the site is doing with advertisers — it's partnering with GE to allow readers to navigate the site in "Flight Mode." The campaign was designed to promote GE Aviation's presence at the Paris Air Show, a weeklong industry event that ends today. In Flight Mode, BuzzFeed becomes a grid of articles, and readers fly over that grid in a little plane. When they alight on a headline that interests them, they just hit the space bar and they can read the article in the normal view.New York Assembly Shelves Bill That Would 'Shut Down' Tesla Sales In The State
Jun 23, 6:24PM
The New York State Assembly has tabled a set of two proposed bills that would render Tesla Motors' business model for selling cars illegal in the state. Tesla's sales model takes a page out of Apple's playbook, selling its electric cars through its own branded stores, rather than through third party dealerships.Ecuador, Where Edward Snowden Seeks Asylum, Is No Utopia For Journalists
Jun 23, 6:17PM
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is bound for the sunnier skies of Ecuador, on this whirlwind tour of countries semi-hostile to the United States. While Ecuador has been a safe haven for world-class leakers in the past, including Wikileaks editor Julian Assange, the country is no utopia for journalists.The Series A Crunch Is No Match For Man's Best Friend
Jun 23, 5:00PM
With all the barking in startup activity these days, it can be tempting to dismiss certain categories as "another sign of the bubble." For example, how about an online marketplace for dog-owners to find other people to pet-sit their four-legged friends? Recently, I was a bit surprised to learn of a $50B+ annual consumer category that seems to double every decade for the past few decades: The U.S. pet industry. To give some perspective, Americans spend about $600B+ per year at supermarkets and grocery stores (some of which includes pet items, I'm sure). As it turns out, a few pet-related startups not only got off the ground and began to make money, at least three of them were able to take a bite out of "The Series A Crunch" to advance their businesses. While it may have been easy to target such startups as "small ideas," the size of the market doesn't lie, and consumers are voting with their paws.
NSA Whistleblower Snowden Requests Asylum In Ecuador After Leaving Hong Kong And Travelling To Russia
Jun 23, 4:33PM
Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program and a number of similar government initiatives over the course of the last few weeks, has left Hong Kong and is currently in transit in Moscow. According to Wikileaks, which has been providing legal assistance to Snowden, he “is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.” That democratic nation, the earliest reports suggested, was Venezuela, with Moscow just being the first stop on his journey. Now, however, it looks like Ecuador, which also offered asylum to Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange, has taken an interest in this case, too. Earlier this week, it seemed Snowden was going to head for Iceland. Update (9:58am PT): It now looks as if Snowden has indeed applied for asylum in Ecuador. The country’s foreign minister just tweeted this: The Government of Ecuador has received an asylum request from Edward J. #Snowden— Ricardo Patiño Aroca (@RicardoPatinoEC) June 23, 2013 Wikileaks has also updated its press release to read: “He is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.” We have updated this story to reflect that. The Ecuadorean Ambassador is still here at Moscow airport. It looks like Ecuador is Edward Snowden's destination http://t.co/ZUfwND94nJ— Daniel Sandford (@BBCDanielS) June 23, 2013 As far as we can see, there are no direct flights that connect Moscow to Ecuador’s capital of Quito, so if Snowden travels commercially (and the distance is out of the reach of most standard business jets), he will likely have to make another stop. Cuba would be a likely candidate, and that option was discussed earlier today when it still looked as if Snowden was heading to Venezuela. The U.S. has revoked Snowden’s passport, though, which shouldn’t be a problem for entering Ecuador, but it could complicate his travels through another country. Snowden was allowed to leave Hong Kong legally, Hong Kong’s government said today, because the U.S.’s request for the issue of a warrant of arrest “did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.” Hong Kong asked the U.S. for more information, but because it didn’t receive this yet, it had “no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.”After Teasing Us At CES, Withings Enters The Fitness Tracking War With The $99 Pulse
Jun 23, 4:08PM
And the battle to build quantified self gadgets rages on. The newest entrant is one that isn't exactly new to the space -- Withings has been churning out smart scales and body analyzers since 2009, but it recently decided to set it sights on Fitbit and Jawbone with a new, $99 wearable fitness tracker called the Pulse.How APIs Help Us Comprehend The Infinite Concept Of Data
Jun 23, 8:00AM
Data is like oil. It only has a future value just sitting in a big pool. “Pure data,” as my fellow panelists said Friday night at API Days, has not proven to have much market play. I agreed with them but it’s the wrong way to look at the matter. More so, it’s about how the data is processed and refined. Explore that dimension and it’s apparent that a data economy has emerged that has the virtual equivalence in power to oil and its impact everywhere. But like oil, people don’t immediately equate data with everyday products or services. They know the data is there, but its uses are as infinite as space and its endless possibilities. How to understand the impact of data as an infinite concept is an intellectual exercise. That’s an important pursuit, but in our world, we need relevance to drive understanding. The API has emerged as the means for connecting software and services. It serves as an intellectual vehicle for understanding how we can connect anything to make new things. And so it makes sense that the API itself is also discussed in an economic context. For example, the theme for API Days was all about the “API Economy.” APIs are tangible because they are real. “Big data” is just a term. It has no meaning because it is not really anything at all. But an API is something that people use to connect services like Twitter, Facebook or Dropbox. The quantified-self movement relies on APIs to connect the data from our bodies to apps that give people new ways to measure their health. Netflix supports more than 1,000 devices with its API. About 20,000 developers use the Netflix API. In an oil-based economy, industrial processes help make gasoline for cars or fibers for clothing. Data-driven processes help developers build software. And APIs connect that software to create new types of services that span the physical and virtual world. 3SCale Co-Founder Steve Willmott presented at API Days. His theory: software is eating the world and APIs are eating software. But by itself software has limited value. Connect it and the software turns things into programmable nodes. By itself, data is irrelevant. The enterprise model has demonstrated that software on-premise has limited value when isolated in silos. But connect it with APIs, and transformations can occur that just were not possible before. But are we justSource: Snapchat Snaps Up $80M From IVP At An $800M Valuation
Jun 23, 6:54AM
It's the second day of summer, and Snapchat has raised an $80 million Series B round at an $800 million pre-money valuation, according to a source. The phat Series B round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, according to multiple sources, after being sought after by many other top-tier Valley VCs.Virtuix Omni Takes Virtual Reality In Every Direction
Jun 23, 5:00AM
Editor's note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Part videogame accessory and part exercise equipment, the Virtuix Omni was inspired by the success of Kinect a few years ago, itself a response to the "Wiimote controller" that defined Nintendo's last gaming console. While both products get you off the couch, they don't necessarily give you any place to go once you're there.Today's Acqui-Hires Will Become Tomorrow's Innovators
Jun 23, 1:00AM
Editor's note: Peter Relan is a former programmer and Internet executive, as well as a successful serial entrepreneur, Silicon Valley executive, angel investor, and technology veteran. There is no doubt about the unprecedented wealth of talent in Silicon Valley, both technical and entrepreneurial. The area has become known as a mecca, and for some the Wild West, of digital innovation. So many entrepreneurs migrate to the Valley in hopes of building the next Facebook or Twitter, and technical talent and engineers are the bread and butter making this possible.RIP Snapjoy: The Dropbox-Acquired Photo Service Is Shutting Down
Jun 22, 11:51PM
Snapjoy, the online photo storage service that Dropbox acquired in December, has some bad news today for its users: it is shutting down. The company noted the information in a blog post, as well as in an email it's currently sending out to users (I am among them: I'm copying the text below).CrunchWeek: Instagram Video; 3D Printing Startup MakerBot's Big Exit, And More Cash For Fab
Jun 22, 10:00PM
It's that time of the week for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days. This week you'll notice that we decided to shoot the show from the middle of the TechCrunch office in San Francisco for a change of scenery.Stripe's Payments Payout Technology For Collaborative Consumption Startups Now Processing Up To $500K Per Day
Jun 22, 9:00PM
A few weeks ago, payments startup Stripe made it significantly easier for collaborative consumption startups to take and process payments. The company's new technology allowed for payments to be distributed to multiple bank accounts, which is an issue for startups like Lyft, which are attempting to pay drivers with different accounts from the accounts of users. Stripe says that the service has taken off, and the company is now paying out up to $500,000 per day in these payouts to collaborative consumption startups alone.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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