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Watch NSA Chief Gen. Alexander's Speech To Black Hat Defending His Surveillance Work
Aug 02, 12:22AM
General Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, recently took the stage at the Black Hat security conference to reiterate that what the NSA is up to is legal, efficacious and, frankly, hardly controversial. Given Glenn Greenwald's deep and broad leaks concerning the general's activities, the NSA had a skeptical audience to convert to its side. For a dive into TechCrunch's first take on his speech, head here. For notes by those critical of his remarks, this is your jam.Social Bill Payments Service PayDivvy Sold To Higher One To Expand Its Education Payments Platform
Aug 02, 12:04AM
Back in February of this year, PayDivvy, a social payment platform that lets people split bills for utilities and other services and each pay their share, announced that it had been acquired and that it was no longer accepting payments on its platform. We reached out at the time and Mike Melby, the co-founder and CEO, said that he would be able to tell us more when the time was right. Today, nearly six months later and now that the deal has finally closed, the company has finally come out with buyer's name: it's Higher One, the publicly-traded universities and students payments and financial services company.Codementor Is An Open Marketplace That Provides Developers With One-On-One Programming Help
Aug 02, 12:00AM
It's a scenario all programmers are familiar with: you are coding alone, only to have something go awry and no one to ask for help. Codementor wants to prevent developers from going insane by providing an open marketplace where they can ask experts for one-on-one programming and design help. The site just launched in private beta and the first 100 TechCrunch readers to sign up through this link will receive a $10 credit.Facebook News Feed Event Aug 6 Will Give Much-Needed Rankings Explanation And Reveal What's Next
Aug 01, 11:49PM
Facebook plans to clear up confusion about what appears in the news feed, announce a ranking algorithm change, and preview the future of the feed at a press event on August 6. The Menlo Park HQ session will be live-streamed to Facebook's London offices to keep European reporters in the loop. Hopefully users will gain a better understanding of how to banish boring and distant acquaintances.Andreessen-Backed Tutor Matching Service Is Working With Colleges To Upend The Tutoring Industry, Starting With Cost
Aug 01, 11:28PM
Of the many ways that technology is disrupting education, one area that's changing a lot, is rife with potential, but doesn't get as much play as it should is tutoring. Mostly, this involves the attempt to make high-quality, local tutors accessible to a wider range of students online, without having to turn to traditional channels, like Craigslist or those pesky, expensive SAT-focused private networks.The New Motorola Is Focusing On "Very Few" Devices, And A Low-Cost Phone May Be Next
Aug 01, 11:27PM
Motorola has never been the most prolific smartphone maker, but there's no question that they've churned out a lot of hardware over the years. Now that Motorola is flying under Google's banner, though, you can expect to see some shifts in the company's hardware strategy, and it looks like that scattershot approach to making phones is getting the ax. According to Motorola CVP of product management Lior Ron, the company is going to be trimming down the number of phones it releases so it can better focus on the ones that are really worth it.YC Partners Taggar, Tan And Reddit Co-Founder Ohanian Raise $39M For Initialized Capital
Aug 01, 10:58PM
YC Partners Garry Tan and Harj Taggar along with the early-stage firm’s “Ambassador to the East” and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have raised $39 million for a separate fund called Initialized Capital, according to an SEC filing today. All three of them have been investing on their own for a couple years and Initialized Capital isn’t formally tied to Y Combinator in any way. It is their own fund. Taggar, who recently went part-time at Y Combinator, was not involved in raising this fund. Initialized looks for high-quality founders first and then try to see if they can help or understand the market a company is attacking in any way. The fund is open to all companies, regardless of whether they have been part of the Y Combinator program or not. It’s their second fund, following an earlier $7 million one that has backed companies like Zach Verdin’s New Hive. Y Combinator has historically taken a two to 10 percent stake in its companies in exchange for $11,000 plus $3,000 per founder, which is ideally is enough to get a startup to a decent first prototype. The firm sometimes invests more than that. But it historically hasn’t done serious follow-on funding, and has instead left that to the broader community of angels and venture capital firms.Employer Tipped Off Police To Pressure Cooker And Backpack Searches, Not Google
Aug 01, 10:54PM
In what might be Medium's first widespread Twitter moment, music writer Michele Catalano used the platform to blog details of an unexpected visit to her home yesterday, from six men she identifies as members of the "joint terrorism task force."Wall Street Darling LinkedIn Beats Estimates Again, Revenue Booms 59% To $363M, Now At 238M Members
Aug 01, 10:40PM
The professional network announced its second quarter earnings results on Thursday, and it was another good one, as the company grew to 238 million members and saw revenue increase to 59 percent to $363.7 million from $228.2 million in Q2 2012. Meanwhile, net income also jumped to $3.7 million from $2.8 million in Q2 last year, while non-GAAP net income was $44.5 million, compared to $18.1 million in 2012.LinkedIn Wants To Ramp Up Ads With An Advertising API Like Twitter's And Facebook's; A 'High Priority' Says CEO Weiner
Aug 01, 10:17PM
LinkedIn, now with 238 million registered users on its social network for the working world, wants to follow in the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter and turbo-charge its advertising effort. Speaking during the company's quarterly earnings call, LinkedIn's CEO Jeff Weiner, in answer to a question from an analyst, said that the social network will be introducing an advertising API, so that brands and agencies can more easily make bigger media buys on the social platform. An exact date was not named, but Weiner said an ads API was a "high priority."The American Nightmare
Aug 01, 9:35PM
Inside a casino whose theme is an empire that collapsed into venal decadence, middle-aged computer-security professionals clutching plastic cups half-full of free Veuve Clicquot line up to collect VIP nightclub passes. Outside, teenagers who live in tunnels beg on the pedestrian overpasses. Earlier, the man turning today's empire into a surveillance state was met with warm applause.CityMaps Announces $1.5M In Additional Series A Funding From A-Grade Investments, Endeca's Founder & Others
Aug 01, 7:52PM
CityMaps, a company in the news this week for a new version of its mobile mapping application for iOS, has raised an additional round of $1.5 million in outside funding -- an extension of its earlier Series A, this time bringing in new investors including Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary's A-Grade Investments, Steve Papa (founder of Endeca, which sold to Oracle), and other angels. This additional round brings CityMaps' total raised to date to $5 million.Reebee Launches To Provide A Bridge For Bargain Hunters Moving From Paper To Digital Flyers
Aug 01, 7:39PM
Waterloo-founded startup Reebee, a current Y Combinator Summer 2013 cohort member, wants to take digital flyers and make them actually useable, something which a lot of companies have tried but none have gotten quite right. Reebee is mobile first, which is a great start, but it’s got a lot of plans besides that in store for revolutionizing one of retail’s oldest and most trusted marketing channels. Currently, Reebee is available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry and collects over 300 weekly flyers in Canada. Flyers account for a huge amount of the marketing budget of any brick-and-mortar retailer, even now that a lot of commerce has fled online. The growing number of people shopping online means that flyers need to adapt, but focusing too much on digital means leaving behind older customers and other shoppers who are still very comfortable with the paper flyer format. Reebee solves the problem by keeping things simple; what you’ll get with flyers that appear in its library is a browsing experience that works seamlessly with touch controls, so that you can swipe between pages and pinch to zoom, but otherwise it’s just like reading a print flyer. This is an MVP, according to Reebee co-founders Tobiasz Dankiewicz and Michal Martyniak, and there are more features planned, but the experience as-is is winning them a lot of fans. “Even with the MVP model of just the browsing, people are loving the experience and it’s receiving higher ratings than certain branded apps,” Dankiewicz said. “We’ve even heard feedback from people asking us not to change or add any sort of features, so we have to be really careful when we introduce things not to ruin the extreme simplicity of it.” Feature updates are planned, however, as Reebee wants to make it possible to search through flyers to find the one you’re looking for, as well as create unified shopping lists from various stores. The company also wants to link product pages from retailer’s e-shopping sites in cases where that makes sense, though it’s less useful in cases like grocery stores. For now, Reebee is adding a lot of flyers on its own, but it’s also partnered with some retailers who are paying for its services. In return, these retailers get access to detailed analytics about their customers, as well as priority placement within the app. Soon, Reebee will also be launching a list where users can signFacebook Brings Home's Lockscreen Replacement To Their Main Android App - A Bad Sign For Home?
Aug 01, 7:14PM
Four months after the launch of Facebook Home, which aimed to turn every Android phone into the long-rumored Facebook Phone, the company is starting to bring certain Home features into their primary app with an update today.Hello Moto X
Aug 01, 7:02PM
After Google acquired Motorola Mobility last year, we wondered what was next for the smartphone company. It spent ages clearing out its pipeline of smartphones that were already in development before rumors of an X Phone made in America started making the rounds. In those early X Phone days, Rick Osterloh, Motorola's SVP of Product Management said the team that worked on the device was plopped in front of a whiteboard and asked to describe the product they wanted to make. That brainstorming, plus loads and loads of user testing, came together in the form of the Moto X. Motorola isn't the same company today as it was when Google snapped it up last year -- it's smaller, leaner, and if recent reports are indication, gutsier than ever. The Moto X is that new Motorola's coming out party, and they've definitely got something worth celebrating.Soylent Closes In On Finalizing Its Formula, Reaches $1M In Pre-Orders
Aug 01, 7:01PM
Soylent, the seemingly wacky personal experiment of 24-year-old engineer Rob Rhinehart, is maturing into a full-fledged business. Rhinehart and his team, who were running a Y Combinator-backed startup called Level RF last year, did what Paul Graham has called the “pivot of the century.” Fascinated by inefficiencies in the industrial food system, Rhinehart designed and then started living off a meal replacement he cheekily named Soylent — after the dystopian movie Soylent Green where Charlton Heston discovers that society has been living off rations made of humans. This Soylent, thankfully, is not made of humans. It contains an assortment of carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins and dozens of other vitamins that are deemed medically necessary to for a person to live by the Institute of Medicine, plus other modifications Rhinehart made through the testing process. “I’d like this to be something that is like coffee — a commodity something that’s available everywhere. Maybe a utility like water and power. Something that is ubiquitous and easy to consume,” he said. “I’d like to see it in grocery and convenience stores soon.” Now Rhinehart says the company will be closing in on a finalized formula by the end of next month — a version 1.0, if you will. They’ll have a party in late August where they’ll invite press and members of the public. Then the company will gear up to do 140,000 shipments in September with $1 million in pre-orders. It costs roughly $65 a week, including shipping. Most of the customers are young men, but there have also been a few Doomsday predictors and people preparing for a societal apocalypse that have tried to order lifetime supplies of Soylent, Rhinehart said. The company has been posting updates of modifications to the Soylent formula, including changing the protein source to a vegan one derived from a rice or pea protein isolate. “In terms of a new food product, this is much, much larger initial manufacturing run than has happened in the past,” Rhinehart said. A chance introduction got him in touch with the makers of MuscleMilk, Cytosport, who helped him find a factory in Modesto certified by the NSF. He also started working directly with suppliers; in early versions of Soylent, he would buy components off Amazon or Alibaba. The taste is pretty bland, kind of malty even. “Soylent is not supposed to be this luxurious thing,” Rhinehart explained. To be clear,A Majority Of The Public Still Approves Of NSA Dragnet, 4 Graphs
Aug 01, 6:56PM
I’m not a fan of the National Security Agency’s secret dragnet program, but I’m honest enough to admit that I hold a minority view. Recently, a string of stories have wrongly implied that the public has become more privacy-happy in response to the scandal surrounding the leak of the NSA’s telephone and Internet metadata surveillance program. So, to test whether public opinion had actually changed over the last month, we ran our own national opinion surveys and found that, like last fall, about 56 percent of Americans approve of the government collecting their data to investigate terrorism. Perhaps more importantly, Americans think the government is collecting the actual content of email and phone calls, and approval of the program slightly increased in the last month. In future surveys, I’m hopeful that public opinion will, at the very least, support more transparency in mass surveillance programs, but, in the meantime, let’s explore the facts as they are. Little Shift In Public Opinion Since January 2006, about twice as many Americans have consistently thought it more important to “Investigate terrorist threats” than to “Not intrude on privacy”. The last column in the graph is our own Google Survey CrunchGov Poll. You can view the methodology and wording here. Our results show about a 4 percent dip from Pew from last month, but it’s almost within the margin of error (2 percent) and it’s slightly different wording, so it’s doubtful there’s much of a change, if any, in public opinion. Fortunately, Google Survey also gives us an idea of why people answer the way they do. A few responses: –”protect me within the rules of the law” –”investigating terrorist threats at the sake of privacy is fine as long as the information isn’t used for any other purpose and the focus is on terrorism and not anything else” About the NSA specifically, a slight majority (54 percent) favored the current dragnet program. Some of the justifications: –”acceptable for the investigation of terrorist but evidence cannot be used for anything else” –”acceptable if done by keywords” –”i’m not as upset at that invasion of privacy as the irs” Privacy-advocates may not like the way Pew framed the questions, but I think they’re fair. It explicit asked if it’s ok to track millions of Americans’ phone records. In fact, I thought Pews wording was too negative against the NSA. A more balanced framing would have qualifiedWith JFrog, Binaries Get A Bit Of Respect, As Developers Face Open-Source Licensing Woes
Aug 01, 6:41PM
Binaries, those pieces of an application that go with all that sexy code, are increasingly becoming important as documentation for how software and services are built. It's this documentation that is often overlooked with open-source software, according to a survey of 150 developers at Fortune 500 companies by JFrog, an Israeli company that manages binaries for developers.Apple Acquires Low-Energy Chipmaker Passif, Could Boost Passive Communication Efforts
Aug 01, 6:37PM
Apple has recently bought Passif, a Silicon Valley-based low-energy chipmaker, according to a new report from Jessica Lessin and confirmed by Apple. The company works on communication chips that practically sip power, and offer up radio communication using tech like Bluetooth Low Energy, which is good indicator of why Apple probably came calling.White House Undermines Snowden As No "Whistleblower," Calls Russian Asylum An "Extreme Disappointment"
Aug 01, 6:26PM
Following yesterday's fresh revelations of the NSA program XKeyscore, which can pull up the content of email with the simple input of an address and date range, the White House used its podium today to slap Russia and damn leaker Edward Snowden as neither a "dissident" or a "whistleblower."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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