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Cue, The Startup Formerly Known As Greplin, Shuts Down Its App
Oct 03, 5:32AM
Cue, the personal assistant app that grew out of a promising search product, has shut down. The company left a brief note on their main page today, shown below. Cue is Shutting Down We appreciate all of the support from you, our users, as Cue has grown over the last few years. However, the Cue service is no longer available. Cue Premium users who registered through the website will receive a prorated refund. Cue Premium users registered though the iPhone App can request a refund through iTunes. In accordance with our privacy policy, your data and personal information will not be stored or transferred; it has been permanently deleted. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause you. It's been an incredible journey that wouldn't have been possible without your loyal support. Our sincerest thanks, - The Cue Team The company was backed with at least $4.7 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures and angels like Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Joshua Kushner and his fund Thrive Capital along with Christina Brodbeck, Peter Chane, David Rusenko and Keith Rabois. It’s not completely clear whether the product is merely shutting down, or whether the entire company is closing shop. We’ve reached out for comment. We had heard reports they had raised additional funding last year, but we were never able to confirm this. Update: We are hearing from additional sources that they did raise that extra funding, so this is looking like a product pivot or a sale rather than a full shutdown of the company. Cue started out as Greplin, a search startup that indexed all of a person’s online social content off Facebook, Gmail and Twitter. Last year they pivoted and launched a personal assistant app called Cue, that turned a person’s e-mails, contacts and files into a daily agenda with key items like restaurant reservations and flight confirmations. It’s worth noting that Cue was an investment that former Sequoia partner Greg McAdoo led for the firm before he earlier left this year. One of the other investments he led, Bump, was recently sold to Google, for what we heard was roughly $35 million after raising $20 million in funding.Quantopian, A Community Of Quants, Picks Up $6.7M From Khosla, Spark
Oct 03, 4:37AM
Quantopian, a community where around 11,000 or so quants collaborate on algorithmic trading strategies, has raised $6.7 million from Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital. The new round brings the company’s total funding to $8.8 million. Quantopian says it is the world’s first browser-based algorithmic trading platform. Developers can build and test algorithmic trading strategies on the platform. Then, they can share their work and collaborate with others. Over the past 10 years, quantitative and high-frequency trading strategies have risen in power as daily turnover has exploded. Human speed and judgment hasn’t been able to keep up with the ever-growing complexity of global financial markets. “People are realizing that anything that is subject to human judgement can be improved by automation and machine learning,” said CEO John Fawcett. Fawcett, who used to be a chief technology officer at Tamale Software, a investment research software company that sold to Advent back in 2008, said that he saw an opportunity to support a community of independent traders who wanted to refine algorithmic strategies on their own outside of big funds. “It’s directed at the individual who wants to strike out on their own,” said Fawcett said. “I saw that there were people practicing as quants today, who wanted to operate on their own but couldn’t given compensation, lifestyle and the nature of funds.” He added, “The other thing I wanted to do was be part of a movement for an increasingly systematic approach to investing.” The company has racked up about a decade of pricing data and history that developers can backtest their ideas against. Right now, it’s just U.S. equity data, but it wouldn’t be hard to imagine added historical data on currencies, commodities or other asset classes. “We built this cloud infrastructure that has historical market data for U.S. equities and an integrated development environment where you implement two functions,” he said. “We feed all the data through those two functions, which can decide when to buy or sell any security.” They launched earlier this year and recently poached Jessica Stauth, who used to run Thomson Reuters’ quant strategy, as a vice president. So far, the site has about 50,000 algorithms. But they don’t have a revenue model yet. They’re merely building the community first. Fawcett is critical of the typical fee model where fund managers pick up a set percentage of assets under management and a percentage of how muchPenn Jillette Turns To FundAnything To Become A Bad Guy
Oct 03, 2:56AM
Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame is about as nice as they come. And he's super sick of it. So he wrote a movie called "Director's Cut" in which he will no longer be the hero. His role is so bad, in fact, that he decided not to pitch the script to Hollywood execs, because he's pretty certain they wouldn't buy it. While he funded his last two movies The Aristocrats and Tim's Vermeer himself, he says he doesn't have enough money of his own to take this gamble a third time. So this time he turned to new crowdfunding player FundAnything where he currently is at $437,721 of his $999,972 goal with 32 days left in the campaign.
Veteran Travel Search Engine Skyscanner Lands "One Of Largest" Sequoia Investments To Date At $800M Valuation
Oct 03, 1:40AM
In travel search, most young people’s memories don’t extend much further back than Kayak, which began appearing, circa 2004. Though its name may be slightly less familiar among American travelers, Skyscanner is today one of the largest flight search engines on the Web, and outdates Kayak, with its origins going back all the way to 2001 B.C.E. Over the next 10 years, the Scottish company built its brand on its a fast, reliable flight comparison engine — and, like its North American bretheren, has since expanded into hotel booking and beyond — with its “turnovers” reported to hit $30 million (and $10 million in profits) last year, according to my colleague, Steve O’Hear. Buoyed by partnerships with Chinese search engine, Baidu, and an international user base that sees the search engine now supporting 30 languages, the company announced that it has landed an even bigger fish — a knight, in fact. Today, Skyscanner announced that it has finalized an undisclosed investment from Sequoia Capital, led by partner, Sir Michael Moritz — who will also be joining the company’s board of directors. Although Skyscanner declined to disclose the size of the investment, the company did choose to disclose that the investment came at a whopping valuation of $800 million. That’s a head-turning amount, especially considering that, according to CrunchBase, Skyscanner has raised $5.2 million to date and, as we mentioned above, was seeing $30 million in turnover a year ago. Skyscanner must have really put its foot on the monetization accelerator over the last 12 months. Although, to put this in context, this is a trend that’s been afoot for awhile now among venture investors, as older funds are looking to decade-old, time-tested startups that have been largely bootstrapped. Accel and Sequoia did the same for Qualtrics — hat tip to my colleague Anthony Ha for pointing that out — and Accel did the same for Lynda.com, which raised $103 million after going 15-plus years without taking a cent in outside investment. There are no sure bets on either side of the coin — investing or building — but these are about as close as one can get. I believe some may call it “risk management,” while others would say “timidity,” but either way, it’s a testament to what Skyscanner has been able to build over the last 10 years. Sir Moritz was an early investor in Google, LinkedIn, YouTube andYou've Got Until Sunday To Apply For San Francisco's Entrepreneurship In Residence Program
Oct 03, 1:22AM
Last month, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announced an entrepreneurship-in-residence program for startups solving public sector problems. Now there's an actual application deadline and that deadline (this Sunday, October 6) is coming up. In some ways, the program's head, Rahul Mewawalla (he's on the right of the photo with Lee and Lee's chief innovation officer Jay Nath), embodies the idea of building a bridge between government and the tech world — his résumé includes positions at Nokia, NBC Universal, GE, and Yahoo. Mewawalla acknowledged that EIR programs aren't new (definitely not new at VC firms, and not entirely new on the government side either), but he said San Francisco's is the first to have a strong "product focus."Amazon's Smartphones Detailed: 'Project Smith' 3D Flagship Model And A Value Handset With FireOS
Oct 03, 12:02AM
Amazon is in the process of developing two smartphones, one inexpensive model and one with a 3D eye-tracking interface, TechCrunch has learned. The details are somewhat sparse, but are corroborated by sources and reports from earlier this year. Amazon is planning two devices, the first of which is the previously rumored ‘expensive’ version with a 3D user interface, eye tracking and more. Both devices were under the ‘Project B’ moniker before the news was leaked on WSJ earlier this year. The expensive model’s code-name has since been changed to ‘Duke’ and now ‘Smith’ — and a release is not planned this year. Details of the devices appeared on a HN posting via a throwaway account earlier today and TechCrunch verified some aspects of the posting with our sources and came away with some additional information. They match up with details from the WSJ report: But the people familiar with the plans said the smartphone and set-top box are just two elements of a broader foray into hardware that also includes the audiostreaming device and the high-end smartphone with the 3-D screen. Inside Amazon’s Lab126 facility in Cupertino, Calif., where each of the devices have been under development, the efforts are known as Project A, B, C and D, or collectively the Alphabet Projects, said the people familiar with the plans. The ‘Smith’ project includes a device that sounds like a bit of a hardware beast. The screen itself is not 3D but the device features four cameras, one at each corner of the device that will be used to track eye and head motions in order to move the interface around to ‘give the impression’ of 3D. Instead of using the phone’s internal sensors, like Apple does with iOS 7, it would base the movements off of the user’s point of view. Theoretically, this will provide a more accurate 3D representation of the screen’s contents. There has been some software testing on a feature that will recognize the user’s face and ignore other faces around it, so as not to project 3D perspectives that are proper for your neighbors, but not for you. Another feature said to be planned for the device, but not yet locked for release, is an image recognition feature that lets users take a shot of any real-world object and match it to an Amazon product for purchase. The possibility of this object recognition model offsetting some ofSen. Feinstein Claims The NSA Does Collect Phone Call Location Information, Contradicting The NSA
Oct 02, 11:50PM
Today Senator Feinstein stated that the NSA phone metadata program that collects records on the telephone calls of American citizens includes location information. Previously, head of the NSA, General Keith B. Alexander, stated that the NSA was not currently collecting call location data under the authority of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. It was left open that other authorization could allow for, and be currently used to, collect location data. It was revealed today that in the past a program at least tried to collect this data. Here’s the Senator, as quoted by McClatchy: "I've listened to this program being described as a surveillance program. It is not. There is no content collected by the NSA. There are bits of data – location, telephone numbers – that can be queried when there is reasonable and articulable suspicion." [Emphasis: TechCrunch] So there’s that. The NSA refused to admit that it had never collected call record data. It was later forced to admit that a program had existed. Now, it claims that, under one element of the Patriot Act, it is not still doing so. Following that, Senator Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (giving her likely an expanded knowledge set compared to other senators), directly stated that the NSA does track location data. What odds would you lay that more is going to come out concerning the NSA tracking the location of our every phone call? In other news, Senator Feinstein today vowed to crush a reform bill in the Senate that would end the phone metadata surveillance program. Top Image Credit: David LeeGoogle Acquires YC-Backed Flutter, A Gesture Recognition Technology Startup, For Around $40M
Oct 02, 11:06PM
Google's Glass, Android and other products may soon be picking up more Kinect-style gesture features: the company has bought Flutter, a Y Combinator-backed startup that focuses on gesture recognition technology. Its first and only product -- an app that provides gesture detection and recognition from standard webcam devices -- will remain live and operational, the company says."Piano Hero" Concept Video Makes Me Want To Try To Learn The Piano For The 500th Time
Oct 02, 11:00PM
Take a piano. Strap a projector above it. Build a Guitar Hero-esque interface that shows upcoming notes, and project it down onto the top surface and keys. What do you get? The piano instructor of the freakin' future. Or, at least, a piano instructor that won't yell at you and make you wish you decided to stick with soccer after all.How Microsoft Built The Cameras In The Upcoming Kinect
Oct 02, 10:40PM
Earlier this week I traveled to Microsoft’s Mountain View campus to play with the company’s new Kinect sensor. While there I met with a few of the team’s engineers to discuss how they had built the new device. Up front, two things: The new Kinect sensor is far cooler than I expected. Also, I touched an Xbox One. The story of the Kinect device, both its first and second generations, has been a favorite Microsoft narrative for some time, as it fuses its product teams and basic research group in a way that demonstrates the potential synergy between the two. The new Kinect sensor is a large improvement on its predecessor. Technically it has a larger field of vision, more total pixels, and a higher resolution that allows it to track the wrist of a child at 3.5 meters, Microsoft told me. I didn’t have a kid with me, so I couldn’t verify that directly. It also contains a number of new vision modes that the end user won’t see, but are useful for developers who want to track the human body more precisely and with less interference. They include a depth mode, an infrared view, and new body modeling tools to track muscle use and body part orientation. When in its depth image mode, acting as a radar of sorts, each of the 220,000 pixels that the Kinect sensor supports records data independently. The result is a surprisingly crisp mapping of the room you are in. The new Kinect also contains a camera setting that is light invariant, in that it works the same whether there is light in the room or not. In practice this means you can Kinect in the dark, and that light pollution – say, aiming two floodlights directly at the sensor – doesn’t impact its performance. I did get to test that directly, and it worked as promised. No, I don’t know the candlepower of the light array we used, but it was enough to suck staring into directly. So, developers can now accept motion data from the Kinect without needing to worry about the user being properly lit, or having their data go to hell if someone turns on the overhead light, or time sets the sun. The new Kinect also supports new joints in its skeletal tracking, in case you need to better watch a user’s hands move about. The smallest objectDell Tries To Crack The Android Tablet Code (Again) With The Venue 7 & 8
Oct 02, 10:18PM
Dell rounded up a slew of journalists in New York today to show off a number of new gadgets -- including some shiny new XPS notebooks and convertibles -- but the company is finally making good on promises of a big tablet push. And among that portfolio of tablets are two low-cost options that run Android. Really, Dell?TC Cribs: ModCloth, Where Playing Dress-Up Is All In A Day's Work
Oct 02, 9:00PM
It's not often that visiting a tech startup makes you want to amp up your wardrobe. But that's exactly the feeling you get when you step inside the headquarters of ModCloth, the San Francisco-based company that sells vintage inspired womenswear. At ModCloth HQ, the number of cute dresses per employee is much higher than at the average startup -- and with photoshoots for the heavily trafficked ModCloth site going on daily, everyone has some real incentive to look their best.Tesla Takes A Breather Passing $184/Share Due To Outstanding Convertible Debt, Warrants
Oct 02, 8:51PM
Tesla has been on a tear in 2013, showing its first quarterly profit, raising $1 billion in cash, paying off its government loan, and enjoying a more than 400% gain in its share price year to date. Today, however, Tesla slipped 6%, settling around the $180 per share mark. After having risen to a 52 week high of $191.83, Tesla has eased. A good portion of the slip can likely be attributed to some early terms that got outdated quickly due to Tesla’s meteoric rise. There actually appear to be a few factors, including declining institutional investment and its stock price reaching levels that impact the convertible notes and warrants that Tesla sold in May. At that point in time, Tesla traded for under $100 per share. In its August 7th investor letter, Tesla spelled out its fundraising activity during the quarter, including the sale of 4.5 million shares and the raising of $660 million in convertible debt. About 45% of those funds were used to repay a Federal loan, and a fee for repaying the debt ahead of schedule. The convertible debt carries a 1.5% coupon rate, which is quite low, and on the lower end of expectations set at the time of sale. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the size of the convertible note offering was increased twice to $600 million, a figure that could rise to $660 million if “underwriters purchase additional shares.” They did. So, the full tally of new cash for Tesla tipped past the $1 billion mark. Then its stock continue to rise. Here’s Tesla on how it raised the set up the convertible debt to avoid potential dilution. Recall that Tesla traded for under $100 per share at the time of its issuance: To mitigate the potential dilution impact from the issuance of convertible debt to our common shareholders, we also entered into a call spread to increase the effective conversion price from $125 to $184 per share. The call spread allows us to avoid incremental dilution from the convertible debt until our common share price climbs past $184. Tesla recently went past the $184 per share mark, and then saw its stock fall. The company also issued warrants this May – the time of the share sale and debt issuance – that had a strike price of, you guessed it, $184.84. Those warrants are for 5.3 million shares, or around $1 billion at currentFacebook And Cisco Let Brick-&-Mortars Demand Customers Check-In To Get Wi-Fi
Oct 02, 8:50PM
![IMG_4980[2]](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/img_49802.png?w=100&h=70&crop=1)
Restaurants, hotels, and other businesses are spending a lot to provide customers with free Wi-Fi. Today Facebook and Cisco roll out a way to help them recoup their costs by asking users to check-in to get Internet access. Those who oblige get dropped on the business' Facebook Page, and their anonymous, aggregate demographic info is passed to the merchant.Gay Gets Better (And More Targeted): Say Hello To The Next Generation Of Grindr
Oct 02, 8:21PM
Boys who prefer kissing other boys will be glad to know that Grindr, the location-based hookup app focused on gay men, has today released a huge update with a handful of new features and a brand new look and feel, including an all-new logo. To date, Grindr has over 7 million downloads worldwide, with over one billion chat messages sent each month and 1 billion photos sent every two months.RadiumOne Finalizes IPO Plan As It Hits ~$100M In AdTech Revenue
Oct 02, 7:32PM
RadiumOne is completing selection of which bankers will underwrite its IPO, which it plans to secretly file for soon, according to a source close to its Wall Street negotiations. The advertising tech company is said to have nearly $100 million in yearly revenue, and hopes to draft off of successful IPOs by fellow adtech provider RocketFuel and Twitter, which also filed a secret S-1.Court Docs Reveal Reputed Silk Road Founder's Alleged Murder-For-Hire Plot
Oct 02, 6:50PM
For two and a half years, Silk Road was the Deep Web’s worst keep secret. The underground site was infamous for drug trafficking, gun running and murder for hire – a veritable rogues gallery for underground dealers. Since launching in 2011, the site generated over $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions. It was one of the not-so-secret successes of the underground web. The site was taken offline today and the founder, Ross William Ulbricht, a/k/a “Dread Pirate Roberts”, charged with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, soliciting murder, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing. It is the end of a strange era in computer security when one man and a team of salesmen, programmers, and cryptographers kept the government at bay for two solid years. The court filing reveals in explicit terms the lengths Ulbricht’s site went to ensure its users anonymity and details the violent means he allegedly used to protect himself and the site. The image of Ulbricht comes from his LinkedIn profile. What follows are excerpts from the court document compiling the notes of Special Agent Christopher Tarbell of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Incidentally, Silk Road users, take note: Ulbricht instituted a multi-layer system that protected your identity, but it wasn’t perfect as it seems Silk Road vendors were the weak link in the system. Read on for more details. Anon Transactions Tarbell explains in detail Silk Road’s transaction process. Silk Road uses a so–called “tumbler” to process Bitcoin transactions in a manner designed to frustrate the tracking of individual transactions through the Blockchain. According to the Silk Road wiki, Silk Road’s tumbler “sends all payments through a complex, semi–random series of dummy transactions, . . . making it nearly impossible to link your payment with any coins leaving the site.” In other words, if a buyer makes a payment on Silk Road, the tumbler obscures any link between the buyer’s Bitcoin address and the vendor’s Bitcoin address where the Bitcoins end up — making it fruitless to use the Blockchain to follow the money trail involved in the transaction, even if the buyer’s and vendor’s Bitcoin addresses are both known. Based on my training and experience, the only function served by such “tumblers” is to assist with the laundering of criminal proceeds. Special Agent Tarbell acknowledges that Bitcoins are an anonymous, decentralized form of electronic currency,LinkedIn's Mobile Update Telegraphs Its Interest In Endorsement Data
Oct 02, 6:12PM
LinkedIn has updated its iPhone app with the ability to create endorsements for your connections right from your smartphone or tablet. The move demonstrates how important LinkedIn feels that this endorsement data is to its growing trove of signals. The app has also been updated to look more ‘iOS 7-ready’ and has a new on-boarding guide for users that haven’t used the mobile app before. The LinkedIn newsreader app Pulse for iPhone also gets a refresh which adds background downloading and a new look on iOs 7. But the biggest change is the emphasis on endorsements in the main LinkedIn app, and the additional connective tissue that this adds to its products on all platforms. In a blog post announcing the new ability today, LinkedIn positions endorsements as something that can and should be done on the fly. Previously, these kinds of personal recommendations have only been accessible from the web and were a fairly involved affair. You could draw a fairly clear connection between endorsements and the references you see on a resume. Thorough, in-depth explanations of why someone is good at what they do. Adding them to mobile, along with the language in the release, indicates that LinkedIn wants to ramp up the gathering of these endorsements. Faster, lighter notes about why someone should be considered an expert sounds like a good supplemental source of data that LinkedIn can use to index and recommend workers. Though endorsements have been around since late last year — and LinkedIn says that over 2B of them have been given to day — adding them to mobile introduces a new dynamic. In some ways this sounds like what Geeklist has been doing with developers and tech folks for a while. Geeklist allows users to create ‘brag cards’ of achievements and accomplishments that can be summed up in just a couple of sentences. If LinkedIn is able to turn endorsements into this kind of quick-fire card stack that can be flipped through by users and indexed by LinkedIn itself, it might have something interesting on its hands. Specifically, a source of endorsements that’s more human and parseable. LinkedIn has gained a reputation for being overly complex and dry. A layer of humanity and shareable ‘brag points’ could do something to offset that. These moves fit in with LinkedIn’s efforts to make online resumes feel more at home on mobile. Messaging services for networking andCardFlight, The Stripe For Real-World Payments, Has Raised $1.6 Million From ff Venture Capital
Oct 02, 6:00PM
CardFlight was founded to enable any developer to create his or her own branded app and take in-person credit card payments from it. To accomplish this, it's raised $1.6 million in funding as it moves to support more customers with its card reader and mobile SDKs.Bitcoin Falls 15% Following FBI's Silk Road Seizure
Oct 02, 5:51PM
Bitcoin is taking it on the chin following the FBI seizure of Silk Road, a popular – and partially hidden – marketplace for drugs and other items generally outside the orbit of the law. As TechCrunch reported earlier today, about $1.2 billion in Bitcoin flowed through Silk Road, resulting in a nearly $80 million commission for the service. Bitcoin is responding as you would expect, as a core market that accepted it has been taken down, the federal government hemming in on its slice of the web: By rapidly shedding value. Bitcoin traded as high as $145 per coin at the end of September. Today, it’s trading around the $119 mark. RealTimeBitCoin is reporting a buy-sell spread of $118.10 to $119. This squares with another data source tracking the Mt. Gox Bitcoin-Dollar exchange rate, which places the current trading range at nearly precisely the $118 level. Here’s a chart as compiled by Clark Moody: That’s quite the drop. And it is not really that surprising: With Silk Road out of the picture for the foreseeable future, if not forever, quite a few folks now have Bitcoins burning a hole in their digital wallets. If they can’t use them, what to do? Sell, obviously. And an exodus of that scale pushes prices down. There is also a factor of fear at play. Bitcoin has accreted to itself a modicum of respectability in recent months, failing to collapse as some predicted, and instead showing off a level of price stability that has almost surprised. Until today, of course. Bitcoin started the day at around the $139 mark. At its current level of $118, Bitcoin has lost around 15% of its value. Keep watching the charts. [Update: Bitcoin is trading around the $113 mark, and continues to decline. To stay up to date, click here.] Top Image Credit: Hamed Al-RaisiIf 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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