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Play-i Raises $1.4M From The Crowd For Toy Robots That Make Programming Kid-Friendly, Comes To Stores Near You Next Summer
Dec 07, 4:01AM
If we’re going to prepare future generations for an increasingly technical world (and workforce) ahead, then we need to teach them computer science and engineering. To some, that may sound like a no-brainer, but to the American educational system, where nine out of ten schools don’t offer programming courses, it not. Of course, to really get students engaged and inspire that lifelong love of computer science and technology — just as it is with learning a new language — education has to start early. And it has to be fun. Learning how to code takes time and is a difficult proposition for adults, so asking kids to sit down and write a line of code (let alone learn the laws of computer science) almost seems absurd. It’s this problem that led Vikas Gupta, the former head of consumer payments at Google, to create Play-i and a couple of kid-friendly, educational robots. Joined by co-founders Saurabh Gupta, who previously led the iPod software team at Apple, and Mikal Greaves, who led product design and manufacturing for electronics and toys at Frog Design, to make programming and engineering concepts accessible to kids, who’d rather be outside digging in the dirt. The team knew that whatever solution they designed would need to be something kids would want to play with, so they created Bo and Yana, two programmable, interactive robots that look and act a lot like toys. The team raised $1 million from Google Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and others last year to build the prototypes, and today, though it’s still tinkering with details, the learning system is nearly ready for lift-off. When it comes to market next year, kids will be able to play with Bo and Yana right out of the box, controlling them through Play-i’s companion app designed for the iPad. The app presents visual sequences of actions and simple commands on the iPad that kids can then perform — like clapping, waving their hand or shaking one of the robots — that compel the robots to perform certain actions. Young programmers can get three-wheeled Bo to scoot around the room, blink his light or play a xylophone, shake Yana to roar like a lion, or have them interact with each other. Through actionable storytelling, play and music, younguns start to learn the most basic concepts behind programming, like causation. The coolest idea behind the interactive learning system isFacebook Videos Now Auto-Play On Mobile, Expect Video Ads Soon
Dec 07, 2:52AM
FB could look a lot more like TV soon. While Vine and Instagram Video are booming, you don't see many people natively uploading videos to Facebook. But now Facebook is bringing auto-play for native videos to all users after testing the feature in September. And it's just the beginning of a huge push to put Facebook in motion.Inside India's Aadhar, The World's Biggest Biometrics Database
Dec 07, 1:36AM
India’s Unique Identification project, also known as Aadhar, earlier this week finished capturing demographic and biometric data of over half a billion residents–the largest biometric project of its kind currently in the world. It’s been a multi-year effort not without its critics among privacy and security advocates and others. The latest development this week concerned the method that Aadhar is using to capture, store and manage the data, and the role a startup from the U.S. called MongoDB may be playing in it. MongoDB, a NoSQL database startup, last year raised funding from the CIA-backed In-Q-Tel, an independent non-profit venture backed by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. During past few days, several reports in the Indian media have quoted political parties and activists, raising questions about whether sensitive data is being compromised by Aadhar, headed by the Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani. Some of the reports have linked the controversy with MongoDB. Governments across the world are raising concerns over spying by the National Security Agency, and anything even remotely associated with U.S. government intelligence agencies is enough to cause uproar. Moreover, with general elections set to be held next hear, political rhetoric is at an all time high in India. Still, the timing of these allegations couldn’t have been worse, at least for the ambitious identification project, which is waiting for a parliament bill to be passed this year to be established as a fully constitutional authority. I took a tour of Aadhar’s offices in Bangalore, and the truth of the matter, according to officials I spoke to, is that while some have alleged large contracts that include sharing data with MongoDB, the reality is that Aadhar is using MongoDB open source code that doesn’t touch sensitive data. The meeting also offered an opportunity to understand how the biggest biometrics database on earth is functioning, and dealing with concerns of security and privacy. Moreover, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), refuted allegations of sharing Indian residents’ data with any U.S. agencies. What Aadhar means for India To set the context right here about Aadhar, and what it means for a country like India, more than half a billion people have no official ID of any kind, which makes it impossible for them to receive government aids, open a bank account, get a loan, get a driving license, and so on. The database project, which is now enrolling over one million IndiansToday In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs
Dec 07, 12:56AM
Good morning and how do you do? Do you enjoy all of your limbs and organs? Good! Keep them healthy because these Dystopian War Robots are sure to want them when they come to power. To begin with, we present the two-armed worker robot from Seiko Epson. Designed to work a great deal like the now-famous Baxter, this robot will be available in 2016 and be used to help – and later harm – factory workers in their daily tasks. It can be trained to assist – and later assault – its human counterparts and is, for the time being, called “the autonomous dual-arm robot” and will later be called “My lordship.” It seems, however, that our own lovable Baxter is seeing the competition creeping up and is doing more to assimilate. For example, Active Robots is offering a program for Baxter than will allow him to solve a Rubik’s Cube with nary a whimper. The robot will methodically make all the colors match – and smile the whole time – while viewers are lulled into a dull sense of safety. Then he will pounce. Oh, how he will pounce. Finally we have a charming bipedal robot from the University of Michigan. Named Margo, this old girl can traipse around like a two-legged, high-stepping heifer until it’s time to start doing a little face stomping on the front lines of the human/robot wars. The revolution will be televised and Margo will probably be holding the camera. Until next time, wet spots, keep your eyes on the skies!Architect Bradley Rothenberg Does 3D-Printed Fashion At The Annual Victoria's Secret Show
Dec 07, 12:48AM
The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is about so much more than lingerie. Over the years the annual event, which took place in Manhattan in mid-November and airs December 10, has grown into a mega-beast of elaborate outfits, wings, glitter, and musical performances. Of course, all the images of this year's show have leaked. One that caught our eye was of a delicate, snowflake-inspired, 3D-printed bustier.Ask A VC: Redpoint's Geoff Yang On What Makes A Successful Entrepreneur
Dec 06, 11:38PM
In this week's Ask A VC episode, Redpoint partner Geoff Yang joined us in the studio to talk about entrepreneurship, international investing and much more.
Flurry Raises Another $12.5M For Mobile Analytics And Advertising
Dec 06, 10:54PM
Mobile analytics company Flurry has raised $12.5 million in new funding, as first revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and confirmed by a Flurry spokesperson.NSA Claims Collecting Cellphone Location Data Is Legal Under Executive Order — From 1981
Dec 06, 10:34PM
Today the National Security Agency (NSA) discussed its program that collects billions of cellphone location records each day. The NSA targets foreign phones but also absorbs data on the phones of American citizens.Beeline Bikes Is Like A Homejoy Or Uber For Bike Repair
Dec 06, 10:01PM
While there are thousands of small, independently owned bike shops across the country and in bike-friendly cities like San Francisco, it’s still a pain to bring your bike in for a tune-up. There’s scheduling, and then there’s the hassle of not having a bike for several days. That’s why Peter Buhl, a former longtime partner at BlueRun Ventures who served on the boards of companies like PayPal, had been thinking about a way to address this problem for the past 15 years. He started Beeline Bikes, which is kind of like an Uber or Homejoy for bike tune-ups. They have mobile vans, outfitted with all kinds of parts (see below) and trained mechanics that can fix up many bikes over the course of a day. The nine-person startup has three initial vans and the plan is to cater to startups and tech companies up and down the peninsula and in San Francisco. They’ll also do house calls to families as well. The price for a basic tune-up is $80, but they’ll discount it to $65 with multiple bikes. Each tune-up takes about 30 to 45 minutes and they have concierge levels of service for higher-end bikes. They’ll also do other services like bike fittings and overhauls. “Our goal is to be the virtual bike shop for all the tech companies here,” Buhl said. “This works in cycling dense areas down on the Peninsula and in the Bay Area.” He estimates that the local Bay Area market alone is worth about $6 to 10 million per year, but if you expanded the concept nationally, it could be worth $100 million. Beeline becomes yet another services or logistics startup like Uber, Homejoy, Exec, Postmates, Instacart and others, that use mobile devices and the web to coordinate large networks of service providers. Unlike some of these other companies, Beeline does not rely on contractors. It wholly owns its vans, and the mechanics are full-time employees, although they would be open to exploring a franchising model if they expanded nationally. The company has raised a half-million dollars in seed funding from 15 angels including IronPort founder Scott Banister, Canaan Partner Deepak Kamra, Like.com founder Munjal Shah, BlueRun Ventures partners Jonathan Ebinger and John Malloy and Brian Nesmith.Wisely Helps You Find Where To Shop Or Eat Based On Real Consumer Spending Patterns, Not User Reviews
Dec 06, 10:00PM
When looking for a new place to eat, drink or shop, most people turn to local recommendations services like Yelp, Google Places, or Foursquare, for example. A new mobile application called Wisely, launching today, has a different idea. Instead of user reviews, Wisely taps into actual transaction data, allowing you to filter searches by things like popularity or average bill size.Gift Guide: Five Kitchen Gadgets Your Foodie Will Eat Right Up
Dec 06, 9:58PM
More food is consumed during the holiday season than any other time. But that's the thing with food; you can't stay full forever. And so these gadgets, services and tools should serve your food-friendly loved ones quite handily. We'll cover a range of products, including an ingredient-delivery service, a magical scale that measures the nutrition of your food, and one very special ice cube. Everyone from a master chef to a home cook should have a blast with this gift guide, so let's waste no more time and crack some eggs.Bitcoin Value Loses Its Mind As Trading Lags On The Mt.Gox Exchange
Dec 06, 9:07PM
Bitcoin is acting up at the moment. Following a steep decline that saw the currency trade at prices not seen since late November, trading of Bitcoin on the Mt.Gox exchange has gone crackerdog. It has fallen into a pattern of very rapid rises and falls that end and begin in a very tight, specific trading range. The following is a chart using one-minute ticks to track the price of Bitcoin on the Mt.Gox exchange for today: Trading on Mt.Gox is also seeing massive delays, with the current lag listed as almost 40 minutes. So, I doubt that anyone has an idea about what is going on. Other Bitcoin exchanges, such as Btc-e are displaying similar prices for the currency, so the trading price on Mt.Gox isn’t itself too batty. Instead, current trading patterns themselves are inscrutable, unless we presume some sort of algorithmic allergic reaction to current trading lag. In the meantime, if you can get your trades through, there is likely a decent arbitrage possibility at play, though trading lag times could make any such activity incredibly risky. Coinbase has Bitcoin at $848, and Btc-e at $865. The currency was over the $1,000 mark yesterday. Bitcoin: Still not that mature. China While Bitcoin works through whatever bug or issue is causing its current trading pattern, we need to keep in mind the broader context of the current market position of the currency. A recent decision by the Chinese government to ban financial institutions from trading in the currency cut at its potential to become a global repository for value outside of the control of nation states. Today, news that Baidu has ceased to accept Bitcoin is pushing the currency’s value down. To lose a company like Baidu at once lowers the inherent utility of Bitcoin, and also directly contravenes the narrative that Bitcoin was starting to find wide integration into the world of e-commerce, thus granting it legitimacy, and perhaps improved stability. Chinese demand has been a key supplier of recently robust demand for Bitcoin, comprising an increasing percentage of Bitcoin’s trading volume. If that driver slips, so too could the value, and market interest in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has fallen from over $1,200 since the Chinese news cycle broke. That’s a steep decline — about 30 percent — in a few days. The question now becomes what will bring upside back to Bitcoin? Top Image Credit: FlickrGillmor Gang Live 12.06.13 (TCTV)
Dec 06, 9:06PM
Gillmor Gang - John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today. Like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/GillmorGangMicrosoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy A Chromebook
Dec 06, 8:24PM
About a week after posting its first anti-Chromebook “Scroogled” video, which features the cast of “Pawn Stars,” Microsoft is now back with a second video. But instead of revisiting the humorous approach of the first one, the company has brought back its regular man-on-the-street routine for the second. In this video, Microsoft Evangelist Ben Rudolph is tasked with walking the streets of Venice, Calif., to ask people if they would rather have a Chromebook or a Windows laptop. No surprise — nobody wants the Chromebook. Obviously, everybody he asks either needs Photoshop, Illustrator or a Microsoft Office app. None of these run on a Chromebook (assuming you leave out Microsoft’s Office Web Apps. “If that doesn’t have the capability to run Microsoft Office, it’s kind of useless to me,” one lady tells Rudolph. As in the first ad, Microsoft also plays up the fact that ChromeOS is meant to be online most of the time, conveniently forgetting that there are plenty of offline ChromeOS apps available by now. Instead of a cheap Chromebook, the ad tells viewers, they should rather buy an Asus T100, 10.1-inch Windows 8 machine with a detachable touchscreen. “This one is the same price, about $300 bucks,” Rudolph says. Actually, try more like $400. And running Photoshop and Illustrator on it won’t bring you much joy either. The people on the street are obviously wowed that they can detach the screen and turn it into a tablet, though people haven’t exactly been lining up to buy convertible laptops so far. Given that Chromebooks make up about 1 percent of the PC market, Microsoft is mostly increasing mainstream awareness of these devices with its ads, as The Verge’s Tom Warren pointed out earlier today. Despite this low market share, Microsoft clearly sees Chromebooks as a threat, though, and chances are we’ll see a few more of these videos over time.Former Square Wallet Lead, Google PM Raise $1.2M For Secret (Which Is A Secret)
Dec 06, 8:22PM
David Byttow, the former technical lead for Square Wallet, and Chrys Bader-Wechseler, a former Google product manager at Google+, Photovine and YouTube, are raising $1.2 million for a new stealth startup called Secret. “Nothing is a secret these days,” Bader-Wechseler said, declining to comment on his startup or the round. Byttow designed the infrastructure for Square’s partnership with Starbucks, and was a previous technical lead at Google+. Bader-Wechseler was brought into Google after creating a photo app called Treehouse and a video service laced around Twitter called Vidly. He released Photovine, Google’s competitive entrant into the photo-sharing space,before it folded and he joined the Google+ effort. We hear the seed round includes investors like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Google Ventures and KPCB, but Bader-Wechseler declined to comment or confirm any of that.YC Alum MobileWorks Aims To Make Acquiring Users Easier (For A Price) With LeadGenius
Dec 06, 8:02PM
Startup founders, especially those up to their necks in product development, don’t always have the head for building the kinds of customer bases required to keep their business afloat. That’s where Y Combinator alum MobileWorks comes in. It first raised funding for its approach to building a virtual, on-demand workforce, and now it’s trying to bring that distributed team to bear on another weighty problem: building up a user base. Long story short, MobileWorks CEO Anand Kulkarni is trying to offer user acquisition as a service with a feature called LeadGenius (though I think we can all agree that UAaaS doesn’t have a great ring to it). If you’re a company looking to drum up some new users, the process seems simple enough — you shell out your monthly fee depending on the level of support you need and let the LeadGenius team do its thing. That “thing” naturally involves plenty of conversations. “They’ll come to us and talk about where they found their first users and what they look like,” Kulkarni explained. “From there we discuss where to find reproducible sources of users.” Once that team has dug into the meat of a business, they’ll start trawling sources like LinkedIn, Kickstarter, and even CrunchBase in search of leads that could stand to benefit from a client’s offerings. Of course, much of that legwork can be invisible to the company that requested it — LeadGenius handles some of the initial outreach and qualification so in the end that client company gets leads to try to seal the deal with. Kulkarni says a “good number” of LeadGenius customers are startups like Firebase and Zenefits; considering MobileWorks’ background, it comes as little surprise that many of its users are fellow Y Combinator companies. There are some key larger clients in the mix too, though thanks to some pesky NDAs I can’t name names — one is a notable player in payments and the other is a prominent e-commerce entity. But there’s a fine line between reaching out to a third party for assistance and dumping the job on them entirely, and MobileWorks isn’t ready to cross into that new frontier just yet. For now, the onus of actually making those crucial sales still falls on the client. “We’re one step short of sales as service,” Kulkarni noted. He added that a more sales-centric push may not be completely out of the question, but
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Moto X, Drone Hacks, And Gift Guides Galore
Dec 06, 8:00PM
Happy Friday, lovers. Gift Guide season is upon us, which is why we spend a good chunk of this podcast discussing smart gifts to buy your friends and loved ones. But that didn’t stop us from chatting up the Cyber Monday drama over at Motorola during the Moto X promotion, or the SkyJack drone hack that turns one drone into the leader of an aerial army. Listen in to all this and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, and Darrell Etherington. Enjoy! We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right here. Click here to download an MP3 of this show. You can subscribe to the show via RSS. Subscribe in iTunes Intro Music by Rick Barr.Nickelodeon Vets Debut BatteryPOP, A Kid-Safe, Kid-Programmed Online Network
Dec 06, 7:01PM
YouTube may be a popular destination for kids, but parents know that it's not a kid-friendly one. One innocent video of Elmo singing leads to others of him cursing and slinging racial slurs. That's why two Nickelodeon vets have created BatteryPOP - an online and mobile destination where children ages six to eleven can safely browse through cartoons, comedy, music videos and more, sending their favorites to the top of the heap by "popping" them - a mechanism which could one day pave the way to make BatteryPOP a farm league for the major networks, like Nick or the Cartoon Channel, for example.National Geographic Offers Up Over 500 Maps Through Google Maps Engine's Public Data Program
Dec 06, 6:12PM
Google is launching an initiative to let organizations share their map data with the public, via Google's Maps product and cloud-based infrastructure, and today partner National Geographic announced their participation in the project and shared some info via the official Google Maps blog. The partnership will mean that more than 500 reference and historic maps will now be available to browse as an additional layer on Google's digital Maps engine.Y Combinator Introduces Safe, Its Alternative To Convertible Notes
Dec 06, 6:00PM
Years ago, Y Combinator helped popularize the convertible note as a way for startups that go through its accelerator to easily raise seed money they need to grow. That gave companies the flexibility to get cash quickly without having to worry about hiring lawyers and pricing early funding rounds. Now the accelerator is moving to a new convertible equity model with an investment instrument that it's calling "Safe," which stands for "simple agreement for future equity."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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