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Tuesday, 29 October 2013
Vulnerability lets attackers hijack iOS apps' web requests over WiFi (video)
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Garage Where Steve Jobs Started Apple Designated as Historic Site
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Changes coming to Engadget's RSS feed
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Peripheral Vision 009: Jesse Thorn on using the internet to create something meaningful
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Moto G drops by the Motorola website unannounced, doesn't stay long
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Yelp Beats The Street As Revenue Jumps 68% To $61M, Tempered By An EPS Loss Of $0.04
Yelp, the local online business and restaurant guide that has become the Web's go-to resource for reviews of local businesses since launching in 2004, announced its 2013 third quarter earnings after the market closed this afternoon. For the second straight quarter, the company beat expectations, with revenue coming in at $61.2 million in the third quarter and a per-share loss of $0.04.
Considering Yelp posted a greater-than-expected loss of $2.3 million, it wasn't a categorical victory, but it was a win nonetheless, with revenue increasing 80 percent from the same period in 2012, while cumulative reviews grew 42 percent year-over-year to more than 47.3 million, average unique visitors grew 41 percent year-over-year and local business accounts grew 61 percent to 57,000.
Wall Street expected Yelp to announce a loss of $0.01 per share on revenue of $59.40 million for the quarter. Yelp passed muster in revenues, seeing a net loss in the third quarter of 2013 of $2.3 million, or $0.04 per share, compared to a net loss of $2.0 million in the third quarter of 2012.
Thanks to a fairly consistent performance in recent quarters and solid progress from its local ads business, Yelp's stock price has increased 180 percent over the last six months. This is a strong signal that investor confidence has indeed returned for Yelp, even if many believe that the market is a little too bullish on the company at the moment.
The company's stock price had been hovering around $68 per share on Tuesday, and jumped 40 percent after earnings were released this afternoon.
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman attributed the growth this quarter to the company's renewed focus on its mobile experience, the launch of the Yelp Platform and July, and its hitting a record 117 million unique users over the last quarter.
“We saw another quarter of strong momentum thanks to the high-quality, authentic content contributed by Yelpers around the world,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp's chief executive officer. “Our focus on connecting consumers with great local businesses continues to drive our success. In the third quarter, we improved the user experience by adding the ability to write and post reviews from mobile and launched new features such as the customer activity feed for business owners. Looking to the rest of the year and beyond, we are well positioned to capture the large local opportunity ahead of us through our innovation around mobile, geographic expansion and closing the loop with local businesses.”
Other than that, after adjustments, Yelp's EBTIDA came in at $7.8 million for the third quarter, thanks in part to its mobile performance. The company showed 40 percent of its advertisements on mobile devices, which should be a boost considering companies in its class, like Facebook, have seen significant spikes in mobile revenue.
Comparatively, Yelp's 40 percent is only a 4 percent improvement on its first-quarter figure, which is important considering the company doesn't break out mobile revenue as many other companies do, instead limiting its report to mobile advertising share. Nonetheless, it's mobile ad business has seen consistent growth of late, and the company has been taking steps to improve its mobile experience, like finally giving users the ability to post reviews from its apps, for example.
Yelp's cash position is essentially unchanged in the past six months, growing by under $2 million to rest at the end of the quarter at $96 million in cash and equivalents. Its acquisition of SeatMe in early July for $12.7 million was announced at the time, but recorded as part of this quarter's financial statements.
All in all, Yelp booked a fairly solid performance in the third quarter, just beating expectations, keeping firm hold of its cash, while growing traffic and moving up and to the left in key performance metrics. The company has been expanding aggressively overseas, which from the reports today, appears to be proceeding as expected, without putting too much of a squeeze on capital.
During the third quarter, Yelp took its first steps into Latin America, for example, beginning with Brazil. Yelp will likely look to Brazil to act as a gateway to the region, helping it to secure a foothold in Latin America. Looking forward, the company will likely begin accelerating its international expansion over the next six months. While this could be a drain on profits in the short-term, Yelp could see significant gains in local ad revenues in the long run as it launches in new markets.
Yelp has been turning in solid quarters of late, but it must be said that, when compared to its generation of tech companies (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn among them), Yelp still has some catching up to do.
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HP hopes to make internet more sustainable with three new Moonshot servers
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Facebook latest random company said to be eyeing BlackBerry bid
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La cámara que graba lo que estás viendo solo si detecta que estás «mentalmente interesado»
Viniendo de los creadores de las orejas peludas que se controlan con la mente (las simpáticas Necomimi) y con esa forma de invento de baja tecnologÃa propio de Mortadelo o de Homer Simpson esta neurocámara que graba «cosas interesantes» tiene en realidad más enjundia de lo que parece a simple vista.
(Ejem) SÃ, parece una tipa con un móvil sujetado con las orejas. Pero el teléfono móvil que se ve es un iPhone y la diadema con la que se lleva alrededor de la cabeza es un detector de ondas cerebrales como las que hay en muchos juegos, instrumentos médicos o aparatos de entrenamiento mental.
La cámara graba lo que está viendo la persona, mediante el ingenioso truco de un espejo estilo periscopio que encaja con el objetivo de la cámara. El montaje puede parecer un poco cutre y raruno –en cierto modo lo es, para qué engañarnos– pero una vez todo instalado comienza lo interesante:
La cámara se calibra para grabar graba lo mismo que está viendo la persona que la lleva. Mediante una app especial se analizan al mismo tiempo las ondas cerebrales y cuando se calcula que el usuario está mostrando interés por algo que está viendo comienza a grabar. Si en la una escala de 0 a 100 se sobrepasa el valor 60 se dispara la grabación de un pequeño clip de 5 segundos. El resultado es una secuencia de videoclips sobre lo más interesante y emocionante que le sucede a la persona a lo largo del dÃa – «algo bastante diferente a pulsar un botón para empezar a grabar algo», dicen sus creadores.
De momento es un concepto, pero se ve bastante acabado. Además de que puede ser una buena alternativa del tipo «Google Glass para pobres» –con el plus del «control mental»– el formato gráfico de pÃldoras de fácil consumo, en forma de GIF animados o pelÃculas cortas es carne de red social: justo el tipo de material que más gusta a la gente hoy en dÃa.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/gadgets/camara-graba-si-estas-interesado.html
Twitter streams flooded with media in wake of latest iOS, Android and web update
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JIBE Secures $4 Million Credit Facility To Help Make Companies Better At Hiring
The last time we heard from TC50 alum JIBE, it locked up a $10 million Series B from the likes of Longworth Venture Partners (which led the round), Polaris Partners, Lerer Ventures, DFJ Gotham, and Thrive Capital in a bid to make it easier to apply for jobs from smartphones.
This time around, though, JIBE has more money to expand its operations but without having to offer up any equity in exchange - the team recently announced that it's secured a $4 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank as it prepares to flesh out its backend services for enterprise partners looking to hire the right people.
“We're helping to process hundreds of thousands of applications now,” CEO Joe Essenfeld told me. “But these companies really want to rely on data to see how the application and hiring process differs for different kinds of jobs.” Speaking of hiring, he also noted the JIBE team isn't complete just yet and that hiring would continue as the company prepares to move into a new office in Washington D.C.
As it happens, JIBE has already put part of its new plan into motion. Earlier this month it rolled out a suite of backend tools meant for recruiters. If you thought applying for a job was tough, think about what it must be like for the poor recruiter/HR person stuck trying to sift through that pile of applications.
Essenfeld said that three (sadly unnamed) Fortune 1000 companies jumped on the bandwagon when the startup released its recruiter analytics tools, which lets business insiders see where its applicants are coming from, how they stumbled upon the job opening, and how much time they spend on the application. Perhaps most important is the ability to pinpoint the moment those would-be employees give up on filling out their applications, which should give those companies some insight into how to smooth out the onboarding process.
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ResearchGate: “Forget About Revenue Until The Network Is Valuable Enough To Command It”
ResearchGate's Ijad Madisch lifelong ambition of winning a Nobel Prize for changing the way scientific research is undertaken piqued the interest of Valley investors several years ago.
Now with more than $35 million in funding from investors like Bill Gates, Benchmark, Founders Fund and Accel, he's running one of the Berlin's flagship startups with 3 million scientists using the site.
It wasn't such an obvious journey. Madisch had been working as a medical doctor in Boston several years ago. He asked for permission to go half-time on being a doctor, so that he could spend the other part of his time working on what would become ResearchGate, a LinkedIn-like social network for scientific researchers.
His manager told him it was a “birdshit” idea and that scientists by nature weren't very social.
Madisch went his own way, ultimately relocating back to Germany to build the company. Today on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin with Benchmark's Matt Cohler, he shared a few nuggets of wisdom from his path so far.
“I always was convinced that ResearchGate can change the world,” Madisch said. “The World Wide Web was created to exchange knowledge and now you can buy shoes online, but science is still the same.”
Cohler, who sits on the board, brought experience from his days as an early team member at LinkedIn and Facebook.
The pair really synced on the idea that ResearchGate needed to put off building a revenue model in favor of focusing on product and generating network effects.
One of Cohler's early pieces of advice to Madisch was to forget about revenue until the network was valuable enough to command it.
“We need to really create value for the scientists first. If we succeed with this, then we can start worrying about making money,” Madisch said. “You have to be very brave and experienced to give this advice. I wouldn't have gotten it from any East Coast or German VC investor. And it was the best thing we could have done.”
Madisch said the site, which attracts 1.4 million uploads of papers per month and 1300 data sets uploaded every few days, had led to a few breakthroughs.
There was a Nigerian scientist named Emmanuel Nnadi, who was studying pathogens and found a baby in a local hospital who had died in 28 days.
The cause of death was a mystery. Nnadi collected samples but had no equipment to analyze them. However, he connected with an Italian scientist on ResearchGate named Orazio Romeo, who agreed to study the samples. They discovered a new type of deadly pathogen that had previously only affected plants. It had mutated somehow to affect humans.
Now Madisch is working on ways to surface data to the right groups of scientists in a more automatic way.
“There are all these different connections, which we can draw using new technical architecture,” he said “We will find results, which we can only find because we connect the right data without doing any more research and this will change the whole world.”
As for the somewhat contrarian decision to relocate back to Germany and base the company in Berlin instead of Boston or Silicon Valley, ResearchGate's board member Cohler said that Boston lacks the foundations for helping consumer Internet companies grow.
“We always ask, ‘What's the best place in the world for a particular company given its culture, values?'” Cohler said. “We've got a pretty strong point of view that Silicon Valley and San Francisco is the right answer for many companies and that's why most of what we do is based there.”
He went on, “But I only had one strong point of view - that Boston was not the best possible place to built this company.”
Cohler said there were many reasons for this, but went on to say that Massachusetts labor laws have a chilling effect on how employees can move from startup to startup. Massachusetts strongly enforces non-compete agreements, unlike California. This affects how knowledge is transferred from generation to generation of startups and entrepreneurs.
Cohler said that Berlin has many of the right ingredients to be a strong startup hub, with a decent pool of technical talent, a low cost of living and a place at the intersection of technology and many other industries and cultures.
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If You Want to Talk Like a Silicon Valley CEO, Learn This Phrase
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The house where Steve Jobs built Apple is now a historic landmark
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Firefox 25 now official with guest browsing on Android
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Sprint's LTE network now covers all five NYC boroughs plus 45 additional markets
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Compromised Adobe account tally rises to include at least 38 million users
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Mapping our World, 25 vistas de la Tierra gracias a los satélites de la NASA
Con motivo de la celebración de la Semana de las Ciencias de la Tierra de 2013 la NASA ha publicado Mapping Our World , una web en la que se pueden ver hasta 25 conjuntos de datos distintos recogidos por doce de sus misiones.
Basta con pasar el puntero por encima de las partes en las que está dividido para que salga un pop-up (pero de los buenos, como los de la MTV) explicando de qué datos y de qué misión se trata.
Nivel de la superficie del mar medida por la Ocean Surface Topography Mission del satélite Jason-2
Al hacer clic en él se abre otro pop-up más grande en el que se pueden ver los datos con más detalle asà como los datos de la misión.
También está disponible para su descarga en formato PDF.
(VÃa MundoGEO).
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/mapping-our-world-25-vistas-de-la-tierra-gracias-a-los-satelites-de-la-nasa.html
Researchers beat fiber optic broadband speeds using visible LED light
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Yes, of course Nintendo is releasing its Zelda-themed 3DS XL in the US as well
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Dell officially goes private, says focus is on you
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UN hopes to avert asteroid apocalypse, will adopt early warning measures
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Tinder's Sean Rad Hints At A Future Beyond Dating, Says The App Sees 350M Swipes A Day
Sean Rad, founder and CEO mobile dating app Tinder, offered his broader vision for the app and hinted at future features today at Disrupt Europe.
Rad acknowledged that the “unwritten context” of Tinder right now is romantic relationships, but he argued that the basic mechanism, where two people are only connected when they both express interest in each other, is “a universal thing across friendships, across business, across anything.” The ultimate goal, he said, is to “overcome every single problem you have when it comes to making a new relationship.”
That may seem like a stretch, but maybe my boss Alexia Tsotsis (who interviewed Rad on-stage) represents Tinder's future - as she emphatically pointed out to the audience, she has a boyfriend, but she still uses the app to meet new people.
Rad suggested that there's been a larger shift, where social networks allow people to improve existing relationships, but they haven't made it easier to meet new people. That's because those new connections have developed a “hunter/hunted” dynamic, and social networks might even exacerbate that situation, making the hunters feel like they have to hunt more aggressively and the hunted feel more uncomfortable.
In terms of specific functionality, Rad suggested that Tinder (which already filters its recommendations by proximity) could become more closely tied to real-world locations. Eventually, he said users should be able to spot someone else they want to meet same room, find them on Tinder, and swipe right to show that they're interested in connecting right then and there. To make that happen, Tinder could do more to incorporate the context of who and where you are into its recommendations.
Rad also addressed the question of whether Tinder's interface encourages superficiality, since you're making connections based entirely on photos. He said that's something we do anyway, and that at least with Tinder, people are choosing the right picture to “express themselves.”
“Tinder is less superficial than our everyday lives, our everyday interactions with people,” he said.
The team behind Tinder actually launched a previous product, Cardify, at our Disrupt New York conference in 2012. Rad said that while working on Cardify, he became excited about the idea behind Tinder, and when Tinder took off, Cardify was put “on the shelf.”
When asked about Tinder's business model, Rad said the team is still focused on product and user growth, though they're considering a number of revenue options, including in-app purchases.
As for how much Tinder has actually grown, Rad said he couldn't share user counts, but he did reveal that the app sees 3.5 million matches and 350 million swipes a day. (About 30 percent of those are the right swipes that indicate interest.) And the app has seen 30 billion swipes and 300 million matches total.
One of those matches, by the way, was between Rad and his current girlfriend. Alexia asked him how that happened, and he replied, “She swiped right.”
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Digital Content Seller Gumroad Eyes International Growth With Payment Support In Japan
In what founder and CEO Sahil Lavingia said is its first feature built for international users, online sales platform Gumroad is annoucning that it's now accepting Japanese payments.
The company already worked with Japanese sellers. In fact, Lavingia said Japan is Gumroad's second largest market (after the United States). However, the actual payments required the use of PayPal - not exactly arduous, but not desirable either given Gumroad's goal of providing the simplest way for creative people to sell digital goods.
By integrating with Japan's Zengin system for money transfers, Lavingia said, “Any Japanese creator can now use Gumroad end-to-end, the way that they sort of expect.” Sellers are also able to localize their listings, so a visitor from Japan won't have to read the listing in English.
Gumroad quietly released the feature to Japanese sellers already, he said, resulting in a 28 percent increase in money processed for those sellers. Lavingia added that thanks to the new feature, some big Japanese sellers who left the system have now returned.
And yes, the company plans to do something similar in other countries: “Going from one to two is a lot more difficult than going from two to three.” Over time, he predicted that Gumroad could go beyond currency and language to become “smarter” about localization - for example, he noted that a lot of novels in Japan are written for SMS, so Gumroad could add a feature in that country for forwarding novels to a buyer's SMS account.
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Google+ full-res backups and background sync coming to iOS soon
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Google+ updates Auto Awesome with video support
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Google Hangouts updated with SMS support, animated GIFs and Auto Awesome for video calls
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William C. Lowe, the man behind the IBM PC, dies aged 72
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Facebook tests new version of Messenger for Android with a refreshed look, quicker access to chats
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Apple's iPhone 5c Was Never Meant to Be Entry-Level, Says Cook
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Kitten Delivery Promotion Leads to Uber Cat Shortage
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Microsoft's Remote Desktop app for Android, iOS and OS X nets 1 million downloads
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Payments Giant First Data Acquires Mobile Loyalty Startup Perka For ~$30M To Take On Square And PayPal In SMB Market
In an effort to catch up with Square and Paypal, payment processing giant First Data has been quietly increasing its presence in the mobile payments market. As the largest credit card processing company in the U.S. with over one trillion dollars in card transactions passing through its network each year, First Data is looking to throw its weight around - even if its competitors do have a head start.
Today, the payment infrastructure company announced that it has acquired Perka, the mobile loyalty startup whose launch TechCrunch was first to cover back in October, 2011.
Perka is First Data's second acquisition in October and follows its purchase of Andreessen Horowitz-backed mobile payments startup, Clover, two weeks ago. With its acquisition of Clover, First Data has been looking to ramp up its support for small businesses, particular around point-of-sale (POS) infrastructure.
The move enables First Data to give customers that are using its old school credit card terminals an opportunity to upgrade without having to turn to the Squares and PayPal Here's of the world. And, today, by adding Perka's subscription mobile loyalty services to the mix, First Data is beginning to build out the other side of its fledgling in-store payment solution.
While terms of the Perka deal were not disclosed, sources tell us that the acquisition price was slightly lower than what it had paid for Clover, which we have confirmed in a 10K filing (page 71) to be a net-cash consideration of $34.1 million.
Alan Chung, Perka's co-founder and CEO, said that the startup's 8 product developers and 28 total employees are still with the company and that Perka will continue to operate autonomously out of its Portland, Oregon and New York offices.
In its two years as an independent company - with less than $1 million raised in angel funding - Perka has manage to scale to 50 U.S. states and several countries, catering to customers that range from local coffee shops to modern retailers like The Melt.
Since launch, Perka introduced two loyalty subscription services, which essentially bring those "buy 10, get 1 free" punch cards we all know and love online - and to your mobile device. Through its mobile apps, Perka allows customers to connect with their favorite local merchants and receive recognition for their patronage in an increasing tier of “perks."
On the other side, Perka allows merchants to tap into customer intelligence, and connect with loyal users them via social media even when not in the store. As to why Perka opted to partner with First Data, the founder says that, in the end, it's all about scale.
By teaming up with the largest payment processor in the U.S., Perka will be able to achieve scale faster than it would have on its own, as well as tap into the company's financial resources, brand recognition and its more than 6 million credit card terminal customers in 34 countries.
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