Friday, 31 January 2014
Underground: 40 años fotografiando el metro de Londres
Foto por Bob Mazzer
En los años 70 Bob Mazzer trabajaba como proyeccionista en un cine por lo que se encontraba personajes la mar de curiosos cuando volvía a casa en el metro de Londres tarde después de terminar el trabajo.
A lo tonto, a lo tonto, siguió tomando fotos en el metro durante más de cuarenta años, del estilo de las que se pueden ver en Life in the Tube: 40 Years of London Underground Photography.
Bob acaba además de publicar una selección de ellas en el libro Underground .
(Vía @ElGris).
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Huawei's new high-resolution tablet may give the Nexus 7 a run for its money
BrightFunnel Raises Funding To Build Smarter Marketing Predictions
Marketing startup BrightFunnel is announcing that it has raised a small “advisory round” of slightly less than $1 million from some big-name investors.
Co-founder and CEO Nadim Hossain served most recently as the vice president of marketing at PowerReviews (which was acquired by Bazaarvoice). In that role, and in other jobs as a marketing executive, Hossain said that with his background in economics and econometrics he expected to be “swimming in CMO insights,” but that turned out not to be the case.
Instead, Hossain said he found “production tools” with limited analytics, at least on the level of what a CMO would want to know.
“I remember being at a board meeting in May of 2011, and they asked me questions where I didn’t know the answers,” he said. ” My self identity is as someone who can get at the numbers and get at the truth, and I had to make guesses. It just made me feel not authentic and wonder, why don’t I have the answers? These are knowable questions.”
So at BrightFunnel, he’s trying to build tools that will given him the answers that he was looking for. The eventual goal, Hossain said, is to create “the Google self-driving car for marketers.” In other words, customers should be able to identify how much money they want to spend on a campaign and what their revenue targets are, and with BrightFunnel’s recommendations, the marketing plan should basically run itself.
The company isn’t quite there yet. Instead, Hossain said, it’s more like navigation app Waze. Its current features include identifying the marketing “levers” that can lead to increased revenue, as well as analyzing performance trends by campaign and channel. BrightFunnel also integrates with marketing automation systems including Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, and Hubspot.
And yes, it offers predictions about the revenue impact of marketing campaigns. Hossain estimated that those projections are within 10 to 20 percent accuracy — not just on the conversion rate but also how long it will take to close the sale, which is particularly important for the business-to-business marketers that BrightFunnel is targeting.
One of Hossain goals is to improve that accuracy, which he said is “blows [marketers] away” but is not quite up to snuff for statisticians.
Anyway, here are the investors:
Paul Albright, former CRO, Marketo
David Gutelius, former Chief Social Scientist, Jive Software
Ryan Holmes, founder and CEO, HootSuite
Steve King, former CEO, DocuSign
Scott Kleper, founder and CTO, Context Optional (Adobe Marketing Cloud)
Tim Kopp, former CMO, ExactTarget (Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud)
Chris Maeda, former CTO, KANA Software
Mark Organ, CEO, Influitive and co-founder, Eloqua (Oracle Marketing Cloud)
Venkat Rangan, CTO, Clari and founder, Clearwell Systems (Symantec)
Russell Siegelman, former VP, Microsoft, and Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Facebook Paper, Lenovo-Moto, Carbon 3D Printing, And Coffee!
Looking for a way to get through Friday? Here you go.
Facebook launched a news reader app called Paper. (Teens will love it.) And Google sold Motorola to Lenovo for $3 billion, which made earnings week interesting. And, in the land of startups, we explore a new Carbon 3D Printer and a Keurig Coffee machine. So you can print yourself a cup-holder, which will store your fresh cup of coffee, as you drive to work on this blessed Friday.
We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, and Romain Dillet.
The Superbowl is in two days, and the work week is almost over. We’re almost there.
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.
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This kit lets you build a musical instrument from just about anything
US Cellular offers $50 unlimited plan with throttled data as a catch
Aereo Sells Out Of Capacity In NYC
Aereo, a TV streaming service looking to change the way we consume media, has just sold out of capacity in New York City.
Founder and CEO Chet Kanojia confirmed the news via Twitter.
The company launched in 2011 with NYC as a pilot market, and has since expanded to 11 markets total. The service, much to the chagrin of major network broadcasters, acts as a remote, mini antenna, letting subscribers pull OTA TV signals out of the air and stream them live across any internet-connected device.
And if that weren’t enough, users have the option to use Aereo as a remote DVR service for as low as $8 month.
That said, Aereo has worked tirelessly to ensure that this type of business is actually legal. In much the same way that it’s legal for an individual to use rabbit ears to access broadcast television, it’s legal for an Aereo user to rent out an individual Aereo antenna and access, or record, TV content.
However, a single antenna that sends a signal to multiple, separate users is illegal. In other words, Aereo needs one antenna available for every active user of the service, and at this point, there’s simply not any room left for new users in NYC.
Some have misreported that this is a product of power issues, though recent conversations I’ve had with founder Chet Kanojia suggest that Aereo has been trying to build out more capacity to keep up with subscriber growth.
For a startup, it’s not a bad problem to have. Though, if the company wants to foster growth in its first, and likely strongest, market, it will need to offer extended capacity as quickly as possible.
Broadcasters must be equally displeased by this news, considering that they’ve been bullying Aereo in the courtroom since the service launched. It started with a lawsuit in NY, which migrated to Boston, and again to Utah, until most recently the Supreme Court decided to hear the case and make a final, federal ruling.
Based on the track record, I predict Aereo will win in court and will lead the revolution as a stepping stone from bundled TV packages and middle men to an on-demand, TV consumption structure.
Here’s Aereo’s official statement on the matter:
We’re fortunate that Aereo continues to experience strong growth across all our markets. Our team has been working overtime to add more capacity in our existing markets. As soon as additional capacity is added, new consumers will be notified that they can sign up and create an Aereo account.
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OUYA's new matte black console offers twice the storage for $130
Dispositivos electrónicos en el avión en España: tres semanas sin noticias
Por lo que sabemos tanto Air Europa como Iberia e Iberia Express han entregado la documentación pertinente; Air Nostrum está realizando las pruebas pertinentes en los aviones de su flota, y en cuanto las terminen solicitarán también aplicar la nueva normativa.
Vueling, por su parte, parece que también ha presentado la documentación pertinente, pero no nos lo han confirmado.
En Estados Unidos no habían pasado ni 24 horas de la aprobación de la nueva normativa cuando Jet Blue y Delta ya estaban aplicándola; en el Reino Unido fue British Airways la primera en hacerlo apenas cinco días después de que entrara en vigor la normativa aplicable.
Pero en España toca seguir esperando.
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Ouya Updates Hardware With $129 16GB Console, 8GB Edition Remains At $99
Ouya’s original hardware featured just 8GB of storage onboard, but a temporary Limited Edition all-white version launched during the holidays that doubled that to 16GB. Now, the game console startup is making that a permanent feature of its newest hardware, an Ouya console with a solid matte black finish that also offers better Wi-Fi connectivity and a “refined” controller design.
The new 16GB version adds $30 to the MSRP of the original, coming in at a total of $129 for the console and one controller. It goes on sale at Ouya.tv, as well as Amazon and Amazon.ca starting immediately, and the original 8GB model will continue to be sold as well at its original $99 price point (which is discounted to $69.99 currently on Amazon.ca)
As for what’s been improved about the controller, Ouya says that the joysticks and buttons are “better” and that the controller has less lag time overall. We’ve asked for more specifics around the improved Wi-Fi, but have yet to hear back with any details. The new console also ships with the latest Ouya firmware, which is said to improve all-around performance for the Android-powered hardware.
Ouya has faced some challenges lately, including the departure of one of its key founding team members, VP of Product Muffi Ghadiali. The company has not released any sales data recently, so there’s no telling how it’s performing, but the introduction of a new SKU seems a little unusual given the relatively modest nature of the tweaks.
Developers on the platform recently shared some numbers regarding their software sales on the console with Gamespot, which could be an indicator of hardware sales strength. Feedback was mixed, but overall the impression given was that sales are by no means represent runaway success. Ouya has raised $23.6 million in funding to date, including its initial crowdfunding campaign and a Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins.
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US phone companies to explore replacing all phone numbers with IP addresses
PlayStation 4 companion app update highlights live game broadcasts
Canadian spy agency used airport WiFi to track travelers
Inq Mobile, One Of The First Facebook Phone Makers, Shuts Down
Inq Mobile, one of the first companies to build a Facebook phone, announced that it has shut down with a message on its site (h/t Android Police). The U.K.-based, Hutchison Whampoa-backed company didn’t say why it decided to close. We’ve emailed them for more information.
Inq, which was founded in 2008 and pivoted a year ago to focus on mobile software, said it will no longer update Material and SO.HO, its apps. Material, a news reader, released its final editions on Jan. 28, while social media aggregator SO.HO will not be updated after today, though it will continue to function. Support pages for the Cloud Touch smartphone and Inq’s featurephones remain on its site.
The timing of Inq’s closure and Material’s shutdown is interesting because several of tech’s largest companies have recently started to offer their own news apps and tools. These include Yahoo’s News Digest; Twitter and CNN’s Dataminr; and Paper by Facebook, which will launch next month.
Inq Mobile began as a maker of low-priced Android smartphones. It was one of the first companies that collaborated with Facebook to create a social smartphone in 2011, around the same time HTC and the social network struck the partnership that yielded the Salsa and ChaCha.
Inq’s Cloud Touch, which was released exclusively in the UK three years ago, had a custom Facebook wrapper built on top of Android, and an early version of SwiftKey. Though cheaply priced (starting at $50 with a subsidized contract), the Cloud Touch couldn’t compete with Samsung’s rapid takeover of the Android market. The company pivoted and started developing mobile apps one year ago.
Material, which TechCrunch covered when it launched its iOS version in August, was a social magazine app that used Inq’s “interest extraction engine” to look at the Facebook and Twitter accounts of users and figure out what kind of articles they wanted to see. Content was delivered in two daily editions.
At its launch, Material already had strong competition from popular social news readers like Flipboard, Zite, and Pulse.
Inq CEO and co-founder Ken Johnstone told TechCrunch at the time that Material differentiated from other news readers by offering an easier set-up than its rivals because all users needed to do to power Material’s algorithms was connect their Facebook or Twitter accounts.
“For somebody who has invested a lot of time in Twitter and Facebook anyway, this is about getting a return on that investment,” Johnstone told TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas.
Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook’s news aggregation products all feature some human curation, but, like Material, they also rely heavily on algorithms to customize content for each user. Inq had planned to monetize Material by harvesting enough data to build an advertising business, but its failure to do may be a cautionary tale for other developers of news readers.
Though algorithms are necessary if a news aggregator wants to scale up (and collect enough data to be profitable), they still can’t replace human curation. Like Feedly, Pulse, and Zite, Material’s customized content stream suffered from problems like miscategorized stories, irrelevant content, and “the overall feeling you get from flicking through an edition is not a cohesive, editorially unified whole, but an algorithmically generated bunch of mostly random stories with (at best) a few loose, overlapping themes,” as Natasha put it.
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Archos' Neon tablets are even more budget-friendly than usual
Daily Roundup: Xperia Z1 Compact review, Facebook Paper and more!
The next Windows 8.1 update might skip the Start screen by default
Have a favorite music streaming service? Sound off, people of Engadget
Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Neo aims to offer S-Pen experience without flagship specs
Chromecast, Google Play, Nexus 5 and Google Wallet had a very good 2013
IBM's speedy graphene chip could lead to super-efficient mobile devices
Thursday, 30 January 2014
What does national security have to do with the Lenovo-Motorola deal?
Clinkle Gets Hacked Before It Even Launches
Clinkle is the hottest app around to have done mostly nothing. The stealth payments service, which has raised $25 million from big-name investors, has yet to publicly launch. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be hacked.
Today, a guest user posted a list of 33 usernames, user IDs, profile photos, and phone numbers to PasteBin. Based on the data provided, it seems as though these users are Clinkle employees who are testing the app.
Founder Lucas Duplan is on the list (yep, that’s his Clinkle profile pic, shown above), as well as former Netflix CFO and Clinkle COO Barry McCarthy. Former PayPal exec Mike Liberatore, now Clinkle CFO, is also listed.
The data was seemingly accessed through a private API that Clinkle has in place. Referred to by the hacker as “typeahead”, the API appears to be the basis of an autocomplete tool, allowing uses to type a single letter (like ‘A’) and find all usernames starting with that letter (like ‘Adam’ and ‘Andrew’). [Note: Twitter has a similar tool with the same name — it's unclear if they're one and the same.]
Clinkle seems to use this API in their own app (presumably so users can find friends when making a payment), which has allowed one hacker to search user names, leading to the associated user IDs and phone numbers.
Here’s what the hacker had to say:
Results from Clinkle typeahead API. It requires no authentication. The app stores writes results to disk automatically. This is much worse than Snapchat’s breach. Phone numbers masked as courtesy.
In other words, whoever broke into the app didn’t need a userID to access Clinkle’s list of testers or their personal information, which seems to be saved on a Clinkle server.
But to be fair, Clinkle’s breach isn’t quite the same as Snapchat’s, considering the information of 4.6 million Snapchat users was released, as opposed a small group of employee testers.
Here’s Clinkle’s explanation for the breach:
You’re describing visibility that was purposefully built into the system as part of our preliminary user testing and was always intended to be turned off. As you can see from the list, we’ve been testing internally and registrations have been limited to Clinkle employees. We were using an open API, which has now been closed. That said, only names, phone numbers, photos, and Clinkle unique IDs were accessible.
Clinkle points to a Stanford student as the alleged hacker but that has yet to be confirmed.
Clinkle, rumored to launch later this year, currently has both an iOS app in iTunes and an Android app available in the Google Play store for those who wish to join the waiting list.
Based on the size of the app (52MB) and the unzipped files uncovered after downloading it, it seems like the full Clinkle app is out there, rather than a placeholder app built for wait list registrants.
Right now, the app has a waiting list wall, which “VIP” members can bypass once an administrator grants permission. This likely allows Clinkle to demo the app to investors and partners without having to go through some cumbersome download process.
During the process of fundraising, I’m sure that little trick came in handy. Not so much today, though.
The hack produced some interesting data about the team that works on Clinkle.
Founder Lucas Duplan is listed as the first user (User ID: 1), with a picture that very much resembles him holding cash money. The CFO, Barry McCarthy, is also listed with a legitimate profile photo, as is the Head Of Comms, who confirmed the validity of the images and the data.
The photos from Clinkle’s Team page, where 22 unidentified Clinkle employees are pictured alongside goofy pseudonyms, also seem to resemble people in the leaked profile photos. Finally, we can put faces to names.
So what are the implications?
Well, Clinkle hasn’t actually launched yet, so it’s very possible that the team hasn’t been focusing on security. However, security and trust should be top priorities for a payments company. Especially for a company so young.
Clinkle was founded by a group of more than a dozen Stanford students in 2011, and has stayed under the radar while key employees finish their degrees. The company was partially funded by Stanford professors before raising $25 million in a party round. Over 18 investors participated.
The WSJ, followed by every other news outlet, proclaimed this the biggest Stanford startup exodus in history. Clinkle was all the rage.
Seriously, Silicon Valley wouldn’t shut up about it.
In fall, however, two rounds of layoffs left many wondering if the Stanford-fueled payments startup was really the Messiah of trade. The company slashed around 30 employees, and then another 16.
Around the same time, screenshots and videos of the app in action were leaked, letting Clinkle’s cat out of the bag.
Rumors circulated that the company was going through leadership issues. That those promised equity weren’t getting it. That folks were overworked and underpaid. That there was no transparency about the product timeline, or the product itself. That 22-year-old Lucas Duplan was taking home a six-figure salary and mistreating employees.
Today, the same questions as before creep back into our consciousness.
What have they been doing with all that money this whole time? Posting profile photos that confirm our worst fears? Whether the breach was a result of intentional openness or unintentional laziness on the part of Clinkle is unclear, but the photo doesn’t lie.
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