Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia Explains The Broadcaster Battle In His Own Words

In the past year, Aereo has fought legal battles in three different states with broadcasters looking to get the streaming TV service kicked off the air, if you catch my drift.

Tomorrow, the case goes to the main stage in front of the Supreme Court, where lawyers from both sides will make oral arguments before the SCOTUS.

The case itself is highly complex, with broadcasters alleging that Aereo has no right to stream its copyrighted content, and Aereo arguing that the consumer itself has control over the content and its recording, and that Aereo simply provides the antenna from a remote location.

Many legal precedents go into the case, including the Sony Betamax ruling which gave consumers the right to record broadcast television to a VCR. A more recent Cablevision precedent also comes into play, that said consumers who legally acquire copyrighted content have the right to stream and record it as they choose, whether the content itself is stored in the box in their living room or in the cloud.

Then there’s the potential effects on cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive.

With so many moving parts, we thought it was smart to sit down with Chet Kanojia, Aereo CEO, and have him explain the terms of the case in his own words.

If you’d like to get a closer look into Aereo’s technology, check out our rooftop tour of their Boston facility. Tomorrow, we’ll be covering the court case closely so be sure to stay tuned.

Cognoa’s App Will Evaluate Children’s Risk For Autism From Videos And Other Data

There are life-changing technologies that are being developed at the intersection of health evaluation and diagnosis. For example, Neurotrack has developed a cognitive test to predict and diagnose the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. And a new startup, Cognoa, is launching to help evaluate children’s risk for Autism.

As CEO Brent Vaughan explained to me, the incidence of autism has risen to 1 in 68 children in the United States, and the incidence of all learning delays in children is now close to 1 in 5. Families are faced with enormous individual challenges to navigate through the complex healthcare ecosystem to understand their child’s risk and how to take action. And the average lag time between an initial warning sign and a diagnosis of autism or other developmental condition is around 13 months, with the average waiting time to see a specialist who can provide a clinical diagnosis around 1 year. By the time children get through the system to the clinical professionals, they’ve lost the time to benefit from intervention programs, which are known to be more effective in younger children. Once the child receives an official diagnosis, families are often left to determine alone how to manage their child’s care and therapy.

Cognoa’s test on the iPhone evaluates the risk for developmental delay and autism for children before the age of 3. The app asks parents set of questions around your child’s behavioral tendencies (i.e. will your child play with peers when in a group with two or more other children), and the app also allows parents to take a home video under 5 minutes showing a child in a simple set of activities.

With this data, Cognoa’s test analyzes the video and answers to the questions and will provide an assessment on whether the child has a risk for autism. The technology on the back-end was developed by Dr. Dennis Wall, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where his lab is developing statistical approaches to decode the complexity of autism spectrum disorder and related conditions. It’s important to differentiate that Cognoa isn’t actually diagnosing, but instead just evaluating whether there could be a developmental risk.

It’s still early days to determine the efficacy of the test but Cognoa has been tested in several studies and over 20,000 times, and is showing accuracy of evolution at and above 90% in children under 4 years old and as young as 13 months.

Ask A VC: Next World Capital’s Ben Fu On Engineer Recruiting Challenges

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we hosted Next World Capital’s Ben Fu in the studio to talk about big data, recruiting and more.

Fu, who has backed Datameer, Datastax, and Good Data among others, talked about the talent crunch, and the challenges founders face when recruiting engineers, especially in the enterprise world.

Check out the video above for more!

In Just A Few Minutes, SpaceX Will Attempt To Launch A Reusable Rocket — Watch Now!

Quick! Tune in!

SpaceX is about to attempt something pretty historic: launching a rocket in such a way that much of it can be reused in later launches.

If successful, this launch will head up to the International Space Station, drop off a bunch of supplies, then a controlled fall will bring it back to earth with a set of extendable legs deployed.

Even if the legs deploy properly, the landing is aimed for the water… which the legs can’t actually stand up on. This is more about testing to make sure the process works than trying to actually get this thing to make a perfect landing, but it’s still damned neat to watch.

I’ve embedded both NASA and SpaceX’s stream below, because each offers some pretty amazing angles and insight. If you watch both simultaneously, you probably want to mute one or the other.

Update – 12:26: The rocket launched on schedule at 12:25 p.m. pacific, and is currently en route to the ISS.

NASA’s Stream:

Live streaming video by Ustream

SpaceX’s Stream:

About.com CEO Neil Vogel Discusses The Challenges Of Evolving An Established Brand

About.com has never been the coolest website on the internet. With a grayish background and an ugly logo, it was the place you landed when you searched for help with something, but you rarely went there on your own.

This is the product that Neil Vogel took over one year ago, when he was made CEO of About.com. Not much has changed on the outside, save for a few subtle design tweaks and the addition of social buttons (that’s right — there were no social buttons on About.com a year ago). But in a couple of months, the work that About‘s team has done for the past year will go public.

In the last year, the company has nearly doubled its staff, from 100 employees to 176, and has added about 20 percent more experts delivering content. We sat down with Vogel to discuss the challenges of rebranding and redesigning a site that still gets a tremendous amount of traffic (Vogel says that About.com is the 12th most trafficked site on the internet).

The last year has been spent updating the backend technology so that it’s capable of handling the front-end plans for the site, which will include a much more interactive element, according to Vogel. There has also been a huge focus on responsive web, as nearly 40 percent of About’s traffic comes from mobile devices and tablets.

But perhaps the most important challenge lies in the brand itself.

“We are an information resource and a database, but nobody wants to use a database or an information resource,” said Vogel. “People want to go to a beautiful place where they feel they can trust the advice they’re given. So our mission is to focus on helping people, as much as we can, and keep it as simple as that.”

Zola Debuts Its iPhone App To Allow Couples To Manage Their Wedding Registries On The Go

Zola, the new wedding registry startup emerging from Gilt And AlleyCorp founder Kevin Ryan, has launched an iPhone app to allow couples to create and manage their Zola registries from anywhere.

Zola, led by former Gilt employees Shan-Lyn Ma and Nobu Nakaguchi, is trying to reimagine the wedding registry for couples. It’s part content, part Pinterest-like inspiration sharing, and part wish list/registry. The result is a well-designed, easy-to-use wedding registry that tells a story of a couple. The startup recently raised $3.25 million in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital.

The iOS app includes a lot of the functionality of the web app, but is tailored for an immersive experience. With the Zola app, couples can create and edit their registries while on the go, and scan any product onto their registry using the barcode scanner. The app also includes a feature called Blender, which allows couples to browse the entire Zola selection of items (i.e. kitchen tools), one at a time, swiping right to add to their registry or left to pass. Other features of the app include the ability to upload photos from your iPhone, create new collections for gifts, and track and manage gifts.

While there are many startups aiming to disrupt the wedding registry, Zola’s growth has proved that many couples are craving something new. Since Zola’s launch in October 2013, over 10,000 couples have created a registry on Zola.com, with registry growth accelerating every month. There are now 3,000 products/experiences available on Zola.com, with experiences available across four cities and plans to expand into at least four more within the next six months.

Optimizely Brings Its A/B Testing Platform To iOS Apps

Optimizely, the popular service for testing out different variations of your website, today announced the launch of Optimizely for iOS.

The company says its new mobile tools allow customers to try out different interface and content changes to their iOS apps in real-time, without going through App Store approval. Thanks to the Optimizely Visual Editor, no coding is required to make these changes.

While Optimizely is the big name in A/B testing on the web, we’ve written about a number of other services that have launched on mobile, including Apptimize and Taplytics. One of Optimizely’s selling points is the idea that you can run your web and mobile app tests from the same place.

“We believe that website and mobile app testing are no different from each other in the sense that data enables our customers to deliver the best possible experience to their visitors, regardless of device,” said CEO Dan Siroker in the product press release.

Optimizely made today’s announcement as part of OptiCon, its first customer conference. The company says it has more than 6,000 customers, including Starbucks, Disney, and CNN.

Health Startup Healthberry Soft launches Beta To Measure Patient Feedback

UK-based health startup HealthBerry has soft launched its beta.

Pitched as a “better way to engage with patients” the startup uses social media as a way for national health services to measure patient feedback and thus inform improvements to services. It’s trailing with the UK’s National Health Service.

The platform engages with patients, monitors programmes, syndicates content and push out real-time alerts via push notifications, email and SMS to any device.

Fired Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro’s Severance Totaled $58M

When Yahoo removed Henrique De Castro as its COO, it wasn't clear how much loot he was going to take with him. The final tally, revealed today in an SEC filing that also detailed Yahoo's board nominations, has the figure: $58 million. Read More

Online Dating Site Zoosk Files For $100M IPO, With $178M In Revenues And A $2.6M Net Loss In 2013

Online dating site Zoosk just filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC, announcing its plans to raise $100 million in an initial public offering. The company, which has offers up a website and apps for daters around the world to find each other, posted a net loss of $2.6 million in 2013 on revenues of $178 million.

Zoosk uses big data and a bit of algorithmic recommendations technology to help its users find partners. With a “proprietary Behavioral Matchmaking engine,” the company learns from clicks, messaging, and other actions of its members to produce matches that are supposed to find better matches.

As part of the filing, Zoosk provided details of its global business, which includes 26 million members worldwide and 650,000 paying subscribers across 80 countries at year-end 2013. That’s up from the 18 million registered members and 483,000 paying subscribers a year earlier.

At the same time those subscriber numbers grew, revenues increased 63 percent from 2012 to 2013, rising from $109.1 million to $178.2 during that period. It’s net loss also decreased significantly, from $20.7 million in 2012 to $2.6 million at the end of 2013.

BofA Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and RBC Capital Markets are acting as joint bookrunning managers for the proposed offering, with Oppenheimer & Co. and William Blair acting as co-managers.

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Aereo Shows Off Their Rooftop Antenna Farm Ahead Of Supreme Court Ruling

A lot has been said about Aereo‘s technology — so much, in fact, that there are hundreds of pages worth of legal documents discussing the matter as it relates to the law.

That said, we thought it would be helpful to take a closer look at how Aereo actually works when it lets customers rent out remote DVR antennas and watch what amounts to live television on any device.

Once Aereo establishes itself in any new market, the team brings in what they call an Antenna Farm, or internally, a Raz-12.

This is essentially a small box, that sits on a platform on a data center roof, and is fully insulated, air-conditioned, and lightning proof. It also has one wall that is made entirely of RF transparent material, meaning that the equipment inside is capable of communicating with signals coming from outside the box.

Inside each Raz-12, there is essentially a wall full of technology. Within 12″ x 18″ cubes lies multiple antenna boards, each of which can hold up to 160 antennas. Within one cube, between 7,000 and 10,000 customers can receive service using their own individual antenna.

Once the antenna grabs the signal, which Kanojia constantly reminded us was of the volition of the customer and not Aereo, the little thumb-sized antennas change to pick up the requested frequency. Then, the transmission is sent over a fiber connection down into the data center, where Aereo transcodes the file from an MP2 to an MP4, and handles the storage of that recording on the remote DVR service.

Each rooftop array can hold about 12 cubes, thus the name Raz-12. In total, Aereo can serve around 120,000 customers with each rooftop installation, and the company purposefully buys out surrounding real estate when one antenna farm is established to add another Raz-12 whenever the market is ready for it.

Varsavsky Bets On The Gramofon As A New Take On Social Music

Today, crowd-sourced Wifi network operator Fon launched its new Gramofon device on Kickstarter. This offers a simple Fon-like Wi-Fi sharing functionality via a simple Facebook log-in, can be plugged into an music speakers and comes with a year’s subscription to Spotify. With such a mash-iup of services, it’s quite a new concept on the market/

The device could be a game-changer for Fon, which although it’s still growing like a weed, could use a little sexiness around its product. Then again it may turn out to be a pet project which was a ‘nice to have’ not a must have’ for Fon. Remember, this is launching on Kickstarter, so it’s not as if Fon is putting all its potential muscle behind it.

But whatever happens, it’s all gravy for Spotify, which is now bound to gather some interesting data on how much people are into these kinds of hardware devices liked to its service.

We spoke to CEO Martin Varsavsky in London on the launch of his new pet project.

Fon Launches Gramofon, A Router With Facebook And Spotify Built-In

Today, crowd-sourced Wifi network operator Fon launches its rumoured new product, the Gramofon. But unusually for a large tech company with healthy revenues, it’s launched the product with 30-day crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter at a discounted price, starting at $30.

This device offers simple Fon-like Wi-Fi sharing functionality after you log in via Facebook, an audio out to speakers (no internal speaker) and an in-built Spotify app. What is it? Well, it’s rumored the social music router they’ve been building and Martin Varsavsky, founder and CEO of Fon, thinks its going to be a game-changer both in the market and for the company, which also happens to be the world’s biggest wifi network.

He says they started by building prototypes out of open source hardware and open source software like the Raspberry Pi, with a small team in New York. They’ve now locked their first production run for 6,500 units, set to ship in July, but more are planned if this takes off.

Eventially the Gramofon will have an API so it can integrate any music service with Gramofon and can support as many different providers as possible. It comes with WahWah built in, this is a free radio service that works with Gramofon (the service will start in the USA, Spain and Brazil, and expand over time).

How does it work?

You connect your Gramofon to the sound system or speakers of your choice. Then connect it to the Internet via ethernet or on your current WiFi. Then you connect any Android or iOS phone to the Gramofon’s WiFi signal and plug in any speaker. Thus, yo can now stream Spotify or listen to the Gramofon free radio service powered by WahWah.

Unsurprisingly Gramofon uses the Qualcomm Atheros AR9341 chipset, following its $14 million investment round in Fon earlier this year.

The black square cube features two Ethernet ports, one for connecting to the network and one to connect a PC. Gramofon works over WiFi not Bluetooth, and allows several users at once. Built with the same core technology as the Fon WiFi routers, is also acts as a WiFi hotspot.

So here’s the scenario: When someone visits your house, they simply log-in to the Gramofon WiFi via their Facebook account, and then they can play Spotify through Gramofon using their smartphones as remotes. Any visitor could therefore ‘play the DJ’ and control the music.

People who pledge to buy a Gramofon via the kick-starter campaign will get Fon membership (meaning access to over 12 million Fon hotspots) in return for sharing their WiFi at home, as is the usual Fon deal.

If you’re early you’ll get it in white at $30, or for $40 in black. The remaining units will be offered for $50 and $60 respectively. Other “perks” include getting invited to Gramofon “listening parties around the world”, some of which may feature Varsavsky and celebrities (but you’ll pay around $1,000 for those).

“Our goal is to bring music back into the living room,” says Varsavsky. “We have been working on this for a year now— what started as a passion project is now a living, breathing, incredible product that will transform the music experience, making music social and enjoyed by all involved.”

But why use Kickstarter? Well, Fon COO Alex Puregger says, it’s because “crowdsourcing is a principle Fon was founded on”.

Clearly this will compete with other products like networked speakers from Sonos. But where Sonos must send music around a home with speakers connected to one WiFi Signal, the Gramofon plays music across multiple units so each additional router works as a repeater, thus boosting Wi-Fi coverage across a home.

So we have a router that also plays music that also supports a massive music service, and intends to support others. Not a bad combination if you were going to take on both Sonos and other home automation players like Nest and many others.

A crucial point of the Gramofon is to “cloud enable” your existing sound system. Given that it can connect to music speakers via 3.5mm audio or RCA output, you could say this is a sort of ‘Apple TV for your sound system’.

It means of course that those great speakers you have from an old Hi-Fi system don’t need to be replaced by Bluetooth or wireless speakers after all.

Could Spotify be Fon’s trojan horse into the home? Maybe. But a spokesperson poured cold water on my view that this might be a route into a home automation as they believe the music implementation is alluring enough as it is.

Given the Fon people call this their “most important product since the first Fonera” they are clearly hoping this will be a trojan horse at least for Fon’s WiF service itself.

Social TV App Zeebox Relaunches As Beamly

Zeebox, the app co-founded by former BBC iPlayer exec Anthony Rose, has rebranded and relaunched its social TV app for consumers as Beamly. The new version of the app still has all the same live-chat functionality and screen sync technology that came with Zeebox, but the team has enhanced Beamly to be relevant to users even when they’re not watching their favorite shows.

To do that, Beamly incorporates a wider range of content discovery and social functionality designed to keep users interacting with the app all day long. That includes news feeds and social conversations about their favorite shows throughout the day, giving them the ability to read reactions and discuss topics after an episode is over.

For the company, doing so will hopefully drive up engagement with the app, even in times when users aren’t watching live TV.

Fly Or Die: Omate TrueSmart

In a year, we've gone to having one or two startup smartwatch companies to a sea of offerings before us, from companies as big as Google all the way down to Omate, a startup looking to make your wrist as brilliant as possible. At its core, the TrueSmart is likely one of the most powerful smartwatches on the market. Powered by Android 4.2, the TrueSmart has its own SD card and SIM card, complete… Read More

SeedInvest Raises Series A On Its Own Crowdfunding Platform, $2M Committed So Far

SeedInvest, the equity crowdfunding platform based in New York that helps other startups (like Vengo Labs) raise rounds, is today launching a campaign on its own plaform to complete an intended $3 million Series A round. The startup has already had $2 million committed from VCs Scout Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Avenue A Ventures, Archer Gray and Krillion Ventures.

The funding will be used to expand the kinds of services that SeedInvest offers both to startups and investors, and comes in advance of a change later this year, courtesy of the JOBS Act, where non-accredited investors will also be able to make investments on the platform. “As soon as the final portion of the JOBS Act kicks-in, we will open SeedInvest to 240 million Americans who will be able to invest in startup companies for the very first time,” Ryan Feit, CEO and co-founder of SeedInvest, said in a statement. Feit tells me that the fundraise “will enable us to grow our team in order to support our rapidly growing investor base.” SeedInvest aims to double its employee base over the next six months.

There have been a number of crowdfunding platforms for startups that have sprouted up in the wake of the JOBS Act, with others including AngelList and InvestPrive in Europe (which played a part in AdQuantic raising money prior to telling to Criteo, from what we understand).

The feature that Feit says differentiates SeedInvest from the others is that many rivals keep 20% of any returns through carried interest, while SeedInvest is completely free for investors. SeedInvest was founded by former professional investors and “we choose only the best quality startups to crowdfund through our platform,” Feit tells me. “Historically, just 3% of all companies that have applied to raise capital on SeedInvest have been published for fundraising.” He says that these differences allows SeedInvest “to attract larger, more sophisticated investors, as evidenced by an average check size of $23,000 last month and investments as large as $550,000.”

Since opening for business in February 2013, SeedInvest has reported $1 million in backing for itself, and helped startups raise $15 million in total, although it claims a much more lofty $128 million+ in “collective investor interest,” which I believe refers to how much money potentially there is for investment on the platform, given the right opportunities. It makes money from offering more premium services for startups listing on the platform, as well as investors investing in it; Feit hasn’t broken down for me how many typically take premium services from SeedInvest today. A typical month, say March, saw 60 investments made on the platform, with the number growing 350% in the first quarter of this year over a year ago.

Feit says that to help vet both startups and investors, especially as its net widens later this year, SeedInvest will conduct “background and bad-actor checks on all issuers to ensure they are legit.” Each company will require a “substantial amount of detailed disclosure.”

As part of this round, Bradley Harrison, managing partner at Scout Ventures, is joining SeedInvest’s board. “SeedInvest has both the right team and vision to capitalize on one of the largest shifts of economic power to retail investors that we have experienced in our lifetime,” he said in a statement. “Their results clearly prove that they are addressing a huge problem for both investors and entrepreneurs.”

More on the company in this video.

Entrepreneur First Thinks It Can Grab The Talent Long Before YC

The world of tech startup accelerators has become an ocean of choices. “Batches”, “programmes”, “mentor networks” are thrown around from one organisation to the other. What sets them apart has become difficult to define. Perhaps it’s geography, such as proximity to investors in a big city? Or perhaps its a programme in a vertical, like fashion or fintech? Whatever it is, the sheer number of accelerators has started to pose a question: if, as some think, the best tech accelerator in the world is Y Combinator, does that mean everyone else is an ‘also-ran’. If you wanted to be incredibly harsh about it – does that mean every other accelerator is taking YC’s ‘rejects’, the ones who didn’t create Dropbox? So if you want to do acceleration, how can you be different? And how can you be successful?

Matt Clifford of Entrepreneur First thinks the answer is “pre-acceleration”. Grab the talent before they have even worked out what startup they are going to do. And that means hitting them early.

What would happen if you took university graduates and suggested they try entrepreneurship FIRST, before joining that bank or that big company?

Essentially, that’s Entrepreneur First’s idea.

There’s clearly a need. Smart graduates flood out of university with a choice – do a startup or (as is often the case often) get a high-flying job, such as in the world of finance or management consultancy.

But creating a startup from scratch with no experience is hard and their ideas can be flimsy.

Clifford says they therefore take people purely on talent, pre-team. They then spend 12 months allowing them to form teams, develop their ideas and get to the stage of creating an actual product/startup. His view is that there will be two accelerators left in the world – YC and the few that manage to survive on investing in startups created by the people who didn’t take it into YC.

EF emphasises technical skills, product, speed and iteration. And it prefers people who had an attempt at a startup already, perhaps while at university.

EF – which is backed by private investors who are mostly in London – invests on similar terms as other accelerator, £20k for 8%. They mainly recruit in universities and this year are doubling from 30 to 60 people in their latest batch intake.

So far EF says it has helped create over 10 startups in each batch and says that those companies are now worth over $50million. These include AdBrain (raised $7.5m), Echobox and Blaze bike lights.

Clearly EF is walking its talk. And now it’s expanding to draw in more applicants from Europe.

Can it take on YC? It looks like it won’t need to if it can grab the talent long before anyone has heard of YC.

PayPal Debuts Its Biometrics And Smartwatch Integrations With Samsung

After announcing integrations with the Samsung Galaxy S5 at Mobile World Congress In February, PayPal is finally debuting the integration today, allowing users in 25 countries to login to PayPal with their fingerprint.

The partnership allows allow fingerprints to enable payment verification on PayPal and partner ecommerce sites for making purchases. It’s an interesting move for both Samsung and PayPal when using biometrics for verification on payments, especially because Apple hasn’t opened up its fingerprint sensors from the iPhone 5S to developers. PayPal is also debuting its previously announced app for Samsung’s Gear 2 and Gear Fit to allow wearables and smartwatch users to check their PayPal balance, get payment notifications and access offers from local businesses.

Twitter Makes In-Browser Notifications Official

Twitter today officially announced that it would start to offer in-browser notifications — as we wrote yesterday, noticing a test of the feature.

“When you’re logged in on twitter.com, you will receive notifications if someone has replied, favorited or retweeted one of your Tweets. You can also receive notifications for direct messages and new followers,” Michael Ducker of Twitter writes. “They’re fully interactive, so that you can reply, favorite, retweet, and follow right from the notification. We’ll be rolling this feature out over the coming weeks.”

A reader in Holland alerted us to the feature being tested yesterday, and we wrote a full look at what the implications of the feature were.

Twitter says it will be rolling it out in the coming weeks.

Transportation Aggregator App RideScout Launches In San Francisco

With the launch of new transportation options popping up in many cities around the country, as well as the digitization of public transit schedules, there are more apps than ever for citygoers to use when they want to get from Point A to Point B.

RideScout seeks to simplify those options, with an app that aggregates multiple options for getting around a city all in one place.

So far, the app has been available in Austin and Washington, D.C., but it’s launching in San Francisco today to give users a view of public and private transit options in the city. In the Bay Area, RideScout highlights options that include Sidecar, Silvercar, Muni, BART, Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit, AC Transit, Blue & Gold Fleet, Baylink Ferry, SamTrans, Flywheel, City CarShare, Bay Area Bike Share, and Scoot.

With those partners on board, users can find transportation options for going between points by bus, train, or car — whether that’s one that’s rented or one that’s been hired. The app allows users to search based on speed and price, among other filters.

RideScout also provides walking or driving directions, and it even integrates with Parking Panda to enable users to get a view into nearby parking options when they arrive.

RideScout might not have all the available options in any given city — it’s still looking to sign up big on-demand transportation providers like Uber and Lyft, for example — but it’s a near-comprehensive look into the real-time availability of many public and private transport services.

Google Seems To Be Considering Doing More With Chromecast’s Home Screen

Note: Not an actual screenshot; just a mockup of what the weather icons could look like in practice

While I’ve been a fan of the Chromecast since the beginning, I find myself using it more and more lately. During the work day, I end up using it for all of the random videos I want to watch but that I don’t want taking up my laptop’s screen space or taking my full attention.

As such, my office TV almost always has Chromecast’s idle screen on it.

Right now, that just means it spends much of the day showing a clock and any one of Google’s many pre-selected Chromecast wallpapers. Sometime soon, though, that screen might get a bit smarter.

Redditor asjmcguire was poking around the source code for the screen and noticed a few breadcrumbs left behind: a bunch of javascript references for fetching the current temperature in a region, and a handful of weather-centric icons.

The idea, it seems, is that a quick glance at the Chromecast home screen would tell you what sort of weather to expect (Sweater weather? Tank top weather?) and whether or not you’ll need an umbrella. For people like me who tend to have Chromecast up on a screen more often than not, it’d be a low-bandwidth way to make the idle screen a tad more useful.

I poked around a linked Javascript file a bit more, and found placeholders for current local weather, local weather throughout the day, and local weather predictions for tomorrow. As Gigaom points out, there’s also code in there that suggests the Chromecast might eventually allow for custom wallpapers (instead of just the ones Google provides).

It’s easy to imagine Google going deep on this, especially with their work on stuff like Google Now. It could show upcoming meeting reminders, package delivery trackers — basically, a second-screen dashboard for your life. At a certain point, though (for anything more personal than weather, really) you’d probably want it to be a separate application rather than something that’s on by default.

Founder Stories: For Matt Tucker, A Life’s Work In Building Jive Software

Jive‘s CTO, Matt Tucker, is a pretty unassuming guy. If you didn’t know him, you’d never know Tucker is a co-founder of the 13-year old company, which he helped launch from his college days, which was bootstrapped for the first six years of its life, and which went public in 2011.

Over the arc of Jive’s history, Tucker has assumed roles both as the CTO and Head of Engineering. In this video, we discuss the variance in those technical roles, how he balanced internal-facing duties with external responsibilities, and how they’ve built teams that move offices frequently — as Jive itself is software to help workers collaborate more efficiently.

We also discuss some of the nuances technical leaders face in sharing opinions with team members in ways that aren’t taken as gospel, but instead to foster discussion and debate. Interestingly, Tucker was never interested in wearing the CEO hat, and also talks about why that was the case. For any technical founder out there, Tucker’s story will be of interest.

Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.

Disclaimer: KPCB is an investor in Jive.

What Is Heartbleed? The Video

You've probably heard about Heartbleed. You've probably been told that, as far as security vulnerabilities go on the Internet, it's pretty damned scary. But what is Heartbleed? How does it work? Why is it something that you should care about? This Khan Academy-style video tries to break it all down. Read More

Riding In Cars With VCs

Uber's promo factory has delivered kittens, Christmas trees and ice cream. But its latest PR concoction has taken the Valley darling to a whole new level: Uber for VC meetings. UberPITCH will give free rides to to anyone with a startup idea, allowing them to pitch investors from the Google Ventures team. Yes, that's right. If you've got a great idea for an anonymous photo sharing app that lets… Read More

As Microsoft Support for XP Expires, Antivirus Vendors Pick Up The Slack

As you might be aware Microsoft support for Windows XP expires today, which means that the company will stop issuing security patches. Around 30 percent of you have ignored all warnings up until now and you're still using it. Stubborn bunch, aren't you? Read More

Mobile App Go Dish Brings Dynamic Pricing To The Restaurant World

You’ve probably noticed that your favorite restaurant probably has busy periods, which are usually dictated by when people typically get hungry — and no surprise, that tends to be around lunch and dinner.

But then there are other times when things aren’t so busy. The thing is, restaurants have fixed costs that don’t really waver during ups and downs, like rent and employee salaries.

To deal with that, a new app called Go Dish seeks to get more eaters into restaurants during off-peak hours by offering discounts on meals picked up before or after a typical restaurant’s lunch rush.

Go Dish works like this: Once a user has signed up, every day at around 9:30, she’ll get a notification alerting her to discounts on meals being offered by nearby restaurants. Those discounts typically range from 20 percent to 35 percent, but can go as high as 50 percent for select dishes each day.

But those discounts also depend on users scheduling their lunch plans around the usual 11:30-2:00 lunch rush. Discounts get steeper the earlier someone decides to get lunch before the rush, or the later they’re willing to wait afterward.

Go Dish was founded by a couple of veterans from Wynn Hotels, Hotwire.com, and Liftopia, where they worked on dynamic pricing for hospitality providers. So why not food? That’s the idea behind the app.

Currently Go Dish has about 45 restaurants on board in the Financial District and SOMA in San Francisco, and offers between 10 and 25 dishes per day as part of the apps. It’s looking to expand to more locations and into more neighborhoods as time goes on to reach even more providers.

Comcast Makes Its Case To The FCC For Time Warner Cable Acquisition Approval

A few months ago, Comcast announced its plans to purchase Time Warner Cable in one of the biggest acquisitions in the broadband or pay TV market. In a filing sent to the FCC and an extensive blog post today, Comcast made its pitch to government regulators, providing all the reasons that they should approve its latest massive acquisition.

The filing goes into great detail of all the consumer benefits that it expects to offer consumers based on its existing investments in broadband technologies, on-demand services, and streaming video, as well as the increased scale that comes from combining the two largest cable providers in the U.S.

Comcast’s Promises To Time Warner Cable Subscribers

According to Comcast, Time Warner Cable subscribers will benefit from faster broadband, better TV and streaming video offerings, an extensive on-demand video collection, and a wider selection of apps on a larger number of devices.

On the broadband front, Comcast touts faster speeds — the majority of its subscribers pay for 25 Mbps service, compared to 15 Mbps at Time Warner Cable. That’s due in part to its adoption of DOCSIS 3.1, which allows it to offer speeds of up to 505 Mbps.

Comcast also noted the wider availability of cable hotspots available in its service areas, with more than a million up and running today, compared to the 29,000 deployed by Time Warner Cable.

The company also says has a leg up on Time Warner Cable when it comes to video services — in particular, services that are available through apps on mobile and tablet devices. Comcast’s X1 is one of the more advanced cloud set-top box platforms available to pay TV providers, enabling better search and navigation than the traditional channel grid most subscribers are used to.

On the app front, Comcast’s Xfinity TV Go apps provide access to 300,000 on-demand offerings and 50 live streaming channels. It also offers 50,000 on-demand options through the set-top box, compared to the less than 20,000 that Time Warner Cable offers, as well as electronic sell-through options that allow subscribers to purchase movies instead of just renting them.

Comcast also says that it will extend the net neutrality protection it agreed to as part of its NBC Universal acquisition to Time Warner Cable subscribers. And it promises to offer its Internet Essentials program into Time Warner Cable markets.

All of this is actually a good thing, and most Time Warner Cable subscribers shouldn’t worry about Comcast taking over their service. If the acquisition is approved, the TV offerings, broadband access, and apps they’ll have access to will actually be better than what they have today.

The Competition — Or Lack Thereof

One of the big concerns about Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable revolves around the sheer size of the new combined entity, and what that will mean for the competition. Together, the companies will have about 30 million subscribers, which is nearly a third of the U.S. market.

Comcast has this to say about that:

It’s understandable why any large merger will attract questions about competition and consolidation. But this particular transaction actually raises few competition concerns.

Cable operators generally don’t compete against one another — instead, they are siloed into different geographical areas around the country. Whoever Time Warner Cable was competing with in any given market will still be there, so the consolidation doesn’t change market dynamics that much.

That said, competition in the pay TV market is fairly weak: DirecTV and Dish together would have a few million more subscribers than the combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable entity. And after investing billions to build out fiber-based video and broadband offerings, Verizon and AT&T have largely given up on the television market.

Broadband competition is even worse. Comcast and Time Warner Cable’s high-speed Internet services generally compete with DSL service from the local telco providers, which are generally much slower than the DOCSIS 3.1 technology that Comcast has rolled out.

Comcast points to the growing modern DSL market as competitive, since most DSL providers have upgraded networks to offer service that can reach 75 Mbps to 100 Mbps. That is still well below the speeds that Comcast touts in its consumer benefits pitch.

Meanwhile, despite some deployments by Google, alternative fiber offerings from other providers or municipalities are expensive and have been slow to roll out.

In its appeal to regulators, Comcast actually seeks to expand the competitive market to include Google, as well as companies like Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and even Facebook. In its blog post, Comcast notes that it competes with Google in eight of nine Google Fiber deployments.

But it will be years or even decades before real fiber competition could show up, whether that comes from Google or anyone else.

Unanswered Questions

While it touted all the reasons why consumers would benefit from the acquisition, while also deflecting questions about the competitive environment, there were a few questions that Comcast didn’t address. Those deal specifically with the leverage that it will have over networks and other content providers, as well as what it could do over-the-top.

Comcast’s broadband scale make it a scary competitor to growing online video services like Netflix or Amazon’s Prime offering. The company alleviated some concerns with its commitment to net neutrality through the NBC Universal acquisition. But a recent transit deal with Netflix served as a reminder that there are costs for major content providers that seek to reach Comcast subscribers.

There’s also the question of Comcast’s own desire to go over-the-top itself. While the Time Warner Cable deal gives Comcast a huge amount of scale to reach tens of millions of broadband and video subscribers, all the work it’s done on the streaming side of things with apps means that it’s well-positioned to deploy its own over-the-top offering, if it ever wanted to. The question is, would it?

Sketchfab Revamps Its Platform To Become The SoundCloud Of 3D Files

Sketchfab just released the second version of its 3D platform. As a reminder, Sketchfab’s ultimate goal has always been to become a sort of SoundCloud for 3D models. On the website, you can upload, browse and embed 3D models from your browser. Yet, until now, the company first has been focused on building the foundation of Sketchfab and the web platform was neglected.

“We spent the first two years mostly working on the 3D technology,” co-founder and CEO Alban Denoyel told me. “So with the v2, we evolve from a simple 3D viewer to a true community platform, with a social layer on top of it.”

On the new website, you can find all the features that you would expect from a social platform. You can comment on 3D models, you can follow people to curate a newsfeed of 3D models and more. The entire browsing interface was redone as well. Categories, folders and tags are completely new. The upload process is easier. Finally, it’s a responsive website that will work on your phone, tablet or computer.

Just like YouTube, you can embed your 3D model on your website. You can see at the bottom of this post how an embed looks like.

In addition to today’s update, the company released some numbers. So far, 100,000 3D files have been uploaded to Sketchfab. While it’s tiny compared to YouTube, Flickr or SoundCloud, it’s a lot harder to build a 3D model compared to recording a video. Comparatively, it took four years and a half to get 100,000 files on Makerbot’s Thingiverse. Sketchfab raised $2.5 million to date.

Recently, the company partnered with Adobe to build a deep integration into Photoshop. Now, you can upload a 3D model directly from Photoshop without ever having to launch your browser. It will certainly boost Sketchfab’s growth.

Here’s an example of a Sketchfab embedded model:

Casengo Raises $2M To Accelerate One-Inbox Approach To Customer Service

Casengo is a cloud platform for customer support aimed at online retailers and other small businesses to respond to customer questions faster. It does this by creating one inbox for customer chats, emails and social media posts. In theory, this speeds up response times, especially when customer teams are scrambling around trying to deal with the same single enquiry coming in via different channels like email and social media. It’s now had a €1.5 million ($2 million) from a consortium of European investors led by VC firm henQ.

The problem they are solving is that if a customer does not hear back fast enough they tend to go nuclear on social media. “By treating social media posts with the same importance as emails, companies are on their way to gain more happy customers,” says founder Floris van der Even. And he has a point.

Emails can be turned into chat conversations, with or without a chat button on the website. Casengo sends all messages, wherever they come from, straight to one single team inbox.

Casengo mixes support software like Zendesk, Desk.com and Freshdesk (in some sense also competitors) with chat applications like Olark, Zopim and LiveChat. Over 2,300 companies worldwide now use the cloud application.

Herman Hintzen, executive partner of venture capital firm henQ Invest says Casengo efforts in developing semantic algorithms and mining big data “really triggered us”.

Casengo’s founders, Floris and Thijs van der Even (who are brothers) previously launched Livecom, a customer support application aimed at large enterprises such as Philips, BMW and ABN AMRO.

Apple Poaches Amazon A9 Search Exec For Maps And App Store Search Improvements

Apple has hired away a former Vice President of Search Technology from Amazon, according to 9to5Mac. Benoit Dupin’s profile was removed from Amazon A9′s leadership site, and his LinkedIn now lists him as a Director at Apple. The new role is said to be involved in revamping search specifically as it relates to Apple Maps, according to 9to5Mac’s sources.

The job change is significant because it represents a major poach from Amazon, and specifically its subsidiary that deals exclusive in search and advertising tech. Dupin has been managing Amazon’s search efforts since coming on board in 2007, which means he has a lot of expertise with making sure inputting search terms results in finding the right stuff.

Apple is likely well aware that it needs to shore up its search and discovery options in both the App Store, iTunes Store and Maps, all of which are said to be areas of focus for Dupin at Cupertino. Maps and the App Store in particular have been areas that have come under fire from consumers as not necessarily the most reliable services in Apple’s arsenal, so it makes sense for the company to bring in some fresh talent to tackle these trouble spots.

Updater, The Dashboard For Your Move, Packs Up $8 Million In Funding

Moving is the worst.

Even after you sort through finding a new apartment, struggle through the moving process, and manage to get your new place settled, there are still many tasks awaiting you. Remember that whole mail thing? And your utility accounts? And your magazine subscriptions?

That’s why Updater is hitting the scene with a $8 million Series A round from SoftBank, Second Century Ventures (which represents the investment arm of the National Association of Realtors), IA Ventures, and Commerce Ventures.

But what does Updater do?

Well, instead of calling up your cable company and your bank and running to the post office to change your address, Updater offers movers a complete dashboard for the moving experience.

With Updater, users can change their address online, switch over their bank account information, cable, and other utilities, and make sure their magazine subscriptions show up at the house.

As it stands now, Updater either integrates directly with or has information about 60,000 different vendors.

According to founder David Greenberg, the 45 million Americans who are moving this year will each have to reach out to between 10 and 15 different vendors and services each time they move. Updater condenses all of those processes into a single dashboard.

The service is entirely free to users, and will generate revenue through native advertising. The idea is simple: when you move, moreso than any other time in your life, your loyalties to brands are up in the air. If you’ve been going to Home Depot for years, and there is a Loews around the corner, you may very well switch.

That said, Updater will sign on brands and then surface those brands and vendors to you based on your move, your location, and your life stage. After all, moves often come with a big life transition like a new baby or a marriage. This type of data is super valuable to brands, and will be used (anonymized and aggregated) to make Updater a more informative experience while still providing value to brands.

Updater previously raised a $2 million seed round, bringing the company’s total funding to $10 million.

Netflix Is Now Streaming In 4K

4K TV is here. Sort of. Netflix is now streaming the second season of House of Cards and some nature documentaries in 4K/Ultra HD format. But of course, your TV has to support the higher resolution to take advantage of the extra pixel count.

Programs available for viewing in 4K will appear with the Ultra HD 4K label. Netflix confirmed to Multichannel News that the company is now streaming some titles in the higher resolution. Currently, Netflix is limiting 4k streaming to only TVs with Netflix and HEVC/H.265 decoding capabilities built in.

HDTVtest.com notes that the higher resolution stream really shines with “bright, colorful scenes” adding that the images were “rendered with greater sharpness and smoother gradients.”

Still, the bitrate of these streams are only around 15 Mbps so while the picture will be superior to HD Netflix, this flavor of 4K is not a true demonstration of the higher resolution. HDTVtest.com adds that to their trained eyes, some Blu-ray titles still offer a cleaner image.

The best is yet to come.

Wattpad Raises $46M From OMERS Ventures And Others To Grow Its Social Publishing Network

Social writing platform and writer’s network Wattpad has been at it for a while now, and they’ve quietly amassed a massive user base that engages regularly with the site, posting their own stories and reading the stories of others, all the while engaging with one another through feedback, criticism and support. Now, the startup has raised a Series C round of funding worth $46 million, led by OMERS Ventures, and including August Capital, Raine Ventures and Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund, and all of the company’s existing investors.

Wattpad has around 25 million monthly active users on its network, according to CEO and founder Allen Lau, which is up from users in just six or seven million around the last time they raised funding, a $17.3 million Series B back in June 2012. Lau is maybe more excited by the site’s progress in terms of engagement, which they measure by time spent on site (a more reliable metric than some of the softer ones put forward by startups these days). Wattpad users spend a cumulative total of over 6 billion minutes per month on the network, Lau tells me, which is up from just 1 billion minutes per month on site in February 2012.

“To give some idea of how much content users are posting on Wattpad, they’re uploading one chapter every half a second,” Lau explained. “Thats about 150,000 uploads every day, and if you translate that to reading time, that’s about ten hours of reading uploaded to Wattpad every minute.”

That’s what led Wattpad to translate the appetite for publishing on the platform into a way to generate revenue for the platform via crowdfunding books created by the network’s authors. The crowdfunding effort debuted back in August of last year, and Lau says that while the pilot experiment is now concluded, that doesn’t mean it’s gone away for good.

“Those experiments went pretty well, all the projects met their goals,” Lau said. “We’re in the process of adjusting the specifics of Fan Funding, and are looking forward to the next evolution of the project.”

In the meantime, Wattpad still drives some revenue through search, but Lau emphasized that for now at least, the focus remains on growing its user group, rather than on unlocking the profit potential of the network. To do that, it intends to use this funding to hire more product developers and additional staff to help grow and manage the community.

Lau says they’re focusing on hiring in their hometown of Toronto, which is uniquely positioned to foster the kind of growth Wattpad is looking for. That’s because Wattpad is hoping to increase their international expansion. Currently, 50 percent of Wattpad’s network and activity comes from outside North America, and the startup would like to capitalize on that. Toronto offers an extremely diverse and multilingual talent pool to draw from to make that happen, he notes. A brand new, spacious office opening soon in downtown Toronto should help Wattpad accommodate any new hires coming off of this round.

Wattpad continues to draw interest from top-tier investors and grow its network. Lau says to watch for new product developments, especially on mobile, to help pave the way for the next evolution of the company through 2014.

Indiegogo Updates Its Logo And Redesigns Website, Finally Optimized For Mobile And Tablets

Indiegogo has just revealed a huge redesign that updates the look and feel of the design for the first time in a couple years. The new look brings with it an optimized experience for mobile and tablet, which Indiegogo has never had before.

Before now, campaign owners and funders had to use desktop web on their mobile devices to update something on the go or do some mobile shopping. But according to founder Slava Rubin, more and more traffic is coming from mobile.

“We wanted to evolve the consumer experience,” said Rubin, showing me a brand new Indiegogo logo. Instead of the old cross-hatched pink and teal symbol, the new Indiegogo logo is a constantly updating reflection of all the best campaigns going on on the site at that very moment.

“For Indiegogo, it’s always been about the democratization of capital, and that not only means supporting the entrepreneurs as much as possible, but it means showing that support to consumers who start to browse the site,” said Rubin. “It’s a window for the consumer to look at Indiegogo for what it is.”

Indiegogo has always had a really wonderful experience for campaign owners, with no barrier to entry for those who want access to capital and numerous resources offered by the Indiegogo support team, as well. However, consumers have not had the same experience on Indiegogo. Almost everything is sorted by algorithm, which can make it difficult to surface things based on interest or other factors.

That said, the company has put a lot of work into the new homepage to make it more accessible and navigable for consumers.

But that doesn’t mean support for entrepreneurs is ending. Just the opposite, in fact.

Indiegogo is also releasing, alongside the big redesign, a new Indiegogo Playbook, which takes all the knowledge from Indiegogo support staff, as well as formerly successful campaigners, and offers it to new entrepreneurs and Indiegogo consumer on a single page.

Indiegogo has long offered tons of support to entrepreneurs, but the Playbook condenses it all in one place, and will always be growing with new advice and ideas for running the best possible campaign.

The new website is slowly rolling out today over a two-month period, so if you don’t see it right away, don’t panic.

Indiegogo recently raised $40 million.

Jerry Yang, Box, Workday Founders Invest In Disruptive Supply Chain SaaS Elementum

Elementum, a company that exited stealth recently to disrupt supply chain management, is announcing new investment from Box co-founder Aaron Levie,Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Workday co-founder and co-CEO Dave Duffield, Silver Lake Partners co-founder and managing director Jim Davidson, and Workday VP or Products Mike Frandsen. This follows a Series B raises of $44 million in February, when the startup was officially spun off from Flextronics.

Elementum launched to simplify supply chain management similar to the way Salesforce disrupted the CRM for sales, and Workday reinvented software for HR and finance. The company has created a suite of mobile apps that simplifies and optimizes complicated supply chain processes in the cloud. For most businesses, dealing with supply chain software is an archaic process, and things like mobile, realtime access to data, and even good design is hard to come by.

The company’s Transport app lets companies manage their transportation network, and see every route and shipment in a supply chain—down to individual segments. So you can see delays and lags in real-time. The Exposure app allows you to identify and respond to risks in the supply chain and seee where every component and finished good is supplied, manufactured, and distributed. Elementum also offers an analytics app that monitors the health of asupply chain, and graphs out much of the data collected by the other apps.

“With the creation of the world’s first supply chain graph, Elementum isn’t just disrupting the industry, they’re rewriting the rules,” said Levie of Elementum.

Similar to the way Zendesk is disrupting customer service software, and ZenPayroll is taking on the payroll works, Elementum is tackling the archaic industry of supply chain management. With good design, a mobile focus, and the right advisors and investors, the company is hoping to create an easy for companies to manage logistics and more.

Jinn Expands Its Local On-Demand Delivery App To London

It looks like the same-hour ‘shop on your behalf’ delivery space in London is heating up. In January, French startup Tok Tok Tok raised $2 million for European expansion, with the UK Capital City pegged next. And U.S.-based Postmates, which just raised a $16 million series B round, has hinted that London is on its radar. Meanwhile, amidst all of this VC activity, UK upstart Jinn has quietly expanded to central London after trialing its service in Newcastle, in the North East of England, while taking part in accelerator Ignite100.

Jinn differs from those soon-to-be competitors in a number of ways. Firstly and perhaps shrewdly, it’s initially marketing the service to students, something that co-founder Mario Navarro tells me has proven so far to be a good fit (it seems that students are too lazy to get their own late-night munchies these days). It’s also an easily definable market, he says, and one with built-in word-of-mouth virility.

Secondly, instead of having a catalog of products like Postmates and Tok Tok Tok does, the Jinn iOS and Android app allows you to simply write what you want and where you want it, “making the ordering process as fast and hassle-free as possible,” says Navarro. Products ordered through the app can be from restaurants or any local store, with the aim to be delivered in under an hour. So far, in its Newcastle trial, students have ordered anything from an iPhone charging cable to a pirate’s flag, though, unsurprisingly, fast-food has proved most popular, especially since favourites like McDonalds don’t deliver.

Jinn deliveries are handled by freelance couriers, with the app assigning each order according to proximity. The startup then takes a commission from the £5.95 delivery fee plus 10% of the purchase. “What’s different about Jinn is that they’ve cracked courier recruitment, scaling and other issues by being very clever about who they’re targeting,” Ignite100‘s Paul Smith tells me.

The startup, whose three founders are originally from Spain, is also post-pivot, having originally applied to Ingite100 with an idea related to helping people get around the city more easily only to spot a bigger opportunity in the transportation of products. Couriers are great at delivering stuff, but don’t normally shop on your behalf. They then set about building a very quick and dirty MVP consisting of a Facebook page that allowed users to order anything they wanted via private message. It wasn’t long before students began using the service.

And whilst it’s still clearly early days for Jinn, the burgeoning startup appears to have already got the attention of Postmates’ co-founder Bastian Lehman who tweeted “Stop doing what other people have done already. Get out there and create your own”. He later added: “We will be in London before the Summer.” All the while Jinn is going about the business of actually delivering late night food (and other goods) to the UK Capital City’s malnourished and time-scarce(?) students.

@_marionavarro_ @buro9 @jinnapp Stop doing what other people have done already. Get out there and create your own.—

Bastian Lehmann (@Basti) March 19, 2014

Google Delays I/O Registration By A Week At The Last Minute

If you were planning to wake up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to get your name into the runnings for a Google I/O ticket as early as possible (not that timing matters, given that it’s a roulette this year): feel free to cancel that alarm.

Google has just announced that they’re pushing back I/O registration by a week from its originally scheduled date, from April 8th to April 15th. The reason? The system just isn’t ready yet.

Says Google on their Developers G+ page:

“We’re still working to make the registration process even easier for you, and it will now be open four days starting next week (opening next Tuesday and closing Friday).”

The I/O registration page confirms the change

Also changing is the length of the registration window: instead of running for 3 days (April 8th through the 10th), it’ll be open for four days (April 15th through 18th).

Not changing, however, is the overall plan to offer up tickets roulette style. Tickets will be sold to randomly selected applicants — and given that they just extended the length of the registration window, it’ll probably be just a biiiit harder to win one.

GrabTaxi Raises Series A, Prepares To Expand In Southeast Asia

GrabTaxi, which claims to be the largest taxi app in Southeast Asia, has raised its Series A round from Vertex Ventures, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek, an investment company owned by Singapore’s government. The startup’s CEO and founder Anthony Tan declined to disclose the exact amount of the funding, but said it was more than $1 million.

The startup launched in 2012 and has since opened offices in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia (where it is called MyTeksi). GrabTaxi will use its new funding to expand into new cities. The app currently has 250,000 monthly users and over one million downloads. It claims to book a taxi every two seconds.

GrabTaxi competes in the same space as several domestic taxi-calling apps, as well as Uber and Rocket Internet’s Easy Taxi, both of which are aggressively expanding in Southeast Asia.

But Tan downplays the so-called “taxi app war.” He says that the demand in cities like Singapore or Bangkok is high enough to support several players and that the main challenge for taxi apps is not competing with each other, but changing human behavior.

“We are all fighting to move people from taking taxis on the street, from streets hails to e-hails,” says Tan.

“Our challenge is convincing people to move from street hailing to call centers, from SMS all the way to an app,” he adds.

While Uber focuses on its luxury car services in Southeast Asia and Rocket Internet is busy taking Easy Taxi into emerging markets throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Tan says GrabTaxi differentiates by closely examining the needs of local customers. In order to attract riders, GrabTaxi has focused on two things: convenience in inclement weather and safety, especially for women hailing cabs at night.

The app uses drivers from different taxi networks and automatically shows riders which cars are nearest and have the most reliable drivers using an algorithm that includes variables like distance, traffic, and quality rankings. The app charges a low booking fee (for example, two ringgits, or 61 cents, in Malaysia). Like other taxi apps, GrabTaxi allows riders to rate their driver and track their vehicle’s movements using GPS.

Tan says that in the near future, GrabTaxi will expand into new cities within the countries it already operates in instead of new countries. For example, it just launched in Ho Chi Minh City. Cebu, the second most populous city in the Philippines, is next on the list.

Adobe Announces Lightroom Mobile For iPad And iPhone

Adobe has heard the call from its users, and it’s bringing Lightroom to mobile devices, beginning with the iPad and coming soon to iPhone. The Lightroom mobile app offers the ability to work with RAW photos as you can on the desktop version, as well as smartphone and mobile images to get the most out of those shots you take on the fly. It automatically syncs with Lightroom 5 on the desktop, but there’s a catch – you need to be a Creative Cloud subscriber to take advantage of what Lightroom mobile has to offers, so owners of boxed copy Lightroom software are out of luck.

Making Lightroom mobile a Cloud Service exclusive is clearly a selling tactic – Adobe knows people have been asking for this for a while now. But it offers a lot of great features for the price it incurs, too. As mentioned, it syncs all changes to your desktop automatically, and it works with almost any image format you might come across. It imports photos direct from your iOS device camera roll, and includes sharing options for popular social destinations so you can amp up your art before you reveal it to your network. There’s also a slideshow feature built-in, and you can access your shared libraries from the web via the online Lightroom portal.

The interface for Lightroom mobile is redesigned to work best on your iPad or iPhone’s screen, with the image taking up the bulk of the UI and sliders and touch-optimized controls taking up the remainder of the screen. All of the tools around exposure, color and tonal adjustments are here, just like in the desktop version, but the two versions of the tool (desktop and mobile) are definitely designed to be complimentary, rather than having one replace the other entirely in your workflow.

To get Adobe’s new Lightroom mobile, you’ll need to be a member of one of four Creative Cloud programs:

• Photoshop Photography Program (USD $9.99 per month)


• Creative Cloud complete plan (USD$49.99 per month)


• Creative Cloud Student and Teacher Edition (USD 29.99 per month)


• Creative Cloud for teams complete plan (USD $69.99 per user per month)

Users will have to have an iPad 2 or later to run the software, and will also need to be on iOS 7 or later. Adobe says it’s working on an Android version, but firm plans on launch or release date for software compatible with Google’s mobile OS just yet.

Adobe Launches Primetime 2.0 With Cloud Ad Insertion, Adds Xbox 360 And Roku Support

Adobe's Primetime isn't among the company's most well-known services, but if you watched the Olympics online, chances are you have interacted with it. It's Adobe's platform for online TV delivery and monetization and it counts the likes of TBS, the Tennis Channel, Major League Baseball, WWE, M6 RTL Group, NBC, Comcast, Shaw and Bell Media in Canada among its users. And if you ever watch TV on your… Read More

Massive Security Bug In OpenSSL Could Affect A Huge Chunk Of The Internet

I saw a t-shirt one time. “I’m a bomb disposal technician,” it read. “If you see me running, try to keep up.”

The same sort of idea can be applied to net security: when all the net security people you know are freaking out, it’s probably an okay time to worry.

This afternoon, many of the net security people I know are freaking out. A very serious bug in OpenSSL — a cryptographic library that is used to secure a very, very large percentage of the Internet’s traffic — has just been discovered and publicly disclosed.

Even if you’ve never heard of OpenSSL, it’s probably a part of your life in one way or another — or, more likely, in many ways. The apps you use, the sites you visit; if they encrypt the data they send back and forth, there’s a good chance they use OpenSSL to do it. The Apache web server that powers something like 50% of the Internet’s web sites, for example, utilizes OpenSSL.

Through a bug that security researchers have dubbed “Heartbleed“, it seems that it’s possible to trick almost any system running any version of OpenSSL from the past 2 years into revealing chunks of data sitting in its system memory.

Why that’s bad: very, very sensitive data often sits in a server’s system memory, including the keys it uses to encrypt and decrypt communication (read: usernames, passwords, credit cards, etc.) This means an attacker could quite feasibly get a server to spit out its secret keys, allowing them read to any communication that they intercept like it wasn’t encrypted it all. Armed with those keys, an attacker could also impersonate an otherwise secure site/server in a way that would fool many of your browser’s built-in security checks.

And if an attacker was just gobbling up mountains of encrypted data from a server in hopes of cracking it at some point? They may very well now have the keys to decrypt it, depending on how the server they’re attacking was configured (for example, whether or not it’s set up to utilize Perfect Forward Secrecy.)

To drastically understate it: this is bad news.

The exploit relies on a bug in the implementation of OpenSSL’s “heartbeat” feature, hence the “Heartbleed” name.

It seems the bug has been in OpenSSL for 2+ years (since December 2011, OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f) before its publicly announced discovery today. Even worse, it appears that exploiting this bug leaves no trace in the logs. So there’s no easy way for a system administrator to know if their servers have been compromised; they just have to assume that they have been.

The bug was discovered and reported to the OpenSSL team by Neel Mehta of Google’s security team. OpenSSL released an emergency patch for the bug along with a Security Advisory this afternoon. Security firm Codenomicon has written an in-depth breakdown of the Heartbleed bug here.

Amazon Fire TV Replaces Chromecast Atop Amazon’s Best Sellers List

Don't be surprised. The Amazon Fire TV now occupies the top spot on Amazon's Best Sellers electronics list. Google's Chromecast streaming stick previously held the spot after displacing the Kindle shortly after its launch. Read More

After Raising $250 Million, Lyft Cuts Prices By Up To 20% In All Markets

Last week, Lyft announced that it had raised a massive $250 million round of funding as part of its effort to compete against other on-demand ride services. Now the company is going on the offensive against its competitors, with a price cut of up to 20 percent in all of its markets.

Lyft’s Spring Pricing initiative, which it is announcing to drivers in an email blast today, will lower the cost of rides for all consumers who use the service. But it won’t affect the amount of money that drivers take home — instead, the company is temporarily suspending its 20 percent commission while testing out the new rates.

With the cuts, Lyft is making a big push to acquire users in a market that is being increasingly driven by the cost of getting from Point A to Point B. In January, Uber announced a similar fare reduction in 16 of its U.S. markets, which it claimed would make it the lowest cost provider for its users.

Just last month, Lyft introduced its “Happy Hour” pricing, which lowers rates in periods of low demand. The company has also been giving out free rides to users in newly launched cities as part of its “pioneers” program.

Photo Credit: Tribute/ Homenaje via Compfight cc

Apple Puts iOS 7 Adoption At 87% As iOS 6 And Older Fade To Black

Apple has just released updating figures around iOS version adoption as measured by its own tracking of app usage, and iOS 7 and up now accounts for 87 percent of all iOS devices by that measurement, with iOS 6 making up 11 percent and older versions accounting for just 2 percent of the total picture.

That’s a very thoroughly homogenous mix, given the comparable Android numbers; Google’s own mix shows that the overwhelming majority of devices are still on some version of Jelly Bean, with a big chunk on Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich, and only a relatively small 5.3 percent on KitKat (4.4) or higher.

Apple’s numbers are slightly conservative compared to ones we’ve seen from other sources, too, including Mixpanel, which saw usage cross 90 percent a couple of weeks ago, and still shows it hovering just below that threshold. The adoption has risen from 74 percent late last year, charting consistent gains throughout 2014 so far.

Higher adoption means fewer headaches for developers, and a guaranteed consistency of experience across devices and users for both Apple its third-party software-makers. Google is trying to move some of its OS pieces into Play Store independent services to keep its experience easier to normalize, but Apple is still far and away the winner when it comes to the consistency of mobile OSes.

Inside Jobs: Facebook’s Hardware Engineering Head Who Likes Getting His Hands Dirty

When you think of people in the upper echelons of technical fields like hardware engineering, you might think of lifelong academics with multiple degrees in engineering and math and science. But if there’s one thing that’s become clear in our Inside Jobs series, there are a lot of different types of people in the roles that make the tech world really tick.

Take Matt Corddry. As the Facebook’s director of hardware engineering, he leads the team that builds the actual hardware that stores the photos, thoughts, and memories of the more than 1 billion people worldwide who share their lives on Facebook — serious technology with some very serious responsibilities.

But Corddry didn’t learn about his field in the ivory tower of academia: He actually majored in photography, and dropped out of college a handful of credits shy of graduation to work full time at a startup. All of his technology experience has been built in the real world, not by reading books.

It was fascinating to spend time with Corddry at Facebook headquarters to get an in-person look at how he works on a day to day basis. In keeping with his history, he puts a lot of importance on his team getting their hands dirty and knowing how servers work in the real world of data centers and the technicians who work in them. He told me:

“There are so many people in our industry who design servers, yet have never seen a production data center. They’ve never been out to one, and they really don’t know what the real experience is and what the opportunities are. You need to know very well the people who use your product. You need to know the experience you are creating.

It is insufficient to just write a paper about it, or just have someone else write a paper and you read it. You really need to walk a mile in their shoes… I work as a technician. It’s not just my engineers. I’m out in the data center fixing servers myself. I do it multiple times per year.”

Get an inside look at Matt Corddry’s job in the video embedded above.

Inside Jobs is a 12 episode miniseries from TechCrunch TV airing weekly on Mondays from March 24 through June 9 that gives an in-depth look at people in the job roles that really make the tech industry tick. Last week’s episode of Inside Jobs profiled True & Co.’s head of UX Sarah Harrison.

All shooting, editing, sound, and lighting for Inside Jobs is done by John Murillo. Production coordination and creative direction is done by Felicia Williams. Original logo design by Bryce Durbin. Motion graphics and graphic design by Eden Soto.

The First $299 3D Printer Hits Its Kickstarter Goal In 11 Minutes

Lots of things can happen in 11 minutes. You can grill a nice steak, you can bake a pan of cookies, or you can raise over $400,000 to build an ultra-compact 3D printer that, for a brief period, cost a mere $199. Called the Mini, the printer smashed its Kickstarter goal of $50,000 and is now well on its way to becoming one of the most interesting projects on the site.

Created by a team in Bethesda, MD, the Mini originally sold for $199 for early birds and his since risen by $100. It’s a tiny printer, to be sure, with a 4.5 cubic-inch build volume and a special internal spool that holds the filament inside the printer’s case. It can build objects 4.5-inches high, which isn’t much but it’s enough to have a bit of fun.

Now, for the tough question: can M3D pull this off? The case for the printer itself should cost a little less than $20 and the extruder, pieced out separately, probably costs about $100 or so. A very simple extruder costs $65 retail, so you could reduce that price slightly. Shipping will cost a few dollars – probably $12-$20 – depending on where it’s manufactured, so the $199 model was definitely a loss leader. That said, $299 is an entirely feasible price for a mini 3D printer.

The founders, Michael Armani and David Jones, have done something quite intelligent: they’re building a very bare-bones printer with some very interesting software. If this image is any indication, you’ll be able to search for an open-source object and print it right from the app. The app resizes the object and prepares it for printing and the wee printer does the rest. It also has a self-leveling print bed, an amazing addition at the price.

I doubt this will be the last $199 printer we see – the price will soon fall precipitously and when HP gets into the mix things will really change – but even at $299 this seems like a nice little entry-level device. Caveat emptor, though, because if this campaign takes off I’ll be very curious to see when and how these guys are able to ship all of the printers they sell.

Uber Experiments With A Courier Service In New York City

On-demand ride service Uber has already shown that it can get users wherever they need to go, with just a tap on their smartphone. Starting tomorrow, it will begin testing out a new courier service in New York City.

The new service, called UberRUSH, will appear on users’ home screens alongside its UberBLACK and UberSUV offerings, and will allow customers to have small goods delivered from one place to another. Once a user requests UberRUSH, a courier will arrive either on bike or on foot to deliver a package elsewhere in Manhattan, generally within an hour.

It’s important to note that the UberRUSH is not an on-demand delivery service in the same sense as Postmates or WunWun, in which users place an order and have goods brought to them. Instead, with the new service, couriers will pick up objects from Uber users and deliver them to a specific address designated by the customer.

In that way, UberRUSH is more like a traditional courier service, used for transporting same-day deliveries around the city.

We're rolling out some big news on Tuesday… http://t.co/1pDPy8oV2p—

Uber NYC (@Uber_NYC) April 05, 2014

UberRUSH deliveries will have a base fare of $15 for delivery, and the price will depend on travel within and between various designated “zones” within Manhattan.

The offering will be available from the Financial District all the way up to 110th Street, and the different zones are marked off at Houston Street, 34th Street, 59th Street, and Central Park. For each zone that a courier travels through, the cost will increase an additional $5, for a maximum of $30 per delivery.

According to Uber New York City General Manager Josh Mohrer, the service will be available 24 hours a day beginning tomorrow. But Uber expects the busiest periods to be during general work hours — that is, when businesspeople in the city generally need to expedite documents and other goods within the city.

Over the years, Uber has experimented with various non-ride delivery options, including everything from dropping off mariachi bands to BBQ to kittens. But this is the first time that the company will allow its users to have anything delivered for a fee.

For now, that will be limited to things that couriers can carry themselves, either on foot or on a bike. You can imagine that will include business documents between law, financial, or realty offices, but could also include things like Airbnb users having keys dropped off to a certain location.

Part of the fun for Uber will be figuring out how exactly its customers use the service, and what typical use cases end up being. Once it knows that, it could potentially extend the availability of its service to other providers who wish to ride on top of the logistics network it’s already built.

Xbox One Will Be Able To Upload Game Recordings Straight To YouTube Starting Tomorrow

You’ve just pulled of a truly epic, one-in-a-million shot in Titanfall. Your team is going nuts. Everyone on the opposing team is calling you a hacker. This is why you play games.

“Xbox, record that!” you yell, saving the moment to the console’s hard drive forever.

Now… how to share it with the world?

Up ’til now, getting the clip online meant sharing it to Microsoft’s OneDrive. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that; OneDrive is actually a pretty solid service — but when’s the last time you heard someone talking about their favorite viral OneDrive video? Never? Yeah. Probably never.

If you want eyeballs on the video, you’ll probably want to put it on YouTube. You’ll soon be able to do that directly from the Xbox One.

With an update expected to launch sometime tomorrow, the Xbox One’s YouTube app will have a new “My Uploads” section that lets you pluck videos from your One and toss them online with just a few button presses. You can trim the clip down or add commentary through the One’s built-in editor, or just toss them in raw.

The app will also be getting a bunch of achievements that you’ll unlock for watching videos, because Microsoft has seemingly forgotten what the word “achievement” means.