While Target’s loss of 40 million customer records containing credit and debit card information made the headlines of most news organizations today, while deeply embarrassing for Target, I wonder if anyone really cares?
The fact is that for the past 5 years, data breeches have been occurring with increasing frequency and it therefore doesn’t seem especially surprising when we hear that someone else’s data has been stolen. In a year, when much has been made of the NSA snooping on American citizens, this whole privacy issue seems to be one that was supposed to be big, but just hasn’t turned out that way.
If you extrapolated what analysts were saying a few years back, we should be assuming that Target’s Q4 2013 would be a disaster, with customers boycotting the store and making their vital holiday season a financial misery. This isn’t going to happen because people don’t seem to care about their financial data being freely exposed to the world, because they’ve calculated that the chances of their personal data being used are minimal and if something was to happen, it’s easily solved.
It therefore appears that companies might have some wiggle room when it comes to how they use the mountains of data they are now collecting on everyone and everything. It seems that consumers are very much benefit focused and would rather seize the immediate advantage of a new app, rather than read the small print of the legal statement that might basically say that the company behind the app is taking every piece of data it can from you.
For companies in the data business and those using the data, there’s obviously a fine balance to achieve. As long as people don’t feel their data is being abused and misused and the promise that greater intelligence will provide greater personalization is delivered, all will be good.
However, when someone crosses the line and pushes things to far, there’s a possibility that attitudes could change.
A recent article in Popular Science highlights the news that one of the foremost experts in Artificial Intelligence, Yann LeCun has just been lured away from NYU to Facebook. LeCun’s specialty is using intelligence from images to help a drone fly itself. Popular Science speculates that LeCun might be applying this technology a little differently at Facebook.
“It’s not hard to imagine similar algorithms used to “read” the videos that you upload to Facebook, by examining who and what is present in the scene. Instead of targeting ads to users based on keywords written in Facebook posts, the algorithms would analyze a video of say, you at the beach with some friends. The algorithm might then learn what beer you’re drinking lately, what brand of sunscreen you use, who you’re hanging out with, and guess whether you might be on vacation.”
Maybe I am wrong, but I am not sure everyone who uploads photos to Facebook is expecting them to be hyper-analyzed; useful data extracted and predictive analysis performed and sold to advertisers. If they knew what was going to be done, would they still upload?
While Target’s data breech might make the headlines today, but not cause widespread panic and condemnation from consumers, it’s seems likely that it won’t be long before someone pushes the privacy balance a little too far and gets to experience serious whiplash from the consumer reaction.
About a year ago, I published a post titled, "There Are Officially Too Many MBA's." Hyperbolic, perhaps, but it's undeniable that salaries for new MBAs have decreased since the recession, which suggests the market is glutted with business-school grads.
In a new poll reported in Businessweek, 44 percent of employers told the Council on Graduate Management Admission they wouldn't pay more for new MBAs—and might even cut salaries for fresh business-school grads. Another 45 percent said they'll just pay enough to keep pace with inflation. Only 65 percent of respondents were in the U.S., but it gives you a sense of tepid market for MBAs.
Expected Change in 2013 Base Salaries Compared With 2013
That's not even worst recent news about MBA hiring.
In November, Michigan State's Collegiate Employment Research Center projected that recruitment would tumble nearly 25 percent next near, based on a survey of hiring plans by some 6,500 employers. The center expects a whopping 58-percent decline in finance, a traditional bastion of MBA hiring. Meanwhile, the center expects hiring to improve for bachelor's degree and Ph.D. holders.
Is this the sound of a bubble popping or a tiny market correction? We don't know. But after a decade where MBAs grads grew by an amazing 74 percent, it's possible we're seeing some air being let out of a bubble.
This is what hockey-stick growth looks like: Peer-to-peer lodging marketplace Airbnb announced this morning that it’ll top 10 million guest stays since being launched in 2007. That’s a big number, for sure, but the bigger overall point is that the company had more than 6 million guest stays on the platform in 2013, more than doubling its total over the past year.
Of course, we kind of knew this was coming, based on data Airbnb had shared in October. Back then it touted 9 million stays, so it’s added another million in the past two months alone.
The company’s user base continues to skew international. Of the 6 million guest stays over the past year, about a third were American. The company has said in the past that about 75 percent of its stays have an international component — that is, either a foreign guest staying in a U.S.-based property or a U.S. guest staying in a foreign property, or a non-U.S. guest staying in a non-U.S. property — so that’s not surprising.
But the distribution of guests to lodgings has a funny sort of symmetry: Airbnb says that travelers from more than 175 different countries used the platform over the past year, staying in listings from more than 175 different countries.
While Airbnb has seen really impressive demand, its supply of listings has also grown dramatically in 2013. More than 250,000 properties have been added to the platform over the past year, bringing the total number of listings to 550,000 worldwide.
Airbnb’s big year came after the company raised $200 million in funding from Founder’s Fund last fall. The company has been using that funding to aggressively expand worldwide, something that appears to be working out.
Uber’s revenue numbers, which were leaked to Gawker just a few weeks ago, look bold at roughly $20 million per week.
But there isn’t necessarily a definitive market winner yet in the peer-to-peer space, as the entire field is on a rising tide. Lyft, which started peer-to-peer ride-sharing after Uber’s black cars on demand, is seeing its revenues grow at a rate of about 6 percent every single week, according to raw data and revenue dashboards that Lyft co-founder John Zimmer shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
That growth rate is more than double Uber’s growth pace, which averaged about 2.8 percent in the five weeks of data leaked to Gawker. Compounded over a year, Lyft is seeing 20X growth.
“I think there will be a black car winner at the high end and a peer-to-peer winner at the affordable price point for the mass market,” Zimmer said. “Lyft is already the leader in peer-to-peer, which is the fastest growing on-demand transportation segment.”
You could argue that because Lyft is growing from a smaller revenue base, its growth rate would naturally be higher. But Lyft says it is already doing one-third of the weekly ride volume Uber was doing across all of its product lines when they raised their last round at a $3.5 billion valuation (if you back out Uber’s leaked numbers to June 2013).
Zimmer’s data and revenue dashboards last week revealed a more than $100 million gross run rate.
Uber, for its part, says that growth rates vary drastically in different seasons, with the summers being slower than the holiday season. November, in particular, is a weaker month so they argue you can’t extrapolate growth rates back. (That said, Lyft shared revenue dashboards for the same time period.)
“I’d love to tell you how much bigger we are than them, but I can’t do that,” said Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. “We’re the leader right now, but we take competition seriously. We don’t dismiss it.”
We estimated Uber’s gross revenue run rate at $1 billion from the leaked Gawker dashboard. That is 10X Lyft’s size and Uber said many of the cities it serves on its own have already passed the $100 million gross revenue mark. Kalanick adds that the company has also seen 20 percent month-over-month growth in the last two months, despite growing from a larger revenue base.
But they don’t just do peer-to-peer ride sharing. They have multiple product lines covering black cars, taxis, peer-to-peer ride-sharing and SUVs. Uber is also international, covering 66 cities in 24 countries, compared to Lyft’s U.S.-based 20 markets. (Lyft also doesn’t do 7X surge pricing.)
Then there is a slew host of other companies competing to offer on-demand transportation from your phone like Sidecar, Hailo, Gett, and China’s Didi Dache.
But these competitors are generally much smaller than Lyft and Uber, which are fighting for peer-to-peer in the U.S. market. It’s not clear from Uber’s leaked numbers how big their peer-to-peer business is compared to the original black car or taxi business lines. Kalanick declined to break this out, but he said black car fares are generally only 1.8 times higher than the peer-to-peer fares.
The competition between the two companies has become increasingly cutthroat, with Uber resorting to aggressive campaigns to undercut Lyft’s supply of drivers. They’ve offered $50 gas vouchers to recruit Lyft drivers and have run advertising campaigns urging drivers to “Shave The Stache.”
Kalanick defended these tactics, “It’s important for us to have as much supply as possible. When you’re small, you don’t need that many drivers to make it work. But when you’re big, you’re talking about taking in thousands, if not tens of thousands of drivers. It’s important that if there are good drivers out there, they know they have options.”
Amid Uber’s more competitive tactics, Lyft has stayed focused on growing its core community of drivers and users without poaching from rivals.
“By focusing on community, we’re able to attract the highest quality drivers. It makes sense that our competitors would try to recruit them as they try to catch up in peer-to-peer, but we’re not seeing an impact on our loyal driver base or our ride growth numbers.” said Zimmer, who added that the “Shave the Stache” campaign actually ended up educating more prospective passengers and drivers about Lyft.
Bitcoin took a pounding in the last 24 hours, dropping below the $500 mark on the popular Mt.Gox exchange before rebounding. As TechCrunch’s John Biggs wrote this morning, “China’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, BTCChina, has stopped accepting deposits in Chinese yuan,” which added to the currency’s decline.
However, the fall of Bitcoin’s value has been underway for some time, making the Chinese news merely component to the larger story: Bitcoin is losing momentum.
What pushed Bitcoin to $1,200 is the precise quantity that is taking it down. Hype, media interest, and speculative hope drove it up, and a lack of hype, media disinterest, and falling speculative buys are driving it down.
Bitcoin is trading at $606 at the time of writing. I made fun of Bitcoin when it initially hit $645: “Currently trading around $645 per coin, it has never been worth more, or generated more headlines that I can recall. The two are likely connected.” Yes.
The rise of Bitcoin was a classic bubble. Here’s the Mt.Gox chart of Bitcoin’s price on a daily basis:
So, to see a huge Bitcoin price correction isn’t surprising in the slightest. Let’s go over a few past entries on why Bitcoin was, and is a bubble:
The current rally is being fueled by the usual combination of presumed scarcity, an overzealous investor class, and truckloads of optimism. So, things will calm down in a bit, with a decent price correction. History teaches us that much. Also, can I sell you this tulip bulb.
People keep saying this isn’t a bubble, and it confuses me. Of course this is a bubble. It’s a far too rapid increase in the price of a financial instrument that is unmoored from any inherent value that is being bid up by aggressive individual speculation. What else is that?
Bitcoin has risen up to $621 from $606 since I started writing this short blog post. That doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that the price of Bitcoin has long outstripped the utility that it can provide. This became far more true after the implosion of Silk Road. Until Bitcoin has benefits commensurate with its price, it will remain overvalued. For now, the dollar cost of each coin is far higher than the value you can derive from it — its use for things that you can’t use other currencies for, or wouldn’t want to — aside from its status as an instrument of speculation.
Speculative demand never keeps the value of an asset class high over time.
BlackBerry is keeping the hope alive with a partnership with LG. Announced today, the LG G Pro Lite will ship with BBM already installed on the smartphone.
This comes two months after BBM’s Android and iOS launch. It quickly found footing, and following its launch, raked in 10M downloads in a day. BBM is still a small player in the messaging app game, but there’s no questioning that consumers have latched onto the platform.
We all know the broad strokes: Research In Motion-turned BlackBerry is quickly dying. Its last-ditch effort in consumer hardware failed to revive the storied smartphone brand. But the company is still alive, albeit on life support. BlackBerry Ltd also announced today the hiring of former SAP mobile boss John Sims to lead its global enterprise business.
This partnership with LG shows there could be a future for BlackBerry that doesn’t involve a bankruptcy court. The Canada-based company will never regain its share of the smartphone market, but there’s plenty of money to be made in enterprise infrastructure and global communication.
BlackBerry announces its latest quarterly earnings on Friday. It should be a bloodbath.
WATERLOO, ONTARIO–(Marketwired – Dec 18, 2013) – BBM™ will soon come preinstalled on the LG G Pro Lite from LG Electronics Inc. in markets around the world. BlackBerry® (BBRY)(BB.TO) today announced a bundling agreement with LG Electronics involving both standard and virtual preloading (using the LG App Manager) and confirmed that BBM will also continue to be available as a free download from Android app stores, including Google Play™.
“BBM is widely used throughout the Middle East, Africa and Indonesia where smartphone users tend to engage heavily in social networking,” said Kevin Shin, Vice President of Marketing for Asia, the Middle East and CIS countries of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “The LG G Pro Lite offers an optimized BBM experience with its large, high quality display and embedded Stylus Pen.”
“People across the globe are using BBM to connect with each other and the enthusiasm has been phenomenal,” said Andrew Bocking, Executive Vice President for BBM at BlackBerry. “We’re extremely pleased that LG Electronics will help bring their customers a more seamless experience with BBM by preloading the app, starting with the G Pro Lite in key markets.”
BBM is a premier mobile communication service that gives customers privacy, control and immediacy as they chat with their contacts – either one-to-one, in multiple chats or as part of a BBM Group. BBM’s Delivered and Read statuses, as well as message-in-progress notices, keep people engaged and active in their conversations.
BBM lets users share files such as photos and voice notes, as well as update their profile and status with ease. Up to 30 people can connect as a BBM Group to chat and share photos, calendars and other files or documents.
Every BBM user has a unique PIN tied to their BlackBerry ID that helps maintains their privacy. Users never have to give out their phone number or email address to begin chatting with a new or casual contact.
The BBM experience will continue to evolve for Android and iPhone® users in the coming months, with updates that will include support for BBM Channels, a new service that connects BBM users to communities of shared interests in a very engaging and intimate manner, as well as support for BBM Voice calling and BBM Video calling.
The longer three-month period, stretching from September to November, was also unusually warm—the second warmest on record since 1880; only 2005 was warmer. For the entire year to date, 2013 is on track to be among the top five or six warmest years since we started keeping track. All ten of the ten warmest years on record have happened in the past 15 years.
Good job, everybody. Keep it up and you get a prize.
KesselsKramer has designed a calendar for US hotel group The Standard illustrating comments left by guests in its suggestion boxes.
The calendar depicts 12 of the most unusual notes The Standard staff received in 2013, including one from a customer who claimed their TV was possessed, another who believed the hot tub had melted their prescription lenses and one from an anxious music journalist thanking staff for reading him to sleep.
Top: "Your staff are the nicest pooch lovers in the world. Penny, my precious little wiener...is looking forward to her next stay."
Above: "I had just given an unflattering review to a volatile pop star's latest album and heard through the grapevine he was staying at the hotel. I was certain he was going to exact some kind of revenge...after many anxious phone calls...one of your staff kindly offered to stay up with me until I calmed down."
Scenes were re-enacted by staff and shot at The Standard hotels by French multimedia artist Thomas Mailaender. A guest who bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain well-known religious figure was also asked to take part after he was spotted enjoying his morning eggs in a white dressing gown:
"Thank you for providing a refuge to recover from the harsh world of Los Angeles and its dog eat dog media business...I have been re-born a better man."
Mailaender's images are funny and beautifully shot, and his sense of humour communicates The Standard's 'irreverent and playful sensibility' perfectly.
Tales of 'epic hangovers', rooftop parties and after work drinks boost its reputation as a place to socialise as well as sleep, while comments about haunted electrical equipment and rogue hot tubs suggest amenities are so good, the only complaints guests have are the utterly bizarre.
The calendar will be available at The Standard's online shop later this week.
"The TV is possessed. No matter which button you push...it just channels down"
"Quality of toilet paper could be better...3-ply minimum...otherwise it was a great room and enjoyable stay."
It was only a matter of time before the 2013 meme of the year tried to turn his success into financial gain. Enter Dogecoin: a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency that seems to have started as a joke and is beginning to actually accumulate some value. As with most things meme, there's a community on Reddit called Dogemarket where users are trading Dogecoin for actual, real-world items — though as of today, a single Dogecoin is worth only $0.00023.
That's a far cry from the $735 or so Bitcoin is trading at currently, but you have to start somewhere. Despite that low value, users are actively trading and mining the new currency, and a massive forum thread has sprung up over the last week with Dogecoin fanatics sharing resources and testing...
Beyoncé's surprise album release on iTunes this past Friday has, unsurprisingly, been a huge hit. Apple just announced that the self-titled video and song collection sold a whopping 828,773 copies in only three days, making it the fastest-selling album on iTunes ever. 617,213 copies were sold in the US. According to BIllboard, it will be the top-selling album of the week — even though it was only available for a few days and only on iTunes. In addition to it being the biggest album debut for iTunes, the huge sales of Beyoncé's latest also represent her biggest debut week ever.
Initially, the set of 14 songs and 17 music videos was sold as a complete package without the ability to download individual songs, something that marks a...
The car service Uber has quietly rolled out a new version of Uber Lost, the system that helps riders locate items they’ve left in drivers’ cars. The system allows you to quickly enter your lost item and cross-reference it with rides you’ve taken in order to locate it as fast as possible.
After we saw some Uber service reps tweet out a link to the system to riders looking for lost items we did a bit of digging. The service is now live on Uber’s site and there’s a link provided on receipts emailed to a rider after their trip is completed. That seems like a good choice as that’s likely where they’ll be looking for a support number to call about their item. Now, they can just tap the link.
The system is nothing complex, it just provides you with a simple list of your recent trips, with beginning and end points to help you figure out where you were when you lost the item. Each ride entry contains the driver’s name and phone number so you can ring them up directly to ask them if they’ve found your item.
The new system isn’t anything earth shattering, but it’s a nice addition to the service’s tools for riders. Having recently watched someone attempt to locate a piece of luggage left in a cab, I know just how annoying the process can be. It’s bad enough when you know the cabbie’s medallion number but it can be a real nightmare when it was a quick jaunt in a busy part of town and you have to track down the ride by time and location through the dispatcher.
With the Uber system you’re presented with a way to call the driver back directly, rather than wading through the call center of a cab company and trying to cross reference time, location and cab availability.
Free language learning platform Duolingo has launched an updated version of its iOS app today, introducing a virtual store and a language coach, as it seeks to further engage its users and keep them using the app.
The virtual store features additions to help further engage Duolingo users by letting them purchase virtual items to customize their experience with its new virtual currency “Lingots,” which users can earn by achieving certain milestones in Duolingo.
Despite the use of the term ‘currency,’ Duolingo’s virtual store won’t be a source of revenue for the company. The company’s revenue comes from selling translations created in collaboration by their students while they practice their language skills using real world content — such as to BuzzFeed.
Instead, the virtual store is intended as a “gaming element to make Duolingo more efficient as a learning tool and more engaging,” a Duolingo spokeswoman says.
The language coach, which comes in the form of Duolingo’s mascot Duo the owl, acts as a personal tutor to help users stay on track with goals they have set, helping ensure that they are continually engaged and active on the app.
An update to the Android version of the app will be rolled out “in the future,” according to Duolingo.
In October, Duolingo rolled out a program called the Language Incubator, letting native speakers and language enthusiasts create courses that an algorithm will subsequently ensure are in line with Duolingo’s standards. This meant that the number of languages being offered on Duolingo should go up dramatically — as long as people are creating language courses.
Duolingo started off offering six languages — Spanish, English, French, German, Portugese, Italian — and it is now offering a handful of other courses in beta.
The second-most shared website on the internet doesn’t belong to a heavily staffed blog or one of the old media giants.
It’s an aggregational site run by one man who’s fueled by coffee, Coors Light, and a desire to share the most awesome stuff he finds every day on the Web.
In a revealing Q&A with Esquire’s Ned Hepburn, Abraham Piper, the founder and human engine behind 22 Words, talked about how he got the site started and what made it blow up over the past few months.
“I try to manage the site so that on the whole it comes across sort of like a likable friend — intelligent but not superior, goofy but not inane, sentimental but not saccharine, and consistently interesting without being full of itself,” Piper told Esquire.
The formula is working. 22 Words is becoming ubiquitous on Facebook, with only similar aggregator Upworthy outpacing shares.
As previously noted, the US smartphone market has followed an almost perfectly logistic growth. The measured data (via comScore, in green below) follows a predictive logistic function (thin blue whose formula is discussed here).
The other notable market observation is how closely the iPhone follows the same pattern as the market. The red line representing the iPhone above is almost perfectly parallel to the green and blue lines which represent the overall market. The reason for this seems to be that consumers are absorbing the product in similar way to how they are absorbing the technology.[1] The “learning model” which underpins logistic models could offer clues as to the cause. It suggests that there is a direct communication that happens between the product and the consumer.
Incidentally, the reason other platforms do not follow this pattern is that they are not communicating value with the consumer but with manufacturers or distributors of the product. These alternative communications could create faster or slower growth than the overall market as they are not subject to the same large population imitation/learning models.
If we believe that the iPhone can be modeled behaviorally then it may be possible to forecast its growth. One can simply draw a line extending the existing red segment above and read the F/(1-F) figure at any point in time. Solving for F results in a measure of penetration and hence number of users (if population is known.)
An alternative is to use the following formula derived from the linear interpolation of the two measured market shares. iPhone market share is y/(1+y) where y=0.21x and x = F/(1-F) and F is the expected market penetration of smartphones.
So if F = 91%, x = 10, y = 2.11 and therefore the iPhone market share = 68%.
We also know from the plot of the market that F = .91 is reached around February 2017. So we can suggest that at 90% penetration (approximately saturation) the iPhone will have 68% market share of users in the US. Forecasting the addressable market (US population aged older than 13) at about 266 million that implies 180 million US users of the iPhone by early 2017.
Notes:
Note that this pattern of adoption has happened even though the product has been at least partially unavailable to the entire market until quite recently.
In this 4 1/2 minute video, Harvard business professor Michael Norton describes a study testing people’s willingness to talk about race. He made volunteers play a simple game. One picked a face from a field of 12 and the other asked yes/no questions in order to guess who they had in mind. Among the field of faces, six were white and six were black.
Even though asking if a person was black or white would eliminate half of the contenders, 43% of people did not mention race. If the other volunteer was African American, they were even less likely to mention it. In that scenario, 79% didn’t ask if the face they had in mind was white or black.
They reproduced the experiment with children and found that, while little kids would ask about race, by nine or ten, they’d stopped. The little kids often beat the older kids at the game, given that race was a pretty good way to eliminate faces.
Interestingly, the people who didn’t mention race were probably trying to appear not racist, but their decision had the opposite effect. The partners of people who didn’t mention race rated them as more racist than the partners of people who did. Bringing up race was, in fact, a way to signal comfort with racial difference.
Bill Gates prioritizes disease eradication over the proliferation of internet access and uses his vast wealth for the purposes of malaria research. It's perhaps not a surprise, then, that his favorite books of 2013 are all pragmatic works of non-fiction question that how the modern world was built, and how to make it better. Gates has produced a list of the seven best titles he read this year — many of which were first published before 2013 — on his official site, choosing the works for their "amazing stories of human ingenuity."
Gates has previously published reviews of each of the seven books selected, using this end of year list to consolidate and consider his favorites. His picks appear to echo his logical world-view, valuing...
Beyoncé just shocked the music world by releasing her fifth studio album without warning, and the ramifications don't end there. The "visual album," simply entitled Beyoncé, is exclusively available on iTunes, and sells for $15.99 without the ability to purchase any of the 14 tracks individually. It features guest appearances from the likes of Frank Ocean, Drake, and Jay-Z, and there is an accompanying music video for each song alongside three additional clips.
With season two of The Walking Dead, developer Telltale games has gone in an interesting new direction: this time you're playing as a young girl during the zombie apocalypse. And the first trailer for episode one, "All That Remains," provides a brief glimpse at just how difficult that scenario will be. As the developer told us previously, things aren't any less dark just because Clementine is the lead. "The world doesn't care if you're a little girl," president and co-founder Kevin Bruner told The Verge. "It really is totally indifferent. There are no punches held just because it's Clementine." The developer hasn't given a specific release date for the game — it's been announced for the Xbox 360, PS3, iOS, Mac, and Windows — but...
Vellum is an app for the Mac developed by a team led by two Pixar software veterans that are trying to make the process of creating ebooks less painful. The app allows authors to publish ebooks on Apple’s iBookstore, Amazon Kindle and Nook devices, but the advances here are in how the app enables live previews and fine-tuning.
Ebook creation is an awful experience. The Kindle process is especially poor, with dozens of interlocking parts that must be juggled in order to convert, format, tweak and publish a book. And even then, authors are largely taking a stab in the dark as to how their books will look when they’re live on the store.
Apple took some steps to make this process easier with iBooks Author, but I’ve spoken to some folks who have published there and even its tools have their quirks. And it’s not even close to being cross-platform friendly. Once you’ve gotten a project to look how you’d like it to there, you have to do it all over again if you want to publish on Kindle or Nook or any other platform.
And, after all of the massaging through the laborious multiple-tool process, authors are often left with a product that looks fairly boring and generic. Well-crafted books with gorgeous fonts, nicely presented chapter and header formatting and a highly customized feel are too often the sole purview of publishers with teams of formatting experts.
Those are the issues that spurred Vellum’s Brad West and Brad Andalman to look into creating a tool to help authors get the same kind of access to great book design as major publishers.
“Authors care about how a book looks,” says West, but he notes, “when a book is self published, you can tell. If they had the tools, [authors] would want to make better looking books…the barrier is the tools. Vellum tries to address that.”
West and Andalman spent over a decade each at Pixar (West started there in ’96) working on building software and animation systems used on films like The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and Toy Story 2. West helped develop Pixar’s next-gen animation system that was first used on Brave (under ToyTalk’s Oren Jacob). Doubtless their expertise in building software tools for creators informed their decision to move on to…building software tools for creators.
Vellum is a free Mac app that allows you to import your projects from your writing platform of choice like Microsoft Word. It then lets authors tweak and edit their books, taking advantage of the full suite of tools. Once it’s time to publish, a single book export runs $49.99, with unlimited re-export privileges for any platform on that book. You can also buy bundles of 3 books for $99 or 5 books for $149.
The core of Vellum’s experience is based on live previews that will show authors exactly what it will look like on a variety of platforms. The agnostic nature of Vellum means that it doesn’t have any agendas as far as the platform that they will support, like iBooks.
West acknowledges that Apple’s decision to limit iBooks Author is likely strategic but notes that when it’s siloed to a platform it’s simply not as powerful as it ever could be. With one Vellum file, an author can tweak and serve their project to any platform they wish.
The way Vellum handles typesetting is one example of how it improves on the complex process for Kindle publishing. Normally an author must use a series of tools to first convert a Word file, then lay it out, add customized fonts, preview and then export in a file readable by Kindle. If any formatting or type issues are found, the process must start all over again. Vellum allows industry-standard typesetting to be performed dynamically, updating as the content changes and handling spacing and indentation.
Vellum also allows the quick addition of copyright, epigraph and acknowledgement sections, all with an instant preview of the book. An author gets to see the book exactly as a user does without having to export to devices to check and manage them all. In addition to one-click support for iBooks, Kindle and Nook, Vellum also allows exporting to Epub files for distribution to beta readers.
The process of cross-platform ebook creation has remained almost incredibly static for years, all while the ebook market has been exploding and the barriers of entry to new authors has fallen. Amazon makes it easier than ever for independent authors to publish on the platform, but the tools they’ve given them are anemic and frustrating. It seems like there’s a real opportunity from a software team with experience in creating tools for creators to do something good for the industry. Vellum is available directly from 180g’s site here.
What do you do when your school can’t afford a 3D printer? If you’re Shai Schechter and Andrey Kovalev you build one yourself. Their printer, called Deltaprintr, has just launched on Kickstarter and the pair has already hit $102,000 out of a $195,000 goal. Their goal is to create an inexpensive, extremely usable printer for students and those on a budget. I think they’ve succeeded.
Shai goes to SUNY Purchase and Andrey goes to Cooper Union School of Engineering. Andrey was working on his sculpture homework and realized he could really use a 3D printer. With a $1,000 grant from the school, his small team built a very basic delta-style printer which uses three tall tracks as opposed to a MakerBot-style Cartesian printer. Their first model was hand-made but now they are working hard to make a commercial product, pricing kits as low as $475. In fact, it looks like they’re already oversold for the Kickstarter version of the machine and are scrambling to figure out how to sell more.
The printer automatically calibrates itself – a godsend if you’ve ever used non-self-leveling devices – and it can print PLA at 100 micron resolution. It doesn’t yet print ABS plastic because the bed is not heated.
I sat down with Shai and Andrey and watched their printer in action. It’s an impressive piece of kit, especially when you consider it was built by a team of students. Their intensity and drive is impressive and I’m really excited to see where these guys take their product.
Bradley Horowitz, Google’s Vice President of Product Management for Google+, today admitted there were “real problems” with the way YouTube’s new Google+ powered commenting system was first implemented.
“Out of the gate, we weren’t doing so well and a lot of that had to do with ranking and how we were in a bit of an arms race around spam and abuse,” he said at the LeWeb conference in Paris.
“Oftentimes when you’re dealing with these things it requires several iterations to sort of get the signals right and tune things appropriately.”
The new commenting system was divisive when it launched in November, causing high-profile vloggers such as Emma Blackery and boogie2988 to voice their criticisms on the video-sharing platform. A change.org petition seeking to end the integration currently has 223,837 signatures.
In an interview with Horowitz, LeWeb founder Loic Le Meur asked whether the backlash could be attributed to a vocal minority of passionate YouTube users.
“I don’t think this was YouTube fanatics,” Horowitz said. “There were some real problems with the integration as launched and it took us a matter of days to iron those out. I think most people now are having that experience you are, which are things are dramatically better on the other side of this integration. And there’s much more work we’ll continue doing.”
His comments suggest, not surprisingly, that the new system is here to stay. Google addressed some of the initial teething problems in a YouTube blog post last month; at first, the new experience actually increased the amount of spam. The company appears resolute in its belief that filtering YouTube comments based on their relevancy to users’ social circles is still the optimal solution.
I’m sure that will be a disappointment to some YouTube enthusiasts, but at least this public admittance shows Google has recognized the problem and is actively trying to improve the existing commenting system.
Microsoft says it has sold more than 2 million Xbox One consoles since its launch 18 days ago. The sales figures average out to around 111,111 units per day, a pace that Microsoft describes as “record-setting.” While the company countered Sony’s 2.1 million PlayStation 4 sales with zombie stats previously, it’s clear both consoles are selling well. “Demand is exceeding supply in our 13 launch markets and Xbox One is sold out at most retailers,” says Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi.
Sony has sold more than 2.1 million PlayStation 4s across the US, Europe, and Australia up to December 1st. While Sony’s console launched a week before the Xbox One, it was limited to the US and Canada for the first 14 days of sales and Sony’s most...
The homeless New Yorker could take $100 or an opportunity to learn how to code. If he took the money, it would be spent by now and you wouldn’t be reading this story. Instead, he took a gamble on a path that could lead to higher reward.
And today, that reward comes to fruition. Leo’s app Trees for Cars is available for iOS and Android for 99 cents.
Leo’s story has been closely followed by Caroline Moss of Business Insider ever since Patrick McConlogue, a young programmer, gave Leo the money-or-coding offer. McConlogue bought Leo a refurbished Samsung Chromebook and spent an hour each weekday morning giving him a crash course in coding.
While there were doubters among the thousands who followed the experiment as it gained national media attention, many supporters on Facebook praised the effort as a source of inspiration.
“So impressed by Leo's story, I felt compelled to start in on JavaScript on Code Academy... Dunno [sic] if I'll be any good at it, but it's something I always wanted to learn and can't think of many excuses not to,” Joey Basu wrote on a Facebook post previewing the app release.
Trees for Cars is a mobile app that connects people for carpooling in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. When you share a ride, the app tells what you saved in emissions and gives you the opportunity to compete with other users for the most savings.
As of publication time, the app had more than 50 reviews between the two app stores, almost all of them positive. More than one person mentioned in reviews or on Facebook that they were buying the app to support Leo, despite living in rural areas where they wouldn’t be able to use it.
In a promotional YouTube video (with, we’ll warn you, pretty bad audio), Leo explained his app. “It’s a mobile app about saving the environment, bringing communities together, saving the world, and the best part: saving money in your pocket,” he says.
David Simon is best known as the creator of HBO's much-loved crime drama The Wire, whose uncompromising depiction of inner city life in Baltimore has won a dedicated following of fans. The candid treatment of sociopolitical issues in The Wire is informed by Simon's experience as a journalist and a writer during the 1980s and '90s, and he has given voice to his concerns once more in an op-ed for The Guardian.
Describing the United States of today as "a horror show," Simon speaks of the fracturing of the country's population into increasingly polarized and discordant groups. With free market capitalism serving as both the economic system and policy decision maker in the US, he says, values such as compassion are falling by the wayside in...
