Retooling the traditional public library for a more technically savvy populace is no small feat, especially when library budgets across the U.S. have been gutted these past few years. That sad state of events has forced some libraries to take matters into their own hands. Consider the case of the Northlake Public Library in Northlake, Illinois — it wants to give its communinity (and especially the town’s children) access to a slew of new digital creation tools to help inspire the next generation of makers and artists, and it’s decided to turn to Indiegogo in hopes of making it happen. All told, Northlake trustee Tom Mukite is looking to raise $30,000 to outfit the library with an iMac, a drawing tablet, a Wacom Cintiq display, a fancy lightbox, and (perhaps most tantalizing) a 3D printer for youngsters and local makers to feed their projects to. In a bid to attract younger would-be readers, Mukite says the staff is also planning to use the funding to expand the library’s cache of graphic novels — there’s been plenty of debate about the value of these highly-visual tomes as motivators for childhood and adolescent literacy, but the folks in Northlake firmly believe that they’ll help get reluctant readers devouring content as well as help improve language skills for non-native English speakers. Oh, and then there’s the pièce de résistance — a nine foot tall statue of Dr. Bruce Banner’s green alter-ego hulking out, again meant to attract the kiddies. I’ll admit I don’t really get that part, but then again I was the sort of kid who needed to be carefully coaxed out from among the stacks anyway. It’s not exactly the first time we’ve seen the crowdfunding model applied to spreading literacy — Cassandra Elton and a group of fellow University of Iowa students used Indiegogo to turn a wild-eyed idea into the roving Antelope Lending Library earlier this year even though they missed their funding goal by some $7,000. Northlake’s creation-friendly angle is an intriguing one — I can’t think of any child who wouldn’t like to see their doodles converted into a real-life action figure, and hooking these kids on the joys of making things could help inspire a new generation of designers, entrepreneurs, and engineers. [Image via the Metropolitan Library System]
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Google is under fire in the UK for its tax practices in the country, and a new key witness (who spoke to The Sunday Times) might put them in deeper hot water when he hands over a reported 100,000 emails and documents to the British Revenue & Customs (HRMC) services. Barney Jones, a former Googler who was at the company between 2004 and 2006, says he has material proof that Google’s London sales staff which would negotiate and close sales for the UK market, despite claiming its Dublin HQ handled finalizing all deals. Jones was prompted to speak out by testimony given to the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last week by Google VP Matt Brittin, who said that London-based Google staff were never closing any ad sales deals, though some selling efforts were made there. Brittin had previously gone on record in November 2012 with statements asserting that no one in the London office was doing any kind of ad selling. The matter of where the deals were finalized is especially important because if a sale closes in London, it’s likely they’d be taxable in Britain, rather than in the extremely low tax-rated Ireland. Jones told the Sunday Times that Google is fully aware of this, yet there are still records of Google staff closing major deals from companies like eBay and Lloyds TSB, but Google doesn’t seem at all certain that any of the documentation will absolutely prove that it has done anything strictly against UK tax law, according to a statement provided by Google Direct of External Relations Peter Barron to the Sunday Times. “As we said in front of the public accounts committee, it is difficult to respond fully to documents we have not seen,” the statement reads. “These questions relate to Google’s business in the UK going back a decade or more. None of the allegations put to us change the fact that Google pays the corporate tax due on its UK activities and complies fully with UK law.” Google reiterated this statement to TechCrunch when we contacted them for comment. Ireland uses its lower corporate taxation rate, which is 12.5 percent, or a little over half of Britain’s 23 percent, to attract big names who base their European corporate headquarters there, including Apple and Facebook in addition to Google. The search giant is currently under fire from UK parliament members for its tax practices, thanks to a Reuters investigation that revealed statements it made last November to the PAC about its London operations may not have been entirely accurate. Amazon is next in the PAC’s sights for its UK tax practices, as Reuters has also recently uncovered evidence to suggest that it, too, is doing a lot of selling through an autonomous London-based unit, despite routing its sales on paper through a tax-exempt affiliate based in Luxembourg. In fact, for most on Google’s footing, avoiding taxes seems to be the exception, not the rule, and a recent piece by V3′s Madeline Bennett explains that even if this fresh round of hearings reveals that these schemes do run afoul of UK tax regulations, it’s unlikely we’ll see situations change all that dramatically. Governments are too dependent on the general economic benefits of hosting big corporations, and get too much out of awarding them contracts, she says, to risk doing long-term harm to those arrangements. Still, what Jones claims to have would be incredibly embarrassing for Google, especially if it spells out in no uncertain terms that closing deals was regularly handled by Google’s London staff, in direct contradiction to what Brittin has told the committee, but until we see the goods, there’s no telling how deep down the rabbit hole his information actually goes.
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YouTube turns eight years old today, reminding each of us in some odd way how young or old we really are. Remember, the company launched back in 2005, the same year that Michael Jackson was found not guilty of child molestation, and Lance Armstrong was winning his seventh Tours De France, and Arrested Development was still on the air. A lot has changed since then, but YouTube’s growth remains strong as ever. YouTube announced that its community now uploads more than 100 hours of video to the platform every minute. Minute. That’s the equivalent of four days worth of video every sixty seconds. But of course, the supply makes sense when you consider the demand. YouTube claims that more than one billion people across the world come to YouTube for content each month, which comes out to nearly one in every two people who have access to the internet. Here’s a little perspective on growth: Two years ago, YouTube revealed that users were uploading 48 hours of video each minute, and last year it had grown to 72 hours. Eight years in, YouTube is still a growing platform, while Facebook may be slipping amongst younger and fresher social niche applications. Meanwhile, YouTube opens up new possibilities for startups who want to leverage its massive, active user base and content library. Telecast, in particular, comes to mind, as the betaworks company helps makes all those billions of videos discoverable and curated on mobile devices. Here’s what YouTube had to say about it, in the official blog post: And so, on our eighth birthday, we’d like to thank you for making YouTube the special place that it is. For showing us how video can create connections, transcend borders and make a difference. For clicking these links even if you aren’t sure what they’ll be, but you trust us. In short, thanks for making us better in big ways and small ones, too. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.
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As the Tumblr/Yahoo deal continues to be negotiated by press, and the world gears up for whatever is being announced Monday morning, Tumblr founder David Karp is probably having a very interesting weekend. It’s likely, in between multiple discussions with his board members and Marissa Mayer, that he’ll take a break, like a walk or something, to gather his thoughts. On this walk (or jog or glass of wine at a bar), he likely mull over two main outcomes. He could take Yahoo’s money, whether it be the $1.1 billion that the board is trying to approve giving him or the more that he negotiates. Or, well, not. If he took Yahoo’s money, he would join the Billion Dollar Exit Club — you know, the ranks of Kevin Systrom, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen from YouTube, the Paypal mafia, Tony Hseih, James Clark, Marc Andreessen, etc. He would be considered “successful” by the Valley’s ridiculous standards and everyone else’s, but not Zuckerberg successful, but definitely Michael Birch successful. Maybe he’d buy a nice house in Presidio Heights for when he has to be on the West Coast, and fill it with art and an apartment in Chelsea? [And maybe a vacation home for his family. And maybe a plane.] He’d still oversee the Tumblr product at Yahoo, at least until his lockup expired, and maybe users would leave and maybe they wouldn’t … But the game would be over. The race would be in its cool down period. Still, a pretty chill life overall. Especially in this economy. What would Kevin Systrom do? Sell. But with this, just like with the Instagram sale, comes a nagging, cloying afterthought: “What if Tumblr (or Instagram or _______) could have been the next Facebook?” And this nagging opportunity cost would grow even louder if Yahoo succeeded with Tumblr, finding a way to monetize its millions of eyeballs much like Google did with YouTube. “Tumblr could have been a contender.” It’s this thought that will lead to a “No” from Karp and his board if it gets nagging enough. And this thought is weighty — Zuck had it too when he was being courted by Yahoo and we all know how that turned out. But what happens after the “No,” the fact the Karp will be challenged to build a real business on top of Tumblr’s scale, is daunting enough to turn that “No” once again into a “Yes.” Can Tumblr turn the process of following other Tumblrs through your dashboard into a stream it can monetize with sponsored story style ads? Or find a way to cram ads into the notoriously independent, and risky, content? Can Karp put on the big boy pants, hire a Sheryl Sandberg character, and create a money making machine? Because if he’s not sure, and he’s not ready for a long, hard, uphill fight, he should sell. Look what happened to Groupon; still trading below $6bn offer. A billion dollars is a lot of money.
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Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column looks at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin. An ancient and once-sacred bond between author and audience, reading and writing have become but two more tasks along with a multitude of other things that we do on a host of digital devices — watcing videos, listening to music, playing games, and really anything except using Facebook Home. Still, there are some for whom the intimate act of interface between pen and paper retains more magic than all the electrons powering all the devices in the world have not been able to recreate. For them, a trio of European crowdfunding projects have trotted out a range of products to improve both endpoints of analog document creation. Whacked: LazyPete. Arrgh! Listen up, ye scurvy dogs, as I tell ye the legend of Lazy Pete, a pirate so wrapped up in his romance novels that he didn’t see a great white shark leap from the ocean to leave him with just one hand. ‘Tis in Lazy Pete’s honor that Philip Musche surely named his one-handed book reading contraption, which essentially puts one of those book stands that keep pages open on a beefy handle. Despite showing off the reading aid in nearly enough colors to cover the Seven Seas, Musche failed to capture enough crowdfunding booty, and the campaign ended with only £533 of the desired £30,000 treasure. Backed: Idae. What the GoPro is to most digital cameras, Idae is to most pocket journals, even the durable Field Notes. The waterproof, tear-resistant notebook is just the thing for when you need to make that critical addition to your grocery shopping list in the middle of your next scuba dive, and a perfect match for your Fisher Space Pen. And if you needed any more proof of just how extreme it is, it has a hole for a carabiner. That said, fire will consume it along with the haiku you were inspired to write on the slopes. And if you’re not planning to keep your notes around indefinitely, the notebook can be recycled. Developed in Milan and shipped to backers last month for between $20 and $30 depending on cover color, the 32-page thought preserver cleared its $7,200 funding goal with a couple of hundred dollars to spare, but you’d expect that kind of nail-biting excitement from such a tough guy. Backed: Meteor Grip. The pencil has been thin enough to serve as a benchmark against which to compare high-tech electronics. While it’s comfortable for many, at least for short periods, it can be difficult to grasp for some. Receiving inspiration when his partner Zoë, a tattoo artist, began suffering hand pain in December 2011, Pontefract, UK-based Jai Dickerson Pierce developed the Meteor Grip. Few details are provided about what material is used to create the grip. Rather, the key to its uniqueness is being available in both right and left-handed versions. As the campaign page employs double negatives to claim, “No other manufacturer produces an ergonomic hand grip that is not ambidextrous.” That said, the campaign is not above covering a spectrum of uses, claiming that the product is useful as a novelty gift while also proclaiming that it is “changing the writing experience forever.” Not yet changed for kiddies, though, as a potential meteorite grip is for now on the drawing board. With a bit over three weeks left to go, the Meteor Grip has collected about a quarter of its humble £875 goal. Seven pounds will marry your love of astronomy with hatred of thin writing tools, and ten pounds can get one for you as well as the cramping tattoo artist in your life as soon as this month.
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Mark Suster of Los Angeles’ GRP Partners is known for his unique insights on the tech and digital media worlds, having famously had success on “both sides of the table” as a repeat entrepreneur turned investor over nearly two decades in the industry. And he hit headlines several times this past week, with his viewpoints on acqui-hires (he says they’re often very bad) and founders stepping down from the CEO role such as what happened with GRP portfolio startup Awe.sm (he says sometimes, it’s the best thing that can happen.) So when we heard that Suster was in San Francisco for a couple of days, we asked him to come by TechCrunch TV to talk a bit more at length about all that’s been going on. And while he warned us that he was a bit tired due to a late night visiting with industry folks here in the Bay Area the evening before we met, he was just as engaging as ever, talking about the topics mentioned above as well as the latest hot stuff coming out of the Southern California tech scene. Check it all out in the video embedded above.
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Editor’s note: Richard Bennett is a Senior Fellow with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and co-author of ITIF’s 2013 report, “The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand.” Follow him on Twitter @iPolicy. We’ve all heard the story: America’s broadband networks are second-rate. We pay exorbitant prices for shoddy service because broadband providers print money and hold innovation in a death grip. While America languishes, our competitors in Europe and Asia are racing ahead to a user-generated content utopia. The only way forward is a government takeover, or, failing that, a massive dose of regulation. So go a number of recent treatises such as Susan Crawford’s “Captive Audience”; works by like-minded Internet aficionados Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler; reports by public interest advocacy groups Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the Open Technology Institute; as well as numerous tech bloggers. The only problem with this story is that it’s almost completely untrue. Granted, as recently as the late aughts, the story was plausible: In those dark days, our rankings in terms of both broadband subscription growth and speeds were falling. Increased demand for data capacity and a technology lull combined to push our average Internet connection speed down to 22nd in the world at the end of 2009, according to Akamai’s measurement of “Average Connection Speed.” Since then, the speeds of such shared connections have nearly doubled from 3.9Mbps to 7.2 Mbps, raising the U.S. to eighth place. U.S. Average Connection Speed per Akamai Akamai’s Average Connection Speed measures individual TCP streams over IP addresses that are often shared — and doesn’t sum simultaneous streams — so it’s more a measure of usage than of network capacity, however. To see the capacity of the underlying broadband network, it’s best to look at Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” metric. The distinction between these two metrics flummoxed Ars Technica’s Cyrus Farivar, who maintains that the shared-connection measurement is the more meaningful indication of “user experience.” Farivar is clearly wrong about that, and Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” is the better indicator of network improvement. The Average Peak measurement shows performance in the U.S. tripling over the past five years, up to 31.5Mbps in Q4 2012. We don’t know where the U.S. ranked on this scale before mid-2010, but it’s currently 13th. The tripling of network capacity combined with a doubling of “shared speed” says that networks are getting faster, as the U.S. is simultaneously using them more heavily Average Peak Connection Speed per Akamai America’s broadband speeds are improving for two reasons: first, broadband providers have installed newer technologies, such as Verizon FiOS, DOCSIS 3 cable modems, and AT&T U-verse that are four or more times faster than the technologies they replaced; and second, users have begun to demonstrate a preference for higher-speed broadband by opting into higher-speed upgrades. Some upgrades are costly and others are not; Comcast recently doubled the speeds of most of their Bay Area broadband plans for free. While our networks are improving, we’re retaining low prices for entry-level broadband plans first noticed by the Berkman Center’s “Next Generation Connectivity” report: the U.S. is currently second in the price of broadband for entry-level users. The nation is also third in network-based competition, second in the fiber-optic installation rate, first in the adoption of next-generation LTE, ahead of Europe in broadband adoption, and doing quite well in Internet-based services. While U.S. cable TV companies still lead telcos in new broadband subscriptions, fiber-based telco broadband is gaining subscribers at a faster rate than cable. U.S. broadband providers are profitable, but much less so than Europe’s or Korea’s, where applications like YouTube must pay ISPs for access to residential customers. Significantly, we’ve gained ground on competitors despite an enormous disadvantage stemming from America’s very low urban population densities, which make U.S. broadband networks much more expensive to build and maintain than those in most nations. Amazingly, the European Commission’s top telecom regulator, Vice President Neelie Kroes, tells a story much like the tales of woe we hear from American broadband critics, but with the roles reversed: Kroes laments Europe’s declining standing relative to the U. S., where “high-speed networks now pass more than 80 percent of homes; a figure that quadrupled in three years.” To facilitate private investment in networks, Europe has developed a “Ten Step Plan” for a single, cross-border market for broadband that mimics our interstate, facilities-based broadband market. But these facts are glossed over by the critics of U.S. broadband policy in large part because they directly contradict their neo-populist narrative of rapacious, profit-hungry broadband monopolists gouging consumers. The long tradition of American populism distrusts private provision of “essential” services and refuses to believe that competition can ever be brought to bear on infrastructure markets. Crawford in particular relies too heavily on a strained analogy with electricity, a genuine natural monopoly that is as different from the competing information networks we have in the broadband space as any network can possibly be: Can you get electric service over the air? Critics also come up short on research, generally refusing to consult updated primary sources in favor of blog posts and news articles from inside the echo chamber that simply reinforce the traditional narrative. “Confirmation bias” is rampant in broadband criticism. Broadband advocates would do better to focus their efforts on real problems, such as our dismally low level of interest in the Internet, the primary reason non-subscribers give for refusing to go online. Ideally, these efforts would be combined with initiatives to increase computer ownership among the poor — the second reason so few Americans use the Internet. The world’s high-subscription nations, such as Korea and Singapore, aren’t the price leaders for entry-level Internet services as we are, but they’ve led successful outreach efforts to spread computer ownership, digital literacy, and Internet awareness across their entire populations. Getting all of America online is a goal that all Americans can support regardless of party creed or ideological doctrine. If we can make as much progress with online participation as we’ve made with speed, Europe will have a second Internet crisis on its hands.
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Editor’s note: Keith Teare is the founder of just.me and a partner at Archimedes Labs. He is also the co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare. Because of Google I/O, this was a momentous week for those of us who are watching the rapid transition that is taking place from desktop computing to mobile, and particularly for those focused on mobile-social as I am because of my job at just.me. Here is my take on what we just witnessed. Standalone Hangouts. Google announced at its I/O event that Hangouts was to be launched as a separate app from Google Plus, taking personal conversations out from the G+ app and putting them into their own space. Facebook Home problems. AT&T was reported to have decided to discontinue distribution of the HTC First – the Facebook Home Android phone – due to lack of sales. This comes on the back of publicity pointing to a large number of one-star reviews for the software on the Google Play store. What is at stake? There are many common themes and questions that underpin the launch and evolution of Hangouts as a separate app and previously led to the decision to launch the Facebook Home product. These products represent two very similar answers to a common question. The primary question is who will users look to to enable their social communications needs on mobile devices? To set the context for an analysis let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room that is partially driving these decisions. Mobile Messaging is rapidly becoming the primary way users engage socially on mobile. Figures released this week imply more than 41 billion messages a day are now being delivered via various “Over the Top”  (OTT) messaging apps. Phones were created as social tools. Smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user’s needs, and all without the need for a web-based social network. Users are able to communicate with anybody in their address book anywhere in the world with almost any content mix at any time. This has been compelling to users and has driven the growth of apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk and some other smaller competitors. Almost 750 million users out of a smartphone population of 1.2 billion are already using these apps. If you are Google, Facebook or almost any other major provider of social communications platforms originally developed for the web, this move to mobile messaging represents a considerable challenge. Similar challenges exist from media-sharing apps. As users flock to Vine, Snapchat and, previously, Instagram, the social platforms are challenged to continue to be the primary provider of these services to the growing army of smartphone users. The other core feature of Facebook and Google+, publishing to an audience for all or many to see, are increasingly becoming activities only a few engage in on mobile — and certainly less often than was the case on the web. What Is A Platform Provider To Do? If we look out a few years there is really only one product approach available. That is to build single apps that embrace and extend the current features of the messaging market leaders — hoping to win users over from WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat — while also integrating the features of media sharing, private memory collection and publishing into single unified experiences. Google and Facebook both seem to be pursuing this approach. Breaking out Hangouts and going after the messaging audience with enhanced features makes sense. But Google also showed Google Now and Voice Search as possible points of integration for all of its mobile-social features. It’s early days here, but Android clearly wants to find a point of integration for all the users’ needs. Facebook, with Home, revealed its integrated approach, while under the hood it has Messenger, Camera, Pages and the full Facebook app. Poor as Home’s reception has been, Facebook will certainly continue to deepen and refine its integration efforts and its attempt to be the primary UI a user needs on a smartphone. Vulnerabilities And Strengths Of Mobile-First Companies WhatsApp and its clones can be thought of as mobile-first companies. Their apps sit on top of the smartphone, particularly the mobile address book, and just help a user chat to their friends, family or colleagues.  Their success is their simplicity and the singular purpose they have addressed. Insofar as they are vulnerable, it is due to being very narrowly focused on brief “in the moment” conversations in the form of a chat or instant messaging UI. They have added the ability to include media in those conversations, and some voice-calling abilities. But their goal is really momentary interactions with individuals or groups. Their requirement to have both sides of the conversation install the app is another liability. Human beings have broader needs that are currently served by other single-use apps. Evernote for private memories, email for longer more enduring interactions, social networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for public statements of all kinds and Path or Instagram for photo sharing. This is a little like the era of Windows before Outlook when apps tended to do only one thing and users used many apps. Can Web Companies Beat Mobile-First Companies? These recent moves by Facebook and Google represent early moves by the web-era companies to react to the successes of the mobile-first messengers. They certainly do not represent end points in any way, impressive as they are. And there is plenty of time for the mobile messaging apps to respond by offering a broader range of social features.  There are already clues to the future – provided by users. The continuing use of email on mobile (trillions of messages in 2013) indicates that  users are not entirely catered for by the chat-centric conversational UI. The growth of Vine and Snapchat (single-feature based as they are) indicate not all media-sharing needs are catered for by these apps. There is a lot still to play for. If we look five years out, it is likely that the iOS and Android core will support a far more integrated set of messaging tools that cater for many of the needs we use single-use apps for today. Message saving for private use, shared messaging to individuals or groups, media sharing, video and voice messaging (both synchronous and asynchronous), Timelines to look back and recall what we did in the past. These will all be features of the operating system. As mobile moves from its Windows 3.1 — single-use apps — era to its more integrated future, apps that used to stand alone will have their features sucked into the operating system. Google and Apple have an advantage here of course as they own the operating system. The Future Is Being Fought Over Now In that sense the current product focus – decisions about what features to separate into single apps, and how to integrate those into a unified UI all represent the first moves in defining who wins. Facebook has Messenger, Camera, Pages and its primary app with Home as an integration point. Google has Talk, Contacts, Mail, Plus, Hangouts perhaps with Now as a point of integration. Apple is a little behind but has iMessage, FaceTime, Photostream, Mail and Contacts. iOS itself may be the point of integration. WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk, WeChat and the others will need to move beyond the chat-centric user interface into a broader set of asynchronous messaging features, and a new set of social features, probably with Timeline support, in order to stay ahead of the curve. The End Of Social Networks And The Start Of A New Era? The ground has been set for a fascinating next few years as the web-based social platforms seek to own mobile-social messaging and the mobile messaging apps seek to extend into more fully integrated social features. As of this moment the mobile-first apps have the lead measured by number of users and levels of engagement. To keep it they will need to continue to innovate. The human race is already social, and the smartphone has everything needed to enable them to act on their social needs. As the growth of OTT messaging and media sharing shows, a user’s social needs are being met with no need for a social network. In this mobile-social world the only question is, whose software will we all use to enable human social activities? That is what this week was all about.
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We’ve all by now heard about how Yahoo is trying to get some “cool” with a supposed $1 billion purchase of hip blogging platform Tumblr, but it may be a moot point if Tumblr’s users fail to stick around post-sale. Microsoft and Facebook may be trying to make a move ahead of Yahoo, Tumblr may be inching ever closer to running out of cash, and (despite that) may not be afraid to play a little hardball. But here’s something you’re not hearing much about: Tumblr’s users are almost universally unhappy with the news that the site might get sold to Yahoo. And they may let their fingers do the talking, and the walking. Do a search on Tumblr for “yahoo” and you get a stream of distress, interspersed with the occasional bit of helpless resignation, and some calls for activism. The voices of reluctant acceptance (usually because of the aforementioned cash situation) or anything like positivity are few and far between. No outright enthusiasm. (Daddy!) See for yourself. It’s a problem that extends to some of Tumblr’s oldest users. “If Tumblr goes to Yahoo, I will seriously consider moving my personal blog to Medium, if that’s possible,” Alexia, co-editor over here at TC, told me. She’s had a blog on Tumblr since June 2009, and, while not part of that coveted 18-24 age bracket, is a significant representative of that other cadre of important users: digital influencers. “I don’t know exactly why, but my Tumblr is a part of my identity. And for whatever reason, I don’t want to identify with Yahoo.” Some have tried to start a petition, with a goal of 5 million signatures although others are cynical about whether this will actually have any effect. User attrition is not something to be dismissed, especially when it appears to be underpinned by wider usage trends on the site. When I wrote a post in January about what might come next for Tumblr as a business (it focused on how it could make money; not how it might need to get sold because it doesn’t), I noted that in the prior month, December 2012, it had 167 million visitors and nearly 18 billion pageviews worldwide (Quantcast figures). The trend over the last six months are down, however: in the U.S. page views are down 21% to 5.3 billion, and uniques down 5% to 76 million. Worldwide the picture is better but still not growing: pageviews are down by 4%; uniques are down by 3%. Not a sinking ship, but not a zippy little speedboat, either. Yahoo’s MySpace, indeed. Image via Tumblr
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Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here. One of the memories that sticks with me most about the launch of the Xbox 360 was a silly analogy about inhaling. I can’t remember who said it, but the general idea was that it had a concave body to convey breathing in, perhaps a precursor to exclaiming joy. It was as daft as it sounds, but for a while there the 360 was indeed a breath of fresh air. Xbox 360 had a lot going for it, from online connectivity to a much simpler architecture that developers preferred over the PlayStation 3. In its first few years it maintained the position of being a very games-focused console. Xbox 360 was the home of indie games, for example, and digital distribution. It widely popularized the notion of achievements. But three, maybe four, years ago Microsoft started to push bigger ideas. It left a lot of the gamer-ish stuff behind and redesigned the console’s dashboard toward a media focus. Over a series of updates, Xbox slowly went Metro, became about Netflix, avatars and Kinect. Most of these innovations didn’t stick so well, and the cost they incurred was significant. Xbox 360 went from being a clear proposition to a complex and all-over-the-place machine. Many Kinects were sold, but few people actually used them for long. Many channels of TV content were brought into the fold, but finding room for them essentially killed its indie games market and lost a lot of credibility with that group. Ultimately, the successes of these divergences were generally mute. (18 billion hours of video sounds like a big deal until you break it down per unit over a year.) This is the problem with long hardware cycles (Xbox 360 is 8 years old). Lacking annualized releases of better technology (for some reason the console industry still believes it has to carry on this way), the platform story grows old after a couple of years, leading to the urge to accessorize. Often in so doing it loses itself in the ensuing cruft, and then needs a big reset. All of which leads up to Tuesday’s news: the big event in Redmond to unveil the next Xbox. And boy does the company need it to go well. Perception-wise, Microsoft has had a bad couple of years. Windows Phone may have won a number of plaudits for its looks, but nobody really went for it. Windows 8 sold a ton of copies, but most users sort of hate it. Surface had a glitzy launch, but people are still buying iPads. That leaves Xbox as Microsoft’s one remaining big consumer push. This one has to go right, or lots of talking heads will start to ask if there’s any market that Microsoft can get right any more. The reason the company has had a lot of these issues, I think, is that it’s bad at listening. Microsoft consistently gets lost in grand visions, visions that only it can afford to develop, and produces super-complicated propositions that nobody loves. All those years spend trying to convince the public about Windows Live services. All that time spent trying to bring us around to using Bing. All that wasted effort trying to unify user interfaces with Metro (which at its heart is just a bit broken, as has been said over and over) and who really cares? Grand visions that lose the plot are Microsoft’s forte. Yet, gaming folks are pretty excited about the next Xbox. Will it feature new horsepower? Guaranteed. Will it have Kinect baked into the box itself? Probably, but they don’t care. Will it require an Internet connection? Maybe, and they’re not sure what they think about that. Will it have lots of content partnerships? Undoubtedly. Will it copy Sony’s idea of a Share button on the joypad? Perhaps. Will there be a Halo game on it? You know it. Will it actually be anything fundamentally different, though? It doesn’t sound like it, but that may not be a bad thing. There is often an assumption in tech blog circles that the audience wants permanent revolution, but often it doesn’t. Often it just wants the thing that it knows works, and if that thing gets that job right then it’s happy. The console gaming audience generally doesn’t want consoles to do anything fundamentally different. It tends to embrace features that are additive to its core desires, like online multiplayer or achievements, but all it wants are big TV games with joypads and mad graphics. Everything else is optional. There are maybe 150 million console gamers around the world, judging by platform sales over the last few generations, and they love their expensive splashy videogames. They’ve never particularly cared for the frilly extras, like avatars, but that doesn’t stop them buying in. They like that their consoles have ESPN on them, but those are not crucial purchase decisions. They’re not convergence customers in the way that some PowerPoint deck in the depths of Redmond probably drew a few years ago to justify unified interfaces, but again they don’t mind as long as it’s not going to get in the way of playing Dishonored. For those people, the next Xbox is exciting because of the prospect of an even more-lavish Call of Duty and an even more-next-generation Skyrim. All they really want is a box that they believe can deliver that experience. The risk for Microsoft is if it screws that message up. When videogame platforms live too long, their platform holder often loses sight of its core competency. When the PlayStation 2 was over it had explored so many areas of the market that it was impossible to convey all of them in one coherent story. Sony tried, with the PlayStation 3, but the result was so confused that developers only really heard “it’s over-complicated” while consumers heard “it’s $599 for Ridge Racer.” This is a business built on razors-and-blades thinking. A similar thing is happening to Nintendo with the Wii U. The Wii was a wonderfully simple device with a couple of very smart accessories (like the Wii Fit) and a raft of dumb ones. By the time the Wii U came around Nintendo seemed to have lost its sense of focus that drove Wii, instead releasing a very confusing machine. Now it’s paying the price. The biggest risk for the next Xbox is if Microsoft departs so far from its core audience that the audience feels turned off. If the company comes out only talking about transmedia, television tie-ins, movies on demand, instant messaging, Internet Explorer, phone syncing, emailing from your couch, holographic avatars, Spotify subscriptions, Twitter integration, Facebook integration and party gaming then I fear for Xbox’s survival. The gamers will ask “Yes, but, where’s the games Steve?” At its heart, the next Xbox needs to simply be about the games the games the games. Will Microsoft actually listen this time?
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The idea of a VC having its own news aggregator was a bit outlandish in 2007. But Y Combinator was in an unusual position in those days anyway. Startup accelerators had been a highly visible part of the dot-com crash, and Silicon Valley was still skeptical of the concept nearly a decade later. So YC set out to be something different — a community of hackers building companies on their own terms. Hacker News was initially built by YC co-founder Paul Graham as a demonstration of Arc, a new programming language he’d been working on. He quickly realized that it could help bring together the companies he was supporting and the rest of the folks who wanted in. With 1.6 million page views and 200,000 unique visitors on a given weekday, it’s now a key part of the venture firm’s success. But the site quickly took off, as former Redditors flocked to it to talk about tech and startups (the site was then known as Startup News). Having a big audience isn’t really the goal. In comparison, Hacker News’ inspiration and the first big YC exit, Reddit has seen as much as 4.4 million page views in a given day. A Community For Ex-Redditors As Graham explains, as the site started seeing traction immediately, he realized this wasn’t just a way to test Arc. He wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit felt in the good old days, when most of its community was made up of hackers. As Reddit drew more traffic, the hacker focus of the site evolved. The community’s user base became diluted as it grew, and Hacker News was a new home for some of the early Reddit hackers. Graham writes in February of 2007: Reddit used to have a good concentration of startup-related links, but that was because so many of Reddit’s initial users were connected in some way to Y Combinator. Now that Reddit is so much more popular, the top links tend to be images, or videos, or political news. Another goal of Hacker News, says Graham, was to be a place where founders could share ideas and communicate. In the spirit of Y Combinator’s own incubator, Hacker News was focused on being a community for entrepreneurs and founders in the tech community: a place where they could freely post and where Y Combinator could also get to know potential founders and leaders in the tech world. “From the beginning we had a real community, and some of the core group of refugees from Reddit are still prominent on Hacker News today,” Graham explains. Part of what attracted many to Hacker News was its simplicity and voting system. The product’s UI, design and color scheme have remained relatively constant over the past six years. Thomas Ptacek, one of the site’s first users, explains that he was a Flashdot user and then a Reddit user, and flocked to Hacker News (at the time Startup News) because it was more relevant to the technology and startup community. He found Hacker News to be a refreshing change from past forums where the quality of commenting was declining. Here’s how Hacker News works: Users submit links to stories, and stories are ranked according to a voting system, similar to Reddit. The difference between Hacker News and Reddit, however, is the voting system. While you can vote stories up, you cannot vote stories down (but you can flag stories). According to Graham, 100 upvotes will get a story to the top of the front page of the site. You can only downvote a comment if you have enough “karma” on the site, which is another compelling element of Hacker News. The Karma factor is determined by the number of upvotes on a user’s submission and comments minus the number of downvotes. In terms of the design, Graham says he wanted Hacker News to look like your list of processes in a terminal window. The look and feel of the site was aimed at hackers themselves who are familiar with tabular data. Graham will occasionally add new features, some of which are on the backend of the site. For example, as comments get more deeply nested and heated in terms of exchange, the reply link takes longer to appear. There is a purposeful drag implemented on this, says Graham, because deeply nested discussions are rarely interesting. Another subtle feature addition: a flame-war detector. Graham has been consistently deploying and updating proprietary software that determines whether there is a flame war, where people argue heatedly. When these flame wars take place (which Graham says can often get ugly and personal), the story in which the commenting is taking place is moved further down the page. Graham has also created sophisticated spam-detection software, which was just updated with new code six months ago. With the update, Graham says that it’s rare for spam to last on the site for more than 10 minutes. If a user does spam the site or engages in personally vicious behaviors, they run the risk of being banned. But in an interesting twist, called “hellbanning,” the user may not actually know they are banned. On the backend, Hacker News runs on one core, and Graham calls this a “remarkable feat of scaling.” In terms of human moderation, Graham himself has been spending three to four hours per day simply moderating the site. And that’s in addition to all of his duties running Y Combinator. While a number of other YC alums have moderating abilities, Graham has been the main human element of the site. “It was becoming my life,” he says. Around six months ago, Graham brought on someone else, who he chose not to name, to moderate the site. He says the individual is affiliated with Y Combinator and is a “prudent and thoughtful guy,” and has been doing a great job ever since. Hacker News has a strong affiliation with Y Combinator, as well. Graham explains that founders usually all create a Hacker News account when they apply, and that user name is the founder’s identity at Y Combinator. Hacker News also features a jobs page that shows any jobs available at Y Combinator companies. He adds that this jobs portal is very useful for Y Combinator, as the majority of the site’s audience is made up of programmers and engineers. There is also an internal page that is only visible to YC founders that has a list of recent stories about YC startups. And if you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC founders to enable these entrepreneurs to recognize and meet each other. Graham says that Hacker News gets a lot of complaints that it has a bias toward featuring stories about Y Combinator startups, but he says there is no such bias. Instead, the culture at the incubator is to use Hacker News, and with more than 1,000 YC alumni who have graduated from the incubator, many of these founders are still active on the news site and post links to their fellow founders’ launches and news. “It was a small intellectual village and now it is a giant city.” Growth has its downside. What keeps Graham up at night is worrying about the dilution of quality of the Hacker News. He explains that the site was community of insiders in the hacker world, and it has gradually been getting diluted. “That is what I spend all my time thinking about,” he says. He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.” “The community has been in a perpetual but slow decline because the site is growing,” he says. Ptacek agrees that the value of Hacker News has changed a bit. “I don’t get a community feel as much, whereas in the beginning it was a small group of people who all know each other,” he says. “It’s less likely now to see the same people from thread to thread.” One of Graham’s biggest pain points is the “schoolyard quarrels” he finds on the site on a daily basis, and wishes “users would stop misbehaving.” He cites the example of users organizing voting rings to purposefully vote up stories, which caused Graham to develop additional software to detect this. He adds that more users are trolling under newly created accounts, and are deliberately starting flame wars on the site. “I wish I could get people to stop posting comments that are stupid or mean,” he says. “It takes only one or two negative comments and a discussion turns into a flame war.” Graham adds that he gets a lot of vitriol from users personally with accusations of bias or censoring. He clarifies that he, and the other human editor, rarely take links down unless they are dupes. Even with tabloid or gossip stories that surface, Graham will not take them down. Users with high karma points tend to flag these stories, he adds, and they can then be taken down. “Hacker News makes me sad a lot,” says Graham. “I wish the community would behave the way they did when it was a little village.” Users are noticing Graham’s frustrations. Ptacek says that he observes that Graham is careful not to tell people what to say or think, but it’s clear that he wants people to treat each other better and he gets more sad over time. Could This Be A Business? While Graham is open about not wanting to be the next Reddit, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Hacker News could be a business. Reddit is reportedly raising cash at a $400 million valuation. While Hacker News has a fraction of the traffic that Reddit does, the smaller site could actually have an impressive valuation as a business without any funding or employees. Graham himself uses the site as his primary source of news. He’s even found Y Combinator companies through Hacker News. A user in the community posted a link to Watsi, a non-profit that allows people in dire need of medical care to raise money for procedures and health care. He noticed Watsi the second time it was posted on Hacker News and thought it was an amazing idea. He cold-called the founders and convinced them to be the first ever YC-backed nonprofit. And Graham recently took a first board seat at Watsi, his first board position ever. But Graham is adamant that Hacker News is not a business and would not become a business. There are no ads on the site, and he has no interest in making money from ads. He admits that through the jobs page he indirectly makes money, as he is an investor in Y Combinator companies and will inevitably profit if the company’s hires help the business. Nor would not be interested in selling the site. While it’s clear that Graham has his frustrations with the community, when he talks about the site’s defining moments, he sounds like he is speaking about his own child. One of his most distinct memories about the site is the day following Steve Jobs’ death, when every story on the front page was about the Apple founder. “Users did it collectively as a tribute, and I found this a really remarkable way to show the power of a community. I thought this is really a living, breathing thing. It was like a bunch of birds flying through the sky forming themselves as an S.” “There are really good reasons to engage with Hacker News,” says Ptacek. “There is no better place to stay engaged with the hacker community…At the end of day it is a message board. Having a place where you can reach and talk to groups of people is an important concept.” As for the future of Hacker News, it’s clear that Graham is focused on maintaining quality and making sure that the community treats each other with respect and kindness. “I hope that most Hacker News readers know that I am doing this for their sake,” he says.
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It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show where a few of us writers chat up the most interesting stories from the past seven days. Ryan Lawler, Drew Olanoff (clad in his Google Glass), and I discussed all things Google I/O, including Larry Page’s keynote, Google+’s new photo features, and the latest Google Glass apps and more. We also chatted about Square’s new hardware, Stand, which is a $299 card swiper and stand for iPad registers. Tune in above for more!
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Did Google’s conference succeed? It launched dozens of products and services in its 205 minute keynote, but did the world understand them? I saw some of the smartest journalists in technology struggling to handle the information density. But what’s the alternative? Break it up across multiple days, or even multiple conferences? Google’s breadth presents it with a challenge unique among the tech giants. Apple? Its launches center around a discrete set of devices. That’s why WWDC works. There might be one radically new product, but then just a set of iterations on what we already know. The screen is bigger, the tablet is thinner, the software gets a new sheen. And since Apple is all about hardware you need to touch to believe, it has to do it all in-person. Journalists and pundits can easily digest the news and offer their insights to the world. Facebook? It prefers the rolling thunder approach that works because it’s mostly a software company. Releasing things when they’re ready rather than waiting months for an event embodies its “move fast and break things” ideal. It reaches out to journalists almost daily about new updates. When it has something big, it throws a laser-focused, dedicated event like it did this year for content-specific news feeds, Graph Search, and Home. Even when it threw its last f8 developer conference 20 months ago, it kept it tight to just Timeline and Open Graph. The media could wrap its head around the social network’s plans. Those conferences serve their purposes because they align with the identities of producers. Some see Microsoft’s events as a fragmented mess as they too embody their producer. Microsost has Build for Windows and developers, TechEd for enterprise, a partner conference, a management summit, and a whole event for SharePoint. By splitting them all up, it never feels like there’s one day where Microsoft rules the world. But Google has its own identity and it’s causing I/O growing pains. The conference certainly captures the spotlight. The problem is that Google’s vast ambitions have left I/O bursting at the seams. This year’s mega-keynote tried to combine search, maps, Google+, YouTube, Google Now, Google Play, music, games, Chrome, Android, and a new phone. And that was just the consumer facing stuff! Then there were a huge set of developer announcements like a native client for C++, location APIs, game services APIs, cloud messaging for notifications, and a suite of mobile app building tools called Android Studio. Did you watch the keynote? If so, did you remember all these things? Did you have time to read insightful analysis about them? Did journalists even have the bandwidth to write intelligently about it all? It could take a while to unpack everything from I/O. I know I have at least five stories I want to write. And inevitably things will fall through the cracks as a new week will bring new news from elsewhere. And it’s only going to get more intense. Google employees I’ve talked to say Larry Page is really pushing his 10X innovation mantra and speedier product cycles. They explain that Google could have saved some stuff for another conference later this year, but by then it’ll already have whole slew of new things ready to show off. Plus, developers and futurists might not be willing to come from around the world for two events a year. The single, 3+ hour keynote with no intermission did symbolized Google’s big theme of unification. Google wants to show it isn’t just a grab bag of different products. They all piggy-back on each other. Android ties mobile together. Google+ ties people together no matter what other Google products they’re using. But I/O may be too dense and rich. Like a chunk of chocolate fudge, it overwhelms the senses and leaves you struggling to chew up Google’s vision. It was so mind-boggling it put Wired’s Mat Honan into a psychedelic trance. The three days of developer sessions that followed the keynote were a success, in that they helped developers develop. But perhaps splitting the keynote into two bite-size sessions would make it all easier to swallow. One consumer keynote (Search, Maps, Google+, Hangouts, Music, phone) and one developer keynote (Android, Chrome, APIs, developer tools). They could be split across two days. Alternatively, it could be one keynote with announcements sorted into these two categories with an intermission in the middle. Either would go a long way to making I/O more comprehensible. But for now, sticking with a single, epic conference may be the best route for Google to create momentum, convey unification, bring its community together, and impress the globe. Google is determined to innovate faster and deliver the future. The duty falls on us to keep up.
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It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its five million registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200 million+ monthly active users, and some 600 billion in and outbound messages – but Hike’s growth is  impressive when you consider it’s only just over four months old. WhatsApp, of course, has been around for almost four years. Mobile messaging is hot property right now, with tech giants like Facebook and most recently Google bent on owning the messaging space. The reason for all this interest in cross-platform chit-chat is that mobile messaging looks poised to steal social networking’s crown jewels: aka the cool factor, and thus the user engagement (Hike incorporates social status updates and emoji-based moods into its messaging app, to hang on the social chain). But the idea that there can be one ultimate mobile messaging winner — or one player as dominant as Facebook in the full-fat social networking space — seems unlikely. And that’s what Hike is banking on to disrupt WhatsApp and keep Facebook Messenger and its ilk from crashing its just-getting-started party. There’s no doubt that local market realities intercede much more on mobile than on the traditional social networking playground of the desktop, especially in emerging markets where device, network and carrier variations influence how people communicate based on how they can afford to communicate. Those complexities provide an opportunity for local app makers to triumph over goliath outsiders if they build fixes for the local market, argues Hike. “Given how competitive this market is we do feel that in about 3 or 5 years from now you will have somewhere between three to five players globally that own parts of the messaging space in the world. You’re already seeing it right now, you have Line in Japan, you have Kakao in Korea, you have WeChat in China, you have WhatsApp in South America and Europe, you have of course Facebook message or iMessage dominating in U.S. and WhatsApp growing there too. In India of course WhatsApp is the dominant player but we’ve come on to be a very strong number two in just four months,” says Hike creator Kavin Mittal. “We can see that with communication if you solve local problems in the market there is room for a local player to win the market completely.” Hike is one of the latest contenders to jump into the mobile messaging space, albeit with a few neat tricks up its sleeve that it’s confident will allow it to grab significant share in its chosen markets — namely India, and other similar emerging markets in place like Indonesia, the Middle East and Africa. Some 60% of Hike’s registered users are in India, 40% globally led by the Middle East and Germany (despite its emerging markets focus, Germany was actually the first market to spike an interest in Hike — which its creator puts down to it having 128bit encryption over Wi-Fi and Germans looking for a “much more secure solution to WhatsApp”). On the neat tricks front, Hike has baked a patent-pending SMS conversion tool into its app to take advantage of fragmentation in the Indian market caused by low distribution of data-capable smartphones. So this is not just about incorporating SMS messages into a unified app — as Google plans to with its Hangouts app – but about making sure a data message can still reach someone who doesn’t have data, via the SMS channel. Mittal explains that in India, even where people own smartphones they may not have data enabled, or  may sporadically turn data off to save money. SMS is therefore still a key comms channel that needed to be brought into the loop. This fragmentation was the problem the app’s creators were setting out to solve with Hike. They have also done this in as low cost a way as possible by building a system that ensures it does not send cross-network SMSes (which incur a termination fee in India) but routes same network to same network. “The idea behind Hike… is it works free globally. Hike is available on iPhone, Windows, Android S40, S60, very soon BlackBerry now as well. But in case you don’t have a phone than can install Hike, or let’s say you have a phone but you don’t have data, I can still message you from Hike for free. We convert the IP message into an SMS and it’s free for me as a Hike user, to which you can reply back to – and the reply comes back straight to my inbox making messaging very  seamless. So I have one app for all my friends,”  Mittal tells TechCrunch. Another future trick — due to launch on June 10 — is something that will allow users who have turned off their data to still be notified that they have a message waiting for them, presumably so they know to turn data back on. “At this point in the market there’s no way to notify you when you have a message waiting on one of these applications. So we’re launching something on June 10th that’s going to solve this problem, so no matter where you are – no matter if you’re online or offline – you’ll be able to communicate via Hike with your friend all the time,” he adds. Hike is funding the conversion cost of sending the SMSes itself —  in the Indian market, with a view to extending it to other emerging markets with similar dynamics — so that is one of its largest sunk costs at the moment, according to Mittal. But its monetisation strategy is based on building off that base in another way. The shift Hike’s creators are ultimately calculating on is the movement of consumer spending in its target emerging markets away from carrier ‘value add services’ — paid for infotainment SMSes and so on — to data-based content and entertainment. That’s where Hike sees its future profits, by fleshing out its messaging offering to supplement the bread and butter of social comms with “content that’s very relevant to the local market” – much as the Line messaging app is already doing with entertainment content such as stickers and games. “India is a country of 20 countries. There’s so much diversity, cultural differences, dialects, languages that one has to cater to and given that this is a big entertainment market there is no doubt we’re going to go down the route of enriching messaging around content,” he says. “If you look at why you message it’s around a piece of content, topic, video, something new you’ve found, something funny. And India it’s much more prevalent than other markets so we’re definitely going down that route, there’s no doubt about it.” Hike is also looking to work with carriers to share some of the SMS conversion cost, with the benefit for carriers being that Hike is acting as an IP pusher, turning mobile owners into data drivers — and data is ultimately where carriers in these emerging will be making their future revenues from too. “Given the traction we’ve had in the Indian market we’ve seen a lot of interest from the operators who want to work closely with Hike and figure out how to expand and grow the traction with Hike because what we’re doing for the operators is we’re introducing a lot of people to data,” says Mittal. “What one can also do over SMS is send photos, videos and so forth, so if I’m on Hike and do  SMS I can send you a picture and you get a link on SMS so you can open it on a browser, so we’re striking deals in the Indian market and the emerging markets like Middle East and Africa where the cost is not only bourn by us but by the operator too.” Hike is starting out with more resources than most startups, being created by BSB, a 50:50 Bharti Softbank joint venture, that acts as a “quasi-strategic incubator”, as Mittal puts it. Bharti Softbank invested $7 million into Hike about a month ago — a measure of how much traction the app had managed to achieve in a few short months. BSB projects get their first round funded by the parent companies if they achieve enough traction. Going forward, Hike will likely look outside for funding, says Mittal — assuming it can keep on growing, and reach its goal of at least 10 million registered users (“our internal critical number”), which it views as the baseline required before starting to think seriously about monetisation. “By the end of the year we’ll be in a positon to raise money from the external market. The reason we’re doing that is the VC market in India has less of an appetite for taking massive risk.  Because one of the first questions to ask is ‘hey guys why are you building another messaging app?’ And we were pretty certain that if we did what we did we’d get the traction and so far we’ve proved it,” says Mittal. “We’re in a point where we have the $7 million but we will look outside, even possibly the West Coast for funding.” Mittal won’t put a figure on Hike’s active user base but says it’s “amongst the highest we’ve seen in the industry and definitely way above 50%”. ”We feel there is a room for a local player to dominate markets like India, Africa and China and so forth,  and take care of the local needs, and that is something we’re working on. That’s the big philosophy we have at BSB,” he adds. India’s technology-adoption stratification poses a huge challenge when you’re trying to build an app that lets people talk to whoever they want. A challenge that, ultimately, gives the local kid a toehold over global mobile messaging players, argues Hike. “The market kind of splits India into three sort of broad demographics, the top part really mimics the U.S. population  — 30, 40 million people – they’re really switched on, they know about the Internet, they have smartphones and so on and so forth; there are about 150 million people that are experimenting with the Internet, but they have a lot of churn there because the Internet is still not a utility for these guys; and then you have a billion people at the bottom of the pyramid that have no clue whatsoever the Internet even is,” says Mittal. “As you go further down in India, how do you tackle the one billion people? No one knows but we’re in India here, so we’re the guys to figure it out.”
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This Gillmor Gang was recorded live at betaday, the betaworks annual gathering in New York. The Gillmor Gang included John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Davison, and Steve Gillmor. Enjoy. @stevegillmor, @Borthwick, @scobleizer, @rushkoff, @pdavison The Gillmor Gang is produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Google is prepping… something. An announced Google media streamer was recently found in the FCC’s testing database. Details are nearly nonexistent as most are held under a confidentiality agreement for the next 45 days. However, the documents released to the public call the device several times a “media player” and that it features WiFi connectivity. The H840, with a model number of H2G2-42 (a clever nod to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), could be a Nexus Q replacement. After all, Google’s new music streaming service does not work with the ill-fated Nexus Q, nor does Google have a mass-market way to get it into living rooms. Google essentially needs its own Apple TV device. Mass consumption is the only way Google Play Music All Access is going to be successful. Google needs to follow Pandora’s lead and get its service onto as many platforms and screens as possible. A native Google TV app will likely debut shortly. But Google TV is far from successful enough to do this job alone. It’s rather strange Google didn’t announce this device at I/O last week. This device will launch within the coming weeks. The FCC will release the rest of the details including the device’s user manual in 45 days, giving Google a rather small launch window. A $99-ish Roku/Apple TV clone is a no-brainer for Google. Call it a Nexus streamer. It would be a media consumption device, able to serve up Google Play and likely several staple streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu. Use an Android device for the remote. Profit.
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Editor’s note: Tolga Ozuygur is the co-founder of Overdose Caffeine, an indie game-development company from Turkey that develops cross-platform, real-time multiplayer games. Follow him on Twitter @tolgaozuygur. We at Overdose Caffeine had previously announced that Pocket Fleet, a real-time multiplayer space dogfight game developed for mobile devices, would be available soon on OUYA. Our players were looking forward to it. Even we were excited about the prospect of bringing the game to the platform, as we loved the device and thought TV was a great medium for fast-paced multiplayer gaming. However, we have decided to end development for it and switch to GamePop. I know many people were looking forward to playing the game on OUYA, so I thought I’d explain why we made this decision. Pocket Fleet Is A Cross-Platform Game Pocket Fleet works on Android, iOS and any computer with a browser. We are also about to release the game on Samsung with the 100 percent revenue share indie deal we struck with them. Gamers can also play the game on their PCs and keep playing on their mobile devices, battling players from any other platform. The game runs the same way on every platform, which is why we wanted to add support for a TV console to expand our PC-Mobile combo, and were going to do it with OUYA. But We Are a Small Indie Development Team With Limited Bandwidth We don’t have a separate “design group” to rework menus. We focus all of our energy on building the best possible game mechanics and providing  new fancy features to our fans. This has paid off so far, as Pocket Fleet has exceeded our wildest expectations, having reached downloads in the seven figures in just a few months and a feature in Google Play. We don’t have time to mess around. If we had a larger team, things might have been different. Developing For OUYA Became A Lot More Work While it might seem we would only need to map the controls in Pocket Fleet to the OUYA controller (a job of only a few days), it turned out to be much more than that. The biggest surprise was what they required in terms of new menu design. We assumed the user could move a cursor around to select things on our main menu, but this was not the case. The company required that we redesign the main screen so that people could move around it by highlighting different buttons. This may sound simple but certain circumstances meant that it was anything but. Their ODK was also pretty shoddily thrown together and updates didn’t note what had changed. It began to get very onerous very fast. GamePop Had a Much Simpler Proposition We still loved the idea of bringing Pocket Fleet to TV. Recently, we were contacted by someone from BlueStack, which was about to launch their GamePop subscription service and console. They asked for no menu changes or controller mappings, there’s no SDK, no nothing. Seriously, it was about the easiest onboarding we’ve ever had to a platform, since they basically use our stock APK. We Wish It Weren’t This Way We were (and still are) fans of Ouya and have been rooting for them since the start. We wish them the best. For independent developers however, we just can’t do so much work for such an uncertain benefit. We’re taking the Occam’s Razor approach and going with GamePop for now. Pocket Fleet looks awesome on its prototype and we can’t wait to release the finished product.
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I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not most–homes. I was skeptical to begin with: after all, I thought, Chrome is acceptable when you’re online, but I’ll be spending much of my travel time offline, which probably makes it a non-starter, right? — So I devoted most of my Chromebook’s (bizarrely spacious) 320GB hard drive to an install of Ubuntu. Which I then never used even once. I suppose I would have if some kind of critical work emergency had come up: after all, I’m (mostly) a software developer by trade, and ChromeOS isn’t much of a developer platform. But that didn’t happen. Good thing, too, because Linux-on-the-desktop seems as ugly and frustrating as ever for someone, even a deeply techie someone, who just wants to get things done. ChromeOS, though, is both very pretty and almost painless. Its biggest problem is that out of the box it naively insists that you’ll be online all the time–even though it can be perfectly serviceable while disconnected. You may not have known that nowadays both GMail and (most) Google Docs can work just fine offlne. And if you didn’t, well, Google sure isn’t about to proactively tell you. You actually have to make a point of seeking out, installing, and then activating Offline Gmail and Offline Google Docs from the Chrome Web Store. Why ChromeOS doesn’t prompt you with this option as part of the onboarding process is truly beyond me. Similarly, why on Earth are “Gmail’ and “Offline Gmail” two separate apps? Google may be full of incredibly smart people, but they can also be insanely myopic when it comes to end users. Once those were up and running, though, my Chromebook was a charm to use under almost all circumstances. Offline, I could write documents, check old email, and even play a few free games from the Chrome Web Store, although most Chrome games still seem to require an initial server connection to start up. And online, of course, the world was my oyster. Did I have access to all the features of, say, Word or Excel? Hell, no. (You still can’t create a Google Docs spreadsheet when offline, either.) Was it an all-guns-blazing gaming experience? Again, no, although Chrome’s rapidly evolving Native Client ought to keep matters improving here. What I could do, though, was email, play a few games, surf the Net, communicate (via GChat or Google Hangouts, which worked excellently), and write documents — which unless I’m much mistaken is pretty much everything that most people use their computers for at home. ChromeOS still needs better, and simpler, offline support; and I’d like to see more diversity of available hardware; but once those two things are addressed, which shouldn’t take long, I would happily recommend a Chromebook to my parents the next time they upgrade. In fact I’d happily recommend one to anyone who wants a small second laptop for travel, or who doesn’t need to do serious work on their home computer. Long ago Neal Stephenson, when comparing operating systems to vehicles, described MacOS as a hermetically sealed day-glo VW Beetle; MS Windows as a clunky two-tone station wagon; and Linux as the product of a horde of dreadlocked hippies who spent their time building M1 battle tanks and giving them away for free. Which sounds great at first, but who actually wants to drive a tank? Well, if I may extend that a little, ChromeOS is like a sleek, shiny Airstream trailer built around that same M1 engine. There are many things it can’t do, and a bunch more at which it’s very clumsy, but within its bailiwick, casual exploring, it’s both very attractive and awfully comfortable. I don’t think Stephenson’s original analogies quite hold any more, though. Nowadays OS X is more like a Porsche…and Windows is a gas-guzzling pickup truck, or a cube van that makes disturbing noises whenever it corners. Still suitable for work, but not particularly great for either road trips or sub/urban living — and nowadays looking nervously over its metaphorical shoulder at the flotilla of drones and self-driving cars on the horizon. Image credit: Dan McCullough, Flickr.
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Google is facing another competition investigation, according to the Financial Post. The Canadian Competition Bureau has informed Mountain View of its plans to launch a formal investigation of its Canadian operations. It has not yet requested any information or documents from Google but has informed the search giant of its intention to launch a probe. The Bureau declined to comment on the scope of the investigation, noting that it is obliged by law to conduct investigations confidentially. Asked for comment on the probe, Leslie Church, Google Canada’s head of communications and public affairs, told the Post: “We will work co-operatively with the Competition Bureau to answer any questions they may have.” The Canadian Competition Bureau administers and enforces Canada’s Competition Act, among other laws. Among the types of behaviour it investigates are abuse of a dominant position involving anti-competitive practices that “substantially lessen competition in the market, or are likely to do so”. Google’s search engine is by far and away the dominant player in Canada. According to StatCounter data for April 2012 to 2013 Google’s share has declined over the past year but only very marginally, from more than 90% last year to just under 90% in April this year. The second largest search engine, Microsoft’s Bing, took less than 7% of the market in April 2013. Competition investigation is well trodden ground for Google. Mountain View has been the subject of a string of investigations for a range of business practices, including a 20-month FTC antitrust probe in the U.S. and a two-year+ European Union antitrust probe into its search and advertising operations that’s still ongoing, pushing into its third year. The FTC probe ended with Google agreeing to make some voluntary tweaks to its search and ad business and without any fine being levied. In the European antitrust case, Google submitted proposals for changes to its practices back in April. Yesterday Reuters reported that EU antitrust regulators had extended the review period for Google’s rivals to study its proposals after complaints that competitors were not being given as much time to formulate their responses. If Google is found to have breached EU competition rules it could face a fine of up to 10% of its global revenue.
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Tumblr feels that Yahoo’s $1.1 billion offer as “too low” and view it as “only a first offer”, according to sources close to to acquisition talks. Yahoo may have to significantly increase the offer to close the deal. An acquisition by some tech giant is likely in the cards for Tumblr, though, as sources say the company only has a few months of cash runway left. The news comes after AllThingsD reported Yahoo was in advanced talks to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion cash, and the portal’s board of directors are set to meet on Sunday night to discuss the potential deal. Forbes reports that Facebook and Microsoft have also expressed interest in acquiring Tumblr. However, Forbes says that Yahoo has lock-up agreement arranged with Tumblr that prevents the blogging platform from holding a “bake-off” or bidding war for the right to buy it. If Yahoo comes to the table with an insufficient offer, which our sources say $1.1 billion qualifies as, Tumblr may be able to reject it and shop itself around some more. A few months ago Tumblr let several companies know it was interested in possibly being acquired. Yahoo was the first to come to the table with a firm number, say one of our sources. They say Tumblr is apprehensive about accepting the $1.1 billion cash offer, though. Considering the much smaller, younger Instagram’s acquisition price was supposed to be $1 billion (in cash and stock, though, which would eventually make it worth less), it seems reasonable that Tumblr would view $1.1 billion cash as a lowball. Tumblr employees have been told that the company only has enough funds to operate for a few more months, as its costs far exceed the limited revenue it earns. Tumblr pulled in $13 million in 2012, but has accelerated its advertising offering in hopes of hitting $100 million in revenue this year. The money’s not coming in fast enough to support its expenses though. Employees were recently told not to be concerned, though, because the company is expecting to be bought. Of course, Yahoo might be able to push the deal through for $1.1 billion or just a little more depending on how the acquisition is structured. If it promises Tumblr’s CEO David Karp he can retain control of the company, provides the right retention bonuses, or won’t force Tumblr to shoehorn in integrations with Yahoo’s other properties, Tumblr may be more receptive. If Yahoo successfully buys the startup, it could inject some much needed “cool”, youthful energy, and design sense into the aging tech giant. The acquisition might not be so popular with Tumblr’s users, though, who range from young hipsters to diehard Internet aficionados. Many thought Instagram’s userbase would balk at its acquisition by Facebook, but the photo sharing service has continued to grow, offering some hope to Yahoo and Tumblr if their deal closes.
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Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems. As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we’ve hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that “arch rivals” GrubHub and Seamless are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of course, any potential deal could fall through. Furthermore, it’s not yet clear what kind of synergies would take place, how management of the new entity would be structured or even what the new business will be called. The two companies would not confirm on the record on any of the above. But as far as the name goes, we’re hoping for Grubless. Or Hubless GrubSeam. But they have a nice ring to them, don’t they? If these rumors are true, the merger comes at a good time for the arch rivals, who have been seeing mounting competition of late from a laundry list of new startups entering the space, including increasingly popular alternatives like Delivery.com, ChowNow, Munchery (meals from local chefs), Campus Special, eat24 or the bigs of Europe, like Food Hero and Just-Eat.  If the online food-ordering and delivery market is roughly where daily deals were three-plus years ago, then the deal essentially creates the Groupon of food delivery. Like the daily deals market, food ordering has traditionally had a fairly low barrier to entry, which helps explain why we seem to see a new startup pop up every week. Plus, the business model isn’t particularly complicated, making it replicable. That being said, innovation and tech adoption have been slow to come to the food industry, and, at scale, this model (taking a slice of transactions) has the potential to be able to generate a lot of cash. This is just one part of why the “food tech” business has been so hot lately. Just ask venture capitalists who collectively poured $350 million into food startups over the last year. (Compare that to 2008, when it was less than $50 million.) Plus, when you get right down to it: People need to eat. And, as it turns out, people are pretty busy. Uh, and lazy. Of course, for those who remember the spectacular failure of online food companies like Webvan, Kozmo and HomeRuns, this whole “tech in your kitchen” and online ordering jibber-jabber probably sounds familiar — and not in a good way. But this time it’s different. Research from Cornell University recently found, for example, that over 40 percent of adults in the U.S. have ordered food online, and 10 percent of restaurant orders now originate online — and these numbers continue to head north. GrubHub and Seamless have built successful businesses on this very idea. Both GrubHub and Seamless have been around for some time: The New York City-based Seamless was founded in 1999, while the Chicago-based GrubHub got its start in 2004. And for the most part, the two companies have catered to two different markets geographically. While both now have fairly expansive coverage, GrubHub has naturally developed a firm foothold in the Midwest, while Seamless focused its early attention on NYC, before moving into cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. From that perspective, a merger would make sense, allowing the new, consolidated entity to gain penetration into markets where they lacked a major presence. Writ large, the companies, while having some fundamental differences, do seem to have a lot of synergies on paper — at least “nominally,” depending on who you ask — likely why they’ve increasingly become rivals over the years. Bboth are of fairly comparable size, as GrubHub has more than 18,000 restaurant partners across more than 500 cities, while Seamless has over 12,000 restaurants and serves nearly 5,000 businesses and more than 2 million users. As of February, Reuters reported that Seamless was on track to generate more than $100 million in revenue this year as it expands into new cities and focuses more aggressively on mobile. The company reportedly generated $85 million in revenue last year, growing its consumer business by 60 percent year-over-year and “will soon be processing $1 billion worth of food orders a year,” Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky told Reuters at the time. For the majority of its history, the company focused primarily on New York, but launched a major expansion effort last year, bringing its service to 10 new cities. According to the report, Seamless saw its transaction volume quadruple in Los Angeles during 2012, with transactions tripling in San Francisco. Another interesting point to note: GrubHub was reported to be considering an IPO last fall. The company denied the rumors at the time, and if this merger is true, then they’ve been given the proper perspective. Certainly, it would seem that this wouldn’t take a potential IPO off the table, instead, likely making an opening price that much higher. The IPO rumors for GrubHub came at a time when the company was reportedly doing about $60 million in revenue (this was in 2012) — a little less than half that of Seamless. Furthermore, Crain’s reported in December that GrubHub’s revenue has been doubling every year and, as the company reported $30 million in revenue in 2011, that revenue estimate would make sense and put the company on the path to crossing $100 million well before the end of this year. That is all to say that, although the terms of the potential deal are unclear, these are two sizable businesses that are growing relatively fast, so any potential valuation has got to be fairly high. After all: The two companies were fairly comparably capitalized and staffed, with GrubHub growing to over 250 employees and Seamless over 300, while GrubHub raised about $84 million from a mix of venture and growth equity firms (including Benchmark) and Seamless raised $51 million, $50 million of which came from private equity firm Spectrum Equity. While both companies have made a couple of acquisitions, this would be the second big M&A deal for Seamless, as the company was acquired by food services giant, ARAMARK, in 2006. Five years later, Spectrum bought a minority stake in Seamless from ARAMARK, and about a year later, the food services company spun-off its remaining interest in Seamless to its shareholders. Free from its corporate ownership, Seamless proceeded to go out and buy MenuPages for $15 million, showing up GrubHub, which MenuPages had initially targeted as its acquirer. When GrubHub and MenuPages couldn’t agree to a deal, and it seems that GrubHub was instead in the process of buying Dotmenu/Allmenus, Seamless swooped in — according to BetaBeat. So, as you can see, the companies have a long history of jostling. While GrubHub had been out acquiring restaurant partners fast and furiously, Seamless stagnated a bit under ARAMARK, but since becoming an independent company (again) and with a new board/investors, the company seems to have been compounding its growth. Together, that growth could be exponentially higher. Finally, if this deal is in fact a go, it’s worth looking at this quote from GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney from back in 2011. In it, he shares his opinion on GrubHub’s top competitor, a little company called Seamless. He told BetaBeat: I typically don’t talk this much about Seamless because we don’t view them as incredibly strong competition for what we’re doing … Seamless fundamentally is a corporate catering business. They were founded years and years and years ago to do just that. And they’re still best in the business for corporate. They recently got into the consumer and residential pick-up and delivery. And they do it well in New York, but they really have zero business anywhere else. We don’t even consider them competition anywhere other than Manhattan specifically. So, there you go. A match potentially made in heaven, and one that’s sure to shake up online and mobile food ordering if it happens. Find Seamless at home here and GrubHub here.
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Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change. FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the company’s North Asia president, noted that this month’s production capacity for the flagship device is twice that of April, and that surge will only continue into June. Sounds pretty yawn-worthy, right? Normally I would spend too much time dwelling on the finer points of production capacity, but here’s a device that was launched to widespread praise by an underdog smartphone company some people have written off, and HTC has basically been getting screwed thanks to part shortages for the One’s Ultrapixel camera and a brief injunction due to the HDR microphone it uses. It’s like a perfect storm of headaches for a company that really, really doesn’t need it — one look at its Q1 financials and it’s clear that HTC needed this launch to go as smoothly as possible. It didn’t. For what it’s worth, HTC hasn’t disclosed how many Ones it’s shipped since it launched earlier this year. Meanwhile, rival Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has become the Korean electronics giant’s fastest moving smartphone — Samsung shipped 6 million units in just over two weeks, and it hopes to cross the 10 million unit threshold by the end of this month. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that Google’s Hugo Barra showed off a version of the S4 at the company’s I/O developer conference that runs a version of Android that’s unfettered by the software bloat that many a reviewer took umbrage at. Company representatives were careful not to call it a Nexus — even though it seems to harbor many of the advantages inherent to the Nexus line like a clean Android build and access to frequent software updates. As I noted towards the end of my HTC One review, the wireless industry isn’t a meritocracy — the well-executed device doesn’t always wind up saving the day. Hopefully now that some of these production woes have been ironed out we’ll see HTC live to fight another day, but that’s still far from a given.
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Google made a relatively quiet announcement today regarding how it’s pushing the developer ecosystem forward around Google Now, its intelligent personal assistant for Android devices. The company has begun extending mark up tools for emails from select partners, which help highlight flight schedules, hotel bookings and various types of reservations, to make sure that Gmail can spot that information and use it to auto-generate helpful reminders in Google Now. The extension of the platform tools available to Now partners was announced by Google’s Baris Gultekin, who was one of the creators of Google Now, which sprung out of a project he came up with in his so-called “20 percent time.” He spoke with Google’s Louis Gray ont he Developer Live video stream which ran throughout the I/O conference this year. Gultekin was talking about ways in which Google is working to improve the quality and relevancy of the recommendations and data it surfaces. The project sounds like it’s fairly limited for now, but asking for help from the input sources of data seems like a smart way to supplement Google’s own data detection algorithms that are working to flag interesting data for Now’s use on their own data center side. Doing all the heavy lifting themselves might be more impressive, but if reaching out to partners can help improve user experience, then there’s no reason not to extend that hand. No word yet on whether Google will eventually make those mark up tools available for different types of data or open them up for public use, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where that happens, allowing developers and startups to provide the option of delivering all kinds of relevant information to users from their apps and services on Android. Then again, that has the potential to become overwhelming for users, so we might see a more metered, gradual approach.
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Just about six months ago, Uber won a big battle with D.C. regulators to have its on-demand car service approved for operation within the nation’s capital. But new regulations from the D.C. Taxi Commission could severely hamper the company’s ability to offer low-cost services in the district. Last December, the D.C. City Council voted to approve a legal framework that legitimized mobile e-hail applications there, as long as those applications followed certain rules. It defined a new class of for-hire vehicles (taxis and sedans) that could use mobile apps as a way to connect drivers and passengers. The unanimous City Council vote followed a year of negotiations with local regulators to get its services approved for usage within the district. (The very public fight even included a sting operation by D.C. Taxi Commissioner Ron Linton in which he took an Uber and then handed over a variety of fines to the driver.) Still, after a whole lot of back-and-forth, it seemed like Uber was finally in the clear. New regulations approved by the D.C. Taxi Commission last week could be a setback in the progress that Uber has made there, however. Among other things, those regulations would require mobile e-hail applications to integrate with the payment processor that is used within local taxicabs. That’s a non-starter for Uber, which currently has its own payment processor for in-app payments, and it could mean the end of UberTAXI in the city. Another set of rules, which is being considered now, would ban cars that weighed less than 3,200 pounds. That would keep Uber from offering fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, which would affect its ability to offer its lower-cost UberX service there. With the possibility of UberTAXI and UberX being shut down, the company would only have its legacy black car and SUV businesses in the city. Other regulations that Uber disagrees with would require Uber and other e-hail providers to hand over data related to rides that were booked using mobile applications. According to Uber, another rule could give the Taxi Commission the ability to choose whether or not apps are approved for usage in the city, and unilaterally keep Uber and other services from operating there. For its part, Uber has tried to once again mobilize its users to reach out to D.C. officials and petition the local government. It’s asked users to email and tweet at Mayor Vincent C. Gray, and has put up a petition on Change.org. That petition has already received more than 2,500 signatures, with 5,000 needed.
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Zynga has apparently told the makers of the dating website CupidWithFriends that they need to change the site’s name, because it allegedly infringes on Zynga’s trademarks. CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7 (which also released the dating apps Flock and Wednesday Night). The site launched a couple of months ago, allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their friends. Apartment 7 co-founder Jared Tame just forwarded me a copy of the letter from Zynga’s lawyers. I’ve pasted the full letter at the end of this post, but the gist is that users are likely to think that CupidWithFriends is associated in some way with Zynga (which acquired the developer of the With Friends mobile gaming franchise, a franchise that recently expanded with the launch of Running With Friends). So the social gaming company is demanding that CupidWithFriends change its name by May 24. Tame said he has “no plans to change the name of the product,” adding,”At the end of the day, we’re busy trying to innovate in the dating space and dealing with Zynga would be a major distraction to us. I think they should be more focused on innovating rather than targeting month-old startups like us.” I emailed Zynga for confirmation and details, but a spokesperson declined to comment. When I ran a search on the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website (direct links to specific filings don’t seem to be working for me), I did find a trademark filing for “With Friends” in relation to computer game software and entertainment services. Tame isn’t the only one building an app named using a “with friends” name. There’s also Bang With Friends (which has other problems, as it was recently booted from the Apple App Store) — I asked the company whether it has received a similar letter from Zynga, but it declined to comment. Here’s the full letter to CupidWithFriends: Dear Sir or Madam: We serve as intellectual property counsel to Zynga Inc. (“Zynga”). Among other things, Zynga publishes and owns intellectual property rights in the ‘WITH FRIENDS™ family of social games, which includes Words With Friends®, Chess With Friends®, Scramble With Friends®, Hanging With Friends™, Matching With Friends™, Gems With Friends™ and Games With Friends®, as well as other ‘WITH FRIENDS games in various stages of development (collectively the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks). Each of Zynga’s games using the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks is published and played by millions of users on various social networking portals, including Facebook, Android and iPhone. Zynga has consistently used and promoted the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks together as a family and, as a result of Zynga’s extensive marketing efforts and commercial success, the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks is strongly identified by consumers with Zynga’s reputation for quality. It has come to our attention that CupidWithFriends has developed and launched an application called “Cupid With Friends”. CupidWithFriends’ use of the name “Cupid With Friends” for an online application is confusingly similar to the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks owned by Zynga, and users are likely to believe, erroneously, that CupidWithFriends’ application is published, sponsored, endorsed by or associated with Zynga. CupidWithFriends’ use of “Cupid With Friends” also dilutes the distinctiveness of Zynga’s famous ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks. Zynga has invested substantial time and resources in developing and promoting the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks, and it vigorously protects its rights in its marks, both collectively and individually. Zynga hereby demands that CupidWithFriends immediately cease use of the name “Cupid With Friends” in connection with its online application, and refrain from further exploitation of the goodwill that Zynga has developed in its ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks. We anticipate that you will accede to this demand, and ask that CupidWithFriends confirm by Friday, May 24, 2013 that it has ceased use of the name “Cupid With Friends” in connection with its online application. Nothing contained in this letter constitutes an express or implied waiver of any rights, remedies, or defenses of Zynga, all of which are expressly reserved. Very truly yours, /s/ Dennis L. Wilson Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP
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