Month: August 2018

There’s nothing inherently social about VR. In fact, putting on a headset and entering your own world can be a fairly isolating experience. But Survios’ latest offering is looking to turn that truism on its head. Electronauts is designed to deliver a social experience, in which players can create music for their surroundings.

The new title is immersive, but designed to be played in a social setting, like a party. Players inhabit a kind of Tron-like world, remixing tracks by popular acts like Steve Aoki and D.J. Shadow in real-time.

It’s a group experience the company envisions as something similar to Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Electronauts is an impressive title from the California VR studio that also developed the addictive first-person shooter, Raw Data.

Formed in 2013 by a trio of University of Southern California students, Survios is among the most compelling VR studios around. Before co-founding the company, President Nathan Burba served as the director of Project Holodeck, a USC project aimed at creating full-body 360-degree VR experience. The Oculus-based project took its name from Star Trek’s well known virtual experience. 

Since launch, Survios has generated plenty of notice from entertainment big wigs. Back in 2016, the company raised $50 million, in a round led by MGM.

Burba will be joining us at TC Sessions: AR/VR on October 18 at UCLA. The one-day event combines on stage conversations about augmented and virtual reality with in-person demos and networking.

Purchase your Early Bird tickets here for just $99 and you’ll save $100 before prices go up!

Students get a special rate of just $45 when they book here.

Historically, we haven’t been great about digital security. In 2016 (not long enough ago to feel OK about it), the top passwords were “123456” and “password.”

Awareness has certainly grown, but some folks could still use a nudge in the right direction. Luckily, Fortnite Battle Royale maker Epic Games has a solution.

The company has introduced a new emote to the game — emotes are just one type of cosmetic upgrade that helped Epic rake in $1 billion in revenue. However, this new Boogie Down emote is only available to folks who enable two-factor authentication on their Epic Games account.

As you can expect, hackers and other malicious actors are well aware of both the popularity of Fortnite and users’ willingness to spend money on the game. Obviously, these accounts are attractive targets for “the bad guys.”

Two-factor authentication — which asks for two separate verifications that you are you (usually a password and then an SMS confirmation) — has its shortcomings, but it’s most certainly an upgrade to a single password.

Incentivizing better security practices is an interesting take, and may very well be the first time a game maker has used the technique.

The Boogie Down emote (above) is the prize for enabling 2FA, and it was introduced as part of a competition by Epic Games. In March, the company asked its community to submit dance moves, with the winner making it into the game.

For what it’s worth, the actual dance seems way cooler than the emote in the game.

[via Kotaku]

Build versus buy? Potential partner or potential disruptor?

The option set for corporations to collaborate with startups used to be simpler. Today, the options seem almost endless: build, partner, buy, integrate with their APIs, co-develop product together, white-label a part of their technology, share specific data sets, cross-sell each other’s products — and more. The notion of a straightforward “vendor” relationship doesn’t apply anymore.

The landscape has also changed. If the corporate posture of the past around innovation could be described as “not invented here” with a strong bias toward building internally, today’s corporate posture leans in a much different direction, with many thinking about how to disrupt themselves before an external party beats them to it.

Not surprisingly, this has created more corporate and startup partnerships. While getting this type of collaboration right is beneficial for both parties, if you speak to most startups selling into large enterprises or corporate executives looking to partner with startups today, you will find many justifiable frustrations on both sides.

As the vice president of Business Development at RRE Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York, a major part of my role is leading our business development initiatives, where we enable collaboration between corporations and startups. Before this role, I spent time on the corporate side and on the startup side, so I’ve gotten to see this dynamic from both angles throughout my career. While there is no silver bullet for this type of work, here are a few best practices I’ve learned, sometimes through painful mistakes, or observed along the way.

For startups looking to sell into large enterprises

Do your homework. Corporate executives expect you to be prepared. Spend the time to understand what their business might be going through. Do they need new growth opportunities? Do they need to cut costs? Given the size of these companies, it’s easy to find information on them.

Spend time reading recent press, analyst reports on the company or understanding more about the division you are speaking to. You want to walk in saying some version of “Here is how I think my product can be relevant to you and help you with one of your key objectives” instead of saying some version of “Here is my shiny object — don’t you want to buy it?”

Be realistic about where you are and where you are headed. The last thing you want to happen is for a corporation to agree to use or test your product only for you to tell them in the next sentence that you haven’t yet launched or built what you just showed them. Be realistic with the corporation about what you can do for them today, tomorrow and in the future. They will be more flexible than you might think if they understand your timelines and product road map.

Focus on ease of use and ease of integration. We might all be reading headlines about Mars exploration these days, but let’s ground ourselves in a different space reality. It’s not uncommon for major Fortune 500 companies today to still be operating tech or leveraging data models that were built before man was put on the moon. Your technology might be incredible, but if they can’t test it easily or seamlessly integrate it with their tech stack, you are unlikely to get real traction.

Understand the complexities of operating at scale. Think of your own trajectory as a company and how hard it has been to scale your company, from getting the right people to growing revenue and building the right product — and every detail in-between. Now multiply that by a million. Even though Fortune 500 corporations have more resources in absolute magnitude, they have all the same problems you do, often with more complexities, given their scale.

If integrating your product has negative consequences for them, it will likely affect millions of customers, billions of dollars of revenue and have major brand and shareholder consequences, so have some empathy on why they want to properly vet your product and company first.

Learn to fly at 30,000 feet or 30 feet. Effective startup leadership requires one to zoom in and out on a daily basis, quickly and seamlessly. The ability to quickly shift gears and move between big picture and small details is crucial for operating early-stage companies. It’s also essential for working with corporations. Depending on the meeting, a prospective client might want you to go into the technical weeds or have a strategy discussion on a use case that’s not on your road map.

Be ready to fly at both levels, and also be deliberate about where you personally spend your time, as it’s your scarcest asset while running a resource-constrained startup.

For corporations looking to integrate new technologies

Optimize for quality, not quantity, and focus on real use cases. While it can be tempting to meet with every startup employing the right buzzword of the moment (artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning), you want to avoid going on a startup safari where you see a number of cool things in the wild and walk away without doing anything differently in your organization.

Instead of meeting with technology companies based on buzzwords, identify real problems your organization needs to solve and find companies that can help you solve those problems. What matters in the end is translating technology to real tangible use cases that are digestible internally in your organization.

Make fast decisions. As a corporate executive I know puts it, “Maybes kill startups. A fast No is the best thing after Yes.” If you know you are not going to leverage the company’s product, say no as quickly as possible. With fewer resources, startups don’t have the same meeting after meeting bandwidth as you. Remember, saying no now isn’t no forever.

Should you find yourself in a different situation a few months from now, you can always go back and revisit the company. In either case, please give startups real feedback, especially when you don’t move forward with them. In many cases these companies are early on in their growth trajectory, and providing honest feedback helps them build their own product and business.

Create better internal processes to partner with smaller companies. Unless you are one of the few corporations that have set this up well, most of your internal processes (IT Review, Procurement and Sourcing, Compliance, Security, Risk Analysis and Legal Review) for commercial vendor relationships are not set up with smaller companies in mind, which have limited HR and legal teams. To innovate more quickly, create a different set of processes for these types of partnerships that allow you to still assess risk but in a faster, more streamlined way. If your ability to partner is slower than the pace of change, you will never be ahead of the curve.

Short-term versus long-term change. Think about innovation along different time horizons. A good place to start is McKinsey’s three horizons of growth methodology. Consider how you will collaborate with companies along these different time horizons. The most senior level in your organization should take this view as this conflicts with focusing on real use cases today. Make sure that your company is not just integrating incremental changes at all levels.

Build a better sandbox. Find ways to test new technologies with your own existing systems and data in a way that replicates scale without affecting your existing business. You don’t want to spend months creating a partnership only to find out the technology isn’t what you expected. The more this sandbox can mimic your true environment, the more likely you are to have success with the real integration.

We think a lot about corporate and startup collaboration and welcome any dialogue on the topic; contact us at platform@rre.com.

Amazon acquired social reading service Goodreads five years ago, squelching the life out of the competitive landscape, as minimal as it was. So it’s promising to see a new app appear with the goal of getting more people to move off of Goodreads for social book recommendations. That app is Inky, built by two bookworm friends who wanted a better way to track their reading and find recommendations of what to read next.

The app is very much an indie effort for the time being, and not as polished as a similar app, Reco. However, it works well for those who are looking for a simple way of tracking their “read” list along with their “to read” list, and who want a way to see what other good books people are into right now.

Explains co-founder Simon Bruno, “mobile apps for avid readers just suck. The market leader in social networks for avid readers, Goodreads, is practically synonymous with archaic,” he says.

After asking around about what people actually want in an app for readers, he recruited his friend Mike Salvador to help build it. Both just graduated from college, and have decided to work on Inky full-time.

“No one knows who we are,” Bruno says. “We’re definitely not funded.”

But, he adds, they’re updating the app every few days and getting “little sleep in the process.”

Currently, you can sign up for Inky using Facebook or email, and then you’re presented with some pre-selected users to follow. You can check or uncheck these suggestions as you choose. There aren’t many users on the app at present, beyond around 1,000 early adopters and some Instagram book nerds, the co-founder notes. So you may want to at least seed your network with a few of them.

You can then fill out your two bookshelves  -“read” and “to read” – with books, by searching for titles. Once added, these are presented in a visual format, similar to how Slice Bookshelf looked back in the day before its untimely demise. You can also tap on the books’ covers to read a description, giving you the feeling of picking up a book at the store and reading its jacket.

Unfortunately, the app only presents the new recommendations from those you follow and not their recommendation history in its home feed; but you can visit users’ profiles to check their lists until friends post something new.

The founders say their goal right now is to take in user feedback then build what they hear people want. They aren’t looking to make money off Inky just yet.

“The goal is to partner with publishing houses to help launch new titles, similar to Goodreads’ business model,” says Bruno. “Once we’re confident we have something people absolutely love, we’ll turn our heads towards monetization,” he says.

However, their vision is not to reproduce Goodreads in a more modern format. That is, Inky is not meant to be a catalog of all the books you’ve ever read, but rather a place to for you to show off the books you think should be read. For that reason, the team won’t offer a Goodreads import mechanism. Instead, its focus will be on recommendations.

That may make sense to a point, but there are times you want to read a book and then are unpleasantly disappointed by it. Your negative reaction is just as valuable to your network of book readers as are your recommendations.

As an occasional Goodreads user myself, I can’t see making a full switch to Inky. I miss the “Currently Reading” shelf, the book lists, the discovery features, and of course, the much larger community. But Inky is one to watch as it grows.

Inky is currently available on iOS, but the team says an Android version is the works.

Apple has placed a series order for Foundation, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic series of science fiction stories and novels.

Deadline reported earlier this year that the show was in development, but this was just the latest of several attempts to adapt Foundation, including a version developed by Westworld‘s Jonathan Nolan for HBO.

Now, however, it looks like Foundation really will happen at Apple, with David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman as showrunners. (Like Nolan, Goyer was one of the writers on The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, while Friedman created Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.) The series will be produced by Skydance Television, and Asimov’s daughter Robyn will be one of the executive producers.

The Foundation series (initially a set of stories published in the 1940s, then collected into book form in the ’50s and followed up by long novels that Asimov wrote in the ’80s) focuses on the fall of a long-lived Galactic Empire, with a small group of scientists at the edge of the galaxy working to preserve knowledge and minimize the period of chaos.

Elements of that plot description might make it sound like the ingredients for Apple’s version of Star Wars — and indeed, Asimov’s work is seen as a big influence on George Lucas’ films.

But in its print form, at least, Foundation is far from your typical space opera, focusing more on debate and political intrigue than action, and taking place over hundreds of years, with often interchangeable characters swapped out between stories. In other words, Goyer and Friedman will probably have to make some significant changes.

These are my favorite books by my favorite author, so I’m more excited about this than any of the other original shows that Apple’s planning (even the company’s other space opera, which is being developed by Battlestar Galactica‘s Ron Moore). I sure hope they don’t screw it up.

The largest trend in photography over the last five years or so, not counting smartphones, has been the emergence and maturity of mirrorless camera systems. These operate in a very different manner from traditional SLRs, and as such market leaders with decades embedded in the latter — namely Canon and Nikon — have resisted making the shift. That changes for Nikon today with its announcement of the Z6 and Z7, which show the company is making the change wholeheartedly.

The Z series comprises both these two cameras and a new lens mount, which in many ways is the more important news for photographers. The F mount has been around for decades and boasts some of the world’s best glass. But ultimately a more or less clean break was needed, and the Z mount manages to provide that, as well as solid back-compatibility for those who can’t bear to part with their old standby kit.

The cameras themselves, which have been rumored for ages and were known to be imminent, are both full-frame, meaning their sensor is as big as a 35mm still-film frame. Full-frame cameras are generally intended for professionals or deep-pocketed hobbyists: bodies generally cost well over $1,000 but offer improved image quality for a variety of reasons.

So it’s somewhat ambitious of Nikon to aim at this elevated market, where competition is tough, standards are high and prices are higher. Old favorites like the Canon 5D vie with new challengers like Sony’s a9, and it seems as if slowly but surely the latter are coming out on top, due in no small part to the advantages conferred on them by their mirrorless nature.

The Z7 starts at $3,400, which puts it squarely in professional territory. The Z6, at $2,000, sacrifices resolution but offers some other advantages — aside from holding onto that $1,400. If it were me I’d go for the latter, no question.

Big and small changes

The Z7 is the new flagship, and it closely replicates the ability of the popular Nikon D850, while adding a variety of improvements. Most obvious is body size; the camera is much, much smaller and lighter than its SLR predecessor, but is still far from petite. It also improves on a few stats like burst speed and autofocus in ways that will be appreciated by pros, and a new 10-bit N-LOG video output mode should provide more flexibility in post.

Its sibling, the Z6, has a lower megapixel count (24 versus 45) but further improves burst speed and may in fact prove superior in terms of video performance.

Both make the switch to an electronic viewfinder, or EVF, and apparently Nikon was very particular about this component. The resolution of the OLED eyepiece is 1280×960, which sounds low compared with phone and VR displays, but should be fine — and really, motion and color are more important. The rear LCD is also OLED, as is a little up-facing status display on the top plate.

Both also have in-body stabilization, which means lenses can be lighter and cheaper. The stabilization will work with older lenses too (more on this in a moment) and in cases where a long lens has its own stabilization system, the camera will defer to that at least on some axes.

I haven’t had a chance to play with these in person but I expect to soon; in the meantime, as always, DPReview has a solid set of first impressions.

Z-mount into the future

For many, the biggest change will be the switch to the new Z-mount system. There will be a series of Z lenses, and bonny lenses they will be, with the new dimensions allowing improved optics across the board. Everyone is hot about a F/0.95 Noct lens Nikon has been teasing for 2019. But with a hundred million F-mount lenses out there, backwards compatibility is a must.

For them there is the FTZ adapter, which fits between the Z and the old lens, bridging the old technology and the new. If the lens is relatively new and supports automatic aperture and focus, those will be available. And, in fact, these lenses will benefit from the new autofocus system and may perform better than they did originally, if not identically — slight changes will no doubt emerge from the addition of the new optics.

Older lenses, such as classics with manual focus and aperture, will still fit the adapter but can’t be magically endowed with automatic features.

The adapter is not inconsiderable in size — more like a pancake lens than a filter. So your favorite lightweight walk-around setup may be impacted negatively. But overall it seems like it should do nicely for most.

Nikon has made its play, and the Z series looks like a natural jump for thousands of photographers who have stuck with the brand for years out of loyalty and investment. It doesn’t take much away, it adds quite a bit and in a few years it will probably be a no-brainer rather than a “well, maybe.”

I wrote the law that allows sites to be unfettered free speech marketplaces. I wrote that same law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to provide vital protections to sites that didn’t want to host the most unsavory forms of expression. The goal was to protect the unique ability of the internet to be the proverbial marketplace of ideas while ensuring that mainstream sites could reflect the ethics of society as a whole.

In general, this has been a success — with one glaring exception. I never expected that internet CEOs would fail to understand one simple principle: that an individual endorsing (or denying) the extermination of millions of people, or attacking the victims of horrific crimes or the parents of murdered children, is far more indecent than an individual posting pornography.

If you want to be the CEO of an internet titan where schools communicate with students, artists with their fans or elected officials with their constituents, you need to limit content like pornography — and they all do. But for some reason, these CEOs think it’s entirely appropriate to allow these other forms of indecency to live on their platforms. Their ineptitude is threatening the very legal foundation of social media.

Social media cannot exist without the legal protections of Section 230. That protection is not constitutional, it’s statutory. Failure by the companies to properly understand the premise of the law is the beginning of the end of the protections it provides. I say this because their failures are making it increasingly difficult for me to protect Section 230 in Congress. Members across the spectrum, including far-right House and Senate leaders, are agitating for government regulation of internet platforms. Even if government doesn’t take the dangerous step of regulating speech, just eliminating the 230 protections is enough to have a dramatic, chilling effect on expression across the internet.

Were Twitter to lose the protections I wrote into law, within 24 hours its potential liabilities would be many multiples of its assets and its stock would be worthless. The same for Facebook and any other social media site. Boards of directors should have taken action long before now against CEOs who refuse to recognize this threat to their business.

It’s telling that Reddit, of all the social media sites, has been on the forefront of striking a balance — telling because they’re the only site owned by a traditional pre-internet corporation. This balance is not the one I would have chosen — and certainly there have been missteps and failures — but an average user of Reddit won’t encounter the extremes of obscenity and indecency that it allows in darker corners of the site. And even they have defined certain speech as too indecent to be permitted on their platform.

There are real consequences to social media hosting radically indecent speech, and those consequences are looming. They are threatening to undo more than 20 years of internet law and jurisprudence that has protected speech and expression as never before. The forces of government regulation and control never sleep. Unfortunately, the internet CEOs have been asleep at the wheel.

As fields of research, machine learning and artificial intelligence both date back to the 50s. More than half a century later, the disciplines have graduated from the theoretical to practical, real world applications. We’ll have some of the top minds in both categories to discuss the latest advances and future of AI and ML on stage and Disrupt San Francisco in early September.

For the first time, Disrupt SF will be held in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. It’s a huge space, which meant we could dramatically increase the amount of programming offered to attendees. And we did. Here’s the agenda. Tickets are still available even though the show is less than two weeks away. Grab one here.

The show features the themes currently facing the technology world including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Some of the top minds in AI and ML are speaking on several stages and some are taking audience questions. We’re thrilled to be joined by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China and current CEO of Sinovation Ventures, Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobots, Claire Delaunay, Nvidia VP of Engineering, and among others, Dario Gil, IBM VP of AI.

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the CEO and chairman of Sinovation, a venture firm based in the U.S. and China, and he has emerged as one of the world’s top prognosticators on artificial intelligence and how the technology will disrupt just about everything. Dr. Lee wrote in The New York Times last year that AI is “poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.” Dr. Lee will also be on our Q&A stage (after his interview on the Main Stage) to take questions from attendees.

Colin Angle co-founded iRobot with fellow MIT grads Rod Brooks and Helen Greiner in 1990. Early on, the company provided robots for military applications, and then in 2002, introduced the consumer-focused Roomba. Angle has plenty to talk about. As the CEO and Chairman of iRobot, he led the company through the sale of its military branch in 2016 so the company can focus on robots in homes. If there’s anyone that knows how to both work with the military and manage consumers’ expectations with household robots, it’s Colin Angle and we’re excited to have him speaking at the event where he will also take questions from the audience on the Q&A stage.

Claire Delaunay is vice president of engineering at Nvidia, where she is responsible for the Isaac robotics initiative and leads a team to bring Isaac to market for roboticists and developers around the world. Prior to joining Nvidia, Delaunay was the director of engineering at Uber, after it acquired Otto, the startup she co-founded. She was also the robotics program lead at Google and founded two companies, Botiful and Robotics Valley. Delaunay will also be on our Q&A stage (after his interview on the Main Stage) to take questions from attendees.

Dario Gil, the head of IBM’s AI research efforts and quantum computing program, is coming to Disrupt Sf to talk about the current state of quantum computing. We may even see a demo or two of what’s possible today and use that to separate hype from reality. Among the large tech firms, IBM — and specifically the IBM Q lab — has long been at the forefront of the quantum revolution. Last year, the company showed off its 50-qubit quantum computer and you can already start building software for it using the company’s developer kit.

Sam Liang is the CEO/Co-Founder of AISense Inc, based in Silicon Valley. Funded by Horizons Ventures (DeepMind, Waze, Zoom, Facebook), Tim Draper, David Cheriton of Stanford (first investor in Google), etc. AISense has created Ambient Voice Intelligence technologies with deep learning that understands human-to-human conversations. Its Otter.ai product digitizes all voice meetings and video conferences, makes every conversation searchable and also provides speech analytics and insights. Otter.ai is the exclusive provider of automatic meeting transcription for Zoom Video Communications.

Laura Major is the Vice President of Engineering at CyPhy Works, where she leads R&D, product design and development and manages the multi-disciplinary engineering team. Prior to joining CyPhy Works, she worked at Draper Laboratory as a division lead and developed the first human-centered engineering capability and expanded it to included machine intelligence and AI. Laura also grew multiple programs and engineering teams to contribute to the development and expansion of ATAK, which is now in wide use across the military.

Dr. Jason Mars founded and runs Clinc to try to close the gap in conversational AI by emulating human intelligence to interpret unstructured, unconstrained speech. AI has the potential to change everything, but there is a fundamental disconnect between what AI is capable of and how we interface with it. Clinc is currently targeting the financial market, letting users converse with their bank account using natural language without any pre-defined templates or hierarchical voice menus. At Disrupt SF, Mars is set to debut other ways that Clinc’s conversational AI can be applied. Without ruining the surprise, let me just say that this is going to be a demo you won’t want to miss. After the demo, he will take questions on the Q&A stage.

Chad Rigetti, the namesake founder of Rigetti Computing, will join us at Disrupt SF 2018 to explain Rigetti’s approach to quantum computing. It’s two-fold: on one front, the company is working on the design and fabrication of its own quantum chips; on the other, the company is opening up access to its early quantum computers for researchers and developers by way of its cloud computing platform, Forest. Rigetti Computing has raised nearly $70 million to date according to Crunchbase, with investment from some of the biggest names around. Meanwhile, labs around the country are already using Forest to explore the possibilities ahead.

Kyle Vogt co-founded and eventually sold Cruise Automation to General Motors in 2016. He stuck around after the sale and still leads the company today. Since selling the company to GM, Cruise has scaled rapidly and seemed to maintain a scrappy startup feel though now a division of a massive corporation. The company had 30 self-driving test cars on the road in 2016 and later rolled out a high-definition mapping system. In 2017 the company started running an autonomous ride-hailing service for its employees in San Francisco, later announcing its self-driving cars would hit New York City. Recently SoftBank’s Vision Fund invested $2.25 billion in GM Cruise Holdings LLC and when the deal closes, GM will invest an additional $1.1 billion. The investments are expected to inject enough capital into Cruise for the unit to reach commercialization at scale beginning in 2019.

Twitter says it’s ending support for all Twitter iOS users who are running older versions of the iOS operating system. According to a message in the app’s update text in its latest App Store release this week, only those users running iOS 10 or higher will continue to have a supported mobile client.

The company’s message notes this decision will allow it to streamline its app development for all clients.

Typically, moving off older platforms means a company can more quickly roll out new features and take advantage of the benefits provided by newer frameworks, without worrying how to support legacy users along the way.

It’s not unprecedented for social apps to make this choice, either – LinkedIn and Snapchat also only support iOS 10 or higher. Facebook, meanwhile, caters to anyone on iOS 9 or above.

iOS 10 was released nearly 2 years ago, and next month, Apple device owners will gain access to the public release of iOS 12.

Ditching older versions of iOS is not as risky for Twitter as ditching users on older versions of Android, because a majority of iOS users upgrade when Apple rolls out a new mobile operating system. In fact, Apple’s data indicates only 5% percent of users are still on iOS 9 or below. At Apple’s scale, that’s still millions, but translated to Twitter’s install base it’s a much lower number.

During its Q2 2018 earnings, Twitter said it had 335 million monthly active users. And of course, many of those are running Twitter on Android. Presumably a very, very small percentage of users are on iOS 9 or below. Twitter must believe it’s small enough to be an acceptance loss, if it comes to that.

This would hardly be news except for the fact that the decision comes at a time when Twitter is losing users – it lost 1 million users in Q2 – and when Twitter has been killing off a number of other client applications, as well. The company had already shut down many versions of the TweetDeck client app it acquired, and this year it shuttered Twitter for Mac along with most of its TV apps. It also ended support for legacy APIs, knowing that doing so would impact third-party clients’ ability to operate. And now it’s shedding a small number of iOS users, too.

Twitter says that anyone still running iOS 9 or older will no longer receive updates, so those who want to receive performance improvements, bug fixes and new features will need to upgrade.

With all these changes, it’s clear that Twitter is focused on limiting the number of platforms it has to support, so it can better address the needs of its users. Time will tell if it’s successful with that, however.

Moving to a new city can be tough for a number of reasons, but what’s arguably hardest about moving is a competitive and expensive housing market, and lack of a pre-existing social support network. That’s the problem startup Bungalow is trying to solve.

Bungalow, which just raised a $14 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Founders Fund, Atomic VC, Cherubic Ventures and Wing Ventures, offers people relatively affordable places to live with others who have been vetted by Bungalow’s platform. As part of the round, Keith Rabois of Khosla will join Bungalow’s board of directors. Bungalow also raised a $50 million debt facility to fuel its home growth costs. Bungalow had previously raised a $7 million seed round.

Bungalow, which joins the likes of WeLive, OpenDoor, Common, Roam and so many others, aims to be cheaper than getting your own studio or one-bedroom apartment, and offer a better experience than finding a roommate via Craigslist. Bungalow works with homeowners to lease their homes as the master tenant for three years at time. From there, Bungalow rents out the property on a room-by-room basis while guaranteeing occupancy to the homeowners.

“There aren’t as many families that are looking for these four, five, six-bedroom homes and so the incremental additional cost for those additional bedrooms is not commensurate with the individual rate at which we can lease out those individual bedrooms,” Bungalow co-founder and CEO Andrew Collins told me. “And so we were able to therefore basically create value out of that and then with scale that margin that we’re able to create within those given homes in an incredibly profitable and exciting coupling.”

For the renter, Bungalow says it’s about 30-40 percent cheaper than a studio. Depending on the market, of course, the prices can vary. Bungalow also furnishes shared common spaces, provides utilities, Wi-Fi and housekeeping in the monthly rental cost. In addition to what’s provided inside the space, Bungalow hosts monthly events for members in its properties to meet each other within a given market.

Bungalow currently operates 200 properties across seven markets, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, D.C. In total, there are 750 people residing in a Bungalow-leased property. All residents first must go through credit and background checks, as well as interviews with any existing residents before moving in. But that process can happen very fast, the company said. Some people have moved in same-day, but on average people look about 10 to 20 days ahead of when they’re trying to move.

While Bungalow’s current model is leasing assets from homeowners, it’s set up to operate any type of asset, Collins said, whether that’s a joint-venture or independently owned by Bungalow. Within the next six to 12 months, Bungalow is looking to launch in up to 12 new markets in the U.S. Next year, Bungalow hopes to expand its offering outside of the U.S.