Month: August 2018

[Heavy sigh]

Twitter is doing that thing again. That thing where it stands by an incoherent policy choice that is only consistent with its long historical record of inconsistency.

Late Tuesday, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey took to the platform to defend his company’s choice to keep manic conspiracy theorist and hatemonger Alex Jones and his Infowars empire alive and tweeting.

Last week, that choice wouldn’t have turned heads, but after a kind of sudden and inexplicable sea change from all of the other major social platforms over the weekend, Twitter stands alone. To be fair, those social platforms didn’t really assert their own decisions to oust Jones — Apple led the pack, kicking him out of its Podcasts app, and the rest — Facebook, Spotify and YouTube, most notably — meekly followed suit.

Prior to its new statements, Twitter justified its decision to not ban Jones first by telling journalists like us that Jones didn’t actually violate Twitter’s terms of service because most of his abuse and hateful conduct, two violations that might get him banished, live one click away, outside the platform.

The same could be said for most of the hateful drivel that came from the infamous account of the now-banned Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos was eventually booted from Twitter for violating the platform’s periodically enforced prohibition against “the targeted abuse or harassment of others.” Jones is known for commanding a similarly hateful online loser army, though in his case they mostly spend their time harassing the parents of Sandy Hook victims rather than black actresses. Twitter’s point is that this kind of harassment needs to actually take place on its platform to get a user kicked off, which in a world in which Twitter policy was uniformly enforced (i.e. a world in which Twitter dedicated sufficient resources to the problem) that would at least be a consistent policy.

Instead of articulating that policy in a clear, decisive way, Twitter said some unnecessarily defensive things that kind of miss the point via an @jack tweetstorm and a tepid blog post touting the company’s vague new commitment to “healthy public conversation.”

If you didn’t read either, you’re not missing anything. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post:

“Our policies and enforcement options evolve continuously to address emerging behaviors online and we sometimes come across instances where someone is reported for an incident that took place prior to that behavior being prohibited. In those instances, we will generally require the individual to delete the Tweet that violates the new rules but we won’t generally take other enforcement action against them (e.g. suspension). This is reflective of the fact that the Twitter Rules are a living document. We continue to expand and update both them and our enforcement options to respond to the changing contours of online conversation. This is how we make Twitter better for everyone.”

Great, crystal clear. Right? If it isn’t here’s a taste of Dorsey’s new tweetstorm:

Here’s the gist:

Alex Jones and Infowars didn’t break any of Twitter’s rules. Twitter is very bad at explaining its choices and trying to get better, maybe. Twitter won’t follow other platforms for policy enforcement decisions like this because it thinks that sets a bad precedent. Twitter doesn’t want to become a platform “constructed by [its creators’] personal views” (this delusion of neutrality bit is where he really started losing us).

Dorsey finishes with a fairly infuriating assertion that journalists should shoulder all of the work of addressing hatespeech and generally horrific content that leads to real-life harassment, it’s not really Twitter’s problem. Believe us, we’re working on it!!

“Accounts like Jones’ can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it’s critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. This is what serves the public conversation best.”

To the bit about journalists, all we can say is: Twitter, just own your shit.

Even for those of us concerned about the precedents set by some of tech’s occasional lopsided gestures toward limiting the myriad horrors on the extremely totally neutral platforms that definitely in no way make tech companies publishers, Dorsey’s comments suck. Sure, the whole thing about staying consistent sounds okay at first, but Twitter is the platform most infamous for its totally uneven enforcement around harassment and hatespeech and the one that leaves its users most vulnerable. If the company is truly making an effort to be less terrible at explaining its decisions — and we’re skeptical about that too — this is pretty inauspicious start.

Added to this, former Twitter comms Emily Horne responses to Dorsey with some notable points, including a claim that Twitter has begun taking into account user behaviour offline. That makes the lack of action against Jones all the more baffling.

https://twitter.com/emilyjhorne/status/1027005719307010050

Salesforce is moving to a two CEO model after it promoted executive Keith Block, who was most recently COO, to the position of co-CEO. Block will work alongside Salesforce’s flamboyant founder, chairman and CEO (now co-CEO) Marc Benioff, with both reporting directly to the company’s board.

Block joined Salesforce five years ago after spending 25 years at Oracle, which is where he first met Benioff, who has called him “the best sales executive the enterprise software industry has ever seen.”

News of the promotion was not expected, but in many ways it is just a more formalized continuation of the working relationship that the two executives have developed.

Block’s focus is on leading global sales, alliances and channels, industry strategy, customer success and consulting services, while he also oversees the company’s day-to-day operations. Benioff, meanwhile, heads of product, technology and culture. The latter is a major piece for Salesforce — for example, it has spent Salesforce has spent over $8 million since 2015 to address the wage gaps pertaining to race and gender, while the company has led the tech industry in pushing LGBT rights and more.

“Keith has been my trusted partner in running Salesforce for the past five years, and I’m thrilled to welcome him as co-CEO,” said Benioff in a statement. “Keith has outstanding operational expertise and corporate leadership experience, and I could not be happier for his promotion and this next level of our partnership.”

This clear division of responsibility from the start may enable Salesforce to smoothly transition to this new management structure, whilst helping it continue its incredible business growth. Revenue for the most recent quarter surpassed $3 billion for the first time, jumping 25 percent year-on-year while its share price is up 60 percent over the last twelve months.

When Block became COO in 2016, Benioff backed him to take the company past $10 billion in revenue and that feat was accomplished last November. Benioff enjoys setting targets and he’s been vocal about reaching $60 billion revenue by 2034, but in the medium term he is looking at reaching $23 billion by 2020 and the co-CEO strategy is very much a part of that growth target.

“We’ve said we’ll do $23 billion in fiscal year 2022 and we can now just see tremendous trajectory beyond that. Cementing Keith and I together as the leadership is really the key to accelerating future growth,” he told Fortune in an interview.

It’s not infrequent these days if you’re a big tech company to receive a brusquely worded letter from a group of Senators or Representatives asking you to explain yourself on some topic or another. One recent such letter sent to Apple and Alphabet asks specifically about practices meant to track users or their interactions with the phone without their knowledge or consent. Luckily Apple has much to be proud of on that front.

“Apple’s philosophy and approach to customer data differs from many other companies on these important issue,” preened Timothy Powderly, Apple’s director of federal government affairs, in the company’s response to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s question.

“We believe privacy is a fundamental human right and purposely design our products and services to minimize our collection of customer data,” he goes on. “The customer is not our product, and our business model does not depend on collecting vast amounts of personally identifiable information to enrich targeted profiles marketed to advertisers.”

To whom could Powderly be referring?

The Committee’s questions were perhaps spurred by reports of unwanted collection of audio data from the likes of Amazon Echos and other devices that listen eagerly for the magic words that set them to work. So the actual queries were along the lines of: when a phone has no SIM card, what kind of location data is collected; whom does that data go to and for what purpose; does the device listen when it has not been “invoked”; and so on.

Apple’s responses, which you can read here, are blessedly free of the kind of half-answers that usually indicate some kind of shenanigans.

The answers to most questions are that users who have Location Services enabled on the phone will collect data depending on what wireless options are selected, and that data is sent to Apple in anonymous and encrypted form… and “this anonymous data is not used to target advertising to the user.”

iPhones only listen in with a short buffer for the “Hey Siri” wake-up call, and queries to the virtual assistant are not shared with third parties.

“Unlike other similar services, which associate and store historical voice utterances in identifiable form,” the answer goes on, throwing shade all the while, “Siri utterances, which include the audio trigger and the remainder of the Siri command, are tied to a random device identifier, not a user’s Apple ID.” This identifier can be reset at any time (turn Siri and Dictation off and on again) and any data associated with it will disappear as well.

Apple has its flaws, but its privacy settings are thankfully not among them. It’s true what it says: it’s not a data-monger like Google or Facebook, and has no need to personally profile its users the way Amazon does. It may sell increasingly iffy hardware at truly eye-popping prices, and it may have lost its design edge (been a while now), but at least it isn’t, in this sense at least, evil by nature.

Otter Media is no longer a joint venture between AT&T and The Chernin Group — AT&T announced today that it has acquired The Chernin Group’s controlling interest in the digital media company.

Otter Media was founded in 2014 and owns Ellation (which in turn owns anime streamer Crunchyroll and subscription video service Vrv) and Fullscreen (which owns Rooster Teeth).

It will now become a part of AT&T’s WarnerMedia unit, which was created with the acquisition of Time Warner. Tony Goncalves, the AT&T executive who became Otter Media’s CEO earlier this year, will continue to run the company.

The New York Times reports that analysts valued the deal at more than $1 billion.

“We are thrilled to incorporate the Otter Media brands and talent into WarnerMedia,” said WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey in the announcement. “Working with Tony, we look to harness Otter’s expertise in feeding the passion of on-line audiences to augment our portfolio of digital assets and help us further engage, connect and entertain consumers around the globe.”

AT&T says Otter Media has built up an audience of 93 million unique viewers each month and has 2 million paying subscribers.

Lior Ron, the co-founder of the controversial self-driving technology company Otto, is returning to Uber to head up its trucking logistics company, Uber Freight, TechCrunch has confirmed.

Both Ron and his co-founder and ex-Googler Anthony Levandowski went to Uber after it acquired Otto in August of 2016. However, Levandowski was fired from Uber after pleading the Fifth Amendment to his accused involvement in stealing Google’s self-driving car trade secrets for use in Otto’s technology. Ron exited Uber a month after the company settled with Google parent company Alphabet for $245 million over the dispute.

Now, after some reportedly intense, month-long negotiations, Lior plans to return to Uber pending acquisition of Otto Trucking. The self-driving trucking company is a separate entity from Otto, and the deal to purchase Otto’s other units never fully closed, leading to continued negotiations.

Ron is an obvious pick to run Uber Freight as he helped “lay the groundwork” for the momentum the company has seen since its founding, according to Uber. He’s also managed to negotiate a deal with his employees in mind. The new deal would allow Uber Freight to be a standalone business within Uber and give Otto Trucking shareholders an equity stake in Uber Freight.

However, Levandowski will sell his shares in the freight company to an undisclosed VC firm, according to Bloomberg. Uber did not comment on which firm that might be. Meanwhile, Uber, which owns a majority stake in Freight, plans to double its investment in the company over the next year.

The world of VR may have already sort of figured out the basics of how VR gaming will work, but when it comes to studios building the next generation of narrative “movie” content, there are plenty of questions up in the air.

Baobab Studios CEO and co-founder Maureen Fan has more answers than most. Fan’s studio has raised $31 million dollars from investors betting on their model for bringing narrative content in VR to the masses. The Emmy award-winning studio has dedicated itself to building out virtual reality content that has something to offer everyone. 

We’ll chat with Fan about the economics of VR content, the difficulties of staying lean in the VR industry and the evolving relationship between Hollywood and virtual reality tech at TechCrunch Sessions: AR/VR in Los Angeles on October 18.

The company’s latest animated VR project, Rainbow Crow, stars John Legend and Oprah Winfrey. Fan has led the studio’s efforts to focus on storytelling and character development rather than just promoting VR tech’s bells and whistles. It seems to be working, the startup’s film Invasion! has gained substantial downloads and earned the studio an Emmy.

Fan has experienced the intricacies of the gaming world and where there is room for crossover with film content. She was previously VP of Games at Zynga. Now at Baobab, she’s looking at how the interactivity enabled by VR can help viewers get closer with the characters they see on screen.

While Baobab is firmly focused on immersive video, the characters they’ve created are set to make their way to the silver screen thanks to an adaptation deal with Roth Kirschenbaum Films.

TC Sessions: AR/VR on October 18 at UCLA is a single-day event designed to facilitate in-depth conversations, hands-on demos and networking opportunities with the industry leaders, content creators and game changers bringing innovation to the masses.

Purchase your Early Bird tickets here for just $99. Student get a special rate of just $45 when you book here.

Bird strikes on aircraft may be rare, but not so rare that airports shouldn’t take precautions against them. But keeping birds away is a difficult proposition: how do you control the behavior of flocks of dozens or hundreds of birds? Perhaps with a drone that autonomously picks the best path to do so, like this one developed by CalTech researchers.

Right now airports may use manually piloted drones, which are expensive and of course limited by the number of qualified pilots, or trained falcons — which as you might guess is a similarly difficult method to scale.

Soon-Jo Chung at CalTech became interested in the field after seeing the near-disaster in 2009 when US Airways 1549 nearly crashed due to a bird strike but was guided to a comparatively safe landing in the Hudson.

“It made me think that next time might not have such a happy ending,” he said in a CalTech news release. “So I started looking into ways to protect airspace from birds by leveraging my research areas in autonomy and robotics.”

A drone seems like an obvious solution — put it in the air and send those geese packing. But predicting and reliably influencing the behavior of a flock is no simple matter.

“You have to be very careful in how you position your drone. If it’s too far away, it won’t move the flock. And if it gets too close, you risk scattering the flock and making it completely uncontrollable,” Chung said.

The team studied models of how groups of animals move and affect one another, and arrived at their own that described how birds move in response to threats. From this can be derived the flight path a drone should follow that will cause the birds to swing aside in the desired direction but not panic and scatter.

Armed with this new software, drones were deployed in several spaces with instructions to deter birds from entering a given protected area. As you can see below (an excerpt from this video), it seems to have worked:

More experimentation is necessary, of course, to tune the model and get the system to a state that is reliable and works with various sizes of flocks, bird airspeeds, and so on. But it’s not hard to imagine this as a standard system for locking down airspace: a dozen or so drones informed by precision radar could protect quite a large area.

The team’s results are published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Do you worry about the so-called “kill zones” of big tech companies? The Economist thinks you should. The theory basically suggests that if your product or service is anyway threatening or accretive to one of these incumbents,  they will either force-buy your company or clone it and destroy your market.

Any entrepreneur that believes this should probably pack up now before it’s too late —  if it’s not a “kill-shot,” it will be some other perceived death-knell that ruins your company.

Starting a company has never been easier. But growing a sustainable business is still difficult  —  as it should be. If you build something customers will pay for ,  you’re going to attract competition from copycats and incumbents. Consider it another type of validation, like product-market fit: competitors think we’re right.

Welcome to being an entrepreneur  —  you are going to be constantly battling  –  lack of cash, lack of customers, aggressive competition, better-funded competitors, underperforming staff, slow-moving sales cycle, or some other as-yet-unknown. The list of pitfalls is long. But enough willpower and perseverance — “blood, sweat and tears” —  will get you to the other side. Eventually. Remember  –  the product of an overnight success is years of hard work.

If this is sounds too daunting  –  don’t do it!

If you enter a market large enough, with deep pocketed and dominant incumbents, you have your work cut out for you. Maybe a nice UI and faster workflow attracted customers and some early adopters  – but guess what  – they are copyable features. Features alone are rarely enough to win a defensible market position.

Try to ignore advice that says you should focus on building the best product as your differentiator — this does not set you up with the highest chance of success. Instead, focus on finding and serving a targeted segment of customers, with a unique set of needs, and tailor your product and service experience specifically for them.

It’s easy for features to be copied  –  but you can’t be both custom and generic at the same time. Custom is a great approach that new entrants can take to get a toehold in a larger market with larger players that must be generic (i.e. Salesforce is a generic CRM, but there are lots of vertical CRMs that successfully compete  — Wise Agent for realtors, Lead Heroes for health insurance).

Presenting a Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the bane of potentially good startups that have been schooled in “anything less than a billion-dollar opportunity isn’t interesting.” Maybe we should reframe it as Potentially Ownable Market (POM). What are the details you can build in the beginning — where your tailored approach gives you instant leadership?

Project management for chefs

Let’s use project management as an example. Maybe a new entrant starts as an app for restaurants, which helps chefs build new menus. Each task list is a “recipe,” each recipe has “ingredients,” with amounts and timing, kitchen location, suppliers, alternatives and “garnishes and sauces.” The app integrates with the stock system and POS, and helps chefs predict inventory needs and staffing based on recipe times/complexity.

The founder has looked around and this is the only project management app that focuses on chefs, giving him an instant potentially ownable market. The business might be able to thrive in this segment alone and become the dominant player with its own kill zone.

Maybe this is the first step; the company gets profitable early growth and becomes sustainable, which funds development to grow the business into other vertical and complementary areas. Over time the business will grow into a large TAM  —  a far better approach than starting off in a large market with clear winners already.

Avoid the battle entirely by creating your own category.

Snap Inc got a fresh infusion of cash from the Saudi royal family to help it survive despite losing $353 million this quarter. Prince Al-Waleed Talal tweeted a video of him and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, noting that he’s invested $250 million in exchange for a 2.3 percent stake in Snap Inc. The investment raises questions about what say the Saudis will have in Snapchat’s direction.

Snap declined to comment on the news. But after an initial 11 percent pop after earnings was announced, Snap shares sank to just above the closing price as the user shrinkage and Saudi investment sank in.

Al-Waleed Talal has previously buddied up to the U.S. tech sector, investing in Lyft and Twitter. Elsewhere, he’s recently made investments in European streaming music service Deezer, as well as Chinese ecommerce giant JD.com. He previously owned shared of Newscorp and Citigroup.

The prince had sat down with Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and COO Imran Khan back in 2015 to discuss a possible investment, but nothing came of it until now. The Arabic press release explains that the deal was done on May 25th. “Our investment in Snapchat is an extension of our strategy for personal investment in new technology through leading companies such as Lyft, JD.com, and social networking sites, Twitter” the release explains. “Snapchat is one of the most innovative social networking platforms in the world and we believe it is just beginning to surpass its true potential.”

The extra cash will extend Snapchat’s runway and give it more time to stabilize its business. With its daily user count now shrinking, it will have to find creative ways to squeeze more cash out of those that remain to keep revenue growing. That may take time, and Saudi Arabia just gave it more.

Coinbase just announced two new perks that should please regular cryptocurrency traders. Starting on Tuesday, new Coinbase users will no longer have to wait out for five days to trade after signing up for the exchange.

As the company explained in a blog post:

… When someone makes the decision to sign up, they don’t want to wait days before they can start buying cryptocurrency. While we do support instant transfers via wire transfer and debit cards, purchases via direct debits from your bank account can take days to appear.

With this update, customers will receive an immediate credit for the funds being sent from their bank account. They can then buy and sell crypto to and from their USD wallet right away, but cannot send their funds off the Coinbase platform until the funds coming from their bank have settled.

With the new trading restriction lifted, Coinbase is also raising the daily purchase limit for its tier of verified users to $25,000, up from the previous $25,000 weekly limit.

New users chomping at the bit to start swapping for digital currencies or current high-rollers looking to push the daily limits should note that completing Coinbase’s identity verification, which requires uploading a driver’s license for U.S. users, is a pre-requisite for either new perk.

“Customers who have not yet completed this process will be required to do so before having access to instant purchases, new trading limits and the ability to withdraw or send coins off-platform,” Coinbase explains in the blog post.

Both changes will be available first for U.S. customers who have completed Coinbase’s ID verification requirements. Coinbase users around the globe should expect to wait a little longer for the features to become available.