Year: 2018

Seemingly out of the blue, Apple has just announced that its iTunes Affiliate Program will no longer include apps for iOS or macOS. These changes will go live on October 1st, 2018.

The program previously allowed individuals, blogs, YouTubers, etc to link to an app and earn a small cut of the sale if a purchase was made. When the program first launched, affiliates would make 7% of any app purchase (or a little less than 7 cents on a 99 cent app.) In April of last year, they dropped that down to 2.5%. With this news, the commission is gone completely.

The broader iTunes Affiliate Program itself will live on, but only for music, movies, books, and TV purchases.

Here’s the full text from Apple’s own newsletter

Thank you for participating in the affiliate program for apps. With the launch of the new App Store on both iOS and macOS and their increased methods of app discovery, we will be removing apps from the affiliate program. Starting on October 1st, 2018, commissions for iOS and Mac apps and in-app content will be removed from the program. All other content types (music, movies, books, and TV) remain in the affiliate program.

For more information on commission rates, please see our Commissions and Payments page on the Affiliate Resources site.

If you have questions, please visit our Helpdesk.

This news hits particularly hard for indie review sites like TouchArcade, who rely on affiliate links in their reviews for a substantial chunk of their revenue. In a post on the announcement, TouchArcade editor-in-chief Eli Hodapp writes “I really didn’t think it would be Apple that eventually kills TouchArcade.”

We’ve reached out to Apple for further insight on the change, and will update if we hear back.

Got some spare time this weekend? Why not build yourself a working rover from plans provided by NASA? The spaceniks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have all the plans, code, and materials for you to peruse and use — just make sure you’ve got $2,500 and a bit of engineering know-how. This thing isn’t made out of Lincoln Logs.

The story is this: after Curiosity landed on Mars, JPL wanted to create something a little smaller and less complex that it could use for educational purposes. ROV-E, as they called this new rover, traveled with JPL staff throughout the country.

Unsurprisingly, among the many questions asked was often whether a class or group could build one of their own. The answer, unfortunately, was no: though far less expensive and complex than a real Mars rover, ROV-E was still too expensive and complex to be a class project. So JPL engineers decided to build one that wasn’t.

The result is the JPL Open Source Rover, a set of plans that mimic the key components of Curiosity but are simpler and use off the shelf components.

“I would love to have had the opportunity to build this rover in high school, and I hope that through this project we provide that opportunity to others,” said JPL’s Tom Soderstrom in a post announcing the OSR. “We wanted to give back to the community and lower the barrier of entry by giving hands on experience to the next generation of scientists, engineers, and programmers.”

The OSR uses Curiosity-like “Rocker-Bogie” suspension, corner steering and pivoting differential, allowing movement over rough terrain, and the brain is a Raspberry Pi. You can find all the parts in the usual supply catalogs and hardware stores, but you’ll also need a set of basic tools: a bandsaw to cut metal, a drill press is probably a good idea, a soldering iron, snips and wrenches, and so on.

“In our experience, this project takes no less than 200 person-hours to build, and depending on the familiarity and skill level of those involved could be significantly more,” the project’s creators write on the GitHub page.

So basically unless you’re literally rocket scientists, expect double that. Although JPL notes that they did work with schools to adjust the building process and instructions.

There’s flexibility built into the plans, too. So you can load custom apps, connect payloads and sensors to the brain, and modify the mechanics however you’d like. It’s open source, after all. Make it your own.

“We released this rover as a base model. We hope to see the community contribute improvements and additions, and we’re really excited to see what the community will add to it,” said project manager Mik Cox. “I would love to have had the opportunity to build this rover in high school, and I hope that through this project we provide that opportunity to others.”

In the increasingly crowded world of venture capital, a growing number of firms is producing research as a way to differentiate themselves from the pack. Earlier this year, for example, Wing, a venture firm that focuses primarily on enterprise startups, published a state of the industrial IoT market. The consumer-tech investment firm Goodwater Capital is becoming known for its occasional equity research report on a still-private company.

Now Illuminate Ventures, a nine-year-old, woman-led, early-stage venture firm that’s focused on enterprise cloud and mobile computing startups, has produced some thought-provoking research of its own around how women and male founders view entrepreneurship, from why they do it to how much support they receive from family members.

First, a little about Illuminate’s methodologies. According to firm founder Cindy Padnos, the firm initially reached out to 1,200 tech founders and venture capitalists who Illuminate presented with a litany of questions about entrepreneurship and motivations and challenges that people face in starting companies. In the end, says Padnos, Illuminate had a response rate of just more than 30 . percent, or slightly over 400 completed responses, which it used SurveyMonkey tools to collect. Roughly half the responses came from partner-level VCs at 150 different venture firms; the other half came from U.S.-based founders who raised venture funding in 2017.

So what did they have to say? A lot. If we’re being honest, the survey so wide-ranging as to be a bit overwhelming, You can check out the full paper here. In the meantime, some of the most interesting takeaways can be grouped into several different categories. One of these seems to disprove old myths. Among them:

1.) The belief that entrepreneurs launch companies chiefly for financial gain is seemingly a myth. Only 15 percent of male founders and 2 percent of the female founders who responded to the survey said that money is their primary motivation.

2l) Respondents – – both founders and VCs — also dismissed the idea that a founder needs to have a STEM degree to be a successful tech founder.

3.) Traditional thinking that women founders are more risk-averse than men or are unable to balance the needs of work and family are also incorrect or, at least, outdated, based on feedback from survey respondents. More than twice the percentage of male founders indicated that “balancing family and work” was a strong barrier to their starting a company (31 percent versus 17 percent of women founders). They also rated the “need for financial security” as a strong barrier in slightly higher numbers (49 percent versus 42 percent of women respondents).

4.) It’s widely believed that both women and men, especially in today’s go-go markets, start companies largely for the potential financial gain, but money actually has little  to do with why both women and men start companies. In fact, women say the top three reasons they start companies, in descending order of importance, is to bring their ideas to market, create a long-lasting business, and prove to themselves that they can do it. Men similarly said that bringing their ideas to market is their top motivator, following by creating a long-lasting business. Men did rate the “significant financial gain” that can come with entrepreneurship third on their list, so it’s not entirely a “myth” even if it’s greatly exaggerated.

Interestingly, the survey also showed a real disconnect between how VCs view founders, and how founders view themselves. For example:

1.) Male VCs ranked male founders as likely to be stronger than women in 4 of  10 “success attributes” that were measured. Similarly (and somewhat depressingly), women VCs found only one attribute where they saw women founders as strong than men, being “smart risk-takers.”

2.) In large percentages, both male and female VCs saw 15 of 16 potential barriers to entrepreneurial success as more likely to impact women founders than men.

3.) More than half of VCs said they believe that men are more likely to have attributes like “prior start-up experience” and the “desire to scale a business massively.”  But founder responses refuted the notion that they share VCs’ thinking on this front.

4.) Another way that VCs and founders appear to think differently: None of the VCs who participated in the survey selected “gaining the support of family” among the top five barriers to entrepreneurial success, while nearly a quarter of both male and female founders said it was.

5.) A stat we found to be particularly surprising was the disconnect between how male and female VCs view founders who “think big” and have “strategic vision” and how their impacts their odds of achieving their goals. While 40 percent of women VCs said this was a bigger barrier to success when it comes to female founders, just 12 percent of male VCs said the same of female founders. Could it be that women investors think they are more attuned to how women founders are perceived, or are they themselves harder on women founders? It’s impossible to know from this survey, but it definitely gave us pause.

Again, you can check out the full study here. It has all kinds of interesting nuggets that, at a minimum, may start entirely fresh conversations about what’s happening in the startup industry right now.

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer since 2015, announced that he is leaving the company to take a position at Stanford University. The company has been shedding leadership over the last half a year largely owing to fallout from its response, or lack thereof, to the ongoing troubles relating to user data security and election interference on the social network.

“While I have greatly enjoyed this work, the time has come for me to move on from my position as Chief Security Officer at Facebook,” he wrote in a public Facebook post. “Starting in September, I will join Stanford University full-time as a teacher and researcher.”

Rumors that Stamos was not long for the company spread in March; he was said to have disagreed considerably with the tack Facebook had taken in disclosure and investigation of its role in hosting state-sponsored disinformation seeded by Russian intelligence. To be specific, he is said to have preferred more and better disclosures rather than the slow drip-feed of half-apologies, walkbacks and admissions we’ve gotten from the company over the last year or so.

He said at in March that “despite the rumors, I’m still fully engaged with my work at Facebook,” though he acknowledged that his role now focused on “emerging security risks and working on election security.”

Funnily enough, that is exactly the topic he will be looking into at Stanford as a new adjunct professor, where he will be joining a new group called Information Warfare, The New York Times reported.

“This fall, I am very excited to launch a course teaching hands-on offensive and defensive techniques and to contribute to the new cybersecurity master’s specialty at [the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies],” Stamos wrote.

Leaving because of a major policy disagreement with his employer would not be out of character for Stamos. He reportedly left Yahoo (which of course was absorbed into Aol to form TechCrunch’s parent company, Oath) because of the company’s choice to allow U.S. intelligence access to certain user data. One may imagine a similar gulf in understanding between him and others at Facebook, especially on something as powerfully divisive as this election interference story or the Cambridge Analytica troubles.

“My last day at Facebook will be August 17th,” he wrote, “and while I will no longer have the pleasure of working side by side with my friends there, I am encouraged that there are so many dedicated, thoughtful and skilled people continuing to tackle these challenges. It is critical that we as an industry live up to our collective responsibility to consider the impact of what we build, and I look forward to continued collaboration and partnership with the security and safety teams at Facebook.”

Stamos is far from the only Facebook official to leave recently; Colin Stretch, chief legal officer, announced his departure last month after more than eight years at the company; its similarly long-serving head of policy and comms, Elliot Schrage, left the month before; WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum left that company in April.

Facebook directed me to Stamos’s post when asked for comment; we have asked Stamos for more information directly and will update if we hear back.

Hulu’s taking an interesting approach to adaptation with Castle Rock — instead of basing the series on a specific book by Stephen King, it’s telling a new story about (you guessed it) Castle Rock, the fictional town in Maine where many of King’s stories are set.

The series stars André Holland as Henry Deaver, a lawyer with a mysterious disappearance in his past, and Melanie Lynskey as Molly Strand, a real estate agent with psychic powers and a similarly mysterious connection to Henry. The cast also includes veterans of previous King adaptations, including Sissy Spacek (Carrie) and Bill Skarsgård (It).

On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by Sarah Perez to discuss our reaction to the first few episodes. It’s a show that feels more creepy and mysterious than outright terrifying, but there was at least one jump-scare that got us pretty good. It’s also a show full of Easter eggs that may delight hardcore King fans — but that didn’t do much for us, since we’re casual fans at best.

We also covered the controversy around Disney’s firing of Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn and Discovery’s plans to launch a streaming service of its own.

You may notice that this is a shorter episode than usual, with a distinct lack of co-host Jordan Crook (until the end). That’s not intentional. We had to edit around some technical issues, so what we ended up with was more of a highlight reel from a much longer discussion.

Anyway, you can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

You can no longer automatically cross-post your tweets to Facebook . Twitter announced today that functionality is now coming to an end, and users will instead have to copy a tweet’s URL if they want to share a tweet to Facebook going forward. In a statement, the company attributed the change to a recent Facebook update.

Specifically, the issue has to do with Facebook’s lockdown of its API platform — an overhaul that’s been underway following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where as many as 87 million Facebook users had their data improperly harvested and shared.

Since then, Facebook has been plugging holes in its API platform to prevent future data misuse. One of those changes involves Facebook Login, announced back in April. The company said that apps that had been granted permission to publish posts to Facebook as the logged-in user would no longer have that permission. New apps wouldn’t be able use this feature the day the change was announced. And in the case of older apps, the permission would be revoked on August 1, 2018 — that’s today.

Facebook also said developers who were previously using the API could instead turn to Facebook’s Share dialogs for web, iOS and Android. But Twitter’s statement didn’t mention there would be an alternative means of sharing built back into Twitter, beyond using its existing “Copy link to Tweet” feature. This is a manual way of sharing tweets, of course, and not a replacement for what is being lost.

The option to set up Facebook sharing hasn’t completely disappeared from Twitter’s app as of yet.

Facebook still appears within the “Apps” section via the web, with the button “Login to Facebook” seemingly waiting to be clicked. However, this option will no longer work as of today. Instead, it returns the error: “Facebook reported an error. The error has been reported to our engineering team. Please try again as it might be a temporary problem.”

It doesn’t seem like Twitter users looking for other workarounds will have much success either, given this situation. Other apps, like IFTTT, for example, are throwing errors as of today, too.

 

Marketers are increasingly looking for social media celebrities and influencers who can promote their products with more authenticity (or at least, the appearance of authenticity) than a traditional ad.

So Altru CEO Alykhan Rehmatullah wondered: Why can’t businesses do something similar with recruiting?

And that’s what Altru is trying to accomplish, powering a page on a company’s website that highlights videos from real employees answering questions that potential hires might be asking. The videos are searchable (thanks to Altru’s transcriptions), and they can also be shared on social media.

The startup was part of the recent winter batch at Techstars NYC, and it’s already working with companies like L’Oreal, Dell and Unilever. Today, Altru is announcing that it’s raised $1.3 million in new funding led by Birchmere Ventures.

Rehmatullah contrasted Altru’s approach with Glassdoor, which he said features “more polarized” content (since it’s usually employees with really good or really bad experiences who want to write reviews) and where companies are often forced to “play defense.”

On Altru, on the other hand, employers can take the informal conversations that often take place when someone’s deciding whether to accept a job and turn them into an online recruiting tool. Over time, Rehmatullah said the platform could expand beyond recruiting to areas like on-boarding new employees.

Since these videos are posted to the company website, with the employees’ name and face attached, they may not always feel comfortable being completely honest, particularly about a company’s flaws. But at least it’s a message coming from a regular person, not the corporate-speak of a recruiter or manager.

Rehmatullah acknowledged that there’s usually “an educational process” involved in making employers more comfortable with this kind of content.

“These conversations are already happening outside your organization,” he said. “In the long-term, candidates expect more authenticity, more transparency, more true experiences.”

A number of activists and organizers in the Washington DC area are disputing Facebook’s decision to remove a counter-protest event against a rally organized by Jason Kessler, the white nationalist figure who planned the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Facebook removed the event, “No Unite the Right 2-DC,” after discovering that one account connected to the event exhibited what Facebook calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The company defines this activity as “people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing.”

The Facebook page at the center of the controversy was called “Resisters.” TechCrunch confirmed that the Resisters page was created by “bad actors,” as defined by the company, who coordinated fake accounts to deceive users. Facebook ultimately removed the No Unite the Right 2-DC event due to its known interaction and engagement with the Resisters page and maintains that Resisters was an illegitimate page from its inception.

As the company explained in its blog post:

“The “Resisters” Page also created a Facebook Event for a protest on August 10 to 12 and enlisted support from real people… Inauthentic admins of the “Resisters” Page connected with admins from five legitimate Pages to co-host the event.”

The company also observed that a known Internet Research Agency (IRA) account joined the counter-protest event as an admin, though it only served as an admin for seven minutes. (The IRA has been assessed by the U.S. intelligence community as a content farm likely funded by a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.) On top of that, Facebook noted that an IRA account the company was aware of shared a Facebook event hosted by Resisters in 2017.

Here’s where things get even more tricky. The event that Facebook deleted had been taken over by a handful of real DC area activist groups. These groups, including Smash Racism DC, Black Lives Matter DC, Black Lives Matter Charlottesville and other local groups, worked together under the coalition name “Shut It Down DC” and their actions and plans were not inspired by the “No Unite the Right 2” event, they just happened to cross paths. (Since then, the coalition has recreated the Facebook event as “Hate Not Welcome: No Unite The Right 2.”)

TechCrunch spoke with a handful of DC-based organizers including Andrew Batcher, a Washington DC-based activist involved with Shut It Down DC, to clarify how the local coalition of organizers became connected to an event and an account deemed illegitimate by Facebook.

“It was grassroots organizing from a lot of different groups who were interested in this,” Batcher said. “A lot of groups went down to Charlottesville last year. Charlottesville is only two hours south of DC.”

He explains that the group’s impetus was Kessler’s own event, not a Facebook event that organizers stumbled onto.

“When we started organizing we talked about making a Facebook page and saw that this already existed,” Batcher said. “It happens pretty regularly in DC knowing how many major events take a place here.”

“We asked to be made co-hosts of the event and we put our stuff up on it basically,” Batcher said. That included video calls to action, photos and other content, including the event description. “Everything that was taken down was ours.”

Beyond creating the initial placeholder page, Batcher says that the Resisters page had “absolutely no involvement” in the event.

“This is really outrageous for us,” Batcher said. “[It] makes it look like we’re Russian pawns. We know that we’re not, and we know that we’ve been doing this organizing.”

He and other activists on the left have expressed concerns that this depiction could undermine their efforts in the mainstream and even lead to conspiracy theories like Pizzagate that spill over into real life violence.

Facebook says that it reached out to the legitimate organizers of No Unite The Right 2-DC with the following message:

We haven’t been able to connect on the phone yet, but I did want to make sure you know that earlier today we removed a Facebook event that you are listed as a co-host of, “No Unite the Right 2 – DC”, because one the Pages that created the event, “Resisters”, has been removed from Facebook because [it] was created by someone establishing an inauthentic account that has been associated with coordinated inauthentic behavior.

“I understand this may be surprising or frustrating. We are reaching out to make sure you have the relevant information and understand that this has nothing to do with you or your Page. Later today, we’ll begin providing information about the event deletion to the approximately 2,600 users who indicated their interest in the event, and the 600 plus users that said they’d attend. If you are interested in setting up another event, we would be happy to include details about it in our public communications.”

According to Batcher, most of the event’s organizers with Shut It Down DC did not receive any correspondence and others received an email “two lines long” which he provided.

The group is dismayed that Facebook went ahead and removed the event before making contact with more of its real organizers. In interviews with TechCrunch, he and other organizers expressed a deep distrust of Facebook and a desire to see more evidence from company that supports its recent actions. One organizer connected to the DC groups expressed concern that Facebook might be flagging activists working together using VPNs for suspicious coordinated activity. When asked about that concern, Facebook explained that VPN use and common privacy measures would not be would not be sufficient, by Facebook’s standards, to cause an account or page to be removed.

“If there was an account that did something bad, get rid of that account. It doesn’t seem to me like it would have to spread to all of this legitimate organizing,” Batcher said. He added that Facebook did not show “any kind of care” for the potential damage to those involved in putting the event together in real life.

“What we would like is a public apology and them letting people know that we are real people doing real organizing.”

That distrust is reflected on both sides of the political spectrum. Concerns that Facebook is censoring content made by right-wing figures have bubbled up in Congressional hearings and been floated among many users on the right. While there is little evidence that Facebook is in fact censoring right-leaning content, the company does have a checkered history with left-leaning groups, including some Black Lives Matter supporters and parts of the LGBTQ community.

In some of those cases, Facebook users were abusing the platform’s reporting tools for targeted harassment, but the company was slow to address concerns or to change its policy. Facebook has also dragged its feet in confronting openly abusive, racist content on its platform and recently faced criticism for internal policies that allow white nationalism while forbidding white supremacism, drawing what is widely considered to be an artificial distinction between the two. These woes don’t just affect Facebook, but the platform does appear to be a perfect storm for anyone acting in bad faith.

While the counter-protest organizers have since created a new Facebook event and intend to continue their efforts, the situation is a fairly unsettling cautionary tale of a rising form of manipulation on the world’s biggest social platform. Recent revelations and those from 2017 show that a new breed of “blended” social media influence campaign — fake accounts leveraging the efforts of real, regular people — proves particularly insidious.

So-called “bad actors” are infiltrating legitimate causes, creating chaos and throwing everything into question. Even when these efforts are exposed, it’s a winning formula for anyone seeking to sow further discord and doubt in the U.S. political landscape. For everyone else, the odds aren’t looking good.

The Kroger Co. announced today the launch of its new e-commerce grocery delivery service, Kroger Ship, which will allow customers to shop online for their favorite Kroger brands and get deliveries as quick as the next day in certain areas.

Not to be confused with the grocer’s Kroger Delivery service, which partners with Instacart to home-deliver groceries to customers from local store locations within two hours, Kroger Ship will help shoppers stock-up on necessary non-perishables like toilet paper and peanut butter.

To start, the delivery service will launch in four cities across the Midwest and South: Cincinnati, Houston, Louisville and Nashville. That’s just a small selection of the grocery company’s 2,800 store fleet and 35-state reach. During the first phase of Kroger Ship’s implementation, customers will be able to choose from a “curated selection” of 4,500 Our Brands products, as well as a selection of 50,000 household essentials.

All Kroger Ship deliveries will be fulfilled through the company’s two fulfillment centers — located in Nevada and North Carolina — and will work in partnership with FedEx and USPS to ship deliveries, according to information provided to TechCrunch in an email by Kroger’s head of Corporate Communications and Media Relations. The company also has plans to break ground this fall on a new fulfillment center in Kentucky, with more centers possible in the future as Kroger Ship grows.

During its launch, Kroger Ship will offer free deliveries for all purchases, as well as 15 percent off customers’ first orders with a one-time promotional code. Post launch, orders over $35 will ship for free ($4.99 shipping otherwise) and the service will offer exclusive promotional deals and codes to Ship users.

While Kroger has a pretty firm foothold when it comes to brick-and-mortar groceries (in 2016, the National Retail Federation named it the third largest retailer in the world behind Walmart and Costco), Kroger is joining a crowded online grocery delivery space.

In addition to competition Kroger Delivery already faces from same-day delivery, corporate partnerships like Target and Shipt, Walmart and Postmates and Prime Now fulfillment of Whole Foods deliveries through Amazon, Kroger’s Ship service faces competition from wholesalers like Costco and its two-day nationwide non-perishable delivery service. In its own attempt at buddy-ing with a similar wholesaler, Boxed, Kroger’s $400 million acquisition offer was denied this March.

Tesla reported wider-than-expected losses in the second quarter, but is sticking to a profitable and cash flow positive forecast for the second half of the year.

Tesla reported a quarterly loss of $717.5 million, compared with a $336.4 million loss in the same period last year. Tesla has had just two profitable quarters in its history, the last of which was reported in 2016. This is the company’s seventh consecutive quarterly loss.

When adjusted for one-time items, Tesla losses were $520 million, or $3.06 per share, compared with $220 million, or $1.33 a share, in the same period last year.

There were some bright spots in its second-quarter earnings, which were reported Wednesday after the market closed. Tesla’s negative free cash flow of about $740 million was lower than expected. The company ended the second quarter with $2.2 billion of cash.

Tesla also reported higher than expected sales of $4 billion in the second quarter, a 46 percent increase from $2.8 billion in the same quarter last year mainly due to Model 3 deliveries. Tesla reported sales of $3.4 billion in the first quarter.

Tesla’s automotive gross margin increased to 20.6 percent under generally accepted accounting principles. The company’s non-GAAP automotive gross margin increased to 21 percent.

Tesla said in its second-quarter earnings that it has hit its weekly production goal of about 5,000 Model 3 vehicles multiple times since it first managed to meet its target in the last week of June.

Tesla said it’s now aiming to produce 6,000 Model 3 vehicles per week by late August, and expects to increase production over the next few quarters beyond 6,000 per week, while keeping additional capital expenditures limited.

The company said it will meet those production targets by improving the use of its existing lines and making selective improvements to address bottlenecks rather than creating entirely new duplicated lines.

“We aim to increase production to 10,000 Model 3s per week as fast as we can,” the company said in its shareholder letter. The company said it expect to hit this rate sometime in 2019.