Author: azeeadmin

Good news: HP made an AMD Chromebook. Bad news: It uses an old chipset.

Meet the new HP Chromebook 14. This is one of the first Chromebooks powered by an AMD processor. But don’t get too excited. This isn’t the AMD-powered Chromebook a lot of people were waiting for. This Chromebook is powered by a really old AMD chipset.

Traditionally, Chromebooks use Intel chips. But in the summer of 2018, word spread that Chromebooks would eventually be offered with Qualcomm and AMD chips — both offering unique advantages over their Intel counterparts. The Qualcomm models, in theory, could offer always-on connectivity options with stellar battery life while the AMD could, in theory, bring better graphic render capabilities to Chromebooks.

This HP Chromebook offers neither.

The new HP Chromebook 14 packs a AMD Dual-Core A4-9120. This chip was released in June 2016. Compared to the chips in other Chromebooks announced at CES 2019, this chip is slower and has less power management capabilities. On the upside it packs Radeon R4 graphics, but again, when paired with the older silicon, the net result will not likely be a impressive as it could be.

Hopefully, this model will lead to another AMD Chromebook but one with a modern chipset.

The HP Omen X Emperium is not meant to watch reruns of The Office. Though it can. This display is one of the first in Nvidia’s family of Big Format Gaming Displays. Unlike traditional large displays, these are certified by Nvidia and are said to deliver the best gaming experience through the smoothest motion.

This doesn’t come cheap. The Omen X Emperium is $5,000 and will be available in February.

Last summer Nvidia announced its intention to work with several manufacturers to produce these displays. This is one of the first to be announced and, though it costs significantly more than similar-size displays from traditional TV makers, a good chunk of gamers will likely spend the cash to gain the advantage offered by the incredible picture.

Inside the Emperium is an Nvidia chipset with Nvidia’s G-Sync HDR technology. This technology in the display syncs with an Nvidia GPU in a computer to ensure a proper refresh rate resulting in images that are sharper, more fluid and free of stutter.

The screen its utilizes HP’s fantastic Quantium Dot technology that is among the best available for desktop monitors. It even has a DCI-P3 95%, meaning it has the ability to display a massive amount of the color spectrum. The display packs a resolve rate of 144Hz — and since this display is more monitor than TV, I’m inclined to believe the claim.

Traditionally, large displays from Samsung, LG and others, often claim their displays have a fast refresh rate of 240Hz or higher. And that’s sort of true, but only because of software enhancements that can often make the image look terrible. I’ve yet to see this display in person, but I’m confident that its claims are legit.

Nvidia’s Shield TV software pack is built-into the display, giving the owner access to nearly every streaming service and a wide-range of games through Nvidia’s streaming service.

A soundbar is included with the display because good sound is nearly as important as good images.

Blockchains are boring now. It’s been ten years since Bitcoin launched, and cryptocurrencies have almost exclusively been used to recapitulate existing monetary systems in slightly new forms. This is boring. Programmable currencies give us the ability to build whole new categories of economies, ones which reject all traditional assumptions about how value is generated, transferred, or stored. It’s past time to start experimenting with such systems.

Putting my reputation where my mouth is, your (not-so-)humble correspondent has done just that. Specifically, I have created, and open-sourced, an experimental, blockchain-based, non-monetary economy, one which quantifies reputation as a spendable currency within a gift economy.

I’m not doing this in the hopes it will take over the world. I’m doing this in the hopes it will be one of many experimental blockchain-based economies that reject the tenets of traditional monetary capitalism, some of which might actually take root.

Not that I’m opposed to capitalism. (A surprisingly controversial stance, in the Bay Area where I live.) It’s great up to a point. But there’s no reason to think that it’s the final system forever, the end of all economic history, until the heat death of the universe. Blockchains give us the first real opportunity to experiment with, and the first technological substrate for, new kinds of scalable, quantified, post-capitalist economies … but nobody seems to even be trying.

And so, without further ado, I give you the YKarma Manifesto. (Every weird idea needs a good manifesto.) The basic concept: to model reputation as a spendable currency, every person in a community or organization is allotted “karma coins” to distribute each week. These must be given away to other people before they can be used. The recipients can then spend these coins on various rewards — a day off, a conference ticket, a coffee with someone notable, etc etc etc.

(Please note: this is a reputation economy, i.e. modeling reputation as a private spendable currency, not, repeat not, a reputation system, i.e. some kind of “social credit rating” like China’s. The former is an interesting idea worthy of experimentation. The latter is a dystopia waiting to happen. The two are very different.)

If I sound like I’m being too harsh on the blockchain status quo — well, remember last year, when the cryptocurrency hype was at a peak, along with the aspirational excitement? Blockchains were going to change everything, remake whole economies, restructure the Internet, replace VC with ICOs, seize power from the megacorporations and return it to the people.

That was then. Now blockchains have settled on exactly one killer application: a worldwide unregulated permissionless trading market for penny stocks cryptocurrencies, which I call the “crypto casino.” Oh, they’re occasionally used for transferring money, and for the odd prediction market or digital collectible, and if Bitcoin’s value ever stabilized it would make for a pretty good store of value and hedge against inflation–

— but let’s not kid ourselves. Take a hard look at how people actually use blockchains today, and you can’t help but conclude that basically all we have built is a casino … one which really has only one game.

It’s a casino with some extremely interesting tensions, such as permissionlessness and privacy vs. KYC and AML. It’s a casino whose chips are inherently anti-authoritarian, which is no small thing. It’s a casino which may grow into a full-fledged market for e.g. security tokens. But even then, it’s still just fintech.

True, there are a lot of really interesting meta-projects devoted to new kinds of blockchains (and other decentralized consensus systems), and pan-chain efforts such as Cosmos and Polkadot, and second-layer initiatives such as Lightning, and scaling, and privacy, and decentralized storage/chat/identity, and so on and so forth. There are my two favorites, Blockstack and FOAM.

But most of those, and all of those meta-projects, only matter to people already in the space. To ordinary people, these kinds of initiatives remain as utterly meaningless and eye-rollingly irrelevant as, say, Linux’s systemd wars are to Windows and Mac users.

So let’s broaden the horizon of our experimentation some, and stop greedily trying to make money. Indeed, let’s start experimenting with systems which are explicitly not about money; which are the opposite of money. Let’s start experimenting with reputation economies, or gift economies, or somehow quantifying commodity pathways, or even cultural economies.

If that piques any of your interest, go take a look at YKarma. (It seems strangely appropriate for me to make use of the social, and arguably cultural, capital of my position as a TechCrunch columnist to exhort you to do so.) What I most hope for is not that you start using it; it’s that you fork it, use it as a basis for building your own new avant-garde post-capitalist economic experiment, and help make blockchains weird again.

Gousto, the U.K. cook-at-home meal kit service that competes most directly with HelloFresh, has raised a further £18 million in funding. The round is backed by Instagram “health influencer” Joe Wicks, along with existing investors Unilever Ventures, Hargreave Hale, BGF Ventures, MMC Ventures, and Angel CoFund.

The new funding brings the total raised by Gousto to £75 million since being founded in 2012, and follows a £28.5 million fund raise last March, which it used to invest in its machine learning and factory automation.

The startup also recently launched a customer-facing AI recipe recommendation tool, through which half of customer orders are now placed. Gousto says it will continue to prioritize the majority of its investment in technology to accelerate growth.

In a call, Gousto founder and CEO Timo Boldt told me the startup is now delivering over 1.5 million meals a month to customers, and is seeing 170 percent year-on-year growth. However, he declined to break out specific customer numbers, monthly active or otherwise.

Noteworthy, Gousto says two-thirds of customers are families, and Boldt says this proves that a meal kit service that offers the right mixture of choice, personalization and, crucially, price point, can become a viable alternative to the weekly grocery shop for busy families.

The thinking behind meal kit services more generally is that because they send you correctly portioned fresh ingredients matched to each recipe, you save money by only buying what is needed.

Meanwhile, the services themselves have the potential to run a lot more efficiently than a national grocery store chain’s offline or online offering, including throwing significantly less food away.

To that end, Boldt says that Gousto offers more choice to customers than competitors and is further ahead in terms of driving factory and logistics efficiencies through the use of automation and data. The meal kit service offers over 30 weekly recipes and delivers 7 days per a week. It also claims the shortest lead time of 3 days, and the lowest price point, starting at £2.98 per meal.

The investment in Gousto by “body coach” Joe Wicks is also worth noting, as the startup places more emphasis on healthy eating. The pair had already announced they are working together and this month will launch a co-branded range of nutritious meal kits. This will see a minimum of four new Wicks-branded recipes offered per week, including Joe’s Veggie Spag Bol’ and Satay Chicken Lettuce Wraps, along with Herby Crusted Fish, Root Veg Chips & Peas, and 10-Min Nifty Veggie Noodles.

Cue statement from Wicks: “It was clear from when I first approached Gousto that they were a purpose driven business, with a passion for getting more people cooking and in turn improving the health of the nation. As a customer before becoming an investor, I know that Gousto is having a lasting and hugely positive impact on the way families consume and eat food. I’m delighted to join forces and offer my knowledge to a company who has brought huge and much-needed innovation to an industry”.

In a new a16z podcast with the venture firm’s founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, there’s a lot to enjoy, from Andreessen’s TV show recommendations to Horowitz’s secret to excellent barbecue. (It’s pretty much just “time,” as you might imagine.)

More useful for our founder readers may be Andreessen’s predictions around tech and, because he’s asked about them specifically, his predictions when it comes to wearables, including that virtual reality will be “one thousand” times bigger than augmented reality. It’s an interesting statement given the firm’s bet on Magic Leap and its AR goggles.

You can find the entire podcast here. Our favorite parts are excerpted below for your weekend reading:

On audio:

“The really big one right now is audio. Audio is on the rise just generally and particularly with Apple and the AirPods, which has been an absolute home run [for Apple]. It’s one of the most deceptive things because it’s just like this little product, and how important could it be? And I think it’s tremendously important, because it’s basically a voice in your ear any time you want.

For example, there are these new YouTube type celebrities, and everybody’s kind of wondering where people are finding the spare time to watch these YouTube videos and listen to these YouTube people in the tens and tens of millions. And the answer is: they’re at work. They have this bluetooth thing in their ear, and they’ve got a hat, and that’s 10 hours on the forklift and that’s 10 hours of Joe Rogan. That’s a big deal.

Of course, speech as a [user interface] is rapidly on the rise. So I think audio is going to be titanically important.”

On sensors:

“The second thing I’d nominate for wearables is the concept of sensors on the body. Here, the Apple Watch is clearly in the lead with what they’re doing with the heartbeat sensor. But I think we’ll have a full complement of medical-grade sensors on our body — in a way that we have chosen to [have them] — over the next five or 10 years. I think we’ll be able to predict things like heart attacks and strokes before they happen. Talk about a killer app. [Laughs.] ‘Beep. I’m going to have a heart attack in four hours. Maybe I should drive to the hospital.’

The survival rate [or heart attack victims] at the hospital is, like, 99 percent. The survival rate for people at home is like 50 percent. There’s an opportunity for a massive increase in quality of life with the sensor platforms people are going to have.”

On the future of AR/VR:

“I think optics are coming. It’s going to be a long road, but I think AR and VR are going to work, and that we’re going to have heads-up displays that are going to remove the need for what we have now, which is this little pane of glass that we’re expected to experience the whole world through. The whole world is going to open up around us.

I think AR has tons of potential applications, both at work and at home. [But] I think VR is going to be about 1,000 times bigger. In the Valley right now, this is a very contrarian view. The general theme that you hear is that AR will be bigger than VR, and obviously it should be. If you can do things overlaid over the real world, that should be inherently more interesting than having to construct a synthetic world.

I just think that’s only true for people who live in a really interesting place in the real world. But only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of people on Earth live in a place where they wake up every morning and think, Wow, there are so many interesting things to see. So for everyone who doesn’t already live on a college campus or in Silicon Valley or in a major other city, the new environments we’re going to be able to create in VR will inherently be much more interesting. And there will be a lot more of them.”

The image here come from Elon Musk and is concept art of the Starship test vehicle SpaceX is currently assembling at its Boca Chica, Texas launch facility. The real thing will be even better. This test vehicle is shorter and lacks the windows of the production ship that will eventually go into production.

This March or April SpaceX intends to launch the rocket to suborbital heights to prove the viability of the Starship’s systems. Orbital flights are said to be on the books for 2020.

The Starship, previously named BFR, is key to the next phase of SpaceX’s plans. The company intends to use this model as its primary launch vehicle, eventually replacing the current Falcon and Falcon Heavy rockets. SpaceX intends to the Starship to be rocket to rule them all. And it’s going to look good doing it.

It’s tax season! You know what that means? It’s scamming season, too.

You might have heard this story before. A scammer starts by spoofing an email pretending to be the chief executive of a company, angrily demanding that someone in accounting or human resources immediately sends over their employees’ W-2 forms “or there will be trouble!” The person doesn’t think twice, not wanting to get told off, and emails back the forms, which spell out exactly how much the employees’ earned and how much the company withheld from your wages in tax for the year.

Lo and behold, they’ve just handed over the crown jewels for committing fraud to criminals.

Then, after the scammers steal your W-2 forms, they file your tax returns as though they were you. By fudging the numbers, they can trick the Internal Revenue Service into turning over a tax refund — which then they cash in, using none other than the information from your stole W-2 form.

All the while, you’re putting off doing your taxes until late March because the thought of doing them is so depressing that you literally need months of mental preparation before you start crunching the numbers.

These so-called “W-2 scams” are far too easy to carry out. They’re easy for scammers to obtain and the scammers go undetected for weeks or months, and the IRS doesn’t tell you when your tax return has been filed, meaning anyone can do it without your knowledge.

Scamming consumers out of their tax refunds costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year — and the IRS knows full well how damaging these scams can be. Earlier this year, a government watchdog said that the IRS could do a lot more to prevent W-2 scams in the future — not least telling taxpayers when their filings have been accepted, so that it can be withheld and refunds are protected in case the taxpayer flags it as fraudulent.

Right now, the U.S. is in the midst of a government shutdown — and that’s affecting the IRS. Normally, the IRS lets you start submitting your tax returns by the end of January. This year, it’s not clear when taxpayers can start submitting their filings. Worse, because of the shutdown, any refunds are expected to be delayed.

But it doesn’t mean you can drag your feet and put things off. Now’s a better time than ever to get prepared.

If you haven’t already received your W-2 by mail, you’ll receive it from your employer the end of January. (Many companies these days let you download your W-2 form early through Workday, if you’re subscribed, or other internal corporate portals.) Once you’ve received all of the documents and paperwork you need to file, sit down with a pot of coffee and get the return done.

Once the IRS flings open the doors, file your return as soon as possible.

You should check before you file using the IRS’ filing status checker to see if your tax return has already been submitted. If it has, contact your company and speak to the IRS to file a certain form to get it voided.

Remember, in security, humans are the weakest link. And that’s never been more true than during tax season.

If you have a job today, there’s a good chance you personally reached out to your employer and interviewed with other humans to get it. Now that you’ve been there a while, it’s also likely the workday feels more like a long slog than the fulfilling career move you had envisioned.

But if today’s early-stage startups have their way, your next employment experience could be quite different.

First, forget the networking and interview gauntlet. Instead, let an AI-enabled screening program reach out about a job you don’t seem obviously qualified to do. Or, rather than talk to a company’s employees, wait for them to play some online games instead. If you play similarly, they may decide to hire you.

Once you have the job, software will also make you more efficient and happier at your work.

An AI-driven software platform will deliver regular “nudges,” offering customized suggestions to make you a more effective worker. If you’re feeling burned out, head online to text or video chat with a coach or therapist. Or perhaps you’ll just be happier in your job now that your employer is delivering regular tokens of appreciation.

Those are a few of the ways early-stage startups are looking to change the status quo of job-seeking and employment. While employment is a broad category, an analysis of Crunchbase funding data for the space shows a high concentration of activity in two key areas: AI-driven hiring software and tools to improve employee engagement.

Below, we look at where the money’s going and how today’s early-stage startups could play a role in transforming the work experience of tomorrow.

Artificial intelligence

To begin, let us reflect that we are at a strange inflection point for AI and employment. Our artificially intelligent overlords are not smart enough to actually do our jobs. Nonetheless, they have strong opinions about whether we’re qualified to do them ourselves.

It is at this peculiar point that the alchemic mix of AI software, recruiting-based business models and venture capital are coming together to build startups.

In 2018, at least 43 companies applying AI or machine learning to some facet of employment have raised seed or early-stage funding, according to Crunchbase data. In the chart below, we look at a few startups that have secured rounds, along with their backers and respective business models:

At present, even AI boosters don’t tout the technology as a cure-all for troubles plaguing the talent recruitment space. While it’s true humans are biased and flawed when it comes to evaluating job candidates, artificially intelligent software suffers from many of the same bugs. For instance, Amazon scrapped its AI recruiting tool developed in-house because it exhibited bias against women.

That said, it’s still early innings. Over the next few years, startups will be actively tweaking their software to improve performance and reduce bias.

Happiness and engagement

Once the goal of recruiting the best people is achieved, the next step is ensuring they stay and thrive.

Usually, a paycheck goes a long way to accomplishing the goal of staying. But in case that’s not enough, startups are busily devising a host of tools for employers to boost engagement and fight the scourge of burnout.

In the chart below, we look at a few of the companies that received early-stage funding this year to build out software platforms and services aimed at making people happier and more effective at work:

The most heavily funded of the early-stage crop looks to be Peakon, which offers a software platform for measuring employee engagement and collecting feedback. The Danish firm has raised $33 million to date to fund its expansion.

London-based BioBeats is another up-and-comer aimed at the “corporate wellness” market, with digital tools to help employees track stress levels and other health-related metrics. The company has raised $7 million to date to help keep those stress levels in check.

Early-stage indicators

Early-stage funding activity tends to be an indicator of areas with somewhat low adoption rates today that are poised to take off dramatically. For employment, that means we can likely expect to see AI-based recruitment and software-driven engagement tools become more widespread in the coming years.

What does that mean for job seekers and paycheck toilers? Expect to spend more of your time interfacing with intelligent software. Apparently, it’ll make you more employable, and happier, too.

Security researchers say they’ve found more than a dozen iPhone apps covertly communicating with a server associated with Golduck, a historically Android-focused malware that infects popular classic game apps.

The malware has been known about for over a year, after it was first discovered by Appthority infecting classic and retro games on Google Play, by embedding backdoor code that allowed malicious payloads to be silently pushed to the device. At the time, more than 10 million users were affected by the malware, allowing hackers to run malicious commands at the highest privileges, like sending premium SMS messages from a victim’s phone to make money.

Now, the researchers say iPhone apps linked to the malware could also present a risk.

Wandera, an enterprise security firm, said it found 14 apps — all retro-style games — that were communicating with the same command and control server used by the Golduck malware.

“The [Golduck] domain was on a watchlist we established due to its use in distributing a specific strain of Android malware in the past,” said Michael Covington, Wandera’s vice-president of product. “When we started seeing communication between iOS devices and the known malware domain, we investigated further.”

The apps include: Commando Metal: Classic Contra, Super Pentron Adventure: Super Hard, Classic Tank vs Super Bomber, Super Adventure of Maritron, Roy Adventure Troll Game, Trap Dungeons: Super Adventure, Bounce Classic Legend, Block Game, Classic Bomber: Super Legend, Brain It On: Stickman Physics, Bomber Game: Classic Bomberman, Classic Brick – Retro Block, The Climber Brick, and Chicken Shoot Galaxy Invaders.

According to the researchers, what they saw so far seems relatively benign — the command and control server simply pushes a list of icons in a pocket of ad space in the upper-right corner of the app. When the user opens the game, the server tells the app which icons and links it should serve to the user. They did, however, see the apps sending IP address data — and, in some cases, location data — back to the Golduck command and control server. TechCrunch verified their claims, running the apps on a clean iPhone through a proxy, allowing us to see where the data goes. Based on what we saw, the app tells the malicious Golduck server what app, version, device type, and the IP address of the device — including how many ads were displayed on the phone.

As of now, the researchers say that the apps are packed with ads — likely as a way to make a quick buck. But they expressed concern that the communication between the app and the known-to-be-malicious server could open up the app — and the device — to malicious commands down the line.

“The apps themselves are technically not compromised; while they do not contain any malicious code, the backdoor they open presents a risk for exposure that our customers do not want to take.

“A hacker could easily use the secondary advertisement space to display a link that redirects the user and dupes them into installing a provisioning profile or a new certificate that ultimately allows for a more malicious app to be installed,” said the researchers.

That could be said for any game or app, regardless of device maker or software. But the connection to a known malicious server isn’t a good look. Covington said that the company has “observed malicious content being shared from the server,” but that it wasn’t related to the games.

The implication is that if the server is sending malicious payloads to Android users, iPhone users could be next.

TechCrunch sent the list of apps to data insights firm Sensor Tower, which estimated that the 14 apps had been installed close to one million times since they were released — excluding repeated downloads or installs across different devices.

When we tried contacting the app makers, many of the App Store links pointed to dead links or to pages with boilerplate privacy policies but no contact information. The registrant on the Golduck domain appears to be fake, along with other domains associated with Golduck, which often have different names and email addresses.

Apple did not comment when reached prior to publication. The apps are appear to still be downloadable from the App Store, but all now say they are “not currently available in the U.S. store.”

Apple’s app stores may have a better rap than Google’s, which every once in a while lets malicious apps slip through the net. In reality, neither store is perfect. Earlier this year, security researchers found a top-tier app in the Mac App Store that was collecting users’ browsing history without permission, and dozens of iPhone apps that were sending user location data to advertisers without explicitly asking first.

For the average user, malicious apps remain the largest and most common threat to mobile users — even with locked down device software and the extensive vetting of apps.

If there’s one lesson, now and always: don’t download what you don’t need, or can’t trust.

As every software company knows, over time as code ages and workarounds build on work-arounds, the code base becomes bloated. It becomes ever more difficult to get around the technical debt that you’ve built up over time. It’s really impossible to avoid this phenomenon, but at some point, companies realize that the debt is so great that it’s limiting their ability to build new functionality. That’s precisely what Trulia faced in 2017 when it began a process of paying down that debt and modernizing its architecture.

Trulia is a real estate site founded way back in 2005, an eternity ago in terms of technology. The company went public in 2012 and was acquired by Zillow in 2014 for $3.5 billion, but has continued to operate as an independent brand under the Zillow umbrella. It understood that a lot had changed technologically in the 12 years since its inception when engineering began thinking about this. The team knew it had a humongous, monolithic code base that was inhibiting the ability to update the site.

While they tried to pull out some of the newer functions as services, it didn’t really make the site any more nimble because these services always had to tie back into that monolithic central code base. The development team knew if it was to escape this coding trap, it would take a complete overhaul.

Brainstorming broad change

As you would expect, a process like this doesn’t happen overnight, taking months to plan and implement. It all started back in 2017 when the company held what they called an “Innovation Week” with the entire engineering team. Groups of engineers came up with ideas about how to solve this problem, but the one that got the most attention was one called Project Islands, which involved breaking out the different pieces of the site as individual coding islands that could operate independently of one another.

It sounds simple, but in practice it involved breaking down the entire code base into services. They would use Next.js and React to rebuild the front end and GraphQL, an open source graph database technology to rebuild the back end.

Deep Varma, Trulia’s VP of engineering, pointed out that as a company founded in 2005, the site was built on PHP and MySQL, two popular development technologies from that time. Varma says that whenever his engineers made a change to any part of the site, they needed to do a complete system release. This caused a major bottleneck.

What they really needed to do was move to a completely modern microservices architecture that allowed engineering teams to work independently in a continuous delivery approach without breaking any other team’s code. That’s where the concept of islands came into play.

Islands in the stream

The islands were actually microservices. Each one could communicate to a set of central common services like authentication, A/B testing, the navigation bar, the footer — all of the pieces that every mini code base would need, while allowing the teams building these islands to work independently and not require a huge rebuild every time they added a new element or changed something.

The harsh reality of this kind of overhaul came into focus as the teams realized they had to be writing the new pieces while the old system was still in place and running. In a video the company made describing the effort, one engineer likened it to changing the engine of a 747 in the middle of a flight.

Varma says he didn’t try to do everything at once, as he needed to see if the islands approach would work in practice first. In November 2017, he pulled the first engineering team together, and by January it had built the app shell (the common services piece) and one microservice island. When the proof of concept succeeded, Varma knew they were in business.

Building out the archipelago

It’s one thing to build a single island, but it’s another matter to build a chain of them and that would be the next step. By last April, engineering had shown enough progress that they were able to present the entire idea to senior management and get the go-ahead to move forward with a more complex project.

First, it took some work with the Next.js development team to get the development framework to work the way they wanted. Varma said he brought in the Next.js team to work with his engineers. He said that they needed to figure out how to stitch the various islands together and resolve dependencies among the different services. The Next.js team actually changed its development roadmap for Trulia, speeding up delivery of these requirements, understanding that other companies would have similar issues.

By last July, the company released Neighborhoods, the first fully independent island functionality on the site. Recently, it moved off-market properties to islands. Off-market properties, as the name implies, are pages with information about properties that are no longer on the market. Varma says that these pages actually make up a significant portion of the company’s traffic.

While Varma would not say just how much of the site has been moved to islands at this point, he said the goal is to move the majority to the new platform in 2019. All of this shows that a complete overhaul of a complex site doesn’t happen overnight, but Trulia is taking steps to move off the original system it created in 2005 and move to a more modern and flexible architecture it has created with islands. It may not have paid down its technical debt in full in 2018, but it went a long way on laying the foundation to do so.