Author: azeeadmin

Just in time for the new year, a report from Net Marketshare puts Windows 10 in the top spot for desktop operating systems. It’s the first time Microsoft’s OS took the top spot since hitting the market three and a half years ago.

At 39.22 percent of the market, Windows 10’s rise isn’t an overnight success story, but it’s notable, given the rocky reception its other operating systems have received in recent years. Windows 10 just edges out Windows 7’s 36.90. The more recent Windows 8.1, meanwhile, is a distant fifth — more than a percentage point below Windows XP.

Windows 10 is now in place on 700 million devices, comprising a broad range of products. Microsoft gambled with the release of a convertible operating system that could bridge the device between PC and tablet, and it appears to have paid off. As has the decision to bring the OS to its Xbox platform.

The numbers look solid, even as some enterprise customers continue to drag their feet. That’s to be expected with any relatively new operating system, as anyone who’s ever worked for a large business can tell you. There’s a reason XP is still in the top five.

All of this marks a nice end to Microsoft’s solid year, which found it once again at the top of the most valuable companies. Apple, which is now in the No. 2 spot, secured No. 3 on the OS list, with 10.14 Mojave pulling in 4.73 percent of the market.

Just in time for the new year, a report from Net Marketshare puts Windows 10 in the top spot for desktop operating systems. It’s the first time Microsoft’s OS took the top spot since hitting the market three and a half years ago.

At 39.22 percent of the market, Windows 10’s rise isn’t an overnight success story, but it’s notable, given the rocky reception its other operating systems have received in recent years. Windows 10 just edges out Windows 7’s 36.90. The more recent Windows 8.1, meanwhile, is a distant fifth — more than a percentage point below Windows XP.

Windows 10 is now in place on 700 million devices, comprising a broad range of products. Microsoft gambled with the release of a convertible operating system that could bridge the device between PC and tablet, and it appears to have paid off. As has the decision to bring the OS to its Xbox platform.

The numbers look solid, even as some enterprise customers continue to drag their feet. That’s to be expected with any relatively new operating system, as anyone who’s ever worked for a large business can tell you. There’s a reason XP is still in the top five.

All of this marks a nice end to Microsoft’s solid year, which found it once again at the top of the most valuable companies. Apple, which is now in the No. 2 spot, secured No. 3 on the OS list, with 10.14 Mojave pulling in 4.73 percent of the market.

New York-based venture capital firm Union Square Ventures (USV) has submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicating a $429 million fundraise across two new vehicles.

Founded in 2003 by Fred Wilson (pictured) and Brad Burnham, USV has supported high-flying companies including Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy and, more recently, Carta and Coinbase. The firm has only added four people to its partnership in its 15-year history. Most recently, Rebecca Kaden joined from Maveron to become USV’s first female partner.

Its latest filings show the firm has raised $190 million for its fifth early-stage flagship fund, surpassing its previous vehicle by about $15 million.

Wilson, a long-time VC, has said that USV would never raise a large fund: “We like the small fund model and are completely and totally committed to it,” he told Venture Beat in 2010. That was long before SoftBank and its monstrous Vision Fund emerged to shake up the industry; still, USV has maintained its focused, lean fundraising strategy.

In addition to the $190 million entity, USV has lassoed $238 million for a growth-stage opportunities fund, its largest to date.

In a post on his popular blog, AVC.com, Wilson made his predictions for the new year, ranging from the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump, worsening U.S.-China relations and a fall of the S&P 500. Despite a commonly held belief among private investors that bearish public markets will quickly result in a downturn in the VC market, Wilson seems moderately optimistic about what’s to come.

“I expect that we will continue to see big tech invest and grow their businesses and do well in 2019,” Wilson wrote. “I expect we will see IPOs from big names like Uber/Lyft/Slack, although I also expect those deals will get priced well below the lofty expectations they have in mind right now … However, I do think a difficult macro business and political environment in the U.S. will lead investors to take a more cautious stance in 2019. It would not surprise me to see total venture capital investments in 2019 decline from 2018. And I think we will see financings take longer, diligence on new investments actually occur, and valuations to come under pressure for even the most attractive opportunities.”

A spokesperson for USV didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

New York-based venture capital firm Union Square Ventures (USV) has submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicating a $429 million fundraise across two new vehicles.

Founded in 2003 by Fred Wilson (pictured) and Brad Burnham, USV has supported high-flying companies including Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy and, more recently, Carta and Coinbase. The firm has only added four people to its partnership in its 15-year history. Most recently, Rebecca Kaden joined from Maveron to become USV’s first female partner.

Its latest filings show the firm has raised $190 million for its fifth early-stage flagship fund, surpassing its previous vehicle by about $15 million.

Wilson, a long-time VC, has said that USV would never raise a large fund: “We like the small fund model and are completely and totally committed to it,” he told Venture Beat in 2010. That was long before SoftBank and its monstrous Vision Fund emerged to shake up the industry; still, USV has maintained its focused, lean fundraising strategy.

In addition to the $190 million entity, USV has lassoed $238 million for a growth-stage opportunities fund, its largest to date.

In a post on his popular blog, AVC.com, Wilson made his predictions for the new year, ranging from the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump, worsening U.S.-China relations and a fall of the S&P 500. Despite a commonly held belief among private investors that bearish public markets will quickly result in a downturn in the VC market, Wilson seems moderately optimistic about what’s to come.

“I expect that we will continue to see big tech invest and grow their businesses and do well in 2019,” Wilson wrote. “I expect we will see IPOs from big names like Uber/Lyft/Slack, although I also expect those deals will get priced well below the lofty expectations they have in mind right now … However, I do think a difficult macro business and political environment in the U.S. will lead investors to take a more cautious stance in 2019. It would not surprise me to see total venture capital investments in 2019 decline from 2018. And I think we will see financings take longer, diligence on new investments actually occur, and valuations to come under pressure for even the most attractive opportunities.”

A spokesperson for USV didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Thunderbird, Mozilla’s desktop email client, doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of mindshare of the organization’s Firefox browser, yet even in this age of web-based email services, it still has a sizable user community. For 2019, those users can look forward to a faster and more beautiful application, Thunderbird community manager Ryan Sipes announced today.

Only a few years ago, Mozilla’s relationship with Thunderbird looked rather rocky. Back in 2015, the organization decided to decouple Thunderbird’s technical infrastructure from Firefox’s and to look for other organizations that would like to invest in it. In the end, though, Mozilla decided to keep Thunderbird in-house and not move it to another organization and continue to support the project. That gave Thunderbird some much-needed stability and as Sipes announced today, there are now eight full-time staffers who work on the project, with plans for hiring six more soon.

For 2019, the expanded team promises to make the application run faster and address performance issues — and to rewrite some parts of the client in an effort to build a multi-process version that can make better use of modern processors (it’s worth noting that Firefox went through a similar rewrite).

At the same time, Thunderbird will also get a few user interface updates, better notifications and, maybe even more importantly, better Gmail support. The current Gmail setup procedure isn’t actually all that complicated, but once you do have Thunderbird set up to work with your Gmail account, you don’t get access to many of Gmail’s proprietary features. To work around some of this, the Thunderbird team will soon offer better label support, for example.

Shine, one of the many apps capitalizing on the growing self-care trend, has now brought to Android devices its app used by 3 million people. Originally launched as a simple messaging bot that doled out life advice and motivation, Shine has grown over the years to become a larger self-help platform aimed largely at the millennial crowd — and, in particular, millennial women.

As of Shine’s $5 million Series A round last April, the app’s user base was 70 percent female, and 88 percent were under the age of 35.

Since then, it has added another million to its then 2 million users. That growth came despite Shine having missed the mark at times, as with its failed life-coaching subscription product that never emerged from testing.

Today, Shine’s focus is on personal growth, motivational messaging and other self-improvement topics, which are delivered by way of text and audio. Through short-form audio, users can get help across a number of areas, including things like productivity, mindfulness, focus, stress and anxiety, burn out, acceptance, self-care for online dating, creativity, forgiveness, work frustrations and more.

The app also sends daily motivational texts based on research-backed materials that help users better understand the topic at hand. These are presented in a more casual style — almost like it’s a friend chatting with you.

Shine now monetizes through a Premium subscription that offers expanded access to Shine’s audio talks and challenges, as well as additional features like offline listening and the ability to save favorite texts. This is either $4.50/month if you pay the $53.99 annual fee at once, or $9.99 per month. That’s roughly in line with what some meditation apps charge — for instance, the top meditation app Calm is $59.99 per year. And it’s cheaper than Headspace, which is $95.88 annually, by comparison.

Shine had said last year that one of its plans for its Series A was to build out the Android experience, as nearly half its customers were accessing Shine on Android devices. In those cases they were using the texting service due to the lack of an official app.

On iOS, Shine is fairly popular in its category. It has jumped to become the No. 16 “Health & Fitness” app in the U.S. following the Christmas holiday — a time of year when people get serious about wellness and self-care. However, it’s only the No. 86 app on the “Health & Fitness” Top Grossing chart, which puts it far behind other wellness apps, including meditation apps like Calm, weight loss apps like Lose It! and workout apps like the No. 1 app, Sweat from Kayla Itsines.

Given the app stores’ larger shift to subscriptions over paid downloads in recent years, it will be interesting to see how many apps the average consumer will actually pay for through the subscription model — and to what extent more niche apps like Shine will be sustainable in the long term, as a result.

Shine is a free download on Google Play.

The aerospace industry took flight with ambitious civilian and military projects over the course of 2018, and private investors took notice.

Rockets are flying to the far side of the moon. Entrepreneurs are creating new propulsion technologies to take rockets deeper into space and to make flying on Earth more electric. Finally, plans are afoot from private companies and governments to bring manned missions to the surface of the Moon and Mars.

And venture capital dollars are fueling this new boom in aerospace innovation, with firms investing over $2.3 billion in new companies over the course of 2018, according to data from Crunchbase.

This surge of interest comes as no surprise to longtime industry investors like Francois Chopard, the founder of Starburst Aerospace, an accelerator and investment fund focused on the industry since 2012.

“It started in the past with only space. It was basically rockets and satellites and it used to be just a handful of players,” said Chopard. “Now it’s extended to aviation with all the [electric vertical takeoff and landing], hybrids and supersonic and defense planes.”

One startup developing electric planes, the Boeing and JetBlue-backed Zunum Aero, expects to make its first deliveries of new planes by 2022. And it’s not the only company that’s flying to market in a hurry. Wright Electric, Joby Aviation and Ampaire are all startups that are angling for their own place in the sky.

“We are seeing huge deal flow,” says Chopard. “There are 1,000 startups emerging every year on these subjects… After five or six years we are seeing many more people getting educated… seeing more and more people interested in investing in space.”

Among the investors expressing greater interest in the emerging startups looking to transform the aerospace industry are the very companies those startups are challenging.

“We disrupt ourselves so someone else doesn’t disrupt us,” Brian Schettler, managing director of Boeing’s HorizonX venture arm, told the Wall Street Journal last year.

Space startups command the most attention 

Boeing’s launch into startup investing comes almost directly as a result of already being disrupted in the space industry.

Elon Musk and SpaceX came from nowhere to become a serious competitor to the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that had enjoyed a near monopoly on contracts with the U.S. government for space missions.

And now the space industry is about to break wide open. In addition to Musk’s SpaceX there are companies like Relativity Space, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab, which launched its first mission for NASA in mid-December 2018.

“I’ve never seen the interest level so high to start new businesses,” said Hoyt Davidson, managing partner of investment banking company Near Earth LLC. “It’s a renaissance, a potential space renaissance,” Davidson told Space News about the newfound interest from investors in the sector.

But as Chopard notes, many investors have yet to really take the plunge into aerospace and space investing fully. 

“Right now what we’ve seen is large venture funds investing in space as a bet… if it works fine, if not… it’s not a big deal,” says Chopard. “We haven’t seen purely dedicated space or aerospace venture funds because of the lack of exits.”

Space, right now, still has a lock on investors’ attention. Google first showed the early promise of returns in the satellite business to investors when it bought Skybox Labs for $500 million back in 2014. Although the investment wasn’t a huge hit for Google, which spun out the company and eventually sold it to Planet. And Planet labs itself is highly valued, given a 2018 funding round that pegged the company at roughly $1.4 billion.

Between funding for Rocket Lab, SpaceX, Astroscale, Terran Launch, VectorLaunch, AxelSpace and Spin Launch, the bulk of venture dollars were invested in space and satellite companies.

More money is still needed 

That’s music to the ears of U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who sees in the new space race a nascent industry that could spur incredible job growth and wealth creation (in this, at least, Ross is right). But as Ross acknowledged, other sources of capital need to do more.

“We’re going to need better financing and insurance for the space industry,” Ross said recently in a public address quoted by Space News.”Missing from space financing are the bigger institutions, especially banks. Their participation will be necessary to execute longer-term commercial plans.”

At the start of his fifth year developing early stage aerospace companies, Chopard sees hope coming from the corporate investors who also serve as his partners … and in his own plans for for the growth of Starburst.

“I still think we are early in the process,” said Chopard. “It’s early and everybody has interest to invest in the early stage. We have seen Boeing doing follow ups and Airbus doing follow ups… they are looking at startups that will benefit the entire community.”

Meanwhile, Starburst is looking to raise a second venture fund of its own, and targeting between $100 million and $150 million for it. 

That fund will continue to support portfolio companies like Airmap, an aerospace startup focused on flight plans for drones; Nautilus, a drone for large cargo delivery; Orbital Sidekick, a developer of cubesats with hyperspectral imaging capabilities, and Optisys, which is manufacturing metal antennas for satellites using 3D printing technologies.

“The biggest obstacle is the entire maturity of the ecosystem… our next venture are building the fund and developing more early stage accelerators,” said Chopard. “The plan is to have these early stage accelerators where we take younger startups in order to build a stronger dealflow.”

Hackers are using a decade-old flaw to target and hijack dormant Twitter accounts to spread terrorist propaganda, TechCrunch has learned.

Many of the affected Twitter accounts appeared to be hijacked in recent days or weeks — some longer — after years of inactivity. A sudden shift in tone or the language used in tweets often gives away the hijack — usually a single tweet in Arabic, sometimes praising Allah or retweeting propaganda from another account.

Twitter has suspended most of the accounts we reviewed, but some remain active.

The recent resurgence in hijacked accounts appears to be hackers exploiting Twitter’s legacy lack of email confirmation. Twitter took steps to prevent the automated creation of new accounts in June by requiring new accounts to be confirmed using an email address or phone number, but many older accounts remain unconfirmed.

But while dormant Twitter accounts are never deleted, the email addresses that were used to create them either never existed in the first place, or expired long ago. As such, many older Twitter accounts can be easily hijacked by creating the email address used to initially register the Twitter account.

“This issue has been around for a while but no one really knew and took advantage of it,” said a hacker and security researcher known as WauchulaGhost, who researches and disrupts the online activities of the so-called Islamic State.

“Now, we have Islamic State supporters that have figured it out,” he said.

He found one since-suspended account following many inactive accounts, which had all been recently hijacked. His hypothesis was that, “once you create the email, password reset on the Twitter account, check the email and click the link,” he said. Many of those dormant accounts he tested hadn’t created the email that the account was registered to. The email addresses are partially masked, but it’s easy to tell how many characters are in a Twitter account’s email address. Often the email accounts were simply their Twitter handle at “@hotmail.com” or “@yahoo.com,” he said.

Some of the accounts had tens of thousands of followers, he said.

He shared several of those dormant Twitter accounts with TechCrunch, nearly all of which had registered email addresses that were identical to their Twitter handle. He was able to register all of those email addresses, which would have allowed him to access those accounts.

Many of the hijacked accounts he found in the past few days — and shared with TechCrunch — were spreading propaganda, but were later suspended from the service. The hackers often didn’t bother to change the bios on the account.

The hijacked accounts we reviewed included Arabic-speaking videos of Islamic State fighters wielding weapons and other curated content. Others simply contained text — also in Arabic — that praised violence and other attacks, or retweeted other accounts.

One tweet, roughly translated, used an Islamic State hashtag: “…with your cars, let’s go pack, you bomb, go with a bomb, you go in any way.” Another hijacked account called on Muslims to “kill these Christians wherever you find them,” while another account tweeted about turning the Christmas holidays “into grief and horror.” (These statements go against fundamental Islamic teachings, and calls for violence against non-Muslims is expressly forbidden in the Qur’an.)

Twitter said it’s trying to find a solution to a problem that it claims isn’t theirs to fix.

“Reusing email addresses in this manner is not a new issue for Twitter or other online services,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch. “For our part, our teams are aware and are working to identify solutions that can help keep Twitter accounts safe and secure.”

In other words, it’s the email providers — like Hotmail and Yahoo — that are deactivating accounts and recycling email addresses that are partly the problem — on top of Twitter’s lack of confirming accounts for the first decade of the service’s existence. And Twitter isn’t alone: Facebook also struggled with account hijacks through expired email accounts.

But the researcher said Twitter should shoulder the blame for the account hijacks.

Twitter said it has removed over a million accounts for promoting and sharing content since August 2015 — with more than 205,000 accounts during the first half of 2018 alone. The number of accounts suspended has declined in each reporting period as Twitter claims its technologies are preventing pro-terrorism accounts from spreading content in the first place. Even during the reporting for this story, we’ve even seen account after account get suspended off the site by Twitter. But around one-quarter of accounts that are eventually caught are still able to tweet at least once, it says.

Twitter knows it has a problem. But with other companies as much at fault, neither they — nor the social media giant — appears to have a way to fix it.

Tesla is starting out 2019 in the red following news it missed Wall Street’s delivery estimates. The company said in a letter to investors that it delivered 90,700 vehicles during the fourth quarter. That’s a bit shy of what analysts expected. This, in part, caused the company’s stock to open nearly 8 percent down on the day.

Tesla stock price is down 10 percent as of publication.

The company also announced before the bell that it is cutting $2,000 off the price of a Model S, Model X and Model 3. This is likely in response to the sunsetting of the $7,500 federal tax credit that helped offset the price of Tesla’s vehicles. Starting on January 1, that tax credit is now worth only $3,750.

In the last few days of 2018, Tesla made a large push to get buyers into vehicles to take advantage of the original tax credit. It even kept 44 Tesla showrooms open on New Year’s Eve until midnight to give buyers as much time as possible.

Tesla managed to increase the amount of vehicles it delivered during the last quarter, increasing the amount by 8 percent. In a letter to investors, the company said it delivered 13,500 Model S sedans, 14,050 Model X SUVs and 63,150 Model 3s. It was a record quarter for Tesla, but the numbers still fell short of what Wall Street expected, according to research firm, FactSet.

The company is facing headwinds as it attempts to scale production and fight off an increasing amount of competitors in its space.

The Roku Channel — Roku’s home to free, ad-supported content like movies, TV, sports and news — is expanding to include subscriptions. Essentially Roku’s own take on Amazon’s Prime Video Channels, users can now opt to add some 25 premium video subscriptions within the Roku Channel, centralizing their access to streaming services in one destination that will become more personalized over time.

At launch, consumers will be able to opt to add-on subscriptions from premium networks including Showtime, Starz, EPIX, CuriosityStream, Noggin, Baeble Music, CollegeHumor’s Dropout, Hopster, Magnolia Selects, FitFusion, Smithsonian Channel Plus, Tastemade, Viewster Anime, The Great Courses Signature Collection, MHz Choice and others.

Offering a centralized place to subscribe to paid content is a fairly significant change for Roku’s platform, where, historically, viewers would download and add apps (“channels,” in Roku’s lingo) to their Roku homepage for each service they wanted to watch. Some of those channels require subscriptions, like Netflix and Hulu, while others offer free content.

Roku in fall 2017 began to aggregate the free content from the various channels across its platform in its own Roku Channel, and combined that with content it licensed directly from studios. The Roku Channel initially featured free, ad-supported movies, giving Roku a way to further grow its advertising revenues.

Over the past year, The Roku Channel expanded to include news, sports, TV shows and other entertainment offerings both from traditional studios and digital networks. This pushed the channel to become one of the top five most-watched across the Roku platform.

Now, instead of being only a home to free content, The Roku Channel is working with video partners to offer an alternative way to watch their programming.

“We’ve been focused on ad-supported content and will continue to have a very robust offering there. But there’s lots of great content that’s available only in subscription services,” explained Roku’s vice president of Programming, Rob Holmes, as to why Roku wanted to introduce paid subscriptions. “We also wanted to try to improve the user experience in a lot of the same way that we did with the launch of The Roku Channel around ad-supported content,” he said. 

When you enter The Roku Channel, you’ll be able to explore the premium subscription content before making a decision as to whether or not you want to sign up. That’s a better experience than offered by some subscription apps today, where you’re presented only with a splash screen that directs you to sign up to see the content or offer a very limited view of their programming.

If you choose to subscribe to a premium network via the Roku Channel, you can use the payment card that’s already on file with Roku. Basically, you click a button and then confirm the subscription (in case you clicked by accidentally sitting on the remote), and then you’re signed up.

This method makes it easier to add and remove subscriptions, for those who follow individual shows and want to turn their subscription on and off, timed with the release of new seasons.

The subscriptions also support seven-day free trials, trial expiration reminders and are billed together on a single statement from Roku monthly.

Also of note, when you subscribe to networks through the Roku Channel, you’ll no longer have to download the network’s standalone Roku app to watch. Instead, your subscriptions will get their own area inside The Roku Channel, making it more of a one-stop shop for your streaming services.

The networks will be shown both in The Roku Channel’s homepage and they’ll each get their own tab in the channel, too.

In fact, you currently cannot choose to watch in the network’s standalone Roku app, we understand. Over time, some networks will offer authentication for Roku Channel subscribers, but that’s not the case at launch.

Of course, this begs the question — if you can’t authenticate with the network provider, does that mean you won’t be able to watch the channel’s content, except on a Roku device?

As it turns out, you can.

Alongside the launch of channel subscriptions, The Roku Channel’s mobile app is being updated to support video playback. That means you can watch The Roku Channel content, including subscriptions, on your smartphone or tablet, as well as on the web and on your TV.

Over time, Roku’s plan is to better personalize your subscriptions and recommendations. That means the shows you actively watch will be presented in the front of the queue, and Roku will be able to recommend content across services, based on viewing behavior.

Roku says it will add more partners to The Roku Channel over time. However, many providers will not participate because they want to own the experience, end-to-end with their customers. They also may not want to share a cut of subscription revenue with Roku, as is required today to be promoted as a subscription add-on within The Roku Channel.

For the time being, Roku doesn’t plan on expanding from premium subscriptions to offer some sort of core package of subscription programming the way live TV services like Sling TV or YouTube TV now do.

“I think where we are today is really focused on these à la carte subscriptions,” Holmes said. “Ultimately, from a user standpoint, there’s a lot of value in being able to pick and choose exactly what you want to sign up for — without having to sign up for one of these base packages to start with. That’s how we think about it today.”

Support for subscriptions will begin to roll out to The Roku Channel starting later this month and will complete the phased rollout by early 2019. The new mobile app will launch in late January, as well.