Author: azeeadmin

It’s hard to be a fan of Twitter right now. The company is sticking up for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, when nearly all other platforms have given him the boot, it’s overrun with bots, and now it’s breaking users’ favorite third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific by shutting off APIs these apps relied on. Worse still, is that Twitter isn’t taking full responsibility for its decisions.

In a company email it shared today, Twitter cited “technical and business constraints” that it can no longer ignore as being the reason behind the APIs’ shutdown.

It said the clients relied on “legacy technology” that was still in a “beta state” after more than 9 years, and had to be killed “out of operational necessity.”

This reads like passing the buck. Big time.

It’s not as if there’s some other mysterious force that maintains Twitter’s API platform, and now poor ol’ Twitter is forced to shut down old technology because there’s simply no other recourse. No.

Twitter, in fact, is the one responsible for its User Streams and Site Streams APIs – the APIs that serve the core functions of these now deprecated third-party Twitter clients. Twitter is the reason these APIs have been stuck in a beta state for nearly a decade. Twitter is the one that decided not to invest in supporting those legacy APIs, or shift them over to its new API platform.

And Twitter is the one that decided to give up on some of its oldest and most avid fans – the power users and the developer community that met their needs – in hopes of shifting everyone over to its own first-party clients instead.

The company even refused to acknowledge how important these users and developers have been to its community over the years, by citing the fact that the APIs it’s terminating – the ones that power Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Tweetings and Talon – are only used by “less than 1%” of Twitter developers. Burn! 

Way to kick a guy when he’s already down, Twitter.

But just because a community is small in numbers, does not mean its voice is not powerful or its influence is not felt.

Hence, the #BreakingMyTwitter hashtag, which Twitter claims to be watching “quite often.”

The one where users are reminding Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about that time he apologized to Twitter developers for not listening to them, and acknowledged the fact they made Twitter what it is today. The time when he promised to do better.

This is…not better:

The company’s email also says it hopes to eventually learn “why people hire 3rd party clients over our own apps.”

Its own apps?

Oh, you mean like TweetDeck, the app Twitter acquired then shut down on Android, iPhone and Windows? The one it generally acted like it forgot it owned? Or maybe you mean Twitter for Mac (previously Tweetie, before its acquisition), the app it shut down this year, telling Mac users to just use the web instead? Or nearly maybe you mean the nearly full slate of TV apps that Twitter decided no longer needed to exist?

And Twitter wonders why users don’t want to use its own clients?

Or perhaps, users want a consistent experience – one that doesn’t involve a million inconsequential product changes like turning stars to hearts or changing the character counter to a circle. Maybe they appreciate the fact that the third parties seem to understand what Twitter is better than Twitter itself does: Twitter has always been about a real-time stream of information. It’s not meant to be another Facebook-style algorithmic News Feed. The third-party clients respect that. Twitter does not.

Yesterday, the makers of Twitterific spoke to the API changes, noting that its app would no longer be able to stream tweets, send native push notifications, or be able to update its Today view, and that new tweets and DMs will be delayed.

It recommended users download Twitter’s official mobile app for notifications going forward.

In other words, while Twitterific will hang around in its broken state, its customers will now have to run two Twitter apps on their device – the official one to get their notifications, and the other because they prefer the experience.

A guide to using Twitter’s app for notifications, from Iconfactory

“We understand why Twitter feels the need to update its API endpoints,” explains Iconfactory co-founder Ged Maheux, whose company makes Twitterrific. “The spread of bots, spam and trolls by bad actors that exploit their systems is bad for the entire Twitterverse, we just wish they had offered an affordable way forward for the developers of smaller, third party apps like ours.”

“Apps like the Iconfactory’s Twitterrific helped build Twitter’s brand, feature sets and even its terminology into what it is today. Our contributions were small to be sure, but real nonetheless. To be priced out of the future of Twitter after all of our history together is a tough pill to swallow for all of us,” he added.

The question many users are now facing is what to do next?

Continue to use now broken third-party apps? Move to an open platform like Mastodon? Switch to Twitter’s own clients, as it wants, where it plans to “experiment with showing alternative viewpoints” to pop people’s echo chambers…on a service that refuses to kick out people like Alex Jones?

Or maybe it’s time to admit the open forum for everything that Twitter – and social media, really – has promised is failing? Maybe it’s time to close the apps – third-party and otherwise. Maybe it’s time to go dark. Get off the feeds. Take a break. Move on.

The full email from Twitter is below:

Hi team,

Today, we’re publishing a blog post about our priorities for where we’re investing today in Twitter client experiences. I wanted to share some more with you about how we reached these decisions, and how we’re thinking about 3rd party clients specifically.

First, some history:

3rd party clients have had a notable impact on the Twitter service and the products we build. Independent developers built the first Twitter client for Mac and the first native app for iPhone. These clients pioneered product features we all know and love about Twitter, like mute, the pull-to-refresh gesture, and more.

We love that developers build experiences on our APIs to push our service, technology, and the public conversation forward. We deeply respect the time, energy, and passion they’ve put into building amazing things using Twitter.

But we haven’t always done a good job of being straightforward with developers about the decisions we make regarding 3rd party clients. In 2011, we told developers (in an email) not to build apps that mimic the core Twitter experience. In 2012, we announced changes to our developer policies intended to make these limitations clearer by capping the number of users allowed for a 3rd party client. And, in the years following those announcements, we’ve told developers repeatedly that our roadmap for our APIs does not prioritize client use cases — even as we’ve continued to maintain a couple specific APIs used heavily by these clients and quietly granted user cap exceptions to the clients that needed them.

It is now time to make the hard decision to end support for these legacy APIs — acknowledging that some aspects of these apps would be degraded as a result. Today, we are facing technical and business constraints we can’t ignore. The User Streams and Site Streams APIs that serve core functions of many of these clients have been in a “beta” state for more than 9 years, and are built on a technology stack we no longer support. We’re not changing our rules, or setting out to “kill” 3rd party clients; but we are killing, out of operational necessity, some of the legacy APIs that power some features of those clients. And it has not been a realistic option for us today to invest in building a totally new service to replace these APIs, which are used by less than 1% of Twitter developers.

We’ve heard the feedback from our customers about the pain this causes. We check out #BreakingMyTwitter quite often and have spoken with many of the developers of major 3rd party clients to understand their needs and concerns. We’re committed to understanding why people hire 3rd party clients over our own apps. And we’re going to try to do better with communicating these changes honestly and clearly to developers. We have a lot of work to do. This change is a hard, but important step, towards doing it. Thank you for working with us to get there.

Thanks,

Rob

Hot on the heels of the wonderful NES.party comes Haukur Rosinkranz’s SNES.party, a site that lets you play Super Nintendo with all your buds.

Rosinkranz is Icelandic but lives in Berlin now. He made NES.party a year ago while experimenting with WebRTC and WebSockets and he updated his software to support the SNES.

“The reason I made it was simply because I discovered how advanced the RTC implementation in Chrome had become and wanted to do something with it,” he said. “When I discovered that it’s possible to take a video element and stream it over the network I just knew I had to do something cool with this and I came up with the idea of streaming emulators.”

He said it took him six months to build the app and a month to add NES support.

“It’s hard to say how long it took because I basically created my own framework for web applications that need realtime communication between one or more participants,” he said. He is a freelance programmer.

It’s a clever hack that could add a little fun to your otherwise dismal day. Feel like a little Link to the Past? Pop over here and let’s play!

We have long known that the price of cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive have been getting cheaper over time. Yesterday’s launch of Google One in the U.S. dropped the price for Google storage even further, cutting the cost per terabyte per month in half, driving this point home even more clearly.

As Frederic Lardinois pointed out in his post, 2 terabytes of storage now costs $9.99 a month. Consider that without joining Google One, that was the same price for 1 terabyte of storage. By signing up for Google One, you could double your storage without paying one penny more, and let’s face it this was a ton of storage before the change.

Let’s compare that with some of the other players out there. Each one is a little different, but the storage costs tell a story.

Google One’s shift to 2 TB for $9.99 a month puts it in line with Apple’s pricing, which surprisingly had given you the most storage bang for your buck out of these four companies before Google One came along. Who would have thought that Apple was giving its users the best price on anything? Of course, you get access to Office 365, including Word and PowerPoint, with your terabyte of Microsoft OneDrive storage, which is going to add a fair bit of value for many users over and above the pure storage being offered.

Regardless, if you consider Apple and Google’s pricing, the price of a terabyte of cloud storage has dropped to $5.00 a month. That’s pretty darn cheap and it shows just how commoditized online storage has become and how much scale you require to make money.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst at Deep Analysis, who has been watching this space for years says that consumer cloud storage pricing has always been a race to the bottom. “You can only make a margin with mass scale. That’s why firms who are not Microsoft, Amazon or Google are pushing hard for business and enterprise customers. Google One just brings that message home,” he said.

If you get enough scale, as Dropbox has with an estimated 500 million users, if you can get a percentage to pay $8.25 a month for a terabyte of storage, it can add up to real money. When Dropbox filed its S-1 to before it went public earlier this year, it reported more than $1 billion in consumer revenue. It would be difficult if not impossible for a startup launching today to compete with the existing players, but the ones out there continue to compete with one another, driving the cost down even further.

Today’s announcement is just another step in that downward price pressure of consumer cloud storage, and when you get double the storage from one day to the next for the exact same price, it shows just how true that it is.

We have long known that the price of cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive have been getting cheaper over time. Yesterday’s launch of Google One in the U.S. dropped the price for Google storage even further, cutting the cost per terabyte per month in half, driving this point home even more clearly.

As Frederic Lardinois pointed out in his post, 2 terabytes of storage now costs $9.99 a month. Consider that without joining Google One, that was the same price for 1 terabyte of storage. By signing up for Google One, you could double your storage without paying one penny more, and let’s face it this was a ton of storage before the change.

Let’s compare that with some of the other players out there. Each one is a little different, but the storage costs tell a story.

Google One’s shift to 2 TB for $9.99 a month puts it in line with Apple’s pricing, which surprisingly had given you the most storage bang for your buck out of these four companies before Google One came along. Who would have thought that Apple was giving its users the best price on anything? Of course, you get access to Office 365, including Word and PowerPoint, with your terabyte of Microsoft OneDrive storage, which is going to add a fair bit of value for many users over and above the pure storage being offered.

Regardless, if you consider Apple and Google’s pricing, the price of a terabyte of cloud storage has dropped to $5.00 a month. That’s pretty darn cheap and it shows just how commoditized online storage has become and how much scale you require to make money.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst at Deep Analysis, who has been watching this space for years says that consumer cloud storage pricing has always been a race to the bottom. “You can only make a margin with mass scale. That’s why firms who are not Microsoft, Amazon or Google are pushing hard for business and enterprise customers. Google One just brings that message home,” he said.

If you get enough scale, as Dropbox has with an estimated 500 million users, if you can get a percentage to pay $8.25 a month for a terabyte of storage, it can add up to real money. When Dropbox filed its S-1 to before it went public earlier this year, it reported more than $1 billion in consumer revenue. It would be difficult if not impossible for a startup launching today to compete with the existing players, but the ones out there continue to compete with one another, driving the cost down even further.

Today’s announcement is just another step in that downward price pressure of consumer cloud storage, and when you get double the storage from one day to the next for the exact same price, it shows just how true that it is.

When Cisco bought Ann Arbor, Michigan security company, Duo for a whopping $2.35 billion earlier this month, it showed the growing value of security and security startups in the view of traditional tech companies like Cisco.

In yesterday’s earnings report, even before the ink had dried on the Duo acquisition contract, Cisco was reporting that its security business grew 12 percent year over year to $627 million. Given those numbers, the acquisition was top of mind in CEO Chuck Robbins’ comments to analysts.

“We recently announced our intent to acquire Duo Security to extend our intent-based networking portfolio into multi- cloud environments. Duo’s SaaS delivered solution will expand our cloud security capabilities to help enable any user on any device to securely connect to any application on any network,” he told analysts.

Indeed, security is going to continue to take center stage moving forward. “Security continues to be our customers number one concern and it is a top priority for us. Our strategy is to simplify and increase security efficacy through an architectural approach with products that work together and share analytics and actionable threat intelligence,” Robbins said.

That fits neatly with the Duo acquisition, whose guiding philosophy has been to simplify security. It is perhaps best known for its two-factor authentication tool. Often companies send a text with a code number to your phone after you change a password to prove it’s you, but even that method has proven vulnerable to attack.

What Duo does is send a message through its app to your phone asking if you are trying to sign on. You can approve if it’s you or deny if it’s not, and if you can’t get the message for some reason you can call instead to get approval. It can also verify the health of the app before granting access to a user. It’s a fairly painless and secure way to implement two-factor authentication, while making sure employees keep their software up-to-date.

While Cisco’s security revenue accounted for a fraction of the company’s overall $12.8 billion for the quarter, the company clearly sees security as an area that could continue to grow.

Cisco hasn’t been shy about using its substantial cash holdings to expand in areas like security beyond pure networking hardware to provide a more diverse recurring revenue stream. The company currently has over $54 billion in cash on hand, according to Y Charts.

Cisco spent a fair amount money on Duo, which according to reports has $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a number that is expected to continue to grow substantially. It had raised over $121 million in venture investment since inception. In its last funding round in September 2017, the company raised $70 million on a valuation of $1.19 billion.

The acquisition price ended up more than doubling that valuation. That could be because it’s a security company with recurring revenue, and Cisco clearly wanted it badly as another piece in its security solutions portfolio, one it hopes can help keep pushing that security revenue needle ever higher.

Arm, the company that designs the chips that power virtually every smartphone and IoT device, published its roadmap for the next two years today. That’s the first time Arm has done so and the reason for this move, it seems, is that the company wants to highlight its ambitions to get its chips into laptops.

So far, Arm-based laptops are far and in-between, though Microsoft recently made a major move in this direction thanks to its push for always connected Windows laptops. While that sounds great in theory, with laptops that only need a single charge to run all day, there’s still a performance penalty to pay compared to using an x86 chip. Arm says that gap is closing quockly, though, while offering a better performance/battery life balance.

Indeed, Ian Smythe, Arm’s senior director of its marketing programs, doesn’t shy away from comparing the next generations of its architectures with Intel’s mid-tier Core i5 processors.

“I think it’s clear that we’re on a transformative path,” Smythe said during a press conference ahead of today’s announcement. “It’s a compute journey that is changing the way that computers are able to be delivered in large screen form factor devices. And our vision is very much around how we’re going to be driving laptop performance from that mobile innovation base and how we’re going to be working with foundry partners to deliver that performance in today’s and tomorrow’s leading processes.”

So what does Arm’s roadmap look like? The details are still quite sparse, but this year, the company will deliver its Cortex-A76 architecture that its partners will likely build using both 10nm and 7nm processes. Next year, it’ll launch its Deimos CPUs, which will most likely all be built using 7nm processes. Come 2020, it’ll launch its Hercules processors for both 7nm and 5nm processes.

In terms of raw compute performance, the A76 can compete with some Intel i5 chips and Arm promises less than 5W TDP. Raw compute power based on a single benchmark isn’t all there is to making a computer run smoothly, of course, but this signals Arm’s ambitions (and those of its partners) in competing for the laptop market — while at the same time making smartphones far more powerful, too.

Can Arm-based processors really make a dent in the laptop market, though? Smythe surely thinks so. ‘I think with every disruption we created an opportunity,” he said. “That toehold [in the laptop market] can grow when you can demonstrate the benefits. I think that with the first Windows on Arm devices we’re sharing that capability and as we move towards Cortex A76-based devices and beyond, I think that capability and disruption offers opportunity beyond where we are today.”

Bark, the company behind the BarkBox subscription for dog treats and toys, is planning to open what it calls its first BarkPark in Nashville.

It sounds like the goal is to create a space that combines a dog park with a coffee shop or other hangout spot for humans.

“I was out with friends, we’re drinking wine, it’s a really cool restaurant … it was like a poster for people having a good time in the city,” said Bark co-founder Henrik Werdelin said in a company blog post. “But my dog Molly was left out. And I realized: she deserves a space like this. We should be here together.”

At BarkPark, dogs will be able to play off-leash, and also try out Bark toys and treats (a selection will also be available for purchase). Their owners, meanwhile, will get free WiFi, access to a little coffee shop and the ability to ask questions of Bark staff.

Plus, both the dog and their owners will be able to attend weekly dog-friendly programming, like live music and beer tastings.

Day passes cost $19, and you can also buy four-week ($49) or seasonal ($78) passes. The memberships are designed to be dog-centric — while you (the human) will presumably be paying the bill, your dog is the actual BarkPark member, and can be accompanied by any two humans. So if you’re out of town, you don’t need to worry about getting access for, say, your dogwalker or dogsitter.

Bark is currently building out the Nashville BarkPark location (which is why all the illustrations in this story are either renderings or sketches), with plans to open on September 8. And while the company is treating this as a three-month pop up initially, with BarkPark closing for the winter on November 18, the idea could be extended in Nashville and expanded elsewhere.

Why start in Nashville? While the city has many virtues, Bark said it was ultimately because it’s “ahead of the curve” as a pet-friendly city.

“There’s a fast-growing population of modern dog parents who want to take their dogs everywhere – they’re totally obsessed! – which perfectly describes our vision for BarkPark’s membership,” the company said.

Self-driving car startup Nuro is ready to put autonomous vehicles on the road in partnership with Kroger to deliver groceries in Scottsdale, Arizona. This comes a couple of months after Nuro and Kroger announced their partnership to offer same-day deliveries.

This pilot will serve a single Fry’s Food and Drug location in Scottsdale starting today. Customers can shop for groceries and place either same- or next-day delivery orders via the grocer’s website or mobile app. There’s no minimum order but there is a flat delivery fee of $5.95.

“We’re proud to contribute and turn our vision for local commerce into a real, accessible service that residents of Scottsdale can use immediately,” Nuro CEO Dave Ferguson said in a statement. “Our goal is to save people time, while operating safely and learning how we can further improve the experience.”

Nuro’s intent is to use its self-driving technology in the last mile for the delivery of local goods and services. That could be things like groceries, dry cleaning, an item you left at a friend’s house or really anything within city limits that can fit inside one of Nuro’s vehicles. Nuro has two compartments that can fit up to six grocery bags each. 

In Scottsdale, however, Nuro will initially use Toyota Prius cars before introducing its custom self-driving vehicles. That’s because the main purpose of this pilot is to learn, and using the Prius self-driving fleet can help to accelerate those learnings, a Nuro spokesperson told TechCrunch.

“The Priuses share many software and hardware systems with the R1 custom vehicle, so while we compete final certification and testing of the R1, the Prius will begin delivering groceries and help us improve the overall service and customer experience,” the spokesperson said.

When it came to going to market, Ferguson previously told me groceries were most exciting to him. And Kroger particularly stood out because of its smart shelf technology and partnership with Ocado around automated fulfillment centers.

“With the pilot, we’re excited about getting more experience interacting with real customers and understanding exactly what they want,” Ferguson told me. “The things they love about it, the things they don’t love as much. As an organization for us, it’s also very valuable for us to have to exercise our operational muscle.”

Throughout the pilot program, Nuro will be looking to see how accurate its estimated delivery times are, how the public reacts to the vehicles and how regular, basic cars interact with self-driving ones.

Pantera Capital, which has made its mark in recent years by investing early and often in a wide variety of digital assets, is looking to raise up to $175 million for its third venture fund — an enormous jump from the $25 million it deployed for its second venture fund and its $13 million debut venture fund, which it closed in 2013.

Firm partner Paul Veradittakit says the target amount is a “function of how fast the space is moving, the talent coming in, the opportunities, and the sizing of rounds. With more interesting later-stage investments [on our radar], too, we want to be flexible and able to move with the market.”

Whether the firm closes with $175 million or another number is an open question. A newly processed SEC filing shows it has so far rounded up more than $71 million in capital commitments from 90 investors, an amount that Veradittakit calls a “first close.”

Certainly, Pantera is accustomed to managing meaningful sums of money. In addition to its venture funds, which are structured like most traditional venture funds — they feature a 10-year investing period, similar economics, and involve good old-fashioned checks to startups in exchange for some amount of equity — the firm is also juggling three other strategies.

As we reported last year, one of its newest funds is a hedge fund that’s focused exclusively on initial coin offerings. As firm founder Dan Morehead told us at the time, Pantera buys pre-sale ICOs, “basically getting a discount to the ICO price by getting in early, when it’s just a team and a white paper.” Meanwhile, Morehead had added, “We help provide the right connections, whether in terms of marketing or recruiting or business development.

The vehicle is evergreen, says Veradittakit, meaning it has an indefinite fund life that lets investors come and go.

The other two other funds that Pantera currently oversees are also structured like hedge funds. One is a Bitcoin fund that has attracted plenty of investors over the years, and returned a lot to them, too, according to the calculations of Morehead. In fact, he wrote two weeks ago that the fund, launched five years ago, has enjoyed a lifetime return of 10,136.15 percent net of fees and expenses.

The very last fund invests in cryptocurrencies that are already trading on exchanges — an approach that includes machine learning to algorithmically invest in crypotcurrencies, as well as allows for some discretionary input by Pantera’s top brass, which includes Morehead, Veradittakit, and Joey Krug, who joined Pantera last year after cofounding the market forecasting startup Augur. (It went on to orchestrate the first ICO on the ethereum network.)

Explains Veradittakit of this last pool, it’s for “if you are’t sure that Bitcoin will remain the dominant cryptocurrency, or you’re interested in other use cases that may arise, or you just want to build a diversified portfolio of assets that have asymmetrical returns as bitcoin, or maybe return even more because they feature lower valuations.”

In some ways, the venture efforts of Pantera —   which employs 38 people altogether in San Francisco and Menlo Park, Ca. —  may be its most challenging given the nature of VC. Investors in the asset class are typically willing to wait a handful of years for a firm to produce returns; in Pantera’s case, because it is betting exclusively on ventures, tokens, and projects related to blockchain tech, digital currency, and crypto assets, some of those returns could potentially take even longer.

Veradittakit doesn’t sound concerned. Rattling off some of Pantera’s venture investments to date, including in BitStamp, Xapo, Ripple, and Circle, not to mention more recent investments in Chain, Abra, Veem Polychain, and Z Cash, he sounds more like a proud parent. Pantera has invested in “lots of wallets and exchanges focused around the world, in Coinbases of different geographies, in enterprise-related blockchain companies. More recently, we’ve funded everything from big data to decentralized application platforms.”

It’s still very early days, he acknowledges. But “in terms of returns, there will be companies that create something completely disruptive. There will be M&A [opportunities] more often and that [come together] more quickly than other companies.”

If everything goes as planned, Pantera will be there when they do, and it will have more resources to deploy than ever.

Messaging company Line is continuing to burrow deep into the crypto space after it announced the launch of a $10 million investment fund.

The fund will be operated by Line’s Korea-based blockchain subsidiary Unblock Corporation, which is tasked with research, education and other blockchain-related services. The fund will be called Unblock Ventures and it’ll initially have a capital pool of $10 million but Line said that is likely to increase over time.

The company said the fund will be focused on early-stage startup investments, but it didn’t provide further details.

Line is listed in Tokyo and on the NYSE. This fund makes it one of the first publicly traded companies to create a dedicated crypto investment vehicle. The objective, it said, is “to boost the development and adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.”

Line claims nearly 200 million users of its messaging app, which is particularly popular in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. The company also offers a range of connected services that include payment, social games, ride-hailing, food delivery and more.

This marks Line’s second major crypto move this year following the launch of its BitBox exchange last month. It isn’t available in the U.S. or Japan right now but Line envisages closes ties with its messaging service and other features further down the line.

These moves into crypto come despite some serious downturn in the valuation of the space this year following record highs in January which saw the value of one Bitcoin touch nearly $20,000 and Ethereum, among others, surged. In the months since then, however, many cryptocurrencies have seen their valuations decline. This week, Ethereum dropped below $300 in what is its first major price crisis. Bitcoin has, for many years, risen and fallen although January’s valuations took the extremes to a new level.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.