ChangeTip Wants To Kill Clickbait With Social Bitcoin Micropayments

ChangeTip is hoping to drive mass adoption of micropayments on the web by using Bitcoin plus existing social networks as the medium to deliver feeless micro donations to content creators. Which means part of its mission is “to spell the end of clickbait“. And that’s something anyone who spends time online should really be rooting for.
Those who want a better business model for online content, i.e. one that isn’t based on increasingly invasive surveillance and increasingly insidious advertising, have long held up the hope that micropayments could power an alternative rewards-based system, where the cumulative act of lots of users donating small amounts to the services they use and love adds up to something substantial. It’s a great idea in principle but in practice there are ongoing barriers to creating a web powered by micropayments — transaction fees being one of the biggest.
The closest we’ve yet come to a functioning, mass adopted micropayment model is arguably app stores, where the mobile device user has attached their payment credentials to their device account or carrier — allowing them to purchase apps for small amounts of money with a few clicks. But that only works within a particular walled garden, be it Apple’s or Google’s. Appreciating content all over the web regardless of device used or OS favoured is more difficult.
There are startups trying to tackle this problem, such as, for instance, social micropayments service Flattr. But Flattr still involves a 10% cut creamed off your donations. Which, when you’re talking small amounts in the first place, is rather a large proportion of your tip not going where you’d like it to. Because it’s using Bitcoin as the donation medium, ChangeTip can offer micropayments that don’t come with a fee-shaped chunk cut out.
On the ease of use front, ChangeTip’s tipping system works by mentioning the person you want to tip in a tweet or other public social missive (the service currently supports tipping on Twitter, StockTwits, Reddit, GitHub, YouTube, Google Plus and Tumblr), the amount you want to tip them (which can also be a generic term like ‘beer’ — which ChangeTip has assigned a dollar value to) and that’s it. ChangeTip handles the transaction and the creation of the Bitcoin wallet when the tip collector logs in to pick up a tip. Tips that aren’t claimed are returned to the sender within seven days.

“We’re building a micropayment infrastructure for the web. Micropayments have been talked about for a long time, clear back to [this] in 1999. Digital currencies like Bitcoin make now the right time because they have low transaction fees, they allow for pseudonymity, and they act as currency neutralizers,” says founder Nick Sullivan, a serial entrepreneur with an engineering background and an interest in Bitcoin (he’s an active partner in the largest Bitcoin syndicate on AngelList).
“ChangeTip aims to help drive the mass consumer adoption of Bitcoin by creating a micro transaction platform for the web. Circle, Coinbase, Bitpay and others are working on the on-ramps and off-ramps, we are building out the tools to move money around online on the main highway of the Internet: social media.”
ChangeTip works by transacting tips off-blockchain — until the point when any money is actually deposited or withdrawn.
“We’ve built an off-blockchain ledger, which makes sending and receiving tips free and instant. We only do a Bitcoin transaction when you deposit or withdraw funds. The analogy here is that you wouldn’t have a gambling site do a credit card transaction for every blackjack hand, only when you sit down and leave the table. And of course our users don’t have to worry about the particulars of the tip transactions themselves. We’ve built out an extensive set of social network integrations, where we monitor for mentions of @changetip and then react with a set of robots that parse the tip, notify the recipient, and perform the transaction.”
In terms of rivals, Sullivan identifies DogeTip as most similar but notes that that service only works with the DogeCoin cryptocurrency, making it even more crypto-fringe than Bitcoin.

He also argues that ChangeTip’s focus on “enabling a new set of behaviors” sets it apart from others in the space. “Bitcoin tips are sent instantly and without a fee, allowing for micro-payments of less than a penny. This effectively changes the concept of a ‘share’ or ‘like’ into financial appreciation, which can quickly add up to substantial amounts of money,” he adds. “Once you’ve become the easiest way to move money around online, there are a lot of interesting use cases.”
Among the potential use-cases Sullivan envisages for ChangeTip are tipping on Quora for “high quality, thoughtful answers” — so perhaps micropayments could fix bad comments and tame trolls too? (Here’s hoping…); donating to content creators on services such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Instagram to reward quality; viewing blogs ad-free for 30-days by donating directly to the blogger; skipping pre-roll ads on YouTube by paying a tenth of a penny per video watched; social gifting to friends and family; and rewarding a Github user who contributes a patch that fixes your problem.
ChangeTip launched its service back in February, with support for Twitter, StockTwits, Reddit and GitHub, adding YouTube, Google Plus and Tumblr earlier this month. In terms of usage, it’s got “tens of thousands of users” so far who have linked their social media accounts to ChangeTip and sent “tens of thousands of dollars worth of tips”. The startup itself has raised $750,000 in funding to date from what Sullivan terms “strategic angels” — i.e. who have expertise in payments, fin-tech, bitcoin and the consumer web. ChangeTip investors include Gil Penchina, Howard Lindzon, Brock Pierce and Adam Nash.
In terms of its own business model — given that it’s not taking a cut of tips — Sullivan takes a big picture view, seeing potential for the ChangeTip micropayment infrastructure to both disrupt existing large players on the web and create new revenue streams based on encouraging new behaviors.
“In the former category, PayPal, Western Union, and Visa/MC for person-to-person payments. In the latter, disrupting the online advertising ecosystem sounds fun. We would love to spell the end of clickbait,” he says, adding: “We call ourselves a Love Button for the Internet. We aim to revolutionize appreciation and giving. Our hope is that these small tokens will add up to a fundamental change in the quality of content that is available and prevalent on the web.”
To make that grand vision happen ChangeTip is going to need other startups and businsses in the Bitcoin ecosystem to flourish in tandem, to act as additional emollient to grease the wheels of its vision of easy-peasy micropayments. Safe to say, there is not much about Bitcoin that has been easy to date.
One big blocker to ChangeTip adoption — beyond the huge shift in online mindset that currently says content must be free — is that tippers still need to buy some Bitcoin to tip, and those who receive tips will probably want to exchange their tips for fiat currency so they can actually buy that beer they’ve been tipped (unless they find a watering hole that accepts Bitcoin).
“You’re right to point out that the process of buying and selling Bitcoin is still non-trivial,” adds Sullivan. “Circle, Coinbase, and others are working hard with well-funded companies to solve that problem, and they are making great progress. We’re watching their progress closely and integrating where we can. We are also exploring other options for making it easier for ChangeTip users to top up their wallet, such as with a credit card or ACH.”
But the idea of the tipping going on regardless of whether a tip receiver has a Bitcoin wallet yet is one way to encourage people to think different — i.e. if they get to see ChangeTips flowing around their social media sites, they can start to imagine what online life would be like if more people got involved with micro donations for great content.
Shifting attitudes — and online business models — is the core change referenced in ChangeTip’s name. So the strategy they’re going for amounts to let the social tips flow for micropayments to grow. I for one will be watching keenly to see whether they can build momentum.

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Twitter Is Suspending Accounts For Sharing Beheading Images And Videos

Tweet a graphic image relating to a video allegedly showing the beheading of photojournalist James Wright Foley and risk having your account suspended. The word comes from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo who announced the company’s actions in a tweet on Wednesday morning, several hours after the shocking video appeared on YouTube and suddenly went viral.
Costolo also noted that Twitter has already deleted accounts that shared the images.
This action comes as Twitter users called for a solution to the graphic images suddenly appearing in feeds. Twitter and YouTube users have also called for a media blackout of the beheading video and images, attempting to not give the group behind the horrific act the attention they crave.
Even though it’s the right thing to do, Twitter’s right to remove the content and suspend accounts seems to exist in a gray area within the social network’s rules and terms of service.

Twitter notes in its Abusive Behavior Policy that it “does not screen content and does not remove potentially offensive content unless such content is in violation of the Twitter Rules and Terms of Service.” It also notes: ” Users may not make direct, specific threats of violence against others, including threats against a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, or disability. Targeted abuse or harassment is also a violation of the Twitter Rules and Terms of Service.”
Yet in section four of its Terms of Service, titled Content on the Services, it also notes that “you may be exposed to Content that might be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or otherwise inappropriate, or in some cases, postings that have been mislabeled or are otherwise deceptive.”
Still, even if it’s not specifically mentioned in Twitter’s Rules or Terms of Service, the removal (dare I say censorship?) of the images is the right thing to do.

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Vine Finally Lets You Import Video From Your Camera Roll

With more than 100 million people watching Vines across the web each month, and over 1 billion loops played every day, Vine has just released an update to the app that finally lets users import video from their camera.
Twitter’s video sharing app has always required users to film new content directly within the app, using Vine’s once-unique hold-to-record feature. Now, Vine users can import video that they shot on their phone, or video they downloaded from friends or Dropbox, etc.
This means that slow motion video from the iPhone will now be supported.
When importing videos, users can choose to pull in one full clip, or choose multiple clips to comprise a video that is no longer than six seconds.
Beyond the camera roll import, Vine is also revamping the way that the camera works to offer more precision editing tools, including a button to duplicate a clip and a mute button, to knock out the sound.
The team also added a preview and undo button, which lets you look at the last clip you filmed and gives you the option to undo it.

Both the camera import feature and the ability to delete the last clip shot are available with Instagram Video, which admittedly stole a bit of Vine’s thunder but has yet to reach the same level of creativity or engagement.
Existing features like the Grid view, Ghost (which lets you see a transparent view of the last clip shot; great for the stop-motion/animation artists), and the focus lock can all be found under the Wrench icon, alongside a brand new feature. It’s called Torch view, and it helps Viners get the right shot in low-light settings.
The update is only available for iOS at the moment, but an Android release is currently in the works.

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Startup Marketing And How Emotion Drives Customer Action

Editor’s note: Kobie Fuller is a principal at Accel Partners. 
Put down the calculator and ignore the data for a second. Contrary to popular belief, startup marketing is not all about quantitative metrics and growth hacking. It’s time to start mapping out what creates a connection between you and your customer. Specifically, I am talking about driving customer actions by leveraging human emotion through the art of storytelling.
Humans are intrinsically wired to connect with stories. They connect us to people, ideas, places, products and brands; they help us justify how we spend our money and which brands we champion by substituting promotion with engagement.
Digital media has leveled the marketing playing field – savvy startup marketers can tell compelling stories with equal impact as their larger competitors. Creative, emotion-driven marketing enables any size company to drive product awareness with millions of consumers in real-time. These digital and social direct-to-consumer channels have replaced traditional advertising that once favored larger companies with big budgets.
Many companies know exactly what they do and communicate it well (“we make X app”), but few companies advocate the why ­(“we believe that people should have an easier way to communicate with the people they love”). Eric Holmen, president of marketing automation company Invoca, says, “soliciting an emotional response is an intentional process that leads to buyers who see value and act with urgency (disclosure: Invoca is an Accel-backed company). Too often, startups focus on the tactics rather than the intentional emotions they need to create.”
It is easier to build marketing around the former (what), but storytelling originates in the latter (why). The why enables startups to tap into its product/brand’s intrinsic emotional advantages – like excitement, happiness, or contentment.
In short, startup marketers must tap into the “Story Button” part of the brain; an idea coined by advertising agency Innocean, a partner with Accel portfolio company YuMe on advertising initiatives, and neuroscientist Paul Zak. Through a story, startups connect through emotion-driven marketing, which creates more authentic moments of customer engagement.
Emotion vs. Data
Emotional marketing, however, is the ying to data-driven marketing’s yang. Despite the buzz around growth hacking, today’s most savvy marketers understand that consumers are more experience-driven than ever.
“Because of the abundance of data, there is a lot of focus on data-driven marketing, which is very powerful,” said Craig Elbert, VP of marketing at Bonobos, an e-commerce apparel pioneer. “But numbers will usually only tell you what is happening. To get at the why and create actions, marketers need to ensure they are spending enough time thinking about customer motivations and emotions.”
Elbert hits on an important trend: The most admired brands structure their businesses around meaningful, emotion-driven marketing material that doesn’t feel a whole lot like marketing. In short, great marketers make consumers feel something – fear, gratification, guilt, trust, value, belonging, envy, etc. These feelings, once elicited, drive action.
Companies like Apple, Nike and Virgin America have mastered the art of making customers feel connected to their brands. These companies, along with startups (disclosure: Accel invests in the following) like Atlassian (enterprise), VSCO (photography) and Etsy (marketplace) elicit emotional triggers that build trust, which drives loyalty, which drives brand advocacy, which leads to word-of-mouth growth, which 91 percent of millennials utilize to guide their buying behaviors.

The science behind soliciting an emotional response
Psychologist Robert Plutchik discovered eight basic, primary emotions that guide all behaviors: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, anticipation, anger and disgust. These emotions are product-agnostic, and over time, establish brand-to-consumer relationships that transcend traditional boundaries of engagement.
The question is, which emotions should marketers target, and how do they solicit these emotions? Elbert outlines the following correlations in emotion with user behavior:

• Intrigue and mystery – creates a curiosity that drives initial exploration and clicks; important for advertising and emails
• Desire and aspiration – stokes consideration; helpful for site imagery, product pages and lookbooks
• Urgency and fear – provokes a feeling of missing out, which triggers a purchase
• Surprise and laughter – drives sharing, as seen through April Fool’s Day

“Emotions change the decisions we make by making us more impulsive,” said Kristen Berman, co-founder of Irrational Labs. “Given a person’s impulsive nature, brands can amplify efficiency by not only looking at the metrics and drop-off, but also in thinking about the human emotions at play during each corner of the decision-making process.”
Emotion-driven marketing for the startup
A startup’s brand strategy and messaging should tailor to the core psychological needs, desires and behaviors of any given audience.
If you remember nothing else, remember this: Marketing organizations must incorporate human emotion in all marketing practices, across all marketing channels. For startups, this is even more important as they aim to build early adopter loyalty and a tribal-minded community.

Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary theory of emotion explains that emotions are not only adaptive, but also play an important role both in cognition and behavior. His “wheel of emotions“ diagram (above) illustrates various relationships among emotions. In the world of marketing, this equates to purchasing a product not because of quality, but out of admiration, loyalty or even envy.
For startups, emotion-driven marketing means thinking about how a product or vision supports a broader cause that your community cares about.

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Cloud Storage Is Eating The World Alive

Editor’s note: Alex Teu is the vice president of business development at Oxygen Cloud and odrive.
“Dead man walking.” That is what many in the storage industry are calling IBM’s storage hardware business. But its storage competitors, including EMC or HP, should not be so quick to wave that flag, as they may follow suit before too long. We are already seeing similar trending signs of their downfall.
As you can see, the negative trend spans the industry and does not discriminate.
War of the Giants
The cloud storage war being waged by Amazon, Google and Microsoft has been well publicized, and is resulting in the cost of all cloud infrastructure including storage racing to zero.
As you can see from the graph below, Amazon was the only real game in town for several years, and the price of cloud storage hardly moved the needle. It was only after Microsoft and Google got into the game in 2010 that we saw any real price movements. There were two distinct price battles waged in 2012, with moderate price drops. Earlier this year in March, the gloves came off and the cloud storage prices bottomed out to the current $.024/GB level.

The price points plotted on this graph constitute the standard storage prices listed by the providers. The providers offer different price points for storage based on factors such as region, redundancy and volume tiers.

Where do we go from here? Undoubtedly, to zero. When? Perhaps as soon as this summer or by year end. Will it literally go to zero? Maybe no, maybe yes. If you only had to pay $.001/GB, that works out to $1/TB. Oh yeah, that feels like zero!
Casualty of War
It’s well established that cloud storage is 10X better. It’s more accessible, more secure, elastic, pay-as-you-go.

Today, we are all on mobile devices, work everywhere and generate ever increasing amount of data. Our work and personal lives are set up as the perfect playground for cloud storage.
Now that the cost of cloud storage is near-zero, the business choice to abandon clunky, expensive traditional storage is a no brainer.
Some Not-So-Bold Predictions
For most small businesses and newer companies born in the cloud, the shift to cloud storage is already happening and will be at close to 100 percent in three years.
For larger businesses with existing data centers and lots of existing data, the shift will be slower and take a different path. Most will start with less sensitive data sets. As reflexive concerns like data sovereignty and regulatory compliance give way to convenience and common sense, the transformation will be complete. Within five years, I believe that a majority of enterprises will have at least 50 percent of their data in the cloud.
Zombie Life
No doubt, the traditional storage players will attempt to slow the adoption with the same tired, overplayed FUD, but the train has already left the building. However, this will just be prolonging the inevitable. It will be like the un-dead walking among us. As we’ve seen in the movies, the zombies can now run fast and talk intelligibly. Perhaps the traditional storage players have a fighting chance after all.
Author’s note: The data research for the top graph involved a mix of public announcements, a search of the Internet Archive and efforts from others who attempted to track the price changes such as David Rosenthal. This also involved some guesstimation on my part for some begin and end dates of a price change as I was able to ascertain a price on a given date but was not able to confirm with a public announcement.

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Twitter Pollutes The Timeline

If your Twitter stream is looking a little more crap random than usual there’s a concrete reason for that: Twitter has made a behind-the-scenes change which means it’s algorithmically adulterating the mix of content you see. Not that they’re putting it like that, of course.
The specific change in how your Twitter timeline operates allows for the company to inject additional content into your feed from other users you don’t follow. This is in addition to promoted tweet advertising content — you still get that thrust into your feed too.
Yesterday the company added the following paragraph to a Help Center page which details exactly how far it’s moving the goal posts here:

Additionally, when we identify a Tweet, an account to follow, or other content that’s popular or relevant, we may add it to your timeline. This means you will sometimes see Tweets from accounts you don’t follow. We select each Tweet using a variety of signals, including how popular it is and how people in your network are interacting with it. Our goal is to make your home timeline even more relevant and interesting.

So basically this change means tweets from people you’re not interested in may now show up in your Twitter feed. And judging by the popularity reference, at least some of the content being algorithmically injected is exactly the sort of mainstream trivia that makes Facebook so uninteresting to a large swathe of Twitter users (myself included). And indeed the sort of content that populates Twitter’s Discover feed — aka ‘the feed that no-one reads’. Except now some of that crap is being thrust in front of your eyeballs, mingled with the tweets you did want to read.
Twitter’s focus on popularity as a selection criteria for injecting tweets evidently also means that tweets marked as favorites by other users can now appear in your timeline — a change that has already triggered a backlash of complaints, as noted by an earlier Guardian report.
Here Twitter has spectacularly failed to appreciate that the favorite function is used in multiple ways; not just to signify that a particular piece of content is well liked. Twitter users lean on the function to act as a marker to themselves to read something later or just to bookmark a tweet for later reference. Or as a meta communication to another Twitter user — to silently say the equivalent of ‘thanks’ or ‘noted’ or ‘I saw that’ or ‘yes’ or ‘lol’. And now all those meta communications run the risk of being broadcast to others they weren’t intended for — destroying the layered value of the favorite function.
But presumably that’s what Twitter wants — and this is the company attempting to force the favorite function to become a Facebook-style ‘like’ button so it acts as an individual preference marker that can be tracked and monetized.
Twitter is famous for tweaking its product and doing A/B tests to try out tweaks to see how loudly the Twittersphere squawks in protest — such as when it added thin blue lines to thread conversations, reversing the flow of the timeline in order to make it easier for newcomers to navigate conversations. Those blue lines showed up in Twitter tests before being rolled out to everyone. Other tweaks have been tested and rejected. But don’t get your hopes up; TechCrunch understands this latest ‘injected tweets’ shift is not a trial — it’s a done deal.
This change is also BS. I say that as a long time Twitter user with 21,600+ tweets to my name over six years using the service. If it’s stuff from someone I don’t follow, then — sorry, Twitter — to me that stuff is probably crap. If I wanted to eyeball a stream of populist rubbish I’d be using Facebook. Or, as one of my TC colleagues judiciously put it, “just because something is ‘popular’ does not mean it’s ‘relevant'”.

Twitter declined to answer a series of questions I put to it about this change — including whether it will offer an opt out — saying only that it updated its Help Center yesterday and adding: “We don’t have anything additional to share at this stage.”
The underlying impetus for Twitter polluting users’ timelines with populist content is of course its ongoing need to grow usage of the service. While its latest set of financial results boosted its stock, the company’s share price took a battering in its first two financial reports — diving to a record low in May when a big shareholder lock-in expired.
How do you grow really, really big — big enough to keep the shareholders happy? By running a celebrity-packed bandwagon right down the middle of the road of course. Too bad you’re going to annoy the hell out of long-time users who found value in a service exactly because it took a different path. A small hardcore of loyal users don’t please shareholders.
This injected tweets shift is just the latest in a series of populist moves for Twitter as a publicly traded company. Another mainstream change it foisted on users earlier this year was to automatically push photo previews in users’ timelines — turning a dense 140-character info-stream into something that more closely resembles the multimedia Facebook news feed. After all, pretty pictures catch the mainstream eye.
The photo preview change does at least have an opt out on mobile. But Twitter’s latest populist shift has no direct opt-out within its own products (third-party clients may be able to offer a workaround for a while, until Twitter updates its API) — making a mainstream-flavoured timeline the new world order for the service.
And Twitter one step closer to becoming Facebook.

Update: TechCrunch understands that the feature has so far only been implemented on Twitter’s iOS and Android mobile apps so one way to avoid any algorithmically determined content adulterating your timeline is to use another mobile client, such as Tweetbot, or to use Twitter’s web interface (or another third party web client such as Hootsuite)

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Sony Doesn’t Know Why The PS4 Is Doing Well

Earlier this month, Sony announced that it has already sold 10 million units of its PlayStation 4 game console since its launch last November, a record-setting figure for the company’s hardware. In an interview with Eurogamer published yesterday, Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida admitted that the company doesn’t really know why its console is doing so well in today’s gaming market.
That sounds like a good problem to have. When sales are high, something is working, so why rock the boat, right?
But as Yoshida points out in the interview, not knowing why people are buying its console now could have serious implications on Sony’s strategy going forward. If it turns out that all of the “core” gamers – those who consistently buy the latest releases in series like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto — coincidentally decided to all buy their preferred next-gen console at once, then it’s hard to predict where sales will go from here.
When the core market is satisfied, Sony (and Microsoft) have to focus marketing towards everybody else. Generally speaking, casual gamers:

• Are more price-conscious than hard-core early adopters
• Don’t spend most of their gaming hours playing big-budget, cinematic, “AAA” games
• Don’t have strong ties to a particular console brand, unless their friends do

That audience, in Sony’s nightmare scenario, doesn’t need a new game console in their home this generation. As Yoshida notes:

As soon as we see a great sales number, our instinct tells us we should be concerned about future sales, right? Are we exhausting all the core gamers? If we sell this number of units, there are no more consumers we can sell to. That’s a really terrifying prospect.

If that really is the case, it could have all kinds of implications for the path Sony should take over the next few years: how aggressive it has to be with pricing; which games it tries to negotiate exclusivity deals for; and the kinds of games Sony makes for its own consoles, among other factors.
Of course, Sony’s success over the last year could simply reflect that the company made a console that a whole lot of people, core and non-core gamers alike, think is worth their money. After all, Nintendo’s original Wii launched with similar sales during its first year and went on to sell another ~90 million units over the following seven years; maybe Sony has a similar hit on its hands. But until Sony knows whether the PlayStation 4 really has legs under it, it can’t be sure about its strategy.
It’s important to note that I’m not talking about why the PlayStation 4 is doing well compared to the Xbox One and Wii U. It had some pretty significant advantages over those consoles in its first year: the Xbox One cost $100 more at launch and came with the kind-of-creepy Kinect camera, and Microsoft had trouble explaining some of its decisions regarding DRM to gamers following its announcement at E3 2013; the Wii U is underpowered and doesn’t get many of the third-party games that come out on the PlayStation and Xbox.
Now, those advantages might have stolen some sales from Nintendo and Microsoft. That still doesn’t give Sony much information to base its forward-looking strategy off of, as again, those people buying consoles within the first year of their release are most likely “core” gamers. Their purchases, while making for flashy numbers now, don’t necessarily show us what the next few years are going to look like

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A Second Act For The Internet Of Things

Editor’s note: David Hirsch is co-founder and partner of Metamorphic Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm headquarterd in New York City. Prior to Metamorphic, he spent eight years at Google where he was on the founding team that launched Google’s advertising monetization strategy and execution.
There has been a lot of talk in the venture capital industry about automating the home and leveraging Internet-enabled devices for various functions. The first wave of this was the use of the smartphone as a remote control to manage, for instance, a thermostat. The thermostat then begins to recognize user habits and adapt to them, helping consumers save money.
A lot of people took notice of this first-generation automation capability when Google bought Nest for a whopping $3.2 billion. But this purchase was never about Nest; rather, it was Google’s foray into the next phase of the Internet of Things.
The ability to control the temperature using Nest or to open your garage door using your smartphone falls under first-order IoT applications. The next phase will be two-fold. It will be about connecting Internet-enabled devices in the home, as well as leveraging data to improve people’s lives and the efficiency of their businesses.
Google is already headed in this direction through Nest’s acquisition of Dropcam. Dropcam provides Wi-Fi-connected web cameras, trackers, and cloud-based storage. Having both Nest and Dropcam allows Google to own a whole host of data about your daily habits and adds another piece of hardware in the home that can communicate with Android devices.
Using Nest and Dropcam, consumers can begin to track movements and know who is in the home at all times. Google has this data, as well. If you think about it, Google has so much data already about people, but what they didn’t have was the human data of where they are at any given moment, their habits, etc. This is the missing piece to Google’s puzzle, especially around Google Now where context is everything.
Playing in the Space
We’re actively investing in the IoT space at Metamorphic. An investment we’re just closing, Weaved, provides services, APIs and infrastructure to build on the Internet of Things. Samsung recently acquired SmartThings, which provides kits to add sensors to existing items in the home and control them via your smartphone. SmartThings is an open platform, but the ecosystem needs better infrastructure to allow developers to build connectivity on devices that speak to each other.
The company we invested in helps to provide this by offering services to IoT device makers that allow them to better speak to each other and leverage the different strengths. To date, most of the Internet of Things has been built on disparate wireless protocols and companies. They live inside of their own ecosystem, but there isn’t a unifying language that allows them to speak to each other and work seamlessly together. This is a large hurdle that this category faces moving forward.
We also recently invested in a company that we haven’t announced yet that is building smart devices for restaurants and bars. In this scenario, it’s the data that is most important: not being alerted when a restaurant or bar is running low on inventory but rather allowing owners to easily reorder, make predictions around demand and improve the overall margins of the business.
This type of machine-to-machine technology is extremely powerful for the industry at large due to the ability to bring down long-term costs by reducing equipment and wasted inventory. If a bar owner knows that a certain liquor has a trend of being consumed less during certain times of the year or is losing popularity, they can be alerted in real time rather than suffering loss on the balance sheet.

This begins to influence wearables, as well. Companies like Sproutling are leveraging Internet-enabled devices to compile and use actionable data, which allows the company to do all sorts of things current baby monitors can’t: measure heart rate, temperature of the room and ambient heart rate, as well as tell you if the baby is awake or asleep or if it’s facing up or down, etc.
Eventually, though, they compile data about the baby that can predict how long the baby will be asleep for, when the baby will sleep more soundly (temperature, timing, etc.) and more. This type of data is valuable not only for the industry but for the actual parents who can start to plan their own sleep schedules around how long and when the baby will sleep.
Another good example of this is Canary, which provides seamless home security, detecting when an intruder is in your house. Canary has several sensors, including a video camera, a humidity monitor, a siren and an air-quality sensor. Over time Canary learns your habits and knows when you’re typically coming home, which visitors should be in your house, when you’re not there, etc. This allows for far fewer mistakes in tripping up the alarm and having the police department come to your house in non-emergency situations.
The Human in Act II
As more Internet-enabled devices come online, communicate with each other, and compile more and more comprehensive data sets, our world will become more efficient, safe, and personalized. I’ve spoken about the Human API before. It is a thesis about where the world is going — where your preferences, needs and interests will all be delivered to you in all forms of nutrition, media, content and health.
The next wave in the Internet of Things is a huge step in that direction, as devices begin to communicate and play off one another and more and more data is leveraged to make actionable insights, predictions and decisions. Search and discovery has been about text, but the Human API encompasses other information like human data. Examples of this would be, “Is my produce low or are we managing energy effectively?” The Internet of Things offers a new way to index information beyond text, where text is less effective (voice will be important here, as well).
There will also be an explosion of apps that will emerge and eventually define the growth of the Internet of Things. Just like Snapchat and Instagram redefined the camera on the smartphone, as all devices get smart and connected, they will become a platform onto themselves that will spawn new apps and services in which there will be “vertical solutions” built on “horizontal platforms” — just as it did with the PC (wintel) and with mobile (iOS/Android/ARM).
Stephen Liguori, formerly the executive director of global innovation and new models at GE, predicts there will be 50 billion industrial devices online in the next 10 years. I think this is coming sooner than that.
We went from desktop to mobile, which is so much more than the phone in your pocket and tablet by your nightstand. Mobile is everything and includes all of the devices we interact with on a daily basis. These devices will become connected both to the Internet and to each other. The Internet of Things is finally here and I for one couldn’t be more excited.

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12 Questions With The CEO Of Thumbtack, Google Capital’s New $100 Million Bet

In terms of Silicon Valley hype, Thumbtack has flown a bit under the radar since it was founded five years ago in 2009. But with the announcement today that it’s landed a whopping $100 million investment led by Google Capital, Thumbtack’s days of relative tech press anonymity are almost certainly over.
For the uninitiated, Thumbtack is an online marketplace that helps connect all types of local service providers — think painters, wedding photographers, plumbers, tutors, therapists, and more — with potential clients. It works like this: People in need of a service provider provide Thumbtack with a summary of the work they need done or the type of service they’re looking for. Thumbtack then analyzes that request, and sources relevant local service providers who can then provide bids on the project. Thumbtack makes money by charging service providers a small fee for each bid.
I met with Thumbtack’s co-founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta today at the company’s San Francisco headquarters to talk to him more about this new funding round and his plans for the months ahead. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Q: $100 million is a big round. What is it about Thumbtack that attracted this kind of attention?
A: The local marketplace space in general has gotten much hotter over the last 6 to 12 months. I think Uber is probably the reason for that. I think that traditionally, “local” was seen as a minefield for Internet companies — a place where you could lose a bunch of money. No one had made any serious money in local at all. I think what has changed is smartphones, and the distribution of connectivity, and a change in cultural disposition on the part of customers.
You’re not super satisfied anymore with an experience that ends with 10 blue links on Google, or ten links on Yelp. You want to be able to go a step further and hire the person, or book the restaurant, or have the car come pick you up.
I think our investors saw the opportunity here for a local services marketplace that really worked, and saw that there’s really nobody else at our scale and momentum. We could be the category killer.
Q: It was only a few months ago, in May, that Thumbtack closed on a $30 million Series C round of funding. What made this new round come together so quickly?
A: The announcement of the last round precipitated this in a lot of ways. The news there generated a bunch of inbound interest [from potential investors.] In these conversations, we met Google Capital’s David Lawee. The thing that’s awesome is that he has extremely relevant domain experience. He’s thought hard about how to communicate to these local businesses.
We certainly didn’t need any more money yet. But after our conversations with Google Capital, we thought it was worth it to take a look into this investment. …They’re not taking a board seat. They just want to be a part of our growth. And they have a great network that we are able to tap into.
Q: Why Google Capital, as opposed to Google Ventures?
A: You know, I haven’t spoken much with the people at Google Ventures. But we’re certainly a growth stage investment at this point. We have more than 600 full-time staff across our offices in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and the Philippines. We’re not a traditional early stage venture investment.
Q: What categories are seeing the most activity on Thumbtack?
A: Overall we divide things into four different types of categories: Home improvement and repair, event services, instruction like tutoring or music lessons, and wellness. Right now we see a lot of activity in intra-city moving services, interior painting, personal training, photography, catering services, chiropractors.
Q: Do you plan to add more categories in the months ahead?
A: Over time it will expand. But today, honestly, we’re supply constrained, so we’re not trying to make our lives harder by trying to add more categories just yet. But we think our model is highly scalable. Part of our ultimate value proposition is breadth. We are trying to build the Amazon for services: the one place to go to solve all the services needs you have. That’s the dream.
Q: How does your approach compare with other local-oriented platforms, like Yelp and Angie’s List?
A: I think Yelp is a great product, but I think it’s great for a different subset of questions and problems that we solve. It’s awesome when you’re trying to say, ‘Where should I go to get my hair cut, or eat Chinese food, or get cupcakes?’ The thing is, in all of those cases, pretty much any store is willing to have you. With restaurants and spas and stuff like that, you can walk into the front door and get what you want.

Thumbtack solves a different problem: It’s about who can come to me. The availability and interest for services is much more important. Say you need to hire a plumber. There are a lot of them in the San Francisco Bay Area, but only some are able to do the job, and available to come to your apartment and to the job this week. You have to match with someone who is interested. That matching problem is very different from what directories do.
Q: Are those directory companies still your biggest competitors?
A: We have surprisingly little overlap with Yelp. Only 8 percent of our providers are on Yelp. Yelp by and large is deep in restaurants and beauty services. They’re not super deep in the world of the local services. By and large, the folk we’re seeing just haven’t been online before. There’s no TripAdvisor for this space yet.
Q: What about other service marketplace startups like TaskRabbit? They recently changed their business model, and seem to be also focusing on the types of local services that Thumbtack deals in.
A: Well, they may have realized they needed to move in this direction. But it’s also a very different experience. They’re trying to make hiring a service provider like a product buying experience, something you buy off the shelf. We don’t think that works. The needs that we help solve are different for every customer.
Say you’re looking for someone to paint your apartment. Maybe your apartment has crowd moldings, maybe you’ve got 16 foot ceilings, maybe it has some funny angles. It’s unfair to the professional to ask them to sort of package “interior house painting” into one flat hourly rate per job. Our model presupposes that sort of uniqueness of demand, and solves specifically for that. I think that there are scenarios where TaskRabbit’s new model works, but by and large, I don’t think that it holds true.
Q: Speaking of painting, I actually did use Thumbtack to look for someone to repaint my apartment. I got a few bids on the service, and it was great, but I ultimately ended up hiring someone I found elsewhere. Does attrition like that happen a lot?
A: Our belief is that if we deliver you great options quickly and reliably, you’re going to keep using us, and one day hire from us. Hey, if someone you learned about through your next door neighbor ended up being available when you thought they wouldn’t be, that’s great. [Ed. note: Oddly this is pretty close to what happened.] We’re not going to bat 1000, we don’t expect our providers to win every job, and they don’t expect to win every job either. It’s about making sure that they get their money’s worth and their time’s worth, that they’re getting more leads and making good bids.
Q: A lot of Silicon Valley and tech press articles seem to like to refer to Thumbtack as “the biggest startup you’ve never heard of.” Why do you think that is?
A: I think it’s by design. We have known what it takes to make our customers happy, we’ve just been hesitant to shout about it before we can ensure everyone has a great experience. We’ve been building this a long time. It’s hard. We’ve been growing so fast on the demand side: We’ve got more than a $1 billion worth of jobs going through our system to professionals each year. We have tens of thousands of professionals who are using our platform to help make their livelihood. We’re focusing on that.
Also, San Francisco is our 14th biggest city. Our biggest markets are New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta. I actually think that’s part of what investors love. We haven’t had to put boots on the ground to make it work in, say, Boise. It can just work everywhere.
Q: What kind of retention are you seeing from service providers? How many of them churn out, and how many stick around?
A: What we find is that the professionals who invest in it upfront — build a great profile, encourage clients to give reviews, communicate and use messaging well — stick around, because they make money. Our challenge is helping everyone be successful, and educating them, saying, ‘This is what it takes to build a good profile. Clipart as a profile picture is probably not going to cut it.’
The main reason anyone churns out is because we haven’t educated them. They’re professionals at their trades — they work hard, they know how to be great plumbers, great tutors. They don’t need to know how to be great online marketers. It’s on us to help them with that part, to teach them how to be successful in this platform. Any churn we have is a product failure, and a support failure, and something we’re definitely focusing a lot on.
Q: Thumbtack is definitely a broad platform play. But right now, everything seems to be about specialized apps and “unbundling.” What do you…
A: [Interjecting] I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe in five years that you’re going to have an app for house cleaners, an app for electricians, an app for tutors, and on and on. No. You’re going to have one app to stay in touch with the professionals that you know and love.
Growing up, my parents had a drawer in our kitchen that had the Yellow Pages, and next to it was a stack of business cards for the local companies and guys and gals they would go to for all the stuff they needed done. That’s a “bundle.” That’s what Thumbtack wants to be.

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Which Apps Are Eating Your Battery? Normal Will Tell You.

Somewhere, somehow, maybe less than a year after I got the latest version of my iPhone, its battery would mysteriously deplete in about half a day.
I wasn’t really sure why. But now I can find out.
There’s a new app called ‘Normal’ out from a pair of Stanford Ph.Ds in computer science named Adam Oliner and Jacob Leverich, who are turning some postdoctoral research into a company called Kuro Labs.
Their first project, Normal, is a battery diagnosis service that tracks and compares your app usage to other iOS device owners to see if there are any specific actions you can take to save battery life. The 99 cent app compares your phone’s battery usage over time with other people who have similar combinations of apps.
Hence, the name ‘Normal’ — is your phone’s battery life normal compared to other devices that are the exact same model?
“Battery is a pain point and there are not good solutions,” Oliner said. “The device doesn’t tell you everything you need to know. Why is it using so much energy? Is that normal or not? That’s what we’re trying to adjust.”
When you go inside Normal, you’ll see active apps, inactive battery hogs and other apps. For each app, there is a ring chart that will show you how much battery life you’ll save if you close a specific app.
So for instance, if I shut Facebook’s mobile app off, Normal estimates that I’ll save 26 minutes and 47 seconds of battery life. Or if I close inactive apps running in the background like Instagram, I’ll save an hour and seven minutes.

Certain apps can be re-configured to use up less battery. Oliner says Pinterest, for example, is not normally a battery hog but there are a few configurations that make it more energy intensive. There’s a screen inside the app that will tell you if a specific app is behaving normally compared to other identical apps on other smartphones.
The app is based on a project Oliner led at UC Berkeley that eventually became an app called Carat. The concept seems almost identical. That older app would quietly take measurements from your device, combine that data it with other people’s anonymized usage metrics, and then send back tips on whether to update your OS or kill or restart apps.
Now that Oliner is finished with postdoc work, he decided to start a new bootstrapped company with Leverich called Kuro Labs that may spin out more similar concepts. He hinted at looking at laptops or tablets.
“The closest analogous company is something like Bugsense, which diagnoses crashes,” he said. “But we’re doing energy instead.”

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Unseen, An Anonymous Photo Sharing App For Colleges, Raises $2.1 Million

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An Austin-based company called Bearch has raised $2.1 million in seed funding for its anonymous photo-sharing app Unseen, which has been trending on college campuses. Investors in the round include Rackspace co-founder Dirk Elmendorf, Indeed.com CEO Rony Kahan, CEO of Woodbolt International Doss Cunningham, and several other angel investors.
At first glance, Unseen looks similar to other anonymous networking apps that have become popular in recent months, including competitors like Secret or Whisper, for example. But co-founder Michael Schramm stresses, its intention is to ultimately build a different type of community for its users. Using both manual and outsourced moderation procedures, the idea with Unseen is to cut down on the bullying and other inappropriate behaviors that anonymous apps can contribute to without being heavy-handed.
But Unseen isn’t there yet, from what I saw. A brief tour around one university’s photos in the app included spy shots of a girl commenters called “slut,” and suggestions of sexual activity that could later take place, to put it mildly. Many posts are sexual in nature, and there are quite a few of female body parts. Others are photos of joints or packed pipes, and a lot seem to be groups of guys discussing girls in photos or directly asking female users more general sexual questions.
Of course, like other apps in this space, Unseen isn’t only going to feature this sort of content. There have been a couple of threads about serious matters, like depression, says Schramm, where support was offered.
But from what I saw, the app favors sexual content, drugs and spy shots. Some users are posting goofy photos, or text-only comments that you could imagine would come from a young college kid, like “What are the best places to buy alcohol with a fake [ID]..?”
Kids will be kids, I guess. But if this is the future of social media, I’m glad I’m so darned old.
Schramm, who created Unseen along with co-founder Munjal Budhabhatti, believes that anonymous apps are not just a flash in the pan, and they’ve entered this space because they want to figure out how to get things right. In fact, Unseen grew out of two pivots from previous attempts to connect users via mobile, one a Jelly-like local Q&A app and the other a place for group discussions.
Unseen is the one that took off – or at least, the one that was able to attract investor attention. The company declined to share user numbers but says growth has been 93 percent week-over-week for the past five weeks. The app is only three months old, so that doesn’t really prove much of anything at this point. Going from zero to anything is going to yield big numbers.
And on Android, there are only somewhere between 500-1,000 users according to Google Play’s install tracking. On iOS, there are likely more, but Unseen is not a runaway hit at this early stage so much as it is a calculated bet.

The app is live now on 40 college campuses. Users don’t have to sign up or log in; they just pick their college campus feed from a search box to participate.

Setting The Right Tone?

“I hate anonymous apps, I think they’re garbage,” co-founder Schramm proclaimed at the beginning of our conversation, but then explained how anonymous apps are a great door for people to enter into things with. Traditional social media, he added, “is actually driving people further apart rather than bringing them together because you have to maintain this appearance to your friends, or professionally.”
The younger generation – those who grew up being publicly exposed (and shamed) for their Facebook activity and photos – has certainly been drawn to anonymous platforms. They like Snapchat and other private and “ephemeral” messaging apps, and more “social” apps like Yik Yak or Whisper. Unseen is hoping to ride that trend, too, but set a different tone.
Schramm says they quietly censor photos on Unseen. If someone posts a full nude, for example, they delete it. If the poster returns and posts a partial nude, they just keep deleting it until the photo fits in with the guidelines and rules of the community Unseen wants to establish. (It’s “no nipples” by the way.) There’s even a long user agreement up front when you first open up the app that tells you what you can and cannot do.
In time, Unseen’s…well…unseen censorship hopes to help set the community’s tone.
Now the plan with the new funding is to moderately grow its install base. The wait list today includes 863 schools where users have signed up to join. Schramm says they need to be careful about their next steps. “Growth unchecked in the anonymous world is a very dangerous thing,” he says.
So is the anonymous world itself.

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Facebook

Facebook is an online social networking service founded by Mark Zuckerberg on February 4, 2004 with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
The name, “Facebook,” comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to students at American universities. Though membership on Facebook was initially limited to Harvard students, it later expanded to other universities and high schools. In 2004, Facebook moved its headquarters to Palo Alto, Calif., and in 2011 to nearby Menlo Park.
It received its first investment in June 2004 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Facebook applied for a $5 billion IPO in 2012, one of the biggest in the history of technology. By the end of May 2012, the stock lost over a quarter of its starting value, prompting “The Wall Street Journal” to call the IPO a “fiasco.”
Facebook’s subsidiaries include: Instagram (acquired in April 2012 for $1 billion); WhatsApp (acquired in February 2014 for $19 billion); and Oculus VR (acquired in March 2014 for $2 billion). Facebook has been blocked at various points in China, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Uzbekistan, but as of December 2011, it was the second-most accessed website in the U.S. after Google.
As of March 2014, Facebook had 1.28 billion active users.

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Microsoft

Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, and personal computers.
Its most recognized software products include the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office suite, and Internet Explorer web browser. Microsoft hardware products include the Xbox game console and the Microsoft Surface series of tablets.
In September 2013, Microsoft agreed to buy Nokia’s mobile unit for $7 billion; with the acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services to form Microsoft Mobile Oy, Microsoft will re-enter the smartphone hardware market.
In July 2013, Microsoft announced its intention to reorganize the business into four new divisions by function, which will absorb all previous divisions without any workforce cut. There divisions are: Operating System, Apps, Cloud, and Devices. In February 2014, Satya Nadella succeeded Steve Ballmer as CEO.
In July 2014, Nadella released a memo announcing a new direction for Microsoft: sharpening the company’s devices and services strategy to focus on productivity and platforms. Shortly after that, the company announced that it would lay off 18,000 workers over the course of the next year (12,500 will be Nokia employees, brought on by Microsoft when it acquired Nokia’s devices and services division).

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Your Lost Android Phone Can Now Call You

Did you know that Android has a built-in mechanism for locating or locking your lost phone? Google hasn’t done the best job marketing it, but it’s actually been baked right in since the release of Android 4.4*.
(It works with older Android phones, too — you just have to install the free app yourself)
Today that feature gets even better, thanks to the addition of a trick that seems so obviously great in hindsight: your lost phone can be set to call you — and only you — as soon as someone finds it.
If you lose your phone, just head over to Google’s browser-based Android Device Manager. Tap the lock button, toss in a “Recovery Message” (read: a plea to whoever finds the phone to not be a jerk) and an unlock password, and add a phone number where you can be reached.

Bam! Whoever finds the phone now has a way to instantly reach you with the press of a button — but since the rest of the phone is locked down behind a password of your choosing, that’s the only thing they can use your phone for.
One catch: even if you’ve got an Android phone that comes with the locator functionality out-of-the-box, you’ll need to update to the latest build for the phone-the-owner functionality to work. You can find the update in the Play Store here.
[via Phandroid]

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Android

Released in September 2008, Android is an operating system based on the Linux kernel with a user interface that allows for direct manipulation. It was designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers with variants for television, cars and wristwear.
The operating system uses a virtual keyboard, as well as touch inputs that correspond to real-world actions, like swiping, tapping, pinching and reverse-pinching to manipulate on-screen objects. Although the Android operating system was designed primarily for touchscreen input, it has also been used in television, game consoles, digital cameras and other electronic devices.
Android’s source code is released by Google under open source licenses. The operating system was initially developed by Android, Inc., which Google backed financially and then bought in 2005. Since 2008, Android has been updated every six to nine months. In June 2014, Google announced that there were over 1 billion active monthly Android users.

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Truth Lets You Send Anonymous Texts

With Whisper and Secret raising millions of dollars to build anonymous services, all kinds of apps are popping up that let you share things without attaching your identity.
While most of the apps emerging try to build a community by letting you scroll through streams of anonymous messages, some developers are creating apps that let you reach out directly to people in your contacts.
There seems to be some latent demand for these kinds of services. Leak, a service for anonymously emailing people, recently launched and shut down in a manner of days due to the combination of a huge influx of people trying it out and the fact that it was quickly built on platforms not intended for that use.
Over the last few days I’ve been playing with Truth, a similar app for iOS that lets you send anonymous text messages to people in your phone’s contacts.
The interface is a close facsimile of Apple’s default Messages app, so there isn’t much of a learning curve. There is a bit of friction to get started with the app, however: besides the expected popups asking for permission to access your contacts, Truth also makes you register with an email address and password.

That doesn’t seem like it should be a necessary step, considering the point is that the app in anonymous and it confirms that you’re actually using your phone number with a text verification. I asked Ali Saheli, one of the creators of the app, why it requires that step. He told me via email that credentials are being collected so that they can be used in an unannounced upcoming “part of [their] platform.”
Protip: if collecting an email address isn’t needed for the primary function of your app and you can’t tell users exactly what it will be used for, just don’t.
That quibble with the setup process aside, Truth works as advertised. You can choose any contact in your address book to send an anonymous text, and in several tests, messages arrive in about as much time as they would via a regular text. Messages begin with “The truth is” by default, which is meant to inspire compliments or hard truths that might be too awkward to express openly.
If you send a message to someone who has also installed Truth, it’ll show up in their app with an anonymized identity. If the chosen recipient hasn’t used the app — which is far more likely — they’ll get a text from a Bay Area phone number that they haven’t seen before.
My biggest concern with Truth is that, like other anonymous apps, the service seems easy to abuse. Most of the screenshots Truth uses to market the app suggest that it’ll be used for flirting, which would be fine except for the fact that receiving messages isn’t opt-in. Considering how often flirty behavior can turn into unwanted advances in situations where identities are known, I have a feeling that quite a few people who receive messages from Truth before installing the app will end up blocking its number.

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Looking Ahead To Windows 9

A preview of Windows 9 will be made available in either September or October, according to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. That timeline keeps ‘Threshold’ — Windows 9’s codename — out into the public market as a finished product likely in early 2015.
The Windows 8 era isn’t merely closing, it’s racing to an end.
Last weekend I posited that as Windows 9 appears to be galloping to market, it’s a decent time to start saying goodbye to Windows 8. Now that Foley has revealed that Windows 9’s preview should be open to the public, for a good-sized chunk of the computing world Windows 8 is all but over — they will be able to quickly scoot over to the new code, provided that the preview isn’t too buggy.
It’s both correct and unfair to say that Windows 8’s period is ending. Windows 8 itself will soon be replaced, yes, but at the same time, much of what it brought to the market will persist. As TechCrunch wrote when it became generally known that Microsoft intended to push the desktop in Windows 9:

We’re in a potentially Office 2007 situation, when Microsoft shook up the paradigm, took a number of potshots, managed to keep the bulk of the work intact and push out Office 2010 to massive success. Provided that Microsoft can keep that which is good in Windows 8, and blend in a host of strong desktop-focused updates, prioritizing each in different weight based on device form factor, the company could have a pretty solid operating system on its hands.

There is a lot of ‘maybe’ in that, of course.

What we should keep in mind is that, according to Foley’s information, getting our hands on to Windows 9 is not something to think about as some sort of far away, future eventuality. Instead, given her stated calendar, the preview is likely no more than eight to ten weeks from the market.
How well did Windows 8 perform in its life? Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have more than twelve percent market share, combined. Put another way, about one in every eight PCs in use today runs Windows 8 or a variant of the operating system. Windows 8.1 is more popular than Windows 8, but the latter still controls just under six percent of PCs in the world.
It will be incredibly interesting to see how much of Windows 8’s market share its successor can nab, and how quickly. Windows 8, by way of comparison, hasn’t been known for its ability to get people off of its predecessor, Windows 7.
I’m curious: If you are a Windows user, do you plan on moving to Windows 9 from either Windows 7 or 8?

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Apple Flexes Muscles in Health Field

Apple is building up for a major move in the health industry, based on unconfirmed reports that it has engaged in deep discussions with major healthcare and electronic health records providers. Hopes -- and perhaps fears -- that Apple soon will unveil an amazing, stylish must-have wearable gadget that does all the things you'd want a smartwatch or fitness band to do are on the rise

The app will collate all a user's fitness and health data.
Apple has discussed HealthKit with healthcare providers Mount Sinai, the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins, along with electronic health records provider Allscripts, Reuters reported this week.
Allscripts is a competitor to Epic, which recently inked a partnership deal with Apple, also announced at WWDC.
Apple partners include Nike and the Mayo Clinic as well. The latter reportedly is testing a service that alerts patients when results from apps and devices they use are abnormal, and makes follow-up information and treatment recommendations.
Kaiser Permanente is piloting several mobile apps that leverage HealthKit, according to Reuters.

The Ghost in the Machine?

HealthKit and its associated developers' tools were announced only in June, and HealthKit is a feature in iOS 8 that will run on the iPhone 6, neither of which has yet been released. So, it's a little difficult to understand how anyone might be piloting mobile apps leveraging HealthKit.
Still, "any vendor that can get a significant healthcare provider to recommend or require a product will move into the market much faster than with any consumer marketing campaign," said Ezra Gottheil, principal analyst in the computing practice at Technology Business Research (TBR).

The Healthcare Roller Derby

"Apple appears ready to transform healthcare, a complex and fragmented industry -- slowest to technology adoption," Harry Wang, director of mobile and health research at Parks Associates, told TechNewsWorld.
While iPads and iPhones are commonly used in healthcare, Apple is far from having a lock on the market, though.
Google recently announced Google Fit, an open platform that lets users control their fitness data, and this week released the SDK for developers' preview. Google X Labs is seeking 175 volunteers to provide bodily samples so it can create their biochemical fingerprints in an effort to create a baseline for a healthy body.
Google last year announced Calico, a company that will focus on health and well-being, as well as explore how technology can tackle aging and associated diseases.
"Google is talking more about developer tools, and Apple is talking more about data storage and security, but the offerings are similar," TBR's Gottheil told TechNewsWorld.
That's possibly because Google "was burned by its Google Health venture several years ago," Parks' Wang suggested.
Samsung is also in the race, having launched the SAMI platform and S Health app for its e-health business, but "it may not have the right mix of software and platform expertise to draw enough developer support and partner interest," Wang said.
On the other hand, Samsung "does have a strong brand and a large installed smartphone user base in the U.S., so no healthcare partners will ignore [its] call," Wang surmised.

The Tattletale Wearables Are Coming

It's possible that all wearable technology devices will provide feedback on users' health data to a smartphone or other similar hub device from Apple, Google or Samsung.
HealthKit may connect to an Apple iWatch or even iTV in the future, "and possibly Apple TV as well," Wang said.
It might even be extended to OS X, because Apple "is constantly working on helping them collaborate," Gottheil suggested.

Show Me the Money

The potential rewards are great.
Parks Associates defines the connected health market narrowly, focusing on specific health applications and services, but still estimates the market will be worth US$30 billion in the U.S. alone in the next five years, so "the growth will be substantial," Wang said.
Apple "does want to lay its groundwork, and have a real impact on people's health and well being." Wang observed. "By becoming a critical enabler in the $3 trillion healthcare industry, it will be rewarded, if not in the near future."

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Is iPhone 6L Apple's chosen name for the larger 5.5-inch handset?

Having it large?

The iPhone 6 is in line for a reveal on September 9

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• Purported iPhone 6 casing is slimmer and may hint at a little extra glow
• This could be our first picture of the iPhone 6 running iOS 8
• Did Apple take iPhone 6 design cues from the competition?

The rumoured larger iteration of Apple's next-gen handset will be called the iPhone 6L, according to a Chinese website which claims to have obtained components and spec details.
The AppleDaily site has posted photos of what it claims to be the 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch display components for the respective iPhone 6 handsets.
Along with asserting the iPhone 6L moniker, the report also claims the bigger model will also have a larger 2915mAh battery, while a 1810mAh cell will power the 4.7-inch version.
The larger battery would be necessary, of course, to power the larger display.

Just another rumour?

Naturally, the report can be classed as speculation, so we'd advise you to take it with a large dose of salt.

If the device does turn out to be called the iPhone 6L, then what of the 4.7-inch device? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

• Is this the iPhone 6 in its retail box?

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iPhone 6 release date, news and rumors

  

 iPhone 6 release date, news and rumors

Updated Everything we've heard so far about the new iPhone 6

Page 1 of 3iPhone 6 release date and price

Is an even bigger iPhone on the way?

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• Samsung Galaxy Note 4 release date, news and rumors
• Apple iWatch will reportedly have slightly rectangular 2.5-inch display
• iPad Pro release date, news and rumors

Latest update: Looking for an iPhone 6 release date? Well we may just have one as September 9 is looking pretty likely at the moment.
We've also seen more of how it will look - and do we even have a glimpse of it running iOS 8?
The new iPhone could be one of the most pivotal devices in the Cupertino brand's history - with the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C simple updates to previous models, there's a lot of pressure heaped on the iPhone 6.
We've already been given a small sneak peak at what Apple may have in store for us on the iPhone 6 thanks to the announcement of iOS 8 at WWDC - from a bigger screen and camera to health monitoring and more storage.

• What iOS 8 tells us about the iPhone 6

One thing is for sure, with the Samsung Galaxy S5, LG G3, Sony Xperia Z2 and HTC One M8 now out in wild, Apple needs to be on its game with the new iPhone - and many believe a bigger screen is simply a must.

• Apparently there's new iPad Air and new iPad Mini tablets on the way too

Cut to the chase

• What is it? A major revision of the iPhone including entire design
• When is it out? September 9 2014 seems most likely
• What will it cost? Prices are likely to start at around £550 / $944 / AU$1006

iPhone 6 release date

The iPhone 6 release date is virtually certain for September, which would fit in nicely with the rollout of the newly announced iOS 8.
More exactly, the iPhone 6 release date momentum has now gathered pace around September 9, an idle Tuesday at the start of the month.
Apple has launched the last few iPhones at a special event in September, so the smart money has always been on September 2014 for the iPhone 6's arrival - followed by a new iPad Air launch in October.
Not to mention the fact that according to ifun.de Apple is restricting holidays during September for employees at German Apple Stores, which strongly suggests a new hardware launch then.
It's looking increasingly likely that we'll see more than one Apple handset this year, with a 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and a 5.5-inch phablet - possibly dubbed the iPhone Air - coming alongside. The latter was rumored to be pushed until later in the year, thanks to problems with the battery and production, but recent updates seem to say these have been solved.
TechRadar's sources have also intimated that both models will launch together, so we're pretty confident that will happen.

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The launch could still be split - it makes sense to launch an iPhone Air and iWatch together at an event - but that would be too many in the space of a few months, so an iPhone 6 and iPhone Air dual announcement makes sense.
And it sounds like production is about to start, as the Economic Daily News reports that the 4.7-inch has already gone into production, while the 5.5-inch handset will enter production soon too - so it could be the release dates for the two models are split.
After trawling through all the iPhone 6 rumors we kicked our render machine into gear and came up with a concept of what we'd like Apple's eighth generation flagship smartphone to look like.
Check out our creation in the video below.

iPhone 6 price

There's one thing we can be sure about when it comes to the iPhone 6 - it won't be cheap.
Apple's legacy is a long line of premium devices sporting premium price tags and you can expect that trend to continue with the iPhone 6.
One analyst even goes as far as predicting that Apple will hike up the price of the iPhone 6, possibly by as much as $100 (around £60, AU$110). With a larger screen, new glass covering the front and possibly even a new, more impressive, material used in construction, we can see the price being hiked.
We'd be surprised is the mooted 4.7-inch iPhone 6 would get such a massive price bump, as it needs to stay competitive, but the hike does make sense if Apple launches a larger, phablet sized iPhone.
We have also got wind of possible pricing for the 4.7-inch model and it's reportedly starting at around £500 for a 32GB handset, which is around the same as a 16GB iPhone 5S, so if anything it might be a little cheaper, but that still leaves the 5.5-inch model open to being more expensive.
Indeed the latest pricing rumors echo the £500/$858/AU$915 pricing for the 4.7-inch model, but add that the 5.5-inch handset is likely to start at around £563/$966/AU$1030 and those are based on Chinese prices, so won't account for local taxes.
Interestingly the same sources claim that the 5.5-inch handset will be called the 'iPhone Air'.

iPhone 6 design

We could see up to three models coming on September 9: an iPhone 5C sequel, an iPhone 6 and an iPhone Air, with the latter being a larger size to compete with the likes of the Galaxy Note 3, as phablets are becoming hugely popular in areas like Asia.

"If the iPhone 6 doesn't have a Liquidmetal body, then we'll probably never see one."

One thing you probably can expect is more premium metal to come your way with the iPhone 6, and Apple patents for liquidmetal 3D printing suggest there may be a new way to form the sultry chassis on the new iPhone.
Writing in early January 2014, MacRumors quotes a batch of liquidmetal patents reportedly filed by Apple employees.
This has been doing the rounds for a while though, and apparently it's a tricky material to work with.
Liquidmetal or not, that chassis could well be the thinnest yet (thanks to that LED backlight we mentioned earlier) - with word that Apple will slim down the svelte 7.6mm 5S body for the iPhone 6, and if leaked images of the phone's case are legit the handset may well be shockingly slender.

Credit: C-Tech

These shots are similar to another picture claiming to show the internal body work of the iPhone 6, where the LCD display would sit plus further snaps of the rear picked up by MacRumors - adding yet more detail to the collection of leaks we're gathering.
Newer, more detailed images give us an even clearer look at its slimline shell, as well as showing it in a fancy new dark grey colour, which may be one of the colour options come release.

Another thing to take away from this image is that the Apple logo is a cut-out. There are several possible reasons for that, and given Apple is looking to add NFC into the phone for the first time then having a metal free section makes perfect sense, backed up by more recent leaks with the new logo cut-out.

We've since seen images of a thin plastic Apple logo in the slot, thin enough that light could shine through it, leading to suggestions that it will light up, possibly to alert users to notifications.
With talk of larger screens, we can expect the body of the iPhone 6 to grow and leaked schematic designs claim the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 will be 66mm wide and 7.0mm thick (the 5S is 58.6 x 7.6mm).
The larger 5.5-inch handset is said to be 77mm in width and a super svelte 6.7mm in depth - the Galaxy Note 3 is 79.2 x 8.3mm.
The 5.5 inch model is rumored to be called the iPhone Air, so it makes sense that it would be exceedingly slim.
These super slim dimensions have been given a little more firepower as we've now had multiple sources claiming to have case designs and schematics for the new iPhone 6, showing off designs similar to the iPad Air and Mini 2.
The most recent shows the iPhone 6 actually running iOS 8 - it's not clear if this is a final version, but it is swiped from Foxconn apparently.

Credit: TMZ

But how will the iPhone actually look? Well it's going to be rounded, larger (of course) and with lines running over the top and bottom sections, presumably to improve reception and overall connectivity, as we saw in early assembly snaps.
Compared to the iPhone 5S, it's taking design cues from the iPad Air and Mini 2 - that's something we think would be a great idea, as those both have a great feel in the hand.

Aside from the change in size and shape the other visible difference is that the power button has been moved to the side of the handset, as it's going to be larger and hitting the top will be tricky. The rear of the phone will have a slightly protruding camera as Apple tries to keep things thin but pack in slightly more camera tech to keep pictures looking great.
This is seen in both the TMZ leak (as a final unit, apparently) and in components found by nowhereelse.fr. The two tone flash, which gives great colour but was an odd oblong last time out, has been made circular to fit with the more rounded finish of the phone, it seems.

Credit: TMZ

A set of dummy images from 9to5Mac, show the new handset in gold, silver and grey and they more or less match the previous ones, with a rounded design and a power button on the side.

One of the big clues about how the new iPhone 6 will look is from Taiwanese actor Jimmy Lin, who posted a photo of himself holding an iPhone 5S and what he claims is an iPhone 6.

Credit: KitGuru

Why is this significant? Well Lin posted pictures of the iPhone 5C ahead of its launch last year, so it looks like he may have repeated the trick in 2014.

Mr Lin with the iPhone 6 (credit: Jimmy Lin, Weibo)

Mr Lin may also have the larger 5.5-inch iPhone 6 (or at least a mockup unit) in his possession, after he posted another photo online which a big looking iPhone sitting on a work bench.

Is this really a iPhab? (credit: Jimmy Lin, Weibo)

The same design keeps popping up in the leaked photo, and surely this isn't coincidence as even more images along the same design lines pop up from Sonny Dickson - again claiming to show the iPhone 6.

Credit: Sonny Dickson

Sonny Dickson has gone one further though after getting his hands on mockups of two sizes of iPhone 6 handsets, giving the clearest look yet at the probably final designs.

Credit: Sonny Dickson

Apparently the iPhone 6 has also been snapped alongside the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 3, all three of which are showing off their TouchID sensors as well.

The iPhone 6, Air 2 and Mini 3? (credit: AppleClub)

A larger body housing a larger screen would mean there would be some additional space which a larger power pack could accommodate, and we've even spotted an image claiming to show the iPhone 6 battery on the production line.
In other areas, patents show that Apple has been thinking about magical morphing technology that can hide sensors and even cameras. Will it make it into the iPhone 6? Probably not.
And one final nugget to chew over before you head into the wonderful world of whether the iPhone 6 will have a sapphire screen: will Apple be launching a more premium version later in the year with that harder, less breakable sapphire display to satisfy those that want the best iPhone whatever the cost?

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