Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ Salary To Get 50% Pay Bump To $3m In 2014

Remember Qwikster? Wall Street doesn’t.

The AP is reporting this morning that Netflix CEO will get a healthy pay raise in 2014. According to a regulatory filing, Reed Hastings’s annual salary jumps tp $3 million, up from the $2 million he raked in this year. His annual stock option allowance also improves to $3 million from the current level of $1 million.

It’s hard to argue against the pay increase. Netflix had a great 2013. The stock price is up 296% on the year. It’s trading around an all time high of $365. The stock was the top performer in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 this year.

The company isn’t raking in the profits. In its most recent quarterly report, Netflix only made $32 million. But Wall Street doesn’t seem to mind and so the company should stay the course raking in the subscribers and producing award-winning original content. Netflix just needs to remember to listen to their subscribers.

The Twitter & NYSE Honeymoon Is Over As Stock Price Takes Another Nosedive

Today at market opening, Twitter shares (NYSE:TWTR) dropped once again. With a stock price of $60.27 a share, shares were down 5.46 percent compared to Friday’s closing price of $63.75. This nosedive marks the end of the honeymoon between Twitter and the NYSE as many analysts stated that shares are overpriced. Until now, the stock held strong amid those reports, but it seems to be coming to an end.

It is not the first drop as shares were already down 13 percent on Friday, shaving $5 billion off Twitter’s market capitalization. It was a big correction of Thursday’s good performance â€" on Thursday, shares popped 5 percent for no apparent reason.

Many analysts find that Twitter is an expensive company. With a market cap of $33.6 billion, the company has yet to turn a profit â€" analysts don’t expect to see any profit before 2015. But this pessimistic trend on the analyst’s side seems to be increasing. On Friday, Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter downgraded Twitter.

According to Bespoke Investment Group, the average price target stands at $44.27, around 37 percent below today’s trading price.

But why is the stock price dropping today? The Twitter IPO was a great sign for the entire tech industry. Private companies saw that the stock market could be friendly again with tech companies â€" and now, everyone wants to IPO.

When Twitter became a public company on November 7, the company priced its IPO at $26 a share. Shares popped 74 percent on that day. After this very good IPO performance, the stock price has been relatively flat.

Many commented that the IPO was underpriced on purpose to make a big splash on the NYSE. Leaving money on the table was a way to improve the longterm prospects and overall image. Shares are still up around 135 percent compared to the IPO price.

Yet, there was a recent turning point for Twitter shares. When the company introduced retargeted ads in early December, the advertising industry was very enthusiastic. Ads would soon be more relevant thanks to browser cookies and more user information. And shareholders voted with their wallets.

Shares went from $44.95 on December 6 to $73.31 on December 26. It represents a 63.1 percent increase, or a $15.7 billion increase in market capitalization. But it wasn’t sustainable on the long run. This 3-week honeymoon was great while it lasted, but it’s time to come back to reality.

Update at 9:45 am (ET): Shares are now down 7.22 percent to $59.15 a share.

RSA’s Deal With The NSA Reflects A General Mistrust

Here’s how it works when a big company believes that its power is in its girth: They enter this bizarre world that leads them to believe that what comes from their PR organs is enough to float their troubles away. It’s all about denial and avoiding any potential shareholder backlash. And so we come to the sad state of affairs at RSA, the security division of EMC, one of the big-bellied enterprise kings that apparently made a deal with the National Security Agency.

It’s a deal that is now affecting the trust that people have in the company and raises questions about other technology companies and how they have profited from their relationships with the government. It’s fine enough for technology executives to sit down with President Barack Obama like they did last week and say how awful the NSA is behaving. But the RSA’s work with the NSA shows that technology companies need scrutiny as well. The reality: mistrust is spreading, writes security expert Bruce Schneier.

I think about this all the time with respect to our IT systems and the NSA. Even though we don’t know which companies the NSA has compromised â€" or by what means â€" knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they’ll be able to say is: “We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don’t know about or can’t talk about.”

There’s proof that RSA made a deal with the NSA to use the spy agency’s random number generator as the preferred or default formula in Bsafe, its software for enhancing security on personal computers and other technologies, Reuters reports. This has put RSA in the bright light of scrutiny.  The $10 million deal looks especially bad, considering the connection it has to documents released by Edward Snowden and reported by the New York Times in September. In those documents it was revealed that the NSA formula was actually flawed and had been used by the agency to create a backdoor into encryption products.

RSA said in a blog post on Monday that it does not  ”ever divulges details of customer engagements, but we also categorically state that we have never entered into any contract or engaged in any project with the intention of weakening RSA’s products, or introducing potential ‘backdoors’ into our products for anyone’s use.” But many in the security profession are just not buying it. Here’s a tidbit from an awesome rant and good summary of what happened from Melissa Elliott, a security analyst and novelist:

September 2013: Revelations derived from the Snowden leak show* that Dual EC is definitely deliberately backdoored by the NSA. RSA acts really surprised. RSA offers some weak excuse that elliptic curves were totally hip (literally in vogue) at the time. RSA does not mention anything about taking anyone’s money. Allegations are posted that an unspecified company accepted ten million dollars to make it their default. Everyone paying attention is pretty sure it’s RSA. (* Full disclosure: smart people disagree with the smoking-gunness of Dual EC being called out specifically by the leak. It’s complicated.)

December 2013: Reuters points to RSA specifically regarding the ten million dollars. RSA issues a non-denial of such magnitude that I’m driven to rage blog.

The denial makes their predicament worse than it now is. It has even led to a backlash. Mikko Hypponen, chief of research at F-Secure,  announced this week in an open letter to EMC Chairman Joe Tucci that he would not participate in the RSA’s annual lavish conference slated for February in San Francisco. Hypponen is a well-respected security expert who had planned to lead a talk titled: “Governments as Malware Authors.”

It’s clear that the actions of RSA and EMC have cast a shadow across the IT world. Until now, it has been the NSA that has been perceived as the true force of darkness, worming its way into systems to monitor our data streams. Now we see a side of the business that is more intertwined with the NSA and by proxy, its agenda for spying.

(Feature image via Flickr)

I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, But T-Mobile Is Awesome

I’ve spent the last week back in my wintry homeland in Canada, and here the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I have seen the light, and I have a message for all of you who live in America, a message of the utmost importance, inscribed in fire on the sacred stone of the Internet. And that message is: holy crap T-Mobile is awesome. If you travel internationally at all, you should switch to T-Mobile now.

Yes, I know I sound like a paid shill. I feel awkward and embarrassed about that. I think my record speaks for itself, though: when it comes to tech companies, usually I’m a crotchety, negative guy. But this is different. This is terrific.

Heck, only six months ago I wrote a post called “America’s Carriers Are Terrible. It’s Probably Your Fault.” But then in October T-Mobile rolled out its free unlimited international global roaming.

Basically, international travellers on a monthly T-Mobile plan no longer have to either deal with rapacious roaming charges or the hassle of getting and activating a new SIM card local to your destination. Instead you just switch data roaming on and let your phone find your provider. To my considerable amazement, that’s all I needed to do; no APN hacking, no mobile-network munging, no service calls; It Just Works. I could even tether.

It’s not perfect, of course. You still have to pay, albeit very reasonable prices, for calls and texts, and your free data is only 2G/128kbps. Needless to say, you can buy 4G roaming from T-Mobile, but I’ve found no need to do so; in Toronto, at least, 2G is plenty good enough to check email and Twitter between the many zones and cafes where you can pick up a cup of wi-fi nowadays â€" and it’s so much better than the alternatives that any comparison at all is kind of insulting.

I am not accustomed to sounding like an advertisement like this. To be honest it kind of makes my skin crawl. But it’s probably important, on the rare occasions that a company â€" an American carrier, no less â€" actually does that right thing, that we praise them to the rafters and sing hosannas in their name.

Oh, I have no illusions that T-Mobile’s boardroom is full of angels. They were only driven to doing the right thing because they were the distant fourth-place competitor in a vicious market; and now that Softbank/Sprint is on the verge of buying them, everything may change. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they canned this initiative the day after the merger closes, on the grounds that it actually improves their users’ lives without desperately inconveniencing them at every possible pretext and then charging them to mitigate those inconveniences â€" and we can’t have that, can we? It sets a bad precedent.

I half-expect their attitude towards their customers to soon revert to that of a medieval lord towards his serfs. But maybe, in the interim, we travellers can send a message by voting with our feet. Abandon your current carrier, buy an unlocked phone, and flock to T-Mobile and its (currently) almost incomprehensibly user-friendly plans. This golden era probably won’t last; but make the most of it while you can.

Image credit: chrisinplymouth, Flickr.

Bitcoin Exchanges In India Shut Down After Regulator Warning

Bitcoin exchanges in India are shutting down days after the country’s banking regulator warned users of virtual currency against security and financial risks associated with them. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had remained silent on Bitcoin over past few weeks, even as China started clamping down on the exchanges, sending the virtual currency into a downward spin earlier this month.

A week after India’s small, but growing Bitcoin community organized its first conference, and made an appeal to the country’s banking regulators for recognizing the virtual currency, the RBI said the Bitcoin users have not obtained any regulatory approvals yet, which poses several risks to anybody associated with them. This is what the RBI said:

There have been several media reports of the usage of VCs, including Bitcoins, for illicit and illegal activities in several jurisdictions. The absence of information of counterparties in such peer-to-peer anonymous/ pseudonymous systems could subject the users to unintentional breaches of anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) laws

However, the wording of the announcement from RBI leaves a question mark over the legality of not just the exchanges but also of the people who trade on them.

As we had reported earlier this month, India was just beginning to see a rise in Bitcoin exchanges and the country’s 1000-member strong Bitcoin community was hoping to get more merchant endorsements.

BuysellBitco.in, an Indian website offering Bitcoin exchange in the local currency, has already suspended its operations. The founder of BuysellBitco.in, Mahim Gupta, who had previously mentioned that his monthly turnover was around $200,000, but he could also not be reached for comments for this post. Other bitcoin traders, perhaps cautious that the RBI’s statements threw their own legal situation into question, were also unavailable.

Gogolook Confirms Its Acquisition By Naver, The Owner Of Line

Taipei-based startup Gogolook confirmed that it has been acquired by Naver, the Korean Internet giant that is best known outside of Asia for being the owner of Line. Gogolook has not disclosed the acquisition price, but a report yesterday from the Investment Commission of Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said the amount was NT$529 million (or about $17.6 million USD) (h/t Tech In Asia). In an email, Gogolook CEO Jeff Kuo told me:

“After joining the Naver group, Gogolook will be able to accelerate and extend our strategic business deployment in a global scope. With the affiliation of LINE and abundant resources from the parent company worldwide, we cannot wait to show the world the strong innovative capabilities of Taiwan app startups.”

Gogolook’s flagship product is Whoscall, a caller ID app that has 1.2 million monthly active users and over 600 million numbers in its database, according to the company. We profiled Gogolook in June when the company launched the iOS version of Whoscall. Gogolook was officially launched in April 2012, but started three years earlier as a side project by three friends, including founders Kuo and Edgar Chiu. Whocall’s database of numbers was originally gathered from public sources like the Yellow Pages and the Google Place API, but as the app’s user base grew, it began to rely on crowd-sourcing. The company’s database of numbersâ€"including spam callersâ€"might prove handy to Naver as it seeks to build Line’s global footprint and compete against other popular messaging apps like WeChat and WhatsApp.

Gogolook raised about $500,000 in angel funding and its investors included Trinity VC.

With $1.5M In Angel Funding, byUs.com Wants To Provide Better Recommendations For Important Service Providers

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Fly Or Die: Nokia Lumia 1520

Nokia Lumia 1520 | Fly or Die

Nokia is now basically the defacto Windows Phone handset manufacturer, and the Lumia 1520 is its latest effort. The big, big full HD 6-inch display sets it apart from any previous Windows Phone device, and puts it into a rare class of device even among Android phones, whose screens can also get pretty darn huge.

The screen is great, but the phone is a crime against nature. Or at least, that’s my side of the story. Chris predictably sees it differently, because he’s blind. Of course, there are some arguments in favor of the gargantuan device, but they melt away when you try to wrangle one in a human-sized hand.

You can probably predict how the chips fall given that description, but watch for the Christmas sweaters, and stay for the verdict.

Samsung’s Newest Ad Is Pretty Much The Worst

Worried that none of their recent commercials would take home that coveted “Worst Ad Of The Year” trophy, Samsung has swooped in with one hell of a last minute entry.

It’s like Samsung wanted to give us all a Christmas present. But instead of giving us socks, or candy, or a puppy, Samsung gave everyone a big ol’ box of cringe.

Like any masterpiece of cinema, the spot leaves the viewer with questions to consider post-viewing. Watch the commercial above, then join us below for some of our favorite bits:

0:15 â€" If a stranger asks “Want to see something cool?” on a ski lift, is the answer ever anything but “No.”?
0:28 â€" Did he just kill someone? Pretty sure he just killed someone.
0:32 â€" Ey pree lady.
0:55 â€" “Check this out. I know I just met you literally 15 seconds ago, but I took 64 pictures of you.”
1:14 â€" Oh god why is he watching this video in a club who does that
1:51 â€" Why is she calling him? She JUST walked away from him. Seriously, she just walked out of frame less than 2 seconds ago. Maybe they’re both crazy.
2:20 â€" Jiggle fist pump.

Perhaps Samsung is just a master troll. Maybe. I hope.

How To Hire More Engineers In Less Time

Editor’s note: Bryan Schreier is a partner at Sequoia focusing on consumer and enterprise companies. He represents Sequoia on the boards of Dropbox, Hearsay Social, Inkling, Qualtrics, Thumbtack and TuneIn among others. Follow him on Twitter @schreier.

Got 990 free hours?

Not likely. Yet that’s how long it takes the typical startup to hire 12 engineers. Even if you spread your hiring over the course of a year, you’ll need to spend more than 19 hours a week recruiting candidates to hit that target.

A shortage of engineers is the biggest challenge facing Silicon Valley startups today. Hiring is what enables you to execute your product roadmap. So, falling behind on recruiting is a competitive issue.

Yet many fast-growing startups resist hiring a recruiter. It makes sense to rely on your network of contacts for the first handful of developers. But at Sequoia, we think that once you have product-market fit, the risk to your business is too great not to have someone dedicated to staffing.

Recruiting Calculator

Bret Reckard, who heads up technical recruiting for Sequoia, put together this calculator to help you plan your recruiting efforts. In particular, it highlights two variables that have the biggest impact on the time it takes to build a team: your referral percentage and your ability to close candidates.

Start by entering the number of engineers you’re looking to hire and how many months you have to meet this goal. Then enter the percentage of your hires that typically come from referrals and the percentage of candidates who typically accept your offers. If you don’t know these, start tracking. The tool will calculate how many hours you’ll spend recruiting and shepherding candidates through the hiring process.

Finally, the calculator will suggest how many full-time recruiters it will take to meet your hiring goal. A seasoned recruiter at a company with a lot of resources can directly source and hire about 30 engineers a year. For reasons we’ll outline below, the number climbs to 70 if candidates come from referrals.

The Value of Referrals

Recruiting is hard work, especially for a company that doesn’t have a lot of name recognition. To find one new engineer, you need to scour LinkedIn, GitHub and your employees’ networks to identify 100 people who appear to have the right skills. Of those, maybe 10 people will be interested and open to a job change. After hours on the phone and countless cups of coffee, you’ll have a small pool of candidates.

Referrals allow you to skip these early stages of recruitingâ€"the candidate’s contact at your company did that for you.

A company with a 20 percent referral percentage will spend more than 1,200 hours adding 12 engineers. The same company with an 80 percent referral percentage will spend about 750 hours.

Between 40 percent and 60 percent of hires should come from referrals. If your percentage is less than that you likely aren’t doing enough to encourage referrals, or worse, your employees can’t recommend your company to their friends. It’s also possible you’ve exhausted your networks, but in most cases companies don’t push enough to find this limit.

Companies with high referral rates tend to make a big effort to get them. They tend to make hiring a top company goal, providing regular updates at all-hands meetings.

Some companies go further. Dropbox, for instance, built an app to manage referrals. Employees enter a candidate into the system and can track the hiring process. When you refer someone, being able to follow the process makes a big difference. Also, a fast hiring process is always important, but especially with referrals. Nothing kills referrals faster than letting people languish in the interview queue.

Don’t just sit around and wait for employees to recommend friends. A referral program should be a systemized way to get leads. Sit with employees and make lists of the best people from their previous jobs, colleges and peer networks. These leads are just as valuable as the name of a friend who is looking for a job.

Take time to court and get to know the people on your referral list. Even if they don’t join, they can and will be advocates in the community.

There’s a lot more to recruiting than referrals. There are things you can do to improve the other big variable, your ability to close candidates. We think a company should be able to close around 75 percent of the candidates it makes offers to. Your close starts as soon as you meet a candidate with no upper limit to the lengths you can go. I often talk to prospective engineering hires on behalf of the companies I work with and I’d encourage you to ask the same of your board members.

You can read more about building a referral program, closing candidates and what to expect from recruiters here. 

It’s A Wonderful Life, For A Few Of Us

So where were we? Oh yes: everybody hates us. San Francisco’s recent Google-bus and “homeless trash” kerfuffles are symptoms of an increasingly broad, deep, and bitter anti-tech animosity. The Economist predicts: “The tech elite will join bankers and oilmen in public demonology.” The New York Times concurs: “Tech workers have, rightly or wrongly, received the blame. Resentment simmers.”

Such ingratitude! What’s wrong with these warped, blinded haters?

…Well, OK, it might be the very real sense that these days, with software eating the world, if you’re not in tech, or you’re not already rich, then you are probably basically screwed for life. “We are in the midst of the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has known.” Unemployment remains high, and many unemployed “may simply give up looking for jobs once their benefits lapse.”

Meanwhile, US income inequality today is the highest that it’s been since 1928 â€" which matters especially because “the decline in middle-class incomes owes as much to rising inequality as it does to the depressed state of the economy.” The NYT recently highlighted a Brooklyn neighborhood where

the top 5 percent of residents earn 76 times as much as the bottom quintile … addicts gather outside a food pantry a block from $2 million brownstones

The economic doldrums have hit Europe, too, outside of Germany. Don’t even get me started on Spain or France: and as for the UK, well, the BBC recently reported that, for the first time, “More working households were living in poverty in the UK last year than non-working ones … low pay and part-time work has prompted an unprecedented fall in living standards.”

So just go get a good education! Right? Sorry, no. Even if you have a Ph.D.:

The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. … Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labour markets virtually everywhere. One of the hot topics in labour market research at the moment is what we call “dualisation.” Dualisation is the strengthening of this divide between insiders in secure, stable employment and outsiders in fixed-term, precarious employment.

Hell, even law school is a disaster nowadays. And total American student-loan debt exceeded $1.2 trillion this year. At that price, for many people, paying for higher education is almost like dumping your life savings into a lottery, or a casino; great if it works out…but absolutely crippling if it doesn’t.

So everyone can move to the tech sector! Again, sorry, no â€" or at best, not any time soon. You cannot reasonably expect to retrain significant numbers of people into skilled engineers, and there’s little-to-no room for the unskilled. (Unlike most fields, bad software engineers actually add negative value to the projects they work on.) Engineering is hard. Most people aren’t any good at it.

So people who aren’t rich, and aren’t in tech â€" the vast majority, I hasten to remind you â€" will increasingly become part of the precariat:

This is not just a matter of having insecure employment, of being in jobs of limited duration and with minimal labour protection, although all this is widespread. It is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations … had come to expect as their due.

Meanwhile, the rich, as a class, are behaving with their usual elegance, taste, and restraint. Finding new ways to evict tenants so they can charge higher rents. Reshaping corporations into what The Economist calls “distorporations.” “Ruining art for the rest of us.” And it’s hard to wander amid San Francisco’s new-growth luxury boutiques, artisanal coffee shops, and opulent social events without getting the sense that techies, too, are making decadent hay of today’s inequalities. I mused the other day on Twitter:

You think this is bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Right now the precariat mostly just resents the tech world because we’re wealthier. That’s because tech has only barely begun to eat their jobs â€" and keep their homes and cars under constant surveillance. How do you think they’ll feel about us in five years’ time?

That process has already begun, though, and it will only accelerate. Everyone’s worried about the way Amazon treats its workers; will they be as upset about those replaced by the robots now rolling out to Amazon’s warehouses? (And before you start blaming Asian outsourcing, note that Foxconn is seeking to replace its Chinese laborers with a “robot army” too.) As Andrew Leonard put it in Salon:

the big difference between the current technological revolution and the Industrial Revolution is that the initial technological advances of the 18th century created jobs for unskilled workers, while today’s robot armies are increasingly replacing the jobs of unskilled workers.

Raising the minimum wage will help those cursed with shitty jobs…but it won’t create more of them. Cutting food stamps may save money, but it can’t drive the poor to take jobs that don’t exist.

In the long run all this ferment, disruption, and innovation is a good thing for everyone, of course, but in the medium term, we’re staring down the barrel of a wrenching period of transition. Ask the poor, struggling, and insecure â€" the precariat â€" how they feel about Silicon Valley’s hallowed goal of disruption, and its implications for them.

True, we seem to be in a cyclical economic upturn at last; but at the same time, the real US unemployment rate is probably something like 11.5%. As the Washington Post puts it, when people drop out of the work force, “it will look as if the labor market has improved, even though it hasn’t.” Even if we are enjoying a cyclical upswing, it can only mask an ongoing structural decline in employment for so long.

It seems to me (and many others) that we’re at the beginning of a Great Bifurcation. On one side: those who were rich when it began, plus the upper echelon of the tech world, the usual oil/finance suspects, and a smattering of others. Figure about 15% of the population. They will cluster in dense little islands of wealth â€" San Francisco, Manhattan, beach houses and mountain chalets. They will travel to all the best places. Their parties will grow ever more decadent. Their children will get the best education â€" and, in time, the best biotech â€" that money can buy.

But not all techies will be winners. This modern-day Belle Époque is increasingly for people who can tick at least two of the following boxes: smart, skilled, and well-connected. (Don’t kid yourselfâ€"the tech world is by no means a pure meritocracy.) The room for people who can boast only one of those, let alone zero, is diminishing. The mediocre, unskilled, poorly-connected, and/or just plain unlucky will join the other side of the great divide soon enough.

By which I mean the teeming masses of the precariat, getting by with part-time jobs, contract work, and sharing-economy serfdom, perpetually fighting a Sisyphean battle to erase their debts and amass some savings … and mostly losing.

And across that great divide? Growing resentment verging on fury. Again, you think techies are disliked now in places like San Francisco? Just wait another five or ten years. Yes, SF could and should build out much more housingâ€"

â€"but if I’m right about the fundamental trends here, even that won’t help. The tech world, and/or the machinations it is setting in motion, is becoming Henry Potter to the precariat’s George Bailey, and/or Ebenezer Scrooge to its Bob Cratchit, for a period of wrenching disruption measured in decades. I know that’s not how we like to think of ourselves. But until and unless we come up with a better way â€" a fundamental change, not band-aids â€" then it’s what we will become.

Warby Parker Raises $60 Million From Existing Investors

Online eyeglasses company Warby Parker just raised a $60 million Series C round from its existing investors, with Tiger Global Management leading. General Catalyst Partners, Spark Capital, Thrive Capital and First Round Capital also reinvested.

It is likely that the company wasn’t short on cash before raising this round. But the momentum was right for the company as receiving new cash from existing investors is a great vote of confidence. Warby Parker plans to increase its customer support team. As Zappos showed everyone, having a great support team is an important asset when it comes to large-scale specialized e-commerce companies.

The startup first started as a way to get cheaper glasses. Instead of selling traditional brands, Warby Parker chose to go directly to the manufacturers in China and work with them. By removing the middleman and selling exclusively on its website, the startup became very competitive while maintaining healthy margins. Recently, the company put a toe in the water by opening a bricks-and-mortar store in New York. But the website remains the main retail location.

As a reminder, the company raised $41.5 million in January. Warby Parker now has enough cash to do small acquisitions. But it’s still unclear whether an IPO is in the works.

WunWun, The Uber For Anything, Implements Surge Pricing

WunWun, the on-demand delivery service for anything, is changing things up a bit to streamline operations.

The company is introducing some version of surge pricing, wherein users can pay an extra $10 to “get it now”, rather than wait for free delivery. Both the free delivery ETAs and the “get it now” prices are subject to change based on demand, with a cap at six hours for waiting and $30 for immediate service.

A lot has been said recently about surge pricing, especially as it relates to Uber.

Time will tell if WunWun users will stand for paying higher rates for something they used to get for free, which was super fast and free delivery of anything.

On-demand services seem to be able to get away with surge pricing, as users tend to be more liberal spenders.

The update also allows for an “Indoor delivery” option that costs $5, which means that the WunWun helper will get off their bike, lock it, buzz into the apartment building, and come upstairs to your front door.

The company says that it saves between ten and 15 minutes each time a customer receives their order at the front door.

In the past, WunWun used to offer free on-demand delivery from stores, and charge a $20 fee for custom orders like restaurant delivery, picking up someone from the airport, or having a key copied.

Now, custom orders automatically include “Get it now” and indoor delivery.

WunWun claims to be growing 50 percent month-over-month, but won’t clarify the exact number of users on the service.

The app is only available in New York.

Apple’s New Holiday Ad Flips Your Expectations And Tugs The Old Heartstrings

Oh, brooding, teenage boy apparently dejected at holiday family gathering, I was you once. But unlike the character in Apple’s note-perfect holiday commercial embedded above, I was doing terrible things like texting with my friends about how lame everything was and playing Snake, not capturing sentimental moments shared with family to surprise them with later.

Apple may get flack from the Android camp for not opening up its platform enough and other grave sins related to things that mostly concern us super nerds, but Apple has a knack for consistently nailing the human aspect of technology, which is what’s on display with this commercial. I’m still willing to bet that in real life, that volta where everything’s revealed to be sweetness and good feeling is a rarified occurrence, but you still got me right in the feels, Apple.

Rebtel Launches Sendly, A Money Transfer App For Topping Up Pre-Paid Phones

VoIP provider Rebtel has been steadily growing ever since launch in 2006, with over 20 million users and an increasingly popular VoIP SDK.

But today the company is dipping their toes in a new pool, launching a credit transfer service called Sendly.

Sendly is a standalone app that lets almost anyone in the world send credit to their friends or loved ones that can be used to top up prepaid phones.

Obviously, this move makes sense for Rebtel’s existing customers who are predominantly using the app to talk to loved ones who are in a different country. Sending funds to distant loved ones goes hand-in-hand with that, especially as pay-as-you-go phone plans become more and more popular.

To use Sendly, all you need is the app and the recipient’s phone number. You can choose the amount you’re sending, and when the notification is received, the money automatically turns into phone credit.

Here’s what Sendly’s Mans Ullerstam had to say about the launch:

We know that the people who use our calling app the most are those with family and friends in other countries. With Sendly, we want to give millions of callers an easier and quicker way to provide their loved ones with credit to use on calls, texts and data. The ability to send mobile credit to prepaid phone users is another big step we’re taking as a leading communications platform that’s powering stronger connections between individuals, businesses, and mobile subscribers around the globe.

The app is free, and thanks to existing relationships between Rebtel and over 60 global mobile operators, fees taken by the company are lower than other, traditional forms of money transfer. According to CEO and founder Andreas Bernström, Rebtel’s fees are about 12% of the value of the transfer.

But even more interesting are the opportunities beyond topping up a phone. Rebtel sees huge potential for this type of technology to be turned into an API, allowing other app makers to implement money transfer within their apps.

Sendly is available in over 50 countries at launch, and interested parties can learn more here.

CrunchBase Reveals: The Average Successful Startup Raises $41M, Exits at $242.9M

The CrunchBase dataset has now captured more venture exits than ever, so we decided to take a closer look at what successful startups can tell us about venture investing and the startup landscape.

We found that the average successful US startup has raised $41 million and exited at $242.9 million. We also found that there is a strong correlation between larger exits and companies that raised more money, but no such relationship between the amount of time between founding a company and being acquired or taken public.

Between the two types of exits, we found that the average successfully acquired U.S. startup has raised $29.4 million and sold for $155.5 million, for investor profits of about 7.5x (if you assume 100 percent investor ownership of the company, which is never the case). Startups that went public in an IPO raised significantly more funds, but also took substantially more venture funding, and thus more dilution.

The average IPO-bound startup raised $162 million before going public. Thanks to a few recent large IPOs, the average raised amount soared to $467.9 million, for a 2.9x investor return (of course, venture investors will never sell all their shares on the IPO date).

The analysis includes all funded startups in CrunchBase that had an exit since 2007. As with most analysis dealing with startups and venture investing, it’s worth noting that some company information from CrunchBase may be incomplete or inaccurate, even if it’s the largest free source for startup information in the world.

Facebook both took the most pre-IPO money, $2.3 billion, and raised the most through going public at an estimated $18.4 billion. Twitter raised an estimated $1.8 billion in their IPO, but also took almost $1.2 billion from venture investors before going public. Mouse over the dots below for more details.

Company age did not seem to factor into a successful exit. Acquired companies were an average of seven years old, while IPO companies went public around 8.25 years, on average. However, there was no clear trend between age and the value of either type of exit.

The venture investors with the most successful exits were led by SV Angel, one of the most active investors in the last few years, along with perennial heavyweights Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Accel Partners and Benchmark.

We compared our dataset to CB Insights Venture Capital Data Comparison. Not seen below is that CrunchBase has since captured 255 additional exits through Q3 and Q4 and continues to add more data points every day.

To follow the trends with startups and investors, use the latest CrunchBase data set to take a look for yourself. Download the November 2013 Data Export and let us know what you find.

Amazon Drones: As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap

As a drone hipster â€" I wrote an entire novel about a drone apocalypse a full five years ago â€" I watched the techosphere’s reactions to Amazon’s announcement that it was experimenting with drone delivery with a mixture of amusement and despair. Almost everybody is thinking so small. Jeff Bezos must feel like Butch Cassidy: “I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”

The naysayers were out in force. “Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon’s Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense,” bleated Wired‘s Marcus Wohlsen. Dan Lyons reacted to the piece with a condemnation of “the credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes,” again complaining that drone deliveries are “years away.” The Guardian‘s James Bell dismissed it as “little more than a publicity stunt,” and added: “what happens when next door’s kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle?” And Slate called it “hot air” and compared it to an April Fool’s joke.

What is wrong with these people? Do they moonlight as stock analysts who only care about the next quarter’s results? Do they have no vision at all? Do they not care about anything unless it will directly interact with them tomorrow, or at the absolute latest, next year? They’re the same ilk who, I’m sure, claimed that credit cards would never work, that merchants would never adopt them, that people would not use them, that fraud would make their use untenable.

I’m choosing that as the analogy because drones lost to birds and BB guns will be treated in exactly the same way credit-card providers treat fraud today: as an acceptable loss in the context of that enormous business. Yes, drone reliability will need to improve, and bad weather will be a problem. Yes, regulatory roadblocks need to be hurdled. Yes, the logistics of drone delivery need to be fine-tuned. No, you won’t see drones arriving at your doorstep anytime soon; Amazon drone delivery will presumably begin with small pilot projects delivering to organizations that own their own buildings. To quote Bezos himself:

The hard part here is putting in all the redundancy, all the reliability, all the systems you need to say, ‘Look, this thing can’t land on somebody’s head while they’re walking around their neighborhood,’

But at the same time, “Technically it is totally feasible,” according to MIT aeronautics professor R. John Hansman. Which may explain why DHL and UPS are testing drone delivery too. (But remember; nonsense! hot air! nothing but a publicity stunt! Sigh.)

Yes, the cost to Amazon will be extremely high, to begin with…but in the long run, this isn’t merely about delivering the goods you buy. In fact that service might wind up as a mere loss leader. As usual, John Robb â€" you might remember his DroneNet idea, which I wrote about a year ago â€" has a more clearly farsighted view of what’s really going on here:

This isn’t about supplementing UPS; in the long run, this is about supplanting them â€" and FedEx, and the Post Office â€" with Amazon Delivery Services. After all, once you’ve got an Amazon Skyport on the roof of your business, or your apartment building, and once their reliability has been established, why would you only use it to receive packages? Why would you ever go to the post office or wait for UPS pickup again?

On the other hand Bezos’ dream might well be delayed, or even quelled, by an outright ban on drones in private hands. No, really.

I’m not talking about drone surveillance, although that will be a problem. What I’m worried about (and have been for some time; it’s what my drone novel is about) is drone terrorism. Because after a drone packed with Semtex targets its victim’s GPS coordinates or license plate and blows them up, you’ll have one hell of a time trying to trace it back to its sender. Oh, and drone crime, too; you can expect fleets of them to be flying north across the Rio Grande in the next decade, full of drugs. And if many of them are intercepted, well, that’s just acceptable loss, again.

Drones will decouple criminals from their crimes, and there’s precious little that the authorities can do about that. I expect the widespread rollout of Amazon’s delivery drones to be delayed not by fundamental technical or logistical problems but by an inevitable backlash. One which, some would argue, politicians of all people should have seen coming, for “as ye sow,” it is said, “so shall ye reap…”

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Nextdoor Competitor Meetey Launches Its Local Social Network Internationally

Back in October Nextdoor, the startups that lets people create private social networks with others who live in their local neighborhoods, raised a new $60 million funding round boosting it’s cash pot to $100 million. It’s now live across 22,500 of neighborhoods in the US. So as you can tell this is going to be a pretty hot space, aiming to be for our “local life what Facebook is for our social life and what LinkedIn is for our professional life” says CEO and founder Nirav Tolia.

However, others want in on this space. Tel-Avib-based Meetey wants to do something similar and today its expanding to over 90 countries beyond its home market in Israel and says it has hit 200,000 users. That’s probably less that NextDoor, and Meety has not released any information about its funding to date. However, it will be interesting to watch this David and Goliath battle.

The company also unveiled data from its platform that shows that on average, active users are forming 56 distinct new relationships that don’t exist on their current social graph.

This suggests that current social platforms like Facebook aren’t good at real-world interactions. I mean, when was the last time you wanted your random neighbours to see pictures of your new baby? Yeah, let’s not go there…

It would seem Meetey has its work cut out for it trying to go up against NextDoor, which has such enormous funding and a head start in the crucial US market.

But it’s interesting that Meetey seems to push the flirting side of neighbourhoods. Could this be the Tinder of Neighbourhoods?

Perhaps then next Social Media Gurus will have to become Relationship Counsellors as well.

NomNom Launches First Plugin-Free Commercial Game Based On Asm.js And Unreal Engine 3

Earlier this year, Epic Games and Mozilla showcased a demo of Epic’s popular Unreal Engine running the browser without the need for a plugin. Based on Mozilla’s Asm.js JavaScript subset and its Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript Compiler, this demo was meant to showcase what developers can now do in the browser thanks to the asm.js project and WebGL for bringing 3D content to the browser. Until now, though, virtually all projects that combined these technologies were demos. Now, NomNom Games, a subsidiary of Trendy Entertainment, has launched Monster Madness, the first commercial game that uses Unreal Engine 3 and Mozilla’s technologies.

As expected, the game runs best in Firefox, which recently gained full support for asm.js, but it will also happily run in Chrome and Opera. The game, it’s worth noting, is officially in alpha, but it’s now available for anybody who wants to give it a try â€" including some multi-player elements.

Bringing Monster Madness to the browser, Mozilla says, only took about a week (though they got some technical support from Epic and Mozilla).

Asm.js and Emscripten obviously help developers port many of their C and C++ assets to JavaScript and then run them at near-native speeds. Most game development shops are heavily invested in these programming languages because that’s basically the only way they can get the performance they need.

Mozilla is clearly homing in on games as the first set of applications to bring these technologies to the mainstream. The organization, however, also says that it believes other types of content can also benefit from the performance gains that asm.js offers.

Box Rolls Out New Management Tools, Gives Its 200K Business Users More Control Over Their Files

This morning Box announced a number of feature improvements to its file-storage platform, as well as corporate moves that the company says will help its customers better manage their employees use of the product.

As a company, Box wants enterprises of scale to adopt its technologies. Those contracts are lucrative but come with an implicit feature list: companies that large are accustomed to managing their denizens on a very granular level.

Maddening to your everyday Dilbert, certainly, but delightful to the micro-megalomaniacal IT guru. Box needs to make that person happy.

So, Box has introduced Content Manager, which, get ready for a surprise, allows companies to manage their content from a central hub. Firms will now be able to reach into the accounts of individuals, change permissions and the like.

Also announced today is a set new controls that can prevent a company’s employees from uploading sensitive information, such as payment signatures. And, all arms to whistleblower Edward Snowden, Box can now alert an admin if a user is sucking down huge amounts of the company’s data.

The company also formalized its services group into a unit called Box Consulting, which is designed, naturally, to help people get onto the cloud with more alacrity than they could manage on their own. Box has also signed a deal with Capgemini that will see the latter vend Box.

Box also has created an automation system that, akin to IFTTT, lets companies build processes around file varieties. So a firm that wanted to set it up as such could have files of variant x, that have been opened, placed in one folder and not the next, and so forth.

And finally, Box stated that its service is used by 200,000 businesses, which is up from 180,000 in September, implying an 11.11 percent growth rate of corporate usage (in terms of unique businesses) in a period of roughly one quarter in length. The company also disclosed that its customers that total more than 5,000 ‘seats’ grew 300 percent in 2013 compared to 2012.

The company needs to continue to press ahead, because it has rivals aplenty. Dropbox is raising a huge sum of money, and earlier today Egnyte announced that it had picked up a $29.5 million Series D round of funding. Box itself recently raised $100 million.

Box’s larger technology stack is maturing, and it is meeting an increasing percentage of the enterprise client wish list. May the enterprise file storage wars continue.

Postmates Launches In Washington, DC And Releases An Android App In Beta

On-demand delivery service Postmates has launched in Washington, D.C. today, marking its fifth market in the U.S. The company is also releasing a beta version of its app for Android, which will make the service available for a whole new group of mobile users.

It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since Postmates first launched service in San Francisco. It spent a lot of time in its home market working out the kinks, improving its app, and proving out a model that would allow customers to get items delivered within an hour for a low price.

Then after a while it started expanding into other markets where people need stuff delivered for cheap in under an hour, places like Seattle and New York City and Brooklyn.

That expansion has gone really well, according to Postmates co-founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann, especially in the Big Apple. Manhattan, where Postmates has been in business for the last six months, has grown three times faster than San Francisco and is already profitable, Lehmann says.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that we’d hear about another new Postmates market not long after. With its expansion into Washington, D.C., Postmates seeks to meet existing demand in the nation’s capital. According to Lehmann, D.C. has had the highest number of app activations outside of New York City.

There are a number of things that make Washington, D.C. an attractive market: It’s densely populated, has a great food scene, and has a lot of office workers with expense accounts who get stuck at their desks during lunch.

While Postmates sent in an advance team to recruit couriers, the company plans to manage the new market from New York, thanks to the proximity of the two cities. And it’s been busy populating its app with restaurants and shops and menus from the area.

In addition to a new market, Postmates is close to releasing a new app for Android mobile users. For now, that app is only being launched in beta at postmates.com/android rather than through the Google Play store.

Part of the reason for the limited release is that the company’s biggest concern is seeing overwhelming demand due to a large number of new Android users. “It’s such a highly requested feature we don’t know what to expect,” Lehmann said.

While “too much demand” seems like a good problem to have, Postmates has already been having problems keeping up with the number of requests it’s had coming in. Last month it introduced “Blitz pricing,” which is kind of like Uber’s surge pricing, and is its own way of dealing with high demand.

Postmate investors include Founders Fund, SoftTech VC, Matrix Partners, Crosslink Capital, and Expansion Venture Capital, along with angels such as David Sacks, Dave Morin, Bill Lee, Scott Banister, David Wu, Thomas Korte, Naval Ravikant, Russell Cook, Russel Simmons, Walter Lee, Andy McLoughlin, Paige Craig, Jawed Karim.

NSA And Other Intelligence Agencies Got All Up In Your World Of Warcraft, Xbox Live

The next time you’re looking to party with a dark elf Rogue in World of Warcraft, think twice: that could be an NSA agent in disguise. According to new documents from the Snowden leaks, both the NSA and the GCHQ employed World of Warcraft and Second Life, as well as Xbox Live, to gather intel and uncover plots â€" but it seems mostly they ended up just bumbling into one another by accident.

The New York Times reports (via The Verge) that efforts around online gaming worlds were thought to be a good idea since they seemed fertile ground for covert enemy activity: false IDs, voice and text chat and even built-in monetary exchange systems, like the WoW in-game goods market, all seemed to have potential for use by a network of militants or terrorists. Seeming like a perfect vehicle for fomenting revolution isn’t the same as actually being one, it turns out.

While intelligence agencies may have gotten a few level 90 characters out of the program, they didn’t reap much in terms of usable intelligence â€" the documents reveal that a so-called “deconfliction” group was needed for Second Life, for instance, just to make sure that the various agencies involved (including the FBI, CIA and the Pentagon) didn’t trip over each other’s feet. In other words, if one of the groups thought they’d finally tracked down a spy in-game, it would usually turn out to be just another spy on the same side.

In the end the documents don’t reveal any successes from the project, according to the NYT. But the combination of troves of data, huge user pools and communications channels apparently proved impossible to pass up. Second Life appears to have been a particularly high value early target, with its parent company Linden Labs’ CTO meeting with NSA officials at their offices in 2007. The NYT notes that CTO, Cory Ondrejka, had previously worked as a Navy officer with the NSA on top-secret projects before coming to the virtual world startup.

One document from this recent batch of released information suggests that the NSA was able to ID groups, guilds and users on WoW who were associated with extremist Islamic organizations and movements, and another from GCHQ says that they were even able to secure discussions between Xbox Live members, though to what result wasn’t clear. One thing’s for sure: cutting through the static when it comes to the general level of discussion on services like Xbox Live and Second Life would be a full-time gig for any analyst, and determining what’s a coded transmission and what’s just offensive l33tspeak from a nearly illiterate, Mountain Dew-addled 13-year old is essentially impossible.

TechCrunch

One day each of us will pass on and be no more. We will cease to be, expired stiff and bereft of life, our metabolic processes part of history. Most of us don’t like to think about joining the choir invisible or, for that matter, what will happen to our online profiles once we become ex-people. A startup called Perpetu wants to make it easier for us to ensure that our social network accounts are unplugged once we shuffle off this mortal coil. The service, which currently lets users add Facebook or Twitter accounts for free, just launched its premium service, which costs $15 a year or a $100 one-time payment and includes support for LinkedIn, Gmail, Dropbox, Flickr and GitHub.

How it works

Founded by an intellectual property lawyer and banker, Perpetu allows you to decide what happens to your “online assets” after you die even if you don’t have a will.

First, you sign up for Perpetu with your email, Facebook or Twitter account. Once you are logged in, you will see a list of services you can add to Perpetu. There are several options for each. For example, you can schedule a final wall post for your Facebook profile, or download photos, your status updates and private messages and have the files emailed to certain people. On GitHub, developers can select repositories to make public after they die. Your LinkedIn contacts can downloaded and forwarded to a colleague or someone else.

Online privacy laws are still in their infancy and each social network has different ways of dealing with the information of deceased users. Unfortunately, their methods often conflict with the wishes of family members and friends.

Co-founder Ryanne Lai says two cases in particular motivated her. In the U.K., a woman named Louise Palmer complained after her late daughter Becky’s Facebook profile was turned into a memorial page because she could not log on to remove spam or read the encouraging messages friends had sent Becky after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Several years earlier in the U.S., the family of soldier Justin Ellsworth sued Yahoo in 2005 to gain access to their son’s email account, where he had been drafting a memoir of his service in Iraq before he was killed by a roadside bomb.

“The thing about the [Ellsworth] case that was really shocking to me was that on one hand I couldn’t believe how much trouble the family had to go through to get access to the emails,” says Lai. “But even more shocking to me is that the son may not have wanted his family to see everything. He had no control and there was no way to strike a balance.”

Balancing privacy and access

Perpetu seeks to respect the wishes of its users while making sure that their heirs don’t need to endure the lengthy process of submitting death certificates, obituaries and court orders in order to gain access to their online accounts. The company tackles the problem by letting you chose which files or folders to send to specific people, one of the main ways in which it differentiates from competitors.

Similar services include Legacy Locker, which was acquired by PasswordBox earlier this month, AssetLock and Google’s Inactive Account Manager. Other “digital afterlife” services include DeadSocial and LivesOn which lets you prepare messages to be published to your social networks after you die.

Unlike Legacy Locker or AssetLock, Perpetu doesn’t ask users for their passwords. Instead, you select what information is downloaded and sent to your friends and family so they don’t have to log into your accounts and go through the potentially traumatic process of sifting through all your private emails, documents and photos.

“That’s why I started Perpetu. I have a Tumblr. I have a fan Twitter account used specifically for tweeting to Adam Lambert,” says Lai. “These are things that I want to keep and that my family wouldn’t understand.”

“For companies like Yahoo, Facebook and Google, they are not putting enough effort into dealing with dead users’ accounts. It doesn’t get them any more data. There’s no incentive for them,” she adds. “I appreciate Google doing an inactive account manager, but Perpetu has no conflict of interest.”

Lai first pitched Perpetu’s concept at Startup Weekend Hong Kong in 2011, where she met co-founder Andrea Livotto. The two built a prototype at the event, then applied for funding from the Hong Kong government. Perpetu, which first launched in April, is currently part of Hong Kong Cyberport‘s incubator and has received a total of $630,000 HKD (about $81,000 USD) in seed funding from the program.

So far, none of Perpetu’s 1,000 registered users have passed away, which means its founders are still able to glean feedback about features from them. Perpetu’s early adopters asked for Dropbox and Instagram support, which is why the startup decided to launch a premium service.

Getting users to sign up for the site’s free service has not been a problem, even though dying is a topic most people don’t want to confront. Perpetu’s site was designed so it doesn’t look “too dark or depressing,” Lai says. The service is also much easier than finding a lawyer and drafting a will.

Making sure you are really, really dead

On the other hand, deleting online accounts is sometimes too easy, as demonstrated by a January Buzzfeed article titled “How To Murder Your Friends On Facebook.”

To avoid accidents and pranks, Perpetu has several safeguards in place to verify a user’s death before it starts deactivating accounts. When you sign up, you provide contact information including your email, phone number and the beneficiaries listed on your will, if you have one.

When Perpetu learns of your death, it will send an email to you (or your inbox, rather), then call you to make sure that reports of your death have not been greatly exaggerated. You can also set an amount of time to elapse after your death before Perpetu starts following your instructions. Lai says the company is looking at other ways of verifying deaths in different countries, such as checking with government agencies.

R.I.P. data?

Though Perpetu gives you a certain amount of control over your online legacy, there are also things it cannot do. For example, Perpetu can’t ensure that Facebook or other online services will permanently wipe your data from their servers.

Lai also emphasizes that Perpetu is not meant to replace a final will.

“We can carry out online wishes for our users through an online mechanism, but if they have a will and the will contradicts Perpetu’s instructions, then of course the will overrides it,” she says. The company wants to work with lawyers and legal firms to encourage people to mention Perpetu accounts in their wills.

What Perpetu can do is give you more control over what people can or can’t see on your profiles after you die.

“What we want to focus on is that you have so much you have created in your life. There’s value in those creations,” says Lai. “When people start leaving final wishes, they reflect on what they can do in life.”

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Sugru To Offer A Kit To Attach Anything To Anything

While attaching one thing to another is a fairly basic process â€" epoxy is still a thing, after all â€" what do you use if you want to occasionally remove that thing from the other thing? The answer? Magnets. And Sugru.

Sugru, the rubbery, self-hardening material that allows you to fix nearly anything, is planning on offering a very simple connection kit for hardware hackers. It comes with four magnets and a bunch of Sugru. To use it you simply create a little mountain of Sugru, stick a magnet inside, and attach it to one surface. Then you do the same for the other surface. Once the material hardens, the magnets will hold your stuff together without slipping.

The kits will cost $16 when the company begins making them this year and they are offering pre-orders now. While this definitely isn't rocket science â€" any yutz can buy some magnets â€" it looks like the folks at Sugru have thought this through and are offering just the right magnets and just the right material for an ideal experience. In short, it looks pretty Sugreat.

Get it?

UPS Also Said To Be Testing Drone Delivery, Constant Robot Background Hum Increasingly Inevitable

UPS is also looking into getting flying robots to deliver packages, according to The Verge, along with Internet ecommerce giant Amazon. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos dominated the news cycle yesterday with the revelation that Amazon was working on drone delivery with 30-min. ship times, albeit for a few years out in a best case scenario, but UPS also now appears to be interested in replacing its reliable army of brown-shorted carriers with repurposed evil mindless deathbots.

UPS told the Verge that it finds the concept of commercial drone use “interesting,” and that it'll continue to “evaluate” its usefulness for the parcel carrier. Big Brown also pointed out that it pours more money into R&D than any of its competitors in the delivery business, which, while not confirming it's spending on drones specifically, definitely suggests that could be the case.

In addition to the official statement, Verge quotes multiple sources close to the company as confirming that it's testing a number of different drone-based delivery programs. But unlike Amazon's vision of a robot flying from a warehouse to your door with your order of Uranium ore, the UPS implementation could shore up something like delivery from the airport to the local storage warehouse or distribution center. That's actually a vision that's much more feasible in the near-term, so long as regulators can catch up and the FAA can establish some clear guidelines on the use of unmanned transport in domestic airspace.

Imagining a world where the freeways aren't clogged with huge, noisy, loud, polluting transport trucks presents a tempting vision, especially for frequent commuters. But drones whirring between local sort facilities, central depots and airports, not to mention consumer doors and driveways, presents a possibility of a sky darkened by quad- and octocopters buzzing about their business.

The delivery drones will block out the sun, and all will be plunged into darkness. On the bright side, we'll get our Kindles in record time.

Google Brings The Telethon Online With First-Ever “Hangout-a-thon”

On Tuesday â€" aka Giving Tuesday - Google will repurpose its video broadcasting service called Google+ Hangouts to help host an online “Hangout-a-thon” that aims to connect those interested in making charitable donations with a worthy cause of their liking. Like a modern-day telethon, the “Hangout-a-thon” will feature celebrities, including  Jennifer Garner, Chris Daughtry and Sophia Bush, plugging their favorite non-profit or charity, says Google.

Organizations like Unicef, Charity Water, Save the Children, the Malala Fund, The Trevor Project, and several others will be involved, asking donors to give to help improve clean water access, eliminate bullying, provide disaster relief in the Philippines and more, Google explains in a post this morning announcing the event, that will take place tomorrow starting at 9 AM ET on the “Giving Tuesday” Google+ page.

In addition to the usual round-up of organizations doing good, the Hangout-a-thon will also have a tech angle, it seems. Google notes that viewers will also get a “quick coding lesson” from Code.org, Girls Who Code, and Code2040, who will also be there to inform viewers about the topic of digital literacy.

The event will be 12 hours long, and include 24 charities and brands in total, a full list of which has not yet been released. Viewers watching the event will be invited to donate directly to the organizations doing the fundraising, or support the organizations via the “Shoppable Hangouts” app which will allow viewers to buy “goods for good” (i.e. actual products) during the event.

This is the first time organizations have ever used Hangouts to power a charitable event like this, Google says. But it's not Google's first foray into giving. Not only does the company have a charitable arm called Google.org which develops tools that use technology for social impact, it also this year launched its inaugural attempt at mobile giving with the Google One Today Android app, which encourages users to donate $1 toward causes they like.

It should be interesting to see what kind of reach an online telethon-like event can generate â€" although it takes place on a social platform that's available worldwide, it's also competing with the vastness of the internet for your attention, while the old-school TV telethon generally took place during a time when there weren't that many other choices in terms of programming. Still, for those wasting time online during the holidays, there are far worse destinations to mindlessly click through to than an event for giving, of course.

In Which We Make Coffee With The Founders Of Bonaverde, A Machine That Roasts, Grinds, And Brews

In Which We Make Coffee With The Founders Of Bonaverde, A Machine That Roasts, Grinds, And Brews

Last we heard from the founders of Bonaverde, they had just launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $135,000 to produce a coffee maker that turns green, unroasted beans into a cup of coffee in under 14 minutes.

At this point the startup has raised $465,475 with eight days to go, so we caught up with founders Hans Stier and Felix Artmann when they were in New York to check out a prototype of the machine. You may be wondering if this was just an elaborate ploy to get a free cup of coffee. The answer is yes.

As far as user experiences go, the Bonaverde is about as easy to manage as the Keurig you bought for your dad on Black Friday - although presumably less so on the cleanup. A couple spoonfuls of green coffee beans go in the hatch on top, you hit “On,” and the machine does its thing: roasting, cooling, grinding, and brewing the beans.

Unroasted beans stay fresh for months - much longer than the pre-roasted beans you might otherwise buy - so flavor is one of the claims on which Bonaverde is staking its business. Turns out their machine brews really solid coffee that's neither stale-tasting nor bitter. Some critics have pointed out that roasted beans should be allowed more time to air before they are ground, and while that may be optimal, Bonaverde's coffee was still really good.

When it launches Bonaverde will also serve as the online marketplace for the raw beans, meaning coffee farmers can connect directly with their end consumers. Down the line, the site will feature all of the producers that shoppers can buy from.

Note that coffee maker in the video is just a prototype of the one that will go to market, which has a much prettier exterior.

Yahoo Users Anonymous: A Transcript

This is what happened:

Scene: A Silicon Valley church basement. Folding chairs, coffee, cigarettes tucked behind ears. Jon EVANS, a tall man with a shaved head and an Arsenal FC T-shirt, steps forward to the podium. He has a slight Canadian accent.

Jon: Hi, my name's Jon, and I'm a Yahoo! user.

Room, in unison: Hi, Jon!

Jon: I guess…I mean, this is so embarrassing, obviously…I guess my story's like a lot of yours. I got into Yahoo! when I was young, because back then it seemed really cool. If only I had known then what I know now. But I went for a six-month trip across Africa and Yahoo was the only web-mail service that could access my Unix shell account via POP. Gmail didn't exist yet, Hotmail was a joke, and I was sending friends emails from Cameroon and Zimbabwe, they were amazed, they were jealous. So I got hooked. And then…

He falls into grim silence for a moment.

Moderator (a pale, gaunt woman with nails bitten to the quick): Then what?

Jon: Then I guess I went all the way down the rabbit hole. I registered my domain with them. I used them to host my vanity site. I was in so much denial that when they bought Flickr, you're not going to believe this, but when they bought Flickr I was excited about it. I thought it would be great.

(Hollow laughter echoes through the room.)

Jon: Now, though â€" I mean, you all know what it's like to be a Yahoo! user now.

Pained yet sympathetic expressions ripple across the crowd.

Jon: The things that work haven't changed in like ten years, and the things that have changed don't work any more. Or they look prettier, like the Flickr redesign, or their new NFL game reports, but then you try to use them and you realize that actually they're just more broken than ever. I used to be proud that I was a Yahoo! user. Now it's shameful. I have to hide it from all my friends. (glances at camera in corner of the room) That thing isn't on, is it?

Moderator: (hastily - too hastily) No.

Jon: Good. (under his breath) I'm totally going to bury this post on a holiday weekend when no one will read it.

Moderator: Excuse me?

Jon: Uh, nothing. Anyway, the thing is, I even know what their problem is. I'm an engineer, and a long-term user, so I can tell Yahoo!'s engineering is just terrible. I mean, maybe their engineers are pretty good and they're just hamstrung by their process and bureaucrats and what have you, I don't know about that, but the results are terrible. Paul Graham said it years ago: “Yahoo treated programming as a commodity.” I mean, consider Yahoo! Mail â€"

(A loud, angry groan erupts around the room.)

Jon: Last year they mixed secure and insecure JavaScript files on my inbox page for months. Months! Can you imagine Google doing that for so much as a day? Or even Microsoft? And just this week I've been getting half-a-dozen copies of every email, but the first one arrives hours late half the time, and that's if the page loads at all! For days! It's ridiculous!

Moderator: So why have you stuck with them?

Jon: I…I really don't know. Partly it was because I was uncomfortable about how much of my online information Google has, but now I've lost so much faith that I'm backing up all my mail to one of my Gmail accounts anyway, which kind of fundamentally defeats that purpose. Partly because moving would be such a hassle. But the thing is - well â€"

Moderator: Go on.

Jon: The thing is, I somehow still want Yahoo not to suck. Every time they say things will get better, I want to believe them, even though every time it's been a lie. Oh, we've licked the peanut butter problem, now everything will be fine. Oh, Marissa Mayer's CEO, now everything will be fine. But the truth is â€"

Moderator: What?

Jon: The truth is that it's not going to be fine. Not now, not ever. Because their engineering sucks, so they're like a sprinter wearing leg irons starting 50 metres behind the competition. And you know what? It's too late for even Marissa Mayer to fix that.

Moderator: So you're quitting? Cold turkey?

Jon: Iâ€"

(Chairs creak as their occupants lean forward, with bated breath, hanging on his words)

Jon: you know what, I'm going to give them one more chance. I don't even know why. Just one more. But this time, I swear, this time if it doesn't work out, I'm done.

(Disappointment is written loudly across every face in the room, including his.)

Moderator: (with deep sadness) OK. We understand. Thanks, Jon.

Jon: I'm sorry.

Image credit: Dave Ward, Flickr.