With $2 Million In New Seed Funding, Classtivity Rebrands As ClassPass To Add Variety To Your Workout

ClassPass, an NY-based company focused on bringing value to athletes and local gyms, has today announced a $2 million seed round from an assortment of angel investors, including Fritz Lanman, SV Angel, Hank Vigil, Blake Krikorian, Gordy Crawford, Owen Van Natta, Vivi Nevo & Keith Nowak, Kal Vepuri, and Dave Tisch.

ClassPass originally launched out of TechStars NY as Classtivity, looking to give users an easy, centralized location to figure out which gym classes had available slots, for things like Yoga, spin, etc. Over time, however, the company realized that a pay-per-class model might not be sticky enough for users, which led to the launch of ClassPass.

ClassPass is a monthly $49 payment that lets users go to any class at any gym as part of a monthly subscription. The service integrates from the get-go with the gym’s POS system so that users don’t have to go through any arduous registration process, and vendors already have their new guest’s information when they walk in.

Since it’s launch, ClassPass has been so successful that the company got rid of the pay-per-class model entirely and re-branded from Classtivity to ClassPass.

The idea behind ClassPass is to throw the traditional model of user discounts on its head. After brick-and-mortar stores have been burned by peaked traffic off of a Groupon or LivingSocial deal, they’re not too keen on trying out the same tactic. But with ClassPass, people who visit the gym become more sticky.

They’ve already paid for more classes, and if the gym gives good service and provides an enjoyable experience, there’s no reason for that user to continue using their ClassPass at that same gym.

“I began teaching my TTL class just a year ago with a small, loyal following,” said Patricia Whitcas, founder of PatriciaFit. “Since becoming a class provider through ClassPass, my classes have been consistently full and/or sold-out with many repeat students, all without any other marketing.”

The service has signed on over 65 boutique gyms in the New York area, as well as expanded into Boston with over 20 gyms on the platform there.

For $49, users buy access to 10 classes wherever they’d like to go, with no requirements on which type of class they take. Since launching the ClassPass in September of last year, the company has grown from a total of 20,000 reservations booked on the site to 100,000 reservations.

Right now, ClassPass is still in beta with an option to sign up for their waiting list. If you’re interested, hop over here and check it out.

How To Run Live User Testing, Part 3: The Debrief

Editor’s Note: Brenden Mulligan is a co-founder and designer at Cluster, and previously created Onesheet, MorningPics, ArtistData, and others. This is the final part of a three-part series on how live user testing is run at Cluster in preparation for the next release of their iOS and Android apps.

The first part of this series focused on getting the tests setup, which includes deciding on a specific thing to test, when and where to conduct the user study and what type of users to study, as well as recruiting participants with Craigslist, trimming the candidates list, prioritizing and scheduling candidates, and getting the right equipment.

The second part focused on actually running the tests, which includes arranging the room, meeting the participant, introducing the study, not revealing the answers, simulating app discovery and installation, walking the user through the prototype, and wrapping up.

This post will focus on taking all that amazing feedback you just gathered and parsing it into useful, actionable intelligence.

One more time, I want to give a huge amount of thanks to Michael Margolis and the Google Ventures design team, who taught us most of these techniques.

So what next? You have a set of recordings containing incredible user feedback, and now it’s time to parse and process it so you can turn the insights into action items for your product. Here’s how to pull out the good stuff and get your team on board with next steps:

1. Schedule viewing party
2. Distribute materials
3. Capture insights and ideas
4. Combine everyone’s insights
5. Identify patterns
6. Bucket patterns according to app sections
7. Address the problems & start again

Like the first two parts of the study, this takes time, but it’s very worth it in the end.

Schedule viewing party

The first step is to schedule a time for the company’s key decision-makers to review the videos. Including everyone might sound like a waste, but it’s very important. I know because we didn’t always do this.

When the whole team sits around, you have a much bigger opportunity to understand what feedback is important and what is worth ignoring. You’ll pull a lot more out of the sessions.

Reviewing the videos with the Cluster team

So, even though it seems like a lot of time, schedule time for the core team to watch all the videos in their entirety. Don’t skip this, or you’ve wasted all the time prior.

Distribute materials

While watching the videos, the goal is for the team to capture insights and ideas from what the user is saying and doing. The tools we use to do this are:

Tools for capturing thoughts and ideas

1. 3×5 inch Post-it notes
2. Legal pad
3. Regular pen
4. Thick marker

Capture insights and ideas

We’ve found it helpful to instruct everyone to capture two kinds of things on paper while watching:

1. Important insights (good and bad) learned from the user on the notepad
2. Any specific implementation ideas on Post-it notes

My notes and ideas from 5 videos

The majority of the writing will be insights from the user and should be captured with a normal pen and paper. Examples of insights are things like:

• “Blue button really works”
• “Really understood intro page”
• “loves design”
• “had no idea what to do first”

Everyone should write down everything they notice from what the user is saying/doing.

If the insights lead a team member to have a specific idea of how to fix / improve the app (ex. “Add ‘We will never post’ under the Facebook login button”), have them write each down on their post-it notes using a thick, black marker. Getting these ideas down on paper will let the team member focus on the rest of the study instead of trying to remember their idea.

Combine everyone’s insights

After watching each video, have someone stand at a white board and write down the insights everyone captured. Use a green marker insights for things that worked, a red marker for things that didn’t work, and black for general insights. Only write down things that more than one team member heard. The purpose of this step is to distill everyone’s page of notes into a common list of insights to address later.

Blurred version of the board after one of our debriefs

Create one column of notes for each study participant. Then, somewhere off to the side, have everyone put up their Post-it notes in no particular order.

Identify patterns

Once you’ve watched all the videos, and everyone’s insights are up on the board, it’s time to find patterns. It’s not worth fixing every small issue each person had because all users are different. The goal of the entire exercise is to figure out the re-occurring problems that might also affect users in the wild.

With a new color, circle or draw a dot near any insights that come up more than two times (or more than 40 percent of the time depending on your number of participants). Do this for green, red, and black insights.

Bucket patterns according to the app

Now that you know what common insights came from testing, it’s useful to categorize what part of the app the insights affect. With Cluster, our users were testing four sections:

1. Pre-Registration Screens (including App Store marketing)
2. Creating & Naming Initial Cluster
3. Inviting Friends
4. Uploading Photos & Exploring App

On another whiteboard, we made a column for each section. Then we went through the first whiteboard and moved each recurring pattern over to the appropriate column.

Common insights and patterns

Suddenly, hundreds of insights were distilled and organized according to the part of our app they affected. An actionable list emerged.

We then moved the ideas that had been posted underneath the insights. What we found was that most negative insights already had some great suggestioned ideas for improvements.

Address the problems & start again

Now it’s time to get to work to improve the product to address the common negative insights you found during this process. Then, start over and do the whole thing again. Keep going until you’re satisfied that the problem areas aren’t too big of a deal.

You’ve now completed the entire user testing journey! I know it’s a lot of work, but once you do it a few times, you’ll start to see problem areas disappear and users start to understand your app much faster. It’s invigorating. I’d encourage you to trust the process and see what happens. I guarantee your app will become easier and more delightful to use.

Google Cracks Down On Deceptive Ads And Other Shady Behaviors Found In Android Apps

Android apps are about to get cleaned up. That is, if the recently added changes to the Google Play Developer Program Policy are actually enforced. Google this week updated its policy that dictates to app developers what sort of content their apps are permitted to display, with a number of rules designed to crack down on shady and deceptive ads.

In addition, the changes put the onus on the developers themselves to make sure that no ad networks or affiliates they’re using for app promotion purposes are engaged in these practices.

The majority of the changes are detailed in a new section of the Google Play Developer Program Policy called “App Promotion,” which reads as follows:

Apps published on Google Play may not directly or indirectly engage in or benefit from the following behavior:

• Promotion via deceptive ads on websites, apps or other properties, including simulated system, service, or app notifications or alerts.
• Promotion or install tactics which cause redirection to Google Play or the download of the app without informed user action.
• Unsolicited promotion via SMS services.

It is your responsibility to ensure that no ad network or affiliate uses such methods to direct users to pages that make your app available for download.

In other words, app developers are not permitted to fool users into downloading apps by simulating a system dialog box â€" a nasty trick that has been around the web for eons, most memorably perhaps with web-based pop-up ads designed to look like Windows dialog boxes, warning users of system errors or malware infections. Those same tactics today continue today on Android, too, except this time around, the system being simulated is the Android OS, not Windows.

Another change regarding advertising warns developers about an ad’s context, reminding them again that:

Ads must not simulate or impersonate the user interface of any app, or notification and warning elements of an operating system. It must be clear to the user which app each ad is associated with or implemented in.

This line is also warning ad networks, who are often at fault for these deceptive behaviors.

Other Changes

Apps are also no longer allowed to use the smartphone’s SMS functionality without getting explicit user consent. That’s something many app developers take advantage of today on both Android and iOS, actually â€" they often send out text messages as a way of building up an app’s initial audience through forced viral effects. (Sometimes it almost works.)

Though Apple has enforced stricter policies on this matter by way of its app review policy, a number of iOS apps, too, have made their app’s user interface just confusing enough that users would accidentally give consent, and then unknowingly spam their friends. On Android, however, some apps wouldn’t even bother with tricking users into consenting â€" they’d skip right to the spamming.

A few other sections of the content policy have been clarified, including those referencing sexually explicit material, and those banning dangerous products and other changes to the system interface.

In the case of the former, the text has been modified to include “erotic content,” noting basically that now an app’s content can’t be “erotic” in order to promote pornography.

Previously, Google said that: “We don’t allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material.”

Now that text reads: “Apps that contain or promote pornography are prohibited; this includes sexually explicit or erotic content, icons, titles or descriptions.” 

(Finding a non-pornographic screenshot for the search “sexy” on Google Play was nearly impossible!)

This revised wording seems to leave a loophole for educational material related to sexuality, possibly allowing for the more instructional, as opposed to smutty, Kama Sutra apps, for example.

In-App Purchase Clarity And Minor Tweaks

Another change in a different section says that app developers must be clear when they’re using in-app purchases to generate revenue, explaining to users which features require an additional charge.

Finally, apps are also banned not only for containing viruses, worms and other malware, but also for simply linking to them, as well as for modifying browser settings, which is now a system interface change banned alongside adding homescreen shortcuts, bookmarks or icons.

Google is alerting developers to the change via email, giving the a couple of weeks to unpublish their app and resubmit it before these apps are banned:

Any new apps or app updates published after this notification will be immediately subject to the latest version of the Program Policy. If you find any existing apps in your catalog that don’t comply, we ask you to unpublish the app, or fix and republish the app within 15 calendar days of receiving this email. After this period, existing apps discovered to be in violation may be subject to warning or removal from Google Play

The full text of that emailed letter to mobile app developers is here.

Japan’s New Alert System Will Warn Mobile Users Of Incoming Missiles, Terror Attacks

It’s hard to imagine a more terrifying text message than one that reads “Incoming ballistic missile detected. Please find shelter.”

Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency announced this morning that their alert system â€" similar to the one you might’ve seen lately for broadcasting Amber alerts to your phone â€" will now automatically warn local mobile users of ballistic missile launches and major terror attacks. This system was first built to warn of earthquakes and potential tsunamis.

The messages will automatically be sent to mobile users in effected areas, with one caveat: the system is currently only up-and-running on Japan’s three largest mobile networks, NTT Docomo, Softbank, and KDDI.

With over 115 million subscribers across these three networks, that means it’ll reach around 90% of Japan’s population. For those without mobile phones, local governments will continue to broadcast warnings through traditional systems (like loudspeakers, or sirens)

[Source: Japan's Fire and Disaster Management Agency via The Verge]

Rumr, Group Messaging With An Anonymous Twist, Launches On iOS & Android

Say hey to rumr, a new messaging app that’s vying to draw your attention away from all the other ways to say hey already in play.

Rumr has been in the works for around half a year, raising an $800,000 seed back in October, led by Khosla Ventures‘ Ben Ling. Google Ventures‘ MG Siegler also participated in the round (Disclosure: Siegler is a columnist for TechCrunch but he had no input into this article â€" and, to my knowledge, was not aware I was writing it); along with Greycroft Partners; LA-based angel investor Paige Craig; and Scott Lahman, textPlus founder and CEO.

rumr is launching today as a free download for iOS and Android

Before you say ‘yeah, good luck with competing with WhatsApp/Facebook/Snapchat et al’ rumr’s twist is that it’s anonymous group messaging with friends. (Or at least, with people you actively choose to connect with for the purposes of identity-free chatting.)

This is not about anonymously chatting with Internet randoms/digital bottomfeeders, says rumr CEO and founder James Jerlecki, who brings a background in messaging to this startup, having previously worked for textPlus. rumr is about “controlled anonymity” â€" aka, having a bit of free-flowing fun with your friends.

Instead of having name tags next to them, chats are assigned colours so the conversation can flow without individual speakers being immediately evident.

Why would you even want to talk to your friends without each person knowing who’s saying what? Most likely for what my TC colleague Alex Wilhelm would refer to as shiggles. So basically having a bit of fun without everyone having to always be minding their Ps & Qs.

But Jerlecki reckons the rumr concept can also support more serious use-case applications. Conversations that are difficult to have honestly in person, whether that’s among family, friends or in a more professional sphere. He posits that rumr could be used by groups of teens to discuss personal issues without risking being singled out for the things they’re revealing. Or even, as a way for adult dudes & bros to talk ‘feels’ with each other. 

“We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about messaging and to us it always seemed there was something missing â€" as far as a place to let your guard down, a place where you didn’t always have to be perfect,” Jerlecki tells TechCrunch. “We wanted to create a chat experience that was more open and free-flowing so we thought the way to do that was essentially anonymity â€" but controlled anonymity.

“Because what’s always been missing for me with anonymity is context. It’s always been with some sort of broad audience, like if you look at Whisper it’s just out to people I have no connection with, I don’t really know them. And even Secret, it’s a smaller sub-set of that â€" it’s your address book â€" but who’s in your address book? I have thousands of contacts in my address book.. I don’t know who most of those people are.

“That to me is not compelling. What is compelling is a group of people that I know, that I trust on some level, that I can truly be myself with, that I can’t do on Facebook… I need a private forum to a place where I can let my guard down and that normally is with my friends.”

On the professional use-cases front, Jerlecki reckons the app could even work as a tool to aid social work, again to facilitate more honest group discussions. Part of the 100-strong beta trial for rumr has involved his sister using the app with a group of teens she works with, as a way for them to communicate with her without having to attach their identity to all the conversations they have with her.

So, in other words, helping to inject a little more honestly into unequal relationships â€" between dependents/minions and authority figures.

“What’s cool about this is it’s actually really flexible as a tool for communication,” adds Jerlecki. “It’s really good as a tool for saying things that are funny. And it’s also really good for conversations that are hard to have in person.”

Another possible professional scenario he brings up is for companies to use as an anonymous feedback forum â€" to, for instance, have a conversation about office culture.

“If I wanted to have a conversation about culture in an office, typically what I would do is I would get 10 people together, we’d go in a conference room and we would try and have that conversation. But everyone in that room has a different agenda… You can’t really be honest,” adds Jerlecki. “I think there’s a perfectly viable use-case [for rumr].”

No smoke without fire

Various rumours have been circulating about rumr prior to today’s dual platform launch. Aptly enough, these have been wide of the mark. rumr does not, contrary to what others have previously reported, allow one-way anonymity.

To be clear: all participants in rumr’s group messaging conversations are anonymous â€" identified only to each other by the colour their chats are (randomly) assigned. The use of colour for chats gives users a way to track the flow of conversations without individual identities being disclosed.

Everyone in a rumr chat also knows who all the other chat participants are. But that’s all they all know. Identity is not attached to specific chats (although users can of course make guesses as to who’s who, based on what’s being said).

If there are only three people in a particular rumr conversation it’s probably not going to be too tough to figure out identities, hence Jerlecki describing the app as working on a “sliding scale of anonymity”; i.e. the more people you add, the more anonymity everyone gets.

And if people leave or join a chat there is a named notification that that has happened displayed in the chat window. However new colours are simultaneously assigned to all participants in order to continue masking everyone’s identities.

One-way anonymity might well have made the service more obviously open to becoming a conduit for bullying. Such problems have caused trouble for Q&A service Ask.fm, for instance, which does allow for one-way anonymity â€" and has run into problems with teen bullying.

rumr is having none of that. All its users are equally in the dark, so targeted nastiness isn’t quite so easy to achieve. Determined bullies will likely always find a way but rumr is not literally giving them a perfect tool. There is still potential for abuse â€" being as users’ identities are masked â€" but since every rumr participant is on an equally footing, there is at least a level playing field to make it harder for targeted nastiness with no chance for comeback.

(It should be noted that the app does also support one-on-one chats, so it’s conceivable that a co-ordinated group of users could end up ganging up on another user in an ongoing group chat by backchannel stealth â€" messaging each other til they figure out who’s who and then turning on the person who’s been identified. However pulling that off in practice would require multiple users to be considerably co-ordinated.)

Perhaps to dispel such unpleasant thoughts about its potential to foster nastiness, rumr has a cutesy Panda as its mascot â€" setting a cuddly, fun tone from the get-go. (The cartoon panda also hints at the stickers Jerlecki says will be coming in a future update.)

How is rumr going to deal with abusive users? To a degree, it has yet to fully figure that out as it wants to work that out with its users, once the service gets up and running. Jerlecki talks about maybe having a ‘time out’ function, where abusive users aren’t able to post for a certain period of time â€" as a way to ensure that abusive users aren’t just immediately unmasked when they’re kicked out of conversations.

In the meantime, the basic tools for keeping early rumr users safe from bad behaviour include the ability for users to report problem content (which he says rumr will look at on a “case by case” basis). The owner of the chat also has the power to kick anyone out, and chat participants can voluntarily leave each chat at any time.

Obviously, rumr is hoping for more constructive use â€" for fostering friendly sports chat, or becoming a sort of messaging meets gaming hybrid; a place where conversations devolve into guessing games as users have fun trying to figure out who’s saying what, or try to mask their own identity by mimicking the opinions of others.

Playing up the gamification element is a likely route to monetizing the app in future, with Jerlecki hinting that rumr has plenty of ideas relating to the central role of colour in the app.

Perhaps users could buy a ‘power up’ that lets them shuffle their own colour to another shade, to spread additional conversational confusion if they feel they are too close to be unmasked.

As mentioned above, stickers are another monetization method in waiting, with Jerlecki arguing that visual media is likely to be even more important for rumr than for a vanilla messaging app, with users needing to find ways to communicate without giving away too many specific clues to their identity.

Photo-sharing will also be coming in future, but it’s not in v1 of the app as Jerlecki said the startup wants to be sure that feature is implemented safely, with no risk of it being abused. For now, rumr is purely text-based messaging â€" with its anonymity twist.

First order of business for rumr now is clearly user acquisition â€" not least because messaging is such a crowded and hyped space. The need to ramp up quickly to a critical mass of users explains the dual launch on iOS and Android. As for whether rumr will soon be looking to raise more funding to keep firing on all cylinders, that depends on how the launch blows up (or doesn’t).

“Secret did it in 45 days â€" maybe we’ll do it in 20. I don’t know,” says Jerlecki, jokily, on the funding point.

Startup Financial Services Companies Come Of Age

With one eye on businesses abandoned in the wake of the financial crisis and the other on a new generation of investors, startup companies are now raising significant sums to challenge the hegemony of big banks and investment firms.

Since the beginning of 2013, venture investors committed over $800 million in new funding to develop businesses providing new investment, lending, mortgage and real estate, and wealth management services in the U.S. These startups have had their best quarter so far in 2014, when 13 companies raised $238.2 million in later stage funding â€" with at least $162 million committed in March alone.

Meyer “Mickey” Malka, the founder of the venture investment firm Ribbit Capital, raised $100 million at the beginning of 2013 to invest behind this thesis.

“We only invest in companies that are disrupting the experience for consumers in financial services,” Malka said. “Over the next ten or fifteen years we are going to see a whole new field of financial services brands that are being built.”

The opportunity to carve out new businesses in vast swaths of traditional financial services firms’ operations means new billion dollar businesses can be made, according to investors and entrepreneurs. “This is one of the only markets that’s actually measured in trillions,” said Adam Nash, the chief executive officer of Wealthfront, a startup investment management firm.  ”The market can be massively inefficient for hundreds of billions of dollars and somehow that is still not enough for the incumbents to go after.”

“Financial services industries are gigantic and are the least suited to making transformational changes in their own businesses,” said one venture capitalist whose firm invested in the $77 million round for OnDeck, a new small business lender.

Meanwhile, peer-to-peer consumer lending company Lending Club is entering the small business lending market, with its own offering. “Since the recession small business lending has contracted,” said Scott Sanborn, the chief operating officer at Lending Club. The company is working on a private offering to a select group of investors to help bankroll the new initiative.

Other startups like CommonBond and Upstart are pitching ways for students to receive or refinance college loans.

On the flip side of the lending and debt market, sits the Ribbit Capital portfolio company Credit Karma, a provider of credit reporting and eventually optimization services. That San Francisco-based company raised $85 million in its own later-stage funding round in March.

“If you think about financial services products over the past twenty years not much has changed. Applications have come online and things have gotten faster, but we think there’s a lot more transparency that we can create and a lot more efficiency,” said CreditKarma chief executive Ken Lin.

Investors are also looking at providing these services to the underbanked with investments in companies like the credit and financial services tracking tool InVenture.

Credit management and lending offerings sit on one side of the ledger, on the other are a host of new wealth management and investment services tools for a new generation of investor. “Over 46% of income in the country will go to Gen Y [the millennials] by 2025,” said Nash. His company, and others like Betterment have seen significant growth on the back of new demand.

“Today we manage about $420 million in investor assets,” said Betterment chief executive Jon Stein. “We grew 4x over the last year… and four times the year before that. We’ve grown about four times just about every year that we’ve been around since we’ve launched.”

Their growth, and that of other wealth management services is partially explained by the fact that the U.S. is on the cusp of an enormous transfer of wealth.

“We’ve got the largest generational transference of wealth ever, happening,” said Jarrett Lillien, the founder of Bendigo Partners and chief executive officer at its portfolio company Kapitall â€" a new online trading platform. “$40 trillion is going to change hands.”

Kapitall received a $14 million commitment from Lillien’s firm, Bendigo, to try and capture some of that wealth. Unlike Wealthfront, which expects millennials to take a passive approach to investment management, Kapitall wants to engage active retail traders on its platform. It’s the same business that Lillien pursued as an executive at Etrade. “It’s taking something old and making it new again,” he said.

Let’s End The Search For Mobile TV

Editor’s note: Tom Limongello is based in NYC and is VP of Product Marketing for Crisp Media.

Mobile TV has never been a thing. Since the Sony Watchman in 1982, we’ve been excited at the prospect of mobile TV, but no matter how good our devices are, there still seems to be something missing. As recently as this January, Josh Elman noted to John Borthwick that the results of the Homescreen 2014 study show that even now, no one keeps mobile video apps on their smartphone homescreens; we don’t even give YouTube or Netflix top billing.

That is not to say that those two apps don’t generate an enormous amount of mobile video views. But interestingly, they have not increased the average time spent watching video on mobile devices to a point where it threatens traditional TV sets.

You might say: Why do we care about watching TV on mobile devices when I’ll likely just watch TV on my biggest screen? I’m not arguing that the TV-viewing experience could ever be preferable on a mobile phone, but I do think that the discovery of content can and may already be better on mobile. Mobile might have the right set of constraints to require a real change in user experience, if not the underlying content recommendation technology.

As a result, video consumption on mobile is currently at two extremes: 1) slowing your scroll to wait for six-second Vines to load while you’re on the toilet, and 2) time-shifting massive TV series from the home when we need to prolong our life-threatening drama binges on our commutes.

The mobile televised revolution

The first mobile TV revolution happened before the iPhone from around 2005-2008 when a few measly million early adopters started double-paying for either MobiTV, MediaFLO from Qualcomm or VCast from Verizon Wireless.

One of the biggest businesses when the CTIA Wireless shows were still kind of a big deal was for TV networks to meet with mobile carriers to discuss TV content licensing deals. However, once the iPhone took off, we forgot all about mobile TV and watched the dawn of mobile video, powered by YouTube searches and Facebook and Twitter shares that enabled the Gangnam-style, billion-view explosions of 2012-14.

Now, nearly 10 years later, it might be time to tune in again. First, we need a distinction between what we mean when we say “video” versus “TV.”

Mobile might have the right set of constraints to require a real change in user experience, if not the underlying content recommendation technology.

“Video” is when you watch the one thing that someone else told you to watch. “TV” is a broadcast concept. Let’s call TV a time-based experience when you turn on a TV on the wall, computer or phone, and just start watching. The catch with TV for the consumer is that it shouldn’t be hard to change the channel and you shouldn’t have to know what you want to watch before you turn on the TV.

The TV experience becomes worthwhile to producers when consumers spend enough time watching TV that they see more than one video in a session, so there can be commercial breaks rather than pre-roll ads. With cable TV interfaces, channel changing is not worth the effort as the 1980s-90s pastime of flipping channels has devolved into scanning bloated menus that look like Microsoft Project and are not conducive to navigating with a remote control.

However, search is not the key to finding shows that you’ve never heard of before. For example, searching for “really good new TV” makes no sense, and automated recommendations are still not satisfying. In fact, the whole search model on desktop has been an easy target for companies like Aol and Turner to game results by featuring videos on well-trafficked pages or through SEM and SEO to get more views for videos that may or may not be the best or most relevant to watch.

The NYTimes’ David Carr mused recently that the universe of quality TV content is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. The new Netflix model of laying out full seasons of TV dramas that are suspenseful enough to get you to binge watch is only the beginning of an explosion of quality content.

Frederic Guarino, head of BD for Montreal-based boutique film production strategy and finance firm MediaBiz, considers this the moment before a global tidal wave of newcomers will start to compete with traditional U.S.-based TV networks. Amazon, Walmart-Vudu and Apple will be followed quickly by international players like Canal+, iTV, Scandinavia’s SVT and DR, and possibly even China’s Alibaba. “Your average TV series buff is now drowning in quality content and not necessarily able to find all of it.” So if there’s all these shows just lying around but no one company owns the best content suggestion interface, what will the industry do to solve that problem?

As Jim Barksdale says: “Two ways to make money in business: you can unbundle, or you can bundle.”

Cashing in on mobile TV

YouTube has succeeded in unbundling TV into mobile video, while multiple system operators (MSO) are trying to take bundled video to mobile and call it TV. MSOs like Verizon and Comcast carry with them nearly all the quality content creators via the television networks, and access to that content comes at a licensing and authentication cost across your devices. In its Q4 2013 Digital Index, Adobe said that iPads, iPhones, and iPods produce nearly 50 percent of play requests for TV Everywhere content.

I asked someone from the original MobiTV team about his experience in 2014, particularly as a parent, in attempting to unlock mobile TV for his family:

TV Everywhere has absolutely succeeded in that it’s enabled the media guys to keep their content behind a paywall without double-charging anybody; that was one of the issues with a MobiTV subscription, you had to buy your mobile content separately from your existing cable package.  However you need to authenticate with your MSO on every device you want to use, which requires your Verizon username and password you got the day they hooked you up…and probably haven’t used since.  In practice, you install the app on your iPhone or iPad, forget about it, and then when you actually want to use it you fire it up and have to authenticate it, which takes a couple minutes so it kills the instant gratification factor.

The MSOs and YouTube both may be too big to create an enjoyable new experience for mobile TV. 5by.com, which was recently acquired by Stumbleupon, uses a mood selector to automatically queue up video categories, and it does a great job of making sense of the vastness of YouTube content that’s out there that would otherwise never be watched. Shelby.tv, Frequency and ShowYou add socially shared videos from Facebook and Twitter to signal which videos should come into your playlist, and they use explicit interactions within their apps such as likes to discern popularity.

The biggest company that is aggressive in this space is Yahoo with two strong offerings made for mobile TV. The acquisition of Tumblr now has given Yahoo a machine for social referrals to TV tune-in. In the same Adobe Q4 Index report, we see that “half of visits referred from Facebook or Tumblr to sports related sites result in a video view.”

The Tumblr team has also found that TV brands are getting serious tune-in through animated GIFs. Sima Sistani, director of media at Tumblr, considers this behavior totally normcore. ”Let’s say I’m in my Dashboard, and I see a hysterical GIF from Jimmy Fallon’s latest rap battle. Now I’m captivated, and I click through to watch a video on his site. In an on-demand world, tune-ins can happen at anytime.”

Something has to change to make watching more than one video at a time enjoyable on mobile.

 Yet, even with high growth, only 6 percent of video starts come from social media referrals, and it seems to be limited to destination TV, such as live events or well-advertised dramas. Yahoo Screen is the company’s mobile TV pure-play product, and Marissa Mayer has written a huge check to NBC so that Yahoo Screen can stream the back catalogue of SNL. However, the challenge remains that if all you really want to do is watch a show that everyone knows, like SNL, then Yahoo still needs to solve the discovery challenge for the rest of its content, especially the non-sports ones like comedy.

When I asked if Facebook, and other social networks would just soon look more like TV platforms, founder and CEO of 5by Greg Isenberg said that wouldn’t likely happen without Facebook launching a new app, because mobile apps need to provide single-purpose user experiences.

For example even Facebook’s Paper, which only changed the reading navigation experience on Facebook, was different enough to require a new app so as not to cause a revolt from the user base. But something has to change to make watching more than one video at a time enjoyable on mobile. It’s possible that one of the things that holds mobile TV back, the fact that when using a smartphone you actually have to hold the screen with the same hands that you use to type, could inform a subtler UX that takes implicit metrics like “seen” instead of “tapped-on.”

If you look at the newest crop of mobile TV apps, a new, accepted interface for them is starting to solidify. All apps are moving toward minimizing the user interface into simple video players that show videos full screen and feature “tap to pause” and “swipe” to change channels. However there are slight differences in the UX of each of these apps, and one company that has yet to officially launch, called EndlessTV, thinks that its UX recipe can help it take the Pandora genome idea for music, and adapt it to fit your mobile TV.

A new model for broadcast TV

Once called Tip or Skip, a “Hot or Not” for products, the team at EndlessTV pivoted last year to experiment with video. Over the past six months, they’ve deployed 15 interest-based TV channel apps that would help them create and analyze content communities. Additionally, when EndlessTV launches its flagship app at the end of this month, it will use implicit metrics, such as average engagement time and percentage-viewed thresholds â€" instead of industry-standard metrics for video views, likes and shares â€" to power its content-suggestion genome.

The company’s hope is that these engagement-based metrics paired with interest-based channels will make automation watchable. Also, they found that the one big difference between trying to make a genome for TV rather than music is that in many cases, especially for news, TV requires an expiration date on certain content.

While watching the data from their 15 apps and 250,000 downloads, which are mostly on iOS, EndlessTV’s other job has been to woo TV producers to give them quality content for free, before it unifies its content into a single app offering. So, the mission of the new, bundled, Voltron of an app is to achieve the ultimate balancing act in promising users that “TV is free again” and promising TV producers that free TV is lucrative again.

“EndlessTV shares revenue with its content partners based on how long viewers watch their content, rather than how many interruptive ads are served,” Michael Weiksner, CEO of EndlessTV, explained. “This creates a positive feedback loop where viewers get better and better content, and content partners get better distribution and monetization for creating engaging content.”

To make sure that they solve for the business case, EndlessTV made a couple of interesting design choices for the app in the name of advertising and for getting the cleanest data for feeding their mobile TV genome. EndlessTV omitted the timeline scrubber from videos so, by design, you can’t adjust where you are in the video, and it removed all mention of the titles of what you’re watching.

By making sure that users only start from the beginning of videos, they have an idea of how engaging each video is based on both crossing a relevant threshold in the clip and time spent on each particular clip and can say to TV producers, ‘give us your most engaging videos’. Like their competitors, on EndlessTV ads would only show up in-between videos as commercial breaks instead of via pre-roll.

Also, by requiring a user to tap to pause the video before they can identify the video’s title, EndlessTV gets an additional display ad space on half of the screen for a standard 300 x 250, but doesn’t have to resort to overlays or interruption of content. Their favorite stat is that after they turned on their nascent mobile TV genome they were able to extend the session time of its users versus a control group by 3x.

The measure of success for EndlessTV and its other mobile TV competitors is to be able to monetize better than YouTube, so the bar is actually pretty low. But as Netflix grows in its subscriber base and continues to collect massive amounts of data, while keeping subscription prices low, these free mobile TV apps might prove an ally to TV networks and independent producers as they rethink their alliances with MSOs and consider their own direct to consumer offerings. Proving a concept like mobile TV is hard, so any success, like getting users to have a favorite app for their homescreen would be a major victory.

Image by Maksim Kabakou/Shutterstock

Enter The Blockchain: How Bitcoin Can Turn The Cloud Inside Out

Drop whatever what you’re doing and go read Maciej Cegłowski’s absolutely magnificent essay Our Comrade The Electron, an astonishing history of the amazing Russian engineer Lev Sergeyevich Termen. Make sure you read right down to its punchline, “the most badass answer imaginable.” But if time is short, or you struggle to read English, please at least read its angry rant, from which I quote:

Technology concentrates power.

In the 90′s, it looked like the Internet might be an exception, that it could be a decentralizing, democratizing force … but those days are gone … What upsets me, what really gets my goat, is that we did it because it was the easiest thing to do … Making things ephemeral is hard. Making things distributed is hard. Making things anonymous is hard. Coming up with a sane business model is really hardâ€"I get tired just thinking about it.

We put so much care into making the Internet resilient from technical failures, but make no effort to make it resilient to political failure. We treat freedom and the rule of law like inexhaustible natural resources, rather than the fragile and precious treasures that they are. And now, of course, it’s time to make the Internet of Things, where we will connect everything to everything else, and build cool apps on top, and nothing can possibly go wrong.

He’s right. And so the Internet has, for most intents and purposes, evolved into a landscape dominated by centralized systems, epitomized by what Bruce Sterling calls the Stacks â€" Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft. To quote, er, myself:

They don’t want much, those Stacks. Just your identity, your allegiance, and all of your data. Just to be your sole provider of messaging, media, merchandise, and metadata. Just to take part in as much of your online existence as they possibly can, and maybe to one day mediate your every interaction with the world around you, online or off.

The Stacks exist in part because less centralized systems are extremely difficult to build. Consider, for instance, Google+ architect Yonatan Zunger’s explanation of “distributed consensus,” i.e. the means by which data can be safely preserved in distributed systems with multiple editors. It’s absolutely brilliant â€" but none of its 8,000 words are wasted. The gold-standard “Paxos” algorithm is sufficiently complex that a pair of Stanford engineers recently published a paper entitled “In Search Of An Understandable Consensus Algorithm” (PDF) â€" the title of which sums up the state of the art nicely â€" in which they present a new alternative, “Raft.”

Distributed algorithms, distributed data, distributed systems, distributed security: messy, tricky, complicated, a maze of vibrating tightropes stretched across an N-dimensional pit full of hungry failure modes with sharp teeth. Hard stuff.

But not impossible.

Just ask Satoshi Nakamoto.

Beyond the hype and the greed, Bitcoin is powered by a genuine technical breakthrough(1), to a degree I did not properly appreciate when I first started writing about it. The “blockchain” â€" the engine on which Bitcoin is built â€" is a new kind of distributed consensus system that allows transactions, or other data, to be securely stored and verified without any centralized authority at all, because (to grossly oversimplify) they are validated by the entire network. Those transactions don’t have to be financial; that data doesn’t have to be money. The engine that powers Bitcoin can be used for a whole array of other applications…

…with one huge caveat. As Michael Nielsen puts it, in his excellent, detailed explanation of how Bitcoin actually works:

For [the blockchain] to have any chance of succeeding, network users need an incentive to help validate transactions. Without such an incentive, they have no reason to expend valuable computational power, merely to help validate other people’s transactions. And if network users are not willing to expend that power, then the whole system won’t work. The solution to this problem is to reward people who help validate transactions.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s genius was twofold; technically, he built the world’s first(1) blockchain; socially, he lured people into powering it, using good old filthy lucre as an incentive. Which was very effective, but is now also a little awkward, as Bitcoin-as-a-currency has attracted a large number of … er … let’s diplomatically call them “colorful personalities,” and also, money-as-a-store-of-value is one field where in fact you probably do want some centralized authority, or at least insurance. I agree with the mordant observations on Twitter that it’s highly amusing watching the extremist fringes of the Bitcoin community slowly rediscover from first principles exactly why financial regulation exists in the first place.

Meanwhile, though, the noise and smoke of the ongoing endless (and endlessly entertaining) Bitcoin sturm und drang has â€" ironically â€" obscured its real breakthrough; the blockchain.

You see, it’s not that hard to imagine other blockchain-based systems which aren’t currencies and don’t attract as many “colorful personalities.” Suppose you replaced the Internet’s centralized Domain Name System with a blockchain for Internet names (like Namecoin) such that every DNS request included some proof-of-work effort. Or you used any blockchain (including Bitcoin’s) as a notary service. Or you built a new blockchain for crowdfunding. Or you replaced a centralized system which absolutely does need to be scrapped â€" that horrific barrel of worms known as TLS/SSL Certificate Authorities â€" with a blockchain-based solution powered at the browser level.

Or you built a new distributed email service, with a blockchain for email addresses, and every time you checked your email you contributed to the network. Or a new distributed social network, with a blockchain verifying identities, powered by code that ran every time its users launched its app or visited its web page.

(Technical note: this would obviously be a far more diffuse and granular system than Bitcoin’s, which runs on machines generally devoted 24/7 to mining. I don’t think that would require substantive changes to the algorithm, but while I’m a pretty good engineer I’m not an expert. That said, there’s no reason why a large number of relatively ephemeral clients would be fundamentally incompatible with a Hashcash-esque proof-of-work system, though I guess you might need a smaller subnet of persistent “supernodes” to maintain the blockchain.)

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that some smart startup might turn around tomorrow and replace Gmail or Facebook with a blockchain-powered solution. But I am saying that some indeterminate number of years hence, as bandwidth improves, and processors grow ever more powerful, and storage gets ever cheaper, it’s not inconceivable that those massive server farms could be replaced, not with a “personal cloud” â€" a bad idea for many reasons â€" but by massive distributed peer-to-peer networks: open-source, encrypted end-to-end, and orchestrated in part by blockchains. I’m saying that I can at least envision, albeit vaguely, the decline of the Stacks. Which if you look at the Internet today seems like a pretty striking and revolutionary thing to say.

For what it’s worth, I’m by no means alone in left field shouting that the blockchain is a big deal; heck, just look at Andreessen Horowitz over the last few months. And it seems likely that the blockchain, and Raft, and Spanner, and that great granddaddy of distributed peer-to-peer data called BitTorrent, are only the beginning; I expect more and more distributed-computing breakthroughs of comparable magnitude over the next decade, as the world’s searchlight minds turn to the forthcoming Internet Of Things.

Last year I argued that “The Internet: we’re doing it wrong.” Now, though, only six months later, I see traces and hints that we’re finally making the first faltering motions towards doing it right. BitTorrent is thirteen years old, but it has only just now been done right (at least for pirates) in the form of Popcorn Time. Raft might be, in a sense, Paxos done right. Threadable looks like group communications done right (and, again, distributed, at least to the extent that email is distributed.) Keybase.io seems like a step towards PGP done right. TextSecure is cross-platform end-to-end-encrypted messaging done right.

Maybe, just maybe, our online future is actually bright, and peer-to-peer, and encrypted end-to-end, and maybe even open-source and far less overtly commercial than today â€" and built, in part, on blockchains.

---

(1)You can argue that it’s more a synthesis of previous theoretical breakthroughs than a completely new invention; whatever, I don’t care.

Battle Of The “Reaction” Messengers

If you build it, they will come? Half a dozen or so applications have launched in recent months, hoping to dominate what they all hope will be one of the next big trends in mobile messaging: the “reaction” messenger. That is, these apps utilize a smartphone’s camera to either photograph or record a video of a message’s recipient to see how they react to your text, or other content, like a shared photo or video. The idea is that there’s uncharted territory still left to be explored somewhere in between the static nature of the text message and real-time video chat.

But how big a trend is this, really? And is it catching on?

Many of these “reaction” messaging apps are practically clones of each other, while others vary the experience only slightly. This one records a video reaction. That one records a video reaction or it snaps a photo. And so on.

Here are the top contenders for the would-be “reaction” messaging throne, and a brief description followed by their iOS App Store rank (U.S.) and current funding in parenthesis, if disclosed:

With so many apps seemingly vying for dominance here, one would assume this space is rapidly heating up, or is already very popular. The latter is not the case, and the former is questionable. If by heating up you mean a bunch of startups are currently building reaction messengers, then yes, that could be true. If you mean that the market itself is reflecting some sort of shift to or adoption of this new format, well, that’s not quite true â€" at least not yet.

Today, the iTunes App Store’s Top Charts in the Social Networking category are nearly overrun with mobile messaging apps. (And no, it’s not necessarily a reflection of the still mind-boggling WhatsApp deal â€" many, if not most, of these applications had been built prior to WhatsApp’s $19 billion exit to Facebook.)

Then, within the general messaging category, there are a number of sub-trends that can be identified. Anonymous or private messaging, for example, seems to be taking off. Apps that connect you with people you don’t know for the purposes of chatting or dating, are also present. Others focused on letting you place free phone calls remain popular. And those that cater to the teen crowd, who are trying to achieve some sense of privacy outside of Facebook where mom and dad can watch their every move, are also seeing growing user bases.

But even though there’s a good handful of “reaction” messengers to choose from, not one has yet to break into the Social Top Charts for any significant period of time. That doesn’t mean that day won’t come to pass â€" the teen and young adult audience these apps target is nothing if not fickle with their attention. Plus, one could argue that’s it’s still early days for these “reaction” messenger types. That’s true, I suppose â€" many of these apps are fairly new. They need time to grow and develop their user base; they need to educate a market as to what a “reaction” messenger even is, and they need to perfect the user experience, and so on.

A third, more pessimistic argument, however, might be this: “reaction” messengers are trying to design an experience that doesn’t actually fulfill a need people feel they have.

The startups would argue that’s not so, of course. Because of physical distance or time zones, you can’t always have a real-time video chat, but there’s still a desire for that human face-to-face connection which traditional mobile messaging doesn’t serve, they’d say. Give it time, the space is new â€" the people will come!, founders tell us over and again. And yet, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that will be the case. Even positive reviews of these apps admit their “unnecessary” nature, or that the apps weren’t really something the writer was looking for. Or, as one commenter chimed in: “cool, but a feature not a product.”

In any event, these “reaction apps” have arrived en masse, at a time when mobile messaging is hotter than ever, into an App Store where the most popular apps are in the mobile messaging category. Now is the time to see if they can deliver.

Trivia App QuizUp Gains 1 Million New Signups After A Week On Android

Sometimes lightning does strike twice. Mobile trivia app QuizUp gained a million new signups in its first week on Android. With 100,000 new signups daily, that success on Android follows its initial launch on iOS, where it also racked up a million registered users one week in.

With Android growing fast, the total number of registered QuizUp users is now up to 12.5 million on both platforms. Those users have played more than 40 million trivia matches and spent 176 years of total game time on the platform, according to game developer Plain Vanilla Games.

QuizUp offers players more than 200,000 trivia questions spread out over 400 different categories. Now that it’s on Android, Plain Vanilla is working on localizing the app to make it available in more languages and more countries nationwide.

The game developer has raised about $28 million from investors that include Sequoia Capital, Tencent, Greycroft Partners, IDG Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, CrunchFund (founded by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington), and MESA+.

Rebelle Raises New Funds As Germans Switch On To Second-Hand Designer Fashion

Second-hand designer fashion has become big business online. Just look at the success of Nasty Gal in the US which has down well out of vintage pieces as well as new clothing, shoes, and accessories from independent designers. Videdressing, a social marketplace where people buy and sell second hand fashion has expanded across Europe. And quite clearly the market is doing well in Germany. Today startup Rebelle, a site for second-hand designer fashion, raised funding from German investor HCS Beteiligungsgesellschaft. Although the exact amount was undisclosed, it was described as being a “medium single digit million Euro amount”. German startups â€" for some reason â€" have a habit of not releasing fund raising amounts, alas.

The Hamburg-based start-up also raised additional funding from existing shareholders, including Hanse Ventures and High-Tech Gruenderfonds. The fresh capital will be used to to further develop its business in the German-speaking market and drive its internationalisation.

The Rebelle platform connects bricks-and-mortar retailers, focusing on the trend in so-called “re-commerce” and the growing luxury goods market. Individuals, as well as owners of luxury second-hand shops, can sell used designer items on the site. The twist is that Rebelle assesses the authenticity and quality of all the products.

Launched in August last year, it lists over 7,000 items and 600 brands and founder Cécile Gaulke (pictured) puts its rapid growth down to a high number of repeat customers and its “high-end positioning.”

Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism And Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

The exit of engineer Julie Ann Horvath from programming network GitHub has sparked yet another conversation concerning women in technology and startups. Her claims that she faced a sexist internal culture at  GitHub came as a surprise to some, given her former defense of the startup, and her internal work at the company to promote women in technology.

In her initial tweets on her departure, Horvath did not provide extensive clarity on why she left the highly valued startup, or who created the conditions that led to her leaving and publicly repudiating the company.

Horvath has given TechCrunch her version of the events, a story that contains serious allegations towards GitHub, its internal policies, and its culture. The situation has greater import than a single person’s struggle: Horvath’s story is a tale of what many underrepresented groups feel and experience in the tech sector.

According to Horvath, she joined GitHub in 2012 when the company was “still pretty small” and its culture was supportive of the women on its staff. She was, at the time, the “only female designer [or] developer on the team.” Despite its generally female-friendly environment, Horvath claims that she had “a really hard time getting used to the culture, the aggressive communication on pull requests and how little the men [she] worked with respected and valued [her] opinion.”

Why did Horvath work for GitHub? She “loved the idea of GitHub because it was the place people went to make things for people who make things,” she wrote in an email to TechCrunch.

In light of that, Horvath told us that she “participated in the boy’s club upon joining,” but when her “character started being discussed in inappropriate places like on pull requests and issues,” the situation changed.

In short, Horvath said that she felt she was being treated differently internally simply due to her gender and not the quality of her work. She calls her colleagues’ response to her own work and the work of other female GitHub employees a “serious problem.” Despite GitHub hiring more female developers, she “struggled to ever feel like [she was] welcome,” she wrote.

Adding to the already difficult situation was the wife of a founder, who she did not name in her email to us. Horvath says she did her “best to distance myself from her as well as the founder for fear of being caught up in an unhealthy situation,” but, as she told TechCrunch, she failed to “move quickly enough.”

The wife of the founder asked Horvath out for drinks, which she agreed to. In her own words: “Of course I agreed seeing as she was my boss’s wife and I’m always looking to meet women I can look up to.”

Instead of it being a friendly meetup, the wife in question began to boast, stating that she “informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub.” As Horvath holds, the wife said that Horvath “better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them,” and that “she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with [Horvath's] relationship to be sure [Horvath] was ‘made very happy.’” The wife wanted Horvath to be happy, “so that [Horvath] wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.’”

We are awaiting comment from GitHub regarding these allegations and GitHub says they are looking into it. It is not clear why this founder or his spouse appear to have felt threatened by Horvath’s employment.

The wife went on to claim that she was, in Horvath’s retelling, “responsible for hires at [GitHub], and asked her “to explain to her what [she] was working on.” The wife also claimed to employ “spies” inside of GitHub, and claimed to be able to, again according to Horvath, “read [GitHub employee's] private chat room logs that only employees are supposed to have access to.”

Horvath called the situation, aptly, “bananas.”

In her email to TechCrunch, Horvath says she felt “confused and insulted to think that a woman who was not employed by my company was pulling the strings.” She also felt “bullied by someone with perceived power and influence over [her] personal relationship and my career at GitHub.”

In retrospect, Horvath feels like should have “handed in her resignation” following the episode.

Horvath then told her partner, also a GitHub employee, about what was happening. She warned him against being close to the founder and his wife, and asked him not to relay information to them. According to Horvath, her partner “agreed this was best,” and he had talked with the founder’s wife, who agreed to give Horvath space.

Instead of the issue blowing over, Horvath received a meeting request from HR at GitHub, and was asked to “relay the details of that personal conversation that took place out of the office.” Horvath recalls that she was “uncomfortable with this but complied to the best of my ability.” Her partner was also asked for a retelling of past events.

Radio silence ensued for a month, according to Horvath, while rumors cropped up that the founder was asking other employees about her and her relationship with her partner. To Horvath, the silence made her think that she was “being bullied into leaving.”

At this point, Horvath began to feel “threatened.” Having her “personal relationship” dragged into her “work life and put on show for [her] coworkers” didn’t sit well with her. The aforementioned wife began a pattern of passive aggressive behavior that included sitting close to Horvath, to, as she told TechCrunch, “make a point of intimidating” her.

This stalemate ended when the founder asked to see her. Horvath said that she “wasn’t going to put myself in a position like that, so I required HR be present if we were to meet.” The meeting did not go well.

According to Horvath, the founder accused her of “threatening his wife, who she had “not interacted with or contacted since [the wife] asked [her] out to drinks.” Horvath cried during the episode, as she said the founder both “chastised” her, and called her a “liar.” He ended the meeting by saying that it was “bad judgement” to date coworkers (referring to her relationship, which was with another employee at GitHub) and then left. Horvath recounts sitting there after his departure both “crying and shaking uncontrollably.”

We are waiting for comment from GitHub about these allegations.

Horvath later learned that the founder had a similar talk with her partner, and demanded that he resign. Her partner is still at the company.

In Horvath’s view her options were limited, given that “HR and the other founders had allowed this to happen even after being made aware of his and her behavior.” It wasn’t clear whom she could turn to.

While the above was going on, Horvath had what she referred to as an awkward, almost aggressive encounter with another GitHub employee, who asked himself over to “talk,” and then professed his love, and “hesitated” when asked to leave. Horvath was in a committed relationship at the time, something this other employee was well aware of, according to her.

The rejection of the other employee led to something of an internal battle at GitHub. According to Horvath, the engineer, “hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation.” The employee in question, according to Horvath, is both “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.”

His “behavior towards female employes,” according to Horvath, “especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting.”

Seeking to create something positive out of the above complexity, Horvath decided to start Passion Projects, an initiative that she now claims “wasn’t just to fix tech,” but was also something designed to “fix GitHub and to strengthen the support network for women who might be experiencing similar things.”

Yet things failed to improve internally. Horvath calls the next period “uglier,” saying that the wife of the founder continued to show up at the office, sit next to Horvath, and “glare at [her] for extended periods of time as if trying to provoke a reaction.”  After a spell, “spending a lot of time in the women’s bathroom crying,” Horvath spoke to a different founder, who was “sympathetic” and promised to “address” the situation with the other founder and his wife.

The first founder asked to meet. Horvath accepted. The founder apologized, and admitted to having “inappropriately escalated the situation.” His wife, he said, would work from home from then on. The wife, to be clear, was not a GitHub employee.

Instead of getting gone, the wife appeared the next day and “planted herself right in front” of Horvath. Horvath pinged various executives who were “busy,” but willing to help eventually.

The situation wasn’t merely passively painful, according to Horvath it became virulent:

The next thing I knew the wife was in my face at my work station verbally attacking me. She demanded to speak with me in private to which I said no. I asked her in a very calm way to leave me alone and told her she was making me uncomfortable. There is an eye-witness to this event.

I was shaking in horror and felt my adrenaline pumping harder than ever before. I was proud of myself for not reacting, though.

I decided to work from home for a while.

HR eventually asked the wife to not be on the same floor as Horvath. But, according to Horvath’s recount, “she continued to find her way in and plant herself right next to wherever I was working.” This continued until her exit from the firm this past Thursday.

The final straw for Horvath came when she saw men gawking at women who were hula-hooping at the office. She called the episode “a really ugly and inappropriate scene. Her words:

Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub.

Horvath told TechCrunch that she thought she “could fix GitHub.” She now claims that she was wrong.

 

After working with HR to secure and announce a simple exit from the firm, someone posted a very unkind post to the Secret social network concerning her tenure. Her exit, at that time, was still confidential. She contacted Secret asking for the post to be removed. Horvath claims the post was not taken down initially. TechCrunch has confirmed with Secret that it was eventually removed.

The Secret post is what led Horvath to “speak up.” Instead of seeking attention, Horvath wants “someone [to be] finally held accountable.”

GitHub says it is investigating the matter: “We’re looking into this.”

Hey! You! Get Off Of Our Bandwagon

The Book of Berners-Lee

And lo, it did come to pass, as prophesied by the geeks of yore, that in the twenty-fifth year of the Web, the world entire, from Kathmandu to Timbuktu to Zanzibar to New York, began to notice its devouring by the Law of Moore.

And the eyes of the world were turned upon those places where that Law had been birthed, and numberless throngs of geeks still teemed, and CEOs and venture capitalists gathered and plotted; to the Valley of Silicon, and the City of Saint Francis, in California North. And it became apparent to all that London and Tokyo and New York, in their might and arrogance, had been displaced; that the Area of the Bay had become the new hub of the world.

And lo, the titans and mavens of the media, from their ancient complexes in London and skyscraping towers in New York, did dispatch emissaries to these newly sacred places, and hire residents within them, commanding: “Tell our people of these lands, and of the doings of their geeks, that our people may be appalled and entertained, and dream of traveling there as founder-pilgrims themselves, and shake their heads in dismay and warn of the comeuppance that will befall these upstarts on the day this bubble bursts, all at the same time. And keep your expenses low this time.”

And so these emissaries lamented the loss of the city’s soul, and reproached its decadent excess, and warned darkly of growing chasms between the mystical wizards(1) of Technology and the ordinary citizens, and between the old wizards and the young.

And the people of the City of Saint Francis did gaze upon these reports; and mightily did they roll their eyes.

But strive as they might to cast these tales entirely from their mind, they could not.

For it seemed true to them that in recent years the founder-pilgrims who had flocked to the City had grown as numerous as locusts, and to many, as welcome. And at brunches around the City there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and even wearing of sackcloth and ashes, when conversation turned to the monthly rent to be tithed if one were to move to a new apartment, even across the great waters in the Land of Oaks. Indeed it seemed to many of the blessed residents of this newly declared Promised Land that, increasingly, the Law of Moore brought wealth only to a few.

Once the City had been a haven for freak and geek alike; was there now room for only the geek? And yet, many of those who complained most bitterly about the newcomers had once been newcomers themselves. Was there no little hypocrisy there?

The denizens of this City were an intelligent, resourceful, and compassionate people. They sought solutions which would be fair to all. They understood that many more towers and rooms were required.

But now that Technology was King, and they were that King’s capital, any such measures seemed feeble and insufficient when arrayed against a colossal shift in wealth and power that was transforming the world entire â€" a shift whose very hinge was their City and the Valley to its south.

And so they bridled anew at every report dispatched around the world, telling of their wonders and their wealth and their decadence, where once they had been proud. They understood, too late, that while this rocket-fueled boom lasted, being pronounced Center of the Universe was more burden than honor, especially for a people who had long been devoted to arts and pleasures and subversions.

And soon they found themselves gazing with resentment upon the teeming masses around the world who longed to join them in their paradise, and wondering when and how this madness might end … and imagining darkly what might happen if it did not.

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(1)Allow me to stress that according to no less a source than J.K. Rowling, “wizard” is a gender-neutral word.

iOS 8 Could Simplify Notification Center, Add Better App-To-App Data Sharing, Ditch Game Center App

A new report from 9to5Mac details a number of small tweaks we could see in the upcoming iOS 8 release from Apple. As always, the blog stipulates that these are merely things that are in development or have been worked on, and won’t necessarily see introduction in iOS 8, but they could significantly change the overall experience of the OS if included.

Much of what the new report from the reliable Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac focuses on is the removal or simplification of existing features to make iOS 8 either easier to use, or more resource efficient, which is great for older devices.

One such tweak would be the removal of the “Missed” tab from the Notification Center, which got a big overhaul in iOS 7 with three tabs including “Missed” as well as “All” and “Today.” Users have voiced some confusion about the distinction between the two notification tabs, and the new report suggests that we’ll see Apple unify them to make things easier.

Voice Memos will be refined, too, with rearranged interface elements that make it easier to find the controls users are looking for. Messages will get a new option to let older threads be automatically deleted after  period of either a month or a year, which should help free up storage space. It seems like a minor issue, but that would help free up storage for those who’ve been using the same backup to restore their devices across multiple generations of hardware.

Game Center might also be on the chopping block: 9to5′s report says that Apple is considering removing the dedicated app from iOS and OS X altogether, instead keeping any and all Game Center features within supported games themselves. Personally, I can’t remember the last time I opened the Game Center app itself, so this could help de-clutter the home screen and might not affect the actual usage of the feature itself.

The new report also details some additions to iOS 8 that could greatly improve overall functionality, including improved data transfer and communication between iOS apps. That’s via a new API being developed that would make it possible for apps to, for example, edit content, then push it to other apps for their subsequent use. This is currently possible to some extent via the “Open in…” iOS feature, but the new API would presumably be much more robust and far-reaching.

Finally, Apple is said to be working on making CarPlay work over Wi-Fi connections, in addition to just via Lightning cable hardwire input. That’s not surprising: A Volvo promotional release detailing its use of the feature said that Wi-Fi connectivity was coming soon early this month. iOS 8 could be how Apple introduces that upgrade, which would definitely make for a smooth experience in terms of making it easy to have CarPlay activate immediately upon entering a vehicle.

This is the latest in a series of reports from 9to5Mac which detail new potential iOS 8 features being worked on. If everything we’ve heard so far proves accurate, this next update to the mobile OS will indeed be a significant addition to the groundwork Apple laid with iOS 7.

Apple Mulls Breaking Out iTunes Radio As Its Own App In iOS 8, Report Claims

The streaming radio race is still overwhelmingly dominated by Pandora in the U.S., but that’s not necessarily going to be the case forever: In a recent survey of streaming music users, iTunes Radio had climbed to third place, surpassing Spotify with 8 percent of respondents to the Statista study saying they’d used it in the past month. Apple has plans to potentially skyrocket its usage stats, however, by breaking out iTunes Radio into its own app in iOS 8, according to a report by 9to5Mac.

The report says that this is still in the experimental stage and not necessarily a sure bet for inclusion in iOS 8, but it makes a lot of sense to break out iTunes Radio on its own. The service currently resides inside the Music app on iOS devices, as a single tab among many. It essentially functions as a completely separate app within that software as it stands, so breaking it out shouldn’t be difficult. The separate app would be pre-installed on iOS 8 devices, which would give it a huge advantage over competing services, along with the fact that it’s already free (though ad-supported).

As 9to5Mac notes, this wouldn’t be the first time Apple has taken what was inside the Music app and made it into its own separate thing. Videos was introduced in iOS 6, and Podcasts and iTunes U all contain content that was originally housed in Music. The only potential downside to doing this as a standalone app would be potentially overwhelming users with an abundance of pre-loaded software with similar functionality, but I think it’s likely that the advantages (more users, better positioning for advertisers) outweigh that potential negative.