Microsoft Rolls Out Surface Pro 3 To 25 New Markets

In keeping with prior expectations, Microsoft is currently in the process of rolling out its Surface Pro 3 tablet-hybrid to 25 new markets over the next 24 hours.

With the 25 new markets all live, Surface Pro 3 will be available in a total of 28 markets. The rollout of the device has therefore been quite constrained to date. Microsoft also detailed in a post today that the new Surface dock will sell in the new markets, ahead of its general availability in mid-September.

The new markets give Surface a chance to put more revenue-points on the board. Surface revenue is a figure that Microsoft breaks out in its earnings, making it simple to track. Top line from the hardware project fell by more than half from the fourth calendar quarter of 2013, to the second calendar quarter of 2014.

Given that Microsoft may be in process of stepping back from its Windows RT-based Surface devices, it’s up to the Intel-based Surface Pro 3 to carry the torch. The device has received the strongest reviews of any Surface device. Microsoft positions it as a computer that can replace a traditional laptop.

The Surface project has been an expensive effort for its parent company. If the Surface Pro 3 fails to ignite revenue in Microsoft’s hardware group, it isn’t immediately apparent what a next step would be — the Surface Mini was yanked moments before its planned announcement, so other new SKUs could be somewhat far from making it to market.

Regardless, New Zealand is up first, along with 24 other markets. We’ll see if the bets that Microsoft has made were worth their time, and expense soon enough.

Microsoft Promises To Remove Scammy Apps From The Windows Store, Kills Off 1,500 Apps To Start

The Windows app store has a problem: it’s full of garbage.

For every popular app, there’s a dozen-plus apps trying their damnedest to trick the user into buying it.

No app store is without its shady apps — even Apple, with their infamously/painfully stringent restrictions (which, notably, seem to have been relaxed a bit over time), has its fair share of iffy clones and trademark violations.

But many of the apps on the Windows Store went far beyond being tacky conceptual clones; many of them didn’t even bother to create new icons, or come up with new names beyond changing a few characters.

Meanwhile, blatant trademark violations were rife. You want iTunes? How about “Itunes PC”, for $4? Or “Itunes Play App” for $9? The icons were the same; the names were intentionally confusing. The only difference was that behind that download button was a hot pile of garbage that no one was likely to download intentionally. And until now, it didn’t seem like Microsoft really wanted to do anything about it.

How-To Geek tore into Microsoft over the issue last week, and now Microsoft is promising to fix it.

In a just published blog post, Microsoft announced three changes to their certification process:

App names have to be clear (So “iTunes PC” is probably a no go.)Apps must be categorized properly (So no more premium “How To” guides disguised as functional apps)Icons must be unique enough that you couldn’t get two apps confused with each other.

They all seem like fairly obvious rules that probably should’ve been in place to begin with — but at least they’re in there now.

Microsoft says that the new rules will impact all future app submissions and updates, but that they’re also going back through and re-reviewing their catalog as quickly as they can. To date, they’ve killed off about 1,500 apps. If you’re unlucky enough to have bought one of the ones that got nixed, they’ll refund your money.

[Photo modified; original photo by Clyde Robinson on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons]

Broad Range Of Public Tech Firms Trade For Record Prices

All the talk of a bubble isn’t slowing down public interest in technology shares. Today, Apple, TubeMogul and Arista Networks set new record highs. TubeMogul and Arista both recently went public.

Other firms, like Microsoft are trading near local maximums. MobileIron set an all-time high yesterday, managed a new intra-day high today, and is up strongly in the past few trading sessions. Facebook is toying with the $75 price per-share range, a record performance.

That we’re seeing companies head public is therefore not surprising. Companies that are losing monday on a GAAP, and non-GAAP basis are looking to raise hundreds of millions from investors — LendingClub filed to raise $500 million today, Box wants $250 million and so forth.

The buoyancy, of course, extends outside of the technology industry. The S&P 500 closed at another record today, implying that a broader set of industries’ stocks are doing quite well.

There are notable exceptions. Twitter remains far under its 52-week high. King Digital has taken a beating in recent days. But the larger market for tech stocks appears healthy.

At least for now, the IPO window looks open, and Silicon Valley is sunny.

IMAGE BY Flickr USER Antonio Morales García UNDER CC BY-SA 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

3D-Printed ‘Bump Key’ Can Open Almost Any Lock

Bump keys are primitive tools used by locksmiths (and HAXoRZ) to knock open simple locks. Until now, many locks were secure simply because they were too complex to be bumped and, as a result, you had a bit of security by obscurity. That’s all changing.

Created by Jos Weyers and Christian Holler, these keys are designed to knock or bump the pins in a standard lock into place after a few sharp raps with a hammer. The pair discovered how to 3D print a piece of plastic that will fit into the keyhole based on a photo of the hole itself. A few carefully cut notches in the plastic and you’ve got a usable bump key.

The video below shows how it works – and how simple it is to use.

The pair don’t want us to break into secure military installations with their tool. Instead, they want to show how primitive most locks really are and how it’s becoming easier and easier to foil physical security systems. If anyone with a 3D printer and a camera can make a key, why have locks?

via Wired

Ruben Bolling Talks About Cartooning As A Career In The Internet Age

It’s back to school time and we decided to share some insight and advice from some amazing people. The first victim participant in our BTS school series of interviews is Ruben Bolling (pictured here), a lawyer-turned-cartoonist who moved from print to a primarily online presence thanks to his poignant, pithy, and hilarious art.

TC: Hi, Ruben! You’re my favorite! How did you get started?

RB: I had a bizarre route to cartooning: I was a brand-new lawyer and decided to be a cartoonist. I’ve almost always continued this dual path, doing cartooning while also maintaining a job in the legal/business fields. I guess the lesson that’s applicable to anyone is that I simply decided I was a cartoonist and pursued it relentlessly.

TC: What is the hardest thing about the business now?

My specific business has been newspaper comic strip cartoonist, and the hardest thing about that business is that it is absolutely disappearing. The solution for me has been to expand into other fields like web cartooning and writing books.

TC: What can students do now to help with later success?

RB: I think the best thing a student can do to help succeed in any field is to simply begin. Even as a student, and even if nobody is paying you or paying attention. In the case of cartooning, that means start drawing comics, even if they just go in a drawer. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll learn and improve. So, don’t say, “I’m going to be a cartoonist” — just BE one!

TC: Who are some young cartoonists you admire?

RB: I don’t know! Many of the new web cartoonists I admire are people I know nothing about, and have no idea if they’re 21 or 60. There’s something very democratizing about the web.

TC: Should people try to be cartoonists? Maybe try to be doctors instead?

Here’s the worst cartooning advice I ever gave. I was once on a panel about alternative newspaper comic strip cartooning, and someone asked about getting into the field. The whole panel, myself included, described how the field was contracting at an absolutely alarming rate, and there were fewer and fewer opportunities. We said it was almost impossible to break in.

A few days later I saw a post online by someone in attendance who complained that we were self-serving jerks for saying there was no room for anyone else in our field.

And that person was right. Everything the panel said was correct, but I should have added that anyone in the audience who could be discouraged by what we said probably wouldn’t make it in the field anyway. Those who will succeed will listen to us and then figure out a way to plug away anyway because they simply must. The truth is, I was told a similar thing when I started, and against all good advice I kept trying because I knew I had no choice. The two most important attributes anyone can have in any endeavor are persistence and passion.

You can read more by Bolling here and sign up for his extra special exclusive Hive thing right here.

LendingClub Files For $500M IPO

LendingClub, a company that provides an online loan marketplace, has filed an S-1 document to raise up to $500 million in its initial public offering.

The San Francisco-based LendingClub, as with many technology companies currently seeking the public markets, has quickly growing revenues but isn’t profitable.

The company had net revenue of $86.94 million in the first half of 2014, up from $37.09 million in the year-ago period. The cost of that revenue growth swung LendingClub from profit to loss. In The first half of 2013, LendingClub had net income of $1.74 million. In the same period this year, the company lost $16.49 million.

The company’s sales and marketing costs jumped from $16.12 million to $39.81 million when comparing the first half of 2013 and the first half of 2014.

LendingClub doesn’t loan out its own capital and collects fees of loans that are originated on its platform from both individuals and more sophisticated investors alike. The more loans that pass through its network, the more money that LendingClub nets without putting more immediate risk onto its books — a neat mechanism.

According to the S-1, LendingClub receives between 1 percent and 6 percent of the principal amount of loaned monies. Also, LendingClub charges investors a small percent — around 1, but variable — management fee, and takes a roughly 1 percent servicing fee on transacted payments.

According to CrunchBase, LendingClub has previously raised $392.9 million in venture capital over the course of 12 rounds — the company’s most recent capital infusion, $65 million, touched down in April of this year. LendingClub reported cash of just under $67 million in its S-1 document.

LendingClub’s loan volume has quickly grown. The company indicates that it has “facilitated” over $5 billion in loans since its birth in 2007. $1 billion of that tally occurred in the second quarter of 2014, implying rapid expansion of demand for its services. According to the filing, loan volume increased by 125 percent from the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014.

The company’s preliminary S-1 doesn’t indicate what its ticker symbol will be, or what exchange it will list on. The document does indicate that the company intends to execute its offering this year.

LendingClub’s IPO could set a benchmark for other companies that have growing revenues and cost structures that lead to GAAP losses.

IMAGE BY Flickr USER Ed Schipul UNDER CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Incubated: Y Combinator’s Approach To Finding And Helping Startups Become Big Winners

Y Combinator is the most famous of all startup accelerators out there, thanks to success of companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe, all of which have gone through its program. YC co-founder Paul Graham once referred to the process of finding and nurturing those big hits as “Black Swan Farming.”

But how does YC do it? What sets it apart from some of the other accelerators out there, and why does it seem like its alumni companies are disproportionately successful? With the latest episode of Incubated, we set out to find out.

At first glance, Y Combinator doesn’t look that different from most accelerators in part because it defined the category. Founded in 2005, its success has inspired multiple other programs to copy its 12-week format of weekly meetings, partner office hours, and access to alumni and mentors from the tech world.

But one of the things that sets it apart from other accelerators is just the depth and breadth of knowledge that exists within its network. In part, that stems from running for so long — there are about 1,500 YC alums available to learn from. And many of those alumni end up becoming the first partners or customers for startups in a current class.

While startups are expected to have their own space, Y Combinator companies meet weekly on Tuesdays to catch up, discuss their progress, and learn from famous entrepreneurs who are invited to talk about their own challenges in scaling up their businesses. It also hosts a series of other events, like Y Combinator Startup School, that are open to entrepreneurs who wish to attend.

One other thing that sets it apart is the selection process: YC takes online applications to help screen applicants, but bases its decision mostly on one 10-minute interview with the accelerator’s partners. It looks for founders who have deep domain expertise, and companies that can be big outliers in different technology.

Y Combinator just opened applications for its winter class this week. If you’re interested in learning more, check out he video above before applying!

This is the fifth of ten episodes for a new TechCrunch TV series called Incubated. We’ll have a new episode after Wednesday afternoon for the next two-and-a-half months, each of which will take a look at what it’s like inside some of the top accelerators in the U.S. Please join us each week to find out how all the different incubators and accelerators help out the startups that participate in them.

Check out all the episodes of Incubated here:

Why More Companies Should Submit To Peer Review

Editor’s note: Michael Housman is chief analytics officer at Evolv, a startup that uses predictive analytics and academic research to improve hiring and managing people.

Academia is governed by a process called “peer review,” which ensures research is validated and reasoning is sound. More simply, it weeds out the real insights from the fluff. Meanwhile, most corporate data (think surveys, white papers), is made public after only an internal, inherently biased review. With recent backlash toward Facebook’s emotions experiment, being cognizant and transparent with data is more important than ever.

As an academic, my expectation when I joined the private sector was that the white papers and collateral released by companies in this space would be based on large sample sizes, best-in-class empirical methods and rigorous interpretation. Suffice to say, that was not the case.

There are relatively few tech companies that support analytics-minded academics and are willing to put in the time to hold the company’s work accountable to a much higher standard. Peer review is an incredibly time-intensive process, but worth it for stronger, more accurate content. And though recent news of a “peer review ring” does show the system isn’t without its faults, with technology’s help, the methods can scale. Here are my top three reasons why companies should invest in academic peer review.

Content Is More Credible

In the peer-review process, once a team of researchers has completed a paper, they submit it to a journal that then circulates it to two to three peer experts for critique. Academic journals use a double-blind process so the authors don’t know the identity of the reviewers and vice versa, with the intention being to ensure that the process is as rigorous and objective as possible.

Although the finished product is inevitably better than the initial submission, the process requires a tremendous amount of work, and can last as long as two years from start to finish. Utilizing a process even near this intensive ensures that research is really real. Outside, educated analysis makes sure that the facts and framing are sound and not biased. This adds much more credibility to content than, say, a survey revealing the importance of secure storage, vetted by a security software vendor.

Thought Leadership Is More Authentic

Clearly most companies will choose to conduct research and develop content in areas relevant to their business – it makes sense to grow voice and market share in your space. But there is a fine line between self-serving and authentically helpful content that benefits current and potential customers. A company isn’t just saying it knows about a space; it is offering concrete evidence validated by others.

The Bar for Ethics and Accuracy Rises

In my role as a chief analytics officer, I often play internal referee – I refuse to release any research from our big dataset that wouldn’t be submitted to a top-tier academic journal. That means I’m responsible for both suppressing good content that isn’t sufficiently backed up by the science, as well as releasing unpopular results when that’s what the data says. This process substantiates our data.

Even if readers of our researchers do not perceive the difference between including fixed effects or clustering standard errors, they appreciate the value of the quality of analytical methods used and knowing what they are reading is truly fact-based. The spurious conclusions companies share in the public domain can sometimes be appalling. Since individuals and companies often base actual purchase decisions on this research, the improper actions and decisions that may result from fluffed up facts are of concern.

The level of rigor that goes into academic papers versus industry papers represents two extremes. One is a highly regimented process that can require many months or years of painstaking work in order to button up the analysis to an incredibly exacting level of detail. And in the other there is no quality-control process at all; analysts can literally release whatever they want into the world without being forced to explain their methods, present raw results or release their data if an outside party wishes to replicate their results.

My hope is that the tech industry can find a middle ground. We should educate the public about how to be more scrutinizing consumers of research – teach people to ask the right questions and look for the answers that have substance. It’s not only the higher-integrity path but also the logical one, as it plays to our strengths as technologists and innovators.

We’ve already seen results in the technology industry that have similar ethos, such as open source projects, which have given us a better infrastructure on the web, in databases and more. We can take that system, implement academic rigor and detail and keep those peer-review circles open, transparent and diverse. Close and careful scrutiny on the back-end will only benefit the industry.

IMAGE BY Shutterstock USER Kzenon (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

How Many People See Your Tweets? Twitter Opens Its Nifty Analytics Dashboard To Everyone

Back in July, Twitter launched a really nifty analytics dashboard. A bit like Google Analytics for tweets, it allows you to gauge the performance of each and every tweet you sent. How many people saw it? How many of those actually clicked your links?

There was one catch, though: it was only open to advertisers and verified users.

No longer! Now you too can obsess way too hard over the performance of every tweet you send! Hurray!

News of the change comes from Twitter front end engineer Ian Chan:

Absolutely thrilled to open up access to analytics.twitter.com to EVERYONE. Check it out, and let us know what you think!—
Ian Chan (@chanian) August 27, 2014

and this page lurking in Twitter’s support base confirms it: the dashboard should now be open to every account that has been open for at least 14 days, isn’t restricted/protected/suspended, and (curiously) that primarily tweets in English, French, Japanese, or Spanish.

You can find the newly unlocked analytics dashboard right here.

Kobe Bryant Reads TechCrunch

This month’s issue of Sports Illustrated is notable because it includes a long form feature by Chris Ballard on Kobe Bryant’s return to the game this fall. The story is worth reading for its support of the growth mindset and its undercurrent theme of “hard work will set you free,” whether you are a basketball fan or not.

Another reason you should read it is that it is proof that Mr. “Black Mamba” himself, Kobe Bryant, reads TC.

Some of Kobe’s favorite topics of conversation include: what Bryant read on Techcrunch the night before, the latest news on Buzzfeed and whether Katy Perry is a genius businesswoman or just a plain genius.

!!!

Since we’ve read this, we’ve been a) Extremely proud and b) Noodling on what on earth Kobe could have been reading the night before. From what I can tell, the meeting referred to in the article was on Bryant’s second day in China, which seems to be July 31st, 2014 per evidence on social media.

So I went back into WordPress and looked at what TechCrunch posts were published on July 30th through the 31st (Beijing is 15 hours forward). Then I picked the stories I would click on if I were Kobe. Very scientific, I know.

Here they are, in no particular order:

“Xiaomei’s One More Thing” by Matt Burns.

“Crave’s Vesper Is A Vibrator That Hides In Plain Sight” Sigh by Catherine Shu.

“Play Chef With Forage’s Twist On Restaurant Delivery” by Sarah Buhr.

“The NFL Gets Quantified Intelligence, Courtesy Of Shoulder Pad-Mounted Motion Trackers” by Darrell Etherington.

“Yo Is Trying To Get Parody App YOLO & Others Pulled From The App Store [UPDATED]” by Sarah Perez.

“Andrew Mason’s Audio Tour App Detour Steers You Away From The Typical Tourist Traps” by Ryan Lawler.

“Snapchat, In Talks With Alibaba, Joins The $10 Billion Valuation Club” by Sarah Perez.

“Founders On Depression” by Catherine Shu.

“Taptalk’s Official Response To Its Clone ‘Instagram Bolt” by Josh Constine.

Of all of these posts, I think Kobe was most likely to have been reading (and talking about) Matt Burns’ Xiaomei article. He was in Shanghai at the time, and probably interested in how the local phone hardware market stacked up against the US’s.

But, as Kobe is an entrepreneur himself, it’s likely that any ole’ startup’s launch post might have piqued his interest, after all, entrepreneurs of any stripe are the music makers, the dreamers of dreams:

Bryant recently cold-called Apple exec Jonathan Ive and Oprah Winfrey, among others, asking for business advice. He is curious in a manner most athletes aren’t. He wants to know how and why things work. Last year he formed Kobe Inc., hiring away creative talents he admired from companies he’d worked with. Among those Bryant ­idolizes—Steve Jobs and Bruce Lee, for ­instance—there is often a common theme. They are outsiders. They buck the system. Succeed against the odds. In their lives Bryant sees not just road maps but validation.

This is why I started reading TechCrunch, years ago, to learn — for free — about people who did not ask permission to build something, whether it was a company or an incredible career in tech, basketball or even, blogging.

Succeeding against the odds is the TechCrunch way. So I hope you enjoyed Matt’s piece, Kobe. And, if you ever want to speak at our Disrupt Conference, as we Greeks like to say, the good people always fit — just let us know.

SWAT Team Detains Popular Gamer Who Was Live-Streaming ‘Counter-Strike’

An incredible video showing the apparent swatting of a video game player who operates under the moniker ‘Kootra‘ was published today.

Swatting is a prank that involves falsely telling the police of a dangerous situation so that a SWAT — special weapons and tactics (SWAT) — team is deployed in response, erroneously. The police are led to believe that they need to roll out the guns and armor, leaving the intended victim of the prank literally staring down the barrel of the gun.

In this case, a Denver-area building was selected for the prank. Nearby schools, according to local media, were temporarily placed on lockdown due to the phantom threat.

Making the entire situation nearly surreal is the fact that Kootra, whose common name is Jordan Mathewson, was streaming a video game to the Internet when the heavily armed police force entered his location, and detained him.

It isn’t clear who instigated the prank that Kootra was caught up in.

The stream continues for some time until a police officer realizes that he is being recorded, at which point he appears to either shut, or otherwise turn off the computer in question. Until that point, the raid was taped, the footage of which was uploaded to YouTube.

Kootra, a member of a gaming group called The Creatures, is a popular personality with more than 200,000 Twitter followers.

Here’s the video:

Kootra later indicated that he’s safe:

Dag nabbit that was dern sure an experience. I am all Ok though. Thanks for all the supportive tweets everyone—
(@Kootra) August 27, 2014

While Kootra got through the ordeal, the danger to his person was material. Whomever instigated the swatting should be ashamed of themselves.

Airbnb Hands Over Data About 124 Hosts To The NY Attorney General

In the latest exchange between Airbnb and the NY Attorney General’s office, the peer-to-peer lodgings marketplace has agreed to hand over “unredacted, personal information” on 124 of its past and present hosts. The news follows a long-running back-and-forth between Airbnb and the Attorney General, which has been seeking to crack down on illegal hotel operations in the state.

In a post on the blog post, Airbnb public policy chief David Hantman said the vast majority of those hosts were no longer on the site. Earlier in the year, the company purged approximately 2,000 listings ahead of a court date it had with the Attorney General.

Airbnb’s fight with the AG’s office began last fall, when it issued a subpoena requesting thousands of host records. The company argued that request was “overly broad” and actually won a legal decision against the Attorney General. However, his office issued another subpoena before Airbnb agreed to settle and hand over anonymized data. Now Airbnb is taking that agreement a step further, as the AG’s office ferrets out hosts with multiple listings on the site.

Announcing The New Convenience Economy Disrupt Panel With Blue Apron’s Matt Salzberg, Good Eggs’ Rob Spiro, And DoorDash’s Tony Xu

Convenience is one of those problems that almost any entrepreneur can tackle, whether you are running an expansive business like WunWun’s on-demand delivery for everything, or running a specifically tailored business like YourMechanic. But some entrepreneurs are looking at the problem of convenience and pairing it with universal needs.

With that in mind, I’d like to introduce some of the incredible speakers joining us on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF for The New Convenience Economy panel: Matt Salzberg from Blue Apron, Rob Spiro from Good Eggs, and Tony Xu from DoorDash.

Each one of these companies has made its own strides — Blue Apron was recently valued over $500 million; Good Eggs raised a hearty $7.5 million Series A from Sequoia; and DoorDash has taken off in the South Bay with nearly $20 million in funding. But it’s not just these folks that are making waves.

Sprig raised $10 million, Spoonrocket just raised $11 million, Caviar raised $15 million, Postmates raised $16 million, and Munchery just raised an additional $28 million.

The space is on fire, which is why we’re absolutely delighted to have Salzberg, Spiro and Xu join us on stage.

These guys will be joining an already-impressive speaker list for Disrupt SF, which currently includes among many others, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, Marc Benioff and Vinod Khosla — best yet, we have a number of surprises yet to announce.

There is still time to snag a Disrupt SF ticket at early bird pricing. After September, the price jumps by $1,000. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, reach out to our sponsorship team for more information.

Why Everyone Is Obsessed With E-Mail Newsletters Right Now

E-mail newsletters are so hot right now.

Some of the best known are by Ann Friedman, Alexis Madrigal, Dan Hon and Rusty Foster. There’s a web ring for e-mail newsletters now, but really the best newsletters are secret. The authors encourage readers to share the subscribe link with other people who might be interested, but request that no one share the subscribe link on social media or the open web, creating a sort of darknet of semi-underground dispatches.

But it’s more than just individual bloggers. Two or three years ago every site on the web was doing all it could to trick coax readers into “liking” them on Facebook. Today much of that focus has shifted towards getting readers to sign-up for an e-mail subscription. Just look at the prime screen real estate e-mail subscription forms are given at Mashable, The Verge and, of course, TechCrunch. Upworthy — the most “social media native” publication to date — goes so far as to put a huge sign-up form below the first paragraph of every story:

Quartz has a much loved daily e-mail blast (though the sign-up form is oddly buried in a pull-down menu) and sports news company The Slurve is going so far as to build an entire business off its newsletter. And it’s not quite the same as a digital newsletter, but the likes of Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Medium are all sending daily or weekly activity summaries to give people an overview of what’s been going on on those sites, and try to entire people to interact. Just last week Madrigal declared that e-mail is still the best thing on the internet.

So why all this effort to herd readers into a medium that is supposed to be dying? And why are we, as readers, so willing to invite even more e-mail into our lives?

Joanna McNeil has suggested that e-mail newsletters give writers a greater sense of intimacy with their readers than today’s social media services, while Rebecca Greenfield suggested the end of Google Reader as a driving factor in sending more people into the arms of e-mail. I think both of these are part of something bigger: sending e-mail gives publishers a greater sense of control over how they reach their audiences.

Facebook is sending less traffic these days thanks to its algorithmic tweaks and the sheer number of things competing for attention in your feed. Twitter isn’t filtering content à la Facebook yet, but many fear it’s only a matter of time. And that’s to say nothing of the other problems of not having much control over the platform on which you share information. You could be kicked off the site for violating its terms of service. A site could do a massive redesign that renders your work moot, or pivot into a different market. Or, like Google Reader, it could just disappear.

E-mail gives publishers a bit more control. Yes, your newsletter could end up in a spam trap, and things like Google’s Priority Inbox and its smart labels do affect where your e-mails will be seen. But if you’re sending mail that your readers legitimately signed up for, it will probably find its way to them somehow, and that’s more than you can say for a Facebook status update these days.

And you can own your own mailing list, more so than you can own just about anything else online. Governments can seize your domain name. If you forget to renew it, some squatter will snap it up and try to sell it back to you for $1,000. But your mailing list is yours. Even if you’re using a service like Mailchimp or TinyLetter, you can back-up your mailing list and use it with another program. And if you use a self-hosted mailing list like Sendy, Dada Mail or the Newsletter plug-in for WordPress, you have even more direct ownership over your lists.

Author Warren Ellis, who has been doing the e-mail newsletter thing for years, has written that his mailing list has a 5,000 out of 6,865 open rate. That’s exceptional, but shows how powerful email can be. The newsletter for my personal blog has only around 320 subscribers. But according to Mailchimp, each e-mail has about a 20 percent open rate. That’s about 64 readers per e-mail. I have over 7,000 Twitter followers, but a very successful post will tend only to be clicked by about 20 people, according to Bitly, which works out to less than 1 percent of my followers.

So while it might be harder to get people to fork over their e-mail addresses than it is to get them to like or follow something, once you do, they’re much more likely to actually pay attention, and you can reach more people in the long run. Marketing types have known this for a long time, hence all the get-rich-quick spammer websites that try to entice you into swapping your e-mail address for a free e-book.

E-mail is great way to reach mobile readers without having to talk them into installing yet another pointless app. It works on everything from tablets to feature phones to Commodore 64s with dial-up Internet access.

That helps explain why publishers want us to sign-up for newsletters, but why do readers actually do it? I think a big part of it is social media fatigue. Other things try to replace e-mail, only to become just as cluttered, creating a bunch of separate cluttered messes to deal with. My inbox is a nightmarish hellscape. But I’d rather visit one nightmarish hellscape per day than a dozen. And while there’s no way I would want to get an e-mail newsletter from every single person I follow on Twitter, those e-mail digests of what’s been happening on Twitter are pretty handy. From a reader’s standpoint, I’d often rather just get a daily or weekly digest than try to follow yet another Twitter account or RSS feed.

For years, those of us who have advocated the indie or federated web have called for social networks to be more like e-mail, but it turns out e-mail itself is a pretty good social media platform. And while getting people to sign up for a Diaspora or Identica account was always a tough sell, just about everyone already has an e-mail address. And e-mail has social features like “reply” and “share” (aka “forward”) baked right in.

But beyond all that, it feels like an admission that the Internet went horribly wrong somewhere along the way. Google+, Tumblr and Facebook Groups felt like a tacit admission that the web had taken a wrong turn somewhere around Friendster and was finding its way back to LiveJournal. But now with the rise of newsletters and Snapchat and “right to forget” legislation, it feels like we’re going back even further, perhaps admitting that this whole web thing, with its search engines and caches and screenshots, were perhaps a bad idea to begin with and it’s not to rip it up and start again from e-mail on up.

IMAGE BY Shutterstock USER Mr. Aesthetics (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Plan B Uses Old Printer Parts To Create Detailed 3D Models

If you’re bored this weekend, go ahead and tear apart your old inkjet printer and grab a few pieces of aluminum. Then head over to Yvo de Haas’ website and get cracking. His new project, called Plan B, is an open source 3D printer that lets you print solid plastic objects by binding a thin layer of plastic powder with an old printer head.

How does it work? Well the Plan B is a 3DP printer which means it uses a little bit of glue to bind thin layers of gypsum powder. The head “draws” the layer in binder and then brushes away the excess. Then another layer of powder is placed and the system repeats itself ad infinitum until the object is built.

The printer has a layer height of 0.15mm to 0.2mm and prints fairly slowly, for now. However, considering it’s completely open source, uses off-the-shelf components, and can be built for under $1,000 it’s definitely an interesting experimental rig for experience 3D printers.

You can download the build manual here or just wonder at the majesty of an era in which a working 3D printer can be made from lab scraps.

via 3Ders

Most U.S. Businesses Don’t Know They Were Caught Up In Massive Cyberattack

Is your payment information safe? It’s hard to know, considering many companies hit by the same cyberattack that hit Target don’t even know it.

According to a New York Times report published Friday, more than 1,000 businesses, including Supervalu and United Postal Service (UPS), were caught up in a breach affecting in-store cash register systems. The Department of Homeland Security issued an advisory that said millions of American payment cards have been affected by the hack.

At the end of July, the report says government agencies instructed companies to check for “Backoff” malware, a type of infection that occurs at the Point Of Sale. Since then seven companies have told the government their systems were hacked, but the Times says the Secret Service estimates more than 1,000 have not checked or stepped forward. Government agencies have instructed companies to search for the “Backoff” malware on their systems or enlist the help of antivirus companies.

Reports like this highlight the need for stricter government regulation and oversight when it comes to protecting customers data. Companies don’t have an incentive to report these breaches because it can result in a public relations nightmare and lead to profit losses. If it weren’t for the work of cybersecurity reporters like Brian Krebs, the public may not have known about the massive breaches that affected retailers like Target.

Businesses also need to take these repeated attacks seriously and upgrade their payment systems. As the Times report notes, magnetic stripe cards aren’t secure. The cost of upgrading to chip-based smart cards can cost large companies millions, but the alternative is watching these hacks continue to happen.

IMAGE BY Flickr USER Mike Mozart UNDER CCPL LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Women In Tech: It’s Not Just A Pipeline Problem

Why are there so few women in tech jobs? Repeat after me, robotically, defensively: “It’s a pipeline problem!” So says David Cohen of TechStars, echoing many others, e.g. Paul Graham and CNN. But come on, folks. We’re kidding ourselves if we pretend that’s the only obstacle here. The pipeline problem is very real; but so is the trapdoor problem.

It’s true that it would be better if more women went into technology to begin with, but it’s disingenuous to turn a blind eye to the fact that many women who do enter the industry subsequently drop out of it. Why? Well, let’s just look at a few recent headlines, shall we?

“European Investor Admits He Pestered Female Entrepreneur For Sex In “Deal” Email” (TechCrunch)

“Armoring Up: Surviving Sexism As A Female Founder” (Forbes)

“No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry” (Polygon)

“Coder livetweets sexist remarks allegedly made by IBM executives” (Daily Dot)

“Tinder Co-Founder’s Lawsuit Reflects Tech Industry’s Rampant Sexism” (VICE)

That’s just the last two months. Too anecdotal? OK: here’s a 2008 Harvard Business Review research report (PDF) on women in science, engineering, and technology, which found:

Between ages 25 and 30, 41% of the young talent with credentials in those subject matters are female … [but] 52% of this talent drops out … The most important antigen is the machismo that continues to permeate these work environments … 63% of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment.

I haven’t found any comparable studies from the last five years, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks things have gotten much better since 2008 — until, maybe, just this last year, when more people seem to have become willing to at least discuss the issue. As long as you don’t suggest it’s anything more than a pipeline problem.

But guess what? If you create an environment wherein a whole class of entrepreneurs and employees goes unnoticed by deeply flawed industry-wide “pattern recognition” heuristics, and/or one where they have to be perpetually on their guard, and must pretend not to notice all the myriad microaggressions that make them feel vulnerable and uncomfortable and out-of-place…

No Google, no I didn't. http://t.co/9BtO4IjBTE—
Emily McManus (@emilymcmc) August 07, 2014

Things men don't have to worry about while heading to a biz meeting: "She wondered about the impact of lipstick." on.recode.net/1sW1o78—
Colleen Taylor (@loyalelectron) August 21, 2014

…then many of those entrepreneurs and employees will decide, rightly, that the tech industry is not worth the hassle and grief.

And so: “52% of this talent drops out.” That’s the trapdoor problem right there.

Still want to talk about the “pipeline”? OK, let’s. Consider this (PDF): “Fewer women pursue STEM careers than would be expected based on the number of girls who earn very high math scores.” Or this: “In 2012, 18 percent of computer science majors were female; in 1985 it was 37 percent.” Maybe, just maybe, a perception of the tech industry as a toxic environment for women has had something to do with that decline. Maybe the pipeline problem is not independent of the trapdoor problem.

Now, for all the hand-wringing about predatory investors and brogrammers, it’s fair to say that the industry has finally taken a few steps in the right direction of late:

Points I was trying to get across: 1. Sea change for women in tech in the last year. This is inspiring and incredibly important.—
Elissa Shevinsky (@ElissaBeth) August 07, 2014

Also, brogramming is a small piece of tech culture. It's not like, everywhere you go there's brogrammers with beer & porn.—
Elissa Shevinsky (@ElissaBeth) August 07, 2014

But we’re still a long way from nirvana here. Pretending that it’s only a pipeline problem does no one any favors. Please stop saying that. It’s not true. What’s more, the trapdoor problem is one we can collectively work on without having to wait for a new generation to filter through; and the first step towards solving any problem is admitting that it exists.

Image credit: Wikimedia.

Apple Opens Battery Replacement Program For Affected iPhone 5 Units

Apple has created an iPhone 5 battery replacement program after it released a statement saying that it had discovered a “very small percentage” of units “may suddenly experience shorter battery life or need to be charged more frequently.”

This iPhone 5 battery replacement program is the second to arrive. Late last year, Apple had a replacement program for iPhone 5s units with battery life issues.

Apple says the affected iPhone 5 units were sold between the month of it’s launch, September 2012, and January 2013.

The support site features a tool to check if your serial number belongs to a faulty iPhone 5. The replacement program is available at Apple Retail Stores, Authorized Apple Service Providers, and via AppleCare, in the US and China first. Those outside those countries will have to wait till August 29th.

As per us usual, you’re advised to backup you data, Turn off Find my iPhone, and Erase all Content and Settings before arriving to get the battery replaced.

If you had already paid to get your battery fixed (and you’re eligible for this replacement), Apple is offering refunds.

The program is available up to March 1, 2015 and it does not extend your iPhone 5’s warranty.

Buying Stuff Within A Tweet Is Reportedly Coming To Twitter Via Stripe

Soon you’ll be able to buy something straight from a Tweet, if the rumours come true. Tech site Re/code says sources have told it that Twitter is working with payments startup Stripe on the launch of its ‘in-tweet’ commerce project.

Twitter is reportedly planning to add buttons within tweets that say “Buy”, or similar, allowing users to enter payment information without leaving Twitter.

Apparently, businesses that want to sell inside tweets will have to sign up with Stripe for all this to work.

Although Stripe is supposedly the only company in the frame right now, who knows if that exclusivity will last. It would seem unlikely, and I should imagine Paypal would be one of those Twitter is also taking to.

The news follows other reports in January that Twitter is looking at building a marketplace on its platform that is similar to what Square offers in the Square Market, with listings for goods across different categories.

Any partnership with Twitter would be a big deal for Stripe, a venture-backed company run by twenty something brothers Patrick and John Collison.

It’s known that Twitter has considered integrating shopping into its service for several years now, and would significantly ad to its revenue base which currently relies heavily on advertising.

German Regulator Backs Google Over Publishers, As Europe Gets Embarrassing

German regulators will not pursue a complaint brought against Google by a group of publishers for giving users access to their news articles.

A number of German publishers, including Axel Springer and Burda, brought the action under a group called VG Media to demand Google pay them for making their articles available to the public on the search engine without paying them.

But Andreas Mundt, president of Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, said in a statement on Friday that: “Sufficient suspicion is always necessary to initiate an abuse procedure. The complaint from VG Media did not establish this.” In other words, there’s no suspicion of abuse – Google is just doing the job of a search engine. Duh.

German legislation came into effect a year ago stating that publishers can stop search engines from using their news articles beyond very short excerpts.

The cartel office has ruled that the scope of that legislation is not entirely clear, but it would continue to monitor Google’s treatment of publishers’ and launch anti-trust proceedings if that was warranted.

In contrast, Spain has passed a law requiring news aggregators such as Google News to pay publishers a fee if they link to their content. Supporters say it will prevent copyright infringements. Opponents say it limits freedom of expression. However, no-one is quite sure how the Google Tax will work.

And guess – what? Spain was where the “right to be forgotten” began, with the European Commission recently ruling that individuals can demand Google remove unfavourable links about them from search results displayed in Europe. The ruling does not apply to Google.com, which is where I find myself search much more these days…

Frankly, some European countries’ attitude to the Internet is becoming embarrassing. I’m sure George Orwell would be shaking his head right now. As least this German regulator seems to get it.

BiiSafe Buddy Is A Bluetooth Keyfob For Item-Tracking And Location Alerts

Forgetful folk who regularly misplace stuff are spoilt for a techie fix these days. Connected item trackers that link your valuables to your mobile phone have been crowding onto the market thick and fast, fueled by the rise of the less battery-thirsty Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity tech, and promising to put an end to your ‘where did I put my keys?’ woes. Just a few that spring to mind include Tile, Chipolo, Duet… the list goes on.

Well here’s another: Finnish made BiiSafe Buddy, which was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, offers item tracking via Bluetooth and a location-sharing alerts feature geared towards families by turning the gizmo into a physical button that lets you quickly share your location on a map with your chosen circle of loved ones.

I gave the BiiSafe Buddy a road test for a few days to see whether the concept lives up to the promise.

MSRP: $50/€39 per single buddy, or lower unit cost multipacksBattery life of between 3 to 18 monthsBluetooth Low EnergyiOS and Android appsProduct info page

Pros

Tactile, minimalist designEasily share your location on a map

Cons

Trigger range not yet customisableInterface has some niggles

The hardware design of the buddy is pleasingly tactile and non-slippery, given its rubbery face, although this material does attract dust so if you’re sticking it in a bag or pocket expect it to gather some lint. There’s a metal ring running around the edge of the device which offers a secure place to easily attach it to your keys or to the zipper inside a purse/bag. The buddy is not at all heavy — akin to the average key-fob in weight — and its tapered shape means it slips into even a small jeans pocket without adding unpleasant bulk.

Set up is relatively straightforward. First you need to download the companion iOS or Android app. You’ll also need to create your usage circle within the app — which means the group of people (or just yourself) who will able to locate a buddy and receive alerts from it. This is done by entering an email address and a password, both of which will be the shared login credentials for all other people in your circle. That’s a bit awkward but again it’s clearly geared towards families who are likely to be used to sharing login credentials.

NB: Only one circle can be linked to an installed BiiSafe Buddy app at a time. And all the others in the circle have to have the BiiSafe Buddy app installed — with the same username and password credentials inputted — in order to get alerts on their mobile device.

After setting up your circle, next you link and configure each individual buddy by tapping on the add new buddy icon in the app and holding one buddy near your BLE-capable mobile device and pushing the buddy button (up to five buddies can be linked per app installation). Each buddy can be named within the app and a display icon chosen for it, such as keys or a bag, to help manage multiple buddies. And that’s the set up done. The app offers other settings you can play around with, such as changing how loud the alert sound is (although the loudest setting is not very loud at all so there’s probably not much scope or need to make it any quieter).

Operation of the buddy is also pretty straightforward, although the interface does have some niggles. If you want to locate a lost buddy you open the app, tap on the particular buddy you’re after and its last known location is plotted on a map. You can also tap on ‘find buddy’ to trigger a short audio alert and a radar style interface that shows if you’re getting nearer to that buddy as you move around looking for it. Neither lasts very long (probably to save battery life) so unless your lost item is not actually very lost you’re likely to need to trigger this multiple times as you go a-hunting.

If you want to use the buddy to share your location — say with a family member who’s coming to meet you — a short press on the button will share your location to the circle. This type of location share is signaled on the buddy by a short burst of green light. Although, in daylight, the light is easily missed and if you press and hold the buddy button for too long (around 2 seconds) it will send the same location share but this time badged as a safety alert (meaning the app will mark your location with a big red circle). The buddy flashes red lights when you’ve triggered one of these safety location alerts.

The specific message that’s sent when you share your location with your circle can be configured to something of your choosing from within the app.

Given how easy it is to trigger the safety alert by mistake — say when someone only meant to share their location, or accidentally because of items pressing against it in your bag — it seems likely that a lot of false alarms are going to be triggered and sent to your circle. So it’s a shame they didn’t make the two trigger functions more distinct. Or the safety alert a little harder to trigger.

Another feature of the buddy is that it can alert you when you and your mobile device have moved more than 50 meters away from a connected buddy (you can disconnect individual buddies when you want to disable this feature). I found this less useful, because 50 meters is actually quite a distance — and you’re likely to have locked yourself out of the house long before the app gives you a warning that you’ve left your keys behind.

Currently the trigger range for this feature can’t be configured but the buddy’s makers say they are looking at ways to integrate that. It would certainly be a lot more useful if the range could be user-defined, given that the size of people’s houses vary — and a shorter trigger might make sense for your keys than for another item you want to keep tabs on. As it stands, 50 meters is only really going to help you if you drop your keys in the street while jogging. Or leave your bag on a park bench.

The buddy has a few other tricks up its sleeve. For instance the hardware includes a temperature sensor so you can view the temperature of individual buddies in the app, should you be curious about how warm it is where your keys are. Plus there’s a motion detection feature you can enable to trigger alerts when an item is dropped from a particular height. That’s neat if you worry about your keys falling out of your pocket, say, or if your child won’t leave the house without their favourite teddybear but always drops and loses it when they do take it out.

If you’re the sort of person who loses their keys in their own house the Biisafe Buddy has got your back, although if your household is generally noisy you may have trouble tracking down where its gentle beeps are coming from. But at least you’ll know for sure that the errant keys are somewhere near so you can be all the more zen as you peek under piles of washing. The location sharing feature is also neat, if that’s useful to you. Families with teenage kids to pick up from clubs and events may find it helpful, although teens may be less keen to have their whereabouts tracked and mapped. Privacy considerations are an issue with any tracking tech that can be used to keep tabs on people as well as insentient things. Ironing out those sort of disputes is likely to be more troublesome than dealing with the app’s more minor interface niggles.

Is Burning Man Just Work?

It’s that time of year again. Summer is over for most people and has just begun for San Francisco. And this week, the city becomes emptier than a VC parking lot at 5 p.m. as many of SF’s denizens head to Burning Man, a festival that celebrates human expression — importing over 70,000 people to Black Rock City, Nevada, to party.

And because many of these “burners” work in the tech industry, notably Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Drew Houston, the festival has a hoard of tech press attending this year.

Nick Bilton, from his relevant new post at New York Times Fashion & Style, has already written about how the tech nouveau riche are using the conference as some sort of Versailles. He referred in that article to a $25K per head posh camp that boasts a suspect 2:1 servant-to-camp member ratio.

Because the attendee line-up is better than your average tech conference, Re/code is sending someone to cover it, VentureBeat is sending someone to cover it, Valleywag is sending someone to cover it, and we, in addition to the die-hard TC burners who attend of their own volition, are also sending someone to cover it.

One of our writers is in a camp with three other tech bloggers. “Great. You all can write about each other,” I said when she mentioned it.

Gore Vidal (or perhaps Leonard Cohen?) once said that you need to try drugs to be able to write convincingly about them, so I was a burner a couple of years ago just so I could one day express a well-informed opinion on the subject — and have fun. I didn’t see any of the crap that Bilton wrote about even though I had a relatively fancy, at least upper-middle class, experience.

As ridiculous as it seems, there is a rationale behind the pile on of investors, founders and executives that use the festival as a networking opportunity: Yes, you can win “deals” at Burning Man. Yes, it’s easier to ace a job interview when you’ve glowed and tripped and watched a burning effigy of Wall Street with the hiring manager. After all, Eric Schmidt got his Google job because he could hang.

Don’t hate the Playa, hate the game.

Think about it this way, startup people: Have you taken something that was supposed to be a spiritual experience, an opportunity to commune with nature and your fellow man, and turned it into work?

I’m not talking about legitimate work like the thousands of hours spent building art cars or icebergs or cheese sandwich restaurants in the desert, or the months of coordination and planning it takes to set up a well-functioning camp, I’m talking about work like positioning yourself in front of your bosses and/or deal flow and trying to build sources. Networking is networking, whether you’re exchanging business cards or Ecstasy.

So ask yourself as you push your bedazzled bike across the white sands of Nevada: Am I here to party or am I here because I think it’ll benefit my career? Could I justifiably expense this? If your answer to the latter is yes, consider not going. Go to Hawaii instead.

Microsoft Research Shows Off “DeLorean,” Its Tech For Building A Lag-Free Cloud Gaming Service

When looking to the future of gaming, few concepts get people as excited as the mythical “Netflix for gaming.” It’s a concept that we’ve seen in multiple forms, from OnLive’s early efforts to Sony’s new PlayStation Now service.

Serving up games from giant clusters of servers has several advantages over the traditional model of running a game on your own console or PC. It allows any device that can play streaming video to play high-def games; graphics can improve at a steady rate because improvements to a cloud architecture are easier to roll out than new console hardware; and games can be played instantly rather than waiting for ~20GB game downloads.

While Microsoft hasn’t gone as far as Sony in releasing its own streaming game platform, it’s shown interest in the concept before. Just this April, Microsoft showed off how developers of big-budget Xbox blockbusters like Titanfall are taking advantage of the Azure cloud platform to include better AI and physics without reducing performance overall.

Yesterday, Microsoft Research published a report that signals that the company is looking for ways that it could use its cloud expertise to create a unique cloud gaming platform at some point in the future. It discusses DeLorean, a “speculative execution engine” that makes it possible to delivery seemingly lag-free gameplay from the cloud despite the myriad sources of network latency between Microsoft’s Azure servers and a player’s device.

The report concludes that most users involved in the study couldn’t tell the difference between playing Doom 3 and Fable 3, two relatively action-heavy games, on a local system or from the cloud using DeLorean with 250 milliseconds of latency. That’s a game-changer — most gamers experiencing that kind of lag would throw their controllers in frustration.

How did Microsoft Research pull off such a feat? The key to DeLorean is the “speculative” descriptor. Video games generally can’t be buffered like a video from YouTube or Netflix because player actions affect what happens on screen — if I shoot my gun in Titanfall and the game showed me jumping, I’d be annoyed. But by looking at previous player input and sampling the most likely player actions, Microsoft found a way to predict the few actions you’re probably going to take and sends the video of each of them over ahead of time, letting it show players the most accurate guess as the game catches up.

The biggest problem with that solution is that it’s very bandwidth heavy: Microsoft notes that the bitrate for its predictive engine is 1.5-4.5 times higher than simply sending just the frames that a game knows to be accurate based on actual player input. That means you’d need a faster connection in order to play games through a theoretical Xbox streaming service than you would for PlayStation Now or Nvidia’s Grid, but you wouldn’t experience the stuttering that happens for gamers that don’t live close to the physical servers hosting those services.

IMAGE BY Back to the Future (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week (8/22)

This week had our writers investigating new engineering, aerospace and NASA hires for Amazon Prime Air, self-reflecting on social media involvement and getting drunk with robots.

1.  Tom Hanks launched the Hanx Writer typewriter app for iPad, and it soared to the top of the iTunes App Store charts ranking first in the Productivity section, and Overall.

2. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stepped down from the company’s board, we give you a look back at his career.

3. Uber released its API to third-party developers, allowing app creators to integrate the ride-sharing service into their apps. 11 API partners have already committed to introducing Uber to their users, including OpenTable, TripAdvisor, United Airlines and Starbucks.

4. Updates from the music front: Ticketfly acquires WillCall, Spotify adds the Tastemaker feature and an advertising platform hits SoundCloud.

5. John Biggs reflects on his relationship with social media and how he got his brain back after deleting social networking apps.

6. Instagram just got more ad-friendly, offering brands a new dashboard interface for tracking their performance that includes business tools like insights and analytics. This might help attract more brands to start using the platform.

7. Amazon Prime Air is getting serious about their project goal of delivering packages within 30 minutes to customers using unmanned drones. While the company continues to dodge setbacks from the FAA, former Microsoft research engineer Paul Viola, Keyhole Inc. (which later turned into Google Earth) co-founder Avi Bar-Zeev, and NASA astronaut Neil Woodward have all joined the Prime Air team.

8. Our team took a trip to the Aloft Hotel in Cupertino to visit Botlr, a robotic butler made by Savioke. The service robot is programmed to bring items to the doors of hotel rooms. In this case, he tried to get Alex Wilhelm drunk.

9. The ALS awareness Ice Bucket Challenge has hit Europe – the startup tech community to be specific. Up to the challenge were Emi Gal of Brainient, Peter Vesterbacka and Ilkka Paananen of Supercell. Samsung, on the other hand, got it all wrong.

10. Microsoft’s Windows 9 has been leaked, and has been said to unveil on September 30. Darrell Etherington gives you a brief update, while Alex Wilhelm argues that the Windows 8 era isn’t merely closing, it’s racing to an end.

11. Kim-Mai Cutler talked with Sam Altman, who took over Y Combinator from Paul Graham at the beginning of the year. For the first time, Y Combinator is supporting biotech companies, including a nuclear battery company, as well as Ginkgo Bioworks.

In other news, Anna Escher and John Biggs put together a gallery of drones that could make you the coolest kid in town. Jon Evans poses the question of whether software engineers get enough respect or not, and Jordan Crook gives you the noPhone, designed to alleviate the anxiety that comes along with not having a phone (but really, phone separation anxiety is a real thing).

San Francisco Open Exchange Aims To Be The E-Trade Of Bitcoin

Y Combinator-backed startup San Francisco Open Exchange (SFOX) is an online trading platform that helps people find the best bitcoin prices at various exchanges. In other words, it would like to help you buy, sell and invest in bitcoin exchanges kinda like and investor buys and sells stock on E-Trade.

Co-founder Akbar Thobhani left his job at Airbnb to create this platform. However, he soon found that using bitcoin was even more expensive than using credit cards. This is because there’s not a lot of transparency. So he started thinking that if he could find a way to compare prices this would help drive widespread adoption for the bitcoin market.

There are similar systems that directly buy and sell. CampBX, based in Atlanta, is one of many hundreds of exchanges out there that allow buying and selling. Although, Thobhani says CampBX is a different business because it’s just one exchange on a closed system. “Our goal is simple – find our customers the best price for their bitcoin. To do this, we work with multiple exchanges and use our algorithms to route the transactions,” Thobhani explained in an email.

The key thing to understand here is that SFOX does not actually allow you to buy or sell bitcoin directly, like CampBX or other exchanges. Rather, it is a platform which facilitates finding the best price on these exchanges. Prices can vary wildly, depending on the exchange used. One bitcoin could be $508.58 on Coinbase but $507.90 on Coindesk or $508.50 on Bitstamp.

There’s also the btcReport app for iOS. However, this app merely shares information about the different prices on different exchanges. It does not allow someone to actually buy or sell bitcoin. This is what makes SFOX unique in the market. It actually finds the prices on different exchanges and then, like a stock exchange platform, facilitates the trade. It also allows you to use standard equity trading features like limit orders, just like someone might find on a platform like E-Trade or Charles Schwabb.

Another thing that SFOX attempts to solve is the location of where the exchanges exist. According to SFOX, 90 percent of all bitcoin trades are done in the U.S. However, the most popular exchanges like Bitstamp and BTC-e are based outside of the U.S. The problem is some exchanges have failed to adhere to U.S. currency regulations. The now infamous Mt. Gox was one such exchange that has faced this very issue. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a warrant to seize money from Mt. Gox’s US subsidiary’s account with payment processor Dwolla in 2013. The Tokyo, Japan-based exchange was at one point handling 70 percent of all bitcoin transactions. But then it announced that around 850,000 bitcoins had gone missing and were likely stolen. The amount of missing bitcoins was valued at more than $450 million at the time.  Mt. Gox didn’t register in the U.S. as a money transmitting company, which is a requirement for U.S. money services and Dwolla had no choice but to comply with handing over the money. SFOX, which is based in the Bay area, claims to be in line with U.S. regulations.

Thobhani and his co-founder George Melika’s idea was pretty well received at last week’s YC Demo Day, too. We asked around to a few investors during the breaks which company they were most impressed with. Many of them mentioned SFOX. The company is now in several talks with potential investors.

Thobani hints at possibly adding other cryptocurrencies such as dogecoin and litecoin to the platform. He also says SFOX could go international at some point.

Trading in SFOX is currently by invitation only.

Amris Acquires Social Recruitment Platform Zao

You’re acquired! L.A.-based Zao, the social recruitment platform that lets employees and a company’s wider network get rewarded for making job referrals, has been bought by legacy UK e-recruitment company Amris (owned by The Internet Corporation Limited).

Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, though my understanding is that Amris is acquiring the full Zao product and technology, while only part of the Zao team will be staying on.

Meanwhile, founder and former CEO, Ziv Eliraz, will be sticking around to the extent of joining the company’s advisory board.

Founded in late 2011, Zao aims to solve the problem in which the main source for company hires — referrals — are often managed in a very manual way, whereby someone from the HR department sends an email to all staff describing a job opening and staff are left to figure out how to leverage their networks to find and attract suitable candidates to apply.

Instead, Zao’s platform provides a step-by-step and gamified process that automatically matches job descriptions with suitable Facebook and LinkedIn contacts to make it easier for employees (and ex-employees) to become recruiters, along with other trusted partners. It also tracks these social referrals so that should they lead to a successful hire, the referrer gets a kick-back.

In June 2012, the startup raised a $1.3 million seed round led by Oren Zeev, Founding Partner at Orens Capital and former General Partner at Apax Partners. Other investors included Oren Dobronsky (Founding Partner at Orens Capital), Zohar Gilon, Gary Ginsberg (EVP, Corporate Marketing and Communications at Time Warner), and Donald Katz (CEO of Audible). As we reported at the time, Robin Klein and Saul Klein also participated.

Amris says Zao’s social referral product will be offered as a “fully integrated” and optional module for existing Amris users, but will also remain available as an independent offering.

Why Are PC Sales Up And Tablet Sales Down?

Editor’s note: Peter Yared is the founder and CTO of Sapho and was formerly the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive.

When iPads first came out, they were hailed as the undoing of the PC. Finally, a cheap and reliable computing device for the average user instead of the complicated, quirky PC. After a few years of strong growth for iOS and Android tablets and a corresponding decrease in PC sales, the inverse is suddenly true: PC sales are up and tablet sales are “crashing.” What happened?

The tablet slowdown shouldn’t be a surprise given that tablets have hardly improved beyond relatively superficial changes in size, screen resolution, and processor speed. The initial market for tablets is now saturated: grandparents and kids have them, people bought them as Sonos controllers and such, and numerous households have them around for reading. People that want tablets have them, and there’s just no need to upgrade because they more than adequately perform their assigned tasks.

Businesses and consumers alike are again purchasing PCs, and Mac sales are on the rise year-over-year. Businesses in particular are forced to upgrade older PCs now that Windows XP is no longer supported. When purchasing a new PC, the main driver to choose a PC versus a tablet is fairly obvious: If you are creating any type of content regularly, you need a keyboard, a larger screen, and (for most businesses) Microsoft Office.

For the tablet category to continue to grow, tablets need to move beyond what Chris Dixon calls the “toy phase” and become more like PCs. The features required for a tablet to evolve into a super tablet are straight from the PC playbook: at least a 13” screen, 64 bit processor, 2GB of RAM, 256GB drive, a real keyboard, an actual file system, and an improved operating system with windowing and true multitasking capability. Super tablets form factors could range from notebooks to all-in-one desktops like the iMac. Small 7” and 9” super tablets could dock into larger screens and keyboards.

The computer industry is littered with the detritus of failed attempts to simplify PCs ranging from Sun Micrososytems’ Sun Ray to Oracle’s Network Computer to Microsoft’s Windows CE. But this time, it’s actually different. The power of mass-produced, 64-bit ARM chips, economies of scale from smartphone and tablet production, and — most importantly — the vast ecosystem of iOS and Android apps have finally made such a “network computer” feasible.

As the former CIO at CBS Interactive, I would have bought such super tablets in droves for our employees, the vast majority of whom primarily use only a web browser and Microsoft Office. There will of course always be power users such as developers and video editors that require a full-fledged PC. A souped-up tablet would indeed garner corporate sales, as Tim Cook would like for the iPad … but only at the expense of MacBooks.

The cost of managing PCs in an enterprise are enormous, with Gartner estimating that the total cost of ownership for a notebook computer can be as high as $9,000. PCs are expensive, prone to failure, easy to break and magnets for viruses and malware. After just a bit of use, many PCs are susceptible to constant freezes and crashes.

PCs are so prone to failure that ServiceNow — a company devoted to helping IT organizations track help desk tickets — is worth over $8 billion. Some organizations are so fed up with problematic PCs that they are using expensive and cumbersome desktop virtualization, where the PC environment is strongly controlled on servers and streamed to a client.

And while Macs are somewhat better than Windows, I suggest you stand next to any corporate help desk or the Apple genius bar and watch and learn if you think they are not problematic.

The main benefits of super tablets to enterprises are their systems management and replaceability. Smartphones and tablets are so simple and easy to manage that they are typically handled by an IT organization’s cost-effective phone team rather than more expensive PC technicians, who are typically so overwhelmed with small problems that they cannot focus on fixing more complex issues. Apps can be provisioned and updated by both IT and end-users without causing conflicts or problems. If a device is lost, it is easy to remote wipe data and to provision a new device with all of the same settings.

Programs like BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) just accentuate the fact that smartphones and tablets are so easy to manage that enterprises are comfortable letting their employees pick the devices themselves. Users also get great benefits, including instant-on, long battery life, simplicity, and access to legions of apps from the iTunes and Play app stores.

Former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée has long pointed out that Apple is gradually converging Mac OS X and iOS and will likely replace Intel processors with ARM processors. However, Apple is steadfast in maintaining a separation between the tablets and PCs and is bridging the divide with its new Continuity features. While Microsoft is willing to hack a touch interface onto a desktop experience, Apple will understandably not go there until the experience is perfect.

Apple will have to make this switch at some point soon, however, as users are increasingly expecting every screen to be touch-enabled. Tim Cook claims that he is not afraid of cannibalizing businesses, but Apple seems reticent to cannibalize its growing $20 billion Mac business.

Google’s Chromebook is essentially a PC that can only run web apps. As many commentators have puzzled, Google should be focusing on a desktop version of Android rather than Chrome OS. The market has decided that it wants native apps on smartphones and tablets, so clearly users are going to want native apps on their PC replacements, as well.

Android has a huge advantage with its large app store and developer community. The Chrome OS has an inherently flawed mission – why try to compete with Windows whilst Microsoft itself is moving beyond Windows? The new generation of ChromeBooks based on ARM chips closely matches the specs of a super tablet – there just aren’t any apps because of the Chrome OS constraint. The hardware is right, but the operating system is wrong.

Microsoft is actually very well positioned for a super tablet world with its Office 365 for iPad and Android, since as a subscription product it can draw revenue long after a manufacturer cashes in the thin margins on the hardware itself. This is an opportunity for Microsoft to make more money on a Mac than Apple does, as Microsoft did in the 1990s. Microsoft has already written off making money on Windows on low-end hardware and is setting itself up for a post-Windows future around devices and services under Satya Nadella’s leadership.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 is a somewhat valiant attempt to reinvent the PC as a super tablet; however it is expensive and has a small screen, a subpar keyboard, a power hungry Intel processor and all of the headaches of managing Windows. The much-panned Surface 2 with Windows RT is ironically a step in the right direction, but its 32-bit ARM processor is underpowered and there aren’t many apps in the Windows Store. Microsoft coincidentally offered Windows CE devices in the late 1990s that were actually quite close to super tablets, but like with Windows touch tablet, they entered the market far too early.

The ecosystem around building, distributing and maintaining PCs is massive and Apple, and the PC companies are understandably reluctant to cannibalize their sales. Lenovo offers a 10? Android notebook and HP is reportedly soon shipping one, but these are intentionally small and underpowered in order to not compete with notebooks. This vacuum presents an opportunity for companies like Sony that have exited the PC business but continue to sell smartphones and tablets.

Samsung in particular is reportedly looking to shutdown its PC business, and must be evaluating how to grow its tablet business now that its smartphone sales have slowed. Samsung could offer up Office 365 bundling in exchange for royalty-free device sales in its next patent conflict with Microsoft.

An interesting side note is that large enterprises typically run numerous legacy web applications that do not work on modern web browsers, with some legacy web applications only working on ancient browsers like Internet Explorer 6. Many of these applications were built in the first wave of the Internet to enable “employee self-service” and have not been touched since that era. Perhaps the move to a simpler, cheaper PC replacement will finally shift the cost/benefit equation such that these web applications will finally be upgraded or replaced with SaaS solutions.

Here’s hoping that the Apple, Google and Microsoft can soon move into a super-tablet future where most businesses and consumers will be able to manage and customize their PCs as easily as they manage their phones and tablets … and us techies can move on from our part-time tech support jobs.

IMAGE BY Shutterstock USER Guillermo del Olmo (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

YC-Backed Rigetti Computing Raises $2.5M To Create Commercial Quantum Systems

Once confined to research labs and science fiction, quantum computing is finally reaching a point where researchers aren’t simply trying to find out what’s possible, but looking at how they can actually work the technology into commercial hardware.

Rigetti Computing, a member of the current Y Combinator batch, wants to be one of the companies that leads the effort to create an ecosystem around quantum computing. Founded by a former high-ranking researcher at IBM and Yale, the company plans to bring consistent performance improvements to the field through an iterative, simulation-driven prototyping process.

As founder and CEO Chad Rigetti explains it, the company has a list of engineering problems it can work through over the next few years that will bring predictable performance and cost improvements once solved. Many of the issues Rigetti is hoping to deal with don’t even involve the actual quantum aspects of their hardware, which is why the startup is able to use Ansys simulation software to rapidly test changes without having to build new circuitry with each iteration.

Back in April, Rigetti was able to turn early results from its simulation-based testing into $2.5 million in seed funding from AME Cloud Ventures, Morado Ventures, Susa Ventures, and Tim Draper, among others. It’s looking to use that capital to turn its small offices in Berkeley into a nimble quantum computing lab employing some of the top scientists in the field — Rigetti says that the company is “taking great care in building out the team,” hiring from the “top 1 or 2% of Ph.D graduates in fields relevant to our technology.” While Rigetti acknowledges hiring from top research labs and other companies looking into the space, he declined to name specifics because that information could reveal which lines of research are influencing their work.

The next few years of prototyping will determine whether Rigetti Computing can build processors reliable, scalable, and affordable enough (compared to the competition) to make their way into commercial deployments. Theoretically, quantum computers can perform certain kinds of operations immeasurably faster than traditional processors; commonly-cited applications for the technology include simulating chemical reactions at a molecular level in order to create drugs and new materials, more advanced artificial intelligence, and cryptography.

Despite the existence of machines claiming to be powered by quantum processors, there still haven’t been any major breakthroughs in which software built for quantum systems left traditional computing in the dust. According to Rigetti, there are two reasons why that might change soon: “The first is the rapid pace in development of new applications for small- to medium-sized quantum computers; the second is the exponential manner in which compute power grows with system size for quantum machines.”

Rigetti Computing’s fate depends on taking advantage of those two trends. Building software for a quantum computer is a lot more complicated than simply changing APIs to port an app from the PC to a smartphone, so the sooner the startup can get hardware into potential customers’ hands so that they can become comfortable working with it, the more likely it is that someone will build software that shows quantifiable results. If they can get to that point, the sky is basically the limit: scaling a quantum computer up theoretically brings exponential improvements to performance, which only makes more applications possible.

IMAGE BY YouTube USER riktw (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Apple’s Next iPad Could Sport Anti-Reflective Coating For Easier Daylight Use

Apple has a new iPad that has just gone into production, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The next Apple tablet will reportedly will reportedly come in both 9.7-inch (iPad Air) and 7.9-inch (iPad mini) flavors, per the news network’s sources, and will be equipped with a new anti-reflective coating that should make it easier to read in bright light situations.

The new iPads could be revealed as soon as the end of this quarter, or early next, which would be in keeping with the October reveal of new iOS tablets last year. The 9.7-inch model is said to be in production already, while the 7.9-inch model should also ship by the end of this year. The report also says that use of the new coating might restrict output of the bigger tablet, but that’s not surprising – Apple almost always has supply constraints on new model hardware when it first enters the production pipeline.

Apple has faced what amounts to a plateau in its tablet sales in the past few quarters, so new devices could inject some much-needed energy into sales of the iPad. There’s not much else revealed in the report from Bloomberg around specifics, but it’s likely both devices will benefit from improved processors, either the same ones that we’ll see debut in the upcoming iPhone 6 in September, or an upgraded version of the same.

What will be interesting is watching the effect that the new iPhone has on tablet sales – if rumors are true (and there are a number of credible reports around this now) the next iPhone will come in bigger screen sizes, including a 4.7-inch version, and a 5.5-inch model. It’s hardly crossing into iPad territory yet, but if those are indeed the dimensions of new devices, they’ll still be answering an apparent user interest in larger-screened devices, which, given the cooling tablet market, might suggest consumers are looking for one device where they were once happy to have a multitude.

Now Launching Out Of Y Combinator, Theorem Aims To Be The Priceline For Fashion

At first, what Theorem does sounds like what a lot of other companies do: It’s an online marketplace for well-made, higher-end clothing and accessories. But Theorem comes with a very interesting twist: The price of each item is up for negotiation. Buying something on Theorem hearkens to the kind of give-and-take that’s been practiced in flea markets and bazaars for centuries, but brought online and into the modern age.

At Theorem’s beta launch in April, the San Francisco-based startup had just two staffers — cofounders Ryan Jackson and Adam Roberts, pictured here — it was completely bootstrapped, and had only a handful of merchants who agreed to list items on the site. But even in those early days, it was apparent that Theorem had a lot of what it takes to be on to something big.

So far, things seem to be headed in the right direction. Now a part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2014 class, Theorem has polished up its product and user interface, doubled in staff size to four full-time employees, and increased the number of merchants selling items on its site to more than 50, with thousands of products on the platform.

In an interview last week, Jackson and Roberts told me that their company’s larger vision now is to become the “Priceline for fashion,” bringing the name-your-own-price model to a new type of market, and letting independent brands benefit. Roughly 60 percent of offers presented by shoppers on Theorem are being accepted by merchants at the moment, giving growing independent brands an outlet for selling items to a new customer base, without diluting their carefully-crafted images.

Embedded below is what a shopper sees when bidding on a Theorem item: As a shopper, you tell the brand exactly what you would pay for an item (offers can’t go below 50% of the list price), and the brand then decides whether or not to accept it. As I wrote at Theorem’s beta launch in April:

“There are subtle differences that make Theorem more special than the classic auction model. Theorem negotiations don’t automatically go the highest bidder, or drive the price down to the lowest common denominator. When I first saw it, I thought it is more reminiscent of the Goethe Auction, or the Becker-DeGroot-Marschack method. It’s a more complicated negotiation scheme than what you see on eBay, but it’s also one that might actually create the best outcome for both buyers and sellers.”

“These brands typically don’t offer discounts, but they do with us, because of the blind auction aspect. We’re not publicizing how much they’re selling the items for,” Jackson said. “On Theorem they can discount more heavily than they ever will in their stores.” Theorem takes a variable cut on each item sold through the platform, depending on the quantity sold and the item’s price. The company hasn’t set an official commission rate just yet, as it’s working on its business model.

Theorem’s blind auction aspect also provides a way for brands to perform the kind of valuable market research on pricing and products that is typically only accessible to large brands and corporations. Brands accept offers in batches, so that lowball offers tend to be evened out by higher ones. In the future, Jackson and Roberts say that they’ll be working on building even better analytics tools for merchants, so they can derive more value from the platform.

“It’s becoming clear that we have the ability to become this data company, and to pull this relevant information that hasn’t been available to anyone before, aside from huge companies like the Gap,” Jackson said. “We can tell a brand: ‘Here was your lowest accepted price, and here are how many offers that were within five or 10 percent of that, and how much money that would have been worth.’ We can show all of this data in a way that’s accessible and actionable.” Having this kind of information could be the difference between a company that fails, and a company that thrives.

Though Theorem focus right now is completely on building out its own flagship site, it could make sense in the future to offer its price negotiation platform as a white label offering for other retail brands to use on their websites, much like Tilt has done with crowdfunding.

Theorem is still definitely in the early upstart stages, but it’s a unique idea that could bring some welcome changes to the way that all kinds of things are bought and sold. With a clever concept, technical chops, and an energetic and smart founding team, it will be exciting to see how the company evolves in the months ahead.

Snapchat Is Now The #3 Social App Among Millennials

Snapchat is now the third most popular social app among millennials, according to a recent report by comScore, which finds that Snapchat has 32.9% penetration on these young users’ mobile phones, trailing only Instagram (43.1%) and Facebook (75.6%).

That means the app is more popular than Twitter, Pinterest, Vine, Google+ or Tumblr among the millennial demographic, which comScore defines as those between the ages of 18 and 34.

It also puts into perspective why Facebook once valued the company at $3 billion, and why Snapchat had the vision – or hubris, perhaps – to turn that offer down. Millennials are the youngest, most active generation of mobile social networking users, and their habits are setting the stage to be the new “default” for the generations that follow, like Generation Z or Generation Alpha, or whatever we’re calling the born-with-iPad-in-hand kids.

As comScore explains, Snapchat’s overall audience penetration among smartphone users was just 12.1% back in November 2013, when reports of the Facebook deal began to circulate. That made the company’s decision to decline the multi-billion dollar acquisition appear risky and maybe even rash – especially since Facebook and MySpace only began to see their user growth really accelerate once they hit 15%-20% penetration – something which Snapchat had not yet achieved.

But Snapchat is now at 18% penetration among smartphone-using adults, says comScore, citing figures from June 2014.

More importantly, when you dive deeper into Snapchat’s user demographics, it seems that Snapchat has long since passed critical mass among users ages 18-24, where it now sees around 50% penetration. Combined with the slightly older 25-34 crowd, Snapchat’s penetration among the broader Millennial demographic is at 32.9%, as noted above.

“At this reach threshold, Snapchat has likely established a certain degree of staying power within this demographic segment that gives it some runway to evolve beyond its core value proposition,” says comScore VP of Marketing & Insights, Andrew Lipsman.

Snapchat’s ability to reach a critical mass matters because it demonstrates that apps that aren’t purely text messaging replacements, like Whatsapp (which sold to Facebook for an astounding $19 billion) can hit it big. Messaging apps as alternatives to pricey SMS was a void waiting to be filled on mobile, where apps like LINE, Kakao Talk, Whatsapp, WeChat, Kik, Tango, Viber and others each attract hundreds of millions of users.

Some of these “messaging” apps are more than simple utilities though, offering a platform for games and other apps to run on top of their social underpinnings.

Similarly, with the launch of the collaborative “Our Story” feature, Snapchat also took its first big steps beyond the friend-to-friend photo messaging experience, offering a platform that could potentially appeal to paying customers like music festivals or sports teams looking to reach the Millennial crowd.

And while comScore’s numbers validate those who believed in Snapchat’s potential, there’s also that gut feeling that this is an app that will continue to resonate with today’s younger smartphone users. It’s a reimagining of a social network for the generation who grew up chastised for over-sharing on Facebook and other social media platforms; for those who watched as Facebook shifted the ground underneath them, tricking users into public sharing with privacy policies that were moving targets.

It makes sense that this group – a group who invented concepts like whitewalling on Facebook, where a third of users have deleted or deactivated entire social accounts – would gravitate toward an app that treats content as disposable.

IMAGE BY Shutterstock (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

BeachMint Gets Lucky In Joint Venture With Conde Nast

E-commerce platform BeachMint announced it will take over all operations for Lucky Magazine today. The takeover is part of a newly formed joint venture between BeachMint and magazine publishing giant Conde Nast. Called The Lucky Group, it will be led by BeachMint’s Josh Berman as CEO with Lucky’s editor in chief Eva Chen and the magazine’s senior VP, Gillian Gorman Round.

A partnership like this makes sense for both BeachMint and Lucky. BeachMint already had the built-in tech to make itself an ideal candidate. Lucky provides the demographic (upper middle class professional women in their mid to late 30’s) to pull in shoppers for BeachMint’s e-commerce platform. “BeachMint has spent the last few years developing a technology platform, growing digital audiences and scaling our commerce operations,” says Berman. “Lucky magazine is about shopping. It references hundreds of brands in every issue and is already responsible for thousands of purchases every day,” he added.

Like much of the publishing world, Lucky’s focus is increasingly on digital. Conde Nast, which owns Lucky, has been promising an e-commerce platform for the mag since Gorman Round took over marketing operations 18 months ago. Lucky’s overall ad sales have continued to slump the last couple of years and there’s been some chatter about how to save the magazine. The magazine’s publisher Marcy Bloom resigned in early 2013 and Gorman Round was brought in as her replacement. Anna Wintour then came on as artistic director and soon brought in Eva Chen as EIC. Wintour will also be an advisor to the new partnership.

More recent sales numbers showed the magazine had the steepest decline out of all major fashion mags this July. Lucky was down 34 percent from last year, with just 90 ad pages, according to the latest figures. However, Gorman Round believes using those numbers to test brand health is simply naive. According to her, digital sales are up by 33 percent and digital revenue is up 47 percent. “That means our P&L (profit and loss) is much healthier than its been in a really long time,” She says.

Much of the retail and publishing world is trying to figure out the best way to monetize using content. “Everyone talks about commerce and content and they’re adding content now,” says Chen, “But we’ve had 14 years of already having content.” She listed off the unique kinds of content Lucky has been sharing. Grumpy cat was in one of its issues. Jiff, the Pomeranian from the Katy Perry “Dark Horse” music video, was in another. “That’s something ppl can look forward to on the platform as well,” Chen says. “That’s something the Instagram generation has been craving.”

Andreessen Horowitz seems to be thinking along the same content and commerce lines with the recent $50 million infusion into online content generator BuzzFeed. Chris Dixon, who will now be advising BuzzFeed, wrote on his blog about the funding announcement, “Tech is now spreading through every industry and every part of the world. The most interesting tech companies aren’t trying to sell software to other companies. They are trying to reshape industries from top to bottom.”

This reshaping is what Berman and execs at Conde Nast believe they are striving for in this partnership as well. “From a tech perspective, there’s a lot of exciting companies working on how to transition a customer from print content to digital content through mobile technology,” says Berman. Competitors to BeachMint such as Shoedazzle and JustFab continue to focus on discovery within an online subscription platform. One Kings Lane sends out a quarterly shopping publication to reach shoppers. This new partnership is sort of a natural reverse of that approach for both Lucky and BeachMint.

Berman added that all of the Mint properties, ShoeMint, JewelMint, StyleMint and BeautyMint will remain member sites within the company. Celebrity partnerships such as with Rachel Bilson and its shoe vertical will also remain intact. Berman also hinted that the new venture would be testing the idea of allowing people to buy products without going into the membership. He then added, “Just to be clear, there’s no intention for the new commerce platform we build for Lucky to have a membership commitment. Where BeachMint’s innovation was centered around subscription and endorsement, we’ll look to innovate around integrating content, commerce and community for this new platform.”

Berman, whose background includes both Myspace and News Corp., is no stranger to the publishing world, either. “It is clearly different from the start-up cultures I’ve been involved in or created.” He emphasized the need for a new kind of platform that bridges the publishing world with online shopping in a 360 degree experience from beginning to end. “The macro trend is to bring content, commerce and community together. Women aren’t just shopping online. They are sharing and creating their own content.”

Added Chen: “Lucky is a magazine you talk back to. There’s already that engagement and conversation. It’ll now feel more like a little bit both commerce and a little bit magazine.”