TechCrunch
Personalized Video Ad Platform Eyeview Raises $8.1M
Eyeview, a company with technology that personalizes video ads, has raised $8.1 million in Series C funding.
You can see some examples of Eyeview’s personalization below. For example, the visuals in an ad for a national retailer could be tailored to highlight local stores and deals. The examples in the video are mostly focused on location, but CEO and co-founder Oren Harnevo said ads can also be personalized based on things like weather and time of day.
There are other personalized ad technologies, but Harnevo said they use Flash banners or some other overlay, whereas Eyeview’s personalization occurs in the video itself — the company can create many different versions of the video, then deliver the correct version to each viewer based on its targeting. And when there’s updated information, like new pricing, the videos are updated too.
That approach is important because it means there’s no real integration required on the part of the video publishers, and because it means Eyeview’s personalization works across devices.
“In the cloud we’re creating hundreds of thousands of videos that you can then use in mobile, in connected TV, with no limitations,” he said. “This is a real play for cross-platform, cross-stream personalization.”
Harnevo told me that when Eyeview announced its Series B early last year, it was still making its initial entrance into the US market. Now he said it’s working with big advertisers like Land Rover, Lowe’s, Toyota, Paramount, and Target. He also said that revenue grew 6x between 2011 and 2012, and it’s on-track to grow the same amount in 2013.
The new round was led by Marker, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, and Nauta Capital. The new funding will go towards expanding Eyeview’s market (so that it’s available in all of the United States) and continuing to develop the technology, Harnevo said.
The company has now raised a total of $19.4 million.
The Government Lied About Being Able To Read Your Email Without A Warrant
Edward Snowden: “I, sitting at my desk, [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email [address].”
Rep. Mike Rogers: “He was lying. [...] It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”
Who is right, and who is lying? According to new revelations by the Guardian newspaper and Glenn Greenwald, the government was again avoiding the truth and Snowden was, in fact, correct. An NSA program by the name of XKeyscore provides precisely the capability that Snowden detailed and Rep. Rogers denied.
Government denials of NSA capabilities are beginning to come up as false a sufficient number of times that they are losing the stature of an official remark, and are instead slipping increasingly into the realm of rank misdirection.
Here’s how XKeyscore allows the NSA to read your email: an analyst, without needing a warrant, merely has to provide an email address or an IP address, a written “justification,” and a time range. That’s it. If that feels a bit loose, you have the proper internal reaction. (For information about how the NSA collects and stores the data, head here.)
The documents note that the “bodies” of emails are in fact searchable, meaning that the NSA has the ability to go far and beyond the simple tracking of email metadata. That too is searchable, however, but is not the full extent of what the NSA can in fact find and access.
What happens after the analyst requests the emails from XKeyscore? Greenwald: “The analyst then selects which of those returned emails they want to read by opening them in NSA reading software.” According to the documents, the software can be used to read communications that “transit” the U.S., as well as conversations that “terminate” in the U.S. While the communication in question is from a foreign source, and therefore not privy to Constitutional protection, I doubt that the rest of the world finds that defense relaxing.
What is perhaps most chilling in this is the laughable security standards set up to protect privacy and individual rights: the “justification” section of the email request. See if you can spot it:
Two small fields and we’re off to the races. And one is a damn drop-down menu. One wonders what options the NSA helpfully provides its analysts.
The above is new, and revelatory, but perhaps not particularly surprising. What it does demonstrate is that our prior idea of digital privacy not existing was correct and that a select cadre in the government is consistently falsely presenting the capabilities of this nation’s digital surveillance.
And that’s not very damn good.
Top Image Credit: Andrew Malone
NSA Director: Don't Worry, Trust Us
General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, gave the keynote speech at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today. It was more interesting than I expected.
Not for the speech itself, which contained zero bombshells–a transcript and video should be up on the Black Hat site fairly soon, for those interested–or for the questions. There was exactly one non-pre-filtered question from the audience, the short version of which was, “Why do foreigners attack America?” (Was it planted? Your guess is as good as mine.)
That said, the audience seemed to largely be on his side, which surprised me. I had expected the tech-security crowd to be heavily anti-NSA, but occasional heckling was met with only scattered applause, whereas when Alexander retorted to “Read the Constitution!” with “I have. You should too,” the resulting ovation was loud and broad.
He did reveal some numbers. Only 22 people at the NSA, he reported, can approve numbers on the US metadata/business-records list for querying; 35 analysts are authorized to run those queries; and in 2012, fewer than 300 phone numbers were approved for queries, which led to all of 12 reports to the FBI. As for what’s captured and what isn’t:
What interested me most was the attitude. The NSA seems to believe that what Americans are most concerned about is the prospect of some cowboy analyst coloring outside the lines. General Alexander reinforced again and again that the US metadata-collection program has “100% auditability” (though I don’t recall him saying the same about the Section 702 foreign-intercept program) and “Our people have to take courses and pass exams.”
From my notes, which I believe are close to a word-for-word transcription here:
Many of you are saying: ‘I hear what you’re saying but I don’t trust that.’ The Senate Intelligence Committee found no wilful or knowledgeable violations of the law in this program. More specifically, they found no one at NSA had ever gone outside the boundaries of what we’ve been given. What people are saying is, ‘Well, they could.’ The fact is, they don’t. And if they did, our auditing tools would detect them, and they would be held accountable, and they know that from the courses that they take and the pledge that they’ve made … Their intent is to find the terrorist that walks among us.
The notion that people would object to the mere existence of massive classified surveillance programs overseen by a one-sided star-chamber court, even if its analysts faithfully follow all the rules that they have been given, almost seems to have passed him by entirely.
Oh, there was some lip service given: “How do we start this discussion on defending our nation and protecting our civil liberties and privacy?” Metadata analysis was described as “the least intrusive measure that we could figure out. And that’s something we should discuss.” He ended with “Help us defend the country and come up with a better solution. The whole reason I came here is to ask you to help us to make it better.”
But of course this is all completely disingenuous; if the NSA actually wanted to have a conversation about civil liberties and the limits of its remit, it wouldn’t have waited until the discussion was forced on it by Edward Snowden. What General Alexander truly believes is all too clear: “If we tell everybody what we’re doing, then our adversaries will know how to get through our defenses … that’s why I believe the damage to our country is significant and irreversible.” The notion that there might be some optimal middle ground between “don’t let the public know about even the existence of vast surveillance programs that may affect them” and “tell everybody everything” appears to have passed him by. The NSA would clearly prefer that the public’s eyes remain closed and our trust remains blind.
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