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Taxi Groups Call For Eradication Of Rideshare Startups At SF City Hall Protest
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San Francisco taxi labor groups called for the eradication of car ride-sharing startups and the imprisonment of some of their members at a protest in front of City Hall yesterday. “We want to see these illegal cabs to go away. We want them to be ticketed, cited, arrested, if necessary. They should not be allowed as long as you have a regulated taxi force,” said Barry Korengold, President of the San Francisco Cab Drivers Association, who helped organize the protest.
Taxi unions have come out in full force against the growing industry of transportation tech startups, which turn car owners into smartphone-enabled cab drivers. Yesterday, several taxi groups ground traffic to a halt around San Francisco’s Civic Center, as fleets of cabs honked their horns in solidarity.
The party line at the protest was that smartphone ride-sharing services were “unlicensed, unregulated, unlawful and unsafe.” Unlike the strictly regulated cab industry, these ride-share drivers are covered under private insurance plans and company training. Protestors argue that the private insurance policies of Lyft and Uber are inadequate to protect consumers and the drivers themselves aren’t properly trained.
Beyond the carefully orchestrated slogans, however, nearly every single driver and representative we spoke with thought ride-share startups caused unnecessary competition to the already beleaguered cab industry. “How will I feed my family when you take my money?” read one protest sign. “Techno Thieves,” read another.
The speakers were more strident than I imagined. In past appearances with TechCrunch, New York City cab unions simply expressed a desire for equal regulation. Uber, Lyft, and SideCar drivers, they argued, need proper licensing, oversight and training to be on the road. Without the burden of regulation and taxes, ride shares can undercut cabs while ignoring important safety requirements.
But when I probed demonstrators in San Francisco, none could imagine a future where ride apps peacefully co-exist with taxis — even if they agreed to regulation. “If they’re going to be on the road, what’s the reason for having taxis in the city? I don’t want them to be on the road,” said one cab driver of four years. “They shouldn’t even exist,” said another driver, who argued that “if we couldn’t get rid of them,” Uber and Lyft should only be able to pick up pre-arranged rides like limousines (instead of on-demand hailing like taxis).
Over the last year, taxi association leaders acknowledged that animosity has turned into violence from cab drivers against their ride-sharing competitors. Last week, a former Lyft driver told me one reason he switched to Uber was because Lyft’s signature pink car mustache encouraged attacks against him and his car. “You get physical confrontations between legal cab drivers and cabs who are trying to steal our fares,” explained Kornengold. “We don’t condone any physical attacks, but we’re all human and people get angry when they’re stolen from.”
The protests over the legality and safety of ride-share startups was entirely preventive. No one could give an example of where an accident with Uber or Lyft resulted in an unfair legal outcome for a consumer. “None have happened yet, but it’s going to any day,” contends lawyer Christopher Dolan, who says he’s trying “to forestall a disaster.”
Two days ago, I got into a Twitter debate over a post I’d written on why labor unions were not generally accepted in Silicon Valley. I presented survey data demonstrating that unions often begrudgingly accept innovation, prioritizing jobs over technological advancement. On the same day of the protests, the California Public Utilities Commission proposed new guidelines that would allow ride-sharing startups to become properly regulated with safety and insurance standards. If the protests yesterday were really about consumers, and not protectionist policies for cabs, we won’t see Taxi associations fight these new guidelines. Time will tell what their true intentions are.
The Essential: Manning (Partly) Not Guilty, Aaron Swartz MIT Doc, An Anti-NSA Bill, Colbert On British Porn Filters
Manning Not Guilty, Kinda Of [TechCrunch]
–Wikileaks leaker, Bradley Manning, was aquitted of the most serious charge, Espionage, but was found guilty on 19 other counts,and could face over 100 years in Prison
Aaron Swartz Case Deepens [Lessig Blog V2]
–MIT’s report on fallen hacktivist, Aaron Swartz, exonerated the university for most wrong doing, but found that MIT never thought Swartz hacking was “unauthorized”
–”If indeed Aaron’s access was not “unauthorized” — as Aaron’s team said from the start, and now MIT seems to acknowledge — then the tragedy of this prosecution has only increased.
New Anti-NSA Bill [The Hill]
–Representatives Amash and Conyers have introduced a bill to make dragnet surveillience illegal, the LIBERT-E Act
–”The Conyers-Amash bill would require the government show “specific and articulable” facts that the phone records are material to the investigation and “pertain only to individuals under such investigation.”
Colbert Takes On Porn Filters
Facebook is near its IPO price. People will keep buying it now as long as their moms don't also acquire stock.
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Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) July 31, 2013–Steven Colbert has some choice words for Britain’s new anti-porn Internet filters. Begins @3:25
Microsoft Will Rebrand SkyDrive After It Settles Trademark Case With Sky Broadcasting
British Sky Broadcasting Group and Microsoft today announced that they have settled the trademark infringement arguments in Europe that Sky brought against Microsoft in an English court. As a result of this, Microsoft will have to find a new name for its cloud storage service SkyDrive. Sky will allow Microsoft to continue using the name for a “transition period,” but after that, Microsoft needs to rebrand the service. It’s not clear when Microsoft plans to announce the new name.
Earlier this month, the English High Court found that Microsoft’s use of the term SkyDrive infringed on Sky’s right to the “Sky” trademark. While Microsoft could have appealed the ruling, the company chose to settle the case and has agreed not to go ahead with an appeal. The settlement includes some financial terms, but the details of these are under wraps.
“We’re glad to have resolution of this naming dispute, and will continue to deliver the great service our hundreds of millions of customers expect, providing the best way to always have your files with you,” Microsoft said in a canned statement today. We asked Microsoft for further clarification, but except for this statement, the company isn’t commenting on today’s announcement.
All of this will sound awfully familiar to anybody who has followed Microsoft’s brands in the past. The WIndows 8 Metro interface, after all, had just become a household name before the launch of Microsoft new operating system when the company had to change it because of what most pundits assume was a trademark dispute with Germany’s Metro AG. Today, nobody knows what to call the Windows 8 interface, its apps and design language, so most people still call it ‘Metro.’
Glide Tops 3.5M Downloads With Over 12 Million Seconds Of Video Shared Each Day
Glide, the video messaging app that launched on the Disrupt NY stage just a few months ago, today announced that it has reached 3.5 million downloads, with users sharing upwards of 12 million seconds of video each day. For some perspective, that’s about 139 days worth of video.
Those users are also watching around 15 million seconds of video each day. According to the official press release, daily active users have grown by 120 percent in July.
Glide is an app that lets users send private video messages to each other, in lieu of text messages. Users can also live broadcast Glides or store them in the cloud for later consumption.
Much of Glide’s growth has to be attributed to the integrated sharing features built into the app. As Sarah Perez noted in a recent post, Glide auto-invites everyone in your address book by default when you sign into the app. In order to shut this off, you must go in and uncheck every name.
When an invite is sent, Glide also sends a text saying “I have something to show you on Glide,” which is clever because it seems like a message written by a human and it implies that a video is waiting specifically for the recipient when they download the app (which isn’t necessarily true).
The ruthless and beautiful (and ruthlessly beautiful) Sam Biddle, of Valleywag, had originally accused Glide of using Nanigans, an advertising startup, to promote Glide in Facebook ads. And lying about it.
Turns out this wasn’t the case — Glide is not a Nanigans customer.
Glide’s growth can also be attributed to the startup’s ability to iterate quickly to meet the demands of users. Just recently, the app launched a much-asked-for feature that lets users forward messages to each other, as well as export videos to share on other social media channels.
Glide is available on iOS and Android.
Pinterest's Mobile App Gets Path-Like Animations, Personalization Options Via New Pin Suggestions
Say what you want about Path and their previous transgressions, but it’s great to see other mobile applications borrowing the interface and animations Path popularized through its stellar design. Tumblr was one of the first big name apps to adopt Path-like pop-out animations (round circles that appear when tapping to create a new post), and now, Pinterest is doing the same in an effort to make repinning, favoriting, and sharing pins easier for users.
In an update to its iOS application, Pinterest has introduced a new interface design where users can press and hold on a pin in their feed, in order to make rounded action buttons appear. However, unlike on Path or Tumblr, Pinterest’s buttons don’t stay visible after you lift your finger – instead you have to slide your finger from where you originally pressed the pin, over to the button you want to use.
Unfortunately, these new animations only show up on items others have pinned, that you now want to engage with in some way. Meanwhile, the process for adding a pin of your own is relatively unchanged – you push the bottom center button and choose what you want to pin from a standard menu offering options like “website,” “camera,” “clipboard” or just “cancel.”
It’s almost as if Pinterest is experimenting with the idea of new interactions here, rather than rolling out a major interface upgrade all at once. By forcing users to press and hold, too, the new animations arrive as optional way of interacting with pins. However, for those mainstream users who are slow to change their ways (i.e., the majority of Pinterest’s user base), they can still pin and share and like from more obvious action buttons on an individual pin’s page itself.
Pinterest’s mobile applications have seen other slow but steady improvements like this over the course of the year, with updates earlier this month which brought pin sharing to iPad and pin search, for example, plus previous updates which finally solved the problem of being able to pin websites, and the addition of things like enhanced pins with pricing info and availability (oh yes!), upgrades to group pin boards, push notifications, and new discovery mechanisms.
Pinterest Moves Toward A Business Model
Pinterest doesn’t make a lot of buzz about its mobile app updates, generally speaking, but it does when it matters. For instance, it’s worth noting that Pinterest’s new pin suggestion feature is launching on mobile at the same time as web.
In fact, the Pinterest app’s update text in iTunes says this feature is actually included with the latest update, noting that users can now “tap edit Home Feed to easily add and remove stuff from their home feed (iPhone).” Oddly, I’m not yet seeing the option appear following the app update, but your mileage may vary. Pinterest said this would arrive in over the next few weeks, so it could be a staged rollout.
While new animations are enjoyable, this forthcoming feature update is the real deal.
Pinterest recently announced it would begin tracking user activity including those who utilize its “Pin It” button on external websites, while simultaneously allowing users to opt-out. The move is meant to personalize the experience for visitors with better pin and board recommendations, but it also serves as a way for Pinterest’s business customers to target users by pointing them to their own relevant user accounts and boards. In the example Pinterest had provided, someone pinning a lot of vegetarian recipes from around the web would be introduced to other popular boards on the site. This could enable a whole new way for interest-based social advertising to exist outside of Facebook’s likes and Twitter’s own attempts at building the interest graph.
This startup is a great example of the kind of mainstream and accessible technology which is still largely lacking in the industry at present. The service presents itself to end users as an engaging time sink, where they can find things that matter to them – “them” being mainly female users who are pinning and sharing things related to fashion, children and family, recipes and cooking, home decor and design, arts and crafts and DIY, and other topics which everyday people care about – and yes, still generally, everyday women.
As pinners’ involvement with the service grew, businesses began to feel the effects – many e-commerce sites now point to Pinterest as being among the top referral mechanisms from social media services.
Pinterest is no small potatoes, either – it had grown to some 50 million monthly uniques by the time of its $200 million Series D. That’s smaller than Twitter, which has some 200+ monthly actives, but it’s growing still.
Diffbot Releases Product Pages API, Uses Robot Learning To Supercharge Shopping And Collecting Sites
Diffbot is a startup that’s trying to make sense of the mass of information available on the web via robotic vision and computer learning, and it’s doing so one chunk at a time. Previously, the company released a comprehensive API for identifying and deriving key info from article pages on the web, and now it’s launching a Product Page API to do the same for ecommerce and shopping sites.
The new API will allow Diffbot to crawl the web and parse information such as price, discounts, shipping, images, descriptions and SKUs, and then translate that into an immediately usable database format for devs to mine and repurpose however they wish. This is incredible useful for comparison shopping sites, for instance, but Diffbot CEO and founder Mike Tung says they’ve also had a lot of interest in the product from collecting, bookmarking and listing sites similar to Pinterest.
“Product discovery type services where the users themselves are submitting links to products [is a use case],” he said. “We did some data analysis last year and 8 percent of the links that people are sharing on Twitter are products, and there are a lot of sites where the entire concept of the site is just to share links to products with other users on the site. With the product API now it’s not just a link, with a picture; you know the price and all the product details.”
Like the Articles API before it, Diffbot will offer the Product API on a usage-based software-as-a-service model, and this should allow everyone from small companies just starting out to big brands to take advantage. Diffbot’s current clients include AOL (disclosure: they own TC), as well as Betaworks, CBS Interactive, StumbleUpon and more. The Product API opens up a whole new category of potential customer for the Palo Alto-based startup, which has raised just over $2 million to date and is not currently looking around for anymore, according to Tung, as they’re already happy with their own current revenue being generated by products.
Diffbot plans to release a whole slew of APIs to target different page categories, and Tung says that the engine behind it can easily learn new categories without much in the way of additional engineering. Preparing a new category for general release involves helping the Diffbot robotic brain to essentially learn to spot pertinent information on its own, and that means talking to stakeholders to identify exactly what kind of information they should be looking for. Sometimes that’s obvious, as with price and description for products, but other, like SKU and manufacturer ID are less so.
Adding to Diffbot’s existing library of Home page, Article page and Image page identification APIs, the Product page release is a key new addition to its platform, and one that should see high demand. Diffbot’s progress is impressive, and this is definitely a startup to watch as it continues to lay pipes working in the background to identify and make sense of the Internet’s mass of available data.
Yet Another Smartwatch Joins The Fight And This One's “Hot”
Pebble not meeting your needs? The Basis knows just a little too much about you for your comfort? Is the Metawatch too meta?
Well then meet the Hot Watch, out of Dallas. The company just launched the product on Kickstarter, and though the campaign is mostly bull shit (with arguments like: “your phone is too expensive to risk taking out of your pocket”), the product seems to be pretty fly for a new guy… in the smartwatch space. I’m funny, dammit. Laugh!
Anyways, the Hot Watch claims to be different from any of its competitors by offering more full-featured functionality when it comes to making calls, sending and receiving messages and emails, and checking up on your social world.
Like the Pebble, the Hot Watch has a 1.26-inch E-paper multi-touch projected capacitive display from Sharp, with a Cortex M3 processor running the show and a secondary DSP processor to handle things like Bluetooth, call control and various audio features. It uses Bluetooth 4.0 to connect to any Bluetooth-enabled phone, but the founders say it works best with Android and iOS phones.
You’ll also find an accelerometer, gyroscope, pedometer and vibration motor in there, and if that weren’t enough, the Hot Watch is water-resistant. Plus, it can detect when your phone is out of reach and will send you alerts that it may be lost or stolen.
But perhaps more interesting than the specs themselves is the fact that the Hot Watch allows for private calling. When you hold the Hot Watch up to your ear, the cup of your hand as it naturally holds up the watch will amplify the call into your ear.
This allows for entirely private calling, the same way it would be on a smartphone. Of course, the Hot Watch covers all the bases when it comes to calling functionality, allowing you to use speakerphone as well. Users can also receive and reply to messages, social feeds, and emails.
Also like the Pebble, the Hot Watch comes with customizable watch faces, as well as an SDK for third-party developers who want to build snazzy apps for the forthcoming watch.
The Hot Watch also has a number of gestures for answering calls, rejecting them, dialing, muting, ending a call, or even calling your favorite number. In fact, the sensors built in can detect when you’ve fallen down and will dial an emergency number if you haven’t responded in 30 seconds.
Plus, there are Hot Gestures that let you get straight to a feature from the lockscreen. For example, write a D on the screen and go directly from the lock screen to the dial menu.
The Hot Watch has just launched its Kickstarter campaign and already received $42,000 of its $150,000 goal. Head on over to the Kickstarter page to check it out.
It’s getting hot in here, so put down all your phones.
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