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Uber Faces Another Fight Over Local Limo Rules, This Time In Dallas
On-demand transportation startup Uber is facing a threat to its business in another of its U.S. markets, as the city of Dallas could soon pass a series of regulations that would seriously hamper its ability to operate there. The rules, which were a late addition to the city council’s meeting agenda this week, would impose new restrictions on how soon limo drivers could pick up passengers and set minimum fares that would make Uber prohibitively expensive.
In a memo to the Dallas City Council, assistant city manager Joey Zapata laid out the proposed regulations, which are aimed at for-hire vehicles. They would prohibit the use of any vehicles with an off-the-lot sticker price of less that $45,000, and would require limo services to be arranged 30 minutes ahead of time. It also seeks to set minimum prices for rides, although they aren’t specified in the memo.
Ensuring that rides would need to be pre-arranged 30 minutes ahead of time would cut into Uber’s promise of fast, convenient transportation, while necessitating a minimum sticker price for vehicles reduces its ability to offer up lower-cost rides through its uberX service.
Meanwhile, there are other proposed regulations that are aimed at the way Uber works: There’s the one requiring a limo driver to only respond to their dispatch company, and another that prohibits the use of any type of metering device (like a phone’s GPS) for determining a ride’s fare. All told, the proposed regulations, if passed, would effectively keep Uber from being able to operate in the market as it has.
That’s nothing new for Uber. After about three years in operation, the company is no stranger to fighting local regulators and governments over restrictive rules and regulations that would threaten to shut it down in various markets. That includes regulatory skirmishes in cities like Washington, D.C., Boston, and Denver, among others.
The Dallas regulations are similar in nature to those proposed in Washington, D.C. last year. Initially, members of the city council sought to create a minimum fare for limo services that would have made operations impossible in the city. But Uber was able to reach a deal with the city council, which drafted new rules that legitimized its mobile ride-hailing app there.
In response, Uber has started a #DallasNeedsUber campaign on the social media, and it’s also asking users to sign a petition and contact city council members and urge them to vote against the regulations.
In other news, Uber just launched in Dubai, which is part of its plans for expansion around the world. Now in more than 40 cities, that expansion will be fueled by a big, $258 million funding round that Uber announced last week.
Kiind Takes Aim At Corporate Rewards Market, Only Makes You Pay For Gift Cards When You Use Them
The dirty secret of the gift-card industry is that many of them go unused. At first glance, that looks like easy money for retailers, but with a slew of new regulations, unused gift cards are actually starting to become a drag on retailers’ books. In comes Kiind, a Victoria, Canada-based startup that only charges you for the virtual gift cards you send once the recipient actually redeems them.
The company already allows users to buy gift cards from major retailers like Amazon, Columbia Sportswear, Gap and several chain restaurants, as well as online music service Rdio.
As Kiind CEO and president Leif Baradoy told me earlier this month, the company is mostly gearing its marketing efforts at businesses that use gift cards as rewards and incentives. For these businesses, Kiind makes it easy to send multiple gift cards to numerous recipients through integrations with services like MailChimp and Salesforce.com. Individual users, of course, can also use the service to send single gift cards.
One nice feature of Kiind is that it also lets you send specific suggestions for what a user should buy with a gift when you send an Amazon gift card. The company’s B2B focus clearly shines through here, as it defaults to offering a selection of business books. Starting today, Kiind users can also select up to five gift suggestions when they send a card. Businesses, of course, can track exactly what happens to their gift cards, set expiry dates and resend them after they expire or just let them go unused (in which case they don’t pay for them either).
As Baradoy told me, the company charges a processing fee and also gets a 5 percent to 15 percent kickback from the retailers when somebody buys a product with its cards.
The company, which so far has raised $495,000 in angel funding, currently has six employees (in addition to its two co-founders). Its biggest challenge, Baradoy argues, is to nail down the right customer segment and area to focus on. While most people intuitively understand the value of its service, he noted, it’s still a new concept that will take some time to take hold – especially given that many larger businesses already have established relationships with other rewards and incentives providers.
Caption Contest: VC Auction
While some of their brethren are off doing deals at Burning Man, a gaggle of venture capitalists are auctioning themselves off to the highest bidder, deadline today. If you’re an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur, you now have a chance to guarantee a lunch with Jeremy Liew, David Lee, Aileen Lee, Jonathan Teo, Ethan Kurzweil, Josh Kopelman, Alfred Lin, Saar Gur, Hunter Walk, Josh Elman, Sameer Ghandi, Dennis Phelps, Glenn Solomon, Dana Stalder, Nick Beim, Andrew Chung, Sameer Gandhi and/or Mo Koyfman.
If you’re aware of the importance of networking in Silicon Valley, or the potential for the right meeting to change your entire life, then doing this might be well worth it.
All auction proceeds will go towards building out the Presidio Knolls School, the first “progressive” Chinese immersion school in San Francisco, a private school that offers financial aid and scholarships. A third of the students at Presidio Knolls are Chinese, a third are mixed ethnicity and a third have no Chinese connection. “We are trying to prepare kids for the next 50 years of entrepreneurship,” Liew tells me, emphasizing the school’s focus on international perspective, creativity, risk taking and a problem solving mindset.
Because they’re VCs, they’ve put an “estimated value” on the lunches, starting at $4k. Right now the only VC to have surpassed the $4k mark is new Greylock Partner Josh Elman — with the bid levels functioning as a sort of de facto VC grading system.
And of course people are riffing on the transactionality of it all. Some of my favorite jokes: “it appears that the VC’s miss-estimated the pre-money valuation of lunch with them”; “at these prices they better lead my next round”; “there is no such thing as a free lunch”; and “the problem with paying $4000 for lunch with a VC is that you just revealed to them that you are bad with money.”
What really needs to happen here is that the individual firms (Sequoia, Accel, DCM, Matrix, FRC, Spark, Khosla, Venrock, etc) should buy and sponsor the lunches to make their boys (and one girl) look good. In the meantime, we’re holding a caption contest for the auction in our comments section, and the winner — decided by our staff — will get a free ticket to Disrupt SF and a lunch with a TechCrunch writer, “estimated value”: $40.
Nest's Matt Rogers To Heat Things Up At Disrupt SF
Who knew that a startup based around a thermostat could be so damn successful? But that’s exactly what Nest Labs led by Matt Rogers and Tony Fadell has managed to accomplish. Now almost two years since launching, Nest Labs has stood tall against the establishment and proved great design along with a keen understanding of the target market can result in runaway success. This is why we’re excited to have founder Matt Rogers at Disrupt SF 2013.
Hardware is quickly becoming a hot item within Silicon Valley and Rogers is a key player leading the charge. Before co-founding Nest Labs he part of the iPod software development team and an early iPhone and iPad engineer. Needless to say, he has earned his stripes in hardware development.
Hardware startups will be a big part of Disrupt SF with several speakers dedicated to the topic. Rogers joins other such notable speakers as GoPro’s Nick Woodman and Pebble Watch’s Eric Migicovsky. The final day of the Disrupt Startup Alley is also reserved for just hardware startups. Registration for that opportunity closes Wednesday night.
General-admission tickets and exhibitor packages are currently available. Buy tickets here.
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Matt Rogers
Nest Labs
Founder & VP of Engineering
Matt Rogers is founder and VP of Engineering at Nest Labs, creator of the Nest Learning Thermostat. By applying modern design and technology, Nest has made the thermostat sexy and revitalized a stagnant – yet very important – industry. Matt is responsible for all product development at Nest, ranging from mechanical design to software to web services, and everything in between. Most recently, Matt led the creation of the second-generation Nest Learning Thermostat, which was released in early October – less than a year after the launch of the first-generation Nest thermostat. Matt also serves on Nest’s board of directors.
Prior to Nest, Matt was responsible for iPod software development at Apple, from concept to production. He was one of the first engineers on the original iPhone, and involved in the development of 10 generations of iPod, 5 generations of iPhone, and the first iPad. He earned his BS and MS degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.
Subscription-Based Interactive Storybooks Service Speakaboos Raises $6.2M In Seed & Series A Funding
Speakaboos, an ed-tech startup offering a subscription based service for children’s interactive storybooks, is today disclosing its seed and Series A funding totaling $6.2 million from New York-based digital media venture development platform [212]MEDIA initially, followed by Shari Redstone’s (Vice Chairman of the Board of CBS & Viacom)’s Advancit Capital; Korean education company Kyowon Group; Gerald Hughes (former President & COO of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); and Rick Segal (Managing Director of ReThink Education).
The company, originally launched to the web in 2009, was first incubated by [212]Media, a company-building firm which both invests and develops startups, leveraging their close ties to nearby New York media companies. Speakaboos is the third company to arrive out of [212]Media, which is best known for Saavn, the “Spotify for India” which has more recently expanded to other Western and Asian markets.
Explains [212]Media’s founding partner Neal Shenoy, his firm typically invests the first $2 to $3 million in a business, and establishes one its partners as the founding CEO. When the company reaches the A round phase, other outside investors are then invited in. In the case of Speakaboos, [212]Media put in $2 million in a convertible note, then closed a Series A in early 2012, which was extended just a few months ago.
The company also recently released its iPad application just over a month ago, with plans to arrive on Android in September.
You can think of Speakaboos as something of a Netflix for children’s e-books, in the sense that its business model is subscription-based, where parents pay either $5 per month or $45 per year to access to an entire catalog of books. Today, this catalog includes around 150 books from over 15 publishers, including big names like The Jim Henson Company, Pearson, Dr. Seuss, Penguin, Charlesbridge, Abrams, and others, as well as independent authors. And, says Shenoy, the catalog is now growing at a rate of around 1 to 2 books per week.
The company licenses the content from publishers, then translates it into interactive storybooks, which children can access through one of three age-appropriate tiers. For littler kids, there’s a lean-back “read to me” mode with animation and narration. Older children can graduate to narrated, interactive books, then to interactive books they read to themselves.
What makes the company interesting is the quality of the team it assembled, whose background includes extensive experience in the children’s education space, including time spent with Nick Jr., PBS Kids, Scholastic, and HIT Entertainment.
For example, Dr. Alice Wilder, Speakaboos’ Chief Content Officer, is known best as co-producer and head of testing for Blue’s Clues, and co-creator of Super Why. Her work was with Blue’s Clues also referenced in Malcom Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” which detailed why the Blue’s Clues TV show was so “sticky” with kids. Researchers believed comprehension and attention were strongly connected, and so they designed the show to increase attention through participation, verbal and visual clues, camera techniques, and more.
Similar ideas are implemented in the interactive storybooks on Speakaboos, which are extensively tested before inclusion in the service. As the narration proceeds, words are highlighted, corresponding to the actions that take place on the screen, and when they become animated and how they appear. Children can’t interact with the content until after the narration ends, allowing them to focus instead on the reading comprehension.
“The tremendous comprehension-based alignment between written word, spoken word, images, and animation, and the fact that every single interaction you see with Speakaboos stories has some type of plot-driven, comprehension-driven purpose – that’s why we’re seeing great engagement numbers and great comprehension numbers,” says Shenoy.
Meanwhile, as a low-cost subscription, the company hopes to appeal to parents looking for an expanded selection of interactive books, rather than having to buy these as standalone apps, often sold for several dollars apiece.
The results so far have seen children using Speakaboos completing 40 storybooks per month on average, spending close to 3 hours reading, and are completing over 85 percent of opened books. Meanwhile, 75 percent of parents and schools subscribing to Speakaboos retain their subscriptions after 12 months. (Schools can license Speakaboos for varying rates depending on size, up to $2,500/year).
To date, the company has sold (or pre-sold) over 10,000 subscriptions, and is now, as the investment indicates, working with edtech companies like Kyowan Group, which wants to bundle Speakaboos’ subscriptions with their own offerings – a reach of 1.5 million customers.
Speakaboos is available for iPad here on the iTunes App Store.
Twitter Hires Ex-Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard As Head of Commerce To Make It Retail Friendly
Twitter has hired ex-Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard as its new Head of Commerce. Hubbard will work under head of revenue Adam Bain to make the platform more friendly to retailers.
We’ve confirmed the hire with Twitter, which pointed to a tweet this morning by Bain. According to Bloomberg, Hubbard will reportedly focus on the business of encouraging retailers to use Twitter to convert sales from tweets. Using Twitter’s Cards feature to present products in the best way possible and to streamline the purchasing procedures will likely be a part of that purview.
At this point, there’s no indication that this will be about creating a payment component to Twitter cards, something that startups like Chirpify are currently working on.
Hubbard tells Bloomberg that it will be ‘partnering’ with retailers to sell digital and physical goods on the platform, helping them to “use Twitter to sell [them] more effectively”.
Hubbard left Ticketmaster earlier this month, where he was overseeing an overhaul of its online business. “To me, Twitter is a cardiogram of the passion of the live moment, So I’m excited to announce I’ve joined the flock as Head of Commerce,” Hubbard said today in an announcement tweet.
Though Hubbard’s position isn’t reportedly about making Twitter a payments platform yet, it’s not hard to see that the integration of Square into Twitter Cards, along with a universal login system, could create a very powerful sales component without much fuss. Depending on how the efforts of Hubbard improve the retail tweeting experience, we could see the birth of a new sales powerhouse along the lines of Amazon or eBay.
Facebook Reports Government Data Requests, US Leads With 12K During The First Half Of 2013
Today Facebook did the world a service by detailing the number of data-collection requests it receives from various nations around the world, as well as the number of user accounts that are part of the inquiries. It also lists the percentage of requests that were honored.
The U.S. is by far the most active requester of Facebook user information. In the first half of 2013, the U.S. logged between 11,000 and 12,000 requests for Facebook user data, involving 20,000 to 21,000 accounts. That the U.S. came in first should not come as a surprise and instead merely confirms that the U.S. government is exactly as zealous about digging into the private digital information of global citizens as you thought. India, in second place, made 3,245 requests. The United Kingdom came in third with 1,975 requests, and fourth place went to Germany with 1,886 requests.
The data is not surprising — we knew that governments ask Facebook for user data and often get it. The United States, for example, had 79 percent of its requests honored by Facebook. Poland, with 233 requests, had only 9 percent answered.
Facebook, in its transparency, is working to exonerate itself as being complicit in government surveillance. Look, it’s trying to say, this is what is requested, and this is how we have handled it. The figures almost feel small: 25,000 requests from all governments? Well, perhaps. Key to remember in all of this is that U.S. law prevents discussion and disclosure of certain requests. So we now have a decent grok of what Facebook is allowed to tell us. The data point is nice, but hardly complete.
Keep in mind, if you take mental refuge in the figures at all, that this is merely one way that the U.S. government collects information on the digital activity of both its citizens and those abroad. It also collects huge sums of the Internet via telecom companies, and taps the fiber-optic lines that constitute the Internet’s passageways.
Why would the government have programs such as PRISM and make requests like those detailed above if it can tap the Internet? Because if it wants all the data on your account, it is far simpler to demand or extort a wrapped package of information from Facebook than it is to slowly collect the same data as you use your account. So, various systems are used to ensure that the government has whatever it wants, whenever it decides it necessary.
Final note: Some countries that are not known for their human rights records do not have many requests. Russia, for example, with its now institutionalized homophobia, made a single request of Facebook during the first half of 2013 (it was not granted). Does that mean that government data asks are not indicative of much at all? That they are merely randomized in their frequency?
I don’t think so. The “Five Eyes” group of nations that share signal intelligence (United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) had at least 100 requests in the first six months of the year. New Zealand and Canada included. That matters. It indicates that countries participating in mass surveillance do so in every way possible. I think that the number of requests helps us understand the zeal of these nations to look into private activity.
However, recall that this is merely legally disclosable requests for the first half of one year by one company. It will be interesting to compare these figures to what Facebook released in a year’s time.
Top Image Credit: zeevveez
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