Jul
07

The top 9 shows on Netflix and other streaming services this week

The third season of Netflix's hit "Stranger Things" arrived on Thursday, and it's bigger than ever. But another Netflix sci-fi series is gaining a larger audience, the German series "Dark."

Every week, Parrot Analytics provides Business Insider with a list of the nine most in-demand TV shows on streaming services. The data is based on " demand expressions," Parrot Analytics' globally standardized TV demand measurement unit. Audience demand reflects the desire, engagement, and viewership weighted by importance, so a stream or download is a higher expression of demand than a "like" or comment on social media, for instance.

Below are this week's nine most popular original shows on Netflix and other streaming services:

Original author: Travis Clark

Continue reading
  80 Hits
Nov
21

Riot Games’ John Needham talks about the future of esports

Teens and young adults are increasingly losing interest in Facebook and gravitating toward platforms like Snapchat and YouTube, according to a new survey conducted by Business Insider.

Business Insider, along with SurveyMonkey Audience partner Cint, polled 1,884 Americans between the ages of 13 and 21 to learn about how those in Generation Z spend their time and money across the internet, in stores, and at fast-food chains, among other areas. Gen Z is the age bracket that follows the millennial generation and applies to any person born after the year 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. The survey was conducted from January 11-14.

When respondents were asked which social media platforms they previously used but don't anymore, roughly 30% of those who answered said Facebook, while messaging app Kik came in second with 29.7% of votes. Many respondents said they no longer use Skype, and more than 20% of respondents voted for Twitter or Instagram.

Yutong Yuan/Business Insider

But at the same time, the survey results indicate that teenagers and young adults are still checking Facebook and Instagram frequently, although YouTube and Snapchat also ranked highly. In response to a question asking which platforms participants check on a daily basis, Instagram came in first with 64.59% of votes, while YouTube came in a close second with 62.48% of votes. Snapchat came in third with 51.31% of votes, while Facebook came in fourth with 34.19% of answers.

Read more: THE STATE OF GEN Z: America's teenagers reveal what they think about everything

Taken together, the answers indicate that YouTube and Snapchat could be resonating more strongly with Generation Z, considering many participants said they're checking these two platforms on a daily basis and fewer respondents said they've abandoned these platforms compared to Facebook and Instagram. (Of those polled, 9.36% said they've stopped using YouTube, while 18.22% said they no longer use Snapchat.)

The results reinforce previous findings that have suggested teenagers are moving away from Facebook in favor of other services like YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram. Last May, for example, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey that found only 51% of US teens between the ages of 13 and 17 use Facebook, while 85% use YouTube, 72% use Instagram, and 69% use Snapchat.

See below for a look at which social media apps teenagers said they've abandoned, according to the survey. The apps are ranked in order from those that have received the most responses to those with the least.

The findings below are based on answers from 1,559 respondents because 325 of those who participated in the broader survey opted to skip this question:

Original author: Lisa Eadicicco

Continue reading
  94 Hits
Jul
07

This Brazilian immigrant CEO thinks that Silicon Valley investors need to do more to help customers outside America, even if their income is lower

Victor Santos comes from a family of entrepreneurs, but his parents wouldn't necessarily describe themselves that way. Santos' mother and father started small businesses and odd jobs out of necessity to provide for the family in northern California after immigrating to the United States from Brazil.

Santos was 12 years old, but knew enough to understand why his parents wanted to immigrate to a new country. He said he remembers his mother pawning her jewelry to help finance her travel business — the only way a bank would loan money to a low-income family like his. He described the economic situation in Brazil as "the worst in the world."

Now, Santos is the founder and CEO of Airfox, a mobile banking startup that operates exclusively in Brazil. On Wednesday, Airfox announced a major partnership with Mastercard Brazil that will help low-income Brazilians access credit without relying on the traditional banks, which he characterizes as unreliable and often-predatory.

"Credit and access to capital runs the economy," Santos told Business Insider. "It has not been easy so far, but the biggest takeaway is staying true to the vision and why I am doing this. If this is just for money or glory, I would be done."

Read More: This 34-year-old CEO's own experience with workplace harassment led her to raise $4.2 million to find a better way to help victims band together and speed up investigations

Santos started Airfox in 2016 after leaving a "cozy" job at Google as a product marketing manager with some savings and a place to sleep on a friend's couch. Airfox was rejected by TechStars, a startup incubator in Boston, and was having trouble raising venture capital for his company.

"It was pretty brutal, actually, I got turned down so many times," Santos said. He started thinking about taking another job and sidelining Airfox entirely, he said.

Santos estimates that he must have pitched "40 or 50" firms at first, and struck out most times. He had the hardest time convincing American tech investors that it was worth investing in an undocumented immigrant with DACA status, leading a company creating financial services for a foreign market with a lower average income.

"Serving low income customers is not something everyone is comfortable with," Santos said. "It's a very difficult conversation, especially if you look at VCs in general; they tend to be on the older side, white, and don't really understand the markets we are playing in. I had one VC that didn't understand how people don't have bank accounts. These were the challenges, like, how do you not know this?"

Santos was able to successfully raise $300,000 in angel funding and was accepted to TechStars on his second attempt. He moved to Boston and has built out a team in the United States and Brazil. His struggle to get funding is still fresh, he said, and highlights the pressing need for more immigrant and minority investors in Silicon Valley and beyond.

"It's unlikely we will raise any more through VCs," Santos said. "Some immigrant founders or early employees are just now leaving to become investors. That shift will happen but it will take time for the old monarchy of VCs to step down and the next generation of investors with a more progressive mindset will take over. It's happening but not at the pace we wanted."

Original author: Megan Hernbroth

Continue reading
  174 Hits
Jul
07

Samsung’s next major smartphone is coming next month, but it could be more difficult than ever to convince people to buy it

Apple may be credited with inventing the modern smartphone, but it was Samsung's Galaxy Note in 2011 that laid the foundation for the big-screened devices we use today. The Note popularized the concept of making mobile devices bigger while the rest of the industry was making them smaller and more portable.

With its bigger screen, included stylus, and increased memory and storage capacity, the Note proved to be a fan-favorite, especially among power users. But in 2019, it could be harder than ever for Samsung to differentiate its Note from the Galaxy S line — especially now that the Galaxy S10 comes in four different versions at various sizes and price points. Samsung typically unveils its Note around the August and September timeframe, and it looks like that will probably be the case again this year since the firm just sent out invites for an event on August 7.

Read more: This wild new computer with two screens made me excited about what could be next for the laptop

The Note's massive screen used to be one of the key characteristics that distinguished the Note from its Galaxy S cousins. However, the discrepancy in screen size and other differentiating features has gradually dwindled over the years.

Other than than Samsung's S Pen stylus, the major differences between last year's Galaxy S9 Plus and the Galaxy Note 9 are the latter's slightly larger screen and battery and the option to purchase it with a lot more storage and memory than the S9 Plus. The Note 9's screen is only 0.2 inches larger than the S9 Plus', and the two phones otherwise offer the same functionality when it comes to important features like the camera.

That wasn't the case several years ago when the Note was still relatively new. The Galaxy Note 2, which debuted in 2012, had a 5.5-inch display, making its screen 0.7 inches larger than the 4.8-inch display on the Galaxy S3 Samsung released that same year. Back then, Samsung didn't release its Galaxy S smartphones in different sizes, making the Note an attractive option for those who wanted a device with a screen that was noticeably larger than what most phone manufacturers were selling at the time.

Samsung's Galaxy S10 Plus. Eric Risberg/AP

Now, Samsung offers more choice than ever when it comes to its Galaxy S phones. Not only does the S10 come in the familiar standard and plus models from years past, but the company also sells a more powerful version called the Galaxy S10 5G that will be able to connect to next-generation wireless networks. The 5G-enabled model features a 6.7-inch display that's noticeably larger than that of the S10 (6.1 inches) and the S10 Plus (6.4 inches) and a quadruple camera setup that includes a 3D depth camera. That differs from the S10 and S10 Plus, which have triple-camera arrangements that lack the S10 5G's depth sensor.

Read more: Apple is expected to release its first 5G iPhone next year. Here's everything we've heard about it so far.

Samsung also sells a version of the S10 Plus that comes with 12 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, while other models like the standard S10 and S10 5G max out at 8 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage.

With so many choices already available when it comes to screen size, storage, and camera quality, it's unclear what the next-generation Note will offer besides the S Pen that the S10 doesn't already have. Even rumors that have emerged so far indicate that the new Note will feel a lot like the S10 and will likely adopt many of its features. While similarities between the latest Galaxy S phones and the Note have always existed, the existence of the Galaxy S10 5G and the Performance Edition Galaxy S10 Plus make the Note feel less relevant.

If the stylus is truly the one feature that separates the Note from the Galaxy S10 family, Samsung will have to do more to make the case as to why it's worth buying over its flagship phone.

Original author: Lisa Eadicicco

Continue reading
  96 Hits
Nov
18

Large-scale global cyber project aims to answer most pressing security questions

Twice a year for the last 26 years, TOP500 publishes a list of the 500 most powerful commercial supercomputers. This most recent list includes a historical first: satellite imagery and data company Descartes Labs rated on the list at #136 — making it the only one of its ilk to run completely on the cloud.

Descartes Labs' computer uses Amazon Web Services, the retailer's market-leading cloud platform. This system can model how people and companies use natural resources at a global scale, simulate weather, and measure earthquakes.

Just as impressively, to build this system, Descartes Labs spent a paltry $5000 on AWS's services — far less than it would take to build most of the rest of the supercomputers on the TOP500 list, which could cost tens of millions of dollars and take months of work just to get up and running.

Mike Warren, CTO and cofounder of Descartes Labs, says that there's always going to be a need for specialized supercomputing systems, especially at places like research labs. But Descartes' approach shows that there's a way to get access to this kind of computing horsepower, without having to spend millions.

"Our performance on the list as a demonstration of the capability of the cloud, but it's definitely not a claim that this is the right way for everyone to solve their specific problem," Warren told Business Insider. "It's certainly going to be an option that's valuable for some people."

Notably, Amazon itself has made the TOP500 list before. However, to achieve that feat, it used the retailer's own, internal platforms — not the version of Amazon Web Services that's available to the paying public.

Descartes, for comparison, achieved this feat on the real, actual AWS platform, facing the same limitations and costs as any other customer of the platform.

This all happens against the backdrop of the burgeoning market for high-performance computing, or HPC. Chirag Dekate, senior director and analyst at Gartner, says that the market for HPC in the cloud is poised to explode, as almost every company would prefer to avoid the high costs of the more traditional approach.

"Many companies are increasingly looking at cloud-based capabilities," Dekate told Business Insider. "They're trying to figure out how to make HPC work in the cloud. While the current market for HPC is small, over time, they are looking forward to creating a cloud based strategy."

Warren spent most of his career in building supercomputers, as far back as the '90s. In 1998, Warren and his team at Los Alamos National Lab built a top-500 supercomputer using Linux.

"At the time, there was a lot of discussion around,' why did this scientist waste his time on a crazy idea of wiring together these machines,'" Warren said.

When he first started building supercomputers, the cloud didn't exist yet. Now, it's easy to set up computing infrastructure with little more than a credit card.

Warren believes that supercomputing applications will eventually migrate to the cloud. The advantage is that it's cheaper, and a company has more control over how they want to run and scale their applications.

"The cloud has grown up to a point where it can do these applications that were formerly the domain of supercomputers you would spend tens of millions of dollars on," Warren said.

"We basically demonstrated it was possible to do that in the world of the cloud where you don't have to own software and there's no upfront capital expense," he added.

Read more: Quantum computing could change everything, and IBM is racing with Microsoft, Intel, and Google to conquer it. Here's what you need to know

Dave Bartoletti, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, says that although it will still require specialized set-up and expertise, Descartes Labs' system will make engineers and data scientists will rethink how to best run demanding supercomputing applications.

"It shows how public cloud platforms are maturing to be able to handle an ever-increasing range of even the most compute-intensive workloads," Bartoletti told Business Insider.

Original author: Rosalie Chan

Continue reading
  47 Hits
Jul
07

One of Apple's most controversial product designs in years may have been the result of Jony Ive's obsession with making devices thinner (AAPL)

Prominent Apple blogger John Gruber once called the keyboards in Apple's more recent laptops " the worst products in Apple's history." Now, he believes departing Apple chief designer Jony Ive is to blame.

"I don't know the inside story, but it certainly seems like a good bet that MacBook keyboard fiasco we're still in the midst of is the direct result of Jony Ive's obsession with device thinness and minimalism," Gruber said in a Daring Fireball blog post last week, upon the news of Ive's departure from the company.

Indeed, many modern Mac laptops — starting with the MacBook in 2015 — come with a so-called butterfly keyboard, which have reliability issues that Apple has acknowledged. Many Mac users, including myself and several other tech journalists, have complained that certain keys can become unresponsive, or they can register twice from a single press.

Read more: I wrote a whole article with a faulty butterfly keyboard on my 2016 MacBook Pro, and didn't correct the resulting typos. Check it out to see how a faulty butterfly keyboard can affect a workflow.

Apple's "butterfly" mechanism allows for laptops to be ultra-thin, but the design is supposedly more sensitive to everyday debris, like dust, than more traditional keyboard designs.

Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

That may be true, but cleaning the keyboard — even underneath the key cap — doesn't always do the trick. Sometimes, entire keyboards need to be replaced, which is an extremely costly repair if a Mac is out of warranty. Thankfully, Apple set up a free keyboard repair program. At the same time, keyboard repairs mean an uncertain amount of time without your laptop.

Whether or not Ive is truly to blame for the butterfly keyboard fiasco is still uncertain. Gruber doesn't go as far as to confirm it was Ive's obsession with making devices thin that led to the fiasco, but he has a strong belief that it did.

To Gruber's point, Apple's Mac laptops are thin and light, especially the MacBook and MacBook Air, and even the MacBook Pros when you compare them to the competition.

And it's true: Mac laptops look and feel better than the competition. But from my experience, and possibly for those who were affected by faulty butterfly keyboards on their Mac laptops, it doesn't matter how thin or premium-feeling a laptop might be if you can't type properly.

Original author: Antonio Villas-Boas

Continue reading
  61 Hits
Jul
07

Building Businesses in Aftermarket Designer Merchandise: ShopWorn CEO Richard Birnbaum (Part 3) - Sramana Mitra

Sramana Mitra: This business started with you taking consignment inventory. Is that how you continued or did you switch to buying inventory? Richard Birnbaum: The next step was going to the 47th...

___

Original author: Sramana Mitra

Continue reading
  15 Hits
Jul
07

A single line from Jeff Bezos' first Amazon job ad tells you everything about his obsession with speed

Amazon's motto may be "customer obsession," but it has another infatuation — speed.

Amazon's brand identity has long rested on the promise of getting parcels to customers as quickly as possible. Last month, the company announced that its Prime service was offering one-day shipping on more than 10 million products.

Read more: eBay is trolling Amazon over last year's Prime Day outage with a 'crash sale'

Looking to the future, Amazon's starting to hype getting people their packages even quicker using drones. The Amazon Air drone programme has yet to launch, but Amazon's CEO of worldwide consumer Jeff Wilke said in June that the drones are going to start making deliveries in the next few months, and will apparently be able to do so within 30 minutes of receiving an order.

Amazon wants to make drone deliveries a reality in mere months. Amazon

Acceleration is a logical progression for a company whose guiding light has always been speed for the sake of customer convenience — and this philosophy was on show in one of Jeff Bezos' first pieces of public communication after setting up Amazon 25 years ago.

Amazon's first ever job ad, posted in August 1994, is for a computer programmer who Bezos says should be able to build and maintain complex systems "in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible."

Doing things faster and better than other companies has turned Amazon into one of the most powerful firms in the world and made Bezos the richest man on the planet. It's an ethos that drives him on, because the alternative is death, as the CEO has made clear on numerous occasions.

Read more: Amazon warehouse employees speak out about the 'brutal' reality of working during the holidays, when 60-hour weeks are mandatory and ambulance calls are common

But there is a human element to this story, which gives Bezos' remark in that early job ad a darker sheen. Numerous reports on Amazon's working conditions have described the intense pressure employees face to stay on rate, the company term for the number of items they're expected to process per hour.

This has manifested itself in stories about warehouse workers and delivery drivers skipping meals and bathroom breaks just to stay on target. One driver reported finding bottles of urine inside delivery vans, echoing a report from inside a UK warehouse where an undercover reporter similarly found a bottle of urine.

Speed is paramount in Amazon warehouses. Getty/JOHANNES EISELE

Amazon has said it is proud of its "great working conditions, wages and benefits, and career opportunities," even going into battle with "Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver last week. Oliver said on his HBO show that Amazon "squeezes the people lowest on the ladder." Amazon's senior vice president of operations Dave Clark tweeted that the British comedian was wrong.

Whatever your view on the human impact of Amazon's need for speed, its relentless culture is set from the very top — and it was unambiguous right from the company's inception a quarter of a century ago.

Original author: Isobel Asher Hamilton

Continue reading
  34 Hits
Jul
06

Watch the moment these guests on a YouTube talk show realize they're sitting through one of the California earthquakes

A YouTuber hosting his daily talk show Thursday recorded the moment one of the California earthquakes hit, and the terrified reactions of his guests.

John Campea is a YouTube personality with just over 176,000 followers. He hosts a daily talk show on his channel called "The John Campea Show" to talk about movies and TV, and frequently invites guests for discussion and banter.

However, Campea and his guests got a little more than they bargained for when recording a segment Thursday. In a video Campea posted to YouTube, Campea (on the left) and his two guests are chatting when each person start to realize that the ground is shaking. You can see their microphones and mic stands start to wobble in front of them.

"We're actually having an earthquake right now," Campea says into his microphone, as the two guests stare open-mouthed in surprise.

About 20 seconds after the group first notices the tremors, the shaking starts getting more violent, and causes some objects to fall off of the shelves situated behind Campea.

Campea quickly ends to segment. No one appeared hurt, and Campea shared the video clip across his social media channels later Thursday.

"What a way to start the 4th of July!!" Campea commented on the the clip he posted on YouTube.

Two major earthquakes hit southern California this past week. The one on Thursday — the earthquake that Campea and his guests sat through — was a magnitude 6.4. The earthquake the following day shot up to a 7.1 magnitude. Property damage and fires have been reported across southern California due to the earthquakes, and officials warn that damaging aftershocks are likely to come.

Here's a clip of the moment the earthquake hit the John Campea show:

Original author: Paige Leskin

Continue reading
  56 Hits
Jul
06

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vikas Choudhury of Pivot Ventures (Part 3) - Sramana Mitra

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you are very comfortable with getting into markets that don’t have a lot of traction, which is unusual in India. What drew you into angel investing at that point? Vikas...

___

Original author: Sramana Mitra

Continue reading
  66 Hits
Jul
06

Colors: Rice Terraces, Yellow Storm - Sramana Mitra

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I...

___

Original author: Sramana Mitra

Continue reading
  62 Hits
Feb
07

Our.News fights misinformation with a ‘nutrition label’ for news stories

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I struggled to understand WeWork’s growth trajectory. Before that, I noted some thoughts on scooter companies’ struggle to raise new cash.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.

What’s on my mind this week? Data. Now that it’s July, I figured it was time for a VC investment data check-in. How much have VCs invested so far this year? Are they finally investing more in female founders? I’ve got answers (Data source: PitchBook):

So far in 2019, VCs have invested $62 billion in U.S. startups. This puts investors on pace to dole out more than $120 billion this year, surpassing last year’s all-time high of $117 billion.Around the world, VCs have invested a total of $104 billion in 2019. Last year, investment soared to $251 billion. We’re unlikely to observe a global record of VC investment this year.Here’s the best news of all: Companies founded solely by women have secured a record 3% of the total capital invested in VC-backed startups in the U.S. this year: “Capital invested crossed the $1 billion mark for female-founded startups in 1Q 2019 — the highest ever for any quarter to date. And out of roughly 300 VC deals for companies led solely by women, four of those businesses have reached unicorn status so far this year. That number includes online luxury reseller The RealReal, which debuted on the NASDAQ in a high-profile exit last month.” – PitchBook.

Startup Capital:

Pod Foods gets VC backing to reinvent grocery distribution
DotLab gets $10M to bring endometriosis test to market 
Waresix hauls in $14.5M to digitize logistics in Indonesia 
Calm gets $27M for its meditation app
Mobi nabs $50M for its new broadcast service

Long Reads:

There were so many deep dives this week on TechCrunch, ranging from Jony Ive’s influence on Apple written by TechCrunch editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino, a look at the intense backlash on Superhuman and whether it’s justified, plus my own look at Fin’s pivot to enterprise analytics platform. Here are the ones I recommend clicking:

Higher Ground Labs is betting tech can help sway the 2020 elections by Jon Shieber 
Superbacklash by Matthew Panzarino 
From Seed to Series A: Scaling a startup in Latin America by Nathan Lustig
Andrew Kortina and Sam Lessin on Fin’s workplace pivot by Kate Clark
Apple sans Ive by Matthew Panzarino

Funds:

E.ventures, an early-stage global fund, brought in a fresh $400 million this week, Sony announced a new $185 million fund and…

Filing scoop: @lancearmstrong's Next Ventures plans to raise $75M for its debut fund to invest in sports, fitness, nutrition and wellness startups: https://t.co/gREk0iUuAX

— Kate Clark (@KateClarkTweets) July 5, 2019

When is the right time to pitch VCs for funding?

A compelling pitch deck that quickly and clearly presents your startup as an exceptional investment opportunity is a clear edge when raising a round. But could fundraising be more effective if you knew when to send your pitch deck — the times of year when it’s more likely to be reviewed and when it’s likely to be viewed more often? If we all had a magical algorithm that could predict exactly which investors would review your deck and when, we’d be fundraising geniuses — closing our round faster and with far less effort. No such algorithm exists (at least not yet), but I can share some useful data that offers insights into some of these seasonal fundraising trends, with a few that seem to defy conventional wisdom…

Extra Crunch readers can read the rest of Russ Heddleston’s story here. If you’ve been unsure whether to sign up for TechCrunch’s awesome new subscription service, now is the time.

#EquityPod

If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, I interview Revolution’s Clara Sieg. We discuss the Rise of the Rest and investing in underrepresented geographies.

Extra Crunch subscribers can read a transcript of each week’s episode every Saturday. Read last week’s episode here and learn more about Extra Crunch here. Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.

Continue reading
  26 Hits
Jul
06

Building Businesses in Aftermarket Designer Merchandise: ShopWorn CEO Richard Birnbaum (Part 2) - Sramana Mitra

Richard Birnbaum: We realized that the garment business was not for long term. We were buying back in the late 80’s. We were buying designer goods in the United States. We were buying Tommy Hilfiger,...

___

Original author: Sramana Mitra

Continue reading
  68 Hits
Nov
18

With 25 AAA games in development, Embracer to add 37 more studios

BRUSSELS — The US-based Tour de France team EF Education First has barred its riders from using their cellphones at the dinner table, so for the next three weeks it's a return to analog chat rooms.

"It was the team directors' idea, but the riders bought into it," Jonathan Vaughters, the team's CEO, told Business Insider. "They were, like, 'Yeah, you know, we shouldn't be on our phones at the table. We should be talking.' So they agreed to make it a rule. It was communal rule making — true democracy."

The ban isn't for all races, just the big ones, and the biggest of them all is the Tour, which starts here Saturday.

Perhaps surprisingly, the riders are OK with it.

"It's not a true ban — more of an unwritten rule," Michael Woods, EF's Canadian climber, said. "Like, if you show someone pictures, that's fine, but don't be scrolling mindlessly, as in any social scenario. It's like when you go to a restaurant and you see two people and they're just staring at their phones. Ugh."

Woods added: "We're already on our phones after the race, in the hotel room, so it's nice to unwind and not be connected in that meal time particularly. It's so good for team bonding. It's good to not be on the phone and not be separated like that.

"Some of our neo-pros, they pull out the phones mid-meal and they get cussed out. It's, like, 'What are you doing?"

EF in action in France in 2019. Tim de Waele/Getty Images

Read more: The shocking number of calories Tour de France cyclists burn each day

Experts on cellphone use say using our phones too much distracts us from being present and in the moment. In fact, spending too much time on social media, constantly receiving notifications, and sleeping near your smartphone could hurt productivity.

"Productivity is often at its apex during a flow state" — when a person is fully immersed in an activity — New York-based psychotherapist Jordana Jacobs told Business Insider. Phones take us out of the flow state.

Time magazine also reported that phone use during meals leads to a modest but noticeable decrease in diners' enjoyment, according to research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The EF team actually tries to avoid being too formal in its rules and regulations, because it's found that just hasn't worked, Charly Wegelius, one of EF's sports directors, told Business Insider.

"It's just awareness from our side that the days at the races are getting more and more complex," he said. "You have little groups of people going off and doing things — often you don't see each other for the whole day. And the number of people, especially at races like this, is getting bigger.

"And like all people in the world, we're all connected now," Wegelius added. "Everything goes through your telephone: private life, social life, but also work-related. Everything's just coming through there. The noise is super loud. We just felt the need to eek out a little corner of quiet."

Woods' teammate Simon Clarke, of Australia, said it really just comes down to etiquette and good manners.

"It's like eating with your mouth open," he said. "At dinner, you try not to use your phone. If someone rings you, you answer it and try to tell them to call you back."

"We normally have good conversations at the table, so using phones isn't normally an issue," Clarke added. "JV is a smart guy, so I'm sure he appreciates not only the physical attributes of riders but also personalities, and intellect is, to some extent, an appealing factor."

The sports directors, headed by Wegelius, a Finnish-born Briton, said they talk a lot about how the team is running, including the staff who support the riders. As with any organization, they come up with many ideas to make the team better, and some work out and some don't.

"Sometimes it works good and sometimes it works bad," he said. "But it's like revolvers in the Western bar: The conversation dies at the table for a second and somebody whips out their phone. Then everybody's got them out."

EF Education First riders in California in 2019. EF Education First Pro Cycling

Wegelius credits fellow director Andreas Klier, of Germany, for bringing about the phone ban during the spring classic races.

"We've found people policing each other in sort of nice way," Wegelius went on. "People have gotten used to looking at their phones — it's like a tic or a reflex. My wife calls me out on that when I'm at home. It's almost mindless, like having a fear of a moment of boredom. Here at the Tour de France, it's just about looking at each other and being there, instead of being somewhere else."

For Vaughters, of the US, the ban harks back to his own days as a Tour rider, when he rode in support of Lance Armstrong.

"I remember when I was on US Postal Service, in the Tour de France, the first Tour we won, in 1999, there were no laptops allowed at the race," Vaughters told Business Insider. "It was, like, 'Don't bring your laptops — you needed to focus on the race.'"

"I mean, that's probably a little too far nowadays. But back then, it was, like, 'If you want to talk to your wife, call her on the hotel phone. And call her collect."

Original author: Daniel McMahon

Continue reading
  67 Hits
Nov
18

HypeHype lets everyone create, remix, and play games on phones

Away from the limelight of the press and the frenzy of fundraising, a tech startup in India has achieved a feat that few of its peers have managed: going public.

IndiaMART, the country’s largest online platform for selling products directly to businesses, raised nearly $70 million in a rare tech IPO for India this week.

The milestone for the 23-year-old firm is so uncommon for India’s otherwise burgeoning startup ecosystem that, beyond being over-subscribed 36 times, pent up demand for IndiaMART’s stock saw its share price pop 40% on its first day of trading on National Stock Exchange on Thursday — a momentum that it sustained on Friday.

The stock ended Friday at Rs 1326 ($19.3), compared to its issue price of Rs 973 ($14.2).

IndiaMART is the first business-to-business e-commerce firm to go public in India. Its IPO also marks the first listing for a firm following the May reelection of Narendra Modi as the nation’s Prime Minister and the months-long drought that led to it.

Accounting firm EY said it expects more companies from India to follow suit and file for IPO in the coming months.

“Now that national elections are over and favorable results secured, IPO activity is expected to gain momentum in H2 2019 (second half of the year). Companies that had filed their offer documents with the Indian stock markets regulator during H2 2018 and Q1 2019 may finally come to market in the months ahead,” it said in a statement (PDF).

IndiaMART’s origin

The fireworks of the IPO are just as impressive as IndiaMART’s journey.

The startup was founded in 1996 and for the first 13 years, it focused on exports to customers abroad, but it has since modernized its business following the wave of the internet.

“The thesis was, in 1996, there were no computers or internet in India. The information about India’s market to the West was very limited,” Dinesh Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of IndiaMART, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Until 2008, IndiaMART was fully bootstrapped and profitable with $10 million in revenue, Agarwal said. But things started to dramatically change in that year.

“The Indian rupee became very strong against the dollar, which dwindled the exports business. This is also when the stock market was collapsing in the West, which further hurt the exports demand,” he explained.

Dinesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of IndiaMart.com, poses for a profile shot on July 29, 2015 in Noida, India.

By this time, millions of people in India were on the internet and, with tens of millions of people owning a feature phone, the conditions of the market had begun to shift towards digital.

“This is when we decided to pursue a completely different path. We started to focus on the domestic market,” Agarwal said.

Over the last 10 years, IndiaMART has become the largest e-commerce platform for businesses with about 60% market share, according to research firm KPMG. It handles 97,000 product categories — ranging from machine parts, medical equipment and textile products to cranes — and has amassed 83 million buyers and 5.5 million suppliers from thousands of towns and cities of India.

According to the most recent data published by the Indian government, there are about 50 to 60 million small and medium-sized businesses in India, but only around 10 million of them have any presence on the web. Some 97% of the top 50 companies listed on National Stock Exchange use IndiaMART’s services, Agarwal said.

That’s not to say that the transition to the current day was a straightforward process for the company. IndiaMART tried to capitalize on its early mover advantage with a stream of new services which ultimately didn’t reap the desired rewards.

In 2002, it launched a travel portal for businesses. A year later, it launched a business verification service. It also unveiled a payments platform called ABCPayments. None of these services worked and the firm quickly moved on.

Part of IndiaMART’s success story is its firm leadership and how cautiously it has raised and spent its money, Rajesh Sawhney, a serial angel investor who sits on IndiaMART’s board, told TechCrunch in an interview.

IndiaMART, which employs about 4,000 people, is operationally profitable as of the financial year that ended in March this year. It clocked some $82 million in revenue in the year. It has raised about $32 million to date from Intel Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners and Quona Capital. (Notably, Agarwal said that he rejected offers from VCs for a very long time.)

The firm makes most of its revenue from subscriptions it sells to sellers. A subscription gives a seller a range of benefits including getting featured on storefronts.

4/4. So many Indian small businesses have so much to thank @DineshAgarwal for. And after the iconic IPO, so many Indian entreprenuers will have so much to thank him for – forever unlocking the Indian public markets to current & future generation of Indian internet companies

— Kunal Bahl (@1kunalbahl) July 4, 2019

Where the industry stands

There are only a handful of internet companies in India that have gone public in the last decade. Online travel service MakeMyTrip went public in 2010. Software firm Intellect Design Arena and e-commerce store Koovs listed in 2014, then travel portal Yatra and e-commerce firm Infibeam followed two years later.

India has consistently attracted billions of dollars in funding in recent years and produced many unicorns. Those include Flipkart, which was acquired by Walmart last year for $16 billion, Paytm, which has raised more than $2 billion to date, Swiggy, which has bagged $1.5 billion to date, Zomato, which has raised $750 million, and relatively new entrant Byju’s — but few of them are nearing profitability and most likely do not see an IPO in their immediate future.

In that context, IndiaMART may set a benchmark for others to follow.

“The fact that we have a homegrown digital commerce business, serving both the urban and smaller cities, and having struggled and been around for so long building a very difficult business and finally going public in the local exchange is a phenomenal story,” Ganesh Rengaswamy, a partner at Quona Capital, told TechCrunch in an interview. “It keeps the story of India tech, to the Western world, going.”

Congratulations @DineshAgarwal for an iconic IPO! @IndiaMART has set an example and hope for all Indian Internet companies looking to go public. Cheers! https://t.co/yJumFjfitS

— Vani Kola (@VaniKola) July 4, 2019

Generally, it is agreed that there are too few IPOs in India and the industry can benefit from momentum and encouragement of high profile and successful public listings.

“There is a firm consensus that in India, markets will prefer only the IPOs of companies that are profitable. And investors in India might not value those companies. Both of these issues are being addressed by IndiaMART,” said Sawhney.

“We need 30 to 40 more IPOs. This will also mean that the stock market here has matured and understands the tech stocks and how it is different from other consumer stocks they usually handle. More tech companies going public would also pave the way for many to explore stock exchanges outside of India.

“Indian market is ready for more tech stocks. We just need to get more companies to go out there,” Sawhney added, although he did predict that it will take a few years before the vast majority of leading startups are ready for the public market.

The Indian government, for its part, this week announced a number of incentives to uplift the “entrepreneurial spirit” in the nation.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government would ease foreign direct investment rules for certain sectors — including e-commerce, food delivery, grocery — and improve the digital payments ecosystem. Sitharaman, who is the first woman to hold this position in India, said the government would also launch a TV program to help startups connect with venture capitalists.

The path ahead for IndiaMART

IndiaMART has managed to build a sticky business that compels more than 55% of its customers to come back to the platform and make another transaction within 90 days, Agarwal — its CEO — said. With some 3,500 of its 4,000 employees classified as sales executives, the company is aggressive in its pursuit of new customers. Moving forward, that will remain one of its biggest focuses, according to Agarwal.

“Most of our time still goes into educating MSMEs on how to use the internet. That was a challenge 20 years ago and it remains a challenge today,” he told TechCrunch.

In recent years, IndiaMART has begun to expand its suite of offerings to its business customers in a bid to increase the value they get from its platform and thus increase their reliance on its service.

IndiaMART has built a customer relationship management (CRM) tool so that customers need not rely on spreadsheets or other third-party services.

“We will continue to explore more SaaS offerings and look into solving problems in accounting, invoice management and other areas,” said Agarwal.

The firm also recently started to offer payment facilitation between buyers and sellers through a PayPal -like escrow system.

“This will bridge the trust gap between the entities and improve an MSME’s ability to accept all kinds of payment options including the new age offerings.”

There’s an elephant in the room, however.

A bigger challenge that looms for IndiaMART is the growing interest of Amazon and Walmart in the business-to-business space. Several startups including Udaan — which has raised north of $280 million from DST Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners — have risen up in recent years and are increasingly expanding their operations. Agarwal did not seem much worried, however, telling TechCrunch that he believes that his prime competition is more focused on B2C and serving niche audiences. Besides he has $100 million in the bank himself.

Indeed, as Quona Capital’s Rengaswamy astutely noted, competition is not new for IndiaMART — the company has survived and thrived more than two decades of it.

“Alibaba came and gave up,” he noted.

An important — and unanswered question — that follows the successful IPO is how IndiaMART’s stock will fare over the coming months. A glance to the U.S. — where hyped companies like Uber, Lyft and others have seen prices taper off — shows clearly that early demand and sustained stock performance are not one and the same.

Nobody knows at this point, and the added complexity at play is that the concept of a tech IPO is so uncommon in India that there is no definitive answer to it… yet. But IndiaMART’s biggest achievement may be that it sets the pathway that many others will follow.

Continue reading
  28 Hits
Jul
06

7-Eleven Japan shut down a mobile payments app after only two days because hackers exploited a simple security flaw and customers lost over $500,000

On July 1st, 7-Eleven Japan launched 7pay, a new mobile app that allows customers to make purchases at its convenience stores, which are widely popular in Asia. But two days later, 7pay was shut down, after the company advised customers that third parties had accessed some accounts.

All told, the company said in a press release, over 900 customers had their accounts accessed, and they lost a collective total of ¥55 million, the equivalent of about $510,000. It promises compensation for affected users.

7pay was 7-Eleven's mobile wallet system, allowing users to make in-store payments by scanning a barcode at the cash register tied to a credit or debit card, similarly to systems like Walmart Pay.

The way it went down, reports ZDNet and Yahoo Japan, is that some bad actors had exploited a simple security flaw with the password system — specifically, that anybody could reset any 7pay user's password.

The issue, per those reports, was that 7pay only required the user's email address, phone number, and date of birth to reset a password. Once all of that information is entered, however, it will apparently send a link to reset the password to any e-mail address you choose, even if it's not your own.

In other words, unauthorized parties could allegedly send the reset link to their own addresses, create their own passwords, and access that account, without any sophisitcated hacking technique. From there, those hackers could have theoretically walked into any 7-Eleven store that accepts 7pay and made purchases with somebody else's account.

Read more: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory network was hacked by targeting a Raspberry Pi that wasn't supposed to be connected to it

After the app launched, 7pay users tweeted about being locked out of their accounts.

A spokesperson for 7-Eleven did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Original author: Rosalie Chan

Continue reading
  57 Hits
Nov
18

Grammarly raises $200M to expand its AI-powered writing suggestions platform

Before fireworks streaked across the skies of southern California on July 4, nature unleashed its own thunderous blast of energy: an earthquake.

The magnitude 6.4 temblor struck near Ridgecrest around 10:34 a.m. PT, cracking roads, bursting water mains, and toppling electrical power lines with its might.

It was the most powerful quake to rattle the state in 20 years, and its shaking ended a five-year "drought" of earthquakes for California. Luckily, no deaths or major injuries have yet been reported.

As with all earthquakes, the Ridgecrest event was felt far beyond the borders of California — though not by people. Rather, incredibly sensitive devices called seismometers picked up the quake's rumbles from thousands of miles away.

Seismometers record the various ground motions of earthquakes, and a single station's data isn't all that interesting. Yet when many of the devices are sprinkled across a continent, they can be used to reconstruct a seismological event as it spreads, dissipates, and even bounces off underground structures.

As shown by a network of hundreds of seismometers called USArray, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, that seismic-wave data can look incredible.

"The ground motions can be captured and displayed as a movie, providing a visual demonstration of these often indiscernible movements," IRIS, a research group that studies seismological events and logs USArray data, says on its website. "The visualizations illustrate how seismic waves travel away from an earthquake."

A Twitter account managed by IRIS posted one such video of California's earthquake on Thursday night.

"Watch the waves from the M6.4 southern California earthquake roll across the USArray seismic network," the group said in a tweet sharing the video below.

On its website, IRIS also shared a US-focused clip of the July 4th quake:

Each animation of the earthquake by IRIS compresses about 34 minutes into roughly 20 seconds.

"This animation, called a Ground Motion Visualization (GMV), shows the motion of the ground as detected on USArray seismometers," IRIS said. "Each dot is a seismic station and when the ground moves up it turns red and when it moves down it turns blue."

White shows a relatively inactive station, and the more intense the red or blue color, the stronger the relative motion. However, the colors are accentuated far away from Ridgecrest to show ground movements on the scale of the width of a human hair.

"Once the earthquake waves are far enough away from the location where the earthquake occurred they can no longer be felt by people, but they can still be detected by sensitive seismic instruments," IRIS added. "That's what this animation is showing — the waves from the California earthquake traveling through the Earth and across Earth's surface."

The shaking was felt from Mexico to San Francisco to Las Vegas, IRIS noted, "but was measured across the world."

Original author: Dave Mosher

Continue reading
  105 Hits
Nov
20

Report: Mid-sized businesses are 490% more likely to experience security breach since 2019

These past few months have been nothing short of hellish and eventful for YouTube.

The video-streaming platform has faced much scrutiny as it works to wade through a deluge of scandals, including concerns over child exploitation, the spreading of dangerous conspiracy theories, and the company's policies regarding the LGBTQ community.

But YouTube has been relatively conservative in its reaction to the most recent controversies. The company's incentive to act with drastic changes is low, analysts told Business Insider.

Actions that YouTube has taken have been incremental and reactionary: The website said it would take down white-supremacist videos already on the site, although hate speech and hateful content has flourished for long enough to radicalize users, according to research by Data & Society. YouTube also declined to punish a conservative YouTuber who used racial and homophobic slurs to refer to a Vox journalist.

Despite much criticism and demand from creators, users, and even Google employees to do something, YouTube's most important clients — advertisers — have stayed relatively quiet.

With more than $3 billion in revenue each year just from ads on its platform, YouTube's cost-benefit formula is simple, analysts say: As long as advertisers are still putting their ads on YouTube, there's little reason to make sweeping changes.

"Companies have to weigh the question, 'How much advertising will I lose if I remove this content from my platform?'" the Forrester analyst Renee Murphy told Business Insider. "Users are the product, not the customer."

YouTube has previously been forced to make major changes because of advertiser backlash. In 2017, hundreds of brands pulled their advertising from YouTube after The Times reported their ads were appearing next to extremist videos. Dubbed the "YouTube Adpocalypse," the mass boycott cost YouTube's parent company, Google, an estimated $750 million, a note from analysts at Nomura Instinet said at the time.

YouTube responded with major changes: It gave advertisers more say over the content their ads appear next to and revamped YouTube's Partner Program to exert more control over who and what can be monetized on the platform.

The same pattern happened in February after a YouTuber helped expose a "soft-core pedophile ring" found on the video-sharing platform. After brands like Disney, Nestlé, and the Fortnite-owner Epic Games removed their ads, YouTube announced it would disable comments on most videos featuring kids.

But in more recent months, as further issues and concerns over the policing of its platform have arisen, there hasn't been any exodus of YouTube's most important and biggest advertisers off the platform. YouTube has learned from its past incidents to be "more quick to act and forthright in their communication," Josh Cohen, the cofounder of online-video-industry publication Tubefilter, said.

"From the advertiser perspective, YouTube has achieved all of its goals," Cohen told Business Insider. "None of this is ideal, but I don't think it's having a massive effect on YouTube's business."

Google, which owns YouTube, did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Although advertisers have yet to pick up and move their business away from YouTube to the extent of what we saw in 2017, we could see a larger shift away from the platform in the next two years for brands that run advertisements next to children's content. A recent PwC report predicts that by 2021, children's advertisers could abandon YouTube, which is under investigation on suspicion that it violated children's privacy laws, in favor of video platforms that are compliant to stricter upcoming digital-privacy laws.

Original author: Paige Leskin

Continue reading
  56 Hits
Jul
05

Read the pitch deck that Uber founder Garrett Camp created for the ride-hailing giant back in 2008 – before the company became the $120 billion giant it is today (UBER)

It's a big year for Uber.

The first name in ride-hailing had a ton of hype around it for the first half of 2019 thanks to its IPO. And though the $8 billion valuation fell well short of speculations of $100 billion, Uber is still one of the biggest names on the market today.

With such eye-popping numbers, it's difficult to remember a time when the 10-year-old company wasn't the juggernaut it is today. Uber currently has more than 2 million drivers ferrying passengers in more than 63 countries.

But back in August 2008, founder Garrett Camp was laying out his dream of a "next-generation car service" in a slideshow on his computer. Little did he know that dream would grow exponentially into a company that now handles grocery delivery, that has a rapidly growing on-demand food delivery segment in Uber Eats, and is developing a fleet of self-driving taxis.

As part of our coverage of the genesis of today's successful companies, BI Prime took a look at how Camp envisioned Uber (then UberCab) 10 years ago in his original pitch deck:

Some of what Camp laid out in the pitch deck no longer holds up, such as a few of Uber's projected eco-friendly benefits and the makeup of Uber's fleet of cars.

The rest of the deck outlines some key points such as:

Plans for surge pricing The company's project valuation Potential outcomes for the company, including a best-case scenario Future optimizations Marketing ideas And more

BI Prime is publishing dozens of stories like this each and every day, chock full of exclusive content and industry analysis. Want to get started by reading the full pitch deck?

Original author: Business Insider

Continue reading
  70 Hits
Dec
18

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking - Sramana Mitra

Like any web browser, you can bookmark web pages you want to return to using Safari on your iPhone.

Once bookmarked, you can find these saved pages by tapping the Bookmark button at the bottom of the Safari screen.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone XS (From $999 at Apple)

How to save a bookmark on your iPhone's Safari browser

1. Start the Safari app and open a web page that you want to bookmark.

2. Tap the Share button (the square with an arrow).

3. Tap "Add Bookmark."

Use the Add Bookmark button to save bookmarks in Safari on your iPhone. Dave Johnson/Business Insider

4. On the Add Bookmark page, you can edit the name of the bookmark and even tweak the URL if necessary — just tap either of those fields and type as needed.

5. If you want to store the bookmark in the default Favorites folder, tap "Save." If you want to choose a different folder, tap "Favorites" and then choose a folder (or create a new one) and then tap "Save."

If you save your bookmark to the default folder, it will appear in the list of favorites when you open a blank new tab in Safari, giving you fast access to commonly used web sites.

You can customize your bookmark by changing its name as well as which bookmark folder you organize it in. Dave Johnson/Business Insider

The difference between favorites and bookmarks in Safari

You might notice that when you tap the Share button, there are options to add both a bookmark and a favorite. Since the Favorites folder happens to be the default location to save bookmarks, this can be somewhat confusing.

There is also an option to save your page as a favorite in the Share menu. Dave Johnson/Business Insider

In reality, favorites are just a special kind of bookmark. If you save a bookmark to the Favorites folder (either using the Add Bookmark button or the "Add to Favorites" button in the Share menu), it's effectively the exact same thing as a favorite. If you store a bookmark in a different folder, you'll need to navigate past the default Favorites folder to find them.

Bottom line: Using the "Add to Favorites" button does the same thing as using the default folder for "Add bookmark."

When you open a new tab, you'll see a list of your favorite bookmarks. Dave Johnson/Business Insider

Original author: Dave Johnson

Continue reading
  59 Hits