The PERI Duo Battery Case Does Double Duty As A Wi-Fi Speaker

The PERI Duo is an iPhone battery case for the frequent entertainer — those who go out with friends and find that they’re the one stuck hooking their phone up to a speaker and doing some impromptu DJing.

Slightly bulkier than a Mophie, the Duo packs two powerful (for their size) speakers that can push a surprising amount of sound. While it’s not going to be the best sound you’ve ever heard (especially if you’re all about that bass), it’s certainly a better solution than putting your phone in a cup to amplify its built-in speakers. The battery can charge your phone by 170% (so fully, and then a bit more) or keep you fully charged and give you 3-4 hours of music over the speakers.

There are a few use cases where you’d want giant speakers attached directly to your phone on the go — PERI co-founder Michael Hsu suggested groups that go running together and want some jams when we met this week — but generally you want a stationary speaker pointing to the rest of the group.

That kind of sucks if you also want to use your phone while entertaining everyone else, so the Duo actually works as a Wi-Fi speaker when disconnected from your iPhone. If you use it at home a lot, you can configure it to connect to your home router and let people control it who are connected to the same network. If you take it out to the beach or a friend’s place, you can set it to generate its own local network.

If you several friends pick up Duos, you can do some neat tricks with the case’s peer-to-peer networking functions. You can set multiple speakers to play the same music, but change the volume levels on individual cases so some rooms can be for dancing and others for hanging out. You could set several up on each side of a room and send the right and left channels of music to each side. Or you could control multiple speakers in different rooms playing different songs, all from one phone.

PERI successfully funded its Indiegogo campaign and sold out of its early-bird specials, but if you’re still interested in picking one up (there’s a version for the iPhone 5/5s and one for the 6) the campaign is still going for another week. They’re going for $99 each, and Hsu says backers can expect to receive their final units towards the end of Q2 2015.

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Once $399 A Year, Google Earth Pro Is Now Free

Lots of people have dabbled with Google Earth to fly around their neighborhood or poke around a 3D version Paris. But how many dropped $400 (per year!) for a Pro subscription?

Not a ton, it would seem. At least, not enough for Google to keep counting on it as an income source.

Google has just nixed the subscription fee for Google Earth Pro, dropping it from $400 a year to completely free.

You’ll still need to get a key from Google to unlock the Pro features, but that’s a matter of filling out a quick form. (Ignore the “free trial” bit in the URL; the new free license should work indefinitely.) Then you’d download the free Pro client from right here.

So what’s different about Google Earth Pro that once made it $400 a year? It’s primarily good for project planning and tinkering with data. It’s not something everyone will need — but hey, it’s free now!

Here’s what it can do that the non-Pro version can’t:

• Print images at 4800×3200; non-Pro is capped at 1000×1000.


• Automatically import a few thousand addresses at once to be pinned on a map


• Capture HD videos of what’s on screen.


• Measure distances/areas using lines, paths, polygons, circles, and more. Non-pro can only handle lines/paths.

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Three Reasons Why Your Software Is So Far Behind Schedule

When not opining here on TechCrunch I’m a software engineer for the fine folks at HappyFunCorp (1) and I’m occasionally called on to diagnose and fix projects that have gone horribly wrong (2). The more I do this, the more I notice commonalities among problem projects–“antipatterns,” if you will. Here I give you three more of my ongoing list of such. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

1. Onboarding Time == Technical Debt

Technical debt is not always a bad thing, but if you accrue too much of it, it will kill you. When under schedule pressure, or when new devs keep coming onto and going off a project, people tend to build new software subsystems and connect them to the old ones Rube-Goldberg style, instead of doing it right. It’s like turning a family home into a cantilevered skyscraper one room at a time, and waiting with dread for an earthquake to hit, instead of razing it and pouring a new foundation as you should have.

But sometimes taking on short-term technical debt is the right thing to do. The real problem with technical debt is that it often lurks off the metaphorical balance sheet: it’s hard to measure, especially if you’re non-technical. What I’ve noticed of late is that there exists an excellent proxy measure for a project’s technical debt: the onboarding time for a new developer.

So ask yourself: how long does it take a new dev to get set up and start pushing good new code to the repo? In many cases the answer should be an hour or less. No, really. “git pull”, “bundle install”, “rails s” and away you go. Or “git pull”, “pod update”, open the workspace in XCode, hit Command-R, and boom. It’s been some months since I did any Android work, but Android Studio ought to be comparably easy.

But, I hear you sputtering, my environment is very complicated! We have virtual machines and multiple databases and virtual private networks! Systems talking to systems talking to systems! No way we can get a new dev set up in an hour! Uh-huh. Facebook’s pretty large and complicated too, you know … and Facebook engineers famously write real code on their first day and push it to the live site their first week. If your new developers are spending hours wrestling with configuration and environments, you have probably run up more technical debt than you care to think about.

2. The Test Suite Sweet Spot

Obviously you need to write, and run, tests for your code. And in an ideal world, you would have up-to-date tests for all of your code, which run automatically whenever you commit a change to the repo. Unfortunately, in testing as in life, the perfect is often the enemy of the good. It’s amazing how often I’ve encountered projects with elaborate test suites that have been hopelessly broken for months and/or take forever to run.

Developers write tests but don’t run them regularly, so they begin to fall out-of-date, and schedule pressure means that fixing the tests is non-critical whereas getting the new release out is critical, so the vicious circle compounds and the test suite decays into uselessness. Or–more rarely–test-driven development becomes test-centered development, and actually Getting Stuff Done takes a back seat to writing ever more and more elaborate test code, the refactoring of which takes so much time that development progress gets slower and slower.

There are costs to maintaining a huge and complex test suite; after you refactor code, you may have to either refactor your tests, which takes time, or let them break, which (ultimately) takes even more time. If your organization / management / development pressures are such that keeping all your tests up to date isn’t a valid option, and you can’t alleviate those pressures, then it’s actually better to shrink your test suite. I know that doesn’t sound appealing. I don’t like it either. But a smaller test suite you actually run and maintain is much better than a larger one you ignore.

3. Please Just Stop Running Your Own Servers Already

Big Company problem projects tend to have something else in common: they’re still running their own servers. No AWS or Google Compute Engine for them, much less Heroku or Elastic Beanstalk or App Engine. They have their own machines. And their own sysadmins. And their own homegrown processes for patching and updating and deploying code. And their own incredibly paranoid security, which often means “no developer may lay hands on the production machines,” which often makes it pretty hard to get anything done.

Big companies need to ask themselves: are our sysadmins better than Google’s or Amazon’s? And since the answer is probably no, the conclusion is: why don’t we let the experts handle it? (To be fair, they often are better than those of some cloud hosts — eg I’ve never had a good experience with Rackspace.) Yes, there are downsides. Yes, it means a loss of control. It’s not a panacea.

But unless your circumstances are truly exceptional, a full cost/benefit analysis usually points very firmly towards moving your servers to The Cloud. Back in the early days of electricity, every factory had its own generator, and many protested loudly at the loss of control inherent in this whole newfangled “power grid” notion. But there’s a reason the grid succeeded, and it’s the same reason the cloud is succeeding today. Don’t get stuck in the twentieth century. Stop making the old mistakes. After all, there are so many bold new mistakes to make.

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(1) Recently profiled on video here, to my great surprise. (Nobody will believe this, but despite my TC-columnist gig, I had no idea this was happening until the week it happened.)

(2) Usually either internal projects at large clients, or startup apps built by a cheap third-party dev shop. There is some truth to the notion that you get what you pay for.

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Review Of Uber’s Privacy Policy Shows Positive Signs, But Still Room For Improvement

Uber today released the results of a review of its privacy policies, which it had commissioned from independent law firm Hogan Lovells. The firm found that Uber had appropriate policies and disclosures in place and that it had invested significantly to enforce those policies. However, it made 10 recommendations into how the company could improve the way it handles user data.

The review of Uber’s policies began after a series of events called its commitment to user privacy into question last year. Those incidents led Senator Al Franken to ask Uber a series of eight questions about its policies in a public letter.

At a dinner last fall, senior Uber executive Emil Michael suggested the company spend $1 million conducting opposition research on journalists. Meanwhile, the company also examined claims one of its general managers had used a journalist’s location data without her permission. Around the same time, a report emerged that Uber executives had shown off its “God View” at a launch party several years ago.

Over a six week period, Hogan Lovells reviewed Uber’s internal documents and interviewed executives about its policies. The firm found that while appropriate policies and procedures in place, especially for a company of its age and scale. But there’s always room for improvement:

Based on our review and findings, we have offered ten core recommendations for the expansion of Uber’s Privacy Program. We recommend that Uber: (1) enhance its existing privacy governance framework by continuing to formalize information policies and practices, developing a concrete plan and time frame for regular reviews of the Privacy Program, and ensuring that senior leadership continues to set an appropriate tone at the top; (2) streamline and enhance the content and availability of existing privacy disclosures to help consumers more readily understand Uber’s practices relating to Consumer Data; (3) implement additional tools, access controls, and written procedures that will help automate and further embed compliance with the Company’s access control policies into day-to-day operations; (4) enhance its privacy by design program by further formalizing the existing privacy review of products prior to launch; (5) further formalize its vendor management program by enhancing template agreements, developing a standard set of diligence questions for vendors, and developing formal procedures to periodically review third parties’ compliance with contractual and legal obligations related to data security; (6) implement additional procedures to review inactive or closed accounts that have been retained for a valid reason for a certain period of time to determine whether that reason still exists; (7) create a central “hub” for incident response resources and revise relevant policies and procedures to reflect a consistent system for classifying incident severity; (8) update the Company’s written data security policies, guidelines, and templates to formally document any unwritten data security expectations for personnel related to Consumer Data; (9) enhance and formalize its training and awareness program to provide tailored trainings about Uber’s privacy practices based on job responsibilities and to mandate regular refresher trainings and updated guidance; and (10) continue to emphasize employee accountability for data privacy through additional formal initiatives.

“While Uber is encouraged by these findings, we fully acknowledge that we haven’t always gotten it right,” the company said in its blog post. It said that it will continue to “review and iterate on its policies, processes, and technology” based on Hogan Lovells’ recommendations.

Featured Image: 360b/Shutterstock



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TC AppleCast 3: Apple Sells All The iPhones

It’s a very special episode of the TechCrunch AppleCast, as we’re joined by Jackdaw Research founder and Chief Analyst Jan Dawson, who offers some context around Apple’s huge earnings success reported earlier in the week. Dawson joins Darrell Etherington and Kyle Russell to explain just how Apple managed to sell 74.5 million iPhones in a single quarter, and to discuss some possible causes of the iPad’s flat growth.

We also talk about what the iPad category might look like in the future, as well as how Apple has changed the way it reports the financial performance of its retail operations, and why it might’ve done that as a result of the retail plans it has for the Apple Watch. Speaking of the Apple Watch, Dawson refers to his recent Smartwatch report to explain why battery life will be the thing to watch when the first reviews of the Apple Watch begin to hit the web.

Speaking of the Apple Watch, it arrives in April, so we also get into some of the other factors that will be key to that launch, including support from third-party developers.

Feedback via email is appreciated, as always, and be sure to also rate the podcast on iTunes if you feel inclined.

Direct download available here, or find us on iTunes and SoundCloud.

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Google Now Gets Upgraded With Cards From Your Favorite Apps

Google Now, Google’s service focused on bringing you real-time information to your mobile device – including things like traffic updates, scores, stock changes, travel times, your flight status, and much more – is getting a notable update today. The company says that, going forward, the Google app will show users updates from their favorite apps, too.

At launch, Google is offering relevant information from over 40 applications, in order to show things like “last-minute hotel deals to home-buying tips,” the company says.

“In the morning, catch up on news of the day with cards from The Guardian. On your commute, Pandora can give you recommendations for music to play, based on what you like, or you can be reminded to complete your daily French lesson on Duolingo,” writes Google, explaining how the new system can work as an alternative to launching the apps directly.

The idea, it seems, is to start taking advantage of the fact that Google can parse the information contained with mobile applications – information that’s been surfaced though deep linking technology, in many cases, and through marked-up email updates from app providers in other cases.

There are over 30 developers – including apps like Airbnb, Lyft, eBay, Instacart, Pandora and Zillow, to name a few – supported as the new feature goes to launch this afternoon. It’s currently only available on Android devices, but likely this will come to the Google app on iOS in the near future.

Google says that other apps will be added in the future, and the feature itself will be expanded over time, as well.

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Top resources for entrepreneurs, from TNW Deals

Planning to launch your own business? The road ahead can be hard and treacherous — and every ounce of wisdom about what to expect can help keep you on the right track.

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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Apple iPhones, Samsung Smartphones, And Legos!

It’s earnings season, which means we get a deeper look into the true popularity of the various gadgets on the market. This week, all eyes were on Apple as the company announced record-breaking quarterly results, including the sale of ~75 million smartphones. Turns out, Samsung showed similar sales figures by unit but at a lower margin per device, yielding lower overall sales.

Meanwhile, LEGOs are still fun to play with. Seriously.

We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Darrell Etherington, and Jordan Crook.

Have a good Friday, everybody!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right here.

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.

You can subscribe to the show via RSS.

Subscribe in iTunes

Intro Music by Mendhoan.

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Vine Introduces Vine Kids

Vine is today introducing a new layer of the app called Vine Kids. It’s meant to be a safe, kid-friendly space for a younger audience to play around with the app and watch vines.

The feature pulls from the millions of Vines being created on the platform and chooses ones that are appropriate for children. The interface of the Kids section of the app has also been tailored to be more fun for children, showing a new Vine each time the user swipes left or right and playing “quirky” sounds each time the user taps the screen.

From the official blog post:

The idea came about during an office conversation in early January. One of my colleagues was talking about how much his two-year-old daughter loves Vine –– he said he wished there was a separate app she could use to more easily watch posts that are appropriate for kids. That week happened to be Hack Week, a time when we get to work on projects outside of our day-to-day work. So two folks teamed up and built exactly that.

Vine is Twitter’s own video platform, where users can create cool stop-animation looping videos and re-share them, like them, etc from a central feed.

Vine has since added channels to help users discover new content, but Vine has always had content on the platform that is PG-13 at the very least. Wandering through the apps various channels and feeds, as kids are wont to do, could lead to some inappropriate content.

Vine Kids solves that problem, letting parents hand over the Vine app without worrying about their kids seeing something they shouldn’t.

The update is available now. Learn more here.

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Airbnb Hires Former Say Media SVP Alex Schleifer As Head Of Design

Airbnb has always been pretty design-oriented, but today it’s announcing that it has hired former Say Media exec Alex Schleifer to head its design organization. He’ll lead the user experience and content design teams, as well as working with the production design team.

Airbnb’s roots in design run deep, since the company was founded by two designers and an engineer. After all, the concept behind Airbnb — then AirBed & Breakfast — came about when Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia rented out air mattresses in their loft to help make rent during the 2007 Industrial Design Conference.

So Airbnb brining in a head of design is not surprising. In fact, the most surprising thing might be that it took this long.

Schleifer is joining the company at a time when the company has already gone through a significant brand and design overhaul. Last summer, Airbnb introduced a new logo and redesign meant to make its website more appealing to customers and easier to use. More recently it’s updated its mobile web design based on an overhauled back end that will help it to roll out new products and features.

But his hire is a long time coming. Schleifer says he spent several months talking with Airbnb’s founders to make sure it would be a good fit.

“The company was in good hands design-wise before they brought me in,” Schleifer told me. But he’s hoping to continue moving the product forward, especially since, as he says, 99 percent of the product is offline. It’s Airbnb’s job to make it easier for consumers to use the product and get out of the way.

“We’re a social network that’s trying to reduce engagement on our app,” Schleifer said.

He brings with him 20 years of experience as an engineer and designer. He most recently came from Say Media, where he led creative as the company’s SVP and Creative Director. He joined that organization after Say Media acquired Sideshow, which is the digital design firm he founded.

At Airbnb Schleifer will join the executive team and lead design efforts for the company. He will work directly with Airbnb’s design teams, but will also coordinate with other parts of the business to make sure all are on the same design page. It’ll be his job, he says, to connect those dots.

“I’ll work with [global hospitality head] Chip Conley on the host stuff and how we communicate with hosts… and I’ll work with [CMO Jonathan Mildenhall] on marketing and branding,” he said. “Each of these groups sits at the same table and has a voice that carries that same weight. We meet every day and discuss all these things.”

But ultimately he’ll report to the founders. So what does it mean to work for a couple of designers and an engineer? Reflecting back on the day he decided to take the job, Schleifer said founder Brian Chesky took 15 minutes to convince him why he should join.

“I knew that working with other designers would either be heaven or hell… It would be either the best job I ever had or the worst job I ever had,” Schleifer told me. But after hearing Chesky out, he says, “I got a sense immediately that it would push me forward and not drag me down. These guys lean very heavily on people they feel can handle the task.”

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Daily Mail Acquires Millennial-Focused Website Elite Daily

DMG Media, publisher of UK newspaper The Daily Mail, announced this morning that it has acquired Elite Daily.

Describing itself as “The Voice Of Generation Y,” Elite Daily mixes general news and culture coverage with stories like, um, “You Can Literally Make Over $13,000 A Year Just By Pooping.” (Which, to be fair, is good to know.) In a blog post about the acquisition, CEO David Arabov said the site now has a 65-person team and reaches 74 million readers.

“This marriage will permit Elite Daily to continue to flourish as a platform for and by Millennials, allowing us to expand internationally, grow our staff and continue to deliver the most relevant and engaging content for Millennials,” Arabov wrote.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reported that the price was $47 million. Jon Steinberg, Daily Mail’s CEO for North America (and previously president of BuzzFeed), told The Journal, “We want to compete with AOL and Yahoo, and this will help us get to that goal.” (AOL owns TechCrunch.)

TechCrunch’s coverage of Elite Daily also got us into a spat with The Awl back in 2013 about whether the site was an “astounding troll-holl” (The Awl’s characterization), and whether, by kinda sorta defending it, we were “startup shills.” So that was fun.

Featured Image: Elite Daily



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Minibar Offers On-Demand Booze Delivery In 13 Cities

The snow is piled high and frozen on the New York city streets. Joshua and Amanda sit on their couch for the fifth night in a row, bored out of their minds but unwilling to bundle up, venture into the winter night and try to find warmth elsewhere.

“Christie and Caleb want to go out,” Amanda says unenthusiastically, without looking at Joshua. “You care?”

“Tell them to come here,” Josh says, staring into his smartphone screen.

“To do what? We have nothing to eat. Nothing to drink. Are we supposed to sit around listening to music and drinking coffee at 10:30 on a Friday night?”

Joshua opens up his phone and flashes an annoyingly overconfident smile at Amanda.

“I’ve got it covered,” he says, as he flips open the MiniBar app on his iPhone. He shops for Amanda’s favorite Gin, gets his favorite Rye, and finds a nice hoppy beer for Christie and Caleb, using the filters in the app, and simply checks out.

As Josh and Amanda wait for their friends to arrive out of the dark snowy night, an order is sent to one of MiniBar’s vendor partners, where inventory is confirmed, and the order is put through the vendor’s payment system. The vendor checks out the user, packages up the product, and sends out a delivery man.

Answering a knock at the door, Josh stands before a man bundled in black and dusted with snow. He wears a yellow reflective vest. His bike is probably downstairs. He asks for Josh’s drivers license, checks it out, and hands over a bag full of booze.

And it is finished.

The story of Josh and Amanda and whatever the others’ names were is true for users across thirteen cities. Minibar is available across the web and on mobile in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Jersey City, The Hamptons, Ithaca, Dallas, Hoboken, Westchester, Silicon Valley, Palm Beach and Miami. Vendors on the platform can list their products, name their prices, and set up shop on the internet to get new, more educated customers.

Even with heavy competition in the space, Minibar cofounders Lara Crystal and Lindsey Andrews say that Minibar is currently the biggest player in the space in terms of revenues. Minibar makes money by taking a transactions-based technology fee from vendor partners at the end of the month.

To check out Minibar, which has raised a total of $1.8 million in seed funding, head over to the website here.

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Canon 5DS Leaked Specs Reveal A High Megapixel DSLR Geared For Color Accuracy

Canon’s announcing a new pro-level DSLR camera next week, according to CanonRumors, and now specs have leaked that reveal what we can expect. The 5DS (and 5DS R, a variant with the low pass filter removed, which should provide greater detail for landscape photographers at the expense of higher moiré) should offer a generous 50.6MP full frame sensor, dual DIGIC6 processors and an ISO range of 100-6400. That range sounds very limited at the top end, but this camera is made special for photographers looking for color accuracy rather than low-light capabilities.

The Canon 5DS will also reportedly have a 61-point AF system, which is likely similar to or the same as the one currently available on the 5D Mark III and the 1D X. It’ll offer 5FPS continuous shooting, a special “fine detail” picture style mode, 1.3x and 1.6x crop shooting modes, time-lapse movie capture, anti-flicker, and interval timer and a bulb timer. It’ll also have a magnesium alloy body designed to be sealed against both dust and rain.

As mentioned, an “R” variant will do away with the low pass filter, which is also called an anti-aliasing filter and which is used in digital cameras to prevent moiré, which is the appearance of weird patterns on materials that contain repeated details, like tweed or gingham clothing, for instance. That’s going to be much better for photographers who do wide landscape shots, however, since low pass filters work by blurring fine details before they reach the image sensor in order to prevent that moiré effect from appearing.

Canon is also putting very a strong color filter array on these cameras, which limits noise-free low-light shooting, but which also should produce much more accurate color capture vs. Canon’s existing camera offerings. The 5DS (and 5DS R) are aimed at a specialist audience, so this makes sense, while a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV will offer even higher sensitivity and better low-light performance, and should arrive some time later this year.

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Airbnb To Begin Collecting Taxes In Amsterdam, San Jose, Chicago, And Washington, D.C.

Over the past few years, Airbnb has been working with local lawmakers and regulators on ways that it can comply with local hotel tax and housing laws. Those efforts have been slow-going, as its public policy team has more or less had to work with each individual city to do so.

But things are speeding up. Today the company announced that it will soon begin collecting and remitting tourist taxes in four new cities: Amsterdam, San Jose, Chicago, And Washington, D.C.

Airbnb will begin collecting taxes in Amsterdam and San Joe, Calif. beginning tomorrow, and will expand that to Chicago and Washington, D.C. on February 15. That follows earlier announcements that it would collect taxes in Portland, Ore. and San Francisco.

So far the company says it has collected and remitted $5 million for those two markets since introducing those taxes just a few months ago. It’s releasing that number in part to show how much money other governments are missing out on by not working with it yet.

While Airbnb could theoretically begin collecting taxes in any market, there are often legal hurdles to it doing so. In some places, like San Francisco, the company needed laws passed that would legitimize the business it operates in those cities.

That’s the case in New York, where the company has been engaged in a long-running fight with the NY Attorney General’s office. NY AG Eric Schneiderman has been pressing the company to shut down what the state views as illegal hotel operations, but under current law they estimate that 3/4 of listings on the platform would be deemed illegal.

For its part, Airbnb is asking to have the laws changed, and is attempting to sweeten the pot by estimating it would collect $65 million in taxes in New York. It just needs the local government to create a framework under which it would be able to legally collect and remit those taxes.

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FCC's Huge Spectrum Haul; Office on Android Tablets; Facebook Place Tips

From Facebook's place tips to FCC's $45 billion auction, here's what you missed on Thursday.

Topping tech headlines on Thursday, the FCC announced that its most recent spectrum auction generated approximately $44.9 billion in revenue.

The auction, for 65 megahertz of spectrum in the AWS-3 band, kicked off Nov. 13 and went on for 341 rounds. The Commission also moved to increase the definition of broadband from 4 Mbps down to 25 Mbps. An accompanying report found that that 55 million Americans – 17 percent of the population – lack access to broadband at 25 Mbps.

Meanwhile, Microsoft released the formal version of Office for Android tablets—users can log into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with a Microsoft Account or Office 365 business credentials to create, edit, and print files for free. Redmond also revealed Outlook for iOS and a preview of Outlook for Android, compatible with Office 365, Exchange, Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail.

In other news, Facebook introduced place tips to show "fun, useful, and relevant info about the place you're at." Apple iPhone users (in New York City for now) may automatically see place tips at the top of their News Feed; the details will appear only if you've given Facebook permission to access your location.

Also, visitors to the popular xHamster porn site may have picked up the wrong kind of Trojan—one designed to install additional malware onto infected computers. See more in the video, and be sure to check out a few other stories making headlines in the links below.

Uber Sued In California For Fraud And Negligence Following New Delhi Rape

Nearly two months ago, a young woman was allegedly raped by her Uber driver in New Delhi, India. The incident led to the banning of the service in India and a full-scale investigation there, but the victim has brought her case over to the U.S. now filing a complaint with the Northern District Court of California.

The charges raised in the complaint include negligence and fraud, and the victim (who is going by Jane Doe to protect her identity) says that it’s Uber’s hollow marketing tactics and disregard for customer safety that led to the events that unfolded on that December 5 night.

One of the focal points of the complaint is Uber’s background check policies with regards to its riders.

Had Uber not sacrificed customer safety for the sake of profit and expansion, and actually cared about who it was employing to drives its cars rather than being preoccupied with claiming its share of the India taxi market, Plaintiff Doe would not have been viciously raped. In fact, a basic background check would have revealed that Yadav had a known propensity for violent and deviant conduct, including numerous arrests for rape and assault, which should have disqualified him from working as an Uber driver.

Uber structures its business in a way that doesn’t shoulder much responsibility for the behavior of its contracted drivers. Uber promises background checks on hired drivers, but it’s up to the user to choose the safest and best driver on the app (even though it automatically matches you and fines you for canceling). What goes on between the time that the driver picks up the passenger and drops them off is the responsibility of the driver alone.

For this reason, similar cases in the past haven’t made much of a dent in Uber’s legal armor.

Following this particular New Delhi case, Uber’s service was banned in the city. India represents one of Uber’s largest markets outside of the United States.

However, one week ago the service returned to the city under new legal restrictions, working on a no-profit model pending radio taxi license approval.

The company, embattled from the start, has grown from fledging startup to one of the most successful companies of the last decade. Uber is valued north of $40 billion and operates all over the world.

If you want to look at the full details of the complaint, we’ve embedded them below.

Jane Doe vs. Uber Technologies

[via Re/Code]

Featured Image: Visual Idiot/Shutterstock



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Tesla Model X Caught On Video At The Test Track

A new model Tesla has been caught on camera at the Alameda Airport test track (via Electrek). The car looks pretty similar to a Prius, or perhaps a crossover utility vehicle, and could plausibly be either the Model X SUV Tesla has been working on for years, or, as others are arguing, a prototype of the mass-market Model 3 that the coming is planning to bring to market in the $35,000 price range.

The video doesn’t show much beyond a car driving around at a relatively high speeds both straight and through some wide loops, and the camouflaged body of the vehicle with a broad back end and what looks like a fairly high seating arrangement for the driver, which does suggest it’s a Model X test vehicle. It also has a lot in common in terms of design, body shape and apparent size with the original Tesla Model X design unveiled in 2013 by Elon Musk.

I think it’s most likely this is the Model X, because of the points raised above, and because Tesla CEO Elon Musk said earlier this month that the Model X is on track for release by the early part of the second half of 2015, meaning it should be about as road ready and design-final as the vehicle in this spy video is. That means it’s time to get excited, electric car fans who want a bit more cargo capacity.

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Secret Co-Founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler Steps Down Because It’s Not About Design Anymore

One year after founding anonymish app Secret with fellow Googler David Bytow, Chrys Bader-Wechseler is leaving the company on amicable terms. He cites that Secret isn’t about design and curation as much now since it redesigned recently, dropping the artful photo squares with overlaid text in favor of a sterile text feed that looks just like competitor Yik Yak.

In a blog post, Bader-Wechseler is quoted as saying:

“It’s become clear that the next chapter of Secret is beginning in a way that will be less about the kind of creation and design that I love, and so it’s time for me to step down, let the team do what they do best, and focus on what I do best.”

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OnePlus teases first in-house Android operating system: OxygenOS

After OnePlus had trouble with Cyanogen turning its back on the company in India, it started working on its own Android release for its phones.

Today, it announced that the upcoming operating system will be called OxygenOS, following a competition the company ran asking for community members to suggest names.

OnePlus says that “we will be launching our own ROM in the near future” and will be “software that is open, customizable, and free of bloat and unnecessary features.”

More information on the company’s forthcoming software will be announced on February 12th.

➤ OnePlus ROM: Oxygen OS [OnePlus Forums]

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iTunes 12 updated with Yosemite Notification Center Widget

Apple updated iTunes to version 12.1 with a new Notification Center Widget.

The new iTunes Widget lets you see what’s playing, skip ahead to the next song and buy songs if you’re listening to iTunes Radio.

Apple says the update also improves the syncing performance of iOS devices.

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Snapchat Out Grows The Friend Zone

Discover is Snapchat’s big new play in the world of media. It is a special tab in the app powered by content publishers like ESPN, Yahoo, etc., offering daily long-form content with videos, articles, and of course, advertisements.

Brands can buy advertisements against these Discover ‘Editions’, which play every three or four swipes. It’s really not all that bad. It’s what we’ve grown accustomed to. It feels like a magazine that you would read in the future. But with the launch of Discover, one small piece of the app disappeared. Best Friends is gone.

This disappearance is small, but it signifies something bigger in the grand scheme of Snapchat’s evolution.

One For All

Snapchat launched as a personal messenger, where people were supposed to “be themselves”, and then opened up the potential for it to become a broadcast tool, where people could become ‘Snapchat stars.’ Some are artists and some are comedians. Some are just random, everyday people, and some are celebrities. Focus shifted from creation to consumption.

And now, Snapchat has gone beyond even that. Snapchat is a now a messenger, a social network, and a media network, all in one.

Sounds good, right? The ‘unbundle’ doctrine hasn’t necessarily played well for companies in the past, especially in Facebook’s case, and Snapchat has become a place where users can do anything. They don’t need a full inbox to check the app. They have Discover. ‘Snapchat stars’ don’t have to worry about connecting directly to their fans. Snapchat gives them the tools necessary to distribute their content, like Stories, as well as tools to communicate, like the messenger and video chat.

The app now has the flexibility to be whatever you want it to be. If you use it only to message close friends, dive right into that. If you use it to broadcast your life to a broad list of followers, you have new filters and drawing tools for that. And if you want to use it as a reader, hit up Discover. You can do whatever you want, but something small is missing.

Best Friends

Best Friends is a feature that goes all the way back to the beginning of Snapchat. In fact, Snapchat Best Friends (the three people you messaged with the most) used to have web profiles as well that you could search by user name. Snapchat fiddled with the feature a bit, adding fun little tricks in the app to expand your Best Friends list from three to five. It wasn’t a prominently displayed feature, but once you found it, it was easy to become addicted to watching it.

When it disappeared in the Discover update, I saw a bit of a reaction on Twitter and thought little of it. Best Friends was never a feature that I really understood. The whole purpose of the app is that you send these snaps and they disappear. They live only in the memories of their recipients, and even then they don’t know if they are the only recipient. To list Best Friends seems slightly counter-intuitive to the whole philosophy of the app.

A Numbers Game

Then I started thinking about my early interactions on Facebook and MySpace. I used to send friend requests to as many people as possible. It wasn’t the people. It was the number. Seems silly now, thinking about how over-populated my friends list on Facebook is, and how it makes the network nearly useless to me. And still, the desire to accumulate more followers on Twitter and Instagram persists.

Those numbers — friends, followers, favorites, and likes — they are a big part of the addiction. The dopamine hit we get when we receive a like or get a new friend or follower is part of what drives us to use these networks.

On Snapchat, Best Friends was the only “metric” for a user that gave any context to their popularity or status. In an app where the goal is to be true to your real life, the Best Friends metric could be an important tool for monitoring their relationships with their friends.

It’s also the only identity that the app gives you. On Snapchat, you have no profile. You can build a daily Story for your friends, that can act as a sort of living profile, but that means snapping all day long. You have a username, and that is all. The Best Friends list was a profile. It was a sort of context.

Luckily, Best Friends isn’t gone for good. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel tweeted out that the BFF feature will be back soon.

Seems reasonable.

Priorities

But as you can see from the responses to the tweet, there is just one small issue with this announcement. In some small way, Snapchat is prioritizing the broadcast portion of the app, “the higher-profile friends”, over regular users who want to see their best friends.

It’s entirely possible that this media network empire that Snapchat is building was the goal all along. But in a landscape where the messenger holds the key, and where other social media giants have taken up so much space in the content broadcast space, it seems counterintuitive to in any way neglect Snapchat’s messenger roots.

Social media giants who have come before, Facebook and Twitter, have followed the same evolutionary path, from personal messenger tool to powerhouse media network. Snapchat entered the scene promising to do things differently, during a time where the most coveted spot of all is the messaging space. The ability to pay friends with Snapchat is a more useful and unique feature introduction than almost anything Twitter or Facebook ever offered users.

Discover is a beautiful product. And finally, so is Snapchat’s traditional messenger. But for Snapchat as a company to reach its highest potential, it must continue fostering the messenger — the part of the app that is personal and intimate — just as much as it does the glitzy, shiny new Discover network.

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Tesla’s P85D Will Get Even Faster Thanks To A Software Update

Tesla’s P85D is already fast. Really, really fast. Push the button to put the car into “Insane” mode (really — that’s what it’s called) and it’ll do 0-60 in 3.2 seconds.

Now it’s about to get even faster.

And get this: it’s getting faster because of an over the air software update.

Musk confirmed the change in a tweet:

0.1 seconds might not seem like a lot — but when you get down into these time ranges, every tenth of a second is monumental.

More importantly, just think about that for a second:

• You buy a car.


• The engineers who made the car realize they can tweak some parameters of the car and make it better


• Next time you get in your car, it’s faster. No going to the dealership for an update, no popping the hood and swapping parts — it’s just faster. Because it can be.

Imagine getting into your car and having it say “Oh! Hey. I’m faster now than I was yesterday. You’re welcome!” Because that’s what’s happening.

Musk also noted that the P85 (the single motor version, versus the P85D’s two) will be seeing an acceleration improvement, albeit not as significant.

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Google CFO Calls Glass A Case Where The Company Needed To “Pause” And “Reset”

Google’s Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette wasn’t too optimistic about the future of Google Glass on today’s Google earnings call for Q4 2014. The executive took some time to highlight the project as an example of when Google is willing to take a step back and rethink something that isn’t working out, even when they’ve made a considerable investment in the tech.

“When teams aren’t able to [leap] hurdles, but we think there’s still a lot of promise, we might ask them to take a pause and take the time to reset their strategy, as we recently did in the case of Glass,” Pichette said. “[A]nd in those situations where projects don’t have the impact we hope for, we do take the tough calls, we make the decision to cancel them, and you’ve seen us do this time and time again.”

Google discontinued the Glass Explorer program back on January 19, after announcing it would shut down and be reassigned to Tony Fadell’s consumer hardware department within the company. Google is still encouraging developers to develop for the platform, and a repositioning under Fadell also doesn’t indicate a finality of its fate, but Pichette’s comments today are the most concreate statement we’ve heard on the Glass program’s outcome from a top executive, and they certainly don’t suggest an imminent consumer launch.

Glass might live on as something else, but Pichette’s statements today suggest we might not recognize the form it takes when it does eventually re-emerge.

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This Week On The TechCrunch Bitcoin Podcast: An Interview With Luis Buenaventura Of Rebit

Welcome back to TCBTC, TechCrunch’s weekly podcast on the cryptocurrency bitcoin. This week Alex is on vacation so I recorded a short interview with Luis Buenaventura Of Rebit, a major Bitcoin remitter in the Philippines. Luis gave us a quick look under the hood of his growing business.

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.

Subscribe on iTunes.

You can subscribe to the show here.

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Amazon’s Mixed Q4 2014 With $29.33B Revenue, And $0.45 EPS

Amazon just released its fiscal Q4 2014 earnings, reporting $29.33 billion in revenue, $214 million in net profit representing $0.45 per share. According to CNBC/Thomson Reuters, analysts expected the company to report earnings of $0.17 per share on $29.67 billion in revenue.

For the past two quarters, Amazon unexpectedly posted losses. Three months ago, the stock market was very harsh with the company, pushing the stock down 10 percent.

Last year, Amazon reported $25.59 billion in revenue, and earnings per share of $0.51.

But this quarter is supposed to be different. Amazon is still recovering from the release of the Amazon Fire Phone. After realizing that very few people were buying the company’s new phone, Amazon had no choice but to lower the price. You can find it for $0.99 every now and then.

As a result, Amazon’s margins are suffering. But things are starting to look better. First, the revenue is still greatly increasing. While the company is investing heavily in research and development for new devices, Amazon is still first and foremost an incredibly successful ecommerce website.

In particular, Amazon Prime is doing really well. Tens of millions of people around the world subscribe to Prime to get faster delivery and streaming services. The company can probably generate healthy margins on this subscription.

Other high margin areas include advertising on Amazon’s properties, the Amazon Appstore for Android, Amazon Instant Video and the Kindle Store.

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Reddit Complied With 58% Of User Info Requests, 31% Of Takedown Notices In 2014

Reddit just released its first transparency report, outlining at the requests for user information and for content takedown that it received in 2014.

Not surprisingly, the report doesn’t go into detail about individual requests, but it does break things down by category. It also notes how many of those requests the news and content sharing site actually complied with and offers some context around how the company makes those decisions.

On the user information side, Reddit says it received 55 requests in 2014, which covered 78 different user accounts. The requests asked for things like account registration data, log data, and content uploaded by users, and Reddit says it complied with 58 percent of them. In those cases, the company says it notified the affected user “unless provided by a court order or where we decide delayed notice is appropriate based on clear criteria.”

Last year, there was a wave of tech company transparency reports following Edward Snowden’s revelations about government surveillance, but in this case, Reddit says it has “never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information.”

As for takedown notices, the company says it received 218, and it complied with 31 percent. Many of the notices that it didn’t comply with were for links to content hosted on other sites, or didn’t cover copyrighted or trademarked material. As a specific example, Reddit says it didn’t remove any content based on “claims of alleged defamation.”

You may recall that there was a bit of controversy last year around the company’s decision to remove subreddits hosting nudes from hacked celebrity accounts. Similar to its comments in the report, the company justified those takedowns as being valid from a copyright perspective.

Outside of the transparency issues, Reddit had a pretty wild 2014 — it raised $50 million, promised to give the equity to users, and lost its CEO.

You can read the full report on the Reddit blog.

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Google Offering 24 Hours Of Inbox Invites On The Day Of Outlook’s iOS Launch

Google is serving up its longest ever period of guaranteed invites for Inbox, its alternative mobile email app built by the Gmail team. The official Gmail account tweeted the announcement today (which was then retweeted by the official Inbox profile), noting that anyone who emails inbox@google.com from a personal Gmail account between 12 PM ET today and 12 PM ET tomorrow will receive an invite.

This is the first time Google has opened the Inbox invites for a full 24-hour period, and also the first time it’s done one of these promotions in 2015. It has slowly been rolling out invites in batches to those who request during times not specifically flagged for guaranteed response, but if you do it in the next 24 hours you’re a lock to get in.

What’s interesting is that this promotion is happening on the day that Outlook for iOS (based on Microsoft 2014 acquisition and third-party mobile Gmail app Accompli) is available to all. The free app from Microsoft is already being hailed as the best mobile Gmail client available on iOS devices, owing at least in part to the fact that it hasn’t been changed very much from the much-loved Accompli upon which it’s based.

Inbox is Google’s attempt to come up with an email client for its Gmail service that makes more sense on mobile devices, but Microsoft may have bought its way to a better solution. Either way, taking advantage of this Inbox invite promotion is your best bet for comparing the two first-hand.

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Cargomatic Gets $8 Million To Build An Uber For Truckers

Every day I hear about a new ‘Uber for X’ startup and most of them are pretty crappy, but every now and then one comes across my desk that’s actually pretty cool.

Los Angeles-based Cargomatic, which hopes to become ‘Uber for truckers,’ is one of the cool ones. And it just raised $8 million to expand its platform for connecting shippers and truckers who are available to help move their cargo.

Launched in 2014, Cargomatic hopes to bring some technology to the local trucking industry by providing a platform enabling shippers to list available jobs that local truckers with excess capacity can complete. By making the connection, the company hopes to not only help truckers make more money, but also to route shipping more efficiently.

The company has a website where companies can enter the details of cargo they need to ship, and a mobile app that can be used by truckers to accept jobs and track their routes.

Like other on-demand services, Cargomatic pre-vets drivers who sign up, reviewing their commercial licenses and insurance to ensure they have everything they need to transport another company’s goods. It also provides pricing transparency by determining how much a driver should make based on the weight and distance of goods that they move.

Finally, the platform enables truckers to get paid more quickly by facilitating the invoicing and payments portion of the transaction. Shippers are asked to enter their credit card or ACH information, which Cargomatic uses to pay out truckers shortly after a job is completed.

Before platforms like Cargomatic, most companies that needed to move cargo mostly relied on a few local truckers that they knew, according to Cargomatic CEO Jonathan Kessler. But those truckers weren’t always guaranteed to have excess capacity. Meanwhile, truckers had to deal with uneven work schedules and driving for a limited number of shippers.

The company hopes to reduce that friction in the market, by giving shippers a way to quickly get their good shipped while also increasing income for truckers by making them aware of jobs that are available. Because it knows where truckers and available jobs are, it can also do more efficient routing to reduce the cost of transporting goods.

The company has been operating in Southern California and in the New York metro area, but it’s looking to expand. To do that, Cargomatic has raised $8 million led by Canaan Partners with participation from Volvo Group Venture Capital, Rob Estes of Estes Express, Morado Venture Partners, SV Angel, Sherpa Ventures, Structure Capital, Nicolas Berggruen, Scott Banister, Fritz Lanman, and Hank Vigil.

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iTunes Connect Issue Logging Developers Into Other Accounts [Now Offline]

UPDATE: Apple seems to have temporarily taken down iTunes Connect.

An issue with Apple’s iTunes Connect service, which lets developers upload new versions of their apps to the App Store and track sales and income, is causing some developers to log into the wrong accounts this morning.

The issue came out as developers, noticing that they had access to apps they clearly did not develop, began posting screenshots of the issue on Twitter. As you can see in some of the examples that popped into my timeline, some of the accounts compromised by the bug gave random users access to apps developed by large companies and small, indie developers.

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Betaworks-Backed Giphy Lands $17 Million Series B Led By Lightspeed Venture Partners

Giphy has just raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from General Catalyst and previous investors such as Lerer-Hippeau, betaworks, RRE Ventures, and CAA Ventures.

The investment values Giphy at $80 million, according to a report from Business Insider.

Giphy is a search engine for gifs, put simply. The company tags gifs to certain categories or with various keywords to make finding the perfect gif that much easier.

And beyond that, Giphy ensures that artists are credited for their works and offers distribution tools to help spread the word. For example, Giphy launched a link shortener that automatically embeds a clickable gif into tweets instead of taking up characters with the gif link and the intended hyperlink.

The company launched out of betaworks in the same class as Dots and Poncho in April 2013, and has since gone on to raise a $2.5 million Series A alongside this recent $17 million Series B.

The team still works out of the betaworks office in NY.

We’ve reached out to the Giphy team and are working on getting more information.

Developing…

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Video Review: BMW i8 Hybrid Supercar

The i8 is BMW’s latest supercar. Able to go 0 to 60 in about 4.4 seconds with its hybrid electric/gas powertrain. The i8 looks like a Hot Wheels car, handles like a supercar and is as expensive as a high-end Porsche. With a starting price of $135,000, this isn’t the car for everyone. It’s actually a gateway into BMW’s other hybrid, the cute and cheap BMW i3, a shorter, sporty runaround that BMW is touting as their answer to crunchy hybrids from Honda, Nissan, and Chevy.

Read our full review here.

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CommunicateBetter.io Teaches Entrepreneurs How To Communicate Better

The fine people behind some of the best SaaS startups around are putting together 52 weekly lessons to get better at communicating both inside your company, and with potential partners and customers. Every week, subscribers will receive an email with advice on how they can get better at communicating. The best part is that it’s free.

So far, 15 companies are on board, and it looks like each company will design its own lesson for now Other companies might join later on, or the original companies will write other lessons. And I’m sure subscribers will receive promo codes for these services.

There is a story behind my interest for CommunicateBetter.io. While the website is not branded, the original idea comes from the team behind Front. Front is a shared inbox app and service that makes email, Twitter and SMS communication suck less.

I met Front co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin two weeks ago, and she couldn’t stop talking about Ben Horowitz’s book — The Hard Thing About Hard Things. “When a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge,” Horowitz wrote.

I feel like she asks the same question every time she meets someone who works in a startup — how do you work with each other? She always wants to know the tools people use, workflows and particular use cases. It’s a great way to learn what people want for Front, but it goes a bit further than that.

Communication is the keystone of a company. It can make or break a startup success story. Teams who can communicate effectively also ship more often. And finally, many startups fail because they can’t get customers and users.

Moreover, communication tools are quite popular right now. Facebook recently launched Facebook at Work, Slack raised $120 million. But instead of trying every new shiny new tool, CommunicateBetter.io might teach you a few skills.

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After Raising $1.8M, Jolla’s iPad Alternative Returns To Indiegogo With 64GB Version

After smashing through its original crowd funding goal of $380,000 in just over two hours, eventually raising $1.8 million before the campaign closed in December, perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised to see the Jolla Tablet return to Indiegogo.

The keep things interesting (and, presumably, a little more competitive), the iPad alternative, which runs Jolla’s open source Sailfish OS, is now being offered in a 64GB version, along with a few other updated specs. These include a bigger battery (4450mAh, up from 4300mAh), and limited support for microSD cards up to 128GB.

The latter means that you’ll be able to use microSD card for back-ups and extra storage, but, due to Microsoft’s licensing limitations and to keep with Jolla’s ‘open source’ ethos, microSD cards that are over 32GB and formatted for use in the Jolla Tablet will not be readable by Windows computers or other devices, such as cameras, phones or tablets, that sport microSDXC support.

“We feel that this suits best with our community’s wishes and Jolla’s values,” says the company.

A couple of other changes see the tablet’s display now being fully laminated, and Jolla are adding gyroscope and compass sensors. However, the proximity sensor that was previously touted, will not be included.

Otherwise, on the hardware front, the Jolla Tablet is aiming to square up to the iPad Mini 2, with a 7.9-inch screen, sporting a resolution of 2048 x 1563. Inside, it’s powered by a 1.8GHz quad-core processor, has 2GB of RAM and there’s a 5MP rear camera.

Meanwhile, this time around, you have until the end of February to back the iPad alternative, built by the same team of (largely) ex-Nokians, who are also behind the Jolla phone.

Talking of which, the company is offering a special phone+tablet bundle as one of the available perks on its Indiegogo campaign, should you want to go all in on Sailfish OS, the operating system that came out of the ashes of Nokia’s Meego OS, the once handset giant’s intended successor to Symbian before it jumped off a burning platform and into Microsoft’s arms.

Of note to previous backers of the Jolla Tablet, for a new perk of $25 you can upgrade to the new 64GB version.

Full list of Jolla Tablet ‘perks’ on Indiegogo:

Jolla Tablet 32GB: $219

Jolla Tablet 64GB: $249

64GB upgrade for early birds: $25

Shipping: $20

The Combo: Tablet 32GB & Phone: $419

The Combo: Tablet 64GB & Phone: $449

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Bench Bookkeeping Service Cooks Up $7 Million Series A

Bench, the TechStars-backed company that matches bookkeepers with businesses, has today closed a $7 million Series A round. The financing was led by Altos Ventures with participation from Contour Venture Partners.

Bench started out as 10sheet, an algorithm-meets-human platform where SMBs could sign up to have all their transaction paperwork sent directly through the 10sheet system and then looked over by a human bookkeeper. The idea was to remove the hassle of bookkeeping so businesses can focus on the service or product they provide, instead of focusing on hiring an accountant to handle the books or doing it themselves.

Turns out, the human piece of the equation was important.

So after graduating TechStars, the Vancouver-based company rebranded to Bench and implemented a system in which every customer would be matched directly with their own Bench bookkeeper. The technology still pulls in transactions from corporate cards and checking accounts, but also provides a one-on-one service to communicate with your assigned accountant.

Since the rebranding, the company has been focused on improving the product to enhance that one-on-one relationship. For example, the startup recently introduced in-app messaging between you and your Bench accountant so that you can communicate any time about any issue without having to call a number or send an email to some generic address.

This latest round brings total funding for the company to $9.1 million.

Bench is using the money to make more hires and build out a solid employee recruitment engine. The company currently has 126 employees, many of which are Bench’s own accountants as the startup only uses its own accountants instead of using a third-party.

“Our job is to ensure that the experience you have is easy and as painless as possible,” said cofounder Jordan Menashy. “We don’t want to effectively risk that relationship or that experience because we used a contractor or an overseas operation when this is ultimately what people are coming to us for. People think you can’t scale if you do the work yourself, but we’re in the business of proving we can actual scale this model.”

Hiring more accountants will give Bench the ability to meet demand better, and the extra funding will allow for a better office and a better system for bringing on and retaining talent.

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Bill Gates AMA; TracFone's $40M Fine; Spotify-Powered PlayStation Music

From Bill Gates' third Reddit AMA to TracFone's FTC settlement, here's what you missed on Wednesday.

Topping tech headlines on Wednesday was Bill Gates's third Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), where he talked HoloLens, world challenges, and personal shortcomings.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft's virtual reality headset came up in conversation, with Gates calling the hologram-like experience "pretty amazing." All futuristic tech doesn't excite the billionaire, though: He admitted this week that artificial intelligence freaks him out, and he approaches bitcoins with caution. Plus, if you're ever feeling down on yourself, just remember: Bill Gates feels stupid sometimes, too. Specifically when it comes to foreign languages.

In other news, TracFone has agreed to pay $40 million to settle FTC charges that it deceived millions of customers by advertising unlimited data, then throttling speeds. The largest prepaid mobile provider in the U.S., the company allegedly cut off or "drastically slowed" data service after customers reached a fixed 30-day limit, but declined to tell users, according to the FTC.

Meanwhile, Sony announced plans to shutter its Music Unlimited service and replace it with a new destination, in partnership with Spotify. Dubbed PlayStation Music, the new offering will roll out this spring in 41 markets, initially for PS consoles and Xperia smartphones and tablets. Gamers will, for instance, be able to link their PSN account with Spotify and subscribe to the Premium service through PSN wallet.

Apple this week announced revenue of $74.6 billion and an $18 billion net profit during the most recent quarter, breaking financial records. See more in the video, and be sure to check out a few other stories making headlines in the links below.

Imgur Releases A Fast Video-To-GIF Converter

Here’s an embarrassing secret: Before today, I’d never made a GIF.

I mean, obviously I’ve seen them, laughed when they’ve been passed along so that (and made a note so that I could send them along myself later). I’ve even searched for them once or twice on Giphy. But deep down, I knew I was a fraud, someone who feared the day when one of my editors would say, “Hey, can you whip up a funny GIF about this?” and I’d have to admit that I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing.

That’s why I breathed a sigh of relief today, when Imgur launched Video to GIF — as the name implies, it allows you to easily convert online videos into GIFs. In fact, the popular image-sharing service describes this as “the easiest and fastest way to make awesome GIFs from videos.”

Since I haven’t actually created a GIF before, I don’t actually know whether this is the easiest and fastest (YouTube has also been rolling out its own built-in GIF creator), but it is pretty friendly to neophytes like me. You just enter a video URL, select the portion of the video that you want to convert, add some text, and voila, you’ve got a GIF a few seconds later.

Even I managed to make a GIF — I’ll admit I had a brief moment of panic when I got confused by the various markers showing the start, stop, and current play points in the video, but eventually I got over the hump. GIFs, I will never fear you again.

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Tune Raises $27M To Unify Mobile Marketing Data

Tune, a company that bills itself as “the enterprise platform for mobile marketing,” is announcing that it has raised $27 million in Series B funding.

Founded by twin brothers Lucas and Lee Brown (pictured above with CEO Peter Hamilton), Tune was previously known as HasOffers — it rebranded last summer, giving it what Hamilton called “a more flexible, bigger name.” HasOffers was the company’s first product, which helps ad networks manage their relationships with publishers. The second product was MobileAppTracking, which helps mobile publisher see which ad campaigns are driving the most installs, engagement, and purchases.

Those are still the company’s two main offerings, but it sounds there are new products in the works.

“We’ve really focused on increasing our product development … we did some acquisitions and got a lot done,” Hamilton told me. “So we’re to start launching things over the next couple of quarters.”

He added that ad attribution has become “table stakes” — every marketer needs and expects it, but it’s not enough on its own. The biggest request from customers has been to create “a unified dashboard for paid and organic activity,” which is what Tune is working towards — it’s helped on the organic (i.e., non-ad) side by the acquisition of MobileDevHQ.

And the funding, of course, should accelerate all of this. The round was led by Icon Ventures (formerly Jafco Ventures), with participation from Performance Equity Management and Accel Partners. (Accel led the company’s $9.4 million Series A back in 2013.) Icon’s Jeb Miller is joining Hamilton, Lucas and Lee Brown, and Accel’s Rich Wong on the board of directors.

Tune says that as of this month, it has reached a $60 million revenue rate, and that it’s used by customers including Uber, Sephora, Trulia, Alaska Airlines, EA, and Supercell — in fact, it says it’s used by 60 percent of the top 20 grossing apps in the App Store.

Among other things, that suggests the company continues to grow a year after what seemed like a potentially significant blow — its removal from Facebook’s Mobile Measurement Partner program.

“I’m just incredibly proud of the team for adjusting to that,” Hamilton said. “We’re focused on helping marketers do what they need to do. Our retention has been phenomenal, and our customers are committed to the growth of our technologies.”

You can read more in this company blog post.

Featured Image: Tune



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Restaurant Discovery App Zomato Acquires Turkey’s Mekanist For Cash

Zomato, the Restaurant discovery service which competes with Yelp, has acquired Turkey’s Mekanist. The price was not disclosed but it has been confirmed as an all-cash deal. The move will take Zomato from covering 27,500 restaurants in Istanbul and Ankara to more than over 50,000 restaurants in Turkey.

The move is a sign that Zomato is prepared to take Yelp on in significant international markets outside the US. Juts read our previous coverage to see how this company is on a tear to race Yelp around the world.

Mekanist’s content and traffic will now be switched over to Zomato, where restaurants can also now use Zomato’s hyperlocal advertising target customers. The startup was founded by Eren Baydemir and Ali Servet Eyüboğlu.

In a statement Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato, said, “Mekanist has established itself as one of the heavyweights in the online restaurant search and discovery space in Turkey, and is one of the first and most successful tech startups to emerge from the Turkish startup ecosystem.”

The move follows an acquisition spree by Zomato, which has picked up five restaurant search companies in New Zealand, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Italy. The acquisition of Urbanspoon for about $52 million earlier this month, allowed Zomato to enter the US and Australia.

Founded in 2008, Zomato is also in Brazil, Chile, Lebanon and South Africa.

Zomato raised about $60 million last November in a round led by Info Edge (India) Limited and US-based investment fund Vy Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital. It is understood to be raising further capital.

It’s restaurant search app core proposition is scanned menus, photos and contact details for restaurants. Users can rate and review restaurants, as well as create their own network of fellow foodies for personalised recommendations.

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OneDrive for Business cloud storage comes to OS X and integrates with iOS app

Microsoft has just launched its OneDrive for Business cloud storage service for Mac desktops, and integrated it into the OneDrive app for iOS.

The latest update to OneDrive’s iOS app lets users access their OneDrive for Business accounts without the need for a separate app. Both services were previously integrated into a single app on Android last August.

While users can now access their work and personal storage from the same app, IT administrators can still manage and secure OneDrive for Business files as before from Office 365.

OneDrive for Business is also making its debut on OS X today, in the form of a sync client available as a public preview from the Microsoft Download Center.

Users can manage and sync files with the service using Finder, as they would with any other system folder.

Microsoft says that more features, including new auditing, reporting and device management tools for admins, are coming soon.

➤ OneDrive for Business [iOS/OS X]

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Samsung Reports Lowest Annual Profit In Three Years Due To Lagging Smartphone Sales

Samsung Electronics reported its lowest annual profit since 2011 during its earnings call today as its smartphone sales continue to suffer from increasing competition. In 2014, the company’s profit was 25 trillion won, a 32 percent drop from a high of 36.8 trillion won in 2013.

Its 4Q2014 net profit fell 27 percent to 5.3 trillion won year-over-year, in-line with Samsung’s earning guidance earlier this month.

The Korean tech giant reported that its mobile unit’s earnings dropped 64 percent year-over-year to 1.96 trillion won, marketing its fifth quarterly decline in a row. Mobile sales accounted for just 58 percent of Samsung’s total operating profit last year, a significant decrease from 70 percent in 2013. The company said smartphone shipments fell in 4Q2014 and will continue to decline this quarter.

Samsung’s semiconductor business helped buoy up its profits, even though it didn’t make up for shortfalls in its mobile unit’s performance. The unit posted 4Q2014 operating profit of 5.3 trillion won and said its performance will continue to improve as more smartphone and tablet manufacturers order chips from Samsung, especially for high-end devices.

The performance of Samsung’s mobile unit stands in contrast to its arch-rival Apple, which yesterday reported that it had sold a record-breaking 74.5 million iPhones during the first quarter of its fiscal 2015 year. Apple gained ground thanks to the popularity of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, especially in China, where it competes with Samsung as well as domestic smartphone makers like Xiaomi and Lenovo.

In fact, research firm Canalys reported that Apple topped smartphone shipments in China for the first time last quarter. This means that Samsung is now in third place, behind Apple and Xiaomi.

During the earnings call, Robert M. Yi, the senior vice president of Samsung Electronic’s investor relations, said that he expected “the business environment in 2015 to be as challenging as in 2014,” due to economic recession as well as intensifying product and price competition and the increasing cost of developing new technologies.

Featured Image: Shutterstock



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Formation 8 And Palantir Founder Joe Lonsdale Named In Sexual Assault Lawsuit

Joe Lonsdale, the technology executive best known as the co-founder of Palantir and a partner of venture capital firm Formation 8, has been accused of gender violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and other charges in a civil lawsuit filed this week in San Francisco. Formation 8 is also named as a defendant in the suit.

Reached today for comment, Lonsdale categorically denied all of the claims and said he is preparing to file a countersuit for defamation.

The lawsuit, which is embedded in full in a Scribd document below, was filed January 27 in the United States District Court in San Francisco, in the Northern District of California. Elise Clougherty, whom the suit describes as a former Formation 8 intern and current resident of Virginia, is named as the plaintiff. (TechCrunch is publishing the name of the plaintiff since the suit does not use a pseudonym such as Jane Doe. When reached today, Clougherty’s legal counsel confirmed that the plaintiff is not requesting anonymity.)

Ms. Clougherty’s legal team declined to provide any additional statement regarding the suit.

In a detailed statement sent today to friends and business associates, which was obtained by TechCrunch and included in a separate Scribd document embedded below, Lonsdale vigorously denied any wrongdoing and said the lawsuit is “a malicious campaign of lies.” He added that he plans to file a defamation suit against the accuser in federal court this week.

According to the lawsuit, Lonsdale and Clougherty began a romantic relationship in February 2012 after becoming linked in a mentorship program at Stanford, where the plaintiff was an undergraduate and Lonsdale was an alumnus.

The suit alleges that the relationship became abusive. “During the period in question, Mr. Lonsdale continuously and systematically subjected Ms. Clougherty to repeated and incessant sexual assaults and abuse, employing psychological manipulation and coercion in order to confuse, isolate, and otherwise disorient Ms. Clougherty from appreciating the true danger of her situation,” the complaint claims. This allegedly resulted in the plaintiff being “damaged and injured physically, emotionally, and financially,” the suit says, adding that she is currently suffering from “pain, anxiety, depression, severe emotional distress, embarrassment, ridicule, and PTSD, as well as loss of health, future relationships, income, employment, and future career benefits and earning potential.”

Formation 8 is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, since the plaintiff says she served as an intern there during the summer of 2012 and that the firm was aware of the alleged abuse. Clougherty, who is represented by Hutchinson Black and Cook in Boulder, L. Lin Wood in Atlanta, and the Liu Law Firm in San Francisco, is seeking a jury trial and monetary damages of at least $75,000.

Lonsdale’s lawyer, Kristen Dumont of Goodwin Procter, sent the following statement:

“This lawsuit is a vile collection of lies and a transparent attempt to destroy the reputation and good name of Joe Lonsdale. To borrow the words Ms. Clougherty used in a text to a friend, this is a ‘take down scheme.’ The overwhelming and unequivocal evidence — which includes hundreds of emails from Ms. Clougherty herself and testimony from her close friend — will exonerate Mr. Lonsdale. For nearly two years, Mr. Lonsdale has been eagerly waiting to tell the truth and to fight these defamatory and outlandish allegations. Sunlight is always the best disinfectant and we welcome this fight and our day in court, where facts trump fiction.”

This is a very sensitive case with very serious and detailed allegations on both sides. We will continue to update as more information becomes available.

The full lawsuit:

Formation 8 Joe Lonsdale Lawsuit

Lonsdale’s statement:

Joe Lonsdale Personal Statement Email

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