Busy is not the point

There’s a common safe place: Being busy.

We’re supposed to give you a pass because you were full on, all day. Frantically moving from one thing to the other, never pausing to catch your breath, and now you’re exhausted.

No points for busy.

Points for successful prioritization. Points for efficiency and productivity. Points for doing work that matters.

No points for busy.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/600174836/0/sethsblog~Busy-is-not-the-point/

EC Weekly: Gaming, crypto, shipping and the multiple future strategies of tech

Niantic EC-1

Illustration by Nigel Sussman

Greg Kumparak published the first part of his planned four part EC-1 series on Niantic yesterday, focusing on the founding story of the AR/gaming unicorn from Keyhole and Google Earth to a complicated spinout from Alphabet. Lots of great nuggets on how companies get formed and built, but one I particularly enjoyed was this one:

Like most companies, Google doesn’t like when employees leave. Especially employees who ran key parts of the company for years. Leaving means competition. Leaving means potential opportunities lost.

John [Hanke, CEO of Niantic] eventually sat down with Larry Page to figure out what it’d take to keep him within Google. They talked about John’s interest in augmented reality. They talked about a book called Freedom by David Suarez, which centers around an out-of-control AI that taps a network of real-world operatives to control the world (the earliest hints of Niantic’s first game, Ingress, already sneaking in here years before it’s made.)

John wanted to take his interest in AR and his background in maps and gaming and mash them all up and see what it could look like. Larry wanted it to happen within Google.

What I loved is that Eliot Peper wrote a piece for Extra Crunch just a few weeks ago about the importance of speculative fiction in the creation of startups, and also gave a guide on just what books he recommends to find your next startup.

Expect Part 2 of the Niantic EC-1 to drop early next week as we do a rolling release.

Game streaming is the new battlefield among tech giants

Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Game streaming is quickly becoming one of the most important strategic arenas for owning users, with offerings from all major tech and gaming companies. Devin Coldewey provided a comprehensive strategic overview of the stakes involved this week, and why so much money is being poured into a technology that until now seemed impossible due to bandwidth and latency. It’s like Super Smash Bros: Tech Melee edition:

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/30/ec-weekly-gaming-crypto-shipping-and-the-multiple-future-strategies-of-tech/

EC Weekly: Gaming, crypto, shipping and the multiple future strategies of tech

Niantic EC-1

Illustration by Nigel Sussman

Greg Kumparak published the first part of his planned four part EC-1 series on Niantic yesterday, focusing on the founding story of the AR/gaming unicorn from Keyhole and Google Earth to a complicated spinout from Alphabet. Lots of great nuggets on how companies get formed and built, but one I particularly enjoyed was this one:

Like most companies, Google doesn’t like when employees leave. Especially employees who ran key parts of the company for years. Leaving means competition. Leaving means potential opportunities lost.

John [Hanke, CEO of Niantic] eventually sat down with Larry Page to figure out what it’d take to keep him within Google. They talked about John’s interest in augmented reality. They talked about a book called Freedom by David Suarez, which centers around an out-of-control AI that taps a network of real-world operatives to control the world (the earliest hints of Niantic’s first game, Ingress, already sneaking in here years before it’s made.)

John wanted to take his interest in AR and his background in maps and gaming and mash them all up and see what it could look like. Larry wanted it to happen within Google.

What I loved is that Eliot Peper wrote a piece for Extra Crunch just a few weeks ago about the importance of speculative fiction in the creation of startups, and also gave a guide on just what books he recommends to find your next startup.

Expect Part 2 of the Niantic EC-1 to drop early next week as we do a rolling release.

Game streaming is the new battlefield among tech giants

Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Game streaming is quickly becoming one of the most important strategic arenas for owning users, with offerings from all major tech and gaming companies. Devin Coldewey provided a comprehensive strategic overview of the stakes involved this week, and why so much money is being poured into a technology that until now seemed impossible due to bandwidth and latency. It’s like Super Smash Bros: Tech Melee edition:

Google and Amazon bring cloud-native infrastructure and familiarity online, but is that enough to compete with the gaming know-how of Microsoft, with its own cloud clout, or Sony, which made strategic streaming acquisitions and has a service up and running already? What of the third parties like Nvidia and Valve, publishers and storefronts that may leverage consumer trust and existing games libraries to jump start a rival? It’s a wide-open field, all right.

Plus, in case you missed our live conference call, you can read the transcript of Lucas Matney and Eric Peckham talking shop from GDC.

Crypto 2.0

Andrey Suslov via Getty Images

Yes, yes, there is a crypto winter, for sure. But this is precisely the time that all the real product development and engineering work is going to take place. Longtime TechCrunch columnist Jon Evans dives into some of the most promising veins of the next-generation of blockchain and crypto technology, finding much to be excited about:

It may seem strange that, even as the public cryptocurrency frenzy of 2017-18 dies down, we seem to be in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of blockchain advances, initiatives, and iterations. But it seems that now that (some of) the get-rich-quick scam artists have been filtered away, the true believers and technical devotees can get back to work building what they believe to be the future.

Is it? Well, maybe not the future, but very possibly a nontrivial part of it. As I’ve argued before, though, cryptocurrencies and decentralized apps don’t need to conquer the mainstream and replace the existing tech megacorporates to succeed, any more than Linux had to destroy Microsoft in order to become enormously influential. All they have to do is provide a viable alternative in other to keep government and fiat currencies somewhat honest. I’m pleased to report that we’re noticeably closer to that state of affairs than we were a year ago.

How to not announce your startup (and avoid prison time)

Henrik Sorensen via Getty Images

I’ve been doing a lot of research around the new culture of Form D filings for the past few months. Those threads finally came together this week in a comprehensive overview of how startups are now filing their rounds with the SEC:

Here’s the secret about Form D filings today: the norms in Silicon Valley have changed, and Form D filings are often filed late, not at all, and many startups are advised to lie low in the hopes of avoiding stricter SEC scrutiny. What was once a fait accompli is now a deliberative process, with important decision points for founders.

Extra Crunch contacted about two dozen startup attorneys, from the biggest firms in the industry to the one-person shops with a shingle out front. Getting straight answers here has been tough, if only because no lawyer really wants to say out loud that they actively recommend their clients violate government regulations (there is that whole law license thing, which apparently lawyers care about).

The ethics of internet culture

Alexander Spatari via Getty Images

Our resident technology ethicist and humanist Greg Epstein interviewed The Atlantic correspondent Taylor Lorenz about the challenges laden with social platforms and their effects on youth culture. Far from a Manichaean view of these tools, Lorenz provides distinctive nuance, serving the good with the trenchant criticism. Lorenz from the interview:

I would say Instagram is just like a microcosm of the broader Internet in a lot of ways. Yes, there is toxic, problematic and awful stuff. There’s also a lot of positive amazing stuff. I actually tend to focus my writing mostly on the more positive things. I write about how people use any social platform, but it ends up being a lot about Instagram because most [young] people are on Instagram, to create and to connect with people.

Like all social platforms, there is a fair amount of misinformation, Nazis, things like that. Those people are always going to be on every platform and they’re going to try to exploit it. I think it’s the job of the platform to police this type of stuff. Instagram has done a better job of mitigating that type of bad content compared to YouTube and Facebook. It’s still there; you can never completely eliminate it.

Improving web accessibility

The original simplicity of the textual web has given way to much richer media content, but that transition hasn’t always been easy for users who rely on screen readers and other technologies to access one of humanity’s most important learning and knowledge resources. Accessibility consultant Beth Franssen walked Extra Crunch through the latest developments on how to make accessibility work again before lawsuits proliferate:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires US businesses that serve the public to provide equal access and accommodations to everyone, whether through a physical building or a digital experience. Just as stores provide ramps as well as stairs, websites need to accommodate people with varying abilities, from movement disorders to visual and auditory impairments. The number of website accessibility lawsuits raised against private companies more than doubled last year. A single plaintiff won $100K in a similar ADA lawsuit in 2017.

Shipping and logistics is getting a tech makeover

Our guest writer John Eden discusses the two forces that are reshaping shipping and logistics:

… technology is not the only force driving change. Regulators are taking a fresh look at the lives of workers in the gig economy, often concluding that many folks classified as independent contractors ought to be treated as employees. As we will see, this is causing a sharp uptick in the creation of small-motor carriers. At the same time, oddly enough, driver scarcity is forcing innovators in the shipping and logistics space to think very hard about how to entice new drivers into the market.

A Tale of Two (other) Transcripts

If you missed our other live conference call this week with TechCrunch editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino on all the announcements out of Apple’s big launch event this week, do be sure to take a read.

We are also trialing a new experiment — using feedback from Extra Crunch members — to transcript some popular Silicon Valley podcasts as a member benefit. This week, we published an episode of ‘This is Your Life in Silicon Valley’ interviewing Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf.

Our next Verified Expert

Eric Eldon published our next Verified Expert attorney, this time Cooley LLP lawyer Mike Lincoln.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/30/ec-weekly-gaming-crypto-shipping-and-the-multiple-future-strategies-of-tech/

Choices

Judge people by where they came from

… Judge people by where they’re going

Choices come with responsibility

… People can’t be trusted to make good choices

Dominate

… Affiliate

Redemption is possible

… Past actions define the future

People with authority should be held accountable

… People with authority should do what they want

It’s most efficient to slot people into tracks early

… There’s potential in everyone

Because I said so

… Let’s figure it out

Talent is inborn

… Skill is earned

Investing in culture change pays off

… People are separate from the culture

Push people away

… Pull people closer

Conserve it for later

… Use it all

Wait to get picked

… Pick yourself

It takes a village

… You can do it by yourself

Look forward

… Look back

Consume

… Create

Possibility

… Safety

Lead

… Follow

Open doors for others

… Take what you can

As long as it’s not against the law it’s fine

… Do what’s right

Politics

… Governance

Later

… Now

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/600149738/0/sethsblog~Choices/

Pretending to be stupid

Intellectual horsepower is overrated.

“I’m too stupid to do that,” isn’t helpful and it’s probably not true.

We’re capable of learning Photoshop, We can figure out the arithmetic behind our analytics. We can follow a nuanced discussion of strategy. We can learn to read a balance sheet and we can get sophisticated about long-term decision making.

If we’re being honest, the real reason we don’t do this work isn’t that we’re stupid.

It’s probably that we haven’t made it a priority.

It might be that we’re afraid, that we’re lazy or that we’re underinformed.

All three are temporary conditions if we want them to be. Or we can live with them and assume that we’re stupid instead.

(Which is worse: to be seen as stupid or to have priorities that don’t match the opportunity?)

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/600114344/0/sethsblog~Pretending-to-be-stupid/

Amazon Prime members get a free year of Nintendo Switch Online through Twitch Prime

You may have forgotten about Twitch Prime, but the company is adding an interesting new perk for Nintendo Switch owners. The company is giving out up to one year of Nintendo Switch Online, the subscription service that lets you play online multiplayer games and access NES games.

If you’re an Amazon Prime or Prime Video subscriber, you automatically become a Twitch Prime member once you link your accounts together — Amazon owns Twitch. Twitch Prime gives you access to free loot, such a in-game skins for Apex Legends or Call of Duty Black Ops 4, as well as free (mostly indie) games.

As part of Twitch Prime, you can also subscribe to a Twitch channel for free — the streamer still gets compensated. Twitch Prime also gives your more options to customize your chat experience.

Nintendo and Twitch are partnering to offer a complimentary Nintendo Switch Online subscription — it usually costs $20. But you won’t get 12 months at once. You can go to this website and redeem three months right now.

In two months, you’ll be able to redeem another nine months. Twitch and Nintendo probably hope that you’ll forget about the second part of the perk, so don’t forget to set up a reminder.

The offer expires on September 24, 2019 for the initial three months, and on January 22, 2020 for the additional nine months. The good news is that it also works if you’re already a Nintendo Switch Online subscriber. You’ll just get additional subscription time.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/28/amazon-prime-members-get-a-free-year-of-nintendo-switch-online-through-twitch-prime/

Boundless gets $7.8M to help immigrants navigate the convoluted green card process

Two years ago, former Amazon product manager Xiao Wang stood on the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco and made the case for a platform meant to help couples apply for marriage green cards, a complex process made worse by bureaucracy and red tape.

Called Boundless, the startup had spun out of Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs and raised a $3.5 million seed round. Now, Foundry Group’s Brad Feld has led a $7.8 million Series A in the startup, with participation from existing investors Trilogy Equity Partners, PSL, Two Sigma Ventures and Founders’ Co-Op.

“Families have really only had two choices, they could spend weeks or months trying to figure this out on their own, or they can spend thousands and thousands of dollars on an immigration attorney,” Wang, Boundless co-founder and chief executive officer, told TechCrunch. “What we are trying to do is basically give everyone access to the information, the tools and the support that was previously only available to those that could afford high-priced attorneys.”

Boundless charges $750 for its online green card application support services, which includes ensuring families correctly complete applications and have access to an immigration lawyer to review those applications. The fee comes at a major discount to the costs of an immigration lawyer and streamlines a process that can be delayed months when errors are made. The startup also offers a recently launched $395 naturalization product meant to assist eligible green card holders with their U.S. citizenship applications.

Wang founded Boundless in 2017 after helping build Amazon Go, the e-commerce giant’s line of cashierless convenience stores. Wang is an immigrant, having relocated to the U.S. from China when he was a child.

“We spent almost five months of rent money on an immigration attorney because the stakes were so high and we only had one shot,” Wang said. “We wanted to make sure we were doing it right. This is a story that is echoed by millions of families every year; this is such an important part of them starting a new life in a new country.”

Wang, after three years at Amazon, realized he could use his technology background and data prowess to build an information platform supportive of these millions of families.

“This is exactly what tech and data is meant to do,” he said. “I believe there is a moral obligation for tech to be used in meaningfully improving people’s lives.”

Boundless plans to use this investment to expand its team and product offerings, as well as build out its content library, which Wang said is rapidly becoming the go-to place for immigrants navigating the legal labyrinth that is the U.S. green card and citizenship process. Its resources page, which includes straightforward guides, a number of forms and more, counts 300,000 unique visitors per month.

“We hold their hand through the entire process,” Wang said. “We want to be the single source of information and tools for all family-based immigration.”

Wang and his team also hope to shine a brighter light on immigration policy. In late 2018, as part of its effort to be louder advocates for immigrants, Boundless, alongside Warby Parker, Foursquare, Foundation Capital and more, published an open letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security opposing its proposed “public charge” immigration regulation, which would allow for non-citizens who are in the country legally to be denied a visa or a green card if they have a medical condition, financial liabilities and other disqualifiers.

“The stakes for making sure your application is correct have never been higher; the government has far more leeway to be able to deny applications,” Wang said. “While we can’t speed up the government processing times, we can make meaningful improvements to helping families gather all the materials they need to send in the right information.”

Pioneer Square Labs is invigorating Seattle’s startup ecosystem

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/28/boundless-gets-7-8m-to-help-immigrants-navigate-the-convoluted-green-card-process/

Microsoft gives 500 patents to startups

Microsoft today announced a major expansion of its Azure IP Advantage program, which provides its Azure users with protection against patent trolls. This program now also provides customers who are building IoT solutions that connect to Azure with access to 10,000 patents to defend themselves against intellectual property lawsuits.

What’s maybe most interesting here, though, is that Microsoft is also donating 500 patents to startups in the LOT Network. This organization, which counts companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, SAP, Epic Games, Ford, GM, Lyft and Uber among its well over 150 members, is designed to protect companies against patent trolls by giving them access to a wide library of patents from its member companies and other sources.

“The LOT Network is really committed to helping address the proliferation of intellectual property losses, especially ones that are brought by non-practicing entities, or so-called trolls,” Microsoft  CVP and Deputy General Counsel Erich Andersen told me. 

This new program goes well beyond basic protection from patent trolls, though. Qualified startups who join the LOT Network can acquire Microsoft patents as part of their free membership and as Andresen stressed, the startups will own them outright. The LOT network will be able to provide its startup members with up to three patents from this collection.

There’s one additional requirement here, though: to qualify for getting the patents, these startups also have to meet a $1,000 per month Azure spend. As Andersen told me, though, they don’t have to make any kind of forward pledge. The company will simply look at a startup’s last three monthly Azure bills.

“We want to help the LOT Network grow its network of startups,” Andersen said. “To provide an incentive, we are going to provide these patents to them.” He noted that startups are obviously interested in getting access to patents as a foundation of their companies, but also to raise capital and to defend themselves against trolls.

Microsoft joins the LOT Network to help fight patent trolls

The patents we’re talking about here cover a wide range of technologies as well as geographies. Andersen noted that we’re talking about U.S. patents as well as European and Chinese patents, for example.

“The idea is that these startups come from a diverse set of industry sectors,” he said. “The hope we have is that when they approach LOT, they’ll find patents among those 500 that are going to be interesting to basically almost any company that might want a foundational set of patents for their business.”

As for the extended Azure IP Advantage program, it’s worth noting that every Azure customer who spends more than $1,000 per month over the past three months and hasn’t filed a patent infringement lawsuit against another Azure customers in the last two years can automatically pick one of the patents in the program’s portfolio to protect itself against frivolous patent lawsuits from trolls (and that’s a different library of patents from the one Microsoft is donating to the LOT Network as part of the startup program).

As Andresen noted, the team looked at how it could enhance the IP program by focusing on a number of specific areas. Microsoft is obviously investing a lot into IoT, so extending the program to this area makes sense. “What we’re basically saying is that if the customer is using IoT technology — regardless of whether it’s Microsoft technology or not — and it’s connected to Azure, then we’re going to provide this patent pick right to help customers defend themselves against patent suits,” Andersen said.

In addition, for those who do choose to use Microsoft IoT technology across the board, Microsoft will provide indemnification, too.

Patent trolls have lately started acquiring IoT patents, so chances are they are getting ready to making use of them and that we’ll see quite a bit of patent litigation in this space in the future. “The early signs we’re seeing indicate that this is something that customers are going to care about in the future,” said Andersen.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/28/microsoft-gives-500-patents-to-startups/

Bottlenecks

Are you a bottleneck?

Sometimes it’s a good thing. It would be impossible to guzzle a Pepsi if it were served in a saucer–the bottleneck creates the path of maximum slam.

It would be difficult to water your lawn without a nozzle. The bottleneck creates pressure that allows you to reach further.

But in an organization, a bottleneck can be a real problem.

If the project is sitting on your desk, no value is being created. The opportunity, then, is to achieve your goals by getting every single thing off your desk so that it can move forward.

A team that is sitting still waiting for you to attend the approval meeting is suffering from your bottleneck. And so are the people you set out to serve.

The trick: Figure out which parts of the approval process truly benefit from your unique judgment and skills, and which parts are merely your fear at work.

And then get it off your desk and let someone else do it.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/600075304/0/sethsblog~Bottlenecks/

The most important developments in Crypto 2.0

Something strange is happening in the world of cryptocurrencies. To the investor, the speculator, or the casual observer, the industry is in the midst of the “crypto winter” marked by dwindling public interest and stagnant prices after last year’s massive plunges.

But to the engineer or the founder, it is an industry which has never been so feverish; a sector erupting and overflowing with new initiatives, new developments, and new technologies. What follows is a brief, oversimplified summary of what I view as the most important current initiatives.

Outsiders ask, quite reasonably: will anyone outside of a tiny minority ever really care? But “ever” is a long time, and blockchainers are still fairly flush with funding from the boom, and — more importantly — armed with two of the most potent weapons known to humankind: technical brilliance and true belief.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/27/the-most-important-developments-in-crypto-2-0/

Microsoft, Adobe and SAP prepare to expand their Open Data Initiative

At last year’s Microsoft Ignite conference, the CEOs of Microsoft, Adobe and SAP took the stage to announce the launch of the Open Data Initiative. The idea behind this effort was to make it easier for their customers to move data between each others’ services by standardizing on a common data format and helping them move their data out of their respective silos and into a single customer-chosen data lake. At this week’s Adobe Summit, the three companies today announced how they plan to expand this program as they look to bring in additional partners.

“The intent of the companies joining forces was really to solve a common customer problem that we hear time and time again, which is that there are high-value business data tends to be very siloed in a variety of different applications,” Alysa Taylor, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Business Applications & Global Industry, told me. “Being able to extract that data, reason over that data, garner intelligence from that data, is very cost-prohibitive and it’s very manual and time-consuming.”

The core principle of the alliance is that the customers own their data and they should be able to get as much value out of it as they can. Ideally, having this common data schema means that the customer doesn’t have to figure out ways to transform the data from these vendors and can simply flow all of it into a single data lake that then in turn feeds the various analytics services, machine learning systems and other tools that these companies offer.

At the Adobe Summit today, the three companies showed their first customer use case based on how Unilever is making use of this common data standard. More importantly, though, they also stressed that the Open Data Initiative is indeed open to others. As a first step, the three companies today announced the formation of a partner advisory council.

“What this basically means is that we’ve extended it out to key participants in the ecosystem to come and join us as part of this ODI effort,” Adobe’s VP of Ecosystem Development Amit Ahuja told me. “What we’re starting with is really a focus around two big groups of partners. Number one is, who are the other really interesting ISVs who have a lot of this core data that we want to make sure we can bring into this kind of single unified view. And the second piece is who are the major players out there that are trying to help these customers around their enterprise architecture.”

The first 12 partners that are joining this new council include Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, Inmobi, Sprinklr and WPP. This is very much a first step, though. Over time, the group expects to expand far beyond this first set of partners and include a much larger group of stakeholders.

“We really want to make this really broad in a way that we can quickly make progress and demonstrate that what we’re talking about from a conceptual process has really hard customer benefits attached to it,” Abhay Kumar, SAP’s global vice president, Global Business Development & Ecosystem, noted. The use cases the alliance has identified focus on market intelligence, sales intelligence and services intelligence, he added.

Today, as enterprises often pull in data from dozens of disparate systems, making sense of all that information is hard enough, but to even get to this point, enterprises first have to transform it and make it usable. To do so, they then have to deploy another set of applications that massages the data. “I don’t want to go and buy another 15 or 20 applications to make that work,” Ahuja said. “I want to realize the investment and the ROI of the applications that I’ve already bought.”

All three stressed that this is very much a collaborative effort that spans the engineering, sales and product marketing groups.

Microsoft, SAP and Adobe take on Salesforce with their new Open Data Initiative for customer data

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/27/microsoft-adobe-and-sap-prepare-to-expand-their-open-data-initiative/

Microsoft sues to take control of domains involved in Iran hacking campaign

Microsoft has won a restraining order in a U.S. court in order to take control of domains used by an Iranian hacker group.

The software and cloud giant applied to the court in order to take control of 99 websites used by the hacker group, known as Phosphorus or APT 35, in various hacking operations. The court granted the motion earlier this month but was unsealed this week, said Microsoft’s consumer security chief Tom Burt in a blog post.

The granted order allowed Microsoft to take control of the domains from the registrars and host the domains on Microsoft’s own servers, including “outlook-verify.net” and “yahoo-verify.net,” and redirect malicious traffic safely into a Microsoft-controlled sinkhole.

“Throughout the course of tracking Phosphorus, we’ve worked closely with a number of other technology companies, including Yahoo, to share threat information and jointly stop attacks,” said Burt. (TechCrunch and Yahoo are both owned by Verizon Media.)

The hacker group is believed to be linked to a former U.S. Air Force counter-intelligence officer Monica Witt, who defected to Tehran in 2013 and is now wanted by the FBI for alleged espionage. The hackers has targeted academics and journalists with spearphishing campaigns designed to look like Yahoo and Google login pages but can defeat two-factor authentication.

It’s the latest legal action Microsoft has taken against a hacker group. Last year, the company filed a suit against Strontium, known as APT 28 or “Fancy Bear” — associated with Russian state intelligence agency, the GRU. It was one of a dozen actions over two years to take down fake websites used to trick targets into turning over their usernames and passwords.

Justice Department files criminal charges against seven Russian spies over Fancy Bear cyberattacks

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/27/microsoft-sues-phosphorus/

Microsoft memo bans April Fools’ Day pranks, because they’re the worst

Beware children. April Fools’ Day is nearly upon us. It’s arguably the worst day of the year, but one we stubbornly cling to because of tradition. Tech companies certainly aren’t immune from the draw of building up and instantly crushing the dreams of millions of users, and pranks have become pretty common place with many top companies. These range from the fun to the terrible, with roughly 98 percent landing firmly in the former.

This year, Microsoft is taking a bold stand against pranks. Chris Capossela sent a memo asking teams “not do any public-facing April Fools’ Day stunts.”  In the letter obtained by the Verge, the marketing head notes that “these stunts have limited positive impact and can actually result in unwanted news cycles.”

As good natured as the pranks may be, they can have problematic repercussions in the era of social media, where readers and reporters alike are having enough trouble filter out the bullshit, even when it doesn’t come from trusted, official sources like Microsoft PR.

Maybe Chris and I are being sticks in the mud, but honestly, what’s the return on investment for the rare good April Fool’s Day prank? “I appreciate that people may have devoted time and resources to these activities, but I believe we have more to lose than gain by attempting to be funny on this one day,” says Capossela.

The cynic in me (embittered by years of bad pranks) thinks this could all be the lead up to some master prank. In which case, my god have mercy on our souls.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/27/microsoft-memo-bans-april-fools-day-pranks-because-theyre-the-worst/

Amazon is developing a show based on Octavia Butler’s ‘Wild Seed’

Amazon Prime Video is developing a series based on “Wild Seed,” the novel by acclaimed science fiction writer Octavia Butler.

Deadline reports that the project comes from Juvee Productions (the production company of Viola Davis and Julius Tennon) and will be written by author Nnedi Okorafor and filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, with Kahiu directing.

Hollywood seems to be taking notice of Butler, who died in 2006, and is seen as a pioneer of Afrofuturist fiction. As of 2017, “Wrinkle in Time” director Ava DuVernay was reportedly developing a TV series based on another Butler novel, “Dawn.”

“Wild Seed” is part of Butler’s Patternist saga, and while it was one of the final books published in the series, it sets the stage for the larger conflict, laying out the romance and rivalry between the African immortals Doro and Anyanwu. (I still have vivid memories of ignoring my high school homework so that I could finish the novel in a single sitting.)

Okorafor, meanwhile, is the author of the award-winning fantasy novel “Who Fears Death,” which was optioned by HBO, with “Game of Thrones” writer George R.R. Martin attached as an executive producer.

“We love Octavia Butler and her work and have for decades,” Kahiu and Okorafor told Deadline. “But Wild Seed is our favorite. It’s expansive, disturbing, and unique.”

I can finally publicly talk about it. We’re developing WILD SEED! !! https://t.co/gZT5XS1icc

— Nnedi Okorafor, PhD (@Nnedi) March 26, 2019

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/27/amazon-wild-seed/

The long run (and the short runs)

I hope we can all agree that the long run is made up of a bunch of short runs.

That seems obvious.

The surprising thing is that we live our short runs as if that isn’t true.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/600038982/0/sethsblog~The-long-run-and-the-short-runs/

Unicorns aren’t profitable, and Wall Street doesn’t care

In Silicon Valley, investors don’t expect their portfolio companies to be profitable. “Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies,” a bible for founders, instead calls for heavy spending on growth to scale in an Amazon-like fashion.

As for Wall Street, it’s shown an affinity for stock in Jeff Bezos’ business, despite the many years it spent navigating a path to profitability, as well as other money-losing endeavors. Why? Because it too is far less concerned with profitability than market opportunity.

Lyft, a ride-hailing company expected to go public this week, is not profitable. It posted losses of $911 million in 2018, a statistic that will make it the biggest loser amongst U.S. startups to have gone public, according to data collected by The Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, Lyft’s $2.2 billion in 2018 revenue places it atop the list of largest annual revenues for a pre-IPO business, trailing behind only Facebook and Google in that category.

Wall Street, in short, is betting on Lyft’s revenue growth, assuming it will narrow its loses and reach profitability… eventually.

Wall Street’s hungry for unicorns

Lyft, losses notwithstanding, is growing rapidly and Wall Street is paying attention. On the second day of its road show, reports emerged that its IPO was already oversubscribed. As a result, Lyft is said to have upped the cost of its stock, with new plans to raise more than $2 billion at a valuation upwards of $25 billion. That represents a revenue multiple of more than 11x, a step up multiple of more than 1.6x from its most recent private valuation of $15.1 billion and, of course, Wall Street’s insatiable desire for unicorns, profitable or not.

New data from PitchBook exploring the performance of billion-dollar-plus VC exits confirms Wall Street’s leniency toward unprofitable tech companies. Sixty-four percent of the 100+ companies valued at more than $1 billion to complete a VC-backed IPO since 2010 were unprofitable, and in 2018, money-losing startups actually fared better on the stock exchange than money-earning businesses. Moreover, U.S. tech companies that had raised more than $20 million traded up nearly 25 percent of 2018, while the S&P 500 technology sector posted flat returns.

Wall Street is still adapting to the rapid growth of the tech industry; public markets investors, therefore, are willing to deal with negative to minimal cash flows for, well, a very long time.

A tolerance for outsized exits

There’s no doubt Lyft and its much larger competitor, Uber, will go public at monstrous valuations. The two IPOs, set to create a whole bunch of millionaires and return a number of venture capital funds, will provide Silicon Valley a lesson in Wall Street’s tolerance for outsized exits.

Much like a seed-stage investor must bet on a founder’s vision, Wall Street, given a choice of several unprofitable businesses, has to bet on potential market value. Fortunately, this strategy can work quite well. Take Floodgate, for example. The seed fund invested a small amount of capital in Lyft when it was still a quirky idea for ridesharing called Zimride. Now, it boasts shares worth more than $100 million. I’m sure early shareholders in Amazon — which went public as a money-losing company in 1997 — are pretty happy, too.

Ultimately, Wall Street’s appetite for unicorns like Lyft is a result of the shortage of VC-backed IPOs. In 2006, it was the norm for a company to make its stock market debut at 7.9 years old, per PitchBook. In 2018, companies waited until the ripe age of 10.9 years, causing a significant slowdown in big liquidity events and stock sales.

Fund sizes, however, have grown larger and the proliferation of unicorns continues at unforeseen rates. That may mean, eventually, an influx of publicly shared unicorn stock. If that’s the case, might Wall Street start asking more of these startups? At the very least, public market investors, please don’t be swayed by WeWork‘s eventual stock offering and its “community adjusted EBITDA.” Silicon Valley’s pixie dust can’t be that potent.

Unicorns aren’t special anymore

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/26/unicorns-arent-profitable-wall-street-doesnt-care/

Adobe announces deeper data sharing partnership with Microsoft around accounts

Microsoft and Adobe have been building a relationship for some time, and today the two companies announced a deeper integration between the two platforms at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.

It involves sharing Marketo data, the company that Adobe acquired last September for $4.75 billion. Because it’s marketers, they were duty-bound to give it a new name. This data sharing approach is being dubbed Account Based Experience or ABX for short. The two companies are sharing data account data between a number of sources including Marketo Engage in Adobe Experience Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, as well as the LinkedIn, the business social platform Microsoft bought in 2016 for a whopping $26.2 billion.

Microsoft has been trying to find ways to put that LinkedIn data to work, and tools like Marketo can use the data in LinkedIn to understand their account contacts better. Steve Lucas, former CEO at Marketo, who is now Senior Vice President and head of the Marketo team at Adobe says accounts tend to be much more complex sales than selling to individuals, involving multiple decision makers. It’s a sales cycle that can stretch on for months, and having access to additional data about the account contacts can have a big impact.

“With these new account-based capabilities, marketing and sales teams will have increased alignment around the people and accounts they are engaging, and new ways to measure that business impact,” Lucas explained in a statement.

Brent Leary, principal at CRM Essentials, who has been working in CRM, customer service and marketing for years sees this as useful partnership for customers from both vendors. “Integrating Microsoft Dynamics and LinkedIn more closely with Marketo gives Adobe’s Experience Cloud some great data to leverage in order to have a more complete picture of B2B customers,” Leary told TechCrunch.

The goal is to close complex sales, and having access to more complete data across the two product sets can help achieve that.

Adobe gets its company, snaring Marketo for $4.75 billion

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/26/adobe-announces-deeper-data-sharing-partnership-with-microsoft-around-accounts/

It’s not your tribe

I didn’t say this clearly enough in my book.

While there are a few outlier organizations and individuals who ‘have’ a tribe, more often than not, we simply have the privilege to talk to a community, to connect a community and perhaps to lead them for a while.

But it’s a mistake to believe that they are ours to do with as we choose.

The tribe of people who read Fast Company in the first few years weren’t invented by Alan and Bill. They were organized by them, introduced to each other (and new ideas) by them and challenged by them. But, as the world changed, the tribe found other places to meet those needs.

At the watercooler and at the conference, the conversations shifted. It’s impossible to stay at the center of an evolving community for very long. Even for Apple. More profit doesn’t always open the door for more connection.

The tribe of people who follow a politician are rarely aligned with her, personally. Instead, they’re aligned with each other, with the way it feels to be part of this movement. Over time, the tribe and the leader inevitably drift apart.

The tribe of people who listen to Dave and Nastassia are into food and drink. But if Cooking Issues went away, the tribe wouldn’t disappear. When Booker and Dax produce a device for the tribe, that’s precisely what they’re doing. Doing it for the tribe, not to them. Most outsiders might wonder what it’s for, or hesitate at the price, but for those in the heart of the community, it’s a no-brainer, right here and right now.

Tribal leaders are in a hurry, a race to connect and inspire. Tribal leaders dig deep to be seen, sure, but mostly to see. To see what the group believes and fears, and to help them get to where they hope to go.

The realization that the tribe is already there, just waiting for you to contribute, is energizing. And the fact is that while we get the benefit of the doubt—that the tribe is open to hearing from you—they’re not yours.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/600004642/0/sethsblog~Its-not-your-tribe/