Month: April 2018

Stock market investors greeted payroll software company Ceridian with enthusiasm on its debut Thursday. After pricing above its expected range at $22 per share, the stock shot up 42%, closing above $31 by day’s end.

Ceridian helps clients ranging from BlackRock to Trader Joe’s keep tabs on personnel including payroll, benefits and onboarding. Its clients pay it a fee per employee per month.

“The platform is designed to ease administrative work for both employees and managers, creating opportunities for companies to increase employee engagement,” reads the prospectus.  ADP and Workday are amongst its competitors.

It was a large tech offering, raising $462 million in its IPO . But the Minneapolis-based business is lower-profile in Silicon Valley, partly because it didn’t raise venture capital.

Instead, Ceridian had financial backing from Fidelity and private equity firm, Thomas H. Lee, which owns 62% of the business. Formed in 1992, the company has gone through a few iterations. It was acquired by financial sponsors in 2007, but the acquisition of Dayforce Corporation in 2012 became the backbone of its software business.

David Ossip became CEO after that acquisition. He told TechCrunch that he was optimistic about its “single code-based platform” and that the money raised in the IPO will be used toward “paying off a bunch of debt.”

The company brought in $750.7 million in revenue for 2017, up from $704.2 million in 2016 and $693.9 million in 2015. Losses shrunk from $104.7 million to $10.5 million in that same timeframe.

“We have a history of losses and negative cash flows from operating activities, and we may not be able to attain or to maintain profitability or positive cash flows from operating activities in the future.

 

Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan served as lead bankers on the offering. Weil Gotshal and Latham & Watkins served as counsel.

The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “CDAY.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Often when I attend a conference or a networking event I am surprised by how many people operate at the periphery of the tech industry. Social media gurus, SEO “ninjas,” bloggers, etc. It’s a coterie of tech “club promoters.” The hype men of the industry.

“Hack your way to success.” “Meet the right people.” “Become a business superstar.” They’ve found their silver bullet. They boast of building a passive income from a web business, all while traveling the world as the rest of us mortals are slaving away at our 9-5 jobs.

In a world where we are searching for silver bullets, these people seem to have amassed an arsenal of them. Moreover, they’ve found audiences to sell their silver bullets to, en masse.

The most blatant example of this are some of the disciples of the 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss. The book itself is not really the issue. Ferriss indeed outlines some interesting tips on managing resources to get the highest ROI on your work. What is objectionable, however, is the hack-your-way-to-success mentality it has spawned in entrepreneurial circles.

It’s a mindset that is antithetical to everything I know about entrepreneurship; a mindset that I see when I hear people talk about having an amazing idea that they want to farm out to a young college student who can code, or outsourcing development of a product to a cheap dev house. It’s a mindset that assumes entrepreneurship is a series of networking events and fundraising meetings, or even some silver-bullet business connection they have, in lieu of a real distribution strategy. It’s taking a passive approach to a very difficult undertaking.

What is missed in all of this is the mindset of craftsmanship; that one’s expertise and deliberate focus on one’s craft is actually the primary driver for success — and not some crapshoot of a series of hacks.

What happens on the periphery  —  whether it be the towel slapping we see on Twitter from tech celebrities or headline gossip out of TechCrunch  —  is not actually meaningful as a foundation of a business or a profession. Neither are the number of coffee meetings you have scheduled or the amount of networking meetings you attend. These things are tertiary at best, and, at worst, just plain-old distractions.

To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and accumulation of expertise. This assumes that for any given undertaking you either provide expertise or you are just a bystander. It’s the experts that are the drivers — an expertise that is gained from a curiosity, and a mindset of treating one’s craft very seriously.

A startup is by nature a crash-course in developing expertise. What makes startups unique is the sheer dearth of resources. This dearth of resources forces founders to rapidly adapt their skills to meet the demands of the project.

“I didn’t know how to do x, so I just had to figure it out.” This is what I regularly hear from successful founders, whereas “I couldn’t find someone to do x, so I had to reconsider whether to pursue it at all” is a common refrain from unsuccessful founders.

If you step up to the challenge, you’ll realize that the startup is nothing more than a teacher. It, in fact, is a great teacher for no other reason than it demands the accumulation of knowledge quickly for the startup to survive.

A technical founder, whose experience may relegate her or him to a specialist role in a large company, for example, has to adapt and take on more expertise in adjacent technical areas. There simply aren’t the human resources to delegate these tasks to another specialist.

This is true for taking on tasks in other domains, whether that be sales, finance, marketing, management or design. You have to take an interest in these domains because there is no one else to fill these roles in your early-stage company.

It’s in exploring these unknown territories and facing the headwind of startup challenges that it becomes clear that the startup is merely a force of catalytic professional and character growth. With actual success of any given venture subject to the whim of outside forces, this growth is the non-monetary dividend that makes the experience priceless.

That is why the passive, 4-Hour Mindset is so self-defeating. To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice.

It’s also not practical. No serious company has been created passively — the passive mindset that leads people to say “I’ve got a great idea, I’ll hire a team to build it out” or “I have this great connection who will drive sales” while I play armchair visionary simply doesn’t work. Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without expertise or the proper skills to execute, for no other reason than ideas are not self-executing, but are rather made into being by intense engagement by skilled operators.

Most importantly, to think of a business as a series of hacks and transactional relationships, you’ll never amass the expertise that your future self and future businesses need to succeed. Startups fail withstanding founder expertise, of course. It is certainly not sufficient to be an expert. However, expertise does make it possible to traverse the struggles of creating businesses over the course of a career. You’re not simply working on the idea in front of you, you’re building the knowledge to succeed at your next projects, as well.

It is the expertise and the mindset of craftsmanship that allows someone like Elon Musk to jump from project to project and sector to sector with the knowledge of how to execute on the highest-level problems. It’s not simply his ability to find interesting ideas — it’s his command of the domains of the business that allow him to execute the way he does. He is the epitome of an interdisciplinary student of his businesses.

If you are to optimize for anything, optimize for the long-term. Use the challenges of your business today to build mastery in your craft. There is no guarantee that any one venture will succeed, but that mastery will bend luck in your favor over the long course of your career.

Source: Tech Crunch

Google has joined Apple in a growing chorus of tech giants coming out in support of the Clean Power Plan. The company filed a statement with the Environmental Protection Agency, which it has since shared with TechCrunch, supporting the Obama-era legislation.

The legislation, which sought curb power plant emissions by more than 30-percent by 2030, is expected to be repealed by the Trump administration. As with Apple’s earlier filing, Google cites both environmental and economic fallout, should the policy be repealed.

“Wind and solar deployment—as well as the associated supply chains—have been among the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy in recent years,” the company writes in the later dated April 25. “With job growth rates significantly exceeding the growth rate of the overall labor force.”

The company also notes its own personal interest in supporting the policy, citing its work to shift toward on renewable energy, along with the CPP’s potential to drive job growth. “The Clean Power Plan can continue to drive innovation and job growth,” Google adds, “while spurring the modernization of the American electricity system and reducing carbon dioxide emissions and helping to mitigate the threat of global climate change.

Under embattled head Scott Pruitt, the EPA has suggested that the CPP was an illegal extension of the agency’s authority. Late last month, Trump signed an executive order, mandating a review of the policy, a move most observers have interpreted as the first steps toward its eventual repeal.

Source: Tech Crunch

The excitement around 5G is palpable at the Brooklyn 5G Summit this week, and for good reason. Once the province of academic engineers, there is increasingly a consensus emerging among technology leaders that millimeter-wave technology is ready for prime time.

Yet, there remain large barriers to a successful rollout, particularly at the local government level. Those challenges could prevent the U.S. from aggressively competing with other nations like China, who are investing massive resources to lead this next generation of wireless technology.

The Summit, now in its fifth year and organized by New York University’s Wireless Center, Nokia, and IEEE, is designed to showcase New York’s technology leadership in the space. New York has been at the forefront of wireless for many years, with the first mobile phone call taking place in Midtown Manhattan.

That was 45 years ago though. This month, New York learned that it had been selected as one of two initial sites for a 5G testbed by the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research program, which is managed by the National Science Foundation in concert with a consortium of wireless companies.

Through a program called COSMOS, researchers will deploy a total of 249 large, medium, and mostly small cell nodes to West Harlem (including Columbia University’s Morningside Heights main campus) in order to investigate the performance of 5G in an urban setting. New York was awarded an initial grant of $3.6 million to execute the initiative.

This sort of testbed model is quite progressive in the wireless industry. While the notion of a minimum viable product and constant test feedback is a hallmark of software startups, that mentality has not been translated well into the wireless world. The hope for this testbed is that as new equipment is invented in the coming years, the West Harlem network can be continuously upgraded, serving as a model for potential deployments onto operators’ networks across the country.

It’s also critical because the network architecture of wireless is expected to change drastically in the years ahead. More computing will be done at the “edge” in order to reduce network latency and power the internet of things. In order to handle that traffic, new machine learning algorithms are going to have to be deployed that can actively manage traffic and ensure that applications have reliable performance. A realistic testbed provides key training data and analytics that can improve those algorithms and ultimately deliver better services to customers.

The good news is that the U.S. has conceived and launched this test program. The bad news is that we may still be too slow to win the competition for this generation of wireless tech.

The wireless industry’s trade association, the CTIA, has declared the rollout of 5G a “race” between the United States and the Asian nations of China, Korea, and Japan. The U.S. widely won the competition for 4G technologies, but the rise of Huawei as a dominant force in the wireless equipment space means that competition for technological leadership has never been more keen.

The White House and the federal government have made a 5G rollout a national security priority, but getting 5G wireless into the hands of consumers is likely to be stymied by opposition from local city councils and mayors around the issue of site access.

In order to provide reliable cell service, operators need to deploy cell sites near consumers. While they don’t need direct line of sight for the spectrum used in 4G, buildings and other objects can interfere with signals, making it critical to have a dense mesh of sites in urban environments.

Concerns about cancer, historical preservation, and fees for renting space have slowed the expansion of wireless services to communities across the country. Permits for erecting a new cell site can easily take a year or more.

In the 4G world, that was somewhat manageable, since the network architecture was built with large cell sites as the core of the network. With 5G though, technologists are pushing for greater decentralization through deployment of microcells that would be closer to street-level, improving quality of service while lowering power requirements. The fear is that if permits continue to take so long for every new site, the burden of that process could kill 5G in the United States.

The FCC is investigating how to reduce the burden of siting requirements, and one option is to exempt from review the kinds of small cells that are at the heart of 5G. That plan though has faced significant pushback from environmental and historical preservation activists, who don’t want the federal government overruling local government decisions on wireless rollouts.

One attendee of the Summit this morning joked that “It takes eighteen months to review a permit, and one hour to install” a small cell. Others noted that it takes just a few short weeks to deploy cell sites in South Korea and China, one reason those countries are in many ways leading the race for 5G.

As with any summit, there were buzzwords galore, but the reality is that the U.S. has an incredible opportunity to win this critical space. But we will need to fight in jurisdictions across the country if we ever want to see this technology actually arrive in our hands.

Source: Tech Crunch

Amongst massive criticism over data privacy, Facebook showed the resiliency of its advertising machine by beating Wall Street’s $11.41 billion revenue estimate by raking in $11.97 billion in revenue with $1.69 EPS compared to $1.35 estimate. Daily active users hit 1.45 billion, up 3.57% to revive Facebook’s growth after slower 2.18% growth last quarter. But Facebook only reached 2.2 billion monthly users, a 3.28 percent growth rate that was a little slower than last quarter’s 3.39% growth.

Showing Facebook’s declining web presence, mobile made up $10.7 billion, or 91% of all ad revenue, up from 89% last quarter.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “Despite facing important challenges, our community and business are off to a strong start in 2018. We are taking a broader view of our responsibility and investing to make sure our services are used for good. But we also need to keep building new tools to help people connect, strengthen our communities, and bring the world closer together.”

This was perhaps the most tumultuous quarter since Facebook went public. Last quarter saw Facebook’s first ever decline in users in a market, with a 700,000 user drop in the US & Canada market following changes to promote well being that reduced the prevalence of viral videos. Meanwhile, Facebook faced intense criticism regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its data privacy practices, leading a massive pull-back of developer capabilities as Zuckerberg headed to testify before congress.

Source: Tech Crunch

Dolo is the kindness of strangers as an app. Where’s the prettiest place in the park? What’s the best thing on the menu? How do I skip the line? Dolo lets you leave helpful suggestions for anyone nearby. The new social app launches out of beta today to augment the world with serendipitous tips from strangers. Built by two ex-Apple employees and backed with pre-seed funding from Floodgate, Dolo could reveal the secrets and potential friends hidden in the ether around us.

Like any new social app, Dolo will have a steep uphill climb to user growth. There are also apps like Foursquare, guide books like Lonely Planet, and social networks like Facebook and its Recommendations feature to compete with. But they’re often bloated, outdated, or unfocused. Dolo hopes to build a new community around turning the whole world into a bulletin board.

“If you take the construct of a cocktail party or a neighborhood bar, people feel more naturally ‘allowed’ to just mingle, eavesdrop, start a conversation, or even meet someone new” says Dolo co-founder and CEO Raja Haddad. “In larger spaces (a park, a neighborhood, a city), there are no vehicles today that allow such frictionless, comfortable, fun socializing.” That means a local expert’s knowledge ends up trapped while tourists and first-timers wander aimlessly.

Haddad and co-founder Benjamin Vigier met when they joined Apple in 2010 and worked on its Apple Store App before Haddad move on to Apple Watch marketing and Vigier helped develop Apple Pay. They later met Andy Mai at Coachella, who grew the Men’s Fashion Advice subreddit to over a million users. Together they set out “to enable serendipitous ways for people to socialize with other people around them, regardless of their pre-existing social bubbles.”

Dolo’s iOS and Android apps are now open everywhere, but it’s currently focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area where it centered its 4000 user beta. The app start with a feed of the closest tips that automatically re-sort as you move around. Anyone can post that “I need some info or a favor”, “folks need to know this!”, “I’m proposing an event”, or “just chatter and banter”. For example, my first contribution was that you can skip the line at famously overpopulated ice cream shop Bi-Rite Creamery by walking down the block to its soft-serve froyo window near SF’s Dolores Park.

That popular hipster picnic spot is actually where Dolo gets its name. And no, it’s not the same as the now defunct “bespoke app” called Dolo from 2013 that just helped you locate your friends in that park.

I was impressed by Dolo’s approach to safety and moderation that other anonymous and hyper-local apps like Yik Yak and Secret neglected until bullying led to their demise. You can use your real name or a pseudonym on Dolo, and choose a pixelated filter or mask sticker to obscure your face from the public. But then if you connect as friends with someone on the app, “the masks come off” Haddad says, and your profile’s bio is revealed. Meanwhile, users are empowered to moderate comments on their own posts by getting alerted to flags that Dolo reviews too. And all photos get reviewed by a crowdsourced moderation service.

Dolo smartly plans to “focus on achieving density vs. going directly for top-line scale” Haddad explains. That mirrors Facebook’s growth strategy that tried to get lots of users at specific colleges or locations so they don’t enter a ghost town, rather than immediately striving for global scale. It’s already raised $680,000 in a pre-seed round a year ago, but will try to raise a seed round early this summer. It hopes to put that cash into product development, and marketing activations at colleges and public places in the fall. 

Advertisers might be keen to reach potential customers when they’re super close-by and looking for local information. But that will require plenty of users as well as a tough-to-scale local ads sales team. Haddad admits “It’s obviously very challenging to get a social platform off the ground, particularly one that relies on location and density.”

NextDoor has at least proven that people are interested in local info, given it’s active in 160,000 neighborhoods. The question is if an app designed to alert you to what’s around you anywhere, rather than just close to home, will have the same legs. Dolo will also have to outlast specialized apps like Wildfire for celebrity sightings and safety alerts, Citizen for crime mapping, and Hive Social for interest-based communities.

It’s somewhat depressing, but an app like Facebook that already has ubiquity, frequent use, and local ad relationships might be better equipped to build this product than a startup. Dolo will have to figure out how to make adding and observing tips a constant enough behavior that users don’t forget about it.

But at least Dolo isn’t burdened by a hundred other features crowding out the local recommendations for attention, nor is it constrained by relying on your existing friend graph. A dedicated app for the insights of passersby holds the promise of not only illuminating what’s around us, but also mending our polarized society.

Source: Tech Crunch

Alexa can do just about everything if you ask it the right question in the right way. Today, it’s gaining a new skill, letting you move through artwork on the Meural Canvas digital artwork frame.

The company’s $595 device lets you browse artwork from new and emerging artists as well as publicly available classics.

One of the cool elements of the product has been the device’s gesture controls which let people wave their hands in front of the frame to swipe through pieces of artwork. It makes a lot of sense to have a tactile control system when you’re showing something to guests or the device is in an easily accessible spot. If you’ve opted to hanging your device on a spot on the wall that’s a little bit tougher to reach, your best move has been to switch artwork with Meural’s mobile app or desktop site.

This update makes things a bit more seamless for smart home enthusiasts and chances are that if you’re buying a smart painting, the rest of your house or apartment might have a voice assistant hub or two as well. It’s just Alexa integration for now so Google Assistant or HomeKit users will have to wait, but for those in the Amazon ecosystem, you’ll be able to swipe through artwork by querying your Echo product.

Meural is one of the more notable startups in the digital art subscription space. For hardware that is ultimately just a high-end digital photo frame, the companies are more focused on the idea that a certain type of consumer is interested in a monthly subscription to digital art. It’s a wild idea that has been a tough one to chase. Another startup in the space, Electric Objects, shut down its hardware business and had its assets bought by Giphy last year.

Source: Tech Crunch

To address parents’ concerns over inappropriate content on YouTube being seen by children, Google today is announcing an expanded series of parental controls for its YouTube Kids application. The new features will allow parents to lock down the YouTube Kids app so it only displays those channels that have been reviewed by humans, not just algorithms. And this includes both the content displayed within the app itself, as well as the recommended videos. A later update will allow parents to configure which videos and channels, specifically, can be viewed.

The controls will be opt-in – meaning parents will have to explicitly turn on the various settings within each child’s profile in YouTube Kids’ settings.

Launched under three years ago, YouTube Kids has been a breakout hit – at least  in terms of usage metrics. Over 11 million children launch the app weekly, and over 70 billion videos have been viewed in the app to date. However, from a public relations standpoint, the app has been a nightmare – inappropriate, and sometimes horrific, videos have slipped past the algorithms, leading to outrage.

The issue has to do with how the YouTube Kids app works. First, videos are uploaded to YouTube’s main site. They’re then filtered using machine learning techniques through a series of algorithms that determine if they should be added to YouTube Kids’ catalog.

But algorithms are not people, and they make mistakes. To fill in the gaps in this imperfect system, YouTube Kids relied on parents to flag suspect videos for reviews.

YouTube employs a dedicated team of reviewers for YouTube Kids, but it doesn’t say how many people are tasked with this job. (That’s a bit concerning, as it could mean it’s fewer than we’d like to see.)

This system, parents have felt for some time, just wasn’t good enough.

But instead of turning YouTube Kids into a hand-curated collection of “safe” content, the company has steadily added more controls to limit kids’ access to videos, in response to parents’ concerns.

For instance, it added a setting to disable search. But even with this on, kids would be recommended videos that only an algorithm had “reviewed.”

And, as any parent will tell you, even one bad video is one too many.

A single viewing of a scary video can lead to weeks of nightmares; and videos with bad language or mature subject matter are just as awful, from a parent’s perspective.

One high profile example of the horrors on YouTube were those videos that took a child’s favorite characters and showed them in violent situations – like “Peppa the Pig” drinking bleach or eating her father. These are offensive to not just to parents, but to many people who don’t think cruel parodies are funny. And yet they kept getting uploaded to YouTube, where they’ve confused its algorithms, much to parents’ disgust and dread.

Even beyond these extreme examples, some parents are uncomfortable with the nature of many YouTube videos themselves. We’ve found our kids watching barely disguised commercials when they’re too young to know the difference between product placements and content. We cringe as prepubescent YouTube stars sass their moms and dads and whine about doing homework. We’re sick of YouTube dictating house-ruining trends like the DIY slime craze. And sometimes, we just can’t stand to hear Jojo Siwa sing.

The updated version of YouTube Kids will let parents turn all that crap off.

Now, when parents will be able to toggle on a new setting for “Approved content only,” which also disables search.

This is different from how disabling search used to work. Before, this removed the search box from the app, but any video from YouTube Kids’ larger catalog could still appear in recommendations. Going forward, when parents make the choice to turn off search, they’re also limiting recommendations to human-approved content as well.

At last.

What took you so long, YouTube?

Meanwhile, within the new “Approved Content Only” section, parents can drill down even further to pick what human-reviewed content gets shown. They can choose from collections of videos built by YouTube and trusted partners including Sesame Workshop, PBS Kids, and Kidz Bop. The collections span categories like “arts, crafts & DIY,” “gaming,” “learning,” “music,” and more.

By default, none of these collections are selected, so parents have to make explicit choices about what kids can watch.

A later version of YouTube Kids will go even further – allowing parents to select individual videos or channels they approve of, for a truly handpicked selection.

“Over the last three years, we’ve worked hard to create a YouTube Kids experience that allows kids to access videos that are enriching, engaging and allows them to explore their endless interests,” says Malik Ducard, Global Head of Family and Learning Content for YouTube.

“Along the way, we’ve never stopped listening to feedback and we’re continuing to improve the app. In addition to all the work our teams are doing behind the scenes to make the experience the best it can be, we’re also offering parents even more options to make the right choice for their family and for each child within their family,” he adds.

Parents should probably just enable all the settings to narrow YouTube Kids down to only human-reviewed selections as soon as the settings option appears. (Just be prepared for the whining and begging that will result when you turn off access to favorite videos and annoying channels. My suggestion? Threaten to delete the app entirely.)

Kids never should have had unfettered access to YouTube, or even semi-filtered access like the YouTube Kids catalog in the first place. It should have begun as a human-reviewed catalog by default, then slowly added options to expand access over time, including the manual whitelisting of channels.

After all, this isn’t Netflix Kids over here – it’s the weird, unpredictable and sometimes scary internet…in video format.

The new features in YouTube Kids will roll out over the course of the year, the company says, with everything but the explicit whitelisting option arriving this week.

* Post clarified to explain the human reviewers will review “channels;” before we wrote they would review “videos.” YouTube reached out to notate the difference. 

Source: Tech Crunch

Netflix and BuzzFeed News are teaming up for a 20-episode documentary series called Follow This.

According to Variety, the show will be less focused on breaking news and more on taking us behind the scenes to show how BuzzFeed News reporters put together specific stories. For example, in the clip below, BuzzFeed’s Scaachi Koul talks about her reporting around ASMR.

Follow This will be produced by BuzzFeed News, with Jessica Harrop serving as showrunner and one of its executive producers. When it premieres on July 9, it won’t follow Netflix’s standard release strategy. Instead, a new 15-minute episode will come out every week.

Netflix executives have been emphatic about wanting to stay out of the live news business, but the streaming service has introduced more news- and reality-based programming over the past few years, including documentaries (like an upcoming film from Vice Media’s Motherboard) and talk shows.

BuzzFeed, meanwhile, has been creating video series for a variety of channels, including its AM to DM series for Twitter. The company told Variety it’s also pitching cable networks on a nightly news show.

Source: Tech Crunch