Amazon is ready to challenge Apple with a cheaper, Alexa-powered set of wireless earbuds. If successful, it would carve out a space for the popular digital assistant, and its deep connections to the rest of Amazon’s ecosystem, in the mobile world Amazon has hitherto largely failed to penetrate. But that’s a big if.
A report from Bloomberg details the upcoming hardware, which sounds a lot like AirPods (and the handful of other wireless sets that have appeared): a pair of small wireless in-ear buds, a case that doubles as a charger and built-in controls and a mic so you can control your music, talk to friends and ask Alexa things on the go.
Of course, the obvious question is how exactly this will work, given that AirPods have special privileges as first-party Apple hardware that let them perform tasks others can’t yet do. If your phone is locked, non-AirPod headphones (for instance Galaxy Buds) can’t connect through their associated app to look stuff up or provide services. You can of course set up a “Hey Siri, OK Google” situation, but that’s a bit sad.
Bloomberg’s report says that the Alexa headphones let you “order goods, access music, weather and other information,” but it isn’t clear under what circumstances. If you have to have the phone unlocked and an app open for it to work, the whole thing is a non-starter. And it seems unlikely that Apple would grant Amazon some kind of clearance to do the kind of things only AirPods can do.
It’s conceivable that the headphones will, when possible, connect instead on detection of a command to a compatible Alexa device nearby with an internet connection — and there’s no shortage of those in many a tech-savvy home. But if you’re walking down the street and need to ask directions, you may have to pull the phone out, which rather negates the already somewhat limited convenience of owning a pair of wireless headphones.
These difficulties, plus those associated with simply making such a sophisticated piece of hardware for relatively cheap, explain why the headphones have reportedly had a bit of trouble getting shipped.
A cheaper price tag and potentially better audio quality may not be enough to make this particular endeavor a winner, but we’ll know more if and when Amazon goes official.
Source: TechCrunch
Snap Games launches with six titles for you and friends to check out.
Source: CNET
It will be built with the help of The9 Limited.
Source: CNET
If you’re a big fan of the show, check out these cool products online.
Source: CNET
Startups are but one species in a complex regulatory and public policy ecosystem. This ecosystem is larger and more powerfully dynamic than many founders appreciate, with distinct yet overlapping laws at the federal, state and local/city levels, all set against a vast array of public and private interests. Where startup founders see opportunity for disruption in regulated markets, lawyers counsel prudence: regulations exist to promote certain strongly-held public policy objectives which (unlike your startup’s business model) carry the force of law.
Snapshot of the regulatory and public policy ecosystem. Image via Law Office of Daniel McKenzie
Although the canonical “ask forgiveness and not permission” approach taken by Airbnb and Uber circa 2009 might lead founders to conclude it is strategically acceptable to “move fast and break things” (including the law), don’t lose sight of the resulting lawsuits and enforcement actions. If you look closely at Airbnb and Uber today, each have devoted immense resources to building regulatory and policy teams, lobbying, public relations, defending lawsuits, while increasingly looking to work within the law rather than outside it – not to mention, in the case of Uber, a change in leadership as well.
Indeed, more recently, examples of founders and startups running into serious regulatory issues are commonplace: whether in healthcare, where CEO/Co-founder Conrad Parker was forced to resign from Zenefits and later fined approximately $500K; in the securities registration arena, where cryptocurrency startups Airfox and Paragon have each been fined $250K and further could be required to return to investors the millions raised through their respective ICOs; in the social media and privacy realm, where TikTok was recently fined $5.7 million for violating COPPA, or in the antitrust context, where tech giant Google is facing billions in fines from the EU.
Suffice it to say, regulation is not a low-stakes table game. In 2017 alone, according to Duff and Phelps, US financial regulators levied $24.4 billion in penalties against companies and another $621.3 million against individuals. Particularly in today’s highly competitive business landscape, even if your startup can financially absorb the fines for non-compliance, the additional stress and distraction for your team may still inflict serious injury, if not an outright death-blow.
The best way to avoid regulatory setbacks is to first understand relevant regulations and work to develop compliant policies and business practices from the beginning. This article represents a step in that direction, the fifth and final installment in Extra Crunch’s exclusive “Startup Law A to Z” series, following previous articles on corporate matters, intellectual property (IP), customer contracts and employment law.
Given the breadth of activities subject to regulation, however, and the many corresponding regulations across federal, state, and municipal levels, no analysis of any particular regulatory framework would be sufficiently complete here. Instead, the purpose of this article is to provide founders a 30,000-foot view across several dozen applicable laws in key regulatory areas, providing a “lay of the land” such that with some additional navigation and guidance, an optimal course may be charted.
The regulatory areas highlighted here include: (a) Taxes; (b) Securities; (c) Employment; (d) Privacy; (e) Antitrust; (f) Advertising, Commerce and Telecommunications; (g) Intellectual Property; (h) Financial Services and Insurance; and finally (i) Transportation, Health and Safety.
Of course, some regulations may touch on multiple regulatory areas, for example, the “Fair Credit Reporting Act” is a law ultimately about privacy, but it impacts many financial and employment-related services as well. Certain laws may therefore be cross-listed in more than one regulatory area. Also, since we can’t look at every U.S. state and city, this article will focus primarily on the federal and California state laws.
After you focus on the particular regulatory areas that may implicate your business, next reference the short quotations and links to relevant primary and secondary sources below, then work to identify the specific compliance risks you face. This is where other Extra Crunch resources can help. For example, the Verified Experts of Extra Crunch include some of the most experienced and skilled startup lawyers in practice today. Use these profiles to identify attorneys who are focused on serving companies at your particular stage and then seek out any further guidance you need to address the regulatory matters pertinent to your startup.
With that as context, the Startup Law A to Z – Regulatory Compliance checklist is below:
Before diving into further detail, it may be helpful for some readers to note the distinction between a law and a regulation. Simply put, regulations provide more detailed direction on how certain laws should be followed. So regulations are not technically laws, but they carry the force of law (including penalties for violation), since they are adopted by governmental agencies under authority granted by statute. Beyond that, understanding how laws and regulations are actually enacted is helpful to illustrate the extent to which the process is politically driven.
In the U.S., a bill must first pass both legislative branches of government, then, if signed by the executive branch, it will be codified in statute as law (Schoolhouse Rock anyone?). Once codified, the legislative branch will authorize the relevant executive department or agency to determine whether specific regulations are necessary to give the law effect. If so, those executive departments or agencies will determine what further rules are needed, and in turn, work to enforce them.
At the federal level, for example, proposed regulations are developed first through a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” listed in the Federal Register and filed in the corresponding executive agency’s official docket (available at Regulations.gov). This affords the public an opportunity to comment on the regulations. After receiving comments, the filing agency may revise the proposed regulation before final rules are issued, which again will be published in the Federal Register and then filed in the agency’s official docket at Regulations.gov, before they are codified in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).
At nearly every step in this process then, institutions, government, and interest groups are working – sometimes at cross purposes – to shape what the law will be and how it will impact your startup.
The Startup Law A to Z – Regulatory Compliance reference guide is below:
Source: TechCrunch
Employees confronted CEO Satya Nadella after weeks of complaints on an internal discussion about lack of advancement and sexual harassment.
Source: Wired
Editor’s note: This guest post is a part of our latest initiative to demystify design and find the best brand designers and agencies in the world who work with early-stage companies — nominate a talented brand designer you’ve worked with.
Chances are you’ve heard one or more of the following statements at work (or some flavor of them):
While at first glance the statements above may seem innocuous, what they really imply is a power dynamic where a particular perspective carries more weight and influence in decision-making than others. How did it get that way in the first place? Was the founder a PM in a previous company? Did the first hires all happen to be engineers? Or does the most vocal person happen to be from a particular discipline? These are some examples of how biases get institutionalized. They can get seeded early and compound over time, or happen quickly as new leaders get installed as the company grows.
Whether intentional or not, these imbalances can disempower other disciplines, create fiefdoms, and erode trust between colleagues. Over time, these divisions kill productivity and quality. Internal factions waste valuable time and energy jockeying for influence and control, while the product gets fragmented and confusing for users.
On the flip side, when disciplines and teams are aligned there is less value placed on which person or discipline “made the call.” Over time, teams move quickly, learn together, get through iteration cycles effortlessly, spend more time producing high-quality results that reach users, and less time infighting. It’s like being in a state of flow, but for teams. So what is it that these high-performing teams align on? You’ve probably heard it before, but it’s worth unpacking:
The user.
Ideally, the most important driver of decisions isn’t one person or discipline in your organization—it should be your user. Your job is to help them navigate. Everyone building the product or making decisions about it, regardless of discipline, should understand who they’re building for, and why what they’re doing is contributing to improving that user’s experience.
User-centric thinking is the hallmark of the world-class companies because they love and obsess about you—the user. Amazon calls this customer obsession. Ideo calls this human-centered design. During my time at Pinterest, the most important company value was to “Put Pinners first.”
By focusing on serving the user, it removes the pressure on any individual or discipline to always make the right call. Focusing on what is right for the user, rather than who is right removes ego from the equation. Users ultimately decide anyway—they vote with their behavior and attitudes.
Serving your users better is a goal with no finish line. Understand that the decisions you make will sometimes improve their experiences and sometimes degrade them. Nobody has 100% hit rate, and nobody can predict the future with complete certainty. In a culture of good decision-making, the goal isn’t to get any single decision exactly right (although that’s always nice), but to make consistently good (and better) decisions over time, especially the important ones.
So how do you get your company oriented around users? Consider three important factors: (1) people with the right mindset, (2) an approach to balanced decision-making that starts with users, and (3) the mechanics and properties of high-quality decisions.
Differences in opinion are inevitable. But in order to have consistently productive discussions, debates, disagreements, and ultimately decisions, you’ll need T-shaped people. A T-shaped person refers to someone who has a deep domain expertise in at least one field (the depth of their T), as well as a strong ability to collaborate with people across other areas of expertise (the breadth of their T). Here’s some examples of T-shaped people, who might also happen to make a strong team:
T-shaped people tend to be the best teammates—they have deep knowledge that they are willing to share and explain to their counterparts, as well as a built-in curiosity that welcomes new perspectives. This is especially important in leadership and decision-making roles. What’s more, their curiosity and empathy doesn’t just apply to their colleagues, it naturally extends to users.
What T-shaped people realize is that no single person or discipline is more important than the other, nor should they strive to be. Sure, there are moments where one’s expertise makes their input more credible, but It’s how their collective talents serve the user that ultimately matter most. People (and hopefully T-shaped people) are the most basic ingredients of your culture. Choose wisely.
Ways to identify T-shaped people
User-centered (aka customer-centric, human-centered) thinking is a way of framing problems with a clear starting point: understanding and empathizing with user needs. If T-shaped people are your basic ingredients, then the user-centered thinking is a recipe—a way to combine and enhance the ingredients to produce amazing results. Here’s what it looks like:
Have your team start by asking “what is the user problem we’re trying to solve?” It’s a deceivingly simple focusing mechanism. It may take some rigorous debate to align on the right problem, but once that happens, decisions from all disciplines have a clear tie back to driving user value first—making the product faster, cheaper, more efficient, more delightful, easier to understand—then orienting their collective effort around providing that value.
Less user-centric teams will do the opposite: look for ways to make their own work easier or more efficient, look to optimize their own sub-team metrics, or satisfy their own personal curiosities—and leave the user to orient themselves around their organizational efficiencies. If you’ve ever felt a broken sign-up flow or confusing onboarding experience, then you know what I’m talking about.
While user-centric thinking starts with users, no single lens is more important than the others. It’s entirely possible to satisfy a user completely, while simultaneously killing your business. That’s not a good decision. Or you could dream up amazing ways to delight your user, but in ways that aren’t achievable with today’s technology—that’s no good either. The overlap of perspectives is what leads to effective decisions and great solutions. T-shaped decision-makers will know how to make those appropriate tradeoffs.
Evaluating decisions through multiple lenses is important to getting to consistently good, balanced decisions over time. What decision best satisfies your user’s needs, is good for the business (overall, not just for your sub-team or business unit), and technically sound? The overlap is where high-quality decisions are born. But there are additional mechanics and properties that make decisions high-quality.
In my experience, high-quality product decisions are:
Very few companies, and even fewer startups, stand the test of time. Products and services today are all dynamic, and expected to evolve with the changing landscape of fickle users and emerging technologies. With limited time and resources, I can already hear people saying, “this seems like a lot of work” and ask, “can we really afford to invest this much thought and energy into culture?”
The bottom line is building great products is hard work. And it’s work that never ends, if you’re doing it well. Over time, your product will morph in small and big ways with each new version, to the point where it may be unrecognizable from your starting point. So what will persist, and why? Your culture—the people, their shared attitudes, values, goals, practices, and decisions—will determine that. So isn’t that worth investing in as much as the product itself? In the end, they’re one in the same.
Source: TechCrunch
Bumble is the latest digital brand to try to extend its reach through a print publication. The dating app maker today announced the launch of Bumble Mag, a lifestyle publication it produced in partnership with Hearst that offers stories and advice about dating, careers, friendship and more to Bumble’s over 50 million users.
On the cover of the 100-page premiere issue is Lauren Chan, a fashion entrepreneur behind the plus-size workwear line called Henning.
Inside, the magazine is organized into four sections that align with the Bumble app’s different modes: “You First,” “You + BFFs,” “You + Dating” and “You + Bizz.” Here, readers will find celebrity interviews, features, advice, product guides, “daily mantras,” and more.
Contributors in this month’s debut issue include Bumble advisor and the star of the brand’s first Super Bowl campaign, Serena Williams; writers, actresses and Bumble Creative Directors Erin and Sara Foster; Man Repeller founder Leandra Medine; jewelry designer Jennifer Meyer; and Away luggage co-founder Jen Rubio.
A digital brand taking to print is no longer a unique occurence.
Airbnb has Airbnb Magazine, which arrives in the mail; Unilever’s Dollar Shave Club runs Mel Magazine; mattress brand Casper created Woolly Magazine in partnership with McSweeney’s; luggage brand Away has Here Magazine; Uber has rolled out several print magazines, including Vehicle, Arriving Now, and Momentum; and even Facebook launched a print magazine, Grow, aimed at business leaders.
For Bumble, the magazine offers the company a way to introduce its brand to new customers as well as extend its relationship with existing users out in the real world. This is part of Bumble’s larger efforts in developing an offline component to its business. The company also runs pop-ups, hosts events, and has spoken of plans to launch more physical locations – “Hives,” in Bumble lingo – sometime this year.
These moves also speak to Bumble’s aspiration to be more than just another dating app and Tinder rival.
The company instead wants to be known more broadly as a women-centric lifestyle brand where its users can network online and off, in all aspects of their lives – not just dating. For example, its Bumble BFF service helps women make new friends, while Bumble Bizz is focused on business networking.
The company says the new magazine will be distributed by its 3,000+ brand ambassadors – marketers and event hosts who work with Bumble to promote its brand. Users can also request a free copy of the first issue within the app.
For Hearst, print efforts from online brands like Bumble represent a new line of business at a time when print is being challenged by digital solutions, like Kindle Unlimited or Apple News+, which are trying to transition print magazine subscribers to go digital-only.
“Bumble is at the forefront of inspiring women to make connections and take initiative in all aspects of their lives with its positive message of empowerment,” said HearstMade Editorial Director, Brett Hill, in a statement. “The magazine is a perfect example of how HearstMade is changing the face of custom publishing with hyper-targeted content that reflects the brand’s ethos in the most authentic way.”
Bumble Mag becomes available nationwide on Friday, April 5, says Bumble.
Source: TechCrunch
Snap is unlocking a new revenue stream while giving you something to do in between chats and Stories. Today Snapchat debuts its Snap Games platform that lets you play real-time, multiplayer games while texting and talking with your friends. The platform is based off Snap’s secret late-2017 acquisition of PrettyGreat, an Australian game studio with talent from HalfBrick which built Fruit Ninja. That team built Bitmoji Party, a Mario Party-style mini-game fest, to show off the platform that includes five games from developers like Zynga and ZeptoLab. The games are rolling out worldwide on iOS and Android starting today.
To monetize the platform, Snapchat will let users opt in to watching six-second unskippable commercials that reward them with a power up or bonus in-game currency. Snapchat will share revenue from the ads with developers, though it refused to specify the split. It could be a little weird watching ads to more easily beat your friends. But down the line it’s easy to imagine Snapchat selling cosmetic upgrades via in-app purchases akin to Fortnite.
Snap announced the new Snap Games platform at its first-ever press event, the Snap Partner Summit in Los Angeles where it also announced an augmented reality utility platform called Scan, an ads network, and a way to put its Stories in other apps. “We wanted to build something that makes us feel like we’re playing a board game with a family of over a long holiday weekend. Something that makes us feel like we’re sitting with friends, controllers in hand, looking at the same screen” says Snap’s head of gaming Will Wu. The Information’s Tom Dotan and Amir Efrati first reported Snap was building a gaming platform and Cheddar’s Alex Heath reported it would end up launching today.
Snap Games could be considered a real-time spin on Facebook Messenger’s Instant Games platform, which has focused on porting well-known asynchronous games like Pac-Man and other arcade titles to HTML5 . Similarly, Snap Games don’t have to be downloaded separately as they’re piped in from the web. Users can browse available games by tapping a new rocket ship button in the chat bar.
You’re invited to Bitmoji Party
#SnapPartnerSummit pic.twitter.com/WBTntkqZil
— Snapchat (@Snapchat) April 4, 2019
With Bitmoji Party, your avatar competes with up to 7 friends simultaneously in a series of mini games where you have to stay balanced on a giant record as a DJ scratches it, or avoid getting knocked in the pool. You can also have another 24 friends spectate and rotate in. Winners earn coins they can use to buy dances to stunt on their competition. And with an ever-present chat bar, users can use text or voice to talk trash.
Rather than port in known IP, Snap recruited developers to build games exclusively for its vertical, real-time multiplayer format. Those include:
Snapchat’s partner games (from left): Tiny Royale, Snake Squad, C.A.T.S. Drift Race
Snap’s game platform has huge potential to boost time spent in the app and the ads views that generates because gaming is perfect for its demographic. “In the United States, Snapchat now reaches nearly 75 percent of all 13-34 year-olds, and we reach 90 percent of 13-24 year-olds. In fact, we reach more 13-24 year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the UK, France, Canada, and Australia” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed today. This is the age group with the free time and dense social graphs to make use of multiplayer real-time games.
The big question is whether Snap’s reward-incentivized video ad views will generate enough cash to keep developers coming to the platform. If not, a limited line of titles could get old quick. Snap has entirely avoided in-app purchases since shutting down its Lens Store in early 2016. There’s understandable concerns that kids could rack up huge bills on their parents’ credit cards. But given how Fortnite has normalized paying for no-utility cosmetic upgrades for this same demographic, with the right controls Snapchat could do the same to make itself and its partners a lot more money. And given you’re always playing with your friends, not strangers, there’s an even deeper urge to buy funny costumes and dances to impress them.
Snapchat’s overarching strategy right now is to build an orbit of time-wasters surrounding chat. What began with Stories now includes Discover publications, premium Shows, augmented reality toys, and now games. It may never become a favorite with the 35+ age group. But since messaging is the top mobile behavior, Snap can use it to keep people coming back and then distract them while they’re waiting for a reply or need a social alternative to small talk.
Source: TechCrunch
Microsoft officially announced the next version of Windows 10 as the May 2019 Update. The company also revealed changes to the rollout system that puts you in control if you want to install it or not.
The post Windows 10 May 2019 Update is coming, but you can decide if you want it or not appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
