Pokémon GO just got a little surprise update, complete with a curious new feature: “Lucky” Pokémon.
Most things in Pokémon GO are adapted from things that already exist in the Pokémon universe. Items like incense, lucky eggs and the like all exist in the main Pokémon series (though what these items actually do tends to be a bit different in GO).
Lucky Pokémon, as far as I know, is a new concept altogether.
So what are they? And how are they different from existing Shiny Pokémon?
Shiny Pokémon are rare variations of existing Pokémon with colors that differ from the standard. You might tap on your 398th Dratini, for example, only to find that it’s bright pink instead of the standard blue. You might randomly tap a Minun to find that it has green ears instead of blue, or an Aron with red eyes instead of blue. It’s a fun way to keep players tapping on Pokémon even after their Pokédex is technically complete. The differences are only skin deep, though; beyond the visual shift, Shiny Pokémon are generally functionally the same as their non-shiny version.
The new “Lucky” Pokémon, meanwhile, don’t look much different (save for a sparkly background when you look at them in your collection). They do, however, have a little functional advantage: powering them up requires less stardust. In other words, you’ll be able to make them stronger faster and with less work.
How do you get ’em? By trading. While folks are still working out the exact mechanics, it looks like non-Lucky Pokémon have a chance to become Lucky Pokémon when traded from one player to another. According to Niantic, the odds of a Pokémon becoming “lucky” after a trade increase based on how long ago it was originally caught.
And for the collectors out there: yes, for better or worse, “Lucky” Pokémon are now a category in the Pokédex. Niantic just added trading to Pokémon GO a month ago, and this is a clever way to get players to care about trading even after they’ve already caught everything there is to catch.
This update also brings a few other small changes, mostly just polishing up the way the friend/trading system works:
Source: TechCrunch
Doughbies should have been a bakery, not a venture-backed startup. Founded in the frothy days of 2013 and funded with $670,000 by investors, including 500 Startups, Doughbies built a same-day cookie delivery service. But it was never destined to be capable of delivering the returns required by the VC model that depends on massive successes to cover the majority of bets that fail. The startup became the butt of jokes about how anything could get funding.
This weekend, Doughbies announced it was shutting down immediately. Surprisingly, it didn’t run out of money. Doughbies was profitable, with 36 percent gross margins and 12 percent net profit, co-founder and CEO Daniel Conway told TechCrunch. “The reason we were able to succeed, at this level and thus far, is because we focused on unit economics and customer feedback (NPS scoring). That’s it.”
Many other startups in the on-demand space missed that memo and vaporized. Shyp mailed stuff for you and Washio dry cleaned your clothes, until they both died sudden deaths. Food delivery has become a particularly crowded cemetery, with Sprig, Maple, Juicero and more biting the dust. Asked his advice for others in the space, Conway said to “Make sure your business makes sense — that you’re making money, and make sure your customers are happy.”
Doughbies certainly did that latter. They made one of the most consistently delicious chocolate chip cookies in the Bay Area. I had them cater our engagement party. At roughly $3 per cookie plus $5 for delivery, it was pricey compared to baking at home, but not outrageous given SF restaurant rates. From its launch at 500 Startups Demo Day with an “Oprah” moment where investors looked beneath their seats to find Doughbies waiting for them, it cared a lot about the experience.
But did it make sense for a bakery to have an app and deliver on-demand? Probably not. There was just no way to maintain a healthy Doughbies habit. You were either gunning for the graveyard yourself by ordering every week, or like most people you just bought a few for special occasions. Startups like Uber succeed by getting people to routinely drop $30 per day, not twice a year. And with the push for nutritious and efficient offices, it was surely hard for enterprise customers to justify keeping cookies stocked.
Flanked by Instacart and Uber Eats, there weren’t many ripe adjacent markets for Doughbies to conquer. It was stuck delivering baked goods to customers who were deterred from growing their cart size by a sense of gluttony.
Without stellar growth or massive sales volumes, there aren’t a lot of exciting challenges to face for people like Conway and his co-founder Mariam Khan. “Ultimately we shut down because our team is ready to move on to something new,” Conway says.
The startup just emailed customers explaining that “We’re currently working on finding a new home for Doughbies, but we can’t make any promises at this time.” Perhaps a grocery store or broader food company will want its logistics technology or customer base. But delivery is a brutal market to break into, dominated by those like Uber who’ve built economies of scale through massive fleets of drivers to maximize routing efficiency.
In the end, Doughbies was a lifestyle business. That’s not a dirty word. A few co-founders with a dream can earn a respectable living doing what they care about. But they have to do it lean, without the advantage of deep-pocketed investors.
As soon as a company takes venture funding, it’s under pressure to deliver adequate returns. Not 2X or 5X, but 10X, 100X, even 1,000X what they raise. That can lead to investors breathing down their neck, encouraging big risks that could tank the business just for a shot at those outcomes. Two years ago we saw a correction hit the ecosystem, writing down the value of many startups, and we continue to see the ripple effect as companies funded before hit the end of their runway.
Desperate for cash, founders can accept dirty funding terms that screw over not just themselves, but their early employees and investors. FanDuel raised more than $416 million at a peak valuation of $1.3 billion. But when it sold for $465 million, the founders and employees received zero as the returns all flowed to the late-stage investors who’d secured non-standard liquidation preferences. After nearly 10 years of hard work, the original team got nothing.
Not every business is a startup. Not every startup is a rocket ship. It takes more than just building a great product to succeed. It can require suddenly cutting costs to become profitable before you run out of funding. Or cutting ambitions and taking less cash at a lower valuation so you can realistically hit milestones. Or accepting a low-ball acquisition offer because it’s better than nothing. Or not raising in the first place, and building up revenues the old-fashioned way so even modest growth is an accomplishment.
Investors are often rightfully blamed for inflating the bubble, pushing up raises and valuations to lure startups to take their money instead of someone else’s. But when it comes to deciding what could be a fast-growing business, sometimes its the founders who need the adjustment.
Source: TechCrunch
San Francisco is one of the most beautiful, diverse cities in the world. If you’re planning a trip to San Francisco this September during Labor Day week, maybe for some sightseeing, maybe for TechCrunch Disrupt SF, then you’ll want to make sure you take advantage of these killer hotel deals TechCrunch has negotiated.
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All these hotels are within easy walking distance of public transportation and major SF sights. You can check out the complete list of hotels right here. You do not need to be registered for Disrupt SF 2018 to take advantage of these awesome hotel discounts.
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About Disrupt SF 2018
Disrupt SF 2018 (September 5-7) is where thousands of startups, investors, founders and entrepreneurs gather to hear from thought leaders and discover the latest tech innovations. With three stages hosting awesome content, a $100,000 pitch competition and a startup-filled expo floor, Disrupt SF 2018 is an event you won’t want to miss. Early-bird ticket sales end July 25. Book your tickets here.
Have more questions about booking your hotel room, or traveling with a big group? Email TechCrunch@38nconnections.com.
Source: TechCrunch
Google was already worth more than $800 billion and, while well short of Apple, is now jumping into that batch of companies that are on their way to being a $1 trillion company.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, substantially outperformed market expectations in its second quarter by bringing in $32.66 billion. That’s a 26% increase year-over-year, and perhaps more significantly, it’s a faster rate of increase than it saw in the same quarter last year. The company’s second-quarter revenue in 2017 was a 21% jump from that in 2016. It’s a bit of a handful, but either way it shows that Alphabet still continues to — unsurprisingly — print money off its advertising business even as its cost-per-click (one of the metrics that indicates the value of its advertisements) continues to decline.
Following the report, Alphabet shares jumped an additional 5%, making its valuation about neck-and-neck with Amazon — though, again, well short of Apple. But it wasn’t that long ago that Apple hit a $900 billion market cap and we started talking about it being a contender to hit $1 trillion. Google’s advertising business continues to be healthy and growing. While it’s getting slapped with a massive fine by the EU, this doesn’t seem to bother Wall Street all that much as it sees Alphabet as a company that will continue to grow over time.
Google’s “other revenue,” which includes its very increasingly important cloud efforts, rose substantially to $4.43 billion. But comparing the growth patterns, Google’s advertising revenue grew around 24%, while Google’s other revenue grew around 37% year-over-year. This isn’t so dissimilar with the patterns you’ll see with Amazon, where its core business continues to grow but its AWS growth appears to be increasingly contributing to its growth and performance. It’s still a slice-of-a-slice of its advertising revenue, but it does represent some substantial upside.
That’s going to be critical going forward as Google tries to convince investors that it’s not just an advertising company, but also a services company, with a set of hardware, and a platform company beyond even that. As Google continues to capture developers with its deep-learning framework TensorFlow, and lock them into its own ecosystem with hardware like the TPU geared toward deep learning, it’ll continue to see a lot of momentum as deep learning tools proliferate across the entire technology industry. Indeed, TensorFlow is increasingly killing off a lot of the complexity that goes into complicated machine learning problems, and it’s going to be a strong lure to get companies onto its cloud platform.
Its other bets — not to be confused with other revenue — that include its other ancillary projects that may or may not pan out and be part of Alphabet’s future business continued to see some improvement by hitting $145 million in revenue in the second quarter this year. Its losses there widened from a loss of $633 million to $732 million.
Source: TechCrunch
Business was good in the second quarter.
Source: CNET
We also talked to our favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Source: CNET
Nikon’s first full-frame mirrorless camera may be coming soon.
Source: CNET
He’s still fired up about science, and it’s infectious.
Source: CNET
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki on Friday promised the company would do a better job with communicating to creators about its experiments and tests. Today, YouTube is making good on that commitment with an update about a new feature it’s testing out: an Explore tab, aimed at offering viewers a more diverse set of video recommendations.
The news was announced via the Creator Insider channel – the same channel Wojcicki highlighted in her recent update as the “unofficial” resource operated by YouTube employees. The channel today offers weekly updates, responses to creator feedback, and behind-the-scenes info on product launches.
According to the announcement, the new Explore feature is currently in testing with just 1 percent of iPhone YouTube app viewers, so there’s a good chance you won’t see the option in your own app.
However, if you do happen to be in the test group, then you’ll notice the bottom navigation bar of the app looks different. Instead of the tabs Home, Trending, Subscriptions, Inbox and Library you have today, you’ll instead see Home, Explore, Subscriptions, Activity and Library.
The idea behind Explore is to offer YouTube viewers a wider variety of what-to-watch suggestions than they receive today. Currently, personalized video recommendations are very much influenced by past viewing activity and other behavior, which can then create a sort of homogenous selection of recommended content.
“Explore is designed to help you be exposed to different kinds of topics, videos or channels that you might not otherwise encounter, but they’re still personalized,” said Tom Leung, Director of Product Management, in a YouTube video.
That is, the videos are still based on viewing activity.
For example, he explains, a viewer who was watching videos about telescopes might be recommended videos about high-end cameras.
“It’s just going to give you a little more variety,” says Leung.
The tab will also feature a “Trending” section at the top of the screen, which directs users to the same sort of content that the Trending tab in the current version of the YouTube app today features.
The hope, however, with the new Explore tab is to offer creators the ability to reach more viewers, even if their content doesn’t “trend.”
Whether or not that theory proves true, remains to be seen. YouTube will review the data from the experiment before making a decision to roll out the Explore tab to more users.
Early feedback from YouTube creators in the comments section of the video seems cautiously optimistic, with many expressing hopes that the new tab would provide exposure to smaller creators rather than just the well-known names.
Calling the tab “Explore” makes sense in light of the increased threat from Instagram, whose own Explore section features personalized video suggestions, and has launched a YouTube rival with IGTV. YouTube has responded by offering its stars big, five to six-figure checks to post their best stuff on YouTube, according to Business Insider. (YouTube downplayed the report, saying it has “always invested in creators’ success.)
But an experiment involving YouTube’s own Explore section makes it clear that the company is interested taking on Instagram head-on when it comes to offering a home for discovering new video content through algorithmic recommendations.
If successful, YouTube’s Explore tab would connect viewers to more creator channels they’ll like and subscribe to, as well as increase their time spent in app. That, in turn, could potentially decrease viewers’ time in apps like IGTV, Facebook, Instagram and elsewhere.
Source: TechCrunch
A 2009 video depicting Harmon molesting a baby doll is coming back to haunt him.
Source: CNET