“In The Studio,” VMware’s Parth Shah Helps Explain The World Of Enterprise IT
Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.
This is the final episode of my show on TCTV, “In The Studio.” The final guest is a good friend, Parth Shah (no relation), an engineer with VMware, and before that, at Yahoo! Parth combines the precision of CMU CS graduate’s take on web development with a hacker mentality, and has the rare skill of being able to explain some of the most complex enterprise IT concepts to those who don’t have as much context — such as me! In this short conversation, Parth shares with us his work at VMware and his generalized thoughts on how the enterprise stack is being disrupted today. This video would be a great primer for anyone who wants to begin to learn about the enterprise world.
As an added bonus, Parth and I have spent a few months collaborating on a post about the enterprise IT stack, written in lay-terms so that a wider audience can learn more about it. We are proud to publish this post today, which you can read here.
Finally, thank you for being a loyal viewer of “In The Studio” as it ends today (my Sunday column, Iterations, will continue). In the span of 18 months, the show ran for 70 consecutive weeks, producing 70 episodes featuring Silicon Valley’s up-and-coming founders, legendary venture capitalists, emergent seed investors, and focused on producing quality, primary-source content in today’s noisy tech media landscape. For me, “In The Studio” was a terrific platform to get to meet people who excelled at what they do. As someone who is new to the technology world, doing the show was a crash-course in learning by conversation, and making those conversations public will hopefully provide insight to others who are looking to learn. I have worked to organize and reproduce all the videos, which you can access here. This is a great privilege, so thanks again to all those who participated.
Read More →Mimvi and Entrepreneur Media Partner with Launcht for TrepLabs™ Mobile App Crowdfunding Platform
Mimvi and Entrepreneur are launching TrepLabs™ to provide highly-skilled app developers a stage to raise capital via crowdfunding, showcase new apps and technologies, and help the mobile developer community reduce its dependency on the Apple and Google Play “app stores.”
“We carefully reviewed all of our possible options and found nothing as robust as the Launcht platform,” said Mimvi CEO Michael Poutre . “Not only will we have state-of-the-art technology, we are getting a best-in-class partner with extensive knowledge and experience in crowdfunding trends and the regulatory environment.”
SOURCE:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mimvi-and-entrepreneur-media-partner-with-launcht-for-treplabs-mobile-app-crowdfunding-platform-207180621.html
Tags: apps, crowdfunding, crowdsource, crowdsourcing, mimvi, technology, tools, treplabs
Read More →Routing Around Apple’s Restrictions, AppCertain & Others Bring Enterprise-Level Control To Consumers In The Interest Of Child Safety
In the interest of protecting children, a new iOS application called AppCertain has debuted a monitoring application aimed at parents. The app, whose goal is to alert parents about the nature of the applications their kids are downloading, involves the use of a “configuration profile” – special software Apple originally intended for enterprise use, not consumer-facing apps sold through its App Store marketplace.
But Apple reviewed the application – for longer than most, founder and CEO Spencer Whitman tells us – and subsequently approved it. For how long that will remain the case is, however, unknown.
“We think we are on a gray line with respect to Apple, but we don’t really know,” Whitman admits.
Configuration profiles, for those unfamiliar, were designed for the enterprise environment, allowing I.T. departments to manage the iPhones and iPads used by a company’s employees. They’re typically employed by Mobile Device Management solutions, for example, which use the software to configure, track and/or restrict a number of system-level settings like Wi-Fi, VPNs, app settings, permissions, and more.
But more recently, a handful of startups have started using these same profiles to work around Apple’s App Store’s restrictions in order to accomplish tasks which wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Apple is aware this is happening, and seems to be handling each app submission on a one-off basis for now.
We’ve seen mobile data compression utilities like Onavo and Snappli take advantage of the technology to intercept, re-route, and compress web data in order to save users’ bandwidth, for instance. Social search engine Wajam also uses a configuration profile to inject its own search results into Safari, though this is done outside of the Apple App Store.
Onavo is still live on the Apple App Store today, though Snappli has since disappeared. (We reached out to the company for details, but have yet to hear back. It’s possible that Apple simply didn’t care for the fact that Snappli had publicly shared data showing how iOS users were dumping the then newly-launched Apple Maps application.)
But frankly, it seems odd that Apple would knowingly ever let these types of applications into its consumer-facing app store in the first place, given the security risks they could pose. If used unscrupulously, a malicious configuration profile could remote control a user’s device, manipulate user activity, and hijack their sessions, or so explained security researchers at Skycure back in March.
AppCertain isn’t a malicious developer, though, and its intentions are not to control or restrict how an Apple device is used, which would then be stepping on top of Apple’s own, built-in Parental Control features. Instead, it only monitors app downloads and reports back to parents via email that an app was downloaded, explaining what the app does, as well as what sorts of permissions it requests, and more.
The idea is to alert parents about the apps their child uses, including whether or not they have educational value. It doesn’t prevent the child from actually downloading or installing apps.
The service, staffed by a number of Carnegie Mellon University alumni, first launched to the web in February after being incubated by seed and studio fund Birchmere Labs.
Whitman explained at the time that the company wanted to help busy parents, who often have a hard time keeping up with what their children are installing and using. It’s not only a problem that affects tech novices, he had said. Even savvy parents often forget or get too busy to keep a close eye on their children’s devices. And these devices, little mini-computers that they are, are not without risks.
Parental Controls Outside Of Apple’s Control
While AppCertain is trying to go the official, Apple-approved route with its creation, another company, a small German app consultancy called Mocava, is not. Its new Parental Control application is an over-the-air install only, knowing that Apple would never approve it for App Store download.
Mocava owner Vinh Phuc Dinh says that he created the app to address a situation he found himself in all the time. “I have many nephews, and would pass on my device for them to play,” he tells us. “Unfortunately, there is no easy way to restrict access on the iPhone and save the desired preferences. So we built it ourselves.”
What he means is that though Apple offers parental control features, it’s not the right solution for those who only need controls on occasion. With his Parental Control App, you can quickly turn on restrictions without having to reconfigure them from scratch them each time you hand your phone or iPad to a child. Even if Apple’s restrictions are turned off, the tool will remember your settings.
You can restrict certain default apps from being accessed or certain content from being viewed. You can disable in-app purchases, or specify that an App Store password is always required, and more. To get started, you configure your settings on the web, then download the profile the company provides.
The mere fact that this app and AppCertain even exist speaks to one of the problems with Apple’s strict control over its OS. Unlike on Android where apps like KIDO’Z, Kytephone, Play Safe, Kid Mode and others allow parents more granular control and insight, Apple’s settings are cumbersome. If you turn on age restrictions, for example, the child can’t watch Netflix. You can disable the web browser, but not whitelist websites, and so on.
These devices are computers, and while parents may disagree on what level of involvement is necessary, it’s fair to say that as with “real” computers, children – especially young children – shouldn’t be given free rein with no parental oversight. Too many parents think of iPads as toys, blindly typing in passwords every time their kid begs for a new app. They perhaps put too much trust in Apple’s “family friendly” policies – just because apps are rated and ranked, pornography or gore-free, that doesn’t make everything appropriate for a every child.
It will be interesting to see how far Apple allows these companies to push into this new territory, before it decides to crack down or otherwise change its policies.
AppCertain is available for download here on iPhone and iPad.
Read More →Apple Supplier Pegatron’s Hiring Spree Further Fuels Speculation About A Cheaper iPhone
Once again, news from a supplier is fueling rumors about Apple’s future product roster. This time it’s manufacturer Pegatron’s announcement that it will increase its number of workers in China by up to 40 percent in the second half of this year. The hiring blitz at the company, which produces iOS devices, has led to new round of speculation that a cheaper iPhone is in the works.
Suppliers have told Reuters that Apple is developing a cheaper iPhone in order to target emerging markets such as China and India. The less expensive version of the smartphone is expected to launch by the third quarter.
Pegatron’s financial performance is closely tied to the Apple products it makes. Just yesterday the company forecast its biggest drop in consumer electronics revenue in six quarters due to falling demand for the iPad Mini. Pegatron said its second quarter revenue will decrease 25 percent to 30 percent from the previous three months.
Other signs that Pegatron is expecting orders for a cheaper iPhone is chief financial officer Charles Lin’s disclosure that more than 60 percent of the company’s 2013 revenue will come from the second half of the year. Pegatron president and chief executive officer Jason Cheng said earlier this week that revenue from communication products will contribute up to 40 percent to the total in second half of 2013, compared to 24 percent in the first quarter.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month that the Cupertino company will start rolling out new products this fall and throughout 2014, including devices in “exciting new product categories.” Though its unclear exactly what Apple will be unleashing in a few months, many analysts believe that it will launch a cheaper iPhone instead of a larger-sized “phablet” that would compete with Samsung’s Galaxy Note.
A less expensive handset will allow Apple to compete with cheaper devices running on Android in emerging markets, but analysts’ opinions on how much of an effect a less pricey iPhone would have on Apple’s earnings vary widely. The company posted its first year-over-year earnings decline since 2003 in the second quarter, reporting $43.6 billion in revenue (up from $39.2 billion in the year-ago quarter) along with $9.5 billion in quarterly net profit.
Enders Analysis’ Benedict Evans said “a blockbuster new Apple phone that almost doubles unit sales and blows a hole in the middle of the Android market might only add 5 percent to Apple’s gross profits.”
On the other hand, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty believes a cheaper version can potentially add another 20 percent to the 10 percent market share iPhone currently holds in China. “Even in a scenario of low 40 percent gross margin and 1/3 iPhone cannibalization rate (flattening legacy iPhone shipment growth, which we view as conservative, the iPhone Mini adds incremental revenue and gross profit dollars,” she wrote in a recent investors note.
Read More →Crosswa.lk Debuts First Public-Facing Tool To Send iOS Apps From Web To Mobile, No Need To Launch iTunes
Crosswa.lk, a mobile application discovery which just over a year ago arrived on the iPhone as an improved version of Apple’s “Genius,” has been quietly building a new product over the past several months, as tides have turned against apps which serve to recommend or promote other apps. The new Crosswa.lk, instead of being a consumer-facing service, now offers tools to push apps from the web to mobile devices, similar to how users can wirelessly install apps from Google Play to their Android phones today.
The first example of this technology is rolling out today, in the form of a Google Chrome extension that detects when there are app links on a webpage, then allowing you to click and send them straight from the web to your device.
You may remember the consumer-facing version of Crosswa.lk, which was pulled down for good this past November, as one of the earlier players in the app discovery space. Part social network, the Crosswalk site and app previously allowed users to find and follow friends, view trending apps, receive personalized app recommendations, and more.
But, explains Crosswa.lk president Thomas McLeod, though that service worked well for heavy-duty app users, it never really gained mainstream appeal. “What we ran into is that nobody cared except for tech journalists, developers and super power users,” he says. “We had a lot of people telling us this great stuff, but we were – for lack of a better word – in the ‘Valley bubble.’ When we looked at returning user metrics, we found that the average person – like my mom – never went back to Crosswa.lk.”
Most people, McLeod’s mom included, were generally pretty happy with using Apple’s App Store to meet their needs, he says.
Meanwhile, Apple had begun cracking down on apps that recommend or promote other apps - a move which has caused its fair share of drama as of late, when app discovery platform AppGratis was kicked out of the App Store, accused of gaming the charts. And just this week, Apple tightened the noose even further, reportedly booting out apps that replicate App Store features like social sharing and search.
McLeod says that Apple’s decision did stop and make him think, even though he didn’t believe Crosswa.lk was in direct violation of the guidelines.
Back at the drawing board, the company took stock in what they had left, and realized that just as they once were able to pull down information from mobile devices, they could instead push apps to the phones, too. The product they ended up with was a developer API for web-to-mobile downloads.
The API powers a Crosswa.lk button, which can be placed on any website, as well as shortlinks that can be shared or tweeted. When clicked, the button or link will take users to a landing page where those clicks are converted to app downloads. On the backend, a suite of tools allows promoters to see how well an ad campaign has been doing, tracking things like the time, the referring site, and UTM tags for the separate marketing efforts.
This API, still in beta, is currently being tested with around 20 publishers, including Cosmopolitan.com, which had the button live during March and April before a site redesign. What they liked about the button was that it allowed for cross-promotion – that is, when end users downloaded the Cosmo app, Crosswa.lk could recommend apps for other publications, too. Other sites now testing the button include danielamitay.com/big-brother, bundlefoo.com (free app bundles), and frametastic.com, but the larger vision is to go after the big brands as well as the so-called “disposable” apps – like those associated with an upcoming movie, for instance.
The service offers something that fills a hole in the Apple universe. When clicked, a window pops up where you enter in your Apple username and password to authenticate, and then the app is sent over-the-air to your phone. (You need to have automatic app downloads enabled for this to work). The experience, as noted above, is a lot like when you send apps to your Android phone from Google Play’s app store, except that it also allows you to send multiple apps from one interface.
McLeod didn’t want to share the technical details regarding how this all works on the record, but says that he doesn’t believe it’s a violation of Apple’s Terms. “We’ll see how this all goes,” he says, on that note. He explains that it’s like “creating a long wire from a website to iTunes,” and it then initiates the download on your behalf. “We’re not changing the security protocols, we’re sending the same encrypted stuff they’re sending. We’re not storing anything, or doing anything dangerous. We’re just moving the box from where it is over there, to where it is over here.”
The new Chrome extension, available here, is the first public, consumer-facing example of the technology, outside of the button’s beta testers. Once installed, as you’re surfing the web, the button appears on any page which offers App Store links. When clicked, you can view a list of the apps that page offers, and then click “send to device” for the ones you want to download – no need to launch iTunes on the desktop.
At present, the extension only works with free apps, and only those on iOS, but Android is in the works.
The extension is free, and for now, the Crosswa.lk button is as well, though the plan is to offer tiered pricing on a subscription basis at some future point.
Those interested in beta testing the button can sign up here. Crosswa.lk is offering access to the button to the first 500 TechCrunch readers who sign up here: http://signup.crosswa.lk to join the beta.
Read More →Pentagon Clears BlackBerry, Samsung Devices For Defense Dept Use
BlackBerry and Samsung devices have been given the go-ahead for use on Defense Department networks. The approved devices are BlackBerry 10 smartphones, BlackBerry PlayBook tablets using the Enterprise Service 10 system and Samsung’s Android Knox. The Pentagon said earlier this week that it also expects to clear Apple devices using iOS 6 in early May.
Pentagon spokesman Lt Col Damien Pickart said in a statement that “this is a significant step towards establishing a multi-vendor environment that supports a variety of state-of-the-art devices and operating systems.” He added that the approval of BlackBerry and Samsung devices does not mean product orders would be placed. Instead, it allows user groups within the Pentagon to select those devices.
In February, the Pentagon initiated an effort to broaden its approved mobile devices so the military can access the latest communications technology and is not dependent on just one equipment vendor. The Pentagon’s initiative to diversify its roster of electronics led to a report that it was in process of phasing out almost all of the BlackBerries used by its employees, which the Pentagon denied.
SaThe Department of Defense’s plans do mean, however, that BlackBerry now faces much more competition for the Pentagon’s 600,000 mobile users. The department currently has 470,000 BlackBerry users. There are also 41,000 Apple users and 8,700 Android users, most of whom are currently participating in pilot or test programs.
Read More →Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei Sellers Are Struggling As Phones Get Cheaper
This is the ground floor of one of the electronics malls in Shenzhen’s famed Huaqiangbei district. Huaqiangbei is a stretch of large malls and shops in the Southern Chinese province, and due to its proximity to some of the manufacturing superfactories in the city, it has a cluster of malls that specializes in carrying tech goods.
These electronics malls generally start out with booths on the ground floor and individual store units as you go up the floors. They’re typically buzzing with activity from consumers to wholesalers keen to check out the quality of new devices coming out of the factories.
But when I visited some of the malls last month, only a handful of the open booths downstairs were tenanted, and the shutters were down on almost every floor of one of the seven-storey malls. when I asked one of the shopowners what was going on, he said his former neighbors packed up progressively over the past months, forced out by the tight competition of hawking nearly identical products as one another.
Ling Liling, who runs a local phone reseller business called Weibintongxin, was at one of the booths downstairs. Her shop window carried an array of Chinese phones as well as Nokia and Samsung knock-offs. She said local phones were starting to sell a lot better these days, compared with several years ago when people were averse to buying local brands.
Furthermore, as Nokia’s brand name slips, there is no draw for the average Chinese consumer to pick up a Nokia, knock-off or otherwise, when a dual-core Huawei goes for just as much and works better, she said. Samsung Galaxy S3 knock-offs are still selling well, however.
She pointed out that as technology gets cheaper, with most makers running Android, resellers have to either rely on selling shiny knock-offs or hope for volume sales on white label phones.
Meanwhile, across the corridor from her, some homegrown brands like Yoobao and Meizu were enjoying comparatively better reception. Rather than imitate foreign brands, these companies have been building up their brand reputations over the past few years.
According to analyst IDC, the top five smartphone makers in China in Q3 last year were Samsung, followed by Chinese makers, Lenovo, Coolpad, ZTE, and Huawei, in descending order. Apple was knocked to sixth place.
The display area for some of the local brands was noticeably more dressed up than the section carrying knock-offs
The closing down of a lot of resellers in Huaqiangbei is also due in part to the government’s ongoing efforts over the past few years to clean up the district’s image as a gritty place to find knock-offs. The growing affluence of Chinese consumers also means that knock-offs aren’t the defacto choice as they used to be, as well.
Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner, who owns Shenzhen CE and IT (SZCEIT), said the average quality level of commodity phones has risen to very decent levels, which explains why so many phone resellers are being squeezed out.
And where the electronics market in Huaqiangbei used to cover a fuller range of IT products like PC parts and peripherals, consumer tastes shifting over to mobile products saw most shops move their product lines to mobile accessories or phones. Jian, a reseller with Xiaozhang Accessories, said she used to carry PC parts, but they moved over to mobile accessories like power banks and micro USB cables. The strategy paid off in early days, but she’s starting to feel the pressure of the growing competition from other resellers coming in with similar commodity products.
“Tablets are the next thing that’s coming in a big way,” Dolgin-Gardner said. The average Chinese user, having been exposed to the Internet via the mobile phone, is craving a larger screen that will still take a 3G SIM card, and is accustomed to the Android interface. “It’s just an evolution,” he said.
This trend isn’t limited to Asia, he added. SZCEIT recently won two big contracts to manufacture tablets for a white label maker in the US, and another in the UK, which are expecting big demand for non-Apple tablets in Western markets.
Read More →Alibaba Group’s New Stake In Sina Weibo May Help Its Nascent Smartphone OS Gain Traction Against Android & iOS
Pouring $586 million in Sina Weibo gives Alibaba Group several perks, including an inroad into social media and access to the microblogging platform’s data. Not only that, but its new 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo may also give Alibaba Group a leg-up as it seeks to promote its own smartphone operating system Alibaba Mobile OS (AMOS) as a rival to Android.
As the Wall Street Journal writes, Alibaba Group’s investment in Sina Weibo means that it now has access to data generated by the platform’s 46.2 million daily users. This is on top of the 500 million registered users on Taobao, one of Alibaba Group’s e-commerce sites.
“If you are a big Internet company and you are ambitious enough in the mobile space, you have to do more than apps. Otherwise, you are just a small species in an ecosystem controlled by others,” Alibaba chief strategy officer Zeng Ming told WSJ.
Zeng said that Alibaba Group’s target for AMOS is to power 10 percent of all smartphones shipped in China, an ambitious goal considering that AMOS currently only has 1 percent market share. According to IDC data, Android currently holds an 80 percent chunk of the market, while iOS accounts for 10 percent. Though seven Chinese smartphone makers — KONKA, ZOPO, Amoi, G’Five, Little Pepper, Haier, and Beijing Tianyu–have pledged to launch AMOS phones, none of them are major players.
Obstacles standing in Alibaba Group’s way include Google, which in September objected to Acer’s plan to sell an AMOS-powered smartphone because Acer is part of the Google-led Open Handset Alliance. Google said that Acer could not work with a “noncompatible” version of Android and, even though Alibaba insisted that its OS is not an Android variant, the Acer phone was shelved. But Alibaba Group seems optimistic that it will ll be able to get around the Open Handset Alliance. Zeng told WSJ “if quite a few handset companies decide to choose Alibaba’s OS, Google will have to be careful in how far they want to push it.”
Alibaba Group recently held a press conference in which it outlined its plans to leverage its e-commerce properties to get support from device makers, telecom carriers, and software developers as it creates an ecosystem for AMOS.
Steps Alibaba Group is taking to promote AMOS include subsidies for smartphone makers and a 1 billion RMB ($162 million) funding program for app developers. The company is also striking deals with telecom operators that would allow customers to purchase AMOS smartphones without deposits or down payments by determining their creditworthiness based on transactions on Alibaba Group’s e-commerce sites.
Furthermore, AMOS may stand to benefit from the Chinese government’s push to promote operating systems developed within that country, which has included attacks on foreign developers. For example, in March China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a white paper that criticized the country’s dependency on Android, while Apple issued an apology earlier this month after a series of attacks by state-run media. Other OSes currently being developed by Chinese companies include Smartisan and Ubuntu Kylin.
Read More →Economies Of Scale As A Service
Credit where it’s definitely due: this post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie.
Don’t look now, but something remarkable is happening.
Instagram had twelve employees when it was purchased for $700 million; all of its actual computing power was outsourced to Amazon Web Services. Mighty ARM has only 2300 employees, but there are more than 35 billion ARM-based chips out there. They do no manufacturing; instead they license their designs to companies like Apple, who in turn contract with companies like TSMC for the actual fabrication. Nest Labs and Ubiquiti are both 200-employee hardware companies worth circa $1 billion…who subcontract their actual manufacturing out to China.
Warren Buffett has long advocated investing in businesses with “moats” around their business model. Often that moat is an economy of scale; the notion that a hundred widgets cost a dollar each but a million widgets only a dime apiece.
Obviously that doesn’t apply to software, or music, or other virtual goods. What’s less obvious is that as time goes by, and technology and interconnectivity advance, it applies less and less to the physical world as well. Industrial capacities that not long ago were available only to gargantuan corporations are today open to anyone and everyone. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and the OpenStack providers compete to rent economies of scale for web services. Foxconn et al essentially do the same for electronics. So what happens when this trend expands into other sectors? What happens when there are Foxconns for furniture, or cars, or houses, or retail stores? And a Dronenet for transporting physical goods?
What happens is that moats dry up, and are bridged, and previously impregnable incumbents start looking very vulnerable to disruption indeed.
But wait. This is all too small. Let’s think bigger yet.
Compare and contrast Intel with ARM. The former is, historically, a vertically integrated design-and-manufacturing monolith which owns and controls everything they do, whereas the latter concentrates on being the best at the one thing they do. I have enormous respect for Intel but it seems clear that the world is trending towards ARM’s more decoupled model, wherein their designs (like TSMC’s manufacturing capacity) are made available to any and all customers.
The logical conclusion of that trend, however, is far more transformative than a mere reduction in optimal corporate size and scope: it’s this–
Will ownership turn out to be largely a hack people resorted to before they had the infrastructure to manage sharing properly?—
Paul Graham (@paulg) April 15, 2013
I might paraphrase that as “property isn’t theft; property is an inefficient distribution of resources.” It signifies a dichotomy between two very different modes of thinking–one where you own things, and one where you just use them, and share them when they’re not in use. This is old news in the tech world, which has been dispersing monolithic dedicated channels into hordes of flexibly routed packets for decades…
Fibers always come in pairs. This practice seems obvious to a telephony person, who is in the business of setting up symmetrical two-way circuits, but makes no particular sense to a hacker tourist who tends to think in terms of one-way packet transmission. The split between these two ways of thinking runs very deep and accounts for much tumult in the telecom world.
— Neal Stephenson, Mother Earth Mother Board, 1994
…but it’s enormously foreign and disruptive, verging on revolutionary, to most everyone else. (Indeed, a whole lot of people have probably just mistaken it for communism. It’s not.)
We’re getting pretty abstract here. Let me pick a particular example: this column by Casey B. Mulligan in the New York Times this week, which concludes that “driverless cars … will increase the number of vehicles on the road.”
It’s a fairly smart piece that suffers from what I call “unidimensional extrapolation,” and so misses effects like the trend I refer to above. Widespread use of driverless cars will inevitably lead to a sharp rise in ownerless cars. A major reason for owning a car is that you don’t need to go get one when you need one. Which sounds like a tautology today, but won’t when shared driverless cars will be able to zoom to your house on five minute’s notice when you need to go to the mall for an hour.
Ultimately, I’m confident that driverless cars will lead to much lower car ownership in urban areas; instead, large numbers of people will have fractional ownership of sizable pools of driverless vehicles, à la Berkshire Hathaway’s NetJets, and just summon them when they need them. This will codify and formalize the running cost of using a car…and since you won’t pay for them when you’re not using them, it in turn will lead to fewer cars on the road.
That’s just one example. More generally, I think it’s hard to deny that both industries (AWS, Foxconn, etc) and individuals (from AirBNB to Zipcar) are increasingly moving towards collective usage of large pools of widely accessible shared resources. Economies of scale as a service, as Aaron put it. So far the effects are limited to specific sectors and domains — but it’s only a matter of time before this wave of change reaches, and profoundly disturbs, entire industries hitherto untouched by its force.
Read More →Facebook Buys Parse To Offer Mobile Development Tools As Its First Paid B2B Service
Facebook has just acquired Parse, marking its entry into a whole new business category: paid tools and services for developing mobile apps.
The company is buying the mobile-backend-as-a-service startup (yes, the industry acronym is mBaaS) in a deal that we’ve heard is worth $85 million. [Update: And we're hearing that excludes retention.] Neither company is commenting on the size of the deal, except that Facebook said it’s not “material.” For more on the long-term impact of Parse on Facebook’s business, read our follow up, “Parse Isn’t An OS, But It Is Facebook’s Answer To Android And iOS“.
Parse was founded about two years ago by a small group of seasoned Googlers and Y Combinator alums who got together to build a useful set of back-end tools for mobile developers. They originally called their back-end service, the “Heroku” of mobile in a homage to what was one of YC’s biggest exits to date — the $212 million sale of Heroku to Salesforce.com. They offer services that help mobile developers store data in the cloud, manage identity log-ins, handle push notifications and run custom code in the cloud.
Facebook won the deal amid what we’ve heard was a competitive process with many of other Valley’s other biggest potential buyers. Parse CEO and co-founder Ilya Sukhar said that he chose Facebook over other suitors — without naming names — because the company was a better cultural fit.
“I don’t think any of the other conversations created anywhere near the excitement level that we had for Facebook,” he said in an interview.
Why Parse? Facebook is in a big push to become more relevant than ever to mobile developers. It doesn’t own its own mobile OS like Apple or Google. It doesn’t make its own devices.
Instead, it’s a horizontal social and identity layer that runs through thousands of apps of iOS and Android, in deep custom integrations in devices made by hardware makers like HTC, and in its latest project, Facebook Home.
In that sense, Facebook has to prove value to mobile developers in other ways. Facebook integrations can make apps stickier when users add friends, and the company’s mobile app install ads help developers acquire new users.
Now through the Parse deal, the company will be able to offer back-end services for data storage, notifications and user management. This is a brand new kind of revenue stream for Facebook, as the company is keeping Parse’s freemium revenue model. Parse currently has over 60,000 apps and roughly the same number of developers. They focus on monetizing the top 10 percent of their clientele.
“This fills out one of the pillars of Facebook platform that we’ve been thinking about for awhile,” said Facebook’s Director of Product Management Doug Purdy. “Since 2007, the Facebook platform has been about being an identity mechanism with sharing. But over the course of the last six months, we’ve been thinking about how we can help applications get discovered and how they can be monetized.”
He added, “In order to provide the best experience possible, developers also need to build a whole host of infrastructure. Parse is a natural fit. They’ve really just abstracted away a lot of the work necessary to get an app up and running.”
The deal is a big exit for Parse, which had raised just $7 million to date from investors including Ignition Partners, Start Fund, Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Data Collective, Yuri Milner, Aaron Iba, Garry Tan, Justin Kan, Chris Fanini, Sean Knapp, Don Dodge and David Rusenko.
As for Parse users, the company says apps won’t be affected in any way, that developers won’t have to integrate Facebook and that existing contracts will be honored. Parse has a freemium model with a basic free version for up to 1 million requests or pushes per month and a limit of 20 bursts per second. A lowest paid version is $199 a month with 15 million requests a month, 5 million pushes per month and a burst limit of 40 per second. Then there’s an enterprise version where the rates are negotiable.
In the long-run, by getting closer to the development process Facebook could increase the likelihood that third-party apps integrate with them and buy their ads. When added to the direct fees Facebook will collect from Parse subscribers, the acquisition could become a critical part of how Facebook earns money from the burgeoning app economy.
To learn how the acquisition will change Facebook’s place in the mobile landscape, read our follow-up, ”Parse Isn’t An OS, But It Is Facebook’s Answer To Android And iOS“
Here’s the announcement post from Parse co-founder Sukhar:
Parse has come a long way. In just under two years, we’ve gone from a rough prototype to powering tens of thousands of apps for a very broad spectrum of customers.
Some of the world’s best brands trust us with their entire mobile presence, and a growing number of the world’s brightest independent developers trust us with their next big thing. We couldn’t be happier.
As stewards of a good thing, we’re always thinking about the next step in growing Parse to become a leading platform in this age of mobile apps.
These steps come in all sizes. Most are small and incremental. Some are larger. Today we’re excited to announce a pretty big one.
Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.
We’ve worked with Facebook for some time, and together we will continue offering our products and services. Check out Facebook’s blog post for more on this.
Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense. In a short amount of time, we’ve built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers.
We think this is the right way to accomplish what we set out to do. We’re excited about the future of Parse!
Ilya, Kevin, and James
And here’s Facebook’s statement from Director of Product Management Doug Purdy:
Read More →Last week, we hosted our first Mobile Developer Conference, where we launched several new products to help mobile developers integrate Facebook: Open Graph for mobile, better Facebook Login, and new developer tools. Today, we’re making it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform by announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers.
By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.
We’ve worked closely with the Parse team and have seen first-hand how important their solutions and platform are to developers. We don’t intend to change this. We will continue offering their products and services, and we’re excited to expand what Facebook and Parse can provide together.