Snapzu Science: Re/code

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Wednesday, 17 September 2014

Here’s How Many Copies of Destiny Activision Actually Sold Last Week

Last week, Activision said it had shipped $500 million worth of its new shooter game Destiny, developed by Halo creators Bungie, into retail stores. Today, it said that in its first week, the game made more than $325 million — which works out to about 5.4 million copies. A spokesperson said that number includes both retail and digital sales. Destiny is one of the more closely watched game launches this year because it is completely new rather than a sequel, with high expectations from analysts, though early reviews have been mixed.

Airbnb Will Collect Taxes in San Francisco Starting Next Month

Airbnb will collect and remit taxes on behalf of its hometown of San Francisco starting October 1, the company said today.

That means Airbnb-coordinated stays in San Francisco are about to cost 14 percent more than before, with the addition of the city’s transient occupancy tax.

The move comes as Airbnb is the focus of a legislative battle in the city over short-term rentals, which have largely existed as a loophole outside leasing and hotel systems. City leaders held a marathon eight-hour hearing on the issue this week.

Airbnb had previously promised to institute the tax plan this summer. (Then again, San Francisco’s mild fall can feel like summer.)

“This is the culmination of a long process that began earlier this year when we announced our intent to help collect and remit occupancy taxes in San Francisco,” said Airbnb public policy leader David Owen in a blog post.

San Francisco supervisors are still in committee hearings about a proposed law that may limit Airbnb-type rentals to a total of 90 days per year when no host is present. They are also discussing host registries and mandatory notifications to landlords whose tenants sign up as hosts.

Owen had appeared at the hearing this week, and argued that it would violate Arbnb hosts’ privacy to share information with the city about their listings and rental history. This comes back to the fact that Airbnb bridges the online and offline worlds. The company says this is parallel to when governments ask internet platforms to hand over user records. The city says it’s more similar to reporting sales tax.

Airbnb is already collecting taxes in Portland, and had discussed collecting taxes in New York.

Chinese Hacked U.S. Military Contractors, Senate Probe Finds

china-hacker

Reuters / Pichi Chuang

Hackers associated with the Chinese government have repeatedly infiltrated the computer systems of U.S. airlines, technology companies and other firms involved in the movement of U.S. troops and military equipment, a U.S. Senate panel has found.

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s year-long probe, details of which were made public on Wednesday, found that the military’s U.S. Transportation Command, or Transcom, was aware of only two out of at least 20 such cyber intrusions within a single year.

The committee’s investigation also found gaps in reporting requirements and a lack of information sharing among U.S. government entities. That in turn left the U.S. military largely unaware of computer compromises of its contractors, it found.

“These peacetime intrusions into the networks of key defense contractors are more evidence of China’s aggressive actions in cyberspace,” Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee’s chairman, said in releasing the report.

The investigation focused on the U.S. military’s ability to seamlessly tap into civilian air, shipping and other transportation assets for rapid troop deployments and the timely arrival of supplies from food to ammunition to fuel.

In a 12-month period beginning June 1, 2012, there were about 50 intrusions or other cyber events in the computer networks of Transcom contractors, the 52-page report stated.

At least 20 of those were successful intrusions attributed to an “advanced persistent threat,” a term used to designate sophisticated threats commonly associated with governments. All of those intrusions were attributed to China, the report stated.

Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the committee’s top Republican, called for a “central clearinghouse” that makes it easy for contractors, especially small businesses, to report suspicious cyber activity.

Among the investigation’s discoveries was that a “Chinese military intrusion” into a Transcom contractor between 2008 and 2010 “compromised emails, documents, user passwords and computer code.” In 2012, an intrusion was made into multiple systems of a commercial ship contracted by Transcom, the report said.

The Senate probe could further increase tensions between the two world powers over cyber spying.

Officials with the Chinese embassy in Washington were not immediately available to comment.

The results of the investigation were revealed months after U.S. authorities in May charged five Chinese military officers and accused them of hacking into American nuclear, metal and solar companies to steal trade secrets.

Last month, Community Health Systems, one of the largest U.S. hospital groups, said Chinese hackers had stolen Social Security numbers and other personal data from some 4.5 million patients.

(Reporting by Ros Krasny; Editing by Susan Heavey and Will Dunham)

LightSpeed Lands $35 Million as Retail Software Battle Heats Up

LightSpeed, a Montreal-based company that makes checkout software and inventory and sales tracking tools for brick-and-mortar businesses, has raised $35 million in a round led by iNovia Capital. Additionally, Hercules Technology Growth Capital and existing investor Accel Partners participated in the funding, which brings total investment in LightSpeed to $65 million. The company also said it was introducing its own payments processing product for its brick and mortar customers.

Code/Mobile to Feature CEOs from Stripe, Quixey and URX and Airtel’s Product Chief

In addition to bringing some of the biggest names to the Code/Mobile stage, we’re also highlighting a handful of startups we think you will be hearing a lot more about.

Last year, we brought you Waze before the Google deal, WhatsApp before Facebook made its acquisition bid and China’s Xiaomi before many had heard of the up-and-coming phone maker.

This year, we’re excited to shine our spotlight on Patrick Collison, part of the brother-and-brother team that run payments company Stripe, as well as the chief executives of Quixey and URX, two startups in the increasingly important area of mobile search.

While Google has become synonymous with search on the Web, searching for things within apps is a new field dominated by small companies that focus on so-called deep links. Tomer Kagan, who runs Quixey, and John Milinovich are experts in that area.

Milinovich runs URX, a San Francisco-based company with a goal to make all the world’s apps searchable. He started the company last year, following short stints at Google and Yahoo, after seeing how apps were becoming all-important yet increasingly walled-off places.

Kagan is also taking on the in-app search challenge and has raised a significant war chest from investors, including Alibaba.

Of course, while search is an area dominated by startups today, it’s also vital to companies like Google and Microsoft. It wouldn’t be surprising to see either of these companies get acquired by one of the big boys.

Mobile payments are already a big deal and about to be even bigger. Stripe is in the middle of nearly all the excitement in mobile commerce these days, powering Lyft, Instacart, and many others, and cutting deals with Apple Pay and Alipay. Collison will talk about how a simple approach helped his startup outmaneuver many larger players in the space.

And Kagan, Collison and Milinovich are all 30 and under.

Another big theme from last year was highlighting the global impact of mobile. To that end, we are pleased to be joined by Anand Chandrasekaran, who is chief product officer for Indian mobile carrier Bharti Airtel. Chandrasekaran left Yahoo earlier this year and has been hard at work on a variety of efforts for Airtel, including becoming the launch carrier partner for Google’s Android One project.

These four join a lineup that also includes Greg Joswiak from Apple, T-Mobile CEO John Legere, the founders of Instagram, Susan Wojcicki of YouTube, Rick Osterloh from Motorola and many more.

Before you ask, no — we aren’t done yet. We have a couple of big name (and yes we do mean big name) surprises still to add. That means if you want to attend Code/Mobile, you would be better off booking your ticket this week rather than waiting and risk being shut out.

Size Matters (Comic)

Riverbed Exec Bolts for Stealth Security Startup Illumio

ejection_seat

US Navy

Illumio, the still-in-stealth security startup that so far has raised $42 million and change in venture capital, has just hired an executive out of the networking company Riverbed.

Via LinkedIn

Scott Downie, who for nearly nine years ran Riverbed’s customer support operations has joined Illumio in a similar role, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Illumio is working on an approach to security that involves applications running in virtual machines, an increasingly common set up in corporate offices. Virtualization, a bedrock technology of cloud computing, allows one single physical computer to split up its resources in such a way that it can act like dozens of computers. Illumio’s investors include General Catalyst, Formation 8, Andreessen Horowitz as well as Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Box CEO Aaron Levie.

Securing virtual machines is a popular themes among startups these days. Just yesterday another startup, vArmour, came out of stealth mode with a plan to secure data traffic between virtual machines.

Cisco to Acquire Private Cloud Vendor Metacloud

handshake_deal

Stockyimages / Shutterstock

Networking giant Cisco Systems said today it will acquire Metacloud, a privately held startup focused on selling private cloud computing services to companies.

Cisco says Metacloud fits with its larger vision to build what it calls a “network of clouds.” It said in March it would spend $1 billion on an initiative it calls Intercloud. That plan calls for Cisco to deliver cloud services through a network of third parties rather than build a distinct service to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services or IBM SoftLayer.

Financial terms of the Metacloud deal aren’t being disclosed, but the Pasadena, Calif.-based company had, according to Crunchbase, raised a combined $25 million in three funding rounds, the most recent of which was a $15 million B round led by Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and UMC Capital. Other investors include AME Cloud Ventures, Canaan Partners and Storm Ventures.

Metacloud has two products, both of them based on OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system. One product runs in a company’s own data center — often referred to as “on premise.” The other was a hosted private cloud that it offered as a service.

Some companies are attracted to the idea of so-called private clouds because they offer flexibility similar to using a cloud service like AWS or SoftLayer, while allowing the customer to maintain control of data they may consider too sensitive to put in the hands of a third party. Numerous companies stepping into the cloud computing services business — which, aside from Cisco, include IBM and Hewlett-Packard — often argue in favor of a hybrid approach that combines privately-run cloud infrastructure with additional capacity from an outside service provider.

Cisco’s deal comes on top of last week’s acquisition by HP of Eucalyptus Systems. It’s another cloud software operation that helps companies manage the various cloud services they use — private and public. It also makes it easy to move computing jobs in and out of Amazon’s cloud.

Lowe’s Backs Home Improvement Site Porch

With a lot of startups tackling home remodeling — Houzz, Thumbtack and Pro.com among them — it’s a pretty good sign of support to get Lowe’s, the big box home improvement store, to lead your $27.6 million Series A funding round. That’s what happened to Seattle-based Porch.com, which aggregates project data so would-be remodelers can do research. Porch is actually already featured in all of Lowe’s stores.

Minecraft Shows Why Game Cloning Can Be a Good Thing

This is not Minecraft.

Infiniminer

In May 2009, a poster on the forums of the popular Web comic xkcd asked fellow forum-goers: What was the “most geeky thing” they had done recently?

The original poster was watching the BBC’s “Walking With…” animal history series in evolutionary order. One respondent was learning to program in the Python programming language. Another designed an RF tracker for his cat.

The ninth response was from a user calling himself “Notch”: “I started working on a clone of Infiniminer. That’s pretty geeky. =D”

Three days later, Markus “Notch” Persson posted on an independent game development forum, TIGForums, to unveil a playable alpha of his clone: The first version of Minecraft. Within 12 minutes, a player had discovered an underground cave, and praised the game’s “great sense of exploration.” Within a few hours, someone had already made art out of the game’s endlessly recombinable blocks: A giant recreation of Nintendo’s flagship character Mario.

As explained in Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson’s book about Minecraft, the basics of Infiniminer will be “eerily familiar” to Minecraft players:

The game is enacted in square, blocky worlds automatically generated before each play. Every individual block can be picked loose from the environment and assembled into something new. Certain blocks, often the ones deep in the ground, contain rare minerals. Others are just dirt and rock to be dug through in the search for treasure.

Here’s the thing, though: Persson did nothing wrong, and there’s a case to be made that the status quo of game cloning is the least bad option.

Off the bat, it’s worth noting that cloning a game is legal. This is because copyright doesn’t protect creative ideas — such as the concept of having a randomly generated world of blocks — but rather the specific expression of those ideas in a published game. Plus, Persson made some crucial changes. He replaced Infiniminer’s third-person view with a first-person view, putting players in direct contact with whatever they crafted and built, and arguably making the creative experience more intimate.

Goldberg and Larsson interviewed Infiniminer creator Zachary Barth for their book, and even he agreed: “The act of borrowing ideas is integral to the creative process.”

Not all developers are quite so forgiving. Earlier this year, an innovative $2 mobile puzzle game called Threes was rapidly cloned and tweaked into a bevy of free-to-play titles, led by Ketchapp’s 2048, that outpaced their inspiration in downloads. Although Threes creators Greg Wohlwend and Asher Vollmer did the iterative heavy design lifting, 2048 became a monumental hit on the back of Threes’ minimalist sliding-numbers mechanic.

Unfortunately for Wohlwend and Vollmer, appealing to the public was about as far as they could go. Regardless of what feels fair, Ketchapp legally made a game that people wanted to play, and designed it to have greater viral reach because it was free rather than paid. It’s hard to say if those free-riding gamers necessarily would’ve ever tried, or even heard about, Threes.

Persson and his startup Mojang managed to build Minecraft into a $2.5 billion property through years of updates to the game, while Infiniminer’s audience dispersed when the game’s source code leaked and the Web was flooded with indistinguishable copies; Barth wound up releasing his version’s open-source code and abandoning it. Knowing in hindsight that Infiniminer would fizzle, it’s worth considering: If Barth had been able to block Mojang from developing its own more tightly controlled take on the genre, would anyone be better off?

In any case, with one of the hottest games of all time now under its belt, Microsoft is probably pretty glad for the status quo.

Hudl Acquires Ubersense, the Slow-Motion Video Coaching App

Ubersense, which makes an iPad app that helps coaches and athletes analyze video so they can perfect their form and technique, has been acquired by sports team software company Hudl.

Users of the app include — at the Olympic level — figure skaters, rowers, track and field athletes, gymnasts, speed skaters, skiers and snowboarders. There are also professional and recreational users across many more sports, and even surgeons and physics researchers.

The app is reputed to be especially good at video features like slo-mo, frame by frame, tracking user over time, side-by-side. It’s iOS for now, though Android is on the way.

Ubersense had demoed at Dive Into Mobile last year — the predecessor for the upcoming Code/Mobile conference in October. It has 2.5 million downloads and about 500,000 monthly active users.

While terms of the deal aren’t being announced, Ubersense said the price was “much more” than its previous valuations and Hudl said it was its largest acquisition to date (of four, total, including Replay Analysis).

The eight member Ubersense team will remain in Boston, while Hudl is in Lincoln, Nebraska. The companies have a lot in common, though Hudl is focused on selling to teams and Ubersense makes money with upgrades by individuals. Hudl is much bigger; it’s used by 55,000 teams worldwide.

For now, not much is supposed to change except that users will be able to plug in their Hudl logins. Later, the two teams plan to work together on releasing more professional coaching content.

Could this kind of video coaching actually push people past today’s limits of athletic performance? “We think there’s really a tipping point in sports where people can get real actionable advice that makes a difference,” said Hudl’s head of product John Wirtz, who personally sought out Ubersense to make the deal.

Ubersense had raised more than $1 million from Google Ventures, Atlas Venture and Boston Seed Capital.