Lawrence Lessig’s Campaign Reform Group Gets Backing From Tech Heavies

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A political action committee created by Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig to back candidates opposed to cronyism in campaign finance, reached its $5 million crowdfunding goal on the last day of its campaign. The successful fundraising means a group of wealthy donors, including Silicon Valley biggies, will kick in a matching contribution of another $5 million, bringing the PAC’s total war chest including an initial round of fundraising to $12 million.

The Mayday PAC, backed by tech heavyweights such as venture capitalist Fred Wilson and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, aims to shine a light on the control that wealthy individuals and big-money interest groups have on political campaigns. More than 45,000 people contributed money to the PAC.

The next step is for the PAC to use the money to help elect Congresspeople who will carry the same message forward in their own campaigns, and hopefully Congress next. Yes, Mayday sought out contributions from wealthy folks to fight against the impact that wealthy folks have on campaigns for public office. “Yes. Embrace the irony,” read a message on Mayday PAC site.

“We've got lots of ideas about how to make this work,” Lessig wrote in a letter posted to Mayday’s site on Friday. “We'll be testing them and improving them and building lots that's new. But you've raised the money. It's time to get down to work. So stay tuned.”

Other Mayday supporters include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Chris Anderson of TED.

YouTube Outs Web Traffic Slow Pokes

ccdblog.com

Look who’s getting in on the slow web traffic blame game.

Google may not be making a lot of noise in Washington in the battle between media companies and Internet service providers over the idea of pay-to-play Internet “fast lanes.” But, following on the heels of Netflix’s public shaming strategy of Verizon, Google is starting to let its viewers know that who’s responsible for slow delivery of YouTube videos.

As Quartz noted earlier today, YouTube now sometimes displays an “Experiencing interruptions?” bar under buffering videos. Clicking on it, according to Quartz, takes viewers to a page that displays the current service quality for the viewer’s internet provider as well as other media providers in the area.

The rating service, dubbed a a Video Quality Report, was first announced about one month ago. A YouTube spokesman said it’s “about educating people, not shaming ISPs.”

Lessons From Sourcebits’ Road To Acquisition

 Globo, an enterprise mobility and telecom software services company, acquired Sourcebits, a design-led engineering company that builds mobile apps for enterprise and consumer markets. The acquisition seems to be for capabilities. In a tough hiring market, teams with execution maturity at an enterprise level make perfect sense. The sale also strongly points to the growing appetite of tools,… Read More

Israeli High Tech Gets Aggressive

 Israel has always taken a disproportionate share of global media attention. This has long held true in international politics, where Israel would prefer a little less attention, but also in high tech where the media attention on start-up success has often been overstated and anecdotal. Read More

The Future of the Workforce May Be Part-Time, Says Google CEO Larry Page

What happens as machines and artificial intelligence push humans out of the workforce? It’s one of the more important problems of our time — theoretical as it may seem in some sectors today — as technology makes industry after industry more efficient.

One of the most important tech overlords, Google CEO Larry Page, thinks most people want to work, but they’d be happy working less.

Page’s take: We have enough resources to provide for humanity. “The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true,” Page said, in an interview at a private event put on by the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures that was just released online.

In fact, today humanity does dumb things like destroy the environment, in part because people work when they don’t have to, Page contended.

The answer isn’t to just cut jobs en masse, Page said. People want to feel “needed, wanted and have something productive to do.” But most everyone would like a little more time off. So perhaps one solution would be to split up part-time work between people, as Page said Richard Branson is experimenting with in the UK.

Page’s co-founder Sergey Brin had a slightly different take. “I do think that a lot of the things that people do have been, over the past century, replaced by machines and will continue to be,” Brin said. But after Page opined about his idea of “slightly less employment,” Brin interjected to say “I don’t think that in the near term, the need for labor is going away. It gets shifted from one place to another, but people always want more stuff or more entertainment or more creativity or more something.”

Here’s the relevant segment:

Sergey Brin: I do think that a lot of the things that people do have been, over the past century, replaced by machines and will continue to be.

Larry Page: 90 percent of people used to be farmers. So it’s happened before. It’s not surprising.

Vinod Khosla, interviewer and long-time technology investor who tried to buy Google when it first started: The vast majority of employment shifted from farming to only needing about 2 percent of the U.S. workforce. That happened between 1900 and the year 2000. I see the beginnings of that happening again with the rapid acceleration the next 10, 15, 20 years.

Page: I totally believe we should be living in a time of abundance, like the Peter Diamandis book. If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy: housing, security, opportunity for your kids. I mean, anthropologists have identified these things. It’s not that hard for us to provide those things. The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I’m guessing less than 1 percent at the moment. So the idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true. I do think there’s a problem that we don’t recognize that. I think there’s also a social problem that a lot of people aren’t happy if they don’t have anything to do. So we need to give people things to do. You need to feel like you’re needed, wanted and have something productive to do. But I think the mix with that and the industries we actually need and so on are– there’s not a good correspondence. That’s why we’re busy destroying the environment and doing other things, maybe we don’t need to be doing. So I’m pretty worried until we figure that out, we’re not going to have a good outcome. One thing, I was just talking to Richard Branson about this. They have a huge problem that don’t have enough jobs in the UK. So he’s been trying to get people to hire two part-time people instead of one full-time. So at least, the young people can have a half-time job rather than no job. And it’s a slightly greater cost for employers. I was thinking, the extension of that is you have global unemployment or widespread unemployment. You just reduce work time. Everyone I’ve asked — I’ve asked a lot of people about this. Maybe not you guys, but most people, if I ask them, “Would you like an extra week of vacation?” They raise their hands, 100 percent of the people. “Two weeks [of vacation], or a four-day work week?” Everyone will raise their hand. Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to do their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the work week. And then, if you had slightly less employment, you can adjust and people will still have jobs.

Brin: I will quibble a little bit. I don’t think that in the near term, the need for labor is going away. It gets shifted from one place to another, but people always want more stuff or more entertainment or more creativity or more something.

Mankind: 1; Uber: 0

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Even as Uber CEO Travis Kalanick contemplates the driverless, robot dystopia of future passenger travel, one rival has gone so far in the other direction one of its passengers actually created life in the backseat.

Nancy Kim and baby

New Yorker Nancy Kim couldn’t wait a second longer after a 120 block race to the hospital in the back seat of a white BMW from taxi-hailing service Gett. Kim gave birth to her newborn son in front of Columbia University’s Medical Center last Thursday.

Coincidentally, Gett, or GetTaxi, the lesser known rival to Uber, was also the target of a local “dirty tricks” campaign by Uber earlier this year, according to Valleywag.

Gett head of marketing Brooke Mooreland said by email: “Our drivers really are the best. Juliet (Ambrose) did a great job getting the couple to the hospital quickly and safely. The couple was clearly pleased with us- they booked a Gett to bring the baby home from the hospital too! I’m so happy for them and thankful everything worked out so well!”

More to the point: In the battle between Robot and Mankind, we know where we’re putting our money. (More in the New York Daily News)

How Twitch’s Founders Turned an Aimless Reality Show Into a Video Juggernaut

Broadcasting yourself playing videogames online may not sound like a billion dollar business. But that’s just a matter of who you ask.

Twitch, the three-year-old video site is raising eyebrows across the tech world since the entertainment trade publication Variety reported it was close to being acquired by YouTube for more than $1 billion (there’s some disagreement about how far along those talks were). Twitch declined comment on those reports for this story.

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Related Article

Gaming

Why a YouTube-Twitch Marriage Makes Sense

By Eric Johnson, May 18, 2014, 7:14 PM PDT

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For gamers and other young people between 15 and 35, CEO Emmett Shear said, Twitch is already mainstream; older generations that didn’t grow up playing games have a harder time with the concept.

“If you’ve never played a videogame before, Twitch is probably not for you,” he said.

A short attempt at an explanation: A fraction of users broadcast or record themselves playing videogames; the rest — a global audience of millions — watch the live broadcasts and, often, chat among themselves and directly with the broadcaster.

How the company got to this point, though, is an interesting story.

The story of Twitch starts in Seattle. That’s where its founders, Shear and board member Justin Kan, grew up, childhood friends living three blocks away from one another in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

But it was as classmates at Yale University that the two first worked together, launching a web calendar startup called Kiko in 2005. It didn’t last. One month after launch, Kiko — designed to combine the power of Microsoft Outlook with the modern web sensibilities of Google’s then-new email product Gmail — was buried by a different solution: Google Calendar.

Google’s clout and resources alone probably would have been enough to stop the startup. But as Kan recently said at a startup networking event in San Francisco, the young co-founders weren’t heavy calendar users themselves and didn’t have the savvy to find any power users for feedback.

“One of the things I’ve learned the hard way over the years is that you should use your own product,” said Kan, now a full-time partner at Y Combinator.

In an interview with Re/code, Shear said needing to use calendars in the professional world, for more than college classes, has made him appreciate what he and Kan could have done differently.

“Now I’m an extremely heavy calendar user and I have all these ideas for things that are annoyingly wrong with Google Calendar, that I use today,” he said. “Now I have all these ideas, but then, I didn’t know. We didn’t talk to anyone, and it was a huge mistake.”

After 14 months, Kiko did find an exit, however … it was sold on eBay, for $258,000.

“We thought we had hit the lottery,” Kan said, having expected no more than $50,000 from the auction. “Maybe startups were not so bad after all.”

That money kept them going, and they learned from a series of further fizzle-outs like a Facebook-for-families social network and a company that would sell glow-in-the-dark gene-spliced roses. Then the duo landed on one idea that Y Combinator founder Paul Graham was willing to invest $50,000 to see: A reality show devoted to broadcasting Kan’s life on the Web, 24/7.

Kan recalled another seed investor saying, “I'll fund that just to see you make a fool of yourself.”

Justin.tv began broadcasting in early 2007, and quickly scored some major headlines; Kan even wound up on NBC’s The Today Show and ABC’s Nightline. Shear said that part of what made the Truman Show-esque experiment work was that this time, the product was something its creators wanted for themselves.

“If we had any success with Justin.tv, it’s because we were our own user,” he said. “We knew what was important because it’s stuff we wanted.”

In time, though, viewers began complaining about the generally drama-less show (“We did not understand reality TV,” Shear acknowledges) and, more crucially, asking how to make their own live video shows. Kan said outsiders often assume that turning Justin.tv into a broadcasting platform for others was part of the plan all along. Those outsiders, he clarified, are wrong.

“The honest truth is, we weren't that smart,” Kan said. “It was only later on that the lightbulb went off.”

The site opened up to other broadcasters in October 2007. Three years later, Justin.tv had raised $7.2 million in venture capital and was claiming some 31 million unique users per month.

It was at this time, in late 2010, that the company began working on two “skunkworks” projects. One project, a Justin.tv mobile initiative led by Michael Seibel, would spin off into an Instagram-for-video startup called Socialcam, which sold to Autodesk for $60 million in 2012. The other, a taskforce led by Shear to grow the audience for videogame content on the site, would also become its own product: A new site called TwitchTV.

“It’s kind of counterintuitive, right?” Shear said. “You want to be as big as possible as a startup, why would you pigeonhole yourself in just one kind of content? It took us a long time to realize that was a good idea.”

Indeed, TwitchTV (later shortened to Twitch) has outpaced its predecessor, raising $35 million in VC funding in the past three years, and claiming 45 million unique viewers per month by the end of 2013, up from about 25 million when the year began. A Twitch representative said that its mid-2014 tally is 50 million monthly viewers.

Meanwhile, Justin.tv’s star has faded. The company representatives with access to its recent non-gaming viewership numbers could not be reached before the holiday weekend, but Alexa calls Twitch the 249th most popular website in the world, while Justin.tv is no. 3,168. It’s no wonder, then, that in February Twitch became the name of both sites’ corporate parent.

So, what’s next? Shear said most of the company is heads-down on improving video streaming quality and speed. However, he has a bone to pick with a subset of those people who say they’ve never played a videogame: Try as they might to avoid the label, many of them are actually gamers. On a recent airplane flight, his seat-mate listened to him explain how Twitch worked and then waved it off because “I’m not much of a gamer.”

“And then he pulls out his iPad and spends the next six hours playing videogames!” Shear said. “I’m like, dude! You’re totally a gamer! We just don’t have the games you play yet. When we do, you’ll watch.”

Bellroy

My thanks to Bellroy for once again sponsoring the DF RSS feed. Bellroy is a new company that specializes in creating slim, stylish, functional wallets.

I’ve been using their Slim Sleeve model (in Cocoa) for the past few months, and it’s the best wallet I’ve ever used: looks great, feels great, and it’s very functional, with quick access to my most-used cards and room for a few more. All of our devices are getting thinner and thinner — why not get a slimmer wallet, too? Visit Bellroy’s online shop and see for yourself.

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Fireworks 2014

Cabel Sasser:

It's my job — no, it's my thrill — to find the weirdest, awkwardest, worst, clip-artiest, mis-translatediest, shoots-flaming-ballsiest fireworks packaging.

Welcome back, my friends. Happy 4th of July.

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The New Fast Food

 By market cap, McDonald’s is a $100 billion business — that’s two-thirds of Amazon. At $19 billion, Chipotle’s worth a whole WhatsApp. Hell, Taco Bell’s parent company is almost worth 1 and a half Twitters. Whither the next unicorn(s)? Food. Read More

Zuora’s Journey To Managing The Subscription Economy

 The idea for subscription billing startup Zuora was born in Marc Benioff’s office. In 2006, K.V. Rao, then a WebEx senior engineer, was meeting with Benioff and Salesforce CMO Tien Tzuo. Tzuo made a comment that subscription billing was a hard problem for Salesforce, and Rao agreed that WebEx also felt the same challenge. He left the meeting with the feeling that this problem was… Read More

Gillmor Gang: Pass the Buck

 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — spend a late Thursday afternoon on experiments, office shake ups, and a potential bank shot from an old monopolist. With the world going cup crazy, you wouldn’t fault those who traded tech for TV and shelter from the tweetstorm. The Facebook social reengineering has been all the… Read More