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Just as fitness apps and wearables are gaining real traction, the introduction of Android Wear is giving consumers their first maybe-viable smartwatches. In the coming months and years, this new category will force consumers to make a similar decision as that between Microsoft’s unified approach to operating systems and Apple’s intentional divergence of iOS and Mac OS X. Read More
If you watch one of a friend’s videos, Facebook will now try to get you to watch more with a new carousel of suggested videos that appears after you view one in the mobile News Feed. Reminiscent of YouTube’s Related Videos, Facebook confirms the existence of this fresh laidback experience in Facebook for iOS that I spotted over the weekend. It lets you quickly watch a series of… Read More 
Isis, the mobile wallet platform backed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon here in the U.S., has decided to rebrand after its name became synonymous with “ISIS,” an Islamic militant group linked to sectarian violence against civilians and government forces in Iraq and Syria, the company is announcing today. That the two organizations share a name is entirely coincidental, but… Read More 
Box, a file-storage and management firm, has raised another $150 million from TPG and Coatue, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company had previously raised $414.1 million, making its total funding in excess of $550 million. TechCrunch has confirmed the amount through a source. Previously, Box filed to go public, with its S-1 document detailing rapid revenue growth. Its top line… Read More 
3D Pictures/Shutterstock
Just as we said it might do last month, Box, the enterprise cloud storage company, has closed another private round of funding intended to tide the company over before it pulls the trigger on its planned initial public offering.
The Wall Street Journal just reported that Box has closed a $150 million round led by private equity firm TPG and hedge fund Coatue Management.
As sources familiar with the company’s plans told Re/code in June, the company is still determined to float its shares publicly sooner rather than later. The next step in the process will unfold when Box updates its S1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a move that could come any day now.
The March 24 public disclosure of Box's S1 filing landed shortly after a significant drop in the shares of publicly traded cloud software companies. The decline in the sector, which wiped away nearly a third of the group's value, derailed Box's debut, which had been initially anticipated in April.
TSA
It’s always a good idea to charge your cellphone before flying, if for no other reason than so you can play Angry Birds while sitting at the gate or during the flight.
Now there is another reason to do so.
The Transportation Security Administration has decreed that fliers heading to the United States may be required to power on their cellphones and small electronics to prove they aren’t actually cleverly disguised explosives.
For now, the rule applies only to flights from “certain overseas airports,” but given the fact that messages often get crossed, it’s probably a good idea to have that cellphone ready to power on at domestic airports, too. It will be interesting to see the impact of the rule — whether it leads to longer lines at security, and if the rule gets expanded to domestic flights.
It’s the latest in a string of changes related to small electronics and flying. The big positive change is that such devices can now be used during takeoff and landing (as long as they are in airplane mode).
The other important rule, though only sporadically enforced, relates to how the batteries that power these devices (and laptops) are to be transported due to risk of fire. Lithium batteries that are being used outside of a device need to go in carry-on rather than checked luggage.
Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus VR said today it will host a developer conference in late September. Oculus Connect is planned for Sept. 19-20 in Los Angeles and will feature keynote talks from CEO Brendan Iribe, founder Palmer Luckey, CTO John Carmack and chief scientist Michael Abrash. Oculus also said it had acquired a networking middleware company, RakNet; it’s the company’s second recent acquisition, following Carbon Design.
Image via Gild
Tech companies have a diversity problem, especially when it comes to hiring software engineers. Software may be eating the world, but for the most part that software is created by white males, despite the fact that there are many qualified engineers in the marketplace who are neither.
A series of self-reinforcing cycles reinforces the status quo. Companies tend to hire alumnae from certain universities and workers from particular companies; they also rely heavily on referrals from existing employees. The result is a workforce with a lot of faces that look similar.
It’s the kind of problem you might expect could be solved by, well, software. Human biases in hiring, innocent and otherwise, can be corrected by an approach that ranks candidates based on the quality of their body of publicly visible work — or so the thinking goes. That’s what Gild does. It’s one of a few up-and-coming companies that has sought to give its customers — some 300 companies at last count — a leg up in finding qualified software developers.
The San Francisco-based company has been growing fast and recently closed a $13.5 million Series B found of venture capital funding led by Menlo Ventures that brought its total capital raised to $27 million. Prior investors include Draper Nexus, Baseline Ventures, Globespan Capital, SAP Ventures and Correlation Ventures.
In an interview with Re/code, Gild CEO Sheeroy Desai and chief scientist Vivienne Ming talked about how the company is starting to help its customers grapple with the difficulties of building a more diverse work force.
Re/code: Gild has just closed a big funding round, and you’re working with companies as large and varied as Microsoft, VMware and Progressive Insurance. Can we start with an explanation of what’s driving your business?
Desai: Number one is the sheer shortage of software engineers. Every CEO I talk to talks about this problem. What we’re seeing playing out now is exactly what Marc Andreessen wrote about: Software is eating the world. You can look at any and all business models, and software is taking them over. As that happens, the world ends up needing more software engineers. And so that acute shortage makes us highly topical right now as companies look for any advantage they can get in hiring them. Also, companies have realized that they need to walk away from their own internal biases in hiring practices. They need different strategies.
When you talk about biases, what do you mean exactly?
Sheeroy Desai
We’re a business that was founded specifically to encourage hiring based on merit. But it’s been frustrating to see that for the most part, mostly in tech, there’s a tendency to hire people who went to certain schools and people who have worked at certain companies like Google or Facebook. It’s highly frustrating because we know the data and we’ve looked at it, and there are unbelievable people who don’t necessarily have the pedigree or the credentials, but whose work shows them to be incredibly skilled software engineers. There are a number of software engineers who, for one reason or another, didn’t even graduate from high school, but they’re still incredibly skilled. But they would easily get filtered out of any company’s screening process.
Do you then find that companies are becoming more open to breaking away from these biases?
It’s a mix. There are some companies that are starting to say they want to change how they hire. Google has been saying that for a year or so now. Their practice may vary from what they say, but at least they are publicly saying it. We work with some customers who are actively trying to change and telling us they don’t want to use their old policies anymore. And there are some that are sticking with them because they say they work. In those cases, I think reality will catch up with them because the supply of programmers who mirror their requirements will be exhausted or they will just become remarkably expensive. That’s the other problem, because when you place a high value on those credentials, you end up overvaluing someone who may not be worth the money and undervaluing someone who may not have the credentials but who has the skills.
So you’re saying there are a lot of overpaid software engineers who may not be so great?
Desai: Compared to the number of highly qualified software engineers who are underpaid, yes. In some ways we’re trying to get the market to clear efficiently.
So we’ve arrived at this moment where we’re having a broader conversation in Silicon Valley about class, social upheaval and overall economic viability. Is your data showing a meaningful shift in how companies are acting in their hiring practices, or anything relative to outcomes?
Desai: I think meritocracy and diversity are closely linked. They are not the same thing, but they are closely linked. And I think one of the things we’re starting to see are numbers being publicly reported by some large companies. Google has done it, Yahoo and Facebook have done it. So has LinkedIn. Pretty much the story is the same at all of them. And when it comes to software engineers the story is pretty abysmal. The vast majority are white males. Are there more software engineers who are white males? Yes, it’s true, but it’s pretty striking what is going on in these places.
Vivienne Ming
Vivienne Ming: There was a great line I read in a blog post about this recently saying that if spam filters sorted mail the same way Silicon Valley sorts engineers, you’d only ever get mail from your college roommates, and you’d never know that anything was wrong with that.
Desai: And there’s one thing that tends to reinforce the hiring bias, and we see this again and again at different companies, especially tech companies: We ask them [for] the number one way they find their employees, and they say it’s their employee referral program. People refer who they know, and that means that if your software team is already white and male, guess who they’re going to refer? And what companies don’t realize is that this is bias, and when you institutionalize it, it is discrimination. It’s unintentional. And I don’t want to accuse any companies of wanting to discriminate against certain ethnicities or anything like that. I don’t think that’s how it starts. The intention may be pure, but the result is still the same.
So where do you see Gild fitting into this?
Desai: We’re not going to solve this problem by driving diversity. What we’re about is the argument that the decision-making process in hiring software engineers should be based on merit and the body of work that you’ve done, rather than your educational credentials and who you know.
If a company wants to address this directly, it would seem they could search for potential employees in such a way that they’re blind to gender and where they went to school and so on. Can you search for employees based purely on merit, on what code they’ve posted to GitHub and so on?
Ming: Can we do it? Yes. For research purposes, I’ve built filters that run through our database and pick out information that is indicative. There was a high-profile project done at a university in Switzerland where the gender and ethnicity markers were stripped off the applications of graduate students and suddenly they found they had admitted a huge number of Turkish and female students in the following year’s class. People have a good reason not to put this stuff on their resumes, so it takes a certain amount of work to build a system that can figure it out. So when I say I’ve done it, it’s not to the degree of accuracy that we’re going to promote this and make it available. The point is that when someone does a search and asks, for example, “Who are the best Java developers in New York City?” we present an unbiased list, or as unbiased as we can. … I think what you’ll find is that the number of women and people of different ethnicities that will appear in our Top 100 list is significantly different than what you’d find in a poll of the 100 best developers in New York.
And yet from what you’re telling me, most companies would probably feel more comfortable hiring programmers based on who their employees recommend. If you take cost considerations out of the discussion for a moment, is that necessarily such a bad thing for a company?
Ming: There’s been a lot of research into this issue of positive discrimination that [shows] you tend to attract and refer people who are like yourself. There’s a lot of research that says that internal referrals work because they’re more likely to get people in the door. It’s a great solution to your short-term needs. The problem is that the research says it’s a terrible long-term solution because you end up with creative stagnation.
It sounds like there’s some fundamental tension between the short-term need to fill an open position and the long-term intent.
Ming: There is. That’s why we say some of our customers are schizophrenic. Their leadership is concerned with the long-term view. Meanwhile, people on the front lines doing the hiring are more concerned with keeping their jobs and meeting their numbers and filling the immediate need. I won’t name names, but we met a very prominent technology company on site, and they took us through their hiring process step by step and apologized for every step. They were doing all the things that we’ve been talking about, but at the end of it, they said, “We don’t know what else we should be doing.” … There’s a recognition of the problem at the leadership levels, but people feel trapped because they need 30 programmers today.
Looking for a bigger piece of the Australian travel market, Expedia announced late Sunday that it had placed a bid to buy online travel company Wotif for about $658 million. Wotif operates several sites that let travelers book hotels, flights and vacation packages.
Vjeran Pavic
There are lots of different reasons why people want to learn a new language. For some people it’s a necessity, if they act as translators for family members or are assimilating into a new culture.
For others, it becomes another bullet point on their resumes, or it’s a way to impress dates (which always makes me think of Kevin Kline in “A Fish Called Wanda,” when he speaks Italian gibberish while seducing Jamie Lee Curtis). And some people might learn for fun.
Whatever your reason, there’s no shortage of language-learning apps available. One app in particular — Duolingo — has been getting attention lately. In 2013, it was Apple’s iPhone App of the Year for language learning, and it’s the No. 1 language app in the Google Play app store.
Vjeran Pavic
Duolingo is totally free; it “gamifies” the learning experience (a technique I normally dislike, but here it actually works); and it offers immersion learning on its website, letting users translate real documents for practice purposes. This translation service is also how the company makes money — clients like CNN and BuzzFeed pay Duolingo to translate their international content.
I’ve been using Duolingo for more than a week, and it gets the thumbs-up from me so far. As promised, it does make learning a new language enjoyable, but it has some room for improvement, as its language options are still somewhat limited.
Duolingo offers courses in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and German for English speakers, and English lessons for speakers of those languages. I decided to try Italian.
Here’s a brief history of my language experiences. I’m a native English speaker who took several years of Spanish lessons and was force-fed Latin for two years as part of SAT prep in high school (note: rattling off i, orum, is, os, is does very little to impress dates). But I only know a couple of Italian phrases, like the curse words my Grandma Flo has said to me (or maybe she is asking me when I’m going to settle down and have children, I’m not really sure).
Italian appealed to me because it’s Latin-based but still new enough to me that I could get a sense of how impactful Duolingo really is.
Vjeran Pavic
Duolingo takes a conversational approach to learning, throwing you right into basic phrases and sentences. Each lesson includes a series of written, spoken or fill-in-the-blank exercises. Brand-new words are highlighted in yellow text, so if you’re looking for a definition, you can simply tap on that word.
You start out with four hearts in the upper right-hand corner of the page. If you get something wrong, you lose a heart. If you use up all four hearts before finishing the lesson, you have to start over. Extra hearts can also be purchased with Duolingo points, called “lingots.” These are not a real currency, just something you earn as you progress.
Here’s an example of an early-stage Duolingo lesson: After learning basic verbs like “eat,” “write” and “read,” Duolingo would have me translate, “Lei ha un giornale,” prompting me to type, She has a newspaper. Next would be something like, “I ragazzi scrivono,” which means, The boys write. My remaining 18 exercises might use some variation of the same words, but would ask for different pronouns or verb conjugations.
The app also recited an Italian phrase to me, then prompted me to speak the same phrase into the microphone, using voice-recognition technology to determine whether my pronunciations sounded okay. If you’re in an environment where you can’t talk out loud, you can indicate this in the app.
One feature of Duolingo I appreciated was the ability to set my own (realistic) goals. Maybe you can practice for only a few minutes a day. That's fine; you can set your learning track to be "casual," "regular," "serious" or "insane," which changes the number of exercises you're required to complete within each lesson.
Vjeran Pavic
Each day I would get email reminders and mobile notifications from Duo, the app’s language-learning coach, which takes the form of an adorable green owl. I’m a sucker for owls.
All of this made Duolingo fun. It really did feel more like a game, rather than a lesson. I would sometimes use Duolingo before bed at night. My boyfriend, who plays Words With Friends, would turn to me and say something like, “How is ‘goode’ not a real word?” And I would say, “Io mangio la mela” (I ate the apple). If anyone overheard me this week, they would believe that I ate at least 17 apples.
On its website, Duolingo has an “immersion practice” section. This is where you can read, translate, edit or vote on documents that other users have uploaded for translation. For example, one document appeared to be a kind of Wiki page for Bon Jovi. “I Bon Jovi sono un gruppo rock statunitense, formatosi nel 1983 a Sayreville, New Jersey,” it read. Translation: Bon Jovi is an American rock band, formed in 1983 in Sayreville, New Jersey. Someone else had already translated it, so I clicked the “Looks Good” button.
As fun as Duolingo is, it’s lacking in some areas. Most notably, Duolingo doesn’t fully support non-Latin-based languages like Mandarin, Japanese or Arabic. Late last year, it launched its own incubator — found at Incubator.Duolingo.com — where volunteers can post courses in Swedish, Russian, Polish and others, which is a good way to bring more languages into the fold. But there still aren’t any Asian or Middle Eastern lessons on Duolingo’s incubator site.
Vjeran Pavic
The best-known language-learning software, Rosetta Stone, is pricey, but does offer language courses in Chinese, Japanese and Arabic, among others. Rosetta Stone also offers a series of mobile apps for travelers that offer the first three lessons for free.
Duolingo also isn’t a language phrasebook, meaning that it’s not going to help you translate on the fly if you need to look up something quickly. In the past, I’ve used these kinds of phrasebook apps, and have found them incredibly helpful. Never mind that people thought I was asking for sushi while I was asking for directions to an aquarium in Osaka, Japan — the poor translation was probably my own fault.
But Duolingo says it plans to offer more language courses in the future, and also has some other interesting projects in the works. It now runs on Google Glass — something I haven’t tried — and it is working with Google to launch, in the near future, an English-language aptitude test that could become a less expensive, more accessible alternative to the current TOEFL test.
If you’re keen on learning a new language this summer, give Duolingo a try. I would say ciao in closing, but I’m too busy eating apples.
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