Technology

Instagram tells me Regramming, or the ability to instantly repost someone elsefeed post to your followers like a retweet, is ¬ happening&, not being built, and not being tested. And thatgood news for all Instagrammers. The denial comes after it initially issued a &no comment& to The VergeCasey Newton, who published that he&d seen screenshots of a native Instagram resharing sent to him by a source.

Regramming would be a fundamental shift in how Instagram works, not necessarily in terms of functionality, but in terms of the accepted norms of what and how to post. You could always screenshot, cite the original creator, and post. But Instagram has always been about sharingyour window to the world — what you&ve lived and seen. Regramming would legitimize suddenly assuming someone elseeyes.

The result would be that users couldn&t trust that when they follow someone, thatwhose vision would appear in their feed. Instagram would feel a lot more random and unpredictable. And it&d become more like its big brother Facebook whose News Feed has waned in popularity & susceptible to viral clickbait bullshit, vulnerable to foreign misinformation campaigns, and worst of all, impersonal.

Instagram denies itbuilding Regramming. Herewhy it&d be a disaster

Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Newtonreport suggested Instagram reposts would appear under the profile picture of the original sharer, and regrams could be regrammed once more in turn, showing a stack of both profile thumbnails of who previously shared it. That would at least prevent massive chains of reposts turning posts into all-consuming feed bombs.

Regramming could certainly widen what appears in your feed, which some might consider more interesting. It could spur growth by creating a much easier way for users to share in feed, especially if they don&t live a glamorous life themself. I can see a case for this being a feature for businesses only, which are already impersonal and act as curators. And Instagramalgorithm could hide the least engaging regrams.

These benefits are why Instagram has internally considered building regramming for years. CEO Kevin Systrom told Wired last year &We debate the re-share thing a lot . . . But really that decision is about keeping your feed focused on the people you know rather than the people you know finding other stuff for you to see. And I think that is more of a testament of our focus on authenticity.&

See, right now, Instagram profiles are cohesive. You can easily get a feel for what someone posts and make an educated decision about whether to follow them from a quick glance at their grid. What they share reflects on them, so they&re cautious and deliberate. Everyone is putting on a show for Likes, so maybe itnot quite ‘authentic&, but at least the content is personal. Regramming would make it impossible to tell what someone would post next, and put your feed at the mercy of their impulses without the requisite accountability. If they regram something lame, ugly, or annoying, itthe original author who&d be blamed.

Instagram denies itbuilding Regramming. Herewhy it&d be a disaster

Instagram already offers a demand release valve in the form of re-sharing posts to your Story as stickers

Instagram already has a release valve for demand for regramming in the form of the ability to turn peoplepublic feed posts into Stickers you can paste into your Story. Launched in May, you can add your commentary, complimenting on dunking on the author. There, regrams are ephemeral, and your followers have to pull them out of their Stories tray rather than having them force fed via the feed. Effectively, you can reshare others& content, but not make it a central facet of Instagram or emblem of your identity. And if you want to just make sure a few friends see something awesome you&ve discovered, you can send them peoplefeed posts as Direct messages.

Making it much easier to repost to your feed instead of sharing something original could turn Instagram into an echo chamber. It&d turn Instagram even more into a popularity contest, with users jockeying for viral distribution and a chance to plug their SoundCloud mixtapes like on Twitter. Personal self-expression would be overshadowed even further by people playing to the peanut gallery. Businesses might get lazy rather than finding their own styles. If you want to discover something new and unexpected, therea whole Explore page full of it.

Newton is a great reporter, and I suspect the screenshots he saw were real, but I think Instagram should have given him the firm denial right away. My guess is that it wanted to give its standard no comment because if it always outright denies inaccurate rumors and speculation, that means journalists can assume they&re right when it does &no comment.&

Instagram denies itbuilding Regramming. Herewhy it&d be a disaster

But once Newton published his report, backlash quickly mounted about how regramming could ruin Instagram. Rather than leaving users worried, confused, and constantly asking when the feature would launch and how it would work, the company decided to issue firm denials after the fact. It became worth diverging from its PR playbook. Maybe it had already chosen to scrap its regramming prototype, maybe the screenshots were just of an early mock-up never meant to be seriously considered, or maybe it hadn&t actually finalized that decision to abort until the public weighed in against the feature yesterday.

In any case, introducing regramming would risk an unforced error.The elemental switch from chronological to the algorithmic feed, while criticized, was critical to Instagram being able to show the best of the massive influx of content. Instagram would eventually break without it. Thereno corresponding urgency to fix what ain&t broke when it comes to not allowing regramming.

Instagram is already growing like crazy. It just hit a billion monthly users. Stories now has 400 million daily users, and that feature is growing six times faster than Snapchat as a whole. The app is utterly dominant in the photo and short video sharing world. Regramming would be an unnecessary gamble.

InstagramCEO on vindication after 2 years of reinventing Stories

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (95 Comments)

TC Sessions: AR/VR on October 18 at UCLA is gearing up to be a great show.Early-bird sales end after today, September 21. Don&t miss out on the biggest savings for this event — book your $99 tickets here before prices go up by $100.

The stage will feature some of the industrymost groundbreaking companies and thought leaders from Oculus, Emmy-winning Baobab Studios, Facebook, Survios and more.

Why attend TC Sessions: AR/VR

Big Conversations Hear todayinnovators, leaders and experts share their experiences and insights

Exclusive Demos Get a first-look at several never-before-seen augmented and virtual technology demos

Community Building Meet the key players and contributors in AR/VR throughout the day and expand your network

Agenda Highlights:

Ditching Headsets for Holograms with Ashley Crowder (VNTANA), Shawn Frayne (Looking Glass Factory) and Brett Jones (Lightform)Augmented reality may be a powerful sight, but it requires participants to own expensive hardware. Is there a workaround Startups are working to centralize the experience but itgoing to look a lot different.

Building Inclusive Worlds with Cyan Banister (Founders Fund)
/> If you had the chance to redesign society, where would you even start As game developers continue designing massive online virtual worlds where we will spend more and more time, how should we look to correct issues we encounter and how can we build a better future

Kickstarting an Industry with Yelena Rachitzky (Oculus)Oculus has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into funding VR content, and while the headset market is still small, developers have built plenty of games and experiences. Facebook VR future rests on people finding new worlds that they want to step into; how will Oculus make this happen

See the full agenda here.

Don&t forget to book your early-bird tickets here before end of day today. Students, you can book tickets for just $45 here.

P.S. When you tweet your attendance through our ticketing platform, you&ll save an additional 25 percent (for Early Bird) and 15 percent (for student tickets).

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (93 Comments)

Back in April we saw that eporta, a London-based B2B interiors marketplace startup, had raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by US investor Canvas Ventures. Eport has digitized the catalogues of furnishing manufacturers and allowed businesses to order direct, cutting out the middle-men.

Now London is continuing its obsession with interior decoration startups with the news that Clippings has raised a Series B round of funding, raising $15.4 million. Advance Venture Partners (AVP) lead the round and existing investor C4Ventures also participated.

Founded in 2014 by architecture-trained entrepreneurs Adel Zakout and Tom Mallory, Clippings now plans to grow in the US.

Currently, the furniture industry is worth €9.6 billion in Europe, and around $120 billion in the US, but only 6% of this spend is online.

Clippings aggregates data on over 7 million products from over a thousand brands to simplify discovery and combines that with interactive mood boards that replace Pinterest to identify and buy a product. Then it throws in collaboration tools for teams, multiple quote requests, orders, invoices and timelines into one place.

It now claims to have about 50,000 people & including teams designing for WeWork, Citroën and British Land & using Clippings.

Adel Zakout, co-founder and CEO of Clippings told me &We&ve built software that enables full management of an interior project, offer a layer of service and logistics so that when you do buy, we manage it all for you vs Eporta where itfully self-serve. This doesn&t fix major pain point of customer.&

He also says they have full pricing control, meaning &we can take a view of a whole project value / customer spend and offer optimal prices vs Eporta who can&t do that as the seller controls price.&

He says a typical large co-working space project may have a budget in the £100k range and will have products from 40-50 different vendors, &so you need to be able to consolidate pricing, service, logistics and offer tech to manage it all.&

Other players in the industry (but not competitors) include Houzz and made.com.

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (92 Comments)

Itbeen a strong year for tech IPOs so far, and it looks like todaydebut of Farfetch — a UK-based shopping site for luxury fashion — is on trend, so to speak. The company opened trading today — on NYSE under the ticker FTCH — at $27, making for a decent pop of 35 percent. The opening followed the company announcing late Thursday evening that it had priced its IPO at $20/share to raise $885 million from the sale of 44,243,749 Class A shares. This was above the expected range of $17 to $19, and gives the company a market cap of $5.8 billion.

The stock went as high as $30.58/shareduring the day before closing at the end of the day at $28.45.

This is generally a strong showing for Farfetch, for e-commerce, and also for those who are working in the area of online sales focused not on bargains and the middle-to-lower end of the market, but the higher-priced end aimed at luxury goods — a market that wasestimated to be worth $307billion in 2017 and projected to reach $446 billion by 2025 (according to Bain, and cited in the original IPO filing).

Notably, in thatfiling, the company had put in a provisional marker for raising $100 million, which in the end was much lower than what it raised. At the time it was speculated that Farfetch would reach a valuation of anywhere between $6 billion and $8.37 billion — but it fell short of that.

As we have noted before,Farfetch was an early mover in the area of building e-commerce marketplaces specifically catering to the luxury fashion and other luxury goods industries. This end of the market was somewhat slow to embrace digital shopping: the belief was that for higher-end goods, you needed higher-end, more personalised and in-person service at beautiful boutiques.

With that backdrop, Farfetch started out by working with boutiques and fashion houses that had yet to establish any kind of online commerce profile of their own. &These sellers have been cautious in their adoption of emerging commerce technologies,& as Farfetch puts it in their IPO filing.

By pooling them together, Farfetch was able to create a high-end experience that was bolstered by its scale and reach. In the meantime, the average shopper for luxury goods has come a long way: at the younger end they are digital natives and expect to buy online (some even bypass sites altogether and only do so through messaging platforms), and there are a lot more of them, coming from cities far from fashion centers like London, Paris and New York. They may not always be able to fly instantly to buy pieces, but they can always click a mouse or tap their smartphone screens.

Itstill a relatively nascent market all the same.

&The luxury market is such a massive market, and so under-penetrated online. Only nine percent of sales happen online, and ita $100 billion opportunity,& said Danny Rimer, a partner at Index, one of Farfetchbiggest investors.

(Farfetchmost recentacquisitionandmajor investment were both out ofChinato target these specific shoppers.)

&Farfetch is the leading technology platform for the global luxury fashion industry,& it notes in the prospectus. &We operate the only truly global luxury digital marketplace at scale, seamlessly connecting brands, retailers and consumers. We are redefining how fashion is bought and sold through technology, data and innovation. We were founded ten years ago, and through significant investments in technology, infrastructure, people and relationships, we have become a trusted partner to luxury brands and retailers alike.&

The company has turned into one of the leaders of the turn that the luxury fashion world has made to e-commerce. Farfetch had nearly 1 million(935,772) active consumers as ofDecember 31, 2017, with that figure growing 43.6 percent over the year, making it the worldlargest marketplace for luxury goods.

But growth is somewhat slowing: in December 31, 2016, it had 651,674 active consumers, which was up 56.8 percent in the previous year.

In terms of its financials, in 2017 Farfetch had revenues of was $386 million, up 59.4 percent versus 2016; and $242.1 million in 2016, up 70.1 percent versus 2015.

The company says that it made an operating profit of $136.9 million for the first six months of this year (vs $94.4 million the year before in the same period), but it is also making a net loss (after deducting tax etc.):$68.4 million for the first six months of this year, up from $29.3 million in the same period a year before.

Gross merchandise value is growing. GMV in 2017 was $909.8 million, 55.3 percent up on 2016. The previous year it grew 53.4 percent ($585.8 million in 2016).

Italso still early days for Farfetch and other companies (Matches is one big competitor) that are targeting the luxury fashion sector.

We&ll update this post throughout the day.

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (93 Comments)

CapitalG, the growth equity arm of Alphabet, has led the $185 million round in Convoy, its first investment in the Seattle-based, tech-enabled trucking network.

The round brings Convoytotal raised to $265 million and values the company at $1 billion. New investors T. Rowe Price and Lone Pine Capital participated in the financing alongside existing investors.

Convoy has long been backed by Greylock Partners, which led the startupSeries A in 2015. Y Combinator is also a backer. In an unusual move last year, Y Combinator led a $62 million round in Convoy in what was the first time the accelerator deployed capital from its continuity fund into a late-stage company that was not a YC graduate.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Bezos Expeditions and former Starbucks president Howard Behar are also Convoy investors.

Founded by a pair of former Amazonians, Dan Lewis and Grant Goodale, Convoy is trying to transform the $800 billion trucking industry, which is no easy feat. Dubbed the ‘Uber for trucks,& Convoyapp connects truckers with people who need freight moved. With the new funding, it&ll expand nationwide and move beyond just freight matching.

&Trucks run empty 40% of the time, and they often sit idle due to inefficient scheduling,& Convoy CEO Dan Lewis said in a statement. &This is a drag on the economy, the environment, and the bottom lines of shippers and carriers alike.&

Accordingto GeekWire, Convoy is working on a new suite of tools to help truckers combine tasks so they waste less time.And itworking to provide shippers access to tracking and pricing data through its platform.

As part of the deal, CapitalG partner David Lawee will join Convoyboard of directors.

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (100 Comments)

The Trump administrationnew cyber strategy out this week isn&t much more than a stringing together of previously considered ideas.

In the 40-page document, the government set out its plans to improve cybersecurity, incentivizing change, and reforming computer hacking laws. Election security about a quarter of a page, second only to &space cybersecurity.&

The difference was the tone. Although the document had no mention of &offensive& action against actors and states that attack the US, the imposition of &consequences& was repeated.

&Our presidential directive effectively reversed those restraints, effectively enabling offensive cyber-operations through the relevant departments,& said John Bolton, national security advisor, to reporters.

&Our hands are not tied as they were in the Obama administration,& said Bolton, throwing shade on the previous government.

The big change, beyond the rehashing of old policies and principles, was the tearing up of an Obama-era presidential directive, known as PPD-20, which put restrictions on the governmentcyberweapons. Those classified rules were removed a month ago, the Wall Street Journal reported, described at the time as an &offensive step forward& by an administration official briefed on the plan.

In other words, it&ll give the government greater authority to hit back at targets seen as active cyberattackers — like Russia, North Korea, and Iran — all of which have been implicated in cyberattacks against the US in the recent past.

Any rhetoric that ramps up the threat of military action or considers use of force — whether in the real world or in cyberspace — is all too often is met with criticism, amid concerns of rising tensions. This time, not everyone hated it. Even ardent critics like Sen. Mark Warner of the Trump administration said the new cyber strategy contained &important and well-established cyber priorities.&

The Obama administration was long criticized for being too slow and timid after recent threats — like North Koreause of the WannaCry and Russian disinformation campaigns. Some former officials pushed back, saying the obstacle to responding aggressively to a foreign cyberattack was not the policy, but the inability of agencies to deliver a forceful response.

Kate Charlet, a former government cyber policy chief, said that policy&chest-thumping& rhetoric is forgivable so long as it doesn&t mark an escalation in tactics.

&I felt keenly the Departmentfrustration over the challenges in taking even reasonable actions to defend itself and the United States in cyberspace,& she said. &I have since worried that the pendulum would swing too far in the other direction, increasing the risk of ill-considered operations, borne more of frustration than sensibility.&

Trumpnew cyber strategy, although a change in tone, ratchets up the rhetoric but doesn&t mean the government will suddenly become trigger-happy overnight. While the government now has greater powers to strike back, it may not have to if the policy serves as the deterrent itmeant to be.

Facebook, Twitter: US intelligence could help us more in fighting election interference

Details
Category: Technology

Write comment (90 Comments)
  1. Eventbrite goes public, and everyone else is raising hella money
  2. uBiome is jumping into therapeutics with a healthy $83 million in Series C financing
  3. Eight Roads Ventures targets Southeast Asia deals
  4. Amazon makes offline retail push in India
  5. AdGuard resets all user passwords after account hacks