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Saturday, December 28, 2013
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At first, it was just an idea, but this bill is now very real — urban transportation services like Uber and LeCab will now have to wait 15 minutes in France before letting a customer in the car. Back in October, the French government mentioned this piece of legislation as these new services would hurt traditional cab drivers. But nothing was set in stone until the AFP spotted the new bill today — and this news comes as a surprise.


In France, you have to pay a hefty price to get your taxi license. As a payback, the taxi industry is very regulated in this country, and drivers can expect to get a healthy influx of clients.


Yet, when the young and fearless startups appeared, many taxi drivers protested against LeCab, Chauffeur-privé, SnapCar, Allocab, Voitures Jaunes and Uber. While the French law calls these companies “VTC” services (car services), taxi drivers think that they are direct competitors — and smartphones certainly make Uber and others act like taxi services. That’s why the government sided with taxi drivers and talked about creating the 15-minute rule.


Shortly after that, Allocab, Chauffeur-privé, LeCab and SnapCar put together an online petition against the project. Then, nothing happened. It was like the government had forgotten about this idea.


In November, French heavyweight LeCab raised $6.8 million (€5 million) in Series B funding. At the time, I wrote that it was “a good time for it to raise” with the impending changes.


Last week, the Competition Authority (Autorité de la concurrence) even wrote that the 15-minute delay was a bad idea.


“This competitive imbalance is not necessary to protect the taxi monopoly on this market. Moreover, it potentially contradicts the objective to improve free traffic flow,” the report says.


But all of this was for nothing as the new 15-minute rule will be enforced on January 1st 2014. Chauffeur-privé CEO Yan Hascoet already reacted to news agency AFP, saying that the French startups will comply with the law but will immediately contest the government’s decision — according to him, the startups have a good chance of winning.


On average, it takes 7 minutes for a so-called black car to come and pick you up in France. What will happen? Will the driver wait in the car on the side of the road? Drivers could spend hours waiting in their cars every day, losing potential income. Rides will take longer on average, meaning that less cars will be available for potential customers. With today’s bill, urban transportation companies are not the only losers — customers are losers too.


(Photo credit: Maxime Bonzi)







2:39 PM

At first, it was just an idea, but this bill is now very real — urban transportation services like Uber and LeCab will now have to wait 15 m...

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Bathys, a boutique watchmaker based on Kauai, Hawaii and run by one determined man, first announced their wild Cesium 133 atomic watch in October. Now, a few months later, the company is nearly ready to hit the shoals of crowdfunding.


The company made a name for itself by building sturdy dive watches for the surfer set. We haven’t heard much from them, however, until recently when they announced plans to make a watch that will remain accurate until your children’s children jet off in their moon cars to Juno. It uses a Symmetricom SA.45s CSAC atomic clock on a chip to power a standard quartz face salvaged from an older Bathys model.


Created by John Patterson, the watch is still a work in progress but there is some talk of crowdfunding the product once it is ready for prime time. At this point ABlogToWatch estimates that the piece will cost $8,000 or so when complete with discounts offered to early adopters.


Obviously this thing is comically large and obviously battery life is an issue but this is the first standalone device that will be more accurate than some GPS units. Because it doesn’t depend on a satellite sync it will be accurate all the time and even far into the future. While you’re not going to wear this on your next surfing safari I don’t see why you couldn’t wear it stargazing or, barring that, while manning the tubes at the Large Hadron Collider.







12:39 PM

Bathys , a boutique watchmaker based on Kauai, Hawaii and run by one determined man, first announced their wild Cesium 133 atomic watch in ...

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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Happy New Year! @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @k...

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I’ve spent the last week back in my wintry homeland in Canada, and here the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I have seen the light, and I have a message for all of you who live in America, a message of the utmost importance, inscribed in fire on the sacred stone of the Internet. And that message is: holy crap T-Mobile is awesome. If you travel internationally at all, you should switch to T-Mobile now.


Yes, I know I sound like a paid shill. I feel awkward and embarrassed about that. I think my record speaks for itself, though: when it comes to tech companies, usually I’m a crotchety, negative guy. But this is different. This is terrific.


Heck, only six months ago I wrote a post called “America’s Carriers Are Terrible. It’s Probably Your Fault.” But then in October T-Mobile rolled out its free unlimited international global roaming.


Basically, international travellers on a monthly T-Mobile plan no longer have to either deal with rapacious roaming charges or the hassle of getting and activating a new SIM card local to your destination. Instead you just switch data roaming on and let your phone find your provider. To my considerable amazement, that’s all I needed to do; no APN hacking, no mobile-network munging, no service calls; It Just Works. I could even tether.


It’s not perfect, of course. You still have to pay, albeit very reasonable prices, for calls and texts, and your free data is only 2G/128kbps. Needless to say, you can buy 4G roaming from T-Mobile, but I’ve found no need to do so; in Toronto, at least, 2G is plenty good enough to check email and Twitter between the many zones and cafes where you can pick up a cup of wi-fi nowadays — and it’s so much better than the alternatives that any comparison at all is kind of insulting.


I am not accustomed to sounding like an advertisement like this. To be honest it kind of makes my skin crawl. But it’s probably important, on the rare occasions that a company — an American carrier, no less — actually does that right thing, that we praise them to the rafters and sing hosannas in their name.


Oh, I have no illusions that T-Mobile’s boardroom is full of angels. They were only driven to doing the right thing because they were the distant fourth-place competitor in a vicious market; and now that Softbank/Sprint is on the verge of buying them, everything may change. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they canned this initiative the day after the merger closes, on the grounds that it actually improves their users’ lives without desperately inconveniencing them at every possible pretext and then charging them to mitigate those inconveniences — and we can’t have that, can we? It sets a bad precedent.


I half-expect their attitude towards their customers to soon revert to that of a medieval lord towards his serfs. But maybe, in the interim, we travellers can send a message by voting with our feet. Abandon your current carrier, buy an unlocked phone, and flock to T-Mobile and its (currently) almost incomprehensibly user-friendly plans. This golden era probably won’t last; but make the most of it while you can.


Image credit: chrisinplymouth, Flickr.







6:08 AM

I’ve spent the last week back in my wintry homeland in Canada, and here the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I have seen the light, and ...

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After its discovery of a security hole in Snapchat was ignored for months, Gibson Security earlier this week released the API for the Snapchat application along with two exploits. One exploit lets hackers match phone numbers with Snapchat users' names en masse; the other enables hackers to create huge numbers of fake Snapchat accounts. Together, the API and the exploits will let hackers duplicate Snapchat's API and stalk the 8 million users the site is reported to have.


5:09 AM

After its discovery of a security hole in Snapchat was ignored for months, Gibson Security earlier this week released the API for the Snap...

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UAhack

Earlier this year I attended Startup AddVenture 2013 in Kiev. Normally tech startup conferences consist of a normal routine of speeches, pitches, panels and networking events. This time however, there was an added element – major social upheaval just around the corner.


In nearby Independence Square, there was a massive protest in favour of the Ukraine joining the European Union. It was ironic. Only a couple of hours away by plane Greeks had been rioting to get OUT of the European Union, with it’s heavy austerity measures. But what was happening in Kiev was different, and closely affected by the politics surrounding Russia in the 21st Century. The Ukrainian president Yanukovych had, at the last minute, reneged on negotiations for the Ukraine to strengthen commercial and political integration with the European Union, to opt instead for closer ties with the Moscow-dominated Russian trading block. That brought thousands of protesters onto the streets.


It certainly charged the atmosphere of the conference, and many of us went down to see the protests on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti square (Independence Square) to take in the atmosphere. Technology has become an intimate part of social movements, and already the #EuroMaidan hashtag on Twitter had sparked international interest and media coverage of the movement.


Since then the protests have continued, and the waves of social media around the protests have exposed police beatings of protesters and journalists alike.


Involved from the beginning, now technology people are rallying. Today, hackers from across Ukraine have gathered for the “IT Hamet” Hackathon being organised by the the “IT tent” based at the Euromaidan protest, the Kiev co-working space Chasopys, and the startup community in Kiev.


You can tune into the live tweets, in English, on @HappyFarmUA from the Kiev-based Happy Farm Accelerator, and follow the event on the hashtag #hackUA


And there is a direct live video feed into the event space here and another feed here.


The aim is to create “instruments of public assistance” for Ukrainians. In other words, to improve the life of the Ukrainian citizen, their relationship with the state and aid their participation in significant public decisions.


Amid all this political upheaval, tech people are seizing the moment to create better democratic tools.


Participants will be presenting their ideas and projects, after that teams will form and approximately 15 projects will be selected for concentrated development – and the work will begin.


On Sunday night the teams will present their hacks and we’ll update this post with links to the projects created.


Of course, Hackathons, can sometimes be marathon affairs, with little in the way of “action”.


But it’s fascinating to watch what will be produced, in the middle of what – to many at least – is a revolution.


Here’s the live feed:







3:09 AM

Earlier this year I attended Startup AddVenture 2013 in Kiev. Normally tech startup conferences consist of a normal routine of speeches, pi...

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Friday, December 27, 2013
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Following security researchers publishing a way to match Snapchat usernames to phone numbers, Snapchat has published a skimpy statement making the hack sound impractical and noting “We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.”


Earlier this week ZDNet published an in-depth write-up of how white-hat Gibson Security researchers had tried to notify Snapchat of a way hackers could connect usernames to phone numbers for use in stalking, but were ignored. The GibSec team then published the exploit publicly on Christmas Eve.


Snapchat hadn’t provided a public statement until now, and what it’s offered isn’t very satisfying. “Theoretically, if someone were able upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way. Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do.” It goes on to note it’s added more barriers to the use of this hack.







4:08 PM

Following security researchers publishing a way to match Snapchat usernames to phone numbers, Snapchat has published a skimpy statement mak...

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