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Monday, December 30, 2013
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cleaning supplies hey paul studios

This year, several notable apps that connect users with house cleaners have launched or gained traction. These include Homejoy, Exec and laundry service Prim. There are a lot of benefits to hiring a professional cleaning service but, unfortunately, I live outside the area covered by these apps. Letting people I don’t know into my apartment also makes me feel exposed. I just don’t like having strangers judge my lovingly curated collections of masking tape, dolls, and whiskers shed by my cats over the years. But I do enjoy living in an (occasionally) neat apartment and my New Years resolution is to develop chore routines that will make housekeeping easy and stress-free by using these iOS apps.


Unfuck Your Habitat


imageMy favorite chore app is called Unfuck Your Habitat, though it is listed as Unfilth Your Habitat on the App Store to get around Apple’s ban on profanities in app names. I think Unfuck Your Habitat is totally worth its $1.99 price because curse words make me giggle. Also, many housekeeping apps and blogs seemed tailored for people who are already pretty organized. Unfuck Your Habitat is aimed at the rest of us.


Its nifty features include a “To-Unfuck List,” or your personal list of chores, unfucking challenges for different rooms, a built-it in timer that balances 20-minute unfucking sprees with 10 minute breaks, and Facebook integration so you can share your unfucking achievements with your friends.


My favorite part of the app, however, is the Random Unfucking Motivation button, which is like a verbally abusive fortune cookie that says things like “NICE ASS. NOW GET OFF IT.” and “MY NANA WOULD BE SO ASHAMED OF YOU.”


The Unfuck Your Habitat app is an offshoot of a popular blog of the same name, with inspirational before-and-after photos of real homes, not domiciles that look like they were ripped out of Domino magazine.


HomeRoutines


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If you are looking for an app with less swearing, try HomeRoutines, which is relatively pricey at $4.99 but provides a very thorough list of cleaning tasks for every part of your residence. Another helpful feature is My.HomeRoutines, which gives you the option of creating an account to back up your data and edit it on HomeRoutine’s site. HomeRoutines also syncs across different devices, which means you can share your account with family members and roommates.


The app lets you create to-do lists and then rotate tasks by day or week, so you develop a routine that makes keeping your house neat relatively mindless. HomeRoutines splits your home into five zones and gives you a list of tasks for each area. This is handy as a reminder for small tasks that often get overlooked, like dusting baseboards.


BrightNest


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If you already have a chore routine in place, but want to figure out better and more efficient ways to organize your home, then try BrightNest. The free app builds a customized list of projects for you based on whether or not you have pets or kids, the appliances or spaces you have to take care of (I appreciate this because I rent an apartment and don’t have to deal with stuff like basements, swimming pools or water boilers), and what your goals are. For example, do you want to make environmentally-friendly alternatives to commercial cleaning solutions, find craft projects or learn some money-saving tips?


BrightNest can also give you home maintenance advice based on your region’s climates, but only if you enter a zip code, so this feature doesn’t work if you don’t live in the U.S. or prefer not to divulge the area where you live. Unlike Unfuck Your Habitat and HomeRoutines, BrightNet also requires that you sign up for an account using your email or Facebook login.


If you are comfortable creating an account, BrightNest is the most attractive of all the housekeeping/chore apps I’ve tried so far. Weekly projects are illustrated with photographs and an estimate of how much time they will take. Some of them are pretty obvious (I really don’t need yet another closet organizing guide), but there are many fun and surprising tips, like using leftover tea or tea leaves as a cleaning agent. BrightNest doesn’t give you a list of routines, but you can create your own schedule with its projects and opt for reminder emails.


Chorma


Do you live with sloppy roommates that you are planning to strangle? Instead of killing them, try Chorma. It’s an easy app that lets you create lists of repeating chores and then assign them to your “housemembers,” who can check-in with their progress. To keep people from slacking off, you can create individual or group rewards that are redeemable once all tasks are created, but this feature is only available if you subscribe to Chroma Pro for $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year per household.


Image by Hey Paul Studios on Flickr







11:24 PM

This year, several notable apps that connect users with house cleaners have launched or gained traction. These include Homejoy , Exec and l...

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paul graham crunchbase

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just published a blog post about what he did and didn’t say during a widely-discussed interview with The Information (if you don’t have a subscription, you can read the relevant quotes in Valleywag). He also makes an announcement, of sorts, that the incubator is planning an event for female founders later this year.


As many of you’ve probably read, Graham attracted lots of controversy for his remarks about getting women interesting programming and hacking. (TechCrunch’s Colleen Taylor weighed in here.) However, Graham claimed in a tweet, and reiterated in the post, that his meaning had been distorted.


Specifically,while he was quoted as saying, “We can’t make women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years,” Graham said there was a crucial word that had been edited out, and it should have read: “We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes …” In other words, he said he wasn’t talking about all women, but rather the ones who “who aren’t programmers.”


To be honest, the language in the new post can still be a bit confusing to parse (for example: “I didn’t say women haven’t been programming for 10 years. I said women who aren’t programmers haven’t been programming for 10 years.”), but Graham’s position (whether or not you agree with it) becomes a little clearer you see the question he was answering, which was about whether YC should be more “proactive” about about recruiting women by “lowering standards or something like that” (I’m not sure that’s the most helpful way to frame the issue, but moving on …)


If I’m reading Graham correctly, his basic argument is that Y Combinator is happy to admit female “hackers,” but he’s resistant to the idea that it should accept women who aren’t hackers and “then somehow make up the difference ourselves during YC.”


At the end of the post, he also that YC has reached “a quorum of female founders who are doing well,” so it’s been planning to hold a Startup School-style event focused on female founders. (Startup School is a popular event with big-name speakers like Jack Dorsey talking about their experiences and offering advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.) It sounds like this new event is in the very early stages of planning, but Graham said he felt obligated to announce it now because otherwise, it might seem “that we’re only doing it for PR reasons.”


I asked YC co-founder Jessica Livingston for more details about the event, and she said she doesn’t have a firm date yet, nor has she invited any speakers:



The rough plan is to have female YC founders give quick talks (a la Startup School) sharing their stories, giving advice and talking about what they’d wish they’d known when they were getting started. I imagine it will be focused mostly on practical startup advice (and inspirational stories) for women who are interested in starting a startup or have already started one.



By the way, if you’re wondering about which female founders are part the aforementioned “quorum,” Graham’s post cites Adora Cheung of Homejoy, Elizabeth Iorns of Science Exchange, Kathryn Minshew of the Muse, Elli Sharef of HireArt, and Vanessa Torrivilla of Goldbely. (He also mentions an “Ann”, but when I asked who that was, Livingston said she’s from a startup that has yet to be announced as part of YC.)


Anyway, you should probably just read Graham’s post for yourself.







2:43 PM

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just published a blog post about what he did and didn’t say during a widely-discussed interview with T...

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Netflix has informed TechCrunch that it is indeed testing a $6.99 single-stream plan to new users as part of a test. The option appears to some new users after selecting the streaming option as a free trial.


Unfortunately for those of you excited for a dollar off discount on a standard definition stream, a Netflix spokesperson also told us that not all users may see the option and that it may never offer it generally.


The plan was first noted by Adweek this morning and we confirmed the plan as an option when we began signing up for the $7.99 streaming-only plan with a 30-day trial.


netflix-sd-plan-hed-2013


Offering a standard-def stream to one device might as well be called ‘the smartphone plan’, as that’s what it seems most suited to. Though many smartphone screens are above HD resolution, the smaller real-estate means that it can be difficult to discern a standard-def stream from a high-definition one.


Netflix analyzes a junk ton of data about user viewing habits including locations, devices and times of day that people view stuff. If that information was telling them that people view Netflix a lot on smartphones while traveling then a single stream in SD rather than HD might actually make a lot of sense for a certain subset of users. Of course, a buck off is a nice ‘sale price’ and if people get utility out of it they might feel inclined to expand the plan further down the road.


Image Credit: Taro the Shiba Inu/Flickr CC







1:54 PM

Netflix has informed TechCrunch that it is indeed testing a $6.99 single-stream plan to new users as part of a test. The option appears to s...

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Screenshot 2013-12-30 15.09.39

Fitbit has just released a major update to its iOS app for iPhone 5s, allowing the smartphone itself to track steps, distance and burned calories.


These are basic features, and just a fraction of the metrics provided by one of Fitbit’s own hardware devices, such as the Fitbit handheld or the Fitbit Flex wristband. With a Fitbit Force, for example, you can track all the basic information as well as flights of stairs climbed and sleep. Plus, it acts as a watch feeding you the information on a digital screen.


Still, the accompanying app has always been an integral part of the Fitbit hardware experience, as it offers a dashboard for every metric as well as a log tracking nutritional intake.


In other words, the app gives a robust outlook of overall health over time, which has made Fitbit a big contender in the space against Nike and others.


With the launch of the M7 motion coprocessor in the iPhone 5s, Fitbit has decided to offer “basic” tracking from the phone itself, likely with the intention to entice an upgrade.


The update comes just in time for New Years, as the pudgy masses resolve to lose the holiday weight.







12:39 PM

Fitbit has just released a major update to its iOS app for iPhone 5s, allowing the smartphone itself to track steps, distance and burned c...

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It may be the holiday season, but Gavin Newsom, California’s tech savvy Lieutenant Governor, is as mad as hell. And he’s not going to take it any more. The fury of California’s second most powerful state politician is, ironically, directed at government itself. After what Newsom called “the debacle” of Obama’s Healthcare.gov roll-out, he says that we now know how fundamentally useless government is when it comes to what he calls the “procurement” of technology.


That’s the really big deal about 2013, Newsom told me when I interviewed him at one my FutureCast salons at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto. In what he identifies as a “Code Red” alert, the incredible incompetence of government has finally been exposed to everyone. It’s both a federal and state problem, Newsom insists, reeling off five outrageous screw-ups of Californian government procurement of technology which has cost the state billions of dollars.


“This is serious,” the Lieutenant Governor insists. “We need to wake up to this.”


So what is to be done in 2014? According to Newsom, the “good news” is that “government is on a collision course with the future.” And it’s government that going to get “run-over” by digital natives. So perhaps Newsom’s advice is to have lots of babies in 2014. After all, that may be the best way to make sure that the government does, in fact, eventually collide with the future.







11:25 AM

It may be the holiday season, but Gavin Newsom , California’s tech savvy Lieutenant Governor, is as mad as hell. And he’s not going to take...

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Archos just dropped a huge smattering of CES news in advance of the huge annual tech show, which kicks off next week in Las Vegas. Among the various announcements, tucked away near the bottom, is the revelation that it will be introducing a “selection of smartwatches” for 2014, which will start at under £50 (roughtly $82 U.S.).


Archos doesn’t go into much detail about its smartwatches, saying only that they’ll have a “pebble-like” design and will work with both Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. The “pebble-like” seems like a blatant shot across the bow of Pebble, the Kickstarter-backed hardware startup that began building smartwatches under that name this past year, though it’s probably meant on the surface to indicate the things will look somewhat like rocks.


The Pebble is arguably the current leader in the smartwatch space, having sold somewhere around 300,000 units to date according to the latest official figures released by the company. Archos, the French company behind a line of moderately successful media players, and subsequently many Android-based tablets and gaming gadgets of questionable quality, looks to be trying to exploit the opportunity exposed by newcomer Pebble with cheaper devices in a range of options to suit the needs of various consumers.


Archos is targeting “simplicity and function” with its smartwatch designs, the company says, which could actually seem to be at cross-purposes. Maybe they’ll have some feature heavy designs, more like the Samsung Galaxy Gear, and some that are essentially just streamlined data delivery devices, more like the Pebble itself. Either way, I highly doubt Archos will find a red-hot seller in any smartwatch design – but that doesn’t mean it can’t meddle with the grand plans of Pebble and other startups.


Pebble is currently running a lot of sales and promotions, and giving away a good number of devices. This means that either A) it’s finding interest is dropping off after initial demand has been satisfied; or B) it’s gearing up to release second-generation hardware. Regardless, I still think we’ve yet to see any proof that watch-based computing is something that’s feasible as a mainstream device, and entrants from Archos are unlikely to provide said evidence.







10:12 AM

Archos just dropped a huge smattering of CES news in advance of the huge annual tech show, which kicks off next week in Las Vegas. Among th...

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Amy-Klobuchar

U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has today taken up the battle cry of numerous legislators before her, calling for wireless carriers to enable new anti-theft technology on handsets.


According to the Senator, one-third of robberies involve cell phone theft, resulting in an estimated $30 billion in lost or stolen phones.


That said, Klobuchar has written a letter to the heads of the major wireless carriers, including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular.


In the letter, she requests an explanations as to why “the most advanced security features” haven’t been provided to consumers.


This comes on the heels of Apple’s iOS 7 launch, which included an Activation Lock feature inside Find My iPhone. This essentially worked as a kill switch, requiring the owners passcode to reactive an account, wipe the device, turn off Find My iPhone, or sign out of iCloud.


The NYT reported last month that Samsung was trying to bring a similar technology to handsets but that it was rejected by carriers.


After all, the carriers make a pretty penny from insurance policies protecting against lost or stolen phones, which has become a huge issue in major cities. Cops have even lovingly given iPhone theft a name: Apple picking.


Meanwhile, carriers have made light of phone theft with stupid commercials. All this while people get hurt.


Here's the full text of Senator Amy Klobuchar's letter:



Dear Messrs. McAdam, Stephenson, Hesse, Legere, and Meyers:


I am writing to express my concern regarding the increase in crimes involving the theft of mobile devices across the country. As a member of the Senate Commerce Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, I understand that consumers are utilizing more mobile technology and this is spurring growth in our economy. Unfortunately, more and more consumers are also at risk of being targeted by criminals looking to steal cell phones and other devices for illegal resale. I appreciate the work the industry has done in creating a database to keep stolen phones from being reactivated, but more action is needed.


According to the Federal Communications Commission, almost one-in-three robberies involve phone theft and the cost to consumers of lost or stolen phones is more than $30 billion each year. I’ve heard from local law enforcement officials about the continued call for the wireless industry to engage with them further and to adopt “kill switch” technologies on devices. Additionally, state Attorneys General have suggested that wireless carriers have not taken adequate steps to fight cell phone theft.


As Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, I expect wireless carriers to compete against one another to ensure consumers are offered the most advanced security features and offerings. Your five companies are the nation’s leading wireless carriers, collectively serving more than 90 percent of the nation’s wireless subscribers. With that market share comes an obligation to do all you can to utilize technologies available to protect consumers.


While I understand your companies are continuing to work with law enforcement on the stolen cell phone database, it is clear that consumers want and deserve a comprehensive strategy to prevent mobile device thefts. That is why I respectfully request that each of your companies provides my Judiciary Subcommittee detailed information on the following issues by January 9, 2014:


· Information explaining whether you have had offers by handset manufacturers to install “kill switch” technology, and, if so, why your company has or has not adopted such technology.


· Information about whether you have considered including this solution on handsets made by manufacturers now competing with Apple’s activation lock technology that operates as a “kill switch” on iPhones. If not, please describe your reasoning behind the decision made by your company.


· How your company will include such technology options at no cost to consumers in the future and how your phone security offerings differ from your competitors.


Identifying ways to curb mobile device theft is a top priority of mine and I will continue to advocate for the American wireless consumer. I also believe additional action to protect wireless consumers is necessary and that’s why I am asking you for this information. The status quo is not acceptable.


Sincerely,


Amy Klobuchar








9:44 AM

U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has today taken up the battle cry of numerous legislators before her, calling for wireless carriers ...

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