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Friday, February 7, 2014

Today in bitcoin ephemera I present this interesting bet between VC Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and Felix Salmon, noted bitcoin curmudgeon. Ben has invested in multiple bitcoin startups while Felix has a really cool name and is a well-known economics writer.

The bet is simple: in January, 2019 the folks at Planet Money on NPR will poll a sample of of Americans. “If 10 percent or more say they have used bitcoin to buy something in the past month, Ben wins. If it’s fewer than 10 percent, Felix wins,” Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein wrote.

The winner gets a pair of alpaca socks, the first item ever paid for in bitcoins.

Salmon believes that Bitcoin’s volatility and rise to prominence makes users think they’ll make more money by sitting on the currency rather than spending it. He brings up the example of the original pair of Alpaca socks bought for bitcoin – that person is probably upset he sold all those bitcoins for some socks. While the original sock purchase is lost in the veil of time, it should be noted that someone paid 10,000 BTC for a pizza in 2009. That pizza would be worth $7,280,000 today.

The potential for profit from sitting on the currency, then, will discourage growth argues Salmon. Horowitz is far more bullish, expecting bitcoin to become the de facto payment mechanism for the Internet by 2019.

“There’s no way that bitcoin is going to be a common payment mechanism in five years’ time. It probably will not even exist. It’s just going to be a vague memory,” grumbled Salmon.

How would I bet? I think Salmon is right, to a degree. I think what we know as bitcoin will be subsumed by the general Internet, and recreated a way to trade value that has little to do with bitcoin as it exists today. Bitcoin is too wasteful, too slow, and still in its beta stag. Just as Windows 3.1 is distant memory in this era of Windows 8.1 so will this early bitcoin be immensely different from bitcoin in half a decade. I’m not BTC bull but I’m not a bear, either. The world needs bitcoin, just not in its current form.

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Ben Horowitz’s Bitcoin Bet

6:23 AM

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Today in bitcoin ephemera I present this interesting bet between VC Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and Felix Salmon , noted bitcoin c...

There are two words I try to avoid connecting: "greatest" and "challenge." Clearly I've failed. I try to avoid this phrase because it reeks of hyperbole -- and yet here I am, typing it out in association with Apple's utterly mythical "iWatch." Still, the more I look ahead, the more I realize that Apple's greatest challenge might be convincing a world that it can produce an iWatch that matters. Consider the abandonment of the watch. As cellphones became more and more ubiquitous, users realized that they told time very well.

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An Awesome iWatch Is Apple's Greatest Challenge

5:10 AM

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There are two words I try to avoid connecting: "greatest" and "challenge." Clearly I've failed. I try to avoid thi...

Barcelona-based startup Voz.io has closed a $150,000 seed round from Kima Ventures. Summann Gandham, co-founder and CEO of Voz.io, says the funding round will “allow us to vigorously pursue business development and user acquisition strategies.” At the same time they’ve launched what they describe as a “scalable browser-based call center & CRM solution” aimed at SMEs. The advantage? As it’s all via a browser, there’s no investment, training or hardware needed to set it up. The secret of course is the employment of the fast-growing WebRTC technologies which are currently pointing a collective gun at the heads of the major voice carriers.

Voz.io, founded last September by Gandham and Sergi Almar, allows companies to provide phone support in more than 40 countries via their platform which features CRM integration. That means customer service agents get a full update about the customer via their browser, where audio and video support is built in. It features intelligent call routing, inbound and outbound call recording, call monitoring, analytics, KPIs and real time reporting.

The business is based on a pay per month per agent model which does not use third party voice APIs (such as Twilio, Tropo, Plivo etc). Instead they are connected with 20 carriers world wide with direct termination, which reduces costs, zero charges on incoming calls to its users.

This investment is part of the “Kima15″ promise recently launched by Kima ventures to fund startups in 15 days. Israel-based Jeremie Berrebi and France-based serial entrepreneur Xavier Niel are founders.

Kima says it plans to make more than 100 seed investments in the next 12 months, and, they say, at least 50 of those will be using the fixed Kima15 offer.

The firm has gained a reputation for a blistering pace of deals, making an average of two new investments every week, making it one of the most active angel investors in the world.

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Browser-Based Call Center Voz.io Closes $150K Seed From Via Kima Ventures

3:24 AM

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Barcelona-based startup Voz.io has closed a $150,000 seed round from Kima Ventures . Summann Gandham, co-founder and CEO of Voz.io, says th...

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Mt. Gox has temporarily suspended Bitcoin withdrawals in order to resolve a technical issue, the company said on its site.

The statement posted on Mt. Gox, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin exchanges, reads:

During our efforts to resolve the issue being encountered by some bitcoin withdrawals it was determined that the increase in withdrawal traffic is hindering our efforts on a technical level. As to get a better look at the process the system needs to be in a static state.

In order for our team to resolve the withdrawal issue it is necessary to temporarily pause all withdrawal traffic to obtain a clear technical view of the current processes.

We apologize for the extremely short notice, but as of now all bitcoin withdrawals will be paused, and withdrawals in the queue will returned to your MtGox wallet and can be re-intiated once the issue is resolved. Customers can still use the trading platform as usual.

Our team will be working hard through the weekend and will provide an update on Monday, February 10, 2014 (JST).

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and ask for your continued patience and support while we work to resolve this issue.

We’ve contacted MtGox for more information. The increase in withdrawals may be related investor concern after Apple’s decision yesterday to drop Blockchain, the last Bitcoin wallet app, from the App Store. The price of Bitcoin has dropped steadily over the last day, and is currently $722.86.

Several investors and Bitcoin-related startups said, however, that Apple has taken a negative stance toward the digital currency for a while, and expect the drop in value to be temporary.

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Mt. Gox Temporarily Pauses Bitcoin Withdrawals

11:09 PM

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Mt. Gox has temporarily suspended Bitcoin withdrawals in order to resolve a technical issue, the company said on its site . The statement po...

Lightworks is a professional-grade nonlinear video editor now available for Linux. It is a cross-platform editor from a well-known player in the media market, so this first-time Linux release could be a big thing. Lightworks version 11.5 for Linux was released late last month. It took the company nearly three years to get this product beyond beta, but the fully functional free -- as in not completely open source -- version may not be as feature-rich as the Pro version.

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Lightworks Video Editor Pulls Plenty of Weight

10:23 PM

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Lightworks is a professional-grade nonlinear video editor now available for Linux. It is a cross-platform editor from a well-known player ...

Google paid $750 million for a 5.94% stake in Lenovo Group on Jan. 30, according to a disclosure on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The purchase was made on the same day after Google announced that it had agreed to sell the Motorola brand to Lenovo for $2.91 billion, but will keep most of the handset maker’s patents.

The purchase of shares might be part of the deal, in which Lenovo agreed to pay a total of $2.91 billion, with $750 million in Lenovo ordinary shares, $660 million comprised of U.S. cash, and the remaining $1.5 billion in a three-year promissory note.

According to one of our sources, Google had wanted to sell Motorola for some time before striking the agreement with Lenovo because the handset brand has yet to live up to its purchase price, but had to hold off on selling the division for tax reasons. On the other hand, buying Motorola helps Lenovo build out its cell phone business. There were rumors in October that it had submitted a bid for BlackBerry, but was turned down.

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Google Pays $750M For A 5.94% Stake In Lenovo

9:39 PM

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Google paid $750 million for a 5.94% stake in Lenovo Group on Jan. 30, according to a disclosure on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The purch...

StartX, the non-profit accelerator for Stanford-affiliated entrepreneurs, introduced the most recent eight companies to have gone through its program at a demo day in Silicon Valley today. Those companies included everything from a non-profit dance program to a mobile tool for helping to treat autism in children presented to investors and press.

Founded in 2009, StartX was launched to bolster entrepreneurship within the Stanford community. While independent of the university, Stanford has committed $3.6 million in funding toward the program, which also has backing from organizations like Kauffman Foundation, Microsoft, Blackstone Foundation, Cisco, Intuit, Greylock Ventures, and AOL.

Last year, the university announced that it would begin investing in startups directly through the Stanford-StartX fund. Since then, it’s invested $13 million in 29 different companies over a period of just four months.

The program runs three session yearly, with about 10 startups per batch. Since the first class in Summer 2010, 134 startups have graduated from the program, and gone on to raise $2.1 million each on average. Recent fundings include a $37 millions Series B round for Genapsys, a $10 million Series B round for Kidaptive, and a $17M Series B round for InstartLogic.

There have been 12 acquisitions since then, with nine of those happening over the last 12 months. Companies acquired include Luma Camera, which was bought by Instagram, WifiSlam (Apple), Loki Studios (Yahoo), Aviate (Yahoo), Shopwell (HarvestMark), 6Dot (ProxTalker), PeerCDN (Yahoo), Nutrivise (Jawbone), Stypi (Salesforce), Accevia, and Thinkbulbs.

The nine companies presenting tonight include:

Apportable – Enables mobile developers to write an app once in Objective-C for iOS and then cross-compile it into a native Android app

DynaOptics – Provides technology that allows an optical zoom camera module to fit inside the current footprint of today’s mobile phones

Everybody Dance Now – A non-profit program that uses dance to cultivate self-esteem, establish healthy lifestyles, and engage at-risk youth to provide an alternative to drugs and violence

Inside Maps – Has a mobile app that enables customers to create 3D models of their homes and visualize furniture inside it before purchasing

Nightingale – Provides a mobile behavioral monitoring tool for parents, teachers, and clinicians of children who have autism

Nurep – Provides a secure mobile live video platform for virtual, on-demand medical device support to operating room staff

Part My Ride – An online car parts marketplace that aggregates parts data from reliable suppliers and provides a single point of contact for buyers to simplify purchasing

Travelnuts – Provides infrastructure that enables hotels to sell extra services, such as hotel transfers and local activities, directly from its own website