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Thursday, February 13, 2014
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It’s just about Valentine’s Day, which means love is in the air, even here among the workaholics in the tech industry. So for this episode of Cribs we headed over to the San Francisco headquarters of Zoosk, the “romantic social network” that started out as a dating-focused Facebook app and has grown into a full on matchmaking service.

Zoosk’s office has a nice mix of business and pleasure: Engineers plug away at code just a few feet from a spirited game of ping-pong, and data scientists furrow their brows and crunch numbers alongside people playing fetch with a newly adopted puppy.


And as you’ll see at the very end of the video embedded above, during my visit Zoosk definitely fulfilled its promise of helping people find true love.





4:54 PM

It’s just about Valentine’s Day, which means love is in the air, even here among the workaholics in the tech industry. So for this episode ...

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In any city or dense urban environment, getting around can be a hassle. Owning a car is expensive, and parking it can be a nightmare -- never mind actually driving it. Enter URB-E, a new foldable electronic bike/scooter invention that brings the sit-down ride of a powered bicycle to the foldable kick scooters that children ride around suburban neighborhoods. At just 27 pounds, the URB-E is something new. Imagine riding an upside-down "V" with handlebars and a seat. It has small wheels, disk brakes, and zooms along at up to 15 miles per hour.


2:45 PM

In any city or dense urban environment, getting around can be a hassle. Owning a car is expensive, and parking it can be a nightmare -- ne...

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What is everyone doing tomorrow? You do know that tomorrow is one of the most romantic days of the year, right? Do you have plans? Dinner? A trip? Is dessert made? Well, thanks to BloomNation, you don’t have to add flowers to your checklist!


BloomNation has agreed to give a romantic bouquet of flowers to five lucky people. They will have the flowers hand crafted by one of their local artisan florist and hand delivered to your Valentine.


That means you have more time to do things for the night — maybe clean the house or scatter those rose petals on the ground. Whatever you’re into.


Sadly, this giveaway is for the U.S. only. It starts now and ends tonight at 9pm EST. All you have to do to enter is comment below about what love means to you. We will go through the comments and pick five winners tonight, so be on the lookout if you enter.





2:20 PM

What is everyone doing tomorrow? You do know that tomorrow is one of the most romantic days of the year, right? Do you have plans? Dinner? ...

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Silk Road

Silk Road 2 moderator Defcon reported in a forum post that hackers have used a transaction malleability exploit to hack the marketplace. The hackers stole over 88,000 bitcoins worth $41,474,415, emptying the site’s escrow account.


The site used a central escrow service to send bitcoins from buyers to sellers. The hackers exploited the transaction malleability bug – essentially a way users can mask transfers and ask for the same amount of BTC multiple times – to clean out this wallet. This is the same bug that forced Mt. Gox to halt all withdrawals and recent updates have made average bitcoin wallets secure against this sort of attack. According to the site, hackers used the Silk Road’s automatic transaction verification system to order from each other and then request refunds for unshipped goods. Hackers were able to use the transaction malleability bug because the Silk Road used only transaction ID to confirm the transfer of bitcoins. You can read more about the problem here.


They supposedly run an automated refund system for their vendors that relies on the TXID to verify transactions. Their claim is that six vendors colluded to exploit that system by ordering from one another and then submitting circular refund requests.


Defcon is calling on the hackers to return the bitcoin. “Given the right flavor of influence from our community, we can only hope that he will decide to return the coins with integrity as opposed to hiding like a coward,” the moderator wrote.


The site’s users are currently attempting to track down the thief. Writes Defcon:


# Attacker 1: (Responsible for 95% of theft)

Suspected French, responsible for vast majority of the thefts. Used the following six vendor accounts to order from each other, to find and exploit the vulnerability aggressively.

## Usernames used:

narco93

ketama

riccola

germancoke

napolicoke

smokinglife

News of the theft has driven the price of BTC down by about 50 points and it’s currently hovering at 600. We’ll post more information on the hack and the exploit as we get it. Defcon, for his part, is calling for further decentralization of online markets and currency.


“No marketplace is perfect. Expect any centralized market to fail at some point. This is precisely why we must unite in the decision to decentralize,” he wrote.


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via DeepDotWeb





2:20 PM

Silk Road 2 moderator Defcon reported in a forum post that hackers have used a transaction malleability exploit to hack the marketplace. Th...

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Who likes Craigslist? No one! Who wants to see a startup succeed in providing a better alternative when searching for an apartment? Pretty much everyone! Will RentHop be that startup? I dunno, maybe.


RentHop, which launched in 2009 and has spent the last several years refining its marketplace for apartment rentals, is now moving beyond just that market and has opened up nationwide. In doing so, it will (hopefully) make apartment hunting more bearable to people outside of New York City.


The key to RentHop is in giving each listing a score, based on a lot of different data it has. That includes information about the apartment itself, its location, the property manager, the number of photos it has, and how good they are.


According to co-founder Lee Lin, Renthop also takes into account how new a listing is, and how many other people have clicked through on it. The thinking there goes that the longer a unit has been on the market, the more likely it is that there’s something wrong with it. And the more people have clicked through, the less likely it is that it will be available for rent.


The whole goal is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and make it easier to find high-quality rentals that are actually available. While much of that is focused on the user experience for renters, the platform also makes it easier for property managers and brokers to gain qualified leads.


RentHop charges just $2 per listing per week, which is low enough that there should be no barrier to getting brokers involved. At the same time, having just the tiniest cost ends up ensuring that brokers and property managers end up putting higher-quality listings on the site.


In general, Lin says some have a habit of spamming Craigslist with bait-and-switch listings, which is something you can’t really do on RentHop. The algorithm behind the scenes does the work of filtering out most fraudulent listings, so renters are only served up the best.


While RentHop is now working with some of the largest brokers in New York City, it’s relying on outside data providers to populate its listings in other markets. But the hope is that as users in those cities start using the site, it’ll become more attractive to local property owners and managers and brokers to list there.





1:49 PM

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citia

The Internet is “melting,” according to Linda Holliday, founder and CEO of startup Citia.


“I’ve been watching this movement from solids and pages to liquids and flows,” she told me. “Everything’s becoming atomic.”


Holliday argued that when you look at sites like Pinterest, you can see how the web is shifting towards a more “card-based” structure. And Citia, which is announcing that it has raised $600,000 in additional funding, aims to help marketers and content creators take advantage of that shift.


The company launched in 2012 by offering card-based layouts for e-book publishers, but now it powers a range of web pages, including eMusic’s Year In Music 2013. When you visit the site, you can browse through cards representing each of the top albums, with the cards sorted into different stacks. Each individual card can be linked to and allows users to listen to music.


Holliday, who was also an angel investor and co-founded Medical Broadcasting Company (now owned by Publicis Groupe and called Digitas Health), described Citia as a “platform as a service” — ultimately, she wants to be the technology provider for these types of online experiences, although the initial projects “need more handholding.” She also said that content management systems like WordPress aren’t competitors — instead, Citia can sit on top of a CMS.


These fancy layouts and the platform powering them are supposed to help marketers in a few key ways. For one thing, they can automatically add and organize streams of content from services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. For another, it allows websites to “blow through the Z axis,” creating three dimensional layouts that are more dynamic and allow users to browse through much more content.


The company recently added support for Android, so a big part of my conversation with Holliday involved swapping between demos on a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone — regardless of the device and whether we were on a website or an app, I found the experience was slick and engaging.


As for the funding, it comes from angel investors including David S. Rose and Geoff Judge, and it brings Citia’s total funding to $2.8 million.





12:24 PM

The Internet is “melting,” according to Linda Holliday, founder and CEO of startup Citia. “I’ve been watching this movement from solids and ...

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Dan Nelson has a dream. His dream is to offer an easy way to find the cheapest chronic in your pro-ganja neighborhood. While you could simply ask your buddy Badger how much he pays, Nelson thought, why not create a website? And so he did.


Wikileaf is a price comparison engine for pot dispensaries. You put in your location and how far you’re willing to travel and the system scours the dank web for pot prices. Think of it as Expedia for herb or Kayak for Kush.


“My background is in banking. I’ve run a successful banking website/blog full time since 2008 and have logged countless hours mulling over interest rate tables. To me, the parallels between banking and marijuana were surprisingly striking and the ways in which banks and credit unions compete against one another online provided an easy framework to apply to the emerging marijuana industry,” said Nelson. “As anyone who’s ever searched for medical marijuana dispensaries online knows there are dozens of websites that all do the same thing. They show where dispensaries are on a map and maybe have some menu options for dispensaries to update. These sites are great and work for a lot of people, but we knew there was a major opportunity in comparing prices openly from these dispensaries and thus forcing them to compete against one another in a completely open and transparent marketplace.”


Nelson hopes to make dispensaries more transparent with his tool. Because each location can set its own prices – and because of the current density of dispensaries in towns like Seattle and Denver – it makes little sense for these companies to advertise their prices unless something like Wikileaf comes along and opens up the various costs associated with picking up a little bud.


“I’m from Seattle, and here in certain parts of the city you can literally stand at the entrance of one dispensary and huck a rock to another dispensary. That’s how abundant they are. The only problem is their current prices and inventory aren’t out in the open. And to make matters worse their store fronts are generally discreet and vague. With wikileaf I wanted to hit two birds with one stone and solve both of these problems in one clean and tidy package,” he said. Dispensaries can update their prices and even add THC strength to their inventory descriptions, allowing users to fine tune their shopping experience.


So far, Nelson has shied away from investment.


“We’ve boot-strapped this with my own personal funds along with minor investments from family,” he said. “That being said, we’re being approached with investor inquires daily and in the coming weeks and months we will be weighing our options for additional funding sources.


The company is still small – he’s only hired a few programmers – but the market has huge potential. Sadly, those in backwater cities like New York can’t yet use the service but here’s hoping that some day it will be 4:20 all day, every day around the world.





12:09 PM

Dan Nelson has a dream. His dream is to offer an easy way to find the cheapest chronic in your pro-ganja neighborhood. While you could simpl...

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