Instagram Invite For Mysterious December 12 Media Event May Hint Toward Printing

Instagram has invited members of the media to an event in NYC on December 12 to “share a moment” with Kevin Systrom and the Instagram team. It’s unclear what this event is in reference to, but considering that the invitation was sent in the mail, on paper, the photo-sharing app could be hinting at a future in print. Other invites were a block of wood with pictures printed on them, with a hanger on one side to hang on the wall. If that isn’t a hint toward printing, I don’t know what is. It sounds ridiculous, considering the digital revolution is in full swing and paper is on its way out, but there is an entire ecosystem of applications, services, etc. that piggy backs off of Instagram’s success. A number of services print Instagram photos on wood, canvas, glass, and even marshmallows so that users can enjoy the physical incarnation of their digital obsession. With Christmas around the corner, the introduction of a photo printing business could mean big bucks for the photo-sharing app, which has just recently introduced a revenue stream in Instagram ads. So far, the roll out is slow and small, while reaction is unclear. Printing could be a strong way to quickly bring in revenue with behemoth Facebook as a backup resource to cover printing, shipping costs. It’s an investment, but one that will generate revenue quickly. On the other hand, Instagram could be trying to pull a fast one on us, and perhaps release a messaging feature to compete with the likes of Snapchat, as Om Malik reported. After all, Facebook has seemed awfully jealous of all of the attention Snapchat’s been getting lately. Envy worth $3 billion. That’s mighty green. Of course, we’ll have to wait until December 12 to find out just what Instagram has in store.

YC-Backed Bop.fm Links Together Music Silos Like Spotify, Radio And iTunes To Share Tracks Universally 71

Competition for listeners among digital music companies is tough – and getting tougher. But while each builds a business that it hopes will stand out enough from the rest of the pack, a new startup called Bop.fm, incubated at Y Combinator this past summer, is blurring those distinctions a bit, with a platform that meshes all the services together on a universal platform — a “canonical home for music on the internet,” as Bop.fm’s co-founder and CEO Shehzad Daredia puts it. Bop works like this: You can search for and listen to any song on Bop.fm. The service detects what music subscriptions you may have and provides tracks from those services first — currently it catalogues streaming services Spotify and Rdio, as well as free services like YouTube and SoundCloud, and paid-for download services like iTunes, Amazon and Google Play; it plans to add more. In cases where you do not subscribe to Spotify or Rdio, or the track is not available on either, a user is given a YouTube link, or a SoundCloud link. You also get options to buy and download tracks. In each case, what Bop.fm has done is use the digital “fingerprint” of each track effectively to map each of these services on top of each other so that you get just one option for listening to it, and one for purchasing. Then, you can create a link to that song to share with others. That link comes back to Bop.fm, and as with your original listening experience, Bop.fm detects which services you use before serving a result. This is a service that has been built with users in mind: it can be annoying when something is shared by someone that you cannot access. Living in London but connected to a lot of people in the U.S., I know this frustration firsthand. (I’ve lost count of the number of times that Twitter links to interesting video clips have taken me to static screens with a “sorry, not accessible in your region” message.) As Daredia tells me, “You don’t have to use the same JPEG viewer when you look at a picture, so why should I have to use the same music service?” (Note to Bop.fm: please do this for video next.) There is also a B2B2C relevance here. Publishers or site operators who want to make sure that links that they are publishing, or allowing others to publish, work for everyone who sees them, not just those in a particular region. As Geoff Ralston of Y Combinator describes it, “The ongoing proliferation of music services such as these make a service like Bop a near inevitability.” Indeed, without any obvious promotion, Bop.fm, in private beta, is already streaming 100,000 songs per day from consumer traffic and sites like RapGenius.com, one of Bop’s first partners, where it powers music playback. (And now, for a little music break to demonstrate the service, a hat-tip to music services working together harmoniously:) The Turtles – Happy Together When I first heard about Bop.fm, I was very intrigued. It reminds me a bit of another startup called Soundrop, which is also integrating track playback across different music services. The difference is that it does so in communal “listening rooms” while Bop.fm offers the experience on a single-track basis, with options to purchase tracks alongside listening. Like Soundrop, Bop.fm has piqued the interest of music portals, as well as labels. For the former, it’s a way of potentially bringing in more users to their platforms longer-term (free links can lead to paid subscriptions or paid downloads). For the latter, it will be yet another way of making sure that the marketing effort expended on an artist gets the biggest bang. In a digital music world that seems to have had fragmentation built into it, Bop.fm is providing a consumer- and business-friendly way out of that. Between them, the two co-founders, Daredia and Stefan Gomez, know a thing or two about how to leverage the concept of aggregation to build successful, consumer-focused businesses. Daredia tells me that collectively they have worked at 11 sites built on search, including the travel juggernaut Kayak (where Daredia led user acquisition), Billshrink (eventually sold to MasterCard) and Foodily. Longer term, you can see a lot of potential for Bop.fm — the addition of playlists, more siloed music services, advertising, other merchandising and special pages dedicated to particular artists, as well as Bop being used to power music on platforms that, like Bop.fm itself, want to see less friction and more grooving.

Google-Backed Anti-Patent Troll Bill Passes The House

The most unproductive Congress in history is on a mini-roll: the House of Representative passed its second piece of tech legislation this week. The Google and White House-backed Innovation Act seeks to punish so-called “patent trolls” that make a living from intellectual property lawsuits. “They don’t actually produce anything themselves. They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack someone else’s idea to see if they can extort some money out of them,” said President Barack Obama in a Google+ Hangout earlier this year. There are a few key troll loopholes that the act from Representative Bob Goodlatte seeks to close. Transparency: Patent trolls can often win money by threatening to sue innovators without much detail or by hiding behind shell corporations. The Innovation Act requires plaintiffs to detail their complaints and who they actually are. For instance, infamous patent troll Intellectual Ventures has 1,000 companies asserting patent rights. Losers Pay: There’s not much financial risk for patent trolls to sue innovators en masse, so the Innovation Act makes it easier for defendants to recoup their loses should they win (an often easy) case. It also denies patent trolls the ability to hide behind smaller shell companies to avoid such losses. Protect Users: Some patent trolls are brazen enough to claim they own key patents on Wi-Fi (yes, Wi-Fi), so they’ve been suing everyone from coffee shops to hotels. “The Innovation Act allows technology vendors to step into the shoes of their customers and fight lawsuits against trolls on their customers’ behalf,” says the Washington Post’s Timothy Lee. While most of the tech scene supports it (including the major lobbies such as The Internet Association and the Consumer Electronics Agency), not everyone is thrilled. “The bill will have unintended consequences that the people who drafted it don’t yet see,” Kentucky Republican and holder of 29 patents, Thomas Massie, told Businessweek. He claims the bill will “weaken the patent system overall.” In addition, TechDirt’s Mike Masnick argues the bill stripped out an important provision to expedite the removal of low-quality patents, often held by big players such as Microsoft and Apple. The bill will head to the Senate to continue the fight, but it’s unlikely it’ll pass by the end of the year.

Who Is The Real Satoshi Nakamoto? One Researcher May Have Found The Answer

The Internet did something strange last week. When a researcher named Skye Grey posted a detailed analysis of textual biases in the writing of shadowing Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and a researcher named Nick Szabo at George Washington University, the interest was muted but optimistic. Did Grey, who declined to go into much personal detail, crack the code? Or was it, as always, just a matter of lucky conjecture. Whether or not Satoshi is a real person, group of people, or some sort of government entity is important. It gives closure to the currency’s origin story and it can confirm or deny a whole host of rumors and innuendo bandied about in the fringier corners of the bitcoin market. If BTC were a way to get us out from under the government, why is Satoshi so secretive? While Grey’s analysis is still being proved or disproved, the process, in the end, is fascinating. Given that Grey’s analysis was, on the surface, solid, I reached out for a short interview. TC: Tell me about yourself. Why did you do this study? SG: Originally it was simple curiosity that drew me to the question. I like mysteries. Then I decided to publish what I found for two reasons: - so that other people could attack my method and findings, or validate them. I want certitudes, and keeping for me what I had found would not get me anywhere. - so as to address people’s concerns that a “bad guy” might have created Bitcoin. I think this question is what could harm the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin in the near future. TC: How sure are you it’s Nick Szabo? SG: I am not certain it’s Nick Szabo, but I have quite a few independent pieces of evidence pointing in his direction, each one interesting in itself: - text analysis (only 0.1% of cryptography researchers could have produced this writing style –again, please, attack my methods on this) - fact that Nick was searching for technical collaborators on the bit gold project (a very similar cryptocurrency) a few months before the announcement of Bitcoin (and then the bit gold project became perfectly silent) - lack of citation of Nick’s work by Satoshi, whereas he cited other, less related cryptocurrencies - lack of reaction on Nick’s part about Bitcoin, whereas a decentralized currency like Bitcoin had been a major project of his for 10 years - fact that Nick deliberately post-dated his bit gold articles to look posterior to Bitcoin, shortly after the announcement of Bitcoin Currently I am in contact with two different persons who will be running their own independent textual analysis to confirm my own. TC: Does it matter? What would it change if it did, in your opinion? SG: I think it’s very important to identify Satoshi at this point in Bitcoin’s history. The “agenda” behind Bitcoin, if there is any, cannot stay in the shadow if Bitcoin is to become a mainstream alternative currency, a challenge to the world’s monetary status quo. There has been speculation that Bitcoin may have been created by a government agency (the main employers of cryptographers of mathematicians) in an attempt to make financial transactions easier to mine for interesting data patterns: we need to clear that up before we start relying heavily on Bitcoin in our lives. I think it would be great news for Bitcoin if Nick Szabo turned out to be the mastermind behind it. Nick appears to be a remarkably brilliant, disinterested polymath academic. Who would you rather have at the origins of Bitcoin, a visionary professor and collaborators, or spooks? TC: How has your digging gone over in the BTC community? It seems like an unpopular topic at best. SG: It has not been received well, many people are telling me to “leave Satoshi alone”. But when one starts having a huge impact on the world, one loses his right to anonymity. Satoshi currently holds about BTC 1M, valued at USD $1B, and has the power to potentially crash the Bitcoin markets. We need to know who the people who have power over us are, and what their intentions are. This is why we require background checks on our elected leaders. In the same way we need a “background check” on the Bitcoin system before we start handing it our monetary exchanges. Next would be to know what has become of Satoshi’s BTC stash. The anonymous figure of Satoshi probably played a role in the early adoption of Bitcoin (“we are all Satoshi”), because the mystery created a powerful story drawing in early enthusiasts. Now this anonymity has become an obstacle to mainstream adoption, because there is legitimate concern over the origins and purpose of Bitcoin. TC: How easy is it to assess identity via written “tics?” SG: It’s rather easy. We all use language in our own particular way: the probability distribution over rare expressions, sentence structures, and stop words in our writing constitute a “signature” of sorts. It is not nearly as uniquely discriminative as a fingerprint, or DNA, but it is discriminative enough to distinguish one person out of a few hundreds or even thousands. For some people who tend to have more particular tics, like authors or academics, it constitutes a solid identification process. In the case of Satoshi, I identified a number of unusual content-neutral expressions used both in Satoshi’s whitepaper and in Nick’s papers. For 4 of these expressions, I was able to estimate (using Google Scholar) the proportion of researchers in the cryptography community susceptible of using these expressions in a paper. These proportions are respectively 15%, 10%, 15%, and 50%. Assuming the use of each one is independent of the use of the others, the joint probability of finding a researcher using all of them in their writing is on the order of 0.1%. So this particular combination of writing tics could identify one cryptographer out of 1000. Even if these approximations are off by a large factor, the joint probability will stay quite small. TC: Are there any close runners-up for the Satoshi identity? SG: Nick is by far the number one candidate. I have nothing else significant enough to be worth mentioning. TC: How many bitcoin do you have? SG: Let’s say I have between 1 and 10 BTC. I am not heavily invested in Bitcoin, but I am definitely bullish on its adoption prospects.

Google Still Lags In Mobile Cameras, But Android 4.1.1 Should Make Things Better For The Nexus 5

Google’s Android OS has many venerable traits, but the camera isn’t one of them. The software iterates with each release, but it doesn’t ever get all that much better, and the hardware on Android devices seems to disappoint pretty consistently. People had high hopes for the Nexus 5 making things better, but photos barely improved versus the dismal Nexus 4. Don’t get me wrong: I love Google’s Nexus devices and the 5 is otherwise a great phone. The problem is that the camera falls completely flat, especially compared to those on iPhone devices. Luckily, Google has created an update to Android 4.4 KitKat (due out over the next few days), as reported by the Verge, that will improve camera performance on the Nexus 5, improving contrast, exposure, autofocus and more. I’ll be somewhat skeptical until I actually get to try it out myself (it should be rolling out in the next few days, according to The Verge), but early examples show a pretty marked improvement. Google’s inability to make a phone with a decent camera is somewhat mind-boggling, given all they’ve been able to accomplish with photos on other platforms. Their Google+ pictures update from June is actually remarkably impressive, delivering automatic adjustments and enhancements that take a lot of the standard busy work out of making small changes to photos that can result in big improvements to the final product. It has the expertise, and with this update it also proves that it’s applying that know-how in intelligent ways. The missed target on the original Nexus 5 camera release might be ascribable to a rush to get the new OS out in time for the scheduled device launch, but at least shoring up this failing makes the Nexus 5 even more of a no-brainer for the budget conscious smartphone shopper than it was before.

Amazon’s Grocery Delivery Service, AmazonFresh, May Launch In SF Next Week

What’s better than drones delivering your stuff? Drones delivering your food*. According to ATD, Amazon may be ready to announce the San Francisco launch of AmazonFresh, the online retailer’s grocery delivery service, on December 10. As it stands now, Amazon is already running the AmazonFresh program in Seattle (the company’s home base) and Los Angeles. Alongside ATD’s unnamed sources, there is additional evidence pointing toward the forthcoming SF launch. SF folks have spotted AmazonFresh trucks in the wild, and we’ve even come across a job posting. Users are already enjoying buying non-fresh grocery items on Amazon, and some even get two-day delivery with an Amazon Prime membership. AmazonFresh, on the other hand, will offer users fresh items like produce, meats, milk, etc. with either same- or next-day delivery. Pretty sweet, huh? For existing members of the AmazonFresh program, the service costs $299/year. Amazon may not make amazing margins in grocery delivery, but the move makes sense considering that Amazon wants to own the entire shopping experience, from electronics to clothes to household essentials and back again. The more users Amazon can wrangle into a membership, such as Prime or AmazonFresh, the more opportunities Amazon has to sell those members items they wouldn’t normally get. If you pay a relatively high yearly fee for free delivery from a retailer, you’ll make sure to use that retailer for as much as possible. Gotta get your money’s worth. Groceries are a great factor in this strategy as… well, a girl’s gotta eat. *And, to be clear, AmazonFresh in San Francisco will not come with drone delivery.

Ting's New Calculator Uses Your Bill to Show You How Much You'll Save

Ting, one of our favorite alternative cellphone carriers, just unveiled a new savings calculator that uses your current cell phone bill to figure out how much you'd save by switching. Plus, they're giving out $5 Starbucks gift cards if you use it. The promotion is all about saving money and "free coffee," as it were. If you're a current Verizon Wireless or AT&T customer, you can use the new savings calculator to log in to your account, and let the tool scrape your past three wireless bills to see how much voice, data, and texts you used and how much they cost. Once Ting knows how much you're spending and what you get, the calculator will show you how much you'll save—if anything—by switching to Ting (which, remember, is an MVNO on Sprint's network). For your trouble, you'll get a $5 Starbucks gift card (a free cup of coffee.) If you're a current customer, they'll give you a $10 credit to your Ting account if you take a friend out for coffee, tell them why they should switch, and then send them your receipt. If you don't have Verizon or AT&T, well, the savings calculator still works for you, but it can't scrape your current bills (and no coffee for you, sadly.) Hit the link below to give it a try.