How other cities can benefit from Silicon Valley

Startup ecosystems are taking root across the country — Utah, Seattle, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, New York City — and they’re all looking to copy the formula Silicon Valley made so successful. According to SSTI, venture capital seems to be flowing across the entire country, with New York seeing $4.4 billion invested, Colorado $800 million, Georgia $836 million, Arizona $113 million, Delaware $98 million, Nevada $45 million, Ohio $300 million, Illinois $1 billion, Idaho $2 million, Kansas $50 million, Indiana $54 million, Florida $864 million, Connecticut $563 million… the list goes on.

While these startup ecosystems are growing, nothing compares to Silicon Valley, which saw a whopping $27.2 billion, accounting for 47 percent of total venture capital invested into companies.

Still, there are many benefits to growing a business outside of Silicon Valley: less competition for talent, more of an opportunity to establish oneself and one’s business and fewer billion-dollar titans overshadowing everyone.

Nevertheless, the Valley remains ascendant. So the question these cities, along with any others looking to grow their technology hubs, must ask themselves is, “How can we tap into Silicon Valley’s resources to improve our economy?”

Tapping into Silicon Valley’s resources

Cultivating the next Apple, Google or Facebook can create thousands of technology-related jobs, which would have a huge impact on any local economy in a short time. However, without the proper resources from investors and technology mentors, it is no easy feat.

Investors prefer to invest locally. It is also easier and cheaper for promising entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to investors, and for investors to co-invest, when they are local. Considering that 300+ VC firms call the Bay Area home, along with thousands of active angel investors, startups outside of Silicon Valley are at a disadvantage when it comes to raising capital.

You don’t need to be in Silicon Valley to reap the benefits of what it has to offer.
None of this means Silicon Valley is the only place a startup can succeed. Nor does it mean every company seeking engineering talent and venture capital needs to pick up and move to Silicon Valley. That simply isn’t feasible.

What it does mean is that areas need to take a new approach to attracting venture capital and investor expertise to their city to help fuel their startup ecosystem’s growth.

San Diego, for example, has tried, and succeeded, in attracting venture capital to their city. They’ve gotten an infusion of $1.15 billion invested into their economy, much of it to their booming biotechnology sector. But is this a positive sign for San Diego?

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Absolutely! That $1.15 billion investment is a massive amount, but it accounts for only 2 percent of the total venture capital investments being made nationwide. San Diego has realized this disproportion of investment into their city (comparative to the Bay Area) and is pioneering a new strategy to work with Silicon Valley to grow.

Ultimately, the key to growth for budding tech cities across the nation is to find a way to bridge the gap between their technology companies and Silicon Valley’s resources.

Bridging the gap to Silicon Valley

Bridging the gap to Silicon Valley has become a priority to many venture capitalists who see the potential in other cities. The possibility for added growth and innovation is becoming increasingly apparent to many. Thus, satellite offices are beginning to pop up in the nation’s technology hub. Many see this as the ideal solution to bridging the gap.

By creating a satellite office, a sort of “bridge” between your city’s startups and Silicon Valley, you can have the best of both worlds. You get the (almost certainly) lower operating costs of your city, and your “bridge” provides the presence in Silicon Valley from which companies can benefit.

Many venture capitalists have even said they will happily invest outside of their home base if the opportunity is there. Investor Karim Faris has said investing outside of Silicon Valley is like a “breath of fresh air” and “each ecosystem thinks in different ways. They have expertise in individual domains that others aren’t as strong in. It’s so fascinating to learn from.”

Mike Krenn of the San Diego Venture Group is pioneering this new approach of helping companies in San Diego better connect with investors in Silicon Valley. They’re building a San Diego Business Hub in the Valley for Southern California startups to gain access to the investment capital Silicon Valley provides, without having to uproot their company.

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Other cities should consider doing the same. Think of these “satellite offices” as a window into Silicon Valley. You get a direct look at the talent and resources available in Silicon Valley. Perhaps more importantly, they get a look at you, as well. San Diego doesn’t look at Silicon Valley as competition, they look at it as a resource — as should other cities.

This way, startups in other cities don’t have to deal with the high cost of operating in Silicon Valley, but they still get the benefit of accessing the massive amount of capital centered there. It’s well known that venture capital talent flows through Silicon Valley like a river; it makes sense to try to tap into that river rather than shift the tide.

Indeed, you don’t need to be in Silicon Valley to reap the benefits of what it has to offer. There’s a better solution. Capture the best of both worlds with satellite offices. Satellite offices mean startups in any city have a way to reach out to the talent and capital in Silicon Valley, without packing up and moving out west.

Why this new approach is a win-win for all

Giving companies in other cities a window of access to the resources in Silicon Valley may be the answer as competition gets more fierce. Valuations are out of control in the tech capital of the world, and investors are eager to diversify outside of their backyard.

But most investors are not going to go out looking for that opportunity. In fact, for as many venture capitalists as there are interested in investing resources outside of the Valley, many more also refuse to invest in a startup outside of the Valley because of the density of talent there.

What that means is you need a strategy so you don’t have to pull them. Go to where they are. Make it easy for them to meet with you and the exciting opportunities in your city. You can make it easier for you to meet with them, and you can make it a lot easier for them to take you seriously.

This way, startups in other cities don’t have to deal with the high cost associated with operating in the tech mecca, but they still get the benefit of accessing the money and talent centered there. It’s well known that engineering talent flows into Silicon Valley; it’s also highly competitive, and that makes it an excellent recruitment hub.

With this strategy you have access to the venture capital and the talent, combined with the inherent advantages of your home city. That’s a recipe for fertile startup ground, and investors will begin to take notice of the companies with these competitive advantages.

Creating a win-win for everyone

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The bottom line is this: Silicon Valley is a resource every city should be looking to tap into. It’s going to continue to lead the way and be an investor magnet. By attaching to that magnet, you’re growing the influence of Silicon Valley as well as reaping the benefits of it.
A strategy of bridging cities helps everyone. Investors in Silicon Valley get an expanded set of opportunities delivered right to their proverbial doorstep. Meanwhile, your city sees an influx of new talent and investment money, providing a spark to your city’s economy.

Bridging the gap, rather than worrying about whether you’re getting the biggest slice of the pie, will help solve the problem of cultivating any city’s local economy. That’s what’s happening as tech startups continue to pop up across the nation. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Report: Pokémon Go has now crossed $1 billion in revenue

Pokémon Go was 2016’s rocket ship — it broke download records and it raced to $500 million in revenue quicker than any app in history. Now it won yet another accolade, the fastest game to reach $1 billion.

That’s according to a new report from app analytics firm Sensor Tower. To give the record some context, a recent App Annie report estimated that iOS and Android developers earned around $35 billion combined last year. Pokémon Go did $1 billion in just over six months, and without a launch in China, the world largest smartphone market. That’s faster than other billion-dollar games Candy Crush Saga and Puzzles & Dragons.

Sensor Tower drilled the point home via a chart comparing Pokémon Go revenue to that of another top mobile game — Clash Royale from SuperCell. Clash Royale did around $550 million in its first seven months. SuperCell is renowned for producing high grossing and addictive games, yet Pokémon Go leaves it trailing in its wake.

Sensor Tower estimates that Pokémon Go is far less lucrative now than at its peak — it is said to be making $1.5 million to $2.5 million per day, down from record highs of $18 million — but the team behind the app has the nous and loyal fanbase to raise that on occasions.

For example, it can add new characters and run special events. A Halloween-period event was estimated to have doubled the game’s revenue, while there’s potential to increase engagement via the newly launch Apple Watch app, too, and generation two Pokémon Go is still to come.

There are also more markets. The app just went live in South Korea, one of the planet’s most lucrative mobile gaming markets, and Niantic can explore the possibilities of a China launch, where it must contend with issues around government concern and a lack of Google services.

So, while there’s little doubt that the hype around the game has died down, there remains much to be upbeat about.

Microsoft asks for exemptions to Trump’s immigration order for visa holders

Microsoft isn’t ending its general opposition to Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration from last week, but it is more formally requesting the granting of immediate exceptions that would help its own employees, as well as the employees of other tech companies who are lawful visa holders but still affected by the ban.

In a blog post, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith detailed the need the company identifies for an “exception process” that would make it possible for “Responsible Known Travelers with Pressing Needs” to get back into the U.S. This category of traveler would include visa holders from the countries named in Trump’s order who have families within the U.S. but were traveling abroad at the time the order was issued.

Smith notes that Microsoft has 76 employees, with 41 dependents, who currently hold non-immigrant visas allowing them to live in the U.S. who are affected by the order. He also points out that the order actually already includes a provision that allows DHS and the Secretary of State to issues visas and entry permissions on a “case-by-case basis, and when in the national interest.”

Microsoft’s request for special permission seeks to take advantage of this allowance to grant entry permission to anyone who already has a work or student visa (or is related to a visa holder and granted access under their permit), hasn’t committed any crime, is looking to travel for work or family emergency for no longer than two weeks and said travel would not include the countries named in the order when done for work purposes.

The argument is basically that the roles these individuals fill are already in the national interest, whether at work or in pursuit of education, and so there should be blanket coverage for them under the existing order’s structure.

Again, Microsoft isn’t saying it’s okay with the order provided these allowances are made; it’s still very much of the opinion that even if this proposal goes through, it “will not and should not end the border debate and deliberations regarding last week’s executive order,” so it’s good to see it pursuing both near-term relief for affected individuals and pushing for long-term solutions.

Facebook is opening up its ‘M’ AI platform as a bot engine for developers

Facebook is opening up its M platform, calling it wit.ai, and letting developers build powerful AI for use as a bot.

Much as Microsoft announced at Build, the M bot platform will allow developers to pre-fab conversations or catchphrases which will return a response. If a user typed “I’m really hungry” to an app for a pizza restaurant, the bot may then ask “your usual, then?” as a static response.

From there, it’s possible to either have a richer conversation with the bot — depending on what the developer has built into M — or just have the pizza delivered straight away.

It’ll take a lot of heavy lifting from developers, as every interaction needs to be granularly built. But, we’re still in early days with our interactions with AI, so there’s likely not a lot of clever things users would ask. Even then, it’s possible to build out a safeguard like Siri’s ‘here’s what I found for you on the Web’ answer.

The platform is open today, so if you’re interested in building your own interactive bot for an app, get crackin’.

Using URL shorteners could expose you to privacy invasions and malware attacks

URL shorteners are great for packaging links that you want to share on blogs, social networks and messaging services. Unfortunately, they can pose grave security risks, as two researchers discovered in a study spanning 18 months (PDF).

Vitaly Shmatikov of Cornell Tech, in collaboration with visiting researcher Martin Georgiev, looked at the URL shortening methods used by Microsoft in its OneDrive cloud storage app, as well Google in its Maps service.

What they found was pretty damn scary. They noted that Microsoft usedBitly’s service to generate short URLs linking to users’ OneDrive files and they had a predictable structure.

This made it easy to look at the full URL for a single file and then discover other files shared by the same user.

And not only did they manage to find files including somecontaining sensitive information, but they also noticed that a small percentage of them were write-enabled. This means that they could inject malware and viruses into those files with ease.

When looking at Google Maps links, Shmatikov and Georgiev said that they were able to scan URLs with five-character tokens and see people’s locations and destinations.

It may seem like they’d only ever come across random information this way, but they were able to uncover things like a user seeking directions from a residence to a planned parenthood facility, along with her full name and age.

Thankfully, both services have amended their link shortening methods after the researchers alerted them about the issues. They said that Google responded immediately and implemented 11-12 character tokens for its Maps links as well defenses to prevent bots from scanning its URLs.

Microsoft didn’t take as kindly to the researchers pointing out the flaw in its service. However, it disabled its link shortening option in OneDrive last month, but maintains that its decision wasn’t related to the issue highlighted by the duo.

Does that mean companies should stop offering URL shortening services? Shmatikov noted that they should explicitly warn users that creating a short link to a file potentially exposes it to unintended third parties.

There are ways to make them safer: using in-house resolvers instead of public services like Bitly, keeping bots from scanning links by using methods like CAPTCHAs, and developing robust APIs that don’t make it easy to uncover all files shared by a user just by finding a single URL.

Apple dropped a big hint that OS X will soon become ‘MacOS’

As if we weren’t expecting it already, there’s a huge new clue Apple is about to rename OS X to MacOS.

In discussing how it concluded product life spans for an Earth Day promotion, Apple writes “years of use, which are based on first owners, are assumed to be four years for MacOS and tvOS devices and three years for iOS and watchOS devices” as determining factors.

It’s not a total surprise; we actually expected Apple to announce this change at last year’s WWDC developers conference. It’s also been subtly altering its ‘iStuff’ naming scheme since introducing watchOS and tvOS.

Oddly, the ‘Mac’ in MacOS is capped-up, which would be a subtle but notable difference from its other platforms.

If Apple does make the change, we’ll expect ‘phoneOS’ to be rumored shortly afterward, and possibly arrive sometime in 2017.

Obama officially backs FCC’s new initiative for cable box competition

In February, the FCC voted in favor of loosening cable’s grip on set-top boxes. Today, President Obama offered a show of support to the initiative that sought to give consumers greater control of how they access their favorite channels.

The “Unlock the Box” initiative sought to encourage competition and promote innovation by giving consumers choice in what box they’d like to use to access cable television.

Currently, cable companies are pocketing an average of $231 per household in lease fees each year on boxes that are “required” to access cable television service.

Under the new plan, consumers could select from a wide variety of third-party options, such as Roku, AppleTV and others, that could offer additional benefits as well as fueling innovation in the space due to increased competition for customers.

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“This will allow for companies to create new, innovative, higher-quality, lower-cost products,” said chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Jason Furman.

“Instead of spending nearly $1,000 over four years to lease a set of behind-the-times boxes, American families will have options to own a device for much less money that will integrate everything they want in one, easier-to-use gadget.”

Obama also issued an executive order today giving federal agencies two months to report on other areas where competition could drive innovation — and it’s not limited to cable TV.

Obama, if you recall was also behind a 2014 law that removed restrictions on carrier swapping for cellphones and he’s been a vocal proponent of net neutrality laws.

Over 1B people used Facebook in a single day for the first time ever

Here’s a crazy statistic for you: For the first time in history, one billion people used Facebook in a single day this past Monday. That means one out of every seven people on the planet was logged into the network at some point during that day.

Mark Zuckerberg took to his own Facebook account to announce the milestone today. It’s an incredibly impressive number.

 While Facebook first reached more than 1 billion active users back in 2012, those were month averages that could include infrequent users on the site only once every couple of weeks. Facebook currently claims 1.31 billion monthly active users in its company info page.

Nearly the same number of people using the platform in a single day is much more significant, and it’s a sign that despite being the most popular social network with its fair share controversies, Facebook is still finding ways to grow.  The CEO had this to say about the achievement:

I’m so proud of our community for the progress we’ve made. Our community stands for giving every person a voice, for promoting understanding and for including everyone in the opportunities of our modern world.

A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values.

Facebook’s even made a video to celebrate. You can watch that and read the full announcement on Zuckerberg’s profile, linked below.

Nokia is making an advanced VR camera for filmmakers

Just because Nokia stopped making phones, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been busy. First apps and tablets, and now it’s getting into the VR game with a new 360-degree camera called Ozo.

The device mixes footage and audio from eight image sensors and an equal amount of microphones. As the camera uses a global shutter for each sensor, the distortion seen during quick motion in many modern cameras (which use rolling shutters) should be nonexistent.

The camera’s software allows you to preview 3D footage in real-time, a big step forward compared to the time consuming stitching process normally needed for this type of immersive video content.

It’s important to keep in mind this is not intended to be a consumer camera – Nokia is aiming the device at professionals. The Verge reports that it’s expected to cost upward of $5,000.

The company says final specs and pricing will be announced at a later date, with shipments expected to begin during Q4 2015.

Nokia is just one of several companies making the move to VR. In fact, it’s first partner to use Ozo will be Jaunt, a company already focused on creating VR experiences, and with a camera of its own. Google also launched its ownVR camera array in partnership with GoPro at its IO conference earlier this year.

1,000 self-targeting sniper rifles can be hacked: Nice work, dummies

Today in scary exploits: TrackingPoint sniper rifles – which run Linux and Android and have WiFi connections – can be remotely hacked. Who could have predicted that?*

Hackers can then either disable the rifle or choose a new target. The only response to that news is:  o_0

At the forthcoming Black Hat hacking conference, Runa Sandvik and her husband Michael Auger plan to present the results of a year’s work on exploiting two of the $13,000 self-aiming rifles.

The pair have discovered how to brick the rifle, making its computer-targeting unusable, as well as getting root access to the targeting system to make permanent changes to the firearm.

There are two slight upsides: a networked attack on the rifle can’t make it fire – that’s controlled by a mechanical system that requires an actual finger on the trigger – and there are only around 1,000 weapons in customers’ hands.

Wired reports that the security researchers were able to demonstrate their exploit, causing bullets to miss the shooter’s intended target and hit an entirely different one.

Sandvik and Auger say they have repeatedly reported the vulnerabilities to TrackingPoint, but the troubled firm’s management has not responded.

The company is currently going through “restructuring”, has laid off most of its staff and is no longer shipping rifles.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that this company will not be the last to put computerised weapons in the hands of the public, while also failing to adequately secure them. A ‘normal’ weapon is unpredictable enough, a hackable one is downright terrifying.

Now imagine what could happen if we ended up with autonomous weapons on the market.