A Story About Threading The Needle On Mobile

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor toTechCrunch. As a disclaimer, he’s an employee of and a early-advisor to Swell, which is mentioned in this post. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

As some of you may know, I’ve been lucky to be a small part of the team behind Swell, a new kind of radio experience built initially for iPhone. After spending many months in stealth mode leading up to our public release at the end of June 2013, I finally gained some perspective with which to reflect on all the little product and strategic decisions the team made to deliver what is, in my (biased) view, a great version one product in a crowded, competitive, and noisyconsumer app marketplace.

About two months into the wild, we are fortunate to have received some nice feedback and organic mentions on Twitter, where much of our core audience resides. Undoubtedly, completing version one only means that we have a long way to go, things to add and mistakes to learn from, but with that said, there could be some useful lessons hidden in the tiny decisions Swell made that may help the next mobile developer down the road.

This post is an attempt to collect those decisions and analyze them with the benefit of hindsight, as well as to share them with you all. The list may start with obvious elements, but please bear with me as the decisions get more precise.

1) Platform – Mobile vs. Web: The team wanted to leverage its expertise in bringing complex technologies to mobile. Given their experience with SnapTell, that meant focusing on the latest iPhones and iOS. It may be en vogue to comment now that it’s time for Android-first, but from a technology development perspective, going that route is either too risky or too difficult for an early-stage startup that has limited resources and time. (The web is a great place to test ideas and build an audience, as well as being a tool to help hack mobile distribution, but the team didn’t feel a web player for Swell radio would deliver a “wow” experience.)

2) Searching For A Daily Active Use Case: One lesson the SnapTell team learned is that using a mobile image app for shopping wasn’t something people did every day. On mobile, the trick is to find a daily use case. The team began to focus on commuters, specifically those commuting by car and train. The idea is that if we could provide value to them during this activity, it could be a daily habit, though any solution would still compete with music, audiobooks, phone calls, terrestrial and satellite radio, and other talk-radio apps for consumers’ time.

3) Foreground vs. Background: The battle for consumer attention is fierce, and no place more fierce than the iPhone. Everyone is building apps that require our eyesight and attention. Some of us are stuck in Twitter, and others are stuck in Facebook, and it’s hard to use these apps when we are not focused and working inside them (outside of push notifications, which can be distracting). Therefore, building on the trend of more “background-related services” in applications, the team decided to focus on a consumer solution that could provide value in the background while the consumer focuses their attention in the foreground on apps like Twitter or Waze, for instance. We didn’t want to compete with these big attention-grabbing apps — we wanted to complement them.

4) Category Specification: The “News” category in the Apple App Store is densely populated. News is, indeed, a competitive category. But, people want news every day. So, instead of trying to build another news reader, the team investigated the audio news category, which still has competition but is not as crowded, relative to the readers. In this process, the team discovered that a treasure trove of quality audio content was either freely accessible through public APIs and/or buried in the world of online podcasts. This presented an opportunity to find the best content, to classify it in a new database  according to a new ontology, to rank it based on a human expert’s understanding of audio content, and to remix that content to deliver to consumers a new, personalized radio experience.

5) Mobile-Specific Optimizations: The timing of this company coincided with some important opportunities presented by the advancements in cellular network technologies and  mobile hardware. In order to deliver a streaming audio experience, mobile consumers would need to dip into their cellular data plans to enjoy the product. Luckily, the streaming costs for audio are quite low relative to video, and they are decreasing. The company went steps further to optimize this for users by building a smart buffering system to pull content to the client when the device is on a Wi-Fi network. A step more, the team built functionality inside the app for the consumer to allocate more client-side storage for content to listen to the audio in an offline mode style of consumption. Finally, these improvements also minimize drain on the handset battery.

6) Quality Content & Personalized Content: The company started out with a desire to build an application that would have the chance to become a mainstream consumer hit. To fulfill that promise, the team recruited an experienced audio producer from the world of radio and media to organize, classify, rate, and license the best content. The result is a valuable repository and ranking system that contains a library of audio content. On the personalization side, the team built an algorithmbased on collaborative filtering (i.e. listening and learning from the amount of people who actually listened to a piece of content) to continuously learn about the consumer’s preferences and tastes and, theoretically, become smarter over time. Inspired by what Pandora has unlocked for our musical tastes, the goal was to build a similar system for audio news and information.

7) Interface Design: It’s cliche to point out how important interaction and visual design are for consumer-level apps, but it bears repeating here, because, as more and more people transition to apps over the web, the experience becomes more like a game and, conversely, raises the stakes for providing a simple experience that doesn’t turn off or frustrate a user. The team recruited a founding designer from the gaming world to design an interface that would both be simple, novel, and fit the needs of people who are driving. That means it involves thinking about everything from Bluetooth integration to locked home-screen controls for iPhones. One of my favorite interactions is the ability to “Skip” through content by swiping cards. In regular terrestrial radio and satellite radio — and even most mobile radio apps — the user has to either turn a dial to tune their experience or search for what they may like. In our app, the “skip” is the dial.

8) Passive Over Active: Many apps get thrown into the market with a ton of features slapped on and “social” awkwardly baked in. We made a conscious decision not to do this. Instead, the company designed the application to be of high use to just one person, to offer a high-quality “single-player mode.” Furthermore, the company elected to focus on delivering content to consumers in a “lean-back” mode, like Pandora, where the user has some basic controls but essentially doesn’t have to do any work to enjoy the experience. In addition to being complex on many dimensions, many apps these days ask the user to do more work than many people have an appetite for. As a result, the radio app was designed for a user to simply hit “play” and then have relevant content delivered to them.

I’d like to underline again that all of this, in no way, implies or assumes success. And mistakes were made, indeed. It is a continual learning process, and there is a long, long way to go to keep threading the needle. Additionally, there are many decisions that couldn’t be included in this post but are no less important to the company. Here, I wanted to focus on the steps we took to conceptualize and build a mobile-first product. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, these decisions may look good, but as things were unfolding and in the moment, it just happened to be a series of seemingly small decisions that, over time, thankfully combined to form the foundation for what the Swell product experience is today.

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The NSA Reportedly Bugged The UN’s New York Headquarters

As tensions mount between the United States and other countries over the NSA’s once-secret spying programs, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported earlier today that the NSA has been spying on the goings-on at the United Nations’ New York headquarters for nearly a year.

Der Spiegel cites a multitude of documents that “stemmed” from security-consultant-turned-leaker Edward Snowden which purport (among other things) that the NSA first managed to crack the UN’s video conferencing system during the summer of 2012.

Some of the documents obtained by Der Spiegel speak nicely to the sort of banality those involved ascribed to their actions — “The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!),” one of them reads. In the weeks that followed the number of decrypted communications surged from 12 to 458 (and almost assuredly grew from there) and it appears that the NSA has only expanded its surveillance of extra-national bodies.

As it turns out, the UN wasn’t the only organization targeted by the NSA in this manner — still more documents obtained by Der Spiegel speak to the existence of a program called the Special Collection Service that allows the agency to monitor goings-on in 80 embassies and consulates across the globe. Also on that list of targets is the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Union, though at this point it’s unclear what exactly the NSA has managed to dig up on either of those bodies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Der Spiegel notes that SCS’s operation is a well-organized one that “has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists.”

As disconcerting as the revelation may be, this is hardly the first time the United Nations has been the stage for a bit of international espionage. British Parliament member Clare Short blew the whistle in 2004 on a UK intelligence effort that saw British agents spying on then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and The Observer published a leaked memo from a senior NSA official just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 asking staffers to increase surveillance on security counsel members and other UN officials.

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The Maginot Line

DEVIN COLDEWEY

posted 3 hours ago

6 Comments

I’m sorry to say that I have succumbed to something like schadenfreude. It’s not that I really enjoy what is happening these days, what with institutions of the web shutting down, basic civil rights being ignored, and all the rest. It’s just that it’s all a little poetic.

The technocracy, hoisted by its own petard – out-technocracied! We’ve been lionizing the Internet full-time for two decades (with good reason, of course) while clucking at the government’s failure to understand or adopt it. We’ve circumvented laws both just and unjust with it, hidden ourselves in its obscurity, reveled in its ubiquity, and laughed at the poor, benighted functionaries we presumed were still toiling over carbon copies and rooms full of file folders. Yet somehow with their ostensibly outdated tools and notions they were in fact subverting our little utopia at its most foundational levels.

Did you know the Greeks had a god specifically for this type of situation? Nemesis, in charge of punishing hubris, often in especially apropos ways (Narcissus, for instance). The FISA court probably set up a temple in her honor. Please fill out form 617-B, allocation for a fatted thigh, the scent of which riseth to heaven and pleaseth the gods.

But let’s cast our eye instead on more recent and confirmed history: the 1930s, on the eastern border of France. An impenetrable series of bunkers, tunnels, and garrisons built with the object of preventing a German assault. It worked wonderfully, of course — so wonderfully that the Germans decided they should go around it.

The Maginot Line is what I think of when I hear about efforts to secure electronic communications, generally via increasingly complex encryption schemes. The battle is over, everyone. Believe it or not, we lost! In fact, we were completely routed, so to speak. And yet it seems like all anyone can think of doing is shoring up defenses which hardly came into play in the first place!

PGP? People can barely manage the privacy settings on Facebook, much less a stable of random numbers and the means to deploy them. Zero-knowledge storage? Great until a court orders you to decrypt your own data (in violation of the 5th amendment, likely, but how long until a friendly precedent on that account?). Self-destructing messages? Print screen says hello, at least until someone finds a nice exploit. End to end encryption? Lovely, so you get flagged as suspicious by the NSA and all your data is stored for five years — plenty of time for them to squeeze the keys out of you or a friend (identified by metadata), at which point they breach a whole network of trust. Tor? The feds are watching exit nodes like prohibition gangbusters outside a speakeasy. 256-bit WPA2 keys? If the password isn’t “password,” “admin,” or “123456,” it’s probably written on a post-it note stuck to the goddamn router! Come on!

It’s not that these methods are technically insufficient for the their own purposes — it’s that they’re simply not practical given the actual threat: ubiquitous, flexible, and resourceful. Each one is arrayed against an idealized attack vector, and even if someone were to adopt each and every one of these worthy measures, they’re still going to get flanked.

Of course, perfect security is just a dream. But when a burglar comes through the window, do you put more locks on the door?

Better to just acknowledge that we chose to live in a dangerous neighborhood. The existing infrastructure of the Internet, from the routers and switches to the browsers and apps we use, was simply not designed with privacy or anonymity in mind.

That wasn’t a problem until the volume and importance of our electronic communications hit some crucial tipping point, at which they ceased being yet another way to get data from here to there, and became an indispensable and historically unparalleled tool for free expression. Gradually, the dissonance of these two ideas — a tool built for shouting that must be used to whisper — has become clear. This whole surveillance debacle is only the latest revelation to disturb our cozy ignorance.

We will have to live with the fact that our data is not secure for a while. Considering the towering privilege that is the Internet in the first place, it’s not too much to ask that we cope with a few cracks in the foundation. People for whom anonymity is critical, such as whistleblowers and activists, will be at risk, as they always were. Don’t forget that while the Internet is a powerful tool, it’s also a new one, and while we should value its contributions and the people whom it enabled, it is by no means an essential tool for confidential communication, or, for that matter, revolution.

But we may also have to face the idea that the savior Perfect Security may never appear to rapture us into a world of true anonymity, fountains of bitcoins, and desiccated surveillance apparati, lovingly tended by weeping spooks. I was told yesterday (by Bruce Schneier, so I trust it) that the noise pattern from a device’s antenna can be used to fingerprint it, a side effect of high-precision wireless transceivers. Metadata is leaking at the seams because our communications must be quick and precise. Our faces are registered on cameras dozens of times a day because the demand for imaging devices has made the cost of capturing and recording less than the cost of not doing so. Every defense we raise is a Maginot Line, and every sword we forge cuts both ways.

We’ve opened box after box from Pandora’s collection, and generally speaking the shrieking demons which emerged have quickly sunk their unholy teeth into industries and institutions whose devourment was long overdue. But sometimes we look down and notice bite marks on ourselves, as when we found that the Internet enables a culture of inhumanity, universal surveillance, or anarchic proliferation.

Clearly, this is one of those times. It does no good for us to pretend that the way we have crafted our world is without consequences unfavorable to ourselves, perhaps permanent ones. The rule of history is two steps forward and one step back. We have just taken a step back. Hubris, meet Nemesis.

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Livewith.us Makes The Roommate Search More Social, Less Painful

posted 1 hour ago

1 Comments

Looking for someone to share your apartment on Craigslist can be a huge pain — so much so, in fact, that when my roommate moved out last year, I considered leaving the room empty. Thanks to some friend-of-friend connections, it all worked out in the end, but if it hadn’t, I probably I could’ve used a service like Livewith.us.

Perhaps the first thing to say about Livewith.us is that it’s not actually trying to compete with Craigslist. Instead, its creators expect users to continue posting and finding roommate listings on Craigslist. However, when the someone finds a listing that seems like a good fit, they can apply via Livewith.us. It’s there, in the latter part of the process — the part that’s largely conducted over email — that the site should be useful.

Both tenants (the people with an apartment who are looking for a room) and applicants have profiles on the site. They can use data imported from Facebook or they can be built from scratch. Basically, these profiles take the place of the copy-paste-bio-intro-email process and the awkward Facebook search that people might perform to learn more about future roommates. Livewith.us gives you the basic social context (including a list of mutual friends) that you’re looking for without showing you their drunk photos or whatever.

Plus, there’s no process of sending messages like, “Hey, we don’t know each other but can you friend me so I can see your profile?”

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Wine Retailer NakedWines.com Savors $10 Million In New Funding

CATHERINE SHU

posted 3 hours ago

5 Comments

NakedWines.com, the customer-funded online wine retailer, has raised $10 million in a third round of investment from WIV Wein International AG, a German group of direct wine-selling companies and founder shareholder. NakedWines.com will use its new funding to accelerate the company’s expansion into the U.S. and Australia.

Based in Norwich, England, NakedWines.com’s business model allows customers to sponsor independent winemakers in return for about 25% to 50% off a wine’s retail price and exclusive promotions. The site currently has 150,000 Angels (customers who fund winemakers) who have invested over $40 million in 130 winemakers around the world and ships over 10 million bottles of wine each year.

Sales grew to over $50 million in 2012, the year the company declared its maiden profit of $1.5 million (which it says was distributed to staff “as a thank you for working their nuts off.”)

Naked Wines was launched in Britain in 2008 by Rowan Gormley (the former CEO of Virgin Money and Virgin Wines) and became available to buyers in the U.S. and Australia last year.

In a statement, Gormley said: “WIV’s latest investment will really help us step up the quality of our wines in a way that our customers can taste. Winemakers don’t get the recognition or the rewards they deserve, and we want to see that change. In the restaurant industry, individual chefs have become much more famous than the restaurant. We’re helping to do the same thing for the wine business.”

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Apple Seeks Patent For Skype-Style Away Status For Phone Calls, But Set Automatically

In a new patent filing published by the USPTO today (via AppleInsider), Apple describes a system for setting essentially an “Away/Available/Busy” style status for receiving phone calls on a smartphone device, but one that updates said status intelligently and automatically using data gathered about the device and its settings.

So the basic premise is this: Just like you can on Skype and most IM services, you’d be able to display a status to contacts that would indicate whether you’re available to field a call or not, which could avoid embarrassing moments like having your phone either ring or buzz loudly while in a meeting.

The system would take into account user preferences, determining what information it can share as set by a user, and filter inbound calls against a phone’s contact list to help preserve privacy before sharing any information. But then it could do things like send the inbound caller information about whether the user has the ringer turned on or set to vibrate, their current location, the strength of their current signal and their device’s remaining battery life.

The patent isn’t so much about letting a user set their own universal status for all inbound calls (which seems quite useful), but instead about letting them set and forget preferences around just how much they’re willing to share and with who, and letting the automated system do the rest.

This is one of a number of patents that Apple has filed detailing changes to the essential phone operations of a smartphone device, which would change the calling experience in a significant way. Combined with iMessage, you could see how Apple could further modify basic in and outbound communication experiences with inventions like these.

On the other hand, allowing your phone to automatically send out information about you would be a big pill to swallow for most in terms of privacy concerns. Apple could introduce this system, but it would be far more useful to invent a system that essentially just allows a user to set a status instant messenger style to automatically be displayed in the Contacts app of other users.

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