Life Graphy Is A Simple But Refreshing New Take On To-Do List Apps

There are so many to-do list apps now that instead of figuring out the differences between all of them, it might seem like a better use of time to just go back to pen and paper (or the infamous white board). But iOS app Life Graphy lends a refreshing new twist to task management. It lets you visualize how many things you manage to complete over the course of each month with a unique calendar view and pie charts (which it calls “masks”) for each day.

Created by a Korean startup, Life Graphy is targeted toward the same people who gravitate toward to-do list apps like Clear and Any.Do because they are easy-to-use and visually appealing. Life Graphy, however, has several key differences. It is meant as a tracker for the kind of recurring, everyday tasks (like taking vitamins or watering houseplants) that are easy to forget, but its simple design means that you can use the app in many different ways.

I am currently using Life Graphy to track how often I manage to hit all of my daily health and fitness goals. The app lets you enter up to 10 items, each with its own icon. Right now mine include six: taking my supplements; getting a certain amount of exercise per day; remembering to fill out my food diary in MyFitnessPal; sleeping at at least 7 hours a night; doing a bit of yoga or meditation; and watering my houseplants (the latter technically isn’t a personal health goal, but I’m trying to cure my black thumb).

Since I started using Life Graphy a couple weeks ago, I’ve done a better job of remembering each goal because at the end of the day, I really want to see a full pie chart. On the other hand, Life Graphy also let me see that I tend to let my routine slip on weekends and Mondays.

But Life Graphy’s simplicity also has several drawbacks. For example, every segment of the pie chart should be a different color to match the customizable buttons assigned to each tasks, so you get more information when looking at the calendar view.

I also wished Life Graphy would allow me to create more than one calendar. For example, I have a couple of prescriptions I need to take varying dosages of throughout the month. If I had a separate calendar, I would set each segment of my daily pie chart to represent increments of milligrams for each medication.

The app previously only had six tasks, but its developers quickly increased that number to 10 because of user demand, so I’m hopeful that they will continue to make improvements to Life Graphy. For now, the app is helping me stay on top of my most important daily health goals, and it’s satisfying to see each week’s accomplishments lined up in neat rows of little circles.

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As Google Shoots For The Moon, Microsoft Praises The Virtues Of Open Research

A few days ago, Google unveiled its latest moon shot: a contact lens with a built-in glucose sensor. As far as Google[x] projects go, the lens is right up there with flying wind turbines and balloon-powered Internet service (though maybe not quite on the same level as self-driving cars). There is an interesting twist to this whole story, though: the researchers who are working on this project at Google previously collaborated with Microsoft Research.

In 2011, Babak Parviz and Brian Otis were still at the University of Washington and published a case study (PDF) with Microsoft Research on how they built a prototype lens that can monitor blood glucose levels. In the paper, Microsoft describes the collaboration as being ‘close’ and going back several years.

“At the time I met Babak, he was starting to work on the functional contact lens, putting displays, or LEDs, into the contact itself, to create displays that sat on the surface of the eye,” Desney Tan, who was then a senior researchers at Microsoft Research, wrote at the time. “He was having a slightly hard time selling the idea, both in terms of feasibility, but also in terms of vision. What we added to the equation was basically a set of needs in all computing environments or in our projections of future computing environments that gelled very well with a particular technology.”

Tan, it turns out, is still at Microsoft Research, and in a somewhat unusual move, he took to Microsoft’s official blog the day after Google’s announcement to talk about Microsoft’s role in all of this. Clearly, Microsoft wasn’t going to let Google get all the praise for a project that was incubated with its support.

Like a good researcher, Tan is quite restrained in his words. He profusely praises the work of Parviz and Otis, but he also notes that Parviz, Otis and the team at Microsoft Research “tackled numerous hard problems around miniaturization, wireless power, wireless communications and biocompatibility.” The really hard questions around this project, he seems to imply, were answered with the help of Microsoft and not at Google[x].

Between the lines, he also sets up the difference between Microsoft’s and Google’s approaches to research in the context of what Google is doing with [x]: ”Our open research and deeply collaborative model allows us to work with the best academic and industrial researchers around the world,” Tan writes, “and we will continue to do so as we certainly believe in the philosophy that ‘we’ is smarter than ‘me.’” While Google[x] works in private and doesn’t openly cooperate with others, Tan seems to imply, Microsoft Research helps to push basic research forward by working with researchers around the world.

He goes on to list some of the projects Microsoft is involved in (HIV vaccines, brain tumor diagnostics, tuberculosis treatments etc.), but the overall message here seems clear: Microsoft does a lot of basic research and doesn’t often get the credit it deserves.

While most of the projects at Google[x] happen in private, though, it’s also worth noting that Google does quite a bit of work with universities around the world. Most of this is focused on its own core competencies and focuses on search-related technologies like natural language processing, machine learning and data mining, as well as basic computer science research.


Google’s Moon Shot approach may yield some breakthrough products in the long run and the smart lens project could improve the lives of millions of people. There is something to be said for participating in the larger research community, though, and Microsoft definitely does this more effectively than Google[x]. At the end of the day, though, Parviz and Otis decided that the best place for their research was at Google. If nothing else, that speaks to Google’s ability to convince researchers that they can have more impact at [x] than at their research universities and more easily bring their ideas from the lab to the real world (and Google[x] probably pays pretty well, too…).
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With Traction But Out Of Cash, 4chan Founder Kills Off Canvas/DrawQuest

“There’s a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that’s the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on,” says moot aka Christopher Poole. So rather than raise more money for his remix artist community Canvas and game DrawQuest, later today he’ll announce they’re closing. “No soft-landing, no aqui-hire, just ‘shutting down’ shutting down.”

[Update: DrawQuest and Canvas have now published blog posts confirming this article and telling their users what's going on. Moot has also penned his own eulogy for his startup, and will be writing more in the future in hopes of educating other entrepreneurs.

In a touching part of his post-mortem, moot opens up saying "Few in business will know the pain of what it means to fail as a venture-backed CEO. Not only do you fail your employees, your customers, and yourself, but you also fail your investors—partners who helped you bring your idea to life."]

What’s different about this trip to the deadpool is that DrawQuest was actually doing relatively well. Launched a year ago to inspire people to take on daily bouts of creativity through drawing challenges, it reached 1.4 million downloads, 550,000 registered users, 400,000 monthly users, 25,000 daily users, and 8 million drawings.

“We’re doing better than 98% of products out there, especially in the mobile space.” says moot, but he admits that traction is ”Shy of that all important million (monthly users). Where we failed basically was one: to crack our growth engine. But importantly, we were never able to crack the business side of things in time.”

Perhaps if DrawQuest was the plan all along, it could have survived long enough to grow and monetize, but it was on a short fuse. Moot originally raised a $625,000 seed round led by Lerer Ventures in May 2010 to start DrawQuest’s predecesor Canvas, a media-centric forum where people could post, remix, and discuss visual Internet art. Then he raised $3 million more in June 2011 in a Series A led by Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson and joined by SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, and Joshua Schachter.

It wasn’t until February 2013 that DrawQuest launched, and that tardy pivot left moot lagging far behind where he needed to be. “We built this app with less than half of our runway remaining. You have to do twice as much with half as much time. It’s really freaking hard.” For seed stage companies it might be easier, but proving you’re worth the valuation of a Series B upround requires incredible metrics that are tough to reach if you have audible late in the game. ”People trivialize pivoting but it’s truly a hail mary, and it’s rare that people can pull this off.”

DrawQuest got some traction, but found that selling paint brushes in a drawing app is a lot harder than selling extra lives in Candy Crush. There’s just not the same emotional ‘I can’t play if I don’t pay’ urgency. “I definitely have a new appreciation for game designers,” moot tells me.

With Canvas/DrawQuest’s headcount incurring serious costs, moot searched for someone to acquire his startup. “We approached a few companies and no one was buying what we were selling. [We were] never trying to win any awards with our brushstroke algorithms, so from an IP standpoint [there wasn't much to buy]. The nut that was interesting was the community, but it wasn’t really clear what exactly this community would do for their business.”

After running “Wild West of the Internet” image-sharing site 4chan since 2003, moot was actually looking forward to not being the head honcho for once. “I thought we were doing great work and we could continue to do great work as part of a bigger organization. I had kind of psyched myself up for that, but then…” no deal materialized.

“Ultimately we decided we wouldn’t go try to raise more money – it wasn’t really on the table because we just hadn’t created enough value” says moot. That’s a rare admission of failure in the success theater startup. Most founders trumpet their funding rounds and growth milestones but slink away when things go pear-shaped. Poole’s willingness to be humble and transparent is admirable, and could increase willingness of investors to back his future projects.

So today he’ll announce that Canvas is shutting down in the next few days, and users will get an email with a link to download all their content.

As for DrawQuest, moot says “I’m going to try to keep the servers up as long as I can. As of today all of the company’s employees are going their separate ways…but I’m hoping that between in-app purchases and whatever money is in the bank we’d be able to keep the service alive for a bit longer. We think it makes sense to pay our AWS bill until we’re completely out of money which will hopefully be a few months.” Perhaps even longer as moot dreams that maybe “some white knight comes in and says ‘I want to chip in for the server costs’.”

In DrawQuest’s goodbye post, moot writes “We hope you’ll all continue to spread the importance of daily creativity, and inspire those around you to draw more often. While DrawQuest may not be around next year, you all will be, and we hope you’ll leave the world a better, more creative place.”

And as for moot himself?:

    “I’m a free agent for the first time in over 4 years because I was in college when I dropped out to start this comapny. I’m definitely not trying to start another company anytime soon. I need to decompress and refelect on what I’ve learned and take some time to myself because it’s been a bit of an emotional rollecoaster. You start to appreciate why the best investors are the best investors. In our final hour everyone was so supportive. It’s made the difference between me being an emotional wreck and me being in as good of a place emotionally as you can be when you fail.

    Most companies fail, and unfortunately we are one of those companies. Those are the odds.”

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Intercom Raises Another $23M For Its New, More Social Approach To CRM

a platform for companies to provide personalised customer responses online, is today announcing that it has raised another $23 million — funding that it will use to continue to develop its product, particularly in mobile, and expand its marketing to compete against bigger players like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce (the behemoth that even uses ‘CRM’ as its stock ticker on the NYSE).

The Series B round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, and includes participation from previous investors Social+Capital Partnership. The company, which was originally incubated at 500 Startups, also counts the likes of Biz Stone and Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin as investors. This round brings the total raised by Intercom to $30 million.

Intercom is among a new wave of companies that are generally called “social CRM” providers. The idea here is that everyone in your organisation should be able to communicate his/her knowledge to customers when and if it is needed. The theory is that this means not only better engagement from your employees in the bigger team effort, but also more satisfying responses for users. It’s an area that larger players like Salesforce are moving on, with the launch of Salesforce One. Some have even hinted that Google could be a contender for social CRM solutions.

The evolution of CRM comes at a time of growth but also maturation of the internet: consumers expect better and more personalised responses, moving away from “super robotic” stock responses, in the words of Intercom’s co-founder and CEO Eoghan McCabe (who hails, along with the other three co-founders, from Dublin).

“CRM companies haven’t innovated in over ten years. Many of them are just ticketing systems. But what’s happening is that customer service is at the leading edge of great competitive online businesses,” he tells me. “In past, leadership was based on top engineering and good design. But today, the real leaders are those like Zappos people spend more there because they know they get to deal with a human.”

This also speaks to a wider trend we’re experiencing, where innovation is happening not at the core of prodcuts, but around how they are delivered. (You could argue that the same is happening in areas like mobile technology, too, where we are seeing more incremental rather than massive shifts at the moment.

Intercom’s approach to CRM involves a few different features. At its core, it’s a platform that receives messages from customers and then lets a company segment them so that they can be accessed by relevant people for responses (the segmentation can be by keywords, but can also be by things like length of membership, duration and date of last visit, and so on). When employees respond to customers, companies can create profiles so that the responses come from actual people rather than faceless general accounts.

The segmentation can also be used as the basis for reaching out to users as well around particular initiatives — one area that McCabe hints may get developed into more products in the future (indeed, you can see how email marketing might go hand in hand with CRM).

Since coming out of beta 18 months ago, Intercom has picked up 2,000 paying businesses, among them Heroku, Hootsuite, Yahoo!, Perfect Audience, Rackspace, and Visual.ly.

Ethan Kurzweil, a BVP partner that is now joining Intercom’s board, says that one of the things that caught his eye most about Intercom, and got him interested in investing, was the fact that several of BVP’s existing portfolio companies were raving about it.  ”We heard a range of good things about Intercom, and how excited employees were to interact using it,” he says.

That has even extended to customers figuring out ways of integrating Intercom into existing systems even when Intercom itself has not yet moved into figuring that out itself. Kurzweil refers to this as them  hacking Intercom integration themselves.”

“One thing we look at when investing is when we see people going to special lengths to integrate something to make Intercom into a central tool,” he says. “You can’t undersell how unique it is when you’ve got your own customers building these hooks.”

As part of today’s news, Intercom is also announcing a new hire, Mark Woolway — a former PayPal and Yammer executive – as chief operating officer. It’s another major addition after poaching Facebook’s head of brand design, Paul Adams, as its VP of product in May last year.

Woolway had a notable role at Yammer helping it raise $142 million and then selling the company to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. At PayPal he had been VP of corporate development when it was still just a startup. He helped with the merger with x.com (Elon Musk’s company), raising money and exiting the company to eBay. He’s also worked as the MD of Peter Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital at a time when it had some $8 billion in assets under management and was launching the Founders Fund. All of this points to some very serious ambitions for Intercom in the years ahead.

Ironically, up to now the company has built itself out with zero sales or marketing staff. “Jessica Halper is our first marketing hire,” McCabe tells me. “Our growth has simply been word of mouth.”

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The Google buses, described as “spaceships” containing “alien overlords”

Like the last time people tried busing as a solution to a socioeconomic problem, the tech busing in San Francisco has become a hot-button topic.

The Google buses, described as “spaceships” containing “alien overlords” by writer Rebecca Solnit, have become potent symbols for income inequality within the city. Beyond the transportation issues, they are now symbolic of other unwanted repercussions of the tech boom, including rising housing costs, Ellis Act evictions and a ”let them eat cake” mentality very publicly exhibited by many tech-employed, Bay Area newcomers.

Reading articles about Google using a yacht to ferry its employees across the Bay, or hiring security guards for its commuter buses, evokes a not-so-distant dystopic future.

Thus, the city of San Francisco, which currently lets the commuter buses use MUNI stops free of charge, is scrambling desperately for a compromise. Tomorrow the seven SFMTA board directors will vote on a proposal for shared use of the bus stops. And in preparation for tomorrow’s board meeting, the Transportation Team at Google sent the following memo to its SF employees:

    [Misc-sf] Next week’s public hearing on shuttle regulations

    Transportation Team XXXXX@google.com Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 11:35 AM Bcc: XXXX@google.com
    IF YOU DON’T RIDE THE SHUTTLE TO/FROM SF, YOU CAN STOP READING NOW. Dear Shuttle Riders,

    This Tuesday (1/21), the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Board will meet to vote on the proposed shuttle regulations we told you about last week. The hearing will take place on January 21 at 1pm PT at San Francisco City Hall (room 400). While we recognized that many of you won’t be able to make it during the workday, we encourage any interested Googlers who live in San Francisco to speak in favor of the proposal (please RSVP here if you are planning to attend). While you are not required to state where you work, you may confirm that Google is your employer if you are so inclined.

    If you do choose to speak in favor of the proposal we thought you might appreciate some guidance on what to say. Feel free to add your own style and opinion.

        *I am so proud to live in San Francisco and be a part of this community
        *I support local and small businesses in my neighborhood on a regular basis
        *My shuttle empowers my colleagues and I to reduce our carbon emissions by removing cars from the road
        *If the shuttle program didn’t exist, I would continue to live in San Francisco and drive to work on the peninsula
        *I am a shuttle rider, SF resident, and I volunteer at…..
        *Because of the above, I urge the Board to adopt this pilot as a reasonable step in the right direction


    You can read the full press release announcing the proposal here, and we’ll keep you updated in the coming weeks as the proposal moves towards approval. Feel free to email us at transport@google.com with any questions.

    Thanks, XXXX, on behalf of the Transportation Team

The missive was then forwarded to Heart of the City, the activist organization who organized the faux Google bus performance at SF Pride and the first Google bus blockade on Dec. 9 (though not the subsequent one in Oakland that turned violent). They sent it to us, and we verified it through a second source. Google has still not returned our request for confirmation. 

In the email, Googlers are given boilerplate talking points to take to the board meeting, including “If the shuttle program didn’t exist, I would continue to live in San Francisco and drive to work on the peninsula.”

It’s notable that a Google employee actually points out the heavy-handedness of the memo on the thread, mentioning that this would look bad for Google if leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle or Valleywag.

“Am I being too paranoid?” the employee asked. No.

    This message comes off a bit high handed and I don’t think it would be good if it showed up on the front page of the chron or valleywag.

    Or am I being too paranoid? XXXX
    [Quoted text hidden]

“They’re urging their employees to say they would drive if not for the shuttle program to keep the ‘eco-friendly’ excuse alive and continue using SF’s tax-payer funded bus stops for virtually nothing,” a representative from Heart of the City wrote in response to the memo. “[According to an SFMTA survey] 31% said they wouldn’t be able to make the trip at all, which implies over 5200 people would choose to live closer to their work in Silicon Valley.”

The survey did not include the option “Quit Google and join an SF-based startup.”
Slide from the SFMTA shuttles proposal.

Slide from the SFMTA shuttles proposal.

If voted through tomorrow, the 18-month Shuttle Partners Program pilot would mean the creation of around 200 legal commuter shuttle stops, according to the SFMTA, and charge the commuter buses $1 per stop, a fee that would not result in any profit for the SFMTA (though the $1.5 million raised would cover the cost of the program).

Raising the fee to the total fines accrued for using the stops illegally or implementing a tax to bring in meaningful revenue for SFMTA, as activists propose, may require voter approval, according to SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin. Heart Of the City estimates that if the SFMTA decided to implement the $271 fine for each time the commuter shuttles used the stops illegally, it would add up to approximately $1 billion dollars.

Busing is just one element of a perfect storm brewing in San Francisco — tech workers vs. the rest of the city — where proponents of the free market come head to head with people unhappy with the loopholes in that market, i.e. the millions in tax breaks offered to tech companies like Twitter or the Ellis Act. The activist argument is that if tech companies don’t have to pay taxes (or fines), they should somehow be responsible for protecting the community in other ways.

While it is a perfect storm, there is no perfect solution for the problems caused by the tech boom and no straightforward explanation as to how the busing affects the real estate crisis, though every resident has an opinion on it — usually emotionally charged. Here is a particularly nuanced one on Quora.

Should corporations feel a fiscal responsibility to a community if they’re leaning on public infrastructure — like public bus stops — to accumulate their cash piles? My views are my own here (not TechCrunch’s), and I think so, though the issue is too complex to fully dissect in this post about a leaked email.

Perhaps Google should build a Google.org focusing only on Bay Area municipal issues? What I do know is that Google, instead of canned talking points, should be sending their employees links to both sides of the debate and increasing awareness instead of acting vaguely like Big Brother.

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With Release Of iOS 7.1 Beta 3, Apple Favors Circular Buttons, Changes To Phone & “Power Off” Screens

Apple is continuing to tweak the interface to its iOS 7 mobile operating system, it seems, as today’s release of the iOS 7.1 beta 3 build indicates. In this latest update, the company has revamped the phone dialer, in-call screen, and power off screen, with a tendency to favor circular buttons where there were once rectangular ones. Also added are new options for setting the wallpaper, and gradient changes to the icons for the Facetime, Messages and Phone apps, among other things.

The latest build follows two others, the first released in November, with beta 2 arriving just last month. These brought about minor interface tweaks, including the removal of the darker keyboard option, and more. With today’s release, the most visible change – at least for consumers, who already took some time to warm up to the visual overall that was iOS 7 – are updates to several of the more commonly used screens on the iPhone.

Screens associated with phone calls are getting a makeover, with round green and red buttons at the bottom of the dialer and call-in-progress screen, respectively. When receiving an incoming call, the “Decline” and “Accept” options are also now just round buttons, with the “Remind Me” and “Message” option as smaller, white icons just above.

Thanks to iClarified.com, you can see great before and after’s of all these changes to the phone interface.

Meanwhile, the “Slide to power off” screen has also been revamped, and the screen will even dim as you slide the button over to the right.

More minor changes include a new wallpaper picker with a motion on/off setting, slightly darker gradients on the green icons for Messages, Facetime and Phone, updated Repeat and Shuffle buttons, new backspace/shift highlights, and a bolder keyboard. The update also fixes bugs related to setting up a new iCloud account during the setup assistant, problems with audiobooks playing in the Music app, but may cause other issues, including the ability to send iMessages, which will sometimes fail upon first try.

Of course, what many are hoping for when Apple ships the 7.1 build are backend improvements that will improve the experience of using the software, which today still suffers from bugs that cause the phone to freeze or even restart. Recently, Google Ventures’ MG Siegler (also a TechCrunch contributor, and longtime Apple columnist) chronicled these problems on his personal blog, saying that iOS 7, as it stands now, is “not up to snuff.”

7.1 may resolve some of these bugs, and given how regularly they occur – at least for some users (yes, myself included) – it’s hopeful that the public build will ship sooner rather than later.

 

 

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Apple Patents Mobile Payments Method With Secure Element For Protecting Account Informations

Apple has filed for a new patent related to mobile payments that might provide more insight into how they’re thinking about implementing that kind of tech with the USPTO, AppleInsider notes. The patent is for an entire “touchless” phone-based payment system, which resembles existing ones in many ways but also incorporates a feature borrowed from Apple’s Touch ID system to make things more secure.

The technology that Apple describes would use two different types of wireless communication, first to send a signal from an iPhone to a nearby receiver to initiate the payment. This could be done via NFC, which is described in the patent despite the fact that Apple hasn’t seemed overly eager to jump on board that train, as well as with iBeacons or other Bluetooth-based communication. A second wireless interface would be used to communicate data from the point-of-sale terminal to the actual payment processing backend online.

Apple has also built in a security method that’s designed to protect user data and resembles in many ways the so-called ‘secure enclave’ it uses with the iPhone 5s to hide fingerprint data. This “secure element” referred to in the patent filing works by making sure that a user’s actual sensitive payment data is stored only on a user’s device separately. To make the payment, an alias is then generated that the processing backend can recognize, and when a user bumps their device against the POS to pay, that alias alone is transmitted along with a cryptographic code. The code is decrypted by the backend, which then compares the alias to the one it stores, but at no time does the receiving end actually get a look at the payment information itself.

Apple has had patents related to mobile payments before, but this one describes a fairly complete, full system for conducting real-world transactions. As with any patent, it’s unclear when or if this will see the light of day, but it’s an interesting look at how Apple is thinking about an area of emerging tech many believe it will inevitably pursue eventually.

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