If you like watching Ronald Acuña Jr. hit dingers, you might be in luck, depending on your feelings about exhibition-type skills contests: the young phenom is ...
View full coverage on Google NewsStocks in Asia climbed along with U.S. equity futures and the yuan after the American and Chinese presidents reached a truce in the trade war and agreed to ...
View full coverage on Google NewsU.S. stock futures surged on Sunday night after the U.S. and China agreed to hold off on slapping additional tariffs on their products in an effort to resume trade ...
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The market's top two point guards, Kyrie Irving and Kemba Walker, are already (ostensibly) off the board. Where does that leave the rest of the free agent ...
View full coverage on Google NewsOn July 8, the 2019 Home Run Derby will be held at Cleveland's Progressive Field. The Home Run Derby is, basically, a meaningless spectacle, but gosh, it is ...
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Bravo stars experience an unforgettable wedding in Kentucky with their friends.
View full coverage on Google NewsThe Lakers, meanwhile, have reached out to D'Angelo Russell's agents to set up a meeting with the All-Star guard.
View full coverage on Google NewsA Texas woman was banned from her area Walmart after police say she ate half a cake and refused to pay for the missing portion.
View full coverage on Google News(NEW YORK) — Dog owners are getting a new warning about concerns over pet food that may be linked to deadly congestive heart failure. The Food and Drug ...
View full coverage on Google NewsPump mastermind and Bravo star, Lisa Vanderpump has made her way to Kentucky to celebrate the wedding of Jax Taylor and Brittany Cartwright despite the ...
View full coverage on Google NewsGoogle’s vice president of finance, has joined Postmates’ board of directors, the latest sign that the on-demand food delivery startup is prepping to take the company public.
Postmates announced Friday that Kristin Reinke, vice president of Finance at Google, will join the San Francisco startup as an independent director.
Reinke has been with Google since 2005. Prior to Google, Reinke was at Oracle for eight years. Reinke also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Economic Advisory Council.
Her skill set will come in handy as Postmates creeps towards an IPO.
Earlier this year, the company lined up a $100 million pre-IPO financing that valued the business at $1.85 billion. Postmates is backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock, Spark Capital, Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Slow Ventures and others. Spark Capital’s Nabeel Hyatt tweeted the news earlier Friday.
Happy to welcome Kristin to the board of @Postmates.
Great times ahead. https://t.co/nEqu3A2YkE
— Nabeel Hyatt (@nabeel) June 28, 2019
“Postmates has established itself as the market leader with a focus on innovation and route efficiency in the fast‐growing on‐demand delivery sector. Given their strong execution, accelerating growth, and financial discipline, they are well positioned for continued market growth across the U.S.,” said Reinke. “I’m thrilled to join the board.”
The startup has been beefing up its executive quiver, most recently hiring Apple veteran and author Ken Kocienda as a principal software engineer at Postmates X, the team building the food delivery company’s semi-autonomous sidewalk rover, Serve.
Kocienda, author of “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” spent 15 years at Apple focused on human interface design, collaborating with engineers to develop the first iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
SpaceX is only getting started launching Falcon Heavy commercial missions, but it already has its eyes on the next prize – launching Starship. Now, we know that it’s hoping to start commercial service for this next-generation, fully reusable rocket by 2021, according to SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales Jonathan Hofeller.
Hofeller was speaking at a conference in Indonesia (via SpaceNews), and noted that the private space launch company is currently talking to three different telecom companies about selecting which will be the first mission aboard the new spacecraft. Starship, formerly knowns as ‘BFR’ or ‘Big Falcon Rocket’) is currently in development at two separate SpaceX facilities, one in Texas and one in Florida, in what amounts to an internal company ‘bake-off’ to see which team can delivery the better solution faster. An engineering show-down of this kind is not uncommon among tech companies, and often produces results from both efforts that complement or enhance whatever the final product ends up being, rather than being a ‘winner take all’ scenario.
Starship, once complete, will include a launch system propelled to orbit by a ‘Super Heavy’ booster, with even more lift capacity than the existing Falcon Heavy rocket. It’ll be able to delivery as many as 20 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit, or over 100 tons to low-Earth orbit. It’s also intended to be the spacecraft that enables SpaceX to achieve its goal of running crewed missions to Mars.
Previously stated target dates for Starship milestones include achieving orbital launches by 2020, though based on this new info those will be test or demonstration missions rather than for paying customers. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also previously said that the company is looking at 2023 as the earliest target date for providing a Moon circuit space trip to his first paying tourist customer, Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa.
New York (CNN Business) Ford's new supercharged high-performance Mustang, the Shelby GT500, is the most powerful car Ford has ever produced — and it ...
View full coverage on Google NewsThe broad market climbed 17.4% the first half of the year. A trade deal will be needed for further strong gains, analysts say.
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View full coverage on Google NewsSpotify seems to have learned little from the Facebook developer platform’s scandals despite getting a huge boost from the social network in its early days. Spotify has been caught allowing record labels to grab tons of unnecessary user data and permissions to even control their accounts just so people can “pre-save” upcoming song releases.
An investigation by Billboard’s Micah Singleton found major label Sony’s app for pre-saving demanded access to users’ email address, what you’ve listened to and saved to your library, playlists you’ve made or subscribed to, artists you follow, and what you’re playing right now. It also asks to be able to take actions on your behalf including change who you follow, add or remove songs from your library, create/edit/follow playlists, and even control Spotify on your devices.
An example of Universal Music Group’s pre-save app that asks for unnecessary user data and access permissions
This means that by agreeing to use a pre-save feature, a record label could index you music tastes and determine your current mood for marketing purposes, subscribe you to all of their artists and playlists, force you to create playlists that include their artists or add them to your existing playlists, and delete or unfollow any music or artists represented by their competitors.
Since users often speed through platform app permission screens assuming they’re just asking for what’s required, many likely gave up valuable data about themselves and the ability to manipulate their accounts without fully understanding what was happening. Other major labels like Warner and Universal’s pre-save apps like this one similarly ask for 10 types of permission — most extraneous.
In reality, the only permission a pre-save app should need is to be able to add the song you wanted to pre-save to your library. Anything else is theoretically prohibited by Spotify’s developer policy section 5.2: “You will only request the data you need to operate your Spotify Developer Application.” If you’ve used these apps, you can go into your Spotify account settings here to remove their access.
In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, platforms like Spotify should know better than to let developers run amok without proper oversight. That’s why I was so disappointed when Spotify refused to provide a statement, explanation, or even talk with me about the issue.
Offering a flexible developer platform has plenty of advantages for users. Apps for DJing with streaming music, discovering new bands, or synchronizing playback with friends could be built with rightful and transparent use of Spotify’s APIs. But for something as simple and common as volunteering to have a new song from your favorite band show up in your library on the day it’s released shouldn’t become a lure for an exploitative data grab.
That’s why Spotify should build its own in-house pre-save app that labels could all use to pre-promote their releases. Approved labels and their artists should be able to punch in their upcoming single’s Spotify URL and get a shareable link back that they can distribute through social media or wherever that only grants permission to pre-save that specific song, and that expires once that action is completed.
Spotify is widening its subscriber lead over Apple Music
Otherwise, Spotify risks losing all the goodwill its built up with listeners by being a music-first company compared to competitors like Apple and Google where music is a rounding error. Apple Music provides app developers with less data about users.
Just today Apple Music announced it has 60 million subscribers, lagging increasingly further behind Spotify which now has 100 million subscribers and 217 million total monthly users. Spotify already dominates cultural mind share for streaming, having used the playlists it controls to become a hit-maker and gain leverage over the labels for royalty negotiations. But turning a blind eye to shady developers just because they own the music it streams could make listeners question their loyalty and stray to Apple, which is notoriously serious about privacy.
If Spotify is unwilling to push back on data abuse by its record label partners, then it’s undeserving of users’ ears and subscription dollars.
MIAMI — Presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio apologized Thursday for what he said was an inadvertent quoting of Marxist ...
View full coverage on Google NewsWhen you live in Silicon Valley, it feels like nearly everyone works in tech and that entry into the industry is wide open. Of course, the reality is very different. Even as software eats the world, not everyone has the training or connections to land a high-paying job in either the traditional tech industry or with a company that’s actively embracing its digital future.
In fact, it would be challenging to interest an executive recruiter in someone who doesn’t have a tech background and didn’t go to college, yet a company called SV Academy is doing just that. According to cofounder and CEO Rahim Fazel, the nearly two-and-a-half-year-old, Bay Area company is currently helping 100 people every 30 days — or 1,200 per year — land jobs at companies like SurveyMonkey, Palo Alto Networks, and PayPal.
Did we mention that it costs these job candidates nothing, that instead employers pay SV Academy between $12,000 to $15,00 per hire? All the prospects really need to do is convince SV Academy that they have the grit required to take a 12-week, tuition-free training program that teaches human-centered skills that place these individuals in sales roles, as well as that they will embrace a year of ongoing training and mentorship for a year after graduating.
It sounds like a great deal, and it is, which is why SV Academy says it has more interest than it can handle. Fazel tells us that the company, which received 1,000 applications over eight months in its first year of operations, is now receiving 1,000 applications a week from people who’ve largely heard of the company through word of mouth.
Because it’s focused on grooming candidates who are serious about developing new careers (and will stay in their jobs), SV Academy is loath to scale up to accommodate that kind of demand. Still, a new round of funding should help widen the funnel a bit. Until recently, the company was backed by $2 million that it raised a couple of years ago from Bloomberg Beta, Rethink Education, Precursor Ventures, Uprising Ventures, 500 Startups and WTI.
The money was enough for SV Academy to achieve profitability and get to the point of placing employers on a waiting list. But with demand beginning to more seriously outpace its supply of candidates, SV Academy recently hit the market again, sharing exclusively that it has just closed on $9.5 million in Series A funding led by Owl Ventures with participation from Kapor Capital, Strada Education Network, and several earlier backer participating, namely Bloomberg, Rethink, and Uprising.
It isn’t the first time that Fazal has started a company that has taken off. He cofounded a company a decade ago that sold to Oracle, where he spent the next two and a half years. But SV Academy is even closer to his heart, given that he is exactly the kind of person who he wants to help with SV Academy — someone smart but lacking resources. Fazel himself grew up in government housing. He didn’t go to college. He knows firsthand that with determination and right amount of guidance and support, obstacles like not financial stability or a fancy degree can fall away.
Fazel also recognizes the importance of having the right cofounder, which he seems to have landed on with Joel Scott, who is also the company’s COO. A Stanford-trained lawyer, Scott was previously VP of operations at Hewlett Packard, and according to Fazel has trained upwards of 500 SaaS salespeople since college.
Indeed, Scott has played a major role in creating SV Academy’s curriculum, which is very focused on training people for SaaS jobs (for now) and that is entirely virtual, from the 12-week-training period, to the coaching that comes afterward. The unsurprising reason: it enables it to reach students in the U.S. wherever they may be, and whatever their experience might be. (Though some of the applicants who it accepts are college graduates, many are also “working full-time jobs, or they’re caretakers, and it’s impossible for them to drive into the city several times a week for classes,” he explains.)
It seems to be working, too. Fazel says that 100% of the individuals who complete the program are not only receiving median job offers of $79,000 plus benefits and, in many cases, equity, but 70% of them are also receiving promotions within their first year. Yes, the law of small numbers is a factor, but it’s also easy to understand investors’ enthusiasm for what they are seeing — including the cautious approach SV Academy is taking to expanding.
“Real transformation is difficult,” says Fazel. “You can’t create outcomes like this by throwing software at the problem.”
Above, left to right: Joel Scott and Rahim Fazel of SV Academy
If you're a Taco Bell super fan looking to stay at the Mexican fast food chain's limited-time hotel, you're already too late.
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