Info's of

Mt. Gox, one of the world’s biggest Bitcoin trading exchanges, has temporarily

suspended all Bitcoin withdrawals with immediate effect as the team seeks to

resolve technical issues experienced by some users while withdrawing

Bitcoin.

The exchange says that the increase in withdrawal traffic was “hindering” its

efforts on a technical level, and to “get a better look at the process the

system needs to be in a static state.”

In order for our team to resolve the withdrawal issue it is necessary to

temporarily pause all withdrawal traffic to obtain a clear technical view of the

current processes.

Mt. Gox says withdrawals waiting to be processed will be returned to users’

wallets and can be re-initiated once it has resolved the technical issues.

Customers can still use the trading platform as per usual.

The company will provide an update on Monday as it works through the

weekend to resolve the problems.

Consequently, the price of Bitcoin has dropped. According to BitcoinWisdom,

Bitcoin hit $619 at its lowest point today, from about $783 just 12 hours ago.

It has started to rise slowly again — but is still far from the price it recorded

yesterday.


Screen shot 2014 02 07 at PM 06.37.05 730x436 Bitcoin plunges as exchange

Mt. Gox pauses all withdrawals due to technical issues

Japan-based Mt. Gox is a service that allows Internet users to trade real-world

currency for Bitcoin and vice-versa, but it has been beset with growing pains

due to its popularity. The company suspended US dollar trading for two weeks

in June and July last year to improve its service, and has suffered a number

of DDoS attacks in the past — it was even forced to halt trading in April

following a major Bitcoin price crash.

Subsequently in August, Mt. Gox announced that its service was running on

Akamai, a move that it hoped could bring greater stability to the growing

platform.

Time is almost always a vital limiting factor in engaging with customers, but

Vine and Instagram each impose a strict maximum (six and 15 seconds,

respectively). This may seem like a short amount of time, but consider

instead how long it takes someone to scroll past a tweet or an individual

photo on Instagram.

Comparatively, video content gives you at least 10 times more eyeball time

(also, Vines garner nearly four times the screen space of a typical tweet in a

Twitter feed). Shouldn’t your brand capitalize on that opportunity? To do so,

it’s important to understand how to construct an engaging video and how to

measure the success of a post or campaign.

Engagement: Techniques and Strategies

Tool: Pitch’d

Time constraints can create pressure to cram as much content as possible

into a finite space. Resist this urge. Instead, tell a story that suits the

medium, embracing it’s structures and limitations.

The Tribeca Film Festival took this to heart in 2013, creating a #6secfilm

hashtag competition where contestants submitted their videos directly

through Vine. To stimulate storytelling, each submission needed a beginning,

middle and end to qualify for the contest. Specific yet non-prescriptive

guidelines unleashed film enthusiasts’ creativity, and thousands of

submissions poured in.

If that sounds overwhelming, a tool like Pitch’d facilitates easy creation and

management of such competitions.

The contest mentioned above was so successful that TFF has already

confirmed a 2014 version of the event. See one of the winning submissions

from 2013 below:



Instagram video, Vine’s slightly lengthier competitor in the social video space

(up to 15 seconds of recording time), is perfect for sharing clips with multiple

cuts or scenes. The slightly extended running time allows for a less frenetic

pace, reducing chances of viewers’ queasiness from watching your video.

Add continuity throughout scenes by keeping either the foreground or

background of a shot consistent, even while the other changes. The athletic

wear and lifestyle brand Adidas features several stellar examples on its

Instagram account (and more on the @adidaswomen feed), showcasing

carefree, stop-motion product demos on a neutral background.

microsoft launched modern.IE at the end of January 2013 to help ease the

pain points of developing for its browser. Today, the company says the site

has saved developers over 1 million hours testing for Internet Explorer,

especially for those who don’t use Windows and/or who need to work with

older versions of the browser.

The company explains how it got the figure: over 750,000 developers have

used the site’s virtualization tools. If you compare that to building a VM from

scratch, they have saved an average of 1 hour and 20 minutes by using pre-

configured VMs and 2 hours and 48 minutes using Browserstack. Not bad

Microsoft, not bad at all.

See also – Microsoft’s new Rethink campaign tries to convince developers and

users that Internet Explorer advances the Web and IE11 passes IE10 in

market share, Firefox slips a bit, and Chrome gains back share

For the past eight months, Jen Mccabe has been leading Nimbus, the hardware

investment portfolio for Tony Hsieh’s Vegas Tech Fund. She stepped into the

role after learning about hardware the hard way at robotics startup Romotive.

We spoke with her about what she’s doing to make things easier for young

hardware startups and how they can perserve through the so-called “trough of

sorrow.”

Mccabe, a Y Combinator alumnus from her previous startup Contagion Health,

said her time at Romotive made her realize the need for better early-stage

investor resources for startups working on hardware projects.

In particular, she realized that entrepreneurs needed more help getting

through the trough of sorrow/despair, a reference to the discouraging

downturn section of Paul Graham’s Startup Curve model.


startupcurve Vegas Tech Fund’s Jen Mccabe on making hardware startups

easier and surviving the ‘trough of sorrow’

“For software, [the trough of despair] is hard, but for hardware, it’s wicked,”

Mccabe said in an interview.

There’s an initial high that comes with the launch of a startup’s first product,

but it’s quickly followed by the challenge of building more units, finding new

distribution channels and coming up with a second product.

After she started working with Hsieh and Nimbus, Mccabe found that, outside

of production issues, the single biggest complaint founders had was that they

didn’t have investors that understood hardware and the unique problems it

faces.

Hardware is currently experiencing a renaissance with the help of the rise of

crowdfunding and a decrease in start-up costs. However, many of the most

popular projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo have had trouble meeting their

own deadlines. Working independently, each batch of hardware founders

would have to reinvent their own wheels, but organizations like Vegas Tech

Fund and Haxlr8r are working to pass along valuable knowledge to early stage

companies.

My reason for being is to be a functional, useful hardware investor, so that

when I talk to these founders we’re talking about how they make an early

stage operations hire, how they work with outsourced industrial designers,

the dangers of injection molding, [etc]. Our goal is to get these startups

through that trough of utter despair as they try to build to scale.

It’s very rewarding work to see something that you’ve built, a physical

tangible object. To see a team go through the process of a design together and

then put it into the hands of customers. There’s something about backing a

team that’s building something real. I hope more investors will see that.

According to Mccabe, software projects have evolved with very set paths in

recent years. A couple of founders might work on a minimum viable product,

find some seed funding, join an incubator or accelerator, then raise a small

amount of investment. Typically by that point, they have a sense of whether

they’ll scale, fail or become a lifestyle business. The hardware process is also

replicable, but there isn’t as much information out there for new

entrepreneurs.

“The biggest challenge is getting that first time product launch experience.

You have to work in a much more rigorous way,” Mccabe noted.

For instance, hardware projects can’t just slip on deadlines because it will

offset the factory schedule and distribution timing.

Mccabe went on to outline the five components she believes are critical to

having a shot at success with a hardware startup. First, companies need to

start with a customer- and market-driven design process.

“Know what category of product you’re competing with going into it, where

it’s sold, and what price point, what customers might buy or use instead,” she

recommended.

As companies move on to the building phase, cheaper prototyping methods

offer startups an advantage. Resources like TechShop, 3D printing and

incubators, have greatly simplified the process.

Selling the product comes next, but Mccabe cautioned against relying solely

on crowdfunding preorders:

After you’ve designed a product for a customer, you have to push it through a

really appropriate sales channel. A lot of hardware begins in preorders like

Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, but that can’t end there. They need to

push themselves beyond direct sale or web orders. The likelihood that a

startup will sell more than 10,000 units on their website is slim. On Amazon,

Brookstone, or Apple.com? Much more likely.

Next up, hardware startups have to actually ship devices out to customers.

It’s a “time-honored, proven process” as Mccabe put it, but it also includes a

lot of surprises for first-time entrepreneurs. For instance, startups might not

know that putting over 35 pounds of product in a master carton incurs a

forklift charge. Or, they might be unaware that they need to budget 8-12

weeks for the necessary GS1 barcodes.

“It’s those things that you only learn by experience, the hard way, but once

somebody you know know those things, you don’t have to fail,” she said.

The final component to success, service, is the one that’s most often

forgotten by startups, according to Mccabe:

Service will save you as a company if your ship date is late. If you’re

customer driven, honest with the people who are supporting your company,

then they’ll be patient with you for the most part. But, if you forget about

service and something happens, you can’t ever recover that first chance at a

good relationship.

Taking care of customers could be as simple as having someone route a 1-800

number to their cell phone via Grasshopper, keeping an eye on the firm’s

Facebook and Twitter accounts, or answering support emails and passing

messages along to the software and hardware teams.

“The way for a hardware startup to get timing right and avoid delays…is to be

focused and know those five priorities: design, build, sell, ship and service,”

Mccabe said, adding that disasters are bound to happen. “Have all those

[components] included on a robust product schedule and roles and

responsibilities clearly defined for your team. That’s how you’re going to beat

those odds.”

With smartphones reaching near-ubiquity among tech consumers, Mccabe

believes hardware’s time has come.

“Everybody has this supercomputer in their pocket with great

microprocessors and an excellent camera,” Mccabe said. “We’re just at the

beginning of what I think is an explosion of using hardware and software

together to create new product experiences across categories like the smarter

connected home, the way people play, the way people work, the way we listen

to music.”

I asked how those categories played out in Vegas Tech Fund’s own

investments. Mccabe mentioned Beep, a startup making a wireless streaming

device and platform that just launched, as an example of one such new

product experience. She said that the first time Beep co-founder Daniel

Conrad showed her the prototype, she could instantly imagine buying several

for her home and to give to friends.


beep 1 730x294 Vegas Tech Fund’s Jen Mccabe on making hardware startups

easier and surviving the ‘trough of sorrow’

Meanwhile, Scanadu is a Vegas Tech Fund-backed startup doing interesting

things in the medical space. The company is trying to make the tricorder

scanner from Star Trek. The fund has also invested in Whill, a startup

rethinking the electronic wheelchair.

These days, talking about hardware inevitably leads to a discussion of the

rising popularity of wearable devices. In Mccabe’s former startup, she ran

tests comparing software in a mobile app and on a wearable and found higher

attentiveness among users for the device they wore.

“There’s something about [wearables] that makes sense to people intuitively,”

she said.

When Mccabe first got started in hardware a few years ago, she only knew a

handful of people with devices like the Fitbit, Nike Fuelband and the

Jawbone. Now, it’s reached a point where non-techie family members know

about them and are using them.

“People like my mom…want to know more about themselves. They’re used to

using software applications that tell them about their health, what they like

to listen to, what they want to watch, where they want to go. Now there’s an

opportunity to bring a specialized piece of hardware that brings it to the top

of mind and body, literally. You can’t avoid what they’re telling you because

you have them on.”

While focusing on an attractive design is important for startups creating

wearables, Mccabe believes the most important factor is to have a specific

customer in mind.

“If it doesn’t speak to someone’s personal drive and experience, it doesn’t

matter how beautiful the hardware is, they won’t pick it up.”

Mccabe also emphasized the importance of having a “charismatic sales-

oriented” founder or CEO during the early stages of a hardware startup

because the founder needs to sell the device in every talk, tweet and pitch.

“The CEO’s message is the product until the product is ready to ship,” she

said. “They have to be talking to a customer intimately, personally to make

that work.”

For those of you with hardware startups looking to raise money, Mccabe said

she loves getting pitched, but you’ll want to bring along a prototype.

“The most important thing for a startup to know when they pitch me is they

should bring the product. I want to get my hands on it. I’ll probably spend the

first 15 minutes ignoring what the founder is saying playing with it to get a

feel for it.

The primary referral method for the fund is through founders of other

portfolio companies, but she also connects with startups based on her

contacts from her time with Y Combinator and Tech Stars. Other investors

also make introductions in order to get the team’s feedback on whether a

company’s product is feasible. Still, Mccabe also said she randomly comes

across projects on place like Kickstarter and will reach out to the founders

directly.

The availability of resources for early stage hardware startups is still woefully

limited, but Mccabe and Vegas Tech Fund are doing their part to change that.

With enough help, we may soon be saying that hardware eats the world.

update: To clarify our earlier report, Google has rolled local payments for

developers in four countries — the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and

Malaysia — not 25 countries. The other countries have been given the option

to set prices in their local currency, while developers based in *some* of them

can use local payment options.

Google has added local payment support for Android apps in a 25 new

countries. The important move will not only allow users in these countries to

buy apps and in-app content in their local currency, but also enables

developers to monetize their apps more efficiently.

The addition of the new countries — spotted by Android Police — comes less

than a week after the story of one developer from Croatia and his issues with

payments gained prominence among developer circles. Goran Kukurin, who is

behind Worldscope Webcams, had his app removed from Google Play because

it was using PayPal to let users upgrade to an ad-free experience.

PayPal, and other payment systems, are barred from Android apps but, as he

explained last week, Kukurin was not eligible to offer payments in his local

currency so he opted for a third party:

The official reason was a violation of a developer distribution agreement – we

have offered to our users a possibility to remove ads by buying a registration

code via PayPal. Buying Ad-free version via Google play store was not

possible, because our country is not on the list of supported locations for

merchants which are allowed to sell paid applications on Google store.

Worldscope Webcams has since been reinstated but the issue is now fixed for

Kukurin — Croatia is on the list. the issue not fixed for Kukurin because

Croatia is not on the list. However, Android developers in Philippines,

Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia can now reach users in over 130 countries

with paid-for apps, in addition to free apps, as Google points out.

The full list of countries with the option to set prices in their local currency

is as follows, some but not all already have local payment options for

developers:

Australia, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Egypt, Indonesia,

Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines,

Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab

Emirates, Venezuela and Vietnam.

Update: While the deal was discovered on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange by

media today, it was actually a part of the deal for Motorola which Google and

Lenovo announced last week and was announced by the HKSE on January 30.

Apologies for any confusion that reporting it today might have created.

The original post continues below…

It has been revealed in a disclosure to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that

Google bought a 5.94 percent stake in Lenovo for $750 million on January 30

this year, Reuters reports. In total, Google purchased 618.3 million Lenovo

shares at $1.213 per share.

The move came right after Google announced it was selling Motorola to

Lenovo for $2.91 billion — though the deal has yet to be reviewed by US and

China regulators. Lenovo will be keeping Motorola’s brand, but Google will

retain the majority of its patents that will be used to “defend the entire

Android ecosystem.”

We’ve reached out to Google to see if it has anything further to say about its

investment in Lenovo.

➤ Google bought $750 million Lenovo stake on January 30: Hong Kong

exchange [Reuters]