CAD Blocks | CAD Desenhos | Design Cidade Urban: novembro 2014

Facebook, Google, And Twitter’s War For App Install Ads

Five Sony Pictures Movie Screeners Leaked After Hacking

Five movie screeners from Sony Pictures have made their way onto torrent sites after the studio’s computer system was hacked earlier this week.

These include unreleased titles “Annie,” “Mr. Turner,” “Still Alice,” and “To Write Love On Her Arms,” as well as World War II drama “Fury.” The latter has been in theaters for over six weeks, but is now the second most popular pirated film with more than 1.2 million downloads as of 11AM on Sunday, notes Variety.

The leak is most likely related to the hacking last week of one of Sony PIctures’ servers, which caused all computers used by the studio to go down. An image with the words “Hacked by #GOP” (which stands for Guardians of Peace, not the Republican Party) appeared on employees’ computer screens, along with a demand for access to financial documents.

The studio is also reportedly investigating a link between the attack and North Korea, as retaliation for “The Interview,” a comedy film about a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong-Un.

In an email to The Verge, a person claiming to be one of the hackers responsible for the attack said they had been aided by Sony employees.

The alleged hacker also told The Verge that IT security at Sony Pictures is lax: “Sony doesn’t lock their doors, physically, so we worked with other staff with similar interests to get in.”

Indeed, this isn’t the first time Sony Pictures’ has suffered a massive security breach. Back in 2011, a hacker group managed to access users’ passwords, email addresses, and other sensitive information on SonyPictures.com with a SQL injection.

We’ve contacted Sony Pictures for comment and will update this post if they respond.

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Lyft Sheds Some Of Its Quirks As It Seeks New Users

The pink mustache. The fist bump. Riding up front, and chatting with the driver.

Those are all things which had come to define Lyft as a service over the earliest part of its journey, as it sought to win over users and position itself as an alternative to Uber and the existing taxi industry.

As time has gone on, however, Lyft has become more lax with some of the traditions it was founded on, and is rethinking what users can expect when they use its app to catch a ride with one of its drivers.

A New Customer Experience For Transportation

To understand the subtle shift in positioning, it’s probably best to look back and see how some of its defining characteristics came to be in the first place.

Before launching Lyft, co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer put a lot of thought into what they wanted the service to ride-sharing service to be like. Zimmer was a graduate of Cornell’s hospitality school, and he hoped to model the user experience on what you might expect from a boutique hotel: it could be quirky, sure, but it would also be friendly and inviting.

Each ride would have its own uniqueness about it, just as no two rooms at a Joie de Vivre hotel would be decorated in the same way. However, even though the Lyft team knew each driver (and car) would have its own unique personality, it hoped to instill some common threads throughout the experience.

Stemming from that ethos came the ritual fist-bump upon entering and leaving a car. Lyft co-founder Logan Green suggested the fist bump because it was friendlier than a wave but not as formal as a handshake, and as he told others at the time, “No one wants to worry about having sweaty palms.”

The other big quirk was the giant pink carstache, which drivers attached to the front of their cars, and would overwhelmingly become the symbol of the service.

Tying it all together was the motto that Lyft adopted for its service: “Your friend with a car.”

Following through on this motto, however, carried with it a certain set of expectations for Lyft passengers — mainly that they would sit up front and chat with the driver throughout the ride, just as they would with one of their friends.

In its earliest days the Lyft team spent a lot of time selecting and training its drivers with all of this in mind. From the time the service initially launched in San Francisco and even up until it entered its second market, Los Angeles, drivers were individually screened before being added to the platform. For a while, co-founders Zimmer and Green even interviewed potential drivers themselves.

At launch, Lyft did all this partly out of necessity. After all, unlike the taxi industry, there was no standardization around the make or model one of its peer-to-peer drivers would drive up in. Having a big pink mustache on the grill was an easy way to help passengers identify the car that was picking them up.

The Disco Lyft is one of the more iconic rides

The Disco Lyft is one of the more iconic Lyft rides

(It also had the side benefit of creating a fair amount of buzz and word of mouth from pedestrian passersby who would walk up to cars wanting to know what the whole mustache thing was all about.)

Moreover, as the first peer-to-peer ride-sharing service, the Lyft had to get users comfortable with the idea of riding with a stranger, and one who wasn’t commercially licensed to drive people around town.

Lyft did a lot of work early on to ensure it did all the necessary driver and criminal background checks required, and as above, screened applicants for friendliness and personality before signing them up for its service. Still, it had to win over customer trust to get them comfortable with the ride-share model.

While a certain amount of trust and safety was already expected and built in to the taxi industry and to the licensed black car drivers that Uber partnered with at the time, Lyft was using regular people and their cars to power its local transportation service.

Positioning a driver as “Your friend with a car” was one way to help instill trust on the customer side of things, and to differentiate itself as an alternative to the silent or sometimes surly taxi drivers passengers had been used to.

Changes In The Competitive Environment

Things change over time, however. As the service matures, the same features which helped Lyft win over its earliest customers two years ago aren’t as useful in the current competitive environment.

Again, some of the shift was born out of necessity. After all, it’s difficult to scale community when your supply of drivers is constrained.

Lyft first saw this about six months into its journey, as demand outstripped supply in San Francisco and it needed to rethink how it was onboarding drivers. The company could no longer afford to have its founders individually interview each to ensure they fit its personality.

Over time, as it’s sought to keep up with demand, the individuality of its drivers is no longer quite as much of a focus. While the “Disco Lyft” and “Karaoke Lyft” vehicles are great when you see them, fewer and fewer drivers are putting in that much effort to provide a differentiated service.

Moreover, it’s becoming clear that drivers themselves are a commodity, particularly as arch-rival Uber has aggressively sought to recruit away those who drive for Lyft across multiple markets.

At the same there’s a bigger shift underway in passenger expectations. Increasingly passengers around the country are becoming comfortable with the idea of hailing a ride via mobile app, and the designation between a commercially licensed driver and one who isn’t licensed doesn’t matter quite so much to most.

That is to say, the same education Lyft needed to provide to users two years ago isn’t quite as necessary in today’s environment. In the same way, it no longer needs a big pink mustache on the grill of its cars to make users aware of its service.

And, finally, more education and awareness among consumers about available ride-sharing services means there’s less actual differentiation between them. Increasingly, users aren’t choosing a Lyft or an Uber based on friendliness of feature set, but based on price and availability.

He who isn’t surge pricing and he who has the nearest car available frequently wins.

A Subtle Shift In Expectations

As a result of all of the above trends, it’s becoming more and more difficult for Lyft to differentiate based on the same founding principles and “user experience” its co-founders dreamed up before launching the service two years ago.

Even if Lyft could scale culture and extend it to thousands of drivers across hundreds of cities, it’s unlikely that consumers would care very much. All of which is why you’re probably seeing a subtle shift away from the Lyft features which used to define it.

Lyft has stopped distributing the iconic giant pink carstache to all new drivers as it seeks to find more sustainable and effective methods of branding.

That’s probably a good thing, since it seems most drivers had stopped attaching the ‘stache to the front of their cars years ago. (In my experience, most used to place the ‘stache on their dash, which could be precarious.)

The company first began transitioning away from the large mustaches in July — as it launched service in New York City — and now provides an emblem for drivers to put in their windshield to identify their cars as Lyft vehicles. They also provide a smaller version of the ‘stache, which Lyft calls the “cuddlestache” and is less cumbersome to place on the dashboard.

A source within Lyft tells me the company is working on new visual branding to reflect its identity and that the “cuddlestache” is merely a short-term placeholder in the interim. It’s not clear when the replacement for the mustache will appear, but it’s likely sometime early next year.

At the same time Lyft is moving away from the mustache, it’s also signaling a shift in passenger expectations. Last week, the company sent an email entitled “The Insider’s Guide To Lyft” which sought to explain some “Family Secrets” to users.

Lyft Secret 1

Lyft Secret 2

Those “secrets” were essentially around how users should greet their drivers and where to sit, and the email basically told users that fistbumping their driver and sitting up front were no longer necessary. While the email said users could continue on with Lyft traditions, it also seemed to make the service more open for users who just want to get from Point A to Point B:

“How you ride with Lyft is up to you. At the end of the day, Lyft is about helping each other get to where we want to go.”

While Lyft’s focus on community and friendliness was a key differentiator early on, there’s evidence that as it seeks new users, those same values might not be helping it.

Anecdotally speaking, I know multiple people who refused to use the service because they didn’t want to sit up front or have a conversation with their driver — they merely wanted a quiet ride and to respond to email in silence while going to or from work, for instance.

As Lyft seeks to grow and compete with Uber, the company realizes it’s going to need those passengers, too. The “Insider’s Guide To Lyft” seems a tacit acknowledgement of that fact.

There’s no doubt Lyft will continue to try to appeal to a certain type of user as a competitive differentiator. After all, some people will want a “friend with a car” rather than a “private driver.”

But for many users, the differences between the two are becoming increasingly blurred. And as Lyft seeks to go mainstream, it seems the company is increasingly aware of that fact.

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The Algorithm Economy Heads To Amazon

Holidays are a time for families to come together, catch up over great food and drinks, and determine all the technical problems that need solving throughout the house. Indeed, for children growing up in the digital age, the holidays ultimately boil down to free (or more accurately, meal-subsidized) technical support for our most cherished loved ones.

Kids: Amazon has you covered.

Well, almost. This past week, Amazon publicly introduced an early release of Selling Services, which we had previously mentioned the company was working on a few months ago. Amazon is developing a marketplace that offers after-sale services such as car alarm installation, iPhone repair, and computer hardware setup to consumers buying relevant products. Today, the marketplace is available in 15 early rollout cities, including New York City and Lexington, Kentucky.

After-sale services are among the highest profit margin revenue streams for retailers, so it is little surprise that Amazon is jumping into the fray. Geek Squad, which was founded by Robert Stephens in 1994 and sold to Best Buy in 2002, is perhaps the most prominent example. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote last year about the hometown retailer, “Over the past decade, Geek Squad has been a cash cow for Best Buy. […A]nalysts estimate Geek Squad generates a gross profit margin of 40 to 50 percent based on a minimum annual revenue of $2 billion, or about 4 percent of Best Buy’s total revenue of $50 billion.”

That profitability of after-sale services has also attracted the attention of startups. One particularly notable example is Geekatoo, which is building a marketplace for technical support and raised $1.7 million this past July. And in a certain kind of disruption irony, Stephens, the founder of GeekSquad who moved to Silicon Valley after leaving Best Buy in 2012, recently recommended the service.

But Geek Squad still has one critical advantage that many of these startups lack: point-of-sale access. After customers have purchased a new flat-panel television set or computer, there is a precise window of time to offer them installation services where the rate of acceptance is significantly higher than it otherwise would be. Few customers later decide to search for a service specialist, hence the need for children to head home for the holidays to install and fix technology.

This is why Amazon’s announcement is so important. Given its dominant position in online commerce, the company’s decision to offer a services marketplace could literally create thousands of jobs across the United States, or at the very least, improve the prospects for specialists already working in the field. For each product, Amazon will list the available services next to the listing, guaranteeing visibility and even potentially increasing sales among customers who are unsure if they can install or use a product.

Perhaps even more importantly, the prices of these point-of-sale services can be much higher than they would otherwise cost, thanks to framing effects. After someone has just spent thousands of dollars on a new device, adding a few hundred more for installation service doesn’t sound like such a bad deal. That’s what made Geek Squad such a profitable division for Best Buy.

That’s also why Amazon’s decision to run Selling Services as an open marketplace is so surprising.

In my research, I split labor marketplaces into two groups: versions 1 and 2. Version 1 marketplaces, which include the newly combined Elance-oDesk, Craigslist, and the original TaskRabbit, are open marketplaces where people can request services or sell their services at any price, and consumers wade through pages of relevant listings to find exactly the level of service quality and price they want.

These marketplaces have many challenges, not least of which is that consumers are terrible about judging quality from online postings. In many marketplace verticals, there can be a race to the bottom as customers rank services by price and then select the cheapest options. Ironically, this behavior is bad for the marketplace as well, since many consumers would be willing to pay more if they had fewer options.

These models compare to version 2 marketplaces like Uber, Rev, Scripted, and the new TaskRabbit, where prices are set flat or with a formula, and the quality of service is guaranteed by the marketplace itself. There is no haggling over price or being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options, but often only a single option or a small handful to choose from. On the whole, these version 2 marketplaces tend to have better customer satisfaction and arguably higher profits.

Interestingly, Amazon’s marketplace doesn’t seem to follow these more recent version 2 marketplaces, but is instead more in line with the version 1 model. Amazon is not prescribing prices for its different services, instead offering an open marketplace where service providers can charge what they want and compete. The choice is no doubt familiar to the company given its other marketplaces.

That’s unfortunate, given that Amazon already has a tendency to cause buyer fatigue due to their massive product catalog. Given the number of customers using Amazon, I imagine many service providers will join the platform, meaning that there will be a surfeit of options for every service in each geography. Now, buyers will be expected to make another purchasing decision as part of their checkout process. I have little doubt that many potential consumers of these services will be left on the table.

The good news is that this is a beta product, and Amazon has a lot of time to get the mechanics of the process right. Unlike startups in this space who have to seek both sides of this market, Amazon has a guaranteed demand-side in its marketplace, so it has plenty of time to figure out how to best develop the supply. That won’t just make after-sale services easier, but save the holidays for millions of children across the country.

~~Now, if you excuse me, I need to get my mother’s new Chromecast working.~~ Update: We got it working.

Featured Image: Jim Bauer/Flickr UNDER A CC BY-ND 2.0 LICENSE

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The Star Wars Episode VII Trailer If It Were Made By George Lucas

sw2

What would that glorious The Force Awakens trailer look like if George Lucas went back and fiddled with it, as he so loves to do?

Probably something like this…

The number of references and jabs crammed in here is off the charts. I won’t spoil them all, but my favorite? The unnecessary rocks at 0:20. (If you don’t get that one, don’t worry — that’s probably a good thing. Here.)

(Joking aside, George Lucas does have a pretty big role in the development of Star Wars VII. While he’s neither directing nor writing the movie, the story concept is his and he was on set as a creative consultant.)

On a side note, I can not comprehend how someone managed to blast this out in just about 36 hours after the trailer’s release. Helluva job, Michael Shanks.

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Clime Stickers Are Up For Pre-Order, Will Tell You (And Baby) If It’s Cold Outside

I first covered Clime a few months ago when they were little more than 3D-printed nubbins. Now these nubbins have brains.

Essentially they are tiny indoor/outdoor thermometers. You can put them anywhere and then check your mobile device for the temperature. You may have something similar in your home – they used to called them weather thermometers – but older systems are far less responsive and far less compact.

The creators are running a crowdfunding effort right now and they’re looking to raise $50,000.

Created by Bart Zimny and Andrzej Pawlikowski, these things are essentially rubber-clad transmitters. As I wrote before, you drop them anywhere you want to sense – a windowsill or empty room or spooky basement – and the sensors do the rest. The goal is to create a cheap home automation system with these sensors at the base.

Eventually the pair plans to add more features including interactivity with climate control systems and notification systems that will inform you when it is, in fact, cold outside, Baby. They will ship in early 2015.

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Mo’ Data Mo’ Problems

The most exciting promise of Big Data–and if you hate that term, you’re not alone, but I think we’re stuck with it now–is this: the data collection happening on an increasingly gargantuan scale, run through modern data-processing and pattern-recognition algorithms, will unearth powerful new insights into our world and, especially, human behavior. Unfortunately this is also its most worrying problem.

Right now, Big Data and privacy seem to be mortal foes. Personal data can reduce your car insurance–at the price of privacy. It can provide valuable public health data–by capturing sensitive private health information. It can help the police track bad guys–by creating a facial-recognition panopticon with technology that is practically crying out to be abused. It can construct a meaningful narrative out of, say, all the pictures you’ve ever posted to the Internet–even if you didn’t intend that to happen.

These aren’t purely theoretical concerns. The New York Times reports:

Having eroded privacy for decades, shady, poorly regulated data miners, brokers and resellers have now taken creepy classification to a whole new level. They have created lists of victims of sexual assault, and lists of people with sexually transmitted diseases. Lists of people who have Alzheimer’s, dementia and AIDS. Lists of the impotent and the depressed.

There are lists of “impulse buyers.” Lists of suckers: gullible consumers who have shown that they are susceptible to “vulnerability-based marketing.”

Now imagine such lists augmented by people who have accidentally, implicitly shown that they are vulnerable — eg with Facebook posts that algorithms interpret, in the context of all the posters’ other information, as evidence of secrets that users don’t want to reveal.

There are two basic problems here. One is that there are no standards for anonymizing and securing data. Organizations that collect and publish data anonymize and secure it only if and how they feel like it, on an ad hoc basis, and much “anonymized” data really isn’t — consider the badly anonymized NYC taxi data from earlier this year.

But there’s a deeper, far more fundamental, issue: do people have the right to know when data about them is being collected? And when it is, should they, rather than the collectors, own that data? I give you MIT professor Alex Pentland and his proposed “New Deal on Data“:

Collectively, we now have data that could help green the environment, create transparent government, deal with pandemics, and, of course, lead to better workers and better service for customers. But obviously someone or some company can abuse that […] The New Deal would give people the ability to see what’s being collected and opt out or opt in. Imagine you had a dashboard that showed what your house knows about you and what it shares, and you could turn it off or on […] Transparency is key. The data being recorded about you will form a fairly complete picture of your life […] I don’t think companies realize that the costs of a “grab all the data” strategy are very high.

Realistically, though, this New Deal implies yet another chapter in the long, sad tale of the battle between innovation and regulation. I’m not opposed to the latter, but I am frequently frustrated by how slowly it evolves compared to the former. There’s little doubt that the exponential growth in our data-collection abilities can lead to enormous benefits–but there’s also little doubt that the population in general is already deeply concerned about technology’s inexorable (and almost accidental) war on privacy, and we’re only a disaster or few away from loud calls for stricter regulation.

It would behoove the tech industry to get ahead of this problem, to begin with, by defining and implementing technical standards for data anonymization. (I wouldn’t be surprised if this actually became a new sub-sub-industry.) Better yet, larger companies could agree on a voluntary equivalent of the New Deal on Data, in hopes of forestalling any cries for regulation. Better sooner than later. I don’t think the tech industry quite appreciates how creeped out the general public is by data privacy and the lack thereof. If we take it casually, we’re playing with fire.

Featured Image: Dafydd Vaughan/Flickr UNDER A CC BY-SA 2.0 LICENSE

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What’s Next For Firefox?

When historians look at the history of the Web ten or twenty years from now, chances are they will point to Firefox as one of the most important products of the last ten years. But right now, it’s hard not to look at Firefox and worry a little bit about its future.

At the height of its success, around 2010/11, Firefox owned more than a quarter of the browser market in the U.S. and almost a third in Europe. Today, those numbers are much lower in most regions (though Germans still love Firefox more than any other browser). The exact numbers always depend on who you ask, but the trend is the same everywhere — and it’s not looking good for Mozilla’s browser.

Google’s Chrome launched at a time when Firefox development felt stagnant. I remember firing up Chrome for the first time back in 2008 and being astonished by how fast it was. I had been a long-time Firefox user at that time and Chrome — even in those early betas — blew it away. Much has changed since then and when it comes to speed, Firefox is now comparable again to Chrome (and it even outperforms it on some benchmarks). Firefox had left an opening for Chrome and Google marched right through it.

Things on the desktop aren’t looking great for Firefox, but Mozilla is also at best an also-ran on mobile. Apple didn’t allow third-party browser engines on its platform during the early days and even as Android gained in popularity, it still took Mozilla a while to launch a useful version of Firefox on that platform. Then, over the last few years, Mozilla tried to make up ground by launching its own platform. That was an audacious effort and I can only laud it for its effort to bring low-cost phones to developing countries — but so far, that effort has barely paid off except for in a couple of very small markets (and now that there are plenty of cheap Android phones around, I doubt it stands much of a chance in those markets either).

In many ways, it feels like the Firefox team is mostly fighting a battle of perceptions. Ask anybody why they don’t use Firefox and they’ll say: “It’s too slow.” That’s not actually the case anymore. Like Microsoft with IE, Mozilla now has to convince people that its browser is quite good again. Unlike Microsoft, it doesn’t have a marketing budget to do that (and it’s not like Microsoft’s IE campaigns have really made a difference either).

firefox-yahoo Mozilla has now partnered with Yahoo to power its search in the U.S. starting next month. And while Yahoo may not be the down-and-out company it seemed to be just a few years ago, it’s not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to search. This deal may gain Yahoo a few extra searchers, but it probably isn’t going to help Mozilla gain market share (because nobody is looking for a browser with built-in Yahoo search).

Maybe Mozilla is okay with all of this. It’s a non-profit organization that aims to make the web a better place and the web is a better place today thanks to the work Mozilla does. But what power does the organization have if its main product continues to lose importance? It’s easy to convince others to follow your lead when you own a large slice of a market, but when that number goes down to ten percent, it’s all too easy for others to ignore you.

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Pottery Barn Teen/Dorm coupon - Buy More, Save More: Up to 25% off purchases

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JCPenney coupon - Up to an extra 25% off purchases

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