Victoria's Blog

Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky, who has served on Snap’s board of directors since December 2012, is not expected to stand for re-election to Snap’s board of directors and will thus be stepping down, according to a report by The Information . Early investors stepping down from the board of directors — or at least not seeking re-election — isn’t that uncommon as once-private companies grow into larger public ones. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton did not seek re-election for Twitter’s board of directors in April last year . As Snap continues to navigate its future, especially as it has declined precipitously since going public and now sits at a valuation of around $16.5 billion. Partners with an expertise in the early-stage and later-stage startup life cycle may end up seeing themselves more useful taking a back seat and focusing on other investments. The voting process for board member re-election happens during the company’s annual meeting, so we’ll get more information when an ...

“Good artists borrow great artists steal” is a phrase that Facebook seems acutely aware of. It’s common to speak of Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo-app-now-social-network, borrowing from Snapchat, but now Facebook’s WhatsApp chat app is increasingly drawing its innovation from others such as Telegram. This week, WhatsApp outed a new feature for its groups that is essentially a replica of Telegram’s channels — that is, a one-way broadcast communication stream. Telegram channels are popular for setting up a broadcast news feed that allows people to sign up to get alerts from channel admins, who might be news agencies, companies, schools, public interest groups or more. Now WhatsApp is adding the feature to gives its message app new use cases. Actually, as is often the case for WhatsApp, users have unofficially adopted channel-like behavior for some time. Last year, for example, there were reports of a rural journalist using the messaging app to report and broadcast local news...

Spin, an electric scooter startup, is raising around $125 million via a blockchain-based security token offering (STO), TechCrunch has learned. Spin, which declined to comment for this story, has previously raised just $8 million. The idea with Spin’s security token offering is to raise money from accredited investors, who will then be entitled to a portion of the revenue from Spin’s electric scooter operations, according to a source close to Spin. Last year, initial coin offerings were the hot thing in the cryptocurrency space. Now, STOs are starting to emerge, given that they provide more security for potential investors. With STOs, investors can buy tokens that are linked to real-world financial instruments. In the case of Spin’s offering, the tokens are linked to its revenue. Spin has been one of the more quiet scooter startups in the industry after announcing its expansion into scooters in February .This comes shortly after electric scooter startup  Bird raised a $300 mill...

Two sites that are actively cataloging failed crypto projects, Coinopsy and DeadCoins , have found that over a 1,000 projects have failed so far in 2018. The projects range from true abandonware to outright scams and include BRIG , a scam by two “brothers,” Jack and Jay Brig, and Titanium , a project that ended in an SEC investigation. Obviously any new set of institutions must create their own sets of rules and that is exactly what is happening in the blockchain world. But when faced with the potential for massive token fundraising, bigger problems arise. While everyone expects startups to fail, the sheer amount of cash flooding these projects is a big problem. When a startup has too much fuel too quickly the resulting conflagration ends up consuming both the company and the founders and there is little help for the investors. These conflagrations happen everywhere are a global phenomenon. Scam and dead ICOs raised $1 billion in 2017 with 297 questionable startups in the mix. Th...

Out on the plains of East Texas, not far from Dallas, a company called TMGcore is mining crypto. The company, funded to the tune of $70 million, will be mining multiple cryptocurrencies and is using some unique technology to ensure that it doesn’t eat up an entire city’s worth of energy. “TMGcore will be one of the first companies to utilize 3M’s Novec fluorochemical coolant at the heart of an enterprise scale cryptocurrency mining apparatus,” said CEO JD Enright. “The company’s intelligent mining system uses a Two Phase Liquid Cooling Immersion technology to dramatically decrease cooling costs by up to 90% and lets the company conduct mining operations from anywhere, including the middle of hot and muggy Texas. TMGcore also employs dynamically intelligent mining software that automatically mines the most profitable coin based on realtime market value and difficulty of access for the most profitable deployment of resources in realtime. Our technology is first-to-market and delivers...

Writers Cristina Henriquez and Edwidge Danticat talk with V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about the urgent issue of keeping immigrant families together and resisting their mass incarceration and detention. Henriquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans , talks about the tragic real-life inspiration for her short story “Everything Is Far from Here”  and the differences between Obama-era immigration policy and the policy of the current administration. Danticat, a National Book Award Finalist and author of The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story and Breath, Eyes, Memory , discusses the treatment of Haitian immigrants, the impossible choices immigrants face while pursuing better lives for their families, and what might lie ahead for detained children after the news coverage fades. Readings: The World in Half , The Book of Unknown Americans , and “Everything Is Far from Here”  by Cristina Henriquez  · “Cristina Henriquez on Immigration, Detention, and Missin...

TODAY: In 1932, Alice Hargreaves, the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  (left), meets publisher Peter Llewelyn Davies (right, with his brothers George and Jack) the inspiration for Peter Pan, at a Lewis Carroll centenary exhibition in a London bookshop.   Miranda Popkey wonders why we’re so perennially fascinated by that master of self-erasure, Véra Nabokov. | Lit Hub “The human soup is a teeming broth, which must mean I have a high threshold for disgust, combined with a weakness for corporeal pleasure .” Maureen Stanton’s brief (and personal) history of public bathing. | Lit Hub “Reading is absolutely vital. It’s simply naive to think that any good writing is sui generis .” Poet Ange Mlinko suggests you open a book. | Lit Hub You’ve been mispronouncing Dr. Seuss your whole life. Howard Allen Frances O’Brien, James Horowitz, Chloe Ardelia Wofford, and other writers who went with a pen name . | Lit Hub From Co...

Five years ago, you weren’t a proper celebrity unless you had your own line of branded headphones. Times change, of course, and now every famous person worth their salt has their own cryptocurrency or kombucha line.  But Dwayne Johnson isn’t just any celebrity. He’s the freaking Rock. If he can turn a 30-year-old arcade game into a blockbuster monster movie , surely he can launch a successful pair of celebrity headphones in 2018. The UA Sport Wireless Train Headphones — Project Rock Edition are as over the top as their nature and name suggest. They’ve got big bull outline on each cup — the logo has graced all of the Rock’s Under Armour collaborations — along with various oversized buttons and switches, along with screws that give them a kind of industrial aesthetic. The headphones are on-ear, with large spongey cups — an interesting design choice given that they’re clearly designed for workouts. I submit this image of a sweaty Rock deep in thought, lifting dumbbells as Exhibit ...

Hot on the heels of Coinbase expanding its crypto fund to U.S.-based investors , the company’s own CEO has unveiled a fund of his own but this time it is focused on philanthropy. GiveCrypto.org is aiming to raise $10 million by the end of this year — it has already secured $3.5 million — with a view to growing its total pot to $1 billion over the next two years. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said he’s been inspired by the Gates Foundation and acts of charity from the crypto community — including Ripple donating millions in XRP to schools , the Pineapple Fund , and OMG giving $1 million to GiveDirectly — all of which he said shows that crypto can have a positive impact worldwide. “People who invested early in crypto have amassed an enormous amount of wealth in a relatively short amount of time. Yet the reputation of the crypto community has been dominated by images of “bros in Lambos,” whose antics get a lot of attention. This doesn’t represent the best of our community. “Most...

Messaging app firm Line has confirmed it will launch a cryptocurrency exchange called BitBox next month. The company said back in January that it planned to enter the crypto space with an exchange, but today it said that the BitBox service won’t be available for users in the U.S. and Japan — that’s presumably down to regulatory uncertainty. What it will include, however, is support for trading 30 tokens — Line is only revealing big names like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin so far — and a 0.1 percent trading fee. Line said it has picked the tokens following “an extensive screening process” which saw an internal commitment asses what on the market represents “the most reliable and safest trading [options] for users.” Bitbox will be available worldwide and in 15 languages. It isn’t yet clear whether it will include an option to buy or sell tokens using fiat — a key ramp to getting new money into crypto — or whether this will just be token-to-token trading. Line has a...

Snap is seeking to explore new ground as it tries to outrun Instagram’s efforts to copy its features. Its newest effort may be building out a bonafide hub for gaming inside Snapchat according to a new report from The Information . The platform will launch later this year, the report says, and Snap is already signing game publishers on to participate in its efforts. We have reached out to Snap for comment. The news makes a lot of sense given the efforts Snap has increasingly been pouring into its own Lens Studio software for developers to create its specialized AR filters. Snap reportedly bought a web-based 3D game engine last year called PlayCanvas which would serve as a good backbone for some even more robust developer tools. It’s not clear from the report whether these gaming titles would be focused largely on AR gaming though one might expect it given all of the attention Snap has paid to the emerging mobile platform. In April, the company launched “Snappables” which were ba...

When I was a little child, my sister, who was nearly four years older, was astonished that I couldn’t read. We were in my mother’s old Ford, driving around the main square of Hyde Park, and my sister pointed to a sign and said, “You honestly can’t read that?” “No,” I said sullenly. “What does it say?” “Graeter’s,” she announced triumphantly, the name of Cincinnati’s premier ice cream maker. “Can’t you see that? What does it say to you?” She wasn’t being mean; she was genuinely puzzled. Reading was a magical portal—once you passed through it, you couldn’t even imagine going back. I must have been four. Two years later I could read, or at least “sound out” syllables (that was the method then). When I realized that I could interpret these hieroglyphics, I felt so free, as if a whole new world had been opened to me. Now I could herar a chorus of voices, even those coming...

Instagram’s latest assault on Snapchat, FaceTime, and Houseparty launches today. TechCrunch scooped back in March that Instagram would launch video calling, and the feature was officially announced in at F8 in May. Now it’s actually rolling out to everyone on iOS and Android, allowing up to four friends to group video call together through Instagram Direct. With the feed, Stories, messaging, Live, IGTV, and now video calling, Instagram is hoping to become a one-stop-shop for its 1 billion users’ social needs. This massive expansion in functionality over the past two years is paying off according to SimilarWeb, which estimates that the average US user has gone from spending 29 minutes per day on the app in September 2017 to 55 minutes today. More time spent means more potential ad views and revenue for the Facebook subsidiary that a Bloomberg analyst just valued at $100 billion after it was bought for less than $1 billion in 2012. One cool feature of Instagram Video Calling is t...