Nelson Mandela is dead at 95

NBC News is reporting that South African civil rights icon Nelson Mandela has died at the age of 95. Known throughout the globe for his role in dismantling the South African apartheid regime, Mandela had been treated for a persistent lung infection earlier this year, and in recent days had retreated to his Johannesberg home. "He is now resting," South African President Jacob Zuma told NBC. "He is now at peace."

Microsoft Sheds $12B In Market Cap On News That Ford’s Alan Mulally Won’t Be Its Next CEO

Ding. Today investors unloaded Microsoft’s stock following indications that current Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally won’t be its next CEO. Ford board member Edsel Ford II stated that “Alan is staying through the end of 2014,” a timeframe that is past the 12-month range that departing Microsoft CEO set to find his replacement. Investors, irked that Mulally will not therefore head up the software giant, knocked Microsoft down around 3.5 percent, or around $1.43 per share. At the time of writing, using a share count of 8.35 billion (via Google Finance), the decline in Microsoft’s share price, which can be correlated to the news more or less directly, leaves Microsoft worth around $12 billion less than before. Yesterday, Microsoft closed at $38.94, a level that it had not seen since 2000. Today the company is trading around the $37.50-60 range, still up more than 40 percent on the year. If Mulally truly is out of the running to be Microsoft’s next CEO, the chance that an outsider will take over the company to lead it forward is now far more remote. Recent indications noted that Mulally was among the top two candidates for the role, standing next to current executive vice president Satya Nadella. Nadella heads Microsoft’s cloud efforts, and is in my estimation a strong potential pick to run the company. Still, some investors had hoped that Mulally, or perhaps another external candidate, would be selected. The drop in Microsoft’s value, while material, is hardly game changing. To his credit, Mulally has been clear that he intends to stay at Ford for some time.

BlackBerry Messenger Directory Search App Lands On Android & Charts Uptick In BBM Interest

BlackBerry hardware may be languishing unloved on warehouse shelves but the company formerly known as RIM’s long-in-the-tooth mobile messaging client, BBM, ain’t dead yet. Indeed, it’s enjoying a bit of revival — firstly because the company (finally) released it on rivals’ platforms (Android and iOS) where many a former BlackBerry user ended up. And secondly because, well, mobile messaging as a space is on fire — tipped by analysts for mass adoption next year and a doubling of its global user-base from 1BN to 2BN by year’s end. That fire is clearly consuming a portion of the attention that used to be funnelled into traditional social networks — redirecting those eyeballs into messaging apps, as kids who previously Facebooked their buddies incessantly now spend their energy sending Snaps or WhatsApps instead (in October Facebook ‘fessed up to some declining usage among teens). All of which is good news if you’re the app maker of a directory style app for BBM. Search4BBM is just that. When we last wrote about the app, just over a year ago, we described it as “a 411 / Yellow Pages” style system for BBM private users and BBM businesses. It basically lets people locate others on the BBM network, which uses a pincode system to link chatters to each other (ergo, you need a BBM user’s Pin to send a connection request so you also need a Pincode directory to unlock potential new BBM buddies). Users of the service, which gets its Pin data solely from user submissions, can set their preferred “security level” so their Pin can be found by everyone, only social friends, or only people they personally approve. Search4BBM has more than 3M BBM pincodes listed in its directory, and allows users to find friends’ BBM Pins by connecting it with their Facebook account, or find others’ Pins by searching by various other criteria — including gender, country, profession, location, GPS, age, city, state and BBM business pages. At the time we last covered the app (November 2012) it had some 1M active global users who were apparently performing 6M searches per month. (It defines active users as people who have used the app at least once a month — while logged in users makes an average of 11 to 15 searches per log in, which may sound a lot but users in some countries use its service as a potential date directory too). Search4BBM launched its service in June 2011 and crossed the 1M active user mark by mid 2012. After that point its fortunes dipped, as you’d expect — in step with declining usage of BlackBerry’s own platform. Founder Barak Hirchson tells TechCrunch it was getting about 50% less traffic in 2013 than it did in 2012. In 2011 and 2012 it had between 11M to 14M searches per month, but in 2013 this dropped down to a low of between 2M to 4.5M monthly searches. However, Hirchson says things have picked up in the past two months — i.e. since BlackBerry liberated BBM from its own walled garden, and allowed it to roam across Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. It’s now seeing 5.5M to 7M searches per month, according to Search4BBM. “After the BBM launch for iOS and Android we instantly saw the users coming back to use BBM,” he adds. Search4BBM launched an Android version of its app about a week ago — giving this the practical name of BBM Pin Finder — and says it’s managed to pass 3,000 users (without any marketing/advertising) for this version of the app. It’s expecting to hit 2M new users on Android in the next three months. iOS and BB10 versions of its apps are also due soon — within “weeks”, adds Hirchson. If you’re wondering where in the world BBM remains most popular, as measured via searches of this single BBM directory service, the top 10 countries performing searches are as follows: India – 11% South Africa – 11% Nigeria – 9% Egypt – 8% United Kingdom – 8% Indonesia – 8% United Arab Emirates – 5% Malaysia – 5% United States – 5% Canada – 4% “In India and Indonesia the users use us as ‘Tinder‘ for BBM,” adds Hirchson. “Most of the users search for friends and for new dating with strangers. They search by ‘location near to me’ sort the users by the gender and age and start meeting new users by BBM.”

Bitcoin Back Over $1K After Chinese Ban, BofA Comments, And Greenspan Mockery

It’s been a rough day for Bitcoin. China slapped a ban on it, Bank of America said it is “at risk of running ahead of its fundamentals” claiming it has little short-term upside, and Alan Greenspan laughed at it. In response, investors in the cryptocurrency sent it under the $900 mark. Bitcoin, buoyed by the endless optimism of its acolytes, bounced back over the $1,000 mark on the Mt.Gox exchange in short order. The market turbulence also hit rival coins, including Litecoin, which saw its trading range ease by up to 25 percent. Adding somewhat to Bitcoin’s woes was Alan Greenspan, who recently mocked its value: ”You really have to stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven’t been able to do it. But if you ask me, ‘Is this a bubble in Bitcoin?’ ‘Yeah, it’s a bubble.” The Independent notes that “[when] asked if Bitcoin is the new gold, Greenspan laughed out loud.” So it’s not really a time of irrational exuberance among all sets. The move by China to ban its banks from using Bitcoin in any sort of transaction could greatly hamper its ability to grow. As Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research reported recently (via Barron’s), Chinese Bitcoin volume has become the vast majority of total transactions:

If the move to ban Chinese banks from dealing in Bitcoin lowers its potential transaction quantity and inherent utility, its price could be cut. For now, however, Bitcoin remains stubbornly over the $1,000 mark, where it appears to have found a comfortable floor. Here’s an hourly chart showing its recent dip and recovery:

What is the fair value of Bitcoin? You tell me.

Clever Gets $10 Million From Sequoia To Provide A Standardized API For School Data

Clever launched about a year and a half ago to provide a standardized API for K-12 schools that allows them to unlock and share data with outside developers. It’s managed to get 10,000 schools signed up to use its tools since then. Now, according to our sources, the company has raised $10 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital. The funding comes as Clever is finding ways to make schools more connected and accessible for developers. Most schools today use a variety of legacy Student Information Systems (SIS) as a way to store student data. But many of those systems tend to be outdated or custom-built, meaning that the information held within — which includes class lists, attendance, and grades — can’t be shared or accessed by outside developers. For developers, that means integrating with individual schools on a one-to-one basis, and that just doesn’t scale. Clever, by contrast, provides a single, universal API that will allow developers and education companies to access all the data that has been locked up in legacy silos and use it in their apps. To remove any friction in getting its system more widely deployed, Clever offers the API free to schools and districts. Instead, it sells to online learning companies and developers looking to integrate their software with and use data from all the various Student Information Systems. By doing so, it believes that software companies can use the data to build better learning tools and improve the overall quality of education. That’s a value prop which seems to be resonating with school systems. When we checked in with Clever about a year ago, the company had signed up 2,000 schools to connect with its APIs. That number has ballooned over the past twelve months, with more than 10,000 schools integrated into its system. And that, in turn, has attracted the attention of investors. A source with knowledge of the situation has confirmed that Sequoia led the company’s most recent round of funding. And Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier, who has taken a keen interest in the ed tech space with investments in companies like Inkling and MindSnacks, will be joining its board of directors. Clever had previously raised $3 million in seed funding from a prominent list of angels that included SV Angel, Mike Maples of Floodgate, SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier, Google Ventures (Kevin Rose), Bessemer Venture Partners, Mitch Kapor, Ben Parr, and Ashton Kutcher. But it also had investment from multiple angels from well-known education companies, including the co-founder of The Princeton Review, 2tor and Noodle John Katzman, Inkling co-founder and CEO Matt MacInnis, Chegg co-founder Aayush Phumbhra, and GSV Advisors CEO Deborah Quazzo.

Trifacta Raises $12M For Platform That Uses Human And Machine Interactions To Prepare Data For Analysis

Trifacta, a platform to prepare data for analysis, has closed a $12 million Series B round led by Greylock Partners and Accel Partners. The company has now raised a total of $16.3 million. In an email interview, CEO and Co-Founder Joe Hellerstein said the company’s platform is designed for business analysts and data scientists to explore, manipulate and cleanse data for the purpose of analysis. The technology is based on research at Berkeley and Stanford that focuses on the interactions between humans and machines to transform data into something useful and meaningful. The process of this human-computer interaction is meant for the analyst and the machine to both provide insights based on the patterns in the information. On the Trifacta platform, users work with visual data and smart suggestions, while machine learning methods analyze data and user interactions, Hellerstein said. The interplay makes this process of data transformation more accessible to business data analysts, while increasing the productivity of quantitative data scientists who can use the human-machine interaction to get through various types of data in a faster manner. Hellerstein said use cases are for just about any industry — a large computing device vendor, for example, that has products in the field that are shipped back to the manufacturer so the behavior data on the device can be analyzed. The data tend to be complex and particular to the revision and configuration of each device. Trifacta’s platform allows the product divisions to do their own data transformation on the raw data logs and transform them into data that can be loaded into business intelligence and predictive analytics tools. The process gives the manufacturer the ability to do maintenance prediction, feature usage assessment, quantitative product design revision, etc. Human-machine interaction is an emerging field that is gaining in popularity as the methods for analyzing data become more accessible. The complexity is lessening as machine learning and other advanced analytics practices get filtered through visual tools. For example, Hellerstein pointed to the work of Mike Bostock at the New York Times who uses D3.js in his data visualizations that appear online and in the newspaper. He originally developed D3.js with Trifacta Co-Founder Jeff Heer while the two were studying at Stanford. D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data that allows for visualizations in the browser. A company like Trifacta represents two trends, said Ronnie Mitra, an API architect, who I interviewed at API Days, a conference now taking place in Paris. The utility for data is illustrated in the way companies are driving more decisions by analyzing mass troves of information. “The other trend is leveraging the UX to provide niche experiences,” Mitra said. “For a long time there was a focus on function, the things that programs do. “The pioneers of interaction design have started moving things up,” to the application level. Trifacta is part of a new generation of companies that provide data-driven analysis for customers to do business intelligence, risk analysis and a host of other matters. The challenge for Trifacta is building a service that competes with a variety of different tools from companies like Informatica, Revolution Analytics and Pentaho.

Shopify’s Popify Retail Store Brings Independent Vendors Greater Visibility

Ottawa-based Shopify, which now has a growing office in Toronto thanks in large part to the company’s recent acquisition of Jet Cooper and Rocketr, is running a pop-up retail experience in Toronto’s Kensington Market over the next few days as part of a project called ‘Popify.’ It’s something the company has done once before in Ottawa, but this time there’s less emphasis on having retailers physically present, and more focus on how to bring bricks and clicks together for better customer acquisition. The Popify store, which I had a chance to check out before their public opening at an event last night, features a number of stores contained within a relatively tight shop in an area of Toronto known for its trendy independent stores and restaurants. Within the single storefront are housed 12 individual stores, from Shopify customers Areaware, Au Lit Fine Linens, Best Made, Biko, Joulies, DODOcase, Grain Audio, Holstee, JM&Sons, Oru Kayak, Partouche, and Poler. Each shop represented had physical product present, but not necessarily any staff. Near each demo product was an iPad, equipped with a Shopify dongle for accepting credit card payments, with a super simple version of their mobile storefront selling just the items available to check out at the shop. Some shops were offering special discounts for the event, including free shipping on items. The idea, according to Shopify VP of Growth Craig Miller, is to help answer the question of how Shopify customers can grow their customer base. The issue, he says, is that a lot of people on the platform love setting up their stores and find it super easy, but then have trouble with the next step, which is making sure that the right people find and see their wares and then hopefully, become customers. To help with that, something like the Popify stores is an idea Shopify is testing out. Andrew Peek, who came on with the acquisition of his company Rocketr, is heading up a sort of experimental skunkworks within Shopify, and this Popify concept shop is the first example of the kinds of projects he’s working on there. It brings together “URLs with IRL,” as Shopify Designer Chris Appleton put it. The phenomenon of showcasing is well documented in our age of digital selling: The idea is that stores like Walmart and Best Buy provide physical showrooms for products that customers can use to try things out, and then those same buyers go online to complete the transaction with a competitor like Amazon where they can get a lower price. According to Peek and Miller, the theory is that giving people access to a showcasing environment that’s cost-efficient and run by Shopify itself will help give its clients the benefit of the showcasing effect while keeping the entire shopping cycle within Shopify’s control. The acquisition of Jet Cooper earlier this year began a string of major announcements from Shopify, all of which point to a company that’s not resting on its laurels, but is instead seeking new ways to add value to the online storefront platform that started the company. Along with Hootsuite, this is one of Canada’s leading independent tech companies, and its growth of late has been very impressive. With projects like Popify, it’s also showing that it can still be nimble like a startup, despite enjoying the status of a more established player.