| How Kik Survived The Group Messaging Wars And Built A Sweet Mobile App For Controlling TVs
If a consumer mobile fad comes and goes, and you don’t play consolidation musical chairs, what do you do next? This is kind of what happened to Kik, a Canadian startup that took off with the explosive growth of its messaging app last year. Amid the hype around messaging, Kik raised $ 8 million in funding from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Not too long after, Kik’s rivals Beluga and GroupMe got acquired in some respectable (but not crazy huge) deals by Facebook and Skype last year. Meanwhile, Kik has stayed independent and is charting a completely different course. About two months ago, they launched Clik, a mobile app that lets you control a TV right from your phone. There are a few steps to making it work, but the major plus to Clik is that it doesn’t require additional hardware. You point your desktop or smart TV browser at ClikThis.com, which generates a unique QR code (a two-dimensional barcode). Then you open the Clik iPhone or Android app, aim the camera at the screen, and the phone syncs to the TV or computer. Once they’re connected, you can use your phone like a remote control to play YouTube videos on your TV. You can see a demo here: So now the company has two major products under its belt: the messaging app Kik and the TV app Clik. There are no plans to spin either product out of the company. Chief executive Ted Livingston says this isn’t a pivot. Really. Kik is very much alive and well with 10 million registered users and 1 billion messages sent per month. It’s maintained a Top 25 ranking in the social networking category in the U.S., according to App Annie, and it currently has a better rank than high-profile apps like Path and Foursquare. The issue is that messaging is a service that could be easily cannibalized by Apple’s iMessages, Facebook Messenger or any change in the way the carriers handle SMS. But the company’s other product Clik addresses a real hole in the market because most TV controllers are horribly designed. That’s the part that has a real revenue opportunity. Plus, Clik has attracted interest from more than 100 potential partners that want to explore using it for video or gaming. “Clik has had huge response from developers who see it as a white-label version of Apple’s AirPlay,” Livingston said. Since Kik has the user base that most mobile developers could only dream of having, the idea is to use Kik to cross-promote and seed Clik’s usage. “We think that Kik will provide viral distribution for Clik,” Livingston said. “We look at Kik as a way to get content from person to person and Clik as a way to get content from person to screen.” Livingston says that Clik is actually a return to the company’s original vision. You see, back when the company started in 2009, it had the vision of making music very easy to play and share between phones and desktop computers. But licensing from the music labels is a pain, so they used the technology to build a messaging app instead. Now that messaging has had its moment in the sun, it’s time to move on. “We always thought that group messaging was a fad,” Livingston said. “We never looked at Kik as a social network. We always looked at it as a way to get content from person-to-person.” Livingston has shown off Clik in a couple different ways. You can use it to send a YouTube playlist on your TV directly from your smartphone. You can also use Clik to play a game on a TV using an iPhone or Android device as the controller, which has piqued the interest of game developers. “We’re looking at the entire stack and how to enable pre-existing experiences to be transferred from the phone to the browser,” he said. Kik should remain free indefinitely, but there will probably be some kind of freemium revenue model behind Clik for partners. And if Apple launches an iTV? Well, that’s just extra marketing for Clik, since Apple would probably pursue a closed solution that would only work on its devices. “The rumors around the Apple TV and awareness around AirPlay has been great for us,” he said. “We let you connect any phone to any screen and we’re open.”
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| Facebook Explains Why It’s Supporting Congress’ CISPA Cybersecurity Bill
Facebook today explained why it has taken a positive stance on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or “CISPA”, bill currently under consideration in the United States Congress. The social networking company is one of a group of tech companies that have announced support for CISPA — Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, IBM, and Symantec are also among its backers. In a post today on the official blog for Facebook’s Washington D.C. office, the company’s U.S. public policy VP Joel Kaplan wrote that there are a number of bills being considered by Congress at the moment that would notify companies like Facebook when the US government knows there is a “critical threat” of a cyber attack. Facebook is supporting CISPA, he said, in part because it would not make Facebook share any more of its own data than is currently required:
Kaplan did acknowledge the criticism that CISPA has attracted from those who say the bill is along the same lines as SOPA in terms of the potential threat to individual privacy and freedom on the web (the reasons for this scrutiny are articulated pretty well by this Lifehacker post.) SOPA was, of course, the proposed anti-piracy legislation that ultimately foundered after coming under incredibly intense scrutiny from the tech community and beyond. Critics say Facebook’s support of CISPA is suspect, considering that the company came out publicly against SOPA. But Kaplan vowed that Facebook is committed to defending its users privacy, and that its support for CISPA is in line with that value:
There will certainly be more developments here as time goes on, but one thing seems for certain: The government has set its sights on the world wide web, and more legislation is coming to the space one way or another. Here’s hoping the larger tech industry is not too fatigued from its fight against SOPA and PIPA — it will be important to stay vigilant about the potential impact of the bills that are yet to come. If you oppose Facebook’s backing of CISPA, there is a petition to ask the command to rescind its support for the bill here.
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| Death To The Gatekeepers: Bezos Talks Innovation In The Publishing Space
The heart of Jeff Bezos’ mission has always to circumvent the traditional “gatekeepers” of commerce. He started with books, an industry ripe for disruption, and moved onto, well, everything else. At this point, his vision has come true. The old gatekeepers in the book sales cycle are on the ropes and electronics companies are already planning to collude in order to maintain a “minimum” accepted price, thereby ensuring Amazon doesn’t eat all of their lunch. But Amazon is hungry and, like Plainview, they have a long straw. They won’t just eat the world’s lunch, they’ll drink its milkshake, too. The recent lawsuits against Apple and various publishers are a testament to Amazon’s power. Publishers won’t accept that their product can’t be sold at Amazon’s prices and Amazon won’t accept that the product can’t be sold at a price that reflects the market. We are, after all, just talking bits shipped to devices and $ 1,000 made in 1,000 ninety-nine cent increments is the same as $ 1,000 made in one-hundred $ 10 increments. Amazon, for the longest time, served as a final lifeline for the paper publishing industry and it seems that this legal move is a way to strip the last vestige of respect from those gatekeepers who, for far too long, made the sale of ideas a process of getting widgets onto shelves. Like the CD makers before them, they just don’t want to give up what has served the industry for so long and so lucratively. But this is just the beginning. In his letter to investors, Bezos writes: I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms because it’s important for a reason I think is somewhat non-obvious: even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say “that will never work!” And guess what – many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.
Arguably, Bezos isn’t a very sympathetic character. His company makes a lot of money and, if we really thought about it enough, we’d realize that he’s a bigger threat to the Mom and Pop stores than even Wal-Mart. At least Wal-Mart helps rural areas retain a sense of community. Amazon is a black box – money in, products delivered. You could live off of Amazon and never leave your house, given enough patience and a good bit of cash. But it’s this mentality – that you don’t need to roll down to Borders for a book or a movie, that you don’t need to hit the student book exchange to get fleeced on a statistics textbook – that really makes sense in a world where most discourse and commerce is happening online anyway. To hold onto the old ways for sake of the old ways is conservative, to be sure, but it’s also a suicide pact with the writers and creators you’re championing. Even more than Jobs, Bezos is intent on blowing up the publishing industry. Tim Carmody at Wired writes “He doesn’t care whether Apple, publishers or anyone else stands in the way,” and this is absolutely true. Call him a zealot, but when’s the last time you drove down to the local bookstore and didn’t think that soon this empire of the mind would be gone, replaced by something Gutenberg wouldn’t couldn’t fathom in his wildest imagination? Heck, when’s the last time you drove down to the local bookstore at all?
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Audience, a Silicon Valley-based company that counts Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (pictured) as a backer, has filed for an initial public offering.
Good news for fans of streaming media who also like low-cost tablets: 
