Tesla Officially Opens West Coast Supercharger Circuit, Covering San Diego To Vancouver

Tesla's West Coast Supercharger Corridor opened today, making it possible for owners of the Model S to travel free between San Diego and Vancouver, using Highway 101 and Interstate 5. This makes a Supercharger reachable within 200 miles to over 99 percent of Californians and 87 percent of those in Oregon and Washington. A lot of attention has been paid to Tesla's efforts to make a coast-to-coast trip in one of its vehicles a reality, via Superchargers and other charging stations, but blanketing the West Coast means that Tesla S owners can now travel from essentially the Mexican border to within the Canadian one without paying any money to fill their cars, and with a minimal amount of charging time required. Superchargers can charge a Tesla S to a capacity worth around 200 miles of driving distance in just 30 minutes, and the stations are positioned near restaurants and shopping centers to give you something to do while your car powers up. To promote the new corridor, Tesla is having two Model S vehicles make the trip from San Diego to Vancouver, and they'll be pushing updates to their various social media properties along the way. Spoiler alert: those cars are definitely going to make it without incident. Supercharger rollout continues globally, with Tesla announcing plans in September to cover 100 percent of the population of Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and Luxembourg, and 90 percent of the population in England, Wales, and Sweden with a station within 320 kms by the end of 2014. Getting past that basic excuse of “I can't buy one, there's nowhere to charge” is clearly a huge part of the company's global rollout strategy, which is why each of these Supercharger network expansions is a big win for Tesla and for founder Elon Musk.

NSA Infiltrates Google And Yahoo Networks, Report Says

The National Security Agency has secretly taped the networks of Google and Yahoo to monitor real-time communication, according to newly revealed documents from whistleblower, Edward Snowden [PDF]. “The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials,” according to The Washington Post, which obtained the hand-scribbled documents. Both Google and Yahoo maintain expensive fiber-optic data linkages in strategic data centers around the world to optimize the flow of information. This infiltration would allow the NSA to know “who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.” Upon learning about the NSA tapping into their networks, Google released a statement, saying the company is "troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity." Codenamed, MUSCULAR, the surveillance project is operated jointly with British Intelligence agency, GCHQ. While the NSA already had access to communication through court-sanctioned collection program PRISM, the agency may prefer international territory because it permits them to subvert American privacy law. The NSA is forbidden from spying on Americans without stringent court oversight; international law may be less restrictive. The Post reports that upon showing this information to two engineers familiar with Google's system, they “exploded in profanity” and said "I hope you publish this.”

ClearStory Data Designs An Analytics Platform That Is About The Experience As Much As The Technology

ClearStory Data has launched a data analytics service that the company says is one of the first to offer a core back-end technology that includes rich visuals and sharing capabilities. On the back-end, ClearStory has a platform for integrating a company's internal and external data using an in-memory database technology, said CEO Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan in a phone interview this week. This can be relational or NoSQL data, point-of-sale information or demographic statistics from external sources. Its advantage is in the ability to process multiple types of data on the fly and then combine that with a modern user interface. ClearStory leverages Apache Spark, an open-source clustering system for its in-memory technology. Companies that use Spark include Yahoo!, Autodesk and Groupon. With Spark, ClearStory is able to achieve the sub-second response times that come with in-memory computing. Customers create stories that displays the data in a dashboard. These stories can then be shared and modified. ClearStory certainly has a strong foundation. Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and Google Ventures have invested $9 million into the company. The experience for the platform was led by Douglas van der Molen, the former Google architect who managed the user experience for Google Analytics, Google AdWords and other Google Ads products. Google Emeritus Shona Brown is a strategic advisor. To make the experience simple is still a feat for most companies that provide data analytics platforms that process and analyze data by the terabyte. I spoke to one analyst who said Datameer is the closest comparable provider to ClearStory. Still, ClearStory is not drop-dead easy to set up and use. It's still relatively complex compared to pure social collaboration services in the market. Too many of today's data analytics services lack the intuitiveness so important in today's market. It reminds me of what LovelyHeroku Co-Founder Mario Danic said to me in a recent interview. Ten years ago building the technology was the most challenging feat. Today, the challenge is creating a compelling user experience almost more than anything else.

No, Madam Secretary, Prices On Healthcare.gov Are Not A “Hypothetical Situation”

Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, wins the award today for most creative political spin. During a congressional grilling about the failings of the federal e-commerce website, Healthcare.gov, the secretary now claims that insurance prices are merely “hypothetical situations.” The claim was in response to recent reports that Healthcare.gov is low-balling insurance prices by 50 percent or more (or hundreds of dollars a month). The website fails to ask consumers their birthdates, only if they're older than 49 years of age, and therefore lumps many older consumers in with some of their 20-something counterparts who are eligible for discounted rates. It's the equivalent of Apple saying that when an iPhone is available for purchase, it'll be half the cost of what consumers end up paying at the register. When Representative John Shimkus asked Secretary Sebelius for an explanation for the low-ball prices, she responded, “It is clearly a hypothetical situation…” While it's true that the Healthcare.gov calculator does inform consumers of possible price changes upon final checkout, it really only emphasizes that prices will be lower “IMPORTANT NOTE: The prices here don't reflect the lower costs an applicant may qualify for based on household size and income. Many people who apply will qualify for reduced costs through tax credits that are automatically applied to monthly premiums. These credits will significantly lower the prices shown for a majority of those applying. Final price quotes are available only after someone has completed a Marketplace application.” As the secretary notes in her testimony, because many consumers cannot actually log in to the website, their true eligibility discounts (i.e. price) cannot be determined. But that's no excuse for misleading consumers trying to financially plan for changes in their monthly expenses. No explanation was given for why the website does not include a simple form for asking consumers for their actual birthdates. The Secretary was willing to take responsibility for Healthcare.gov's failures today; I'm not sure why she felt the need to spin the specifics.

Facebook's Q3 '13 Beats With $2.02B Revenue, $0.25 EPS, With 49% Of Ad Revenue Now Via Mobile

Facebook announced its Q3 2013 results today, posting $2.02 billion in revenue (making this the company's first $2 billion quarter) with earnings of $0.25 a share. That blew away estimates of $0.19 EPS and $1.91 billion in revenue. Much of the growth can be attributed to exploding ad revenue on mobile, with 49 percent of its revenue in Q3 coming from outside of the desktop. Facebook's $1.80 billion overall ad revenue was up 66 percent in Q3 compared to the year-ago quarter. In fact, Facebook grew in almost every important metric. Daily active users were up 25 percent to 728 million, and Facebook's overall users went up 18 percent to 1.19 billion. Mobile MAUs were up 45 percent year over year to 874 million. Facebook's monthly active users number jumped up by 40 million overall. Mobile daily active users were 507 million in September of 2013. Notably, much of Facebook's overall growth was in the rest of the world, with only 1 million new users coming from the U.S. Create infographics The growth in mobile across Facebook's revenue and user counts follows the industry trend as users continue to make their pocket computers their primary ones. Making mobile revenue work has been one of Facebook's primary challenges, and one of the main reasons that so many have been skeptical about its future as a public company. The explosion in mobile revenue as a percentage of Facebook's overall business serves as a sort of answer to those naysayers. “For nearly ten years, Facebook has been on a mission to connect the world,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a release today. “The strong results we achieved this quarter show that we're prepared for the next phase of our company, as we work to bring the next five billion people online and into the knowledge economy.” At the moment, Facebook stock is up nearly 11 percent in after-hours trading to 54 percent.

TechCrunch Disrupt Europe In 1,337 Photos

TechCrunch Disrupt Europe was a hit. Thousands of attendees, founders, and venture capitalists from around the world filled Arena Berlin for the event. Startups from more than 80 countries exhibited their wares. 15 startups launched in the first Startup Battlefield held in Europe and Lock8 won the $50,000 prize and Disrupt Cup. Disrupt Europe was something special. It was alive. It was vibrant, energetic, and rousing. Words cannot describe the electric pulse of this conference, parties and the hackathon. But perhaps the hundreds of photos and videos below can.

Facebook's Mobile Tipping Point: 48% Of Daily Users Are Now Mobile-Only (But No Mention Of BlackBerry)

The word “BlackBerry” did not come up during Facebooks Q3 earnings conference call yesterday, but you can see why such a crazy idea like the social network buying the beleaguered handset maker might have a sliver of plausibility to it. The company is moving closer to a tipping point where mobile usage and revenues will soon be outweighing that of desktop, and although Zuckerberg has ruled out the so-called “Facebook phone,” you never know how the company may want to capitalize on its mobile muscle in the future. CEO Mark Zuckerberg today noted during the company's earnings call that 48 percent of users on a given day are only accessing it from mobile. That comes as nearly half - 49 percent - of the company's advertising revenues, its key revenue driver, now come from mobile ads. That means nearly $890 million in Q3 was made from Facebook's different mobile advertising units such as app install ads and engagement ads. “It's a pretty incredible sign of how Facebook has evolved in the past year,” he said. This shows that Facebook is on track to match the prediction it made in Q2 that mobile revenues would pass desktop by the end of this year. And from the looks of it, the change of balance could come soon on mobile, too. Mobile continues to grow much faster for Facebook. Mobile MAUs grew by 45 percent over the last year (to 874 million in Q3 2013 from 604 million in Q2 2012) - these include both those who are using mobile exclusively for Facebook, and those who are using mobile at some point in the month in addition to desktop. That 45 percent works out to 2.5 times as much growth as MAUs overall, which were up 18 percent ($1,189 million in Q3 2013 and $1,007 million in Q3 2012). Facebook points out its figures do not include Instagram-only usage, but during the call COO Sheryl Sandberg provided some striking figures that point to just how much time consumers are spending on Facebook's mobile properties when you do add it in. Combined with Instagram, the very popular mobile-first, photo-based social network, Facebook now has 150 million monthly active users. It accounts for one of every five minutes spent on mobile in the U.S., Sandberg noted. And that is even having an impact on desktop: Facebook (again, with Instagram) account for one in 8 minutes on desktop, she said. What does Facebook's mobile traffic work out to compared to other popular properties? Sandberg noted that Facebook accounts for more mobile minutes in the U.S. than “YouTube, Pandora, Yahoo, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, AOL, Snapchat and LinkedIn - combined.” (It seems that this stat was taken from comScore research, which actually combined Instagram and Facebook.) Mobile-only users on a monthly basis now stand at 254 million, Facebook noted in one of the slides that accompanied its presentation. The full deck of those slides, which also spell out other metrics like MAUs and DAUs across mobile and desktop, is here. With 1.19 billion MAUs overall, it means that 21.3 percent of MAUs are now mobile-only. That is up 2.3 percentage points from 19 percent in Q2. The same may not be said for desktop. CFO David Ebersman noted that daily actives on web “declined modestly” in contrast to what is happening on mobile. Facebook's daily active users on mobile worldwide now stand at 507 million, up by 38 million over Q2; while monthly active users are up to 874 million, up 55 million from Q2.