Weeks after Google employees around the globe walked out of offices in protest of the company’s handling of claims of sexual misconduct, the Mountain View-based search giant is about to face yet another worldwide protest. This time, however, Amnesty International is coming for it. The planned demonstrations aim to highlight Google’s efforts, codenamed Dragonfly, to build a censored Chinese search engine.
It’s all set to go down on Nov. 27, reports The Intercept, and Amnesty International is not playing around. The NGO launched a petition calling on Google to cease its Dragonfly project, and a scathing satirical Google recruiting video.
What’s more, the petition makes it clear that this is about more than just the censored search engine specifically, and China in general.
“If Google is willing to trade human rights for profit in China, could they do the same in other countries,” asks the petition. “Stand in solidarity with the staff members at Google who have protested the project and tell CEO Sundar Pichai to #DropDragonfly before it can be launched.”
The video, a mock Dragonfly recruitment ad, is a bit more blunt.
“To apply,” explains a fake Google employee, “you’ll need great coding skills, five years experience, and have absolutely no morals and be happy giving up people’s personal data.”
The Intercept notes that demonstrations will take place at Google offices located in the U.S., the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Spain.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has publicly bragged about the censored search engine, telling those at the Wired 25 Summit that “[it] turns out we’ll be able to serve well over 99 percent of the queries.” He further noted that “[there] are many, many areas where we would provide information better than what’s available.”
Google has faced internal pushback against the Dragonfly project, with the New York Times reporting in August that hundreds of employees had signed an internal letter “demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work.”
Tuesday’s protests appear to be another such call for transparency. Time will tell if Google listens.
WASHINGTON – Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort lied repeatedly to the FBI, violating a plea agreement with Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller, who is recommending that Manafort receive no credit to reduce his prison sentence.
The development suggests that Manafort now faces severe punishment for both his August conviction in an Alexandria federal court and for a separate guilty plea in the District of Columbia were promised to cooperate with Mueller’s team to avert a second trial.
In the D.C. case alone, Manafort faces the prospect of perhaps a decade in prison, unless he is pardoned by President Donald Trump.
“The government will file a detailed sentencing submission… that sets forth the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies, including those after signing the plea agreement herein,” prosecutors said in a brief court filing late Monday.
“As the defendant has breached the plea agreement, there is no reason to delay his sentencing,” prosecutors said.
Manafort was convicted on eight counts of financial fraud in an August trial where the jury deadlocked on 10 other counts. Those undecided counts were later dismissed.
Manafort’s August trial in Virginia was the first contested prosecution brought by Mueller.
Since striking a deal to cooperate with Mueller’s team in September, Manafort had been meeting with prosecutors in what authorities had hoped would benefit the continuing investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Manafort’s was not convicted in either Virginia or the District of Columbia of participating in the election interference campaign. But his oversight of the campaign and his participation in key meetings, including a 2016 Trump Tower gathering of top campaign advisers with a Russian attorney promising damaging information on then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, made him a potentially valuable witness as Mueller’s team probed deeper into the Trump campaign’s possible coordination with Russia.
“A breach (in the September plea agreement) relieves the government of any obligations it has under the agreement, including its agreement to a reduction in the sentencing guidelines for acceptance of responsibility, but leaves intact all the obligations of the defendant as well as his guilty pleas,” prosecutors said in court documents.
Manafort’s legal team asserted that their client had lived up to his promise to cooperate with prosecutors during a series of meetings.
“After signing the plea agreement, Manafort met with the government on numerous occasions and answered the government’s questions,” defense attorneys contended in court documents. “Manafort has provided information to the government in an effort to live up to his cooperation obligations. He believes he has provided truthful information and does not agree with the government’s characterization or that he has breached the agreement.”
Citing the government’s conflicting position, defense attorneys also agreed that there is “no reason to delay” sentencing in the D.C. case.
A separate Feb. 8 sentencing already has been set in the Virginia case.
Manafort’s decision to cooperate in the related D.C. case immediately raised expectations that Mueller’s team would be carried further into Trump’s inner circle by a once-trusted adviser who had deep access to the then-candidate’s political strategy.
Asked in September whether Manafort’s deal included an agreement to provide information related to President Donald Trump, defense attorney Richard Westling said his client had pledged “complete cooperation.”
Donald Trump has dismissed a damning climate change study produced by his own government, simply telling reporters, “I don’t believe it.”
The U.S. president rejected the findings of the report, which was produced by over 300 prominent climate scientists and 13 federal agencies and departments.
The Congress-commissioned report, of which Trump told reporters, “I’ve read some of it,” warns that climate change will not only continue to contribute to weather extremes and impact global health, but it will cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
When asked by reporters outside the White House on Monday about such a devastating impact on the national economy, Trump said he didn’t believe it.
Like countless reports before it, including the UN’s special report from October, the study also concludes, based on extensive evidence, that human activities are the dominant cause of global warming.
But Trump diverted attention away from the responsibility and contribution of the U.S. to climate change to the emissions produced by other countries, telling reporters that America is “the cleanest we’ve ever been.”
“You’re going to have to have China and Japan and all of Asia and all these other countries, you know, it [the report] addresses our country,” he said, as reported by the BBC.
“Right now we’re at the cleanest we’ve ever been and that’s very important to me. But if we’re clean, but every other place on Earth is dirty, that’s not so good.
“So I want clean air, I want clean water, very important.”
Trump may say he wants clean air, but he doesn’t want to put policies in place to reduce emissions, preferring to support the fossil fuel industry instead.
According to the bombshell report, how the U.S. responds to greenhouse gas emissions will make a big difference.
“The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future — but the severity of future impacts will depend largely on actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that will occur,” the report states.
Trump’s lack of support for the report shouldn’t really come as a surprise, considering his history of dismissing climate change. But it’s another form of backflip for Trump, who called climate change a “hoax” in June 2017, then reconsidered his stance a year later, telling 60 Minutes, “I don’t think it’s a hoax,” and that climate change will “change back again.”
Yeah, it’s tough keeping up.
If you want to read the whole report, grab a coffee and dig in. It’s quite frankly terrifying.
Michael Douglas has been accused by a former female co-worker of having masturbated in front of her and stopping her from having a successful career in Hollywood. USA TODAY
Catherine Zeta-Jones is recalling the conflict she felt when she heard about sexual harassment accusations against her husband, Michael Douglas.
“My children and I were profoundly devastated by those allegations,” she told London-based newspaper The Times. “And I was torn about where my absolute morals lie.”
Michael Douglas gave a pre-emptive interview in early January to get ahead of a report from author and journalist Susan Braundy that he had made sexually-charged comments and masturbated in front of her during a private meeting in his apartment in the late ’80s, when Braundy ran the New York office of Douglas’ production company.
“I’d confess to anything I thought I was responsible for,” he told The Hollywood Reporter at the time. “And it was most certainly not masturbating in front of this woman. This reeks. I would have respected if she had reached out to me any time over these years, to share her pain or concerns, and I would have been the first one to respond. But this, going directly to the newspapers or whatever you want to call them, it just reeks of something else.”
Zeta-Jones and Douglas have been married since 2000. They have two children: Dylan, 18, and Carys, 15. The actress called the situation “nasty” and noted it put her in a “really hard position.”
“This woman came out of nowhere and accused my husband,” she said. “I had a very big conversation with him, with the kids in the room, and said, ‘Do you understand if more comes out?…’ “
She added that Douglas told his family there was “no story here, and that time will tell.”
“And, of course, it did,” she continued. “There was nothing to back it up at all. For any accusation that comes out that isn’t backed up, that knocks the movement back 20 years.”
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A gift for that friend who watches “Home Alone” every year
It’s that time of year again. You’re permitted to huddle up on the couch — roast beast from Whoville in one hand, a moose-shaped mug of eggnog in the other — and watch a whole bunch of movies you saw at this exact time last year.
From The Santa Clause to Home Alone and The Grinch to Jingle All the Way, these movies are the ones you know back to front. You probably routinely quote them out loud, to the detriment of your relationships.
And if it’s not you annually weeping through Love Actually and The Holiday, or demanding someone listen to your pitch on Die Hard as the ultimate holiday movie, that person is definitely someone you know.
Here’s a few gift ideas for that cotton-headed ninny muggins. Now, go easy on the Pepsi.
“This is my house, I have to defend it.”
It’s only onscreen for a hot minute, but Home Alone fans will know this blueprint well. Our hero Kevin McCallister maps out his defenses, strategically planning surprises for the Wet Bandits. And you can get a print on Etsy!
Pair it with a Little Nero’s Pizza cap and you’ll have a very merry Christmas, ya filthy animal.
If you really love Christmas, come on and let it snow with this delightful Love Actually pillow. Artist and designer Thom Kofoed illustrated one of the most iconic scenes from the film. It’s now a pillow you can give to your own true love.
Clark Griswold’s beloved moose mugs from Christmas Vacation are really awkward to sip from, but damn, they’re good movie merch. Featured in such scenes as Clark losing his damn nerve, these moose mugs should be filled with ice cold eggnog and served when the shit’s about to hit the fan at your family holiday meal.
One of the less obvious holiday movies, but nonetheless, Gremlins is 10/10 yuletide fun. LA designer and illustrator Miranda Dressler created these delightful little pins featuring a Gremlin in a Santa hat. If you’re giving it to a true fan of the film, pair it with one of her Gremlin greeting cards.
What better outfit to snuggle up watching Elf in than this ugly Christmas sweater, emblazoned with one of the highly quotable movie’s best lines. You’ll find many, many variations on the Elf-themed UCS around the internet — just pick your favorite quote, add “sweater,” and punch it into Google.
Monopoly fights are as strong a holiday tradition as pudding, so why not argue over a version inspired by Tim Burton’s cult classic? This collector’s edition of the classic, polarizing board game replaces the traditional boardwalk real estate with locations like Jack’s Tower, Oogie Boogie’s Casino, and Sally’s Alley. Fine holiday fun.
The Grinch’s faithful sidekick Max was the key to the whole “stealing Christmas” operation and every Who in Whoville should know it. This adorable plush toy comes with a pair of removable reindeer antlers — the same faux-reindeer solution seen in the film. Plus, if you press his paw, his ears move up and down. Your giftee’s shriveled heart may grow three sizes after seeing it.
Arnold Schwarzenegger fought tooth and nail and Sinbad to get his son a Turbo Man doll, and all you have to do is shell out your rent money. Made exclusively for Wal-Mart by Tiger Electronics for the release of Jingle All the Way in 1996, this talking action figure is a rare find. You’ll find a few on eBay for cheaper, but plenty are out of the packaging.
President Donald Trump says his administration and lawmakers are exerting “a lot of pressure” on General Motors in response to its decision to cut up to 14,000 workers in North America and possibly shutter up to five plants. (Nov. 26) AP
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump blasted a proposal by General Motors on Monday to sharply reduce the company’s workforce and close plants in Ohio, Michigan and other states where the president has touted the auto industry’s strength.
“This country has done a lot for General Motors,” Trump said as he departed the White House for a series of campaign events in Mississippi. “They better get back to Ohio and soon. So we have a lot of pressure on them.”
Trump said he spoke with General Motors CEO and Chairman Mary Barra, insisting he was “very tough when I spoke to her.”
General Motors announced that is is killing several passenger cars, including the Chevrolet Volt and Chevrolet Cruze. The moves are part of a sweeping $6 billion cost-cutting plan announced Monday. GM is poised to close plants in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Canada and cut 15 percent of its salaried workforce.
“They say the Chevy Cruze is not selling well. I said, ‘Well, get a car that is selling well and put it back in,’ ” Trump said. “I’m not happy about it.”
Trump has frequently touted the strength of the nation’s auto industry on the campaign trail.
“You have car plants moving into Michigan, moving into Ohio, moving into Pennsylvania, massive, massive companies,” Trump said during a rally in Ohio in August. “They’re all coming back and that means jobs.”
And you thought stop-motion animation was creepy on a good day.
From Robot Chicken to Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Adult Swim programming has become notorious for its cartoon insta-nightmares. Their newest series, The Shivering Truth, appears to be shepherding that legacy into a whole new league of horrifying.
Created by Vernon Chatman, an Adult Swim alumnus, the stop-motion project has been described as “a delicately crafted, surreal anthology comedy, a miniature propulsive omnibus clusterbomb of painfully riotous daymares, all dripping with the orange goo of dream logic.”
What does that mean? Well, based on the trailer, we can expect a woman to have her face rubbed off onto a carpet, a drinking game involving a whole lot of fingers, a scary worm burrowing into a guy’s head, a surprisingly gory game of peek-a-boo, and a whole lot of other stuff I’d rather not think about… including hand nipples.
The Shivering Truth hits Adult Swim Dec. 9 at midnight. Plan your electric bill accordingly.
Enquirer beat writers Paul Dehner Jr. and Fletcher Page break down the Bengals 35-20 loss to the Browns. Sam Greene, sgreene@enquirer.com
This story will be updated…
Andy Dalton’s season is over.
The Cincinnati Bengals quarterback was placed on injured reserve Monday after being sidelined with a right thumb injury during Sunday’s loss to the Cleveland Browns.
Dalton suffered the injury in the third quarter while trying to recover a bad snap.
Former backup Jeff Driskel will prepare for his first career start Sunday against the Denver Broncos at Paul Brown Stadium.
“You have to focus every week, knowing the game plan like you’re going to play because you never know when your number is going to be called,” Driskel said Monday before Dalton’s status became official. “My routine is going to stay the same and come Sunday I’ll be ready to go regardless of who is in there.”
Driskel completed 17 of 29 passes for 155 yards and scored a passing touchdown, the first of Driskel’s three-year career, and a rushing touchdown Sunday in relief.
“I was impressed with Jeff and really we’ve been impressed with him every time he’s gone in a game,” said Bengals offensive coordinator Bill Lazor. “He’s poised.”
Dalton is the 12th Bengals player added to IR this season. His season ends after he completed 226 of 335 pass attempts (61.9 percent) for 2,566 yards, 21 touchdowns and 11 interceptions.
This is the second time a right thumb injury cut his season short. He fractured his right thumb in Week 13 of the 2015 season against the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Bengals were 10-2 before losing Dalton, finished the regular season 2-2 and lost to the Steelers in the playoffs.
The Bengals acquired quarterback Tom Savage off waivers from the San Francisco 49ers on Monday. Savage, a fourth-round pick in the 2014 draft, has appeared in 13 career games (all for the Houston Texans), including nine starts, and completed 181 of 315 passes for 2000 yards, five touchdowns and seven interceptions.
Ten years ago, launched the modern era of crowdfunding by creating a place where anyone could pitch their idea, product, or creative endeavor to the entire world, asking for the funds to make it reality. Today there are no shortage of crowdfunding sites, and even though Indiegogo isn’t as large as rival Kickstarter, it’s still tremendously influential, offering entrepreneurs not just a funding platform, but also support beyond their campaigns, with tools to ease the transition from concept to launch.
Indiegogo has always had a more worldwide audience than its peers, and now current CEO David Mandelbrot wants to take things further with more outreach to inventors in China as he leads the venture-funded company to profitability. Mandelbrot joined Mashable’s MashTalk podcast to talk about how crowdfunding has evolved since in the past decade, how the company approaches quality control, and what he thinks of Indiegogo’s “anything goes” reputation.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mashable: Where did you start getting involved in crowdfunding, and how did that sort of transition into Indiegogo and then the CEO gig?
David Mandelbrot: Earlier in my career I spent about seven years at Yahoo, starting in the late 1990s, so I’ve been working in online tech for over 20 years now, but the way I got involved in Indiegogo was, I was at a start-up before Indiegogo call Tynt and we had a board member who was also on the board of Indiegogo and he was based here in New York, we were based in San Francisco, Indiegogo was based in San Francisco, and every time he would come to one our board meetings, his name was Lewis, I would say, “Hey Lewis, what else are you doing while you’re here in San Francisco?” And every time he would say, “Oh, I just had a meeting over at Indiegogo. That is the most amazing business. So exciting what they’re doing, the way they’re empowering entrepreneurs.”
So he’s inspiring you?
Every time he would come he would be like, “Alright let’s talk about Tynt, but let me really tell you about what’s going on at Indiegogo.” In the end Indiegogo got acquired and then, I’m sorry, Tynt got acquired, and then Lewis introduced me to the founder of Indiegogo and things just progressed very rapidly from there.
Well, one of the founders. Wasn’t there, like, three people?
Yeah there was three cofounders of Indiegogo, one is named Slava Rubin. He was at the time the CEO of Indiegogo. We also had two other cofounders, Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell. Danae and Eric were both business students at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley when they had the original idea for Indiegogo.
Are any of them still involved?
Yes, actually both Slava and Danae are both still very active members of the board and Eric Schell is our head of product at Indiegogo, overseeing all of our product development.
So how did you get convinced? You keep hearing about how what a great place — what was it that sort of persuaded you?
Yeah you know it’s interesting for me it’s always been about working with businesses that are doing something that’s transformative. So when I went to Yahoo in the late 1990s I was actually really excited about how the internet was gonna change the way we consumed our media.
That was the place to be in the late 90s.
It really was.
Maybe not a few years later.
It’s sort of sad, I know. I wonder if at some time people will remember you know that there was a time when Yahoo was sort of at the center of so much of what was happening.
It sounds like you’ve got that taste of wanting to be around innovation.
Absolutely, and I think that industries are most interesting at the moment when they’re going through real transformation and what was so interesting to me about Indiegogo that I could see from the very beginning was the potential that Indiegogo had to really change the way entrepreneurs launched their businesses. The typical way that entrepreneurs always launched their businesses, I’m going to overly simplify ’cause of course each entrepreneur’s journey is different, but the typical way that entrepreneurs used to launch a business is they would get an idea, maybe they would start working on it a little bit, and then they would go out and raise financing and then they would develop the product and then they would hopefully get a distributor and get that product into retail stores and then at the very end of this long process that could last years, that product would show up in a store and only at the very end of that process would you find out if there was an actual market for that product, if there were gonna be customers.
Right.
What was so interesting about Indiegogo was the way it was radically transforming that model. The way an entrepreneur could determine extremely early in the life cycle of their product or their business, whether there was gonna be a market for that product and I could see early on what we’ve now come to see over the last ten years, which is it that it would have a really transformational impact on the way entrepreneurs brought their products to market.
There’s been a lot of products that have been funded through crowdfunding and then become these massive success stories. I guess if you’re a VC or a bigger company you can look at these projects and say, “Okay, this thing made 400% above its goal — that’s a good sign.”
Absolutely, you know what’s interesting is almost every party that’s sort of part of the entrepreneurs journey, every third party that the entrepreneurs engaging with whether it’s an investor, a distributor of that product, if they’re a product entrepreneur, the retailer, they’re all basically making a bet essentially on whether there’s gonna be a market for that product in the end. You know the VC is anticipating there will be a big market for this device and the distributor is thinking a lot of retailers will be interested in this device.
The reason that crowdfunding and Indiegogo in particular is so transformative is it makes that part of the analysis so much easier. So what’s exciting about Indiegogo is in part that so many entrepreneurs on Indiegogo have been able to go on and raise venture capital financing. Entrepreneurs on Indiegogo have raised over a billion dollars in venture capital financing after their Indiegogo campaigns.
But what’s also exciting is the way the entrepreneurs have a much easier time getting their products into Target stores, into Amazon, into Brookstone, into many retailers that otherwise might have had more questions about those products. They can look at the success on Indiegogo, say I can see that there’s a market for that product, I wanna carry it in my store.
Dave Mandelbrot (left) guests on Mashable’s MashTalk podcast, hosted by Pete Pachal (right).
Image: Raymond Wong/Mashable
From everything you’ve said, it’s very clear how like crowdfunding changed a lot in the entrepreneurial process, particularly with products. But how do you think crowdfunding itself has changed since it started getting very popular about ten years ago?
There’s a few ways it’s evolved. For one thing the landscape has changed a lot over the last ten years, so when Indiegogo launched a little bit over ten years ago, Indiegogo was actually the first crowdfunding platform. There was no Kickstarter then, there was no GoFundMe then, if you count Patreon there was no Patreon at that time. Indiegogo was the pioneer of crowdfunding and over time other companies started to focus on crowdfunding. Kickstarter jumped in I think about a year later. GoFundMe a few years after that.
The main evolution in the landscape has been that as crowdfunding has evolved, different companies have developed their own individual areas of focus. So for example GoFundMe now is exclusively focused on personal causes and non-profit fundraising, and in fact Indiegogo earlier this year, we actually sold off the portion of our business that was focused on non-profit and personal cause fundraising to a company called YouCaring that was subsequently acquired by GoFundMe so that’s part of GoFundMe’s business now. Kickstarter has really maintained a focus on what they call creators. So those are filmmakers, musicians, the fastest growing category actually on Kickstarter over the last few years has been tabletop game developers.
Oh really? Like these kind of like handheld things?
No not handheld things, like actual tabletop games, like Monopoly. And then Indiegogo in particular over the last three years has really developed a focus on product entrepreneurs and helping those product entrepreneurs identify if there’s a market for their product, and really take their idea all the way from an idea in their head all the way to a manufactured product that’s getting into the hands of their backers.
You mentioned Kickstarter, and I feel like you guys were first, and then they came in and then they kind of swooped up all the attention and the glory. Why did that happen?
You know things changed a lot around, I believe it was 2012. 2011 or 2012 was when the people really started to notice Kickstarter and the main thing that transformed things was that Kickstarter had a single campaign on Kickstarter that was very successful which was a campaign for this product called the Pebble Watch.
You might remember that, and at that time that became the most successful crowdfunding campaign of all time as of 2011 or 2012. It raised over 10 million dollars and so what happened was Kickstarter sort of opened up people’s eyes to the potential of crowdfunding and for a while their name was somewhat synonymous with crowdfunding.
So did they just get lucky then? Because I think there was a perception that with Kickstarter, there’s a certain bar that needed to be met there that maybe didn’t exist on Indiegogo. Is that wrong? Or is that actually a strength?
For a long time and even now in some ways, Kickstarter has had and continues to have a very different approach to how they accept entrepreneurs onto the platform. For, you know, Indiegogo has not only tried to be as open as possible a platform but a also very flexible platform. So on Kickstarter there’s basically one way to offer crowdfunding campaign. You need to provide your product to Kickstarter. Kickstarter actually evaluates who can be on their platform, and who can’t be on their platform.
We take a different approach in part because when the company was founded the goal was to essentially eliminate the gatekeepers so rather than, our idea was why should the VCs be the only people to determine what products get funded and what products don’t, and it’s our feeling that if we evaluated each product for whether it was acceptable or not to our platform we would just be inserting ourselves as the gatekeeper, and with Kickstarter doing that, in our mind they’re inserting themselves as the gatekeeper rather than letting the public essentially decide what products get funded.
So Indiegogo has always been a open platform where any entrepreneur can actually run a campaign on Indiegogo. What we have changed in the last couple years though to make the opportunities much more clear to backers is that we now require entrepreneurs to be very direct about which stage they’re in, in development.
So if you just have a concept, but you haven’t actually developed a working prototype of your product yet, you need to disclose that to backers on Indiegogo. If you have a prototype, we actually verify that you have a working prototype. If you say that you’re in production we actually ask for a production version of the product so that we can validate it. So we’re actually a more open platform but also with a set of rules to make sure that backers that back campaigns know what they’re in for.
So there’s more nuance to it, but it’s more democratic in a simple way — why not just let the people decide?
Absolutely and what’s wonderful about Indiegogo is that because we have this different set of rules it enables products that might not have gotten the opportunity to launch on other platforms or be successful on other platforms to be successful. One example that comes to mind was a campaign that ran I believe about three years ago on Indiegogo was for a product called the Flow Hive, and the Flow Hive was a new type of beehive actually and apparently there had been no real innovations in beekeeping or beehive development in the last 50 years.
Don’t tell Apple.
And a father and son team from Australia came up with an idea for a better beehive. They put in on Indiegogo, they needed $50,000 to be able to set up a manufacturing facility in Australia to be able to manufacture the first beehives. Now at that point when they hadn’t quite gotten to real manufacturing of the product yet, they might’ve had a hard time being able to launch on Kickstarter, they launched on Indiegogo.
They raised, within two months, they raised 13 million dollars to make beehives from an evolving and emerging beekeeping community all over the world, and at Indiegogo we’ve got thousands of stories like that, of entrepreneurs who you might never have thought would have been successful but the public actually got this democratic opportunity to identify what they were really interested in and directly communicate that to entrepreneurs.
So, I have to ask: How do you guys make money?
I’m glad you’re asking! You know we actually just announced this morning, we just had our first profitable quarter in Q3.
Nice.
Indiegogo makes money in a few different ways. The first thing, and the primary way that we make money is that we get fees that are a percentage of the amount of funds raised on our platform. So our standard fee is a 5% fee, and so 5% of whatever the entrepreneur is able to raise on Indiegogo goes to Indiegogo. The entrepreneurs on Indiegogo, and we really like that fee structure because it means that we have a shared interest in the success of those entrepreneurs on Indiegogo. If they’re not successful on our platform then they don’t need to pay us and if they’re extraordinarily successful on our platform then they pay us more. So that’s the primary revenue stream.
So if it’s 5%, and you’ve raised over the years $1.6 billion, what is that…?
That’s 80 million. But that’s just the primary way. In addition, as more entrepreneurs are using Indiegogo as a platform to go direct to consumers, which is really the big movement that Indiegogo is a part of. Now entrepreneurs are bypassing traditional retail, traditional distribution mechanism and they’re selling their products directly to consumers online and as we do that, there are more and more services that those entrepreneurs need. If they’re marketing their product on Indiegogo, the often need help with marketing. Critical to a successful campaign on Indiegogo is having a really good video that demonstrates the benefits of that product. Indiegogo now offers solutions to entrepreneurs to develop a really good video.
Is that like you have an in-house staff of editors, shooters?
Yes it’s a combination of both expertise in house and in outside video. It used to be that if you were a product entrepreneur and you wanted to raise interest in your product, you know say 15, 20 years ago, the only way to do it was with brand marketing and by creating a television commercial. Most of the entrepreneurs on Indiegogo now are able to produce a video for somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 or in a lot of cases less. The most most successful campaigns, those videos are watched by millions of people.
Oh, they’re just fun to watch. I feel like the crowdfunding formula is almost like a reality show plus cool gadgets. I mean it’s like this sort of addictive format you can watch them one after another for hours.
They actually really are fun to watch, and they’re fun to watch because it’s fun to see the most innovative products that are coming to life, it’s also really exciting to see the entrepreneurs behind those products. When we’re marketed to during the Super Bowl, there’s paid models and actors that are demonstrating that product, there’s something actually really rewarding about getting to see an entrepreneur actually explain this product that they have dreamed of and how they are trying to bring that product to life.
You know part of why Flow Hive was so successful is that the backers on Indiegogo just fell in love with the founder and wanted the founder and his dad to be successful with this campaign. Earlier this year we had the most successful campaign on Indiegogo on any platform over the last two years for an electric bicycle called Mate X and the founder of that company is a female entrepreneur. She is a mom with three kids and backers get excited about supporting an entrepreneur like that. So yes, there’s something about the videos that’s just fun to watch, in part because it creates a better connection between the backers of those products and the entrepreneurs that are building those products and providing them to users.
Well congrats on your first profitable quarter, by the way.
Thank you.
How many countries is Indiegogo in now?
About 230 countries. People back projects and offer products from over 230 countries and I’ll actually tell you one of the most exciting things about Indiegogo is that last quarter 48% of all of the transactions on Indiegogo were cross border. So what we’ve created is a true world wide marketplace for entrepreneurs to be able to reach new customers by going direct to consumer.
Why have you had so much success in terms of being international so quickly? Is there a secret to doing that?
You know you asked earlier about how the crowdfunding industry is changed over the last ten years. As we at Indiegogo got really focused on product entrepreneurs, people are recruiting new products and wanted to learn if there was market for those products and go direct to consumers with those products. Our worldwide strategy became much more clear, the most clear example is China actually, needless to say, not only is a lot of product manufacturing happening in China but now there’s been manufacturing in China for decades. There’s a lot of great product innovations that are coming out of China.
I bet you could go down to the Shenzhen market, grab all the components you need and if you’re an inventor, you know, bam, see if something works. Then all you need is Indiegogo to help you out.
It’s absolutely true, and so what we did, part of why it’s worldwide is that Indiegogo really invested in making Indiegogo a worldwide platform. In the beginning when I first joined Indiegogo a little over five years, we used four different payment processors, in part to ensure that we could support transaction processing in those 230 countries. We’ve since been able to streamline it somewhat, but we have a real commitment to being a worldwide platform from the beginning and then in markets like in China, where there’s a strong base of entrepreneurs.
We’ve actually hired people that are dedicated to that Chinese market and so you mentioned Shenzhen, we have dedicated people working for Indiegogo, there’s a little bit of a complicated legal structure to be able to do this in China, but that are based in Shenzhen to create a streamline way for China-based entrepreneurs to be able to reach a U.S. market with their products.
I know Amazon has done a lot in the last couple years to sort of open up its marketplace to international sellers, a lot of them out of Asia, and they’ve received backlash for it because some of these are knockoffs of other products, and they’re either not as good, or even if they are as good, they’re really undercutting the innovation happening here because of the rapid commoditization. Do you see a similar backlash possibly on your side, and are you doing anything to guard against that?
We did see that. One of the things that’s still so exciting about working with a relatively early stage company is that we can be really flexible, so we did see that. We started to see a lot of knockoffs on Indiegogo, we also started seeing a lot of distributors or resellers that were using Indiegogo as a way to just distribute products…
I feel like this is your “fake news” problem. It’s nice to be democratic and be hands off but at the same time you have to take some kind of active roll in ensuring some quality control.
Absolutely, and yes we’re democratic but part of being democratic is also being hands on to ensure that we don’t have fake news, so it’s a policy on Indiegogo that you need to be the original entrepreneur of the product and we have a dedicated trust and safety team that reviews the successful projects on Indiegogo and ensures that is the actual entrepreneur that is running that campaign.
We don’t allow distributors or resellers on Indiegogo and of course if we get notice of copyright violation or patent infringement we’re fully compliant with the DMCA rules and in a lot of cases we’ll take campaigns down if there’s any type of IP infringement happening on our platform. So we did start to see that; we responded very quickly and there shouldn’t be any products on Indiegogo that are not products that are being offered by the original entrepreneur behind that project.
So this may be old news, but I remember about five years ago now the Kickstarter guys came out and basically wrote a blog that said, “This isn’t a store.” I think they were getting a lot of bad press for various things not really living up to snuff at the time. Was that an overreaction do you think? Has it gone into more this is a store with caveats? What should consumer expectation be?
Yeah that’s a really good question. So it’s interesting, we’ve done plenty of research with the backers of projects on Indiegogo and while people have many reasons for backing a campaign, maybe they know the entrepreneur, maybe they wanna make sure that product gets built, what we learned from engaging directly with our backers is that the primary reason that backers back campaigns is because they want to get the product. That’s why they’re doing it. So when you’re in a situation like Kickstarter had a few years ago where they had this project called the Coolest Cooler…
Oh yeah, infamous.
Yeah it raised 13 million dollars and even with the 13 million dollars was not able to deliver that product to the backers. That’s a bad experience for users. You know frankly Kickstarter can say we’re not a store but when people spend 13 million dollars on a product that they don’t get, they’re going to be very unhappy, regardless of what you say.
So what Indiegogo, you know, recognizing that this is a risk with entrepreneurs, we started working closely with companies that could help the entrepreneurs that the most successful entrepreneurs on Indiegogo manufacture and ship those products, so a lot of entrepreneurs went into trouble because, and I think this was the case for Coolest Cooler, because they haven’t really thought through all of the components that they need for that product or how much manufacturing is gonna cost.
So on components, Indiegogo has formed a partnership with Arrow Electronics, one of the largest component distributors in this country. Arrow, for free, will actually review your bill of materials if you’re an entrepreneur on Indiegogo and make sure that you thought through every single component that you need to manufacture that product. They will make sure that those components are not close to the end of life, requiring you to re-engineer the product.
We formed partnership, if you’re a successful entrepreneur on Indiegogo and say you sell 10,000 of your product or you get 10,000 backers for your project, you’ve gotta figure out how to ship to 10,000 backers, so we formed a partnership with Ingram Micro to make sure that entrepreneurs have a solution for doing the logistics of literally shipping 10,000 products.
That’s a lot of stamps.
It is a lot of stamps! And as a result now backers are much more likely to get their product than ever before because we know that for backers to be truly thrilled with the experience that they have on Indiegogo they need to get their products, regardless of what we say. So whether they receive the products that’ll make them most happy and I’ll add on that, in our marketplace we do guarantee fulfillment of the product, and of course the customer satisfaction level is much higher in our marketplace than it is for overall crowdfunding.
So one of the things that I think has changed a lot in crowdfunding, it’s not that new anymore, but is the established companies coming in and like oh this is actually a great place to sort of try out new, like part of their development process, I’m thinking specifically of the Bose Sleepbuds. They had a campaign, I think it was early this year or late last year.
Late last year.
I went to their launch event, and they told me all about the Indiegogo experience and it was really interesting because it always a very different product for them, and they concluded they should do crowdfunding [as part of the development process]. That whole idea seems to have really caught on.
It has, yeah. Within Indiegogo we refer to this as our enterprise business but we’re really talking about really well established companies that are using Indiegogo as a platform for product validation.
My favorite example most recently, just last quarter was Gillette. So Gillette as I’m sure most people know, you know Gillette of course is in a competitive business in the razor business, and particular with some recent direct to consumer brands that have come along, and Gillette is of course always innovating with razors and Gillette developed a new heated razor, and the old model would have been to get all the way through development and then do a big marketing campaign for their new razor.
What Gillette is realizing, which is what most great direct-to-consumer brands now are doing that it’d be worthwhile to get out to consumers earlier. So Gillette actually launched their heated razor on Indiegogo, they launched a project actually for their heated razor and they’re doing it in part to get their first customers, but of course Gillette has a very robust distribution system, drug stores and all kinds of stores all over the world.
What the enterprises are really using Indiegogo for is similar to what Bose, like Bose launched a campaign on Indiegogo, is to connect with consumers early, and get their feed back and figure out if the price point works for consumers, to figure out which features are most important to consumers, to get consumers to test that product. That Bose campaign, Bose did something pretty amazing. Bose actually sent an early prototype to all of the backers of that campaign that bought the headphones to get feedback. They collected that feedback and then after they got that feedback and they made some modifications to the headphones, they then sent all the backers the actual commercial version of those headphones.
Right, that was pretty sweet. Like a big company can sort of afford to do that too. I don’t know if every startup can model their campaigns after that, but…
Exactly, but for them it was a great way to connect with customers.
Oh, and establish so much goodwill.
Absolutely, and if I’m Bose, or Whirlpool has run two campaigns on Indiegogo, I love the Whirlpool example. Whirlpool, known for their washers and dryers, launched a kitchen appliance that was a composting machine on Indiegogo actually, and they did it primarily so they could connect with early adopters and get feedback on the product and I asked them how would you connect directly with consumers before Indiegogo, what would you do if you couldn’t do it on Indiegogo? If they’re selling products through Best Buy, Best Buy doesn’t tell them who the customers are. If they’re selling, for any of the other enterprises that are selling through Amazon or Walmart, they hold that information very close to the vest. So what Whirlpool told me is that the primary, before Indiegogo, the primary way that they would find out who their actual customers were, was from people sending back those warranty cards.
I have to ask though, I know with this idea there’s been a bit of a backlash from sort of the “true” Indies — like, “This is supposed to be our place for startups and people just starting out, and how do we stand out when there’s these bigger fish swimming in our pool?”
Honestly, directly we’ve heard very little negative backlash from the entrepreneurs on our platform and you know we’ve had over 800,000 people that have raised money for different things on Indiegogo and we’ve had almost no negative feedback directly, and the main reason is that the entrepreneurs recognize that these established brands bring a lot of new users to the platform and while they may come to see that big enterprise campaign from Bose or Whirlpool or General Electric or Lego or some of the other big brands that have used Indiegogo, while they’re there they tend to browse around.
I was looking at some stats. There’s something like 22% of your users back more than one campaigns?
Absolutely and if they back one of these large enterprise campaigns then they often elect to join our email lists and they’re getting notified regularly of the latest and greatest innovations on Indiegogo. So what those large enterprises do actually is they really help build the community of early adopters on Indiegogo that then get turned on to innovative projects from small and large entrepreneurs alike.
So what’s next for you guys?
So a lot of things. You know the big things that are coming up for us is continuing our worldwide expansion. We’ve been thrilled to see the tremendous growth that we’ve had in China and we’ll continue to explore how we enable entrepreneurs from all over the world to reach audiences elsewhere in the world.
We’re also continuing to implement to form new partnerships to help entrepreneurs be more successful in manufacturing their products and shipping those products so you’ll see over the next year more announcements of partnerships to enable entrepreneurs once they’ve raised a lot of money to be more successful. You’ll also see us rolling out even more services to make the whole crowdfunding experience easier for entrepreneurs.
And you’ll start to see us in the beginning of next year exploring more and more with guaranteed shipment of products as we have more established entrepreneurs using Indiegogo, they’re less reliant on the funds that they raised in their campaigns to be able to ship their products and they’re able to actually guarantee that that product will ship. For example, Lego launched their first toy aimed at adults on Indiegogo a couple months ago.
“Aimed” at adults?
I’ve learned from experience not to say that Lego is launching their first adult toy on Indiegogo.
That would be really off-brand for them.
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Watch teams react as NASA’s InSight probe lands on Mars NASA, Florida Today
NASA is back on Mars.
The space agency’s InSight mission survived its fiery plunge through the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere just before 3 p.m. EST Monday, deploying a supersonic parachute and firing retro-rockets to touch down softly on a flat plain near the Martian equator.
Engineers manning consoles at NASA’s Jet Propulsion laboratory in California erupted in cheers, hugs and high-fives at the confirmation that the mission launched nearly seven months earlier was positioned to start the first study of the Red Planet’s interior, from crust to core.
Applause broke out again minutes later when the lander returned its first picture, a dirt-spattered image of a rust-colored and apparently flat horizon.
“It was intense, and you could feel the emotion,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who was in the control room and received a congratulatory phone call from Vice President Mike Pence. “What an amazing day for NASA.”
Viewers gathered at watch parties around the globe to see the landing attempt, which was shown live in New York’s Times Square, among other places. They witnessed NASA’s eighth successful touchdown on Mars.
The $814 million InSight mission launched May 5 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California — NASA’s first interplanetary mission not to fly from Cape Canaveral.
On Monday, the spacecraft dropped its cruise stage a little after 2:30 p.m. and prepared to hit a precisely targeted point in Mars’ upper-atmosphere at 12,300 mph.
That marked the start of what NASA has dubbed “seven minutes of terror” — the plunge to the surface.
A heat shield weathered temperatures up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A parachute braked the spacecraft’s fall to below supersonic speed. The lander then shed the heat shield and a backshell, fired a dozen retro-rockets and deployed three shock-absorbing legs before landing in a cloud of dust.
The mission team learned about each milestone about eight minutes after it happened, the time it took radio signals to travel the 91 million miles back to Earth.
In a “first” for NASA, a crucial communications link was provided by a pair of briefcase-sized experimental satellites called “CubeSats,” which trailed InSight by about 3,000 miles. Named Mars Cube One, or MarCO, the tiny deep space explorers relayed a steady stream of data during the drop to the surface formally known as Entry, Descent and Landing, or EDL.
At JPL, engineers wearing maroon mission shirts and armed with lucky peanuts cheered as telemetry confirmed each event.
The stationary lander is parked in Elysium Planitia, a “heavenly plain” that mission managers hoped would be as flat and rock-free as its name suggests, akin to “a giant Walmart parking lot.”
Insight’s arrival was cause for celebration because it was so difficult to achieve — fewer than half of all missions launched to Mars have reached it.
But the excitement needed to be tempered slightly by a nearly six-hour wait, after a pass by the Mars Odyssey orbiter, to confirm that critical power-generating solar arrays had unfurled properly.
That process was expected to begin after a brief pause to let the dust kicked up by the lander settle.
The landing also marked only the start of the real science mission, which faced a series of early challenges.
“Everything up to now has just been a prologue,” said Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s lead scientist from JPL. “It feels like a climax, but it’s actually the beginning.”
Over several months, InSight will use a robotic arm to deploy several science instruments provided by European partners — the first NASA mission to do so.
A seismometer will measure marsquakes and meteorite strikes, using the waves those events generated by those events to generate a 3-D picture of Mars’ interior.
“When we look at the crust of Mars, that’s a snapshot into the past of what the crust of the Earth might have looked like 4.5 billion years ago before it got all busy,” said Banerdt.
That knowledge will inform understanding of how rocky bodies like the Earth and the moon evolve, as well as planets in other solar systems.
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