Costanoa Ventures has raised a $175 million fund, the the third fund for the Palo Alto-based venture firm.
With a focus on enterprise technology, Costanoa Ventures typically invests at seed stage and Series A. The new fund brings the total capital for the five-year-old firm to $500 million under management.
Founder and managing partner Greg Sands came from Sutter Hill and before that, was known for coming up with the name Netscape, the dot-com era web browser where he worked.
Sands tells TechCrunch that he’s looking for “companies that are data driven, Saas and the infrastructure that supports them.” He’s also open to opportunities that don’t fit that mold, like their investment in popular flashcard app, Quizlet. Costanoa’s team is “smart enough to recognize a really special opportunity and company when we see it.”
The group emphasizes their hands-on approach, considering themselves particularly involved for an early-stage fund. Operating partners Martina Lauchengco and Jim Wilson help incubate the startups and work with product-oriented founders to build sales and go-to-market strategies.
Antony Brydon, founder and CEO of Directly, provided us this quote. “The Costanoa team started working with us months before we were even thinking about raising a round, working on pricing in our office and introducing us to customers, candidates and collaborators that were deep in our domain. Most investors lean back until they invest; I’ve never met an investor that added so much before they had an ownership stake. They are entrepreneurs as much as investors – they’re looking first and foremost to build something great.”
Most of Costanoa’s investments have been in the United States, but they also have a few portfolio companies in Australia.
Days after Hurricane Irma wreaked havoc across the Caribbean and several U.S. states, government officials and residents are beginning to assess the widespread damage, pick up the pieces, and figure out their next steps. For some Caribbean islands, like Saint Martin, the destruction is nearly total, with evacuations underway as officials try to rebuild basic infrastructure. FEMA reports that 25 percent of all homes in the Florida Keys were destroyed, while 65 percent were significantly damaged.
This photo provided on September 8, 2017, shows storm damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, in Virgin Gorda’s Leverick Bay, in the British Virgin Islands.
(Caribbean Buzz Helicopters via AP)
Last week, the New York Timespublished an article about Hollywood studio executives blaming the influence of Rotten Tomatoes for its failures at the box office. This seemed silly, and it was practically an admission that the movies these execs are making suck. Well, now we have data that shows the critical consensus on movies is not killing profits.
Hollywood is struggling through a particularly rough financial patch at the moment, and it’s…
Yves Bergquist manages the Data & Analytics Project at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center and he’s helpfully looked over the data from Rotten Tomatoes over the last 17 years to give us some firm answers on the correlation between box office returns and fresh ratings.
First, Bergquist checked out how Rotten Tomatoes scores may have impacted theater attendance in 2017, the year these whiny executives are crying about. He pulled the critics and audience scores for the 150 movies released this year that made more than $1 million. Then he compared those scores to the sales receipts and used Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient (PMCC) analysis to figure out if there was a linear correlation to be found. There wasn’t.
Bergquist’s data showed that there was only a 12 percent PMCC correlation between good or bad ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and the amount of money Hollywood raked in. When he just looked at how a film performed on its ever-important opening weekend, that number dropped to 8 percent. Narrowing the field further to the summer season (May through Labor Day), the number fell to 7 percent.
More damning to Hollywood’s case that snobby professional critics are turning off the audience is the fact that critics have been fairly kind to the movies this year. From Bergquist’s post:
Overall, Rotten Tomatoes scores for all movies grossing more than $2 million worldwide have been pretty stable since 2000: the median score was 51 during the 2000s and 53 during the 2010s so far. It’s actually gone up quite significantly from 2015 (46.5) until 2017 (71).
So, not only are critical scores going up but the median box office is going up with it—$26.6 million in 2015 versus $66.1 million in 2017.
What’s most shocking about Bergquist’s data analysis is that audiences and professional critics are actually reporting nearly the same scores for movies. In 2017, there was an 87 percent correlation between the pros and general audience’s scores for films on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s up from 76 percent in 2013. There are three possibilities going on here: audiences’ level of reading a film is falling into line with critics; Rotten Tomatoes is including more critics that align with audience’s general taste; or both.
Based on this selection from the New York Times, the case for a wider professional critics pool seems pretty strong:
[Fandango president Paul] Yanover rejected [complaints that Rotten Tomatoes casts too wide of a critical net], pointing to the site’s posted requirements. (“Online critics must have published no less than 100 reviews across two calendar years at a single, Tomatometer-approved publication,” for instance.) He also noted that critics at traditional outlets tended to be white men and that Rotten Tomatoes wanted to include female and minority voices.
It’s possible that Rotten Tomatoes is bringing in less-snobby voices and that media-savvy audiences are raising their standards. Bergquist leans towards the latter in his interpretation of the data, he writes, “And I don’t care how old you are, you’re a film expert: how many hours of film and TV have you consumed since birth?”
So, if critics and audiences are actually responding pretty warmly to what Hollywood is producing, and median profits are up, what’s to blame for falling profits? The data points suggest that budgets are to blame. From the 1970s to the 2010s, there was a growing correlation between a film’s production budget and its box office returns. In 2014, that correlation hit 88 percent as opposed to 44 percent in the ‘70s. But that relationship has begun to decline, and in 2017 it dropped to 77 percent. This year, there were 30 more releases with budgets over $100 million than there were in 2016. Those 11 percentage points are a big deal when you’re dealing with billions of dollars.
The area in which audiences’ and professional critics’ scores are diverging the most actually comes in the area of production budgets. The correlation between a films budget and its audience score was 58 percent this year, as opposed to 77 percent from critics. The pro critics are being far kinder to the CGI-heavy blockbusters than audiences!
Bergquist suggests that the novelty of more realistic special effects is wearing off with audiences and promises more data soon about why old-fashioned storytelling could be the secret to future success. You can see the full report right here.
There is now another paper on this theme by Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb, abstract:
In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. Across a broad range of case studies at various levels of (dis)aggregation, we find that ideas — and in particular the exponential growth they imply — are getting harder and harder to find. Exponential growth results from the large increases in research effort that offset its declining productivity.
Image: Me reading this damn list of episodes. via TrekCore
I will be the first person to declare my love of the wildly uneven Star Trek: Voyager above the rest of Star Trek (actually that’s a lie, because my colleague Katharine has beaten me to the punch on this severaltimes). But friends: collectively, we are re-watching far too much Voyager on Netflix.
In celebration of the impending arrival of Star Trek: Discovery, Netflix has revealed an internal study of all the ways we’ve consumed over 536 hours of boldly going where, actually, many people have gone before. Most interestingly, the streaming service tallied up the most re-watched Trek episodes of all time and the results will, for once, make using a “set phasers to stunned” joke totally worth it. Because we’re re-watching Trek in the weirdest damn way.
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There’s a few specific criteria here—Netflix counts a “re-watch” as a viewer going back to watch at least 6 minutes of an episode they had already viewed in its entirety, and the first two episodes of a series were culled from the results as they were, unsurprisingly, the most popular by an overwhelming margin. But what’s left after that for the 10 most re-watched episodes after that is a frankly alarming collection of episodes.
Image: Netflix
Some of these are obvious: The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds” is widely considered one of the greatest Trek stories of all time. And the overwhelming presence of TNG and Voyager is mostly thanks to episodes that feature the Borg, the franchise’s most iconic villains—or revolve around Seven of Nine. But look at this list. Not a single episode of Enterprise is maybe understandable, but no original series? No Deep Space Nine!? At least that one might be explained by the fact that people are simply watching larger amounts of it given its more serialized nature, instead of going back to revisit one-off episodes. Less explainable is why the hell “Clues”—the TNG episode where the crew passes through a wormhole and realizes they’ve been manipulated by a race of Xenophobic aliens trying to keep their planet hidden from outsides—is here above, like, almost any other episode of TNG.
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Remember “Time and Again,” one of the first “proper” episodes of Voyager that saw the crew go back in time to the day before an accident wipes out an entire planet’s civilization? And that said civilization probably deserved it because of that one insanely annoying kid and for literally all of their clothing being various shades of orange, mustard, scarlet, and taupe? Apparently you do, because you re-watch it a lot. And who the hell is skipping all the way back to the end of Voyager just to re-view its finale “Endgame” so much? Spoilers: they get back to Earth, you guys. Stop re-watching it.
There is so much Star Trek to revist on Netflix right now—and in a few weeks, a whole new series in the franchise to discover. What we’re apparently choosing to return to instead is a little disconcerting, to be honest.
you’ll want to have when you can no longer boot into your PC.
Imagine issues like hard drive failure, virus infections, partitioning, password recovery, and data recovery. Hiren’s Boot CD is a Godsend in situations like these. It has a multitude of tools divided into a number of categories like partitioning tools, backup, recovery, and BIOS/CMOS tools to name a few.
Be prepared for serious problems with your PC and upgrade your PC repair toolkit. by having some important repair tools in your toolkit. Here’s how you can set it up and use it.
Download and Burn Hiren’s Boot CD
Since Hiren’s Boot CD (hereafter abbreviated as HBCD) works as a bootable utility, you can’t just install it like a standard program. Instead, you have to burn it to a CD or a USB device if you don’t have any blank CDs around.
Get started by visiting the HBCD download page. Scroll down to the yellow-shaded box near the bottom of the page and click the link next to Filename. You’ll start downloading a large ZIP file (about 600MB). When it’s done, extract the contents.
to create a bootable disc, or just use the basic one included in the ZIP folder.
To use the included tool, open the BurnCDCC.exe file. Click Browse next to the File Image box and browse to the ISO file from the HBCD folder. Make sure Device lists your CD/DVD drive. You don’t have to check any of the other available options, and leaving the speed as Optimal is fine. Click Start, and when the burner is done you’ll have a ready-to-use copy of HBCD.
. Insert your USB device and run the app — it’s portable so you don’t have to install anything. Select its name from the Device drop-down box. Make sure to choose the correct one so you don’t accidentally delete another.
The default option of MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI is fine. Select FAT32 for the file system. Check the Quick Format box, then change the option next to Create a bootable disk using to ISO Image. Select the little CD icon next to this box and browse to the location of the ISO file in the HBCD folder. Give it a new name if you like, and click Start when ready.
When the process completes, you’ll see DONE in the bottom-left corner of the window. Click Close and you’re done — you’ve installed HBCD on your flash drive.
As soon as you turn on your computer, look for a prompt such as Press ESC for boot options or Press F12 to boot from USB device. It’s different for every computer, so you may have to try a few times to catch it. When you find out what button loads the boot menu, continually tap it as soon as your computer turns on until you see a menu that lets you select from a list of devices.
Here, look for your CD or USB device. It should be fairly obvious which one is the right choice — don’t boot from your hard drive or any network option. Use the arrow keys to select a device and Enter to select it. After a few moments, you’ll see the main screen of HBCD appear.
What Can Hiren’s Boot CD Do?
Now that you’ve booted in, let’s take a look at the tools that HBCD provides you.
Booting Into an Operating System
Boot from Hard Drive will simply boot your computer as normal. Mini Windows Xp launches a lightweight copy of Windows XP that you can use to browse files on the host machine, access a Command Prompt, and more.
Pop open the HBCD Menu app and you can use the variety of tools that the disc includes. You’ll find command line versions of Avira Antivirus, CCleaner, a Registry backup, the PC Decrapifier, and more.
Why Windows XP Won’t Be Going Away Anytime Soon People cannot let go of Windows XP. In businesses and homes the world over, it will stick around. We spoke with three Windows XP users from different generations and backgrounds to find out why. Read More
if you’d rather use Windows than a Linux disc to do so.
Back on the main menu, select Dos Programs to load up some command line utilities. You’ll see a list including Partition Tools, Recovery Tools, and more. Choosing the Linux based rescue environment option will provide many options; you can just select Start to load it up.
Recovery Utilities
If you can’t find the tool you need inside one of the above buckets, HBCD includes tons of additional tools on its main menu. Try the Windows Memory Diagnostic and/or MemTest86+ to check for problems with your RAM. If you’ve forgotten a password, the Offline Password Changer might be your ticket back into an account. Kon-Boot is supposed to help you bypass the login screen but it just booted into Windows in my testing.
Seagate DiscWizard encountered an error upon opening. PLoP Boot Manager and Smart Boot Manager let you select a device to boot from if your PC isn’t doing so properly. Fix “NTLDR is Missing” is a self-explanatory utility to fix this booting issue. Darik’s Boot and Nuke is a powerful tool for irrecoverably obliterating everything on a hard drive 4 Ways to Completely Delete Your HDD
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.
Use this with caution!
Custom Menu
The item labeled Custom Menu says that you can use HBCDCustomizer to add your own files, but it contains a huge helping of tools on its own. You’ll find rescue CDs from several different antivirus providers, Clonezilla for cloning disks, partition tools,
multiple distributions of Linux, drive wipers, and more. If something isn’t in here, chances are you don’t need it!
The utilities we discussed above are the most important. Below these is a page of options for booting specific hard drive partitions. This is useful if you’ve set up separate sets of data or operating systems on different partitions, but the average user won’t need them. The end of the list contains Reboot and Shutdown commands.
Hiren’s Boot CD Could Save You
The latest version of Hiren’s Boot CD, 15.2, was released in late 2012. This means that it’s significantly out of date, and it shows with the old versions of Windows and Linux included on the disc. Further, none of these tools are proven compatible with Windows 10. However, while using this recovery disc isn’t an aesthetically pleasing experience and not every tool will work for sure, it still packs lots of useful tools into one package.
Anyone with a spare USB drive or CD should certainly take a few minutes to burn a copy and put it in their desk or computer bag. The average user can probably accomplish most of what they’ll need using the mini Windows XP environment or one of the Linux distros, which is great. You’ll be happy that you prepared it when you need a rescue disc 5 Best Rescue Disks For A Windows System Restore
5 Best Rescue Disks For A Windows System Restore Every Windows user should be aware of at least one bacon-saving, data-recovering system restore disk. It can help you access your computer to make repairs and backups, even when it won’t boot. Read More
Have you used Hiren’s Boot CD to get out of a jam? What included utilities are your favorite? Tell us what you like about it — or suggest an alternative — down in the comments!
Originally written by Varun Kashyap on 25 February 2010.
NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ—Offering immediate, over-the-counter relief to anyone suffering from a sudden misalignment of the four temperaments, Tylenol released its new black bile gel caps on Tuesday for people with unbalanced humors. “Simply take two bile caps when you feel a choleric disposition coming on, and you’ll start to notice harmony restored to the body and spirit within minutes,” said spokesperson Jamie Suarez, adding that each capsule is filled with enough of the melancholic element to draw out any predominance of yellow bile, blood, or phlegm, restoring physical, mental, and emotional vitality for up to 12 hours. “In addition to black bile gummies for children, it will also come in an extra-strength formula for people whose infirmities of constitution stem from even the most severe manners of dyscrasia and bodily imbalances.” Suarez went on to say that Tylenol has plans to complement the gel caps with soon-to-be-released home bloodletting and fire cupping kits.
After years of penalizing players for showboating after a score, the NFL has finally let up on its strict endzone celebration rules. ESPN sat down with a player who knows the drillall too well to get his opinion, and to announce his un-retirement.
The search for the right shop system is often a tedious one. Which system is suitable, and offers all the functions and options that I need? nopCommerce stands out here, due to its comfortable, straightforward and clean interface and beautiful shop designs. Thus, it’s worth taking a look at this e-commerce system, which is also in use by several popular brands. nopCommerce is distributed as open source.
Safe, Stable and Expendable
With over 27,000 installations, nopCommerce is pretty popular. The system has been in development since 2008 and is currently available in version 3.90. With all that experience and success, it is understandable that the developers are confident enough to state that nopCommerce is one of the safest and most stable e-commerce systems out there.
Default View of the Shop With Product Sliders
In addition to the already vast scope of functions, there’s a marketplace that lets you expand nopCommerce in any way you like. For instance, you’ll find market themes to give your shop a new look, as well as many functional extensions.
Clear and Clean Backend
Among other things, you’ll find widgets that allow you to promote offers or price reductions. You can add different payment methods, and add services for parcel delivery. Many extensions are free; some have to be paid for. The selection is broad and leaves little to be desired.
Download and Installation
The source code of nopCommerce has an impressive weight of 115 MB. After a free registration, download said code as a zipped archive. Since nopCommerce was developed using ASP.NET, a Windows server with IIS is required. MS SQL is the only possible database system.
Microsoft’s web platform installer easily installs nopCommerce on your server. Aside from the front end with the shop, there’s a capable, feature-rich, yet clean backend to manage your products, orders, and customers.
Extensive Product Management With Many Features For Clients
A comfortable and powerful product management is essential for any online shop. nopCommerce not only allows you to add meaningful images and descriptions to products, and categorize them. It also lets you set up a product in different versions. This means that a shoe in different sizes only needs to be created as a product once, and then you get to define the various characteristics of that shoe. These can be the already mentioned different sizes, colors, or materials. Price adjustments for individual versions are possible as well.
Default Product Overview
Tracking the stock is another important aspect of a working e-commerce system. With nopCommerce, you get to choose if you want the stock to be tracked for every single product. Of course, with products in different versions, you get to manage the stock separately for each version.
Produkt View in the Backend
To simplify shipping, there’s also an option to enter the measurements and the weight of the product.
Digital Products For Download
When working with digital products like e-books or music, nopCommerce is a well-equipped shop system for you as well. In the end, nopCommerce doesn’t care whether products are sent via email or another physical way of delivery, or made available for download after payment.
You can also sell your music via nopCommerce, for example. Each product can be labeled as a digital product. Subsequently, the respective file is uploaded, and nopCommerce takes care of the rest.
Comparing and Remembering Products
The client gains a lot of information via the many characteristics that you can add to your products. As a unique feature, nopCommerce offers a product comparison. To do that, customers select multiple products from the shop, which will then be displayed next to each other.
Product View in the Frontend
Those that don’t want to purchase right away can add products to a wishlist, allowing them to add them to the cart at a later point.
When a customer finds a product that one of his friends might like, he can send the link to the product page to that friend via email.
Easier and Faster Checkout
Often, the customer’s shop experience cringes at checkout. Unfortunately, this is the point where the actual purchase is made. Checkouts are too complicated or too arduous in many cases. If a customer has to go through a tedious registration process before being able to purchase anything, that alone can be a lethal obstacle.
Selection of the Checkout Method
Thus, nopCommerce took some precautions here. Aside from the classic checkout, a so-called anonymous checkout is possible, too. Of course, it’s not completely anonymous. Nonetheless, your customers can order without having to create a customer account. Personal information is only recorded for this one order.
The so-called one-page checkout unites all information for the checkout on one page, reducing the number of purchase cancellations, which are a pretty common occurrence on multi-page checkouts.
Over 50 Payment Methods
In a lot of cases, purchases in shops fail when it comes to payment. Here, every consumer has their preference on how they wish to pay. If the preferred method of payment is not included, they’ll look for another shop that accommodates their desire better. To prevent this from happening to you, nopCommerce offers more than 50 payment methods.
This includes classics, such as paying via credit card or payment on delivery. Many payment providers, PayPal, and others are included as well. If you run a brick-and-mortar store besides your online shop, you can also offer the method “pay in store.” Here, the customers order online, but pick up the product at your physical location.
Shipping and Calculation of Shipping Cost
nopCommerce also cares for shipping. The delivery costs are calculated based on the measurements and the weight of the product. This allows you to ship your product as affordable as possible.
Overview of the Orders in the Backend
To be able to track shipping from your shop system, you can integrate providers like UPS or DHL. To do so, you need an account with the service that the shipping is taken care off by. Then, you’ll always see the status of your shipments.
Marketing, Marketing, Marketing
Unfortunately, good products and prices alone are not enough. They also need to be communicated accordingly. Thus, marketing is of particular importance in e-commerce. nopCommerce provides plenty of options here.
One classic are bonus points that you can credit to your customers for their purchases. These points can then be spent in a future order.
Discounts and coupons are a welcome reason to revisit a shop as well. Here, you have the choice between relative and absolute discounts. It’s also difficult to imagine an online shop without the option to rate products and write reviews. And you need not, as nopCommerce covers this perfectly.
Managing Marketing Campaigns from the Backend
nopCommerce has many other marketing tools for you – ranging from newsletters to gift cards. In the market place, there are tons of other options as well.
Conference in November
The “nopCommerce Days” in November are a sign of how actively nopCommerce is being developed. The two-day conference deals with the current and future development of the e-commerce system. Aside from technological aspects, like the optimization of 3rd party extensions, and the integration into WordPress, the question how an online shop can be turned into a real business is one of the topics.
The “nopCommerce days” take place on the 16th and 17th of November in New York. One of the keynote speakers is Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman.