Uncrunched

Lots of people are talking about the Superfish malware debacle. People are starting to understand just how bad this situation is.

What I haven’t seen so far why venture capitalists would have backed such a startup.

Superfish investors, board members and advisors include Andrea Stavopouslos (Draper Fisher Jurvestson), Abe Finkelstein (Vintage Investment Partners), Anat Segal (Xenia Venture Capital), Shai Saul (DFJ again) and others.

The company has raised a total of nearly $20 million in venture capital, from people I interact with all the time.

Superfish tells the world they’re a simple visual search startup.

Did these VCs and other individuals, who are on the board of directors and board of advisors, know the truth about Superfish?

If they did, it’s bad. If they didn’t, it’s also bad.

Other startups that use the same SSL intercept module from Komodia include Lavasoft (a free antivirus provider) (now you know why the antivirus is free).

I’d like to see the tech press dig into this. And the venture capitalists involved, particularly the board members, should talk about what they knew and didn’t know.

I finally got around to trying out Circle today. Boy it’s bad. Particularly for a company that has raised $26 million.

This is a space we’re interested in at CrunchFund, and are looking for who might be the breakout winners.

Circle is supposed to be a dead simple Bitcoin wallet and money transfer service. But here’s my experience:

1. I created an account and tried to add my bank account and credit card to deposit money into the system (as Bitcoin). I had to give a lot of personal information. And I had to take a photo of my drivers license. And then I had to take a selfie.

2. I don’t have a huge problem with that since these kinds of services are a huge fraud magnet. But Circle said they needed time to review the information. and here’s the problem, they basically (kind of) shut down my account while they were doing that.

3. This is a bad idea. Why? Because they didn’t actually tell me they were suspending my account. A helpful feature showed me how to receive Bitcoin and so I copied the wallet address and sent myself a Bitcoin from another wallet. I thought, hey, I can still use the service while they figure out my banking situation.

4. The Bitcoin transfer went through and was confirmed in the blockchain. But over at Circle I showed no pending transactions and no confirmed transactions…for hours. No messages that my account was suspended, or why fraud prevention would require them to accept a bitcoin transfer to the address they supplied me but not to tell me about it, even as pending.

5. Then things got weird. When I logged into the mobile app (remember, after I had a confirmed Bitcoin transaction) I saw this:

No sign of the Bitcoin received, either pending or confirmed. But also no suggestion that the account is suspended.

So I logged in from my laptop. And I see this:

Circle actually kicked me out completely with the message “Additional Review Needed”.

But what about that Bitcoin I transferred to the account? It’s clear from the message above that something is very wrong with my account, but that Bitcoin is gone? Where is that Bitcoin? Maybe they shouldn’t have supplied me with a wallet address before they knew if they wanted me as a customer?

6. Meanwhile my friend Nik Cubrilovic tried to send me Bitcoin through Circle and had his own terrible experience, which you can see here. Here’s the tl;dr of that experience:

On the upside Circle wouldn’t let him transfer money into the black hole that is my account. But it was certainly an awful user experience, and an unnecessary one. Just because my selfie wasn’t well lighted enough isn’t a good reason to stop a bitcoin-bitcoin transaction. The account verification stuff is to stop me from moving $ into their network fraudulently, which isn’t happening here.

7. So I go to dinner. Two hours and a bit of Twitter bitching later my account has been un-suspended and I can add my credit card to purchase my weekly limit of $100 worth of Bitcoin. So I do that, and make the purchase. And then I get this:

Overall, I rate Circle zero stars.

Update: Visa has now shut down the credit card I used with Circle. So mare hassle.

Just finished reading about a fairly stupid new book scanning product from Amazon and it reminded me of a product I’d actually really like to have – books that comes in both ebook (text) and audio formats, with tracking and the ability to switch back and forth at will.

I read most of my books on my iPhone 6 plus now. Before that was an iPad. I also listen to audio books in the car and on walks. But sometimes it takes me months to finish a book in the car @ 13-20 hours of audio, and whatever book I’m listening to there in the car is of course a different book than the one I’m reading on my iPhone.

I’d pay a big premium for a combined book format that had both text and audio and allowed me to switch back and forth while reading/listening. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Up until now only iPad/iPhone people could use MTailor, the app that uses your mobile device to scan you more perfectly than any tailor ever could, and have shirts made to your exact measurements.

I last wrote about them in December when CrunchFund invested. Since then they’ve sold a LOT of shirts.

They haven’t started offering pants or suits yet, but once they do they’ll already have your measurements.

People on Android devices were frustrated that they couldn’t use MTailor. Now they won’t be frustrated any more. Get the Android MTailor app here. It launches today.

Detroit. It was once the factory of America.

No more. For most of us, Detroit has been a city in decline for much or all of our lives. The population has declined rapidly, and everyone has seen the images of abandoned buildings, drug violence and abject poverty.

In other words, Detroit is the perfect place to begin anew. There is an energy there as people begin to rebuild. A willingness to experiment. A stubbornness to succeed.

Tech startups can play a pivotal role in rebuilding, but infrastructure is needed. We are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of Detroit based startups looking for venture capital, and there are more venture funds looking to invest there (as well as a few Detroit-based funds looking to make most of their investments in the area).

But there’s more to do. People (like me) who don’t live there need to spend more time there getting to know the community. People in Detroit need to have more places to exchange ideas, and meet outsiders.

That is why I am so happy to be a part of the new reBOOT Detroit tech conference later this year (May 16-19). Other early speakers who have committed to attend include Robert Scoble, Catherine Bracy and Dave McClure. Many more will be added.

This will be a grande conference, complete with hackathon, modeled after TechCrunch Disrupt.

I hope to see you there. Buy tickets here. And I’ll be giving out a handful of free tickets soon as well.