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Monday marks the start of the MLB All-Star break, the only stretch of the year during which none of the four major sports are in action. But that doesn’t mean sports bettors are taking the night off. Online sportsbook Bovada for Monday’s Home Run Derby, offering an idea of how the competition is expected to shake out. We don’t encourage betting money on a meaningless exhibition event like the Derby, but the betting odds provide some interesting food for thought about the upcoming competition.

As of noon Monday, Marlins slugger Giancarlo Stanton is the odds-on favorite in the Derby with 3/1 odds. Stanton has 21 home runs on the season, tied for fifth-most among MLB players. None of the four players ahead of him – Jose Abreu, Nelson Cruz, Edwin Encarnacion and Mike Trout – are competing Monday night, though Stanton will be up against fellow NL All-Star Troy Tulowitzki, who also has 21 long balls on the year, and Athletics’ third baseman Josh Donaldson, who has 20.

Perhaps the most curious odds belong to Yasiel Puig who, along with Yoenis Cespedes, is just behind Stanton with 5/1 odds. Puig is a prodigious talent, but the young Cuban star isn’t exactly mashing the ball this year, with just 12 home runs on the season, fewest among this year’s Derby contestants.

This year’s competition also features former winners in Cespedes, who took last year’s Home Run Derby, and 2008 victor Justin Morneau. Of course past wins are no guarantee of future performance: won in 2011, then failed to hit a single homer in the following year’s competition.

There is a three-way tie for the longest odds to win among Adam Jones, Todd Frazier and Brian Dozier, who are all at 12/1. The low odds of winning are likely more associated with a lack of national popularity than power hitting; Frazier has 19 homers on the year and Dozier is close behind at 18, good for the fourth- and fifth-most among Derby competitors, respectively.

Other Derby-related bets on Bovada include the winner’s league (the NL is favored at -130 to the AL’s even odds), which player will have the most first-round homers (Stanton is favored at 3/1) or who will hit the longest bomb of the opening round (Stanton again, at 11/4). There’s also a long list of player-vs-player showdowns for those interested in predicting the better competitor between Stanton and Tulowitzi, or even Frazier and Dozier. We once again don’t suggest betting on the Derby, but those interested in the latter bet would be smart to remember that Dozier will be in his home park.

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Lyft Will Not Launch In New York Today, Company Says It Will Work With Taxi Commission

New Yorkers hoping to catch a ride with Lyft today are out of luck.
The company said via email and on its blog that it’s putting off its NYC launch. Lyft had announced launch plans for Brooklyn and Queens earlier this week, and it said yesterday that it would move forward with those plans despite the fact that the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission said the service did not comply with safety and licensing rules.
Now it looks like the company wasn’t able to hold to that stance. It wrote on its blog:

Today we agreed in New York State Supreme Court to put off the launch of Lyft’s peer-to-peer model in New York City and we will not proceed with this model unless it complies with New York City Taxi and Limousine regulations. We will meet with the TLC beginning Monday to work on a new version of Lyft that is fully-licensed by the TLC, and we will launch immediately upon the TLC’s approval. This is a positive step forward and a good demonstration of compromise in balancing innovation with government regulation, and we appreciate the continued efforts of New York City government to find common ground for the betterment of New York.

One of the stranger things about this story is a dispute about whether or not the state Supreme Court issued an injunction today. The New York Attorney General’s office says the court did issue an injunction while Lyft says there was no injunction or restraining order — “the judge adjourned to Monday because we agreed to hold our launch and maintain status quo.” The company goes on to call the attorney general’s claim “a deliberate misstatement.”

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Instagram Direct Isn’t Dead, The Messaging Feature Has 45 Million Users

Seven months after launching Instagram Direct, 45 million of Instagram’s 200 million users are actively sending or opening Direct messages, the company tells me. This 23% monthly usage rate indicates Direct is far from stillborn. While I haven’t seen or heard of many friends using the ephemeral private sharing channel, it may be quietly gaining steam with those who use Instagram as their primary social network, or small groups looking for more intimacy than the feed.

Prior to the launch when sources told us an ephemeral Instagram messaging feature was on the way, I said it was wise move for four reasons. Direct could:

Box out private and ephemeral messaging competitors like Snapchat,
Use notifications to inspire return visits better than photos that get lost in the forgettable feed
Grow Instagram overall by creating another reason to sign-up
Unlock sharing of content types unfit for broadcasting to hundreds of millions of people

The last is the most important, and what I suspect is driving Direct’s growth. Whether it’s a goofy face, a flirty smile, a crass joke, or just everyday conversation, Direct creates a medium for a much wider range of photos than what gets publicly published on Instagram. In private, you don’t have to look perfect, capture the most stunningly filtered sunset, or show off your grandiose lifestyle. Micro-sharing one-on-one or to smaller groups of close friends lets us be ourselves.

So Who Is Using Instagram Direct?

A few days after Instagram Direct launched I questioned whether it was doomed. None of my friends were using it. It was awkward to have a visual conversation because each photo or video reply started its own thread. And it didn’t feel different enough from sharing via Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, or even text.

Not Us

I may have succumb to judging an international product’s success by my atypical social graph of more mature, hardcore tech users. Many of my friends were on Facebook and Twitter since the early days. They frequent Snapchat, and use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and more chat services already. Most importantly, Instagram isn’t their primary social network. They’re interested in knowledge sharing through text and links, not just easily digested photos and videos.

My graph is far from representative, though. There are plenty of people out there who live and breathe Instagram. Tired of the drama, inanity, boring links, and ads on Facebook, they use Instagram as their social network. They aren’t necessarily avid Snapchat or messaging app users. To them, Direct is a convenient way to communicate because they already spend so much time in Instagram and that’s where their friends are. Direct could be flourishing with these loyal users.

Groups

Who else? An Instagram executive told me a few months back that Direct was gaining steam with small groups. Some were based around interests, like a tight-knit community of photography enthusiasts using Direct to get feedback on their shots.
Others groups were just cliques of friends who wanted to make sure their besties saw their ‘grams. Since the app has an unfiltered feed, it’s easy to lose track of close friends if you follow too many people or they don’t post that often. Direct’s read receipts show whether friends have viewed a shot you sent them, so you’re not just sharing into the darkness.
This type of micro-sharing opens up more informal content types with a lower barrier to creation. Direct lets people share more types of photos more often…just to fewer people. And as long as that keeps users coming back to the app, taking photos, and browsing the feed where it shows ads, Direct micro-sharing could be a win for Instagram.

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Investments In The UK Surge To Nearly $1B As London Is Calling

London’s TechTicle's invasion is coming to an end, but the rollick wrought by our roving band of reporters is nothing compared to the party that startups and investors are having in Shoreditch and Camden town these days.
For the first half of the year, investors have poured nearly $1 billion into UK-based startups. In all $911 million has been invested in the UK, up from $362 million in the year-ago period, according to data from TechTicle.

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Rap Genius Raises $40M, Changes Name To Genius, Launches Embeddable Annotations

Rap Genius made three big moves today to further its goal to annotate the world. The founders tell me it’s raised a $40 million Series B led by Dan Gilbert and joined by previous investor Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation under $1 billion. It also changed its name to Genius.com and is launching embeddable annotations so any website can hover over text and see explanations and background info on what that text means. You can see a demo run of the embeds on Business Insider’s deep dive into the company.
Genius‘ big new investor Gilbert is the founder and chairman of Rock Ventures and Quicken Loans, plus the majority owner of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers. He’s know to many as a champion of Detroit’s rebirth.
The new funding brings Genius to $56.8 million in total, which it plans to spend hiring engineers, designers, and community leaders. The new Genius name will make it more accessible and intelligible to communities reading and writing annotations outside of rap. And the new self-serve embeddable annotations will give it a powerful way to gain widespread exposure while helping news sites and more offer a unique format for sharing information.

A look at Genius' new embeddable annotions, as seen on Business Insider

Rap Genius launched in 2009, originally as a place to explain the esoteric metaphors and allusions of rap lyrics, but it had a larger ambition to annotate all sorts of texts from legal documents to poetry to news.
The scrappy Y Combinator startup stunned the world in 2012 when it raised a $15 million Series A led by prestigious investor Andreessen Horowitz. Partner Ben Horowitz, an avid rap fan, had dreamed of annotating the web with his old company Netscape. Technical limitations of the 90′s made that impossible, so he invested in Genius to make it a reality.
The startup has since been involved in several scandals, including being temporarily demoted in Google’s search results for using link spam to improve its rank, though it got much of its SEO swag back after apologizing. In May it forced its co-founder Mahbod Moghadam to resign after he used Rap Genius to leave insensitive annotations on Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger’s manifesto.

Now it seems the company and its remaining founders have bounced back.

Rap Genius Founders Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory (From Left)

With the money, name, and embeddable annotations in place, Genius is poised to significantly grow the traffic that it monetizes with ads.
Previously, Genius was at the mercy of SEO, battling older lyric sites for the top result spots for queries like “Kanye Blood On The Leaves Lyrics.” Earlier this year it tested out guided tests of embeddable annotations, but soon they’ll become a self-serve tool any site can use without needing assistance. Annotations featured on other sites could drive Genius extra referral traffic. The company also launched an iPhone app earlier this year that also helps ween the startup off of Google’s teat.
Many said that a couple of troublemaking Yale students weren’t fit to run a well-funded startup. It’s taken a few stumbles and one less founder to get here, but Genius tells me “we’re psyched to pursue our mission of global annotation with newfound vigor.”

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Yahoo Acquires Video Streaming Platform RayV

Following rumors of talks going as far back as May, we’d been hearing whispers all morning that Yahoo had finally acquired the video broadcasting platform RayV.
Sure enough, it’s just been made official.

Built in 2005 as something of a Joost competitor, RayV’s specialty lies in delivering high-quality video streams to a lot of people. Yahoo is in the middle of a huge effort to up their video game, doing things like reviving Community to prove they’re in it — so this move to improve their video streaming tech makes a lot of sense (especially after Yahoo’s attempts to nab Hulu or DailyMotion both fell apart).
Details of the deal are still under wraps; as usual, we’re digging for more and will update this story if/when we hear anything else. RayV had raised roughly $16M to date.

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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Misfit, Android Wear, And Samsung Earnings

After taking a week off for the holidays (sorry about that), we’re back to chat up the latest news in the Gadgets world. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much.
That said, Samsung had some disappointing earnings, and Misfit forged a partnership with Beddit to get into the platform space. Plus, we simply can’t help ourselves from talking about smart watches, including the latest Android Wear from Samsung.
We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast featuring Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, and Darrell Etherington.
Have a good Friday, everybody!

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Apple Opens Up With A New Blog About Swift, Its New Programming Language

Times, they are a-changin’: Apple just launched a blog about Swift, its new programming language that makes it easier to build applications for iOS and Mac OS X.
This marks a new period of openness for the famously walled-in tech giant. While it’s certainly not the same as Apple showing off a product before it’s ready to come to market — a fairly standard practice at rival Google — it shows that Apple recognizes that it can’t keep developers, whose apps are one of the key differentiators in the smartphone and tablet markets, in the dark about what it’s doing until the last second.
In this case, it seems Apple has specifically chosen Swift as a topic where it’s acceptable to be a bit less secretive because A) it plans to eventually migrate developers from primarily using Objective-C to using Swift to develop apps for its platforms and B) the language is technically still in development, so being open lets them get more feedback on its design.
Developers are openly showing their surprise at the change in behavior on Twitter

As for the content of the blog itself, there’s only one post at the moment. It has to do with a concern some iOS and Mac OS X developers had with using Swift in actual production code: if the language is still under development, does that mean our apps might break in the future?

Apparently, that’s not an issue. From Apple’s post:

Simply put, if you write a Swift app today and submit it to the App Store this Fall when iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are released, you can trust that your app will work well into the future. In fact, you can target back to OS X Mavericks or iOS 7 with that same app. This is possible because Xcode embeds a small Swift runtime library within your app’s bundle. Because the library is embedded, your app uses a consistent version of Swift that runs on past, present, and future OS releases.

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Twitter’s New Analytics Tell Advertisers And Publishers How Many People Actually Saw Their Tweets

If you’re looking for more details about how all of your tweets are doing, Twitter today released a new analytics dashboard for advertisers, Twitter Card publishers, and verified users.
The company already gave its advertisers data about tweets that they’d paid to promote, covering things like impressions, replies, and link clicks, but there was nothing equivalent for “organic” tweets, i.e., regular, non-promoted messages. So the new dashboard offers a broader view of an account’s entire Twitter strategy.
That comprehensive view is important from an ad perspective because, as Twitter’s Buster Benson noted in today’s blog post, Twitter’s ads are just organic tweets that advertisers have paid to promote to a specific audience.
The new dashboard includes data like total impressions, total engagements and engagement rates for each tweet, and also aggregates that data for the past month, showing you how you’ve been doing compared to past months.

Benson wrote that Twitter also looked at the data for “200 active brand advertisers” and found some patterns. One of the big messages was just to tweet often: “Tweet consistency is a key factor when it comes to maximizing your organic reach on Twitter.” Other “best practices” include:

Pay attention to when you tweet. Note which time of day and day of the week yields the highest engagement and impressions.

Analyze the frequency of your Tweets. Use your new insights to determine your Tweet cadence.

Identify what Tweet mechanics work, and which aren’t as effective. Keep an eye on elements like different calls to action, the inclusion of rich media and copy length.

The dashboard definitely got the attention of some TechCrunch writers, who are poking around their data as I write this. Hey, it’s one of the perks of being verified — and if you’re not verified, well, you can always create an advertiser account.
You can read more on the Twitter blog.

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FCC Approves Billions To Bring Wi-Fi To More American Schools

American schools are set to receive billions in federal dollars to bring Wi-Fi to more kids.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today approved, by a 3-2 vote, a new plan that will deploy $2 billion over a two-year period to bring increased wireless Internet capabilities to schools. The program will impact at least 10 million kids each year.
The larger E-Rate program that helped get nearly all American schools Internet access has an annual budget of $2.4 billion. The Wi-Fi monies come on top of that tally.
It almost didn’t happen. Republican members of the Commission found the original $5 billion plan too expensive, and Democrats wanted the full amount. The smaller figure failed to unite the opposing sides, and the final vote was executed according to party affiliation.
The FCC, in an email, noted that the passed plan does “target” the original $5 billion amount that Commissioner Ajit Pai stated would “blow a $2.7 billion hole” in E-Rates’ budget.

Complaint was also raised about how the money would be spent in terms of the breakdown of its rural and urban divide, and whether the new plan sufficiently reformed the bureaucratic overhead that the E-Rate program currently endures. Spoiler: Not everyone is convinced.
Despite complaint from various angles, the Democratic portion of the Commission managed to find enough common ground to pass the effort.
In the end, FCC Chairman Wheeler stated that passing the plan was a “good day’s work,” given the impact it will have on kids. That’s correct, but there is enough tang in the vote to indicate that something bigger was perhaps within reach.

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So Who Is Using Instagram Direct?

Not Us

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