Ooma moves into smart home security with face recognition cameras

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Ooma has built its reputation with internet phones over the past 14 years. Now the company is expanding into home security with smart devices that use artificial intelligence and face recognition.

It’s not such a big leap from smart communication to smart home security, but it’s a crowded market. Ooma will compete with the likes of Netgear, which has earned the No. 1 spot in security cameras with its Arlo products in the U.S., according to market researcher the NPD Group.

Undeterred, Ooma today announced its own security products at CES 2018, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas. The Ooma Home security system includes a smart video camera with AI for facial and audio recognition. It also features geofencing capabilities to automatically arm and disarm it, and you can customize the radius to suit your needs.

In addition to the security camera and geofencing feature, Ooma is releasing a siren and smoke detector. The new siren has a 100-decibel alarm that sounds when a sensor is triggered while it’s armed.

The certified smoke detector works with Ooma Home to alert homeowners when smoke is detected, whether they are at home or not. Ooma is also announcing integration with the VTech garage door sensor to alert homeowners if their garage door is left open.

“Ooma continues to push the innovation envelope in the smart home category by enabling new services like Ooma Home, the most complete and affordable DIY home security solution for protecting family and property,” said Ooma CEO Eric Stang, in a statement. “By adding a smart video camera, geofencing, and brand new wireless sensors, integrated with our unique Remote 911 emergency response, we’re providing safety, security, and peace of mind to families throughout North America.”

Ooma’s new Butterfleye AI-powered video camera is a wire-free security camera that learns from what is going on around it. It is able to detect and recognize people, pets, and sounds and will continue working even during internet and power outages. The video camera also features advanced battery technology, 16GB of internal storage, and onboard image processing.

Ooma Home security already includes motion, water, door, and window sensors and a Remote 911 call feature to connect users with their local emergency services dispatcher from anywhere in the world.

You can easily customize the system with a variety of real-time notifications, including phone calls, SMS, email alerts, and app notifications. You can also program the sensors to trigger the Butterfleye video camera to record, and its facial recognition technology minimizes false alarms triggered by pets or loud noises.

Ooma Home Security also allows you to set up your garage door, smoke detector, and siren using the Ooma Home Security Mobile App for iOS and Android mobile devices.

In the U.S., the video camera sells for $200, the water sensor for $30, the motion sensor for $35, and the door and window sensors for $25 each. The garage door sensor is another $30, the smoke detector is $60, and the siren is $40. The products will ship in the first quarter of 2018.

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iHome unveils bedside alarm clock powered by Google Assistant

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Going way back to 2005, SDI Technologies off-shoot iHome built its home audio reputation off the back of the iH5 iPod docking station that doubled as a clock radio. More than 10 years later, iHome now offers a range of speakers and headphone systems for myriad use cases, among those a fledgling line of voice-activated radio alarm clocks.

Now, following the Alexa-powered iAVS16 alarm clock launch last September, iHome is debuting a Google Assistant-powered counterpart.

Priced at $140 — $10 less than the iAVS16 — the iHome iGV1 sports many of the same features as the Alexa incarnation, including voice-controllable access to streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora. It can also be integrated with the broader smart home, meaning you could turn your bedroom lights on, activate your thermostat, or start up the coffee machine downstairs.

Above: iHome iGV1

The iGV1 isn’t the first Google Assistant-powered smart speaker for the bedroom, as the recently launched $100 Insignia offers something similar with its always-on clock display. And it’s easy enough to configure the Google Home itself to serve as your bedside alarm clock. However, the iGV1 sports a good old-fashioned physical snooze button, similar to the Alexa-powered iAVS16. So if you’ve had a rough night and your voice is a little croakier than usual, you can just reach over and smack the top of the speaker to deactivate your alarm.

The iGV1 also comes with both Bluetooth and Google Cast functionality, giving you additional streaming options for your music, while a built-in USB port lets you charge any devices by the side of your bed.

The global smart speaker industry is projected to hit around $13 billion by 2024, and it’s clear that Amazon and Google are locking horns to corner the lucrative market, while Apple’s HomePod launch remains delayed.

To truly scale their digital assistants, the big tech firms have had to open up access to third-party hardware makers — the Google Assistant SDK launched for developers and device makers in the U.S. last April and was expanded to several more markets a few weeks back. It’s unlikely that Google would have launched an alarm clock with a snooze button on it, but embracing third-party manufacturers and developers means consumers will naturally get more choices.

“The smart home market is growing at an incredible pace over the next five years,” predicted Gary Schultz, director of product and business development at iHome. “Much of that growth is being fueled by the proliferation of smart home devices from brands like iHome that offer products that support popular smart home platforms like Google Assistant.”

The iGV1 will go on sale in the U.S. “soon.”

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Apple shareholders urge company to address iPhone addiction in children

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(Reuters) — Apple shareholders Jana Partners and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System are urging the smartphone maker to take steps to address what they say is a growing problem of young people getting addicted to Apple’s iPhones, Jana partner Charles Penner said.

Jana, a leading activist shareholder, and CalSTRS, one of the nation’s largest public pension plans, delivered a letter to Apple on Saturday asking the company to consider developing software that would allow parents to limit children’s phone use, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Sunday.

Jana and CalSTRS also asked Apple to study the impact of excessive phone use on mental health, according to the publication.

CalSTRS and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Jana and CalSTRS together control about $2 billion worth of Apple shares, the Journal reports.

The social rights issue is a new turn for Jana, which is known for pushing companies it invests in to make financial changes.

However, the issue of phone addiction among young people has become a growing concern in the United States as parents report their children cannot give up their phones. CalSTRS and Jana worry that Apple’s reputation and stock could be hurt if it does not address those concerns, according to the Journal.

Half of teenagers in the United States feel like they are addicted to their mobile phones and report feeling pressure to immediately respond to phone messages, according to a 2016 survey of children and their parents by Common Sense Media.

The phone addiction issue got a high-profile boost from the former Disney child star Selena Gomez, 24, who said she canceled a 2016 world tour to go to therapy for depression and low self-esteem, feelings she linked to her addiction to social media and the mobile photo-sharing app Instagram.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Dilts; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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Heartland startups can avoid Silicon Valley’s pitfalls by being better neighbors

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GUEST:

Most articles written about startup scenes outside of the coasts use the phrase “the next Silicon Valley.” As in, St. Louis or Pittsburgh is poised to be the “next Silicon Valley.” But do these cities really want to be the next Silicon Valley?

It’s a serious question. While the Bay Area is known for innovation, it’s also known for ridiculously high housing prices that keep even some relatively well-paid tech workers (to say nothing of teachers, police officers, and nurses) struggling to afford a place to live. In an era where income inequality is a growing concern, Silicon Valley remains one of the country’s most economically unequal communities.

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VentureBeat’s Heartland Tech channel invites you to join us and other senior business leaders at BLUEPRINT in Reno on March 5-7. Learn how to expand jobs to Middle America, lower costs, and boost profits. Click here to request an invite and be a part of the conversation. 

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The problems of Silicon Valley aren’t restricted to expensive housing. The area’s tech companies often have a reputation for being insular and disengaged from their community. As tech communities and startup scenes grow across the Heartland, it’s important to take a thoughtful approach to creating communities where the wealth and economic opportunity created by tech companies — and basics like housing — isn’t just available to a lucky few.

And it’s important that companies make an active effort to improve the cities and communities they call home.

Here are a few ways your company can do that.

1. Get involved in your local school system

If you’ve been around the tech community for very long, you’ll hear a common complaint: Public schools just aren’t producing students that have the coding and programming skills necessary to succeed in the modern workforce. There are two ways to approach this problem. You can:

1. Use it as an excuse to demonize the already overworked and underfunded public education system.
2. Do something about it.

In my community, we did something about it. Randy Schilling, the founder of a successful startup and an incubator (BoardPaq and OPO Startups) serves as the chair of the education committee at the St. Charles County EDC Business and Community Partners (disclosure: I am the VP of marketing and entrepreneurship at EDC). Schilling led an effort to purchase 450 Micro:bits miniature computer kits for the community’s 7th grade students. While the initiative is altruistic, hopefully some of the students use the small, programmable device to learn coding and one day become the highly skilled programmers Schilling and other area tech entrepreneurs need.

2. Use your technical talent to solve community problems

There is no shortage of problems that need solving in the cities and communities of the Heartland. Hunger, crime, and homelessness are still far too common. While not every problem has a technology-based solution, some problems can be helped by bringing together talented programmers and engineers. As an example, every year the St. Louis tech community conducts GlobalHack, a hackathon dedicated to solving challenges facing the greater St. Louis area.

Last year, GlobalHack’s focus was homelessness. The year before, the event focused on creating systems and solutions that would help residents navigate the city’s complex court system. This year, the organization will host Code with a Cause, which will focus on helping the region’s nonprofits address specific software needs.

If your company is headquartered in a city that doesn’t have a community-focused hackathon, start one. The talent in your organization that’s disrupting an industry can afford to spend a day using their skills to make your community better.

3. Embrace your role as an agent for change

You can say a lot about Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and some of it isn’t so good. However, one thing you can say is that Carnegie and Rockefeller took their sense of civic responsibility seriously. Carnegie funded the construction of more than 3,000 free public libraries. Rockefeller helped fund the creation of modern medical science, as well as the modern medical school.

In the modern era, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have taken that lesson to heart, particularly on a global scale.

But Heartland entrepreneurs can have a powerful impact on the local level. You don’t need to have the money to build thousands of libraries or cure malaria.

You and your company still have the ability to make a difference. You can give your time and talent. And when you and your company make a difference in your community, you create a virtuous loop that leads to a bigger pool of talented local employees, more potential investors, and state and local public officials who can, in some instances, make your life a lot easier (or, if you’re not a good corporate citizen, a lot harder).

Being a force for good in your community also makes people root for your company. Your city rooting for you to succeed will make a difference, even if your market is national and international.

Dustin McKissen is an economic development executive in the greater St. Louis area, a LinkedIn Top Voice on Management and Culture, a CNBC contributor, and an Inc. columnist.

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Clan HQ is a messaging app designed for mobile games

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EXCLUSIVE:

Eric Schiermeyer had a lot of success as the cofounder of Zynga and the analytics that it brought to gaming. Now he’s got a new startup dubbed Carnivore that is making Clan HQ , a messaging app that gives mobile games a stronger social community.

Schiermeyer and Zynga veteran John Osvald started Carnivore in early 2017 to create a mobile messaging app that was targeted at mobile gamers who play in clans. Their first supported game is Marvel Contest of Champions, a Netmarble game which is a staple of the top 100 grossing games. The company has raised $3 million to date from Sequoia Capital. The app launched in late December.

“In this world of games, so much focus and attention is on the game itself that one of the critical pieces is overlooked,” Schiermeyer, chief strategy officer of Carnivore, said in an interview. “To be in any kind of social group, I had to join some kind of messaging app like Kik. But none of these messaging apps was designed for the specific case of clan players.”

Carnivore built an iOS and Google Play app that fit the needs of players who participate in alliances or guilds, where one person might manager a group of 300 players. Players sometimes use chat eight to 12 hours a day. Clan HQ is a text-chat system

“We thought that if we do this, we could be a great benefit to the game companies themselves,” Schiermeyer said. “These are incredibly important, as the groups retain the gamers for the game companies.”

But in contrast to rival ClanPlay, Clan HQ does not create officially sanctioned social platforms for game companies. That’s because some players don’t always completely trust the game companies with communication that is supposed to be secret. Another rival is PlexChat, which raised $7 million and has a different mobile chat solution. And if game companies try to do the social layer themselves, they usually don’t have enough spare resources to do it right, Schiermeyer said.

“I felt like this was the idea and opportunity I’d been waiting for my entire career,” said Osvald, CEO of Carnivore. “I’ve lived and breathed free-to-play games for years and focused on midcore for the last few, so this use case immediately made sense to me. Clan-based play has proven to be fun for players and effective for game developers — most of these games now require it to progress in the elder game. And as developers added more and more clan features, managing and communicating with clan mates has become more and more difficult to execute. This is a product players are screaming for.”

Above: Eric Schiermeyer, cofounder of Carnivore

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

The idea is to focus on the problem that players have in communicating effectively with a dispersed group of people.

“If you are an officer in a clan, a lot is asked of you,” Schiermeyer said.

Schiermeyer said that his app focuses on generating better key performance indicators (KPIs) for game developers in a way that requires little effort on their part.

“The problem today is you spend $15 on user acquisition advertising to get a player who never comes back,” he said.

Players can use Clan HQ to manage their alliances, recruit new players, look for a new alliance to join, and participate in community chat rooms to discuss gameplay strategy.

I previously interviewed Schiermeyer a couple of startups ago, when he created Luminary and built Greedy Goblins, a mash-up of an endless runner combined with strategy. The company’s game didn’t catch on, and Schiermeyer moved on to other things.

“The game didn’t do very well, so I wound the company down,” Schiermeyer said. “It was my lesson in hubris.”

Schiermeyer, who was a founder of Intermix (which led to MySpace), was at the start of Zynga with co-founder Mark Pincus, the longtime chief executive who grew the company to more than 3,500 employees and a billion dollars in revenue. At the beginning of Zynga, Schiermeyer set up the analytics to track everything that happened in a social game such as Zynga Poker.

Above: Clan HQ helps clans recruit new members.

Image Credit: Carnivore

One of his key product managers at Zynga was Osvald, who became the cofounder of Clan HQ and serves as CEO. During his time at Zynga, Osvald was responsible for games such as Cafe World, FarmVille, FrontierVille, CastleVille, and Zynga Poker. He was also a cofounder of Shiver Entertainment, which former Zynga executive John Schappert started, and Osvald returned to Zynga from February 2016 to March 2017.

Regarding what he learned from Zynga, Osvald said, “I’ve found the only way to truly understand what players need is to combine the qualitative experience of actually becoming a highly engaged user and the quantitative work of sorting through the data and seeing what themes emerge. I take that learning with me for every product I work on and immerse myself in the experience – so in this case we are immersing ourselves in Clan HQ.”

When Zynga got to be huge, Schiermeyer decided he wasn’t having as much fun. He left Zynga to decompress and then get back to startups. Schiermeyer said that they called the company Carnivore as an homage to a reputation they had earlier.

“At Zynga, our head of HR once referred to Eric and I as ‘meat eaters,’ which was at least part compliment,” Osvald said. “I think she meant to say we got things done but in a rather ferocious way. We loved it and it’s indicative of the type of people we’ve hired to build the team.”

Rivals include Kik, We Chat, Groupme, Discord, PlexChat, and others. Carnivore ran a beta for two months last fall and then the first version debuted with Marvel Contest of Champions in late December. The Clan HQ app has thousands of users.

Carnivore has 14 employees now and it is hiring. Over time, the company will expand to groups for more games. And over time, the company is likely to add voice chat and a desktop client. Over time, game companies will be able to buy ads on Clan HQ.

“We will service any game with a large community around it,” Schiermeyer said.

The PC Gaming channel is presented by Intel^®'s Game Dev program.

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Book on tech bros’ secret orgies promises to make Silicon Valley squirm in 2018

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Bloomberg TV anchor Emily Chang has become one of tech’s most influential interviewers in recent years. But her forthcoming book promises to get 2018 off to an ugly start for Silicon Valley, which is still reeling from a year of sexual harassment allegations.

The book is being published in early February by Portfolio and is called Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. According to a summary of the book: “Silicon Valley’s aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. It’s time to break up the boys’ club. Emily Chang shows us how to fix this toxic culture — to bring down Brotopia, once and for all.”

But we don’t have to wait until February. Today, Vanity Fair published a fun little excerpt under the headline: “OH MY GOD, THIS IS SO F—ED UP”: INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S SECRETIVE, ORGIASTIC DARK SIDE.”

Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse than 2017.

The excerpt focuses on anonymous tales of what it subtly calls “Sex Parties of the Tech and Famous.” In essence, tech bros, singled and married, organize large, drug-fueled parties where men pick and choose sex partners from the abundance of attractive women invited. The parties are attended, according to Chang’s interview with dozens of participants, by “powerful first-round investors, well-known entrepreneurs, and top executives.”

That may not be so shocking, given the Bay Area’s progressive sexual culture. But in this case, the parties seem to blur a line between business and pleasure, leaving female founders and entrepreneurs facing a truly horrific choice in the face of a male-dominated culture: If they don’t participate in the sex games, they risk losing access to the male elite; if they do participate they risk being labeled as promiscuous sex playthings.

“There is this undercurrent of a feeling like you’re prostituting yourself in order to get ahead because, let’s be real, if you’re dating someone powerful, it can open doors for you. And that’s what women who make the calculation to play the game want, but they don’t know all the risks associated with it,” one anonymous female entrepreneur tells Chang. “If you do participate in these sex parties, don’t ever think about starting a company or having someone invest in you. Those doors get shut. But if you don’t participate, you’re shut out. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Brotopia may well prove to be the book of the moment. Silicon Valley has long had a reputation for lacking female founders and venture capital partners. But in 2017, allegations of sexual harassment burst into plain view as a number of victims went public with accusations. These included the blog post by Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer who detailed her own experience with sexual harassment at the company while indicting a broader culture that protected executives accused of harassment. That would be one of many reasons CEO Travis Kalanick was ousted a few months later. And over the course over the year, as the #MeToo movement began to ripple across the entertainment world, big Silicon Valley names were accused of sexual harassment, including David Drummond of Google, influential tech blogger Robert Scoble, Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital, and Shervin Pishevar from Sherpa Capital and Hyperloop One.

Chang’s book appears to pick up that baton and run with it. “Vastly outnumbered, women face toxic workplaces rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and colleagues network over lunch at the local strip club,” reads the book’s description on Amazon.

It goes on to say:

In this powerful exposé, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures despite decades of companies claiming the moral high ground (Don’t Be Evil! Connect the World!) — and how women are finally starting to speak out and fight back.

Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao’s high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they “won’t lower their standards” just to hire women. Interviews with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and former Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer — who got their start at Google, where just one in five engineers is a woman — reveal just how hard it is to crack the Silicon Ceiling. And Chang shows how women such as former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, entrepreneur Niniane Wang, and game developer Brianna Wu have risked their careers and sometimes their lives to pave a way for other women.

Silicon Valley’s sins seem to be numerous. And it looks like 2018 is going to be another year of learning how much worse things are than we thought.

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12 changes that could shake up the blockchain world in 2018

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GUEST:

If there is one thing I have learned in the last two years in the cryptocurrency world, it’s that things change so quickly in this sector, it can humble anybody. Anyone who says he knows what he is talking about, doesn’t!

Still, it’s New Year’s Day, so what the heck? I’ll put my neck out there with 12 predictions for 2018:

1. Ripple will lose its luster

People will realize that Ripple is a cool business but that it doesn’t actually require a protocol token to work. There are a number of other protocols (including some VERY high market cap ones) that also don’t require a token to work.  The market will start to weed them out. That said, Ripple will be a valuable company because of the service it provides. It just won’t be a valuable protocol. The protocol multiples are much higher. Disclosure: I previously owned XRP, but don’t hold any now.

2. The Lightning Network will face the big test

Either Lightning will work and Bitcoin will regain its prominence as THE default cryptocoin in the world, or it will fail miserably and Bitcoin will continue to fall further and further behind as a coin of relevance. If that happens, Bitcoin Cash becomes the “real” Bitcoin.

To me, it’s a coin toss. I’m playing catchup on this one as I sold a lot of my BCH when it came out in favor of BTC, thinking SegWit2x would happen, but I was wrong. Ouch.

3. The privacy wars will begin as people recognize the difference between pseudonymity and anonymit

When they do, the competition will intensify for adoption of a “privacy” coin like

• Zcash (disclosure: They’re a client and I’m biased)
• Monero (which seems to be the privacy coin of choice on the Dark Web).
• Dash has amazing marketing (Amanda B. Johnson is probably the best in the business) but questions abound about the reputation of some of the leadershp team, weaknesses within the masternode setup and possibly even legal implications.
• PIVX which has a fun team and is really fast plus can integrate with Slack.

I predict that one or two of these coins will be recognized as the next Bitcoin within the mainstream media. There are a lot of factors here that will determine the winner, but I it will come down to whose security mentality is superior. We’ll only know that after a few big attacks.

4. The DAO market will take off

The DAO market, currently led by companies like Aragon, Colony, District0x, and DAOStack — will soon have a few proof-of-concept DAOs running. It’ll be interesting to hear the metrics they report in terms of set up time, user base, types of activities/DAOs in operation, etc. These protocols have massive opportunity (as I wrote previously on VentureBeat), though the vision in this market may be way ahead of the tech.

If there are 50 or so legit projects in pilot in 2018, then this sector is on a fast pace. I’m planning a pilot DAO of my own, by the way, so I’ll be updating readers about what the process looks like from the inside.

5. More decentralized AI startups will emerge

Last month, blockchain-based AI-as-a-Service startup SingularityNet’s ICO sold out in 60 seconds, pulling in $36 million. It set the $36 million cap after receiving requests for $360 million worth of its tokens from investors. There will be more ICOs like this one. Since money attracts money, we will see a lot of people leaving high priced AI jobs at big tech firms like Google and Facebook to pursue billion-dollar paydays at the next crypto-AI protocol. We will probably see 10 crypto AI ICOs that are at least $50 million. For more on decentralized AI, see my earlier article here.

6. Ethereum will be the standard … or not

By now, we all know that CryptoKitties brought the Ethereum network to its knees. Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin knows it too and is very aware of the challenges he and his team face.

I had the opportunity to spend time with Buterin and Ethereum developer Vlad Zamfir a few weeks ago, and — although I think the “Vitalik as Wunderkind” narrative is dangerous — I walked away from our conversation very impressed. These two are very thoughtful, articulate, open-minded, and brilliant. There are a ton of things that need to be done to prepare Ethereum to handle the scale and speed the community will need (as I have outlined before), but these two are both smart and humble enough that they could do it.

That said, with all of Ethereum’s issues, there is room for other, newer blockchains like NEM, QTUM, EOS, or AION to start closing the gap, if not overtake the platform. If we see more than 100 projects built on any one of those platforms, I think we’ll be seeing the emergence of an Ethereum contender. If not, Ethereum will keep its hold on the lead.

7. Interoperability protocols will remain immature

I’m rooting for interoperability players — like Polkadot, Cosmos and new entrants like Lamden and Metronome — that will enable transactions and information exchanges between different blockchains. But I think it will be a while before they really get off the ground. In the long term, they’ll enable a multi-blockchain world. But in the short term, they’ll increase the load on key blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin and so won’t likely get much love from those communities just yet. I expect them to be a bit quiet for the time being. For more on this sector, see my earlier story.

8. We’ll see more Crypto Valleys beyond Zug

I lead a quarterly trip to “Crypto Valley” in Zug, Switzerland as part of the Crypto Explorers Association. The next one is January 29, which is sold out, but applications are open for the April trip. See the site for details.

We’ve been approached by governments in places like Oman and Panama that want to set up Crypto Valleys in their geographies and use CryptoExplorers as a way of introducing themselves to the world. They have studied what Zug has done to drive innovation and job creation and they want to do that themselves.

That tells me governments in tier 2 or tier 3 locations see blockchain/crypto as a way to “leapfrog” tier 1 economies in the way Estonia did in the 1990s, going straight to a digital first country. (You can read about my experiences as an e-citizen of Estonia here.)

These new Crypto Valleys will try to become blockchain-first locations. And I think we will see two or three of them make it. I’m not talking about Dubai, Singapore, Tel Aviv, or Berlin. I’m talking about unexpected places like Bratislava, Florianopolis, Panama City, and Muscat.

9. Crypto will go mainstream

Three of the top 10 retail brokers in the U.S. will allow you to buy 1-5 cryptocurrencies directly from their websites, just as you do today with stocks or mutual funds. Coinbase, currently the most popular exchange for crypto newcomers, only supports four currencies at the moment. Unless it wants to start losing ground, it will need to improve its infrastructure and execute a plan for world domination.

10. ICOs will go mainstream

I think we will see the first legitimate ICOs take place on Indiegogo in February, or March at the latest. I predict that, over the course of the year, we will see at least nine more, for a total of 10 in 2018. (Here is Indiegogo’s original announcement.)

11. Reverse ICOs will intensify

Kik did the first reverse ICO; now YouNow is about to do one. I think we’ll see at least 15-20 more reverse ICOs in 2018. A “reverse ICO” is when an existing company decentralizes itself and issues tokens to its members to stimulate a circular economy. This is as opposed to a ICO from a brand new startup project. All this activity will require the services of a new type of professional — the tokenization consultant — so expect to see that role catch on in 2018, too. For more on reverse ICOs, see here.

12. Regulation will get more serious

I’m cautiously optimistic U.S. authorities will be relatively lenient on blockchain startups so as not to impede innovation. But companies that are negligent or outright deceptive will get shut down. ICOs will have to adhere to KYC/AML policies, and their solutions will have to scale. If you look at SEC Chairman Jay Clayton’s letter from December 12, he is pretty clear about the importance of crypto-innovation, and he deserves credit for that. But he is also putting decentralized projects on notice, saying essentially that ignorance of the law is not a defense. I think this is a healthy balance.

The bottom line: If you thought 2017 was crazy, get ready for a lot more upheaval in 2018. This crypto thing is just getting started. Happy New Year!

Jeremy Epstein is CEO of Never Stop Marketing and author of The CMO Primer for the Blockchain World. He currently works with startups in the blockchain and decentralization space, including OpenBazaar, IOTA, and Zcash.

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