Michael Carney

Reporter

Michael Carney is a West Coast Editor at PandoDaily, covering venture capital, financial technologies, ecommerce, on-demand services, and the future of television, among other subjects. He has spent his career exploring the world of early stage technology as an entrepreneur and early-stage investor, working in multiple countries within North and South America and Asia. He is an enthusiast of all things shiny and electronic and is inspired by those who build businesses and regularly tackle difficult problems. You can follow Michael on Twitter @mcarney.

Twenty20 raises $8M, removes the velvet rope on its crowdsourced stock photo platform

By Michael Carney February 26, 2015

Twenty20 has long hinted at ambitions to reshape the way stock photography is sourced. But for the better part of its three years in operation, the company has looked, at least from the outside, more like a photo enthusiasts community, akin to early Instagram or VSCO today. If only we could have seen this duck’s legs paddling beneath the water’s surface. Today, Twenty20 launched out of beta, offering brands, agencies, and creatives a commercial licensing platform through which to access…

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Do you know what your stuff’s worth? Trov raises $6.5M to reinvent insurance for the mobile generation

By Michael Carney February 26, 2015

Millennials, the largest generation since the Baby Boomers (their parents), have almost no relationship with the insurance industry. This is in part due to low rates of home ownership –and a general malaise toward renter’s insurance — but also due to the fact that the insurance industry has yet to deliver a solution that speaks this massive group’s language the way Wealthfront and Venmo do for personal finances, or Gilt, Wish, and Instacart do for retail commerce. You’d be hard…

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Always inept Bitcoin Foundation badly bungles board vote, asks for a do-over

By Michael Carney February 25, 2015

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a faulty and poorly tested voting platform has compromised a high-profile election. The issue this time isn’t “hanging chads” and the offices at stake aren’t quite as critical as the President of the United States. Rather, the Bitcoin Foundation is hosting a run-off election to fill two board member seats and elected to switch the voting platform at the last minute to a blockchain-based system, only to have it fail spectacularly and…

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Uber faces possible IP ban in India, if it doesn’t comply with regulatory demands

By Michael Carney February 25, 2015

The latest threat facing Uber in India could be a lot more troublesome for the company than the bad PR and fines it’s faced around the world for operating outside existing regulations. The New Delhi transportation department said that it’s prepared to request that India’s Central (or federal) Government block access to the company’s IP address on domestic wired and wireless networks. Such a connectivity blackout would render Uber’s platform inaccessible through both its mobile apps and via the desktop or mobile Web.…

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Math does not bow to guns: Bitcoin poker site to relaunch after founder’s home was raided by armed police

By Michael Carney February 24, 2015

Bryan Micon is having a tough month. The co-founder and chairman of the now-defunct bitcoin poker site Seals with Clubs has been the subject of conspiracy theories and fraud accusations after the business abruptly shut down earlier this month. We’ve had a hardware failure and are working to resolve it. ETA 2 hours. — SealsWithClubs (@SealsWithClubs) February 11, 2015 The Seals with Clubs website was later updated with a message that reads, in part: Effective immediately, SealsWithClubs will…

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NexTravel launches out of Y Combinator to make booking corporate travel easier and less expensive

By Michael Carney February 24, 2015

For most business people, the concept of effortless, cost-effective travel has more in common with mythical creatures like unicorns than it does the realities of everyday life. The truth is that while the travel industry was massively disrupted by technology two decades ago, most of the innovation to date has focused on the consumer side of the business, and even there very little has changed from an end-user perspective since the early days of Expedia, Priceline, and Kayak. Most business travel…

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Consumers are using Slack beyond the enterprise, whether the company likes it or not

By Michael Carney February 23, 2015

Rarely when a team sets out to build a new product do they have an accurate idea of how users will actually adopt and make use of its features. Look no further than Twitter, which has embraced and productized the hacked-together features created by its earliest and most engaged users, including tagging (@), retweets (RT), hashtags (#), and favorites (✭). The truth is, when you build a great product that solves a real market need, users will flock to that…

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ThredUp acquires Kindermint, further proving that pre-owned and premium aren’t mutually exclusive

By Michael Carney February 23, 2015

In the average American closet, only 30 percent of items are worn regularly. The other 70 percent of items are simply taking up space, and, in many cases, exerting a cognitive tax as people struggle to sort through their wardrobe looking for something to wear. The options for fixing this problem are well known – throwing away excess clothing, donating to charity, giving items to friends, selling items online, traditional consignment, and yard sales – but none of them are…

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As Uber fights to maintain its technology company classification in India, the rest of the world watches

By Michael Carney February 20, 2015

Uber cars may be whisking passengers across major cities in India once again, after an alleged December rape by one of the company’s New Delhi drivers led to a temporary ban — but the company still lacks the regulatory approval to do so. India’s Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, gave Uber and its local competitors until February 25 to rectify this situation before facing further sanctions. At issue is whether Uber will be classified as a…

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If Pop succeeds in video messaging, it will be by embracing, not fighting the constraints of the channel

By Michael Carney February 19, 2015

Social video is a nut that entrepreneurs and investors have been trying to crack for more than a decade. Content-focused offerings have found more success, as highlighted by YouTube and Vimeo for desktop (and increasingly mobile), or Instagram Video and Vine as mobile-first market leaders. But video communication, on the other hand, still lacks that killer app. In each era, heavily funded and widely-hyped entrants have tackled this market, each with a different twist. In the early Web there was…

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