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A Buddhist temple in Beijing built a robotic monk to spread the word | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | The robotic monk is facing a wall, charging up when I first approach the Longquan Temple’s booth at TechCrunch’s event in Hangzhou, China. There’s probably a good metaphor here for meditation or mindfulness, but as a terrible meditator who semi-regularly runs into objects while his mind is somewhere else entirely, I’m struggling to find the right one. The whole spectacle is an unusual one, alongside row after row of the Chinese companies that dot Startup Alley. Robe-wearing monks meander around, in front of cartoon drawings and figures of , the “Worthy Stupid Robot Monk.” He’s a two-foot-high robot that is something akin to a Buddhist version of SoftBank’s Pepper. He’s an adorable little ‘bot with little in the way of articulation, that sports a small tablet atop his belly. This particular model is one of three versions of the robot that currently exist in the world, designed to greet young visitors at Longquan Temple in Beijing. Children can interact with the robot through the touchscreen or a voice remote, asking it one of 100+ questions. Rather than utilizing some bit of consumer AI like Alexa or Siri, however, the robot is trained to offer up answers provided by the temple’s masters. The robotic version of Xian’er, which is also the subject of books and cartoons, was created in 2015 with help from a number of key Chinese tech firms, including Tencent and iFlytek. It’s designed to serve as an ambassador, helping to help educate children about the ways of Longquan and help bring the temple into the 21st century. |
A bigger Amazon Prime Day 2018 arrives July 16 with more deals, devices and longer hours | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | Amazon’s the company’s annual sales event that’s now its , will be held this year on July 16, starting at 12 PM PT/3 PM ET, and will feature over a million deals, the retailer announced today. One big change this time around is the event’s length — last year, Prime Day ran 30 hours, but this year’s event will run for 36 hours. In addition to being the longest Prime Day to date, the event will also expand to new markets this year, says Amazon. Australia, Singapore, Netherlands and Luxembourg will join the other countries hosting Prime Day this year, which includes the U.S., U.K., Spain, Mexico, Japan, India, Italy, Germany, France, China, Canada, Belgium and Austria. As in previous years, Amazon is touting deals across product categories, like TVs, smart home, kitchen, grocery, toys, fashion, furniture, appliances, back-to-school supplies and everyday essentials. Of course, Amazon will again mark down its own devices for Prime Day, and it’s teasing some of its deals in advance. The retailer says it will offer “double the deals” on Amazon devices, including the lowest prices to date on Echo, Fire TV and Fire tablets. The expanded number of deals comes from Amazon now owning more hardware brands. For example, it earlier this year, and the smart camera and doorbell startup back in December. Today, it’s a of home security products that includes these brands and others, like its own Echo Dot and Amazon Cloud Cam. These could be the “home security devices” that will be newly on sale this year during Prime Day, alongside the Echo Show. Also new this year is Amazon bringing Prime Day to Whole Foods. Prime members shopping in-store can take an additional 10 percent off hundreds of sales items and will receive other deep discounts on popular products, Amazon says. Plus Prime Rewards Visa card members will receive double the rewards — 10 percent back — July 14 through 17 when shopping Whole Foods. In addition to the usual slate of deals, some brands are unveiling new products, new content or special edition products for Prime Day 2018. This list includes the new Delta Trinsic Touch2O, the first Alexa-enabled kitchen faucet; Coleman RoadTrip LXE portable propane grill; Fingerlings Light Up Unicorn Mackenzie; an Audible Original production, which has Bob Newhart sitting down with guests Sarah Silverman, Will Ferrell, Lisa Kudrow, Jimmy Kimmel, Judd Apatow and Conan O’Brien; an exclusive version of the Moto G6 64 GB, and more. Amazon is kicking off the Prime Day deals starting immediately, however. The following items are already on sale: During Prime Day, Amazon is adding 50 percent more Spotlight Deals, and will feature deals across the following: (deal notifications from the Amazon app); Prime Day Sneak Peek (sneak peek at deals in the app from July 9-15); deals by Popular Interests (deals organized by 40 of the most shopped interests); Alexa Shopping (ask Alexa for deals); Amazon Prime Credit Cards (5 percent back on Prime Day purchases). To encourage Alexa shopping this year, Amazon is offering customers a chance to win a where a grand prize winner will get an Alexa-enabled 2019 Lexus ES, a complete Alexa smart home package and more. This is a big step up from the Alexa shopping perks from last year, which $10 for first-time Alexa voice shoppers. Prime Day began as a way to drive more consumers to subscribe to Amazon’s annual Prime membership program, which now has . However, because of the numerous deals available, it’s also become a sales event that outpaces Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other sales holidays for Amazon. Prime Day 2017, for example, was for Amazon, up 60 percent from the year before. With Amazon doubling down on the event this time around, with even more device deals, Whole Foods deals, market expansions and longer hours, it will likely break records again. |
All charges against ex-Vungle CEO Zain Jaffer, including lewd act on a child, dismissed by judge | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | All charges against former CEO Zain Jaffer, including sexual abuse of a child, have been dropped. According to a statement from Jaffer’s representatives, San Mateo County Judge Stephanie Garratt dismissed the charges today. Jaffer was and charged with several serious offenses, including a lewd act on one of his children, child abuse and battery on a police officer. The dismissal is confirmed by San Mateo County Superior Court’s online records. The case (number 17NF012415A) had been scheduled to go to jury trial in late August. Jaffer, whose full name is Zainali Jaffer, said in a statement that: Being wrongfully accused of these crimes has been a terrible experience, which has had a deep and lasting impact on my family and the employees of my business. Those closest to me knew I was innocent and were confident that all of the charges against me would eventually be dismissed. I want to thank the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office for carefully reviewing and considering all of the information and evidence in this case and dropping all the charges. I am also incredibly grateful for the continued and unwavering support of my wife and family, and look forward to spending some quality time with them. Vungle, the fast-rising mobile ad startup Jaffer co-founded in 2011, removed him from the company immediately after they learned about the charges in October. TechCrunch has contacted Vungle and the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office for comment. about why the charges were dropped. San Mateo Deputy District Attorney Sharon Cho told the newspaper they were dismissed due to insufficient evidence and that the defense had provided medical records for Jaffer showing he had undiagnosed bipolar disorder and was on prescription medication that led to the incident. Though prosecutors initially believed Jaffer had been under the influence of LSD, Cho said “what changed was when the defense presented this information, that the act was a result not of LSD but of underlying mental illness that had never been diagnosed. Ultimately, the people have the burden of proving that’s not the case, and when we reevaluated, we felt the evidence was not such that we could meet that burden.” The Chronicle has since amended its story with this statement from the San Mateo district attorney’s office: We do not believe that there was any sexual conduct by Mr. Jaffer that evening and for this reason we dismissed the sexual abuse charges. The physical injury charges were separately dismissed because we believe that the injuries were the result of Mr. Jaffer being in a state of unconsciousness caused by prescription medication. |
null | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 7 | 5 | null |
Some Samsung users say their phones randomly sent photos to contacts | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | Some Samsung users are complaining that their smartphones randomly sent photos and scheduled texts to contacts. According to posts on Reddit and Samsung’s official support boards , the devices affected include the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 8. Their owners say that Samsung Messages, the default texting app for Galaxy devices, pushed photos and scheduled texts to random contacts, but left no record of the messages being sent. One Reddit user sent his entire photo library to a contact in the middle of the night while he was asleep (fortunately, that contact was his partner). The poster says that even though there was no evidence of the mass photo sharing in Samsung Messages, it showed up on his T-Mobile logs. He also added that he has never used the Shared tab in Samsung Gallery app, which lets users send photos through messaging apps, email or social media without leaving their photo gallery. The issue also appears to be affecting some text messages. On , a user said Samsung Messages became buggy after a T-Mobile RCS/advanced messaging update on his phone. Errors included scheduled text messages ending up in the wrong threads. Many complaints posted online are from people who said they are T-Mobile customers and recently updated Samsung Messages, leading to a theory that the issue may have been triggered by the carrier’s recent RCS (Rich Communication Services) updates. RCS is supposed to improve texting by like group chat, video and GIF support, and file and location sharing. Since several accounts said photos had been randomly sent to partners or family members, there is also speculation that the problem affects shared plans. In a statement, a Samsung spokesperson said “We are aware of the reports regarding this matter and our technical teams are looking into it. Concerned customers are encouraged to contact us directly at 1-800-SAMSUNG.” TechCrunch has also reached out to T-Mobile for comment. The carrier told Gizmodo that “it’s not a T-mobile issues” and asked users to contact Samsung. There are currently two fixes if you are worried about the issue affecting your device. First, you can go into its app settings and revoke Samsung Message’s ability to access your storage, which means it won’t be able to send anything stored on your phone, including photos. This may be a pain, however, because it means if you do want to send photos or files through the app, you need to restore permission in Settings again. The second fix is to stop using Samsung Messages until the company says the issue has been resolved and switch to a third-party messaging app instead. |
Dell will soon be a public company (again) | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | Dell, which went private in one of the the largest leveraged buyouts in tech circa 2013, through a relatively complex mechanism that will once again bring the company back onto the public markets with founder Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners largely in control. Dell’s leveraged buyout largely marked the final page in the company’s storied history as a PC provider, going back to the old “dude, you’re getting a Dell” commercials. The company rode that wave to dominance, but as computing shifted to laptops, mobile phones, and complex operations were offloaded into cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud, Dell found itself navigating a complex environment while having to make a significant business transition beyond the PC era. That meant Dell would be beholden to the whims of public markets, perhaps laden with short-term pessimism over the company’s urgent need to find a transition. The transaction is actually an offer to buy shares that track the company’s involvement in VMWare, converting that tracking stock into Dell Technologies stock that would mark its return as a publicly-traded company. Those shares will end up traded on the NYSE, around five years later after its founder took the company private with Silver Lake Partners in a deal worth roughly $25 billion. Silver Lake Partners owns around 24% of the company, while Dell owns 72% and will continue to serve as the chairman and CEO of the company. This move helps the company bypass the IPO process, which would remove the whole time period of potential investors scrutinizing the company (which has taken on a substantial debt load). Dell said in its most recent quarter it recorded revenue of $21.4 billion, up 19% year-over-year, and over the past 12 months the company generated $82.4 billion of revenue with a net loss of $2.3 billion. The company said it has also paid down $13 billion of gross debt since its combination with EMC back in 2016. All this has been part of the company’s transition to find new businesses beyond just selling computers, though there’s clearly still demand for those computers in offices around the world. As it has expanded into a broader provider of IT services, it’s potentially positioned itself as a modern enterprise tools provider, which would allow it to more securely navigate public markets while offering investors a way to correctly calibrate its value. |
Google releases Beta 3 of Android P | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | It still doesn’t have an official name (Popsicle? Peppermint? Your guess is as good as ours), but Google’s just dropped what it says is a near-final version of Android P. The new version arrives a month after Beta 2, bringing with it what largely amounts to bug fixes and stability tweaks. This is the last major beta update the company is sending out to developers prior to the final version of the mobile operating system, due out for the rest of us later this summer. From the sound of it, there shouldn’t be too many major visible tweaks this time out — Google brought a number of those with Beta 2. “With the developer APIs already finalized in the previous update,” Android VP of Engineering Dave Burke says in a blog post tied to the announce, “Beta 3 now takes us very close to what you’ll see in the final version of Android P.” Among the key updates this time out are finalized APIs so developers can start testing and building apps for the new version of the software. Among the system tools available here are multi-camera support, enhanced notifications, display cutout (notches for days) and ImageDecoder. The update is available today for developers with access to a Pixel device. Those who are already running Beta 2, meanwhile, will get the update automatically. For good measure, the company will also be hosting a Reddit AMA on July 19 to field all of those technical questions about the new OS. |
The FBI, FTC and SEC are joining the Justice Department’s inquiries into Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica disclosures | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | An alphabet soup of federal agencies are now poring over Facebook’s disclosures and the company’s statements about its response to the improper use of its user information by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission have joined the Justice Department in examining how the personal information of 71 million Americans was distributed by Facebook and used by Cambridge Analytica, released Monday. According to the Post, the emphasis of the investigation has been on what Facebook disclosed about its information sharing with Cambridge Analytica and whether those disclosures correlate to the timeline that’s being established by government investigators. The fear, for Facebook, is that the government may decide that the company didn’t reveal enough to either investors or the public about the extent of the misallocation of user data. Another concern is whether the Cambridge Analytica decision with the Federal Trade Commission. The redoubled efforts of so many divisions could potentially ensnare Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who was brought before Congress with other Facebook officials to testify about the breaches. People familiar with the investigation told the Post that the officials’ testimony was being scrutinized. In a statement, Facebook noted it had received questions from different agencies and that it was cooperating. The Federal Trade Commission first confirmed that in March. Acting director Tom Pahl said at the time: The FTC is firmly and fully committed to using all of its tools to protect the privacy of consumers. Foremost among these tools is enforcement action against companies that fail to honor their privacy promises, including to comply with Privacy Shield, or that engage in unfair acts that cause substantial injury to consumers in violation of the FTC Act. Companies who have settled previous FTC actions must also comply with FTC order provisions imposing privacy and data security requirements. Accordingly, the FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices. The multiple investigations by U.S. and U.K. agencies into the ways in which Cambridge Analytica accessed and exploited data on social media users in political campaigns have already . It’s unlikely (read impossible) that Facebook would suffer anything like the same fate, and the company’s stock price has already recovered from whatever negative impact the scandal wrought on the social network’s market capitalization. Rather, the lingering investigations show the potential for government regulators (and lawmakers) to involve themselves in the company’s operations. As with everything else in Washington, it’s always the cover up — never the crime. |
Singapore’s Homage, which matches care recipients and caregivers, raises $4.15M for expansion | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | , a Singapore-based startup that helps connect caregivers and organizations with care recipients and their families, has raised $4.15 million as it begins to eye overseas expansion. The company was started in 2016 by Gillian Tee, a Singaporean who spent time working in the U.S., healthcare industry exec Lily Phang and former banker Tong Duong. Tee’s previous stints include founding , a travel startup backed by Y Combinator that has raised nearly $30 million, but she moved home after 15 years to be closer to her family. The goal of Homage is to make it easier for caregivers and patients to connect, whilst also keeping their families updated. “We’re realizing how much of a need there is for personalized one-on-one care,” Tee told TechCrunch in an interview. “A lot of what we do is actually non-medical, and it’s even more clear that we need to help people be mobile, be functional and have the choice to live with dignity as they age.” ; this new round is jointly led by existing backer Golden Gate Ventures and new investor HealthXCapital. Other participants in the round included returning investors SeedPlus, Juha Paananen (CEO of Nonstop Games, acquired by King.com) and former JobsCentral execs Lim Dershing (CEO) and (co-founder) Huang Shao Ning. Tee, the Homage CEO, said the company is ramping up as it sees increased demand for its services. Homage began focused on caregiving for the aging population, but it has since expanded to cover areas such as physiology, speech and occupational therapy — areas for post-stroke discharge. It also offers six different apps, which include two for caregivers, two for family members and two for partners, such as NGOs and other care agencies. Tee said the plan is to use this new capital to push into other verticals and offer new services where there is demand from patients and caregivers, but Homage is also looking overseas for potential expansion for the first time. “The focus is on Singapore but we’re looking at one other market in APAC,” she said. “We’re not quite decided on which one that’ll be [but] we see that across Asia this is something that’s very much needed.” Along the way, Homage has also received praise from a very high level in Singapore: none other than Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. On National Day Rally, August 20, 2017, for tapping the rise of on-demand apps like Uber and said he hopes that “more companies and government agencies will learn from Homage in using IT to improve lives.” |
Facebook is shutting down Hello, Moves and the anonymous teen app tbh due to ‘low usage’ | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | Facebook, the world’s largest social network with 2.2 billion users, is all about capitalizing on scale, and so today it announced that it would be three apps in its stable that simply weren’t keeping up. After failing to gain traction, Hello, Moves and tbh will all be depreciated in the coming weeks, the company announced today. The three apps are being shut down at varying times we’re noting below. Facebook says that all user data from all three of these apps will be deleted within 90 days. “We regularly review our apps to assess which ones people value most. Sometimes this means closing an app and its accompanying APIs,” said Facebook. “We know some people are still using these apps and will be disappointed — and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their support. But we need to prioritize our work so we don’t spread ourselves too thin. And it’s only by trial and error that we’ll create great social experiences for people.” But “low usage” is a pretty wide range, it turns out. Sensor Tower notes that Hello had only 570,000 installs — that is, total downloads — but tbh had 6.4 million and Moves 13 million. Still, these numbers are all just blips in comparison to billions of downloads and users of Facebook and the other popular apps that it owns: Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. The three getting sunset are all examples of the different angles that Facebook has explored over the years to evolve its business into newer areas — not all of which have panned out. Moves came to Facebook by way of an of the fitness and tracking app. At the time, Facebook in exploring more about how people might use their Facebook social graphs to share more data about their own fitness regimes, and to possibly use Facebook not just as a place to share but to track progress. With its acquisition of Moves, it might have been the case that Facebook believed that it could take a more direct role in that process. Early on, there was promise: Moves already had amassed four million downloads before the acquisition. However, things simply did not continue to bulk up much after that point, either because Facebook saw that there wasn’t a large enough critical mass of people interested in making fitness social, or because its own spin on how to do that wasn’t where the market has moved. (You could argue that there has always been a huge social element in exercise — gyms and exercise classes being two obvious examples — but these are more about people in physical spaces doing things together.) In the end, Moves the app hasn’t been updated in more than a year, and it languishes at around 616 in the fitness category today. It will be shut down in the coming weeks, Facebook said. Hello, , was part of Facebook’s wider strategy to build more communications services to bridge the gap with users, targeting those specifically in emerging markets. In the case of Hello, the app was Android-only and worked in the U.S., Nigeria and Brazil. The app is a bit like TrueCaller: people could link up their Facebook accounts to a dialer, which would then show you the Facebook identity of a caller so you could decide whether or not you would like to take the call. As with Moves, Hello came amid a time when many thought Facebook had big plans for communications, with rumors abounding of Facebook phones and Facebook wanting to take on carriers with its own voice services. Hello, however, never expanded — neither in geography nor features — and so now we say goodbye. The Hello app and its API are both getting depreciated on July 31. The app was actually removed from the Android store on June 26, when it had a . Lastly, tbh is the youngest of the apps to be getting the chop — in more ways than one. The “anonymous compliment” app was made specifically for teens, a relatively new category for Facebook, and the company was only acquired by the social network in October 2017. Indeed, tbh was young and hardly ubiquitous when Facebook snapped it up, and although the company seemed interested in letting it run its course, to be honest, it’s no surprise to see it also go away. Facebook is not giving a date for its disappearance: the app is at the moment. App Annie, however, notes that its ranking currently in the U.S. is . Facebook is no stranger to spring cleaning and clearing out unpopular apps, as well as a wide swathe of other services such as APIs that are no longer core to what it’s working on. Other dead app efforts have included , the personal assistant app, its And just today, it issued a to better reign in how its user data is tapped by third parties. |
Bag Week 2018: Osprey Momentum 32 is ready for muddy trails | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | The impresses. I used it during a muddy week at Beaumont Scout Reservation and it performed flawlessly as a rugged, bike-ready backpack. It stood tall in the miserable rain and insufferable heat that engulfed northern Ohio during the camping trip. If it can withstand these conditions, it can withstand an urban commute. For those following along, Bag Week 2018 ended a week ago. That’s okay. Consider this as bonus content. Before publishing a review on this bag, I wanted to test it during a camping trip, and last week’s trip provided a great testing ground for this bag. [gallery ids="1667188,1667180,1667181,1667189,1667187,1667185,1667183,1667184"] Osprey markets the Momentum 32 as an everyday pack with a tilt toward bicyclists. There’s a clip on the outside to hold a bike helmet and a large pocket at the bottom to store bicycle shoes — or just another pair of shoes. The back panel features great ventilation and the shoulder straps have extra give to them thanks to integrated elastic bands. It’s the ventilated back panel that makes the pack stand out to me. It’s ventilated to an extreme. Look at me. I’m in my mid-thirties and on a quest to visit all of Michigan’s craft breweries. I sweat and it was hot during my time with this bag. This bag went a long way in helping to keep the sweat under control — much more so than any other commuter bag I’ve used. There was never a time when I was using this bag that I felt like a sweaty dad, even though the temp reached into the 90s. I appreciate that. The internal storage is sufficient. There’s a good amount of pockets for gadgets and documents. There’s even a large pocket at the bottom to store a pair of shoes and keep them separated from the rest of the bag’s contents. As any good commuter bag, it has a key chain on a retractable cord so you can get access to your keys without detaching them from the bag. The bag also has a rain cover, which saved me in several surprise rain showers. The rain cover itself is nothing special; a lot of bags have similar covers. This cover is just part of a winning formula used on this bag. The Osprey Momentum is a fantastic bag. It stands apart from other bags with extreme ventilation on the back panel and features cyclist and commuters will appreciate. |
Code2040’s Karla Monterroso on desegregating the tech industry | Henry Pickavet | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | Welcome back to CTRL+T, the TechCrunch podcast that connects the tech to the human. On this episode, we talk about the and some of the issues we have with the Memoji feature. We also discuss the fact that Microsoft , making it easier to identify darker skin tones. Oh great. Finally, Karla Monterroso of Code2040 joined us in the studio to drop some pretty hard truths about diversity in tech. The CEO of Code2040, which aims to increase the representation of black and brown people in the industry, says that the tech workforce is segregated. In 2018. Think about that. And that often the burden to effect change from within a company is placed on those two or three — or one or two — black and Latinx folks. “Managers are asking the brown people to be the tech Ruby Bridges and to come in and be full-throated in their opinions, but you are not setting up the safety mechanisms for those people to be able to do that safely,” Monterroso says. She added that there’s a lot of data that says people of color drop out in the second or third years of their tech careers because they’re often stepping into a hostile environment. “You gotta be in this conversation thinking about risk and power,” Monterroso told us. “If I am a person and I am one or two black or Latinx people in this entire company… and I say, ‘hey this thing is wrong and it’s hurting me.’ …. It’s much riskier for that person because their economic security and their social security within their company is at stake.” Click play below to hear the full interview. It’s great and you’ll learn some stuff. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Find us on , , , or whatever other podcast platform you can find. |
Anthony Levandowski is back with a new self-driving startup, called Kache.ai | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | This is a comeback story. Or at least the first chapter to one. Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, is back. And he is connected to an autonomous trucking company that is still in stealth mode, TechCrunch has learned. The company, called (pronounced like cache), has kept a low profile since paperwork registering it as a corporation was first filed with the California Secretary of State nearly seven months ago. And at first glance, there’s no indication that Levandowski is even tied to the company. ( : Kache.ai rebranded as and came .) Corporation documents, filed with the state, list a “Thomas S. Lee Jr.” as its president. A search on LinkedIn showed Lee, a software developer whose previous experience includes co-founding two San Diego-based companies, as president of Kache.ai. Since reaching out to Kache.ai, all references of the company have been removed from LinkedIn. However, the address listed on the tells a different story. Kache.ai’s documents filed with the state lists an address in St. Helena, Calif. The property is owned by Levandowski’s father and stepmother, according to property tax and title records reviewed by TechCrunch. Levandowski’s stepmother Suzanna Musick was CEO of another one of Levandowski’s startups, called . The company didn’t return calls for comment. However, other unnamed sources within the global autonomous vehicle ecosystem confirmed to TechCrunch that Levandowski is connected to the company. Little is known about Kache.ai. The word “Kǎchē” in Chinese means truck, which could signal a connection to China. Although TechCrunch was not able to independently verify if Kache.ai has any outside partners or backers yet. The company’s website, which at one point listed an email contact for Lee and described its mission, is now blank except for a single image of a jagged mountain ridge. TechCrunch was able to review and capture screenshots of the website prior to the changes, one of which is shown above. At that time, the Kache.ai website said the company was working on “the next generation of autonomous vehicle technology for the commercial trucking industry.” The employment opportunities section of the now erased website once said: We’re developing the solution for the next level of on-the-road self-driving trucks. Our development philosophy is based on a fast moving, very aggressive agile team approach and we’re seeking both software and hardware engineers that thrive in such an environment. It appears the company is hiring at every level, from mapping and database experts to people with robotics and simulation skills. The website also noted that the company is looking for software engineers with experience in convolutional neural networks as well as computer vision and machine learning algorithms. The website said Kache.ai is located in the San Francisco area. To outsiders, Levandowski’s return to the autonomous vehicle stage might have seemed improbable just a year ago. To former colleagues and others who know him, it was inevitable. However, outside a few vague remarks that Levandowski was “working on something,” his return (until now) was mostly based on rumor and speculation. Levandowski is part of the brain trust of autonomous vehicle technology that for years was largely confined to academic research. That began to change on March 13, 2004 when 15 teams brought their autonomous vehicles to the desert outside of Barstow, Calif. They were there to compete in the , a 142-mile race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to encourage development of autonomous vehicle technology. Levandowski’s “blue team” had the distinction of being the only one to bring a two-wheeled vehicle, an autonomous motorcycle they called Ghostrider. The vehicle is now at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. And while not a single team completed the course, it prompted DARPA to hold two more autonomous vehicle challenges. The endeavor fueled the interest and passion of a few dozen people who would later go on to lead Google’s self-driving project, head AV R&D efforts at large companies or look for ways to move the autonomous vehicle needle forward. Levandowski was one of them. In 2007, Levandowski joined Google, where he was one of the principal architects of Google Street View. The engineer had other projects too, notably a that made and sold sensor systems to his employer, Google. 510 Systems was a pioneer of using light ranging and detection systems known as LiDAR to make maps. Google quietly bought 510 Systems and another one of his startups, Anthony’s Robots, in 2011. (Photo: ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images) After nearly nine years at Google, Levandowski left the company with fellow Google employee Lior Ron. The pair founded Ottomotto, which later became Otto, along with Don Burnette and Claire Delaunay. The timing couldn’t have been better. The race to deploy autonomous vehicles had heated up, creating a frenzied winner-takes-all environment. Competition between companies to attract talent pushed up salaries and incentives. For those who had been on the ground floor at Google’s self-driving project and other high-profile startups and academic positions, the world was theirs for the taking. The venture capital community didn’t just take note; they poured money into the effort. Large automakers and Tier 1 suppliers looking for an edge started snapping up startups brimming with self-driving technology talent. Uber’s purchase of Otto for an in August 2016 — just months after its founding — was just one example of the feeding frenzy. As part of the acquisition, Levandowski became head of Uber’s self-driving car research. (Documents filed as part of the lawsuit between Waymo and Uber suggest the pay out might have been as low as .) But the buzz around the size of the Otto deal would soon be replaced with a different, more unwelcoming kind of attention. Nine months after the acquisition, Uber was embroiled in a trade secrets lawsuit with Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet. And Levandowski was out of a job. The lawsuit, filed against self-driving truck startup Otto and its parent company Uber in February 2017, alleged patent infringement and stealing trade secrets. The lawsuit made a number of allegations specifically against Levandowski, including that he downloaded more than 14,000 confidential and proprietary files shortly before his resignation. Waymo contended that Otto and Uber were using key parts of its self-driving technology, specifically related to its light detection and ranging radar. This technology, known in the industry as LiDAR, measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. The case went to trial in February 2018. After days of titillating testimony, including from former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, the two parties reached a settlement agreement. Uber agreed to not incorporate Waymo’s confidential information into their hardware and software. Uber also agreed to pay a financial settlement that includes 0.34 percent of Uber equity, per its Series G-1 round $72 billion valuation. In other words, Waymo got about $244.8 million in Uber equity. Six weeks later, Uber would be grappling with the involving one of its self-driving test vehicles in Tempe, Ariz. The other three Otto founders have all left Uber, as well. Burnette, the last one to depart, founded an autonomous vehicle company in April called Kodiak Robotics with Paz Eshel, who formerly worked at Battery Ventures. Levandowski’s return will likely raise questions, and possibly even anger, among people within Uber and Waymo. However, it’s unclear if Kache.ai will even use LiDAR, the sensing technology at the heart of the trade secrets lawsuit and one of Levandowski’s talents. Some autonomous trucking startups have avoided LiDAR except for use in mapping because they argue that the sensors aren’t practical on a heavy-duty autonomous truck traveling on highways at speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour. Instead, autonomous trucking companies like TuSimple use multiple cameras, which have better resolution. If Kache.ai bypasses LiDAR — which at this point is unclear — it could help alleviate IP concerns and attract investors. For now, the beginning of Kache.ai’s story is tied to Levandowski’s past, which is marked by engineering prowess and ingenuity as well as legal and ethical missteps. The remaining chapters will reveal whether the unique value prop of what Kache.ai is developing is strong enough to render all of that moot. : Kache.ai rebranded as and came . |
Facebook bug temporarily unblocked people from 800,000+ block lists | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | If you block someone on Facebook, you probably want them to… you know, stay blocked. At least until you say otherwise. Facebook has just disclosed that around 800,000 users were impacted by a bug that silently unblocked “some” people they had blocked. The bug was live from May 29 until June 5, . Worth noting: The bug didn’t go so far as to make the would-be blocked individual your friend (even if they were your friend prior to the block), so anything an affected individual might’ve posted to a friends-only audience have remained private. It would, however, allow a blocked user to do things like contact you on Messenger, or try to re-add you as a friend. While Facebook isn’t saying much about what caused the bug, they’re sending out a notification (pictured above) to anyone they believe was affected. Facebook has shared some more details about the cause of the bug with TechCrunch’s Josh Constine via Twitter: Hey Josh, it’s always hard to find the right level of technical detail to put in a blog post like this. More context on what caused the bug: most visible user data on FB is stored in pairs called “associations,” which control what posts people see and the actions they can take. — Facebook (@facebook) A bug mistakenly deleted some of these associations across Facebook and Messenger, which caused blocks to be lost. — Facebook (@facebook) |
Browser maker Opera has filed to go public | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | Norway-based company has filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. According to , the company plans to raise up to $115 million. In 2017, Opera generated $128.9 million in operating revenue, which led to a net income of $6.1 million. While many people are already familiar with the web browser Opera, the company itself has had a tumultuous history. Opera shareholders separated the company into two different entities — the browser maker and the adtech operations. The advertising company is now called . And a consortium of Chinese companies the web browser, the consumer products and the Opera brand. That second part is the one that is going public in the U.S. Opera currently manages a web browser and a handful of web browsers . On Android, you can download Opera, Opera Mini and Opera Touch. On iOS, you’ll only find Opera Mini. More recently, the company launched a standalone app. Overall, Opera currently has around 182 million monthly active users across its mobile products, 57.4 million monthly active users for its desktop browser and 90.2 million users for Opera News in its browsers and standalone app. There’s some overlap across those user bases. More interestingly, Opera only makes money through three revenue sources. The main one is a deal with two search engines. Yandex is the default search engine in Russia, and Google is the default search engine in the rest of the world. As the company’s user base grows, partners pay more money to remain the default search engine. “A small number of business partners contribute a significant portion of our revenues,” the company writes in its F-1 document. “In 2017, our top two largest business partners in aggregate contributed approximately 56.1% of our operating revenue, with Google and Yandex accounting for 43.2% and 12.9% of our operating revenue, respectively.” The rest is ads and licensing deals. You may have noticed that Opera’s speed dial is pre-populated with websites by default, such as Booking.com or eBay. Those are advertising partners. Some phone manufacturers and telecom companies also pre-install Opera browsers on their devices. The company is getting some revenue from that too. The browser market is highly competitive and Opera is facing tech giants such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. At the same time, people spend so much time in their browser that there is probably enough room for a small browser company like Opera. The company will be listed on NASDAQ under the symbol OPRA. |
This smart contract scanner will ensure your token is tip-top | John Biggs | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | A group of researchers at ETH Zurich have created an Ethereum smart contract scanner that will check your smart contracts for bugs, exploits or potential problems. The researchers, Dr. Petar Tsankov, Dr. Hubert Ritzdorf, Prof. Martin Vechev and Dr. Arthur Gervais, all have extensive experience in system security and they are working on improving the blockchain space one smart contract at a time. The team recently incorporated as a new company, ChainSecurity, and they are releasing products to help programmers and ICO builders understand and launch their tokens. “The main technical challenge in building an effective security scanner for smart contracts is finding a way to explore all behaviors of the contact, which can even exceed the number of atoms in the universe. Existing automated security checkers for smart contracts essentially avoid this problem by only inspecting a subset of all behaviors of the contract,” said Tsankov. “However, since not all behaviors are covered, these checkers can miss critical security vulnerabilities. Our new Ethereum scanner considers all behaviors of the contract to solve the challenge, rather than avoid it. Indeed, a study on open-source Ethereum contracts reveals that existing solutions can miss up to .” Who are the founders and what is their background? The project is self-funded and the team was clear that they would never launch an ICO. You can check out the beta version of the scanner . The team has seen a great deal of interest in their products and they will officially launch this new one this week. “Our Securify system has about 100 contract uploads per day (which is 50x higher than commercial alternatives, such as ). It is currently the top choice when it comes to auditing smart contracts and is regularly used by professional security auditors. I expect the new Ethereum security scanner to have even higher traction due to the larger coverage of vulnerabilities and new features,” said Tsankov. “The startup / project started very organically. I am very keen on work in the area of automated security analysis. Having observed the big security issues in Ethereum smart contracts, and the significant financial consequences of these, I started working on automated security analysis of Ethereum smart contracts together with a few other PhD students in the lab. We managed to build the first automated verifier for Ethereum smart contracts in the research lab and release it publicly. At this point, it became hard to keep this a purely academic project. There was a significant commercial interest from blockchain projects who worry about the security of their contracts. To address their needs, we incorporated the startup in October 2017, called ChainSecurity, and started collaborating with crypto initiatives and projects,” he said. The team’s goal is to automate smart contract security audits. Their company, , is built on the team’s work at and and aims to be the gold standard for smart contract threat detection. A quick test of the new feature showed how quickly and precisely the system could find exploits, which was quite interesting. Given these contracts will be managing millions of dollars in capital down the line, it’s better to be safe than very, very sad. |
These 50 founders and VCs suggest 2018 may be a tipping point for women in tech: Part 2 | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | On Friday, — and who happen to be women. Herewith, 25 more who deserve some kudos for getting it done in the first half of this year. This list, meant to highlight the growing number of women with interesting companies or starting venture firms to watch, could easily be several times longer, we’re gleefully aware. Please feel free to tweet us or nominate in our comments section other women who’ve reached a particular milestone in 2018 and should be included in future profiles of female leaders who are on the rise, along with their organizations. Shan-Lyn Ma has huge ambitions for her wedding registry startup , and her investors clearly trust her instincts. We can see why, too. Ma — a former executive with the e-commerce companies Gilt Groupe and Chloe + Isabel — originally started Zola to reinvent the traditional registry process. Now, Ma sees instead an opportunity to eventually address every need a young couple may have, from caterers to Cuisinarts, to eventually, perhaps, even home mortgages. It’s well on its way, connecting engaged couples to 600 brands and 60,000 products. With the that Zola closed last month, its technology will presumably only grow more efficient — and ubiquitous. “Right now, we’re investing for growth. But we’re marching toward that goal where we are a huge company, serving companies across the entire wedding-planning journey, and have a business that supports that mission. Absolutely,” she tells us. For nine years, Stanford MBA Heather Mirjahangir Fernandez led advertising product, marketing and sales strategy for Trulia, which builds tools and sells subscription services to real estate agents. But after Trulia was acquired by Zillow, Fernandez decided she’d learned enough to become a founder herself, co-founding , a healthcare startup that, in the words of Forbes, “wants to do for urgent care what OpenTable did for restaurants, by bringing transparent pricing and easy-to-book appointments to the industry.” There’s “something working in healthcare today, and it’s a category called convenient care,” Fernandez, who is CEO, told the outlet. Investors think Solv is particularly adept at booking urgent care visits through its products, providing the company with $21 million, including that Solv closed this past May. Amanda Johnson and KJ Miller met as Harvard Business School classmates. Now, they’re the founders of , a cosmetics company for women of color whose message, and products — including nude lipsticks that match deeper skin tones — is resonating. As Miller last fall, “Girls have been tagging their friends in their posts . . . Women of color were used to being treated as an afterthought. It’s not every day that you’re a priority.” The company seems to be at the top of investors’ minds, certainly. After closing in seed funding last year, the outfit last month closed another that Johnson and Miller are using to expand Mented’s product range, which currently includes lip glosses, eyeshadows, nail polishes and accessories aimed at helping spread the word. Jen Rubio and Steph Korey met while working at eyeglass outfit Warby Parker, and they together spied what looked like a gap in the market between junky travel offerings that threatened to fall apart and richly priced luggage that was too expensive for even gainfully employed millennials. Their solution was , which makes “first-class luggage at coach price,” which Rubio and Corey say they can offer by selling directly to consumers, rather than through third parties that would eat into profit margins. The price belies some sophistication: Away’s polycarbonite bags come with 100 parts, including a located underneath the handle that travelers can eject to remain compliant with airline policies and which investors seem to like. Just last week, they provided the company with led by earlier investors Forerunner Ventures, Global Founders Capital and Comcast Ventures. Away has now raised $81 million altogether. Lea von Bidder knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur. She trained for it, nabbing degrees in entrepreneurship at Zhejiang University, Purdue University and Ecode de Management de Lyon while also burnishing her operating skills via a marketing stint at Proctor & Gamble, and strategy consulting at Estrin & Co. in Paris. All would lead to , a med-tech startup that has been called the because of its popular tracking bracelet that monitors nine physiological parameters to help detect users’ fertility windows, from breathing rate to pulse rate to temperature. Despite plenty of competition from other ovulation trackers, investors think Ava is on to something, providing the company with late last month. The majority of Ava’s new funding came from earlier investors, with prominent European VC firms btov and SVC also joining the round. A San Francisco-based startup called wants to educate women about their reproductive health much earlier in their lives, enabling them to become more “proactive” instead of reactive, says co-founder and CEO Afton Vechery, a former product manager at the genetic testing company 23andMe and, before that, an analyst at a healthcare-focused private equity firm. In both jobs, Vechery learned of the growing number of companies that are empowering customers with information about their own bodies. At 23andMe in particular, she also came to appreciate the importance of making that information affordable. Indeed, after shelling out $1,500 for tests run by a reproductive endocrinologist to get a better picture of her own reproductive health, Vechery and her friend and co-founder Carly Leahy, a creative strategist, set out to create similar tests that one needn’t be a Rockefeller to order. The product they built — an at-home finger-prick hormone test that sells for $199 — is something investors are betting will take off. The day that the tests were made available to customers for the first time, in late May, Modern Fertility also announced in funding, co-led by Maveron and Union Square Ventures. Sarah Smith spent roughly five years at Facebook in a variety of roles before logging another roughly five years at the question-and-answers site Quora, where she served as the company’s vice president of advertising sales and operations. While Smith was gaining operating expertise, the one-time music education major knew she wanted to break into the world of venture capital. Part of that effort included helping out , a young venture firm that relies on a network of entrepreneurs and angel investors as deal scouts, and is backed by big wheels like Reid Hoffman and Bill Gates. Smith also worked three years as a partner with , a seven-year-old, early-stage investment group, where she sourced 20 deals, including Winnie, whose founders we featured . As Smith recently , “When I thought about the next steps in my career, [venture capital] seemed the best way to work with multiple companies.” Ultimately, Smith decided that the best place to do that is with , which recruited Smith as its first female investing partner in late May — a big deal, considering the firm has been up and running for 17 years. For Smith, the opportunity isn’t merely to help BCV reshape its thinking and (likely) attract more female founders, it’s also a chance for her to write bigger checks to startups, given that BCV is currently investing out of a (and is likely to close another big fund in the not-too-distant future). Investing in initial coin offerings, or ICOs, is a minefield. This isn’t just true for people with absolutely no technical background but also for many investors who may be well-versed in tech but still struggle to understand many projects’ white papers. Enter L.A.-based , a platform for users to research and validate claims that people make online, whether in a blog post, white paper, website or social media post. The young company’s aim is to “bring authenticity back into the digital and decentralized world.” At least it will be when it gets built. Right now, investors are betting entirely on the talents of TruStory’s founder, Preethi Kasireddy, a USC grad who studied industrial and systems engineering before taking a job as a banking analyst with Goldman Sachs after graduating and, later, a role with Andreessen Horowitz’s deals group. A third job, with the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, would lead her to teach herself software engineering, enabling her to architect and implement the front-end interfaces and APIs required for the integration of Ethereum onto Coinbase’s brokerage platform, among other things. Maybe it’s no wonder that investors, including Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, gave TruStory , given Kasireddy’s penchant for getting things done. There are more than 50 million immigrants in the U.S. and Canada, and more than 240 million immigrants around the world. In fact, immigrants account for one of the fastest-growing demographics in the world and are expected to drive more than 80 percent of population growth in developed economies. Yet when they arrive in the U.S. as students or for work, they’re basically credit invisible. , a three-year-old, San Francisco-based startup, is trying to address the issue by providing lenders, property managers and other businesses with real-time international credit reports in order for them to acquire immigrant consumers from around the world. The company’s founder, Nicky Goulimis, a native of Greece who grew up in the U.K., came up with the idea while attending Stanford’s grad school, where she quickly discovered the problems she faced — including difficulty in getting an apartment without a U.S. credit report (no choice but to pay several months’ rent up front), getting a credit card (which involved having to use small amounts on a very limited card, pay it off, then ask for a progressively larger credit line) — have been the case for all internationals relocating to the U.S. for years. In fact, her two co-founders — Misha Esipov, whose parents moved to the U.S. from Russia, and Loek Janssen, who arrived at Stanford from the Netherlands — experienced the same things. The good news: investors see opportunity in addressing the issue. Earlier this year, General Catalyst and Index Ventures led a in Nova Credit. First Round Capital, Nyca and Y Combinator also joined the financing. , a five-year-old, South San Francisco-based developer of Alzheimer’s disease therapeutics, raised at the end of last month, including from Sequoia Capital, Vulcan Capital and Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences subsidiary. The company’s CEO? Casey Lynch, a serial entrepreneur with a background in Alzheimer’s research at both UCSF and Stanford, whose biggest fear is that our bodies are living ever longer, while our brains have the same short half-life. She’s trying to do something about it, too. Specifically, Cortexyme believes that toxic bacterial proteins secrete enzymes that digest our brain cells, causing our neurons to fall apart. Toward that end, Lynch’s company has looked at dozens of Alzheimer’s patients’ brains to confirm that the proteins are causing the problem, not merely correlated with it. Whether the narrow antibiotic that Cortexyme is developing to take on these proteins will work remains an open question, but clearly investors — including early backer Breakout Ventures, a venture firm that counts Peter Thiel as its anchor investor — think it . People in Silicon Valley circles don’t know Stephanie Alsbrooks or Georgine Muntz, but their five-year-old, Texas-based company, , certainly caught the attention of the folks at Bain Capital Ventures, which provided it with in the company in January. What’s the attraction? For starters, Alsbrooks and Muntz have spent the last 14 years, collectively, in the world of auto finance; the experience makes them as well-positioned as any to run a software-as-a-service business aimed at the auto-lending industry. It’s also a huge industry. In 2016, the total balance of auto loans outstanding in the U.S. hit a record . Bain also insists that defi gives lenders far more control and configurability so they can manage a loan’s entire life cycle without expensive and oft-delayed professional services. That’s a big deal in a world not known for being especially insightful about customers’ pain points. Alexandra Zatarain was born in San Diego and raised in Tijuana, Mexico, where most of her family lived, before she set out for New York and a job in public relations. Zatarain might have stayed in PR, too, if not for her father, who was struck with terminal cancer and suffered the loss of strength and body heat that afflicts so many cancer sufferers. It made Zatarain — missing him from 4,400 miles away — wonder what a product might look that could have monitored him remotely, as well as made him more comfortable. Enter , an online mattress company Zatarain created four years ago with three co-founders, whose beds also track users’ sleep, allows them to set the ideal temperature for both sides of their bed and sets “smart alarms.” The startup, which already sells three models of mattresses, ranging in price from $699 to $1,299, is certainly a soothing proposition to investors. Earlier this year, Eight raised $14 million in Series B funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and Yunqi Partners. The company has now raised $27 million altogether. Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck didn’t set out to create a startup that handles people chores, one to-do item at a time. The friends, who met while at Harvard Business School, decided to explore the idea after they hired help from Craigslist to assist with their own laundry and grocery shopping, splitting the cost and attracting the attention of acquaintances in the process. “It was a little bit of an accident,” Sapone once . “We built the product for ourselves, and over time people in our apartment building said ‘Hey, can I get in on that?'” Fast-forward and their four-year-old, New York-based company, , now relies on a growing flock of trained home helpers who help customers of their company with all kinds of chores on a once-a-week basis, enabling the company to charge the kind of monthly subscription fee that investors like to see. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, Hello Alfred closed on in fresh funding led by real estate developers Divco West and Invesco, with participation from Spark Capital and New Enterprise Associates. The company has now raised more than $52 million altogether. Launched in 2015, ’s founders Alex Friedman and Jordana Kier formed a company around an idea that they thought stood a chance of challenging industry giants Tampax and Playtex: 100 percent organic feminine products. As Kier a couple of weeks ago, “We founded LOLA with a simple and seemingly obvious idea — as women, we shouldn’t have to compromise when it comes to our reproductive health.” Like most women, Kier said, “[W]e’d been using the same feminine care products since we were teenagers. But when we found out that brands — including the same ones we were loyal to all those years — aren’t required to disclose exactly what’s in their products, it made us wonder: what’s in our tampon?” Smart question — and clearly one that Kier and Friedman weren’t alone in asking, given the company appears to be growing at a healthy clip. It’s direct-to-consumer subscription approach — it ships out tampons, pads and liners that are made only with organic cotton and don’t contain fragrances or dyes — appeals to investors, too. Earlier this month, the company closed on Alyssa Ravasio always loved the outdoors and according to a recent , headed to a developer boot camp after striking on the idea of creating a site filled with everything a camper needs to know about state and national campgrounds, including, say, a nearby surf break they might want to check out. An even bigger insight would come later: that there was an opportunity to partner with private land owners to give camper’s the kind of experience they can’t enjoy at a crowded campground. Enter , a now five-year-old, San Francisco-based operator of a site for travelers to discover and book camping experiences, and which raised last month led by Benchmark. It’s a big deal for the company, and gives it more ammunition to compete against a newer, New York-based competitor called Tentrr that raised in Series A funding earlier this year and is making its way West this summer. Ruzwana Bashir, a native of England born to Pakistanti immigrant parents, has said that she was always an explorer, including while studying at Oxford, working in investment banking and private equity at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone and dabbling in the startup world — at Gilt Groupe and Art.sy — before jumping into entrepreneurship. Why make the leap? Because of 20 hours spent trying to plan a friend’s birthday in Istanbul, after which it occurred to Bashir that it’d be awfully nice if there were simply a one-stop that helped users discover what to do on their trips and which vendors to use to do it. So began , a now six-year-old, San Francisco-based “OpenTable for the $100 billion activities market,” as Bashir has , that now claims to offer 10,000 experiences in the U.S., Mexico and numerous European cities. The vision has struck a chord with investors, too. Just two weeks ago, the company closed on In mid-June, PayPal that it’s paying $400 million in cash for , an 18-year-old, Bay Area-based company that helps people and small businesses receive payments for products and services that they sell, including through the vacation rental platform HomeAway and the skin care marketing company Rodan & Fields. What was the allure? Well, Hyperwallet interlinks cash networks, card schemes and mobile money services with domestic ACH networks around the world to enable what it characterizes as “disruptively priced” and, as crucially, compliant mass payments. If you think the company was flying low, its founder, and former CEO Lisa Shields, seems to fly even lower, despite her bona fides as an entrepreneur. The MIT-trained engineer, who originally launched Hyperwallet in Vancouver, last year founded a second company called , which is an API management platform that aims to allow banks to quickly deploy new business banking products. Before switching gears, however, she was presented with an Entrepreneur of the Year award by EY in 2015, where she’d said she was “honored and humbled, not to mention surprised.” Cindy Mi started building a global education marketplace from day one with her online company, , which matches Chinese students with North American teachers. The reason, she says: She’d start teaching younger children English at age 15, and she felt, even then, that she was helping to empower these children for a future where the world is increasingly connected. Following her dream of scaling that effort is certainly paying off — for Mi, for teachers and for students. According to VIPKid, the online company now matches more than 30,000 North American teachers with more than 200,000 primarily Chinese students for one-on-one sessions in English that give teachers extra money and the flexibility to teach when they can. The platform also enables parents to provide the kind of education for their children that might not be available in their own backyards. As for VIPKid, it reportedly brought in $760 million in revenue last year, more than double what it garnered in 2016. Perhaps it’s no wonder that in June, Mi’s company announced a fresh , at a whopping $3 billion valuation. Carmen Chang knows the ins and outs of startups in China as well as anyone, having headed up Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati’s corporate and securities practice in China before getting plucked out of the global law firm by venture heavyweight , whose China practice she has led for the last five years. If there was any surprise in NEA’s late May announcement that Chang had been promoted to general partner at the firm — the very first woman to hold that most senior role in NEA’s 39 years of operation — it was that Chang, who received her law degree from Stanford and represents the venture firm on 10 different companies’ boards, didn’t hold the title already. |
Lyft Bikes is now a thing | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | Lyft, the rideshare giant that last week closed on in fresh funding, just announced the latest move in its ongoing chess match with its older and better-funded competitor Uber. It has acquired Motivate, the oldest and largest electric bike-share company in North America, for undisclosed terms. Motivate, which operates in New York as CitiBike; in Washington, D.C. as Capital Bikeshare; and in San Francisco as Ford GoBike, was reportedly on the cusp of selling to Lyft , with the outlet The Information reporting that Motivate was likely to fetch $250 million or more. While the final price tag isn’t being shared, certainly the deal seemed inevitable after Uber paid a reported in April for Motivate’s most direct U.S. competitor, the bike-sharing startup Jump (renamed in recent years after operating previously as Social Bicycles, or SoBi). Whether bike sharing will provide a rich new stream of revenue for either company remains a question mark. While bike-share companies have long insisted that they make their bikes as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible in partnership with China-based manufacturers, they haven’t proven lucrative businesses to date. As of last year, Motivate — which bought CitiBike in 2014, oversees many thousands of bikes across bike-sharing programs in nine U.S. cities, and recorded more than 1.8 million rides in New York City alone in the month of May — still , according to a source close to the company with whom we’d spoken at the time. Still, the companies are looking for new ways to not just ferry people but also other goods, which these bike operations enable them to do more effectively. The bikes also provide them with the opportunity to tout their , as Lyft did today in its announcement about Motivate. It’s also the case that ride-share companies increasingly have little choice when it comes to getting their customers to their destinations. As for e-scooter companies in particular demonstrate, plenty of urban dwellers would prefer to hop on a bicycle or scooter to avoid the growing amounts of congestion that cities experience as the economy chugs along for the 10th year in a row. Indeed, along with e-scooter companies Bird and Lime and Spin, both Uber and Lyft for permits that would enable them to place their own e-scooters on the streets of San Francisco. The big question is whether they build or buy, with Lyft reportedly for its own e-scooter designs in recent months. |
Snag your ticket to the TechCrunch Summer Party at August Capital | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | Great news for all you Silicon Valley startup fans who have yet to score your ticket to the on July 27: We’re releasing our third round of tickets today. Tickets are available on a strictly first-come, first-served basis, and the first two batches of tickets disappeared pretty darned quick. Don’t miss out on the party, people — We truly love this event, which explains why we’ve been holding this party for 13 consecutive years. August Capital, located in Menlo Park, provides a beautiful location, spacious grounds and a lovely deck where you can enjoy cocktails and conversation with like-minded entrepreneurs. Relax and unwind, network for your next opportunity or perhaps do a little of both — it’s all possible and it’s all up to you. Here’s another possibility; if you have an early-stage startup, buy a . C’mon, networking is always a part of every TechCrunch event and that includes exciting startups showcasing their tech and talent. Each demo table includes four Summer party tickets. Learn more about demo tables . Here are the basic details you need to know about the TechCrunch Summer Party at August Capital: Come and spend a beautiful evening on the deck, sip cocktails and enjoy celebrating the entrepreneurial spirit. You might even go home with some great door prizes, including TechCrunch swag, Amazon Echos and tickets to The third round of TechCrunch Summer Party at August Capital tickets is available now, and you can . We can’t wait to see you on the deck! |
Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson to speak at Disrupt SF | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | Marillyn Hewson, the head of Lockheed Martin, is joining us at Disrupt SF. This is fantastic. The giant American technology and defense company has long been at the forefront of security, aerospace and defense technology, and Hewson has led the company since 2013. There’s plenty to talk about. Lockheed Martin has proven itself by turning wild ideas into sellable products through various means. The company is increasingly building out its space flight and artificial intelligence divisions, and we want to hear how Hewson is pushing Lockheed Martin forward as competition increases from Silicon Valley. Hewson joined Lockheed Martin more than 35 years ago as an industrial engineer, rising through the ranks and serving in numerous leadership positions until reaching the top floor in 2013. She’s a leader in the aerospace field, a former chairman and a current member of the executive committee of the Aerospace Industries Association. She also serves on the National Space Council’s Users Advisory Group and on the board of trustees of both the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Khalifa University for Science and Technology in the United Arab Emirates. Hewson comes from Junction City, Kansas, and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in business administration and her Master of Arts degree in economics from the University of Alabama. Later, she attended the Columbia Business School and Harvard Business School executive development programs. Needless to say, she’s a big deal and we’re excited to have her. She joins other executives such as Goldman Sachs CFO and Dropbox’s . This year’s Disrupt SF is going to be the biggest yet, with two stages of programming. Fireside chats and panels on space travel and artificial intelligence will be featured on both. Tickets to the show, which runs September 5-7, are available . |
CowryWise micro-savings service opens high-yield government bonds to everyday Nigerians | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | In emerging market countries where economic volatility is a way of life, there aren’t a lot of relatively safe options for members of the burgeoning middle class to park their money. For instance, countries like Nigeria have experienced a tremendous growth in the number of citizens entering the middle class, which now accounts for about 23 percent of the population (it’s around 50 percent in the U.S.), according to a recent citing the African Development Bank. While Nigeria now faces some significant headwinds from a weak domestic currency (the naira), high interest rates and a manufacturing recession, there are ways that local investment can both protect the wealth that’s been created and encourage investment domestically to potentially spur development. At least, that’s the conclusion that college friends Razaq Ahmed and Edward Popoola came to while they were thinking about opportunities for new financial services options in their home country of Nigeria. The two men, Ahmed with a background in finance and Popoola in computer science, are launching a company called that gives Nigerian investors a way to save their money by investing in high-yield government bonds. The rates on those products are high enough to absorb the wild swings in value of the naira and still provide a healthy return for investors, according to Ahmed. Set to present at this year’s demo day from , CowryWise is one of a number of startups that Y Combinator has backed coming from the African continent, and an example of the wellspring of entrepreneurial talent that is flourishing in sub-Saharan Africa. Using CowryWise, a customer would just have to sign up with their email address and phone number and link their bank account up to the CowryWise platform. There are already roughly 57 million savings accounts in Nigeria and 32 million unique bank users. By investing in the bonds, these savers gain access to interest rates that range between 10 percent and 17 percent, according to Ahmed. “The bonds… are similar to the treasuries issued by the U.S. government, which is A-rated,” says Ahmed. Even if there were foreign currency risk from investing in the naira, the inflation rate is currently around 11 percent, according to Ahmed. Given that most of the bonds are yielding interest rates on the higher end, it’s just a better deal for consumers, he said. “There’s more value in keeping the money in government treasury bills” than in the bank, says Ahmed. For Ahmed and Popoola, the decision to launch CowryWise was a way to bring investment opportunities to a retail investor that hadn’t been able to access the best that the financial system in Nigeria had to offer. To target these retail investors meant leveraging technology to scale quickly and cheaply across the country. The two men started developing their service in January and tested it in February and March with friends and family. CowryWise isn’t without competitors. Another Nigerian company, Piggybank, . Like CowryWise, Piggybank also taps into government bonds to offer better rates to its investors. That company already has 53,000 registered users — who have saved in excess of $5 million since 2016, according to a release. There are subtle differences between the two. touts its ability to save through bonds, but it is primarily working with banks to get Nigerians saving money. CowryWise is using Meristem Financial (Ahmed’s old employer) as the asset manager for its investments into the bond market. Another difference is the time customers’ funds are locked up. Piggybank has a three-month savings period required before investors can withdraw funds, while CowryWise will let its customers withdraw cash immediately, of the two services. Ultimately, there’s a large enough market for multiple players, and a need for better financial services, according to Ahmed. “We kept having interest from retail investors on why they want to do micro-savings and micro-investment, but they didn’t have the required capital,” Ahmed says. “That was the major reason for staring the company. Why not democratize the assets? And make them available in investments and savings in this traditional instrument?” |
FoodChéri expands beyond Paris with Seazon | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | There’s no lack of on-demand fresh meal services in Paris and its surrounding area. But what about the rest of France? FoodChéri has launched a new offering called to deliver fresh meals with no additives every week. Seazon is a subscription service that delivers anywhere in France. You decide how many meals per week you want (4, 6, 8 or 10), and you decide what you like. You also can filter options if you’re vegetarian or vegan. After that, you’ll start getting a weekly delivery from a refrigerated truck with all your meals. This could work particularly well for lunch at work. Maybe you don’t have time to cook lunch boxes or maybe you work in a company with few lunch options. Seazon offers the same meals as the ones you can find on FoodChéri. The company uses fresh ingredients and organic food as much as possible. When it comes to sourcing, the company works directly with local farmers. FoodChéri originally started as an online-only restaurant and delivery service. The company offers a dozen different options as well as a handful of starters and desserts. The company cooks everything in-house and delivers to your office or home in half an hour or an hour. You can still order on if you live or work in Paris or near Paris — the existing service is not going away. Back in January, corporate catering giant FoodChéri without folding the service into another Sodexo offering. While many big French companies rely on Sodexo for their cafeteria, many small companies don’t have a cafeteria. FoodChéri lets you have a cafeteria experience without requiring a big kitchen and an expensive contract with a catering company. This is a highly competitive market in Paris, as there have been quite a few full-stack food startups over the past few years. and also have a somewhat similar approach. Popchef to serving corporate clients exclusively. 62degrés got acquired by . Le Zeste’s team joined Frichti. |
What next? Oh yes, turning a luxury car into a non-fungible token | Mike Butcher | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | We’ve seen more than one project use the immutability of blockchain to verify important physical things. So, for instance, a pioneer in the space, , has certification of high art to leading galleries worldwide, and other players are now entering this growing market. is a new startup also putting art on the blockchain. The benefits are obvious: reducing to near-zero the possibility that an artwork could be fake. This is an incredibly powerful idea, especially at the high end of the commercial spectrum. A relatively new idea is to take blockchain to the car market. Automakers are already starting to take an interest. BMW, Ford, Renault and General Motors recently joined a new working group of more than 30 auto companies to employ blockchain technology. The Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative aims to speed up the adoption of blockchain, with use cases ranging from autonomous payments to ridesharing. But that’s not where blockchain adoption for cars ends. There remains the need for trustworthy assurances of authenticity and condition, especially when it comes to high-end cars. And that’s doubly true of classic and exotic vehicles. Collectible, classic cars can have their documentation forged or misassigned as there’s no one, single, global document standardization for these kinds of cars. Now a startup hopes to bring their newly launched platform for tokenization to this market. is a blockchain startup that has launched a user-friendly method to register classic car collections on the blockchain, making it both unforgeable and verifiable by anyone. The is in Switzerland. Proxeus’s process verifies the certificates of authenticity and conditions of the vehicles. As an additional step, the car itself could actually be taken to the blockchain as a non-fungible token with an integrated certification library, offering not only proof of ownership and history but also to serve as a permanent link to the verified documentation. It’s now launching the beta version of its engine, which has a drag and drop interface. But do we really want to tokenize luxury cars? Proxeus says that’s not the point. They say their technology means someone without specialized programming skills can have the ability to deploy blockchain for a wide variety of use cases. Antoine Verdon, co-founder, says: “For the first time we are able to show that our technology is real.” Artan Veliju, CTO, says the platform has the “ability to easily build the workflows needed to use blockchain productively without needing to launch a software development project.” Their idea is to allow anyone to legally incorporate businesses, register assets and validate certificates on their testnet blockchain. It’s so far been used by the University of Basel’s Center for Innovative Finance course certificates or WWF Switzerland’s tax donation verification system. Test XES tokens will be provided to show how they function within the Proxeus ecosystem and are used to pay for Proxeus’ services. Shortly after raising $25 million as a part of their ICO, Proxeus now plans to complete the functions described in its whitepaper and release a fully developed solution for enterprise. Meantime, I’m going to make a, perhaps obvious, observation: The tokenization craze is clearly not going to end here. |
Data breach exposes trade secrets of carmakers GM, Ford, Tesla, Toyota | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | Security researcher UpGuard Cyber Risk disclosed Friday that sensitive documents from more than 100 manufacturing companies, including GM, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, Tesla, Toyota, ThyssenKrupp, and VW were exposed on a publicly accessible server belonging to The exposure via Level One Robotics, which provides industrial automation services, came through rsync, a common file transfer protocol that’s used to backup large data sets, according to UpGuard Cyber Risk. The data breach was first reported by the . According to the security researchers, restrictions weren’t placed on the rsync server. This means that any rsync client that connected to the rsync port had access to download this data. UpGuard Cyber Risk of how it discovered the to show how a company within a supply chain can affect large companies with seemingly tight security protocols. This means if someone knew where to look they could access trade secrets closely protected by automakers. It’s unclear if any nefarious actors actually got their hands on the data. At least one source at an affected automaker told TechCrunch it doesn’t not appear that sensitive or proprietary data was exposed. UpGuard’s big takeaway in all of this: rsync instances should be restricted by IP address. The researchers also suggest that user access to rsync be set up so that clients have to authenticate before receiving the dataset. Without these measures, rsync is publicly accessible, the researchers said. The breach exposed 157 gigabytes of data—a treasure trove of 10 years of assembly line schematics, factory floor plans and layouts, robotic configurations and documentation, ID badge request forms, VPN access request forms. The breach even included sensitive non-disclose agreements, including one from Tesla. Personal details of some Level One employees, including scans of driver’s licenses and passports, and Level One business data, including invoices, contracts, and bank account details. The security team discovered the breach July 1. The company successfully reached Level One by July 9 and the exposure was closed by the following day. |
Indie gem Stardew Valley will get multiplayer on August 1st | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | Stardew Valley, the popular indie farming simulator (it’s more fun than “farming simulator” makes it sound, I promise) is quite possibly the chillest game of all time. But, without any multiplayer aspect, it can get … a bit lonely. From farming, to fishing, to exploring mines, it’s always felt like a game that would be better with friends. We’ll soon find out if that’s true. After about year of work has been put into the feature, the game will get cooperative multiplayer starting on August 1st. There’s a slight catch: multiplayer will be limited to PC/Mac/Linux, at first. The trailer (below) says support will roll out to Nintendo Switch/PS4/Xbox One “soon,” but doesn’t get into specifics. Multiplayer Stardew Valley will support up to four (4) players on the same farm, with all players sharing the same money and farmland. According to this page on the , groups will be able to tweak the game a bit to their tastes (specifically, they can scale things like profit margins and in-game item costs) to account for the added ease of having four players doing the work that was previously designed for one. Stardew Valley is surprisingly in-depth for a game built primarily by just one person; while it’s published by a company, the vast majority of the work — from the pixel art, to the musical composition, to the programming — is done by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone. By the beginning of this year, it was . GQ did a profile on Barone and how . |
Facebook suspends analytics firm Crimson Hexagon over data use concerns | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | As part of its ongoing mission to close the barn doors after the cows have got out, Facebook has suspended the accounts of British data analytics firm Crimson Hexagon over concerns that it may be improperly handling user data. The ominously named company has for years used official APIs to siphon public posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other sources online, collating and analyzing for various purposes, such as to gauge public opinion on a political candidate or issue. It has clients around the world, serving Russia and Turkey as well as the U.S. and United Kingdom. Facebook, it seems, was not fully aware of the extent of Crimson Hexagon’s use of user data, however, including in several government contracts which it didn’t have the opportunity to evaluate before they took effect. The possibility that the company is not complying with its data use rules, specifically that they may have been helping build surveillance tools, was apparently real enough for Facebook to take action. Perhaps the bar for suspension has been lowered somewhat over the last year, and with good reason. “We are investigating the claims about Crimson Hexagon to see if they violated any of our policies,” said Facebook VP Product Partnerships Ime Archibong in a statement. , which first reported the suspension, noted that Crimson Hexagon currently has a contract with FEMA to monitor online discussion for various disaster-related purposes, but a deal with ICE fell through because Twitter resisted this application of their “firehose” data. However, beyond the suggestion that the company has undertaken work that skirts the edge of what the social media companies consider appropriate use of public data, Crimson Hexagon doesn’t seem to have done anything as egregious as the wholesale network collection done by others. It restricts itself to publicly available data that it pays to access, and applies its own methods to produce its own brand of insight and intelligence. The company also isn’t (at least, not obviously) a quasi-independent arm of a big, shady network of companies working actively to obscure their connections and deals, . Crimson Hexagon is more above the board, with ordinary venture investment and partnerships. Its work is in a way similar to CA, in that it is gleaning insights of a perhaps troublingly specific nature from billions of public posts, but it’s at least doing it in full view. As before, the onus of responsibility is equally on Facebook to enforce as it is on partners to engage in scrupulous handling of user data. It’s hardly good data custodianship for Facebook to let companies take what they need under a handshake agreement that they’ll do no evil, and then take them to task years later when the damage has already been done. But that seems to be the company’s main priority now: To reiterate the folksy metaphor from above, it is frantically counting the cows that have bolted while apologizing for having left the door open for the last decade or so. Incidentally, Crimson Hexagon was co-founded by the same person who was put in charge of : Harvard’s Gary King. In a statement, he denied any involvement in the former’s everyday work, although he is chairman. No doubt this connection will receive a bit of scrutiny on Facebook’s side as well. |
What should competitive Fortnite look like? | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | Games put forth its first true effort at official competitive Fortnite Battle Royale. It was . The private hosts used for the tournament were about as laggy as could be, with pro players getting eliminated simply because they couldn’t move. This tournament was for a total prize of $250K. That’s big money, and big frustration for pro players who were essentially eliminated by the whims of the server gods. But on top of the lag, the whole thing was, well, boring. A cardinal sin in any sport. The fact is that when you put 100 pro players in a lobby together and tell them that the last man standing wins, most of them will simply sit in a fort and stay safe as long as possible. This does not generate a whole lot of action. And when there is action on the map, there was no way for a spectator to know about it. There are, after all, a hundred people to watch out for, and jumping from one engagement to another is not only difficult but lacks a certain narrative quality, making the whole thing feel scattered. It seems clear that a guided mode or hotspot indicator would go a long way to improving the viewing experience. Being told where the fighting was or could be happening or having a guide that flagged these opportunities could work. There could also be a documentary-style concept that followed a few top players on their entire run, with the hope that they’ll find action and maybe even be pushed into conflict to impress viewers. Epic recently published , outlining ways that the publisher can improve on the tournament. They’ve also set forth , proposing a score-based tournament where both eliminations and Victory Royales count toward players’ overall score. Whether or not this will incentivize more action will be determined following the event. It’s also worth noting that Epic scheduled today’s event during the Fortnite Friday tournament. Fortnite Friday, hosted by popular YouTuber Keemstar and facilitated by UMG, was a $20,000 elimination-based tournament with top players. In this week of the Summer Skirmish Series, which is worth a total of $8 million, Epic is choosing to host a two-day tournament, effectively . It doesn’t have to be this way, Epic. I know that the concept of 100 of the best players in the world dropping into one map sounds incredible. It does. It sounds great, in theory. But in practice, it’s just a disorderly live stream of a bunch of highly talented players sitting around in bases, or, worse, lagging to the point of being frozen. And, an invitational tournament (that goes terribly wrong) doesn’t scream “inclusive,” which is what Epic repeatedly says competitive Fortnite should be. There is another way, and it’s the same way that Fortnite players have been competing for months now. A kill race. But let’s back up a bit. Right now, Fortnite is played by 100 people in a single lobby, and “winning” the game is defined by being the last survivor(s). This can be played in solo mode, with 100 individuals facing off against the storm and each other, or in 50 teams of two (Duos), or 25 teams of four (Squads). Video games often get tweaks for the competitive scene, whether it’s limiting the resources/gear that players can use or reducing the number of maps that can be played. When skill level is that high, most games must make changes to allow for true competition. Given it’s still early days, Fortnite Battle Royale featuring purely pro players simply hasn’t worked. But as it stands now, there are roughly two schools of thought. Pros: Cons: Gamebattle sites like CMG and UMG have been running minor tournaments for quite a while now using this format. Fortnite Friday, arguably one of the biggest weekly tournaments, also follows this format. Here’s how it works: Individual players load up in a Duo match on the same team, or teams of two load up into a Squad match, also on the same team, and race for who can get the most kills in a public match. This means that these opposing players can’t kill each other, but can keep track of each other’s kills and placement on the map. When you’re racing for kills, understanding where the other duo is fighting and how many kills they have is important information. Given only four players are competing at a time, that means the rest of the 92 people on the map are regular Fortnite players. This is where RNG comes into play. RNG is a term used in gaming that means Random Number Generator. It is the gaming equivalent of Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” It essentially means there is some level of random luck involved in the game. For example, you might land in a place where there is usually a weapon or chest, but that weapon or chest isn’t there, leaving you vulnerable to other players who land around you. Great players can work around or overcome a certain level of RNG, but if the opposing team comes up on a squad of noobs and your team rolls up on a squad of great players, the tide of the match will inevitably shift against you, and may even result in a loss. This is the cost of the 2v2 format that has become popularized with the vast majority of Fortnite competitive players. While it takes more time to have 100 players compete four at a time, this format allows the viewer to watch no more than four players as they traverse the map and seek eliminations. At most, the audience has to follow along with four separate stories on the map. In most cases, duos play together, which brings that number down to two. In either case, it’s much easier than following along with the stories of 50 separate teams. Pros: Cons: This format was used during the Ninja Live tournament, the Fortnite ProAm tournament and, most recently, during the $8 million Summer Skirmish series, hosted by Epic Games. Here’s how it works: 100 pro players/streamers pair off into teams of two and all load into the same lobby, with the goal of lasting the longest. As I said, Fortnite Battle Royale is built around the idea that there would be a sole survivor, but doesn’t predicate that survival on a certain level of skill. In other words, it’s relatively easy to hide, avoid fights and survive to the near end of a game, or potentially even win. It doesn’t take much skill to squat in a bush or set traps in a house and sit in the bathroom. Obviously, with pro players, there will be gunfights, and those gunfights should be pretty interesting. But they are few and far between, and are difficult to predict and capture for the live stream. This also excludes regular players from being a part of the action. Yes, it’s a risk to construct a competitive scene on the backs of public gameplay. But it’s also never been done before in the pro gaming world. And it is the best way to include public players into the competitive scene. A regular player is far more likely to get interested in the competitive scene knowing that, on Friday or Saturday, they have the chance to play against the world’s greatest competitors. The best way to build on the momentum of Fortnite’s popularity, as well as support the community as a whole, is to build out tournaments focused on eliminations within public lobbies. It makes sense for Epic to want to control that experience, and it certainly makes sense for Epic to want the competitive scene to fit within the game they built, which is a Battle Royale. But thus far, competitive Battle Royale featuring purely pro players simply hasn’t worked. And it feels slightly underhanded for Epic to barrel over Fortnite Friday, given that the more competitive tournaments around Fortnite, the better for the game. The community is here, telling you what it wants, Epic. And in true Fortnite fashion, if you build it, they will come. |
Niantic explains how and why it bans players in Pokémon GO | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | Getting banned for cheating is nothing new in Pokémon GO. There’ve been big ol’ ban waves every few weeks for ages now. The policies have never been totally set in stone, however — at least not publicly. Like many of the game’s mechanics, the player base has had to share info amongst themselves to figure out the offenses and their relative punishments, from slaps on the wrist to lifetime bans. At long last, Niantic has published a proper “ .” As the name implies, infractions will be handled on a three-strike system. Niantic notes, however, that “some misbehaviors” (they leave that one pretty open-ended) will work out to an instant perma ban. So what’s worthy of a strike? Spoofing (making the game think you’re somewhere you’re not), using modified Pokémon GO clients or bots or doing something that accesses Pokémon GO’s backend in an unauthorized way. On the first strike, you’ll get a warning message. You’ll still be able to play, technically, but you won’t see anything even remotely rare for seven days. On the second strike, they’ll close your account for a month. On the third strike, the account is banned for good. And if you think you got stuck in the crosshairs by accident? Niantic has an for that. It’s worth noting that these punishments aren’t really ; bans of all variety have been happening since shortly after the game’s release. This is just the first time Niantic has really put the hows-and-whys in stone. Niantic could probably go a few steps further in their clarifications here, though, as plenty of players are still confused as to whether or not they’re breaking the rules. Will they get in trouble for using third-party software (like an automated IV calculator) that modify the client or access Niantic’s backend but does provide the player with more info? What about players using third-party versions of the Go Plus hardware, like the Go-tcha? That thing pretty much automates catching/spinning as you walk around… but it’s also been sold in retail stores for years now, likely to many players who’ve never considered that this thing they bought in their local GameStop might not be allowed. |
James Gunn fired from ‘Guardians of the Galaxy 3’ after offensive tweets resurface | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | 1. Many people who have followed my career know when I started, I viewed myself as a provocateur, making movies and telling jokes that were outrageous and taboo. As I have discussed publicly many times, as I’ve developed as a person, so has my work and my humor. — James Gunn (@JamesGunn) Gunn has that reflects and expands on his earlier Twitter apology, My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative. I have regretted them for many years since — not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don’t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.” “Regardless of how much time has passed, I understand and accept the business decisions taken today. Even these many years later, I take full responsibility for the way I conducted myself then. All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be: accepting, understanding, committed to equality, and far more thoughtful about my public statements and my obligations to our public discourse. To everyone inside my industry and beyond, I again offer my deepest apologies. Love to all. |
Now this… this is an ultra-wide monitor | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | I’ve been working with an ugly but functional lopsided two-monitor setup for years, and while it has served me well, I can’t say the new generation of ultra-wide monitors hasn’t tempted me. But the truth is they just aren’t wide enough. Or rather, they . Samsung has just blown my mind with a monitor so wide it will serve as a ramp that you can trick off of in the summer. It’s so wide that when it puts on a pair of BVDs they read BOULEVARD. It’s so wide that the Bayeux Tapestry got jealous. Actually it’s a little wide than a couple of the monitors Samsung announced at CES — but those had two problems. First, they were 3840×1080. And I just need more vertical pixels than that. Second, they were 49 inches wide. That’s a BIG monitor! Not just big, but with those pixels spread out that far, it’s not going to be sharp at all. On the other hand, this new one not only adds an extra 120 pixels, bringing it to the far superior 1200 vertical (for a total of 3840×1200), but it is 43 inches corner to corner. Forty-three inches… would that be too big, too small, or would it be… Just right?! (Yes, my left monitor is a bit warmer than my right, but it’s not as bad as it looks — that’s a viewing angle issue.) One of the downsides of a giant monitor is that it can be a pain to separate workspaces or, say, have a movie playing “full screen” on one half while you browse Etsy for vintage kettles on the other. But Samsung has a “picture-by-picture” mode and some other useful features that help with this. So I’m going to give it a shot. It’s also got 120Hz refresh (though no word on sync tech), a bunch of USB ports, and even a headphone jack. I don’t know why you would want built-in sound on a thing like this, since you clearly are a media freak if you buy it, but they felt the need to add in speakers. will cost $900 when it comes out, which admittedly is two or three times what I would normally pay for a monitor — I’m more of a Dell Ultrasharp guy, IPS all the way. But my whole workflow could change when this thing goes on sale. |
Comics writer Grant Morrison signs a content deal with Magic Leap | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | null |
Oscar and Lemonade founders will join us at Disrupt SF to strategize about the future of insurance innovation | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | Insurance premiums , and yet, where that money goes is something of a mystery. It certainly doesn’t seem to get invested in the consumer experience, where ancient incumbent companies still process paperwork as if it is the 1800s, and consumers are left wanting for new insurance options that meet their needs. Insurance might well be the last frontier for disruptive innovation, but now, a generation of insurance tech startups is bringing new data models and product experience talent to bear on this sclerotic industry. In the process, they may well become some of the most durable and profitable companies the industry has ever seen. Those startups face challenging questions. How can a startup even get started in an industry where an insurer often needs millions sitting on the balance sheet just to get started? How can a startup compete in a highly regulated industry, where incumbents have the financial might to actively stamp out competition? Can there be such a thing as delightful insurance? These are just some of the questions we will be investigating during a high-powered insurance tech panel at Disrupt SF this September 5-7. We will be joined by two founders who are spearheading a complete overhaul of the industry through their companies. Mario Schlosser is the CEO and co-founder of Oscar, a New York-based health insurance startup that . Schlosser started programming as a young boy in Germany, and eventually moved to the U.S. to work on computer science research at Stanford. Later, he migrated to Harvard Business School, where he met his Oscar co-founder Joshua Kushner. Mario Schlosser (Oscar Health) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 Working with Kevin Nazemi, the trio launched Oscar in 2013 just as Obamacare’s exchanges were becoming operational. Since then, the company’s health insurance products have become available in six states, and it has more than 700 employees. The company is , and . Health is just one segment of the insurance landscape though. We also will be hosting Daniel Schreiber, who is the CEO and co-founder of Lemonade, a New York-based renters and home insurance startup. Lemonade, which uses artificial intelligence to make the insurance process faster and more consumer friendly, has gotten huge attention from investors since its launch in 2015, receiving $180 million in venture capital, . Daniel Schreiber (Lemonade) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 Schreiber, a former attorney who was perviously president of wireless charging startup Powermat, joined with Shai Wininger to launch the startup, and since then the company’s product has been made available in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Perhaps most interestingly, Lemonade has a unique service model for its policyholders. Policyholders are grouped together with “peers” who want to commit to helping the same causes. Then, at the end of the calendar year, any premiums remaining in that group of peers is donated to their cause as part of a “Giveback.” Lemonade takes a fixed cut of the premium, to incentive-align itself with customers and ensure they always pay out claims as efficiently as possible. If you want to understand the challenge but incredible opportunities present in regulated businesses like insurance, these two founders are not to be missed. They will be chatting on the Next Stage of Disrupt SF the morning of September 5th. The . Passes for the show are available at the Early-Bird rate until Aug 1 . |
Wilson is like Longreads for podcasts | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | Meet , a new iPhone app that plans to change the way you discover and listen to podcasts. The company describes the app as a podcast magazine. It has the same vibe as , the curated selection of longform articles. With its minimalistic design and opinionated typography, Wilson looks like no other podcasting app. On an iPhone X, the black background looks perfectly black thanks to the OLED display. It feels like an intimate experience. Every week, the team selects a handful of podcast episodes all tied together by the same topic. Those can be the Supreme Court, the LGBTQ community, loneliness, dads, the World Cup… Each issue has a cover art and a short description. And the team also tells you why each specific podcast episode is interesting. In other words, Wilson isn’t just an audio experience. You can listen to episodes in the app or open them in Apple Podcasts. Navigating in the app is all based on swipes. You can scroll through past editions by swiping left and right. You can open an edition by swiping up, and go back to the list by swiping down. This feels much more natural than putting buttons everywhere. Wilson also feels like tuning in to the radio. Podcasts are great because they let you learn everything there’s to learn about interest you can have. But it also narrows your interests in a way. Podcast apps are too focused on top lists and “you might also like” recommendations. Gone are the days when you would switch on the radio and listen to a few people talk about something you didn’t know you cared about. Human editors can change that. That’s why Wilson can be a nice addition to your podcasting routine. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 2 | null |
YouTube CEO’s latest update details its growth, glosses over content problems | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | YouTube highlighted its growth and promised better communication with creators about its tests and experiments, the company today in its latest of an ongoing series of updates from CEO Susan Wojcicki focused on YouTube’s top five priorities in 2018. The majority of her missive today – which was also released in the form of – were wrap-ups of other announcements and launches the company had recently made, like the including Channel Memberships, merchandise, and Famebit. However, the company did offer a few updates related to those launches, including news of expanded merch partnerships. But YouTube didn’t detail the crucial steps it should be taking to address the content issues that continue to plague its site. YouTube said one way it’s improving communication is via , an unofficial channel started by YouTube employees, which offers weekly updates, responds to concerns, and gives a more behind-the-scenes look into product launches. In terms of its product updates, YouTube said that Channel Memberships, which are currently open to those with more than 100,000 subscribers, will roll out to more creators in the “coming months.” Meanwhile, merch, which is now available to U.S.-based channels with over 10,000 subscribers, will add new merchandising partners and expand to more creators “soon.” At present, YouTube is partnered with custom merchandise platform Teespring, which keeps a cut of the merchandise sales while YouTube earns a small commission. The company didn’t say which other merchandise providers would be joining the program. YouTube’s Famebit, which connects creators and brands for paid content creation, is also growing. YouTube says that more than half of channels working with Famebit doubled their YouTube revenue in the first three months of the year. And it will soon launch a new feature that will allow YouTube viewers to shop for products, apps, and tickets right form the creator’s watch page. (This was announced at VidCon, too.) There was little attention given to brand safety in today’s update, however, beyond a promise that this continues to be one of YouTube’s “biggest priorities” and that it’s seeing “positive” results. In reality, the company still struggles with content moderation. It even fails to follow-up when there’s a high-profile case, it seems. The most recent example of this is YouTube’s of the “FamilyOFive” channel this week. The channel’s creators, Michael and Heather Martin, are serving probation in Maryland after being convicted of emotionally and physically abusing their children in “prank” videos for their prior DaddyOFive channel. They lost custody of their two younger children as a result. Unbelievably, the as FamilyOFive and FamilyOFive Gaming, and continued to produce videos reaching a combined 400,000+ subscribers. Seemingly without remorse for their past actions, their new channel – one of their children took a shot to their groin in one video, and another was harassed to the point of a meltdown in another. The family has claimed it’s all “entertainment,” but the justice system obviously disagreed. The site needs to have much stricter policies not only around bans, but about the use of children in videos entirely. Kids do not have the autonomy to make decisions about whether or not they want to be filmed, and aren’t able to comprehend the long-term impacts of being public on the internet. While FamilyOFive is an extreme example, YouTube is still filled to the brim with parents exploiting their kids for cash – the stage moms and dads of a new era, raking in the free toys, products, and cash from brands who see YouTube as the new TV, and its creators and their children as the new, less regulated actors. Unfortunately for children, child actor laws that protect children from exploitation and set aside some portion of their earnings outside of parents’ reach haven’t always applied to YouTube stars. YouTube now complies with local child labor laws, , but it’s not involved in enforcement. And even with a policy in place, it’s clearly not enough to dissuade parents from . YouTube’s post today also highlighted other growth metrics. It noted it now has 1.9 billion logged-in monthly users, who watch over 180 million hours of YouTube on TV screens every day. Overall interactions, such as likes, comments and chats, grew by more than 60% year over year, and live streams increased by 10X over the last three years. Over 60 million users click or engage with Community Tab posts. YouTube says it answered 600% more tweets through its official Twitter handles (@TeamYouTube, @YTCreators and @YouTube) in 2018 than in 2017 and grew its reach by 30% in the past few months. And the company noted its plan to expand Stories to those with more than 10,000 subscribers, plus the launches of its new , screen time limitation features, and new dashboard which will roll out in 76 languages in the next two weeks. |
Healthcare data breach in Singapore affected 1.5M patients, targeted the prime minister | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | In what’s believed to be the biggest data breach in Singapore’s history, 1.5 million members of the country’s largest healthcare group have had their personal data compromised. The breach affected SingHealth, Singapore’s biggest network of healthcare facilities. Data obtained in the breach includes names, addresses, gender, race, date of birth and patients’ national identification numbers. Around 160,000 of the 1.5 million patients also had their outpatient medical information accessed by unauthorized individuals. All patients affected by the hack had visited SingHealth clinics between May 1, 2015 and July 4, 2018, Singapore newspaper The Straits Times . “Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System confirmed that this was a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyberattack,” a from Singapore’s Ministry of Health stated. “It was not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs.” The hackers appear to have accessed the sensitive data by compromising a single SingHealth workstation with malware and were then able to obtain privileged account credentials with which they accessed the patient database. The breach was first noticed on July 4 and a police report was filed on July 12. During a press conference, investigating authorities disclosed that Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was “specifically and repeatedly targeted.” The Prime Minister elaborated on the incident on his Facebook page: SingHealth’s database has experienced a major cyber-attack. 1.5 million patients have had their personal particulars… Posted by on |
Trump’s China tariffs could drive up the price of the Apple Watch and Fitbit trackers | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | null |
Redefining dilution | Eric Paley | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | Everyone generally agrees that dilution should be avoided. VCs insist on pro-rata rights to avoid the dreaded “D” word. Executives often complain, after a new financing, that they should be “made whole” to offset the dilution that came with the new round. Founders work as hard as they can to maximize their valuation at each financing event to avoid painful dilution. Dilution = bad. And yet, entrepreneurs want to raise money. In many cases, they want to raise lots of money. There is great pride in the amount of money that is raised and a larger raise is typically celebrated as a greater success. This is a bit confusing, given that a larger raise should also mean more of that awful dilution that everyone is trying to avoid. Most people in the startup ecosystem think of dilution as the percent of the company that is sold in a financing transaction. If your startup completed a $5 million Series A on a $20 million pre-money valuation, (option pool aside) you would have 20 percent dilution, and everyone will own 20 percent less than they did before the transaction. This is very misleading. While every equity holder may own 20 percent less of the company than the day before the financing, the company is worth more than the day before the financing. Even if you assume that the valuation was an objective measure of the value of the company and was flat from the previous financing, everyone now also owns their percentage share of the new cash that was added to the cap table, which wasn’t part of the company’s value prior to the financing. Here’s an example: Company Value Your Ownership Your Dollar Value Pre-Series A $20M 10% $2M Post-Series A $25M 8% $2M
I believe the startup ecosystem is confused about the impact of financings. Rather than being dilutive, any up-round financing (with a caveat that I’ll address below) should be a demonstration of value accretion. Let’s add some context to our previous example. If the previous round had $10 million post-money valuation, and you owned 10 percent, your ownership was worth $1 million at the time of the seed financing. With this new $5 million financing on a $20 million pre-money valuation, you may now only own 8 percent of the company, but your value in the startup has actually doubled to $2 million. That’s amazing! Company Value Your Ownership Your Dollar Value Post-Seed $10M 10% $1M Post-Series A $25M 8% $2M
If VCs want to purchase their pro-rata because they believe in the long-term value of the startup, and buying pro-rata is part of their strategy, by all means, they should do so. However, if they are doing so to avoid dilution, I think they’re missing the point completely, given that they haven’t been diluted. If a founder receives more stock options because their performance is outstanding and they deserve more compensation, that’s terrific. If they are being “made whole” because they own a smaller percentage, which has doubled in value over the larger percentage they previously owned, that’s simply faulty math. While financings reflect value accretion or dilution, the transaction isn’t where these values really change. Dilution is actually much more complicated and shouldn’t be viewed as a transactional event. Dilution is a function of your burn rate relative to your accretion of value. It is often measured in financing events, but it actually plays out every day in the choices the startup makes and the work the startup accomplishes. Simply put, if you are accreting more value than you burn, there is no dilution. If you’re burning more cash than you’re accreting value, then there is dilution. Put another way, you’re not being diluted because a VC decrees it; you’re being diluted because you spent money building features that your customers didn’t want, instead of the ones that they need. You’re being diluted because you kept scaling up an ineffective sales process because you didn’t want growth to slow. Each financing event is more of a check-in point on the value of the company than a true dilutive or accretive event. It’s the time between the financings, when the company was burning cash to build additional value, that was truly the accretive or dilutive journey. In other words, the company isn’t worth $20 million because someone bought stock in a day. Its valuation increased from $10 million to $20 million because of the work that was done to increase the value of the company that greatly outpaced the cost of creating that value. If the cost outpaced the value of the work, that would have been dilutive, as demonstrated by a down round. It’s the burn rate relative to the value creation, not the financing event, that truly determines accretion or dilution. However, I’d acknowledge that this equation is ambiguous at all times and the market determines that value, which is why it is fair to say that financing events are the measuring moment of the most recent period of work. What’s particularly complicated is that financing events are incredibly inaccurate measures of value creation. In the recent era of an overcapitalized venture capital industry, we’ve seen some extraordinary financing events across nearly every startup stage. So what is the implication of overcapitalized and overvalued companies? Are those transactions clear evidence of value accretion? Unfortunately, this is a particularly confusing phenomenon. These financings are celebrated because they appear to be minimally dilutive and the company gets a stock-pile of cash. Unfortunately, I think they distort the economic equation of the startup and usually have the opposite result. Imagine that same startup that rationally should have raised $5 million on $20 million pre-money is able to raise $20 million on $80 million pre-money. Company Value Your Ownership Your Dollar Value Post Seed $10M 10% $1M Post Series A $80M 8% $8M This type of round seems crazy to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but we’ve been there with our companies many times. It appears that the company has just had an exceptional outcome. The person who previously owned 10 percent still owns 8 percent, but the value appears to have increased from $1 million to $8 million. Happy days! For the same 20 percent dilution, the company raised 4X the capital and stock is now worth 8X the last round value! Unfortunately, it is the embedded future implications of this event that are so misleading and undermine that value. Because it is the burn rate and not the transaction that really drives dilution, typically these large financings end up being very dilutive to the company. As I’ve written about previously, these financings often come with unreasonable pressures to prematurely grow the business and incentives to at great cost. The end result of these financings is typically that the burn rate will often outpace value accretion at the startup. This is extremely dilutive over time and typically will have the effect of conditioning a company for an indefinitely high burn rate, which will require much more cash and possibly a down round in the future. Or worse yet, the company fails as the investors lose enthusiasm and the company is depending on continued cash infusions that never come. In other words, large financings are typically very dilutive, even if on paper they appear to be evidence of massive value accretion and misleadingly little dilution. Paradoxically, given the same stage of growth, the $5 million financing for 20 percent of the company is often more likely to be long-term accretive than the $20 million financing for 20 percent. I would encourage startup founders, employees and investors to stop viewing up-round financings as dilutive and recognize that they are accretive (except when they incentivize future wasteful spend). Instead, they should obsess about the burn rate and ensure that the capital being burned is invested in high-confidence opportunities that yield true value that will be reflected in accretive future financings. If every dollar invested is showing demonstrable value accretion, by all means burn as fast as confidence allows! Profitability is important, but focusing on it too early can undermine value in the same way that burning too aggressively can. The point of venture capital is to make investments in confident areas of high growth. Venture capital is not the right tool for every job, but if a startup can use VC as intended, they should. We had a saying at my last startup that “ ” While that was probably a good mindset, the wording suggests that investing in a business with strong return isn’t worthwhile. Today I’d revise that saying to “every dollar that we spend that doesn’t create more than a dollar of value, is dilution.” May your burn rates be accretive and your financings increase your ownership value. |
The World Cup led to a record-breaking number of app downloads and consumer spend in Q2 | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | The second quarter of 2018 was another record-breaker for mobile app downloads and revenue. According to a new this week from App Annie, there were over 28.4 billion app downloads worldwide across both iOS and Google Play in the quarter, up 15 percent year-over-year. That number is even more remarkable because it doesn’t include reinstalls or updates – only new app downloads. In addition, consumer spending in apps was up 20 percent year-over-year to reach $18.5 billion across iOS and Google Play combined. This is the most money spent in apps compared with any other quarter before, the report notes, topping the prior quarter’s record-breaking $18.4 billion in app revenue, and 27.5 billion downloads. Much of the download activity in Q2 came from Google Play. On its app marketplace alone, global downloads topped 20 billion, up 20 percent year-over-year and widening the gap between itself and iOS by 25 percent points to 160 percent. (See below). This massive download growth is attributable largely to India, says App Annie. The country was the biggest driver of download growth year-over-year in both absolute values and growth in market share. Indonesia also played a big role in Google Play downloads. Meanwhile, the U.S., Russia and Saudi Arabia saw the largest growth in iOS downloads. In particular, Google Play app downloads included growth in categories like games, video players and editors, and – not surprisingly, given the World Cup – sports applications. And on iOS, Sports apps were also the largest driver of global iOS downloads, followed by Finance and Travel apps. The impact on the 2018 FIFA World Cup on sports app downloads was also highlighted last month by , whose own analysis found that new installs of the five leading live TV on demand apps offering channels with the World Cup grew 77 percent during the first week of World Cup coverage, compared with the three preceding weeks (excluding the NBA Finals period). Sports streaming service fuboTV saw the largest impact, growing at a whopping 713 percent and adding 309K new users in the U.S., while Hulu saw the smallest impact at 18 percent growth. Single network apps grew, too, this earlier report said. FOX Sports downloads increased by 95x for the same period, while Telemundo Deportes En Vivo grew 444x, for example. App Annie added that the top 3 sports apps in Android in the U.S. during the first three weeks of the tournament were Telemundo Deportes (#1), FOX Sports GO (#2), and FOX Sports (#3), in terms of average megabytes per user – an indication of users’ live-streaming activity. The apps were also new entrants to the top 10 list of apps by total time spent, compared with the three weeks directly prior. In the U.K., over 6 million hours were spent in the top 10 sports apps on Android during the first 3 weeks of the World Cup, up 65 percent from the 3 weeks prior. The World Cup also had an impact on consumer spending in apps in the quarter. Sports apps on iOS were the third largest contributors to absolute growth in consumer spend and in market share in Q2, while Entertainment and Productivity apps were numbers one and two, respectively. In-app subscriptions for both Sports and Entertainment apps drove the consumer spending increases. On Google Play, Games, Social, and Music & Audio apps saw the largest download growth, quarter-over-quarter. However, despite the downloads and consumer spending in sports and TV apps, the charts of the top 10 apps by worldwide downloads and consumer spending look a lot like they usually do – with Facebook apps dominating the top 10 by downloads (Messenger, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were the top 4). And the top 10 apps by spending were still largely those subscription-based entertainment services like Netflix, Tencent Video, iQIYI, Pandora, Youku, and YouTube. |
Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are driving 25,000 miles every day | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, has driven 8 million miles on public roads using its autonomous vehicles. Waymo CEO John Krafcik shared the company’s milestone Friday while onstage with Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval at the Waymo’s fleet of self-driving vehicles are now logging 25,000 miles every day on public roads, Krafcik said. He later tweeted out the stats along with a graphic. Waymo has 600 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans on the road. The company also relies on simulation as it works to build an AI-based self-driving system that performs better than a human. In the past nine years, Waymo has “driven” more than 5 billion miles in its simulation, according to the company. That’s the equivalent to 25,000 virtual cars driving all day, everyday, the company says. Waymo has self-driven 8 million miles on public roads, now at a rate of 25K miles per day. This real-world experience, plus over 5 billion miles in simulation, is how we're building the world’s most experienced driver. — John Krafcik (@johnkrafcik) This newly shared goal signals Waymo is getting closer to launching a commercial driverless transportation service later this year. More than 400 residents in Phoenix have been trialing Waymo’s technology by using an app to hail self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans. The company says it plans to launch its service later this year. Waymo’s driverless ride-hailing service has received the most attention. But the company is also working to apply its self-driving system to three other areas, including logistics (so trucking), Waymo, and more specifically Krafcik, has never provided much detail about how its self-driving system would make public transportation more accessible. On Thursday, Krafcik teased a future announcement. “We’ll have announcements soon about how we’re going to use our technology move people from their homes or work to existing public infrastructure hubs so we as a society can get more ROI from those public transportation infrastructure investments,” Krafcik said. |
Prices for Disrupt SF 2018 passes increase in a few days | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | There isn’t a business person alive who doesn’t appreciate an advantage, but sometimes folks need to be reminded of an advantage that’s staring them right in the face. This is that reminder. Your opportunity to save up to $1,200 on passes to , which takes place on September 5-7, comes to an end on . Why pay more? . Disrupt SF 2018 is the place to be if you’re at all interested in tech startups. Whether you’re a founder, an investor, a marketer or a job-seeker, you’ll find plenty of inspiration, opportunity and blow-your-mind technology at Disrupt. And this year, we’ve gone all-out to produce our biggest Disrupt event ever. What’s that mean? Well, take for example. We’ve upped the ante on the world’s best startup pitch competition by increasing the prize money to $100,000 in non-equity cash. Yeah, we did. You know the battle will be even more fierce, exciting and epic. It also means we’ve tripled our floor space by moving the party over to Moscone Center West. We expect a minimum of 10,000 attendees, and you’ll find more than 1,200 outstanding startups and exhibitors showcasing an incredible array of technology on our show floor in . Disrupt is famous for the quality of its speakers and (shameless brag) we’ve outdone ourselves this year. We’re offering more than 40 presentations, and here’s just a taste of what you can expect: Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO, Bumble; Reid Hoffman, partner, Greylock; and Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber. . If you want to dig even deeper, you can check out the full . We also wanted our hackathon to reflect the grandeur of this year’s Disrupt. How’d we do that? By going virtual — and global. Thousands of the best hackers, developers, designers and programmers around the world can compete in our . The application for submitting a hack is August 2. If you want to compete, , right now. takes place on September 5-7, and early-bird pricing disappears — along with your chance to save up to $1,200 — on July 25. You don’t need to be in fintech to know a good deal when you see one. . |
Tempow’s Bluetooth stack can improve your TV setup | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | French startup has been working on improving the Bluetooth protocol at a low level to make it more versatile. The company is introducing a new audio profile for your TV or set-top box. TV and set-top box manufacturers can license Tempow’s software and integrate new features in their devices. It works with regular Bluetooth chips, but it opens up new possibilities. In particular, Tempow has been working on a one-to-many pairing model. You can pair multiple Bluetooth speakers with your TV to create a wireless surround system using good old Bluetooth speakers. The reason why soundbars slowly replaced 5.1 systems is that you don’t have to run cables on the floor to the back speakers. Tempow solves that, and Bluetooth speakers are much cheaper than a bunch of Sonos speakers. With Tempow’s stack, you can also stream different audio tracks to different devices. In other words, you could pair multiple headphones with your TV and watch a movie in different languages. If your kid is too young to read subtitles, you no longer need to make compromises. You can also configure each speaker individually so that you can reproduce the same sound profile across the board, even if you’re using speakers from different brands. The startup first worked on an audio profile for smartphones. For instance, if you have a Moto X4 phone, you can pair it with multiple Bluetooth speakers at once. With today’s news, the company is expanding beyond smartphones. But it’s still about Bluetooth. |
Worried about a slowdown? It already happened in 2016, says one new venture study | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | In today’s market, it’s hard to make sense of what’s what. Deals have grown incestuous for the first time, with outfits like GV last week — just months after its parent company, Alphabet, was at . A $10 million-plus round of seed funding is . Venture firms continue to raise record-breaking amounts of money, despite what feels like creeping uncertainty about how much longer this go-go market can continue. Unsurprisingly, there’s been some talk lately about deal flow and the possibility that some of the most well-regarded early-stage investors in the industry have . Yet new analysis out of , the 7.5-year-old, Silicon Valley venture firm co-founded by veteran VCs Peter Wagner and Gaurav Garg, draws a conclusion that might surprise nervous industry watchers. After tracking the investment activity of what Wing considers to be the 21 leading venture firms, it discovered that a pullback already happened . . . in 2016. In fact, Wagner, who oversaw the analysis, tells us there’s been so sign of a slowdown since then. We caught up with Wagner last week to learn more about Wing’s findings — and what might be causing some confusion in the industry right now. PW: There’s been a lot of analysts and reporters and LPs and VCs asking us about our investment pace lately, and I think it owes to talk of and Union Square Ventures , so we thought we’d look at some parameters and see what’s going on. PW: They’re kind of swamped with the data of less discriminating investors, though. You really want to focus on the signal, which is why we track what the 21 leading venture firms are doing. And in that analysis, we found no signs of a slowdown. We found instead that there was a peak of activity in 2013 and 2014, a pullback in 2016, and an uptick since. We cut it different ways, too. We removed international deals in China and India, because they have their own rhythm and can get frothy. We removed seed deals, given there’s been some major schizophrenia among venture firms that waded into seed deals, then pulled out. Even still, 2017 saw an increase in deals over 2016, which was the lowest year in terms of deal activity since 2010. PW: Yes, and the reason is that follow-on rounds are dictated more by the operational needs of companies. Some could be running out of cash, for example, so it’s non-discretionary. If you want to look at sentiment, you have to look at first-time investments in isolation. PW: We have partial data, of course, and we’ve annualized it to “predict” that 2018 numbers will be close to 2017. That is, if you buy the idea of projecting out, which I don’t really. Also, because you’re looking at a smaller batch of numbers, you’re on thin ice statistically. But for now, at least, we’re seeing a level of activity that was higher than 2016. PW: I really don’t know that it was down so much versus that prior years were up. It was a more a reversion to the mean. The 2016 number still represents a pretty decent and sustainable pace for this industry. PW: It’s a known unknown. We know there will be a change, but we don’t know when or how deep it will be. PW: It’s pretty darn mainstream, whether via digital transformation or just the massive disruption of massive industries buy digitally native competitors. I don’t know, is the answer. But it’s true. Tech isn’t a sideshow anymore. |
China’s Didi Chuxing is close to launching a taxi-booking service in Japan | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Days after , Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has continued its international push with the launch of a local business in Japan. Its new Japan-based unit is a joint venture with SoftBank, a longtime Didi investor, which . Today’s news isn’t that the service is live yet — it isn’t — but rather than the JV has been formally launched. Didi did say, however, that it plans to launch services for passengers, drivers and taxi operators in Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Tokyo and other major cities from autumn this year. Didi said that its users in China and Hong Kong will be able to use the soon-to-launch Japan service through their regular Didi app — that’s interesting since a ‘roaming’ strategy involving Lyft and others arranged years ago never came to fruition. And yes, you did read correctly that taxi operators are part of the target audience. That’s because Japan doesn’t allow unlicensed private cars to operate as taxis. That’s made the country a real challenge for Uber, which has , and it also explains why — JapanTaxi — is backed by the taxi industry. JapanTaxi is even owned by an insider, Ichiro Kawanabe, who runs Japan’s largest taxi operator Nihon Kotsu and heads up the country’s taxi federation. Working with taxi operators means Didi has a fleet management platform, as above, as part of its Japan-based service. That concession on working with taxis doesn’t necessarily mean that Didi isn’t focused on widening the market by enabling “ride-sharing” with non-taxi drivers in the future. that SoftBank supremo Masayoshi Son — one half of the Didi Japan joint venture — made some family scathing comments at an annual event. “Ride-sharing is prohibited by law in Japan. I can’t believe there is still such a stupid country,” Son is said to have remarked. Didi, of course, is playing things more cautious as it rides into Japan. The company said that the country, which is the world’s third-largest market based on taxi ride revenue, “holds great potential as a market for online taxi-hailing.” “There is earnest demand for more convenient urban and regional transportation services, especially in light of the growing population of senior citizens,” Didi added via a statement. The Japanese expansion is another example of Didi’s push to internationalize its service beyond China in 2018. Last year, , and this year it has come good on that promise by entering , and . While over in Brazil, it leaped into the market through . The 99 deal was a particularly interesting one since . Didi didn’t say much about the mechanics of that strategy, but it has investments in ride-sharing companies worldwide, including Lyft, Grab, Ola, Careem and Taxify, which you’d imagine, like 99, could be converted into full-on acquisitions at some point in moves that would speed up that international expansion. |
And now, here’s a ‘Trumpy Cat’ augmented reality app from George Takei | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Anyone who follows George Takei on can tell you that is not a fan of President Donald Trump. But he’s found a new way to express that criticism — not just in tweets, interviews and op-eds, but also in an augmented reality app called . The app was built in partnership with Montreal-based development company BMAD, and it allows users to interact with animated animal characters like Trumpy Cat, Meowlania, Vladdy Putin and Lil’ Rocket Pug. They can add their own voice recordings, superimpose the animals on real environments and take photos with them — Takei suggested including Trumpy Cat in photos of real-world protests. When I asked where the idea came from, Takei had a simple explanation: “The Internet loves the combination of politics and cats.” While the app looks pretty silly, Takei made the by-now-commonplace observation that satire is having a hard time keeping up with the daily news. We spoke shortly after Trump had his press conference with Vladimir Putin — setting off this week’s cycle of criticism, denial and — and Takei told me, “No augmented reality could have created the true reality of what we saw this morning: Donald Trump standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Vladimir Putin … his denial of the attack on the core activity of our democratic system.” Takei added that humor is a key ingredient in getting a serious message out into the world. He’s pointed to his embrace of memes ( ) as one of the main drivers of his popularity on social media, which in turn gives him a bigger platform for his political views. “I’m a political activist — I have been since I was a teenager, largely because of ,” Takei said. He said his social media presence is meant to be an extension of that activism, but, “I notice that if I’m documenting the truth, people are nodding off. [So] I try to kind of inject a little humor into it.” The app costs 99 cents, and there are plans for subscription content as well. It might seem strange to pay money for a satirical cat app, but keep in mind that some of the profits will go to . “Making a mockery of this particular person is going to be a very effective tool,” Takei said. “We’ll have fun while we also accomplish our mission to make this a better America.” |
Midwest rising | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | has been updated to indicate that Edison Partners is close to closing on its ninth fund with at least $300 million. For the last four years, AOL co-founder Steve Case has been criss-crossing the country preaching a gospel of economic renewal for American cities driven by startup investment and technology-based entrepreneurialism. With Case called — a $150 million vehicle raised by some of tech’s highest-profile names. Investors like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet; Jim Bryer, the former head of the National Venture Capital Association and an early investor in Facebook; Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr; and Facebook’s former President Sean Parker; came together with the family offices of some of America’s wealthiest people to back the fund. As Schmidt told , “There is a large selection of relatively undervalued businesses in the heartland between the coasts, some of which can scale quickly.” Steve Case (Revolution LLC) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 Case and his partner JD Vance (the author of ) are only two of the would-be pioneers that are bringing the venture investment model to the Midwest. In fact, i But the Midwestern investment scene isn’t just defined by Valley transplants coming in. Some of the entrepreneurs behind the region’s home-grown success stories, like Indianapolis’ ExactTarget, have launched funds of their own to plant an entirely new crop of tech companies in the Midwest. These are funds like , which just closed its second $85 million fund, High Alpha Capital II, and raised another $16.5 million for a companion venture studio that ideates and incubates startups. For its venture studio, the firms was able to bring back Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based software as a service investor, and woo new investor Foundry Capital, a Boulder, Colo.-based firm co-founded by the legendary investor Brad Feld. Both Feld and Gordon Ritter, the founder of Emergence Capital will take seats on the High Alpha Studios board. High Alpha investments have been made in Atlanta, Chicago, Des Moines, Minneapolis, Seattle and Toronto, says Dorsey. “ Dorsey and the High Alpha team focus their investments on marketing and automation software — an area that can run the gamut from drone use in agricultural applications to a software service that monitors company spending on business software so that the procurement process can be more efficient. While the venture arm is one way that the firm is seeding a new generation of technology companies across the Midwest and around the country, the venture studio is focused on building businesses in Indianapolis itself, Dorsey says. Through the studio, Dorsey and his partners have plans to start eight to 10 new software as a service businesses, and High Alpha is tapping local talent to do it. For instance, Dorsey’s former colleague Scott McCorkle, who ran Initiatives in states like Indiana are also helping to encourage a more entrepreneurial and tech focused mindset, according to Dorsey. Like other states, Indiana is now mandating computer science classes for every grade from K-12 in public schools. The state also has created a $250 million fund-of-funds to invest in venture funds that will commit capital to companies that will bring jobs to the state. Finally, Indiana has passed a law to forego collecting sales tax on software as a service companies that are developing and selling products and services in the state. State incentives aside, there are structural reasons for the moves in the Midwest. The companies require less capital to scale compared to companies on the coasts, thanks to rising real estate prices and the intense competition for talent. Indigenous venture investors are springing up thanks to earlier bets on technology companies coming from the region. U.S. land grant colleges, which may well be the most underappreciated heroes of American economic growth, are increasingly becoming startup hubs. With new companies emerging from Ann Arbor, Mich., Columbus, Ohio and Madison, Wis. “ For some firms, the revelation of abounding opportunities in states where the wind goes sweeping through the plains isn’t all that new. Growth capital firms like Edison Partners, the Princeton, N.J.-based investor which is close to closing its ninth fund with $300 million, has long been an investor in far-flung geographies. Only a minority of the firm’s investments fall inside the North Atlantic corridor of Boston and New York, according to partner Chris Sugden. The rapid growth of VC deals in NY Metro, Midwest, and LA compared to stable growth in New England. “Two-thirds of our investments are outside of New York or Boston [and] we haven’t participated in the Valley,” Sugden says. “ For the 30 years it has been in business, Edison has backed companies outside of the traditional investment lanes for tech investors. “These ecosystems have been in place for a long time. The challenge for them has always been scale,” Sugden says. And exits are beginning to follow this exodus. ExactTarget planted a flag in Indianapolis’s tech ecosystem, while Groupon did the same in Chicago. Now a new generation of entrepreneurs is getting its first taste of Valley returns. These are people like Bill Smith, whose Birmingham, Ala.-based grocery delivery business Shipt was acquired by Target for $550 million late last year. For Sugden, the four critical components an emerging tech ecosystem need to take flight are an educational hub to produce talent, an urban center to capture it, capital to sustain it, and government and traditional industry support to accelerate it. “I’ve seen first-hand the incredible entrepreneurs trying to build great businesses outside of Silicon Valley,” said Vance, in a statement announcing the Rise of the Rest fund last year. “They often possess all the ingredients for success, but struggle to find enough investment capital to break through and have a positive impact on their region.” *This sentence was updated to reflect the fact that Mr. Dorsey was the chief executive of ExactTarget, which Salesforce acquired in 2013. |
Senate wants emergency alerts to go out through Netflix, Spotify, etc. | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | An emergency alert goes out, trying to let you know about incoming bad news — a missile, a tsunami or something else terrifying. Your phone starts shouting… but it’s downstairs. A warning ticker pops on TVs, if you’re watching cable… but you’ve got your eyes glued to Netflix, or Hulu, or some other online streaming service. Should these services, with their ever-increasing ownership of our screen time, be prepped to broadcast these warnings? Senators in Hawaii and South Dakota think so, having (the “Reliable Emergency Alert Distribution Improvement,” or READI, act) that would “explore” broadcasting alerts to “online streaming services, such as Netflix and Spotify,” amongst other changes to the Emergency Alert System. “Hawaii? Wasn’t that the state that had a with its emergency alert system?” Yep! But it seems that in investigating what went wrong, the state found plenty of long-lived shortcomings in the existing, aging alert system. The idea of sending emergency alerts to Netflix etc. seems a bit obvious at this point — hell, I was mulling over it , and it seemed a bit obvious even back then. With that said, I still have the same hesitations I had at the time. After the recent false alarms and ensuing panic, it’s clear that any such system needs to be from a security standpoint — one missed bug or exploit and half the country is freaking out about non-existent incoming missiles when all they wanted to do was watch Orange Is the New Black If it can be done right, though, it seems like a reasonable idea. |
‘Underwater Pokéball’ snatches up soft-bodied deep dwellers | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Creatures that live in the depths of the oceans are often extremely fragile, making their collection a difficult affair. A new polyhedral sample-collection mechanism acts like an “underwater Pokéball,” allowing scientists to catch ’em all without destroying their soft, squishy bodies in the process. The ball is technically a dodecahedron that closes softly around the creature in front of it. It’s not exactly revolutionary, except in that it is extremely simple mechanically — at depths of thousands of feet, the importance of this can’t be overstated — and non-destructive. Sampling is often done via a tube with moving caps on both ends into which the creature must be guided and trapped, or a vacuum tube that sucks it in, which as you can imagine is at best unpleasant for the target and at worst, lethal. The rotary actuated dodecahedron, or RAD, has five 3D-printed “petals” with a complex-looking but mechanically simple framework that allows them to close up simultaneously from force applied at a single point near the rear panel. “I was building microrobots by hand in graduate school, which was very painstaking and tedious work,” , “and I wondered if there was a way to fold a flat surface into a three-dimensional shape using a motor instead.” The answer is yes, obviously, since he made it; the details are published in Science Robotics. Inspired by origami and papercraft, Teoh and his colleagues applied their design knowledge to creating not just a fold-up polyhedron (you can cut one out of any sheet of paper) but a mechanism that would perform that folding process in one smooth movement. The result is the network of hinged arms around the polyhedron tuned to push lightly and evenly and seal it up. In testing, the RAD successfully captured some moon jellies in a pool, then at around 2,000 feet below the ocean surface was able to snag squid, octopus and wild jellies and release them again with no harm done. They didn’t capture the octopus on camera, but apparently it was curious about the device. Because of the RAD’s design, it would work just as well miles below the surface, the researchers said, though they haven’t had a chance to test that yet. “The RAD sampler design is perfect for the difficult environment of the deep ocean because its controls are very simple, so there are fewer elements that can break,” Teoh said. There’s also no barrier to building a larger one, or a similar device that would work in space, he pointed out. As for current applications like sampling of ocean creatures, the setup could easily be enhanced with cameras and other tools or sensors. “In the future, we can capture an animal, collect lots of data about it like its size, material properties, and even its genome, and then let it go,” said co-author David Gruber, from CUNY. “Almost like an underwater alien abduction.” |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 20 | null |
Hyundai teams up with Amazon to offer virtual showroom | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Next time you’re grabbing a new charging cord on Amazon, you might be tempted to grab a new Hyundai as well. a partnership with Amazon to create a digital showroom to allow customers to compare pricing and reviews, book a test drive and find a dealer in their area to purchase the car (no, you can’t order them directly from Amazon — yet.) “The car industry is changing, and customer demands and expectations around a frictionless, efficient and transparent experience are key drivers,” Dean Evans, Hyundai Motor America CMO, said in a statement. The digital showroom will be incorporated into , which Amazon launched in 2016 for customers to browse automobile makes and models, from Tesla cars to vehicles from Toyota. But, while some of these vehicle profiles are lacking in detailed pictures or model information, Hyundai has created a more robust experience. On , Hyundai highlights the brand’s features, such as its compatibility with Alexa and its Shopper Assurance program, and creates a selection of Hyundai vehicles for you based on your preferences and buying habits. From there, you can select a model you’d like to look at and explore it in typical Amazon style — flipping between different product pictures, colors and customer reviews. After you’re happy with your selection, you can either schedule a test-drive — where you have the option for the car to pick you up in your driveway — or go directly to a dealer near you to sign the paperwork. With the average industry price of $36,270 for a new car in 2018, , maybe it’s a good thing there’s no Dash button for these vehicles just yet. |
Coinbase didn’t get (or need) SEC approval for acquisitions after all, company says | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Hmm. Well, after Coinbase confirmed to (and us) that they had received regulatory approval for some acquisitions that would let it eventually usher in trading tokenized securities on its exchange, the company is now walking back from which agencies it received approval. While a Coinbase spokesperson had initially indicated that the company had received approval from both FINRA and the SEC, it is now saying that the SEC did not offer approval, but only because Coinbase did not need their approval for a change of control application in the first place. “T It’s all a bit confusing, though it doesn’t appear to change much as they still seem to have the needed approval from FINRA, but it is certainly an error in communication. The cryptocurrency industry and the SEC have not always had the most pleasant of interactions, so the news made it sound like both regulatory agencies were on a united front on this when the SEC didn’t offer any official input — so there really aren’t any takeaways, good or bad. |
Essential discounts its 360 Camera to $19, a day after its phone was half-off | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | We reached out to the company for an update and received the following statement from a spokesperson, “We’re offering a great deal on the Essential 360 Camera accessory so new customers who bought our phone during Amazon Prime Day can enjoy the full Essential experience.” So, perhaps there’s something to be said for roping people into the ecosystem and then offering a doubly deep discount on an accessory that only works with that device. |
Roblox responds to the hack that allowed a child’s avatar to be raped in its game | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | There’s a special place in Hell for people who think it’s funny to rape a 7-year-old girl’s avatar in an online virtual world designed for children. Yes, that . Roblox, a hugely popular online game for kids, was hacked by an individual who subverted the game’s protection systems in order to have customized animations appear. This allowed two male avatars to gang rape a young girl’s avatar on a playground in one of the Roblox games. The company has now issued an apology to the victim and its community, and says it has determined how the hacker was able to infiltrate its system so it can prevent future incidents. The mother of the child, whose avatar was the victim of the in-game sexual assault, was nearby when the incident took place. She says her child showed her what was happening on the screen and she took the device away, fortunately shielding her daughter from seeing most of the activity. The mother then captured screenshots of the event in order to warn others. She described the incident in a that read, in part: At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My sweet and innocent daughter’s avatar was being VIOLENTLY GANG-RAPED ON A PLAYGROUND by two males. A female observer approached them and proceeded to jump on her body at the end of the act. Then the 3 characters ran away, leaving my daughter’s avatar laying on her face in the middle of the playground. Words cannot describe the shock, disgust, and guilt that I am feeling right now, but I’m trying to put those feelings aside so I can get this warning out to others as soon as possible. Thankfully, I was able to take screenshots of what I was witnessing so people will realize just how horrific this experience was. *screenshots in comments for those who can stomach it* Although I was immediately able to shield my daughter from seeing the entire interaction, I am shuddering to think of what kind of damage this image could have on her psyche, as well as any other child that could potentially be exposed to this. Roblox has since issued a statement about the attack: Roblox’s mission is to inspire imagination and it is our responsibility to provide a safe and civil platform for play. As safety is our top priority — we have robust systems in place to protect our platform and users. This includes automated technology to track and monitor all communication between our players as well as a large team of moderators who work around the clock to review all the content uploaded into a game and investigate any inappropriate activity. We provide parental controls to empower parents to create the most appropriate experience for their child, and we provide individual users with protective tools, such as the ability to block another player. The incident involved one bad actor that was able to subvert our protective systems and exploit one instance of a game running on a single server. We have zero tolerance for this behavior and we took immediate action to identify how this individual created the offending action and put safeguards in place to prevent it from happening again. In addition, the offender was identified and permanently banned from the platform. Our work on safety is never-ending and we are committed to ensuring that one individual does not get in the way of the millions of children who come to Roblox to play, create, and imagine. Roblox has a number of built-in controls to guard against bad behavior, including a content filter and a system that has moderators reviewing images, video and audio files before they’re uploaded to Roblox’s site. It also offers parental controls that let parents decide who can chat with their kids, or the ability to turn chat off. And parents can restrict kids under 13 from accessing anything but a curated list of age-appropriate games. However, Roblox was also in the process of moving some of its older user-generated games to a newer system that’s more secure. The hacked game was one of several that could have been exploited in a similar way. Since the incident, Roblox had its developers remove all the other potentially vulnerable games and ask their creators to move them over to the newer, more fortified system. Most have done so, and those who have not will not see their games allowed back online until that occurs. The games that are online now are vulnerable to the exploit the hacker used. The company responded quickly to take action, in terms of taking the game offline, banning the player and reaching out the mother — who has since agreed to help Roblox get the word out to others about the safeguards parents can use to protect kids in Roblox further. But the incident raises questions as to whether kids should be playing these sorts of massive multiplayer games at such a young age at all. Roblox, sadly, is not surprised that someone was interested in a hack like this. YouTube is filled with videos of Roblox rape hacks and exploits, in fact. The company submits takedown requests to YouTube when videos like this are posted, but YouTube only takes action on a fraction of the requests. (YouTube has its own issues around content moderation.) It’s long past time for there to be real-world ramifications for in-game assaults that can have lasting psychological consequences on victims, when those victims are children. Roblox, for its part, is heavily involved in discussions about what can be done, but the issue is complex. laws prevent Roblox from collecting data on its users, including their personal information, because the law is meant to protect kids’ privacy. But the flip side of this is that Roblox has no way of tracking down hackers like this. “I think that we’re not the only one pondering the challenges of this. I think every platform company out there is struggling with the same thing,” says Tami Bhaumik, head of marketing and community safety at Roblox. “We’re members of the , which is over 30 companies who share best practices around digital citizenship and child safety and all of that,” she continues. “And this is a constant topic of conversation that we all have – in terms of how do we use technology, how do we use A.I. and machine learning? Do we work with the credit card companies to try to verify [users]? How do we get around not violating COPPA regulations?,” says Bhaumik. “The problem is super complex, and I don’t think anyone involved has solved that yet,” she adds. One solution could be forcing parents to sign up their kids and add a credit card, which would remain uncharged unless kids broke the rules. That could dampen user growth to some extent — locking out the under-banked, those hesitant to use their credit cards online and those just generally distrustful of gaming companies and unwanted charges. It would mean kids couldn’t just download the app and play. But Roblox has the momentum and scale now to lock things down. There’s enough demand for the game that it could create more of a barrier to entry if it chose to, in an effort to better protect users. After all, if players knew they’d be fined (or their parents would be), it would be less attractive to break the rules. |
The Galaxy Note 9 is leaking out all over the place | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Maybe Samsung doesn’t mind. Maybe it’s just happy to have everyone talking about the Note 9, while it’s hard at work on that we’ve heard so much about. S Pen? — Evan Blass (@evleaks) – – Samsung Galaxy Note 9 live images leaked — /LEAKS (@Slashleaks) |
New law forces Airbnb to open its books to New York authorities | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | The New York City Council has voted in favor of a new law requiring Airbnb and similar home-share companies to share data on their users. The company has fought the law tooth and nail, but city authorities say it’s basically common sense for the local government to be informed of the number and nature of residents using the service. The law was characterized by the council as one that would “provide the City with an additional tool to enforce the laws against illegal short term rentals.” “This bill is about transparency and bringing accountability to billion-dollar companies who are not being good neighbors,” explained NYC Councilwoman Carlina Rivera. You can read the text ; what it amounts to is that Airbnb is required to collect and present the following information monthly: Failure to do so will result in a substantial fine: $1,500 or more per item, depending on the listing. Some of this data has already been provided voluntarily by Airbnb for a year and a half in monthly reports for its New York operations; . It is however one thing to give statistics like average amount earned per month in this or that borough, and quite another to say Jane Jamison of 224 East 85th St. earned $3,712 from 12 nights at this address and 8 at her second place over in Brooklyn. The granularity of the data matters. In the first case, Airbnb is in a position of power, voluntarily granting data more or less of its own choosing, while also protecting the privacy of its users. But in the second case, hosts can be identified individually for all kinds of purposes: fines, taxes, licenses, inspections and so on. It’s not ideal for Airbnb or hosts, both of which will have their liberty curtailed considerably by the mere fact of their commerce being open for inspection by the city and potentially released publicly as part of studies, lawsuits and so on. But as with so many other new industries that have gotten ahead of regulation, this kind of clampdown was inevitable from the start; how long did Airbnb really think it could get away with its limited disclosure of data so obviously valuable to local government fighting skyrocketing rents, property scams, unscrupulous landlords and so on? Airbnb says that the whole thing is bought and paid for by the hotel industry, which of course does have an enormous interest in keeping its thumb pressed firmly down on this new challenger. “We’re not surprised the City Council refused to meet with their own constituents who rely on home sharing to pay the bills and then voted to protect the profits of big hotels,” Airbnb thundered in one of its usual bombastic statements. “The fix was in from the start and now New Yorkers will be subject to unchecked, aggressive harassment and privacy violations, rubber stamped by the City Council.” But while Airbnb may be a young company, it is fabulously rich and extremely politically active, so this argument comes off as a bit disingenuous. We’ve seen similar rants from other unregulated companies as they run headlong into the red tape and inertia inherent to the establishment. What the harassment and violations comprise isn’t clear. Certainly there is one man suing the city, saying he was targeted with housing code violations after speaking out against the proposed law; . But the city says its targets are bad actors, people running what amount to off-the-books hotels, renting units with unsafe conditions, or keeping housing units off the market for long-term residents so they can make a greater profit off visitors. There’s no doubt that, armed with this more complete information, city authorities will have the opportunity to do legal and financial harm to the people who are taking part in this technically unsanctioned but largely harmless (and in many ways beneficial) business. If they’re going to require this information to be disclosed, users of Airbnb and other services deserve to know exactly what it is going to be used for. It’s not enough to say that bad actors are being targeted when a man who opposed the city has $30,000 in fines leveled at him the next week. Regulation is necessary for healthy and safe industry, and data is necessary for regulation, so this bill seems reasonable to me and to the city council members who voted for it in overwhelming majority. But it’s only part of the puzzle; citizens should feel that their elected officials are acting to protect them, not expose them. |
Rolls-Royce demonstrates robotic bugs as the future of engine maintenance | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Rolls-Royce this week at the and it might make your skin crawl. As part of its IntelligentEngine vision (which the company ), it demonstrated plans for both a robotic snake and swarm of cockroach-like miniature robots that, in theory, will work together to inspect the interior of aircraft engines without removing the entire engine. Neither technology is mature enough to be put into practice yet, but here’s how it should work: In partnership with Harvard University and the University of Nottingham, Rolls-Royce is working to build 10mm miniature, collaborative robots — called SWARM — that will be able to provide to the human operator a live video feed of an engine interior via small cameras. While scaling these bots down to size will be a challenge for the company and its collaborators, it’s a challenge that Harvard University researchers have been , according to a at the show. For SWARM to access the engines, these small bots will catch a ride with FLARE — a pair of endoscopic, snake-like robots that can slither inside the nooks and crannies of a large piece of machinery and deposit SWARM at the inspection point. The company also has plans for FLARE to carry out internal patch repairs. In addition to these ambitious plans, Rolls-Royce also displayed slightly more mature technologies, including a network of periscope-like INSPECT bots, which they plan to permanently install inside engines for constant spot maintenance, as well as remote boreblending robots that can be controlled by specialist engineers to assist with complicated maintenance tasks. These kinds of advancements in engineering could help lead to more cost-efficient maintenance of large crafts, where previously maintenance was driven by internal sensor data and carried out manually — a process that can last up to five hours, James Kell, Rolls-Royce on-wing technology specialist, . With robots like SWARM, Kell told the publication, the process could take as little as five minutes. While the efficiency of these robotic assistants cannot be denied, the accuracy and reliability has yet to be demonstrated, and the level of comfort passengers have knowing their aircraft was inspected by an intelligent swarm of robotic bugs is still up in the air. |
Facebook can now sync your Instagram contacts to Messenger | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Facebook wants to expand your Messenger contact list with a little help from Instagram. The company has launched a feature in Messenger that pulls in your contacts from Instagram, if you opt to connect your account. The option appears in Messenger’s “People” tab, alongside the existing option to sync your phone’s contacts with Messenger. The feature was first spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, who posted a screenshot to Twitter. Facebook Messenger is testing (?) syncing with Instagram account — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) Others outside the U.S. noticed the option as well. – Facebook Messenger ya permite sincronizar la cuenta de Instagram. 👉 — After Office (@AfterOfficeEc) We also found the option enabled in our own Messenger app, and have now confirmed with Facebook it’s a full public launch. When you tap on “Connect Instagram,” Messenger adds contacts from Instagram automatically. In addition, your Instagram username and account also then becomes visible to other people on Messenger. The result is an expanded social graph of sorts — one that combines the friends and family you know from Facebook, with those you know from Instagram. Not everyone is thrilled with the feature, however. As one Twitter user pointed out, it’s not clear that pushing “Connect Instagram” (the button’s title that appeared to some), means Messenger will add your Instagram contacts to Messenger. It seems that you should be given a choice here as to if you want to add them, but that’s not the case. OMG FACEBOOK MESSENGER JUST ADDED ALL MY INSTAGRAM FRIENDS … WTF … I DIDNT MEAN 2 DO THAT I SWEAR I'M NOT A BEG LOOOL — rellz. (@RelliRellz) In December 2017, TechCrunch spotted a to sync Instagram contacts to Messenger in the same People section. However, the option never launched to the public and later disappeared. But the recent re-emergence of the feature is not a continued test — it’s now rolled out, Facebook says. This is not the first time Facebook has added integrations between its apps. For example, in 2016 it gave businesses access to a unified inbox of conversations from across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Last year, it also tested a cross-app notification feature. There’s even an option to launch Facebook right in Instagram itself, via an icon on your Instagram profile page. The timing of the launch is notable, given that Instagram’s own Direct Messaging service has become a popular communications service of its own. Instagram Direct had 375 million users, and was last year in select countries outside the U.S. With so many users now messaging through Facebook-owned Instagram, it’s clear that Facebook wants to capitalize on that activity to grow its own Messenger app, too. |
Reddit expands chat rooms to more subreddits | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | If you’d rather spend time chatting with strangers who share a hyper-specific interest instead of keeping up with your co-workers’ stale memes on Slack, Reddit is ready for you. The platform has quietly been working on a chat room feature for months now, and today it as a very limited closed beta. Plenty of subreddits already make use of a chat room feature, but these live outside of Reddit, usually on Slack or Discord. Given that, it makes sense for Reddit to lure those users back into the engaging on Reddit itself by offering its own chat feature. I spent a little time hanging out in the /r/bjj (brazilian jiu jitsu) chat as well as the psychedelics chat affiliated with r/weed to see how things went across the spectrum, and it was pretty chill — mostly people asking for general advice or seeking answers to specific questions. In a Reddit chat linked to the r/community_chat subreddit — the hub for the new chat feature — redditors discussed if the rooms would lead to more or less harassment and if the team should add upvotes, downvotes and karma to chat to make it more like Reddit’s normal threads. Of course, what I saw is probably a far cry from what chat will look like if and when some of its more inflammatory subreddits get their hands on the new feature. We’ve reached out to Reddit with questions about if all subreddits, even the ones hidden behind content warnings, will be offered the new chat functionality. Chat rooms are meant as a supplement to already active subreddits, not a standalone community, so it’s basically like watching a Reddit thread unfold in real time. On the , u/thunderemoji writes about why Reddit is optimistic that chat rooms won’t just be another trolling tool: I was initially afraid that most people would bring out the pitchforks and… unkind words. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most people are actually quite nice. The nature of real-time, direct chat seems to be especially disarming. Even when people initially lash out in frustration or to troll, I found that if you talk to them and show them you’re a regular human like them, they almost always chill out. Beyond just chilling out, people who are initially harsh or skeptical of new things will actually often change their minds. Sometimes they get so excited that they start to show up in unexpected places defending the thing they once strongly opposed in a way that feels more authentic than anything I could say. While a few qualitative experiences can only go so far to allay fears, Reddit’s chat does have a few things going for it. For one, moderators add chat rooms. If a subreddit’s mods don’t think they can handle the additional moderation, they don’t have to activate the feature. (A on the thinking behind chat explores some of these issues in more depth.) In the , u/thunderemoji adds that Reddit “made moderation features a major priority for our roadmap early in the process” so that mods would have plenty of tools at their disposal. Those tools include an opt-in process, auto-banning users from chat who are banned from a subreddit, “kick” tools that suspend a user for 1 minutes 1 hour, 1 day or 3 days, the ability to lock a room and freeze all activity, rate limits and more. To sign up for chat rooms (mods can add as many as they’d like once approved), a subreddit’s moderators can add their name to a list that lives . To find chat rooms to explore, you can check for a link on subreddits you already visit, poke around the sidebar in or check out , a dedicated new subreddit collecting active chat rooms that accompany interest and community-specific subreddits. |
Funko is getting into Fortnite toys because it’d be dumb not to | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Funko. Even if you don’t know the name, you’ve probably seen their toys. They’re the ones that make those figurines with the big ol’ heads that line the walls of half the stores at the mall — the ones that seem to exist for just about every pop culture-related license on the planet, from random 80’s horror movies to mega properties like Star Wars or Marvel. So they’re getting into Fortnite toys. The company announced today that it’ll ship Fortnite-themed toys across 10 different product lines, from clothing, to keychains, to the aforementioned big-headed Pop! figurines. While there don’t seem to be any images of the toys in progress out there just yet, the company says the new stuff should start hitting the shelves by the holidays of this year. Fortnite is a pretty obvious fit — and as long as the game’s popularity doesn’t dive off a cliff before Christmas for some reason, it’s a pretty big win. It’s easy to imagine Funko-fied versions of the game’s most recognizable bits, like a vinyl keychain Battle Bus or a Pop! version of the supply llama. But even beyond that, it could be a pretty consistent source of new, limited run releases — something that Funko loves to do. Fortnite shifts to a new “season” every few months, with each iteration introducing dramatically new character skins and retiring those that came before it. Fortnite’s creators at Epic undoubtedly have the data to prove which skins are most popular, which should help them figure out which ones to turn into merch. As of April, Fortnite was reportedly already pulling in on in-game items alone, and adding a bunch of real-world merch to the mix is probably just going to make that money machine crank even harder. |
Gorilla Glass 6 is here to withstand your clumsy hands | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | null |
Fortnite maker Epic Games beefs up its Unreal game engine in new update | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | After a wildly successful last few months thanks to Fortnite, is delivering some substantial new updates to its Unreal game engine, which supports a variety of cross-platform titles and experiences. Some features like smoother compatibility on mobile and better support for Switch come directly from the fact that they’ve had to iterate so quickly on building such a massively successful cross-platform title. “Our engine is as good as it is because we ship games,” Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri told TechCrunch. “How many clicks an artist has to do to be able to change the color of something or adjust the look of something is all highly optimized because the artists scream at us day-in and day-out on the engine team if it’s not efficient.” The engine enables indie developers to gain access to a system for environment building and rendering that is on-par with the major studios. A lot of the new features come from tools that Epic Games built because it needed them for its own titles. The latest 4.20 update is fairly notable for the engine, bringing some performance bumps but also a new visual effects engine and some other new stuff. One of the bigger highlights of this update is a system for rendering objects at reduced polygonal complexity when need be. The engine’s Proxy Levels of Detail tech competes directly with some of the technology built by Simplygon, which Microsoft . The tech basically allows objects to render in low-poly mesh versions rather than a soft or all-or-nothing scenario, whereas you traverse an environment, objects will just appear out of nowhere on the horizon as they render. The company says that this tech was essential for ensuring that Fortnite players are on an even footing even when on lower-power devices. The feature has been available in an experimental build since the most recent update, but it has been honed to be more reliable in this new release. Another heavy hitter of the release is the early access release of Niagara, a long-awaited visual effects editor that the company talked about a lot at GDC. The tool allows developers a lot of control over particle physics for something like an explosion or fire and will eventually be replacing the engine’s existing Cascade system. In addition to visual effects looking more realistic, Epic is looking to give cutscenes a shot in the arm with tech that allows developers to deliver some pretty top-notch movie-quality shots via depth-of-focus bokeh-like enhancements that draw attention to what matters in a scene. On a similar note, Epic is releasing the tools they have been using in their work to create more realistic digital human characters. There’s a lot of other new functionality in this release, including updated AR support for Magic Leap One and ARKit 2, as well as some mixed reality capture functionality in early access. All of these features are available to devs now in the 4.20 update. |
Google Assistant can now do things automatically at a scheduled time | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Back at Google I/O, Google announced : custom routines and schedules — both focusing on automating things you do regularly, but in different ways. The first lets you trigger multiple commands with a single custom phrase — like saying “Hey Google, I’m awake” to unsilence your phone, turn on the lights and read the news. Schedules, meanwhile, could trigger a series of commands at a specific time on specific days, without you needing to say a thing. While custom routines launched almost immediately after I/O, scheduling has been curiously absent. It’s starting to roll out today. As first noticed by , it looks like scheduling has started rolling out to users by way of the Google Home app. If you don’t see the “time and day” option yet, check back in a day or two. Google is rolling it out over the next few days (generally done in case there’s some bug it missed), so it might pop up without much fanfare. Want your bedroom lights to turn on every morning at 7 am on workdays? You can do that. Want that song from the Six Flags commercials to play every day at noon to get you over the hump and/or drive your roommates up a wall? Sure! Want to double-check the door lock, dim the downstairs lights and make sure your entertainment center is off at 2 am? If you’ve got all the smart home hardware required, it should be able to handle it. While a lot of things you might use Google Assistant for can already be scheduled through their respective third-party apps (most smart lights, for example, have apps with built-in scheduling options), this moves to bring everything under one roof while letting you fire off more complicated sequences all at once. And if something breaks? You’ll know where to look. |
InkHunter heads to YC to build a try-and-buy tattoo marketplace | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | , an augmented reality tattoo try-on app that was born out of a 48-hour hackathon back in the altogether gentler days of 2014, has bagged a place in Y Combinator’s summer 2018 batch, scoring itself the seed accelerator’s standard $120,000 deal in exchange for 7 percent equity. We first covered InkHunter in when it had just launched an MVP on iOS and was toying with building a marketplace for tattoo artists. Several months and 2.5 million downloads later, InkHunter , having spent summer 2016 going through the accelerator program in New York. At that time the team was considering a B2B business model pivot, based on licensing their core AR tech to e-commerce apps and other developers. Though they wanted to keep the tattoo try-on app ticking over as a showcase. Fast-forward two years and it’s the SDK idea on ice after InkHunter’s app gained enough traction in the tattoo community for the team to revive their marketplace idea — having passed eight million users — so they’ve relocated to Mountain View and swung back around to the original concept of a try-before-you buy tattoo app, using AR to drive bookings for local tattoo artists. “We are focusing on iterating from ‘try’ to ‘try and buy’ experience, based on feedback we got from our users. And this is our goal for the YC program, which places a lot of focus on growth and user interactions,” CTO Pavlo Razumovskyi tells us. “Last time we have talked, we did not expect such adoption on the tattoo market. But when we saw really strong usage and feedback from the tattoo community, we decided to double down on that audience.” The newly added booking option is very much an MVP at this stage — with InkHunter using a Typeform interface to ask users who tap through with a booking request to input their details to be contacted later, via text message, with information about relevant local tattoo artists (starting with the U.S. market). But the team’s hope for the YC program is help to hone their approach. “While this approach doesn’t scale, it helps us to figure out problems and quickly iterate solutions,” he adds. “We are almost done with this stage, and close to launch an in-app search for tattoo artist into selected locations, listing only licensed artists with the large portfolio.” InkHunter says close to half (45 percent) its users have expressed a desire to get a tattoo within the next few months, while it got more than 500 booking requests in the first week of the concierge feature. Though you do have to wonder whether users’ desire to experiment with ink on their skin will also extend to a desire to experiment with different tattoo artists too — or whether many regular inkers might not prefer to stick with a tattooist they already know and trust, and whose style they like. (A scenario which may not require an app to sit in the middle to take repeat bookings.) “We want to help them do this with as little regret as possible,” says CEO Oleksandra Rohachova of InkHunter’s tattoo-hungry users — so presumably the team will also be carefully vetting the tattoo artists they list on their marketplace. The main function of the app lets users browse thousands of tattoo designs and virtually try them on using its core AR feature — which requires people spill a little real-world ink to anchor the virtual design by making a few pen marks on their skin where they want the tattoo to live. As use-cases for AR go it’s a pretty pleasing one. InkHunter also supports taking and sharing photos — to loop friends’ opinions into your skin-augmenting decision, and help the app’s fame spread. The team’s hope for the next stage of building an app business is once an InkHunter user has settled on the design and placement of their next tat, they’ll get comfortable about relying on the app to find and book an artist. And the next time, for their next tattoo too. |
Twitter will suspend repeat offenders posting abusive comments on Periscope live streams | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | As part of Twitter’s attempted crackdown on abusive behavior across its network, the company on Friday afternoon a new policy facing those who repeatedly harass, threaten or otherwise make abusive comments during a Periscope broadcaster’s live stream. According to Twitter, the company will begin to more aggressively enforce its by reviewing and suspending accounts of habitual offenders. The plans were announced via a Periscope blog and tweet that said everyone should be able to feel safe watching live video. We’re committed to making sure everyone feels safe watching live video, whether you’re broadcasting or just tuning in. To create safer conversation, we're launching more aggressive enforcement of our guidelines. — Periscope (@PeriscopeCo) Currently, Periscope’s comment involves group moderation. That is, when one viewer reports a comment as “abuse,” “spam” or selects “other reason,” Periscope’s software will then randomly select a few other viewers to take a look and decide if the comment is abuse, spam or if it looks okay. The randomness factor here prevents a person (or persons) from using the reporting feature to shut down conversations. Only if a majority of the randomly selected voters agree the comment is spam or abuse does the commenter get suspended. However, this suspension would only disable their ability to chat during the broadcast itself — it didn’t prevent them from continuing to watch other live broadcasts and make further abusive remarks in the comments. Though they would risk the temporary ban by doing so, they could still disrupt the conversation, and make the video creator — and their community — feel threatened or otherwise harassed. Twitter says that accounts that repeatedly get suspended for violating its guidelines will soon be reviewed and suspended. This enhanced enforcement begins on August 10, and is one of several other changes Twitter is making to its product across Periscope and Twitter focused on user safety. To what extent have been working is questionable. Twitter may have policies in place around online harassment and abuse, but its enforcement has been hit-or-miss. But ridding its platform of unwanted accounts — including spam, — is something the company must do for its long-term health. The fact that so much hate and abuse is seemingly tolerated or overlooked on Twitter , and the problem continues today. And it could be one of the factors in . After all, who willingly signs up for harassment? The company is at least attempting to address the problem, most recently by the anti-abuse technology provider Smyte. Its but the technology it offers the company could help Twitter address abuse at a greater scale in the future. |
The best Amazon Prime Day deals you can still grab | Makula Dunbar | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | Amazon Prime Day this year, despite its , and . And now that it’s over, we found some deals you can still take advantage of. A new low price on our gaming monitor pick for Nvidia graphics card users. While it only beats our previous low by a few bucks, this monitor has been stubborn about sticking to $740. The is our G-Sync pick in . David Murphy wrote, “Our pick had the best contrast ratio and lowest measured black levels among our finalists, which helps bring out detail in movies and games; it has all the input connections you need, as well as a built-in USB 3.0 hub; and it’s incredibly adjustable.” At $7 for a 15 foot cable, this is a new low price. We haven’t seen any discount for this particular size since 2017 and the street price typically sticks to $11. The is the top pick in . “The AmazonBasics High-Speed HDMI Cable is a no-frills HDMI cable, but with HDMI, frills aren’t necessary,” Geoffrey Morrison wrote. “The cable is sturdily built and works with any video signal of today (and probably ones into the near future). Both the 3- and 15-foot lengths passed all our tests, including HDR tests.” Down to $500 in all available colors, this is a solid drop from a typical price of $550 for the , a bundle that includes the Spark, controller, extra battery and other accessories. The DJI Spark is our entry-level pick for drone photography in . “If all you want is something to capture aerial footage on occasion for personal use and social-media sharing, you can save several hundred dollars by getting the DJI Spark,” Mike Perlman wrote. “Despite weighing half as much as the Mavic and folding up to about the size of your hand, it has all the important features you need from a video drone: 1080p video recording, image and flight stabilization, collision-avoidance technology and an included controller, and smart-flight modes like ActiveTrack (tracks and follows a subject) and gesture controls all come standard.” If you’re looking for a this is a good deal on one that includes two switches, one bridge and two remotes. Usually priced at $160, the price drops to $120 at checkout, this matches the lowest price we’ve seen. The Lutron Caséta Wireless In-Wall Dimmer and the Lutron Caséta Smart Bridge are the top picks in . Rachel Cericola wrote, “After spending more than 30 hours swapping out switches, flipping switches, programming timers, and talking to experts, we’ve decided that the Lutron Caséta Wireless In-Wall Dimmer is the best wireless in-wall dimmer switch for most people. It’s phase-adaptive, so it can work with any lighting load; it’s the easiest to physically install; and like the other eight units we tested, it features straightforward remote control and scheduling.” For those of you who want a set of smart LED light bulbs but don’t want or need the added price for color, a 4-pack of is an excellent deal matching the previous lowest price on the white variant of our top pick for . “Setting up Hue lights requires a few simple steps, much like any other smart-home device. The gateway connects to your home router or network switch via a wired Ethernet port,” Grant Clauser wrote. “This connects the system to your network and allows you to control the lights with a smartphone or tablet connected wirelessly to the same network.” At $243 from a street price of $270, this is the lowest price we’ve seen for a pair of in either the American Walnut finish or graphite color. These colors are typically priced lower than the black and white colors, but if you absolutely must have either of those, they are also down to the lowest price we’ve seen at $289 from $320. The Q Acoustics 3020 is the top pick in . “The Q Acoustics 3020 pair reproduces music of all genres with great detail and clarity on a wide soundstage. Despite each speaker’s compact size, the set delivers both strong bass and accurate vocals,” Chris Heinonen wrote. “These speakers are efficient, too, which means they can play louder with less-powerful receivers and amplifiers. The compact, rounded-corner design comes in four finishes to help this set fit in with a wider variety of decors.” Recently we’ve been seeing a lot of price fluctuations between $40 and $50, so it’s nice to see this media streaming device down to a new low price of $35. Prior to this deal the best price we’ve seen is $39. The is the runner-up pick (if you don’t need 4K) in . Chris Heinonen wrote, “If you don’t need to stream UltraHD 4K content, the Roku Streaming Stick is the best option available today. It is almost identical to the Streaming Stick+, but supports only 1080p resolution and doesn’t have the external Wi-Fi antenna. If you know you aren’t going to get a 4K TV in the future, or are just looking to upgrade an existing 1080p TV or projector, it offers the same content selection, search, and performance of our main pick.” The high-end Fujifilm camera we recommend is down to a new low price of $1,100 from a street price of $1,500. The deal is for the black color and only the body without a lens. Prior to this sale the lowest price we’ve seen is $1,400, although there were some deals around Black Friday for the camera with a lens. The is the top pick for experienced shooters and pros in . Amadou Diallo wrote, “The Fujifilm X-T2 represents a significant investment into your photography, and that’s before you even consider adding any of Fujifilm’s well-regarded lenses. But its sensor outperforms what you get in many DSLRs, providing impressively detailed images in even very dark lighting conditions.” Use the code AMUZISNW to get this price. It’s the lowest price we’ve seen so far, and only $8 more than our top pick, but with 30 percent more mAh/charge. The is our runner-up pick for laptop charging in our guide to . “If our top pick is unavailable or you need a little more power to keep a larger laptop going, get the ChargeTech Portable Power Outlet,” Mark Smirniotis wrote. “It has the same 85 W output as the Jackery PowerBar, so it can power the same types of laptops and electronics, but with an extra 25 percent capacity, this ChargeTech model will last a bit longer—handy if you’re frequently on long-haul flights or working in the field.” Down to $40 when typically it’s priced around $85, this is an all-time low price for this electronics kit. Prior to this deal the lowest price we’ve seen is $56. We doubt this deal will last more than a few days, at most, so don’t wait — grab it at this low price if you know a would-be inventor. The is the upgrade pick in . “Kids can create a piggy-bank alarm, a catapult, or an invention of their own using modular pieces that snap together magnetically. Each project takes more time and produces a more satisfying, practical device than those in the other kits we tested,” Signe Brewster wrote. “The Rule Your Room Kit comes with the fewest pieces and sample projects among our field of competitors, but because littleBits encourages the incorporation of everyday items into the projects, the kit feels like it offers more possibilities than other kits of similar size.” Back down to $200, this is a nice deal on this recommended electric skateboard. The is our budget pick for lighter riders in our guide to the . If you’re a sub-180-pound rider who isn’t looking to spend a ton, this is a good opportunity to save some cash. While the street price has dropped in recent months, it’s still a solid discount. “The Acton Blink Lite may not be the most powerful board around, but it’s a phenomenal value considering its price, and it would be a good gift for the young skater in your life,” Jack Smith wrote. “But despite the lack in power, we found riding the Blink Lite to be a blast, largely due to its nimble mini-cruiser design and small size. It’s also significantly cheaper than most other boards available.” |
New York kicks Charter out of the state after failure to honor conditions of Time-Warner merger | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Broadband providers! They love to make noise about how dedicated they are to improving your service, rolling out new features and generally adhering to both the law and their own code of ethics. So how can it be that Charter has so badly failed the terms imposed on its that the state of New York is showing them (specifically their subsidiary Spectrum) the door? Could all these promises be only so many words? Say it ain’t so! Yes, to the surprise of no one but to the continued detriment of New York’s broadband customers, Charter has failed to meet various obligations, lied about compliance and performance and apparently has even been operating unsafely out in the field. New York’s Public Service Commission approved the merger at the state level in 2016 on condition that the company expand broadband offerings in both quality and quantity; . Unfortunately, Charter has failed repeatedly and publicly to meet the NY PSC’s requirements. : Charter, doing business as Spectrum, has — through word and deed — made clear that it has no intention of providing the public benefits upon which the Commission’s earlier approval was conditioned. These recurring failures led the Commission to the broader conclusion that the company was not interested in being a good corporate citizen and that the Commission could no longer in good faith and conscience allow it to operate in New York. Charter is the largest cable provider in the state, serving some 2 million people in a variety of urban communities, so this isn’t a matter of swapping out a couple of neighborhoods. The company has 60 days to provide a plan for “an orderly transition to a successor provider(s).” Difficulty level: “Charter must ensure no interruption in service is experienced by customers.” The PSC has clearly had it with the company and gladly recounts its sins: By its own admission, Charter has failed to meet its commitment to expand its service network that was specifically called for as part of the Commission’s decision to approve the merger between Charter and Time Warner Cable. Its failure to meet its June 18, 2018 target by more than 40 percent is only the most recent example. Rather than accept responsibility Charter has tried to pass the blame for its failure on other companies, such as utility pole owners, which have processed tens of thousands of pole applications submitted by Charter. Despite missing every network expansion target since the merger was approved in 2016, Charter has falsely claimed in advertisements it is exceeding its commitments to the State and is on track to deliver its network expansion. This led to the Commission’s general counsel referring a false advertising claim to the Attorney General’s office for enforcement. Not only has Charter’s performance been wholly deficient and its behavior before the Commission contrary to the laws of New York State and regulations of the Commission, but it has also repeatedly claimed not to be bound by the terms of the Commission’s approval. Such egregious conduct cannot be condoned and the only reasonable remedy that remains is for the Commission to revoke the 2016 merger approval… …and its subsequent removal from the state. It has also been ordered to pay $3 million in fines. The company would not be able to operate in New York, but it could continue to do business in other states. That said, a string of failures this prominent is sure to draw federal attention; the FCC requirements included some broadband deployment ones, and Charter’s negligence in such a major market will not go unnoticed. Charter that it will fight the PSC’s order, and in a statement said that election season had caused the “rhetoric” to become “politically charged,” and that it had expanded to 86,000 new homes since 2016. (Disclosure: Verizon, another ISP that serves New York, owns Oath, which owns TechCrunch. This doesn’t affect our coverage.) |
Star Wars: Episode IX will feature unseen footage of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Meet the cast of Star Wars: Episode IX. Beginning filming next week. — Star Wars (@starwars) |
NASA’s 3D-printed Mars Habitat competition doles out prizes to concept habs | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | A multi-year NASA contest to design a 3D-printable Mars habitat using on-planet materials has just hit another milestone — and a handful of teams have taken home some cold, hard cash. This more laid-back phase had contestants designing their proposed habitat using architectural tools, with the five winners set to build scale models next year. — the (actual) second phase and teams took home quite a bit of money. The teams had to put together realistic 3D models of their proposed habitats, and not just in Blender or something. They used Building Information Modeling software that would require these things to be functional structures designed down to a particular level of detail — so you can’t just have 2D walls made of “material TBD,” and you have to take into account thickness from pressure sealing, air filtering elements, heating, etc. The habitats had to have at least a thousand square feet of space, enough for four people to live for a year, along with room for the machinery and paraphernalia associated with, you know, living on Mars. They must be largely assembled autonomously, at least enough that humans can occupy them as soon as they land. They were judged on completeness, layout, 3D-printing viability and aesthetics. [gallery ids="1681791,1681792,1681829,1681793,1681794,1681828,1681795"] So although the images you see here look rather sci-fi, keep in mind they were also designed using industrial tools and vetted by experts with “a broad range of experience from Disney to NASA.” These are going to Mars, not paperback. And they’ll have to be built in miniature for real next year, so they be realistic. The five winning designs embody a variety of approaches. Honestly all these videos are worth a watch; you’ll probably learn something cool, and they really give an idea of how much thought goes into these designs. has the whole print taking place inside the body of a large lander, which brings its own high-strength printing mix to reinforce the “Martian concrete” that will make up the bulk of the structure. When it’s done printing and embedding the pre-built items like airlocks, it lifts itself up, moves over a few feet, and does it again, creating a series of small rooms. (They took first place and essentially tied the next team for take-home case, a little under $21K.) focuses on the basic shape of the vertical cylinder as both the most efficient use of space and also one of the most suitable for printing. They go deep on the accommodations for thermal expansion and insulation, but also have thought deeply about how to make the space safe, functional, and interesting. This one is definitely my favorite. has a striking design, with a printed structural layer giving way to a high-strength plastic layer that lets the light in. Their design is extremely spacious but in my eyes not very efficiently allocated. Who’s going to bring apple trees to Mars? Why have a spiral staircase with such a huge footprint? Still, if they could pull it off, this would allow for a lot of breathing room, something that will surely be of great value during a year or multi-year stay on the planet. has carefully considered the positioning and shape of its design to maximize light and minimize radiation exposure. There are two independent pressurized areas — everyone likes redundancy — and it’s built using a sloped site, which may expand the possible locations. It looks a little claustrophobic, though. has a design that aims for simplicity of construction: an inflatable vessel provides the base for the printer to create a simple dome with reinforcing cross-beams. This practical approach no doubt won them points, and the inside, while not exactly roomy, is also practical in its layout. As AI SpaceFactory pointed out, a dome isn’t really the best shape (lots of wasted space) but it is easy and strong. A couple of these connected at the ends wouldn’t be so bad. The teams split a total of $100K for this phase, and are now moving on to the hard part: actually building these things. In spring of 2019 they’ll be expected to have a working custom 3D printer that can create a 1:3 scale model of their habitat. It’s difficult to say who will have the worst time of it, but I’m thinking Kahn-Yates (that holey structure will be a pain to print) and SEArch+/Apis (slope, complex eaves and structures). The purse for the real-world construction is an eye-popping $2 million, so you can bet the competition will be fierce. In the meantime, seriously, watch those videos above, they’re really interesting. |
Idaho inmates hacked prison-issued tablets for $225,000 in credits | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Inmates in Idaho successfully hacked the software of the prison-issued tablets to issue themselves nearly a quarter of a million dollars in credits on the devices that are often one of their only connections to the outside world. The tablets, made by prominent prison vendor JPay, give inmates the ability to use email, listen to music and transfer money, among other basic computing functions, but charge fees for some services. The that Idaho prison officials discovered 364 inmates leveraging a software vulnerability to increase their JPay account balances. In Idaho, the devices are the result of a partnership between JPay and CenturyLink. The latter company confirmed the software vulnerability but declined to offer further details beyond stating that it had since been resolved. Of the 364 inmates exploiting , 50 inmates were able to issue themselves credits for more than $1,000. One inmate was able to use the software flaw to self-issue a credit of almost $10,000. The company has recovered about a quarter of the total of around $225,000 so far and has suspended some functions for inmates until they reimburse the stolen credits. “This conduct was intentional, not accidental. It required a knowledge of the JPay system and multiple actions by every inmate who exploited the system’s vulnerability to improperly credit their account,” Idaho Department of Correction spokesperson Jeff Ray said in a statement on the JPay incident. The individuals exploiting the JPay system are incarcerated at a handful of Idaho prisons, including Idaho State Correctional Institution, Idaho State Correctional Center, South Idaho Correctional Institution, Idaho Correctional Institution-Orofino and a private Correctional Alternative Placement Plan building. On its website, JPay describes itself as a “highly trusted name in corrections because we offer a fast and secure method of sending money,” which seems up for debate given the recent turn of events. The company has a presence in prisons across 35 states. |
Check out this first of its kind, direct-to-consumer urine-testing app with FDA clearance | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Urinary tract infections are highly uncomfortable and distracting, and they are very common for women because of the female anatomy. In fact, according to the Mayo Clinic, many women experience during their lifetimes. Many of the afflicted try resolving the infection on their own — using heating pads, drinking more water, taking pain medications. But often, these infections become quickly more advanced, a doctor is called, an in-patient visit is made, and the whole terrible episode is only ended after a trip to the pharmacy for some antibiotics. Until now, at least. A young San Francisco-based startup called just this week began selling directly to consumers the first and, for now, the only FDA-cleared urine testing app that allows someone to test their urine at home using a paper test strip and a camera phone. (Its app uses sophisticated color metrics to analyze the strip and determine what’s what.) The kits are just $5. A call to Scanwell to confirm the results — it relies on outside physicians — will cost another $25. But that prescription service will also call in an order for antibiotics immediately if there’s an infection. (Users can also order the antibiotics, but it takes a couple of days for them to arrive.) The startup — which has so far raised just $120,000 from Y Combinator — was founded by Stephen Chen, a Harvard MBA who has the kind of backstory that makes investors slobber. Right out of school, he joined Teco Diagnostics, a now 33-year-old maker of in-vitro diagnostics and medical devices, first as an R&D manager and later as a GM. Using what he’d learned there, he left Teco in 2013 to create a separate company, , which makes a urine test for pets that can help identify a range of issues, from diabetes to kidney stones to bacterial infections. He even pitched the company on the show “Shark Tank,” which was hosting open tryouts within distance of his home a couple of years ago, and he landed $300,000 in exchange for 20 percent of the company. While the exposure was great, the terms were not, suggests Chen, who says he ultimately didn’t take the money. He didn’t need to, apparently. Petnostics is still a going concern and it has generated enough revenue to support the development of Scanwell, which Chen says was always part of his master plan. In fact, Chen started the FDA approval for Scanwell nearly three years ago. The reason: UTI testing for humans is a much bigger market, especially when factoring in the billions of dollars that are wasted on emergency room trips for UTIs each year. Though hard to fathom, a visit to the ER for the condition can cost a . What happens from now depends on how effectively Scanwell reaches its target market, but so far, it seems, so good. Though the direct-to-consumer service will take some time (different states have different regulations around over-the-phone prescription services), people in California and select other states can use the service today. In the meantime, Scanwell is making its kits available on as many college campuses as possible, given UTIs tend to be prevalent at schools because students are sexually active. The company is also looking to work more closely with insurance companies, arguing it can help them improve their own quality ratings by using Scanwell kits to reduce Medicare and other insurance payouts. Not last, the four-person team is already working on other urine-based tests, including a test that identifies chronic kidney disease, and another test for cardiovascular diseases. Says Chen, “Paper tests are so cheap. They can reach people through the mail. It’s kind of like when AOL used to send out a bunch of discs. We can work with health providers to work with their patient populations and reach them more effectively through home tests.” Hopefully, they’ll agree with Chen. Certainly, as he notes, home access to diagnostics is “long overdue.” |
Viacom acquires Gen Z digital media company AwesomenessTV | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Viacom today confirmed it’s acquiring digital media company AwesomenessTV, whose network reaches 158 million subscribers and approximately 300 million monthly views. The news follows a report from earlier this week that said the two were in talks about an acquisition, which priced the deal at “well below $300 million,” . Viacom did not confirm the deal terms, but an under $300 million price point would be less than half of AwesomenessTV’s previous $650 million valuation, by Bloomberg. [update: pegs the price at $25M + debt] Prior to this, AwesomenessTV was majority owned by Comcast/NBCUniversal which has a 51 percent stake in the company; Hearst and (TechCrunch parent company by way of Oath), Verizon, are minority shareholders with 24.5 percent stakes. When Verizon its stake two years ago, it spent around $159 million, which valued the business then at the $650 million price point, or double its valuation at the time Hearst invested in 2014. “Awesomeness has done an incredible job building their brand into a digital media powerhouse for today’s most sought-after and hard-to-reach youth audiences,” said Kelly Day, President of Viacom Digital Studios and former Chief Business Officer of AwesomenessTV, in a statement about the deal. “The team brings strong digital expertise, deep connections with top talent and influencers, a world-class television and film studio, and a robust branded content team and creative agency that will accelerate the growth and scale of Viacom Digital Studios.” Viacom’s interest in the property has to do with its ability to reach young viewers – specifically “Gen Z” viewers who are growing up watching YouTube, not traditional TV. AwesomenessTV has reach into this market by way of its 158 million total subscribers and over 6 million YouTube subscribers. Viacom sees its youth focus as a natural fit that falls in between its younger Nickelodeon and older MTV audiences. AwesomenessTV’s studio has put out Emmy-winning content, and has developed a library of over 200 hours of long-form TV series and feature films, which it brings to Viacom. It also has connections with those in the digital-native talent and influencer space of value. And it has established relationships with advertisers catering to this youth market, including Hollister, Gatorade, Invisalign, and Kraft, which Viacom took into consideration when making this deal. Following the deal’s close, AwesomenessTV will be integrated into Viacom’s Digital Studios division led by president Kelly Day, while its existing CEO Jordan Levin will depart. Levin will remain during a transition period only, we understand. But a CEO is no longer needed as AwesomenessTV will not operate as a standalone entity. AwesomenessTV was co-founded by Brian Robbins, who currently serves as President of Paramount Players at Viacom, and Joe Davola. Robbins connection likely helped to spark the talks, sources had told Variety. Viacom seemed an ideal suitor for the business, given its interest in digital video/influencer space, which it has acted on before with its February , and its . The news of the deal also follows the high-profile closure of one of AwesomenessTV partners’ efforts in the streaming space: Verizon’s go90. Verizon had been working with AwesomenessTV to develop short-form original programming for its misguided streaming service go90, which failed to take off and is shutting down for good this month. |
Anchor opens a Manhattan studio where people can podcast for free | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | You can . |
Why unskippable Stories ads could revive Facebook | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it’s going to end up with commercials. Users won’t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But there’s no way Facebook and its family of apps will keep letting us fast-forward past Stories ads just a split-second after they appear on our screens. We’re on the cusp of the shift to Stories. Facebook estimates that across social media apps, through feeds some time in 2019. One big reason is they don’t take a ton of thought to create. Hold up your phone, shoot a photo or short video and you’ve instantly got immersive, eye-catching, full-screen content. And you never had to think. Facebook CPO Chris Cox at F8 2018 charts the rise of Stories that will see the format surpass feed sharing in 2019 Unlike text, which requires pre-meditated reflection that can be daunting to some, Stories are point and shoot. They don’t even require a caption. Sure, if you’re witty or artistic you can embellish them with all sorts of commentary and creativity. They can be a way to project your inner monologue over the outside world. But the base level of effort necessary to make a Story is arguably less than sharing a status update. That’s helped Stories rocket to more than 1.3 billion daily users across Facebook’s apps and Snapchat. The problem, at least for Facebook, is that monetizing the News Feed with status-style ads was a lot more straightforward. Those ads, which have fueled Facebook’s ascent to earning $13 billion in revenue and $5 billion in profit per quarter, were ostensibly old-school banners. Text, tiny photo and a link. Advertisers have grown accustomed to them over 20 years of practice. Even small businesses on a tight budget could make these ads. And it at least took users a second to scroll past them — just long enough to make them occasionally effective at implanting a brand or tempting a click. Stories, and Stories ads, are fundamentally different. They require big, tantalizing photos at a minimum, or preferably stylish video that lasts five to 15 seconds. That’s a huge upward creative leap for advertisers to make, particularly small businesses that’ll have trouble shooting that polished content themselves. Rather than displaying a splayed out preview of a link, users typically have to swipe up or tap a smaller section of a Story ad to click through. And Stories are inherently skippable. Users have learned to rapidly tap to progress slide by slide through friends’ Stories, especially when racing through those with too many posts or that come from more distant acquaintances. People are quick with the trigger finger the moment they’re bored, especially if it’s with an ad. A new type of ad blindness has emerged. Instead of our eyes glazing over as we scroll past, we stare intensely searching for the slightest hint that something isn’t worth our time and should be skipped. A brand name, “sponsored” label, stilted product shot or anything that looks asocial leads us to instantly tap past. This is why Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg scared the hell out of investors on the when she admitted about Stories that, “The question is, will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? And we honestly don’t know.” It’s a radically new format advertisers will need time to adopt and perfect. Facebook had spent the past year warning that revenue growth would decelerate as it ran out of News Feed ad inventory, but it’d never stressed the danger as what it was: Stories. That contributed to its . The shift from News Feed ads to Stories ads will be a bigger transition than desktop ads to mobile ads for Facebook. Feed ads looked and worked identically, it was just the screen around them changing. Stories ads are an entirely new beast. There is one familiar format Stories ads are reminiscent of: television commercials. Before the age of TiVo and DVRs, you had to sit through the commercials to get your next hit of content. I believe the same will eventually be true for Stories, to the tune of billions in revenue for Facebook. Snapchat is cornered by Facebook’s competition and . So this week, it unskippable vertical video ads it actually calls “Commercials” to 100 more advertisers, and they’ll soon be self-serve for buyers. Snap first them in May, though the six-second promos are still only inserted into its longer-form multi-minute premium Shows, not user-generated Stories. A Snap spokesperson said they couldn’t comment on future plans. But I’d expect its stance will inevitably change. Friends’ Stories are interesting enough to compel people to watch through entire ads, so the platform could make us watch. Snapchat is desperate, and that’s why it’s already working on unskippable ads. If Facebook’s apps like Instagram and WhatsApp were locked in heated battle with Snapchat, I think we’d see more brinkmanship here. Each would hope the other would show unskippable ads first so it could try to steal their pissed-off users. But Facebook has largely vanquished Snapchat, which has seen user growth sink significantly. Snapchat has 191 million daily users, but Facebook Stories has 150 million, Messenger Stories has 70 million, Instagram Stories has 400 million and WhatsApp Stories (called Status) leads with 450 million. Most people’s friends around the world aren’t posting to Snapchat Stories, so Facebook doesn’t risk pushing users there with overly aggressive ads, except perhaps amongst U.S. teens. Instagram’s three-slide Stories carousel ads That’s why I expect we’ll quickly see Facebook start to test unskippable Stories ads. They’ll likely be heavily capped at first, to maybe one to three per day per user. Facebook took a similar approach to back in 2014. And Facebook’s apps will probably only show them after a friend’s story before your next pal’s, in-between rather than as dreaded pre-rolls. Instagram already offers with up to three slides instead of one, so users have to tap three times to blow past them. An Instagram spokesperson told me they had “no plans to share right now” about unskippable ads, and a Facebook spokesperson said “We don’t have any plans to test unskippable stories ads on Facebook or Instagram.” But plans can change. A Snap spokesperson noted that unlike a full 30-second TV spot, Snapchat’s Commercials are up to six seconds, which matches an emerging industry trend for mobile video ads. Budweiser recently made some six-second online ads that it also ran on TV, showing the format’s reuseability that could speed up adoption. For brand advertisers not seeking an on-the-spot purchase, they need time to leave an impression. By making some Stories ads unskippable, Facebook’s apps could charge more while making them more impactful for advertisers. It would also reduce the creative pressure on businesses because they won’t be forced to make that first split-second so flashy so people don’t fast-forward. Employing unskippable ads could also create an incentive for people to pay for a in the future. If Facebook makes the Stories ad format work, it has a bright future that contrasts with the doomsday vibes conjured by its share price plummet. Facebook has more than 5X more (duplicated) Stories users across its apps than its nearest competitor Snapchat. The social giant sees libraries full of Stories created each day waiting to be monetized. |
Russian hackers already targeted a Missouri senator up for reelection in 2018 | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | A Democratic senator seeking reelection this fall appears to be the first identifiable target of Russian hacking in the 2018 midterm race. In a , Andrew Desiderio and Kevin Poulsen reported that Democratic Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill was targeted in a campaign-related phishing attack. That clears up one unspecified target from last week’s statement by Microsoft’s Tom Burt that three midterm election candidates had been targeted by Russian phishing campaigns. The report cites its own forensic research in determining the attacker is likely Fancy Bear, a hacking group believed to be affiliated with Russian military intelligence. “We did discover that a fake Microsoft domain had been established as the landing page for phishing attacks, and we saw metadata that suggested those phishing attacks were being directed at three candidates who are all standing for elections in the midterm elections,” Burt said during the Aspen Security Forum. Microsoft removed the domain and noted that the attack was unsuccessful. Sen. McCaskill confirmed in a that she was targeted by the attack, which appears to have taken place in August 2017: Russia continues to engage in cyber warfare against our democracy. I will continue to speak out and press to hold them accountable. While this attack was not successful, it is outrageous that they think they can get away with this. I will not be intimidated. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Putin is a thug and a bully. TechCrunch has reached out to Sen. McCaskill’s office for additional details on the incident. McCaskill, a vocal Russia critic, will likely face Republican frontrunner and Trump pick Josh Hawley this fall. |
Magic Leap details what its mixed reality OS will look like | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Magic Leap just updated its developer documentation and a host of new details and imagery are being spread around on Reddit and Twitter, sharing more specifics on how the company’s Lumin OS will look like on their upcoming Magic Leap One device. It’s mostly a large heaping of nitty-gritty details, but we also get a more prescient view into how Magic Leap sees interactions with their product looking and the directions that developers are being encouraged to move in. Worth noting off the bat that these gifs/images appear to be mock-ups or screenshots rather than images shot directly through Magic Leap tech. Alright, first, this is what the Magic Leap One home screen will apparently look like, it’s worth noting that it appears that Magic Leap will have some of its own stock apps on the device, which was completely expected but they haven’t discussed much about. Also worth noting is that Magic Leap’s operating system by and large looks like most other operating systems, they seem to be well aware that flat interfaces are way easier to navigate so you’re not going to be engaging with 3D assets just for the sake of doing so. Here’s a look at a media gallery app on Magic Leap One. Here’s a look at an avatar system. The company seems to be distinguishing between two basic app types for developers: immersive apps and landscape apps. Landscape apps like what you see in the image above, appear to be Magic Leap’s version of 2D where interfaces are mostly flat but have some depth and live inside a box called a that fits spatially into your environment. It seems that you’ll be able to have several of these running simultaneously. Immersive apps, on the other hand, like this game title, . — which Magic Leap has been teasing for years — respond to the geometry of the space that you are in and is thus called an immersive app. Here’s a video of an immersive experience in action. Make your own derpy gravity defying driving game using this developer lesson in ! 🚗😎 — Giant Space Turtle (@GST_naomi) Moving beyond apps, the company also had a good deal to share about how you interact with what’s happening in the headset. We got a look at some hand controls and what that may look like. When it comes to text input, an area where AR/VR systems have had some struggles, it looks like you’ll have an appropriate amount of options. Magic Leap will have a companion smartphone app that you can type into, you can connect a bluetooth keyboard and there will also be an onscreen keyboard with dictation capabilities. One of the big highlights of Magic Leap tech is that you’ll be able to share perspectives of these apps in a multi-player experience which we now know is called “casting,” apps that utilize these feature will just have a button that you can press to share an experience with a contact. No details on what the setup process for this looks like beyond that though. Those are probably the most interesting insights, although there’s plenty of other stuff in the , but also here are a few other images to keep you going. [gallery ids="1681679,1681678,1681680,1681705"] It really seems like the startup is finally getting ready to showcase something. The company says that its device will begin shipping this summer and is already in developer hands. Based on what Magic Leap has shown here, the interface looks like it’ll feel very familiar as opposed to some other AR interfaces that have adopted a pretty heavy-handed futuristic look. |
Amazon lets you collaborate with others on Wish Lists | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Amazon may soon be adding a feature consumers have wanted for years: collaborative wish lists. [Update, 8/25/18: the feature is now live.] A number of people using Amazon.com and its mobile app recently spotted the option to “invite others” to their wish lists. This offers a URL that can be shared via text messages, email, social apps and more. Once clicked, the invitees can then both add and remove wish list items, alongside the wish list’s original owner. The feature, while relatively minor, is something Amazon shoppers have been clamoring for. Parents want to be able to co-manage wish lists for their kids, while others – like friends, couples, party planners, family and friends – have also wanted to team up on lists of gift ideas for special occasions, such as birthdays, holidays, and various celebrations. But there’s been some confusion over whether the feature was something Amazon was only , or if it was in the early of a rollout to all users. Amazon declined to comment on its plans specifically, but did tell us this is a test with a “small number of customers.” As one report from noted, there are some Wish List features not everyone has, even if they’ve been opted in to the new collaborative lists test. For instance, some people will also see a conversation icon on the right side of the list’s page that allows list members to discuss items on the list with one another. Another ellipsis icon lets the original list creator manage the list’s membership. So far, the feature has been spotted on the Amazon.com desktop and mobile website, and on iOS but not Android. It’s common for Amazon to launch new features on iOS first, however. That’s the case with the which has launched publicly, but only on iOS to start. Update, 8/24/18: Amazon has now officially launched this feature, so all customers can build both Shopping Lists or Wish Lists together in one location. |
MoviePass borrowed $5M to end yesterday’s outage | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | More bad news for subscription movie ticket service , which that there was an unidentified issue preventing people from using their MoviePass credit cards to get tickets. A from parent company Helios & Matheson offers more insight about what happened. The filing ( ) announces a “demand note” of $6.2 million, including $5 million in cash that the company borrowed. It goes on to explain: The $5.0 million cash proceeds received from the Demand Note will be used by the Company to pay the Company’s merchant and fulfillment processors. If the Company is unable to make required payments to its merchant and fulfillment processors, the merchant and fulfillment processors may cease processing payments for MoviePass, Inc. (“MoviePass”), which would cause a MoviePass service interruption. Such a service interruption occurred on July 26, 2018. In other words, it looks like MoviePass wasn’t able to pay one of its service providers, which led to the outage. In order to make those payments, it borrowed $5 million. This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in MoviePass’ finances. A Helios & Matheson filing from earlier this month suggested that to fund MoviePass’ operations and growth. Meanwhile, although the service is best-known for offering access to unlimited movie tickets for $9.95 per month, the specifics of the pricing model have been changing . |
1 week until the deadline for Disrupt SF 2018’s Hackathon + new sponsor prizes | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Are you a hacking speed demon of incomparable skill? Then we want you to submit your best hack to the Virtual Hackathon going down at on September 5-7. But you need to chug Red Bull like never before, because this is the last week you can submit your hack. The deadline is August 2, so no matter where you are in the world, get coding and . C’mon, show us your mad skills. Here’s how the Virtual Hackathon works. We’ve recruited some awesome judges — including a few from Pinterest and Slack — and they’ll scrutinize and score all submitted hacks. Based on the quality of the idea, technical implementation of the idea and the product’s potential impact, the judges will score each hack on a scale of 1-5. The 100 top-scoring teams win up to five Innovator Passes to for the members of their team. The top 30 teams move forward to the semi-finals and demo their hacks at Disrupt SF 2018. The top 10 semi-finalists will step onto to demo their product to the world. The “Best in Show” team will win a grand prize of $10,000 and be crowned TC Disrupt Virtual Hackathon’s first champion. Of course, our Hackathon is famous for interesting hack contests from our sponsors, and the Virtual Hackathon has many additional thousands of dollars in cash and prizes on the line. Not to mention some wicked cool challenges from , , and . Check them out and jump on in! You have no time to waste if you want to participate in our first Virtual Hackathon and have a shot at free passes to on September 5-7 — and a whole lot more. The deadline for submitting your hack is August 2. That’s just one week away, so . Now we’re thrilled to tell you about this contest sponsored by Novartis. Heart failure is a chronic debilitating and potentially life-threatening disease affecting 26 million people worldwide. It is one of the most difficult and chronic heart diseases to manage and the biggest cause of hospital admissions in adults aged over 65 in the Western world (Source: Heart Failure). As a result, treatment costs, including hospitalizations, are estimated at $108 billion a year worldwide. About 25 percent of patients die within a year of diagnosis and 50 percent within five years (Source: CDC and WHO). What Novartis is looking for is a digital solution to help better monitor, manage and even predict worsening symptoms of heart failure. After a patient is diagnosed with heart failure, there are very few resources available to easily and unobtrusively monitor their heart health over time. Adherence to therapy and lack of health interventions are major reasons why patients’ health often deteriorates rapidly after a diagnosis. This solution should therefore drastically reduce the number of hospital re-admissions and deaths following an initial diagnosis. Help us reimagine medicine by using your creativity and tech skills to develop a tool that easily captures important cardiovascular vitals and monitors symptom progression, empowering patients to detect potential problems earlier and seek treatment sooner. Novartis is looking for accessible, affordable and easy to use technologies that can seamlessly integrate into the life of a patient who has recently been diagnosed with heart failure. Use of personal digital devices (smartphones, smartwatches, etc.), telemedicine and innovative patient engagement are encouraged. Novartis is not looking for diagnostic devices that (a) is not a standard consumer device (e.g. a non-commercial wearable) and (b) increases the burden and involvement of a patient in monitoring their disease. Consider including the following: Have you been working on something truly innovative, but started before the hackathon began? We still want to see what you’ve been cooking up. Submit your project to Devpost regardless of when you started working on it. We’ll be awarding up to $30,000 in prizes, including TWO first prizes – one for the hackathon challenge and another for our “Extended Innovation Challenge” (for teams that have worked on their solution before the hackathon started on June 5, 2018). Three more prizes will be awarded to the runner-up teams. The top five teams will be invited to a pitch competition, live at the Novartis booth during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018. They will be judged by a panel of esteemed healthcare industry veterans and there will be a single Grand Prize (detailed below) awarded to the overall best team, which will be announced and awarded on the main TechCrunch stage. First Prize – Novartis Hackathon Challenge: $12,000 First Prize – Novartis Extended Innovation Challenge: $12,000 Second Prize: $3,000 Third Prize: $2,000 Fourth Prize: $1,000 Grand Prize: A validation study (where appropriate), dedicated Novartis mentors, access to Novartis data lakes, free space and use of fabrication equipment, frequent encounters with industry leaders and investors through events, office hours, and networking opportunities. To contact our challenge administrators at HITLAB send an email to: challengeadmin@hitlab.org. |
Disney and Fox shareholders give acquisition the green light | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | null |
null | Adam Eichen | 2,018 | 7 | 18 | null |
The cloud continues to grow in leaps and bounds, but it’s still AWS’s world | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | With the big cloud companies reporting recently, we can be sure of a couple of things: the market continues to expand rapidly and AWS is going to be hard to catch. Depending on whose numbers you look at, the market grew around 50 percent as it continues its unprecedented expansion. Let’s start with market leader, Amazon Web Services. of the market while . That’s close enough to be considered a dead heat. As Synergy’s John Dinsdale points out, AWS is so dominant that in spite of mega growth numbers from other vendors, it is still bigger than the next four competitors combined, even after all these years. Those competitors, by the way, are no slouches by any means. They include Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba, so some pretty elite enterprise players. As we’ve noted in one of the primary issues for all the competitors is how late they were to the market. They gave Amazon a massive head start, and they show no signs of ceding that lead any time soon. Of course, AWS isn’t standing still either, it grew 48 percent last quarter by Canalys’ estimate, while Synergy has AWS marketshare up a tick to 34 percent. Interestingly, Synergy finds this overall competitor growth did not cut into Amazon’s marketshare at all, but was the result of continued growth in the marketplace, as companies continue to shift workloads to the cloud. “The rapid growth of Microsoft, Google and Alibaba sees them all increase their market shares too, but it is not at the expense of AWS,” Synergy’s John Dinsdale pointed out in a statement. That is not to say that Microsoft and Google are not growing too. In fact, Canalys had Microsoft growing at an 89 percent clip last quarter while Google grew an amazing 108 percent. It’s always important to point out that it’s easier to grow from a small number to a bigger number than it is to grow from a big number to a bigger number. Yet AWS continues to defy that idea and grow anyway, although not quite at the rate of its competitors. Synergy reports these marketshare percentages for the competitors: Microsoft 14 percent, IBM 8 percent, Google 6 percent and Alibaba 4 percent, while Canalys shows Microsoft with 18 percent and Google with 8 percent. It did not report on IBM or Alibaba. While these growth numbers have to drop at some point, they could continue to grow for the next several years as large companies get more comfortable with the cloud and move increasing percentages of their workloads. Of course, even then it’s not a zero sum game. As we see increasing use of data-intensive workloads involving internet of things, blockchain and artificial intelligence, it’s entirely possible that the market will continue to grow even with fewer workloads moving from private data centers. For now, even with their eye-popping growth numbers, the competition continues to chase AWS. Even as these companies find ways to differentiate themselves with different approaches, offerings and services, the market dynamics are hardening and catching AWS seems less and less likely. It also seems increasingly less likely that some small upstart can come in and undermine the top players, as it just takes too much investment to keep up with them and their scale. “In a large and strategically vital market that is growing at exceptional rates, [the market leaders] are throwing the gauntlet down to their smaller competitors by continuing to invest enormous amounts in their data center infrastructure and operations. Their increased market share is clear evidence that their strategies are working,” Synergy’s Dinsdale said a statement. What the competitors need to do now is continue to focus on customer requirements and what they can offer in terms of price and service to continue to take advantage of their own unique strengths. There’s plenty of room in this space for everyone to thrive, but some will thrive more than others. That’s just the nature of the market. |
In Argentina, venture capital surges even as the broader economy stutters | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Even as the Argentine government was announcing in the country’s economic output in nearly a decade, technology investors in the nation’s capital are all gearing up for record fundraising years. Three of the country’s biggest firms (which are still small by international standards) are raising new, exponentially larger funds in a sign that technology companies are showing promise despite the bleak picture painted by the broader economy in Latin America. Leading the pack is , the early-stage investor that’s developing a regional network of accelerators and seed investment funds through partnerships that extend from Mexico City to Montevideo and São Paulo up to San Francisco. Despite its regional reach, home for NXTP is Buenos Aires and it’s there that the firm began accelerating and investing in early-stage companies back in 2011. NXTP has already had 13 exits, , and is perhaps the most mature of the crop of investment firms in the country. It’s also looking to be among the largest as it capitalizes on that track The firm is currently knocking on doors to raise $120 million, a significant step up from its previous $38.5 million investment vehicle. NXTP Labs isn’t the only firm based in Argentina that’s looking to significantly expand its capital under management. , a firm that invests in both Argentina and Mexico, and , an Argentine-focused, Buenos Aires-based investment firm, has already raised roughly $30 million of the $60 million it has targeted for its new fund. While Cygnus is very much focused on the early-stage Argentine opportunity (which makes sense given the track record of technology companies coming out of the country — and the capital behind the firm) both NXTP and Jaguar have more of a regional perspective. And Jaguar, too, is massively increasing the size of its fund. While its first fund was only $10 million, the new one will be closer to $60 million, according to one person with knowledge of the firm’s plans. Behind the surge of confidence in the region’s technology fortunes, despite the economic turmoil that continues to roil the region, is a growing track record of valuable companies — all with a home base in Latin America’s largest market. And while Brazil remains the region’s undisputed economic powerhouse, there’re growing numbers of tech giants coming from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Chile, investors said. As Gonzalo Costa, a co-founder of NXTP Labs earlier this week: For the first time, companies are raising rounds of $100 million plus. 99 (acquired by Didi Chuxing), Nubank and Rappi, have all raised mega rounds in the past two years. Others have raised large rounds, such as Selina and Movile, with $90 million-plus, or Auth0 (part of our portfolio), with $50 million rounds in 2018. But the increase in dollar amounts is not only driven by mega rounds. More than 30 transactions of $3 million or more happened in 2017, which is triple in amount of rounds of that figure when compared to 2016. This shows a market maturity not seen before. Not only are companies attracting more capital, but entrepreneurs are launching companies across a dizzying array of technology verticals. These are companies like , which provides competitive analysis and data for marketplaces like MercadoLibre; or , which is developing a network of satellites for earth observation ( ); or , which provides financing options for farmers in Latin America (and is raising a $20 million round, according to sources). It’s clear that venture capital and tech in Argentina (and across Latin America) is having a moment. But with a broader base of local capital, it’s possible that this moment could become a movement. And that would have a profound effect on economies around the world. |
Browser maker Opera successfully begins trading on NASDAQ | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Opera is now a public company. The Norway-based company priced its initial public offering at $12 a share — the company initially expected to price its share in the $10 to $12 price range. Trading opened at $14.34 per share, up 19.5 percent. The company raised over $115 million with this IPO. filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. . The company is now trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol . Chances are you are reading this article in Google Chrome on your computer or Android phone, or in Safari if you’re reading from an iPhone. Opera has a tiny market share compared to its competitors. But it’s such a huge market that it’s enough to generate revenue. In , the company revealed that it generated $128.9 million in operating revenue in 2017, which resulted in $6.1 million in net profit. The history of the company behind Opera is a bit complicated. A few years ago, Opera shareholders decided to the browser operations to a consortium of Chinese companies. The adtech operations now form a separate company called . Opera Ltd., the company that just went public, has a handful of products — a , different and a standalone app. Overall, around 182 million people use at least one Opera product every month. The main challenge for Opera is that most of its revenue comes from two deals with search engines — Google and Yandex. Those two companies pay a fee to be the default search engine in Opera products. Yandex is the default option in Russia, while Google is enabled by default for the rest of the world. The company also makes money from ads and licensing deals. When you first install Opera, the browser is pre-populated with websites by default, such as eBay and Booking.com. Those companies pay Opera to be there. Now, Opera will need to attract as many users as possible and remain relevant against tech giants. Opera’s business model is directly correlated to its user base. If there are more people using Opera, the company will get more money from Google, Yandex and its advertising partners. ✨Cheers to on its IPO day! — Nasdaq (@Nasdaq) |
Tiger Global reportedly pours more than $1B into SoftBank, saying its shares are “undervalued” | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | Tiger Global has poured more than $1 billion into SoftBank Group, . The newspaper reports that the firm told investors SoftBank’s shares are “meaningfully undervalued.” In response to a request for comment, SoftBank sent the same statement to TechCrunch as other media outlets: “We continue to believe the market significantly undervalues our stock and we welcome the support from a sophisticated institutional investor like Tiger Global.” Tiger Global and SoftBank share several investments in common, including Alibaba, Flipkart and Uber. According to a quarterly investor letter obtained by the Financial Times, Tiger Global wrote that “the combination of a world-class set of assets trading at a record discount to net asset value strikes us as an odd anomaly that is unlikely to exist forever.” It also said that “in our view, the opportunity to buy the shares cheaply exists today because SoftBank’s stock has not appreciated in nearly five years, even though the value of its Alibaba stake has increased by over $90 billion, more than SoftBank’s entire market capitalization.” The Financial Times reports that Tiger Global believes SoftBank can create an additional $73 billion of value before tax if its $100 billion Vision Fund returns 2.5 times its original investment over the next seven years. Other growth prospects it cited include the upcoming , its Japanese telecoms unit, and the of Sprint, which SoftBank holds a majority stake in, and T-Mobile, pending regulatory approval. |
Discovery may launch its own streaming service, too | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | Following Discovery Communications $14.6 billion of Scripps Networks Interactive in March, the company is now toying with the idea of launching its own direct-to-consumer service. According to remarks made by Discovery CEO David Zaslav at an industry event, [paywalled], the company is considering a service with all of Discovery’s networks at a price point of $5 to $8 per month. Whether the service would be U.S.-only has not been determined, nor did the CEO hint at any kind of timeframe for a launch. However, Zaslav did note that he was encouraged by other newcomers in the streaming space, including the low-cost skinny bundle , and . Discovery’s channels today are available on a number of the over-the-top live TV services, including WatchTV, which houses 30 of its networks. Following its merger with Scripps, the company operates four of the top five cable networks for women 25-54, the exec also said – ID, HGTV, Food Network and TLC. And it accounts for 22 to 25 percent of the U.S. female audience on any given night, he claimed. That sizable chunk of the viewing audience, plus demand for its popular fare like “Shark Week,” could drive customers to a standalone service. However, it’s unclear if that many consumers would pay for Discovery as a standalone offering, given how competitive the streaming landscape has become these days. Beyond the big three – Netflix, Hulu and Amazon – consumers are being asked to consider a variety of other add-ons, ranging from premium cable networks like HBO, Showtime, Starz and Cinemax, to channels’ own apps, as with CBS All Access, to streaming sports services like fuboTV. Then there are the over-the-top live TV offerings including Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, AT&T’s DirecTV Now and Watch TV, and Philo. It’s possible Discovery could have some success through Amazon’s Prime Video Channels, which allow consumers to build a true a la carte service. Amazon’s Channels today account for 55 percent of all direct-to-consumer video subscriptions, and is growing. But critics have suggested that even with Scripps, Discovery would need to pick up another company to make its offering more appealing and competitive – especially in light of industry consolidation efforts, like Disney’s Fox acquisition, and its plans to take on Netflix in streaming in 2019, as well as AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner. With so much choice today, and the high-quality, award-winning shows appearing on services like Netflix, Discovery’s traditional cable TV fare – like reality shows, home makeovers, animal documentaries, and cooking shows – may not have enough pull to support a standalone offering. |
Medical care scheduling startup Doctolib acquires MonDocteur | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | What do you do when you’ve raised nearly $100 million and you want to grow as quickly as possible? In case, the startup is acquiring its main competitor . Together, the two companies work with tens of thousands of doctors and get tens of millions of unique visitors every month. Doctolib has developed an online scheduling platform for all sorts of doctors, from your physician next door to the hospital in the big city. Instead of creating integrations with existing calendars and software solutions, Doctolib is replacing your doctor’s scheduling system altogether. After signing up, you can create your profile and manage your calendar from Doctolib directly. This way, patients can look at their doctor’s calendar on Doctolib’s website and find a time slot that works for everyone. But doctors even use Doctolib for patients who call them directly as it replaces the entire calendar system. MonDocteur started five years ago with the exact same idea in mind. Over time, the two companies have significantly grown and convinced more and more doctors. You can’t use both solutions, so each doctor had to decide between Doctolib and MonDocteur. Here are some numbers: So it’s clear that MonDocteur was smaller than Doctolib, but not really an order of magnitude smaller. These two startups will form a big company after the acquisition with 600 employees. It will also lead to a huge jump in monthly recurring revenue. It’s clear that Doctolib now has nothing to worry about in France. The startup also recently launched its service in Germany. Now, it’s all about convincing new doctors in France and Germany to join the platform. The company could also expand to new services to create new revenue streams. For now, both MonDocteur and Doctolib will stick around. If you’ve been using one of those two sites, nothing will change. Doctors will also remain segmented between the two sites. Eventually, there will be just one service. |
The U.S. and ZTE reach a deal that will lift export ban | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | The United States government has made a deal with Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE that, once completed, will lift the ban preventing the company from working with American suppliers. The agreement eases tensions in the U.S.-China trade war because the seven-year denial order, which the Trump administration imposed in April after ZTE violated sanctions against North Korea and Iran, was a major point of contention between the two countries. Our statement on and the escrow agreement: — U.S. Commerce Dept. (@CommerceGov) According to a , once ZTE completes a $400 million escrow payment, the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) will lift the ban. The Commerce Department says “the ZTE settlement represents the toughest penalty and strictest compliance regime the Department has ever imposed in such a case. It will deter future bad actors and ensure the Department is able to protect the United States from those that would do us harm.” Many U.S. lawmakers are still concerned about the security repercussions of the deal, however, and a bipartisan group of senators that could potentially restore some of the penalties imposed on ZTE. The denial order was imposed because the Commerce Department claimed that ZTE violated U.S. laws against selling equipment containing American technology to Iran and North Korea, and not only failed to follow the terms of a 2017 agreement with the Department of Justice, but also lied to the U.S. The ban cut off access to several of ZTE’s key suppliers, including Qualcomm, and was severe enough that it was described as a “death penalty” for the company, which . But ZTE quickly and the that the company could continue buying from U.S. suppliers if it paid a fine of at least $1.3 billion and replaced its senior management and board. ZTE’s , with new CEO Xu Ziyang promising stronger compliance procedures. |
Overwatch League strikes a milestone deal with Disney and ESPN | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | If you’re sick of hearing about esports, you need to get over it. The space continues to grow, inching its way into the traditional media landscape. Today, in fact, Activision Blizzard that the Overwatch League playoffs will be aired on ESPN and Disney XD. The , as it’s the first true city-based league for a competitive video game. While most esports leagues consist of privately owned teams with little or nothing to do with geography, Overwatch League is a pro league made up of city-based teams such as the Dallas Fuel or the San Francisco Shock. Many of these teams are owned by big names in the traditional sports world, such as Robert Kraft (CEO and owner of New England Patriots, who owns the Boston Uprising) and Jeff Wilpon (COO of the New York Mets, who owns the New York Excelsior). The agreement, which also includes a recap/highlights package from 2018 Grand Finals coverage on ABC on July 29, marks the first time that live competitive gaming has aired on ESPN in prime time, and will be the first broadcast of an esports championship on ABC. Activision Blizzard said in the announcement that this is just the start of a multi-year agreement. That said, EA’s Madden NFL 18 did on ESPN2 and Disney XD earlier this year. Overwatch League playoffs begin tonight at 8pm ET, and will culminate in the Grand Finals, taking place in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, on July 27 and July 28. Here’s what Justin Connolly, EVP of Affiliate Sales and Marketing at Disney and ESPN, had to say in a prepared statement: The Overwatch League Grand Finals is by far our most comprehensive television distribution for an esports event over a single weekend: 10 total hours over four networks and three days. This overall collaboration with Disney/ABC, ESPN and Blizzard represents our continued commitment to esports, and we look forward to providing marquee Overwatch League coverage across our television platforms for fans. The rise of Twitch stars, like , and the growth of the competitive gaming scene have paved the way not only for a new type of sports media, but for a growing new economy. While challenges remain around monetizing the content, the pieces of the puzzle are slowing coming together to create an audience large enough to incentivize advertisers to spend big money. In fact, sponsorship revenue and ad spending revenue are , according to Newzoo. That doesn’t sound like much when you think about the NFL, which raked in $1.3 billion in revenue in 2017 alone. But, like this deal proves, the esports space is growing and working its way into the mainstream, hoping to get the attention of young men between 18 and 34 who have become increasingly difficult to reach via traditional advertising. Alongside the live TV broadcast of the Overwatch League playoffs on ESPN and Disney XD, the playoffs will also be live-streamed via Twitch, MLG.com and on the ESPN app and DisneyNOW. |
‘Airbnb mafia’ fund Wave Capital makes it official, closing its debut fund with $55 million | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | A couple of weeks ago, Airbnb announced some to the ways it compensates employees before it goes public. At least two former Airbnb employees and a longtime VC will be ready to fund those who leave when it does. They’ve been waiting on this moment since last summer, in fact. That’s when Airbnb’s former head of data science, Riley Newman, left the firm to start work on a venture firm, quickly enlisting the help of his colleague of several years, Sara Adler (Airbnb’s former head of corporate development) and former Madrona Venture Group principal David Rosenthal. What they set out to do with that fund, , is invest in marketplace startups, including — especially, even — those founded by other former employees of the home-rental giant. It’s an idea that has resonated with investors. Wave just closed its debut fund with $55 million in capital commitments, than the three were targeting. They’ve already begun putting it to work, too. To find out more about those bets, and where the three expect to shop next, we asked them for a few more details in a chat that has been edited for length. DR: Riley is really the hub for all of us; his wife and mine grew up together in Marin and have remained best friends since early childhood. As Riley’s career at Airbnb progressed and my career in VC progressed, we talked about doing something together at some point in time. RN: Meanwhile, Sara and I sat beside each other and together reported to the person who was effectively Airbnb’s CTO and we were part of a number of working groups together. David and I started talking about doing something together and we quickly drew Sara into our plans. DR: For me, when I was at Madrona, we incubated the [dog services company] and I saw the power of marketplaces and the importance of helping them get off the ground. And Riley and I talked a lot over the years about how he watched Greg McAdoo [formerly of Sequoia Capital and now of the venture firm ] work with Airbnb in the early days, and the importance of a true lead board member. And we thought that between our three collective experiences, we could play that role. SA: As a member of the corp dev team at Airbnb and at Dropbox and Facebook before that, I could also see the impact of investors even on the final stages of companies’ journeys. DR: We think roughly 18 to 20 companies. We intend to lead every round and to take board seats. We want to play the same role as Greg did at Airbnb. SA: We expect for each partner to do one to two deals per year. RN: It was definitely a process. [Laughs.] We were told no multiple times. We had not invested together and it did come up quite a bit and was a disqualifying thing for people who care a lot about that. We underwent a monster due diligence process with [the investment consulting company] that thankfully put us on [institutional investors’] buy list. But we dealt with every flavor of [no] before that. I think what won everybody over were the skill sets that each of us have, and how well-rounded they are in combination with one other. RN: was our first investment. We spent months with [co-founder] Dan Hill [who was formerly a director of product and performance marketing at Airbnb and whose startup connects prospective donors with local philanthropies]. We helped them firm up their marketplace design and design a long-term strategy and our [check] was built around a financial model that we built for them to get them from seed to a Series A round. We’ll have to go out and execute on that, but that process determined what they needed. We have another investment at the finish line. SA: Airbnb will be a big part of our network, especially with our first fund, because we know exactly who the great people are at the company, which you only know by working with them. But across my time at Airbnb and Dropbox and Facebook, I’ve been a part of acquiring 30 companies and I’ve interacted with thousands more during the evaluation process, so there’s a deep network of founders for us to draw from. DR DR: We’re sector agnostic. We believe in the business model, whether it’s consumer or b2b or healthcare. Crypto, we’re a little scared by, but I suppose those are marketplaces, too. |
Ex-Tesla worker makes it official and blows the whistle to SEC | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | The former Tesla employee who was fired and then sued by the electric vehicle automaker has filed a formal whistleblower tip to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the company has misled investors and put its customers at risk. Martin Tripp has retained Meissner Associates, a whistleblower, securities, investment fraud and employment law firm to represent him before the SEC. Tesla did not respond to questions about the whistleblower tip. The filing is the latest blow in a bout between Tesla, its CEO Elon Musk and Tripp. Tesla on June 20 against Tripp for $1 million, alleging the man, who worked as a process technician at the massive battery factory near Reno, hacked the company’s confidential and trade secret information and transferred that information to third parties, according to court documents. The lawsuit also claims the employee leaked false information to the media. A mere 24 hours later a between Musk and Tripp emerged. Tesla also notified police based on a tip to its customer service line that Tripp had allegedly told a friend he was going to attack the company’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada Tripp has denied this and the Storey County Sheriff’s department, which investigated, told TechCrunch they found no credible threat. Tripp is turning to an attorney with a successful whistleblower track record. The firm obtained a more than $22 million judgment from the SEC on behalf of a Monsanto whistleblower in 2016. Tripp’s whistleblower tip, which was filed July 6, alleges that Tesla knowingly manufactured batteries with punctured holes possibly impacting hundreds of cars on the road; misled the investing public as to the numbers of Model 3s actually being produced each week by as much as 44 percent; and lowered vehicle specifications and systemically used scrap and waste material in vehicles, all so as to meet production quotas, according to a statement from Meissner Associates. Tesla has said in the past that Tripp’s allegations are false and contend that he is not a whistleblower, but someone who hacked and stole confidential information. Tripp says he has been threatened and harassed in the days since he revealed information about Tesla to the media. “Getting the truth out has become a nightmare. While we have had to relocate due to threats and harassment, both online and offline, making it difficult to press on, my family and I have also received a ton of support, which keeps us going,” Tripp said in a statement. “I hope that, in the end, my fight will make it easier for future whistleblowers to come forward without fear of repercussions like those I have endured.” Meissner will not handle the federal lawsuit that Tesla filed against Tripp. He is currently looking for an attorney to represent him in the case, the firm’s managing member Stuart Meissner told TechCrunch. Meissner, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and assistant New York state attorney general, said Tesla filed its lawsuit against Tripp and engaged in a PR campaign to defame him in a calculated effort to ruin his reputation and silence him and other potential Tesla whistleblowers from coming forward. |
Nurx raises $36 million and adds Chelsea Clinton to its board of directors | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | Telemedicine startup Nurx recently closed a $36 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. As part of the investment, Kleiner Perkins General Partner Noah Knauf is joining the startup’s board of directors, along with Chelsea Clinton. With this new funding, CEO and co-founder Hans Gangeskar told TechCrunch that the startup plans to scale its clinical teams, pharmacies and geographic reach in the coming year. “We have a new site in Miami where we have a team of nurses being on-boarded, [we’re] building out our engineering and design teams and really just [working to] increase the pace of everything that we’re doing,” Gangeskar said. The startup launched in 2014 with the goal to make . After plugging your information into its online app, users are connected with physicians, given a prescription and Nurx prepares their product for delivery. Since its launch, this California-based startup now operates in 17 states, and has expanded its products to include not only contraceptives (such as pills, patches, injectables and products like Nuva Ring) but the anti-HIV medication PrEP as well. Gangeskar says the company is also preparing to launch an at-home lab kit soon for HIV testing. For Gangeskar, creating affordable access to contraceptives is a first step to changing how patients interact and receive medication from their physicians. “Birth control is one of the fundamental functions of any health care system [so] for us its a natural place to start,” said Gangeskar. To help advance its plans to redefine this space, Gangeskar says Nurx is excited to welcome public health veteran Chelsea Clinton to its board. “Her experience in public health and global health from the has been really valuable, [particularly learning about] rolling out preventative services in large scales, because really that’s the potential of our platform — [to reach] populations that can’t be reached by the conventional medical system.” to American’s healthcare access, startups like Nurx offer a fresh perspective on this critical space. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 7 | 27 | null |
Enterprise software investments may be tepid now, but they’re poised to engage | Logan Bartlett | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | Have we reached “peak software”? Just like the idea of “peak oil” — the hypothetical point at which global oil production could max out — you could say we’re approaching a saturation point for venture-capital investments in software companies. Recent data from PitchBook shows that venture investing in software companies has plateaued: The amount of VC money invested in these companies — $32 billion last year — remained roughly constant over the last four years. The actual number of venture-backed software investments, mostly for business-focused companies, has actually declined, from 4,068 in 2014 to 2,980 last year. But software is not, in fact, a declining industry. As I explore with my colleague Neeraj Agrawal in a recent report called , released last month, a closer look at the PitchBook data shows that the fall-off in software deal volumes is primarily in the Bay Area, where an overheated market has boosted valuations and caused some investors to temporarily pull back. Investment in other U.S. regions, and globally, is actually going up. Investment in software companies based in Europe, Canada and Australia/New Zealand, for example, was $5.4 billion in 2017, up nearly 69 percent from the previous year. Perhaps more important, a number of broader, global mega trends continue to fuel software innovation today, promising more new companies and more new jobs. These trends include everything from the rise of artificial intelligence, which is pushing software into new fields like autonomous driving, to the recent corporate tax cuts in the U.S., which could free up hundreds of billions of dollars for big corporations to buy up software startups. Mary Meeker just released her annual, consumer-focused Internet Trends in May. But here are some of the key trends we see shaping the global, mostly business-focused software market this year: (Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images) SoftBank’s new, $100 billion Vision Fund has had a huge impact on the technology industry already, given the Japanese firm’s ability to essentially play kingmaker in a given technology market by making a huge investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in one company. This, obviously, makes it extremely difficult for competitors to keep up in terms of building market share. And if a company declines SoftBank’s money, there’s the potentially lethal possibility that SoftBank could fund a competitor, essentially snuffing out the first company. What’s less noticed, however, is that SoftBank is investing in many business-focused software companies, not just big consumer names like Uber, FlipKart and SoFi. Softbank recently put $2.25 billion into GM’s Cruise business unit for autonomous driving and $250 million into secondary storage vendor Cohesity, for example, and has backed other B2B players such as construction/building-software outfit Katerra; real-estate software company Compass; and workplace chat app Slack. With these investments and others, SoftBank is accelerating the pace of growth in many key software markets and likely also dampening these companies’ IPO prospects, since companies receiving several hundred million dollars from the Japanese company face less of a financial need to go public. SoftBank is essentially taking the place of an IPO. Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch The continuing march of software innovation isn’t great for everyone — losers in this picture could include hardware vendors and people with jobs that can be automated by smart, software-powered robots. (Yes, even lawyers and doctors could be affected — it’s not just truck drivers.) The implications of artificial intelligence on the job market, and the auto industry, have been widely discussed. Less noticed, though, are the shifting growth rates in cloud-based IT gear versus traditional IT hardware, the technology that powers large corporations and other organizations. IDC predicts that by 2020, corporate spending on cloud-infrastructure software will finally exceed spending on non-cloud IT infrastructure — meaning all those boxes inside corporate data centers from vendors like Dell, IBM, Cisco, H-P etc. Many of those companies are trying to figure out their cloud services approach to stay relevant. Not everyone loves the Trump administration’s policies, but if you’re a software CEO, you might be a fan of the administration’s new tax bill. That’s because the 2017 bill could be a boon for software-industry M&A. Two key components of the new law — the reduced rate charged to companies to repatriate cash from overseas and the lowering of the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent — could leave many big tech acquirers with new war chests, analysts believe. According to investment bank Qatalyst Partners, both changes could leave a group of the largest traditional tech-company acquirers with an additional $400 billion to spend, if they repatriate money from overseas. This would be enough to buy 50 leading software companies today, according to Qatalyst. We have already seen some of this with the recent acquisitions of GitHub by Microsoft ($7.5 billion) and Adaptive Insight by Workday ($1.55 billion) and Q1 deals like MuleSoft by Salesforce ($6.5 billion) and CallidusCloud by SAP ($2.4 billion). The traditional tech acquirers could be more receptive to acquisitions than ever these days, given that the easy, low-cost cloud business model has allowed a range of young tech upstarts to attack many parts of their businesses from all angles. Often, the easiest solution is for the big tech companies to buy the upstarts. As software transforms big, well-known corporate markets — like data center software, and technology for functions like human resources, sales and marketing — it is also making inroads into much more narrow industries and corporate functions. The low cost of the cloud makes it easy for every industry, from physical therapy to prison management to mortgage lending, to grow its own, customized software, usually deployed for tasks like operations and customer management. Often there are multiple firms vying for customers (and investor dollars) today in these specialized fields. Similarly, software is fueling extremely specialized companies to serve business needs inside companies today. These include companies as varied as DocuSign, which has built a multi-billion dollar public company focusing exclusively on document signing, and Carta, which sells technology to help companies manage their financial cap tables. Mary Meeker is right that consumer internet trends like the rise of online wallets, subscription services for certain goods and increasing oversight of social media by regulators will have big economic implications in the years to come. But we humbly offer that business software is a pretty big economic driver too — you just have to work a little harder to figure out the implications for businesses and the markets. |
Casper opens a storefront for $25 naps | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | is opening a storefront designed specifically for sleepy New Yorkers in need of a nap. In , you can reserve nooks for 45 minutes at a time, at a cost of $25 per session. These nooks are basically giant wooden “O”s with curtains and soundproofed backing, and of course they’re stocked with Casper beds. It’s easy to or giggle about a nap store, but it seems a lot less funny when it’s a warm afternoon and you’re having trouble keeping your eyes open at work. In fact, I will happily confess to taking advantage of the TechCrunch New York couch after a big lunch, or after a morning that started stupidly early thanks to deadlines and embargoes. The Dreamery, of course, is a lot fancier than the office couch, as I discovered when I dropped by for a quick tour. Beyond the nooks themselves, there are also lockers to drop off your stuff, private washrooms to get cleaned up, a lounge for hanging out and drinking coffee before or after, plus additional amenities like pajamas and Headspace “sleepcasts.” (And yes, a Casper spokesperson assured me that the sheets are changed between each session.) “The Dreamery is about making sleep and rest a part of our regular wellness routines — similar to how many people prioritize a workout class,” said COO Neil Parikh in a statement. “The concept enables us to pilot new ways of bringing better sleep to more people and to more places — whether that’s here, the workplace, airports, or beyond.” Oh, and this new storefront is located on the same New York City block as , so it should be a pretty quick walk if you love the experience so much that you want to take a mattress home. |
Dirt Protocol raises $3M for a decentralized, blockchain-based approach to information vetting | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | The team at is using blockchain technology to create a new approach to verify information. The startup doesn’t plan to launch its platform until later this year, but it announced today that it has raised $3 million in seed funding from General Catalyst, Greylock, Lightspeed, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, SV Angel, Avichal Garg, Elad Gil, Fred Ehrsam, Linda Xie and others. Founder Yin Wu previously created ( in 2015) and . She told me that after becoming interested in the cryptocurrency industry, she was concerned about the around coin offerings — after all, we’ve covered where companies appear to have disappeared with people’s money. “The market today is still unregulated, with high incentive for people to spread misinformation for personal gain,” Wu said. Her solution? Build databases where anyone can contribute information, but where they have “skin in the game,” so there’s a financial penalty if they’re not truthful. Dirt Protocol isn’t trying to create a single, definitive data repository, but rather to provide the tools for developers to build their own databases. Those databases might focus on things like ICOs (providing information like the team, the investors and the number of tokens in circulation), or online publishers (to help advertisers avoid bots), or professional listings and membership lists. Dirt Protocol diagram based on Dimitri De Jonghe There will be a single token that works across the Dirt platform. Users will need to stake tokens to add new information to databases, to challenge an entry or to vote in disputes — you’ll be penalized (by losing tokens) for adding misinformation and rewarded for weeding it out. While that should create an economic incentive for people to not just avoid inaccuracies but also to actively remove them, it doesn’t fully address the question of determining the truth — who, ultimately, gets to decide whether an entry is accurate? Wu said Dirt will support a variety of different “governance structures,” whether that’s centralized moderation, free-for-all voting or a system where votes are weighted by reputation. Wu also suggested that the system is designed in a way to discourage concerted misinformation campaigns. For one thing, hoaxers will probably want to target the more popular databases, but those are also the ones that should attract more active moderation. Plus, she said, “The more valuable the network, the more people are contributing information, the more expensive [it becomes to contribute].” A recurring theme in our conversation was the advantage of a “decentralized” approach to data verification. Wu said that isn’t always the right way to go, but she said it makes sense when there’s a big platform with a centralized vetting process that works too slowly, or in situations where “you can’t trust the curator” of information, or with data sets that are just proprietary and expensive to access — while you have to buy tokens to contribute information, Wu said that Dirt Protocol data sets should be freely accessible, and “no single party owns that information and can shut off access.” In a similar vein, she said Dirt Protocol isn’t currently focused on making money. Ultimately, the business model will probably involve some combination of giving the software away for free and charging for additional services. “We’re focused on creating this open data set that anyone can use,” Wu said. “If we achieve that goal, I’m confident that some monetization will arise.” |
Uber lays off self-driving car operators in SF and Pittsburgh | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | Uber has let go all (about 100) of its self-driving car operators in Pittsburgh and San Francisco, and has been confirmed by TechCrunch. This comes after , following a fatal car crash involving one of its autonomous vehicles in March. Despite how this may initially look, Uber is still working on resuming autonomous vehicle testing in Pittsburgh this summer. Those affected by the layoffs can apply for one of roughly 55 new advanced operator positions that Uber calls Mission Specialists in either San Francisco or Pittsburgh. Mission Specialists are trained for on-road and test track operations, and are responsible for giving feedback to developers. There are also other open roles that don’t involve the operation of self-driving cars. “Our team remains committed to building safe self-driving technology, and we look forward to returning to public roads in the coming months,” an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. Uber suspended its self-driving car operations in all markets following the fatal Tempe, Ariz. crash, but operators were still employed by Uber and receiving regular pay. Now, those vehicle operators get first priority at applying for a Mission Specialist role, which requires some more technical expertise. In California, Uber decided in March not to re-apply for its self-driving car permit in the state, but Uber is still in fact intending to resume testing in the state at some point. A couple of months later, at Uber’s Elevate conference, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he expected . Self-driving testing is also on hold in Toronto, but it seems that the employees behind the wheel were already in Mission Specialist-like roles. You can read more of TechCrunch’s coverage of Uber’s autonomous driving below. |
Broadcom acquires CA Technologies for $18.9B in cash | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | , the massive semiconductor supplier you may remember from its to acquire Qualcomm, today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement with , a major IT management software and solutions provider. The price of the acquisition is $18.9 billion in cash. CA’s shareholders will receive $44.50 per share, a 20 percent premium over the closing price of the company’s stock today. It’s a bit of a surprise to see chip manufacturer Broadcom acquire a major and company. “This transaction represents an important building block as we create one of the world’s leading infrastructure technology companies,” Broadcom CEO and president Hock Tan explains in today’s announcement. “With its sizeable installed base of customers, CA is uniquely positioned across the growing and fragmented infrastructure software market, and its mainframe and enterprise software franchises will add to our portfolio of mission critical technology businesses. We intend to continue to strengthen these franchises to meet the growing demand for infrastructure software solutions.” This comment doesn’t exactly explain the rationale behind today’s acquisition, but Broadcom is clearly trying to diversify its offerings. Earlier this year, the company walked away from its proposed hostile takeover of Qualcomm after the Trump administration blocked it. At the time, Broadcom was willing to pay $117 billion for Qualcomm, which would have greatly extended the company’s semiconductor business. Today’s move sees Broadcom enter a completely new business. The company expects the acquisition to close in the fourth quarter of 2018. It’s unlikely that Broadcom will face any major headwind from Washington this time around. |
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s brutal education in net neutrality | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | Judge Brett Kavanaugh has been nominated for the position of Supreme Court Justice, and on this occasion I think it warranted that we revisit in detail the sound intellectual thrashing this man suffered at the hands of his colleagues just last year on the topic of the internet and net neutrality. Because Kavanaugh was very, very wrong then and gives every indication that he will take his ignorance unapologetically to the highest court in the land. To set the scene: In 2015 the United States Telecom Association sued the FCC, alleging the Open Internet Order that passed earlier that year, establishing net neutrality as we know it — or rather, — was illegal. This highly watched case was heard late in 2015 and six months later, in June of 2016. DC Circuit Judges Srinivasan, Tatel and Williams ruled against the telecoms, essentially finding that the FCC was well within its jurisdiction in establishing net neutrality rules to begin with, and also that the rule as written was lawful. Unsatisfied with this ruling, the USTA petitioned to have the case reheard “en banc,” meaning with all active circuit judges present. This petition was denied, primarily because the Open Internet Order was by that point in peril of replacement, and new deliberations would as likely as not soon be rendered moot. But two judges had dissenting opinions to bruit, and so the court published them alongside the denial — though unfortunately for them Srinivasan used the same opportunity to demolish their arguments. It would have been better for them, in retrospect, if they had remained silent, rather than raising their profound ignorance like a dirty flag to be mocked and pointed at forever — as we do here today. , because it was only one case and news story among many having to do with net neutrality, and having no official consequences (the motion, after all, was denied) it was only worth touching on in brief. But now, with Kavanaugh ascendant, I feel it is important to resurface his late folly as evidence of his unsuitability for the position to which he has been nominated. His dissent deeply misinterprets multiple Supreme Court decisions, demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about how the industry works and produces absurd results if taken to its logical conclusions. I’ll present Kavanaugh’s arguments in good faith, since they were offered that way, and then summarize their point-by-point demolishment by Srinivasan, the FCC or common sense. Kavanaugh’s first argument is that the FCC’s rule is illegal to begin with because it does not have authority to issue it. He cites what he calls the “major rules” doctrine, which is that an agency like the FCC requires clear and explicit permission from Congress to issue “decisions of ‘vast economic and political significance.’ ” This makes perfect sense — there have to be limits so serious questions of policy aren’t defined by a small group of commissioners. He writes: If an agency wants to exercise expansive regulatory authority over some major social or economic activity–regulating cigarettes, banning physician-assisted suicide, eliminating telecommunications rate-filing requirements, or regulating greenhouse gas emitters, for example–an ambiguous grant of statutory authority is not enough. Congress must clearly authorize an agency to take such a major regulatory action. Congress has never enacted net neutrality legislation or clearly authorized the FCC to impose common-carrier obligations on Internet service providers. As this is primarily a question of authority and precedent and not technology, I won’t go too into detail here. If you’re curious, goes into the various court and agency decisions that led to the 2015 rules. In brief, however, the question comes down to whether Congress has authorized the FCC to make a decision like that made in the 2015 rules: to classify broadband providers as common carriers and exert its powerful Title II authority over them. Srinivasan explains that it most certainly is: We have no need in this case to resolve the existence or precise contours of the major rules (or major questions) doctrine described by our colleagues. Assuming the existence of the doctrine as they have expounded it, and assuming further that the rule in this case qualifies as a major one so as to bring the doctrine into play, the question posed by the doctrine is whether the FCC has clear congressional authorization to issue the rule. The answer is yes. Indeed, we know Congress vested the agency with authority to impose obligations like the ones instituted by the Order because the Supreme Court has specifically told us so. And it told us so in a 2005 decision known as which Kavanaugh himself cites. In it was decided that the FCC could in fact define DSL as telecommunications but cable internet as an information service (again, the piece above has more context for these terms). Kavanaugh argues that shows that the 1996 Telecommunications Act, from which the FCC derives its authority, is ambiguous in its definition of internet services. This ambiguity, he says, means there is no specific mandate from Congress to create a major rule such as net neutrality. “That analysis,” Srinivasan explains in his enjoyable prose, “rests on a false equivalence: it incorrectly equates two distinct species of ambiguity.” “Whereas Brand X found statutory ambiguity on whether ISPs telecommunications providers, the decision found statutory ambiguity on whether the FCC to answer that question,” he writes (emphasis mine). And once the Supreme Court decides something is legal, he concludes, “our inquiry is over.” Ouch. It’s important to note here that isn’t some obscure case — it’s extremely influential and well-studied. Kavanaugh’s interpretation of it is exceptional in its backwardness, attempting to wring the complete opposite conclusion from what has been accepted for more than a decade. This kind of poor reasoning isn’t the kind you expect to find in a Supreme Court Justice. But the question of jurisdiction is only prefatory to the main event, in which Kavanaugh truly embarrasses himself. “Imposing common-carrier regulations on Internet service providers violates the First Amendment,” he writes. And to be clear, he’s talking about the First Amendment rights . He cites the Supreme Court again, this time two cases from the ’90s involving Turner Broadcasting. Some readers may already be exhibiting signs of skepticism. Turner Broadcasting? In the ’90s? Wasn’t that a completely different era and industry? It was, but Supreme Court decisions can be surprisingly broad and durable; precedents may stand for decades, if not centuries. So let’s hear Kavanaugh out, shall we? The cases, he explained, had to do with Turner Broadcasting challenging “must-carry” rules that required cable operators to carry certain programming — local stations, for instance. Turner argued that the government requiring it to broadcast certain information infringed on its right to free speech. And indeed, although the court ultimately decided that the must-carry rules should be enforced, it was also acknowledged that Turner does indeed exert free speech rights when it decides what content to broadcast or not broadcast. “The First Amendment’s basic principles ‘do not vary when a new and different medium for communication appears,’ ” he writes, “Although there of course can be some differences in how the ultimate First Amendment analysis plays out depending on the nature of (and competition in) a particular communications market.” Starting from this solid ground, Kavanaugh immediately drifts into the hard vacuum of ignorance. Please remember that the following was written by someone nominated to be a Justice of the Supreme Court. I really can’t condense it because every sentence has, as Srinivasan might put it, a distinct species of ignorance (emphasis mine). Here, of course, we deal with Internet service providers, not cable television operators. But . Just like cable operators, Internet service providers deliver content to consumers. Internet service providers may not necessarily generate much content of their own, but , just as cable operators decide what content they will transmit. Deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN and deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN.com are not meaningfully different for First Amendment purposes. Indeed, some of the same entities that provide cable television service – colloquially known as cable companies – . If those entities receive First Amendment protection when they transmit television stations and networks, they likewise receive First Amendment protection when they transmit Internet content. . Setting aside the unprofessional and unjustified bravado that concludes this breathtaking little salvo, it really would take hours and thousands of words to explain satisfactorily, to Kavanaugh himself, all the different ways he is incorrect. I’ll attempt to satisfy the demands of posterity and brevity in summarizing them. Packet-based internet service is fundamentally different from cable broadcasting, even if the latter has converted to packet-based transmission over the last decade. What they have in common is that they are transmitted as electrical impulses, sometimes over wires. It’s akin to the level of similarity between a telephone call (mostly also packet-based now) and a cable television signal. The idea that because things are transmitted via the same medium, they are legally identical, is so mystifyingly naive and backwards that I’m surprised to see it in a legal document of any kind, let alone a judge’s official dissent in a major case. Just as a basic counter-example, what about radio waves? They are used in countless different capacities by countless different devices, many of which are differently regulated, subject to different laws, possessed of different capabilities and so on. What about DSL? It runs over telephone lines; should it be regulated like phone calls? Outside some very basic and well-understood limits, internet service providers do not decide what content to deliver to users. And in many cases, thanks to encryption, they are totally unable to track (and therefore unable to control) what data they are providing. If all the traffic on the internet was encrypted and ISPs only transmitted data that was totally unintelligible to them, they would still be able to advertise and provide the exact same, highly valuable service to their users. Kavanaugh does touch on, and dismiss, some of this as follows: [T]he FCC argues (and the panel agreed) that does not apply in this case because many Internet service providers do not actually exercise editorial discretion to favor some content over others… I find that argument mystifying. It may be true that some, many, or even most Internet service providers have chosen not to exercise much editorial discretion, and instead have decided to allow most or all Internet content to be transmitted on an equal basis. But that “carry all comers” decision itself is an exercise of editorial discretion. Moreover, the fact that the Internet service providers have not been aggressively exercising their editorial discretion does not mean that they have no right to exercise their editorial discretion. We have already established, of course, that ISPs not only not decide what content to transmit, but that in many (approaching all) circumstances, it do so. But beyond this elementary oversight, Kavanaugh has also failed to comprehend, or perhaps even to read, the rule he is railing against. Because his exact argument is preemptively dealt with in the text of the rule itself, which in the first place defines entities affected by the rules as advertising and providing “the capability to transmit data to and receive data from all or substantially all Internet endpoints” — a definition that precludes editorial control. And if that’s too ambiguous for Kavanaugh, several paragraphs are dedicated to addressing his concerns in detail. Some excerpts: As a factual matter, broadband Internet access services are nothing like the cable service at issue in Cable operators… both engage in and transmit speech with the intent to convey a message either through their own programming directly or through contracting with other programmers for placement in a cable package. Broadband providers, however, display no such intent to convey a message in their provision of broadband Internet access services—they do not engage in speech themselves but serve as a conduit for the speech of others. There’s more (paragraphs 544 to 549 or so) in the Open Internet Order if anyone (for instance, Judge Kavanaugh) is curious. And in case you are worried that these definitions and assertions have been found wanting by others or challenged by the parties affected, allow Srinivasan to set your mind at ease: An ISP has no First Amendment right to engage in those kinds of practices [i.e. editorial content control]. No Supreme Court decision suggests otherwise. Indeed, although the two dissenting FCC Commissioners objected to the agency’s adoption of the rule on multiple grounds, neither suggested the rule poses any First Amendment issue. Similarly, the principal parties challenging the Order in this court, who collectively represent virtually every broadband provider—including all of the major ISPs—bring no First Amendment challenge to the rule. Considering especially the length and thoroughness with which now-Chairman Ajit Pai excoriated the original rule, it may be expected that if there were free speech considerations, he would have brought them up. Likewise the many ISPs and trade organizations, which would have loved to have something like Constitutional grounds to challenge the order. The only ones who bring up the issue are Kavanaugh and a tiny ISP in Texas called Alamo, which wanted to offer a “family-friendly” edited subset of the internet to its customers. Funnily enough, this is permitted! And by publicly stating that it has no intention of providing access to “substantially all Internet endpoints,” Alamo would exempt itself from the net neutrality rules! Yes, you read that correctly — an ISP can by changing its business model. They are, to Kavanaugh’s evident bafflement, essentially voluntary. But here’s Srinivasan again enlightening his colleague: There is no need in this case to scrutinize the exact manner in which a broadband provider could render the FCC’s Order inapplicable by advertising to consumers that it offers an edited service rather than an unfiltered pathway. No party disputes that an ISP could do so if it wished, and no ISP has suggested an interest in doing so in this court. In the event that an ISP nonetheless were to choose to hold itself out to consumers as offering them an edited service rather than indiscriminate internet access—despite the potential effect on its subscriber base—it could then bring itself outside the rule. In that sense, the rule could be characterized as “voluntary,” [as Kavanaugh describes it], but in much the same way that just about any regulation could be considered voluntary, insofar as a regulated entity could always transform its business to such an extent that it is no longer in the line of business covered by the regulation. Lastly, not content to be wrong on several Supreme Court cases, the technical basis for the industry he is writing about or the rule itself he is suggesting is unconstitutional, Kavanaugh felt the need to offer, as a rancid cherry on top, a dose of FUD suggesting that if this rule (which as he sees it permits government tampering with free speech without evidence of monopoly) were lawful, the government could move on to regulating the speech of edge providers from Google and Facebook to this website: If market power need not be shown, the Government could regulate the editorial decisions of Facebook and Google, of MSNBC and Fox, of NYTimes.com and WSJ.com, of YouTube and Twitter. Can the Government really force Facebook and Google and all of those other entities to operate as common carriers? Can the Government really impose forced-carriage or equal-access obligations on YouTube and Twitter? If the Government’s theory in this case were accepted, then the answers would be yes. After all, if the Government could force Internet service providers to carry unwanted content even absent a showing of market power, then it could do the same to all those other entities as well. The vast and numerous differences between a broadband internet provider and a service like Facebook, let alone a press outlet like The New York Times, are perhaps unsurprisingly lost on Kavanaugh. Once more Srinivasan explains it concisely: Those companies evidently do not share our colleague’s concern—all but one is a member of a group that supports the rule in this court. That may be in part because those companies, in contrast with broadband ISPs, are not considered common carriers that hold themselves out as affording neutral, indiscriminate access to their platform without any editorial filtering. The real slippery-slope concerns run in the reverse direction. Under our dissenting colleague’s approach, broadband ISPs would have a First Amendment entitlement to block and throttle content based on their own commercial preferences even if they had led customers to anticipate neutral and indiscriminate access to all internet content. That’s the last thing on the long list of things about which Kavanaugh needed to be schooled in order to issue even a reasonably opinion on this subject. This has been a rather long exposition, but I thought it was important that everyone see, in Kavanaugh’s own words, exactly how poor of a study he is, at least as far as this issue is concerned, and how little he seems to think through both his own arguments and those of others. As Srinivasan notes, what Kavanaugh essentially suggests is that, against the explicit findings of several Supreme Court decisions, the regulators, and the regulated industry, internet providers should be granted free speech rights that allow them to arbitrarily limit the free speech of their users. Is this the type of twisted logic, inadequate research and shallow understanding that we want in a Supreme Court Justice? I think not. Kavanaugh’s brash and embarrassing failure on this case alone is in my opinion generates sufficient doubt regarding his competence that his nomination should be denied. |
Come see Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi at TC Disrupt | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | In the days of Uber 1.0, the ethos seemed to be about doing all the wrong things. Now, with former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi at the helm, Uber is clearly on its way to becoming a sort of Expedia for transportation. Though, Khosrowshahi has previously likened Uber’s business to aligning more with the idea of an Amazon for transportation. At TechCrunch in September, Khosrowshahi will join me to discuss Uber’s big plan to own the entire transportation experience for people, the highs and lows of his first year on the job, Uber’s upcoming initial public offering and much more. Under Khosrowshahi’s leadership, Uber officially became a multi-modal transportation platform with its acquisition of , the launch of Oh, and Uber is also working on electric scooters, as well as flying cars via its Elevate program. Just like residential and buildings have gone three-dimensional, Khosrowshahi said at a tech conference in May, “you’re going to have to build a third-dimension in terms of transportation.” For Uber, ” on that third-dimension of transportation, he said. The big plan with all of these modes of transportation — whether that’s bike sharing, electric scooter sharing, ride sharing, flight sharing or whatnot — is to become a multi-modal transportation service. Under the leadership of Khosrowshahi, Uber also seems to be moving into an era where the company works with governments, instead of in spite of them. This is quite the 180 for Uber. Before the days of Khosrowshahi, Uber was to share data with cities. Now, Uber is expanding Movement, to map travel times, to 12 new cities across five continents. The intent is to help urban planners, local leaders and civic communities make more informed decisions. While Khosrowshahi is making positive moves in a business direction, it’s worth noting the company is still in need of a chief financial officer, and there have been some high-level departures that have continued under his leadership. In June, for example, Uber’s chief brand officer, Bozoma Saint John, . At the time, Saint John told me that while “nothing horrible or terrible happened,” Uber’s corporate culture has not “righted itself 100 percent.” At Disrupt, Khosrowshahi and I will also discuss Uber’s corporate culture and what it’s going to take to fully recover from its 2017, , mismanagement and a toxic work environment. Then, just this month, Uber’s chief people officer, Liane Hornsey, . This should go without saying, but there will be a lot to discuss. In order to see him in person you’ll need to grab your passes to , which runs September 5-7, are available . |
YouTube TV goes down during the World Cup | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 11 | Croatia scored and the score is now 1-1 against England. If you’re a YouTube TV subscriber, you might not know that because YouTube TV has been down for around 40 minutes. It’s back just in time for extra time. People who pay $40 a month to subscribe to live TV on YouTube are arguably mad. One of the main reasons YouTube TV makes sense is that it lets you watch live sports. You won’t find any soccer match on Netflix or HBO Now after all. YouTube has tweeted about the issue, but this isn’t a quick downtime. As Owen Williams , if Google can’t keep the live stream up during the World Cup, it’s unclear which company can do it. Maybe our live-streaming future is not ready yet. Hey everyone — sincere apologies for streaming issues with YouTube TV. The timing is horrible but we're working to be up and running again ASAP! — YouTube TV (@YouTubeTV) We're watching the FIFA on YouTube TV and it's completely down. If Google can't keep it online in a surge like this, nobody can. — ⚡️ Owen (@ow) Quickly deleted tweet by after the service went down — Stuart Becktell (@StuartBecktell) Of course (which I bought for the sole purpose of watching the WC) goes down during the semifinals. — Jeff 🦒 Keese (@JKeester) Youtube TV down during world cup Semis ! Exactly why I took the subscription in the first place :-/ — Mihir Gangar (@gangarmihir90) |
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