title stringlengths 2 283 ⌀ | author stringlengths 4 41 ⌀ | year int64 2.01k 2.02k | month int64 1 12 | day int64 1 31 | content stringlengths 1 111k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Instagram adds a status indicator dot so people know when you’re ignoring them | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 19 | In a , Instagram announced a new feature: a green status dot that indicates when a user is active on the app. If you’re cruising around Instagram, you can expect to see a green dot next to the profile pics of friends who also are Instagramming right then and there. The dot will show up in the direct messaging part of the app but also on your friend’s list when you go to share a post with someone. Instagram clarifies that “You will only see status for friends who follow you or people who you have talked to in Direct,” so it’s meant to get you talking more to the people you’re already talking to. You can in the “Activity Status” bit of the app’s Settings menu, where it’s set to “on” by default. Prior to the advent of the green dot, Instagram already displayed how long ago someone was active by including information like “Active 23m ago” or “Active Now” in grey text next to their account info where your direct messages live. For those of us who prefer a calm, less real-time experience, the fact that features like these come on by default is a bummer. Given the grey activity status text, the status dot may not seem like that much of a change. Still, it’s one opt-out design choice closer to making Instagram a compulsive real-time social media nightmare like Facebook or Facebook Messenger. The quiet, incremental rollout of features like the grey status text is often so subtle that users don’t notice it — as a daily Instagram user, I barely did. Making major shifts very gradually is the same game Facebook always plays with its products, layering slight design changes that alter user behavior until one day you wake up and aren’t using the same app you used to love, but somehow you can’t seem to stop using it. Instagram is working on a feature for , but stuff like this negates Facebook’s broader to make our relationship with its attention-hungry platforms less of a compulsive tic. It’s not like users will be relieved that they can now see who is “online” in the app. The last time Instagram users passionately requested a feature it was to , and we all know how that went. Over the years, Instagram users have mostly begged that the app’s parent company not mess it up, and yet here we are. The Facebookification of Instagram marches on. It’s a shame to see that happening with Instagram, which used to feel like one of the only peaceful places online, a serene space where you weren’t thrown into fits of real-time FOMO because usually your friends were #latergramming static images from good times previously had, not broadcasting the fun stuff you’re missing out on right now. It’s hard to see how features like this square with Facebook’s ostensible mission to move away from its relentless pursuit of engagement in favor of deepening the quality of user experiences with a mantra of “ .” As users start to resent the steep attentional toll that makes Facebook “free,” it’s a shame to see Instagram follow Facebook down the same dark path. |
FCC issues ‘de facto merger death sentence’ to Sinclair-Tribune deal | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 19 | A broadcast merger that has been the poster boy for has been ordered to undertake a lengthy and potentially embarrassing process that amounts to, in the words of one commissioner, a “de facto merger death sentence.” The proposed takeover of Tribune by Sinclair has been criticized by many as an unnecessary and potentially dangerous consolidation of media properties. The resulting company would have incredible reach and influence, especially combined with other recent rule changes that have further unshackled big media companies. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has himself been the target of many a sharp inquiry from the public, lawmakers and even the Office of the Inspector General. The general feeling seems to be: We understand that you have a deregulatory to-do list here, and that’s valid, but practically everything you do benefits Sinclair directly or indirectly. Justify yourself. Whether it was because of this unremitting scrutiny or simply because Sinclair’s merger proposal was blatantly disingenuous, Pai decided to do an about-face and put the brakes on the deal. He and which would require Sinclair to appear before a judge in an adversarial courtroom setting and explain its misdeeds. What misdeeds, you ask? Well, the main one cited in the HDO is this: Sinclair was required to divest itself from certain media holdings, but instead of doing so, it set up one (WGN-TV) to be sold massively below market price to a corporate confederate, who would then effectively cede control back to Sinclair. Here’s how the order puts it: The record raises significant questions as to whether those proposed divestitures were in fact ‘sham’ transactions. …One application proposed to transfer WGN-TV in Chicago to an individual (Steven Fader) with no prior experience in broadcasting who currently serves as CEO of a company in which Sinclair’s executive chairman has a controlling interest. Moreover, Sinclair would have owned most of WGN-TV’s assets, and pursuant to a number of agreements, would have been responsible for many aspects of the station’s operation. …There is a substantial and material question of fact as to whether Sinclair affirmatively misrepresented or omitted material facts with the intent to consummate this transaction without fully complying with our broadcast ownership rules. There are pages and pages of allegations and hints regarding the cozy relationship between Fader and Sinclair, as well as a few other entities that would be part of this obvious sweetheart deal. The order says, essentially, that Sinclair will be given the chance to explain all this — but it would be on the record, in court. Only after they offer sufficient justification could the merger go forward. For too long the has twisted & bent its policies to serve the business plans of Sinclair Broadcasting. As I've said before, this is not right. I'm glad my colleagues now agree & have supported halting the Sinclair-Tribune merger with this hearing: . — Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) But does a company like Sinclair really want to appear publicly before a judge and attempt to convince them that this was all just an innocent mistake? That it was planning to sell a major media property to a good friend for 90 percent off while retaining editorial and operational control? Not only that, but it would take a non-trivial amount of time and money to prepare for this debacle. Sinclair’s board and stakeholders may understandably choose rather to abandon the merger than subject the company to that kind of scrutiny — not to mention the financial disincentives of delays, extra costs and any other concessions that might need to be made to put the deal forward. It’s already been revised again and again, with less favorable terms for Sinclair — at some point it stops being a deal worth pursuing. That’s why Commissioner O’Rielly, , calls the order a death sentence. Not only would the Administrative Law Judge process be potentially damaging to Sinclair’s reputation, but it would be a mess of red tape. He managed to slip in some revisions, however, which “some may refer to as an initiation of a hint of due process.” Corporations do have rights, too. Although for now the Sinclair-Tribune merger is only temporarily halted, the end result is as likely as not that it will be withdrawn. That’s entirely up to the company, of course, but it may be that the FCC has in this case succeeded in effectively regulating its industry. That would be cause for celebration. |
null | John Biggs | 2,018 | 7 | 10 | null |
WeWork China raises $500M to triple the number of cities it covers | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | WeWork’s China business is getting a fresh injection of capital after . The company entered China two years ago and today it covers Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu with nearly 40 locations. It claims 20,000 members, and it is also active in Hong Kong, which technically falls under ‘Greater China.’ The new capital comes from Trustbridge Partners, Singapore’s Temasek, SoftBank, SoftBank’s Vision Fund and Hony Capital. WeWork said it’ll be used for expansion into six new cities: those are Shenzhen, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing, and Wuhan. This new raise is a Series B, , which was also when the Chinese entity was founded. The company has been pretty busy over that 12-month period, most notably and massively grew its reach. Naked Hub builds on WeWork’s presence in Greater China by adding 24 office locations and a further 10,000 members. That’s why WeWork China’s figures are so impressive for just two years of operations. Now, this new capital will put WeWork’s own DNA into that network through this planned expansion spree. “This investment will help WeWork fuel our mission to support creators, small businesses, and large companies across China,” WeWork CEO and co-founder Adam Neumann said in a statement. “WeWork has built an incredible team in China that supports our members every day, serving as a bridge for local companies who want to reach the world as well as for global companies that want to enter the Chinese market.” Outside of China, WeWork is also making inroads in India — where it launched in 2017 — Korea, Japan ( ) and Southeast Asia, where . Indeed, WeWork has a float of around $500 million for its operations in Southeast Asia and Korea, although the total pot for India is unknown at this point. WeWork China’s big raise comes days after and . |
Meet Salto-1P, the jumping robot | John Biggs | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | Salto is a jumping robot that is all heart (and legs). A project originally launched in 2017 this tiny robot thrusts itself up and down and back and forth like a crazed grasshopper, jumping with absolute precision and loads of speed. Created by the , this little robot uses rotor-based thrusters and bouncy legs to do its tricks. Salto, which stands for “Saltatorial Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles,” is designed to mimic saltatorial – jumping – animals like kangaroos and bush babies. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dJmArHRn0U&feature=youtu.be&t=8] Sadly, this little robot doesn’t always survive its jumps. In this video, Salto basically destroys itself as it jumps, something all robots may need to fear as they reach for the sun (or ceiling.)
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgNvgV3yNLA] |
Twitter says it does not shadow ban, despite complaints by Republicans | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | After President Donald Trump , the company denied that it uses the practice, in which someone’s posts are made invisible or undiscoverable without them knowing. In a blog post titled “ ,” Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s legal and product leads, respectively, were blunt: “We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” Twitter exists to serve the public conversation, enabling important discussions around the world to occur. Favoring one specific ideology or belief goes against everything we stand for. — Vijaya Gadde (@vijaya) Gadde and Beykpour also addressed recent complaints, which , that some accounts did not appear in auto-suggestions even when users searched for them by name. The two said the issue had been resolved and had affected “hundreds of thousands of accounts,” not just those representing certain ideologies. In fact, “most accounts affected had nothing to do with politics at all,” they wrote. Gadde and Beykpour said that the platform “ranking models take many signals into consideration to best organize tweets for timely relevance.” Twitter’s search engine shows users results from people they find interesting and popular tweets, while ranking lower “tweets from bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or divide the conversation.” “Bad-faith actors,” they added, are determined based on how authentic their account appears to be, the actions they take on Twitter and how other users interact with them (for example, how often they are muted, blocked, retweeted or followed). Gadde and Beykpour said the third criteria may have made it appear that accounts by Republican representatives were being disproportionately affected by the auto-suggestion issue. “There are communities that try to boost each other’s presence on the platform through coordinated engagement,” they wrote. “We believe these types of actors engaged with the representatives’ accounts– the impact of this coordinated behavior, in combination with our implementation of search auto-suggestions, caused the representatives’ accounts to not show up in auto-suggestions.” Gadde and Beykpour’s explanation, however, frustrated users on both ends of the political spectrum, who said the company has to do a better job of defining who “bad-faith actors.” Liberals argued (as ) that Twitter does not include enough bullies and troll accounts in its definition of “bad-faith actors,” while some conservatives continued to claim that the platform is biased against them. If what Twitter means by bad faith actors & manipulation is abusers, harassment, hate speech, then say that. Otherwise, this reads as a values-based decision w/opaque criteria for what constitutes “manipulation.” Maybe spell out what specific *behaviors* you’re targeting. — Robi-Ann Doyle (@doyle1020) It says in this article that you judge ‘bad faith actors’ based on who they follow and what they retweet. And then give NO FURTHER INFORMATION on this. That’s *very* dodgy. — Jamie (@realurbanspice) a few problems. “How other accounts interact with you(e.g. who mutes you, who follows you, who retweets you, who blocks you, etc)” If the Left has large preemptive block lists, that creates a problem. (1) — Lee Doren (@LDoren) Yes you do not “shadow ban” in fact you do not ban not even far right trolls accusing people they dislike of being pedophiles. In fact you give them blue check marks and verify them. Just use as an example and that’s that. — Raúl Vergara (@RaulVB) |
The incredible rise of Pinduoduo, China’s newest force in e-commerce | Emma Lee | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | From Alibaba to JD, China is not short of e-commerce powerhouses. Although the country’s e-commerce market is highly consolidated, it’s not impossible for startup teams to crack this market as long as they are solving the right problems for the right group of customers. Chinese social e-commerce platform Pinduoduo just proved this. The Shanghai-based company just went public raising this week, which stands out as one of the largest deals of the year. Excitement is quickly intensifying surround the company, which claims 195 million monthly users and has managed to become successful within China’s highly competitive e-commerce market inside just three years. Like Alibaba’s Taobao and rival JD.com, Pinduoduo is an e-commerce platform that offers a wide range of products from daily groceries to home appliances. Pinduoduo’s twist lies in its integration of social components into the traditional online shopping process, which the company describes as the “team purchase” model. By sharing Pinduoduo’s product information on social networks such as WeChat and QQ, users can invite their contacts to form a shopping team to get a lower price for their purchase. The mechanism keeps the users motivated and better hooked for a more interactive and dynamic shopping experience. Coupled with other incentives such as cash, coupon, lottery and free products, Pinduoduo manages to acquire users at a very low cost. Combined with the extra satisfaction of scoring a good deal with your friends as a team, Pinduoduo soon became a viral sensation in China. Extremely low prices are another compelling attraction of Pinduoduo. The discount is usually up to 90 percent, including everything from RMB 10 ($1.50) bed sheets to RMB 1,000 ($150) PCs. But the bestsellers are daily items at unbelievable low prices. More than 6.4 million units of tissue paper were sold at RMB 12.9 ($1.90) for 10 boxes and 4.8 million umbrellas were purchased at RMB 10.3 ($1.51) apiece. The company’s bulk-selling model easily creates huge orders for the sellers and leaves them more room to cut prices. At the same time, Pinduoduo’s app is designed to facilitate this, : “Alibaba Taobao’s interface is search-based and centered on multiple product displays, while Pinduoduo’s is more similar to a news feed and thus gives more exposure to a single product and easy to create “爆款” [ meaning viral items]. Taobao has more products listed, but Pinduoduo put its focus on fewer bestsellers that attract more buyers.” Pinduoduo’s C2B model allows it to ship directly from the manufacturers eliminates layers of distributors, not only reduces the price tag for buyers but also raises the profit of manufacturers. This approach is particularly effective for the sales of , where the speed for matching supply and demand is critical. Lesser-known brands were chosen over famous brands to erase any premium that comes from branding. Additionally, the costs for advertising and marketing are also lowered through user sharing to social media. The approach is both cost-saving and effective. Through social sharing, users are sending the product information precisely to friends and groups that may have similar income and consumption preferences. Viral marketing is a more clever way to build the identity of all the lesser-known brands on its platform. Financially, the platform could even out part of discounts with less marketing budgets. Price and social features are not only the only path to Pinduoduo’s meteoric rise, and spotting the right user profile is the last piece to the puzzle. Operation director of Chinese mobile e-commerce platform Chuchujie, Yang Lin shot to the core of the problem in : “Taobao has over 500 million users while WeChat has over 1 billion, the gigantic missing group between two of China’s giant apps is distributed in third- or lower-tier cities, mostly senior citizens. This group, which only recently came online and depends on the ubiquitous WeChat as the chief source of information, is the target users of Pinduoduo.” Data from research institute Jiguang shows that users from third- and lower-tier cities account for around 65 percent of Pinduoduo’s total user base, while JD’s users in first plus second-tier cities and the rest of China were half-and-half. Additionally, females account for 70 percent of Pinduoduo’s user base. They are responsible for family purchases and more price sensitive. This guarantees more active sharing and purchases. Consumption upgrade, a trend in which affluent Chinese customers are increasingly willing to pay for quality, has dominated China’s e-commerce industry in the past few years. Taobao and JD’s globalization initiatives to bring overseas quality products, the boom of cross-border e-commerce sites like Red and Kaola are all based on the consumption-upgrading backdrop. But the growth of Pinduoduo has sparked an argument focusing on whether the platform represents consumption downgrading. Maybe consumption upgrading or degrading isn’t the key problem. It is just one more piece of evidence for how big and segmented the Chinese market can be. Rising income may give part of Chinese urban citizens the freedom to vote for quality, but RMB 1 difference in price tag may be enough of an incentive for their countryside counterparts, who have been more neglected by e-commerce so far. Cost performance is still the most important factor to consider for consumers. A higher price tag does not necessarily represent the better quality or vice versa. The huge potential in this often-overlooked market is luring more competitors. , a dedicated app for China’s low-end users. Pinduoduo didn’t invent the social e-commerce model. Groupon pioneered the group-buying concept years ago. But it is succeeding thanks to a new ecosystem consisting of super app WeChat, mobile payment infrastructure, and mobile-first users. Founded in September 2015, Pinduoduo is the fourth startup of Colin Huang, an ex-Googler who once worked on early search algorithms for e-commerce. His previous startups include consumer electronics e-commerce site Ouku.com, Leqi, e-commerce platform marketing agent service and a WeChat-based role-playing game company. With experiences in both e-commerce and gaming, Huang founded Pinduoduo with a vision to combine the secret success recipe of both Alibaba and Tencent, the two Chinese internet giants known for their e-commerce and gaming /social dominance respectively. “They don’t really understand how the other makes money,” . Huang seems to be right about how the two industries can work together. Pinduoduo’s annual GMV (gross merchandise volume) surpassed RMB100 billion ($14.7 billion) in 2017, that’s around two years since its inception. To hit the same milestone, Taobao took five years, VIP.com took eight years and JD ten years. Pinduoduo now claims more than 343.6 million active buyers with an annual GMV of RMB 262.1 billion, or $38.5 billion. A huge turning point occurred in the third quarter of 2017 when the weekly active rate, penetration rate, and open rate of the Pinduoduo app all surpassed those of JD. Compared to the previous year, it according to data from Jiguang. Steep growth trajectory lured financial backings. In 2015, Huang launched Pinhaohuo, a social commerce platform for fruits, with the team from his second startup Leqi. His gaming startup incubated Pinduoduo. Four months after Pinduoduo received undisclosed A round from IDG and Lightspeed China in March 2016, the company secured over $110 million in Series B financing four months later from Baoyan Partners, New Horizon Capital, Tencent, and others. In April 2018, Pinduoduo completed a new round of financing raising $3 billion at a valuation of nearly $15 billion. Given Pinduoduo’s WeChat-based ecosystem, Tencent . Given the history between Pinduoduo and Pinhaohuo, then of the two largest players in the social e-commerce sector, to form one dominator. “If you close your eyes and visualize the next stage for Pinduoduo, it would be a combination of ‘Costco’ and ‘Disneyland’, driven by a distributed network of intelligence agents,” Huang wrote in the IPO prospectus. Huang’s comparison was thus interpreted as a combination of “value for money” and entertainment, but many are questioning whether or to what degree Pinduoduo can live up to the founder’s expectation. Although Pinduoduo claims to have several channels to lower product prices, increasing product quality and counterfeit complaints still raise concerns for a possible low-cost and low-quality association. The percentage of complains on Pinduoduo is 17.87 percent, and the user satisfaction rating is only 1 star, according to the 2017 National User Satisfaction Survey of Major E-commerce Platforms released by the China E-Commerce Research Center. Complaints mainly target at the problems of poor quality, slow delivery, misleading ads, etc. In addition to mounting domestic complaints, the Chinese shopping app was , shortly after filing for a US IPO. Alongside Alibaba and JD’s efforts to remove fake goods on their platforms, fake goods are flooding to emerging e-commerce platforms like Pinduoduo and Weishang, according to Alibaba. As Pinduoduo gets into life as a public company, the firm is following the e-commerce giants in cleaning up the platform. According to the company’s for 2017, it has taken down 10.7 million problematic listings, blocked 40 million suspicious external links, representing 95 percent of the fake good sellers from the platform. The company set up an RMB 150 million ($22 million) fund to deal with after-sales disputes. But tightening regulation is causing more friction between Pinduoduo and its merchants on the platform. In June, under the company’s office building claiming that Pinduoduo conducted improper product-quality checks which damaged the owners’ rights. Company founder Huang i . Many also questioned the validity of entertaining features in Pinduoduo’s value proposition. “We have observed that a few users find shopping on Pinduoduo to be very entertaining, which is attributable to its extremely low pricing and interaction among Weixin users,” according to research institute 86 Research. Pinduoduo went public on NASDAQ market on July 26 and raised . However, shareholders should still be concerned about the company’s fundamentals Financially, the company is still in the red. Pinduoduo suffered a net loss of RMB 292 million ($43 million) and RMB 525.1 million ($77 million) in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Its net losses reached RMB 201 million ($30 million) in the first quarter of this year. The net loss is expected to be widened, mainly attributable to investments in branding and ads. Over 88.4 percent of Pinduoduo’s RMB 1.2 billion ($180 million) Q1 revenue was spent on marketing. This could be translated as a sign of difficult traffic acquisition. The most typical Pinduoduo users are price sensitive women that reside in low tier cities. Merchants are selling at a low price to appeal to this group. But how to maintain these users and its growth momentum is a big challenge for Pinduoduo now given rising product quality complaints. “The retention rate is a big challenge of Pinduoduo, implying potential GMV slow down. Pinduoduo will have difficulty in upgrading to a marketplace of premium products because of its user demographics and brand image,” according to 86 Research. |
Tech companies can bid on the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud contract, starting today | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | On Thursday, the Pentagon opened bidding for a huge cloud computing contract that could be worth as much as . Given its size, the , known as JEDI, is alluring for major cloud computing companies that might not normally do much business with the Department of Defense. , JEDI is structured as a winner-take-all contract with a potential 10-year term, though the Pentagon that the original award will span just the first two years, so all 10 years aren’t set in stone up front. While it’s not yet sparked the as Google’s AI contract with the Pentagon known as Project Maven, JEDI isn’t uncontroversial. The now infamous Project Maven was a smaller, more specific contract with direct implications for the military’s use of drones, while JEDI is broader and bigger, seeking a vendor to provide cloud services for all branches of the military. Google has since to renew the contract, but Maven was likely for the company in the lead-up to JEDI. While Amazon is , Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are also among the major tech companies expected to throw their hats into the ring. Earlier in the process, it looked possible that companies could band together to form against the perceived frontrunner, though it appears in the final request for proposal that the Pentagon plans to award the contract to a single company capable of handling it. Interested parties will have until September 17 to , so in the months to come we can certainly expect to hear more from companies in the running and workers who oppose JEDI involvement. |
Microsoft partners with Black Girls Code to help the organization launch Seattle chapter | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | Microsoft has partnered with Black Girls Code, led by Kimberly Bryant, to enable the organization to launch a chapter in Seattle, . Since launching in 2011, Black Girls Code has introduced technology and computer science to young black girls in 13 cities throughout the country. Seattle marks Black Girls Code’s 14th chapter. Microsoft also deepened its partnership with Technology Access Foundation, founded by Trish Millines Dziko. Across both partnerships, Microsoft invested $500,000. Earlier this year, Black Girls Code teamed up with Lyft — — to make the nonprofit organization . We're incredibly excited to announce our partnership with the team in Seattle! Mountains of gratitude to the BAM team and Satya for supporting our mission to bring more girls of color into tech! 🙏🏾 — Kimberly Bryant (@6Gems) In a LinkedIn post, Microsoft Corporate VP and Lead Mary Snapp said she hopes the investments “will help a lot more students find a passion for technology, the opportunity to pursue a STEM education and most importantly believe it is possible for them. “As Satya has said in the past, Microsoft can only be successful if we have people of all backgrounds building our technology and we cannot build product and services for everyone unless everyone is represented in our engineering ranks,” Snapp wrote. Computer science education should be accessible to young people of all backgrounds, which is why we're partnering with to help establish a Seattle chapter. Thanks for your pioneering work to empower the next generation of innovators. — Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) |
Nintendo’s new Labo Vehicle Kit looks like a buggy full of fun | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | Nintendo has just announced the latest in its Labo series of whimsical cardboard accessories for the Switch gaming console, and this one looks like a must-have. Called for obvious reasons, the flat-pack, assemble-it-yourself add-ons include a steering wheel, gas pedal, “keys” that activate different vehicles, all of which work inside a cool-looking game that comes with. Frankly this just looks like a humongous bargain. Perhaps the most humongous of all time. $70 gets you a whole fold-up steering assembly with shifters on the sides; a pedal that I really hope stands up to some serious stomping; a joystick for piloting a plane, a weird thing that controls a submarine; and a “key” that your Joy-Con fits into, which itself slots into the various other setups to activate them. They’re all meant to be used in a game that, despite not having a name, looks insanely cool. It looks like a big island with secrets hidden all over the place that you just tool around in using your buggy, your submarine, and your plane, and whatever other weird vehicles you might come across. https://youtu.be/vI6QzU8NXFI You can race, spray-paint your vehicles, blow up rocks and cut down trees. There’s also a two-player mode where you battle with cars that have extendable arms for some reason. Don’t think too hard about it. Of course you’ll have to put all this together yourself (I guess either I think kids read TechCrunch or our readers buy Nintendo gear made for kids), but so that shouldn’t be a problem. It’s a feature, not a bug. You’ll be able to buy this kit starting September 14 for $70, which, again, is obviously a steal. If any of us gets their hands on one ahead of that date we’ll definitely let you know. |
Congress members demand answers from Amazon about facial recognition software | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | null |
Slack forms key alliance as Atlassian throws in the towel on enterprise chat | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | With today’s announcement from Atlassian that of its two enterprise communications tools, HipChat and Stride, it closes the book on one of the earliest competitors in the modern enterprise chat space. It also was a clear signal that Slack is not afraid to take on its giant competitors by forming key alliances. That the announcement came from Slack co-founder and only exacerbated that fact. Atlassian has a set of popular developer tools like Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket. At this point, HipChat and Stride had really become superfluous to the company and they sold the IP to their competitor. Not only is Slack buying the assets and Atlassian is effectively shutting down these products, Atlassian is also investing in Slack, a move that shows it’s throwing its financial weight behind the company, as well, and forming an alliance with them. Slack has been burning it up since in launched in 2014 with just 16,000 daily active users. At last count, in May, , 3 million of which were paid. That’s up from 6 million DAUs and 2 million paid users in September 2017. At the time, the company was reporting $200 million in annual recurring revenue. It’s a fair bet with the number of paid users growing by one-third at last count, that revenue number has increased significantly, as well. Slack and products of its ilk like Workplace by Facebook, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams are trying to inside organizations. Slack has managed to advance the idea of enterprise communications that began in the early 2000s with chat clients, advanced to Enterprise 2.0 tools like Yammer and Jive in the mid-2000s and finally evolved into modern tools like Slack we are using today in the mobile-cloud era. in business because it does much more than provide a channel to communicate. It has built a platform on top of which companies can plug in an assortment of tools they are using every day to do their jobs, like ServiceNow for help desk tickets, Salesforce for CRM and marketing data and Zendesk for customer service information. This ability to provide a simple way to do all of your business in one place without a lot of task switching has been a Holy Grail of sorts in the enterprise for years. The two previously mentioned iterations, chat clients and Enterprise 2.0 tools, tried and failed to achieve this, but Slack has managed to create this single platform and made it easy for companies to integrate services. This has been automated even further by the use of bots, which can act as trusted assistants inside of Slack, providing additional information and performing tasks for you on your behalf when it makes sense. Slack has an otherworldly valuation of more than $5 billion right now, and is on its way to . Atlassian might have thrown in the towel on enterprise communications, but it has opened the door to getting a piece of that IPO action while giving its customers what they want and forming a strong bond with Slack. Others like Facebook and Microsoft also have a strong presence in this space and continue to build out their products. It’s not as though anyone else is showing signs of throwing up their hands just yet. In fact, just today to enhance its offering by giving users the ability to collaborate via email or the Workplace by Facebook interface, but Atlassian’s acquiescence is a strong signal that if you had any doubt, Slack is a leader here — and they got a big boost with today’s announcement. |
You can buy the NES Classic and SNES Classic on Amazon now | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | If you missed the first few rounds of excitement about , you’ve got another shot at paying a normal price. Nintendo’s NES and SNES Classic consoles aren’t always easy to find, but they’re now available from Amazon for and . You can place an order for either right now, though be aware that the NES Classic won’t ship until it’s back in stock on August 12 and the SNES Classic looks like it’ll be back on August 3 — a pretty reasonable wait for a sure thing. When they were first introduced, the reimagined versions of two of the best-loved consoles of all-time arrived to feverish demand. Back in 2016, the NES Classic was difficult to hunt down, and when it hit in August 2017, the SNES followed suit, managing to even outpace interest in its own progenitor. (Naturally, scarcity is the perfect fuel for a nostalgia-powered fire.) Nintendo originally didn’t intend for either console to be restocked indefinitely, but after observing the “ ” of the retro gaming boxes it decided to keep them around. The consoles reappeared in and but sold out quickly. Even with the repeat appearances, it’s been hard to keep track of when and where the things go on sale. If you’re reading this and you’ve yet to score a one-way ticket to nostalgic 8- or 16-bit euphoria, the Amazon listings look like a sure bet — for the moment, anyhow. |
This 3D-printed AI construct analyzes by bending light | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | Machine learning is everywhere these days, but it’s usually more or less invisible: it sits in the background, optimizing audio or picking out faces in images. But this new system is not only visible, but physical: it performs AI-type analysis not by crunching numbers, but by bending light. It’s weird and unique, but counter-intuitively, it’s an excellent demonstration of how deceptively simple these “artificial intelligence” systems are. Machine learning systems, which we frequently refer to as a form of , at their heart are just a series of calculations made on a set of data, each building on the last or feeding back into a loop. The calculations themselves aren’t particularly complex — though they aren’t the kind of math you’d want to do with a pen and paper. Ultimately all that simple math produces a probability that the data going in is a match for various patterns it has “learned” to recognize. The thing is, though, that once these “layers” have been “trained” and the math finalized, in many ways it’s performing the same calculations over and over again. Usually that just means it can be optimized and won’t take up that much space or CPU power. But researchers from UCLA show that it can literally be solidified, the layers themselves actual 3D-printed of transparent material, imprinted with complex diffraction patterns that do to light going through them what the math would have done to numbers. If that’s a bit much to wrap your head around, think of a mechanical calculator. Nowadays it’s all done digitally in computer logic, but back in the day calculators used actual mechanical pieces moving around — something adding up to 10 would literally cause some piece to move to a new position. In a way this “diffractive deep neural network” is a lot like that: it uses and manipulates representations of numbers rather than ones. As the researchers put it: Each point on a given layer either transmits or reflects an incoming wave, which represents an artificial neuron that is connected to other neurons of the following layers through optical diffraction. By altering the phase and amplitude, each “neuron” is tunable. “Our all-optical deep learning framework can perform, at the speed of light, various complex functions that computer-based neural networks can implement,” write the researchers in the paper describing their system, . To demonstrate it they trained a deep learning model to recognize handwritten numerals. Once it was final, they took the layers of matrix math and converted it into a series of optical transformations. For example, a layer might add values together by refocusing the light from both onto a single area of the next layer — the real calculations are much more complex, but hopefully you get the idea. By arranging millions of these tiny transformations on the printed plates, the light that enters one end comes out the other structured in such a way that the system can tell whether it’s a 1, 2, 3 and so on with better than 90 percent accuracy. What use is that, you ask? Well, none in its current form. But neural networks are extremely flexible tools, and it would be perfectly possible to have a system recognize letters instead of numbers, making an optical character recognition system work totally in hardware with almost no power or calculation required. And why not basic face or figure recognition, no CPU necessary? How useful would that be to have in your camera? The real limitations here are manufacturing ones: it’s difficult to create the diffractive plates with the level of precision required to perform some of the more demanding processing. After all, if you need to calculate something to the seventh decimal place, but the printed version is only accurate to the third, you’re going to run into trouble. This is only a proof of concept — there’s no dire need for giant number-recognition machines — but it’s a fascinating one. The idea could prove to be influential in camera and machine learning technology — structuring light and data in the physical world rather than the digital one. It may feel like it’s going backwards, but perhaps the pendulum is simply swinging back the other direction. |
Atlassian’s HipChat and Stride to be discontinued, with Slack buying up the IP | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | HipChat, the workplace chat app that held the throne before Slack was Slack, is being discontinued. Also being discontinued is Atlassian’s own would-be HipChat replacement, Stride. News of the discontinuation came to our attention from a somewhat surprising source: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. In a series of tweets, Butterfield says that Slack is purchasing the IP for both products to “better support those users who choose to migrate” to its platform. Butterfield also notes that Atlassian will be making a “small but symbolically important investment” in Slack — likely a good move, given that rumors of a Slack IPO have been swirling (though Butterfield ). Getting a pre-IPO investment into Slack might end up paying off for Atlassian better than trying to continue competing. The deal we’re announcing today with Atlassian is pretty amazing. Indeed, I tried to fit it all in one (280 character) tweet but I just couldn’t do it. So, I’ll lay it out in a few. But first, I wanted to thank Scott, Mike, Jay and the team: incredible to work with you. — Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) Details: • Atlassian is discontinuing Hipchat/Stride • Slack is purchasing the IP to better support those users who choose to migrate • We’re both working closely together to make sure that’s as simple and painless a process as possible … — Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) Atlassian VP of Product Management, Joff Redfern, confirmed the news , calling it the “best way forward” for its existing customers. It’s about as real of an example of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” as you can get; even Atlassian’s own employees will be moved over to using Slack. According to an FAQ about the change, Stride and HipChat’s last day will be — or a bit shy of seven months from the date of the announcement. So if you’re a customer on either one of those platforms, you’ve got time to figure things out. It doesn’t sound like any of Atlassian’s other products will be affected here; Bitbucket, Jira, etc. will carry on, with only the company’s real-time communications platforms being shuttered. Hipchat was launched in beta form back in 2009, long before Slack’s debut in 2013. It mostly ruled its space in the time in between, leading Atlassian to acquire it in March of 2012. Slack quickly outgrew it in popularity though, for myriad reasons — be it a bigger suite of third-party integrations, a better reputation for uptime, or… well, better marketing. By September of 2017, Atlassian overhauled its chat platform and rebranded it as , but it was never able to quite catch up with Slack’s momentum. |
Age restrictions proposed for drone use in UK | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | null |
Amazon’s AWS continues to lead its performance highlights | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | Amazon’s web services AWS continue to be the highlight of the company’s balance sheet, once again showing the kind of growth Amazon is looking for in a new business for the second quarter — especially one that has dramatically better margins than its core retail business. Despite now running a grocery chain, the company’s AWS division — which has an operating margin over 25 percent compared to its tiny margins on retail — grew 49 percent year-over-year in the quarter compared to last year’s second quarter. It’s also up 49 percent year-over-year when comparing the most recent six months to the same period last year. AWS is now on a run rate well north of $10 billion annually, generating more than $6 billion in revenue in the second quarter this year. Meanwhile, Amazon’s retail operations generated nearly $47 billion with a net income of just over $1.3 billion (unaudited). Amazon’s AWS generated $1.6 billion in operating income on its $6.1 billion in revenue. So, in short, Amazon’s dramatically more efficient AWS business is its biggest contributor to its actual net income. The company reported earnings of $5.07 per share, compared to analyst estimates of around $2.50 per share, on revenue of $52.9 billion. That revenue number fell under what investors were looking for, so the stock isn’t really doing anything in after-hours, and Amazon still remains in the race to become a company with a market cap of $1 trillion alongside Google, Apple and Microsoft. This isn’t extremely surprising, as Amazon was one of the original harbingers of the move to a cloud computing-focused world, and, as a result, Microsoft and Google are now chasing it to capture up as much share as possible. While Microsoft doesn’t break out Azure, the company says it’s one of its fastest-growing businesses, and Google’s “other revenue” segment that includes Google Cloud Platform also continues to be one of its fastest-growing divisions. Running a bunch of servers with access to on-demand compute, it turns out, is a pretty efficient business that can account for the very slim margins that Amazon has on the rest of its core business. |
Bird and Skip secure Portland e-scooter permits and there’s already drama | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | Electric scooter startups Bird and Skip have landed permits to operate in Portland under a new pilot program that aims to gauge how the controversial form of micro-transportation will fit in the city. And already there’s a bit of drama, or call it skeptical-scooter feelings, scuttling about. The permits issued by Portland Bureau of Transportation will run until November 20, when the pilot program is set to end. Scooters could be available for rent as soon as this week, PBOT officials said. The PBOT will conduct an evaluation of the program and survey Portlanders to determine whether scooters are compatible with the safe, efficient and equitable operation of Portland’s transportation system, the department said. And while the official line from PBOT is neutral, there’s at least one staffer whose snarky tweet suggests that the scooters are something more repugnant: just another toy for tech bros. It all started after PBOT tweeted a PSA about the rules for scooters. In response, one person wrote, “Instead of preemptively shaming and chastising e-scooter users PBOT should be bending over backwards to encourage this alternative. I would like @PBOTinfo staff to reread the climate action plan, bike plan, and comp plan to come to grips with the magnitude of their failure.” Instead of preemptively shaming and chastising e-scooter users PBOT should be bending over backwards to encourage this alternative. I would like staff to reread the climate action plan, bike plan, and comp plan to come to grips with the magnitude of their failure. — unrepentant utopian 🌹🏴 (@sorenimpey1) A staffer within PBOT wasn’t too pleased and posted this retort. “Or maybe they’re toys that tech bros leave strewn about, blocking corner ramps needed for people with disabilities. Also, people need to know the helmet laws for scooters are different than for bicycles. We’ll see how it goes during this pilot period!” Sorry for playing into stereotypes. That mistake obscured our message about what we hope to get out of the pilot: a better understanding of how scooters can fit into our transportation system. — Portland Bureau of Transportation (@PBOTinfo) And then later, another tweet. This time the PBOT staffer tries to walk back the previous comments. Another 15 minutes later and it looks like that staffer’s tweeting privileges have been taken away. The tweet that went out this morning by one of our staffers does not represent the views of our bureau. We’re excited to welcome scooters as a new transportation option into our city and to see what we can learn from this pilot. — Portland Bureau of Transportation (@PBOTinfo) The PBOT scooter skeptic, and the initial tweet that prompted the snippy response, is a symptom of a wider controversy bubbling up in densely populated cities throughout the U.S. as traditional car ownership — and the traffic congestion that comes with it — collides with public transit and newer forms of mobility such as ride-hailing, bike sharing and scooters. The scooters have had a polarizing effect on residents living in cities. Some love the dockless scooter services because they provide a fast and cheap means of traveling short distances. Others loathe them, or more accurately, the misuse of them. (Scooters are supposed to be used in the bike lane, not on sidewalks.) Still, the wave of scooters doesn’t appear to be slowing. Bird, for instance, launched in Portland and Cincinnati on Thursday. The company has launched in about 30 U.S. cities to date. Although not all of those have gone smoothly. For instance, after Bird entered into Milwaukee on June 27, the city attorney issued a cease-and-desist letter and sued the scooter-share startup. The Milwaukee City Council is now considering a ban of all electric scooters. Meanwhile, the streets of San Francisco remain scooter-less while the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency continues its review of the 12 applications from companies to operate electric scooters in the city. Bird, Lime, Lyft, Uber and others have applied for permits to in San Francisco. The ban, and subsequent permit process, was the result of several startups Meanwhile, back in Portland, the number of scooters will be capped at 2,500, with each permitted company receiving a portion of the total. PBOT says it will continue to issue permits to companies that qualify under the pilot rules. In other words, Bird and Skip may soon have competition. The PBOT is limiting the rollout, as well. Companies are allowed to deploy up to 200 scooters during its first week of operation. The department is also requiring that each company deploy a portion of their fleets in East Portland. State law requires scooter riders to wear a helmet and prohibits use on sidewalks. Riders will be required to park scooters on the sidewalk close to the curb, so that scooters do not interfere with pedestrians, according to PBOT rules. |
How (and how not) to fix AI | Joshua New | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | While artificial intelligence was once heralded as the key to unlocking a new era of economic prosperity, policymakers today face a wave of calls to ensure AI is fair, ethical and safe. New York City Mayor de Blasio recently announced the formation of the to monitor and assess the use of algorithms. Days later, the European Union enacted sweeping new data protection rules that require companies be able to explain to consumers any . And high-profile critics, like , have called on policymakers to do more to regulate AI. Unfortunately, the two most popular ideas — requiring companies to disclose the source code to their algorithms and explain how they make decisions — would cause more harm than good by regulating the business models and the inner workings of the algorithms of companies using AI, rather than holding these companies accountable for outcomes. The first idea — “algorithmic transparency” — would require companies to disclose the source code and data used in their AI systems. Beyond its simplicity, this idea lacks any real merits as a wide-scale solution. Many AI systems are too complex to fully understand by looking at source code alone. Some AI systems rely on millions of data points and thousands of lines of code, and decision models can change over time as they encounter new data. It is unrealistic to expect even the most motivated, resource-flush regulators or concerned citizens to be able to spot all potential malfeasance when that system’s developers either. Additionally, not all companies have an open-source business model. Requiring them to disclose their source code reduces their incentive to invest in developing new algorithms, because it invites competitors to copy them. Bad actors in , which is fiercely competing with the United States for AI dominance but routinely flouts intellectual property rights, would likely use transparency requirements to steal source code. The other idea — “algorithmic explainability” — would require companies to explain to consumers how their algorithms make decisions. The problem with this proposal is that there is often an inescapable trade-off between explainability and accuracy in AI systems. An algorithm’s accuracy typically scales with its complexity, so the more complex an algorithm is, the more difficult it is to explain. While this could change in the future as research into explainable AI matures — to this problem — for now, requirements for explainability would come at the cost of accuracy. This is enormously dangerous. With autonomous vehicles, for example, is it more important to be able to explain an accident or avoid one? The cases where explanations are more important than accuracy are rare. Rather than demanding companies reveal their source code or limiting the types of algorithms they can use, policymakers should instead insist on — the principle that an algorithmic system should employ a variety of controls to ensure the operator (i.e. the party responsible for deploying the algorithm) can verify it acts as intended, and identify and rectify harmful outcomes should they occur. A policy framework built around algorithmic accountability would have several important benefits. First, it would make operators responsible for any harms their algorithms might cause, not developers. Not only do operators have the most influence over how algorithms impact society, but they already have to comply with a variety of laws designed to make sure their decisions don’t cause harm. For example, employers must comply with anti-discrimination laws in hiring, regardless of whether they use algorithms to make those decisions. Second, holding operators accountable for outcomes rather than the inner workings of algorithms would free them to focus on the best methods to ensure their algorithms do not cause harm, such as confidence measures, impact assessments or procedural regularity, where appropriate. For example, a university could conduct an impact assessment before deploying an AI system designed to predict which students are likely to drop out to ensure it is effective and equitable. Unlike transparency or explainability requirements, this would enable the university to effectively identify any potential flaws without prohibiting the use of complex, proprietary algorithms. This is not to say that transparency and explanations do not have their place. Transparency requirements, for example, make sense for . After all, there is a in requiring the judicial system be exposed to the highest degree of scrutiny possible, even if this transparency may not shed much light on how advanced machine-learning systems work. Similarly, laws like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act require companies to provide consumers an for denying them credit. Consumers will still have a right to these explanations regardless of whether a company uses AI to make its decisions. The debate about how to make AI safe has ignored the need for a nuanced, targeted approach to regulation, treating algorithmic transparency and explainability like silver bullets without considering their many downsides. There is nothing wrong with wanting to mitigate the potential harms AI poses, but the oversimplified, overbroad solutions put forth so far would be largely ineffective and likely do more harm than good. Algorithmic accountability offers a better path toward ensuring organizations use AI responsibly so that it can truly be a boon to society. |
Google revamps local events search to include personalized suggestions | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | Last May, Google designed to help web searchers more easily find things to do nearby, while also challenging Facebook’s dominance in the local events space. Today, Google is updating event search with personalized event suggestions, and well as a new design that puts more event information directly in the search results. When the feature first launched last year, Google said it was built in response to the millions of search queries the company saw daily for finding local events and activities. However, it was also clearly an area where Google had ceded ground to Facebook. The social network said last fall that 100 million people were using Facebook Events on a daily basis, and 650 million were using it across the network. Those numbers have surely grown since. The original design for Google’s events search offered web searchers a list of events they could filter by category and date. Meanwhile, the event listings themselves were powered by data from Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, Meetup, Vividseats, Jambase, LiveNation, Burbio, Allevents.in, Bookmyshow.com, StubHub, Bandsintown, Yext and Eventful. Now, Google is returning these event results in a new format — instead of more standard search results, they appear as cards, each with a little bookmark icon you can click on to save the event details for future reference. In addition, when you tap on one of the event listings’ cards, you’re directed to a more information-rich page, offering the date, time, location and shortcuts to save the event, buy tickets, get directions or share it with others. The design looks even more like a Facebook event page, albeit without a discussion section for posts and comments. Clicking on the “Get tickets” button will pop up a window that links to ticket resellers for the event in question — like Ticketmaster or StubHub, for example. As users continue use the system, it will be trained to know what sort of events users like. Google tells us that for users who are signed in and have history turned on, it will provide customized recommendations based on their interests. People have control over their Search history and data via . This data will be used to power the new personalized recommendations feature, found in the bottom navigation bar’s “For You” tab, which organizes suggested events by category, like “concerts,” “festivals,” “shows,” free events and more. This page also will show you trending and popular events in the area, if you need ideas. The feature is not currently live for everyone, but is rolling out to mobile users over the next few days, says Google. |
Virgin Galactic’s third supersonic test flight hits Mach 2.4 and 170,000 feet | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | Virgin Galactic is celebrating the third successful supersonic test flight of VSS Unity, the passenger spacecraft it intends to make available for space tourism in the near future. This flight took the craft higher and faster than ever, stressing the system and providing useful data for the rocket plane’s engineers. Virgin’s two-part flight system uses a traditional jet-powered plane, the WhiteKnightTwo-class VMS Eve, to carry the spacecraft up to about 45,000 feet, after which the latter detaches and zooms ahead (and upward) on rocket power. Each of Unity’s flights has pushed its specs a bit further: , in April, achieved Mach 1.6 and just over 84,000 feet of altitude. , in May, hit Mach 1.9 and reached 114,500 feet. Today’s went to Mach 2.47 and got up to 170,800 feet, touching the Earth’s mesosphere before gliding down to a soft landing. It’s still not nearly to space; the Karman Line, where space “officially” begins, is about twice as high. But at this rate it sure just seems like a matter of time before they get up there. (Max speed was originally reported as Mach 2 but updated in an email from Virgin Galactic.) Importantly, the rocket powering Unity’s flight burned this time for 42 seconds, well over the 30 seconds or so it’s been fired for until now. These tests necessarily have to advance degree by degree, but going from 30 to 42 is a big jump that the engineers are probably thrilled about. “Having been a U2 pilot and done a lot of high altitude work, or what I thought was high altitude work, the view from 170,000 feet was just totally amazing,” said one of the pilots, Mike “Sooch” Masucci, . “The flight was exciting and frankly beautiful. We were able to complete a large number of test points which will give us good insight as we progress to our goal of commercial service.” The team is working on analyzing the data from this flight, and of course inspecting and tweaking the spacecraft, and we can probably expect another test flight in the next few months. |
null | Shaun Abrahamson | 2,018 | 7 | 19 | null |
Daimler’s car2go car-sharing service adds its first US city in four years | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | , the free-floating car-sharing service owned by Daimler, launched in Chicago this week — the company’s 25th market globally. The car-sharing company, which lets customers rent out vehicles on a short-term basis, has been steadily expanding in the past several years, adding to and changing up its fleet beyond the diminutive Smart cars that were once the lone option for customers. This launch stands out because it’s the first time in four years that car2go has added a U.S. city to its ranks. The last time car2go added a U.S. city was New York in 2014. Mercedes-Benz CLA and GLA, as well as the two-door Smartfortwo vehicles. Daimler was one of the first automakers to get into the car-sharing business. And others have followed, some of which have announced plans just in the past few months. In 2016, BMW’s ReachNow and GM started , which recently expanded its offerings to a peer-to-peer car-sharing service in Chicago, Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan. VW Group announced in July it will launch a next year in Germany that uses only electric vehicles, with plans to expand to other major cities in Europe, North America and Asia beginning in 2020. Volvo and Renault have also announced plans for a car-sharing service. This automaker-jumps-into-car-sharing-story is indicative of a bigger trend within an auto industry grappling with how to earn money beyond the traditional business of building and selling cars. And this period of transition and experimentation isn’t likely to slow down. If anything, expect more tinkering. For instance, Daimler announced Thursday it would break itself into three separate units — focused on trucks, its Mercedes-Benz car division and mobility — in a massive restructuring aimed at helping it keep pace with the emergence of automated and electric vehicles. |
Extras for bringing the fun at summer festivals | Makula Dunbar | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | One of the many ways to take full advantage of the summer is by attending long-awaited happenings and events. Summer festivals of all sorts come around every year, and they’re even better with a few friends — plus some extras to make the experience more memorable. No matter the type of event, having gear that allows you to kick back, keeps you hydrated and powered makes any festival day worthwhile. Photo: Kimber Streams : For music festivals and events that have areas for camping or lounging (while waiting for the band you actually came to see), an will come in handy. The is 7 feet long, so it’s big enough to sit three people, or for one person to stretch out. It comes with a stake to keep it from blowing away when it’s not in use, stays inflated longer than other couches we tested and folds down into a portable pack. Use its side pockets to store your phone, a water bottle and other belongings while you kick back and . Taking pictures to capture time spent at an exciting festival is a given. Though when attending with family or friends — especially those who you may not see often — having something tangible to take home makes the outing even better. The is the instant printer pick in our , and we like that it’s portable and produces old-school Polaroid prints straight from a smartphone or tablet. It works through the Instax Share app and allows for filters and borders to be added to your snapshots. You can print one picture in about 10 seconds, or print multiples of one image for passing out to your group. When you get tired of taking group selfies and want to capture videos and pictures of the main event, a good smartphone lens attachment can help with getting closer to the action. While some smartphone cameras produce good photos, a lens attachment can further expand your phone’s field of view or extend the optical zoom without distorting images. For photography enthusiasts who are fine attending events without a professional camera, our , the (for closer, high-quality shots) and the (for crisp, wide-angle photos) are great alternatives and offer more portability. They’re an improvement on the iPhone camera and are for lens attachments. Kyle FItzgerald Spending long days at a fair or similar event means your phone will likely run out of juice before you’re ready to go. Bringing along a ensures that you’ll be able to stay powered while you’re having fun — and long after when you need to round up friends or call a ride. The is small enough to fit in a backpack or purse and it has enough power to charge one smartphone everyday for nearly a week. It also can simultaneously charge two USB devices at full speed and will keep them powered for days before the battery pack itself needs to be recharged. Photo: Rozette Rago Since you can’t bring a or everywhere, it’s almost necessary to have a drink or two on hand when you’re outside in the heat for long periods of time. For events that allow outside beverages, carrying them in a is a great way to keep them fresh, cold or hot. We put eight growlers to the test and the had the best-tasting beer and fizzy drinks. We like the Miir’s design and that it’s easy to drink from, seal and handle. Its lid can be fully detached, which makes cleaning it by hand a bit easier. With a 64 oz. capacity, you’ll have more than enough of your favorite drink to last throughout the day, or to share. |
Propelling deep space flight with a new fuel source, Momentus prepares for liftoff | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 21 | Mikhail Kokorich, the founder of , a new Y Combinator-backed propulsion technology developer for space flight, hadn’t always dreamed of going to the moon. A physicist who graduated from Russia’s top-ranked Novosibirsk University, Kokorich was a serial entrepreneur in who grew up in Siberia and made his name and his first fortunes in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The heart of Momentus’ technology is a new propulsion system that uses water as a propellant instead of chemicals. Image courtesy Momentus Using water has several benefits, Kokorich says. One, it’s a fuel source that’s abundant in outer space, and it’s ultimately better and more efficient fuel for flight beyond low earth orbit. “If you move something with a chemical booster stage to the moon. Chemical propulsion is good when you need to have a very high thrust,” according to Kokorich. Once a ship gets beyond gravity’s pull, water simply works better, he says. Some companies are trying to guide micro-satellites with technologies like Phase 4 which use ionized gases like Xenon, but according to Kokorich those are more expensive and slower. “When ionized propulsion is used for geostationary satellites to orbit, it takes months,” says Kokorich, using water can half the time. “We can carry ten tons to geostationary orbit and it’s much faster,” says Kokorich. The company has already signed an agreement with ECM Space, a European launch services provider, which will provide the initial trip for the company’s first test of its propulsion system on a micro-satellite — slated for early 2019. That first product, “Zeal,” has specific impulses of 150 to 180 seconds and power up to 30 watts. Kokorich started his first business, Dauria, in the mid-90s amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, selling explosives and engineering services to mining companies in Siberia. Kokorich sold that business and went into retail, eventually building a network of stores that sold home goods and housewares across Russia. That raked in more millions for Kokorich, who then said he diversified into electronics by buying Russia’s BestBuy chain out bankruptcy. But space was never far from his mind, and, eventually he returned to it. “In 2011 I hit my middle-aged crisis,” Korkorich says. “So I founded the first private Russian aerospace company.” That company, Dauria Aerospace, was initially feted by the government, a place , and its inaugural cohort of space companies. In an announcement of the successes the space program had achieved in 2014 Kokorich with the Russian cosmonaut , who remains the executive director of the networking and aerospace programs at the multi-billion-dollar startup incubator. Utilis detects water leaks underground using satellite imagery. A few months later Kokorich would be in the U.S. working to back the first of what’s now a triumvirate of startups focused on space. “With all the problems with Russia in the Western world, I moved to the U.S.,” says Kokorich. Dauria had quickly raised $30 million for its work, but , stiff competition from U.S. firms and the sanctions leveled against Russia in the wake of were taking their toll on the entrepreneur’s business. “ For all of his protestations, Kokorich has maintained several economic ties with partners in Russia. It’s through . that Kokorich took an investment stake in the Canadian company , which was one of his first forays into space entrepreneurship outside of Russia. That company makes cryptographically secured applications for the transmission and reception of data from internet-enabled devices. The second space company that the co-founder has built since moving to the U.S. is the satellite company Astra Digital, which processes data from satellites to make that information more accessible. Now, with Momentus, Kokorich is turning to the problem of propulsion. “When transportation costs decrease, many business models emerge” Kokorich says. And Kokorich sees Momentus’ propulsion technology driving down the costs of traveling further into space — opening up opportunities for new businesses like asteroid mining and lunar transit. The Momentus team is already thinking well beyond the initial launch. The company’s eyes are on a prize well beyond geostationary orbit. Indeed, with water as a power source, the company says it will lay the groundwork for future cislunar and interplanetary rides. The company envisions a future where it will power water prospecting and delivery throughout the solar system, solar power stations, in-space manufacturing and space tourism. |
Eventbrite is reportedly going public in the second half of this year | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 7 | 21 | , the 12-year-old, San Francisco-based event-planning company, has filed confidentially for an IPO and plans to go public later this year, according to a . The company’s lead underwriters are Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Co., it says. The offering must seem a long time in coming for Eventbrite founders Julia Hartz; her husband, Kevin Hartz; and the company’s technical cofounder and CTO, Renaud Visage. Originally created for individuals wanting to host smaller events and private parties, but who faced few options aside creating Excel spreadsheets — remember, the ticketing world formerly revolved around stadiums and major sporting events — Eventbrite has grown steadily over the years into a corporate giant. It now powers ticketing for millions of events in more than 180 countries, and it has rung up more than $10 billion in cumulative tickets sales since its founding. According to Forbes, in 2017, Eventbrite processed more than three million tickets per week to events, including conferences and festivals. Part of the company’s growth has come through acquisitions. Last year, for example, Eventbrite acquired Ticketfly, a ticketing company that focused largely on the live entertainment industry and which had sold to the streaming music company Pandora in 2015 for a reported $335 million but Eventbrite was able to nab last year at the discounted price of . Eventbrite has also made a broader international push in recent years, , one of Spain’s leading ticketing providers, back in April, and Amsterdam-based Ticketscript back in January of last year. And those deals followed roughly half a dozen others. Indeed, the company — which has raised roughly $330 million over the years, including from Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, and DAG Ventures — has long been expected to go public, thanks in large part to its momentum, as well as its fairly turnkey and (we’d guess) lucrative business model. Though we won’t see its numbers until closer to its IPO apparently, Eventbrite makes money off every transaction. For event organizers charging for ticket sales, Eventbrite’s fees vary by package, but one of its most popular packages collects 1 percent of the ticket price and $0.99 per paid ticket, plus another 3 percent for payment processing per transaction. It also sells a “professional package” wherein it collects 2.5 percent of the ticket price and $1.99 per paid ticket, plus a 3 percent payment processing fee per transaction. Last but not least, Eventbrite sells “premium package” with customized pricing. Eventbrite is led by Julia Hartz, who took over the position of CEO in 2016, roughly six months after husband Kevin stepped down from his chief executive duties owing to a “non-life-threatening medical condition.” Until that point, Julia Hartz had primarily been tasked with overseeing marketing, customer support, sales, and human resources. Both cofounders appeared earlier this month at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, an event that attracts many of the wealthiest and most powerful people in U.S. media, technology, and sports, and whose attendees are often on the cusp of taking their companies public — if they haven’t already. When Eventbrite does complete its IPO, Hartz will join a tiny but growing list of female founders to steer their companies onto the public markets. Last October, when the mail-ordering clothing service Stitch Fix went public, its founder and CEO, Katrina Lake, became the to take an internet company public in all of 2017. |
Warner Bros. unveils the first trailers for ‘Aquaman’ and ‘Shazam’ | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 7 | 21 | Today at Comic-Con, Warner Bros. gave fans a peek at the first DC Comics films post- . Warner Bros. and DC had a bumpy 2017. There was the astonishing critical and commercial success of , followed by the box office disappointment of — leading to and . Will , which stars Jason Momoa as the titular superhero and is due out on December 21, turn things around? Director James Wan that his goal is to create a movie that “plays more like a science-fiction fantasy film than a traditional super hero movie.” Wan (who’s best-known for horror titles like and but also directed ) previously said because he wanted to ensure the visual effects were ready — and after watching this footage, you can see what he was talking about. The trailer does spend some time establishing the relationships between Aquaman, his love interest Mera (Amber Heard), his mother Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) and his half-brother/rival Orm (Patrick Wilson). My real takeaway, though, is that this is going to be a spectacular, effects-filled movie with plenty of undersea action. Then there’s , which looks like it could be DC’s first outright comedy. With the film’s release date (April 5, 2019) still nearly a year away, this trailer seems to focus on a few key scenes setting up the premise, with young Billy Batson (Asher Angel) gifted by a mysterious stranger with the ability to turn into a big red superhero (Zachary Levi) by just calling out the word “Shazam!” (The character was originally known as Captain Marvel, but I assume that they’ll stick with the Shazam name in the movie.) Like Wan, director David F. Sandberg has previously helmed horror movies (specifically and ), but the trailer makes it clear that he’s taking a light-hearted approach to the material. Despite his appearance as an invulnerable superhero, this version of Shazam is still a goofy kid. And if you were hoping for a glimpse at , it sounds like , but they don’t have a polished trailer yet to put online. Director Patty Jenkins said she looks at the movie as less of a sequel and more a standalone story with the same character: “We can make a whole new movie that’s as strong and unique as the first. It’s not more of anything; it’s its own thing.” Oh, and stop reading now if you don’t want to be spoiled for a year-old movie, but if you’re wondering why Chris Pine is in when his character Steve Trevor appeared to die in the first : Apparently there were no answers forthcoming during the panel. |
Ellen Pao memoir adaptation among 7 new Shonda Rhimes projects for Netflix | Henry Pickavet | 2,018 | 7 | 21 | When Shonda Rhimes , both she and the studio kept a tight lid on their plans. We could only imagine where the twists and turns that her future stories would take us. Well, now we know. This week, Rhimes’s production company and Netflix seven projects that she will make for the streaming platform with her production partner Betsy Beers who also made the move to Netflix. The projects tell stories of women of color, talented kids, important and routinely overlooked American history, fancy English relationships and pre-2017 White House doings. Shonda Rhimes just announced SEVEN new Netflix projects — let’s break them down: Based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning book, "The Warmth of Other Suns" will track the migration of African-Americans fleeing the South between 1916 & 1970. is set to adapt. — See What's Next (@seewhatsnext) Ellen Pao’s memoir , published last fall, details her life and career, which includes the she brought against her former employer Kleiner Perkins in 2015. Even though she lost the suit, Pao felt the battle was worth it, saying at the time: “If I’ve helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it.” She continues to work for inclusion in tech as founder and CEO of , an organization dedicated to making careers in tech accessible to everyone. Julia Quinn’s best-selling Bridgerton will jump off the page and onto our screens, because we all need to be flies on the proverbial walls of “ ” Mmhmm. Scandal writer will be responsible for the adaptation. “ ,” published in 2010 by Pulitzer Prize-winning author , tells the story of the African-American migration out of the South between 1916-1970. According to her website, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people and uncovered archival works over 15 years in order to bring these stories to light. Actor, solo performer, playwright and professor is signed on to adapt the piece for a viewing audience. And for some more history, “Pico & Sepulveda” is set in the 1840s when California wasn’t quite California yet. According to Netflix, it will track “the end of an idyllic year there as American forces threaten brutality and war at the border to claim the breathtaking land for its own.” “ ” is a non-fiction tale told by Kate Andersen Brower that details the relationship between White House staffers and First Families in an upstairs/downstairs kind of way. The book was published in the spring of 2016 so, well, you know. ’s Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, an award-winning reimagining of the Tchaikovsky ballet, will get the documentary treatment by Shondaland and Netflix, behind-the-scenes style. “Sunshine Scouts” will be a half-hour dark comedy that follows a group of teenage girls who survived an apocalyptic-level disaster while they were at sleep-away camp. These seven projects join the adaptation of a about how Anna Delvey duped people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by posing as a German heiress. Rhimes is set to write this one. If you want to hear Rhimes talk about her move to Netflix, you’re in luck, because she was the first guest of TechCrunch Mixtape (formerly CTRL+T), my podcast with senior reporter . Check it out below. |
Now is the time for Walmart to strike at Amazon Prime | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 21 | Amazon Prime has been an enormous influence on e-commerce, but this online juggernaut is beginning to show cracks. Now is the time for arch-rival Walmart to swoop in with a Prime-like offering that strikes at the weaknesses Amazon has introduced into its formidable loyalty program: price, a lack of focus, and competing subscription services. Here’s the problem. Amazon has invested in its Prime program continuously, adding feature after feature in an obvious bid to make the service appear as valuable as possible. But while these additions are superfluous to many a user’s needs, everyone pays for them whether they’re used or not. That’s part of the strategy, of course — if you know your customer won’t stop paying for a subscription, you can use that to squeeze the life out of other subscriptions they might pay for, and redirect that money to yourself. Prime Video and Music, for example, are clearly meant to take the place of Netflix or HBO and Spotify or Apple Music. Why pay for two? And if you have to choose, well, it’s easier to quit HBO than Prime. This only goes so far, though. For years users have been subject to these pressures, watching the price of Prime rise all the while, and meanwhile other services are getting better and better. Streaming services and exclusive content have multiplied, and Prime users are frequently left out in the cold. Photo storage? Isn’t that free everywhere? Twitch Prime? Is that really useful for millions of working families? Prime Originals? Not exactly raking in the Emmys. But still… it’s . It’s . The only one who can realistically break this deadlock is Walmart. Not by providing the same thing as Amazon, but by providing something simpler and more focused, taking over the workhorse duties of Prime (shipping, sales, some basic media of opportunity) at a much lower price, granting the customer freedom to pursue their own choice in subscriptions while not meaningfully affecting their online retail experience. What would this Walmart offering consist of? They already offer free shipping on a lot of items, free store pickup, and so on. You don’t need to use your imagination here. What would make this better? Free 2-day shipping on all items with no minimum amount; grocery and secure package delivery; a set of basic TV and music streams or even just a partnership with a couple existing products; and lastly some in-store benefits like members-only promotions and perhaps even early access on Black Friday. (Plus extra perks .) Leveraging Walmart’s brick and mortar presence is important, but it’s hard to say what they have the leeway to try there, as it’s likely a delicate balance. But it’s a major advantage to have regular visitors to major retail locations, whereas Amazon has to either home-deliver or install lockers. There are already indications this is happening — a for home delivery, a rumored streaming service, (even easier with an account), revamping of existing , emphasis on cloning or promoting existing services that match or exceed Amazon’s… it looks a lot like a shift to an end-to-end loyalty service. There are rumors of a standalone smart device, but that might conflict with with Google. Still, voice assistants are hot and Walmart needs an answer to Alexa if it wants to compete directly with Amazon in the living room. could conceivably broaden the company’s reach considerably as well. How much would it cost? I’d say if they go about $50 per year they’re asking for trouble. It’s one of those magic numbers not just on its own, but in relation to Amazon’s $120 per year. $60 would be merely half price — $50, why that’s positively generous! And the considerable savings opens up a bit of cash for secondary subscriptions like Netflix, which ends up, ironically, causing consumers to lock themselves into Walmart just as they were with Amazon, since once again they can’t switch easily! But they will almost certainly be getting more for their money. Naturally $50 won’t pay for all that stuff on Walmart’s side — but building brand loyalty on the scale of years, while sucking a customer from a competitor… that’s worth spending a little cash for. Timing-wise they’d want to announce this well ahead of the holidays — at least three months. First three months free if you sign up now and all that. It’ll be a big cash outlay but you don’t unseat a titan like Amazon on a shoestring budget. You do what it takes to put items in carts and go from there. Walmart won’t risk its business on this, but it makes sense to do it now and do it with vigor. Walmart doesn’t get by on word of mouth — it needs a full court press ahead of Amazon’s busiest period, in which it can unequivocally say “This is the better option for you. Switch now and you’ll never look back.” The real question is: what will they call it? MartLand? WalSmart? Or perhaps… Wal Street? |
While tech waffles on going public, biotech IPOs boom | Joanna Glasner | 2,018 | 7 | 21 | For people who make investment decisions based on revenues and projected earnings, biotech IPOs are kind of a non-starter. Not only are new market entrants universally unprofitable, most have zero revenue. Going public is mostly a means to raise money for clinical trials, with red ink expected for years to come. That pattern may be one reason the venture capital press, Crunchbase News included, tends to devote a disproportionately small portion of coverage to biotech IPOs. It’s more exciting to watch a big-name internet company in first-day trading or at an underperforming dud. But with our fixation on all things tech, we’re missing out on the big picture. There are actually a lot more biotech and healthcare startup IPOs than tech offerings. In the second quarter of this year, for instance, at least 16 U.S. venture-backed biotech and healthcare companies went public, compared to just 11 tech startups. In three of the past four years, bio offerings outnumbered tech IPOs, according to Crunchbase data. In the following analysis, we attempt to get up to speed on the pace of biotech offerings, assess where we are in the cycle and spotlight some of the rising stars. As mentioned above, U.S. bio IPOs outnumber tech offerings in most years. However, the bio cohort raises less total capital, partly because the largest technology IPOs tend to be much bigger than the largest bio IPOs. In the chart below, we compare the two sectors over the past four years. Globally, the numbers are much higher. Using Crunchbase data, we’ve put together a chart looking at global VC-backed biotech and healthcare IPOs over the past four years. While we’re just over halfway through 2018, biotech and health IPOs have already raised more money than in any of the prior three full calendar years. It’s pretty clear we’re in an upcycle for all things startup-related. VCs are flush with cash, late-stage rounds are ballooning in size and IPO and M&A action is picking up, too. So what does that mean for bio IPOs? Is the uptick in the pace and size of offerings mostly a result of bullish market conditions? Or is the current slate of pre-IPO candidates more compelling than in the past? We turned to Bob Nelsen, co-founder of , one of the top-performing biotech investors, for his take, which is that it’s a “fundamentals driven, cycle amplified” IPO boomlet. More companies are launching well-received IPOs because the pace of startup innovation is faster than in the past. Nelson calls it “the result of the previous 30 years of investment and innovation in biotech that has finally led to essentially data-driven innovation.” That’s leading to more curative treatments, disease-modifying therapies and preventative technologies. Yet we’re also in a bullish segment of the market cycle for biotech. That’s prompting companies that might have stayed private under other conditions to give going public a shot. It’s also providing bigger outcomes for emerging companies that were already on the IPO track. The latest example of a big outcome IPO is , which develops drugs based on genetically engineered red blood cells. This week, the five-year-old company raised $241 million at an initial valuation of over $2 billion, making it the largest bio offering of 2018. The Cambridge, Mass. company, which previously raised nearly a quarter-billion-dollars in venture funding, is still in the pre-clinical trial phase. This year has delivered several other good-sized offerings as well, including drug developers and , recently valued around $800 million each, along with , valued around $1.2 billion. (See the full list of 2018 global bio and health offerings .) As for aftermarket performance, that’s been up and down, but includes some big ups. Last year, biotech led the pack for best-performing IPOs on U.S. exchanges. The sector accounted for four of the six top spots, according to , led by drug developers , and , along with , an agbio startup. While things are already up, bio VCs, generally an optimistic bunch, see several reasons why bio IPOs could go higher. Nelson points to what he sees as the lagging pace of in-house innovation at big pharma and biotech players. Increasingly, they need to acquire startups and recently public companies to stay competitive and build out new product pipelines. There is also tons of fresh capital earmarked for healthcare startups. In the U.S. in 2017, healthcare-focused venture capitalists raised $9.1 billion. That figure was up 26 percent from 2016, per . More dollars also are flowing from venture firms that invest in a mix of tech and life sciences through a single fund. That list includes well-established VCs with dry powder to invest, including , , and . Still, Nelson observes, deep into an IPO bull market, the average quality of offerings does tend to decline. That said, he’s been through similar inflection points in previous cycles and “for the same point in the cycle, the quality is markedly higher.” |
Weekly Roundup: July 21 | Taylor Nakagawa | 2,018 | 7 | 21 | Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company, Blue Origin, performed its most critical test to date, Prime Day had some ups and downs but ultimately broke records and major tech companies are uniting to help you move data across apps. Blue Origin crossed a major milestone on Wednesday as it successfully executed a live separation test. This sent the rocket’s crew capsule higher than it’s ever gone before, while the rocket’s booster coasted back down to earth unscathed. The critical achievement marks a big win for Jeff Bezos’ company and the prospect of commercial space flights. on Amazon’s site during the first two hours of Prime Day are estimated to have cost the e-commerce giant $1.2 million per minute. The total loss is difficult to nail down, in part because the exact span of the outage varied; however, multiple reports put the loss in the $90 million range. And yet, these setbacks didn’t dampen the day. Prime Day , making it the biggest sales day in Amazon history, beating out Cyber Monday, Black Friday and the previous Prime Day in 2017. Google has been fined a record-breaking €4.34 billion (~$5 billion) by European antitrust regulators for abusing the dominance of its Android mobile operating system. The European Commission is arguing the tech giant dominates markets for general internet search services, licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android mobile operating system. Google responded stating it will the fine and argued Android brings more choice to the market, not less. After spending some quality time with the latest MacBook Pro, it’s obvious Apple is tipping its cap to its core user base of creative professionals. The 2018 model is the most substantial upgrade (at least regarding performance) since the introduction of quad-core processors in the 2011 MacBook Pro. Emerging venture capital firms in smaller American cities are increasingly attracting larger funding as investors see opportunities for returns beyond the coasts. But the Midwestern investment scene isn’t just defined by Valley transplants, and many success stories are home-grown. The Data Transfer Project is a new team-up between tech giants to let you move your content, contacts and more across apps. Founded by Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft, the DTP today revealed its plans for an open source data portability platform any online service can join. Creating an industry standard for data portability could force companies to compete on utility instead of being protected by data lock-in that traps users because it’s tough to switch services. In the past year, Microsoft’s stock has gone up more than 40 percent. In the past two years, it’s nearly doubled. In addition, Microsoft passed $100 billion in revenue for a fiscal year. That Microsoft is even in the discussion of being one of the companies chasing a $1 trillion market cap is likely something we wouldn’t have been talking about just three or four years ago. |
Updated: Elon Musk says SpaceX is working on a kid-size submarine to extract those boys in Thailand | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | Over the last couple of days, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk has been tweeting about how to potentially help the 12 young soccer players and their coach who began exploring a cave in Thailand on June 23rd, quickly becoming trapped there by rising floodwaters. Now, suggests Musk, working with cave experts in Thailand, he and engineers from his rocket company, , have decided on the “primary path” to attempt to freeing the group: a “tiny, kid-size submarine” that uses the “liquid oxygen transfer tube” of SpaceX’s Falcon rocket as the hull. It’s “[l]ight enough to be carried by two divers, small enough to get through narrow gaps. Extremely robust,” Musk tweeted a couple of hours ago, adding that construction on the vehicle will be “complete in about 8 hours” after which it will be sent on a 17-hour flight to Thailand. (SpaceX is based in Hawthorne, California, outside of L.A.) Whether the creation is made and shipped out remains to be seen, but Musk suggested on Twitter that it would be “[f]itted for a kid or small adult to minimize open air” with “[s]egmented compartments to place rocks or dive weights” and “adjust buoyancy.” Musk had tweeted last night that both SpaceX and his much newer, tunnel boring company, , would be to Thailand today to see how they could help. If SpaceX is able to create an escape pod that works, Musk — who enjoys a kind of cult status in the business world for building superior products in challenging, capital-intensive industries — will only further burnish his reputation as a kind of figure. Indeed, his Twitter feed is currently filled with relating to his interest in rescuing the soccer team. It’s a daunting challenge. As reported in the New York Times, the cave complex has never been and it features different waterways that don’t appear to be directly linked. Rescue attempts have already led to , that of former Thai Navy SEAL diver Saman Gunan, who brought tanks of air to the boys and their coach, then lost consciousness in one of its passageways on his swim out of the complex. Some good feedback from cave experts in Thailand. Iterating with them on an escape pod design that might be safe enough to try. Also building an inflatable tube with airlocks. Less likely to work, given tricky contours, but great if it does. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Got more great feedback from Thailand. Primary path is basically a tiny, kid-size submarine using the liquid oxygen transfer tube of Falcon rocket as hull. Light enough to be carried by 2 divers, small enough to get through narrow gaps. Extremely robust. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Construction complete in about 8 hours, then 17 hour flight to Thailand — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Simulating maneuvering through a narrow passage — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) |
Castbox turns to blockchain to help podcasters get paid | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | null |
With its goofy video loops, YC backed Splish wants to be the ‘anti-Instagram’ | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 7 | 21 | Is there any space on kids’ homescreens for another social sharing app to poke in? Y Combinator backed wants to have a splash at it (😊) — with a super-short-form video and photo sharing app aimed at the under-25s. The SF-based startup began bootstrapping out of their college dorm rooms last July, playing around with app ideas before settling on goofy video loops to be their social sharing steed of choice. The Splish app pops content into video loops of between 1-5 seconds. Photos can be uploaded too but motion must be added in the form of an animated effect of your choice. So basically nothing on Splish stays still. (Hence its watery name.) But while wobbly, content on Splish is intended to stick around — rather than ephemerally pass away (a la snaps). Here are a few examples of Splishes (embedded below as GIFs… but you can see them on its platform , and ): It’s the first startup for the four college buddy co-founders: Drake Rehfeld, Alex Pareto, Jackson Berry and Zac Denham, though between them they’ve also clocked up engineering hours working for Snapchat, Facebook and Team 10. Their initial went up in March and they landed a place on YC’s program at the start of May — when they also released their . An Android app is pending, and they’ll be on the hunt for funding come YC demo day. The gap in the social sharing market this young team reckons it’s spotted is a sort of ‘anti-Instagram’ — offering a playful contrast to the photo sharing platform’s polished (and at times preening) performances. The idea is that sharing stuff on Splish is a bonding experience; part of an ongoing smartphone-enabled conversation between mates, rather than a selectively manicured photoshoot which also has to be carefully packaged for public ‘gram consumption. Splish does have a public feed, though, so it’s not a pure messaging app — but the co-founders say the focus is friend group sharing rather than public grandstanding. “Splish is a social app for sharing casual looping videos with close friends,” says Rehfeld, giving the team’s elevator pitch. “It came out of our own experience, and we’re building for ourselves because we noticed that the way you socialize right now in real life is you do activities with your friends. You go to the beach, you go to the bar, the bowling alley. We’re working to bring this same type of experience online using Splish through photo and video. So it’s more about interaction and hanging out with your friends online.” “When you use Instagram you really feel like you’re looking at a magazine. It’s just the highlights of people’s lives,” he adds. “And so we’re trying to make a place where you’re getting to know your friends better and meeting new people as well. And then on the other side, on Snapchat, you’re really sharing interesting moments of your lives but it’s not really pushing the boundaries or creating with your friends. It’s more just a communication messaging tool. “So it’s kind of the space in between broadcast and chat — talking and interacting with your close friends through Splish, through photo and video.” Users of the Splish app can apply low-fi GIF(ish) retro filters and other photographic effects (such as a reverse negative look) to the video snippets and photos they want to send to friends or share more widely — with the effects intended to strip away at reality, rather than gloss it over. Which means content on Splish tends to look and feel grungy and/or goofy. Much like an animated GIF in fact. And much less like Instagram. The team’s hope is the format adds a bit of everyday grit and/or wit to the standard smartphone visual record, and that swapping Splishes gets taken up as a more fun and casual way of communicating vs other types of messaging or social sharing. And also that people will want to use Splish to capture and store fun times with friends because they can be checked out again later, having been conveniently packaged for GIF-style repeat lols. “Part of the power here in Splish is that relationships are built on shared experiences and nostalgia and so while [Snapchat-style] ephemerality reduced a lot of the barriers for posting what it didn’t do is strengthen relationships long term or over time because the chats and the photos disappeared,” says Rehfeld. The idea is a content format to gives people “shared experience that lasts”, he adds. They’re also directly nudging users to get creative via a little gamification, adding a new feature (called Jams) that lets users prompt each other to make a Splish in response to a specific content creation challenge. And filming actual (playful) physical shoulder pokes has apparently been an early thing on Splish. That’s the merry-go-round of social for ya. Being a fair march north of Splish’s target age-range, I have to confess the app’s loopy effects end up triggering something closer to motion sickness/vertigo/puking up for me. But words are my firm social currency of choice. Whereas Rehfeld argues the teenager-plus target for Splish is most comfortable with a smartphone in its hand, and letting a lens tell the tale of what they’re up to or how they’re feeling. “We started with that niche first because there’s a population in that age range that really enjoys this creative challenge of expressing yourself in pretty intuitive ways, and they understand how to do that. And they’re pretty excited about it,” he tells TechCrunch. “There’s also been a little bit of a shift here where users no longer just capture what they have in real-life using the camera, but the camera’s used as an extension of communication — especially in that age range, where people use the camera as part of their relationship, rather than just capturing what happens offline.” As with other social video apps, vertical full screen is the preferred Splish frame — for a more “immersive experience” and, well, because that’s how the kids do it. “It’s the way users, especially in this age range, hold and use their phones. It’s pretty natural to this age range just because it’s what they do everyday,” he says, adding: “It’s just the best way to consume on the phone because it fills the whole screen, it’s how you were already using the phone before you clicked into the video.” Notably, as part of the team’s soft-edged stance against social media influencer culture, Rehfeld says Splish is choosing not to bake “viral components” into the app — ergo: “Nobody’s rewarded for likes or ‘re-vines’. There’s no reblog, retweet.” Although, pressed on how firm that anti-social features stance is, he concedes they’re not abandoning the usual social suite entirely — but rather implementing that sort of stuff in relative moderation. “We have likes and we have a concept of friends or follows but the difference is we’re building those with the intention of not incentivizing virality or ‘influencership’,” he says. “So we always release them with some sort of limit, so with likes you can’t see a list of everybody who’s liked a post for example. So that’s one example of how we’ve, kind of, brought in a feature that people feel comfortable with and love but with our own spin that’s a little bit less geared towards building a following.” Asked if they’re trying to respond to the criticism that’s been leveled at a lot of consumer technology lately — i.e. that it’s engineered to be highly and even mindlessly addictive — Rehfeld says yes, the team wants to try and take a less viral path, less well travelled, adding: “We’re building as much as possible for user experience. And a lot of the big brands build and optimize towards engagement metrics… and so we’re focused on this reduction of virality so that we can promote personal connections.” Though it will be interesting to see if they can stick to medium-powered stun guns as they fight to carve out a niche in the shadow of social tech’s attention-sapping giants. Of course Splish’s public feed is a bit of a digital shop window. But, again, the idea is to make sure it’s a casual space, and not such a perfectionist hothouse as Instagram. “The way the product is built allows people to feel pretty comfortable even in the more public feeds, the more featured feeds,” adds Rehfeld. “They post still very casual moments, with a creative spin of course. So it’s stayed pretty similar content, private and public.” It’s fair to say that short form video for social sharing has a long but choppy history online. Today’s smartphone users aren’t exactly short of apps and online spaces to share moving pictures publicly or with followers or friends. And animated GIFs have had incredible staying power as the marathon runner of the short loop social sharing format. On the super-short form video side, the most notable app player of recent years — Twitter’s Vine — and virally in 2013, amassing a sizable community of fans. Although Instagram soon , albeit with a slightly less super-short form. The Facebook-owned behemoth has gatecrashed other social sharing parties in recent years too. Most notably by , and using its long reach and deep resources to from the rival product. Twitter voluntarily threw in the towel with Vine in , focusing instead on its , which is certainly a better fit for its core business of being a real-time social information network, and its ambition to also become a mainstream entertainment network. Meanwhile Google’s focus in the social video space has long been on longer form content, via YouTube, and longer videos mesh better with the needs of its ad network (at least when YouTube content isn’t being ). Though Mountain View also of course plays in messaging, including the . Apple too has been adding more powerful and personalized visual effects for its iMessage users — such as . So smartphone users are indeed very, very spoiled for sharing choice. Vine’s success in building a community did show that super-short loops can win a new generation of fans, though. But in May its original co-founder, Dom Hofmann, indefinitely postponed the idea of reviving the app by building — citing financial and legal roadblocks, plus other commitments on his time. Though he did urge those “missing the original Vine experience” to check out some of the apps he said had “sprung up lately” (albeit, without namechecking any of the newbs). So perhaps a Splish or two had caught his eye. There’s no doubt the space will be a tough one to sustain. Plenty of apps have cracked in and had a moment but very few go the distance. Overly distinctive filters can also feel faddish and fall out of fashion as quickly as they blew up. Witness, for example, the viral rise of . (And now try and remember the last time you saw one of its art filtered photos in the wild… ) So sustaining a novel look and feel can be tough. Not least because social’s big beast, Facebook, has the resources and inclination to clone any innovations that look like they might be threatening. Add in network effects and the story of the space has been defined by a shrinking handful of dominant apps and platforms. And yet — there’s still always the chance that a new generation of smartphone users will shake things up because they see things differently and want to find new ways and new spaces to share their personal stuff. That’s the splash that Splish’s team is hoping to make. |
MoviePass offers ticket refund after Friday Night outage | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | We have full resolution of the outage and are confident users can check in again for this evening. Thank you for bearing with us. We ask those who paid out of pocket wait until tomorrow to send us their stubs so we can help those that need check-in assistance this evening. Thanks — MoviePass (@MoviePass) |
‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ director Peyton Reed on following ‘Infinity War’ | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | hoping for clues to the aftermath of , you’ll probably be disappointed: Although the just-released film is coming out a few months after , actually takes place earlier, and it’s focused almost entirely on the personal struggles of its heroes. In fact, after , there was at least one article wondering, “ ” In other words, after you’ve watched armies of Marvel heroes battling for the fate of the universe, how can you care about an adventure that takes place earlier, with a mere two superheroes? Peyton Reed, director of both Ant-Man films, told me he wasn’t worried about the stakes feeling too low. There’s some precendent, after all, with ‘s release a few months after . “That really is part of the Ant-Man movies — the stakes are really high … they’re just personal stakes,” Reed said. “You know it’s not a gigantic, genocidal villain like . On that level, we don’t want to top Thanos.” Instead, Reed said these films have “very different storytelling ambitions,” and in fact, his hope is that they have “the most personal tone” of the Marvel films. At the same time, this is a sequel, and the 20th (!) film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Asked how he approaches the audience when he’s this deep into a mega-franchise, Reed said, “I really just use myself as the moviegoer, as a litmus test in terms of what they have and haven’t seen. [At] Marvel, no one wants to repeat themselves, no one wants to bore an audience.” One of the big changes from the first is right there in the title: Hope van Dyne (played by Evangeline Lilly) is no longer just assisting her father Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). Instead, she’s putting on her own costume, fighting crime and searching for her long-lost mother Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer). In many ways, Hope proves to be a more competent superhero than Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who took on the mantle of Ant-Man in the previous film. Rather remarkably, this is the first time a female superhero has made it into the title of a Marvel Cinematic Universe film (Marvel characters like Black Widow and Gamora have thus far been limited to team movies, or appeared as supporting characters in someone else’s story). Reed said even while he was developing , there was already a plan to have Hope step up in the second film — thanks to the comics, he’d always thought of the characters as a duo. “It also felt like the organic way to forward these characters from the first movie,” he said. “We knew Hope van Dyne was very capable, but was being held back from that by her issues with her father. Now that the issues between them are resolved, we can create a really fully-formed hero.” The sequel also provided more of an opportunity to explore the sub-microscopic “quantum realm” introduced in . The setting may feel pretty out-there, but Reed said he worked with (a quantum physicist at Caltech) to try to get the science right. “We don’t want to give the audience a headache — but 20, 30, 50 years from now, we don’t want people to say, ‘Oh man, that was way off, that has no bearing on reality,'” Reed said. As an example, he pointed to the film’s treatment of quantum entanglement as a way to incorporate a real scientific concept while introducing it in a way that’s funny and character-driven. also takes better advantage of real San Francisco locations like Lombard Street — Reed noted that while the first film took place in SF, much of the action was limited to Hank Pym’s house. This time around, he wanted to “open up and be in actual San Francisco,” which created its own challenges, particularly since the new movie is also playing with Scott’s ability to both shrink and increase his size. “Shooting in daylight, exterior San Francisco, you had to believe that Giant Man was really there,” Reed said. “That was probably the biggest overall challenge — we’d done a shrinking movie already, so we played with variable size while trying to keep it photo realistic.” While Reed’s found new success with superheroes, I also wondered if he ever worries that Marvel and Marvel-style blockbusters are crowding out the studio comedies that he made his name with, like and Reed countered that this was an issue “long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” with studios either wanting to make “low, low budget movies” or giant blockbusters. “I don’t think it any tougher now,” he said. “Honestly, in some ways it’s a bit easier, because not only studios but people like Netflix are financing comedies and stuff like that. I guess what I’m saying is: It’s always been tough.” |
There’s a new, $100 million fund expressly for women founders of color | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | When Richelieu Dennis came to the U.S. from his home in Liberia to attend Babson College, he wasn’t expecting to stay. But unable to return home owing to the first Liberian civil war, stay he did, building the personal care products company with his college roommate Nyema Tubman in Harlem and later establishing a larger holding company, Sundial Brands, that would oversee a suite of product lines focused on women of color. Among them, SheaMoisture, , and , named after a philanthropist and social activist and one of the earliest female founders of color. (Walker, the daughter of slaves, died a wealthy woman at the age of 51 in 1919, after herself for black women.) All that hard work was seemingly rewarded when, last year, consumer goods giant Unilever acquired Sundial for undisclosed terms. In a unique twist, the deal should fuel the companies of future founders of color, too. To wit, when the acquisition was announced, Unilever and Sundial announced they would create a new investment vehicle to empower minority women entrepreneurs — the — to which they would commit an initial $50 million. Thursday, at in New Orleans, Dennis said he was officially launching the fund with twice that amount — $100 million — adding that roughly a third of the fund has already been committed to black women entrepreneurs. (According to the fund’s site, it writes seed through Series C checks.) The outlet Black Enterprise was first to . The development will undoubtedly be welcome news to women, and particular women of color, who are among a fast-growing percentage of entrepreneurs in the country, according to the , a 31-year-old, Washington-based nonprofit. According to one of its reports, women of color — who constitute approximately 35 percent of the female population aged 18 and older — owned 929,445 businesses in the United States, representing 17 percent of all women-owned firms, in 1997. By 2014, that number had hit 2,934,500 businesses, or 32 percent of women-owned firms. Naturally, these aren’t all venture-backed (or backable) businesses, but those numbers are on the rise, too, and their founders are going to need capital on the scale that New Voices is promising. Per , an organization that supports black and Latina women tech founders, of the $84 billion that VCs plugged into startups last 2017, just 2.7 percent flowed to women-led companies, and black women founders saw just .2 percent of that capital. |
Shoe startups aren’t dragging their feet | Joanna Glasner | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | Good thing Carrie Bradshaw, the shoe-loving heroine of Sex and the City, wasn’t a footwear venture capitalist. The high-heeled, high-priced and hard-to-walk-in pairs beloved by the TV icon are pretty much the least fundable concept in the shoe startup space lately. Instead, when they do dip their toe in the footwear space, venture investors have been putting a premium on comfort. At least that’s what recent funding records indicate. Over the past year-and-a-half, investors have tied up roughly $170 million in an assortment of , according to an analysis of Crunchbase data. The vast majority is going to sellers and designers of footwear that people might actually want to walk in. Top funding recipients are a varied bunch, including everything from used sneaker marketplaces to high-end designers to toddler play shoes. Startups are also experimenting with little-used materials, turning used plastic bottles, merino wool and other substances into chic wearables. Below, we look at how startups are leveraging market trends to get a foot in the door. It should be noted that recent footwear funding activity comes on the heels of some positive developments for the shoe industry. First, this is a huge and growing industry. One recent pegged the global footwear market at $246 billion in 2017, with annual growth rates of around 4.5 percent. Second, public markets are strong. Shares of the world’s most valuable footwear company — Nike — have climbed more than 50 percent over the past nine months to reach a market cap of nearly $130 billion. Stocks of several smaller rivals, including Adidas, have also performed well. Third, men are spending more on footwear. Though they’ve long been stereotyped as the gender with more restrained shoe-buying habits, men are putting more money into footwear and could be on track to close the . Both men and women are spending more on sneakers, and venture capitalists have taken notice. Sneakers and sneaker-related businesses account for the majority of footwear startup funding, as consumers increasingly opt for more casual, sportier styles. Much of the innovation is in the sale and design of pricey, high-performance shoes. The largest footwear-focused round in recent months, for instance, went to , operator of an online sneaker marketplace that specializes in rare and high-end shoes. The three-year-old, Los Angeles-based company secured a $60 million Series C in February. Other sneaker companies to raise funding recently include , an auction-style GOAT competitor; , a streetwear retailer; and , which makes high-performance athletic shoes for children. The spike in sneaker funding comes amid a growth streak for the sector. As mentioned previously, much of that is driven by men. However, one other bullish sneaker trend footwear analysts point to is the of women. Driven perhaps by a desire to walk more than a few blocks without being in pain, we’re buying fewer high heels and more sneakers. Demand for more comfortable footwear doesn’t only translate into more sneaker sales. Venture investors also see potential in other comfy shoe startups, particularly those with eco-friendly options. In this camp is , a maker of merino wool shoes in casual styles that has raised more than $27 million to date. Meanwhile, , which makes shoes out of recycled plastic bottles and sells them for around $125 a pair, has brought in $7 million. Slippers are also a fundable space, as evidenced by the $2 million seed round last fall for , a maker of footwear for people who want to pad around the house in slippers while also looking stylish. And as previously noted, it doesn’t look like high heel-focused startups have been kicking up a lot of capital lately. However, designers that offer varied heel heights are still scoring some big rounds. This category includes , a two-year-old brand that has raised more than $40 million to scale up a shoe design portfolio that runs the gamut from flats to spike heels. Recent history shows you can make a good exit with a shoe startup. And you can also flop or stagnate. One of the more noticeable recent flops was Vancouver-based Shoes.com, an online shoe retailer that last year and filed for bankruptcy following disappointing sales. Others found they weren’t as good a fit for today’s consumers as hoped. Most recently, , a made-to-order women’s shoe startup that raised more than $25 million, secured a small to keep operations afloat. A few years earlier, ShoeDazzle, a celebrity-backed shoe subscription service with more than $60 million in funding, at a steep markdown. Meanwhile, developers of 3D printing and scanning technology are stepping up the pace of M&A. In April, Nike snapped up , a seed-funded startup that specialized in 3D foot-scanning. Last year, Worldwide, a leading maker of therapeutic footwear, bought , a venture-backed maker of 3D-printed custom orthotics and insoles. Granted, it’s hard to imagine an episode about Carrie Bradshaw shelling out for custom orthotics. But in the exit-driven world of startup financing, it seems clear that Manolo Blahniks are out, while sneakers and insoles are in. |
Is this DJI’s next Mavic drone? | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | null |
RIP “crypto” | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | RIP “crypto”. You had a good run. This week veteran cryptographer Matt Blaze, gave in — to what must have been a near-constant, low-level drone of ‘CAn Buy Crypto.com???$$$$!’ spam — and sold the pithy domain name he registered in 1993, in the midst of the PC era crypto wars, to use as an , to , a Zug, Switzerland-based payments and cryptocurrency platform startup whose self-styled mission is “accelerating the world’s transition to cryptocurrency”, positioning itself at the nexus of the current crypto craze. So crypto.com now points to crypto . Which seems a fitting moment to say RIP “crypto” as shorthand terminology for an entire domain of cryptographic work that underpins so many more things than Bitcoin or Ether or Ripple or Litecoin or Zcash — or any of the myriad digital coins that have winked (and more recently minted) into virtual existence over the last decade or so, hoping to hit the crypto jackpot. Frankly this is not at all fair. But, linguistically, so it goes. Languages live or they die. And to live in linguistic terms means to shift your meaning as word usage ebbs and flows. The sale of crypto.com tells us not so much that money talks, though clearly there’s that too — domain sellers were speculating that the price for crypto.com could have been a cool $5M-$10M, per this report from March; though the actual price-tag paid by Monaco has not been disclosed. Mostly it underlines that trying to push as an individual against a surging tide is hopeless. Principled, one-man-stands of linguistic resistance against the crypto(currency) craze are futile at this particular juncture of its technological development. Spam with no end in sight would worry the will of anyone. So apologies also to the few folks who have written to complain about incorrect use of “crypto” in TC headlines. Using “cryptocurrency” is indeed more accurate if that’s what the story is about. But as a term it’s headline-unfriendly as well as being really quite a horrible mouthful. And, well, “coin” is too generic unless you’re coin trade press. Alternative linguistic confections — anyone for ‘cryptoc’? — were never going to fly. So cryptocurrency colloquially colonizing “crypto” was really only a matter of time, given how many joules of attention-energy are being claimed and drained in its name. Turns out language change can have plenty to do with the price of Bitcoin. On the flip side, any craze can be a fleeting thing, and it’s entirely possible that, in time, “crypto” could revert to its proper meaning of cryptography should the cryptocurrency hype die back, as hype is wont to do when people get bored — because something that was new and novel becomes properly understood and adopted (and thus less of a conversation starter). Sustained acceptance can make tongue-tripping nicknames less necessary, and reset the linguistic order. Equally, though, a nickname can stubbornly stick around for ages — outlasting any nonprofessional understanding of the logic underlying its coinage. Or at least until evolving usage causes another terminology shift. Think, for example, of the rhythmic swings of “telephone” -> “phone” -> “mobile phone” -> “mobile”. Crypto(currency) could ultimately even lose the ‘crypto’ prefix should the technology end up becoming so ubiquitous as to be considered synonymous with the generic term “currency”, and usurp/displace word, sinking back into the accepted conceptual morass that envelopes the idea of money. Of course the crypto(graphy) community have not been at all happy about the linguistic sands shifting treacherously under their foundational field. And they do have a point, given that without their founding crypto there could be no, er, ‘crypto’… Has anyone had a "Crypto means Cryptography" shirt printed yet? If I had some printed would anyone else want one? I think I need something to passive-aggressively wear around my WeWork space. — Amie Stepanovich (@astepanovich) Reminder for blockchain folks: While you keep screaming "distributed!", your prime virtue is actually "crypto". It comes from the greek "kryptós", meaning "hidden, secret": Historically, secrecy is not a main driver of an open collaborative culture. — samim (@samim) Yeah, that's definitely available. — matt blaze (@mattblaze) “”Crypto” could mean encryption, cryptography, or cryptology, but never cryptocurrency,” one computing academic tells us, adding: “I’ve heard plenty of whinging about the changed meaning of “crypto” and I don’t expect a dignified fall-back.” “Normal usage says “encryption” is only one application of “cryptography” (building schemes for encryption and similar apps) which together with “cryptanalysis” (trying to break such schemes) makes up “cryptology”,” he adds. Certainly, don’t expect the original crypto community to migrate to alternative terminology — not willingly, and not anytime soon. Which will probably make for some confused messaging at times. But technology applying pressure points to human communications is just par for the course. As recently as the content on Blaze’s (now former) website included the express declaration that: “This site does not trade in or provide services related to cryptocurrencies. It is concerned with cryptography, computer and network security, and technology policy research.” It further capped that caveat with an explicit disclaimer — writing: “ Many cryptocurrencies are scams, and I strongly advise against their use as investment vehicles.” Visitors to crypto.com now will not encounter any such caveats. But most of these folks probably weren’t headed there looking for cautionary tales. Nor seeking Blaze’s contact details. So you really can’t blame him for moving with the times. For the original crypto community, playing the long game and waiting for the upstart crypto usurper to get linguistically cut back down to size seems the best option. Sure, they’ve lost this “crypto” war — but and (hopefully) won. And of course, in the far-flung future, who knows how 2018’s crypto craze will be viewed? Perhaps as the pinnacle of a hype-cycle that didn’t end in the wholesale reconfiguration of business and society that the crypto oracles promise, even if they managed to shift the conversation of a certain IT crowd for a while. On another level, given rising levels of tech-fueled disruptive uncertainty crisscrossing so many facets of life, perhaps it’s fitting for “crypto” to become something of a cipher itself, devoid of fixed meaning. 'Crypto means crypto' would be more in keeping with the spirit of the age — Natasha (@riptari) “Encryption technology is the key to the future of the information revolution,” wrote Blaze in 1996. “It allows businesses and individuals to communicate securely over any inexpensive communication platform without fear of eavesdropping.” That sentiment at least remains constant. |
‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Dr. Strange’ co-creator Steve Ditko has died | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | 1. Soon after the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie came out in 2002, Gary Groth and I were on business in NYC one day and had a few hours to kill. Gary said, "Wanna meet Steve Ditko?" It sounded good to me. We showed up at Ditko's 5th Ave. studio and knocked on the door. — Eric Reynolds (@earinc) Spider-Man Dr. Strange Eternity J. Jonah Jameson Dormammu Green Goblin Baron Mordo Gwen Stacy Blue Beetle Squirrel Girl Hawk & Dove Aunt May The Question Speedball Flash Thompson Ancient One Harry Osborn Sandman Clea Scorpion Wong Chameleon Creeper Shade Dr. Octopus Etc. — Steve Horton (@tropicalsteve) |
null | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 26 | null |
Watch all the interviews from TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | What a day. Yesterday, hundreds of people gathered in Zug, Switzerland for . In addition to some of the key people of the Ethereum Foundation, the team interviewed the entrepreneurs behind Binance, Coinbase, ConsenSys, CryptoKitties and many other organizations. The event was packed with interesting content. But if you couldn’t be there in person, don’t worry as you can watch everything that happened in Zug: |
Univision reportedly mulling sale of Fusion Media Group | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 7 | null |
Twitter’s CFO clarifies that its second-quarter user metrics won’t be affected by fake account purge | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | After a Washington Post report last week that Twitter’s fake account purge might affect its second-quarter user numbers, Twitter’s chief financial officer said on Monday that most accounts affected by its clean-up will not be included in its metrics. In a tweet, Ned Segal explained that most of the suspended accounts were less than 30 days old or caught at sign up and therefore never counted. Some clarifications: most accounts we remove are not included in our reported metrics as they have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted. — Ned Segal (@nedsegal) He added “If we removed 70M accounts from our reported metrics, you would hear directly from us. This article reflects us getting better at improving the health of the service.” On Friday, the that Twitter has been suspending more than 1 million accounts a day in recent months, good news for people who have been calling on the platform to get serious about fake accounts that can potentially be used to spread misinformation. According to data reviewed by the newspaper, more than 70 million accounts were suspended in May and June, with that pace continuing in July. But the Washington Post also cited an anonymous source who said the clean up might “result in a rare decline in the number of monthly users” in the quarter that ended on June 30. Twitter’s stock price fell more than 9% to a low of $42.46 on Monday, but has been climbing back up after Segal’s clarification. The company’s next earnings report is scheduled for July 27. |
Popular crypto service MyEtherWallet hit by attack after Hola VPN gets hacked | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | , one of the internet’s most popular services for managing cryptocurrencies, suffered a serious security issue for the second time this year after a widely-used VPN service was compromised for five hours. MyEtherWallet (MEW) is used to access crypto wallets and send and receive tokens to/from other wallets. Today, it warned that users of its service who utilize the , a free VPN which plugs into browsers and claims nearly 50 million users, may have been caught up in a malicious attack to steal crypto. Regulars users of MEW were not impacted by the breach because the MEW service itself wasn’t compromised. The company said that Hola was compromised for a period of five hours, during which time any Hola users who navigated to MEW and accessed their wallet with the VPN switched on may have been affected. MEW is recommending anyone who used the site and VPN in the last 24 hours to transfer their tokens to a new wallet… assuming that they still have access to them. The incident is a good reminder of why it is better to pay for a VPN service rather than use a free one. Back in 2015, for paying clients using the computing power of its users so the writing has been on the wall. MEW pointed TechCrunch to statements on Twitter when asked for comment on the incident. The company said the attack “appeared to be a Russian-based IP address.” “The safety and security of MEW users is our priority. We’d like to remind our users that we do not hold their personal data, including passwords so they can be assured that the hackers would not get their hands on that information if they have not interacted with the Hola chrome extension in the past day,” MEW added. We contacted Hola for comment but had not heard back from the company at the time of writing. We received a report that suggest Hola chrome extension was hacked for approximately 5 hrs and the attack was logging your activity on MEW. — MyEtherWallet.com (@myetherwallet) It isn’t yet clear how many users were hit, but the situation recalls when MEW was affected by a DNS attack that saw at least $365,000 of crypto stolen from users. MEW is one of the most popular wallet services on the internet, but other options include — — and , which is run by . |
Grab co-founder says Southeast Asia still has plenty of competition despite Uber’s exit | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | Grab may have bought itself a dominant position in Southeast Asia through , but the company still believes there’s competition in the ride-hailing space despite what consumers may feel. But Grab customers aren’t alone in feeling that the Grab-Uber deal is detrimental, that the tie-up is hurting consumers and that a lack of competition will reduce innovation. The watchdog is in the process of an investigation into the deal which could see it dish out fines for Uber and Grab, or potentially unwind the deal in Singapore altogether. Despite that threat looming, Grab co-founder Hooi Ling Tan told an audience at that the market, and ride-hailing more generally, remains competitive in Southeast Asia despite Uber’s exit. “There’s still a lot of existing competition, we don’t foresee it ending ever.. and to be honest we don’t want it to because we continue to learn from them,” Tan said. “We continue to learn from alternative players who take alternative strategies [and] operational tactics.” Go-Jek, the billion-dollar firm that dominates Indonesia and is plotting a regional expansion to fill Uber’s void, may be the most obvious rival, but Tan said that Grab is competing with more basic forces. “From day one, our primary competitor has never been other ride-hailing apps, it’s actually been what [Grab CEO Anthony Tan] calls the hand — the hand that waves down a taxi on the side of the road,” Tan, who is not related to the Grab CEO, said. “That market is huge, [and it is something] we’re trying to provide an alternative service to because it isn’t exactly efficient as is.” 10 July 2018; Tan Hooi Ling, left, Co-Founder, Grab, and Kara Swisher, Executive Editor, Recode, on Centre Stage during day one of RISE 2018 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Hong Kong. Photo by Stephen McCarthy / RISE via Sportsfile CCCS, the Singaporean watchdog, doesn’t agree, however. Last week it expressed concern that no other taxi apps rival Grab and that a prohibitive barrier of cost and network effects prevents new entrants from competing squarely. A lack of competition has already led to Grab raising prices, it argued, although Grab has denied doing so. Tan didn’t comment directly on the regulator’s comments, but she did say at a subsequent press briefing that regulating ride-hailing is a tricky process. “We’re all trying to figure out what’s the right way to balance the needs of the consumer and need to create an environment that’s supportive of innovation,” she said. “Together we’re trying to figure things out, we make mistakes together but are 100 percent combined in terms of our intent.” An entity with which Grab is more unexpectedly combined with is Uber, and Tan’s comments certainly paint the relationship between the once-sworn enemies as a very pally one. “The partnership makes a tonne of sense to us because we saw [Uber] as really true potential partners,” Tan said. “For example some of the things that they’ve been helping us a lot on… they have Uber Eats in Southeast Asia, which we didn’t have, and since we’ve helped take over their operations we’ve helped them expand it from two countries to six countries right now with a bunch more growth expansion plans. “They’ve also had some of the best technology know-how, whether it’s mapping or just basic scaling infrastructure, those are some of the other things we’ve continued learned from them,” she added. Tan said that Uber and Grab are educating each other on how their respective businesses are developing, and on that note . , but it will take some imagining for the ride-hailing giant to adopt non-transportation services like Grab’s push into payment and financial services. But then that’s entirely the point of its Southeast Asia exit. It’s |
After Uber buyout, Grab aims to go beyond rides to become Southeast Asia’s one-stop app | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | Grab is shrugging off the threat that after the ride-hailing firm announced a new strategy to become Southeast Asia’s one-stop “super app.” it may levy a fine or unwind the Uber-Grab deal but today Singapore-based Grab announced a push to beyond merely offering rides in Southeast Asia, a region of more than 600 million consumers. Grab will now allow third parties to become a part of its service, which claims over 100 million downloads to date. ‘Grab Platform’ — as the initiative is called — allows partner companies to tap Grab’s scale to reach new customers and utilize other services. The first to sign up is grocery delivery company HappyFresh, which has developed a version of its service that’s integrated into the Grab app. HappyFresh, , will enjoy Grab’s distribution and the opportunity to tap into Grab’s fleet and its GrabPay payment service. Grab declined to provide financial details of the partnership. Grab co-founder Hooi Ling Tan said that Grab has plans to introduce APIs and, in time, make partner sign-up “significantly more self-serving so that even SMEs can leverage so the same assets that some of our larger partners have.” Aside from related partner services, Grab is also bringing news, games and other content to its app, which is getting a design facelift to reflect the change. In the past, Grab’s app had opened to a ride-booking screen, but now it will load a list of services and content to reflect a more diverse set of options. There’s actually nothing new there. That approach is very much similar to Go-Jek, and first pioneered the concept of on-demand services in Southeast Asia. The Grab refresh also takes cues from China’s Meituan, and , and blockbuster Chinese apps WeChat from Tencent and Alipay. Grab’s new app design — “we are not longer just transport” — looks an awful lot like Go-Jek’s with many more services than rides — Jon Russell (@jonrussell) “All of this is aimed to help our consumer experience become Southeast Asia’s everyday super app,” Tan said at a press event at . — a deal that represents the largest ride-sharing investment from an automaker — and Tan hinted that the company could be profitable. “We are already profitable in some of our markets and especially the more mature ones [and] we are in a position to continue investing into growth,” Tan explained. There’s a “strong path to profitability but we’ve made an active decision to continue growing because we know that there’s so much potential there.” Grab said last month that it is on course to reach $1 billion in revenue for 2018, and Tan added that GMV has jumped by nine-fold over the past 12 months. While Tan declined to discuss profit or loss figures, she did say that Grab has now crossed two billion rides having . |
Trump’s Supreme Court nominee opposes net neutrality, supports NSA bulk collection | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | President Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee will face more scrutiny for his ideological leanings around issues like abortion than his thoughts on tech, but we do know a bit about the latter. On Monday, to fill the seat that opened when Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in late June. A list of Trump’s potential picks circulated previously and Kavanaugh was believed to be a frontrunner. Kavanaugh, who previously clerked for Kennedy, was appointed to the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2003 by former president George W. Bush and eventually confirmed in 2006. As future digital privacy cases wend their way toward the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh’s stated views on the NSA’s spying program could prove relevant. In 2015, Kavanaugh of the NSA’s warrantless bulk collection of phone metadata, issuing strong support for the controversial practice and categorizing its collection as a “special need” that eclipses personal privacy concerns. In : The Government’s collection of telephony metadata from a third party such as a telecommunications service provider is not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment, at least under the Supreme Court’s decision in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979). … Even if the bulk collection of telephony metadata constitutes a search, cf. United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945, 954-57 (2012) (Sotomayor, J., concurring), the Fourth Amendment does not bar all searches and seizures. It bars only unreasonable searches and seizures. And the Government’s metadata collection program readily qualifies as reasonable under the Supreme Court’s case law. The Fourth Amendment allows governmental searches and seizures without individualized suspicion when the Government demonstrates a sufficient “special need” – that is, a need beyond the normal need for law enforcement – that outweighs the intrusion on individual liberty. In short, the Government’s program fits comfortably within the Supreme Court precedents applying the special needs doctrine. Kavanaugh is also an opponent of net neutrality. In a , he argued that rules supporting net neutrality impinges on an internet service provider’s “editorial discretion” and therefore violates its First Amendment rights: In short, although the briefs and commentary about the net neutrality issue are voluminous, the legal analysis is straightforward: If the Supreme Court’s major rules doctrine means what it says, then the net neutrality rule is unlawful because Congress has not clearly authorized the FCC to issue this major rule. And if the Supreme Court’s Turner Broadcasting decisions mean what they say, then the net neutrality rule is unlawful because the rule impermissibly infringes on the Internet service providers’ editorial discretion. To state the obvious, the Supreme Court could always refine or reconsider the major rules doctrine or its decisions in the Turner Broadcasting cases. But as a lower court, we do not possess that power. Our job is to apply Supreme Court precedent as it stands. For those two alternative and independent reasons, the FCC’s net neutrality regulation is unlawful and must be vacated. Kavanaugh, a reliable conservative, also opposes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and argued in 2018 that the bureau’s existence is an unconstitutional threat to executive power. In theory, the CFPB advocates for consumer interests in incidents like the Equifax hack, but CFPB supporters argue that the agency at the hands of its acting director, Trump appointee Mick Mulvaney. Broadly, Kavanaugh looks like a friend to big business and an enemy to digital privacy advocates, though we’ll likely learn more of his record as he moves forward in the confirmation process. |
YouTube is fighting fake news with $25M to promote journalism and more context in search results | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | YouTube today to stem the spread of conspiracy theory videos and fake news on its platform, including inserting context from trustworthy sources into search results about hot topics. In a blog post, YouTube also said it is working with the Google News Initiative, which was . This includes earmarking $25 million in Google News Initiative funding to create a working group of news organizations and media experts that will advise YouTube on new features. Members already include Vox Media, Brazilian radio station Jovem Pan and India Today, with more to be added in the coming weeks. Part of the funding will also be used for grants that will be awarded to news organizations through an application process to help them train staff and build their video production capabilities. The money will also be used on expanding the YouTube team that works with news publishers. YouTube has been about historical topics including the moon landing and news events like the 2016 presidential election and Sandy Hook and Parkland, Florida school shootings, with its search and recommendation algorithms cited in particular for pushing problematic videos to more viewers. In March, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki promised new features to make YouTube a more reliable source of information , stating that “this has been a year of fake news and misinformation and we have seen the importance of delivering information to our users accurately.” Similar to Facebook’s attempts to fight fake news by , YouTube said it is will add context to search results about breaking news topics to help people quickly see if a video is from a trustworthy source. Search results will also include linked previews of news articles, since journalists usually write about breaking news first before producing more labor-intensive videos, and reminders that information about developing events can change quickly. To combat conspiracy theories, YouTube will start displaying information from third-party sources like Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica next to videos about “well-established historical and scientific topics that have often been subject to misinformation,” including the Oklahoma City bombing and the moon landing. Other new features include ones that will surface local news in the YouTube app for TV screens across 25 American media markets and the addition of Top News and Breaking News shelves (the row of videos users see at the top of their screens) that will highlight videos from news organizations on YouTube’s homepage. The Top News and Breaking News features are already available in 17 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, Japan, India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria. YouTube says that number will double in the coming months. The platform is also supporting MediaWise, a non-profit led by the Poynter Institute to help teens develop media and online awareness, and working with six YouTube Creators popular with young audiences, including John Green, Ingrid Nilsen and Mark Watson “to bring awareness to digital literacy and help educate teens.” |
Canon and Nikon are reportedly both planning full-frame mirrorless cameras this year | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | It’s going to be an exciting year for photographers — finally — as both Canon and Nikon are reportedly planning full-frame mirrorless cameras for debut before the end of 2018. It’s good news for consumers, because it means that both companies have been investing heavily in the next phase of digital photography, and that competition in the mirrorless world is about to heat up. Photography is a difficult space right now because smartphones have been eating up the low-end and increasingly the mid-range market. Point-and-shoots are effectively extinct, and DSLRs are reserved for serious shooters — though those occupying the middle ground, such as Fujifilm with its lively X series and Olympus with its PENs and OM-Ds, have been prospering modestly. , which basically do away with the bulky mechanical bits of a single-lens reflex camera but have virtually no drawbacks from their absence, allow for a more compact camera that still seriously outperforms phones. They seem quite clearly to be a big part of the future of photography, which is why every company has been investing heavily into the technology. Early results weren’t great, and it was clear that Canon and Nikon in particular have had their priorities divided: DSLR sales have been dropping, but flagship full-frame (that is, with sensors the size of 35mm film) DSLRs still represented the best of the camera world, embraced especially by professionals. But inroads have been made, especially by Sony and Fujifilm, into even that professional space. The Alpha and X-Pro series have shown that mirrorless cameras can perform at least as well as DSLRs, and boy are they easier to carry around. So, faced with either innovating and cannibalizing their own sales, or allowing competitors to eat their lunch, Canon and Nikon have chosen to do the former… after a couple of years of the latter, anyway. We’ve seen the early results from Canon in the form of the mid-range M50, but it seems Nikon has kept theirs under wraps. and report that the companies both plan to sell full-frame mirrorless cameras by the end of the year — in Nikon’s case maybe even by the end of the month. Going full-frame means several things: That last point is likely the scariest for them. These are companies that have been making SLR cameras for the better part of a century — it’s not just part of their core competency but key to their identity as camera makers. This is essentially a point of no return for them. Sure, SLRs will stick around for a while longer, but sooner or later the burden of improving and manufacturing them as sales decline and mirrorless systems take over will prove too much. What about the cameras themselves? There are supposedly two from each company. Nikon’s have lots of rumored details, the most important of which are that there will be one high and one low megapixel model, in-body stabilization (allows for smaller lenses), a new lens mount and naturally an electronic viewfinder. Less is known (or rumored anyhow) about the Canons, but they will likely share many of these characteristics. Don’t expect a lower cost to accompany this shift. These cameras will likely cost in the $2,500-$4,000 range, just like the SLRs they’re replacing. This is also a chance to really go to town on the features and shooting experience; both companies need to make a big impression, not just with the customers they’ve lost to rival systems but to their own loyal shooters. So there may be other major changes, such as to the interface, layout and so on. Expect lots of digital integration like wireless tethering as well — better than the junk they’ve been foisting on us for the last few years. Will this reverse the tide of smartphones taking over the photography world? No, but it’s heartening to see these rather inertia-bound companies finally embrace the future. I love SLRs, and I plan to shoot on them forever in one way or another, but as an occasional serious photographer I’ll be glad to give these new systems a try. I’ve asked both companies about the rumors, but I doubt they’ll comment. On the other hand, if the rumors are true, we won’t have long to wait before they turn into facts. |
This is Microsoft’s $399 Surface Go | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | null |
Facebook was never ephemeral, and now its Stories won’t have to be | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | Before Snapchat made social media about just today, Facebook made it about forever. The 2011 “Timeline” redesign of the profile and keyword search unlocked your past, encouraging you to curate colorful posts about your life’s top moments. That was actually an inspiration for Snapchat, as its CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in its IPO announcement that “We learned that creativity can be suppressed by the fear of permanence.” Now Facebook is finding a middle ground by optionally unlocking the history of your Stories that otherwise disappear after 24 hours. Facebook will soon begin testing Stories Highlights, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Similar to , it will let you pick your favorite expired photos and videos, compile them into themed collections with titles and cover images and display them on your profile. The change further differentiates Facebook Stories from the Snapchat Stories feature it copied. It’s smart for Facebook, because highly compelling content was disintegrating each day, dragging potential ad views to the grave with it. And for its 150 million daily users, it could make the time we spend obsessing over social media Stories a wiser investment. If you’re going to interrupt special moments to capture them with your phone, the best ones should still pay dividends of self-expression and community connection beyond a day later. Facebook Stories Highlights was first spotted by frequent TechCrunch tipster , who specializes in generating screenshots of unreleased features out of the APK files of Android apps. TechCrunch inquired about the feature, and a Facebook spokesperson provided this statement: “People have told us they want a way to highlight and save the Stories that matter most to them. We’ll soon start testing highlights on Facebook – a way to choose Stories to stay on your profile, making it easier to express who you are through memories.” These Highlights will appear on a horizontal scroll bar on your profile, and you’ll be able to see how many people viewed them just like with your Stories. They’ll default to being viewable by all your friends, but you can also restrict Highlights to certain people or make them public. The latter could be useful for public figures trying to build an audience, or anyone who thinks their identity is better revealed through their commentary on the world that Stories’ creative tools offer, opposed to some canned selfies and profile pics. Facebook paved the way for Highlights by in May. This automatically backs up your Stories privately to your profile so you don’t have to keep the saved versions on your phone, wasting storage space. That Archive is the basis for being able to choose dead Stories to show off in your Highlights. Together, they’ll encourage users to shoot silly, off-the-cuff content without that “fear of permanence,” but instead with the opportunity. If you want to spend a half hour decorating a Facebook Story with stickers and drawing and captions and augmented reality, you know it won’t be in vain. Facebook Stories constantly adds new features, like this Blur effect I spotted today While many relentlessly criticize Facebook for stealing the Stories from Snapchat, its rapid iteration and innovation on the format means the two companies’ versions are sharply diverging. Snapchat still lacks a Highlights-esque feature despite launching its Archive-style Memories back in July 2016. Instead of enhancing the core Stories product that made the app a teen phenomenon, it’s concentrated on Maps, gaming, Search, professional Discover content, and a disastrously needless redesign. Facebook’s family of apps seized on the stagnation of Snapchat Stories and its neglect of the international market. It copied whatever was working while developing new features like Instagram’s Superzoom and Focus portrait mode, the ability to reshare public feed posts as quote tweet-style Stories and the addition of licensed music soundtracks. While writing this article, I even discovered a new Facebook Stories option called Blur that lets you shroud a moving subject with a dream-like haze, as demonstrated with my dumb face here. The relentless drive to add new options and smooth out performance has paid off. Now Instagram has 400 million daily Stories users, WhatsApp has 450 million and Facebook has 150 million, while Snapchat’s whole app has just 191 million. As Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom admitted about Snapchat, Still, it hasn’t had a megahit since Stories and AR puppy masks. The company’s zeal for inventing new ways to socialize is admirable, though not always a sound business strategy. At first, the Stories war was a race, to copy functionality and invade new markets. Instagram and now Facebook making ephemerality optional for their Stories signals a second phase of the war. The core idea of broadcasting content that disappears after a day has become commoditized and institutionalized. Now the winner will be declared not as who invented Stories, but who perfected them. |
Overwatch ‘Pink Mercy’ sale raises $12M for breast cancer research | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | It can be hard sometimes to grok the scale of the gaming community, but the occasional charity event not only demonstrates the hugeness of the industry but also its diversity and willingness to shell out for a good cause. Today Blizzard announced that an Overwatch charity campaign for breast cancer research in just two weeks. Overwatch is an extremely popular team-based shooter game that has made an impression not just with its solid gameplay, but its striking and inclusive character design. This sensitivity to the ever-widening demographics of gaming led them to conceive of this charity campaign back in May. Players could for a limited time purchase a special “skin,” or 3D model, for the character Mercy — she’s the most powerful healer in the lineup, so the choice makes sense, even though the statuesque blonde isn’t exactly their most interesting character work. (A Pink Genji would probably look cool, but it would probably just make more people play him — a regrettable outcome.) Special skins are highly sought-after, and while many can be obtained through in-game loot boxes, they can also be purchased. In this case, the price was set at $15, rather high for a skin but clearly that didn’t deter players, who shelled out by the thousands for both it and related t-shirts. I asked for a breakdown, but a little napkin math gives a basic idea of the volume. The press release announcing the $12.7 million number says “thousands” of t-shirts were sold at $30 apiece; usually if it’s 10,000 or more they say so, so we’ll just use 10K as our estimate. That makes $300K from shirts, so the remaining $12.4 million means somewhere north of 820,000 people paid for the Pink Mercy skin. Think about that! In two weeks more than three quarters of a million people paid $15 each for a virtual item. Pretty great. It’s all going to the , by the way. They got a big novelty check: And this is by no means the only big gaming charity event. regularly raises millions, and Penny Arcade’s got so big that it had to be spun off as its own thing. It just recently funding pediatric hospital equipment and staff, by the way. This event went well enough that we can probably expect more in the future for other causes — I’ve asked Blizzard for any details on that front and will update if I hear back. |
Retail startup Bulletin is giving brands new tools to manage their in-store presence | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | If you visited a store, or bought products off its website, COO Ali Kriegsman said you might “pigeonhole” the company as a “feminist apparel brand” — a place to buy T-shirts and accessories with fun, provocative political slogans. And yes, that is part of what draws consumers. But Kriegsman and her co-founder Alana Branston have also , one where brands essentially rent out shelf space in Bulletin stores. So brands that may have only sold online can experiment with physical sales, while shoppers can purchase from a curated, constantly refreshed selection of brands and products. “We’re building this more feminine retail company, but we are also part real estate company, and now, we are also part technology company,” Kriegsman said. The “now” that she’s referring to is the launch of Bulletin Omni, a software platform that allows brands to apply to sell with Bulletin, manage their inventory and track their sales. Bulletin has actually been working on something like this since , but according to Maggie Braine, the company’s director of product and brand experience, Omni only just reached the point where the company is ready to roll it out to all of the 150 brands it works with. She said that without it, the company has mostly relied on “emails, phone calls, and a very, very large Google Doc” to manage the process. Braine gave me a quick walk-through of Omni, showing me how a brand could, with just a few clicks, add a new product to its offerings in a given store, confirm once that product has actually arrived and then see how each product is selling in each store. That’s “unheard of” in traditional retail, she said, where “there’s very little transparency” once goods are purchased by retailers. With Omni, Braine said the goal is to give brands the same kinds of data around physical purchases that they have access to when they promote and sell their products through online channels. She also said the team plans to introduce ways for in-store staff to offer feedback to the brands — like whether a product isn’t selling because it’s too expensive. Kriegsman said that if the software does well enough, she could imagine Bulletin becoming “a retail software destination,” where other companies buy the software to manage non-Bulletin stores. Either way, she predicted that Omni will allow Bulletin itself to expand more quickly. The company currently has three New York City stores — one in SoHo, one in Williamsburg and a recently opened location near Union Square — with plans to open in additional cities later this year. |
Indianapolis vice cop says SESTA/FOSTA closure of Backpage has ‘blinded’ investigators | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | Online sex market Backpage was in April following new regulation intended to stem human trafficking, but the results haven’t been entirely positive. for catching pimps and others in the sex trade shows how the closure has taken away a valuable tool for keeping tabs on the unsavory but ineradicable industry. Backpage, where prostitutes would list themselves and attract customers, let the whole business take place rather in gig economy fashion rather than out on the street. As controversial as the sex industry is, it’s not going anywhere, and at the very least most of us can agree that it should at least be conducted as safely as possible. And Backpage did at least provide some level of safety and regularity to it, even if it also contributed to worse issues . “We used to look at Backpage as a trap for human traffickers and pimps,” explained undercover vice investigator John Daggy to RTV6. “We would subpoena the ads and it would tell a lot of the story. Now, since it has gone down, we’re getting late reports of them and we don’t have much to go by.” As evidence, in 2017 Indianapolis cops charged four pimps using Backpage data, and dozens of prostitution cases used it as well. But this year only one pimp has been charged, caught via old-school undercover work: a cop posing as a prospective prostitute. That may be what the movies present vice investigations as, but the truth is that kind of work is extremely dangerous, not to mention time-consuming and difficult. Having a nice digital trail to follow or cite in court was clearly a godsend. As critics noted earlier this year, SESTA/FOSTA has good intentions but a seriously flawed execution resulting in numerous unforeseen consequences. This decline in police effectiveness in vice investigations is one of them. “I get the reasoning behind it, and the ethics behind it,” Daggy said. “However, it has blinded us.” , as it has context from others and is part of a series on the sex trade in the city. |
Instacart hires its first chief communications officer, Dani Dudeck | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | , the grocery delivery platform valued at , has today announced that it has hired its first chief communications officer in Dani Dudeck. Dudeck has been in the communications world for the past 15 years, serving as VP of Global Communications at MySpace for four years and moving to Zynga as CCO in 2010. At Zynga, Dudeck oversaw corporate and consumer reputation of the brand before and after its IPO, helping the company through both tremendous periods of growth and a rapidly changing mobile gaming landscape. Dudeck joins Instacart at an equally interesting time for the company. Though Instacart is showing no signs of slowing down — the company recently raised $200 million in funding — the industry as a whole is seeing growing interest from incumbents and behemoth tech companies alike. Amazon last year acquired Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion, signaling the e-commerce giant’s intention to get into the grocery business. Plus, Target in December. Meanwhile, Walmart has partnered with DoorDash and Postmates for grocery delivery after a . In other words, the industry is at a tipping point. Instacart not only needs to out-maneuver the increasingly competitive space, but continue to tell its story to both consumers and potential shoppers/employees alike. Dudeck plans to hit the ground running after having been an Instacart customer since 2013. Here’s what Dudeck had to say in a prepared statement: We’ve been an Instacart family for years and as a mom it’s been a game changer for me. Our home is powered by Instacart because over the years, I saw how the products helped me better manage our household rhythm. Whether I’m doing a fast diaper delivery or fresh groceries for our weekly shopping, I love feeling like I can be in two places at once while getting to spend more time with my family. After getting to know the internal team, I was blown away by the strength of Instacart’s business and the unique culture they’ve created. By building on that success, we have a compelling opportunity to grow Instacart into a beloved, household name and turn Express into a must-have membership for families and busy people everywhere. I’m excited to join the management team and partner with them to accelerate their ambitious plans for future growth. |
New Microsoft Surface hardware is probably arriving tomorrow | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | Where will Surface go next? — Microsoft Surface (@surface) |
TrustToken opens its dollar-backed cryptocurrency to accredited investors | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | Pitching a dollar-pegged token that offers cryptocurrency speculators a way to move their investments across volatile exchanges, (the from ) is now looking for public investments from accredited investors on . The company’s first token is TrueUSD, a stablecoin that is redeemable one-to-one for U.S. dollars. In its first four months of trading, the speculative investors that are looking for some sort of island of security have boosted the coin’s market price to more than $85 million. There’s a $61 million hard cap on the token allocated over three tranches at $0.12, $0.14 and $0.16 per trust token. Other investors in TrustToken’s initial $20 million pre-sale include BlockTower Capital, Danhua Capital, GGV Capital, Jump Capital and other undisclosed investors. As it expands its investor base to include accredited investors, the TrueUSD currency is also expanding its reach, with an agreement between the company and HitBTC to list the stablecoin as a quote currency. The TrueUSD coin can be used as a stalking horse to secure investments in Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Monero, 0x and NEO, according to a statement from the company. Every TrueUSD token is redeemable one-for-one with U.S. dollars, which the company’s founders think should open the door for more institutional investment (or speculation depending on your point of view) into the market. Using TrueUSD’s system, dollars are held in the escrow accounts of multiple trust companies rather than in a bank account. Those accounts are verified by an independent third party that on the amount of dollars held in collateral. A buyer of TrueUSD needs to pass a know your customer and AML check and then can send dollars to one of TrueUSD’s trust company partners. Once that transaction is verified, the TrueUSD smart contract issues tokens on a one-to-one ratio before sending the tokens to a buyer. The company uses , a Las Vegas-based company for its financial services. Once tokens are delivered to a wallet, those tokens can be transferred or used as payment to buy other cryptocurrencies. “The users of this space are really the traders,” says TrustToken co-founder and chief executive Danny An. “They want a native crypto asset that’s stable. They want to be able to hedge against volatility.” An said the company does have a broader vision than just helping traders secure speculative assets so they can come up with even more arcane financial instruments. “For the entire crypto-economy to work, a lot of people believe that a stablecoin or multiple stablecoins need to be created,” An said. TrustToken makes money whenever its coins are minted or burned, An says. “Whenever USD is involved we take a small cut,” which is 10 basis points per transaction, he said. Ultimately, TrustToken (like other alt-coins) wants to tokenize all real-world assets. And one of the most attractive markets for An and his co-founders is real estate. “There is $200 trillion dollars of real estate that is offline,” said An. Tokenizing those assets would create more wealth in the world overall, he said. “Assets that are not liquid are not as valuable as assets that are liquid,” An said. It’s a far cry from the work that An and his co-founders Rafael Cosman and Stephen Kade were doing at Kernel — a company that was developing technologies to create neural interfaces between humans and machines. |
Meet TechCrunch in Tunis, Cairo, Dubai and Beirut this month | Samantha Stein | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | just announced our first-ever taking place in Beirut, Lebanon in October. We’re hitting the road to meet with regional early-stage startups, investors and entrepreneurs in July. Sign up below. Startups and investors can meet the TechCrunch team and learn more about program. Founders will learn how to for Startup Battlefield with a solid application, and investors will learn how to early-stage companies in their portfolio. We’ll be visiting Tunis, Cairo, Dubai and Beirut to meet with founders, investors, angels and established entrepreneurs across the Middle East and North Africa. is TechCrunch’s renowned startup launch competition. The Startup Battlefield alumni community comprises almost 765 companies that have raised more than $8 billion USD and produced over 105 successful exits and IPOs. Applications are now open, and founders can here until July 31. You can also refer founders here and speakers or judges . For questions, please email battlefield@techcrunch.com Hold the dates in your calendar below, and sign up to get updates as RSVP links go live. July 12th, Thursday
Host:
Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm
July 17th, Tuesday
Host:
Time: 6:00 to 8:30pm
July 18th, Wednesday
Host:
Time: 6:00 to 8:30pm
July 24th, Tuesday
Host: In5
Time: 10:00 – 12:00
July 26th, Thursday
Host:
Time: 5:30 to 7:30pm
|
PlayVS CEO Delane Parnell to talk high school esports at Disrupt SF | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | The gaming world is evolving at a rapid clip. No longer is the idea of the lonely gamer a reality. Twitch and Discord have brought gamers together and given everyone the opportunity to see just how talented some of these young players are. Meanwhile, publishers and esports organizations have built out an infrastructure. But there is plenty left to do, and founder and CEO Delane Parnell is well aware of this. We’re amped to announce that Parnell is joining us at in September to talk about how high school esports could pave the way for even more growth in this industry. PlayVS is a startup that has partnered with the NFHS to bring esports to the high school level, providing infrastructure around scheduling, refs, rules and state tournaments. Not only does this allow high school students to get extracurricular experience doing what they love (playing video games), but it offers a new way for esports orgs and colleges to look at the bright young talent coming up through the ranks. PlayVS after securing its partnership with the NFHS. Through this partnership, the company will be able to bring organized esports to more than 18 states and approximately 5 million students across 5,000 high schools. The company has since , and the inaugural season begins in October of this year. We’re absolutely thrilled to get the chance to sit down with Parnell to discuss the launch of the platform and hear about how high school esports could set the tone for the industry as a whole. Passes to Disrupt SF are available . |
Snapchat code reveals team-up with Amazon for ‘Camera Search’ | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | a visual product search feature, codenamed “Eagle,” that delivers users to Amazon’s listings. Buried inside the code of Snapchat’s Android app is an unreleased “Visual Search” feature where you “Press and hold to identify an object, song, barcode, and more! This works by sending data to Amazon, Shazam, and other partners.” Once an object or barcode has been scanned you can “See all results at Amazon.” [Update: Snap confirmed our scoop by announcing the launch of on September 24th.] Visual product search could make Snapchat’s camera a more general purpose tool for seeing and navigating the world, rather than just a social media maker. It could differentiate Snapchat from Instagram, whose clone of Snapchat Stories now has more than twice the users and a six times faster gro wth rate than the original. And if Snapchat has worked out an affiliate referrals deal with Amazon, it could open a new revenue stream. That’s something Snap Inc. direly needs after posting a $385 million loss last quarter and missing revenue estimates by $14 million. TechCrunch was tipped off to the hidden Snapchat code by app researcher . His tips have previously led to TechCrunch scoops about Instagram’s video calling, soundtracks, Focus portrait mode and QR Nametags features that were all later officially launched. Amazon didn’t respond to a press inquiry before publishing time, and it’s unclear if its actively involved in the development of Snapchat visual search or just a destination for its results. Snap already sells its on Amazon — the only place beyond its own site. Snap Inc. gave TechCrunch a “no comment,” about visual search but the company’s code tells the story. Snapchat first dabbled in understanding the world around you with its back in 2016 that lets you tap and hold to identify a song playing nearby, check it out on Shazam, send it to a friend or follow the artist on Snapchat. Project Eagle builds on this audio search feature to offer visual search through a similar interface and set of partnerships. The ability to identify purchaseable objects or scan barcodes could turn Snapchat, which some view as a teen toy, into more of a utility. Snapchat’s code doesn’t explain exactly how the Project Eagle feature will work, but in the newest version of Snapchat it was renamed as “Camera Search.” If you remember, Snap used another animal name, “Cheetah”, as the secret word for its big redesign. The app’s code lists the ability to surface “sellers” and “reviews,” “Copy URL” of a product and “Share” or “Send Product” to friends — likely via Snap messages or Snapchat Stories. In characteristic cool kid teenspeak, an error message for “product not found” reads “Bummer, we didn’t catch that!” Eagle’s visual search may be connected to which debuted late last year and pull up business contact info, restaurant reservations, movie tickets, Ubers or Lyfts and more. Surfacing within Snapchat a context card of details about ownable objects might be the first step to getting users to buy them… and advertisers to pay Snap to promote them. It’s easy to imagine context cards being accessible for products tagged in Snap Ads as well as scanned through visual search. And . Snapchat’s Camera Search could become a direct competitor for , which identifies objects and brings up related content. Pinterest has evolved the product, embedding it inside the apps of retailers like Target. Beyond shopping, Camera Search could let Snapchat users find Stories that contain the same object they’re snapping. Being able to recognize what you’re seeing makes Snapchat more fun, but it’s also a new way of navigating reality. In mid-2017 that map the surfaces of your surroundings so you can place 3D animated objects like its Dancing Hotdog mascot alongside real people in real places. Snapchat also released a last year that compiles Stories of user-submitted Snaps featuring your chosen keyword, like videos with “puppies” or “fireworks,” even if the captions don’t mention them. Pinterest’s Lens visual search feature Snapchat was so interested in visual search that this year, it reportedly held early-stage acquisition talks with machine vision startup Blippar. The talks fell through with the U.K. augmented reality company that has raised at least $99 million for its own visual search feature, but which recently began to implode due to low usage and financing trouble. Snap Inc. might have been hoping to jumpstart its Camera Search efforts. Snap calls itself a camera company, after all. But with the weak sales of its mediocre v1 Spectacles, the well-reviewed v2 failing to break into the cultural zeitgeist and no other hardware products on the market, Snap may need to redefine what exactly that tag line means. Visual search could frame Snapchat as more of a sensor than just a camera. With its popular use for rapid-fire selfie messaging, it’s already the lens through which some teens see the world. Soon, Snap could be ready to train its eagle eye on purchases, not just faces. |
BigClapper does away with tedious clapping, happiness | John Biggs | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a robot clapping over a human face, forever,” wrote George Orwell, and his dire prediction has finally come to pass. This product – a year old device that I have never seen before but now love – is and it is basically an orb with a funny face and big white hands. When you set it up in a location it will yell and clap endlessly, a sort of robotic tummler that can pick up your spirits while it drains your will to live. The product, found by , is wildly manic. BigClapper can be used at offices! In front of stores! At parties! It can clap as people walk by, encouraging them to come into your shop! It is red! It has hands! While it’s not yet Alexa compatible, the BigClapper looks to be a model of future human-computer interaction. After all what is more pure than a big red face howling at you on the street while it claps maniacally in an effort to sell you more products. It’s a literal symbol of true capitalism in this modern era. I, for one, welcome our clapping robot overlords. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Twt1FxHKvc] |
Topbox raises $5M for its customer experience analytics service | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | helps businesses understand how their customers experience their products and where they run into issues by analyzing voice and text chats to surveys, social media posts and online reviews. Today, the company announced it has raised a $5 million funding round led by Telescope Partners, with participation from Cascade Angels, Flyover Capital and the Maryland Venture Fund. Topbox CEO Chris Tranquill told me he first experienced the problem he’s trying to solve when he was running call centers with thousands of agents. All of the companies that contracted his services faced the same problem: understanding the friction points their customers were experiencing. “We always had this vision that being able to really understand those friction points with deep context — that’s what the key is — but really getting to that granular level of detail so that you can have that context to support a decision,” Tranquill said. Say you want to understand what issues customers are having with a new shoe. Ideally, Topbox will aggregate all of the data across all channels about that shoe and help the company understand who the wearers are and what issues they are experiencing. Theoretically, companies could do this on their own, but all of this data exists in various silos and combining those disparate data sets is a major challenge. Topbox uses its technology to ingest this data (and it’s pretty agnostic about where it comes from) and then runs it through its classification models. Indeed, as Tranquill told me, it’s this model that’s the secret sauce behind the company’s ability to classify data. It’s not just about getting a high-level overview of your customer’s reactions, though. Tranquill stressed that users can go deeper. “The big thing for us is granularity,” he told me. “I can find high-level data all day long, but can I find the root cause?” With a few clicks, any Topbox user should be able to understand what issues their customers are facing, no matter whether that’s a product issue, a shipping problem or something else. Current Topbox customers include the likes of Orvis, Bed Bath & Beyond and Western Union. With this new round, Topbox expects to build out its go-to-market strategy and continue to develop its product. Currently, the company focuses on a number of verticals where its model works best (retailers, mobile telcos, cable and broadband providers and healthcare companies), and Tranquill tells me this is where it will focus its energy for now. The company will also soon launch a new user interface and bring on more machine learning experts as it looks to provide its users deeper insights into their data. |
Golden Gate Ventures hits first close on new $100M fund for Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | One of the fascinating things about watching an emerging startup ecosystem is that it isn’t just companies that are scaling, the very VC firms that feed them are growing, too. That’s perhaps best embodied by , a Singapore-based firm founded by three Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in 2011 which is about to close a huge new fund for Southeast Asia. Golden Gate started out with a small seed investment fund before in 2015. Now it is in the closes stages of finalizing a new $100 million fund, which has completed a first close of over $65 million in commitments, a source with knowledge of discussions told TechCrunch. in June first showed the firm’s intent to raise $100 million. The source told TechCrunch that a number of LPs from Golden Gate’s previous funds have already signed up, including Naver, while Mistletoe, the firm run by SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son’s brother Taizo, is among the new backers joining. Golden Gate’s existing LP base also includes Singapore sovereign fund Temasek, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and South Korea’s Hanwha. A full close for the fund is expected before the end of the year. The firm has made over 40 investments to date and its portfolio includes mobile classifieds service Carousell, automotive sales startup Carro, real estate site 99.co, and payment gateway Omise. TechCrunch understands that the firm’s investment thesis will remain the same with this new fund. , founding partner Vinnie Lauria told us that Golden Gate had found its match at early-stage investing and it will remain lean and nimble like the companies it backs. One significant change internally, however, sees Justin Hall promoted to partner at the fund. He joins Lauria, fellow founding partner Jeffrey Paine, and Michael Lints at partner level. Hall first joined Golden Gate in 2012 as an intern while still a student, before signing on full-time in 2013. His rise through the ranks exemplifies the growth and development within Southeast Asia’s startup scene over that period — it isn’t just limited to startups themselves. The Golden Gate Ventures team circa 2016 — it has since added new members With the advent of unicorns such as ride-sharing firms Grab and Go-Jek, travel startup Traveloka, and e-commerce companies like Tokopedia, Southeast Asia has begun to show potential for homegrown tech companies in a market that includes over 650 million consumers and more than 300 million internet users. The emergence of these companies has spiked investor interest, which provides the capital that is the lifeblood for VCs and their funds. Golden Gate is not the only one raising big. Openspace, , , , and Singapore’s , while last year. Growth potential is leading the charge but at the same time funds are beginning to focus on realizing returns for LPs through exits, which is challenging since there have been few acquisitions of meaningful size or public listings out of Southeast Asia so far. But, for smaller funds, the results are already promising. , which tracks investment money worldwide, shows that Golden Gate’s first fund has already returned a multiple of over 4X, while its second is at 1.3 despite a final close in 2016. Beyond any secondary sales — it is not uncommon for early-stage backers to sell a minority portion of equity as more investment capital pours in — Golden Gate’s exits have included (although not a blockbuster), , and . |
Bird’s electric scooters are going international | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | Electric scooter startup Bird, , is going international. This does not come as a surprise, given that Bird was looking to expand to Europe. Today, Bird is launching a pilot program in Paris to see how the electric scooter service operates in a city with more than two million people. “Paris is very forward-thinking on solving congestion issues and is one of the cities that’s dealing with the most congestion and pollution,” Bird Head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa Patrick Studener told TechCrunch. Bird is also gearing up to deploy some scooters in Tel Aviv, where the company says it’s chatting with Tel Aviv University and some municipalities about making something work in those areas, Studener said. In Tel Aviv, Bird will charge 5 shekels to start and then 50 agorot per minute. As Bird expands to international markets, it’s worth noting that competitor Lime has operated its bikes and scooters outside of the U.S. for quite some time. , Lime brought its bikes to a number of European cities and in June, . Lime also . In Paris, Bird scooters will cost €1 to start followed by €0.15 per minute, which is exactly how much Lime charges. Bird says Paris city officials know the company is planning to deploy about 100 scooters in the city. But this isn’t an official partnership of sorts, Studener said. “In both cities we’ve started conversations at the national and city levels with officials,” Studener said. “Our approach is to be very collaborative. Almost every city that I’m speaking to, their north star is very much aligned with our north star — and that’s reducing car ownership.” Since launching last November in Santa Monica, Calif., Bird hasn’t always had the best relationships with city regulators. Upon deploying some scooters in Santa Monica, . Fast-forward to June, . Studener and the rest of the European team is based in Amsterdam, though, Bird has not yet deployed its scooters in the Dutch city. As head of EMEA, Studener has his eyes on a number of markets, but for this week, he is focused on “going from just being in the U.S. to going internationally. That’s step one.” In response to a question about Africa, Studener said Bird is still evaluating which African markets would be ripe for Bird scooters. He said, “I definitely am keen to get that solution there as well because there is especially a very young and innovative population there that are very quick to adopt new solutions.” |
Four million people are using Apple’s OS betas | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | For the past few years, Apple has made early versions of its operating systems available to those willing to brave the bugs. Through its beta software program, anyone willing to deal with spotty battery life or a crash or three could load up pre-release builds of iOS, macOS, watchOS or tvOS. Ever wonder how many actually take advantage of it? According to , more than four million people are currently running on the betas. Alas, that’s as detailed as he got. He didn’t break down which platforms had the most beta users (though I’d bet iOS or macOS lead the way), nor what percentage of that beta group was developers (accessing the beta to debug their apps before the update) versus consumers (who just want to poke around the new goods early). For reference: As of February of 2018, Apple had 1.3 billion active devices across Apple TV, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Mac. So if each of the users Tim Cook mentioned is running a beta OS on one device, that’s around 0.3 percent of active devices running on a beta. While that percentage might not sound huge, having people happily stress test your software before you officially ship it is a rare strength that few other companies can claim. Still, Apple has had a few rather glaring bugs slip through the cracks — from the annoying but forgettable bug for a few days, to more severe security issues Could Apple be doing more to encourage pre-release bug hunting? |
Apple Pay is finally coming to CVS and 7-Eleven, and will soon expand to Germany | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | Longtime Apple Pay holdout CVS will finally be adding support for Apple’s mobile payments platform this fall, along with 7-Eleven, Apple CEO Tim Cook said this afternoon on the company’s earnings call. The news is particularly notable because CVS was one of the first major retailers to snub Apple Pay, choosing instead to “CVS Pay” back in 2016, following the failure of the retailer-backed Apple Pay rival CurrentC. CVS Pay had become the first mobile payments solution the pharmacy chain adopted, after having purposefully avoided support for Apple Pay or any other rival NFC (tap to pay) technologies at its register. The company believed there was value in offering its own end-to-end solution to customers that combined both payments and loyalty, it . In addition, CVS had earlier backed an , which was developed by the merchant consortium MCX, led by major retailers like Walmart, Best Buy, Rite Aid and others. The QR code-based payments solution was designed to challenge Apple’s potential dominance in mobile payments. Many of the retailers even blocked Apple Pay at their stores in advance of bringing CurrentC to market. However, CurrentC and the technology was . Some of its backers — like Best Buy and Rite Aid — had also relented, by allowing Apple Pay into their stores. But CVS did not. It instead moved forward with its own solution. That it has now decided to also support Apple Pay is a major win for Apple, as is the addition of 7-Eleven to the list of retailers that will soon offer Apple Pay at checkout. The retail expansions weren’t the only big Apple Pay news announced on the call. Cook also said that Apple Pay would launch in Germany — but didn’t offer a timeframe for this launch beyond “later this year.” And he noted that Apple Pay saw more than 1 billion transactions in the third quarter of 2018. That’s triple the number from a year ago, and more mobile transactions than Square and PayPal, he noted. The news follows a new released by Juniper Research which now estimates Apple’s Pay will account for 1 in 2 contactless mobile wallet users (in OEM-provided wallets) by 2020. With its expansions, Apple Pay’s global traction is growing. The service is now live in 24 markets worldwide, with more than 4,900 bank partners. Apple Pay will also go live on eBay in the U.S., Cook said, as . |
DHS launches a new cyber hub to coordinate against threats to US infrastructure | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | Among the many things the current administration has been criticized for is its lack of a unified strategy to combat cyber threats, especially in light of ongoing election interference and psy ops perpetrated by Russia. The Department of Homeland Security is advancing the ball with the creation of the National Risk Management Center, intended on protecting from attacks and subversion by online adversaries. The NRMC was announced today at a cyber summit in New York held by the agency, where DHS Secretary explained the purpose and justification for this new entity. Remarkably, she directly contradicted the ongoing soft-pedaling by the Executive of Russian operations targeting the country. “Let me be clear: Our intelligence community had it right. It was the Russians. It was directed from the highest levels. And we cannot and will not allow it to happen again,” she said. DHS Secretary Nielsen in 2017. Thus the creation of the NRMC, which will work directly with various entities and federal agencies to protect infrastructure like banking systems and the power grid (not to mention ). These are such obvious targets for foreign intelligence to attack, either for destructive or informative purposes, that they merit special attention from our side as well, and DHS is in fact the one to provide it. The new center will be online and staffed tomorrow, though it will take some time to spin up completely as DHS allocates space, personnel and resources. Its exact duties, jurisdictions and connections with other units will no doubt be made clear as well. Vice President Pence spoke at the event too, but naturally chose to lash out at the Obama administration, which he said “often chose silence and paralysis over strength and action.” This is a strange thing to say when several prominent cybersecurity-related posts and offices have been and a report by the Office of Management and Budget found agencies around the country are for even elementary cyberattacks. One of the major moves to improve cybersecurity, , was an Obama-era plan, and the president’s overall cyber strategy, announced last year, also cribbed liberally from the previous administration. That said, the vice president was realistic on other points. “The fact is Russia meddled in our 2016 elections,” he concurred. “This administration will not tolerate threats from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or anyone else.” The other countries on the list, it bears mentioning, have not been found to have interfered with American elections, though admittedly they might if they had the chance. Pence also acknowledged states’ prerogative in running their elections how they like, but also said the federal government would be providing additional funding and technology for election security. He mentioned the “Albert sensors” being deployed to help monitor online systems, and a “virtual situation room” many states are already using that connects DHS with state authorities. “I want to urge, with great respect, every state to take renewed action. Take advantage of the assistance offered by our administration,” Pence said. That seems like a good idea, as ahead of the 2018 midterms. Perhaps that proposed by Putin will help. Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded.. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) |
Uber and Lyft encourage NYC customers to oppose proposed ride-hail cap legislation | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | Uber is making calls to some of its customers in New York City, offering to connect them to local council members to express their opposition to the proposed legislation that would cap the number of ride-hailing drivers in the city, . Meanwhile, reaching out to its NYC-based riders, asking them to contact their local officials. For context, the NYC city council is on the road. Specifically, the proposal wants to place a one-year hold on the issuance of new for-hire vehicle licenses, unless the vehicles are wheelchair accessible. This legislation would affect Uber, Lyft, Juno and Via — all of which operate ride-hailing services in the city. The deadline to submit an amended version of the proposal is tonight at midnight, so the clock is ticking. Anyway, some people seem to be a bit upset about receiving calls from Uber, but Uber Director of Public Affairs Jason Post told TechCrunch the calls are simply one of its tactics that is consistent with its terms of services. Uber is not calling every single customer in the city, Post said, but the company is making enough calls to yield a few dozen calls per council member. Though, why people are answering calls from unknown numbers is beyond me. Uber is also employing an in-app takeover that notifies passengers of the legislative landscape in NYC. “Uber has launched an App takeover so New Yorkers can read the Council’s bills for themselves,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. “We believe New Yorkers will join us in supporting living wages for drivers and opposing a cap that will harm outer borough riders who have come to rely on Uber because of the unreliable, or non-existent subway.” Lyft says the proposals would affect wait times, driver earnings and job opportunities. “Worst of all, the proposals prioritize corporate medallion owners above the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers,” a Lyft spokesperson said. “And while many are saying that this a cap would not diminish service, based on Lyft’s internal driver attrition trends, we believe the industry’s annual churn rate is at least 25%, meaning available drivers for New York City ride-share would shrink significantly within the next year if a cap were imposed, massively undercutting service levels across the board and in particular in outer-borough neighborhoods.” Lyft’s VP of public policy, Joseph Okpaku, also noted in a Medium post that the cap would have even worse effects on communities of color. “For , who, before the arrival of ridesharing, were denied equal transportation options, the impact will be felt even more strongly,” . “It will return us to the days when African-American and Latino New Yorkers had to worry whether they would get a ride every time they raised their hand to hail a cab.” |
Spotify now offers motion comics starring Archie | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | Spotify has been experimenting with incorporating non-musical formats over the last couple of years, including and . Next up: Motion comics based on new stories. For those of you who haven’t been keeping track of the comics incarnations of Archie and his friends, the title was recently rebooted by writer Mark Waid ( ) and artist Fiona Staples ( ). While I was initially skeptical about the need to mess with the characters’ classic designs, I found the first collection to be a perfectly enjoyable combination of teen comedy and soap opera. Now, as , the first six issues have been transformed by digital comics startup with music and voice acting. It’s still a comic book, and you can still see Staples’ gorgeous art, but it’s a story that you hit a “play” button to experience, rather than turning any pages. (Madefire and its CEO Ben Wolstenholme to distinguish the format from the cheesy motion comics of the past, but I suspect the distinction is lost on most readers.) You can find them on Spotify as . Archie Comics CEO Jon Goldwater told Nerdist that “Archie has always been about trying to find new ways to get comics to fans and readers,” and said that working with Spotify was “a perfect match.” |
Apple nears a $1 trillion market cap as it clears another quarter ahead of expectations | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | Apple is inching closer and closer to becoming a $1 trillion company today after posting third-quarter results that beat what analysts were expecting and bumping the stock another few percentage points — which, by Apple standards, is tens of billions of dollars. The company’s stock is up around 2.5 percent this afternoon after the report, which at a prior market close with a market cap of around $935 billion, is adding nearly another $20-plus billion to its market cap. A few quarters ago we were talking about how Apple was in shooting distance of that $1 trillion mark, but now it seems more and more like Apple will hit it. Apple is headed into its most important few quarters as we hit the back half of the year, with its usual new lineup of iPhones and other products and its accompanying critical holiday quarter. Here’s a quick breakdown of the numbers: So in all, the shipment numbers were hit or miss at a granular level, but at the same time the iPhone is generating a lot more revenue than it did last year — implying that there might be a shifting mix toward more expensive iPhones. Apple’s strategy to figure out if it could unlock a more premium tier in consumer demand, then, may be panning out and helping once again drive the company’s growth. It’s then padding out the rest of that with growth in services and other products like it has in the past few quarters as Apple heads into the end of the year. In the past year or so, Apple’s stock has continued to rise even though there may have been some dampened expectations for its latest super-premium iPhone, the iPhone X. Its shares are up more than 20 percent in the past year, and in the second quarter the company announced that it would return an additional $100 billion to investors in a new capital return program, which at the time also sparked a considerable jump in its stock. Apple hasn’t delivered a product that has entirely changed the market calculus like it did when it first started rolling out larger iPhones, but its strategy of incremental improvements and maneuvering in Wall Street continues to provide it some momentum as it heads toward $1 trillion. |
Midterm attackers cited Black Lives Matter in false flag Facebook rally | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | Unknown midterm election were hosting a political rally next month that they pinned on Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other organizations, according to third-party event websites that scraped the now-removed Facebook events. Facebook provided an image of the “No Unite The Right 2 – DC” event as part of its announcement today that merely showed its image, title, date, location and that a Page called “Resisters” was one of the hosts of the propaganda event. But a TechCrunch discovered on Rallyist provides deeper insight into the disruptive information operation. Facebook won’t name the source of the election interference but said the attackers shared a connection through a single account to the Russian Internet Research Agency responsible for 2016 presidential election interference on Facebook. “We are calling all anti-fascists and people of good conscience to participate in international days of action August 10 through August 12 and a mass mobilization in Washington DC” the description reads. “We occupy ICE offices, confront racism, antisemitism, islamaphobia, xenophobia, and white nationalism. We will be in the streets on August 10-12, and we intend to win.” But what’s especially alarming is how the event description concludes [emphasis mine, in full below]. “Signed, , Charlottesville Summer of Resistance Welcoming Committee Agency, Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective, Crushing Colonialism, D.C. Antifascist Collective, Future is Feminists, Holler Network, Hoods4Justice, The International, Capoeira Angola Foundation-DC (FICA-DC), Libertarian Socialist Caucus Of The DSA, March For Racial Justice, , One People’s Project, Resist This (Former DisruptJ20), Rising Tide North America, Smash Racism D.C., Showing Up for Racial Justice Charlottesville, Suffolk County DSA, Workers Against Racism, 350 DC.” It’s unclear if the attackers effectively “forged” the signature of these groups, or duped them into signing off on supporting the rally. The attackers were potentially trying to blame these groups for the rallies in an effort to further sow discord in the political landscape. Facebook initially provided no comment about the description of the event, but then confirmed that it was originally created by the attackers’ since-deleted Page “Resisters,” which then later added several legitimate organizations as co-hosts: Millennials For Revolution, March To Confront White Supremacy – from Charlottesville to DC, Workers Against Racism – WAR, Smash Racism DC and Tune Out Trump. Strangely, those co-hosts have relaunched a new event with a similar name, “Nazis Not Welcome No Unite The Right 2” and similar description, including a similar but expanded “Signed by” list, and now including BLM Charlottesville and D.C. as co-hosts. Meanwhile, Facebook also shared an image of a November 4th, 2017 “Trump Nightmare Must End – NYC” event, also without details of the description. A shows the description as “History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late. There is only one force that can stop this nightmare: we, the people, acting together. On November 4 we’ll take to the streets demanding that Trump regime must go! We meet at Times Square (42 St and Broadway) at 2 PM!” The co-opting of left-wing messaging and protests is a powerful strategy for the election interferers. It could provide the right-wing with excuses to claim that all left-wing protest against Trump or white supremacy is actually foreign governments or hackers, and that those protests don’t represent the views of real Americans. |
Digital therapeutics are just what the doctor ordered for patients — and for global healthcare systems | Meri Beckwith | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | It would be hard to argue that digital products have a net-positive impact on our health. Most are designed to provide as a slot machine. We all know someone who wasted their youth playing games that were designed to be all-consuming, with the World Health Organization recently going so far as to categorize as a mental health disorder. But this habit-forming power of digital products can be used for therapeutic benefit too, often by changing the behavior that causes disease or ill health. This new range of products is being commonly referred to as . These apps and services offer evidence-based and personalized behavioral therapy, and cater to a broad cross-section of illnesses and conditions — from diabetes to loneliness, and everything in-between. Given the difficulty developing traditional therapeutics, the likelihood of the next blockbuster treatment or cure emerging from digital therapeutics is ever-increasing. And thanks to their low cost, adaptability and speed-of-deployment, they could have a transformative impact on millions of lives, and on ailing healthcare systems. I live and work in the U.K., so I will be using the NHS as a recurring reference point in this article — however, fee-for-service, or value-based healthcare systems equally stand to benefit. A range of startups are leading the charge in digital therapeutics, tackling some of the biggest problems facing patients and our healthcare system today. And the evidence proves that these treatments work. Type 2 diabetes, the type determined mostly by diet and lifestyle, has been called the “scourge of the 21st century” by the Royal College of Physicians. And rightly so: the NHS spends around £12 billion annually, or 10 percent of its budget, treating the condition. However, in many cases, lifestyle change alone is enough to prevent, or even cure it. has developed a digital program that does exactly that, with a recent study showing a mean 7.5kg weight loss in participants, which is enough to put type 2 diabetes sufferers into remission. Another leader is , whose app helps 36 percent of its users to quit smoking completely — versus just 3 percent of smokers who are able to quit on their own. Smoking is a massive burden on our collective health, and global healthcare systems. In the U.K. alone, smoking cigarettes led to an estimated 16 percent of all deaths. For those suffering from a mental health condition, has been a leader in delivering psychological therapies digitally, and has shown that standard treatments (like cognitive behavioral therapy) are more effective when delivered digitally (e.g. via messaging app) than in person. However, while one in four of us suffer from a mental health condition, we can all benefit from looking after our mental well-being. Newer entrants like are helping all of us be our best selves, initially by providing digital access to therapists, and by building an AI life coach that helps us deeply understand what makes us happy, and what we can do to improve our mental well-being. Other players, like , and , are helping users look after our mental well-being where most feel most stressed: at work. The data behind these products demonstrates a triple win: a reduction in stress levels for employees, boosted productivity for employers and reduced burden on our public healthcare system. Digital therapeutics are also a great fit for notoriously complex conditions like IBS, a condition affecting 800 million people, 60 percent of whom go on to develop depression or anxiety, hitherto only treated imperfectly by a range of measures from restricted diet to antidepressants. Companies like are using data to personalize treatments and improve outcomes, and pioneering the use of hypnotherapy to treat IBS. Bringing traditional therapeutics to market is becoming exponentially more expensive. The full explanation of this is ; however, in short: the cost to develop a new drug has doubled every nine years since 1950. And even after a lengthy testing and approval process, drugs may have unintended consequences. Or, quite simply, they might not work at all. Additionally, healthcare systems are under pressure from aging populations and tightening purse strings. This is, of course, particularly true in the U.K. Against this backdrop, digital therapeutics are a great solution. They are relatively cheap to develop — all the companies I have mentioned raised less than $5 million to develop their products. This is particularly true in contrast to traditional therapeutics — it now takes a market-ready drug. The digital delivery method means it is much easier to collect data, iterate and refine the treatment and evidence efficacy, allowing treatments to change with the needs of the population. Quantifying the resulting cost savings is tricky, but healthcare consultancy estimating the NHS would save £170 million if it adopted currently available digital therapeutics in five disease areas (with £131 million saved in diabetes alone). Digital therapeutics companies have so far found success in selling direct to consumers, even in the U.K., where healthcare is theoretically free at the point of service for all. However, helped by the evidence that they work, the NHS is “learning” how to purchase and prescribe digital therapeutics. The NHS recently launched (still in beta), showcasing trusted digital apps to consumers; and , a platform for doctors to discover, prescribe and track the best digital health apps, is being rolled out across GP surgeries in the U.K. And if they were to develop their own digital therapeutic solutions, national health systems like the NHS would be at a tremendous advantage, thanks to the huge amounts of longitudinal health data they own (data relating to how patients, and their health, fare over time). Consumers are discovering digital therapeutics, and the treatments are already transforming lives. Now that the body of evidence shows they work, it is my hope that healthcare systems, particularly the U.K.’s NHS, begin to reap the benefits offered by this new treatment mode. |
TV Time debuts an analytics platform for the streaming era | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | , the that helps bingers keep track of where they are with favorite shows and socialize with fellow viewers, is today expanding its business with the launch of an analytics platform called The new service will allow creators and distributors to tap into real-time data from across more than 60,000 TV shows. It will also offer other anonymized data collected from viewers, including things like on which platforms viewers watched, their favorite characters, bingeing behavior, viewers’ locations, anticipation from fans for new episodes, social engagement and more. The data is pulled from the app’s community of around from more than 200 countries who check in with the app some 45 million times per month. To date, TV Time has tracked more than 10 billion TV episodes, and has seen 210 million reactions. TV Time began its life as a , but later pivoted to a social TV community after in December 2016. This proved to be a smart move on its part, as the company has grown to 12 million registered users (and growing). The app’s core functionality is focused on offering TV viewers a place where they can follow shows and mark off the ones they’ve watched — something that’s especially helpful in the streaming era where people are often hopping from one binge-watching session to another, then back again, or are watching multiple series at once and need to remember where they left off. In addition to being a utility for tracking shows, the app offers a community section for each episode where fans can post photos, videos, GIFs and memes, as well as like and comment on the content others share. Viewers can even leave video reactions about each episode, in a format similar to the “Stories” found on apps like Instagram or Snapchat. TV Time also interjects questions of its own — asking about your reaction (good, funny, wow, sad, etc.), favorite character, device watched on and more. And it inserts its own polls in the middle of the fan discussion page, which ask about pivotal moments from the episode and what people thought. With the launch of analytics, TV Time aims to make use of all this data by offering it to clients in the TV industry who are looking for more comprehensive viewership data for planning purposes. Of course, TV Time’s data is not a Nielsen equivalent — it’s user-generated and self-reported. That means it’s not going to be able to tell content creators, networks, distributors and other clients how many people are watching a show exactly. Nor can it give a holistic overview of the show’s fan base. TV Time’s viewers skew younger — in the 18 to 34-year-old range — and only around 10 to 15 percent are based in the U.S., though that market is the fastest growing. But TV Time can tap into the reactions and sentiments shared by a subset of a show’s most engaged fans. Its paying clients today include a handful of TV networks, streaming services and talent agencies that have been testing the app in beta for around a month. They use TV Time’s analytics to help spot trends, develop and expand a show’s audience and make decisions about how to cast and market their shows. Some have also used it in advertising negotiations. Customers pay a flat annual subscription fee for access to this data, but TV Time won’t disclose exact pricing. “We’ve been testing it to figure out which of the insights we’ve launched are most valuable. That’s how we landed on things like the completion rate, the binge rate, affinity reports, mobility scores and favorite characters,” explains TV Time head of Programming, Jeremy Reed. The value offered by TVLytics data doesn’t just come from the data itself, but also how hard it is to collect. In today’s fragmented TV viewing ecosystem, consumers now watch across devices, and split their time between live TV, recorded TV, live TV delivered over the internet, subscription video services and internet video sites, like YouTube. In addition, TV Time notes that, overall, the number of long-form shows on television has grown by 69 percent since 2012, with nearly 500 scripted original series airing in 2017, citing data from FX Research Networks. The majority of these scripted shows are coming from over-the-top platforms such as Netflix, Amazon and others. That’s a lot of TV content to keep up with, especially as consumers hop between devices — even in the midst of a single episode. What TV Time does is keep all this viewing data together in a single destination, and can make connections about what viewers are watching across platforms — from TV to Netflix and beyond. “With studios — they’re looking two years out in producing content. They start to see trends in types of characters, and certainly start to see the characters of this show resonate with the characters of this other show and start to see the overlap,” notes Reed. Plus, he adds, that overlap is “agnostic to platform.” TV Time data is put to use for consumers as well, in terms of helping to recommend their next binge. And now its community is demanding the ability to track movies, too — especially now that streaming services are backing their own feature films. Reed says this isn’t something TV Time has planned for the near-term, as there’s so much to do around episodic content — but that it’s absolutely “a never-say-never” kind of thing, he hints. Santa Monica-based TV Time’s team of 35 is backed by $60+ million in funding, , from investors including Eminence Capital, WME, IVP, Raine Ventures and Greycroft, plus individual entertainment and media industry executives like Ari Emanuel, Peter Guber, Steve Bornstein, Scooter Braun, Gordon Crawford and Ron Zuckerman. |
Test.ai nabs $11M Series A led by Google to put bots to work testing apps | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | For developers, the process of determining whether every new update is going to botch some core functionality can take up a lot of time and resources, and things get far more complicated when you’re managing a multitude of apps. is building a comprehensive system for app testing that relies on bots, not human labor, to see whether an app is ready to start raking in the downloads. The startup has just closed an $11 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Also participating in the round were e.ventures, Uncork Capital and Zetta Venture Partners. Test.ai, which was founded in 2015, has raised $17.6 million to date. “Every advancement in training AI systems enables an advancement in user testing, and test.ai is the leader in AI-powered testing technology. We’re excited to help them supercharge their growth as they test every app in the world,” Gradient Ventures founder Anna Patterson said in a statement. “In a couple years, AI testing will be ingrained into every company’s product flow.” The company’s technology doesn’t just leverage AI to cut down on how long it takes for an app to be tested; there are much lengthier processes it helps eliminate when it comes to developers readying lists of scenarios to be tested. Test.ai has trained their bots on “tens of thousands of apps” to help it understand what an app looks like and what interface patterns they’re typically composed of. From there, they’re able to build their own scenario list and find what works and what doesn’t. That can mean, in the case of an app like our own, tracking down a bookmark button and then deducing that there are certain process that users would go through to use its functionality. Right now, the utility is in the fact that bots scale so broadly and so quickly. While a startup working on a single app may have the flexibility to choose amongst a few options, larger enterprises with several aging products having to grapple with updated systems are in a bit more of a bind. Some of Test.ai’s larger unnamed partners that “make app stores” or devices are working at the stratospheric level having to verify tens of thousands of apps to ensure that everything is in working order. “That’s an easy sell for us, almost too easy, because they don’t have the resources to individually test ten thousand apps every time something like Android gets updated,” CEO Jason Arbon tells TechCrunch. The founders say they hope to use this latest funding to scale operations for their growing list of enterprise clients and hire some new people. |
null | John Biggs | 2,018 | 7 | 9 | null |
Can Electronauts help make VR more social? | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | null |
Gusto raises $140 million to go after small business payroll and benefits with more gusto | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | , which sells payroll, benefits and human resources management and monitoring services to small businesses, has raised $140 million in its latest round of funding. The company said it will use the money to add new services to increase payment flexibility for employees. The company launched a new service called Flexible Pay, which gives employees a way to get paid no matter when a company’s pay schedule dictates. The late-stage round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates portfolio, MSD Capital (the family investment fund for Michael Dell), Dragoneer Investment Group and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. Previous investors, including General Catalyst, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, 137 Ventures and Emergence Capital, also participated in the round. The company claims that it processes tens of billions of dollars in payroll and offers a range of benefits, including health insurance, 401(k) plans and college savings plans. |
Google partners with news orgs to show more data in its search results | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | Google today that it is working with a number of news organizations to surface more data from their data journalism projects in its search results. The idea here is to make it easier to discover the data that a lot of these organizations produce and then surface it in an easy to read format on the company’s search results pages. The company is currently working with a few news organizations, including ProPublica, to produce the in the format it needs for its search index. As long as that data is in a table, adding it to the index should be pretty straightforward. “As a news organization that is focused on having real-world impact, it’s very much in our mission to give people information at the point of need,” said Scott Klein, the deputy managing editor of ProPublica. “If we can make the data we’ve worked hard to collect and prepare available to people at the very moment when they’re researching a big life decision, and thereby help them make the best decision they can, it’s an absolute no-brainer for us. And the code is trivial to add.” Any news organizations that produce this kind of data can follow Google’s guidelines and have their data indexed. For the right queries, the result of that is going to be prime placement on Google’s search results pages, so it’s probably worth the effort. That first results, after all, is all that counts. It’s worth noting that Google already indexes and highlights lots of other data it finds online, but this is the first time it’s making a concerted effort to include journalism projects, too. |
Facebook shuts down a Unite the Right counter-protest event linked to fake accounts | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | According to COO Sheryl Sandberg, getting ahead of an event called “No Unite the Right 2, DC” is the reason behind Facebook’s decision to that closely resembles previous Russian state-sponsored activity meant to sow political discord in the U.S. “We’re sharing this today because the connection between these actors and the event planned in Washington next week,” Sandberg said, calling the disclosure “early” and noting that the company still does not have all the facts. A Facebook Page called “Resisters” created the event, set to take place on August 10, as a protest against Unite the Right 2 — a follow-up event to last year’s deadly rally in Charlottesville, Va. that left peaceful counter-protester Heather Heyer dead. The Page, which Facebook identified as displaying “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” also worked with the admins from five authentic Facebook Pages to co-host the event and arrange transportation and logistics. Facebook has notified those users of its findings and taken down the event page. This isn’t the first event coordinated by fake Facebook accounts with the likely intention of further polarizing U.S. voters. In a call today, Facebook noted that the new inauthentic accounts it found had created around 30 events. While the dates for two have yet to pass, “the others have taken place over the past year or so.” Facebook will not yet formally attribute its new findings to the Russian state-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA). Still, the Resisters Page hosting “No Unite the Right 2, DC” listed a previously identified IRA account as a co-admin for “only seven minutes.” That link, and whatever else the public doesn’t know at this time, is enough for the Senate Intel committee vice chairman Mark Warner to credit the Russian government with what appears to be an ongoing campaign of political influence. “Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity,” Warner said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “I also expect Facebook, along with other platform companies, will continue to identify Russian troll activity and to work with Congress on updating our laws to better protect our democracy in the future.” Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, maintained that the company “doesn’t think it’s appropriate for Facebook to give public commentary on political motivations of nation states” and calls the IRA link “interesting but not determinant.” |
Waymo partners with Phoenix to connect people to public transit | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, is launching a program in Phoenix next month that will focus on delivering people to bus stops and train and light-rail stations. The pilot program announced Tuesday is in partnership with Valley Metro, the Phoenix area’s regional public transportation authority. The announcement gives clarity to the fourth leg in Waymo’s business strategy. The company’s has publicly shared plans to focus on four areas: create a ride-hailing service, develop self-driving trucks for logistics and license its technology to automakers for personally owned vehicles. But it was the fourth piece — connecting people to public transportation — that was nebulous until now. The program initially will be offered to employees of Valley Metro. These riders will be able to use the Waymo app to hail a ride in one of the company’s autonomous Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans to take them to the nearest public transportation option. Waymo will expand the program and provide first-and-last mile travel to Valley Metro RideChoice travelers, which covers groups traditionally underserved by public transit. Waymo and Valley Metro hope to learn more about how people use public transit and what role self-driving cars can have in connecting people to the buses, trains and light-rail systems found in cities. The company said it hopes to open the service to the public in the future. Phoenix has become a major testing hub for Waymo. The company has been testing its self-driving vehicles there for months and launched an early rider program. In March, Waymo began shuttling a group of early riders in self-driving vehicles behind the wheel. Last week, the company, a series of partnerships with Walmart, AutoNation, Avis and others to give customers access to autonomous vehicles. Under the partnerships, and drive them to businesses in the Phoenix area. |
Just 24 hours until prices go up for Disrupt SF 2018 passes | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | A lot can happen in 24 hours. Just ask Jack Bauer, the hard-charging protagonist from the TV drama series 24. Seriously, he had to save the world every dang episode. All you have to do is buy your pass to before the prices go up in — you guessed it — 24 hours. We want you to join us on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West, and we want you to get the best deal possible. You have until midnight PST on August 1 before the price hike hits. Depending on the pass you buy, you could save up to $1,200. Jack Bauer would take action, and so should you. right now. What can you expect at ? Plenty, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But sometimes it helps to hear what your peers found most beneficial. For example, Vlad Larin, one of the founders of Zeroqode, shared his Disrupt experience with us. “TechCrunch Disrupt was a massively positive experience,” said Larin. “It gave us the chance to show our technology to the world and have meaningful conversations with investors, accelerators, incubators, solo founders and developers.” If you’re more interested in a VC’s point of view, here’s what early-stage investor Michael Kocan of New York-based Trend Discovery had to say. “Attending Disrupt San Francisco helped me plug into that community and take the pulse of what’s going on,” he said. “It’s probably the best place for us to meet the most early-stage founders quickly, so that’s the biggest benefit for us.” There’s plenty of programming to keep you happy as you search for opportunity. Don’t miss an incredible talking about the most pressing tech and investment issues of the day. And take a peek at the while you’re at it. Check out our first — from thousands of submitted hacks, we’ll have the top 30 contenders showing their stuff at Disrupt SF. You’ll find more than 1,200 startups and exhibitors in — along with the . We have Top Picks in each of these categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics. And, of course, you don’t want to miss , the crown jewel of TechCrunch Disrupt. This year, we doubled the prize money to $100,000. The competition’s going to be intense! takes place on September 5-7. You have only 24 hours left before the prices increase. If you leap into action now, you won’t save the world, but you will save some money. today. |
Blockchain media project Civil turns to Asia with fund to kickstart 100 new media ventures | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | , the blockchain-based journalism organization, is casting its eye to Asia after it set up a $1 million fund that’s aimed at seeding 100 new media projects across the continent over the next three years. The organization has teamed up with , a Singapore-based media startup which will manage the fund, . There’s been a lot of attention lavished on Civil for its promise to make media work more efficiently using blockchain technology and its upcoming crypto token, CVL. , the blockchain corporation led by Ethereum co-creator Joe Lubin, and with the goal of raising around $32 million to launch its network and actively onboard new media companies worldwide. But the company is waiting around. Civil has already actively jumped into the media space — — but the scope of the project in Asia is different in trying to kickstart a wave of new media organizations by giving them money to get off the ground. Alan Soon, co-founder and CEO of Splice, told TechCrunch that it hasn’t been decided whether the financing will be in the form of grants or equity-based investments. Despite that, he said deals will be “pre-seed, micro-investments to help entrepreneurs take their ideas to prototype stage.” Soon said that all kinds of media are in play, ranging from the more obvious suspects such as publishers, reporting websites and podcasts to behind-the-scenes tech like automation, bots and adtech. Notably, though, he clarified that the beneficiaries of the fund will be under no obligation to adopt Civil’s protocol, the technology that will be funded by the upcoming ICO. Splice itself, however, has committed to doing so which will mean it gains access to the network’s content, licensing opportunities and more. “I’m with Civil because I really believe in their values,” Soon added. “They want to do the right thing for this space.” |
Samsung reports Q2 profit slowdown, says Galaxy S9 sales were lower than expected | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | Struggling against competition from Chinese smartphones, Samsung Electronics posted a lackluster with its slowest profit growth in more than a year. On the bright side, the Korean tech giant said its semiconductor business is doing well. Operating profit rose 5.7% year-over-year to 14.9 trillion won (about $13.3 billion), representing Samsung Electronic’s slowest quarterly profit growth since the first quarter of 2017. Net income was 11 trillion won (about $9.8 billion), almost the same result Samsung posted in the same period a year ago. Sales revenue dropped 4% to 58.5 trillion won (about $52.3 billion). Samsung blamed lower-than-expected sales of the Galaxy S9, its flagship smartphone, seasonality and competition from lower-priced handsets. Two Chinese companies in particular, Xiaomi and Huawei, have emerged as formidable rivals, putting pressure on Samsung in China and India. As in previous quarters, Samsung’s semiconductor business posted strong performance even as its smartphones suffered. Samsung reported that second-quarter operating profit for its chips rose 45% year-over-year to 11.6 trillion won. The company said it anticipated strong demand for chips during the second half of the year thanks to demand from high density data centers. It expects smartphone and tablet demand to continue lagging, however, thanks to competition from lower-priced devices with strong specifications. |
Facebook finds evidence of possible Russia-linked influence campaigns targeting US midterms | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | In a , Facebook revealed that it has detected evidence of “ ” designed to influence U.S. politics on its platform. According to Facebook’s head of Cybersecurity, Policy Nathaniel Gleicher, the company first identified the activity two weeks ago. So far, the activity encompasses eight Facebook Pages, 17 profiles and seven accounts on Instagram. Facebook stated that the activity “violate[s] our ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook has declined to attribute the new findings to the Russian government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA), but an IRA account was found to be a co-admin on one of the newly outed fake events “for only seven minutes.” Facebook has been in contact with Congress and law enforcement about the discovery, which suggests that social platforms should expect to again detect the kind of coordinated disinformation campaigns that targeted the 2016 election around U.S. midterm elections this November. The company stated that more than 290,000 accounts followed one of the Pages it identified. The Pages in question were created starting in March 2017 and most recently in May of 2018. The most popular Pages displaying this kind of behavior were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being” and “Resisters.” The other Pages had less than 10 followers each and the Instagram account did not have any followers. That does not necessarily discount other kinds of potential activity, like commenting and messaging. Like the fake Russia-linked ads and Pages formerly released through the and , the new content specifically amplifies American tensions around race. The examples released by Facebook appear to mostly target the US political left. Some examples contain explicitly anti-Trump content, but most offer appeals to racial identity targeting black and Mexican-American Facebook users. According to Facebook, “They ran about 150 ads for approximately $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in US and Canadian dollars” between April 2017 and June of this year. The Pages also made around 30 Facebook events. As Gleicher writes in the post, these accounts are operating more cautiously than the infamous Russian disinformation accounts around the 2016 election: For example they used VPNs and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf. As we’ve told law enforcement and Congress, we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort. Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we’ve found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year, which is covered below. But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here. Still, the newly discovered wave of activity pushing polarizing political content on Facebook previous content linked to the IRA. The evidence is sufficient for Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a prominent figure in the investigation into tech’s culpability in disseminating of Russian disinformation, to make the connection. “Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity,” Warner said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. |
The Istio service mesh hits version 1.0 | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | , the service mesh for microservices from Google, IBM, Lyft, Red Hat and many other players in the open-source community, version 1.0 of its tools today. If you’re , that’s understandable. Few people are. But Istio is probably one of the most important new open-source projects out there right now. It sits at the intersection of a number of industry trends, like containers, microservices and serverless computing, and makes it easier for enterprises to embrace them. Istio now has more than 200 contributors and the code has seen more than 4,000 check-ins since the launch of version 0.1. Istio, , handles the routing, load balancing, flow control and security needs of microservices. It sits on top of existing distributed applications and basically helps them talk to each other securely, while also providing logging, telemetry and the necessary policies that keep things under control (and secure). It also features support for canary releases, which allow developers to test updates with a few users before launching them to a wider audience, something that Google and other webscale companies have long done internally. with the success Kubernetes the abstraction around microservice development a a Even before the 1.0 release, a number of companies already adopted Istio in production, including the likes of eBay and Auto Trader UK. Lin argues that this is a sign that Istio solves a problem that a lot of businesses are facing today as they adopt microservices. “A number of more sophisticated customers tried to build their own service management layer and while we hadn’t yet declared 1.0, we hard a number of customers — including a surprising number of large enterprise customer — say, ‘you know, even though you’re not 1.0, I’m very comfortable putting this in production because what I’m comparing it to is much more raw.'” IBM Fellow and VP of Cloud Jason McGee agrees with this and notes that “our mission since ’s launch has been to enable everyone to succeed with microservices, especially in the enterprise. This is why we’ve focused the community around improving security and scale, and heavily leaned our contributions on what we’ve learned from building agile cloud architectures for companies of all sizes.” A lot of the large cloud players now support Istio directly, too. IBM supports it on top of its Kubernetes Service, for example, and Google even announced a for its Google Cloud users, as well as some for serverless applications built on top of Kubernetes and Istio. Two names missing from today’s party are Microsoft and Amazon. I think that’ll change over time, though, assuming the project keeps its momentum. Istio also isn’t part of any major open-source foundation yet. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the home of Kubernetes, is backing linkerd, a project that isn’t all that dissimilar from Istio. Once a 1.0 release of these kinds of projects rolls around, the maintainers often start looking for a foundation that can shepherd the development of the project over time. I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before we hear more about where Istio will land. |
Logitech is buying Blue Microphones | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | In an emailed statement a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the Blue brand is sticking around and the company’s team will be joining up with Logitech. |
Firefox is getting a new logo (or 10) | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | When you think of “Firefox,” you probably think of something that looks like this: Or, perhaps, something like this: That logo (or some iteration between the two) has been the browser’s logo since it launched back in 2002. Its time for change, Mozilla says. In a blog post about Mozilla Creative Director Tim Murray outlines the company’s thinking: Firefox isn’t just one browser now. With side projects like Firefox Rocket (the company’s browser for connections with less bandwidth) and Firefox Reality (Firefox, but for virtual reality), the company is finding it needs a bit more wiggle room with its design language. While they shared a few work-in-progress potential logos, they were quick to note that none of them are final. They might tweak things over time (and they’re asking for feedback), or just go back to the drawing board all together. The whole thing might sound a bit up-in-the-air right now, and that’s mostly intentional — it’s still pretty early days in the process. But eventually, Firefox will be getting a new logo; or, more accurately, new logo . The work was presented in two potential “systems,” each composed of one “Masterbrand” logo and 11 auxiliary logos. The masterbrand would be the primary one used for representing the brand as a whole, while those beneath it could each represent an individual product. If it’s a choice between the two systems, I like System 2 — but I’ve always the existing Firefox logo, and that’s the set that feels like more of an update and less of a complete replacement. It’s more “Firefox”, less just “fox.” Firefox says the branding shift should come together “over the next few months” — so if you’re a fan of the classic logo, it’ll still be hanging around for a while. |
Google snags Sony’s ‘Magic Lab’ VR guru | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | Google has hired Richard Marks, Sony’s Magic Lab head who was behind much of the company’s VR efforts, to a position in its Advanced Technology and Projects group, reports. Google confirmed the hire to TechCrunch, sending along a statement from ATAP head Dan Kaufman. “ATAP is at the intersection of science and application where our goal is to solve significant problems and close the gap between what if and what is. We’re super excited about Richard joining the senior team and look forward to his contributions.” According to LinkedIn, Marks spent the last 19 years at Sony, including time as a research fellow while getting his doctorate at Stanford. Marks has been the public face of Sony’s virtual reality efforts throughout the development of the company’s virtual reality tech, but has also worked on some of the computer vision tech behind other PlayStation products. The Magic Lab, which Marks ran, was devoted to researching gaming technologies for future generation hardware and software. One of the big projects to emerge from the group was called “Project Morpheus,” a precursor for what would later be called PlayStation VR. While Sony was quick to express an interest in virtual reality technologies and publicly debut its experiments with PS VR years before its 2016 launch, the technology platform has been facing an uncertain future as headset sales have failed to meet expectations. The PlayStation VR headset debuted as a cheaper alternative to headsets from Oculus and HTC that debuted at prices that were hundreds of dollars more expensive, but after aggressive price slashing from Oculus moved hardware margins downwards across the board, the console maker seems to have had a tougher time distinguishing its efforts. Also, while it had appeared that Sony’s efforts were arriving ahead of a current-generation Xbox VR play, the company announced that it would not be pursuing a virtual reality headset for the Xbox One X, though that was initially a selling point of the more powerful system. It’s unclear where exactly Marks will be directing his attention at Google within ATAP, though the company certainly has plenty of efforts in the AR/VR and gaming spaces that would benefit from his experience. |
Newly legal 3D-printed gun blueprints targeted by state lawsuits | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | Hot on the heels of the , 21 states have filed a joint lawsuit against the federal government, alleging not only that decision is dangerous but also that it’s illegal for a number of reasons. But the lawsuit may backfire via the so-called Streisand Effect, further entrenching the controversial technology. Earlier this month brought the news that the U.S. government dropped its case against Cody Wilson and his companies dedicated to the proliferation of 3D models of firearm parts. There are still restrictions on how guns can be made and sold, but the files containing 3D data and allowing people to print components seem to have been determined not to fall under those rules. This was unwelcome news for those in favor of stricter gun control laws, a group apparently including the attorneys general of 21 states. Bob Ferguson, AG for Washington, announced that his team would be leading a lawsuit intended to block the federal actions that legalized this particular form of data. “These downloadable guns are unregistered and very difficult to detect, even with metal detectors, and will be available to anyone regardless of age, mental health or criminal history. If the Trump Administration won’t keep us safe, we will,” . They allege that the administration needs the Defense Department to sign off on the decision, and that Congress needed to be notified 30 days in advance. The decision is also held (owing to a lack of on-record citations or consultations) to be “arbitrary and capricious,” and thus illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act. The Tenth Amendment also gives states the right to regulate firearms, and the filers say that the federal action deprives them of this right and is therefore unconstitutional. That’s all well in order, but the danger posed by these files is overestimated, as is the ability of the government, state or federal, to curtail their distribution. If this lawsuit is successful, it will have little or no effect on 3D printed guns at all. “The status quo – which currently ensures public safety and national security by prohibiting publication of firearm design files on the Internet – should be maintained,” reads a letter sent from a number of AGs to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and AG Jeff Sessions. At the risk of dipping into an extremely charged debate and sensitive political topic (I’ve added the “Opinion” tag just in case), the status quo does no such thing. It must be said that if effective gun control is the goal, there are far more important steps to pursue. Loopholes abound in existing regulations, for instance gun show purchases of unregistered firearms and “80 percent lowers,” which are a quite legal method for creating them. Furthermore, any attempt to remove something from the internet is doomed to failure, as we have seen again and again, often enough that the phenomenon has its own nickname, the Streisand Effect. Workarounds for illegal content are numerous and effective, and presumably the type of person interested in printing their own gun will not be shy about using a VPN or torrent site. If anything, a concerted effort to remove something from the internet usually causes that thing to be permanently maintained online as a sort of middle finger to the authorities. It’s not in the internet’s DNA to forget. While it’s true that outlawing the 3D models would give prosecutors and investigators more to work with, the nefarious actors of the world haven’t been waiting with bated breath on the outcome of the previous lawsuit. Criminals, terrorists, foreign adversaries and so on in the first place don’t even need these files to obtain or create unregistered guns in the first place, nor would their being illegal deter them in the least. The lawsuit may, it is true, tie up and possibly bankrupt Wilson and his supporters, but that’s not much of a victory and certainly doesn’t make anyone safer. Unfortunately this particular demon isn’t going back in the box. |
Cult classic indie game La-Mulana finally gets a proper sequel | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | The sequel to the legendary, and legendarily difficult, indie sleeper hit La-Mulana , and all gamers with a penchant for retro-style platforming and a broad masochistic streak are encouraged to descend into its depths. If there were a gaming achievement hall of fame, surely one of the rarest feats would be beating . The original game was a contemporary of the revered and influential ; both were wonderful free games made with charming retro pixel art, but beyond that the stories diverged. While Cave Story was a relatively accessible action-adventure that took seven or eight hours to complete, La-Mulana’s tale of an archaeologist delving into the titular ruin was so deep, complex, obscure and difficult that only the truly dedicated were able to survive even the first few hours, let alone the dozens to come. The new game goes for a sort of 32-bit look, like the 2012 remake of the original. This gem, lovingly crafted to closely mimic the look and feel of an MSX game (though enormously expanded), received a screen-for-screen remake for the Nintendo Wii in 2012, but it wasn’t until early 2014 that the original team of three decided to make a whole new game. , with an estimated delivery date of December 2015. That date slipped and slipped, but seemingly because the game they were creating was one worth taking the time to do right. Fast-forward a few more years and here we are: La-Mulana 2 was released today. It’s substantially the same: a labyrinthine underground ruin to explore, deadly traps and monsters to avoid and maddening puzzles to solve. I’ve played the first couple of hours and from what I can tell it is true to form. You’ll play as the daughter of the original explorer, who has arrived at the ruins to find them turned into a tourist trap — but soon it becomes clear that a twin ruin, hitherto unexplored, is wreaking havoc on the first one and must be investigated. If this game is even half the size and depth of the original it will be well worth the — plus you get the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie developer that’s been doing its own weird thing for 15 years or so now. Just don’t expect any hand-holding — this game is the real deal, “Nintendo hard” all the way. It may not be up everyone’s alley, but I wanted to celebrate La-Mulana and its new sequel. I like to think of small gaming studios as startups, as indeed they are, and a big launch like this deserves recognition. It’s available right now for Windows and macOS — but I’d be surprised if we didn’t see it on Switch at least fairly soon. |
MoviePass could block more big movies from its subscription service | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | The service caused an uproar among users when it barred users from seeing the latest Tom Cruise blockbuster using its app. It’s another in a string of unfortunate incidents for the service, which has fallen on rough financial times, of late. Earlier today, users were met with when attempting to view screenings on the app. And just a few days ago, the to end another service outage. |
MoviePass is down again | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | After the revelation that MoviePass to keep its service up and running last week, things aren’t looking good. subscribers, myself included, were met on Monday with a blank screen where their choice of screening should be. Navigating around dozens of theaters only shows a message that “There are no more screenings at this theater today.” , and people are starting to sound the death knell for the beleaguered monthly movie subscription service. Some MoviePass theaters that offer e-ticketing still appear to have available showings , but that doesn’t appear to be true across the board. Plenty of companies fail, but few flail so publicly before doing so. MoviePass has dragged its subscribers on for its own apparent financial rollercoaster ride, switching pricing schemes around with , and suffering We are very sorry to users having issues checking-in this evening. Some users have reported issues with card-based check-ins and we are working towards a fix on this technical issue. In the meantime, all e-ticketing remains fully functional. — MoviePass (@MoviePass) On Monday, stock for MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY) plunged by a rather bleak 60 percent. Competing services from and are moving into the space with seemingly less doomed business models, so for frequent moviegoers, that’s something to watch. Unfortunately, jumping ship from MoviePass is easier said than done, as many users have reported problems cancelling the service. (For the record, I just tried to cancel my subscription through the Android app and my own cancellation would not go through.) Given the service’s unreliability and cancellation practices, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear the FTC and other consumer protection groups getting involved. Is this the end? Has MoviePass its last stack of cash? Is it just a popular day at the movies? The company hasn’t tweeted or provided any official updates yet, but if this isn’t the end, then it’s certainly near. |
Uber’s self-driving trucks division is dead, long live Uber self-driving cars | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | Uber is shuttering its self-driving trucks unit, a beleaguered program borne out of the company’s controversial multi-million acquisition of Otto nearly two years ago. The company said Monday that Uber Advanced Technologies Group will stop development of self-driving trucks and instead focus its efforts on self-driving cars. “We recently took the important step of returning to public roads in Pittsburgh, and as we look to continue that momentum, we believe having our entire team’s energy and expertise focused on this effort is the best path forward,” Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber Advanced Technologies Group, said in an emailed statement. Uber Freight, a business unit that helps truck drivers connect with shipping companies, is unaffected by this decision. , which launched in May 2017, is designed for vetted and approved drivers, who can use it to find nearby available loads and see destination info, distance required and payment upfront. If the drivers like what they see, they can tap to book. Uber Freight, which started in three regions, is now available throughout the continental U.S. And it is considered a viable and promising business (and revenue opportunity) within the company. The business unit has expanded threefold in the past 15 months and has offices in San Francisco and Chicago. “Rather than having two groups working side by side, focused on different vehicle platforms, I want us instead collaborating as one team, according to an email reviewed by TechCrunch that was sent by Meyhofer to employees. “ I know we’re all super proud of what the Trucks team has accomplished, and we continue to see the incredible promise of self-driving technology applied to moving freight across the country. But we believe delivering on self-driving for passenger applications first, and then bringing it to freight applications down the line, is the best path forward. For now, we need the focus of one team, with one clear objective.” Uber’s self-driving trucks unit is based in San Francisco, while the team dedicated to self-driving cars is located in Pittsburgh. Uber says it will pivot employees focused on self-driving trucks to other work that supports its ongoing development of self-driving technology. If there isn’t a comparable role, Uber will offer relocation to Pittsburgh or a separation package to support the transition. Uber ATG is going to continue to investigate approaches to highway driving using the car platform, and is going to keep its relationship with truck manufacturers intact. The company may return to self-driving trucks, but only after it has developed the foundation of the self-driving system. Uber ATG will continue its in-house development of light detection and ranging radar known as LiDAR. This technology, which would later be at the heart of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. Uber’s self-driving truck efforts have been plagued by controversy since its beginning. , the self-driving trucks startup founded by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski and three others, including Lior Ron, who was head of product at Google Maps, in August 2016 for $680 million. (Later reports suggest the actual payout might have been as low as .) As part of the acquisition, Levandowski became head of Uber’s self-driving car research. Two months later, the company enjoyed a moment of glory that received a lot of media attention: a self-driving truck that drove 120 highway miles along a route in Colorado with a trailer full of Budweiser. But the buzz around the size of the Otto deal and its self-driving truck run in Colorado 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. Waymo accused Levandowski of hatching a plan to use trade secrets related to Waymo’s in-house development of LiDAR tech and use it to kickstart Otto and ultimately, Uber’s own self-driving technology program. The lawsuit, filed against 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 LiDAR. Uber would later . However, the polarizing star engineer isn’t out of the self-driving trucks game just yet. TechCrunch uncovered that , a self-driving trucks company that is still in stealth mode. The case did go to trial in February 2018. Before a jury could weigh in, the two parties reached a . 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. Uber ATG has had other existential struggles in recent months. The unit has suffered a number of departures. The other three Otto founders left, including Don Burnette, who, with Paz Eshel, formerly of Battery Ventures, in April founded an autonomous vehicle company called Kodiak Robotics. In March, and just six weeks after settling with Waymo, an Uber self-driving test vehicle was involved in a in Tempe, Ariz. Uber halted all of its autonomous vehicle operations March 19, the day after one of its vehicles struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in the Phoenix suburb. Uber was testing its self-driving vehicles on public roads in Tempe, Ariz., where the accident occurred, as well as in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto. Uber’s decision to shut down its self-driving trucks operation comes just a week after the company put its . For now, Uber’s modified self-driving Volvo XC90 vehicles will only be driven manually by humans and under a new set of safety standards that includes real-time monitoring of its test drivers and efforts to beef up simulation. This manual-first rollout is a step toward Uber’s ultimate goal to relaunch its autonomous vehicle testing program in Pittsburgh. |
Gillmor Gang: Backflip | Steve Gillmor | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | The Gillmor Gang — Esteban Kolsky, Frank Radice, Michael Markman, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Sunday July 29, 2018. Social markets, what is notification media, the 20 percent solution. Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Google’s lead lawyer moves into a global policy role | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | Google is promoting its top lawyer, Kent Walker, into a global policy position, . Walker, Google SVP and general counsel, has already been a public voice in the company’s recent privacy tangles, but will move into a formal role as senior vice president of global affairs, overseeing Google’s policy, trust and safety, corporate philanthropy and legal teams. Last year, Walker joined Richard Salgado, Google’s Director, Law Enforcement and Information Security, to head to Capitol Hill for the on big tech’s failure to mitigate political disinformation campaigns during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Since then, Walker has commented publicly on Google’s policies around and on YouTube, among other policy issues facing the company. With social platforms at an globally and at its newly forced compliance with international privacy laws, any public-facing global policy role will be very much in the spotlight in 2018 and beyond. Google hired Walker away from eBay in 2006, where he served as the company’s deputy general counsel. Prior to his time at eBay (and AOL, prior to that), Walker was an assistant U.S. attorney with the Department of Justice. |
Google gives Chrome the virtual reality treatment | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | Google is injecting a little Chrome into its VR platform, bringing the web browser to Daydream headsets, the company today. It’s been a long time coming considering the depths of Google’s WebVR experimentation on desktop and mobile Chrome. The Mountain View tech giant announced it was working on this quite a while ago, . Google has been moving pretty slowly with any big Daydream updates lately, all while Facebook’s Oculus has driven heavy news to its mobile platform thanks to new standalone hardware. Daydream rolled out its own positionally-tracked headset with Lenovo earlier this summer but a major lack of content has been the system’s biggest issue. Bringing the web to Daydream could help correct this, and directing more mobile developer attention to WebVR might be a positive move for Google as it looks to make content discovery more simple. Last year, the company made it so that you could open WebVR content in mobile Chrome on your phone and then drop it into a Cardboard headset and check out the content, with this you’ll be able to launch inside VR, explore inside VR and then move onto something else. Loading desktop webpages inside a VR headset doesn’t necessarily seem earth-shatteringly disruptive but there are some optimizations Google has ensured that some non-WebVR content gets special treatment including a “cinema mode” that drops videos into a special environment to keep your eyes on the content. You’ll also get incognito mode, voice search and access to your saved bookmarks. The browser is available for Lenovo’s Mirage Solo as well as Google’s own Daydream View headset and you’ll gain access after updating Chrome on Android. The web is largely still an untested wilderness for virtual reality that nobody is racing to conquer given headset volume is still pretty low and a lot of wind has been sucked out of VR’s sails lately. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that the web enables for virtual social environments especially and though most major powers are drawing attention to their own platforms, a platform like Chrome arriving on Daydream could start to spark some developer imagination for what’s possible. |
null | Benjamin Joffe | 2,018 | 7 | 31 | null |
OpenAI’s robotic hand doesn’t need humans to teach it human behaviors | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 30 | Gripping something with your hand is one of the first things you learn to do as an infant, but it’s far from a simple task, and only gets more complex and variable as you grow up. This complexity makes it difficult for machines to teach themselves to do, but researchers at Elon Musk and Sam Altman-backed OpenAI have created a system that not only holds and manipulates objects much like a human does, but developed these behaviors all on its own. Many robots and robotic hands are already proficient at certain grips or movements — a robot in a factory can wield a bolt gun even more dexterously than a person. But the software that lets that robot do that task so well is likely to be hand-written and extremely specific to the application. You couldn’t for example, give it a pencil and ask it to write. Even something on the same production line, like welding, would require a whole new system. Yet for a human, picking up an apple isn’t so different from pickup up a cup. There are differences, but our brains automatically fill in the gaps and we can improvise a new grip, hold an unfamiliar object securely and so on. This is one area where robots lag severely behind their human models. And furthermore, you can’t just train a bot to do what a human does — you’d have to provide millions of examples to adequately show what a human would do with thousands of given objects. . Instead, they let the computer try and fail over and over in a simulation, slowly learning how to move its fingers so that the object in its grasp moves as desired. The system, which they call Dactyl, was provided only with the positions of its fingers and three camera views of the object in-hand — but remember, when it was being trained, all this data is simulated, taking place in a virtual environment. There, the computer doesn’t have to work in real time — it can try a thousand different ways of gripping an object in a few seconds, analyzing the results and feeding that data forward into the next try. (The hand itself is a , which is also more complex than most robotic hands.) In addition to different objects and poses the system needed to learn, there were other randomized parameters, like the amount of friction the fingertips had, the colors and lighting of the scene and more. You can’t simulate every aspect of reality (yet), but you can make sure that your system doesn’t only work in a blue room, on cubes with special markings on them. They threw a lot of power at the problem: 6144 CPUs and 8 GPUs, “collecting about one hundred years of experience in 50 hours.” And then they put the system to work in the real world for the first time — and it demonstrated some surprisingly human-like behaviors. The things we do with our hands without even noticing, like turning an apple around to check for bruises or passing a mug of coffee to a friend, use lots of tiny tricks to stabilize or move the object. Dactyl recreated several of them, for example holding the object with a thumb and single finger while using the rest to spin to the desired orientation. What’s great about this system is not just the naturalness of its movements and that they were arrived at independently by trial and error, but that it isn’t tied to any particular shape or type of object. Just like a human, Dactyl can grip and manipulate just about anything you put in its hand, within reason of course. This flexibility is called generalization, and it’s important for robots that must interact with the real world. It’s impossible to hand-code separate behaviors for every object and situation in the world, but a robot that can adapt and fill in the gaps while relying on a set of core understandings can get by. As with OpenAI’s other work, , as are some of the tools they used to create and test Dactyl. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.