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Can Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Wear chip breathe life into Wear OS? | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 9 | 10 | The new chip starts shipping for mass production today. |
Mercedes-Benz’s vision for autonomy is flexible and fugly | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 9 | 10 | Mercedes-Benz shared on Monday its vision for how people and packages will someday move in dense urban environments. It’s called Vision Urbanetic — an all-electric autonomous concept vehicle that can change from a toaster-looking cargo van to a dung beetle-esque (or it is bike helmet) people mover. The Vision Urbanetic joins a growing list of fugly to debut in the past two years. But that’s not really the point here. Moving past the hot takes on its looks, the Urbanetic shows where Mercedes and other automakers are headed. This is a concept, not plans for a production vehicle, after all. Mercedes-Benz Vision Urbanetic. Mercedes’s vision of a powertrain platform that can house several different vehicle bodies is not unique. Automakers are increasingly moving toward a universal powertrain platform for some of its production vehicles to improve manufacturing efficiencies and reduce costs. The difference here is that the vehicle bodies could be changed on the fly by a team of workers back at a mobility hub, as depicted in the video below. The system is based on an autonomous driving platform onto which the respective bodies (people mover or cargo) are fixed. The underlying platform incorporates all the driving functions, which means the autonomous chassis could make its way to its next job location without a body attached, the company said. The people-mover body type has space for up to 12 passengers, while the cargo module has a storage volume of 353 cubic feet, can be divided into two levels and transport up to 10 pallets. The idea presents new logistics and infrastructure challenges that any company with plans to deploy a commercial autonomous vehicle ride-hailing fleet will also face. If this vision were ever to become reality, Mercedes would need hubs located near urban centers, where the Urbanetic vehicles would be housed, maintained and charged. This is also where the body type would be swapped out, depending on needs at that time. Mercedes seems to have thought through some of this. The vehicle bodies could be swapped out automatically or manually, and take a few minutes, Mercedes said. It also outlined a dynamic communications system that would be able to capture and process data in real time to determine what kinds of vehicles are needed, and where. For instance, it could identify a crowd of people gathered in a certain area or capture local information that a concert would soon be over and then deploy more ride-hailing vehicles to that location. Mercedes said the vehicles could be used in restricted areas such as a factory site or an airport. |
null | Sarah Buhr | 2,018 | 9 | 17 | null |
Meet SelfieCircus and 8 more in Snapchat’s new startup accelerator | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 9 | 10 | Snapchat is hedging its bets as its social network shrinks. Today Snap Inc. revealed the first class of called Yellow that offers $150,000 in funding and creativity-centric business education in exchange for what a source says is a seven to 10 percent equity stake — in line with other accelerators like Y Combinator. The nine companies will take up a three-month residency in one of Snap’s buildings in Venice, Calif., near Los Angeles. The accelerator class ranges from augmented reality and journalism studios to lifestyle brands around weddings and fashion to aesthetic-focused marketplaces like ConBody that pairs you with a muscular ex-convict for workouts. Yellow calls itself “A launchpad for creative minds and entrepreneurs who are looking to build the next generation of great media companies.” Yellow could become a content provider and potential acquisition feeder for the company. ANRK and Space Oddity Films could boost Snapchat’s AR gaming effort, Hashtag Our Stories could fill Snap Map with citizen news broadcasts, Toonstar could bring animation to Discover, and SelfieCircus could power marketing pop-ups like the Snapbots that sold the company’s Spectacles. But at the same time, it’s hard not to see Yellow as a potential escape route for Snap’s business if Instagram’s competition ends up stealing all its users. Snapchat lost three million last quarter, contributing to a massive share price downslide. Following today’s departure of COO Imran Khan, it’s trading at $9.66, just a few cents above its all-time low. If a few of Yellow’s investments blow up and Snap makes capital available for follow-on rounds, the returns could supplement its ad revenue. But none of this first batch of startups looks poised to be gamechangers the way Snap’s acquisitions of Bitmoji and Looksery’s early AR filters were. Here’s a look at the first nine companies in Snapchat Yellow, courtesy of write-ups provided by Snap. (London, UK) – a new realities studio, exploring immersive storytelling through AR, VR, games and beyond. (New York, NY) – a prison-style fitness bootcamp that hires formerly incarcerated individuals to teach fitness classes. ConBody is facilitating an opportunity-filled lifestyle by empowering our community to realize success lies within. We hire formerly incarcerated individuals to build personal discipline through a unique blend of cardiovascular training and bodyweight exercises that take advantage of the resistance properties of everyday objects. We apply military techniques to space constraints intimately familiar to city-dwellers and individuals who reside in small, constrained spaces. In addition, we’re changing the views of formerly incarcerated individuals to be changed by allowing professionals to interact with formerly incarcerated individuals, which gives professionals a different perspective on them. ConBody (Durban, South Africa) – an international mobile journalism (MOJO) network, publishing vertical video stories on social media. Created by citizens, curated by journalists. Since September 2017, we’ve empowered 200 citizen storytellers in over 40 countries to produce videos with their phones. We focus on constructive, solutions-based stories and provide more diverse news coverage. Because more cameras and more perspectives means more truth. Hashtag Our Stories (Los Angeles, CA) – the ID for Korean music. We are a digital media company expanding in-depth on the music of Korea and K-Pop as a globally recognized genre; showcasing the identity of the artists that shape the culture. We provide insightful and rich coverage and content for the global Korean Pop audience. We are creating a Global Brand and Destination for an English-Speaking Korean Pop Audience. Our mission is to create rich and stylized content about the Korean Music Genre; less gossip, more news and features. We want to provide a legitimate outlet for Korean Pop Culture; to create emotive, aspirational stories that are visually chic to a young, hyper-aware and digitally engaged audience. As the company begins we will focus on publishing the best in engaging social video content. We will translate this content across platforms, ultimately building brands, shows and stories that feed the insatiable audience appetite for Korean Pop. From there we will build toward live events, merchandise and much more. (New York, NY) – a video platform for wedding planning and inspiration, bringing engaged couples and event professionals together in a uniquely visual community. Think of us like “Houzz” for weddings: We connect brides and grooms with the ideas, inspiration, products and services they need for their weddings. [Note: Snap tells me Love Stories TV did not give up a seven to ten percent equity stake as it had previously raised a $1.7 million seed round, but wouldn’t disclose more details about its equity stakes in the other startups.] On filmmakers and newlyweds from all over the world share their professionally produced videos along with the data and details about the wedding. Brides and grooms watch the videos to find ideas, inspiration, products and services for their wedding. We also have an active community of pre-engaged-brides under the age of 24 who watch the videos on our site, social and Amazon Prime channel for entertainment. We partner with brands and wedding pros to help them reach brides and grooms on our site and channels via the real wedding films that feature them and original content. Love Stories TV (Los Angeles, CA) – a fashion-first, body-positive lifestyle brand for the plus-size It-Girl. Today, 67 percent of women in America wear plus-sizes — yet plus-size fashion only accounts for 17 percent of the women’s apparel market. When it comes to media representation, plus-sizes are similarly lacking in positive, aspirational visibility. Premme empowers women who have been historically marginalized through fashion-forward, statement-making clothing and visionary, contemporary editorial content and imagery. By creating a relatable, yet aspirational brand that centers on plus-size women, we aim to flip the script on what it means to look and be stylish, while leading the conversation and movement toward truly diverse and inclusive fashion. Premme (Los Angeles, CA) – a new kind of circus. SelfieCircus creates pop-up experiences designed to be documented and shared on social media. The company is building a platform to connect artists, brands and consumers. The first SelfieCircus will open in Los Angeles in late 2018. SelfieCircus (Los Angeles, CA) – a content studio exploring tech and culture that creates innovative content for every platform: mobile, digital, AR/VR, video games, feature film and television. We tell stories about the convergence of humanity and technology. Our original viral tech horror thriller shorts are the foundation of our brand. Our goal is to make the future now. Space Oddity Films (Los Angeles, CA) – a digital animation network that creates and distributes daily pop culture cartoons for an “always on” world. Powered by proprietary animation tech, we produce daily, snackable, interactive animated content at unprecedented speed and cost. We have a large and highly engaged audience of teens and young adults generating millions of views per week because our content is sticky, shareable, relatable and engineered specifically for social. We’re a team of studio alumni and media tech innovators who have produced hit digital animated series, built groundbreaking interactive media technologies and launched mega entertainment franchises. Now we’re on a mission to build a next-gen animation network that delivers greater reach + engagement at a fraction of the operating cost. Toonstar |
LinkedIn sucks | John Biggs | 2,018 | 9 | 10 | I hate LinkedIn. I open it out of habit and accept everyone who adds me because I don’t know why I wouldn’t. There is no clear benefit to the social network. I’ve never met a recruiter on there. I’ve never gotten a job. The only messages I get are spam from offshore dev teams and crypto announcements. It’s like Facebook without the benefit of maybe seeing a picture of someone’s award-winning chili or dog. I understand that I’m using LinkedIn wrong. I understand I should cultivate a salon-like list of contacts that I can use to source stories and meet interesting people. But I have my own and my own contacts. It’s not even good as a broadcast medium. I have 16,000 connections. As a test I posted a story on and on . It’s a post about how to write a book. If the spammers on LinkedIn would have loved to learn something from a writer, I suspected that would have been it. But no. Check out these read counts… This is Medium: And this is LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a spam garden full of misspelled, grunty requests from international software houses that are looking, primarily, to sell you services. Because it’s LinkedIn it’s super easy to slip past any and all defenses against this spam and so I get messages like these on a daily basis: [gallery ids="1708969,1708970,1708971,1708972,1708973"] I don’t know this for sure but I think that somewhere out there is a self-help book about networking that tells introverted desk jockeys to fill their conversations with canned junk. Gail, above, seems nice enough and he’s been doing a really nice job keeping up with all of my anniversaries. But why? What did it get him? Maybe I’ll meet him at a conference and he’ll be able to use it as a point of connection. That might be cool, but I doubt it will happen. I know people have used LinkedIn to find jobs. I never have. I know people use LinkedIn to sell products. It’s never worked for me. Guys like have used it to create mass followings but now Lewis is mostly showing up on Facebook and not LinkedIn. In short, I know people like LinkedIn. I think it’s hot vomit in a paper bag. How would I like LinkedIn to be used? Want to see the best pitch I ever got in that dead drop sewer? It’s right here: Bang. That’s the best exchange I’ve had on LinkedIn in years. I mean the very best. It’s one that I replied to kindly and with interest. Why? Because I wasn’t someone’s cheery spam message. It was a question that I could help with. That’s it. It’s an actual conversation. Someone says “Hey, I need help” and the response is a quick “What’s up?” Someone on Twitter said that this exchange stroked my ego. Sure. Why not. But it was also the most human interaction I’ve had on LinkedIn in years. Rather than get into that, however, I’d like to explain how to pitch someone like me — a busy journalist and entrepreneur who treats LinkedIn like a whack-a-mole weekly chore that has become more a bad habit than necessity. As I’ve : selling and PR and gathering customers is about being a human. Want to approach me on Twitter? You say “Hey, I have a question,” you ask it when prompted, and you wait for a response. Sometimes it never comes. You move on. A lot of folks have said they prefer a full chunk of text when the get spammed on services but I disagree. I get enough of that in email. I get enough of that everywhere else online. If you’re going to network with me (or anyone else who is equally cranky) you’re going to have to try something different. You’re going to have to try to be human. So next time you’re encouraged to Control-V in some copypasta about your business, don’t. Next time you think it might be a good idea to say “Congragulations on fifteen years at Scrablr!” maybe take another tack. LinkedIn isn’t a game. It isn’t an alternative to MailChimp. It’s a conversational tool. Use it that way. Fortnite is impressive, but it’s absolutely dwarfed by the world’s largest video game, LinkedIn, played exclusively by 40-50 year old white guys who compete by sending random connection requests in a quest to build the furthest-reaching “professional network.” — Zack Kanter (@zackkanter) |
Vietnam’s new automaker shows off first vehicles ‘designed’ by its citizens | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 9 | 10 | VinFast, Vietnam’s new (and only) automaker, turned to its citizens to decide what its inaugural vehicles should look like. Now, VinFast is sharing the first images of the final product — a sedan and SUV that will debut October 2 at the Paris Motor Show. The vehicles were officially designed by Italian company Pininfarina, which collaborated with VinFast. Before the design process started in earnest, VinFast took 20 sketches from four Italian car design houses and let the public vote on their favorite in a nationwide poll that attracted 62,000 people. The images below are the ultimate fruits of that early voting on what styling direction VinFast should take. VinFast shows off the first images of its sedan, pictured here, and SUV ahead of the 2018 Paris Motor Show Both vehicles have a prominent chrome “V” in the center of the grille and LED daytime running lights that create an italicized F-motif. The premium sedan has a long hood and horizontal body lines, while the SUV has a more muscular-looking hood. VinFast’s first SUV. Photo: VinFast VinFast, a unit of Vietnam’s biggest private conglomerate Vingroup JS, has a bit of General Motors DNA. GM sold its Vietnam operations to VinFast earlier this year. Under the agreement, VinFast took and has distribution rights of GM’s Chevrolet brand in Vietnam. VinFast, whose CEO Jim DeLuca is a former GM executive, will use the plant to produce its own developed vehicles, in addition to a planned plant in Hai Phong. Construction on the Hai Phong factory began in 2017. Sales of the sedan and SUV are expected to begin in September 2019. The automaker has plans to produce a range of passenger cars and electric scooters, some of which will be exported to foreign markets in the future. |
Pinterest reports 25% increase in monthly active users | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 10 | Two hundred and fifty million people are using Pinterest every month, , according to new numbers the company this morning. The visual search giant is also reporting that more than half of its users and 80 percent of new sign-ups come from outside the U.S. “ ,” or items saved to the site, are growing, too. There are now 175 billion of them, a 75 percent increase YoY. To facilitate that growth, Pinterest has been on a hiring spree. It now has more than 1,500 employees, a 32 percent increase from last year. The company has secured more than $1 billion in venture capital funding, most recently . Many expected it would make its highly anticipated public debut in early 2018, but that ship has sailed at this point. Now, indicate Pinterest is looking at a mid-2019 IPO and expects to reach $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time. Those numbers should help it garner support on Wall Street, as will this nugget: The part of Pinterest that includes items for purchase on retailer sites is the fastest growing part of the platform, up 115 percent in the last year. The company’s key sell to VCs has been that its visual search tool converts users to buyers, but with , it will take data points like that one to convince investors it’s worthy of that $12.3 billion valuation. Pinterest has been busy expanding as it presumably gears up for an IPO. In March, it , where users could view only the content from brands and people they follow. It also added the as part of an effort to create more local content for its users. And it implemented — an area where it competes directly with Facebook and Google. |
Meituan-Dianping’s IPO off to a good start as shares climb 7% on debut | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | (3690.HK) enjoyed a strong debut today in Hong Kong, a sign that investors are confident in the Tencent-backed company’s prospects despite its cash-burning growth strategy, heavy competition and a . During morning trading, Meituan’s shares , a 7% increase over its initial public offering price of HKD$69. When Meituan reportedly set a target valuation of $55 billion for its debut, it that the company, which bills itself a “one-stop super app” for everything from food delivery to ticket bookings, as overconfident. While Meituan, the owner of Mobile, is the leading online marketplace for services in China, it faces formidable competition from Alibaba’s Ele.me and operating on tight margins and heavy losses as it spends money on marketing and user acquisition costs. As it prepared for its IPO, Meituan was also under the shadow of and . Like Xiaomi, Meituan is listed under a new dual-class share structure designed to attract tech companies by allowing them to give weighted voting rights to founders. The sponsors of Meituan’s IPO are Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. |
VW reimagines the microbus as an all-electric cargo hauler | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | towards electrified vehicles isn’t isolated to passenger cars and SUVs. Manufacturers are investing in commercial vehicles as well — everything from school buses and delivery vans to big commercial trucks. VW Group’s vision for an electrified commercial vehicle future also includes a microbus. The automaker’s commercial vehicles unit unveiled five zero-emission vehicles at the 69th IAA Commercial Vehicles show in Hannover, Germany. Among them is an all-electric cargo van that’s meant to be the commercial equivalent of the I.D. Buzz microbus revealed in 2017. The others include a commercial-grade cargo e-bike, an electric concept van called the Crafter HyMotion that’s powered by hydrogen fuel cell system, a Transporter concept van with a 48-volt mild hybrid drive system that combines a turbodiesel engine with an electric drive and finally, the A Some of these concepts such as the hydrogen fuel cell Crafter HyMotion are far from hitting the streets. The Crafter HyMotion concept 3.5-ton van is equipped with a hydrogen tank that enable a total range of about 217 miles. “This is still a concept vehicle, but the technical concept is already near-production,” Heinz-Jürgen Löw, head of sales and a board member of Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles said in a statement. “We are conducting an intensive cost and benefit analysis to determine its market potential. The Crafter HyMotion with a fuel cell drive is absolutely a beneficial addition to our drive portfolio of petrol, diesel, natural gas and electric motors.” The microbus with its 1970s hippie-turned Jetson-vibe is of course the show stopper, which VW describes at the “ideal vehicle for the urban traffic of tomorrow.” And unlike many other concepts, a version of this one might actually make it into production. The company said it could be launched into the market as early as 2021, a year ahead of the passenger version unveiled last year. The I.D. Buzz cargo microbus concept is equipped with 20-inch wheels (smaller than the I.D. Buzz passenger van) and a solar roof that can extends the battery’s range another 9 miles a day. It also wide-opening rear wing doors, a new rear bumper and is equipped with a “connected” system that allows all items on its interior shelves to be tracked. Users can unlock the vehicle from the outside via a sensor that recognizes authorized persons via a digital key which is sent to the van from a smartphone. The cockpit has all the futuristic leanings you might expect with information like navigation projected in #D via an augmented reality head-up display and a portable tablet where the infotainment and climate control functions are housed. The main controls for driving are located on the steering wheel. The concept also has autonomous driving capabilities, although it’s unclear if this technology will make it into a production version. Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images This isn’t the first microbus concept VW has shown off in recent years. There was the BUDD.e, which was introduced in January 2016 at CES. BUDD.e was intended to show the world that VW was serious about electric vehicles in the wake of the diesel emissions scandal that has led to arrests, jail sentences and fines. The following year, VW unveiled an electric all-wheel drive microbus called , a futuristic take on the family camper van. The I.D. Buzz will go into production starting in 2022. While the diesel emissions saga drags on, VW is pushing slowly ahead with its electric vehicle plans. VW Group’s board agreed in June 2016 to transform its core automotive business to focus more on electric vehicles, autonomous driving technology and launch mobility services such as shuttle on demand and ride hailing. Up to 25% of new vehicles under VW Group — a portfolio that includes Audi and Volkswagen Passenger Cars — will be all-electric under the board’s . Those electric ambitions (and investments) doesn’t translate into an exodus of diesel — at least on the commercial vehicle front. Thomas Sedran, board chairman of Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, said that despite progress made in the electrification of its products, the business unit would continue to rely on highly advanced diesels as the backbone for logistics, particularly vehicles that make long distance runs, in rough terrains and for heavy loads. |
India’s Livspace raises $70M for its one-stop-shop for interior design | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | , an India-based startup that helps consumers manage home renovations and interior design, has pulled in a $70 million Series C deal that’s led by Goldman Sachs and TPG Growth. Existing investors Jungle Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Helion Ventures also took part in the round, which takes Livspace total funding to date to over $100 million. The deal follows Goldman’s involvement in fintech startup , while TPG Growth recently hired former Twitter Asia head Shailesh Rao to lead its business in India and Southeast Asia. Livspace was founded by former Googler Anuj Srivastava and Ramakant Sharma, who has spent time with Myntra and Jungle Ventures among others, in 2015. The business aims to be a one-stop-shop for home interior design — whether that be renovations or new home design. That makes it an e-commerce business that integrates multiple pieces of the interior ecosystem: consumers, designers and the supply chain. For that reason, Livspace is an inherently local business. Interior designers need to be local to customers and supply chain partners need to have the capacity to ship to a location, too, but Livspace actually goes beyond that by mapping buildings in a city to enable virtual mockups and 3D models to be rendered to help show a consumer a compelling preview of what their home could look like. The company also operates brick and mortar ‘Design Centers’ where consumers can touch and see materials and furniture, while the centers also operate as a location for designers and consumers to meet up if needed. The company is currently present in seven cities in India. With this money in the bank, the plan is to expand to reach 13 cities in India by the end of next year but it’s ambitions go beyond its founders’ home country. In an interview with TechCrunch, Srivastava said that he sees an opportunity to grow the business not just in Asia but also western markets where, to date, there are no integrated solutions such as Livspace. “The industry has suffered from chaos,” he said. “There’s little to no aggregation on supply and demand, and there is significant opportunity for tech-based platform to unite consumers, agents and the supply chain market. So far so good. Livspace says it is on track to reach $100 million in annualized gross revenue by March 2019. Srivastava said it has outfitted 5,000-6,000 houses so far with 1,200-1,500 projects in its system at any one time. Consumers, of course, shop around for deals and the completion rate of projects is at around one-third, Srivastava said, with an average of about $15,000 per consumer. Of that, the take rate for Livspace is around 40 percent with seven percent for the designer. The company claims to have around 25,000 designers on the platform but less than 10 percent of all applicants are approved to ensure quality and expertise. Through Livspace, Srivastava claims designers can massively boost their income, typically by around 2X. He argues that is not only because the rates earned are higher, but also because average project time is reduced from multiple-months to just 12-14 weeks. That means designers can also operate more efficiently. Financially, Srivastava said he believes the business model itself can scale and that there is clear “path to profitability” particularly if the company can expand internationally. “We started monetizing in India but we have our eyes set on every single other similar market in the planet. We’ll get there in time,” he said. |
Google’s Cloud Source Repositories gets better search tools | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | Google today announced an update to , its recently relaunched Git-based source code repository, that brings a significantly better search experience to the service. This new search feature is based on the same tool that Google’s own engineers use day in and day out and it’s now available in the beta release of Cloud Source Repositories. If you’ve been on the internet for a while, then you probably remember . Code Search allowed you to search through any open-source code on the internet. Sadly, Google shut this down back in 2012. This new feature isn’t quite the same, though. It only allows you to search your own code — or that from other people in your company. It’s just as fast as Google’s own search, though, and allows you to use regular expressions and other advanced search features. One nifty feature here is that for Java, JavaScript, Go, C++, Python, TypeScript and Proto files, the tools will also return information on whether the match is a class, method, enum or field. Google argues that searching through code locally is not very efficient and means you are often looking at outdated code. As Google also notes, you can mirror your code from GitHub and Bitbucket with Cloud Source Repositories. I’m not sure a lot of developers will do this only to get the advanced search tools, but it’s definitely a way for Google to get more users onto its platform, which is a bit of an underdog in an ecosystem that’s dominated by the likes of GitHub. “One key benefit is that now all owned repositories that are either mirrored or added to Cloud Source Repositories can be searched in a single query,” Cloud Source Repositories product manager Russell Wolf writes in today’s announcement. “This works whether you have a small weekend project or a code base the size of Google’s. And it’s fast: You’ll get the answers you need super quickly—much faster than previous functionality—so you can get back to writing code. And indexing is super fast, too, so the time between new code being added and being available means you’re always searching up-to-date code.” |
Google brings vulnerability scanning to its Cloud Build CI/CD platform | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | Google today announced an important update to its Cloud Build CI/CD platform that brings to all container images built using the service. Container Registry vulnerability scanning, which is now in beta, is meant to ensure that as businesses adopt modern DevOps practices, the container they eventually deploy are free of known vulnerabilities. As Google rightly notes, the only way to ensure that security protocols are always followed is by automating the process. In this case, all new Cloud Build images are automatically scanned when Cloud Build creates an image and stores it in the Container Registry. The service uses the standard security databases to find new issues. Currently, the service can identify package vulnerabilities for Ubuntu, Debian, and Alpine, with CentOS and RHEL support coming soon. When it finds an issue, the service will notify the user, but businesses can also set up automatic rules (using Pub/Sub notifications and Cloud Functions) to take actions automatically. Users also get detailed reports about the severity of the vulnerability, VCSS scores, which packages were affected and whether there’s a fix available already. |
Google’s Cloud Memorystore for Redis is now generally available | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | After five months in public beta, Google today announced that its , its fully managed in-memory data store, is now generally available. The service, which is fully compatible with the , promises to offer sub-millisecond responses for applications that need to use in-memory caching. And because of its compatibility with Redis, developers should be able to easily migrate their applications to this service without making any code changes. Cloud Memorystore offers two service tiers — a basic one for simple caching and a standard tier for users who need a highly available Redis instance. For the standard tier, Google offers a 99.9 percent availability SLA. Since it first launched in beta, Google added a few additional capabilities to the service. You can now see your metrics in Stackdriver, for example. Google also added custom IAM roles and improved logging. As for pricing, Google charges per GB-hour, depending on the service level and capacity you use. You can find the full pricing list . |
‘Jackrabbot 2’ takes to the sidewalks to learn how humans navigate politely | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | Autonomous vehicles and robots have to know how to get from A to B without hitting obstacles or pedestrians — but how can they do so politely and without disturbing nearby humans? That’s what Stanford’s Jackrabbot project aims to learn, and now a redesigned robot will be cruising campus learning the subtleties of humans negotiating one another’s personal space. “There are many behaviors that we humans subconsciously follow – when I’m walking through crowds, I maintain personal distance or, if I’m talking with you, someone wouldn’t go between us and interrupt,” said grad student Ashwini Pokle in a Stanford News release. “We’re working on these deep learning algorithms so that the robot can adapt these behaviors and be more polite to people.” Of course there are practical applications pertaining to last mile problems and robotic delivery as well. What do you do if someone stops in front of you? What if there’s a group running up behind? Experience is the best teacher, as usual. , and has been hard at work building a model of how humans (well, mostly undergrads) walk around safely, avoiding one another while taking efficient paths, and signal what they’re doing the whole time. But technology has advanced so quickly that . The JackRabbot project team with JackRabbot 2 (from left to right): Patrick Goebel, Noriaki Hirose, Tin Tin Wisniewski, Amir Sadeghian, Alan Federman, Silivo Savarese, Roberto Martín-Martín, Pin Pin Tea-mangkornpan and Ashwini Pokle The new robot has a vastly improved sensor suite compared to its predecessor: two Velodyne lidar units giving 360 degree coverage, plus a set of stereo cameras making up its neck that give it another depth-sensing 360 degree view. The cameras and sensors on its head can also be pointed wherever needed, of course, just like ours. All this imagery is collated by a pair of new GPUs in its base/body. Amir Sadeghian, one of the researchers, said this makes Jackrabbot 2 “one of the most powerful robots of its size that has ever been built.” This will allow the robot to sense human motion with a much greater degree of precision than before, and also operate more safely. It will also give the researchers a chance to see how the movement models created by the previous robot integrate with this new imagery. The other major addition is a totally normal-looking arm that Jackrabbot 2 can use to gesture to others. After all, we do it, right? When it’s unclear who should enter a door first or what side of a path they should take, a wave of the hand is all it takes to clear things up. Usually. Hopefully this kinked little gripper accomplishes the same thing. Jackrabbot 2 can zoom around for several hours at a time, Sadeghian said. “At this stage of the project for safety we have a human with a safety switch accompanying the robot, but the robot is able to navigate in a fully autonomous way.” Having working knowledge of how people use the space around them and how to predict their movements will be useful to startups like Kiwi, Starship, and Marble. The first time a delivery robot smacks into someone’s legs is the last time they consider ordering something via one. |
SparkLabs is launching a cybersecurity and blockchain accelerator program in the US | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | Investment firm SparkLabs has run accelerator programs across APAC, now it has announced its first that’ll be based on U.S. soil and it’s that’ll be located in Washington, D.C. from next year. The program will be led by former Startup Grind COO Brian Park and Mike Bott, who is ex-managing director of accelerator. Advisors signed on to work with the batch of companies includes top names like Microsoft’s former chief software architect Ray Ozzie, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, LinkedIn co-founder Eric Ly and Rich DeMillo, who was the first CTO of HP. Named “SparkLabs Cybersecurity + Blockchain,” the program will kick off with an inaugural batch of companies in March next year, with applications opening accepted from January. SparkLabs co-founder and partner Bernard Moon told TechCrunch in an interview that the plan is to run the program for four months with two intakes per year. It’ll use SparkLabs’ standard investment approach that sees selected companies offered $50,000 for up to six percent equity. That’s variable on a case-by-case basis — for example for those that have raised significant early funding at a large valuation — but Moon said that the priority for the security and blockchain program is to seek out companies that are bootstrapped or at least have not raised much. Moon said that the general focus is not on cryptocurrency but instead enterprise-led technologies. So, on the blockchain side, that might mean protocols and other infrastructure layer plays, although Moon said he does believe that there is scope for more consumer companies, too. SparkLabs has a dedicated blockchain fund — — but neither that fund nor its principal, Stellar founder Joyce Kim, is directly involved in the accelerator. That’s very deliberate, Moon said, because SparkLabs wants to grow its network in the blockchain space outside of SparkChain, although he did explain that the program will be “a vetted deal source” for the fund, so graduates could potentially look it to when they want follow-on funding. Outside of SparkChain Capital, SparkLabs is active in crypto, primarily through its presence in Asia — especially Korea where it operates its first accelerator program. — a six month IOT-focused initiative in Korean smart city Songdo and Cultiv8, an accelerator for agriculture and food tech in Australia — although Moon said that the project has been delayed but remains on track to happen soon. Investment-wise, it has backed over 10 blockchain companies and a dozen in the cybersecurity space. The cybersecurity and blockchain program has an interesting story. Park and Bott originally spun out AOL’s Fishbowl Labs accelerator program but after a discussion with Moon for advice, the pair ended up signing up with SparkLabs. That’s a move that Moon believes will help bring a global perspective through SparkLabs’ presence in the rest of the world — it has six other programs globally — and marrying that with what’s happening in the U.S. “We want to foster and grow a robust ecosystem in both cybersecurity and distributed ledger technologies. We believe these two verticals are synergetic by nature, but we will seek innovations beyond the overlap,” Park said in a statement “It’s so early within this space that we are only seeing the Friendsters and MySpaces of the blockchain world. The next Facebooks and Twitters will be developed over the next several years,” he added. |
Facing sexual assault charges, 3D-printed gun advocate Cody Wilson evades US authorities | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | The gun rights activist who waged a very public legal war over the right to over the internet is that have nothing to do with firearms. According to a law enforcement press conference today, Cody Wilson, 30, is believed to have traveled to Taipei after learning that he was under investigation for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old. Wilson, who travels frequently, also missed his scheduled return flight. According to an affidavit filed on Wednesday, Wilson is charged with the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl in Travis County, Texas. The affidavit describes how Wilson, an Austin resident, began communicating with the alleged victim under the handle “Sanjuro” using the website “SugarDaddyMeet.com.” The two continued talking via iMessage and Wilson allegedly identified himself to the victim and mentioned that he was a “big deal,” prompting her to find his name featured in recent news stories. In addition to his high-profile role in the debate over 3D-printed firearms, Wilson also attracted attention when he founded , a crowdfunding site for fundraisers that violated the rules of sites like Patreon and Kickstarter. The , published in full on , details how the two met in person on August 15 at a local coffee shop and Wilson then took the victim to a hotel in a vehicle registered to his company, . The victim alleges that the sexual assault took place at Austin’s Archer hotel, after which Wilson paid her $500. Surveillance footage corroborates the victim’s story. Austin’s police department is coordinating with international authorities to bring him back to the country to face the second-degree felony charges, which could be punishable by up to 20 years in prison. : A reporter with the Austin American-Statesman reports that the U.S. Marshals have issued a wanted poster for Wilson. NOW: U.S. Marshals release “wanted” poster for Cody Wilson, maker of so-called 3D guns. — Tony Plohetski (@tplohetski) |
Lime is pissed at San Francisco for denying it an e-scooter permit, claims ‘unlawful bias’ | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | Lime is waging a war against the San Francisco Municipal Transporation Agency (SFMTA), claiming the organization acted with “unlawful bias” and “sought to punish Lime” to operate in San Francisco last month. Lime has sent an appeal to the SFMTA, requesting an “unbiased hearing officer” reevaluate its application to participate in the city’s 12-month pilot program for e-scooter providers. The SFMTA, however, says they are “confident” they picked the right companies in Scoot and Skip. “After a thorough, fair and transparent review process, we are confident we selected the strongest applicants to participate in the one-year scooter pilot,” a spokesperson for SFMTA said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “Scoot and Skip demonstrated the highest level of commitment to our city’s values of prioritizing public safety, promoting equity and ensuring accountability. Lime’s appeal will go to an independent hearing officer for further consideration.” San Francisco’s permit process came as a result of Lime and its competitors, Bird and deploying their scooters without permission in the city this March. As part of a new city law, which went into effect in June, scooter startups are not able to operate in San Francisco without a permit. Skip, Spin, Lime, Scoot, ofo, Razor, CycleHop, USSCooter and Ridecell all applied for permits. Now, Lime is arguing the selection process was unfair and that because it deployed scooters in the city without asking permission — the Uber model of expansion — the SFMTA intentionally rejected its application despite its qualifications. “The SFMTA ignored the fact that Scoot’s price is twice that of other applicants, including Lime, and that Scoot declined to offer any discounted cash payment option to low-income users, as required by law,” Lime wrote in a statement today. “SFMTA inexplicably avoided inclusion of these factors as evaluation criteria and instead deemed Scoot ‘satisfactory’ because they ‘agreed to comply.'” When Lime learned of its rejection on Aug. 30, CEO Toby Sun said he was disappointed and planned to appeal the decision. Though Lime wasn’t able to successfully sway San Francisco authorities, last month alongside Bird, Lyft and JUMP Bikes. E-scooters are expected to return to the streets of San Francisco on Oct. 15. |
18 new details about Elon Musk’s redesigned, moon-bound ‘Big F*ing Rocket’ | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | at this week’s SpaceX event was squarely on Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — for the company’s nascent space tourism business — Elon Musk also revealed a wealth of new details about the BFR and just how this enormous rocket and spacecraft will get to the moon and back. In a lengthy (one might even say rambling, in the true Musk style) presentation, we were treated to cinematic and technical views of the planned rocket, which is already under construction and could take flight as early as a couple years from now — and Musk then candidly held forth on numerous topics in a lengthy Q&A period. As a result we learned quite a bit about this newly redesigned craft-in-progress. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Hope you like pictures of spaceships! (Note: Quotes are transcribed directly but may have been very slightly edited for clarity, such as the removal of “you know” and “like.”) Well, that’s not really news — it’s right there in the name. But now we know exactly ridiculously big. “The production design of BFR is different in some important ways from what I presented about a year ago,” Musk said, including its dimensions. The redesigned spacecraft (or BFS) will be 118 meters in length, or about 387 feet; just under half of that, 55 meters, will be the spacecraft itself. Inside you have about 1,100 cubic meters of payload space. That’s all around 15-20 percent larger than . Its max payload is 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit. “I mean, this is a ridiculously big rocket,” he added. The illustration on the wall, he pointed out, is life-size. As you can see it dwarfs the crowd and the other rockets. What will fit in there? It depends on the mission, as you’ll see later. Although Musk was clear on how the spacecraft worked, he was still a little foggy on nomenclature — not because he forgot, but because the parts don’t really correspond exactly with anything in flight right now. “There are two forward and two rear actuated wings, or fins,” he said. They don’t really fit the definition of either, he suggested — especially since they also act as legs. The fin on top of the craft gives it a very Space Shuttle-esque look, and it was natural that most would think that it’s a vertical stabilizer of some kind. But Musk shut that down quickly: “It doesn’t have any aerodynamic purpose — it really is just a leg.” He pointed out that during any atmospheric operations, the fin will be in the lee of the craft and won’t have any real effect. “It looks the same as the other ones for purposes of symmetry,” he explained. It was pointed out when the new design was teased last week that it bore some resemblance to the ship Tintin (and Captain Haddock, and Professor Calculus, et al.) pilot to the moon in the classic comics. Turns out this isn’t a coincidence. “The iteration before this decoupled the landing legs from the control surfaces — it basically had 6 legs. I actually didn’t like the aesthetics of that design,” Musk said. “I love the Tintin rocket design, so I kind of wanted to bias it toward that. So now we have the three large legs, with two of them actuating as body flaps or large moving wings.” “I think this design is probably on par with the other one. It might be better. Yeah, if in doubt, go with Tintin,” he said. An interplanetary spacecraft doesn’t have the same design restrictions as a passenger jet, so it may fly completely differently. “You want four control surfaces to be able to control the vehicle through a wide range of atmospheric densities and velocities,” Musk explained, referring to the four fin-wing-flaps. “The way it behaves is a bit more like a skydiver than an aircraft. If you apply normal intuition it will not make sense.” Actually if you imagine the plane as a person falling to earth, and that person controlling their orientation by moving their arms and legs — their built-in flaps — it does seem rather intuitive. “Almost the entire time it is reentering, it’s just trying to brake, while distributing that force over the most area possible — it uses the entire body to brake,” Musk said. This is another point of similarity with the Space Shuttle, which used its heat-resistance bottom surface as a huge air brake. “This will look really epic in person,” he enthused. Of course, that only applies when there’s an atmosphere. “Obviously if you’re landing on the moon you don’t need any aerodynamic surfaces at all, because there’s no air.” Astute observers like yours truly noticed that the number and arrangement of the craft’s Raptor engines had changed in the picture tweeted last week. Musk complimented the questioner (and by extension, me) for noting this and explained. “In order to minimize the development risk and costs, we decided to harmonize the engine between the booster and the ship,” he said. In other words, it made more sense and cost less to put a similar type of Raptor engine on both the craft itself and the rocket that would take it to space. Previously the ship had been planned to have four large Raptor engines and two smaller sea-level engines for landing purposes. The trade-off, obviously, is that it will be a bit more costly to build the ship, but the benefits are manifold. “Having the engines in that configuration, with seven engines, means it’s definitely capable of engine out at any time, including two engine out in almost all circumstances,” he said, referring to the possibility of an engine cutting out during flight. “In fact in some cases you could lose up to four engines and still be fine. It only needs three engines for landing.” The booster, of course, will have considerably more thrusters — 31 to start, and as many as 42 down the road. (The number was not chosen arbitrarily, as you might guess.) In the video explaining the mission, the BFS deploys a set of what appear to be solar panels from near the engines. How exactly this would work wasn’t explained at all — and in the images you can see there really isn’t a place for them to retract into. So this is likely only in the concept phase right now. This isn’t exactly a surprise — solar is by far the most practical way to replenish small to medium amounts of electricity used for things like lights and life support, as demonstrated by most spacecraft and of course the International Space Station. But until now we haven’t seen how those solar panels would be deployed. The fan structure at the rear would keep the panels out of view of passengers and pilots, and the single-stem design would allow them to be tilted and rotated to capture the maximum amount of sunlight. Although everyone is no doubt eager to see what the inside of the spaceship looks like, Musk cautioned that they are still at a concept stage there. He did say that they have learned a lot from the Crew Dragon capsule, however, and that will be plenty of shared parts and designs. “Depending on the type of mission, you’d have a different configuration,” he explained. “If you were going to Mars that’s at least a three-month journey. You want to have a cabin, like a common area for recreation, some sort of meeting rooms… because you’ll be in this thing for months.” Water and air in a months-long journey would have to be a closed-loop system, he noted, though he didn’t give any indication how that would work. “Now if you’re going, say, to the moon or around the moon, you have a several-day journey,” Musk continued. But then he mused on what the spare space would be used for. “What is the most fun you can have in zero G? That for sure is a key thing. Fun is underrated. Whatever is the most enjoyable thing you could possibly do — we’ll do that.” Assuming the passengers have gotten over their space sickness, of course. Musk was reticent to put any hard numbers out, given how early SpaceX is in development, but said: “If I were to guess it would be something like 5 billion dollars, which would be really quite a small amount for a project of this nature.” He’s not wrong. Just for a sense of scale, the Space Shuttle program would probably have cost nearly $200 billion in today’s dollars. The F-35 program will end up costing something like $400 billion. These things aren’t directly comparable, of course, but they do give you a sense of how much money is involved in this type of thing. First two Starlink demo satellites, called Tintin A & B, deployed and communicating to Earth stations — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Where exactly that money will come from isn’t totally clear, but Musk did point out that SpaceX does have reliable business coming from its International Space Station resupply missions and commercial launches. And next year, he pointed out, crewed launches could bring another source of income to the mix. That’s in addition to Starlink, the satellite internet service in the offing. That’s still in tests, of course (and Tintin-related, as well). Hanging out with before the moon mission announcement — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Although both men declined to elaborate on the actual price Maezawa paid, Musk did indicate it was considerable — and of course, he’s also essentially paying for . “He’s made a significant deposit on the price, which is a significant price and will actually have a material effect on paying for the cost of developing the BFR,” Musk said. “It’s a non-trivial amount.” “We’re already building it. We’ve built the first cylinder section,” Musk said, showing an image of that part, 9 meters in diameter. “We’ll build the domes and the engine section soon.” “We’ll start doing hopper flights next year,” Musk said. “Depending on how those go we’ll do high-altitude, high-velocity flights in 2020, then start doing tests of the booster. If things go well we could be doing the first orbital flights in about two to three years.” This is the most optimistic scenario, he later clarified. “We’re definitely not sure. But you have to set a date that’s kind of like the ‘things go right’ date.” The flight plan for the trip around the moon is relatively straightforward, as lunar missions go. Launch, orbit Earth, thrust to zoom off towards the moon, use moon’s gravity to boomerang back, and then land. But the exact path is to be determined, and Musk has ideas. “I think it would be pretty exciting to like skim the surface,” he said, attempting to illustrate the orbit with gestures. “Go real close, then zoom out far, then come back around. In the diagram it looks kinda symmetric but I think you’d want to go real close.” As the moon has no atmosphere, there’s no question of the craft getting slowed down or having its path altered by getting closer to it. The orbital dynamics would change, of course, but the moon’s trajectory is nothing if not well understood, so it’s just a question of how safe the mission planners want to play it, regardless of Musk’s fantasies. “This is pretty off the cuff,” he admitted. There will be plenty of tests before Maezawa and his artist friends take off. “We’ll do many such test flights before putting any people on board. I’m not sure if we will actually test a flight around the moon or not, but probably we will try to do that without people before sending people.” “That would be wise,” he concluded, seeming to make a decision then and there. But spaceflight is inherently risky, and he did not attempt to hide that fact. “This is a dangerous mission,” he said. “We’ll leave a lot of extra room for extra food and oxygen, food and water, spare parts… you know, just in case.” Maezawa, who was sitting next to him on stage, did not seem perturbed by this — he was certain to have assessed the risks before buying the ticket. In answer to a related question, he did indicate that astronaut-style training was in the plans, but the regimen was not yet planned. There’s no getting around the fact that BFR stands for “Big Fucking Rocket,” or at least that’s what Musk and others have implied while coyly avoiding confirming. This juvenile naming scheme is in line with Tesla’s. Perhaps cognizant of posterity and the dignity of mankind’s expansion into space, Musk suggested this might not be permanent. “We should probably think of a different name,” he admitted. This was kind of a code name and it kind of stuck.” Again, if it officially just stood for “Big Falcon Rocket,” this probably wouldn’t be an issue. But regardless, Musk’s trademark geeky sense of humor remained. “The only thing is, we’d like to name the first ship that goes to Mars after — Douglas Adams, my favorite spaceship — the Heart of Gold, from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” As far off as the moon mission is, the Mars mission is even further, and Musk changes his mind on nearly everything — but this is one thing I can sense he’s committed to. |
Lyft now integrates public transit info in app | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | Lyft has officially entered the public transit space with the , a feature currently available just in Santa Monica, Calif. This comes just a couple of days after . Today, Lyft customers in Santa Monica will see the Nearby Transit option, which includes route information and schedules for the Big Blue Bus, LA Metro and Metrolink. The feature is in partnership with Trafi, a transit information platform. “Building on the launch of Lyft Scooters in Santa Monica this week, it’s another step toward providing effective, equitable, and sustainable transportation to our communities, and towards creating a more seamless and connected transportation network,” the company posted on its blog. Lyft has also brought on Lilly Shoup, formerly of Nelson\Nygaard Consulting, to serve as senior director of transportation policy. In that role, Shoup will oversee Lyft’s multi-modal transportation efforts as they pertain to equity, land use, autonomous vehicles and more. Uber announced its , but has yet to integrate those offerings into the app. Whenever Uber integrates public transit, the company will take it a step further than Lyft by enabling people to purchase tickets, not just check routes. |
Entrepreneurs: It’s time to put corporate VCs back on your short list | Gil Beyda | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | The startup media is awash with stories of corporate venture capital prioritizing their own interests over those of their portfolio. While acknowledging that some of these stories may have a basis in truth, it’s critical to recognize . It’s time the whole story is told. The truth is that not all corporate venture capital firms are the same. And in fact, some have a strategic advantage because they have access to proprietary insights from dozens of markets and technologies that are simply unavailable to other venture capital firms. Further, corporate venture capital firms can create synergies between portfolio companies and their parent companies to help accelerate business, an opportunity unavailable to most venture capital firms. There are two types of corporate venture capital, and it’s essential to understand the difference between them. The first type, , provides significant benefits to all parties if done well. These firms can help accelerate portfolio companies with revenue, market/customer insights and technology/roadmap development. The second type is . These firms are run like typical venture firms and are primarily driven to maximize financial returns, and the firm’s partners are rewarded for making profitable investments. These firms make investment decisions just like every other non-corporate venture firm, based on team, market, competition, product, traction, capital efficiency, exit potential, etc. Once an investment is made, financially focused corporate venture capital firms often take board seats and work to add value in all the same ways other venture firms do, with strategy, product, go-to-market, hiring, financials, etc. Because Now, the upshot. In many cases, a financially focused corporate venture capital firm can be a better partner for some companies. Not only does the firm provide all the typical value-add of a typical venture firm — smart partners, large networks, etc. — they also provide something that other firms can’t provide: proprietary insights. Financially focused corporate venture firms have a close working relationship with their corporate parent, which allows them access to technology, industry operators and visionaries, giving them proprietary insights to which normal venture firms simply don’t have access. These proprietary insights give financially focused corporate venture capital partners the ability to see the market and technology landscape in a different, more informed, way. The bottom line is that financially focused corporate venture capital firms have all the benefits of a typical venture firm exclusive proprietary insights — without the potential downside of strategically driven corporate venture capital firms. One obvious objection to corporate venture capital is that these firms are unlikely to invest in companies that may put it out of business. By the way, most venture capital firms restrict themselves from investing in companies that are competitive with their portfolio. However, there are some venture capital firms that take a more “survival of the fittest” approach and encourage making many investments in a hot space without concern for competition. To illustrate the advantages of working with a financially focused corporate venture capital firm, let’s look at a real example — my investment in blockchain. Comcast is to allow users to create a unique digital identity and associate it with IoT devices in the home to control access to those devices. Given my affiliation and close working relationship with Comcast Corporation and NBCUniversal, I was afforded a front-row seat to the potential advantages and disadvantages of leveraging cutting-edge blockchain technology to solve real-world problems. No other venture capital firm has this level of access to early use cases. Here’s what that looked like: I met with the team developing this technology before it was made public. I spoke with the engineers to understand how they were using blockchain, why they chose it and how it helped their efforts. I saw a demo and got to play with it. This hands-on experience was invaluable to blockchain executives — and it was only afforded to “members of the Comcast family.” Further, the insight also helped inform my investment thesis around blockchain, so I could better serve their business interests. There are many applications of blockchain technology. Another group within Comcast is looking at how . Beyond that, Comcast and NBCUniversal are looking at blockchain technology and how it relates to identity, rewards and loyalty, security and IoT, to name a few. It comes down to real-world problems, being solved by real-world practitioners, who are experimenting with blockchain. been helping drive our investment strategy in blockchain technologies and token-based economies. We have already made a number of investments in the space and continue to believe there are investment opportunities at the protocol, platform, infrastructure and application levels. Outside of blockchain, there are a number of examples within Comcast Ventures that also show advantages of leveraging resources at a corporate venture capital firm: EdgeConneX its business model with the help of Comcast; Brightside was , securing Comcast as its first customer; Zola with NBCU; Comcast became one of ; and Icontrol was . Financially focused corporate venture firms have super-talented partners in the firm who can help entrepreneurs build great companies. Just like other venture capital firms, we are financially incented to find the next billion-dollar company, and we invest in your strategy, not ours. But unlike other venture capital firms, we have exclusive proprietary insights into dozens of markets and technologies. And, we also can create synergies between portfolio companies and Comcast and NBCUniversal to help accelerate growth if there is mutual interest and benefit. Finally, we are measured on financial returns, so we win only if you win! |
Amazon launches Scout, a machine learning-powered visual shopping tool | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | Amazon is experimenting with a new tool called Scout designed to help shoppers better figure out what they want to buy in a more visual fashion, according , which first spotted Scout live on Amazon’s site. Using a combination of imagery, a thumbs up and down voting mechanism, and machine learning technology, Scout offers an almost Pinterest-like way of browsing Amazon products, then refining recommendations through user input. Currently, the site lets you search for furniture, kitchen, dining products, home décor, patio items, lighting, and bedding, as well as women’s shoes. In time, Amazon will add more products like clothing and handbags, it said. While Amazon.com today has just about any product you could want, finding items you like when you only have a vague idea of what you want can be more difficult. For example, if you’re looking for a dresser, or a new comforter, or deck chairs, you’re often stuck scrolling down through a long list of matching results that aren’t at all customized to your particular tastes. For this reason, shoppers tend to find themselves heading to other more “inspirational” sites, like Pinterest or Houzz, for example. Scout aims to help customers narrow down their choices more quickly. Specifically, it focuses on solving two dilemmas, an Amazon spokesperson said: “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it” and “I know what I want, but I don’t know what it’s called.” “This is a new way to shop, allowing customers to browse millions of items and quickly refine the selection based solely on visual attributes,” the spokesperson noted. “Amazon uses imagery from across its robust selection to extract thousands of visual attributes for showing customers a variety of items so they can select their preferences as they go. This innovative shopping experience is powered by machine learning. The result is a beautiful and inspirational image feed, which gives customers the ability to explore a wide range of products in a playful and personalized manner with just a few clicks,” they added. This isn’t Amazon’s first go at trying to solve its discoverability problems or add elements of personalization to product hunting. The retailer had previously launched ,” which features a curated selection of products under dozens of top level categories like clothing, toys, gadgets, travel, workspace, smart home, pets, and more. As you “heart” (like) items in this visual storefront, Amazon then creates a personalized group of suggestions But Interesting Finds today is more about serendipitous discovery – not a directed search where you want to refine the results to your personal tastes. While Amazon hadn’t publicly announced Scout, some Amazon shoppers were happening upon it when browsing specific products. There, they’d see a link to “Scout Style Explorer” which would take them over to the new tool, CNBC said. The site isn’t its own URL, but rather a subsection of Amazon.com, on . The retailer says it’s live now on Amazon’s website and in Amazon App. |
Coinbase hires Fannie Mae exec Brian Brooks as chief legal officer | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | Coinbase has made yet another addition to its C-suite. The cryptocurrency trading platform has hired Brian Brooks, the former executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of Fannie Mae, as its chief legal officer. The hiring is part of the company’s effort to expand its legal, compliance and government affairs teams. Mike Lempres, who until now held the chief legal and risk officer title, will transition into the role of chief policy officer. “From the time it was founded seven years ago, Coinbase has been a leading advocate for the adoption of cryptocurrency,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a statement. “We’ve engaged proactively with regulators as we built products and services that allow people to buy, sell and use cryptocurrency all over the world. In recent years, the industry expanded faster than we could have imagined with an explosion in customer demand and entrepreneurial activity pushing the capabilities of the ecosystem forward. As this trend continues, it is more important than ever that we contribute to a public policy and regulatory environment that fosters innovation while protecting investors.” Brooks joined Fannie Mae in 2014; before that, he was the vice chairman of OneWest Bank and a managing partner at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers. The news comes one day after . Li had spent the last seven years at LinkedIn, most recently as its head of analytics and data science. Here’s an updated round-up of Coinbase’s other notable 2018 hires: |
Fabricio Bloisi’s Movile is leading tech’s charge in Brazil and beyond and he’s coming to Startup Battlefield Latin America | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | In the 20 years since launched its first technology services in 1998, the . Movile chief executive Fabricio Bloisi Technology startups have gone from being an afterthought to being at the forefront of the economic changes sweeping through the region. And Movile’s digital marketplaces, delivery services and investment capital (powered by Naspers) have, in many ways, led the charge. At our Latin America Startup Battlefield event, Movile chief executive officer Fabricio Bloisi will walk us through two decades of digital transformation and technology development in the region. Earlier this year, Bloisi’s company landed a to continue its efforts to build a pan-Latin American juggernaut providing a range of mobile marketplace services. As we wrote earlier, investments in (supplemented by co-investors like Innova, which participated in the most recent round) have been one of the driving forces sustaining the Brazilian startup community. In all, the South African technology media and investment conglomerate and its co-investors have invested $375 million into Movile over the course of several rounds that likely value the company at close to $1 billion. Since Movile’s rise, players like Rappi, in delivery, Nubank, a Brazilian financial services startup, and 99 Taxi have become billion-dollar companies in their own right, but in many ways, Movile set the stage. As more capital floods into the region ( the new venture from 99 Taxi’s co-founders, ), the future for Latin American startups looks bright. It’s against this backdrop that Bloisi will walk attendees at our event through the perils and promise of starting up a tech business in the region. We’ll look forward to . Pick up . |
Password bypass flaw in Western Digital My Cloud drives puts data at risk | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | A security researcher has published details of a vulnerability in a popular cloud storage drive after the company failed to issue security patches for over a year. found in Western Digital’s My Cloud devices, which he said allows an attacker to bypass the admin password on the drive, gaining “complete control” over the user’s data. The exploit works because drive’s web-based dashboard doesn’t properly check a user’s credentials before giving a possible attacker access to tools that should require higher levels of access. The bug was “easy” to exploit, Vermeulen told TechCrunch in an email, and was remotely exploitable if a My Cloud device allows remote access over the internet — which . He posted on Twitter. Details of the bug were also independently found , which released . Vermeulen reported the bug over a year ago, in April 2017, but said the company stopped responding. Normally, security researchers give 90 days for a company to respond, in line with industry-accepted responsible disclosure guidelines. After he found that WD updated the My Cloud firmware in the meanwhile without fixing the vulnerability he found, he decided to post his findings. A year later, WD still hasn’t released a patch. The company confirmed that it knows of the vulnerability but did not say why it took more than a year to issue a fix. “We are in the process of finalizing a scheduled firmware update that will resolve the reported issue,” a spokesperson said, which will arrive “within a few weeks.” WD said that several of its My Cloud products are vulnerable — including the EX2, EX4 and Mirror, but not My Cloud Home. In the meantime, Vermeulen said that there’s no fix and that users have to “just disconnect” the drive altogether if they want to keep their data safe. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 9 | 10 | null |
Fitbit targets employers and health plans with Care | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | null |
Facebook plans voter drive, partners with Democratic/Republican Institutes | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | Facebook will push users to register to vote through a partnership with TurboVote, has partnered with the and nonprofits to monitor foreign election interference and will publish a weekly report of trends and issues emerging from its new political ads archive. Facebook has also confirmed that its election integrity war room is up and running and the team is now “red teaming” how it would react to problem scenarios such as a spike in voter suppression content. These were the major announcements from today’s between Facebook’s election integrity team and reporters. Facebook’s voter registration drive will also partner with TurboVote, which Instagram announced yesterday will assist it with a similar initiative [Update: Facebook also today that its context button designed to deter the spread of false news by giving people information about an article’s publisher is now expanding to appear on all links shared to the News Feed, not just articles. Alongside a Wikipedia blurb about the publisher if available, the context button will now also show the age of the domain. This could help users spot sketchy, recently-created news outlets or ones attempting to spoof the brand of an established outlet by using a slightly different URL. Beyond the US and UK, the context button is now expanding to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland as well.] Much of the call reviewed Facebook’s past efforts, but also took time to focus on the upcoming Brazilian election. There, Facebook has engaged with over 1,000 prosecutors, judges and clerks to establish a dialog with election authorities. It’s partnered with three fact-checkers in the country and worked with them on like “Fátima” and “Projeto Lupe” that can help people spot fake news. The voter registration drive mirrors to work with TurboVote to push users to registration info via ads. Facebook says it also will remind people to vote on election day and let them share with friends that “I voted.” One concern is that voter registration and voting efforts by Facebook could unevenly advantage one political party, for instance those with a base of middle-aged constituents who might be young enough to use Facebook but not so young that they’ve abandoned it for YouTube and Snapchat. If Facebook can’t prove the efforts are fair, the drive could turn into a talking point for congressional members eager to paint the social network as biased against their party. The partnerships with the Institutes that don’t operate domestically are designed “to understand what they’re seeing on the ground in elections” around the world so Facebook can move faster to safeguard its systems, says Facebook’s director of Global Politics and Government Outreach Team Katie Harbath. Here, Facebook is admitting this problem is too big to tackle on its own. Beyond working with independent fact-checkers and government election commissions, it’s tasking nonprofits to help be its eyes and ears on the ground. The war room isn’t finished yet, according to a story from The published in the middle of the press call. Still under construction in a central hallway between two of Facebook’s Menlo Park HQ buildings, it will fit about 20 of Facebook’s 300 staffers working on election integrity. It will feature screens showing dashboards about information flowing through Facebook to help the team quickly identify and respond to surges in false news or fake accounts. Overall, Facebook is trying to do its homework so it’s ready for a “heat of the moment, last day before the election scenario” and won’t get caught flat-footed, says Facebook’s director of Product Management for News Feed Greg Marra. He says Facebook is “being a lot more proactive and building systems to look for problems so they don’t become big problems on our platform.” Facebook’s director of Product Management for Elections and Civic Engagement Samidh Chakrabarti noted, this is “one of the biggest cross-team efforts we’ve seen.” |
GitLab raises $100M | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | , the developer service that aims to offer a , today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series D funding round at a valuation of $1.1 billion. The round was led by . As GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told me, this round, which brings the company’s total funding to , will help it enable its goal of reaching an IPO by November 2020. According to Sijbrandij, GitLab’s original plan was to raise a new funding round at a valuation over $1 billion early next year. But since Iconiq came along with an offer that pretty much matched what the company set out to achieve in a few months anyway, the team decided to go ahead and raise the round now. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub earlier this year helped to accelerate those plans, too. “We weren’t planning on fundraising actually. I did block off some time in my calendar next year, starting from February 25th to do the next fundraise,” Sijbrandij said. “Our plan is to IPO in November of 2020 and we anticipated one more fundraise. I think in the current climate, where the macroeconomics are really good and GitHub got acquired, people are seeing that there’s one independent company, one startup left basically in this space. And we saw an opportunity to become best in class in a lot of categories.” As Sijbrandij stressed, while most people still look at GitLab as a GitHub and Bitbucket competitor (and given the similarity in their names, who wouldn’t?), GitLab wants to be far more than that. It now offers products and also sees itself as competing with the likes of VersionOne, Jira, Jenkins, Artifactory, Electric Cloud, Puppet, New Relic and BlackDuck. “The biggest misunderstanding we’re seeing is that GitLab is an alternative to GitHub and we’ve grown beyond that,” he said. “We are now in nine categories all the way from planning to monitoring.” Sijbrandij notes that there’s a billion-dollar player in every space that GitLab competes. “But we want to be better,” he said. “And that’s only possible because we are open core, so people co-create these products with us. That being said, there’s still a lot of work on our side, helping to get those contributions over the finish line, making sure performance and quality stay up, establish a consistent user interface. These are things that typically don’t come from the wider community and with this fundraise of $100 million, we will be able to make sure we can sustain that effort in all the different product categories.” Given this focus, GitLab will invest most of the funding in its engineering efforts to build out its existing products but also to launch new ones. The company plans to launch new features like tracing and log aggregation, for example. With this very public commitment to an IPO, GitLab is also signaling that it plans to stay independent. That’s very much Sijbrandij’s plan, at least, though he admitted that “there’s always a price” if somebody came along and wanted to acquire the company. He did note that he likes the transparency that comes with being a public company. “We always managed to be more bullish about the company than the rest of the world,” he said. “But the rest of the world is starting to catch up. T fundraise T setting |
Here are all of Google’s 20th anniversary Easter eggs | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | |
China’s Didi Chuxing launches taxi-hailing service in Japan | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | around passenger safety, but overseas the ride-hailing giant has moved into another new market after its taxi-booking service began operations in Japan. The service has gone live in Osaka, the city of nearly nine million people, and parts of the surrounding area including Kansai International Airport. The Didi Japan app links passengers up with drivers from 10 local taxi companies, and Didi said it will use an AI-based dispatch and fleet management system for efficiency. Didi, which is valued at $56 billion, entered Japan in partnership with SoftBank, which is of course one of its investors. The company said it plans to expand the service to major cities including “Kyoto, Fukuoka and Tokyo” in the near future. The company is going to stick to license taxis and not private cars because the latter is banned in Japan. Still, the traditional taxi industry is big business in Japan . The country is the world’s third largest taxi market based on revenue ($13 billion GMV), and it has some 240,000 licensed vehicles. Uber, meanwhile, is piloting a similar taxi-based approach across Japan, but there are some far bigger players in the space. JapanTaxi is a ride-hailing startup operated by Ichiro Kawanabe, who runs Japan’s largest taxi operator Nihon Kotsu and heads up the country’s taxi federation. JapanTaxi also has big-name backers, with . Beyond that, popular messaging app while Lyft, Uber’s rival in the U.S. market, , too. Didi is hoping to stick out from the competition by appealing to both travelers and locals. To help snag interest from tourists visiting the country, it has created a ‘roaming passport’ that will allow users of other Didi apps — including China, Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan — to use their regular Didi app in Japan. This Japan launch has been in the offing for some time — — and this is the fifth expansion that Didi has completed so far this year. and it earmarked that capital for developing AI, core tech and international markets. Didi hasn’t held back in broadening its business globally. The company has expanded into and organically, while and launched a franchise-based expansion in Taiwan. It global reach also includes investments, and it owns stakes in , , , and . |
YC grad The Lobby raises $1.2M to help job seekers break into Wall Street | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | , is announcing a $1.2 million investment. The startup connects job seekers to Wall Street bankers, venture capitalists and other finance “insiders” for advice and personalized career coaching. Founder and former investment banker wants to help people who don’t come from elite backgrounds or have the network of an Ivy League graduate land high-profile finance roles. Chhugani, a graduate who began his career at Merrill Lynch, believes he was only able to break into Wall Street because the firm had a hole in its Latin America M&A group and he’d grown up in Ecuador. He and his other non-Ivy League friends who are or have been employed on Wall Street, in venture capital or private equity, are lucky, he says. Despite being perfectly able to succeed, many people of similar backgrounds have had no such luck navigating the finance job market. is creating real meritocracy that we tell ourselves job market is –– or at least should be,” said Matt Mireles in a statement. Mireles, a scout investor at Social Capital, invested personally in the seed round alongside Y Combinator, Ataria Ventures, 37 Angels, former Travelocity CEO Carl Sparks and Columbia Business School’s chief innovation officer Angela Lee. Using The Lobby, job seekers can connect with professionals over anonymous 30-minute phone calls, where they can conduct mock interviews or fix-up their resumes. Insiders, who are paid by The Lobby’s customers, can give the honest truth about what it’s like to work in finance, a sort-of real-life Glassdoor. As for the name, Chhugani says he can’t promise any of the startup’s customers a job, but he can promise to get them in the lobby. |
Hands-on with Oculus Quest, Facebook’s best shot at a mainstream VR device | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | Most mobile VR headsets have left me with the impression of, “well… you have to start somewhere,” but after spending some time with Facebook’s newly-announced Oculus Quest, it’s clear that the standalone hardware is far less caged by its limitations and has a lot to offer as what is clearly the company’s most balanced consumer device. When Facebook originally announced the device prototype two years ago it wasn’t clear if it was going be an Gear VR “pro” or a Rift “lite”, it’s clear now that from an experience standpoint that the Quest is more like the latter even if its technical specifications prevent it from reaching the depth of fidelity that you can get on a PC-based system. [gallery ids="1721367,1721368,1721369,1721371,1721372,1721373,1721374,1721375"] Unlike past years where the press were escorted to guarded rooms showcasing new prototypes, this year I had my Quest demos on the main show floor with the rest of the Oculus Connect attendees. I had about a half-hour with the system checking out various titles and the headset delivered everywhere I had hoped. The most critical feature of the headset is its tracking and it’s worth emphasizing that these were perfect demo environments for the Quest to operate in, I was in a walled in space with plenty of unique features on the walls and floor for the tracking system to grab onto. I didn’t have any hiccups with the headset or controller tracking though, everything moved along smoothly. So yes, you can duck and dive and walk around and the content moves with you with the Quest. This is a big part of immersive VR and there’s a reason that die-hards in the space have talked about tracked headsets and hand controllers as a bare minimum device requirement for a “mainstream” device. If Oculus can get developers to direct enough quality content to the new platform, Oculus will have a device with so much of the excitement that the Rift has caused with far less of its annoying PC quirks. I played a Quest port of Superhot VR — a title I’ve dropped a couple dozen hours into on the Rift — and the freedom offered by losing the cords really accentuates the ballet of violence that Superhot VR is. The fact that it was all running off of a Snapdragon 835 chipset was equally impressive though I’m sure some developers are less than thrilled Oculus shipped the headset with last-gen compute power. At $399 they had to make sacrifices somewhere. While fixed point-of-view devices like Oculus Go puts the content all around you, the Quest really captures the magic of immersion that’s so much more than a big, enveloping display. You really feel transported with this technology and the tracking is the not-so-secret sauce that has just been so irksome to integrate into headsets until now. Inside-out tracking is available on other systems and it’s hard to compare the tech Oculus has built from what others have based on these demos alone, but the Quest definitely offers the most complete package available thus far. The Quest is still double the price of the Oculus Go, but based on the sturdy quality of the finished product and what’s inside I would doubt that Facebook is making much of a profit off each device. There’s a huge jump in experience between the two systems based on my initial time with the Quest, but $399 is still a different echelon of pricing and I think it’s a tossup whether VR devices can reach a mainstream audience with that high of an upfront cost. Oculus Quest is being released in spring of 2019 so there’s quite a bit of time before most users will be able to try it out, but there seems to be less urgency for Facebook now as the Oculus platform seems far more mature than any other system. It’s certainly Facebook’s market to direct, but it’s also theirs to completely screw up. The Oculus Quest seems like the first VR device normal people could really fall in love with, but have consumers gotten a really mainstream reason to need it yet? That’s the big Quest-ion (sorry). |
UK cybersecurity firm Darktrace raises $50M, now valued at $1.65B | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | U.K.-based cyber defense firm Darktrace has raised $50 million in its recent Series E round of funding, putting the company’s valuation at $1.65 billion. The company said Wednesday that the funding — led by Vitruvian Partners, with help from KKR and 1011 Ventures — will drive further international expansion. Darktrace is on the market. Its proprietary technology sits on a company’s network and uses machine learning to identify and stop malicious behavior, which helps administrators tackle threats as they arise. Since a $75 million injection at its Series D funding a year ago, Darktrace said it has more than doubled its deployments to more than 7,000 networks, and counts London Gatwick Airport, AIG and the Science Museum Group as customers. Darktrace chief executive Nicole Eagan said the company is enjoying “strong growth in new and existing geographies.” “Our biggest priority in the immediate future is meeting the demand for our technology to continue to combat AI-based attacks,” Eagan told TechCrunch. “We’re currently heads down focused on growth.” “We’re also continuing to open offices in regions where demand is highest, hiring more employees to meet our rapidly growing demand, and gathering feedback from customers to better serve our customer base,” she said. The company has also increased its headcount by more than half and has eight new offices, including Los Angeles and the tripling of its Singapore office. |
NASA’s bold-ish plan for the next era takes us to the moon and Mars… eventually | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | NASA has summarizing its official plans for exploring our solar system, and it makes for exciting reading — if you don’t mind that it comes with a dose of realism. Crewed missions to the moon’s surface; a semi-permanent base orbiting it; a Mars sample return mission; all these and more are there, if not necessarily in the next decade. The National Space Exploration Campaign is the name of NASA’s overarching plan to stop worrying about low Earth orbit (LEO), ditch the ISS, win the next moon race and then head off to Mars. It was, in a way, commissioned by the President’s Space Policy Directive-1, which directed NASA to focus on expansion and exploration throughout the solar system. A good goal, and fortunately one that the administration has already been pursuing for a long time. So the plan for the next decade or two looks a lot like it did a few years back, since by necessity these things have to be pursued on extremely long time frames. The simple truth is that even if we went all-out right now, it would be extremely difficult, not to mention risky, to put boots on regolith within 10 years. It’s not that we couldn’t do it just to say we did, but that any future moon mission would have to be part of a long-term strategy to leverage lunar orbits and landers in the pursuit of interplanetary travel. In other words, we could spend billions for a showy short-term Apollo-style touchdown, or we could billions in long-term infrastructure that could lead to meaningful dominance in a number of fields. To that end, NASA has some short-term goals that are ambitious but achievable, and has locked future projects, like the Lunar Gateway and landers, behind the pending results of those efforts. After all, if the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System are delayed, or perhaps exceed expectations, that has a material knock-on effect when it comes to using those systems to build and staff a permanent installation in lunar orbit. Its priorities lie essentially along three lines: NASA has operated launches to LEO, for instance International Space Station resupply missions, for decades. It’s ready to be done with that, and commercial endeavors are ready to take over. “It is vitally important that a broad customer base emerges in the next few years to supplant NASA’s historically central role in the LEO economy,” the report reads. Its goals here for the next few years are essentially directing funding and contracts while carrying out studies of effectiveness, competition and so on. Depending on how this goes, the U.S. could eliminate direct federal funding of the ISS by 2025, instead relying on commercial providers. This doesn’t mean we’d leave the ISS altogether — NASA would just stop being the one bringing up supplies and astronauts. Indeed, $150 million is earmarked for funding a new Commercial LEO Development program aimed at potentially replacing the ISS altogether — or at least getting the pieces in place to do so. It wouldn’t have to be nearly the same scale, but an orbital platform or two to call our own be nice. More generally, getting out of the LEO business frees up a ton of money and resources at NASA, which they can direct toward more ambitious projects. The moon is a fabulous staging area for our planned exploration of the solar system. It’s inhospitable as all hell, meaning we can test things like Mars habitats and space radiation exposure there. It might have a ton of useful minerals underneath its coating of moon dust, and perhaps even some usable water, which would greatly simplify putting a base there. Unfortunately, the last time anyone stepped foot on the moon was decades ago, and there have been precious few return trips even with robotic landers. So we’re going to fix that. We’ve got plans for commercial lunar landers and rovers starting as early as 2019 — that is to say, they’ll be in development, not touching down. Based on the cost and success of these, more missions will be commissioned or undertaken in order to improve our basic knowledge of the lunar surface, which is still full of unknowns when it comes to practical applications like drilling, mining and so on. Meanwhile, the Orion spacecraft and SLS will be getting its first orbital tests in 2020, and if all goes well it could potentially deliver astronauts (and potentially small payloads) to lunar orbit within a few years. After that’s been proven, the cargo-carrying Orion variant could be taking 10 tons of payload to orbit at a time. This is all preparatory to establishing the Lunar Gateway, a space station in orbit around the moon, which would be staffed by NASA astronauts and used as a deep space test bed and lab. They’re going to try to nail down the basics — volume, mass, materials, technologies — by next year, and want to have the first component in lunar orbit by 2022. NASA is full of scientists, and asking them about a Mars mission in the future will likely draw glares as they point furiously to the many Mars missions they’re already juggling. The administration’s roadmap, unsurprisingly, focuses more on the near future than the far future. The fact here is that Mars is already a priority and they have major missions planned already, but to say anything about a crewed mission or base would be irresponsible and premature. Insight is already en route and will land in November; the Mars 2020 Rover is all set to take off next summer; both will produce all kinds of interesting results critical to planning future missions. Mars 2020 will be bagging up samples for possible return via another mission several years out. Can you imagine what we can do with a cargo hold full of Martian rock? You better believe we want to get that stuff into the lab before we send out an away team. 2024 is the earliest time NASA commits to making a decision about a crewed Mars mission perhaps in the 2030s — and even then it would be an orbital one. Naturally, further missions will depend on the incredibly valuable observations and lessons learned from that mission — so perhaps we’re looking at the late 2030s for boots on Mars. Is that a bit disappointing? Well, with the rate things are progressing in commercial space, we may very well see a private Mars mission well before that. But NASA is under certain obligations, being a scientific organization and one funded by taxpayers, to justify its work and test it to a degree that private companies may choose not to. The report is heavy on promises but light on actual policy and hard dates, which is to be expected when many of the goals are far enough out that they can’t be effectively outlined beyond “we’ll know in 2024.” It may be a bit frustrating in this period of rapid advances in space to have such distant and vague goals, but that’s kind of the nature of the business. In the meantime, it’s not like there’s any shortage of exciting developments from NASA or the many commercial space companies reinventing the entire sector. If you don’t like NASA’s patient approach, you’re welcome to mount your own mission to space — no, really. You wouldn’t be the only one. |
Juul, the popular e-cig startup under growing FDA scrutiny, says removing flavors is ‘on the table’ among other things | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | has been on an incredible, and in some ways, nightmarish, ride this year. The three-year-old, San Francisco-based company has handily won 75 percent of the e-cigarette market in the U.S., thanks in large part to the sleek design of its nicotine vaporizer. It is reportedly on track to see at least $1 billion in revenue this year. And the company has capital to invest in its business, having sealed up a $1.2 billion round that it began raising in summer. Much of that money will be spent internationally, and no wonder — roughly 95 percent of the world’s billion smokers live outside of the U.S. Against the backdrop of this supercharged growth, dark clouds have gathered around the company as parents and regulators have grown concerned by its adoption by teenagers, many of whom might never consider smoking a cigarette but are taking up nicotine vaping and “Juuling” specifically. In fact, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb in New York yesterday that his agency is releasing data in November that will show year-over-year use among high schoolers has risen by at least 80 percent and that middle-school usage has grown, too. Gottlieb further warned that the agency might also eventually ban the sale of e-cigarettes online out of concern that they are being bought in bulk and acquired by minors. Last night, at a hosted in San Francisco by this editor, I sat down with Juul’s founders, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, who met while at Stanford and have teamed up to develop numerous vaporizer products over the years, including the popular Pax cannabis vaporizer and, more recently, Juul, where they are currently CTO and chief product officer, respectively. Over the course of 30 minutes, we talked about the future of the company (they have secured more than 100 patents between them and have applied for many more), whether they would consider an acquisition offer from a tobacco company (the answer seemed to be yes), and why they don’t drop the most controversial feature of the Juul product: its variety of flavored e-cigarette liquids, which critics argue are attracting children but that Juul has long insisted is imperative to getting its target customer — adult smokers — to switch to Juul. We’ll have video of our conversation available at a later date. In the meantime, here are outtakes from our conversation, edited lightly for length. JM: Man, this is quite an experience, one that we never really knew if it was going to come to fruition or not, though I think we always expected that if this was going to work, it was going to be really hard. As smokers ourselves, we were really passionate about ending the combustible cigarette once and for all. There are a billion smokers globally, and the U.S. has 38 million smokers. We don’t see them as much here in the Valley. But I’m from St. Louis, and when I grew up, I was exposed to cigarettes, and I think the story was somewhat the same for Adam. Half of long-term smokers will die of smoking-related diseases if we don’t do something about this. Unfortunately, along with that comes a lot of challenges . . . I think what we really didn’t expect was the unfortunate level of adoption by underage consumers, and that is definitely something that we now take on as our mantle to own. JM: We’re changing very rapidly. At the beginning of this year, we had about 225 employees and today we have about 1,100. AB: Our biggest offices are in San Francisco, with offices in multiple cities in multiple countries, including in Israel. We just launched in Canada recently. And we’ll be launching several more [offices] this year. AB: No. Israel imposed a restriction on the nicotine strength allowable for e-cigarettes, so that includes the 5 percent version of our product, which we currently sell in the U.S., but we have since switched to a reduced strength that is compliant with the now-effective limit [there]. JM: This is an incredibly complicated company, perhaps the most we’ve ever seen and perhaps the most that most of our investors have ever seen. I’m sure there are people in this room who either invest in or have started hardware companies, and [who know that] hardware is just hard. We are a hardware company. We’re a hardware company that makes and sells millions of products a week. We’re a hardware company that has produced those products at incredibly high volume, all five of them, all of which we manufacture on equipment and tools that we built from scratch. We have to work with contract manufacturers and vendors that are selling us parts in the tens or hundreds of millions on a weekly or monthly basis. We have to do that in multiple countries around the world. We have to comply with regulatory guidelines in many, many different countries. We have to market our products as carefully and effectively as possible. We have to communicate publicly in as grown-up and responsible a fashion as possible. I could keep going, but the point is we have an incredible diversity of employees. There’s just an amazing amount of cross-functional work that happens at the company. AB: I think morale is very high. People are energized and galvanized to continue working on this cause, which is providing smokers with a satisfying alternative and address the challenges that we face head on. People are really energized to address the issues like youth usage. So that is an accurate reflection of the vibe at the office right now. JM: The technologies that we’ve been building are incredibly powerful and could be deployed in other markets, there’s no doubt about that. Some of our patent filings cover some bases outside of the core areas that we’re really focused on right now, which is the elimination of smoking from the face of the earth. But the mission of this company is exactly that, to eliminate smoking. The reason that it is the mission is that smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the world. And we’re very interested in that, I think, conceptually, intellectually, and it’s just kind of a fun mission to work on. AB: Sure. Listing the company is certainly a possibility [as is] continuing to grow it privately. These are tactics that we can employ. But really, we’re just focused on growth, both domestically and abroad. So that’s the primary use of the proceeds from the most recent round raised. I mean, we have a ways to go just here in the U.S. We’re 75 percent of the e-cigarette market, which sounds like a lot, but we’re only 4 to 5 percent of the U.S. cigarette market. And that’s what we’re really out to displace. So we’re really just getting started here, and we’ve just scratched the surface outside of the U.S., where 95 percent of smokers live. JM: Any under-age use of this product or any nicotine product is strictly unacceptable. And that is the challenge that we are more than happy to take on, and we’re excited to take on. Frankly, I think this has been way too longstanding of an issue in the market. And things are changing. We’re moving away from a stick that you light on fire and beginning to have the ability to apply technology solutions to a massive problem that has existed for a really long time. JM: That’s one of many examples of technologies we can use to deploy to reduce or eliminate these problems. We’ve been using that as sort of an illustrative example of many things because, look, we’re in the midst of conversations with the FDA. We believe very strongly that some of these technology solutions will be huge steps ahead of how this industry has been able to tackle these challenges in the past. But I don’t think at this moment, we’re ready to really talk about specific things. JM: Yeah, there was there was an article that speculated about this. That is one of many, many patents that have been filed publicly, and if you dig even further, you’ll see a whole bunch of exploration that we’ve done because we’ve been working on this issue for a long time. Unfortunately, the U.S. is unlikely at this moment to be the ground zero for the deployment of some of these youth prevention technologies because there’s a moratorium on new product introductions, but obviously that’s AB: We’re trying to solve the same problem as the FDA actually. Our interests are really aligned in that they want to see smokers move to reduced risk products while minimizing the uptake by youth and other unintended consequences, and so do we. So it’s really a question of, how do we get there collectively. And we need to work with them. JM: All options are on the table. And that’s one of them. Look, this issue has to be resolved. We mean that. We have absolutely no interest in any underage consumer ever using these products. It is detrimental to the mission of the company. We are not a major tobacco company. We have not saturated this market. We are less than 0.5 percent of the global tobacco market. And all of this upside will only be achieved if we create goodwill and stand out in contrast to the way tobacco companies have traditionally behaved. Removing flavors is certainly on the table. But we have not seen evidence that there’s causation necessarily for flavors being a lead-in for underage consumers. Cigarettes have been a major problem for underage consumers for some time. What we do see strong evidence of internally is a much stronger correlation for adult consumers staying away from cigarettes as they move further from everything that reminds them of cigarettes in the first place, which includes the taste of cigarettes. JM: That is evidence that is amongst the many, many, many things that we will be sharing with the FDA. AB: We know many folks in the tobacco industry but we’re very proudly independent and continue to grow the company independently. JM: Obviously, the big concern for pretty much anyone, including us, is what does that mean to the mission of the company, to consider partnering with, working with, the major tobacco companies. We’ve done that in the past. Many, many years ago, we had a partnership with the third largest global tobacco company [which bought the trademark and IP for Monsees’ and Bowen’s earliest vaporizer, called Ploom]. Then we bought them out of the deal; we parted ways. Look, if a partnership with a major tobacco company — if, frankly, any number of things that we could do — will accelerate the decline of adult smoking and improve the lives of consumers around the world, we would certainly consider it. We’re not necessarily convinced at this moment that that’s the move that would make that happen. AB: The majority of our sales are actually offline, though we still think that online is an important route of access for adult smokers to get the product. Fortunately, there are very strict age-verification technologies you can employ, and we have the strictest in place, so it’s a matter that we think should be addressed just by employing very rigorous age verification, on our own site and by requiring that any e-commerce resellers we work with use those strict controls, as well. |
At Oculus Connect keynote, original co-founders absent onstage | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | As Facebook execs took to the stage during the opening keynote for the company’s VR-focused Oculus Connect 5 conference, one thing was clearly missing, the founding team that had built the virtual reality startup Facebook bought for $2 billion in 2014. None of the five original OculusVR co-founders took to the stage at the company’s big keynote, while Facebook executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, long-time VP of Ads Andrew Bosworth — now VP of VR/AR — and Hugo Barra, Facebook’s VP of VR, delivered the bulk of major announcements. VP of VR/AR Andrew Bosworth The absence of OculusVR co-founders onstage at Facebook’s biggest VR event of the year comes as a flurry of news circulates surrounding the former leaders of high-profile Facebook acquisitions. Earlier this week, Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger they were unexpectedly leaving the company. Today, WhatsApp founder Brian Acton who left Facebook earlier this year and walked away from $850 million after growing dissatisfied with the direction of the company he originally built. From 2014 Oculus has had a more turbulent time at Facebook than other acquisitions, the company was at the center of a $3 billion lawsuit last year with ZeniMax Media over the founding of the company and the theft of intellectual property. Ultimately, Facebook was made to pay up $250 million. Founder Palmer Luckey also proved to be quite the headache for Facebook’s public communications after his donation to an anti-Clinton group during the 2016 election led a firestorm of negative press. Luckey . While the company’s other co-founders held onto leadership roles following the acquisition, a big shakeup at the end of 2016 downgraded the roles of then-CEO Brendan Iribe and then-VP of Product Nate Mitchell, with Xiaomi’s Barra coming onboard later to lead Oculus as Facebook’s VP of VR reporting directly to Zuckerberg. The OculusVR co-founders have been taking more of a backseat role in the past couple of years at events as well. While Iribe and Luckey held a major presence during the keynotes at early conferences, last year, only Mitchell took to the stage. This year there were plenty of callbacks to Connect keynotes of the past with early employees like Chief Scientist Michael Abrash speaking about the future of the VR platform, but ultimately none of the startup’s original leadership were present onstage during the nearly 2-hour presentation. As Facebook continues to shift its high-profile acquisitions away from autonomy and further under its core leadership umbrella, the future of founding leaders driving the public vision of the companies they originally built seems even more uncertain. |
Amazon is opening a new brick-and-mortar store in NYC featuring its best sellers | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | Amazon is expanding its brick-and-mortar footprint with a new kind of store, the company announced this afternoon. On Thursday, the retailer will open an “Amazon 4-Star” store in New York, where all the items it sells are rated 4 stars and above, are a top seller or are new and trending on Amazon. It’s effectively a real-world introduction to Amazon’s best products, in other words. The store will be located in SoHo, on Spring Street between Crosby and Lafayette Streets, and will be open 10 AM – 9 PM Monday through Saturday, and 11 AM – 8 PM on Sundays. The 4-Star store, Amazon explains in an , is “a direct reflection of our customers—what they’re buying and what they’re loving.” Amazon, thanks to its massive e-commerce site, does know what sells. The average rating of all the products it stocks in the new store is 4.4 stars, and combined, the products have amassed more than 1.8 million 5-star customer reviews, the retailer says. The store is divided into sections like “Most Wished For” items, which represent those people are adding to their Amazon Wish Lists, as well as “Amazon Exclusives,” and “Frequently Bought Together,” which represents the Amazon algorithm come to life. It will also feature some locally popular products in its “Trending Around NYC” section. At launch, the store includes items like the card game (4.8 stars, with more than 2,000 customer reviews); a (4.4 stars, with more than 10,900 customer reviews) and, naturally, Amazon’s own devices like the (4.5 stars, with more than 5,600 customer reviews) and the (4.4 stars, with more than 197,000 customer reviews). Both the Spot and Fire TV Stick were top sellers on Amazon Prime Day this year, and are among Amazon’s overall best sellers. What’s interesting about Amazon 4-Star is how the items are priced. Shoppers who are Prime members will pay the Amazon.com price for their purchases, while non-Prime members will pay the list price. The store will also work as a fairly expensive user acquisition strategy for Amazon, given the cost of real estate — non-Prime members will have the option to sign up for a free Prime trial in the store in order to get the Amazon.com discount. Amazon has been steadily expanding into real-world venues in recent years. It acquired a large brick-and-mortar footprint with its of green grocer Whole Foods, and its new cashierless Amazon Go stores in select markets, as well. It also has some and other focused on device sales around the U.S. The retailer didn’t say if it intends to bring 4-Star to other locations either in or outside NYC in the future. |
FCC cracks the whip on 5G deployment against protests of local governments | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | for speedy deployment of 5G networks nationwide with an order adopted today that streamlines what it perceives as a patchwork of obstacles, needless costs and contradictory regulations at the state level. But local governments say the federal agency is taking things too far. 5G networks will consist of thousands of wireless installations, smaller and more numerous than cell towers. This means that wireless companies can’t use existing facilities, for all of it at least, and will have to apply for access to lots of new buildings, utility poles and so on. It’s a lot of red tape, which of course impedes deployment. To address this, the agency this morning voted 3 to 1 along party lines to adopt the entitled “Accelerating Wireline Broadband Deployment by Removing Barriers to Infrastructure Investment.” What it essentially does is exert FCC authority over state wireless regulators and subject them to a set of new rules superseding their own. First the order aims to literally speed up deployment by standardizing new, shorter “shot clocks” for local governments to respond to applications. They’ll have 90 days for new locations and 60 days for existing ones — consistent with many existing municipal time frames but now to be enforced as a wider standard. This could be good, as the longer time limits were designed for consideration of larger, more expensive equipment. On the other hand, some cities argue, it’s just not enough time — especially considering the increased volume they’ll be expected to process. Cathy Murillo, mayor of Santa Barbara, writes in a submitted comment: The proposed ‘shot clocks’ would unfairly and unreasonably reduce the time needed for proper application review in regard to safety, aesthetics, and other considerations. By cutting short the necessary review period, the proposals effectively shift oversight authority from the community and our elected officials to for-profit corporations for wireless equipment installations that can have significant health, safety, and aesthetic impacts when those companies have little, if any, interest to respect these concerns. Next, and even less popular, is the FCC’s take on fees for applications and right-of-way paperwork. These fees currently vary widely, because as you might guess it is far more complicated and expensive — often by an order of magnitude or more — to approve and process an application for (not to mention install and maintain) an antenna on 5th Avenue in Manhattan than it is in outer Queens. These are, to a certain extent anyway, natural cost differences. The order limits these fees to “a reasonable approximation of their costs for processing,” which the FCC estimated at about $500 for one application for up to five installations or facilities, $100 for additional facilities, and $270 per facility per year, all-inclusive. For some places, to be sure, that may be perfectly reasonable. But as Catherine Pugh, mayor of Baltimore, put it in a to the FCC protesting the proposed rules, it sure isn’t for city: An annual fee of $270 per attachment, as established in the above document, is unconscionable when the facility may yield profits, in some cases, many times that much in a given month. The public has invested and installed these assets [i.e. utility poles and other public infrastructure], not the industry. The industry does not own these assets; the public does. Under these circumstances, it is entirely reasonable that the public should be able to charge what it believes to be a fair price. There’s no doubt that excessive fees can curtail deployment and it would be praiseworthy of the FCC to tackle that. But the governments they are hemming in don’t seem to appreciate being told what is reasonable and what isn’t. “It comes down to this: three unelected officials on this dais are telling state and local leaders all across the country what they can and cannot do in their own backyards,” said FCC Commissioner in a statement presented at the vote. “This is extraordinary federal overreach.” New York City’s commissioner of information technology that his office is “shocked” by the order, calling it “an unnecessary and unauthorized gift to the telecommunications industry and its lobbyists.” The new rules may undermine deployment deals that already exist or are under development. After all, if you were a wireless company, would you still commit to paying $2,000 per facility when the feds just gave you a coupon for 80 percent off? And if you were a city looking at a budget shortfall of millions because of this, wouldn’t you look for a way around it? Chairman Ajit Pai argued in a statement that “When you raise the cost of deploying wireless infrastructure, it is those who live in areas where the investment case is the most marginal—rural areas or lower-income urban areas—who are most at risk of losing out.” But the basic market economics of this don’t seem to work out. Big cities cost more and are more profitable; rural areas cost less and are less profitable. Under the new rules, big cities and rural areas will cost the same, but the former will be even more profitable. Where would focus your investments? The FCC also unwisely attempts to take on the aesthetic considerations of installations. Cities have their own requirements for wireless infrastructure, such as how it’s painted, where it can be located and what size it can be when in this or that location. But the FCC seems (as it does so often these days) to want to accommodate the needs of wireless providers rather than the public. Wireless companies complain that the rules are overly restrictive or subjective, and differ too greatly from one place to another. Municipalities contend that the restrictions are justified and, at any rate, their prerogative to design and enforce. “Given these differing perspectives and the significant impact of aesthetic requirements on the ability to deploy infrastructure and provide service, we provide guidance on whether and in what circumstances aesthetic requirements violate the [Communications] Act,” the FCC’s order reads. In other words, wireless industry gripes about having to paint their antennas or not hang giant microwave arrays in parks are being federally codified. “We conclude that aesthetics requirements are not preempted if they are (1) reasonable, (2) no more burdensome than those applied to other types of infrastructure deployments, and (3) published in advance,” the order continues. Does that sound kind of vague to you? Whether a city’s aesthetic requirement is “reasonable” is hardly the jurisdiction of a communications regulator. For instance, Hudson, Ohio city manager Jane Howington writes in a comment on the order that the city has 40-foot limits on pole heights, to which the industry has already agreed, but which would be increased to 50 under the revisions proposed in the rule. Why should a federal authority be involved in something so clearly under local jurisdiction and expertise? This isn’t just an annoyance. As with the net neutrality ruling, legal threats from states can present serious delays and costs. “Every major state and municipal organization has expressed concern about how Washington is seeking to assert national control over local infrastructure choices and stripping local elected officials and the citizens they represent of a voice in the process,” said Rosenworcel. “I do not believe the law permits Washington to run roughshod over state and local authority like this and I worry the litigation that follows will only slow our 5G future.” She also points out that the predicted cost savings of $2 billion — by telecoms, not the public — may be to spur further wireless deployment, but there is no requirement for companies to use it for that, and in fact no company has said it will. In other words, there’s every reason to believe that this order will sow discord among state and federal regulators, letting wireless companies save money and sticking cities with the bill. There’s certainly a need to harmonize regulations and incentivize wireless investment (especially outside city centers), but this doesn’t appear to be the way to go about it. |
Facebook poisons the acquisition well | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | sell your startup to? Facebook and the founders of its former acquisitions are making a strong case against getting bought by Mark Zuckerberg and Co. After a half-decade of being seen as one of the most respectful and desired acquirers, a series of scandals has destroyed the image of Facebook’s M&A division. That could make it tougher to convince entrepreneurs to sell to Facebook, or force it to pay higher prices and put contractual guarantees of autonomy into the deals. WhatsApp’s founders left amidst aggressive pushes to monetize. Instagram’s founders left as their independence was threatened. Oculus’ founders were demoted. And over the past few years, Facebook has also shut down acquisitions, including viral teen Q&A app (though its founder says he recommended shutting it down), fitness tracker , video advertising system , and still-popular mobile app developer platform . [Correction: Voice control developer tool Wit.ai has not shut down, just its Bot Engine.] Facebook’s users might not know or care about much of this. But it could be a sticking point the next time Facebook tries to buy out a burgeoning competitor or complementary service. The real trouble started with WhatsApp co-founder before he was fully vested from the $22 billion acquisition in 2014. He’d been adamant that Facebook not stick the targeted ads he hated inside WhatsApp, and Zuckerberg conceded not to. Acton even got a clause added to the deal that the co-founders’ remaining stock would vest instantly if Facebook implemented monetization schemes without their consent. Google was also interested in buying WhatsApp, but Facebook’s assurances of independence sealed the deal. WhatsApp’s other co-founder, Jan Koum, left Facebook in April following tension about how Facebook would monetize his app and the impact of that on privacy. Acton’s departure saw him leave $850 million on the table. Captivity must have been pretty rough for freedom to be worth that much. Today in an interview with , he detailed how Facebook got him to promise it wouldn’t integrate WhatsApp’s user data to get the deal approved by EU regulators. Facebook then broke that promise, paid the $122 million fine that amounted to a tiny speed bump for the money-printing corporation, and kept on hacking. When Acton tried to enact the instant-vesting clause upon his departure, Facebook claimed it was still exploring, not “implementing,” monetization. Acton declined a legal fight and walked away, eventually tweeting “Delete Facebook.” Koum stayed to vest a little longer. But soon after they departed, WhatsApp started charging businesses for slow replies, and it will inject ads into the WhatsApp’s Stories product Status next year. With user growth slowing, users shifting to Stories, and News Feed out of ad space, Facebook’s revenue problem became WhatsApp’s monetization mandate. The message was that Facebook would eventually break its agreements with acquired founders to prioritize its own needs. Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger , which sources tell TechCrunch was because of mounting tensions with Zuckerberg over product direction. Zuckerberg himself negotiated the 2012 acquisition for $1 billion ($715 million when the deal closed with Facebook’s share price down, but later $4 billion as it massively climbed). That price was stipulated on Instagram remaining independent in both brand and product roadmap. Zuckerberg upheld his end of the bargain for five years, and the Instagram co-founders stayed on past their original vesting dates — uncommon in Silicon Valley. Facebook pointed to Instagram’s autonomy when it was trying to secure the WhatsApp acquisition. And with the help of Facebook’s engineering, sales, recruiting, internationalization and anti-spam teams, Instagram grew into a 1 billion-user juggernaut. But again, Facebook’s growth and financial woes led to a change of heart for Zuckerberg. Facebook’s popularity amongst teens was plummeting while Instagram remained cool. Facebook pushed to show its alerts and links back to the parent company inside of Instagram’s notifications and settings tabs. Meanwhile, it stripped out the Instagram attribution from cross-posted photos and deleted a shortcut to Instagram from the Facebook bookmarks menu. , his close friend and former News Feed VP Adam Mosseri, as Instagram’s new VP of Product mid-way through this year. The also saw Systrom start reporting to Facebook CPO Chris Cox. Previously the Instagram CEO had more direct contact with Zuckerberg despite technically reporting to CTO Mike Schroepfer, and the insertion of a layer of management between them frayed their connection. Six years after being acquired, Facebook started breaking its promises, Instagram felt less autonomous and the founders exited. The message again was that Facebook expected to be able to exploit its acquisitions regardless of their previous agreements. Zuckerberg declared Oculus was the next great computing platform when Facebook acquired the virtual reality company in 2014. Adoption ended up slower than many expected, forcing Oculus to fund VR content creators since it’s still an unsustainable business. Oculus has likely been a major cash sink for Facebook it will have to hope pays off later. But in the meantime, the co-founders of Oculus have faded into the background. and Nate Mitchell have gone from leading the company to focusing on the nerdiest part of its growing product lineup as VPs running the PC VR and Rift hardware teams, respectively. Former Xiaomi hardware leader Hugo Barra was brought in as VP of VR to oversee Oculus, and he reports to former Facebook VP of Ads Andrew “Boz” Bosworth — a longtime Zuckerberg confidant who TA’d one of his classes at Harvard who now runs all of Facebook’s hardware efforts. Oculus’ original visionary inventor Palmer Luckey left Facebook last year following a schism with the company over him funding anti-Hillary Clinton memes and “sh*tposters.” He was pressed to apologize, saying “I am deeply sorry that my actions are negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners.” Lesser-known co-founder Jack McCauley left Facebook just a year after the acquisition to start his own VR lab. Sadly, Oculus co-founder Andrew Reisse died in 2013 when he was struck by a vehicle in a police chase just two months after the acquisition was announced. The final co-founder Michael Antonov was the chief software architect, but Facebook just confirmed to me he recently left the division to work on artificial intelligence infrastructure at Facebook. Today for the first time, . Obviously the skills needed to scale and monetize a product are different from those needed to create. Still, going from running the company to being stuck in the audience doesn’t send a great signal about how Facebook treats acquired founders. Facebook needs to take action if it wants to reassure prospective acquisitions that it can be a good home for their startups. I think Zuckerberg or Mosseri (likely to be named Instagram’s new leader) should issue a statement that they understand people’s fears about what will happen to Instagram and WhatsApp since they’re such important parts of users’ lives, and establishing core tenets of the product’s identity they don’t want to change. Again, 15-year-old Instagrammers and WhatsAppers probably won’t care, but potential acquisitions would. So far, Facebook has only managed to further inflame the founders versus Facebook divide. Today former VP of Messenger and now head of Facebook’s blockchain team for his Forbes interview and claiming that Zuckerberg tried to protect WhatsApp’s autonomy. “Call me old fashioned. But I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class. It’s actually a whole new standard of low-class,” he wrote. Posted by on But this was a wasted opportunity for Facebook to discuss all the advantages it brings to its acquisitions. Marcus wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, and as a former lifelong entrepreneur and founder, there’s no other large company I’d work at, and no other leader I’d work for,” and noted the opportunity for impact and the relatively long amount of time acquired founders have stayed in the past. Still, it would have been more productive to focus on why’s it’s where he wants to work, how founders actually get to touch the lives of billions and how other acquirers like Twitter and Google frequently dissolve the companies they buy and often see their founders leave even sooner. Acquisitions have protected Facebook from disruption. Now that strategy is in danger if it can’t change this narrative. Lots of zeros on a check might not be enough to convince the next great entrepreneur to sell Facebook their startup if they suspect they or their project will be steamrolled. |
Farmer’s Fridge wants to make eating healthy food as easy as getting money from an ATM | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | Fast, healthy food is one of those concepts that just seems too good to be true. But Farmer’s Fridge, a Chicago-based startup that recently closed a $30 million Series C round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, aims to make that a reality. Farmer’s Fridge retrofits vending machines to serve up — salads, sandwiches, granola, etc. — for people on the go, for anywhere from $5 to about $8. In order to ensure restaurant-quality food, Farmer’s Fridge has a chef on board who receives feedback from customers to constantly tweak the menu and the food. There’s also a large workforce in place to restock the food, which is prepared daily in Farmer’s Fridge’s kitchen, every morning. I tried the food while I was in Chicago, and I must admit that it was good. And this is coming from someone who generally dislikes salad. While the amount of waste is low (about 5 percent left over) — thanks to its allocation algorithm that determines how much of each type of food to stock in each vending machine location — Farmer’s Fridge has a system in place to deliver leftover food to the , a food bank that works in partnership with 700 agencies, including soup kitchens, shelters and pantries. “The hypothesis for the business is that it’s been done for ATMs, it’s been done for movies, and those things have nothing to do with each other. So the only connection would be that consumers generally want things that are faster and cheaper and more convenient, as long as they don’t have to sacrifice any quality from the experience,” Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders told me at the startup’s headquarters in Chicago. Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders at the startup’s Chicago-based HQ “So, renting a movie from a kiosk — there’s no difference,” he added. “It’s the same movie when you get home. With food, though, it was interesting because there’s a lot of businesses where the experience is supposedly the most important part, so ‘if you have really good service at a restaurant, could technology actually replace that experience’ was the core question of the business. Or is that an important sustained advantage for a restaurant versus our business model?” So far, it’s been working. Since launching in 2013, . Farmer’s Fridge vending machines can be found in airports, hospitals and in traditional retailers, like pharmacies, convenience stores and even the Amazon Go store in Chicago. Each location gets stocked at least five days a week, while the airport gets stocked seven days a week. Depending on the business partner, Farmer’s Fridge has a revenue model that ranges from subsidized accounts to revenue shares. “Each vertical behaves really differently,” Saunders said. “In a hospital, they care more about having an amenity overnight for employees who don’t have access to a cafeteria than they do about profitability. At O’Hare International Airport, it’s a revenue share because of the traffic generated. For some retailers, it’s about the traffic Farmer’s Fridge brings to those places.” The app is probably the least technologically interesting part about Farmer’s Fridge, but what it offers is an easy way to see where you can find a fridge, the inventory of said fridge and the ability to reserve food from that fridge ahead of time. The fridge itself is the real technological achievement. It’s an internet-connected device that runs firmware and features a graphical user interface and cloud infrastructure. Next year, the plan is to expand regionally and launch in an additional region. In the nearer term, Farmer’s Fridge is expecting to grow from 130 employees today to about 200 by the end of next year. |
Star Wars: Vader Immortal is a virtual reality series coming in 2019 | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | Few properties seem better suited to tap VR than Star Wars, if only because… you know, lightsabers. And Lucasfilm knows it. They’ve just announced Star Wars: Vader Immortal — a three-part, at-home experience that’ll launch on Oculus’ . Alas, there’s not much to go on besides the name, a quick teaser trailer and that it’s launching sometime in 2019. Lucasfilm note that it’ll be a “yet untold story” that’ll take place across three episodes, with the story writing led by Dark Knight writer David S. Goyer. This isn’t the time the Lucasfilm/ILM teams have dabbled with VR. They released a short one-off experience for the HTC Vive two years ago, and they worked with The Void to build the massive, full-building VR game that launched at Disneyland last year. But Trials was short and experimental, and Secrets requires you to be in a very specific place in the real world. This one sounds like it’ll be a bit more substantial, and intended for a wider audience. More on this as we hear about it. |
Bipartisan bill seeks to elevate the federal CIO position | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | On Wednesday, Texas Rep. Will Hurd and Illinois Rep. Robin Kelly introduced a bipartisan bill that would reorganize how IT is managed throughout the federal government. The bill, the , would make a handful of changes with the intention of making the government run more smoothly and securely. Among those changes, the bill would rename the Office of E-Government, the department overseen by the federal CIO, to the “Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer.” Second, it would “elevate” the federal CIO position so that the position reports to the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) instead of the deputy director, as it stands now. The decision to further empower agency CIOs, in May, aimed to “better position agencies to modernize their IT systems” and to reduce cybersecurity risk by streamlining the way agency CIO roles functioned. The federal CIO bill has the same goals in mind. “No entity can operate securely and efficiently without a CIO in the year 2018, including the federal government,” Rep. Hurd said of the proposal. “This bill does more than just rename an office. It makes a clear statement that the Federal CIO is in charge of coordinating IT policy across the government in order to ensure that our agencies are able to provide better, faster and more cost-efficient services for the American people.” Rep. Kelly added that the bill seeks to “streamline government IT processes,” part of a broader effort to bring government technology — and the positions that manage it — up to date. |
Stripe is now valued at $20B after raising another $245M led by Tiger Global | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | Payments startup has changed the landscape for how businesses can collect funds online by using a few lines of code, and today the company is announcing that it’s picked up more funding of its own. Stripe has raised $245 million, valuing the company at $20 billion. This is a big jump on its previous round, two years ago, that . Led by Tiger Global Management, other new backers included DST Global and Sequoia, along with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and Thrive Capital. The company says it plans to use the funding to hire more people for what it describes as its “distributed global engineering team.” It now has hubs in San Francisco, Seattle and Dublin (its co-founders, John and Patrick Collison, hail from Ireland), and it’s also going to launch a new hub in Singapore. Engineering has been at the heart of the company’s growth from the start, up to now. Recall the about Stripe that served as a mantra of sorts for how startups should grow. Fast forward to today, and Stripe boasts that “all told, the company deployed more than 3,200 new versions of its core API over the past year.” The funding underscores the continuing strong climate for raising money from private backers at increasingly staggering valuations. VCs and private equity firms have raised billions, and they are looking for fast-growing, promising startups where they can invest that money. A number of startups are foregoing, or delaying, going public in favor of staying private for longer, financed by them. “We have no plans to go public,” said John Collison in an interview. “We’re fortunate to be in the position that the Stripe business is performing very well and the long-term opportunity is that we’re very optimistic to providing the richer stack to businesses. Strong businesses do not always tend to be dependent on outside funding.” (Not all are following this route: a key competitor of Stripe’s, , had a very strong IPO debut earlier this year.) Stripe itself is a prime target for VCs looking to park their money in fast-growing, outsized startups. The company says it now has “millions” of customers, including Google, Didi, Mindbody, Spotify and Uber. It is live in 130 markets for acceptance and 25 countries for originating the charges. Carving a place out for itself as a faster, easier way to integrate payments infrastructure into websites and apps, by way of a few lines of code, Stripe’s pitch is that it replaces the more laborious, and often more expensive route, of working with banks and other payment providers in a complicated chain of players that includes gateway providers, credit card processors, merchant acquirers, specialized payment methods, wallets and more. And although Amazon is one of the world’s biggest companies, and most retailers have a digital presence, e-commerce is still a relatively nascent area, with only about three percent of all transactions occurring online at a global average. That means a big opportunity for companies like Stripe, but also competitors like Adyen, PayPal and others. “We believe in the contingency of progress,” said Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison, in a statement. “Better global payments infrastructure will increase economic output, encourage entrepreneurship and help upstarts compete with incumbents. By bringing Stripe into more markets and building out our capabilities for companies of all sizes, we hope to accelerate innovation around the world.” Stripe estimates there will be $4 trillion in online sales by 2020 globally. While payments is Stripe’s bread and butter, the company has also been diversifying and now also includes Stripe Issuing, Stripe Terminal, fraud detection and , among its various offerings. These help the company develop stronger ties with its customers, and also potentially increase its margins. “No one else is going as deep as us on software and the technology stack as we are,” said co-founder and president John Collison. |
Uber to pay $148 million in data breach settlement | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | Uber has agreed to pay $148 million to settle a data breach that affected some 57 million customers in 2016. The agreement was with the attorneys general of all 50 states and the District of Columbia to resolve their legal inquiries on this matter, Uber’s chief legal officer Tony West said in a statement released Wednesday. The data breach affected 50 million riders and 7 million drivers; around 600,000 driver license numbers for U.S. drivers were also included in the breach. Uber’s response and cover up of the breach led to the firing of Joe Sullivan, the company’s chief security officer at the time. Uber didn’t report the incident that occurred in October 2016. Instead, the company paid hackers $100,000 to get rid of the evidence and keep the data breach a secret, which . The data breach and ensuing cover up was revealed in November, more than a year after it had occurred and just a few months after Dara Khosrowshahi had taken the CEO position. West noted that Uber (and in Khosrowshahi’s first year as CEO) has worked to improve safety and security following the scandal. For instance, Uber hired in 2018 Ruby Zefo as chief privacy officer and Matt Olsen as chief trust and security officer. The hiring of Zefo, who led Intel’s global privacy and security legal team, and Olsen is part of the company’s mission to move past the embarrassing data breach, as well as other weak privacy practices employed by , who resigned in 2017 after a string of scandals. In April, Uber expanded a proposed settlement made with the Federal Trade Commission pertaining to data mishandling, privacy and security complaints that date back to 2014 and 2015. That proposed settlement happened prior to . |
Chegg resets 40 million user passwords after data breach | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | Chegg, a technology giant specializing in textbook rental, has confirmed a data breach affecting some 40 million customers. In a filing with , the company said it will reset all user passwords after hackers gained access to the company’s customer database. That database includes users for Chegg’s website but also other products, such as citation service EasyBib, which it owns. The breach occurred in April, but was only discovered a week ago. Hackers stole usernames, email addresses, shipping addresses and hashed passwords, the company said, but doesn’t believe that financial data was taken. The company went , and is currently worth $3.3 billion. Chegg’s stock is down more than 10 percent a day after the breach was revealed. |
Oculus Hybrid Apps let you use 2D & 3D software simultaneously in VR | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | Oculus showed off the future of working in VR today. Rather than just splaying out 2D software on an infinite desktop, the new Oculus Hybrid Apps system lets you see both 2D screens and 3D models in VR at the same time. That means you could use a traditional image editing suite to change the look of a piece of a 3D object while also being able to rotate, move, and look around that object. Hybrid Apps were conference today in San Jose where Facebook also revealed the new , , a for discovering and remotely installing software on the Rift, and the debut of the . Hybrid Apps are built atop the announced last year. In this demo, you can see an artist using the 2D Substance Painter software to polish the colors and textures of a 3D robot model while being able to see changes live. Oculus showed off a wide array of other new software today. Your Sims-style customizable Oculus Home can now sport Custom Developer Items so you can earn (or maybe one day buy) 3D goods within games. Earn an airship in a flying game, and that airship can float inside your Oculus Home when you’re done playing. The feature could let you build your own trophy wall, making those in-game achievements a lot more tangible. Each year Oculus shows off the newest versions of its Avatars system that lets you create in-VR visual identity. They’re getting more lifelike thanks to additional hairstyles, skin tones, and accessories. And later this year, Oculus will launch Expressive Avatars that use its research on simulated eye and mouth movement as well as microexpressions to make them feel real. Overall, Oculus Connect 5 felt a bit anti-climactic. Facebook has a lot of scandals distracting from its VR efforts while also triggering more scrutiny of any choices it makes related to privacy. What once might have been seen as mildly creepy now triggers damaging press cycles. Facebook ended up adding a privacy shield to cover the lens of its upcoming Portal video chat screen, . Combined with slow adoption of VR, it seems like there is less and less progress between Oculus’ annual conference. Instead of big advances in avatars, we get cosmetic upgrades and reveals of changes that won’t arrive for months. The newest Oculus Quest headset looks pretty similar to its previous prototypes. At this point, the necessary technology for satisfactory VR has largely arrived. It’s now on Oculus and its legion of developers to build products and experiences that are simple, affordable, and impressive enough to be worth the hassle of face computing. |
null | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 9 | 19 | null |
CollegeHumor unveils Dropout, a subscription service for comedy videos, comics and more | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | CollegeHumor is getting into the subscription business with a new service called . Dropout is part of CH Media, the IAC-owned subsidiary that also includes Dorkly, Drawfree and CollegeHumor proper. It’s not a subscription video service. Yes, there will be ad-free video series, many of them starring familiar faces from previous CollegeHumor shows, but Dropout will also offer comics and chat stories. The shows include “Dimension 20: Fantasy High,” which CollegeHumor describes as what you’d get “if John Hughes ran a tabletop RPG,” plus a second season of “Lonely and Horny” starring Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld. Many of the comics and chat stories will tie into the series in some way, and there will also be a members-only Discord channel allowing subscribers to interact with CollegeHumor creators and stars. Chief Business Officer Shane Rahmani said that rather than SVOD (subscription video on demand), Dropout is offering “SMOD — subscription media on demand.” He added that with a subscription model, CollegeHumor can “play at a proverbial next level of investment,” with content that “feels much more premium.” It’s been a little over a year since . Rahmani didn’t discuss Seeso directly during our interview, but he addressed the broader question: “Why do I think this will work?” “It really all comes down to the core offering for this very specific consumer,” he said. “It’s built for a very digitally native consumer particularly, someone who loves nerd culture but also loves comedy and goes out to things like Comic-Con. Someone who plays a lot of video games and loves being a fan of ours. We’re dead-focused on meeting their needs specifically in the first year.” Although Rahmani and his team have a clear audience in mind, they don’t see “nerdy” as synonymous with “white guys.” In fact, when I asked about diversity of talent and of audience, CollegeHumor sent me the following statement from Chief Creative Officer Sam Reich: Inclusivity is a top priority for us at CollegeHumor / DROPOUT. We don’t see nerdy topics as belonging to one group of people and not another. If you look at RPGs, for instance, there is a more diverse collection of people playing them now than ever before — and if you look at the cast of our RPG show, “Dimension 20,” it reflects that. If some bad fans of these topics have at one point alienated people, then it’s our job to create an environment that’s inclusive and supportive enough to win them back. Of course, when you’re talking about streaming comedy, you also have to acknowledge Netflix, which is . CollegeHumor, in contrast, doesn’t really do standup. Instead, Rahmani said the company’s approach is “rooted in world-building sketch comedy — comedy layered with characters and storylines and elements that cross-pollinate … a Marvel universe for comedy.” Dropout is launching on the web in a public beta test, with native apps to follow. It will start at $3.99 per month before adding different tiers — you’ll still be able to pay $3.99 per month after the beta, but only if you commit to an annual subscription. Otherwise it’s $4.99 per month with a six-month subscription or $5.99 month-to-month. Even without a subscription, CollegeHumor fans will get access to some of the new content. Rahmani said the windowing policies (i.e. how long CollegeHumor waits before releasing a previously paywalled video for free) are still being decided, but there will be teasers released for each episode that should also work as standalone funny videos that are a couple of minutes in length. |
YouTube’s VR app is coming to Oculus Go | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | For a while, the best thing Google Daydream had going for it was YouTube, the platform has had a ton of 360 content on it but has been unavailable on Facebook’s Oculus Go headset. At the company’s Oculus Connect 5 keynote, the company announced that a YouTube VR app will soon be arriving on the $199 headset bringing a load of user-created and professional 360 content to the device. YouTube VR supports a number of VR video types including 360 spheres, 360 livestreams and 3D stereo videos running on its VR180 platform. |
A Lime scooter rider died in Washington, D.C., marking the second fatality this month | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | , the 18-month-old, San Francisco-based company whose bright green bicycles and scooters now dot cities throughout the U.S., launched a pilot program in Tacoma, Washington, today, but that tiny victory might have felt short-lived. The reason: on the opposite side of the country, a Lime rider was today by an SUV while tooling around Washington D.C.’s DuPont neighborhood. The local fire department shared video of the rescue, which shows that the victim, an adult male, had to be pulled from the undercarriage of the vehicle. It’s the second known fatality for the company following a death in Dallas, when a 24-year-old Texas man fell off the scooter he was riding and died from blunt force injuries to his head. On the one hand, the developments, while unfortunate, can hardly come as a surprise to anyone given how vulnerable riders or e-scooters are. E-scooter use is on the rise, with both Lime and its L.A.-based rival , announcing this week that their customers have now taken north of . At the same time, after has deemed their use on sidewalks illegal out of fear that fast-moving riders will collide with and injure pedestrians. That leaves riders sharing city streets with the same types of giant, exhaust-spewing machines that they hope to increasingly displace. In fact, sales of traditional SUVs has , thanks in part to low unemployment, high consumer confidence, and Americans’ enduring love with gigantic vehicles. One solution to the issue, and one for which the e-scooter companies and their investors have been advocating, are protected lanes that would allow e-scooters to be operated more safely. has even publicly offered to new infrastructure that keeps cyclists and scooter riders safer. Another possible answer would appear to be mandating the use of helmets with e-scooters, though California evidently disagrees. On Wednesday, Governor Jerry Brown signed a into a law that states Californians riding electric scooters will no longer be required to wear helmets as of January 1. The bill was reportedly . |
Mithril Capital Management, cofounded by Ajay Royan and Peter Thiel, is leaving the Bay Area | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | From its glass-lined offices in San Francisco’s leafy Presidio national park, six-year-old has happily flown under the radar. Now it’s leaving altogether and relocating its team to Austin, a spot that, among others the firm had considered, has “enough critical mass of a technical culture, an artisanal culture, an artistic culture, and [is] not necessarily looking to Silicon Valley for validation,” says firm cofounder Ajay Royan. The move isn’t a complete surprise. Royan, who cofounded the growth-stage investment firm in 2012 with renowned investor Peter Thiel, hasn’t done much in the way of public relations outside of . Thiel and Royan — who’d previously been a managing director at Clarium Capital Management, Thiel’s hedge fund — largely travel in social circles outside of Silicon Valley. The firm has always prided itself on finding startups that don’t fit the typical ideal of a Silicon Valley startup, too. One of its newer bets, for example, is a nine-year-old in Miami, Fla. that says it performs implant surgery faster and more effectively, and is tackling a growing market. More than people now receive implants each year. “It was a hidden team because it’s in Miami, and it was a field that was under invested in,” says Royan, noting that one of the few breakthrough companies in the dental world in recent years, , which makes an alternative to braces, caters to a much younger demographic. Even still, Mithril’s departure is interesting taken as a data point in a series of them that suggest that Silicon Valley may be losing some of its appeal for a variety of reasons. One of these is so-called , which had already driven Thiel to make Los Angeles . An even bigger factor: the unprecedentedly of living. As The Economist recently reported about the Bay Area’s , a median-priced home in the region costs $940,000, which is four-and-a-half times the American average. “It’s hard to imagine doing another startup in Silicon Valley; I don’t think I would,” said Jeremy Stoppelman — who cofounded the search and reviews site Yelp and took it public in 2012 — to The Economist. Late last week, to learn more about Mithril’s move out of California and to get a general sense of how the firm is faring, we sat down with Royan at the space the firm will formally vacate next year, when its lease expires. We talked for several hours; some outtakes from that conversation, lightly edited for length, follow. AR: In 2016. I started seeing a lot more correlation in the companies that we were seeing; they were looking more similar to each other than before, and the volume was going up as well. So to put that in context, 2017 was our largest volume in the pipeline, meaning the number of companies coming through the system. And it was also the year that we did the least number of investments. We made one investment, in Neocis [the aforementioned dental robotics company]. AR: The problem is what I call time horizon compression. So a pension fund is supposed to invest on a 30-year time horizon, but if you look at the internal incentives, the bonuses are paid on an annual basis [and the investors making investing decisions on behalf of that pension] are evaluated every six months or every quarter. So you shouldn’t be surprised when people do really short-term things. There are very short-term versions of investing in the private markets, as well. It’s the 15th AI company, or the 23rd big data company, or the 256th online-to-offline services company. A lot of the people making these investments are very smart. The question is: why are they funding these companies? And why are people starting them? I would suggest it’s because both are under tremendous time pressure, and pressure not to take real risk. If you’re really smart, and you’re told that you’ve got to make returns tomorrow and you can’t take a lot of risk, then you do a me-too company and you look for momentum funding and you try to get out as quickly as possible. It’s a perfectly rational response to bad incentives, and that’s part of what we started to see a lot of in Silicon Valley. I think you have a lot of it going on right now. AR: I think that’s fake. Private investors are maybe even more demanding than public investors, because we have material amounts invested generally. Certainly, we do at Mithril. When it comes to governance at our companies, it’s pretty tough, and we get a lot of insight into their activities. It’s not like a public board, where you get a quarterly meeting and a pretty presentation and then people go home. I think it’s risk budget and time horizon, bottom line. So the ability to take risks in ways that are not supported by historical models would be: if it goes well, people are happy; if it goes south, the public markets I don’t think will forgive you. AR: Amazon is like the sovereign exception that proves the rule. It’s like [Jeff Bezos] was structured to basically not care both in terms of governance, or he cared in the way that was actually constructive to building Amazon, which is, ‘I’m just going to keep reinvesting all my profits into things that I think are important, and you all can just wait,’ right? And not a lot of people have the intestinal fortitude to do that or the governance structure to sustain it. AR: Palantir is still doing extremely well as a company. What’s interesting is 80 percent of our capital in [our first of three funds] is concentrated in, like, 10 companies. Our two biggest investments were Palantir and [the antibody discovery platform] [in New Hampshire], and I’d argue that Adamab is even bigger than Palantir. We actually helped them go public in 2014 when they were thinking about it. AR: Adimab was founded in 2007, so it was already seven years old when we encountered them. And I was looking for a company that would be not a drug company but instead [akin to] a technology company in biotech, and Adimab is that. The’ve built a custom-designed yeast whose DNA was redesigned based on the inputs from a multi-year study of about 120 human beings, I think at Harvard, where they assessed the immune responses of the humans to various diseases, then encoded what they understood about the human immune system into the yeast. So the yeast essentially are humanized proxies for the immune system. AR: You can attack the yeast with disease, and the antibodies the yeast produces are essentially human antibodies. Think of it as a biological computer that responds to disease vectors. We now have a database of 10 billion antibodies that we can use to figure out how best to interrogate the yeast for the next generation of diseases that needed an immunotherapy solution. AR: It is. They don’t need any new money. We’ve just begun a program to help them restructure their cap table so they can take out early investors. AR: They want more stock, so we’ve created the equivalent of stock options that are tied to value creation. A lot of biotech companies go public very early on. If Adimab had, they would have been under tremendous pressure to actually build a drug company. People would have said, ‘Hey, if you’re discovering all these antibodies and they’re empowering other people’s drugs, why don’t you just make your own drug?” But the founder, Tillman Gerngross, who’s also the head of bioengineering at Dartmouth, he doesn’t want to be in the position of having to sell or be under tremendous pressure [to create a drug company] when he thinks the full impact of what Adimab is building won’t be realized for another decade. AR: The cost of trying is what I’m worried about [here]. It’s that simple. That applies to people who are starting jobs in someone’s company, or trying to start a company themselves. If it’s expensive for the company to take risk, it’s going be expensive for you to take risk inside the company, which means your career will take a different path than than otherwise. After [I was an] undergrad at Yale, New York was a natural place to go, but I never worked there. It just felt like a place that was externally very pressurized. You had to conform to the external pressures that dictated your daily life. Your rent was $4,000 to $6,000 a month for craziness for like a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. Social structures were fairly set, like, you had to go to the Hamptons in the summer or something. There were these weird things that felt very dictated and you had to fit and you had to climb the pyramid schemes that people had established for you. Otherwise, you were out. What made [Silicon Valley] really attractive was it was a one giant incubator as a society, with a lot of pay-it-forward forward culture and a low cost of trying. Now I’m worried about all three of those. I’m not saying that just by moving, that gets fixed. That’s facile. But if you conclude that this is an issue that you need to think through, and try to find thoughtful ways to get around, you have to enlist every ally you can. And one of those allies might be reducing unidirectional environmental noise, and having more voices that you can listen to and being exposed to more lived experiences that are varied. . . It builds your capacity for empathy, and I think that’s important for good investing and being a good founder. AJ: It’s a great town. Everyone’s been super friendly. I get to wear my cowboy boots. You can actually do a four-hour tour of food trucks without running out of food trucks. Also, most of the people I’ve met are registered Democrats and like, half of them own really nice guns. And these are not considered contradictory at all. |
Japan’s Hayabusa 2 mission lands on the surface of a distant asteroid | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | The coolest mission you haven’t heard of just hit a major milestone: the Japanese Hayabusa 2 probe has reached its destination, the asteroid Ryugu, and just . Soon it will touch down itself and bring a sample of Ryugu back to Earth! Are you kidding me? That’s amazing! is, as you might guess, a sequel to the original Hayabusa, which like this one was an asteroid sampling mission. So this whole process isn’t without precedent, though some of you may be surprised that asteroid mining is essentially old hat now. But as you might also guess, the second mission is more advanced than the first. Emboldened by and having learned much from the first mission, Hayabusa 2 packs more equipment and plans a much longer stay at its destination. That destination is an asteroid in an orbit between the Earth and Mars named Ryugu. Ryugu is designated “Type C,” meaning it is thought to have considerable amounts of water and organic materials, making it an exciting target for learning about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life and the history of this (and perhaps other) solar systems. It launched in late 2014 and spent the next several years in a careful approach that would put it in a stable orbit above the asteroid; it finally arrived this summer. And this week it descended to within 55 meters (!) of the surface and dropped off two of four landers it brought with. Here’s what it looked like as it descended towards the asteroid: These “MINERVA” landers (seen in render form up top) are intended to hop around the surface, with each leap lasting some 15 minutes due to the low gravity there. They’ll take pictures of the surface, test the temperature, and generally investigate wherever they land. : At time of writing, the landers had apparently safely landed but were on the far side of the asteroid and had not made contact with the mothership. Now they have, and have sent back some fabulous imagery as well! This dynamic photo was captured by Rover-1A on September 22 at around 11:44 JST. It was taken on Ryugu's surface during a hop. The left-half is the surface of Ryugu, while the white region on the right is due to sunlight. (Hayabusa2 Project) — HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) Waiting for deployment are one more MINERVA and MASCOT, a newly developed lander that carries more scientific instruments but isn’t as mobile. It’ll look more closely at the magnetic qualities of the asteroid and also non-invasively check the minerals on the surface. The big news will come next year, when Hayabusa 2 itself drops down to the surface with the “small carry-on impactor,” which it will use to and sample below the surface of Ryugu. This thing is great. It’s basically a giant bullet: a 2-kilogram copper plate mounted in front of an explosive, which when detonated fires the plate towards the target at about two kilometers per second, or somewhere around 4,400 miles per hour. Hayabusa 2’s impactor in a test, blowing through targets and hitting the rubble on the far side of the range. The orbiter will not just observe surface changes from the impact, which will help illuminate the origins of other craters and help indicate the character of the surface, but it will also land and collect the “fresh” exposed substances. All in all it’s a fabulously interesting mission and one that JAXA, Japan’s NASA equivalent, is uniquely qualified to run. You can bet that asteroid mining companies are watching Hayabusa 2 closely, since a few years from now they may be launching their own versions of it. |
VCs say Silicon Valley isn’t the gold mine it used to be | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | leading up to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, published the cover story, The author outlined reasons why the Valley has “peaked.” Venture capital investors are deploying capital outside the Bay Area more than ever before. High-profile entrepreneurs and investors, , have left. Rising rents are making it impossible for new blood to make a living, let alone build businesses. And according to a recent , 46 percent of Bay Area residents want to get the hell out, an increase from 34 percent two years ago. Needless to say, the future of Silicon Valley was top of mind on stage at Disrupt. “It’s hard to make a difference in San Francisco as a single entrepreneur,” said J.D. Vance, the author of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ and a managing partner at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Fund, which backs seed-stage companies based outside Silicon Valley. “It’s not as a hard to make a difference as a successful entrepreneur in Columbus, Ohio.” In conversation with Vance, Revolution CEO Steve Case said he’s noticed a “mega-trend” emerging. Founders from cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit or Portland are opting to stay in their hometowns instead of moving to U.S. innovation hubs like San Francisco. “We are seeing the beginnings of a slowing of what has been a brain drain the last 20 years,” Case said. “It’s not just watching where the capital flows, it’s watching where the talent flows. And the sense that you have to be here or you can’t play is going to start diminishing.” J.D. Vance says that most entrepreneurs don't need to move to Silicon Valley. Here's why. — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) “It’s too expensive to live here,” said Aileen Lee, the founder of seed-stage VC firm Cowboy Ventures, amid a conversation with leading venture capitalists Spark Capital general partner Megan Quinn and Benchmark general partner Sarah Tavel. “I know that there are a lot of people in the Bay Area that are trying to work on that problem and I hope that they are successful,” Lee added. “It’s an amazing place to live and we’ve made it really challenging for people to live here and not worry about making ends meet.” One of Cowboy’s portfolio companies opted to relocate from Silicon Valley to Colorado when it came time to scale their business. That kind of move would’ve historically been seen as a failure. Today, it may be a sign of strong business acumen. Quinn said that of all 28 of Spark’s growth-stage portfolio companies, Raleigh, North Carolina-based Pendo has the easiest time recruiting folks locally and from the Bay Area. She advises her Bay Area-based late-stage companies to open a second office outside of the Valley where lower-cost talent is available. “We often say go to [flySFO.com], draw a three-hour circle around San Francisco where they have direct flights, find a city that has a university and open up a second office as quickly as possible,” Quinn said. Still, all three firms invest in a lot of companies based in San Francisco. Of Benchmark’s 10 most recent investments, for example, eight were based in SF, according to . “I used to believe really strongly if you wanted to build a multi-billion dollar company you had to be based here,” Tavel said. “I’ve stopped giving that soap speech.” Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), Megan Quinn (Spark Capital), and Sarah Tavel (Benchmark Capital) on whether or not Silicon Valley is on the wane for investors — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) A lot of Bay Area VCs have been blind to the droves of tech talent located outside the region. Believe it or not, there are great engineers in America’s small- and medium-sized markets too. At Disrupt, Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton . The program will have cohorts based in four cities; San Francisco was noticeably absent from that list. Instead, the firm, which invests in underrepresented founders and , will work with companies in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, London and one more city, which will be determined by a public vote. Aniyia Williams, the founder of Tinsel and Black & Brown Founders, will spearhead the Philadelphia effort. “For us, it’s about closing that wealth gap to address inequity in tech,” Williams said. “There needs to be more active participation from everyone.” Hamilton added that for her, the tech talent in LA and London is undeniable. “There is a lot of money and a lot of investors … it reminds me of three years ago in Silicon Valley,” Hamilton said. Silicon Valley’s demise may not be just as a result of increased costs of living or investors overlooking talent in other geographies. It may be because of heightened competition abroad. Doug Leone, an early- and growth-stage investor at Sequoia Capital, said at Disrupt that he’s noticed a very different work ethic in China. Chinese entrepreneurs, he explained, are more ruthless than their American counterparts and they’re putting in a whole lot more hours. Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital says founders in the US and China both want to change the world, but Chinese founders are a little more desperate (and you see it in the crazy work ethic they have). — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) “I’ve had dinner in China until after 10 p.m. and people go to work after 10 p.m.,” Leone recalled. “We don’t see that in the U.S. I’m not saying the U.S. founders oughta do that but those are the differences. They are similar in character. They are similar in dreams. They are similar in how they want to change the world. They are ultra-driven … The Chinese founders have a half other gear because I think they are a little more desperate.” Much of this, however, has been said before and still, somehow, Silicon Valley remained the place to be for investors and startup entrepreneurs. The reality is, those engaged in tech culture are always anxiously awaiting for the bubble to pop, the market to crash and for “peak Valley” to finally arrive. Maybe, just maybe, Silicon Valley is forever. Here’s more of our coverage of |
Polestar unveils first production EV with aim to overtake Tesla | Jake Bright | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | Jake Bright is a writer, author and advisor with a focus on global business, politics, and technology. From 2017 to 2020, he was a contributing writer and advisor at TechCrunch where he published on Africa, mobility and politics. Bright helped spearhead consistent Africa coverage and co-produce the first Startup Battlefield competitions in Africa and Africa focused programming on the Disrupt San Francisco mainstage. Bright’s first book, (Macmillan 2015), forecast the rise of Africa’s venture backed startup scene. Prior to this he worked in international finance and as a speechwriter in Washington, DC. Bright continues to contribute occasional guest pieces at TechCrunch. debuted its first production EV and previewed its electric car line in New York with the CEO squarely taking aim at Tesla. The Volvo subsidiary pulled the cover off its Polestar 1, which it positioned less as a hybrid and more as a fully electric (gas optional) car to attract fence sitters to EVs. The $155,000 auto—that will hit streets in 2019—has twin electrical motors powered by three 34kWh battery packs and a turbo and supercharged gas up front (more details ). All electric range is up to 100 miles—which the company claims gives the Polestar 1 the longest all electric range of any production hybrid. Polestar drivetrain The Polestar 1 brings 600 horsepower and 738 ft-lbs of torque. It is the first in a series, with an all electric Polestar 2 to debut in 2019 and a Polestar 3 SUV after that. “Polestar 2 will be a direct competitor to the Tesla Model 3…” CEO Thomas Ingenlath said on the launch stage. He told TechCrunch the company will focus more on creating converts to EVs than pulling away Tesla’s existing market share. Thomas Ingenlath, chief executive officer, Polestar One advantage Ingenlath described was using Polestar 1 as a gateway car for getting laggards to go all electric. “There are many people out there who still think a car has to have a combustion engine,” he said. “Polestar 1 is an extremely good vehicle to get people across that line and once they drive it…understand what an amazing experience an electric car is.” Polestar converts shouldn’t get too attached to that gasoline/voltage combo, however. Polestar 1 will be the company’s first and last electric and gas vehicle, according to Ingenlath. “The future is electric. We will not do a hybrid car again,” he told TechCrunch. At their New York Polestar 1 debut, the company devoted about as much time to the Polestar sales and service experience as the actual car. It will be multi-channel—from app to physical—leveraging parts of Volvo’s dealer network for certain things and staying completely separate for others. For one, Polestar will not have dealers or use Volvo dealers to showcase their cars, according to Ingenlath. The buyer experience will start on the company’s app, then move into what it refers to as a network of “Polestar Spaces” across the U.S., Europe, and China where buyers can view and test cars. Purchased cars can be delivered to one’s home and service coordinated by app and home pickup—though Polestar will use Volvo dealers (not their spaces) on the service end. “We will become a company that produces around a 100,000 cars a year and this will definitely scale-up,” said Ingenlath. “We’ll never become a Volvo, but we certainly need a certain scale to come in to a profitable range.” The company oversubscribed orders for the Polestar 1 with 200 cars coming to North American buyers. While Polestar’s HQ is in Gothenburg, Sweden, it will manufacture cars at a plant in . The company’s EV debut comes as Tesla’s Model 3 earned the and Audi introduced it $74,800 all electric e-tron SUV (covered here at ) In the U.S. market Tesla still dominates plugin sales by make and model and its Model 3 is expected to boost that lead, according to . |
Twitter says bug may have exposed some direct messages to third-party developers | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | Twitter said that a “bug” sent user’s private direct messages to third-party developers “who were not authorized to receive them.” The social media giant began warning users Friday of the possible exposure with a message in the app. “The issue has persisted since May 2017, but we resolved it immediately upon discovering it,” the message said, which was by a Mashable reporter. “Our investigation into this issue is ongoing, but presently we have no reason to believe that any data sent to unauthorized developers was misused.” A spokesperson told TechCrunch that it’s “highly unlikely” that any communication was sent to the incorrect developers at all, but informed users out of an abundance of caution. Sorry, what ?! My DMs may have been sent to developers for a more than a year?? — Karissa Bell (@karissabe) Twitter said that only messages sent to brand accounts — like airlines or delivery services — may be affected. In , Twitter said that it’s investigation has confirmed “only one set of technical circumstances where this issue could have occurred.” The bug was found on September 10, but took almost two weeks to inform users. “If your account was affected by this bug, we will contact you directly through an in-app notice and on twitter.com,” said the advice. The company said that the bug affected less than 1 percent of users on Twitter. The company had 335 million users as of its latest earnings release. “No action is required from you,” the message said. It’s the second data-related bug this year. In May, the company said it mistakenly in an internal log, used by Twitter staff. Twitter urged users to change their password. |
Instagram denies it’s building Regramming. Here’s why it’d be a disaster | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | Instagram tells me Regramming, or the ability to instantly repost someone else’s feed post to your followers like a retweet, is “not happening”, not being built, and not being tested. And that’s good news for all Instagrammers. The denial comes after it initially issued a “no comment” to , who published that he’d seen screenshots of a native Instagram resharing sent to him by a source. Regramming would be a fundamental shift in how Instagram works, not necessarily in terms of functionality, but in terms of the accepted norms of what and how to post. You could always screenshot, cite the original creator, and post. But Instagram has always been about sharing window to the world — what you’ve lived and seen. Regramming would legitimize suddenly assuming someone else’s eyes. The result would be that users couldn’t trust that when they follow someone, that’s whose vision would appear in their feed. Instagram would feel a lot more random and unpredictable. And it’d become more like its big brother Facebook whose News Feed has waned in popularity – susceptible to viral clickbait bullshit, vulnerable to foreign misinformation campaigns, and worst of all, impersonal. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images Newton’s report suggested Instagram reposts would appear under the profile picture of the original sharer, and regrams could be regrammed once more in turn, showing a stack of both profile thumbnails of who previously shared it. That would at least prevent massive chains of reposts turning posts into all-consuming feed bombs. Regramming could certainly widen what appears in your feed, which some might consider more interesting. It could spur growth by creating a much easier way for users to share in feed, especially if they don’t live a glamorous life themself. I can see a case for this being a feature for businesses only, which are already impersonal and act as curators. And Instagram’s algorithm could hide the least engaging regrams. These benefits are why Instagram has internally considered building regramming for years. CEO Kevin Systrom told Wired last year “We debate the re-share thing a lot . . . But really that decision is about keeping your feed focused on the people you know rather than the people you know finding other stuff for you to see. And I think that is more of a testament of our focus on authenticity.” See, right now, Instagram profiles are cohesive. You can easily get a feel for what someone posts and make an educated decision about whether to follow them from a quick glance at their grid. What they share reflects on them, so they’re cautious and deliberate. Everyone is putting on a show for Likes, so maybe it’s not quite ‘authentic’, but at least the content is personal. Regramming would make it impossible to tell what someone would post next, and put your feed at the mercy of their impulses without the requisite accountability. If they regram something lame, ugly, or annoying, it’s the original author who’d be blamed. Instagram already offers a demand release valve in the form of re-sharing posts to your Story as stickers Instagram already has a release valve for demand for regramming in the form of the ability to you can paste into your Story. , you can add your commentary, complimenting on dunking on the author. There, regrams are ephemeral, and your followers have to pull them out of their Stories tray rather than having them force fed via the feed. Effectively, you can reshare others’ content, but not make it a central facet of Instagram or emblem of your identity. And if you want to just make sure a few friends see something awesome you’ve discovered, you can send them people’s feed posts as Direct messages. Making it much easier to repost to your feed instead of sharing something original could turn Instagram into an echo chamber. It’d turn Instagram even more into a popularity contest, with users jockeying for viral distribution and a chance to plug their SoundCloud mixtapes like on Twitter. Personal self-expression would be overshadowed even further by people playing to the peanut gallery. Businesses might get lazy rather than finding their own styles. If you want to discover something new and unexpected, there’s a whole Explore page full of it. Newton is a great reporter, and I suspect the screenshots he saw were real, but I think Instagram should have given him the firm denial right away. My guess is that it wanted to give its standard no comment because if it always outright denies inaccurate rumors and speculation, that means journalists can assume they’re right when it does “no comment.” But once Newton published his report, backlash quickly mounted about how regramming could ruin Instagram. Rather than leaving users worried, confused, and constantly asking when the feature would launch and how it would work, the company decided to issue firm denials after the fact. It became worth diverging from its PR playbook. Maybe it had already chosen to scrap its regramming prototype, maybe the screenshots were just of an early mock-up never meant to be seriously considered, or maybe it hadn’t actually finalized that decision to abort until the public weighed in against the feature yesterday. In any case, introducing regramming would risk an unforced error. The elemental switch from chronological to the algorithmic feed, while criticized, was critical to Instagram being able to show the best of the massive influx of content. Instagram would eventually break without it. There’s no corresponding urgency to fix what ain’t broke when it comes to not allowing regramming. Instagram is already growing like crazy. It just hit . Stories now has 400 million daily users, and that feature is growing six times faster than Snapchat as a whole. The app is utterly dominant in the photo and short video sharing world. Regramming would be an unnecessary gamble. |
Early-bird tickets close today, 9/21 | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | TC Sessions: AR/VR on October 18 at UCLA is gearing up to be a great show.
. Don’t miss out on the biggest savings for this event — book your $99 tickets before prices go up by $100. The stage will feature some of the industry’s most groundbreaking companies and thought leaders from Oculus, Emmy-winning Baobab Studios, Facebook, Survios and more.
Hear today’s innovators, leaders and experts share their experiences and insights
Get a first-look at several never-before-seen augmented and virtual technology demos
Meet the key players and contributors in AR/VR throughout the day and expand your network with Ashley Crowder (VNTANA), Shawn Frayne (Looking Glass Factory) and Brett Jones (Lightform)
with Cyan Banister (Founders Fund)
with Yelena Rachitzky (Oculus)
. Don’t forget to book your early-bird tickets before end of day today. Students, you can book tickets for just $45 . |
Interiors startup Clippings raises $15.4M Series B with Advance Venture Partners | Mike Butcher | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | Back in April eporta, a London-based B2B interiors marketplace startup, had raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by US investor Canvas Ventures. Eport has digitized the catalogues of furnishing manufacturers and allowed businesses to order direct, cutting out the middle-men. Now London is continuing its obsession with interior decoration startups with the news that has raised a Series B round of funding, raising $15.4 million. Advance Venture Partners (AVP) lead the round and existing investor C4Ventures also participated. Founded in 2014 by architecture-trained entrepreneurs Adel Zakout and Tom Mallory, Clippings now plans to grow in the US. Currently, the furniture industry is worth €9.6 billion in Europe, and around $120 billion in the US, but only 6% of this spend is online. Clippings aggregates data on over 7 million products from over a thousand brands to simplify discovery and combines that with interactive mood boards that replace Pinterest to identify and buy a product. Then it throws in collaboration tools for teams, multiple quote requests, orders, invoices and timelines into one place. It now claims to have about 50,000 people – including teams designing for WeWork, Citroën and British Land – using Clippings. Adel Zakout, co-founder and CEO of Clippings told me “We’ve built software that enables full management of an interior project, offer a layer of service and logistics so that when you do buy, we manage it all for you vs Eporta where it’s fully self-serve. This doesn’t fix major pain point of customer.” He also says they have full pricing control, meaning “we can take a view of a whole project value / customer spend and offer optimal prices vs Eporta who can’t do that as the seller controls price.” He says a typical large co-working space project may have a budget in the £100k range and will have products from 40-50 different vendors, “so you need to be able to consolidate pricing, service, logistics and offer tech to manage it all.” Other players in the industry (but not competitors) include Houzz and made.com. |
Luxury fashion marketplace Farfetch closes at $28.45, up 42% on its first day of trading on NYSE | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | It’s been a strong year for tech IPOs so far, and it looks like today’s debut of — a UK-based shopping site for luxury fashion — is on trend, so to speak. The company opened trading today — on NYSE under the ticker FTCH — at $27, making for a decent pop of 35 percent. The opening followed the company that it had priced its IPO at $20/share to raise $885 million from the sale of 44,243,749 Class A shares. This was above the expected range of $17 to $19, and gives the company a market cap of . The stock went during the day before closing at the end of the day at $28.45. This is generally a strong showing for Farfetch, for e-commerce, and also for those who are working in the area of online sales focused not on bargains and the middle-to-lower end of the market, but the higher-priced end aimed at luxury goods — a market that was estimated to be worth $307 billion in 2017 and projected to reach $446 billion by 2025 (according to Bain, and cited in the ). Notably, in that filing, the company had put in a provisional marker for raising $100 million, which in the end was much lower than what it raised. At the time it was speculated that Farfetch would reach a valuation of anywhere between $6 billion and $8.37 billion — but it fell short of that. As we have , Farfetch was an early mover in the area of building e-commerce marketplaces specifically catering to the luxury fashion and other luxury goods industries. This end of the market was somewhat slow to embrace digital shopping: the belief was that for higher-end goods, you needed higher-end, more personalised and in-person service at beautiful boutiques. With that backdrop, Farfetch started out by working with boutiques and fashion houses that had yet to establish any kind of online commerce profile of their own. “These sellers have been cautious in their adoption of emerging commerce technologies,” as Farfetch puts it in their IPO filing. By pooling them together, Farfetch was able to create a high-end experience that was bolstered by its scale and reach. In the meantime, the average shopper for luxury goods has come a long way: at the younger end they are digital natives and expect to buy online (some even bypass sites altogether and ), and there are a lot more of them, coming from cities far from fashion centers like London, Paris and New York. They may not always be able to fly instantly to buy pieces, but they can always click a mouse or tap their smartphone screens. It’s still a relatively nascent market all the same. “The luxury market is such a massive market, and so under-penetrated online. Only nine percent of sales happen online, and it’s a $100 billion opportunity,” said Danny Rimer, a partner at Index, one of Farfetch’s biggest investors. (Farfetch’s most recent and were both out of to target these specific shoppers.) “Farfetch is the leading technology platform for the global luxury fashion industry,” it notes in the prospectus. “We operate the only truly global luxury digital marketplace at scale, seamlessly connecting brands, retailers and consumers. We are redefining how fashion is bought and sold through technology, data and innovation. We were founded ten years ago, and through significant investments in technology, infrastructure, people and relationships, we have become a trusted partner to luxury brands and retailers alike.” The company has turned into one of the leaders of the turn that the luxury fashion world has made to e-commerce. Farfetch had nearly 1 million (935,772) active consumers as of December 31, 2017, with that figure growing 43.6 percent over the year, making it the world’s largest marketplace for luxury goods. But growth is somewhat slowing: in December 31, 2016, it had 651,674 active consumers, which was up 56.8 percent in the previous year. In terms of its financials, in 2017 Farfetch had revenues of was $386 million, up 59.4 percent versus 2016; and $242.1 million in 2016, up 70.1 percent versus 2015. The company says that it made an operating profit of $136.9 million for the first six months of this year (vs $94.4 million the year before in the same period), but it is also making a net loss (after deducting tax etc.): $68.4 million for the first six months of this year, up from $29.3 million in the same period a year before. Gross merchandise value is growing. GMV in 2017 was $909.8 million, 55.3 percent up on 2016. The previous year it grew 53.4 percent ($585.8 million in 2016). It’s also still early days for Farfetch and other companies ( is one big competitor) that are targeting the luxury fashion sector. |
Trump’s new cyber strategy eases rules on use of government cyberweapons | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | The Trump administration’s out this week isn’t much more than a stringing together of previously considered ideas. In , the government set out its plans to improve cybersecurity, incentivizing change, and reforming computer hacking laws. Election security about a quarter of a page, second only to “space cybersecurity.” The difference was the tone. Although the document had no mention of “offensive” action against actors and states that attack the US, the imposition of “consequences” was repeated. “Our presidential directive effectively reversed those restraints, effectively enabling offensive cyber-operations through the relevant departments,” said John Bolton, national security advisor, to reporters. “Our hands are not tied as they were in the Obama administration,” said Bolton, throwing shade on the previous government. The big change, beyond the rehashing of old policies and principles, was the tearing up of an Obama-era presidential directive, known as PPD-20, which put restrictions on the government’s cyberweapons. Those classified rules were removed a month ago, , described at the time as an “offensive step forward” by an administration official briefed on the plan. In other words, it’ll give the government greater authority to hit back at targets seen as active cyberattackers — like , , and — all of which have been implicated in cyberattacks against the US in the recent past. Any rhetoric that ramps up the threat of military action or considers use of force — whether in the real world or in cyberspace — is all too often is met with criticism, amid concerns of rising tensions. This time, not everyone hated it. Even like Sen. Mark Warner of the Trump administration said the new cyber strategy contained “important and well-established cyber priorities.” The Obama administration was long criticized for being too slow and timid after recent threats — like and . Some former officials pushed back, saying the obstacle to responding aggressively to a foreign cyberattack was not the policy, but the inability of agencies to deliver a forceful response. Kate Charlet, a former government cyber policy chief, said that policy’s “chest-thumping” rhetoric is forgivable so long as it doesn’t mark an escalation in tactics. “I felt keenly the Department’s frustration over the challenges in taking even reasonable actions to defend itself and the United States in cyberspace,” . “I have since worried that the pendulum would swing too far in the other direction, increasing the risk of ill-considered operations, borne more of frustration than sensibility.” Trump’s new cyber strategy, although a change in tone, ratchets up the rhetoric but doesn’t mean the government will suddenly become trigger-happy overnight. While the government now has greater powers to strike back, it may not have to if the policy serves as the deterrent it’s meant to be. |
On-demand trucking app Convoy raises $185M at $1B valuation | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | CapitalG, the growth equity arm of Alphabet, has led the $185 million round in Convoy, its first investment in the Seattle-based, tech-enabled trucking network. The round brings Convoy’s total raised to $265 million and values the company at $1 billion. New investors T. Rowe Price and Lone Pine Capital participated in the financing alongside existing investors. Convoy has long been backed by Greylock Partners, which led the startup’s Series A in 2015. Y Combinator is also a backer. In an unusual move last year, in what was the first time the accelerator deployed capital from its continuity fund into a late-stage company that was not a YC graduate. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Bezos Expeditions and former Starbucks president Howard Behar are also Convoy investors. Founded by a pair of former Amazonians, Dan Lewis and Grant Goodale, Convoy is trying to transform the $800 billion trucking industry, which is no easy feat. Dubbed the ‘Uber for trucks,’ Convoy’s app connects truckers with people who need freight moved. With the new funding, it’ll expand nationwide and move beyond just freight matching. “Trucks run empty 40% of the time, and they often sit idle due to inefficient scheduling,” Convoy CEO Dan Lewis said in a statement. “This is a drag on the economy, the environment, and the bottom lines of shippers and carriers alike.” According to , Convoy is working on a new suite of tools to help truckers combine tasks so they waste less time. And it’s working to provide shippers access to tracking and pricing data through its platform. As part of the deal, CapitalG partner David Lawee will join Convoy’s board of directors. |
null | John Biggs | 2,018 | 9 | 26 | null |
Eventbrite goes public, and everyone else is raising hella money | Alex Wilhelm | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | Hello and welcome back to , TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we worked with an (excellent) skeleton crew. Our own held down the fort with a guest that knew quite a lot: . There was a healthy blizzard of news to get through, so Connie and Jamie plowed ahead. Up top, the was big news. After a long path to going public, Eventbrite reported , attached to a standard set of GAAP net losses. (Standard in that most tech IPOs these days do not feature profitable companies.) But Eventbrite’s IPO was just one thing going on the IPO front. also after a somewhat muted pricing event. But even wasn’t all the IPO news. There was one more tidbit to hang our hat on: . Moving along, Uber may be going on a shopping spree, picking up (a rival car-sharing service) or (a competing food-delivery service), or both. Or neither! We’ll have to see when all the dust comes to rest. But that wasn’t all! Ro has to spend, bringing more drugs to the male health space. Oh, and UiPath as well. And I think that that is it. Thanks for hanging with us over so many dozens and dozens of episodes. We think that you are just great! |
uBiome is jumping into therapeutics with a healthy $83 million in Series C financing | Sarah Buhr | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | , and now is the next tech company to jump into the lucrative multi-billion dollar drug discovery market. The company started out with a consumer gut health test to check whether your intestines carry the right kind of bacteria for healthy digestion but has since to include over 250,000 samples for everything from the microbes on your skin to vaginal health — the largest data set in the world for these types of samples, according to the company. Founder Jessica Richman now says there’s a wider opportunity to use this data to create value in therapeutics. To support its new drug discovery efforts, the San Francisco-based startup will be moving its therapeutics unit into new Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters and appointing former Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez to the board of directors as well. The company has a healthy pile of cash to help build out that new HQ, too, with a fresh $83 million Series C, lead by OS Fund and in participation with 8VC, Y Combinator, Dentsu Ventures and others. The drug discovery market is slated to be worth nearly by 2022, according to BCC Research numbers. New technologies — those that solve logistics issues and shorten the time between research and getting a drug to market in particular — are driving the growth and that’s where uBiome thinks it can get into the game. “This financing allows us to expand our product portfolio, increase our focus on patent assets and further raise our clinical profile, especially as we begin to focus on commercialization of drug discovery and development of our patent assets,” Richman said. Though its unclear at this time which drug maker the company might partner up with, Richman did say there would be plenty to announce later on that front. So far, the company has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers on microbiome research, has entered into research partnerships with the likes of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and leading research institutions such as Harvard, MIT and Stanford and has previously raised $22 million in funding. The additional VC cash puts the total amount raised to $105 million to date. |
Eight Roads Ventures targets Southeast Asia deals | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 9 | 21 | , the investment arm of financial giant Fidelity International, is moving into Southeast Asia where it sees the potential to plug the later stage investment gap. The firm has funds across the world including the U.S, China and Europe, and it has invested nearly $6 billion in deals over the past decade. The firm has been active lately — earlier this year — and now it has opened an office in Singapore, where its managing partner for Asia, Raj Dugar, has relocated to from India. The firm said it plans to make early-growth and growth stage investments of up to $30 million, predominantly around Series B, Series C and Series D deals. The focus of those checks will be startups in the technology, healthcare, consumer and financial services spaces. Already, it has three investments across Southeast Asia — including virtual credit card startup , and fintech company . There’s a huge amount of optimism around technology and startups in Southeast Asia, where there’s an emerging middle-class and access to the internet is growing. that the region’s ‘online economy’ will grow to reach more than $200 billion. It was estimated to have hit $49.5 billion in 2017, up from $30.8 million the previous year. Despite a growing market, investment has focused on early stages. A number of VC firms have launched newer and larger funds that cover Series B deals — including and — but there remains a gap further down the funding line and Eight Roads could be a firm that can help fill it. “Southeast Asia has several early-stage and late-stage funds that cater well to the start-ups and more mature companies. The growth-stage companies, looking at raising Series B/C/D rounds have had limited access to capital given the lack of global funds operating in the region. We see phenomenal opportunity in this segment, and look forward to helping entrepreneurs as they scale their business, providing access to our global network of expertise and contacts,” Eight Roads’ Dugar said in a statement. |
Coinbase plots to become the New York Stock Exchange of crypto securities | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | The future of Coinbase looks something like the New York Stock Exchange. That’s according a vision laid out by CEO Brian Amstrong who was interviewed on stage at today. Coinbase is known for being the most popular exchange for converting fiat currency into crypto — most of the largest traded exchanges are crypto-to-crypto — but he foresees a future in which it plays host to a growing number of cryptocurrencies as it becomes standard for companies to create their own token, which runs alongside equity as an alternative investment system. “It makes sense that any company out there who has a cap table… should have their own token. Every open source project, every charity, potentially every fund or these new types of decentralized organizations [and] apps, they’re all going to have their own tokens,” Armstrong said. “We want to be the bridge all over the world where people come and they take fiat currency and they can get it into these different cryptocurrencies,” he added. Brian Armstrong (Coinbase) says crypto regulation will result in the next version of the stock market — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) That tokenized future could see Coinbase host hundreds of tokens within “years” and even potentially “millions” in the future, according to Armstrong. That’s a big jump on the five cryptocurrencies that it currently supports today, and it would make it way larger than financial institutions like the New York Stock Exchange, which is actually a Coinbase investor and , or the NASDAQ. One of the critical pieces of making this vision a reality is, of course, regulation. This week at Disrupt, that a lack of clarity around crypto regulation is costing the U.S. as innovation and startups are being developed in overseas markets. As the founder of a U.S.-based crypto startup that is valued at over $1 billion and is hiring hard, Armstrong doesn’t subscribe to that thesis but he did admit that there is “a big open question” over whether the majority of the new rush of tokens he foresees will be securities or not. Still, Coinbase has made moves to add security tokens to its portfolio with . “We do feel a substantial subset of these tokens will be securities,” he said. “Our approach has always been to be the most trusted [exchange] and the easiest to use. So we want to be the legal compliant place where you can start to trade these tokens that are classified as securities.” “Web 1.0 was about publishing information, web 2.0 was about interaction and web 3.0 is going to be about value transfer on the internet because now the web has this native currency and so applications can be built that instantly tap into this global economy on the internet,” Armstrong added. How international can crypto become? The Coinbase CEO thinks that the total number of people in the crypto ecosystem can reach one billion within the next five years, up from around 40 million today. You can watch the full video from Armstrong’s interview below. |
And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2018 is… Forethought | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | At the very beginning, there were 21 startups. After three days of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner. Startups participating in the have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup. After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: CB Therapeutics, Forethought, Mira, Origami Labs and Unbound. These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: (Founders Fund), (Sequoia Capital), (Uncork Capital), (Forerunner Ventures), (Cowboy Ventures) and (TechCrunch). And now, meet the Startup Battlefield winner of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018. has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work. Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise. Read more about Forethought in . makes fashion-forward vibrators, and their latest is the Palma. The new device masquerades as a ring, offers multiple speeds, and is completely waterproof. And the team plans to add accelerometer features. Read more about Unbound in . |
Fortnite hits 15 million installs on Android | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | null |
Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong: ‘I’d love to run a public company’ | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | Watch the full interview with Brian Armstrong below. |
DARPA announces $2B investment in AI | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | At a symposium in Washington DC on Friday, DARPA to invest $2 billion in artificial intelligence research over the next five years. In a program called the agency now has over 20 programs currently in the works and will focus on “enhancing the security and resiliency of machine learning and AI technologies, reducing power, data, performance inefficiencies and [exploring] ‘explainability'” of these systems. “Machines lack contextual reasoning capabilities, and their training must cover every eventuality, which is not only costly, but ultimately impossible,” said director Dr. Steven Walker. “We want to explore how machines can acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities, with the ability to recognize new situations and environments and adapt to them.” Artificial intelligence is a broad term that can encompass everything from intuitive search features to true machine learning, and all definitions rely heavily on consuming data to inform their algorithms and “learn.” DARPA has a long history of research and development in this space, but has recently seen its efforts surpassed by foreign powers like China, who to become an AI leader by 2030. In many cases these AI are still in their infancy, but the technology — especially machine learning — has the potential to completely transform not only how users interact with their own technology but how corporate and governmental institutions use this technology to interact with their employees and citizens. One particular concern with machine learning is the potential bias that can be incorporated into these systems as a result of the data they consume during training. If the data contains holes or misinformation, the machines can come to incorrect conclusions — such as which individuals are “more likely” to commit crimes — that can have devastating consequences. And, even more frighteningly, when organically coming to these conclusions the “learning” a machine is obscured in something called a black box. In other words, even the researchers who design the algorithms can’t quite know how machines are reaching their conclusions. That said, when handled with care and forethought, AI research can be a powerful source of innovation and advancement as well. As DARPA moves forward with its research, we will see how they handle these important technical and societal questions. |
Elon Musk shuffles Tesla’s executive team in email | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | After a string of executive departures over the past several months that continued Friday with the resignations of two people in high-profile positions, CEO Elon Musk announced a series of promotions and job updates in an email sent to employees. To be clear, these are not new hires and some of these promotions were already finalized before the most recent resignations reported earlier Friday. In other words, Musk didn’t suddenly promote a bunch of executives in response to the Friday to the resignations or his during a podcast with Joe Rogan. Still, the promotions are notable because it gives rarely provided insight into the structure of the company — as well as who is left. It also shows the increasing workload placed on a few people. For example, Kevin Kassekert previously headed up infrastructure development, a job that included leading the construction and development of Tesla’s gigafactory near Reno, Nevada. His new title is vice president of people and places, a position that gives him responsibility of human resources — a job that was once filled by Gaby Toledano — as well as facilities, construction and infrastructure. Tesla has more than 37,000 employees and facilities all over the world, including its factory in Fremont, California. Musk also promoted Jérôme Guillen to president of automotive. Guillen, a former Daimler Freightliner executive, will oversee all automotive operations and program management, as well as coordinate Tesla’s supply chain. Guillen previously headed up Tesla’s truck program and worldwide sales and service. Other promotions and position updates include: The letter contained a few other forward-looking statements ahead of the company’s next quarterly earnings report. “We are about to have the most amazing quarter in our history, building and delivering more than twice as many cars as we did last quarter,” Musk wrote. “For a while, there will be a lot of fuss and noise in the media. Just ignore them. Results are what matter and we are creating the most mind-blowing growth in the history of the automotive industry.” Tesla produced 53,339 vehicles in the second quarter. If Tesla does build and deliver more than “twice” as many as cars as it did last quarter, that means the company would hit something like 107,000 vehicles. |
Fast-growing game engine startup Unity loses its CFO | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | Unity Technologies, the highly valued startup behind one of the most popular game development tools, lost its CFO Mike Foley last week, (paywalled) reported. A company spokesperson confirmed the CFO’s departure, saying it was a “friendly and mutual decision between both parties,” while also noting that the company was searching for a replacement and had some candidates and hoped to announce more details soon. In a statement, Foley told TechCrunch, “I look forward to seeing Unity’s continued success under its strong leadership team.” Unity has raised north of $600 million at a valuation over $3 billion, CEO John Riccitiello confirmed to us earlier this week. In an interview at our Disrupt SF 2018 conference, Riccitiello told TechCrunch that the company’s game engine platform now powers about half of all new games. In April, Riccitiello told the publication that the company was on the “general path” toward an IPO. “We’re not putting out dates but I do believe the company is strong enough financially to go public now.” The company is not the only third-party game engine tool available for developers, but Unity has become a favorite for indie developers due in large part to the breadth of integrations for various game platforms and the ease of deploying to them. The game engine company was started 14 years ago scraped from the remains of a failed video game title, but has begun to grow rapidly in the past couple years particularly due to investor bullishness around AR/VR and the potential for a real-time rendering engine to shape everything from manufacturing design to autonomous systems training. |
Amazon’s cashier-free Go store is coming to NYC | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | null |
Apple Music launches a ‘Top Charts’ playlist series | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | Apple Music is rolling out a new playlist series that will feature the Top 100 songs on Apple Music globally and for those countries where Apple Music is available. Because they’re playlists, users will be able to add these top charts for their country or the to their library so they can stream them any time, or listen offline. The feature was first reported by , which was given a preview of the changes by Apple. At launch, there are 116 charts launching in total, including the Top 100 Global and one for each Apple Music market. Many countries will have access to all of these new Top 100 playlist charts, but availability will vary, we understand. What’s also interesting about the top chart playlists is that they’ll be updated daily at 12:00 AM PT based on Apple Music streams, which keeps them fresh. Rolling Stone’s report indicates the release of these charts is due to growing importance of streaming numbers. Artists and their managers as well as labels and scouts tend to reference top streaming charts in the hunt for new talent, it says. And the industry has adapted, too, by more paid streaming over free. On that front, Apple Music’s dominance in North America means its numbers, in particular, are important to track. Apple Music, now with 50 million paid subscribers worldwide, is currently ahead of Spotify in the North American market, according to comments made by CEO Tim Cook “We took the leadership position in North America during the quarter and we have the leadership position in Japan, and in some of the markets that we’ve been in for a long period of time,” he said in July. Spotify is still ahead on the worldwide stage, with However, it’s worth also pointing out that these new top charts aren’t just launching as a static section of the Apple Music app – they’re dynamic playlists. That is, Apple’s new Top Charts playlists will not be replacing the existing Top 200 Songs chart, available today. Playlists are an important battleground between the major streaming services, with Spotify focusing heavily on personalization with playlists like its flagship Discover Weekly, plus Release Radar, Daily Mixes (and a newer variation, Your Daily Car Mix), Your Summer Rewind, and Time Capsule. Apple Music, meanwhile, offers users a Favorites playlist, along with a New Music Mix, Chill Mix, and is . The feature is available today on Apple Music. You can check out these playlists as an example: |
The reality of quantum computing could be just three years away | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | Quantum computing has moved out of the realm of theoretical physics and into the real world, but its potential and promise are still years away. Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, a powerhouse in the world of quantum research and a young upstart in the field presented visions for the future of the industry that illustrated both how far the industry has come and how far the technology has to go. For both Dario Gil, the chief operating officer of and the company’s vice president of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and Chad Rigetti, a former IBM researcher who founded and serves as its chief executive, the moment that a quantum computer will be able to perform operations better than a classical computer is only three years away. “[It’s] generating a solution that is better, faster or cheaper than you can do otherwise,” said Rigetti. “Quantum computing has moved out of a field of research into now an engineering discipline and an engineering enterprise.” Considering the more than 30 years that IBM has been researching the technology and the millions (or billions) that have been poured into developing it, even seeing an end of the road is a victory for researchers and technologists. Achieving this goal, for all of the brainpower and research hours that have gone into it, . The Chinese government is building a $10 billion National Laboratory for Quantum Information in Anhui province, which borders Shanghai and is slated to open in 2020. Meanwhile, the U.S. public research into quantum computing is running at around $200 million per year. Source: Patin Informatics via . One of the reasons why governments, especially, are so interested in the technology is its potential to . Some technologists argue that quantum computers will have the potential to crack any type of encryption technology, opening up all of the networks in the world to potential hacking. Of course, quantum computing is so much more than security. It will enable new ways of doing things we can’t even imagine because we have never had this much pure compute power. Think about artificial and machine learning or drug development; any type of operation that is compute-intensive could benefit from the exponential increase in compute power that quantum computing will bring. Security may be the Holy Grail for governments, but both Rigetti and Gil say that the industrial chemical business will be the first place where the potentially radical transformation of a market will appear first. To understand quantum computing it helps to understand the principles of the physics behind it. As Gil explained onstage ( ), quantum computing depends on the principles of superposition, entanglement and interference. Superposition is the notion that physicists can observe multiple potential states of a particle. “If you a flip a coin it is one or two states,” said Gil. Meaning that there’s a single outcome that can be observed. But if someone were to spin a coin, they’d see a number of potential outcomes. Once you’ve got one particle that’s being observed, you can add another and pair them thanks to a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. “If you have two coins where each one can be in superpositions and then you can have measurements can be taken” of the difference of both. Finally, there’s interference, where the two particles can be manipulated by an outside force to change them and create different outcomes. “In classical systems you have these bits of zeros and ones and the logical operations of the ands and the ors and the nots,” said Gil. “The classical computer is able to process the logical operations of bits expressed in zeros and ones.” “In an algorithm you put the computer in a super positional state,” Gil continued. “You can take the amplitude and states and interfere them and the algorithm is the thing that interferes… I can have many, many states representing different pieces of information and then i can interfere with it to get these data.” These operations are incredibly hard to sustain. In the early days of research into quantum computing the superconducting devices only had one nanosecond before a qubit transforms into a traditional bit of data. Those ranges have increased between 50 and 100 microseconds, which enabled IBM and Rigetti to open up their platforms to researchers and others to conduct experimentation (more on that later). As one can imagine, dealing with quantum particles is a delicate business. So the computing operations have to be carefully controlled. At the base of the machine is what basically amounts to a huge freezer that maintains a temperature in the device of 15 millikelvin — near absolute zero degrees and 180 times colder than the temperatures in interstellar space. “These qubits are very delicate,” said Gil. “Anything from the outside world can couple to it and destroy its state and one way to protect it is to cool it.” Wiring for the quantum computer is made of superconducting coaxial cables. The inputs to the computers are microwave pulses that manipulates the particles creating a signal that is then interpreted by the computers’ operators. Those operators used to require a degree in quantum physics. But both IBM and Rigetti have been working on developing tools that can enable a relative newbie to use the tech. Even as companies like IBM and Rigetti bring the cost of quantum computing down from tens of millions of dollars to roughly $1 million to $2 million, these tools likely will never become commodity hardware that a consumer buys to use as a personal computer. Rather, as with most other computing these days, quantum computing power will be provided as a service to users. Indeed, Rigetti that can provide computing services to help the industry both reach quantum advantage — that tipping point at which quantum is commercially viable — and to enable industries to explore the technologies to acclimatize to the potential ways in which typical operations could be disrupted by it. “A user logs on to their own device and use our software development kit to write a quantum application,” said Rigetti. “That program is sent to a compiler and kicks off an optimization kit that runs on a quantum and classical computer… This is the architecture that’s needed to achieve quantum advantage.” Both IBM and Rigetti — and a slew of other competitors — are preparing users for accessing quantum computing opportunities on the cloud. IBM has more than a million chips performing millions of quantum operations requested by users in over 100 countries around the world. “In a cloud-first era I’m not sure the economic forces will be there that will drive us to develop the miniaturized environment in the laptop,” Rigetti said. But the ramifications of the technology’s commercialization will be felt by everyone, everywhere. “Quantum computing is going to change the world and it’s all going to come in our lifetime, whether that’s two years or five years,” he said. “Quantum computing is going to redefine every industry and touch every market. Every major company will be involved in some capacity in that space.” |
Commons Clause stops open-source abuse | Salil Deshpande | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | There’s a dark cloud on the horizon. The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon, threatens the viability of open source. During 13 years as a venture investor, I have invested in the companies behind many open-source projects: Open source has served society, and open-source business models have been successful and lucrative. Life was good. I admire Amazon’s execution. In the venture business we are used to the large software incumbents (such as IBM, Oracle, HP, Compuware, CA, EMC, VMware, Citrix and others) being primarily big sales and distribution channels, which need to acquire innovation (i.e. startups) to feed their channel. Not Amazon. In July 2015, The Wall Street Journal as saying, “Amazon executes too well, almost like a startup. This is scary for everyone in the ecosystem.” That month, I wrote on investor site Seeking Alpha. is up 400 percent since I wrote that article. (I own AMZN indirectly.) But to anyone other than its customers, Amazon is not a warm and fuzzy company. its bruising and cutthroat culture. Why would its use of open source be any different? Go to (AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year. For example, Amazon takes ( in StackOverflow’s developer survey), gives very little back, and runs it as a service, re-branded as AWS Elasticache. Many other popular open-source projects including, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, Hadoop, Spark and more, have similarly been taken and offered as AWS products. But we think it is wrong, and not conducive to sustainable open-source communities. In early 2018, I gathered together creators, CEOs or chief counsels of two dozen at-scale open-source companies, some of them public, to talk about what to do. In March about this effort. After a lot of constructive discussion the group decided that rather than beat around the bush with mixing and matching open-source licenses to discourage such behavior, we should create a straightforward clause that prohibits the behavior. We engaged respected open-source lawyer to draft this clause. In August 2018 Redis Labs announced their decision to add this rider (i.e. one additional paragraph) known as the to their liberal open-source license for certain add-on modules. Redis itself would remain on the — nothing had changed with Redis itself! But the Redis Labs add-on modules will include the Commons Clause rider, which makes the source code available, without the ability to “sell” the modules, where “sell” includes offering them as a commercial service. The goal is to explicitly prevent the bad behavior of cloud infrastructure providers. Anybody else, including enterprises like General Motors or General Electric, can still do all the things they used to be able to do with the software, even with Commons Clause applied to it. They can view and modify the source code and submit pull-requests to get their modifications into the product. They can even offer the software as-a-service internally for employees. What Commons Clause prevents is the running of a commercial service with somebody else’s open-source software in the manner that cloud infrastructure providers do. This announcement has — unsurprisingly, knowing the open-source community — prompted spirited responses, both favorable and critical. At the risk of oversimplifying: as a in open-source licensing that allows open-source companies to run viable businesses while investing in open-source projects. , creator of , in , put one part particularly well: We see people running open source “foundations” and web sites that are essentially talking heads, spewing political arguments about the definition of “open source” as described by something called “The Open Source Initiative”, which contains various names which have attained some level of popularity or following. They attempt to state that such a license where the source code is freely available, but use cases are limited, are “not open source”. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. point out that the Commons Clause makes software not open source, which is accurate, and that making parts of the code base proprietary is against the ethos of open source; and Redis Labs must be desperate and having trouble making money. First, do not worry about Redis Labs. The company is doing very, very well. And Redis is stronger, more loved and more than ever before. More importantly, we think it is time to reexamine the ethos of open source in today’s environment. When open source became popular, it was designed for practitioners to experiment with and build on, while contributing back to the community. No company was providing infrastructure as a service. No company was taking an open-source project, re-branding it, running it as a service, keeping the profits and giving very little back. Our view is that open-source software was never intended for cloud infrastructure companies to take and sell. That is not the original ethos of open source. . Academics, hobbyists or developers wishing to use a popular open-source project to power a component of their application can still do so. But if you want to take substantially the same software that someone else has built, and offer it as a service, for your own profit, that’s not in the spirit of the open-source community. As it turns out in the case of the Commons Clause, that can make the source code not technically open source. . Redis Labs released certain add-on modules as Apache + Commons Clause. Redis Labs made amply clear that the application of Commons Clause made them not open source, and that . Some rabid open-source wonks accused Redis Labs of trying to trick the community into thinking that modules were open source, because they used the word “Apache.” (They were reported to be foaming at the mouth while making these accusations, but in fairness it could have been just drool.) There’s no trick. The Commons Clause is a rider that is to be attached to any permissive open-source license. Because various open-source projects use various open-source licenses, when releasing software using Commons Clause, one specify to which underlying permissive open-source license one is attaching Commons Clause. There are two key reasons to not use in this scenario, an open-source license that says that you must release to the public any modifications you make when you run AGPL-licensed code as a service. First, AGPL makes it inconvenient but cloud infrastructure providers from engaging in the abusive behavior described above. It simply says that they must release any modifications they make while engaging in such behavior. Second, AGPL contains language about software patents that is unnecessary and disliked by a number of enterprises. Many of our portfolio companies with AGPL projects have received requests from large enterprises to move to a more permissive license, since the use of AGPL is against their company’s policy. Cloud infrastructure providers are not bad guys or acting with bad intentions. Open source has always been a balancing act. Many of us believe in our customers and peers seeing our source code, making improvements and sharing back. It’s always a leap of faith to distribute one’s work product for free and to trust that you’ll be able to put food on the table. Sometimes, with some projects, a natural balance occurs without much deliberate effort. But at other times, the natural balance does not occur: We are seeing this more and more with infrastructure open source, especially as cloud infrastructure providers seek to differentiate by moving up the stack from commodity compute and storage to higher level infrastructure services. The Commons Clause as of this writing is at version 1.0. There will be revisions and tweaks in the future to ensure that Commons Clause implements its goals. We’d love your . Differences of opinion on Commons Clause that we have seen expressed so far are essentially differences of philosophy. Much criticism has come from open-source wonks who are not in the business of making money with software. They have a different philosophy, but that is not surprising, because their job is to be political activists, not build value in companies. Some have misconstrued that it prevents people from offering maintenance, support or professional services. This is a misreading of the language. Some have claimed that it conflicts with AGPL. Commons Clause is intended to be used with open-source licenses that are more permissive than AGPL, so that AGPL does not have to be used! Still, even with AGPL, few users of an author’s work would deem it prudent to simply disregard an author’s statement of intent to apply Commons Clause. Some open-source stakeholders are confused. Whose side should they be on? Commons Clause is new, and we expected debate. The people behind this initiative are committed open-source advocates, and our intent is to protect open source from an existential threat. We hope others will rally to the cause, so that open-source companies can make money, open source can be viable and open-source developers can get paid for their contributions. |
Five-camera phones are coming soon, because sure, why not? | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | null |
Trump wants to just tariff the hell out of China | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | Another day, another whopper of a tariff. The Trump administration has been busy finalizing the rulemaking process to put , which will and have on-going repercussions for Silicon Valley supply chains. That followed the implementation of tariffs on . Now, President Trump, this morning, has said that he is prepared to triple down on his tariffs strategy, saying that he is ready to add tariffs to another $267 billion worth of Chinese goods. Although the president has a flair for the dramatic in many of his policies, the China tariffs are one arena in which his rhetoric has matched the actions of his administration. Each set of these tariffs has been vociferously opposed by tech industry trade groups, but their concerns seem to have had little effect on the administration’s final thinking. Jose Castaneda, a spokesperson for the Information Technology Industry Council, called this next wave of potential tariffs “grossly irresponsible and possibly illegal.” Yet, despite the constant threat of more tariffs, , and , China continues to dominate trade with America. this week showed that America’s trade deficit with other nations reached five-year highs in July, surpassing $50 billion for the month, with the China trade goods deficit hitting $36.8 billion. These numbers may well have triggered the president’s latest comments. They may also have been triggered by , in which a Trump “senior administration official” said that “Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people…. In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the ‘enemy of the people,’ President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.” Anti-trade or not, it is clear that the package of tariffs and other policy reforms have done little to dampen the trade deficit or trigger a broad restructuring of the supply chains underpinning American brands. In my discussions at the Disrupt SF 2018 conference the past few days, one persistent theme has been the durability of certain Chinese cities — particularly Shenzhen but not exclusively — to weather these trade storms. Because of the depth of expertise, fast turnaround times, extreme flexibility and cheap costs of hardware supply chains, there are sustainable advantages that the U.S. can’t hope to fight with a couple of measly tariffs — even on $500 billion worth of goods. Indeed, as one prominent venture capitalist put it to me, hardware investing is now significantly easier for those with the right knowledge of the Chinese ecosystem. Just a few years ago, a couple of millions in capital could get a startup a working prototype. Now, startups can raise $1-2 million in some cases and get a working product into sales channels. The Chinese ecosystem around hardware has just continued to improve with alacrity. For Trump, a much more robust policy will be needed to move the trade numbers in the other direction. Better funding for universities to produce the right talent. Pushing for a region in the U.S. to become the “Shenzhen of America” through a combination of private and public funding. Greater preferential treatment around taxes for keeping manufacturing in the U.S. And maybe tariff the hell out of them. |
Deep-linking startup Branch is raising more than $100M at a unicorn valuation | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | null |
Dozens of popular iPhone apps caught sending user location data to monetization firms | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | A group of security researchers say dozens of popular iPhone apps are quietly sharing the location data of “tens of millions of mobile devices” with third-party data monetization firms. Almost all require access to a user’s location data to work properly, like weather and fitness apps, but share that data often as a way to generate revenue for free-to-download apps. In many cases, the apps send precise locations and other sensitive, identifiable data “at all times, constantly,” and often with “little to no mention” that location data will be shared with third-parties, say security researchers . “I believe people should be able to use any app they wish on their phone without fear that granting access to sensitive data may mean that this data will be quietly sent off to some entity who they do not know and do not have any desire to do business with,” said Will Strafach, one of the researchers. Using tools to monitor network traffic, the researchers found 24 popular iPhone apps that were collecting location data — like Bluetooth beacons to Wi-Fi network names — to know where a person is and where they visit. These data monetization firms also collect other device data from the accelerometer, battery charge status and cell network names. In exchange for data, often these data firms pay app developers to collect data and grow their databases and often to deliver ads based on a person’s location history. But although many claim they don’t collect personally identifiable information, Strafach said that latitude and longitude coordinates can pin a person to a house or their work. To name a few: , a teen-focused anonymous question-and-answer app, has 1,400 ratings on the Apple App Store and touts tens of millions of users. It asks for access to a user’s location that “won’t be shared with anyone.” But the app sends that location data to two data firms, AreaMetrics and Huq. When reached, the app maker said it believes its location collection practices “fit industry standards, and are therefore acceptable for our users.” has more than 266,000 reviews and has millions of downloads. Access to your location “is used to provide weather info.” But an earlier version of the app from March was sending location data to three firms, Factual, Sense360 and Teemo. The code has since been removed. A spokesperson for Apalon, which built the app, said it “conducted a limited, brief test with a few of these providers” earlier this year. is a popular app that asks that you switch on your location to help “find nearby homes.” But the code, thought to be old code, still sends precise coordinates to AreaMetrics. The app maker said it used AreaMetrics “for a short period” last year but said the code was deactivated. , an augmented reality beauty app with more than 100 million users, asks for location to “customize your experience based on your location and more,” and refers users for more — which does state that location data will be used for advertising. The app was briefly pulled earlier this year outed the researchers, but returned to the app store days later. The current app version contains code for eight separate data monetization firms in the latest version of the app. The app maker did not return a request for comment. And the list goes on — including more than a hundred Sinclair-owned local news and weather apps, which share location data with Reveal, a data tracking and monetization firm, will help the media giant bolster its sales by “providing advertisers with target audiences.” That can quickly become a lucrative business for developers with popular apps and monetization firms alike, some of which collect billions of locations each day. Most of the data monetization firms deny any wrongdoing and say that users can opt out at any time. Most said that they demand that app makers explicitly state that they require app developers to explicitly state that they are collecting and sending data to third-party firms. The team’s research shows that those requirements are almost never verified. Reveal said it requires customers “state the use cases for location data in their privacy policy” and that users can opt-out at any time. Huq, like Reveal, said it carries out “regular checks on our partner apps to ensure that they have implemented” measures that explain the company’s services. AreaMetrics, which collects primarily Bluetooth beacon data from public areas like coffee shops and retail stores, says it has “no interest” in receiving personal data from users. Sense360 said the data it collects is anonymous and requires apps to get explicit consent from its users, but Strafach said few apps he’s seen contained text that sought assurances. But the company did not answer a specific question why it no longer works with certain apps. Wireless Registry said it also requires apps seek consent from users, but would not comment on the security measures it uses to ensure user privacy. And in remarks, inMarket said it follows advertising standards and guidelines. Cuebiq claims to use an “advanced cryptography method” to store and transmit data, but Strafach said he found “no evidence” that any data was scrambled. It says it’s not a “tracker” but says while some app developers look to monetize users’ data, most are said to use it for insights. And, Factual said it uses location data for advertising and analytics, but must obtain in-app consent from users. When reached, Teemo did not answer our questions. SafeGraph, Mobiquity and Fysical did not respond to requests for comment. “None of these companies appear to be legally accountable for their claims and practices, instead there is some sort of self-regulation they claim to enforce,” said Strafach. He said there isn’t much users can do, but limiting ad tracking in your iPhone’s privacy settings can make it more difficult for location trackers to identify users. Apple’s crackdown on apps that don’t have privacy policies kicks in next month. But given how few people read them in the first place, don’t expect apps to change their behavior any time soon. |
How Adidas and Carbon are changing the sneaker supply chain | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | While the Adidas Futurecraft 4D shoes are cool looking sneakers, the story behind those shoes is even more interesting. The sportswear company has partnered with to design a new kind of sneakers. Behind the Futurecraft 4D, you can find a process that is not that new — 3D printing. Many companies promised an industrial revolution by bringing back factories to service-driven countries, such as the U.S. and European countries. But this partnership between Adidas and Carbon could turn that wild dream into a reality. “What you saw there was basically this integration of hardware, software and chemistry all coming together to take a digital model, print it very fast, but do it out of the materials that have the properties to be final parts,” Carbon co-founder and CEO Joseph DeSimone told TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino. And the secret sauce behind Carbon’s process is its cloud-based software tool. You use a primitive CAD, define some mechanical properties and it gets manufactured in front of your eyes. It’s quite hard to buy Futurecraft 4D shoes right now because production is still extremely limited. Adidas CMO Eric Liedtke is hopeful that it’s going to change over the coming years. “Ultimately, we're still ramping up the innovation. It will be faster, more limited material. Ideally, the vision is to build and print on demand,” he said. “Right now, most of our products are made out of Asia and we put them on a boat or on a plane so they end up on Fifth Avenue.” You could imagine Adidas reducing the stock in its warehouse. “Instead of having some sort of micro-distribution center in Jersey, we can have a micro-factory in Jersey,” Liedtke said. When it comes to material, this manufacturing process lets you partly use corn-based material. And it’s not just design. Making shoes on demand lets you optimize the structure of the shoe for different sports and bodies. “In this case, we took 10 years plus — maybe 20 years — of science that we had on foot strikes, and running, and how runners run, and where the impact zones are, and what we need to design into it from a data standpoint. And then, we let the creative takeover,” Liedtke said. Carbon isn’t just working with Adidas. The company is quite active on the dental market for instance, working on resins. “We now also have the world's first 3D-printed FDA-approved dentures,” DeSimone said. It’s interesting to see that a simple product, such as a pair of shoes, can become the representation of a long process of research and development, engineering and design. |
Glossier CEO Emily Weiss on why the company won’t sell on Amazon | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | E-commerce beauty startup founder, Glossier CEO Emily Weiss, dished on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 this morning about some of the company’s top competitors in the e-commerce space, including Amazon as well as the forthcoming threat from Instagram – which is building out its own standalone shopping app, Glossier, founded in 2014 and backed by $87 million, has created a massive beauty brand that’s now a household name among women. And it’s done so without being on Amazon. The company doesn’t work with Amazon, and Weiss said that it doesn’t intend to. When asked if the company would sell into Amazon, she responded with an emphatic ” Glossier may have been acquisition target for Amazon, however – when asked if Amazon ever approached Glossier about about a deal, Weiss didn’t deny it, but instead demurred, “a lot of people have approached Glossier,” before quickly moving on. Weiss, clearly, doesn’t think that Amazon is the best place for beauty brands. “The interesting thing about Amazon and how they’ve addressed obviously one of the biggest consumer needs, which is solving buying, is that in the process, in some ways, they’ve kind of killed shopping,” Weiss said. “I think in terms of breadth of product, obviously, no one will ever beat them. They have done the most phenomenal job,” she continued. But going to Amazon for everything, every time doesn’t make sense, she believes. It’s only one kind of shopping experience. And even though Amazon is massive, it doesn’t mean there’s no room for others outside of its shadow to grow. “E-commerce is 10% of global commerce – that’s nothing,” Weiss pointed out. “We are at the dawn of e-commerce, and this is one user experience,” she said, referring to Amazon. Plus, Amazon’s user experience may not be the best fit for beauty and fashion products – even though Amazon is quickly ramping up in those areas with its own private labels, Amazon Fashion, Prime Wardrobe, beauty boxes, and other initiatives. “I think it’s exciting that we are really at the dawn of e-commerce, and that there’s going to be so many paradigms. What we’re focused on building is an emotional commerce experience which is focused on a breath of connection, and not a breath of product,” Weiss explained. While Glossier may not be on Amazon, it does leverage Instagram to reach customers, possibly making Instagram’s shopping app a bigger rival, if launched. “It makes sense,” Weiss said, when asked her thoughts about Instagram’s plans in this space. “72% of millennials make their purchasing decisions for beauty and fashion products through Instagram,” she said. Glossier itself has a long history with Instagram. It launched on Instagram before it even had its website up, for example. They also just hired , who led DMs and Camera at Instagram, as Head of Product. “Instagram’s an incredible tool,” Weiss admitted, but also cautioned that it could still face difficulties as a shopping app. “I think of the challenges might be these platforms were not built around specific topics, they were built around specific media expressions,” said Weiss. That said, Instagram could have more potential in the beauty market than Amazon. “When you look at a platform like Amazon, no woman has ever told me that their criteria for best mascara was what was fastest or cheapest. That’s not how people are buying emotional things – like a fashion or beauty product,” said Weiss. “But the leading paradigm of what an e-commerce experience gives you is one of efficiency, and one of breadth of product. When what users are actually doing and wanting is one of breadth of connection,” she said. |
Tor Project launches official mobile browser for Android | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | Tor Project, the group behind the anonymous Tor browser, has an alpha version of its own anonymous browser for Android. Following this release, Orfox, the longstanding Tor Project-approved browsing app for Android, said it will be sunset by 2019. To run both apps, users will need to also download the Tor Project proxy app, Orbot. Tor Project’s anonymous browser uses a system of decentralized relays that bounce a user’s data to anonymize internet activity. This makes it almost impossible for ads, location trackers and even government surveillance to follow your tracks across the web. While Tor is often associated with illegal drug or weapons sales on the dark web, the browser is also a haven for political dissidents, journalists and just browsers who prefer to maintain their anonymity. This release comes several days after Tor Project rolled out , based on Firefox’s 2017 Quantum browser structure. The major updates include a new user landing and on-boarding page, increased language support and improved bridging methods to enable users to access the browser in countries where Tor is banned — like . While the service is regarded as the current gold standard of anonymous browsing, there are still vulnerabilities. Federal investigators can gain access and identify users through security flaws in the browser itself. It remains to be seen how secure Firefox Quantum will be for Tor 8.0, but users would be wise to follow Tor’s , just in case. |
Highlights from Elon Musk’s interview with Joe Rogan | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | Elon Musk made an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast hosted by the eponymous comedian, where the pair smoked a blunt and pondered the flat-Earth movement, the future of AI, “inventing shit” and several other of the eccentric billionaire’s favorite topics. The now-viral interview, which was live-streamed to thousands of viewers, was immediately followed by . The company’s . Here are a few highlights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnvPxvI8yXk You can watch the full interview . |
ConsenSys details the first cohort of companies to enter its new accelerator, Tachyon | Mike Butcher | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | , the accelerator of the blockchain powerhouse which earlier this year, has announced the first cohort for its 10 week accelerator program which is aimed at taking early stage blockchain projects from idea to a viable product. Sixteen companies were selected from around the world and will be brought together in San Francisco to participate in programming and accelerate their businesses. The projects are placed into one of three tracks: Blockchain for-profit projects, open source and social impact. The program will culminate with a demo day for investors on November 17th. Kavita Gupta (Managing Partner, ConsenSys Ventures) said: “We launched Tachyon with the intention of finding extremely promising early-stage companies and providing them with hands on support from the get-go. Among this inaugural group, I feel confident that we’ve found the next crop of game-changing projects that will drive innovation across the blockchain ecosystem.” Joe Lubin (Founder, ConsenSys) commented: “One thing that excites me about this first Tachyon cohort is that it demonstrates the degree to which our Ethereum community remains decentralized, even as it continues to grow. In this first batch, I see companies coming from Israel, China, India, Europe, the South Atlantic and Pacific Northwest all coming together to drive innovation beyond their geographical boundaries.” Here’s a run-down of each company selected, in their own words: : BULVRD is Washington DC based map and navigation app that tokenizes and gamifies the community aspect of navigation apps like Waze, rewarding users to report route information in the app making maps more real-time and community driven. : Decompany is a Korea based decentralized and incentivized knowledge trading system coming from Polaris Office (Infraware is publicly traded parent company). Decompany will be using the blockchain to build a global and monetizable version of Slideshare, utilizing network effects and a lone currency for transactions. : Elkrem is a Cairo based company creating hardware that will make it easy for IOT devices to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Using proprietary software, Elkrem’s boards can force devices to interact with the Ethereum stack in an efficient and scalable way. (Open Source Grant): A Candian company, ETH Status Codes, also known as the ERC-1066 proposal, outlines a common set of Ethereum status codes in the same vein as HTTP statuses or BEAM tagged tuples. These shared set of signals allow smart contracts to react to situations autonomously and expose localized error messages to users. : Out of the Harvard innovation lab, Expercoin is a decentralized AI powered marketplace protocol empowering non-technical individuals to create specialized learning economies with the ability to instantly monetize them. : China based high throughput decentralized exchange protocol built on Plasma. At scale, FastX will combine the security of a DEX with the UX and low fees of a centralized offering, offering a low-latency decentralized platform to serve Web 3.0’s largest use-case to date: the exchange of digital assets. (Non-profit grant, Social impact track): A TED prize recipient, GlobalXplorer is a crowdsourced archaeology initiative that allows for locals to participate in archaeology and legitimize findings in their region. The GXº Blockchain is a global registry for antiquities and an Ethereum-based marketplace for the sustainable distribution of an antiquity’s cultural heritage data which can be curated and collected. (Open Source): Out of the Nova Scotia based Blockcrushr labs, The Groundhog Wallet is a multi-blockchain crypto wallet, browser, and hub for decentralized access to Web 3.0 that includes Groundhog Pay, a payment platform that lets merchants world accept all types of crypto currencies including subscription payments over Ethereum. : MWC Vision is a Berlin based studio spinning up decentralized, on-chain video games, the first of which is Chainmonsters. ChainMonsters is an Ethereum-based game in which users can catch, collect, and battle with monsters known as ChainMonsters (much like the handheld Pokemon games). Utilizing non-fungible Ethereum tokens, users can fully control and own an in-game avatar and explore a digital world, catching and training ‘monsters’ represented by tokens which can be sold and used elsewhere. : Net Ninjas is an Israel based protocol for all things decentralized compute and storage, starting with an offering that will use the blockchain to create a decentralized VPN that can be used by enterprises. : Nuo is an India based project facilitating decentralized crypto lending on-chain. Borrowers on the platform can stake tokens as collateral and get ETH as a result. The protocol has already processed $15,000 worth of loans and provides an entirely on-chain lending solution for digital assets. : The Pulse protocol allows users to tokenize their ‘intent’ to procure a service that potential sellers can bid on, aiming to become the defacto protocol for service customer acquisition and a simpler way for users to connect directly with service providers. In this decentralized network, relayers and market makers help organize ‘intent’ and any dApp or current publisher can plug directly into the Pulse infrastructure to participate, contribute, and earn tokens. : Quidli is a France based protocol building the technological infrastructure that makes equity based employee compensation possible – with a particular focus on the startup space . Currently a centralized protocol, integrating an Ethereum-based solution will allow for the tokenization of equity – making equity based compensation programs programmable and tradeable. Stealth Project: A member of our cohort still in stealth mode is a project re-imagining databases by building a P2P network with an open participation model aiming to be a decentralized version of an SQL database, providing a fundamental data storage building block enterprises and future dApps. (Open source): SF based, TapTrust is building a a self sovereign wallet that utilizes a standard username and password login and allows users easy set-up without ever needing to back up a seed phrase. In addition to their wallet offering, TapTrust is incorporating a commercial feature called TrustFund that provides loss protection for smart contract security exploits. The loss protection offered with TrustFund along with the ease of setup for the TapTrust wallet should make it easy for people to get started with using dApps without the major risk factor of losing their crypto. (Open Source Grant): WalletConnect is a simple solution that bridges communication between browser-based dApps and mobile wallets using a QR code scan to establish the initial connection. It is an open protocol and does not require a dApp user to install a browser extension. The protocol is agnostic to specific mobile wallets a user may want to use and will enable dApp developers to integrate with multiple wallets and reach users through a single implementation. |
Tokens can better incentivize startup employees than equity | Joyce Yang | 2,018 | 9 | 9 | Token structuring and tokeneconomics are among of the most important considerations when designing a blockchain. When thinking about how best to distribute these tokens, founders often think about how the tokens will impact external stakeholders such as their investors, the community, and stakers (people that can mine or validate block transactions according to how many coins he or she holds). But token economies are also bringing disruption to organizations internally, especially when it comes to HR and compensation. If the tokens are structured properly for a blockchain, external stakeholders will be directly aligned with the goal of the project. Those incentives can encourage participation on the blockchain platform and/or drive token demand with community-building and marketing. Similarly, if internal stakeholder incentives are structured correctly, the project could accrue long-term value by motivating employees to work towards the same goal, while reducing adversarial behavior and also bad actors. For any blockchain company to succeed long-term and scale, it’s inevitable that they need to structure their tokens to retain and reward the best employees sustainably. This is as important it not important than incentivizing external token holders. Currently, equity in the form of stock options is widely distributed as part of compensation packages amongst startups. When employees join a company, they are usually offered a combination of cash and stock options. The options become a way for the employees to meaningfully participate in a company’s upside should they succeed. Often, employees can negotiate between taking a higher cash comp or higher options amount, depending on their risk appetite. There are many ways tokens and equity are similar. For one, both assets motivate individuals to align their goals with that of a company’s. If the company becomes more successful, the value of its tokens and equity should theoretically go up. Nonetheless, one of the downsides of stock options is that they usually require a liquidity event for an employee to convert them to paper money. Historically, that was when a company went public and the employee could convert their options into stocks and then sell them in the public markets. However, in the last decade, with the increasing amount of private capital and subsequent larger private fundraising rounds, companies are taking way longer to IPO. Companies such as Dropbox took eleven years from founding to IPO, while Airbnb has been around ten years and still hasn’t gone public. As a result, private companies started doing option buybacks to provide liquidity for their employees. Simultaneously, this phenomenon has caused the secondary market to thrive in Silicon Valley. One of the largest differences between tokens and equity is that tokens are immediately liquid, assuming that they have already been listed on an exchange. To put simply, equity options only prove their value at the end, whereas tokens have certainty values from the beginning. Now in cryptocurrency and blockchain companies, employees could get paid in tokens in lieu of equity or cash, primarily outside of the U.S. Many tokens have a liquidity advantage over equity. For example, it can be immediately sold upon reception, assuming that the token has been listed on an exchange and there is enough trading volume. This is also one of the reasons why exchanges are so important for the cryptocurrency space because 1) it’s one of the easier ways to gauge the value of a company given that the industry has yet to figure out a proper valuation methodology, and 2) it provides immediate liquidity for employees who have been burned by the hopes a billion dollar company not coming to fruition and all the options going to zero. For an employee looking for a job in a technology-based company, consider two companies that are exactly the same, with the same team quality and same targeted industry, but one company has a token incentive structure instead of an equity incentive structure, and the token is already traded on an exchange. Why would the employee ever want equity? With tokens, you’d still share the upside in the company’s success, but also have immediate liquidity. Additionally, outside the U.S., often employees can also get paid in tokens or stable coins in lieu of cash to take advantage of tax benefits given the lack of regulatory sophistication. That may change very soon, however. Token structure, therefore, is a disruption to a company’s internal structure and we will share some examples below of how that’s already affecting a number of Chinese crypto companies. These changes to employee compensation have already become popular in places like China, where a number of Chinese blockchain companies have started on the foundation of distributing tokens as compensation. Companies like Ontology, NEO, Huobi, and Binance pay their employees in their own tokens. Many of these teams operate worldwide but they are able to manage hundreds of people, often with just a handful of HR staff, through a shared incentive structure. In the case of Neo, the original founding team, in fact, didn’t have anyone with a computer science background. When they were looking for developers, they would pay tokens to people to do development work for them. For Ontology, it was even more extreme. The founding team initially set up the Ontology Foundation. They didn’t want to hire people, so instead, they listed out a list of things that needed to be developed and paid tokens to all the developers who contributed. Binance, similarly, paid their employees in tokens. They would then use their quarterly profits to which subsequently boosted the value of the remaining tokens. It is possible that partially due to these effective token incentives, Ontology has been the best performing token this year while Binance continues to hold the lead in the exchange space. China has taken a lead here compared to the U.S. partially because of regulatory uncertainties, but there are examples in America as well of these changing compensation norms. In the early days of cryptocurrency when it was (even more) wild west, Consensys got started by compensating their employees in tokens until their first legal hire came along. That story is similar to Coinbase, where initially a number of first employees were given the choice of being paid in coins and/or cash. Token compensation also seems to be particularly powerful incentives for Chinese blockchain companies, more so than their U.S. counterparts. Maomao Hu, Partner at Eigen Capital and CTO of Calculus Network, talks about the psyche of the young generation of Chinese developers: “Being Chinese, Chinese engineers, especially the young ones, have a hunger that you only see in some parts of Silicon Valley, and that’s like everyone. They are just doing 80 hours 100 hour weeks because they hate being poor and they hate not having an opportunity and they don’t have other ways to get an opportunity, and that’s like everyone.” It may also be that because there have been fewer technology cycles in China, and the rise of the largest technology companies happened only in the last decade, equity compensation remains a relatively new concept to local citizens. With token compensation introduced, this is the first time for many Chinese people to be able to participate in a company’s upside so directly. Despite their growing popularity, these incentive schemes are still early and experimental, and there are unforeseen risks associated with token issuance as compensation. In particular, the appeal of short-term, quick gains from tokens is ever more attractive. If wrongly incentivized, people could end up spending time hyping up their tokens instead of building product, allowing employees to cash out quickly without producing. As a result, serious founders of new token-based companies should be aware of such short-sightedness when designing employee token incentives. They can potentially introduce long-term token vesting schedules, and also hire people who care about driving long-term value. For CEOs, this is going to be an increasingly important role they will have to take in the token economy. I’m certain though that the next set of large unicorns will be coming from tech companies with great token incentives structures, in or outside of the U.S. |
Alibaba announces CEO Daniel Zhang will succeed Jack Ma as chairman next year | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 9 | 9 | Following speculation about Jack Ma’s imminent retirement, Alibaba Group announced today that its CEO, Daniel Zhang, will succeed Ma as chairman next year. After stepping down as chairman on September 10, 2019 (exactly a year from now), Ma will continue serving as a board member until its annual general shareholders’ meeting in 2020. After that, Ma will remain a lifetime partner of the , or a group of 36 partners drawn from the senior management ranks of Alibaba Group companies and affiliates. They hold a considerable amount of sway over the company because they have the right to nominate, or in certain situations, appoint up to a simple majority of its board of directors. Alibaba’s announcement that Ma’s retirement from the company he co-founded in 1999 as an online marketplace was imminent, with Ma, a former English teacher, planning to dedicate his time to philanthropy in education. Ma downplayed those reports, however, (which is owned by Alibaba) that instead he will gradually reduce his role in the company through a succession plan. Ma stepped down as CEO in 2013, handing the position over to Jonathan Lu. Lu was replaced in 2015 by Zhang, Alibaba’s former COO, after Ma reportedly told employees that it’s time for the company to (Zhang was born in 1972, three years after Lu). In a letter sent to media outlets today, Ma wrote that Zhang has “demonstrated his superb talent, business acumen and determined leadership” since taking over as CEO. “Under his stewardship, Alibaba has seen consistent and sustainable growth for 13 consecutive quarters,” Ma continued. “His analytical mind is unparalleled, he holds dear our mission and vision, he embraces responsibility with passion, and he has the guts to innovate and test creative business models.” Ma added that “this transition demonstrates that Alibaba has stepped up to the next level of corporate governance from a company that relies on individuals, to one built on systems of organizational excellence and a culture of talent development.” Ma also re-emphasized his narrative that his departure from Alibaba Group will be very gradual. “I have put a lot of thought and preparation into this succession plan for 10 years. I am delighted to announce the plan today thanks to the support of the Alibaba Partnership and our board of directors,” he wrote. Of his plans after Zhang takes over as chairman next year, Ma said he will continue contributing to the Alibaba Partnership, before adding “I also want to return to education, which excites me with so much blessing because this is what I love to do. The world is big, and I am still young, so I want to try new things – because what if new dreams can be realized?! The one thing I can promise everyone is this: Alibaba was never about Jack Ma, but Jack Ma will forever belong to Alibaba.” |
Optimistic | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 9 | 9 | I spent TechCrunch’s latest Disrupt extravaganza asking questions of various notables onstage, and what struck me most was how fantastically optimistic they were. To pick two examples: talked about preparing for a world of mass plenitude and abundance 30-50 years from now; waxed enthusiastic about quantum computers simulating life-changing new materials and pharmaceuticals, transforming everyone’s lives for the better. And then I turned around and returned to the world of hair-trigger outrage, condemnation, consternation, pessimism, gloom and impending apocalypse; which is to say, America and social media, where it sometimes seems an encouraging word is rarely heard without being promptly drowned out by a dozen angry doomsayers prophesying rains of fire and blood. Surely the truth is somewhere in between; surely any rational assessment of the future must include a mixture of both optimism and pessimism. So why do those seem like two entirely separate modes of thought, of late? Certainly there’s much to be pessimistic about. Our slowly boiling planet; the resurgence of racist nationalism around the global; the worldwide rise of authoritarian demagogues who don’t represent their people. Certainly tech industry folk, and especially investors, are deeply incentivized to be optimistic. If they’re right, they win big, and if they’re wrong, well, there’s no real downside except maybe having their embarrassing pro-Theranos / pro-Juicero tweets paraded out a few years later. Panglossianism is not the path of wisdom. But neither is apocalypticism. Whisper it, but there is much to be optimistic about. For all of capitalism’s flaws, and there are many, it has reduced the number of people living in extreme poverty by . Fast, far-reaching progressive social change has been proved possible; witness e.g. the attitude change towards gay marriage in America from 2005 to 2015. We’ve connected the planet, put supercomputers in the pockets of , made solar/wind power and electric cars both increasingly widespread and increasingly cost-effective, and we’re working hard at replacing most rote human drudgery with robot labor. Sure, we live with fat-tail risks of various catastrophes of mindnumbing scale; but why do we never speak of the fat-tail chances of benevolent breakthroughs? Why does optimism about the future — not even net optimism, but optimism — seem so rare these days? Partly this is social media’s fault. Facebook and Twitter “optimize,” so to speak, for engagement, which is to say they implicitly amplify that which causes outrage, fury, terror, and insecurity, rather than that which prompts a quiet hope for / confidence in things slowly getting better. From this we get the sense that everyone else is appalled by everything that’s going on, and so we naturally grow more appalled ourselves. Partly it’s that the fruits of the advances which provoke this optimism remain so unequally distributed. It’s nice to talk about a world full of plenitude, but if 80% of the benefits go to 20% of the population, while the 40% at the bottom see their lives actually get worse as a side effect of the disruptive changes, are our collective lives really getting better? And even if your life is objectively improving a little every year, if you seem to be falling further behind the median, you’ll still feel it’s actually getting worse. But there’s more to it than that. Optimism is dangerously provocative. It implicitly calls on us to do something, to contribute, to join the spreading wave, whereas pessimism is easier. It only calls on us to endure. It’s true that the tech industry often seems to handwave that because in the long run, our new technologies will make everything better, we don’t need to bother worrying about its short- and medium-term effects. This is wrong and dangerous and (ironically) spectacularly shortsighted; we need to do better. But at the same time, the pessimists need to do better too, by realizing that there is plenty of room for hope and optimism in any reasonable imagination of the future. |
Interview with Priscilla Chan: Her super-donor origin story | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 9 | 9 | Priscilla Chan is so much more than Mark Zuckerberg’s wife. A teacher, doctor and now one of the world’s top philanthropists, she’s a dexterous empath determined to help. We’ve all heard Facebook’s dorm-room origin story, but Chan’s epiphany of impact came on a playground. In this touching interview this week at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Chan reveals how a child too embarrassed to go to class because of their broken front teeth inspired her to tackle healthcare. “How could I have prevented it? Who hurt her? And has she gotten healthcare, has she gotten the right dental care to prevent infection and treat pain? That moment compelled me, like, ‘I need more skills to fight these problems.'” That’s led to a from the ’s $45 billion-plus charitable foundation. Constantly expressing gratitude for being lifted out of the struggle of her refugee parents, she says “I knew there were so many more deserving children and I got lucky.” Here, Chan shares her vision for cause-based philanthropy designed to bring equity of opportunity to the underserved, especially in Facebook’s backyard in The Bay. She defends CZI’s apolitical approach, making allies across the aisle despite the looming specter of the Oval Office. And she reveals how she handles digital well-being and distinguishes between good and bad screen time for her young daughters Max and August. Rather than fielding questions about Mark, this was Priscilla’s time to open up about her own motivations. Most importantly, Chan calls on us all to contribute in whatever way feels authentic. Not everyone can sign the Giving Pledge or dedicate their full-time work to worthy causes. But it’s time for tech’s rank-and-file rich to dig a little deeper. Sometimes that means applying their engineering and product skills to develop sustainable answers to big problems. Sometimes that means challenging the power structures that led to the concentration of wealth in their own hands. She concludes, “You can only try to break the rules so many times before you realize the whole system’s broken.” [gallery ids="1706485,1706479,1706480,1706481,1706483,1706484,1706492,1706491,1706487,1706486,1706478,1706477"] |
Unmortgage scores £10M seed round to offer ‘part-own, part-rental’ housing | Steve O'Hear | 2,018 | 9 | 9 | “ enables everyone to live in the home they want to, that’s our mission,” Unmortgage co-founder and CEO Ray Rafiq-Omar tells me. “We do that by allowing people to buy as little as five percent of a home and rent the rest. So there’s no mortgage involved, hence the name Unmortgage”. The burgeoning London startup, which aims to launch next year having just closed a hefty £10 million seed round, calls its model “part-own, part-rent”. However, unlike traditional shared ownership schemes, Unmortgage doesn’t want you to have to take out a mortgage to buy the first portion of your own, and it isn’t targeting new-builds. Like a number of other fintech/proptech companies, such as and , it is the latest attempt to solve the increasing difficulty first time buyers face trying to get on the housing ladder as rising house prices typically outstrip wages. If people rent, they often cannot save the large deposit required for a mortgage. It is this “vicious circle” that Unmortgage want to break: by helping families that can afford to rent gradually buy a home. “The way we like to think about it is the security of home ownership with the flexibility of renting,” says Rafiq-Omar. “You find a home. If we like it too, we’ll but it together in partnership. You’ll own your bit and you’ll pay rent on our bit. Then you have the option to buy more of your home from as little as a pound at any time”. To keeps things fair — Rafiq-Omar stresses that fairness is “our core value” — Unmortgage will revalue the property on a monthly basis so you’ll always have an up-to-date valuation when increasing your stake. And at any point you are free to either buy out Unmortgage with a mortgage or an inheritance or to give the company three month’s notice for it to buy you out so you can take your cash at market price and move on to your next home. Likewise, the rent you pay on the part of the property you don’t own is pegged to rises to inflation. But in case inflation outpaces market rate rents, Rafiq-Omar says Unmortgage will allow the customer to ask for a rent review. “They have the ability to not have to worry about their rent but if they are worried they can have it reviewed,” he says. Unmortgage will use institutional funding to finance its part of the homes it purchases, who Rafiq-Omar says would like to own residential property, and the secure income stream it brings, but don’t want to be landlords or end up in the media for behaving like a landlord. “Unmortgage gives them a way to invest in residential property while solving societal need, which is [that] people want to own their own homes and have security over their housing situation”. Meanwhile, investors in Unmortgage’s seed round are fintech venture capital firms Anthemis Exponential Ventures, and Augmentum Fintech plc. “”We’re grateful to our investors for believing in us and our social mission and excited to be working with them – especially Tee Pruitt [of Anthemis], who was instrumental through much of this process,” adds Rafiq-Omar. |
LendingTree is the secret success story of fintech | Conor Witt | 2,018 | 9 | 9 | excitement centered around fintech over the past half-decade, most venture-backed fintech companies struggle to acclimate to public markets. LendingClub and OnDeck have plummeted since their late 2014 IPOs after several years of darling status in the private markets. GreenSky, which went public in May of this year, has been unable to return to its IPO price. Square is the exception to the rule. Sometimes we overlook the companies that hail from the era that precedes the current wave of fintech fascination, a vertical which has accumulated over $ in global investment capital since 2010. One of these companies is LendingTree, which got its start height of the Internet bubble, going public in mid-February of 2000, less than a month before the Dot-com bubble peaked. LendingTree began in 1996 in a founding story that epitomizes the early Internet era. Doug Lebda, an accountant searching for homes in Pittsburgh, had to manually compare mortgage offers from each bank. So he created a marketplace for loans in the same way OpenTable helps you find your restaurant of choice or Zillow simplifies the home buying process. In the , iconic founder of Expedia, Zillow, and Glassdoor, this business is a classic “power to the people play.” |
The best gear for starting a small business | Makula Dunbar | 2,018 | 9 | 30 | When you’re ready to start a small business, having some helpful essentials will make the process a bit easier. Whether you need to print your own business cards or you’re ready to process orders on a reliable laptop, we’ve put together a few of our recommendations that will cover the basics. Photo: Michael Hession has the best print quality of all the services we tested, and its website offers the best ordering and design experience. If you don’t need a large quantity of , Vistaprint will allow you to order batches as small as 100. You can choose from thousands of templates and a variety of finishes. During printing testing, we were able to read small type and we found that the service’s colors and trimming were accurate. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald For an easy-to-use that makes editing, creating, and finding your business’ site manageable, we recommend . Compared to other site builders we tested, Wix’s template-editing tools get a working site up and running fastest. The platform offers a broad range of plug-ins for integrating tools like Google Maps and OpenTable. Adding plug-ins for things like contact forms, menus and reservations is also painless. There aren’t an overwhelming number of website templates, but the ones that are available offer a good mix. Plus Wix has an intuitive editing interface and built-in SEO tools. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald The is a powerful laptop that can be used on the go or with . It’s light, has a durable build, plus it’s equipped with an impressive 13.3-inch screen. Previous versions of the XPS 13 have been our top pick for over three years, because it offers the best balance of features and performance of any we’ve tested. We like that it’s compact, comes with a good trackpad and keyboard, and that it has a mix of new and old ports. We recommend the configuration that has 8GB of RAM, a 256 GB PCIe solid-state drive, and an Intel Core i7-8550U processor. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald Having your own will let you print and scan important documents whenever you need to. The offers simple installation and it’s paired with intuitive software and ink that’s affordable. It has a durable build and a large, responsive touchscreen. In addition to handling everyday printing tasks, the OfficeJet Pro can produce colorful graphics and high-quality photos. You can connect to and operate the printer from a computer, tablet, mobile device or the printer control panel. In our tests over Wi-Fi, we didn’t experience any connectivity issues. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald A trusted virtual private network provides more online protection beyond device encryption, secure passwords and privacy plug-ins while using a home network or public Wi-Fi. After spending over 130 hours testing 32 services, we chose as the best VPN provider for most people. It’s easy to set up, has easy-to-use apps, and can be used with most any device running macOS, Windows, iOS or Android. Overall, IVPN offers solid performance and doesn’t cut corners on security nor transparency. You don’t have to worry about your activity or logins being monitored. It’s pricier than competitors but worth the investment because it’s fast, stable, integrates with all major platforms, and comes with features that block data on unsecured connections. . |
Unbiased algorithms can still be problematic | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 9 | 30 | algorithms isn’t impossible — it’s just time consuming. “It actually is mathematically possible,” facial recognition startup Kairos CEO Brian Brackeen told me on a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular course of action. Whether it’s the type of information we receive, the information people see about us, the jobs we get hired to do, the credit cards we get approved for, and, down the road, the driverless cars that either see us or don’t, algorithms are increasingly becoming a big part of our lives. But there is an inherent problem with algorithms that begins at the most base level and persists throughout its adaption: human bias that is baked into these machine-based decision-makers. Creating unbiased algorithms is a matter of having enough accurate data. It’s not about just having enough “pale males” in the model, but about having enough images of people from various racial backgrounds, genders, abilities, heights, weights and so forth. Kairos CEO Brian Brackeen “In our world, facial recognition is all about human biases, right?” Brackeen said. “ you the fair way is ‘pale males.’ It’s very, very good. Very, very good at identifying somebody who meets that classification.” But the further you get from pale males — adding women, people from different ethnicities, and so forth — “the harder it is for AI systems to get it right, or at least the confidence to get it right,” Brackeen said. Still, there are cons to even a one hundred percent accurate model. On the pro side, a good facial recognition use case for a completely accurate algorithm would be in a convention center, where you use the system to quickly identity and verify people are who they say they are. That’s one type of use case Kairos, which works with corporate businesses around authentication, addresses. “So if we’re wrong, at worst case, maybe you have to do a transfer again to your bank account,” he said. “If we’re wrong, maybe you don’t see a picture accrued during a cruise liner. But when the government is wrong about facial recognition, and someone’s life or liberty is at stake, they can be putting you in a lineup that you shouldn’t be in. They could be saying that this person is a criminal when they’re not.” But in the case of law enforcement, no matter how accurate and unbiased these algorithms are, facial recognition software has no business in law enforcement, Brackeen said. That’s because of the potential for unlawful, excessive surveillance of citizens. Given the government already has our passport photos and identification photos, “they could put a camera on Main Street and know every single person driving by,” Brackeen said. And that’s a real possibility. In the last month, Brackeen said Kairos turned down a government request from Homeland Security, seeking facial recognition software for people behind moving cars. “For us, that’s completely unacceptable,” Brackeen said. Another issue with 100 percent perfect mathematical predictions is that it comes down to what the model is predicting, Human Rights Data Analysis Group lead statistician Kristian Lum said on the panel. Human Rights Data Analysis Group lead statistician Kristian Lum “Usually, the thing you’re trying to predict in a lot of these cases is something like rearrest,” Lum said. “So even if we are perfectly able to predict that, we’re still left with the problem that the human or systemic or institutional biases are generating biased arrests. And so, you still have to contextualize even your 100 percent accuracy with is the data really measuring what you think it’s measuring? Is the data itself generated by a fair process?” HRDAG Director of Research Patrick Ball, in agreement with Lum, argued that it’s perhaps more practical to move it away from bias at the individual level and instead call it bias at the institutional or structural level. If a police department, for example, is convinced it needs to police one neighborhood more than another, it’s not as relevant if that officer is a racist individual, he said. HRDAG Director of Research Patrick Ball “What’s relevant is that the police department has made an institutional decision to over-police that neighborhood, thereby generating more police interactions in that neighborhood, thereby making people with that ZIP code more likely to be classified as dangerous if they are classified by risk assessment algorithms,” Ball said. And even if the police were to have perfect information about every crime committed, in order to build a fair machine learning system, “we would need to live in a society of perfect surveillance so that there is absolute police knowledge about every single crime so that nothing is excluded,” he said. “So that there would be no bias. Let me suggest to you that that’s way worse even than a bunch of crimes going free. So maybe we should just work on reforming police practice and forget about all of the machine learning distractions because they’re really making things worse, not better.” He added, “For fair predictions, you first need a fair criminal justice system. And we have a ways to go.” |
Until data is misused, Facebook’s breach will be forgotten | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 9 | 30 | Cambridge Analytica because it could have helped elect Trump. We ignored because even the though the company was selling and exposing the real-time GPS coordinates of our phones, it was never clear exactly if or how that data was misused. This idea, that privacy issues are abstract concepts for most people until they become security or ideological problems, is important to understanding Facebook’s massive revealed this week. The social network’s engineering was sloppy, allowing three bugs to be combined to steal the access tokens of 50 million people. In pursuit of rapid growth at affordable efficiency, Facebook failed to protect its users. This assessment doesn’t discount that. Facebook screwed up big time. But despite the potential that those access tokens could have let the attackers take over user accounts, act as them, and scrape their personal info, it’s unclear how much users really care. That’s because for now, Facebook and it’s watchdogs aren’t sure exactly what data was stolen or how it was wrongly used. This could all change tomorrow. If Facebook discovers the hack was perpetrated by a foreign government to interfere with elections, by criminals to bypass identity theft security checkpoints and steal people’s bank accounts or social media profiles, or to target individuals for physical harm, out will come the pitchforks and torches. Given a sufficiently scary application for the data, the breach could finish the job of destroying Facebook’s brand. If users start clearing their profile data, reducing their feed browsing, and ceasing to share, the breach could have significant financial and network effect consequences for Facebook. After years of scandals, this could be the hack that’s broke the camel’s back. Yet in the absence of that evil utilization of the hacked data, the breach could fade into the background for users. Similar to the tension-filled departures of the founders of Facebook’s acquisitions Instagram and WhatsApp, the brunt of the backlash may not come from the public. The hack could hasten regulation of social media. Senator Warner called on Congress to “step up” following the hack. He’s previously advocated for privacy laws similar to Europe’s GDPR. That includes data portability and interoperability rules that could make it easier to switch social networks. That threat of people moving to competing apps could succeed in compelling Facebook to treat user privacy and security better. The FTC or European Union could hand down significant fines to Facebook for the breach. But given it earns billions in profit per quarter, those fees would have to be historically massive be a serious penalty for Facebook. One of the biggest is whether the tokens were used to access other services like Airbnb or Spotify that rely on Facebook Login. The breach could steer potential partners away from building atop Facebook’s identity platform. But at least you don’t have to worry about changing all your passwords. Unlike hacks that steal usernames and passwords, the lasting danger of the Facebook breach is limited. The access tokens have already been invalidated, whereas password reuse can lead people to have their other apps hacked long after the initial breach. If government investigators, journalists, or anti-Facebook activists want to make the company pay for its negligence, they’ll need to connect it to some concrete threat to how we live or what we believe. For now, without a nefarious application of the breached data, this scandal could blend into the rest of Facebook’s troubles. Every week, sometimes multiple times a week, Facebook has some headline grabbing problem. Over time, those are adding up to deter usage of Facebook and spur more users to delete it. But without an independent general purpose social network they can easily switch to, many users have endured Facebook’s stumbles in exchange for the connective utility it provides. As breaches become more common, the public may be desensitized. At worst, we could become complacent. Corporations should be held accountable for privacy failures even when the damage done is vague. But between Equifax, Yahoo, and the cell phone companies, we’re growing accustomed to letting out a deep sigh with maybe some expletives, and moving on with our lives. The ones we’ll remember will be those where the danger metastasized from the digital world into our offline lives. |
Trump administration sues California over its brand-new net neutrality law | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 9 | 30 | The Department of Justice that it has filed a lawsuit against California to block its new net neutrality law, just hours after it was . The lawsuit was first . Senior Justice Department officials told the newspaper it is filing the lawsuit because only the federal government can regulate net neutrality and that the Federal Communications Commission had been granted that authority by Congress to ensure states don’t write conflicting legislation. In its announcement, the Justice Department stated that by signing California’s Senate Bill 822 into law, the state is “attempting to subvert the Federal Government’s deregulatory approach by imposing burdensome state regulations on the free Internet, which is unlawful and anti-consumer.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said “under the Constitution, states do not regulate interstate commerce—the federal government does. Once again the California legislature has enacted an extreme and illegal state law attempting to frustrate federal policy. The Justice Department should not have to spend valuable time and resources to file this suit today, but we have a duty to defend the prerogatives of the federal government and protect our Constitutional order.” This is the latest of several legal showdowns between the Trump administration and California, the largest blue state. Under Attorney General Sessions, the Justice Department has already filed separate lawsuits against California and . The Trump administration is also . Senate Bill 822 was to reinstate Obama-era net neutrality protections . Even though Washington and Oregon have also passed their own net neutrality laws, the outcome of the federal government’s battle with California will have ramifications throughout the country because the state’s new net neutrality law is the most stringent one so far, banning most kinds of zero-rating, which allows telecoms to offer services from certain providers for free. As such, it has been the . While the FCC’s chairman Ajit Pai and telecoms argue that zero-rating allows them to offer better deals (Pai claimed in the Justice Department’s statement today that they have proven popular “especially among lower-income Americans,”) net neutrality advocates say it gives Internet service providers too much power by forcing users to rely on certain services, stifling consumer options and freedom of information. |
Carpooling service Klaxit partners with Uber for last-minute changes | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 9 | 30 | French startup connects drivers with riders so that you don’t have to take your car to work every day. And the company recently announced a new feature with the help of Uber. If your driver cancels your ride home, Klaxit will book an Uber for you. Klaxit is a ride-sharing startup that focuses on one thing — commuting to work. And this problem is more complicated than you might think. You can’t just go to work with the same person every day because you don’t always go to work at the same time. Similarly, sometimes your driver has to leave work early, leaving you at the office with no alternative. As a driver, you want to take the quickest route to work. So you want to be matched with riders who are exactly on the way to work. Klaxit currently handles 300,000 rides per day. In particular, the company has partnered with 150 companies, including big French companies such as BNP Paribas, Veolia, Vinci and Sodexo. Klaxit can be particularly useful for companies with large office buildings outside of big cities. Promoting Klaxit instantly fosters supply and demand from and to this office. But you don’t have to work for one of those companies to use Klaxit. Local governments can also financially support Klaxit to improve traffic conditions and mobility for users who don’t have a car or a driver’s license. “Subsidizing rides on Klaxit is 8 to 10 times cheaper than building a bus line,” co-founder and CEO Julien Honnart told me. One of the biggest concerns as a rider is that you’re going to be stuck at work in the evening. Klaxit is now asking its users to request a ride with two other drivers. If they both decline your request, Klaxit will book you an Uber ride to go back home. You don’t have to pay the Uber ride and then get reimbursed, Klaxit pays Uber directly. You don’t need an Uber account either as Klaxit is using . MAIF is the insurance company behind this insurance feature, and also one of Klaxit’s investors. This is a neat feature to convince new users that they can trust Klaxit. Klaxit competes with other French startups on this market, such as and BlaBlaCar’s . |
null | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 9 | 7 | null |
Relike lets you turn a Facebook page into a newsletter | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 9 | 30 | French startup has recently released a new product called . Relike is one of the easiest ways to get started with email newsletters. You enter the web address of your Facebook page and that’s about it. The company automatically pulls your most recent posts from your Facebook page and lets you set up an emailing campaign in a few clicks. You can either automatically pick your most popular Facebook posts or manually select a few posts. Just like any emailing service, you can choose between multiple templates, decide the day of the week and time of the day, import a database of email addresses and more. If you’ve used Mailchimp in the past, you’ll feel right at home. But the idea isn’t to compete directly with newsletter services. Many social media managers, media organizations, small companies, nonprofits and sports teams already have a Facebook page but aren’t doing anything on the email front. Relike is free if you send less than 2,000 emails per month and don’t need advanced features. If you want to get open rates, click-through rates and other features, you’ll need to pay €5 per month and €0.50 every time you send 1,000 emails. The company’s other product Ownpage is a bit different. Ownpage has been working with media organizations to optimize their email newsletters. The company is tracking reading habits on a news site and sending personalized email newsletters. This way, readers will get tailored news and will more likely come back to your site. Many big French news sites use Ownpage for their newsletters, such as Les Echos, L’Express, 20 Minutes, BFM TV, Le Parisien, etc. Ownpage founder and CEO Stéphane Cambon told me that Relike was the obvious second act. Using browsing data for customized newsletters is one thing, but many talented social media managers know how to contextualize stories and maximize clicks (even if it means clickbait, sure). The startup was looking at a way to get this data, and ended up creating Relike, which could appeal to customers beyond news organizations. For now, both products will stick around. In the future, the company plans to add Twitter and Instagram integrations as well as better signup flows for newsletter subscribers. |
What the heck is going on with measures of programming language popularity? | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 9 | 30 | I looked at the today, as I do every so often, as most of the software pros I know do every so often. It purports to measure the popularity of the world’s programming languages, and its popularity-over-time chart tells a simple story: Java and C are, and have been since time immemorial, by some distance the co-kings of language. But wait. Not so fast. The rival “ ” (PopularitY of Programming Languages) says that Python and Java are co-kings, and C (which is lumped in with C++, surprisingly) is way down the list. What’s going on here? What’s going on is that the two indexes have very different methodologies … although what their methodologies have in common is both are very questionable, if the objective is to measure the popularity of programming languages. TIOBE measures the sheer . PYPL measures how often . Both are bad measures. We can expect the availability of online resources to be an extremely lagging indicator; a once-dominant dead language would probably still have millions of relict web pages devoted to it, zombie sites and blog posts unread for years. And the frequency of tutorial searches will be very heavily biased towards languages taught en masse to students. That’s not a meaningful measure of which languages are actually in use by practitioners. There are lots of weird anomalies when you look harder at the numbers. According to TIOBE, last C went from its all-time lowest rating to Programming Language Of The Year in five months. I can buy that C has had a resurgence in embedded systems. But I can also easily envision this being an artifact of a highly imperfect measure. The more flagrant anomaly, though, in both of those measures, is the relative performance of Objective-C and Swift, the two languages used to write native iOS apps. I can certainly believe that, combined, they have recently seen a decline in the face of the popularity of cross-platform alternatives such as Xamarin and React Native. But I have a lot of trouble believing that, after four years of Apple pushing Swift — to my mind, an objectively far superior language — Objective-C is still more popular / widely used. In my I deal with a lot of iOS/tvOS/watchOS apps, and interview a lot of iOS developers. It’s extremely rare to find someone who hasn’t already moved from Objective-C to Swift. But hey, anecdotes are not data, right? If the only available measures conflict with my own personal experience, I should probably conclude that the latter is tainted by selection bias. And I’d be perfectly willing to do that … … except there is another measure of programming language popularity out there. I’m referring to GitHub’s annual reports of the fifteen most popular programming languages on its platform. Those numbers are basically a perfect match for my own experience … and they are way disjoint from the claims of both both TIOBE and PYPL. According to GitHub’s and reports, the world’s most popular programming language, by a considerable distance, is Javascript. Python is second. Java is third, and Ruby a close fourth. This is in stark contrast to TIOBE, which has Java and C, then a big gap, then Python and C++ (Javascript is ) — and also to PYPL, which claims the order is: Python and Java, a huge gap, then Javascript and PHP. Obviously the GitHub numbers are not representative of the entire field either; their sample size is very large, but only considers open-source projects. But I note that GitHub is the only measure which counts Swift as more popular than Objective-C. That makes it a lot more convincing, to me … but its open-source selection bias means it’s still far from definitive. These statistics do actually matter, beyond being an entertaining curiosity and/or snapshot of the industry. Languages aren’t all-important, but they’re not irrelevant either. People determine what languages to study, and sometimes even what jobs to seek and accept, based on their popularity and their (related) projected future value. So it’s a little upsetting that these three measures are so starkly, radically different. Sadly, though, we seem to still be stuck with tea leaves rather than hard numbers. |
Jack Ma says he isn’t about to retire from Alibaba but is planning a gradual succession | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 9 | 8 | Reports of Jack Ma’s impending retirement are greatly exaggerated, it seems. Ma, the co-founder and executive chairman of Alibaba, has pushed back on claims that he is on the cusp of leaving the $420 billion Chinese e-commerce firm. that the entrepreneur plans to announce that he will leave the firm to pursue philanthropy in education, a topic he is passionate about — Ma is a former teacher. But that news was quickly rebutted after Ma gave — — in which he explained that he plans to gradually phase himself out of the company through a succession plan. When reached for comment, Alibaba pointed TechCrunch to the SCMP report which claims Ma’s strategy will “provide [leadership] transition plans over a significant period of time.” In order words, Ma isn’t abruptly leaving the company, but it seems that his role will be gradually reduced over time. Alibaba confirmed he’ll remain a part of the company while the succession plan is carried out. The exact details will be announced on Ma’s birthday, September 10. That transition isn’t a new development. Ma stepped back from a daily role when . Speaking at the time, he said that he would remain active and that it was “impossible” for him to retire but he did concede that younger people with fresher ideas should lead the business. That’s exactly what has happened in the preceding years. 13-year Alibaba veteran Jonathan Lu stepped into Ma’s shoes as CEO. He led Alibaba when it went public in , but after reportedly losing Ma’s confidence. Former COO Zhang leads the company today, although Ma’s presence still looms large and he is particularly involved in the political side of the business. That’s included a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, and various activities with national leaders in markets like Southeast Asia, where Alibaba has sought to leverage the colossal size of its business to make inroads in emerging markets and position its business for growth as internet access continues to increase. “I sat down with our senior executives 10 years ago, and asked what Alibaba would do without me,” Ma told SCMP in an interview. “I’m very proud that Alibaba now has the structure, corporate culture, governance and system for grooming talent that allows me to step away without causing disruption.” |
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