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DoorDash raises another $250M, nearly triples valuation to $4B | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Food delivery startup announced this afternoon that it has raised $250 million, just five months since the company announced . Why raise more money so soon? CEO Tony Xu that he wasn’t actively looking for additional investment, but was open to investor interest because it could help the company expand more quickly. (Maybe he’ll have more to say about those plans next month.) The new funding was led by Coatue Management and DST Global. It sounds like the terms were pretty appealing too, with the valuation growing from $1.4 billion to $4 billion. In , the company said it’s had a good 2018, with deliveries increasing 250 percent year-over-year, restaurant chains like Chipotle and IHOP signing up and last week’s launch of , where you can pay $9.99 per month to get unlimited free deliveries. “As we grow, we will stay true to our values and our mission of connecting people with possibility — and, trust us, we’re just getting started,” DoorDash wrote. |
Facebook awards $200K to Internet Defense Prize winners | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Facebook the winners of its annual Internet Defense Prize and awarded first-, second- and third-place winners a total of $200,000 for research papers that addressed topics of internet security and privacy. Combined with $800,000 in awarded to security and privacy researchers earlier this week, the company has now completed toward securing the internet. The first started in 2014, but this year the prize quadrupled from its original $50,000 award to $200,000 spread across three groups. In a statement announcing the winners, Facebook said that the increase of this year’s prize money reflected not just the company’s ongoing (and in light of the , seemingly increased) interest in security and privacy, but also the quality of work submitted. “Over the years we’ve gotten higher and higher quality of submissions,” Pete Voss, Facebook’s Security Communications Manager told TechCrunch. “[But] the criteria has always been the same, and that’s making practical research. Making this go beyond theory and making it so you can actually apply security in real life.” The first prize, $100,000, was taken home by a team from Belgium for a paper entitled “Who Left Open the Cookie Jar? A Comprehensive Evaluation of Third-Party Cookie Policies” that proposed improvements to browser security that would make users less susceptible to having their internet trail tracked from site to site. Second- and third-place prizes (for $60,000 and $40,000 each) were awarded to research teams in the U.S. and China, respectively, for papers focusing on proper use of cryptography for app development and for strengthening the algorithm behind single sign-on security systems. Voss says the entries this year are a great example of the award’s mission to fund research that benefits not just Facebook’s interests in security and privacy, but the internet’s as a whole. “We’re investing in not just Facebook security but in public security for the entire internet,” said Voss. “We want to keep the internet strong and the only way we can do that is by making it secure.” As for the recipients of the Secure the Internet Grants, the $800,000 was divided between 10 teams whose research ranged from sociological approaches (like “Understanding the Use of Hijacked Facebook Accounts in the Wild” and “Enhancing Online & Offline Safety During Internet Disruptions in Times of War”) to more technical ones like improving the strength of encryption methods. Voss told TechCrunch that Facebook has no plans to announce at this time regarding its next steps toward providing funding for researchers in this space (unlike last summer when the company laid out its $1 million goal), but says that the company is “always looking at incentivizing this kind of research” and providing support. |
Coinbase now supports buying and selling Ethereum Classic | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Coinbase has added a new buying option for its customers after the crypto exchange introduced Ethereum Classic to its collection. but Coinbase took its time to implement its newest addition following criticism over the way it added Bitcoin Cash last year. Allegations of insider trading led which saw service outages and wild price fluctuations for Bitcoin Cash right after its addition to the exchange. It later introduced a framework for adding new tokens. Nonetheless, Ethereum Classic’s value spiked 20 percent on last month’s news. Today, though, it is down two percent over the last 24 hours, . Coinbase has taken a conservative approach to adding more crypto. Today’s addition takes it to five tokens — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash are the others — but that’s likely to change this year. Last month, it announced it is “exploring” the addition of another five tokens while when I interviewed him at the recent TechCrunch blockchain event in Zug. “We hear your requests, and are working hard to make more assets available to more customers around the world,” Dan Romero, who heads Coinbase’s consumer business, published today. A note on Ethereum Classic — it was created in June 2016 following , a fundraising vehicle for the project. Update: the Ethereum Foundation has been in touch to ask us to correct the above because it doesn’t create versions of Ethereum; it’s the community / ecosystem that created the new version. “Governance in Ethereum works as researchers and developers propose changes, any/all interested parties debate those things online and on live-streamed calls, things that earn consensus are developed into reality by different clients teams (that create software to support that users need to later run), and users download and run those things,” the spokesperson said. |
Pokémon GO is getting a big new ‘Special Research’ quest next week | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Just a few months back, Niantic added its first “Special Research” to Pokémon GO. Sort of like an in-game quest, the research had players complete a series of tasks (often over a number of days) to unlock an otherwise unobtainable Pokémon. Now they’re back with another one. The company will be adding a second Special Research quest to the game on August 20th. Whereas the last set unlocked Mew from the first generation of Pokémon games, this one brings out Gen II’s Celebi. This technically isn’t the first time Celebi has appeared in GO — attendees of GO Fest back in July got an early crack at a Special Research quest specifically tailored to the event, with the final reward being the opportunity to catch Celebi a solid month before anyone else. Though a bummer to anyone who couldn’t make it to Chicago, it was a fitting way to debut Celebi. Celebi has almost always been an “event” Pokemon in the original series, meaning you had to do something special to encounter one. Depending on the game, sometimes that meant going to a physical, real-world event; sometimes it just meant having the right pre-order disc. Those who already did the GO Fest research will also be able to do this public run of the Special Research, earning a bit more candy for the Celebi they’ve already caught. And if you haven’t finished the first (Mew) Special Research yet? That’s okay — they can run in parallel. These Special Research quests are a clever way for Niantic to keep things interesting. It turns the process of catching one particularly worthwhile Pokémon from something that might take 10 seconds into something that might spread into hours or days (depending on how intense you get about it). I just wish there were more of them, even if they were only for big lumps of XP. Though it’s smart for Niantic to keep them rare and special, these multi-stage tasks are a bit more rewarding than the one-off quick tasks you get anytime you spin a Pokéstop. |
The Reality Ecosystem: What AR/VR/XR needs to go big | Tim Merel | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Source: Digi-Capital . Source: Digi-Capital |
Netflix signs exclusive deal with ‘Black-ish’ creator Kenya Barris | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Netflix just a multi-year deal with Kenya Barris, creator of Black-ish and its spinoff Grown-ish. While Barris will remain an executive producer on those shows (and on the upcoming Besties), he will be exclusively developing new series for Netflix. The deal only covers TV, as Barris (who was one of the writers of Girls Trip) has a first-look movie deal at Fox. That’s , which also cites sources who say the deal is for three years and is in the “high-eight-figure range.” “When my agents reached out to me about this little garage start-up called Netflix, I wasn’t sure what to think,” Barris said in a statement. “But after I talked to [Netflix executives Ted Sarandos and Cindy Holland], I started to believe that maybe this mom-and-pop shop with only 130 million subscribers might just be something… so I decided to take a swing… a leap of faith if you will, and take a chance with the new kids on the block.” In the past year, Netflix shook up the television industry by signing big deals with and — Rhimes’ deal was reportedly worth $100 million, while Murphy’s was for $300 million. In each case, Netflix isn’t just betting on one big show. Rhimes and her production company Shondaland, for example, in development for the streaming service. |
Autonomous retail startup Inokyo’s first store feels like stealing | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Inokyo wants to be the indie Amazon Go. It’s just launched its prototype cashierless autonomous retail store. Cameras track what you grab from shelves, and with a single QR scan of its app on your way in and out of the store, you’re charged for what you got. ‘s first store is now open on Mountain View’s Castro Street selling an array of bougie kombuchas, snacks, protein powders and bath products. It’s sparse and a bit confusing, but offers a glimpse of what might be a commonplace shopping experience five years from now. You can get a glimpse yourself in our demo video below: Inokyo (rhymes with Tokyo) is now who want early access to its Mountain View store. The goal is to collect enough data to dictate the future product array and business model. Inokyo is deciding whether it wants to sell its technology as a service to other retail stores, run its own stores or work with brands to improve their product’s positioning based on in-store sensor data on custom behavior. “ “ Here’s how the Inokyo store works. You download its app and connect a payment method, and you get a QR code that you wave in front of a little sensor as you stroll into the shop. Overhead cameras will scan your body shape and clothing without facial recognition in order to track you as you move around the store. Meanwhile, on-shelf cameras track when products are picked up or put back. Combined, knowing who’s where and what’s grabbed lets it assign the items to your cart. You scan again on your way out, and later you get a receipt detailing the charges. Originally, Inokyo actually didn’t make you scan on the way out, but it got the feedback that customers were scared they were actually stealing. The scan-out is more about peace of mind than engineering necessity. There is a subversive pleasure to feeling like, “well, if Inokyo didn’t catch all the stuff I chose, that’s not my problem.” And if you’re overcharged, there’s an in-app support button for getting a refund. Inokyo co-founders (from left): Tony Francis and Rameez Remsudeen Inokyo was accurate in what it charged me despite me doing a few switcharoos with products I nabbed. But there were only about three people in the room at the time. The real test for these kinds of systems are when a rush of customers floods in and cameras have to differentiate between multiple similar-looking people. Inokyo will likely need to be more than 99 percent accurate to be more of a help than a headache. An autonomous store that constantly over- or undercharges would be more trouble than it’s worth, and patrons would just go to the nearest classic shop. Just because autonomous retail stores will be cashier-less doesn’t mean they’ll have no staff. To maximize cost-cutting, they could just trust that people won’t loot it. However, Inokyo plans to have someone minding the shop to make sure people scan in the first place and to answer questions about the process. But there’s also an opportunity in reassigning labor from being cashiers to concierges that can recommend the best products or find what’s the right fit for the customer. These stores will be judged by the convenience of the holistic experience, not just the tech. At the very least, a single employee might be able to handle restocking, customer support and store maintenance once freed from cashier duties. The Amazon Go autonomous retail store in Seattle is equipped with tons of overhead cameras While Amazon Go uses cameras in a similar way to Inokyo, it also relies on weight sensors to track items. There are of other companies chasing the cashierless dream. China’s BingoBox has nearly $100 million in funding and has more than 300 stores, though they use less sophisticated RFID tags. Fellow Y Combinator startup has raised $5 million to equip old-school stores with autonomous camera-tech. does the same, but touts that its cameras can detect abnormal behavior that might signal someone is a shoplifter. The store of the future seems like more and more of a sure thing. The race’s winner will be determined by who builds the most accurate tracking software, easy-to-install hardware and pleasant overall shopping flow. If this modular technology can cut costs and lines without alienating customers, we could see our local brick-and-mortars adapt quickly. The bigger question than if or even when this future arrives is what it will mean for the millions of workers who make their living running the checkout lane. |
Work-Bench enterprise report predicts end of SaaS could be coming | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | , a New York City venture capital firm that spends a lot of time around Fortune 1000 companies, has put together , which you could think of as a State of the Enterprise report. It’s somewhat like Mary Meeker’s , but with a focus on the tools and technologies that will be having a major impact on the enterprise in the coming year. Perhaps the biggest take-away from the report could be that the end of SaaS as we’ve known could be coming if modern tools make it easier for companies to build software themselves. More on this later. While the report writers state that their findings are based at least partly on anecdotal evidence, it is clearly an educated set of observations and predictions related to the company’s work with enterprise startups and the large companies they tend to target. As they wrote in their , “Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees. For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters.” Whether that’s the case will be in the eye of the reader, but it’s a comprehensive attempt to document the state of the enterprise as they see it, and there are not too many who have done that. The report points out the broader landscape in which enterprise companies — startups and established players alike — are operating today. You have traditional tech companies like Cisco and HP, the mega cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the Growth Guard with companies like Snowflake, DataDog and Sumo Logic and the New Guard, those early stage enterprise companies gunning for the more established players. As the report states, the mega cloud players are having a huge impact on the industry by providing the infrastructure services for startups to launch and grow without worrying about building their own data centers or scaling to meet increasing demand as a company develops. The mega clouders also scoop up a fair number of startups. Yet they don’t devote quite the level of revenue to M&A as you might think based on how acquisitive the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle have tended to be over the years. In fact, in spite of all the action and multi-billion deals we’ve seen, Work-Bench sees room for even more. It’s worth pointing out that Work-Bench predicts Salesforce itself could become a target for mega cloud M&A action. They are predicting that either Amazon or Microsoft could buy the CRM giant. We saw and it turned out that Salesforce was too rich for even these company’s blood. While they may have more cash to spend, the price has probably only gone up as and . The report dives into 4 main areas of coverage, none of which are likely to surprise you if you read about the enterprise regularly in this or other publications: While all of these are really interconnected as SaaS is part of the cloud and all need security and will be (if they aren’t already) taking advantage of machine learning. Work-Bench is not seeing it in such simple terms, of course, diving into each area in detail. The biggest take-away is perhaps that infrastructure could end up devouring SaaS in the long run. Software as a Service grew out of couple of earlier trends, the first being the rise of the Web as a way to deliver software, then the rise of mobile to move it beyond the desktop. The cloud-mobile connection is well documented and allowed companies like Uber and Airbnb, as just a couple of examples, to flourish by providing scalable infrastructure and a computer in our pockets to access their services whenever we needed them. These companies could never have existed without the combination of cloud-based infrastructure and mobile devices. But today, Work-Bench is saying that we are seeing some other trends that could be tipping the scales back to infrastructure. That includes containers and microservices, serverless, Database as a Service and React for building front ends. Work-Bench argues that if every company is truly a software company, these tools could make it easier for companies to build these kind of services cheaply and easily, and possibly bypass the SaaS vendors. What’s more, they suggest that if these companies are doing mass customization to these services, then it might make more sense to build instead of buy, at least on one level. In the past, we have seen what happens when companies try to take these kinds of massive software projects on themselves and it hardly ever ended well. They were usually bulky, difficult to update and put the companies behind the curve competitively. Whether simplifying the entire developer tool kit would change that remains to be seen. They don’t necessarily see companies running wholesale away from SaaS just yet to do this, but they do wonder if developers could push this trend inside of organizations as more tools appear on the landscape to make it easier to build your own. The remainder of the report goes in depth into each of these trends, and this article just has scratched the surface of the information you’ll find there. The entire report is embedded below. [scribd id=386310309 key=key-XCOorGGhhx0EBErAv0ZD mode=scroll] |
null | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 8 | 29 | null |
Facebook is going back to college | Ryan Craig | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Kids these days take a greater interest in practical things than we give them credit for. For example, this summer my 12-year-old son Leo was at sleepaway camp in Canada. When we received his first letter home, among camp platitudes, the two notable items reported were that one of his counselors was discharged from the Israeli Army a week before camp, while another was recently “mugged by three guys (one had a gun!) and got stabbed in the arm.” Leo reported the cabin was mesmerized when, as a reward, the counselor showed campers his sweater with a knife hole in it. America’s colleges and universities could learn a thing or two from Leo, because they continue to resist teaching students the practical things they’ll need to know as soon as they graduate; for instance, to get jobs that will allow them to make student loan payments. Digital skills head this list, specifically experience with the high-powered software they’ll be required to use every day in entry-level positions. But talk to a college president or provost about the importance of Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, Tableau, Adobe and Autodesk for their graduates, and they’re at a loss for how to integrate into their degree programs in order prepare students to work on these essential software platforms. Enter a new company, , which just announced a partnership with tech leader Unity and previously partnered with Facebook. Pathstream supports the delivery of career-critical software skill training in VR/AR and digital marketing at colleges and universities. According to Pathstream co-founder Eleanor Cooper, the company was created from piecing together two insights. First, graduates aren’t getting the digital skills they need to be hired. Employers are so frustrated that they no longer believe that new grads are qualified for digital jobs; according to a recent survey of more than 95,000 job postings by TalentWorks, 61 percent of positions that say they’re seeking entry-level employees now specify at least three years or more of relevant work experience. Second, tech companies are struggling to reach new generations of learners. While today’s college graduates are “digital natives,” these natives have been conditioned on Netflix-like interfaces, and aren’t accustomed to laborious software configurations, or the steep learning curves required to master a software platform. As a result, Cooper says Pathstream makes learning a new software platform live up to student expectations of receiving “joy before pain,” thereby gently nudging college students down the road to mastery. In addition, rather than traditional classroom-based learning, Pathstream’s platform simulates a work environment, where students complete tasks and projects on the platform, build a portfolio of work and earn a certification from both a higher education institution and the software company. Facebook is using Pathstream to support training students on its digital marketing platform, including social media marketing using Facebook Ad Manager and Instagram. Parisa Zagat, Policy Programs Manager at Facebook, related the partnership with Pathstream to its in June to train 1 million U.S. small business owners on the digital skills they need to compete in today’s workplace. Unity is focusing its training on VR/AR courses for industry use cases (construction, manufacturing, automotive, enterprise training). Jessica Lindl, Global Head of Education at Unity, said “in order to gain employment in today’s digitally focused world, job-seekers are required to rapidly up-level their skills.” Image: Getty Images/smartboy10/DigitalVision “The problem is there’s a significant education gap between those who seek to learn these skills and the programs available to them. With Pathstream, we will be able to provide interactive programs for students of all backgrounds to learn real-world software platforms in their own way, making it easier and more efficient for them to find success in their current career path or a new one.” While it completes training programs for Facebook and Unity, Pathstream is building out a network of colleges that will offer the curriculum to students. Recently, Facebook announced that Pathstream will be offering digital marketing certificates at Central New Mexico Community College and Des Moines Area Community College. According to Zagat, “By the end of the year, Facebook plans to form a total of 20 partnerships with community colleges across the country, working hand-in-hand with Pathstream and the colleges to build out custom curriculums and programs for these partnerships.” Cooper says that “colleges and universities understand that their students are focused on employment, and specifically on getting a good first job. Today’s students no longer buy the line that college prepares you for your fifth job, not your first job. They know that if you don’t get a good first job, you’re probably not going to get a good fifth job.” And, as she points out, most good first jobs specifically require one or more technologies like Facebook or Unity — technologies that colleges and universities aren’t teaching. If Pathstream is able to realize its vision of integrating industry-relevant software training into degree programs in a big way, colleges and universities have a shot at maintaining their stranglehold as the sole pathway to successful careers. If Pathstream’s impact is more limited, watch for millions of students to sidestep traditional colleges, and enroll in emerging faster and cheaper alternative pathways to good first jobs — alternative pathways that will almost certainly integrate the kind of last-mile training being pioneered by Pathstream. |
Streaming TV services now reach 5% of U.S. Wi-Fi households, up 58% since last year | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | The number of U.S. households watching streaming TV services – those that deliver cable TV-like programming over the internet – has grown a remarkable 58% over last year, according to . However, these services still account for a small portion of the overall market, as only 5 percent (4.9 million) of U.S. households with Wi-Fi streamed TV over one of these services in April 2018. In citing that number, comScore was specifically looking at what it called “pure-play” vMVPDs (virtual multichannel video programming distributors) – a variation on a fancy industry term that refers to live TV services like Sling TV. These services stream multiple channels over the internet without supplying infrastructure like coax cable to do so, and don’t offer other content like original programming or user videos. Today’s lineup of these “vMVPDs” includes: Sling TV, DirecTV Now, Playstation Vue, fuboTV, Philo, YouTube TV, and Hulu with Live TV. These “pure-play vMVPDs,” as comScore referred to them, are basically that same list, excluding Hulu Live and YouTube TV, as those also include access to non-linear, digital-only content like original programming. The firm found that consumer adoption of these “pure-play” live TV services is growing significantly, as more people cut the cord with traditional pay TV. For example, these “pure-play” streaming services accounted for 10% of all the time spent streaming shows and movies over-the-top during the month of April 2018. That’s up 53% from last year. And in households where one of these live TV services is present, nearly half the time that household spends streaming programming over-the-top is via that service. Also interesting is the fact that, unlike with a lot of new technology, these live TV services aren’t just being adopted by younger demographics. In April 2017, 29% of U.S. households using one of these service had a head of the household who was under the age of 35. In a year’s time. that percentage dropped 8 points to 21%, which indicates there are more older viewers now signing up. Another finding from the report is that the live TV services are coming into households that are already doing a ton of over-the-top streaming. In April 2018, these households streamed an average of 128 hours of over-the-top content. That’s far more than the average of 54 hours. Around half the hours they spent was on streaming live TV, and the other half is streaming from other services, like video-on-demand services such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. comScore estimates these live TV services will continue to grow in the months ahead, and even forecast that newcomers like Hulu Live and YouTube TV to well exceed a million users each sometime this year. That would put all the vMVPDs at more than 7 million total users – or nearly one-third the number of households with satellite TV. |
Facebook cracks down on opioid dealers after years of neglect | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Facebook’s role in the opioid crisis could become another scandal following yesterday’s release of harrowing new statistics from the Center for Disease Control. It estimated there were nearly 30,000 synthetic opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2017, up from roughly 20,000 the year before. When recreational drugs like Xanax and OxyContin are adulterated with the more powerful synthetic opioid Fentanyl, the misdosage can prove fatal. Xanax, OxyContin and other pain killers are often bought online, with dealers promoting themselves on social media including Facebook. Hours after the new stats were reported by and others, a source spotted that Facebook’s internal search engine stopped returning posts, Pages and Groups for searches of “OxyContin,” “Xanax,” “Fentanyl” and other painkillers, as well as other drugs like “LSD.” Only videos, often news reports deploring opiate abuse, and user profiles whose names match the searches, are now returned. This makes it significantly harder for potential buyers or addicts to connect with dealers through Facebook. However, some dealers have taken to putting drug titles into their Facebook profile names, allowing accounts like “Fentanyl Kingpin Kilo” to continue showing up in search results. It’s not exactly clear when the search changes occurred. On some search result pages for queries like “buy xanax,” Facebook is now showing a “Can we help?” box that says “If you or someone you know struggles with opioid misuse, we would like to help you find ways to get free and confidential treatment referrals, as well as information about substance use, prevention and recovery.” A “Get support” button opens of The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the U.S. department of health and human services that provides addiction resources. Facebook had back in June that this feature was coming. Facebook search results for many drug names now only surface people and video news reports, and no longer show posts, Pages or Groups, which often offered access to dealers When asked, Facebook confirmed that it’s recently made it harder to find content that facilitates the sale of opioids on the social network. Facebook tells me it’s constantly updating its approach to thwart bad actors who look for new ways to bypass its safeguards. The company confirms it’s now removing content violating its drug policies, and it’s blocked hundreds of terms associated with drug sales from showing results other than links to news about drug abuse awareness. It’s also removed thousands of terms from being suggested as searches in its typeahead. Regarding the “Can we help?” box, Facebook tells me this resource will be available on Instagram in the coming weeks, and it provided this statement: We recently launched the “Get Help Feature” in our Facebook search function that directs people looking for help or attempting to purchase illegal substances to the SAMHSA national helpline. When people search for help with opioid misuse or attempt to buy opioids, they will be prompted with content at the top of the search results page that will ask them if they would like help finding free and confidential treatment referrals. This will then direct them to the SAMHSA National Helpline. We’ve partnered with the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration to identify these search terms and will continue to review and update to ensure we are showing this information at the most relevant times. Facebook’s new drug abuse resource feature The new actions follow like “#Fentanyl” on Instagram back in April that could let buyers connect with dealers. That only came after aggressively criticized the company, demanding change. In some cases, when users would report Facebook Groups’ or Pages’ posts as violating its policy prohibiting the sale of regulated goods like drugs, the posts would be removed, but Facebook would leave up the Pages. This mirrors some of the problems it’s had with Infowars around determining the threshold of posts inciting violence or harassing other users or deletion. Facebook in some cases deleted posts selling drugs, but not the Pages or Groups carrying them Before all these changes, users through posts, photos and Pages on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook also introduced last week requiring addiction treatment centers that want to market to potential patients be certified first to ensure they’re not actually dealers preying on addicts. Much of the recent criticism facing Facebook has focused on it failing to prevent election interference, privacy scandals and the spread of fake news, plus how hours of browsing its feeds can impact well-being. But its negligence regarding illegal opioid sales has likely contributed to some of the 72,000 drug overdose deaths in America last year. It serves as another example of how to the harsh realities of how its service can be misused. Last November, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that learning of the depths of the opioid crisis was the “biggest surprise” from his listening tour visiting states across the U.S, and that it was “really saddening to see.” Zuckerberg meets with Opioid crisis caregivers and the families of victims in Ohio in April 2017 Five months later, Representative David B. McKinley (R-W.VA) Zuckerberg about Facebook’s responsibility surrounding the crisis. “Y Yet the fact that he called the crisis a “surprise” but failed to take stronger action when some of the drugs causing the epidemic were changing hands via his website is something Facebook hasn’t fully atoned for, nor done enough to stop. The new changes should be the start of a long road to recovery for Facebook itself. |
China is the fastest growing smart speaker market | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | null |
Tomu is a fingernail-sized computer that is easy to swallow | John Biggs | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | I’m a huge fan of single board computers, especially if they’re small enough to swallow. That’s why I like the . This teeny-tiny ARM processor essentially interfaces with your computer via the USB port and contains two LEDs and two buttons. Once it’s plugged in the little computer can simulate a hard drive or mouse, send MIDI data, and even blink quickly. The Tomu runs the Silicon Labs Happy Gecko EFM32HG309 and can also act as a security token. It is completely open source and all the code is on their . I bought one for $30 and messed with it for a few hours. The programs are very simple and you can load in various tools including a clever little mouse mover – maybe to simulate mouse usage for an app – and a little app that blinks the lights quickly. Otherwise you can use it to turn your USB hub into an on-off switch for your computer. It’s definitely not a fully fledged computer – there are limited I/O options, obviously – but it’s a cute little tool for those who want to do a little open source computing. One problem? It’s really, really small. I’d do more work on mine but I already lost it while I was clearing off a desk so I could see it better. So it goes. |
Intel buys deep-learning startup Vertex.AI to join its Movidius unit | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Intel wants to bring more artificial intelligence technology into all aspects of its business, and today it is stepping up its game a little in the area with an acquisition. The computer processing giant has acquired , a startup that had a mission of making it possible to develop “deep learning for every platform”, building a deep learning engine called to do this. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but Intel has provided us with the following statement, confirming the deal and that the whole team — including founders Choong Ng, Jeremy Bruestle and Brian Retford — will be joining Intel. “Intel has acquired Vertex.AI, a Seattle-based startup focused on deep learning compilation tools and associated technology. The seven-person Vertex.AI team joined the Movidius team in Intel’s Artificial Intelligence Products Group. With this acquisition, Intel gained an experienced team and IP to further enable flexible deep learning at the edge. Additional details and terms are not being disclosed.” A note on Vertex’s home page says the team will become part of Intel’s Movidius unit, which was formed around a computer vision chipmaking startup of the same name that Intel . Vertex says that Intel will continue to develop PlaidML as an open source project (see its ), where it will continue to support a variety of hardware under an Apache 2.0 license with an Intel nGraph backend. “We are excited to advance flexible deep learning for edge computing as part of Intel,” the company said. Intel, once a pace-setter and leader in the computing industry on the strength of its processors, has lost some momentum amid a new wave of companies building processors for mobile and other next-generation devices. The company has set its sights on being at the centre of the next wave of computing, and that is the wider context for its focus on R&D and other investments in AI. Vertex is an interesting company in that regard, as its platform is focused on building AI capabilities into a variety of chips, and is focused on helping bridge the gap between having powerful processors and actually using them to build AI into apps. “There’s a large gap between the capabilities neural networks show in research and the practical challenges in actually getting them to run on the platforms where most applications run,” Ng noted in a statement on the company’s launch in 2016. “Making these algorithms work in your app requires fast enough hardware paired with precisely tuned software compatible with your platform and language. Efficient plus compatible plus portable is a huge challenge—we can help.” For Intel, this could mean using Vertex’s IP to help build its own applications, or potentially applications for of its customers. It’s not clear how much funding Vertex.AI had raised. Investors included Curious Capital, which focused on pre-seed and seed-stage funding for startups in the Pacific Northwest; and the Creative Destruction Lab, an accelerator focused on machine learning startups based in Toronto. Intel doesn’t break out revenues specifically for its Artificial Intelligence Product Group, a business unit it established in , but the company noted that its various data-centric business units, where the AIPG would sit, grew by 26 percent, versus six percent for its legacy client computing business. While it’s not growing as fast, Intel’s PC-centric business still makes more than the data-centric business, $8.8 billion versus $7.2 billion. |
Google Search’s new featured snippet panel saves you more clicks | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Google is introducing an additional format for in its search results today. For years, these snippets have appeared at the top of the search results page and featured both images and text that Google thinks are relevant to your query. They are all about Google saving you a click. Today, Google is going beyond this single answer for some queries and a panel that also features relevant subtopics, saving you even more clicks. Google’s canonical example for a query to trigger this new panel is “ .” This query brings up the usual snippet, plus subtopics like cost, benefits, weight and durability. Those topics are automatically chosen based on what Google’s algorithms understand about this topic. You don’t need a [vs.] query to trigger this, though. If you look for something like “emergency funds,” you’ll also see a similar panel. For now, I was only able to trigger these new panels on mobile, but Google says it is rolling out this feature over the coming days, so it may be a while before you spot one in the wild. I was also unsuccessful in triggering them with any other query I tried, but maybe you are luckier than me. Google notes that today’s announcement is part of an to provide more comprehensive results to your questions. This February, for example, Google started showing multiple featured snippets when its systems think a query has multiple interpretations. |
MoviePass is limiting selection to ‘up to six films’ a day | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | We want to share more details about our service moving forward as part of our commitment to keep you fully informed. Here’s a full lineup of movie titles available on MoviePass in the coming days: — MoviePass (@MoviePass) Which movies are chosen and when will likely be at least partially dependent on deals struck between MoviePass and studios/distributors. And, of course, “up to six films” leaves the door open for a lot of wiggle room on selection here. It will also likely severely limit the ability to go see films in repertory movie houses, not to mention those in areas outside of big cities, where selection is far more limited. Come celebrate the 1 year anniversary of $9.95 with us by entering the Ultimate MoviePass Getaway! You and a guest could win a free trip to LA and so much more. Enter here: — MoviePass (@MoviePass) |
New Zealand to VCs and hedge fund managers buying up its land: No more | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Over the last couple of years, a once well-kept secret began to gain traction in New York media outlets: wealthy American investors, including VCs and hedge fund managers, had begun snapping up tracts of land in New Zealand, largely out of fear that a Trump administration could have a destabilizing effect on an already polarized United States but also owing to growing concerns about climate change and other impending disaster scenarios. Now, facing a growing backlash over rising housing prices, New Zealand’s parliament has banned non-residents from purchasing most types of homes, aside from new apartments in large developments. (Australians and Singaporeans are exempt because of free-trade deals.) The bill, passed narrowly yesterday, was by New Zealand’s Trade and Economic Development Minister David Parker as a “significant milestone.” Said Parker, “This government believes that New Zealanders should not be outbid by wealthier foreign buyers . . . Whether it’s a beautiful lakeside or ocean-front estate, or a modest suburban house, this law ensures that the market for our homes is set in New Zealand, not on the international market.” The move to block foreign buyers isn’t a complete shock given the amount of publicity that New Zealand has garnered in recent years as a haven for wealthy survivalists, including those in tech. The New Yorker began exploring the trend in a about Y Combinator President Sam Altman, which said that Altman’s plan, in the case of a pandemic, was to “fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand.” The outlet followed up with several months later, in January of last year, about many other investors who’d come to see New Zealand as their backup plan. In fact, there were so many of them — particularly hedge fund managers — that it had become a bit of a running joke, LinkedIn founder and investor Reid Hoffman told the magazine. He recalled telling a friend that he was thinking of visiting New Zealand, after which the friend had asked Hoffman, “Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?” Said Hoffman to the New Yorker, “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.’ ” (Thiel’s ties to New Zealand became particularly prominent after The New York Times last year published his successful 2011 application for citizenship to the South Pacific island nation, in which Thiel had stated: “I am happy to say categorically that I have found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand.” As for the story’s timing, it was in February of last year, several days after Trump, who’d made Thiel an advisor, signed an order that temporarily banned all refugees from the U.S.) According to the country’s Internal Affairs Department, last year, were granted New Zealand citizenship. Nearly six thousand of them came from the United Kingdom. Another 4,665 came from India and, lower down the line in terms of the percentage of people accepted, 1,314 people were granted citizenship who were born in China, and 735 came from the U.S. originally. It isn’t clear if New Zeland — which is currently home to roughly five million people — plans to amend its processes around granting citizenship. With rare exceptions, as with Thiel, applicants are usually required to have been living in New Zealand with residence status for before they apply. It’s also hard to know just how many wealthy Americans have become landowners in New Zealand, though New York hedge fund managers appear to have gotten the memo about the country ahead of Silicon Valley. (Thiel, notably, had created a hedge fund called Clarium Capital back in 2002, though it’s been wound down in more recent years.) According to The New Yorker, Rob Johnson, a former hedge fund manager with Soros who is today the president of a Soros-backed think tank called the , told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in 2015, “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.” Underscoring the country’s global attraction, a about the new ban states that Chinese investors have been among the biggest and most active offshore buyers of property in New Zealand in recent years. |
Bernie Sanders’ problem with Amazon | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Sanders is seeking additional information about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses in advance of legislation he’s preparing to introduce on September 5. Income inequality was, after all, the centerpiece of Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. It was a populist message that resonated strongly with voters, giving the dark horse candidate a boost among concerned progressives and independents during a tooth and nail primary battle. Are you a current or former Amazon employee? Please share your experiences with Sen. Bernie Sanders. — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) SAN FERNANDO DE HENARES, SPAIN – 2018/07/16: General view of the Amazon warehouse in San Fernando de Henares. Does Disney CEO Bob Iger have a good explanation for why he is being compensated more than $400 million while workers at Disneyland are homeless and relying on food stamps to feed their families? — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) |
Google and GN Hearing partner to stream audio from Android devices directly to hearing aids | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | Denmark’s broke new ground in hearing aid technology five years ago when it to develop a hearing aid that would integrate seamlessly with an iPhone, with no need for an intermediary device. And today it a significant, new milestone expansion in that technology: it has partnered with Google to bring the same functionality to Android handsets. Google has published a for audio streaming for hearing aids using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and connection-oriented channels which, in the words of Google, relies on “an elastic buffer of several audio packets to maintain a steady flow of audio, even in the presence of packet loss. This buffer provides audio quality for hearing aid devices at the expense of latency.” GN Hearing will be the first to develop these hearing aids using Google’s specifications, which it helped to write. “Google is working with GN Hearing to create a new open specification for hearing aid streaming support on future versions of Android devices,” said Seang Chau, Vice President of Engineering at Google, in a statement. This will mark the first time that Android smartphones will stream audio directly to hearing aids, and, since Android devices account for a majority of smartphones in use today, it is a big step up in helping people who use hearing aids be more integrated with the “smartphone revolution” and the wave of services and applications that come with using mobile devices. Up to now, because of how hearing aids are designed to amplify sounds, those who used one, and also wanted to use an Android device, would either have to use a supplementary piece of hardware to use the two together, or remove the hearing aid altogether and have a poor quality conversation. In addition to using the specification to stream audio from calls and phone apps directly to the hearing aid, users will also be able to monitor their hearing aids and modify their volumes using an app on their phones. Anders Hedegaard, the CEO of GN Hearing, tells TechCrunch that he “cautiously” estimates that the first hearing aids with live Android integrations will hit the market in 2019. And while his company does not have exclusivity on this — and the specification, like others on Android, is open source for anyone else to use — GN Hearing is likely to be the first because it has been working on the specification. Hearing loss has been on the rise, in part because people are living longer, and in part because of environmental factors (like headphones that people use with loud volumes). The World Health Organization estimates that there are some with disabling hearing loss, up from about 360 million in 2013, and that will grow to 900 million by 2050. But despite the growth of the issue, both the hearing aid industry and its users have been relatively slow to embrace wireless technology, although things have been changing. Hedegaard said that when his company first announced its partnership with Apple in 2013, the idea of a connected hearing aid was relatively new, and it took until 2016 for any one of its competitors to add the iPhone integration that GN Hearing pioneered. “Today, data connectivity is a core part of hearing aids,” he said, “and 90% of our devices have it.” Similarly, the amount of hearing aid users actually employing the connected functionality is also going up. “We have seen the percentage of people using connectivity going up dramatically,” he said. In 2013/14, he estimated that only about 10 percent of people who had connected hearing aids actually used the service with apps and other devices. Now “the majority” download apps and take advantage, he said. It helps that with each year, the gap between the ageing population and those who have spent years using computers and mobile phones and apps is shrinking. “Time is going our way,” he said. |
Cleo Capital sets $10M target to fund female entrepreneurs | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | In 2017, only 11.3 percent of partners at VC firms were women, according to PitchBook data. Female founders, meanwhile, raised just 2.2 percent of all venture funding. |
Pandora introduces capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Pandora for advertisers today — the ability to dynamically assemble different audio ads for different listeners, the ability to sequentially target ads so that they fit together into a larger strategy and shorter ad formats that range from four to 10 seconds in length. Claire Fanning, Pandora’s vice president of ad strategy, told me via email that the company is announcing these capabilities at the same time because “they work together in really powerful ways.” For example, she also sent along campaign mock-ups that showed how ads could be tailored to include both the day of the week and a call-to-action tied to the listener’s location, and how the ads could be also specifically sequenced so that listeners start with the longer message, then hear shorter and shorter spots. “We believe that an advertiser’s personalized audio strategy will not only be unique to that advertiser, but also unique to each campaign,” Fanning said. “In some cases, leveraging one capability may be best (short form, dynamic, sequential) — and in other cases, leveraging 2 or 3 may be most powerful. It’s really dependent on the advertiser’s creative strategy and which solution, or solutions, will support that strategy best.” While Pandora last year, advertising remains the main way the company . It says it’s the first company to make these features available in a large-scale way, and it’s already been testing them with 20 advertisers, enlisting to measure the results. For one thing, it says that Lay’s found short-form audio had a 56 percent higher return on ad spend. As the company looks to deliver more personalized advertising, it may face more questions about privacy, but Fanning said Pandora doesn’t collect any personally identifiable information about users except for their email addresses. “We use industry-standard security practices to protect our data and have developed internal tools and processes to ensure compliance with our privacy commitment,” Fanning added. “We’ll continue to fortify this by tightening certain contractual language, auditing existing 3rd-party data partners, and evaluating future partnerships with enhanced rigor.” |
Security tokens will be coming soon to an exchange near you | Sunny Dhillon | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | While cryptocurrencies have generated the lion’s share of investment and attention to date, I’m more excited about the potential for another blockchain-based digital asset: security tokens. Security tokens are defined as “any that is subject to regulation under security laws.” In other words, they represent ownership in a real-world asset, whether that is equity, debt or even real estate. (They also encompass certain pre-launch utility tokens.) With $256 trillion of real-world assets in the world, the opportunity for crypto-securities is truly massive, especially with regards to asset classes like real estate and fine art that have historically suffered from limited commerce and liquidity. As I’ve written previously, imagine if that you could trade as safely and easily as you do stocks. That’s where we’re headed. There’s a lot of forward momentum around tokenized securities, so much so that based on their current trajectory, I believe security tokens are going to become a common part of Wall Street parlance in the near future. Investors won’t just be able to buy and sell tokens on mainstream exchanges, however; “crypto-native” companies are also throwing their hats into this ring. The race is on to bring security tokens to the masses Because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are , it’s been much easier to facilitate trading on a large scale. Security tokens are more complex, requiring not just capabilities around trading, but also issuance and, critically, compliance. (See more of my thoughts on compliance .) It’s a major undertaking, which is why we haven’t seen the Coinbase or Circle of security token trading emerge yet (or seen these companies expand their platforms to address this — more on that later). Meanwhile, regular exchanges are blazing the trail and moving into providing tokens trading. The founder and chairman of the company that owns the NYSE , Bakkt, that would provide an on-ramp for institutional investors interested in purchasing cryptocurrencies. Last month, the SIX Swiss Exchange — Switzerland’s principal stock trading exchange — announced plans to . The trading and issuing platform, SIX Digital Exchange, will adhere to the same regulatory standards as the non-digital exchanges and be overseen by Swiss financial regulators. This announcement confirms a few things: Most assets (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.) will be tokenized and supported on regulated trading platforms. Incumbents like SIX have a head start due to their size, regulatory licensing and built-in user base. They are likely to use this advantage to defend their position of power. Most investors will never know they are using distributed ledger technology, let alone trading tokenized assets. They will simply buy and sell assets as they always have. I expect other major financial exchanges to follow SIX’s lead and onboard crypto trading before long. I can imagine them salivating over the trading fees now, Homer Simpson-style. Live shot of financial exchanges drooling over crypto trading fees The big crypto companies are preparing to enter the security token arena Stock exchanges won’t have the space to themselves, however. Crypto companies like and have already debuted dedicated platforms for security tokens, and all signs indicate announcements from Circle and Coinbase unveiling their own tokenized asset exchanges are not far behind. Coinbase is much closer to offering security token products after in June, effectively backward-somersaulting its way into a state of regulatory compliance. President and COO Asiff Hirji all but confirmed crypto-securities are in the company’s roadmap, saying that Coinbase “can envision a world where we may even work with regulators to .” Circle is also laser-focused on security tokens. Circle CEO and co-founder Jeremy Allaire explained the company’s acquisition of crypto exchange Poloniex and launch of app Circle Invest in terms of the In addition, it is with the SEC to facilitate token trading — it could also attempt to take the same backdoor acquisition approach as Coinbase. If there’s a reason Circle and Coinbase haven’t moved into security token services even more rapidly, it’s that there simply aren’t that many security tokens yet. Much of this is due to the lack of compliance and issuance platforms, keeping high-quality securities on legacy systems with which issuers feel more comfortable. As projects like Harbor ramp up more, this comfort gap will grow smaller and smaller, driving the big crypto players deeper into security token services. Expect a battle between traditional and crypto exchanges This showdown between traditional finance incumbents and crypto giants will be worth watching. One is incentivized to preserve the status quo, while the other is looking to create a new, more global financial system. The Swiss SIX Exchanges of the world enjoy some distinct advantages over the likes of Coinbase — they have decades of traditional financial operating experience, deep relationships throughout the industry and a head start on regulatory compliance. Those advantages probably mean that such incumbents will probably be the first to make infrastructural and logistical upgrades to their systems using security tokens. The first time you interact with a security token, it is likely to be through the Nasdaq. Having said that, incumbents’ greatest disadvantage will be transporting an old-finance-world mentality to these innovations. Coinbase, Circle, Polymath, Robinhood and other newer players are better suited to harnessing the stepchange elements of security tokens — particularly asset interoperability and imaginative security design. University of Oregon professor , an authority on security tokens, told me that “the potential for programmable securities to enable the expression of new investment types is the most exciting feature.” Harbor CEO Josh Stein explained why private securities in particular will be transformed: “by automating compliance, issuers can allow their investors to trade to the limit of their liquidity across multiple exchanges. Now imagine a world where buyers and sellers around the world can trade 24/7/365 with near instantaneous settlement and no counterparty risk — that is something only possible through blockchain.” Those hypergrowth startups are going to experiment with these new paradigms in ways that older firms won’t think of. You can see evidence of this forward thinking in that allows Venmo users to send value to Alipay users — exactly embracing interoperability, if not in an asset sense. As Polymath’s and have been saying for the past year, the financial services world is moving toward security tokens. As the crypto economy matures, we’re inching closer to a new era of real-world assets being securitized on the blockchain in a regulatory compliant manner. The challenge for both traditional and crypto exchanges will be to educate investors about this new way to buy and sell investments while powering these securities transactions via a smooth, seamless experience. Ultimately, security tokens lay the groundwork for granting investors their biggest wish — the ability to trade equity, debt, real estate and digital assets all on the same platform. |
Civil, the blockchain journalism startup, has partnered with one of the oldest names in media | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Iles added that Civil has plans to announce a |
Twitter’s deletion of its Facebook app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | explaining why the cross-posted tweets disappeared. Essentially, Twitter deleted its app from Facebook after Facebook stopped allowing cross-posts earlier this month, since without that feature it was basically useless. This unexpectedly caused old posts to disappear. TechCrunch also heard from a source with understanding of the situation that the deletion of the app took Facebook by surprise, as well as the fact that Twitter didn’t immediately tell them to restore the content.) Facebook users are complaining the company has removed the cross-posted tweets they had published to their profiles as Facebook updates. The posts’ removal took place following the recent API change that Twitter users from continuing to automatically publish their tweets to Facebook. According to the affected parties, both the Facebook posts themselves, as well as the conversation around those posts that had taken place directly on Facebook, are now gone. Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking into it. TechCrunch was alerted to the problem by a reader, , who couldn’t find any information about the issue in Facebook’s Help Center. We’ve since confirmed the issue ourselves with several affected parties and confirmed it with Facebook. Given the real-time nature of social media — and how difficult it is to pull up old posts — it’s possible that many of the impacted Facebook users have yet to realize their old posts have been removed. In fact, we only found a handful of public complaints about the deletions, so far. For example: I used the Twitter for Facebook app for years, and I realize it's not working and isn't going to. But I just discovered all the Facebook updates it put have been deleted and dissappeared from my timeline! Is there a way to retrieve this? — Omer Lev (@omerlev) A recent update to the Facebook Platform Policies ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to our Facebook profile or page and all of our previous Twitter posts were deleted by Facebook. — Plano, Texas Weather (@PlanoWX) My post on Facebook via Twitter was deleted. Why? Can someone explain it? — Tarin (@lestarindah499) Some of those who were impacted were very light Facebook users and had heavily relied on the cross-posting to keep their Facebook accounts active. As a result of the mass removals, their Facebook profiles are now fairly empty. TechCrunch editor Matthew Panzarino is one of those here who was impacted. He points out that the ability to share tweets to Facebook was a useful way to reach people who weren’t on Twitter in order to continue a discussion with a different audience. “I’ve had tweet cross-posting turned on for years, from the early days of it even existing. This just removed thousands of posts from my Facebook silently, with no warning,” Matthew told me. “Even though the posts didn’t originate on Facebook, I often had ongoing conversations about the posts once my Facebook friends (and audience) saw them. Many of them would never see them on Twitter either because they don’t follow me or they don’t use it,” he said. “It’s wild to have all of that context just vanish,” he added. As you may recall, Facebook earlier this month to prevent third-party apps from publishing posts to Facebook as the logged-in user. The change was a part of Facebook’s larger overhaul and lockdown of its API platform in the wake of the where as many had their data improperly harvested and shared. Since then, Facebook has been trying to plug up the holes in its platform to prevent further data misuse. One of the changes it made was to stop third-parties from being able to post to Facebook as the logged-in user. For existing apps, like Twitter, that permission was revoked on August 1, 2018. Before the API changes, Twitter users were able to visit the “Apps” section from Twitter on the web, then authenticate with Facebook to have their tweets cross-posted to Facebook’s social network. Once enabled, the tweets would appear on the user’s page as a Facebook post they had published, and their friends could then like and comment on the post as any other. In theory, the API changes should only have prevented Twitter users from continuing to cross-post their tweets to Facebook automatically. It have also deleted the existing posts from Facebook users’ profiles and business users’ Facebook Pages. This is a breach of trust from a company that’s in the process of trying to repair a broken trust with its users across a number of fronts, including data misuse. Regardless of whatever new policy is in effect around apps and how they can post to Facebook, no one would have ever expected that Facebook would actually remove their old posts without warning. We’re hoping that the problem is a bug that Facebook can resolve, and not something that will result in permanent data loss. Facebook tells us while it doesn’t have further information about the problem at this time, it should have more to share tonight or tomorrow about what’s being done. |
You can now apply to get a verified badge on Instagram — here’s how | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Instagram is at last quenching the thirst of its thirsty, thirsty unverified users. The company just designed to make Instagram a generally safer and more authentic place to hang out ( — enable it!) and for the first time the platform now offers users a straightforward way to request verification. On Instagram, blue check marks are fairly rare, even among pretty big brands and public figures. Getting verified on the platform has long been the stuff of legend — no one quite knows what goes on behind the scenes but knowing a guy doesn’t hurt. Remarkably, there’s even a where people charge thousands of bucks to hook you up with verified status (or more likely to just rip you off). The whole thing has always been kind of mysterious, with little blue checks quietly sprinkled around in no discernible pattern. It looks like those days are over. While it’s too early to tell if Instagram will be handing out more verified badges to users, they’ve at least made the process much more transparent. Now, any user can request to be verified with a few steps. As a note: In our testing, the option to request verification is live now in iOS but hasn’t yet popped up in the updated Android app. If you’re curious if you might qualify to begin with, here’s how Instagram framed the new verification system in its latest announcement: … The blue verified badge is an important way for you to know that the account you are interacting with is the authentic presence of a . Today we are enabling a new way for accounts that reach large audiences and meet our criteria to request verification through a form within the Instagram app. Does that sound like you? Here’s what you need to do. From your profile, navigate to the menu and then find an option to “ .” Provide the relevant documents. Instagram accepts government-issued IDs (driver’s license, passport or other national ID cards). In lieu of that, you can submit official documents like a utility bill, tax filing or article of incorporation. These documents won’t be public on your profile. If your official documentation isn’t a match for your legal name, you might be out of luck. We’ve asked Instagram to clarify if these documents need to match your account information exactly or if they just need them on file for reference. Wait while Instagram reviews your request. Instagram says that you’ll receive a notification letting you know if you’ve been approved or rejected, so look out for that. If you are rejected you can reapply after 30 days. Before you apply, it’s worth reading over . According to its hub on verified badges, Instagram will evaluate your account for ” — the criteria it must meet in addition to abiding by the platform’s terms of service. What do those things mean? Instagram defines an account as one that “represent[s] a real person, registered business or entity.” When Instagram demands an account be “ ” what it really means is that it intends to only approve one account per business or individual except in cases of “language-specific accounts.” Instagram reminds users that it “[doesn’t] verify general interest accounts (example: @puppymemes).” To make sure your account is , it must be public, with a profile photo, bio and one post minimum. Importantly, Instagram stipulates that your account “can’t contain ‘add me’ links to other social media services,” so prune anything like that. The last criterion is the toughest. Instagram requires that your account be “ .” You might think that your account is [100 emoji], but unless you are a “well-known, highly searched for person, brand or entity” you probably won’t make the cut. Instagram explains further that it reviews accounts “featured in multiple news sources” and paid content doesn’t count. While Instagram’s process is way more transparent now, this bit does leave some room for interpretation. Even with the new request form, keep in mind that most users won’t make the cut. Historically, it’s kind of unpredictable. Popular users who seem like a no-brainer for a verified account sometimes don’t have verified status, while others with a far less substantial public profile do. Even here at TC, some of us (like @ with his assiduous sneaker content) sport a little blue check while others don’t. We don’t know if there is more rhyme or reason to verification now, but at least the process is public and available for everyone. |
Another food delivery startup, Foodsby, rakes in venture capital funding | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | null |
Robinhood gives investors international targets to aim for with launch of ADR products | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | , the app-based investment platform for all your speculative investing needs, has launched a tool for investors to throw money at publicly traded international companies through the rollout of American depositary receipts. ADRs are the investment mechanism that U.S. investors use to invest in foreign companies whose shares aren’t traded on U.S. stock exchanges like the or the , and, as of today, the company said it would roll out opportunities to invest in 250 stocks from global companies. The list of potential investment targets include Tencent, Nintendo and Adidas the company said. And opportunities will exist to invest in public companies from China, Japan, Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom whose shares trade in the U.S. A full list can be found by searching “New on Robinhood” in the company’s app or on desktop. For the Francophiles in the room, French companies like LVMH, Michelin and Ubisoft Entertainment will be made available soon, Robinhood said in a statement. |
Will big brands disrupt higher education? | Daniel Pianko | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | In the years to come, who will hospitality hiring managers trust to credential students: Cornell University or the Four Seasons? Will it be Google or Penn State that sets the standards that determine who qualifies as a good computer programmer? Could GE define competency in aeronautic engineering rather than Vaughn College? Should employers place more value in a fashion credential backed by the editors of Vogue or the Pratt Institute? Institutions of higher education are, of course, not unfamiliar with branding. The brands of top-tier institutions shape not just consumer sentiment, but the market and regulatory landscapes that have governed their existence for decades. The single greatest determinant of U.S. News & World Report rankings is reliance on “reputation.” Eight of the top 20 U.S. News universities are Ivy League schools which are, on average, more than 250 years old. Brands evolve slowly in any industry. Just ask Arizona State University’s Michael Crow or other leaders of a cadre of innovative colleges and universities that tout dramatic accomplishments, but fail to crack the spaces dominated for centuries by big brands like Harvard, Yale and Princeton. But the role of brands in higher education may be changing. Mega brands from education are beginning to transform the way students and employers think about learning. Owners of global consumer brands sense two broad shifts in higher education that make it ripe for “brand extensions.” First, traditional education is under assault. Employers are increasingly skeptical of the correlation between a college performance and workplace outcomes. Depending on how you count, coding schools may be graduating as many computer scientists as traditional universities. Peter Thiel offers $100,000 to brilliant minds willing to drop out of college. Major companies like Google and IBM are looking beyond the degree to find employees with the skills and competencies they demand — regardless of whether they went to college. The New York Times partnered with Cambridge Information Group, which operates Sotheby’s Master’s degree-granting Institute of Art, on art business, contemporary art and fine and decorative arts and design. And startup has made a splash by teaming up with celebrities like Wolfgang Puck, Serena Williams and Malcolm Gladwell to teach classes in their respective fields. The definition of education credential, too, is changing. As the shelf life of skills shrinks, the degree is fast losing relevance as the primary unit of measurement for post-secondary education. Our nation’s colleges and universities are, increasingly, using digital credentials to help their graduates show-what-they-know and enable employers to make sense of skills or accomplishments. Even the U.S. Department of Education is supporting “experimental sites” that in favor of a focus on the underlying most. The economics of higher education also makes sense to big brands. Consider the potential for old-line media companies faced with falling revenues as digital distribution models take market share and compete for advertising dollars. Media brands desperately seeking product extensions understand that education is a big market, with over $500 billion of higher education spend in the U.S. alone. No-name private colleges charge $50,000 in tuition and fees. Name-brand colleges create massive profits, and emerging brands like General Assembly command premium fees to train students for the of the future. Contrast the lifetime value of credential seekers with average revenues per customer selling ads and magazine subscriptions. But the opportunity for brands is not just economic. Media companies bring other assets to the table, including more curated, and often times high-quality, content than virtually any university. Imagine working with Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The World Is Flat, to create a course on the Middle East — or a product manager of Samsung on mobile computing. This is not an either-or for universities. Parsons with Teen Vogue Magazine to launch Certificate in Fashion Industry Essentials. Bellevue University teamed up with Chipotle to build a restaurant-oriented that maps to the Chipotle career path. And Queen Latifah — perhaps one of the best lessons in branding — is building with Strayer University an online course for aspiring entrepreneurs covering . Smart global brands and universities with stellar reputations will partner with each other to build up their respective competencies. Great universities will bring tradition and academic excellence — while the global brand has connections to employers and incredible content. The formula is simple: Well-structured, branded programs will be superior to an unbranded degree. They will give elite institutions a run for their money. It’s only a matter of time before the U.S. News & World Report rankings are riddled with global brands. |
New Knowledge just raised $11 million more to flag and fight social media disinformation meant to bring down companies | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Back in January, we about a young, Austin, Tex.-based startup that fights online disinformation for corporate customers. Turns out we weren’t alone in finding it interesting. The now four-year-old, 40-person outfit, , just sealed up $11 million in new funding led by the cross-border venture firm GGV Capital, with participation from Lux Capital. GGV had also participated in the company’s $1.9 million seed round. We talked yesterday with co-founder and CEO Jonathon Morgan and the company’s director of research, Renee DiResta, to learn more about its work, which appears to be going well. (They say revenue has grown 1,000 percent over last year.) Our conversation, edited for length, follows. JM: Election interference is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of social media manipulation. Our customers are a little sensitive about being identified, but they are Fortune 100 companies in the entertainment industry, as well as consumer brands. We also have national security customers, though most of our business comes from the private sector. RD: It was a great opportunity to educate the public on what happens and to speak directly to the senators about the need for government to be more proactive and to establish a deterrent strategy because [these disinformation campaigns] aren’t impacting just our elections but our society and American industry. JM: It’s pretty typical for consumer-facing brands, because they are so high-profile, to get involved in quasi-political conversations, whether or not they like it. Communities that know how to game the system will come after them over a pro-immigration stance for example. They mobilize and use the same black market social media content providers, the same tools and tactics that are used by Russia and Iran and other bad actors. JM: Where we see this more for financial gain is when it involves state intelligence agencies trying to undermine companies where they have nationalized an industry that competes with U.S. institutions like oil and gas and agriculture companies. You can see this is the promotion of anti-GMO narratives, for example. Agricultural tech in the U.S. is a big business, and on the fringes, there’s some debate about whether GMOs are safe to eat, even though the scientific community is clear that they’re completely safe. Meanwhile, there are documented examples of groups aligned with Russian intelligence using purchased social media to circulate conspiracy theories and manipulate the public conversation about GMOs. They find a grain of truth in a scientific article, then misrepresent the findings through quasi-legitimate outlets, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that are in turn amplified by social media automation. JM: We have a SaaS product and a team of analysts who come out of the intelligence community and who help customers understand threats to their brand. It’s an AI-driven system that detects subtle social signs of manipulation across accounts. We then help the companies understand who is targeting them, why, and what they can do about it. JM: First, they can’t be blindsided. Many can’t tell the difference between real and manufactured public outcry, so they don’t even know about it when it’s happening. But there’s a pretty predictable set of tactics that are used to create false public perception. They plant a seed with accounts they control directly that can look quasi-legitimate. Then they amplify it via paid automation, and they target specific individuals who may have an interest in what they have to say. The thinking is that if they can manipulate these microinfluencers, they’ll amplify the message by sharing it with their followers. By then, you can’t put the cat back in the bag. You need to identify [these campaigns] when they’ve lit the match, but haven’t yet started a fire. At the early stage, we can JM: First, different platforms are used for different reasons. You see peer-to-peer disinformation, where a small group of accounts drives a malicious narrative on Facebook, which can be problematic at the very local level. Twitter is the platform where media gets its pulse on what’s happening, so attacks launched on Twitter are much more likely to be made into mainstream opinion. There are also a lot of disinformation campaigns on Reddit, but those conversations are less likely to be elevated into a topic on CNN, even while they can shape the opinions of large numbers of avid users. Then there are the off-brand platforms like 4chan, where a lot of these . They are all susceptible in different ways. The platforms have been very receptive. They take these campaigns much more seriously than when they first began looking at election integrity. But platforms are increasingly evolving from more open to more closed spaces, whether it’s WhatsApp groups or private channels or private Facebook channels, and that’s making it harder for the platforms to observe. It’s also making it harder for outsiders who are interested in how these campaigns evolve. |
Yahoo still scans your emails for ads — even if its rivals won’t | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | You’re not the only one reading your emails. A on Tuesday dug out new details on a massive email scanning operation by Oath, the Verizon-owned subsidiary that’s the combined business of AOL and Yahoo. The email-scanning program analyzes for data that can be sold to advertisers. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon by way of Oath.) The logic goes that by learning about its users, the internet giant can hone its ad-targeting effort to display the most relevant ads. But where other major email providers have bailed from email scanning amid privacy scandals and security issues, Oath remains the outlier. Google across its consumer Gmail service last year — a decision lauded after facing criticism for years over the practice — though the company still uses machine learning to . Meanwhile, Microsoft told TechCrunch in a statement that it does “not use email content for ad targeting in any way, anywhere in Microsoft.” And Apple has never scanned its customers’ inboxes for advertising, though says it can access your data for law enforcement purposes or for more vague reasons like “issues of public importance.” So it’s basically just Oath, then. Scanning the inboxes of its hundreds of millions of email users is a gutsy move for the year-old internet giant, which prior to its rebranding was responsible for two data breaches at Yahoo exposing more than thee billion users’ data and a separate breach at AOL in 2014. Yahoo reportedly built a secret customer email-scanning tool at the behest of the U.S. intelligence community, which led to the departure of former Yahoo infosec chief Alex Stamos, . Although the email scanning program isn’t new — announced earlier this year — it does go deeper than Gmail’s scanning ever did. “Yahoo mined users’ emails in part to discover products they bought through receipts from e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com,” said the WSJ. “In 2015, Amazon stopped including full itemized receipts in the emails it sends customers, partly because the company didn’t want Yahoo and others gathering that data for their own use.” Although some content is excluded from the scanning — such as health and medical information — it remains to be seen how (or even if) Oath can exclude other kinds of sensitive data from its customers’ inboxes, like bank transfers and stock receipts. Yahoo Mail’s says email accounts are subject to “manual review,” which allows certain Oath employees access to inboxes. TechCrunch asked Oath and its parent Verizon about what assurances they could provide that confidential emails and information won’t be collected or used in any way. We also asked how consent was obtained from users in Europe, where data protection rules under the newly implemented regulations are stricter. Neither Verizon or Oath responded by our deadline. It should go without saying that email isn’t the most sensitive or secure communications medium, and inboxes should never be assumed to be private — not least from law enforcement and the companies themselves. Deleting your account might be overkill, especially if you once it’s recycled. But if there’s ever been a time to find a better inbox, now might be it. |
null | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 8 | 16 | null |
Microsoft will soon automatically transcribe video files in OneDrive for Office 365 subscribers | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Microsoft today a couple of AI-centric updates for OneDrive and SharePoint users with an Office 365 subscription that bring more of the company’s machine learning smarts to its file storage services. All of these features will launch at some point later this year. With the company’s Ignite conference in Orlando coming up next month, it’s probably a fair guess that we’ll see some of these updates make a reappearance there. The highlight of these announcements is that starting later this year, both services will get automated transcription services for video and audio files. While video is great, it’s virtually impossible to find any information in these files without spending a lot of time. And once you’ve found it, you still have to transcribe it. Microsoft says this new service will handle the transcription automatically and then display the transcript as you’re watching the video. The service can handle over 320 file types, so chances are it’ll work with your files, too. Other updates the company today announced include a new file view for OneDrive and Office.com that will recommend files to you by looking at what you’ve been working on lately across the Microsoft 365 and making an educated guess as to what you’ll likely want to work on now. Microsoft will also soon use a similar set of algorithms to prompt you to share files with your colleagues after you’ve just presented them in a meeting with PowerPoint, for example. Power users will also soon see access statistics for any file in OneDrive and SharePoint. |
Distributor of plans for 3D-printed guns puts his product back in circulation | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Cody Wilson, the self-described crypto-anarchist who on Monday was blocked from distributing schematics for 3D-printed guns online, is making good on his promise for “one hell of a week.” I am about to give you one hell of a week. — Cody R. Wilson (@Radomysisky) Exploiting what Wilson says is a loophole in the judge’s injunction against the distribution of the plans for how to print a firearm using 3D printers, Wilson has replaced the “download” option for the schematics on his website with an option to purchase. At a news conference in Texas, Wilson said he had begun selling the plans on Tuesday morning and had already received nearly 400 orders, . “Anyone who wants to get these files is going to get them,” the AP quoted Wilson. “They can name their own price.” By selling the schematics and distributing them via email or secure digital download, it looks like Wilson may just skirt the judge’s injunction on the distribution of the plans. As in its report on Wilson’s plans, the judge who issued the ruling wrote that, The Arms Export Control Act is the original statute that the State Department cited when it . Then, in 2015, Wilson counter-sued the State Department claiming that his First Amendment free speech rights had been violated by the State Department order. After several years of litigation, the government blinked and, earlier this year, settled with Wilson — that he had a First Amendment right to distribute the plans. However, in a Monday ruling, Judge Robert S. Lasnik of the Federal District Court in Seattle ruled in favor of attorneys general from Washington, D.C. and 19 states who argued that the distribution of 3D-printed guns posed a threat to national safety. The judge wrote that any First Amendment arguments and issues “are dwarfed by the irreparable harms the states are likely to suffer if the existing restrictions are withdrawn and that, over all, the public interest strongly supports maintaining the status quo through the pendency of this litigation.” That ruling extends a July 31 temporary restraining order on distribution of the files until the case brought by the attorneys general is settled. By distributing the plans for the 3D-printed weapons, Wilson runs the risk of being held in contempt of court — something that the anarchist appears to relish. Importantly, the plans have already made their way onto other platforms. Earlier this week, a book that compiled all of the schematics in one bound edition . The online retailer took it down. |
Facebook has committed to using 100% renewable power for global operations by 2020 | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Earlier today, Facebook said that and using 100 percent renewable energy to power global operations at the social networking giant by the end of 2020. So, while the company (or garbage influencers from engaging in influence operations), at least they’ll be doing it with less of an effect on climate change. Facebook gave itself a well-deserved pat on the back for its . The company bought over 3 gigawatts of new solar and wind energy since its first renewable energy purchase in 2013 (that includes 2.5 gigawatts in the past 12 months alone — a rate of acquisition that makes the intervening years look… well… kind of paltry). What’s especially good about the Facebook renewable purchases is that they’re not just offset agreements — deals where a company buys renewable energy in some far-flung geography to offset the power they’re buying in local markets that relies on traditional carbon-based fuel sources. “All of these wind and solar projects are new and on the same grid as our data centers,” the company said. “That means that each of these projects brings jobs, investment and a healthier environment to the communities that host us — from Prineville, Oregon, and Los Lunas, New Mexico, to Henrico, Virginia, and Luleå, Sweden.” The targets that Facebook is making public today are part of the company’s commitment to the Paris Agreement through the “We Are Still In” initiative, the company said. For Facebook, the announcement is something of a victory lap. Back in 2015, the company set a goal of having 50 percent of its power supplied to facilities from renewable energy sources by 2018. It actually hit that target in 2017. |
Instagram announces verification requests, transparency tools and stronger 2FA | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Instagram has introduced a wide-ranging set of new tools today with security and transparency in mind. In a blog post titled “New Tools to Keep Instagram Safe,” the company is announcing three significant updates: an “About This Account” section to provide users more context about accounts with large followings, a form through which accounts can request a coveted blue verified badge and support for third-party authenticator apps. Instagram’s new “About This Account” section is designed to give users more information that they can use when evaluating the legitimacy of an account. The feature will be available by tapping the menu button from an account with substantial reach and will provide information like when an account was created, the country in which it is based, accounts that share followers and a lineage of that account’s username changes over the last year. The feature will also link accounts with large audiences to the Instagram ads they are running, a nod to recent conversations around ad transparency in light of Russian government-sponsored political ads and disinformation seeping into social platforms. According to Instagram, “In September, people who have accounts that reach large audiences can review the information about their accounts that will soon be publicly available.” When that period is over, the About This Account tool will launch to users around the globe. The second major Instagram change will offer accounts a path toward verification on the platform, standardizing a process that’s generally been opaque. A blue verified badge can be requested through a user’s own profile by tapping the menu icon, choosing Settings, and “Request Verification.” Instagram will then review the request, asking users to “provide your account username, your full name and a copy of your legal or business identification,” information that will not be made available to the public. Last but certainly not least, Instagram is adding support for third-party authenticator apps like Google Authenticator and DUO Mobile that provide more robust methods of two-factor authentication (2FA). The move is a to make Instagram more robust against threats to user accounts that target text-based 2FA, which is notoriously vulnerable to sim hijacking attacks. “We’ve been focused on the safety of our platform since the very beginning, and today’s updates build upon our existing tools, such as our spam and abusive content filters and the ability to report or block accounts,” Instagram co-founder and CTO Mike Krieger said in a statement about the updates. “We know we have more work to do to keep bad actors off Instagram, and we are committed to continuing to build more tools to do just that.” |
Yes, Slack is having connectivity issues again (Update: It’s back) | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | No, it’s not just you. Yes, Slack is having connectivity issues yet again. Though this time, they seem a bit less pronounced. I know we’re having some problems off and on, with different channels appearing offline. For the most part, however, communication is still up, so you probably won’t be able to convince your boss to take the rest of the day off. Sorry. We're investigating the cause of connectivity issues affecting all users. Thanks for your patience. — Slack (@SlackHQ) Slack acknowledged the problems on , noting, “Folks are having troubles connecting to their workspaces. We’re looking into the cause and will have updates shortly.” The site experience earlier this month and . We’ll update shortly after those updates arrive shortly. Shortly. Things appear to be back to normal. Here’s the full rundown from Slack, On August 28, 2018 between 10:15amPDT and 10:59amPDT, Slack experienced a 44-minute outage where all users were unable to establish new connections to the Slack service. Users who were already connected to the service were able to remain connected during this time. A configuration change at 10:15amPDT accessed incorrect settings and prevented service access for new connections. We reverted the configuration change at 10:59amPDT and new connections to the service were able to resume. We called the all clear at 11:23amPDT. We are currently hard at work to scope preventative measures to ensure this does not happen in the future. |
FirstMark Capital’s Catherine Ulrich is joining us at TechCrunch Sessions: AR/VR | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Before joining FirstMark as a managing partner this past year, Ulrich served as the chief product officer at Shutterstock and previously held a number of executive roles at Weight Watchers. Ulrich recently led the firm’s investment in Parsley Health, an ambitious medtech startup looking to reimagine the healthcare industry with its membership service. FirstMark Capital is a New York City VC firm that has made a name for itself in the past decade with smart early-stage bets. They’ve made notable investments in Airbnb, Frame.io, Shopify, Pinterest, DraftKings and Riot Games, among many others. While so much of the AR/VR scene has been pushing forward in LA and San Francisco, FirstMark is firmly rooted in NY, though they have managed to begin experimenting with investments in the space. The firm led 3D object platform Sketchfab’s $7 million Series A. The tool has become a popular hub for 3D models that can be shared and purchased by creators. While other more established firms have been reticent to pump money into a field with so many variables, others see the massive opportunity presented by AR/VR as well worth the massive risk. With so many of today’s massive tech giants arguing that AR and VR will be the most critical future platforms, it’s really a question of when the timing will be right and which startups have the longevity to make it there. We’ll zero in on all of these questions and more when Ulrich takes to the stage at our . Early-bird tickets are now on sale for $99 — that’s 50 percent off before prices go up! Student tickets are available for $45. You can get your tickets . Find out more about the event, see more speakers and join our newsletter . |
Facebook expands its Express Wi-Fi program for developing markets via hardware partnerships | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | Facebook is today a partner program for its , which helps bring higher-speed connections to developing markets, including India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania. The program itself involves having local business owners install Wi-Fi hotspots, where internet service is provided by local ISPs, mobile network operators, and others that Facebook has partnered with. Now, Facebook is launching a new partner program that will allow access point manufacturers to build devices compatible with Express Wi-Fi. Its debut lineup of partners for “Express Wi-Fi Certified,” as the partner program is called, include Arista, , and , an ARRIS Company. Facebook first began testing Express Wi-Fi three years ago, and has since expanded it to the five above countries and 10 partners. The is to create an entrepreneurial grassroots base for the its Wi-Fi service – that is, the operators and ISPs would be working with local entrepreneurs who want to resell internet access in their own communities. The partners set the prices, but Facebook provides the software. The company has tried to address the needs of developing markets before, via its zero-rating program Free Basics. But this program was criticized over net neutrality concerns, as it only provided access to specific websites – like Facebook, of course – to the developing markets. India eventually that program in 2016, as a result. Express Wi-Fi, on the other hand, offers full, unrestricted access to the web, not a selection of pre-approved sites and services. It’s one of Facebook’s many connectivity initiatives today, along with others like , rural access programs, drones, and other projects. The new partner program for Express Wi-Fi, announced today, was built to address specific issues Facebook and its partners faced in the field, the company now explains. It says it has been working with the manufacturers to build new access points that better detect registration pages and more accurately count the amount of Wi-Fi data consumed. This will allow the Wi-Fi service providers to sell prepaid access as well as different traffic classes – like offering some services or content for free, while charging for others. Presumably, this would be another avenue of making Facebook free to developing markets down the road. Facebook says having hardware manufacturers on board will help its operator partners more easily set up and manage their Express Wi-Fi hotspots. Weak and expensive connectivity is a big barrier to Facebook adoption in developing markets, especially as user growth in developed regions is – or, even at times. In July, Facebook no user growth in the U.S. and Canada, and a loss of European users it attribute to GDPR requirements. Developing regions, however, are still coming online and could bring Facebook a whole host of new users, if people can get connected. |
Five (more) reasons why Disrupt SF is where you should be on Sept. 5-7 | Ned Desmond | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | null |
It’s Friday so relax and watch a hard drive defrag forever on Twitch | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | It’s been a while since I defragged — years, probably, because these days for a number of reasons computers don’t really need to. But perhaps it is who need to defrag. And what better way to defrag your brain after a long week than by watching the strangely satisfying defragmentation process taking place on a simulated DOS machine, complete with fan and HDD noise? , which has defrag.exe running 24/7 for your enjoyment. I didn’t realize how much I missed the sights and sounds of this particular process. I’ve always found ASCII visuals soothing, and there was something satisfying about watching all those little blocks get moved around to form a uniform whole. What were they doing down there on the lower right hand side of the hard drive anyway? That’s what like to know. Afterwards I’d launch a state of the art game like just to convince myself it was loading faster. There’s also that nice purring noise that a hard drive would make (and which is recreated here). At least, I thought of it as purring. For the drive, it’s probably like being waterboarded. But I did always enjoy having the program running while keeping everything else quiet, perhaps as I was going to bed, so I could listen to its little clicks and whirrs. Sometimes it would hit a particularly snarled sector and really go to town, grinding like crazy. That’s how you knew it was working. The typo is, no doubt, deliberate. The whole thing is simulated, of course. There isn’t really just an endless pile of hard drives waiting to be defragged on decades-old hardware for our enjoyment (except in my box of old computer things). But the simulation is wonderfully complete, although if you think about it you probably never used DOS on a 16:9 monitor, and probably not at 1080p. It’s okay. We can sacrifice authenticity so we don’t have to windowbox it. The defragging will never stop at TwitchDefrags, and that’s comforting to me. It means I don’t have to build a 98SE rig and spend forever copying things around so I have a nicely fragmented volume. Honestly they should include this sound on those little white noise machines. For me this is definitely better than whale noises. |
The public finance opportunity | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | If you’re a certain age, it’s likely that you’ve never given a second thought to buying a municipal bond or the process of bond buying, even if you’ve intuited, rightly, that’s it’s an intentionally opaque business. Yet there could be a big opportunity for startups, and for people looking for places to invest, and for cities with crumbling infrastructures, in disrupting the status quo. First, there’s a strong case for buying bonds. Late last year, the Trump administration capped at $10,000 the amount that taxpayers can deduct in property tax and local and state income tax. Most people with hefty tax bills are benefiting in other ways from that same new tax bill, but this aspect of it isn’t so great for them, and municipal bonds can help. The reason: interest income paid on muni bonds is exempt from federal tax. (Bonds issued within one’s state can also be free of state tax.) What about people without hefty tax bills? For one thing, bonds are a very safe investment. They’re not sexy, it’s true ( they typically deliver interest in the single digits), but they also feature low default rates. Whether debts from states, cities, or counties, they’re typically government guaranteed and paid back in full at the end of their term. In fact, muni bond default rates have been as low as below .03 percent over the last decade. What’s also compelling — perhaps even more so — is that bonds can give residents an opportunity to help out the community where they live. For example, Oakland, Ca. voters in 2016 overwhelmingly approved a $600 million bond to fix old city streets and build affordable housing. You might be wondering at this point where the new opportunity lies and what role tech can play. Let’s start with the moolah, which there happens to be a lot of sloshing around the municipal bond market. Last year, Morningstar Direct reported $34 billion in net inflows to municipal bond funds and exchange-traded funds, and there’s a lot of action happening outside these kinds of products, which package up a bunch of bonds to create a diversified portfolio for investors. Like any financial services disruptor, the idea here is to offer what the big financial institutions are offering but to do it at less cost. There’s also room to create many more bonds than are currently available. As the New York Times earlier this year, fewer municipal bonds have been hitting the market ever since the financial crisis of 2008. More, the Trump administration’s new tax law revision eliminated something called “advance refunding issues,” which the Times describes as a type of municipal bond financing that accounts for around 15 percent of the market. Where there’s constrained supply, there’s demand. Right now, there aren’t tons of startups paying attention to public finance, and perhaps just one company laser focused on bringing the muni bond market into the 21st century: , which is a six-year-old, Bay Area-based company that’s very progressive, to say the least, for a bond broker. In 2017, its technology enabled the city of Cambridge, Ma., to create $2 million of “mini bonds” that allowed residents to earn tax-exempt interest for smaller check sizes than typically possible, and the residents were able to invest that money directly in a variety of projects, without going through a middleman. (Apparently, it was successful; Cambridge staged a mini bond sale earlier this year.) Earlier this year, Neighborly and Berkeley, Ca. announced an initiative to use blockchain technology to reshape the face of municipal finance for social good. The city, UC Berkeley Blockchain Lab, and Neighborly launched what they called the Berkeley Blockchain Initiative to develop a first-of-its-kind tokenized municipal bond and drive investments into cash-strapped projects in Berkeley. The project is still in development, (Neighborly has some competition for underwriting it), but if it works, it could provide a roadmap for other cities. Whether Neighborly winds up being a pioneer in the space- – or else trampled by a newer entrant — remains to be seen, but a recent on-stage sit-down with a longtime political strategist turned investor, Bradley Tusk, opened our eyes to the possibilities. You can check out part of that conversation below. Note that Tusk is not an investor in Neighborly but has more recently begun advising the company. Our chat has been edited for length. BT: We have a system now that, on the one hand works. Governments can issue debt. People will pay for it. You can build projects and people will get paid back. That basically works. But it’s a very opaque, very closed system. And in the way that tech has managed to disrupt other very closed industries and force change and make them more cost efficient and transparent, there’s no reason that can’t happen in public finance as well. [Earlier in my career], I was at Lehman Brothers . . . and they didn’t know where to put me so they stuck me in public finance. The people who worked there were honest, they weren’t the people who bankrupted the global economy. But they made a lot of money, and effectively, it was just all layered on top of the taxpayers. It’s built into [banks’] underwriting costs. And you just don’t need that any more. BT: I think blockchain gets confused with crypto and ultimately, it’s just a better system of piping, a more efficient way of moving data across a ledger from Point A to Point B and done n a way where it’s distributed across lots of different places so that it’s more secure and less hackable. But it’s plumbing; it’s infrastructure at the end of the day. So it will evolve to the point where it will just make a transaction that’s complicated and has lots of different parties and pieces just easier and faster. It’s no different than how the Internet makes it faster to do things we used to do. Email is faster than writing a letter. Text is faster than email. [To your point], what Neighborly is trying to achieve isn’t solely dependent on blockchain. I don’t think it existed in the form it does now when [Neighborly founder and CEO Jase. Wilson] first came up with this idea. The main notion is you have a public finance system that’s expensive and opaque and not particularly democratic. You meanwhile have a lack of awareness by the people most impacted by the decisions [about where bond money should go], and those are real inefficiencies in the marketplace that Neighborly and other companies are trying to do address. Blockchain should just help them do it more efficiently over time. BT: Both. It can participate in a process and make bonds available or it can work with a municipality that, say, wants to create community-owned broadband. BT: Yeah, there’s a huge problem right now, which is that you have all these firms that advise government on issuing debt or participate in the process that, even though a lot of them are prohibited from giving money directly to candidates, they are very, very entrenched. They have relationships with mid-level people at budget offices everywhere. This is a cartel that has to be taken on, just like Uber has had to take on the taxi industry and Airbnb has taken on hotels. In some ways, it’s an even harder cartel to fight because it’s so opaque. No one really understands how the budgeting process works internally, so it’s a big cartel and it’s a silent cartel, which in some ways is the most powerful of all, so it’s a pretty big fight. I give Neighborly a lot of credit for taking it on. BT: [Not really.] One company does it well, then 15 more pop up. The first one has to do all the heavy lifting and take on all the fights and that’s probably what’s going to happen here, too. When market opens up, and people realize there’s money to be made, you’ll see more come in, but right now, there’s just one company that I’m aware of that’s doing most of the work. Public finance departments are good at really working over who gets to issue and underwrite the debt, and Neighborly would rather live in a world where they didn’t have to play that game, but to some extent, the real world of politics still exists. |
Y Combinator invests in non-invasive breast cancer screening bra EVA | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | According to a , an estimated 266,120 women will be newly diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States this year and (according to a 2016 estimate) between $60,000 and $134,000 on average for treatment and care. But, after hundreds of thousands of dollars and non-quantifiable emotional stress for them and their families, the American Cancer Society still estimates 40,920 women will lose their battle to the disease this year. Worldwide, roughly 1.7 million women will be diagnosed with the disease yearly, according to by The World Cancer Research Fund International. While these numbers are stark, they do little to fully capture just how devastating a breast cancer diagnosis is for women and their loved ones. This is a feeling that ‘ co-founder and CEO Julián Ríos Cantú is unfortunately very familiar with. “My mom is a two-time breast cancer survivor,” Cantú told TechCrunch. “The first time she was diagnosed I was eight years old.” Cantú says that his mother’s second diagnosis was originally missed through standard screenings because her high breast density obscured the tumors from the X-ray. As a result, she lost both of her breasts, but has since fully recovered. “At that moment I realized that if that was the case for a woman with private insurance and a prevention mindset, then for most women in developing countries, like Mexico where we’re from, the outcome could’ve not been a mastectomy but death,” said Cantú. Following his mother’s experience, Cantú resolved to develop a way to improve the value of women’s lives and support them in identifying breast abnormalities and cancers early in order to ensure the highest likelihood of survival. To do this, at the age of 18 Cantú designed — a bio-sensing bra insert that uses thermal sensing and artificial intelligence to identify abnormal temperatures in the breast that can correlate to tumor growth. Cantú says that EVA is not only an easy tool for self-screening but also fills in gaps in current screening technology. Today, women have fairly limited options when it comes to breast cancer screening. They can opt for a breast ultrasound (which has lower specificity than other options), or a breast MRI (which has higher associated costs), but the standard option is a yearly or bi-yearly mammogram for women 45 and older. This method requires a visit to a doctor, manual manipulation of the breasts by a technologist and exposure to low-levels of radiation for an X-ray scan of the breast tissue. While this method is relatively reliable, there are still crucial shortcomings, Higia Technologies’ medical adviser Dr. Richard Kaszynski M.D., PhD told TechCrunch. “We need to identify a real-world solution to diagnosing breast cancer earlier,” said Dr. Kaszynski. “It’s always a trade-off when we’re talking about mammography because you have the radiation exposure, discomfort and anxiety in regards to exposing yourself to a third-party.” Dr. Kaszynski continued to say that these yearly or bi-yearly mammograms also leave a gap in care in which interval cancers — cancers that begin to take hold between screenings — have time to grow unhindered. Additionally, Dr. Kaszynski says mammograms are not highly sensitive when it comes to detecting tumors in dense breast tissue, like that of Cantú’s mom. Dense breast tissue, which is more common in younger women and is present in , can mask the presence of tumors in the breast from mammograms. Through its use of non-invasive, thermal sensors EVA is able to collect thermal data from a variety of breast densities that can enable women of all ages to more easily (and more frequently) perform breast examinations. Here’s how it works: To start, the user inserts the thermal sensing cups (which come in three standard sizes ranging from A-D) into a sports bra, open EVA’s associated EVA Health App, follow the instructions and wait for 60 minutes while the cup collects thermal data. From there, EVA will send the data via Bluetooth to the app and an AI will analyze the results to provide the user with an evaluation. If EVA believes the user may have an abnormality that puts them at risk, the app will recommend follow-up steps for further screening with a healthcare professional. While sacrificing your personal health data to the whims of an AI might seem like a scary (and dangerous, if the device were to be hacked) idea to some, Cantú says Higia Technologies has taken steps to protect its users’ data, including advanced encryption of its server and a HIPAA-compliant privacy infrastructure. So far, EVA has undergone clinical trials in Mexico, and through these trials has seen 87.9 percent sensibility and 81.7 percent specificity from the device. In Mexico, the company has already sold 5,000 devices and plans to begin shipping the first several hundred by October of this year. And the momentum for EVA is only increasing. In 2017, Cantú was awarded Mexico’s Presidential Medal for Science and Technology and so far this year Higia Technologies has won first place in the SXSW’s International Pitch Competition, been named one of “30 Most Promising Businesses of 2018” and this summer received a $120,000 investment from Y Combinator. Moving forward, the company is looking to enter the U.S. market and has plans to begin clinical trials with Stanford Medicine X in October 2018 that should run for about a year. Following these trials, Dr. Kaszynski says that Higia Technologies will continue the process of seeking FDA approval to sell the inserts first as a medical device, accessible at a doctor’s office, and then as a device that users can have at home. The final pricing for the device is still being decided, but Cantú says he wants the product to be as affordable and accessible as possible so it can be the first choice for women in developing countries where preventative cancer screening is desperately needed. |
Tesla lost nearly $8 billion in shareholder value this week and its board should be ashamed | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | Over the last five days, shareholders watched the value of their stock decline by roughly 16 percent and saw nearly $8 billion in value erased, as the company’s celebrity chief executive, Elon Musk, had what amounts to a very public breakdown. However, Musk is not the only person responsible for the collapse of Tesla’s stock price. As The New York Times article which on the public markets makes clear, . For months, Musk has been showing signs of strain (generously speaking), and has been accused of making questionable decisions to drive growth and stifle criticism or dissent at the revolutionary electric vehicle company he founded. During that time, as Shira Ovide notes in her piece from Bloomberg, Tesla’s board (primarily composed of Musk’s friends, relatives and initial investors) took no public steps to control or manage the situation. Some Tesla board members are reportedly concerned about Elon Musk's workload and his use of Ambien. If so, here's a solution for directors: Do your jobs. — Shira Ovide (@ShiraOvide) Privately and on background the board (or certain members) expressed concern over Musk’s recent behavior, drug use (both medicinal and recreational) and Twitter habits. Those concerns should have been aired at the board level and the company’s directors should have exercised their ability to manage the mercurial Musk as his public actions became increasingly unmoored. Something could have happened after the . It could have happened around the time of the that were made . It could have happened after At any of those moments the board could have stepped in and demanded that Musk face the consequences for actions that cost his company billions of dollars. They did not, and now Tesla’s position is more precarious than ever. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Musk for his public statements around privatization plans for Tesla that may or may not have been real. It’s another distraction for the company’s chief executive at a time when he is already under tremendous pressure to meet production targets for the company’s troubled Model 3 rollout ( ). The problem is that Musk’s cult of personality is so intertwined with Tesla’s corporate identity, there’s a fear that as Musk goes so goes Tesla. That’s no way to run a business, and it’s no way to ensure long-term value for shareholders (either as a public or private company). Ultimately the board at Tesla needs to step in and take a more active role in overseeing the company, before the next decision they find themselves confronted with is the company’s liquidation. |
The Automatica automates pour-over coffee in a charming and totally unnecessary way | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | Most mornings, after sifting through the night’s mail haul and skimming the headlines, I make myself a cup of coffee. I use a simple pour-over cone and paper filters, and (in what is perhaps my ), I grind the beans by hand. I like the manual aspect of it all. Which is why this robotic pour-over machine is to me so perverse… and so tempting. , this gadget, currently raising funds on Kickstarter but seemingly complete as far as development and testing, is basically a way to do pour-over coffee without holding the kettle yourself. You fill the kettle and place your mug and cone on the stand in front of it. The water is brought to a boil and the kettle tips automatically. Then the whole mug-and-cone portion spins slowly, distributing the water around the grounds, stopping after 11 ounces has been distributed over the correct duration. You can use whatever cone and mug you want as long as they’re about the right size. Of course, the whole point of pour-over coffee is that it’s simple: you can do it at home, while on vacation, while hiking or indeed at a coffee shop with a bare minimum of apparatus. All you need is the coffee beans, the cone, a paper filter — although some cones omit even that — and of course a receptacle for the product. (It’s not the simplest — that’d be Turkish, but that’s coffee for werewolves.) Why should anyone want to disturb this simplicity? Well, the same reason we have the other 20 methods for making coffee: convenience. And in truth, pour-over is already automated in the form of drip machines. So the obvious next question is, why this dog and pony show of an open-air coffee bot? Aesthetics! Nothing wrong with that. What goes on in the obscure darkness of a drip machine? No one knows. But this — this you can watch, audit, understand. Even if the machinery is complex, the result is simple: hot water swirls gently through the grounds. And although it’s fundamentally a bit absurd, it a good-looking machine, with wood and brass accents and a tasteful kettle shape. (I do love a tasteful kettle.) The creators say the machine is built to last “generations,” a promise which must of course be taken with a grain of salt. Anything with electronics has the potential to short out, to develop a bug, to be troubled by humidity or water leaks. The heating element may fail. The motor might stutter or a hinge catch. But all that is true of most coffee machines, and unlike those, this one appears to be made with care and high-quality materials. The cracking and warping you can expect in thin molded plastic won’t happen to this thing, and if you take care of it, it should at least last several years. And it better, for the minimum pledge price that gets you a machine: $450. That’s quite a chunk of change. But like audiophiles, coffee people are kind of suckers for a nice piece of equipment. There is of course the standard crowdfunding ; this isn’t a pre-order but a pledge to back this interesting hardware startup, and if it’s anything like the last five or six campaigns I’ve backed, it’ll arrive late after facing unforeseen difficulties with machining, molds, leaks and so on. |
YC-backed Mutiny helps B2B business personalize their website for each visitor | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | , which is part of the current batch of startups at accelerator Y Combinator, helps business-to-business, software-as-a-service companies present a message that’s customized to each visitor on their website. Co-founder and CEO Jaleh Rezaei said this concept is alive and well in the analog world: When she was at VMware, sales reps were given materials to help them tailor their pitch for each prospective customer. Then, when she was one of the early employees at HR services startup , she tried to do something similar online, only to find that existing software wasn’t quite up to the task. There are , but Rezaei asked, “Who wants to create a thousand versions of your website?” And there are , but Rezaei argued that they’re really designed to test “generic content” and use “very little audience intelligence.” And as for creating your own personalization tools, many companies will find that it requires “way too much engineering effort.” That’s where Mutiny comes in. It integrates with existing data sources to allow businesses to divide their customers into segments. Then they can use Mutiny’s graphical interface to create personalized elements of the webpage for each segment. For example, when you visit the homepage of Mutiny customer , things like the customer testimonials and the call to action will change depending on the size of your company. Or when customers click through from an email marketing campaign, they’ll see a credit card offer tailored to their name and company. These kinds of changes might not seem all that significant, but Rezaei said that when someone visits a B2B website, they’re probably interested in the product or service already. If they’re not converting, it’s probably because “they didn’t find what they wanted right away.” Mutiny can help surface the right content or the right message for the right customer. The startup will also compare the personalized results to the generic webpage to help determine what does and doesn’t improve the bottom line. Rezaei said some of Mutiny’s early customers (who include Gusto, Infusionsoft and Brex) have seen conversion rates improve by 20 to 180 percent. “That’s not to say that every test performs better, but the nice thing here is that you immediately see how something is performing,” she added. Eventually, Rezaei is hoping to expand Mutiny’s technology so that it can personalize every aspect of the B2B purchase experience, including email and ad retargeting. “Our passion as a founding team is growth,” she said. “Progress occurs not when you just build something, but when that product makes it into the hands of the person for whom it was intended to help.” |
Movado Group acquires watch startup MVMT | John Biggs | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | The Movado Group, which sells multiple brands, including Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger and Hugo Boss, has purchased MVMT, a small watch company founded by Jacob Kassan and Kramer LaPlante in 2013. The company, which advertised heavily on Facebook, logged $71 million in revenue in 2017. Movado purchased the company for $100 million. “The acquisition of MVMT will provide us greater access to millennials and advances our Digital Center of Excellence initiative with the addition of a powerful brand managed by a successful team of highly creative, passionate and talented individuals,” Movado Chief Executive Efraim Grinberg said. MVMT makes simple watches for the millennial market in the vein of Fossil or Daniel Wellington. However, the company carved out a niche by advertising heavily on social media and being one of the first microbrands with a solid online presence. “It provides an opportunity to Movado Group’s portfolio as MVMT continues to cross-sell products within its existing portfolio, expand product offerings within its core categories of watches, sunglasses and accessories, and grow its presence in new markets through its direct-to-consumer and wholesale business,” said Grinberg.
MVMT is well-known as a “fashion brand,” namely a brand that sells cheaper quartz watches that are sold on style versus complexity or cost. Their pieces include standard three-handed models and newer quartz chronographs. |
6 million users had installed third-party Twitter clients | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | Twitter tried to downplay the impact would have on its community and the third-party Twitter clients preferred by many power users by saying that “less than 1%” of Twitter developers were using these old APIs. Twitter is correct in its characterization of the size of this developer base, but it’s overlooking millions of third-party app users in the process. According to data from Sensor Tower, six million App Store and Google Play users installed the top five third-party Twitter clients between January 2014 and July 2018. Over the past year, these top third-party apps were downloaded 500,000 times. This data is largely free of reinstalls, the firm also said. The top third-party Twitter apps users installed over the past three-and-a-half years have included: Twitterrific, Echofon, TweetCaster, Tweetbot and Ubersocial. Of course, some portion of those users may have since switched to Twitter’s native app for iOS or Android, or they may run both a third-party app and Twitter’s own app in parallel. Even if only some of these six million users remain, they represent a small, vocal and — in some cases, prominent — user base. It’s one that is very upset right now, too. And for a company that just posted , it seems odd that Twitter would not figure out a way to accommodate this crowd, or even bring them on board its new API platform to make money from them. Twitter, apparently, was weighing data and facts, not user sentiment and public perception, when it made this decision. But some things have more value than numbers on a spreadsheet. They are part of a company’s history and culture. Of course, Twitter has every right to blow all that up and move on, but that doesn’t make it the right decision. To be fair, Twitter is not lying when it says this is a small group. The third-party user base is tiny compared with Twitter’s native app user base. During the same time that six million people were downloading third-party apps, the official Twitter app was installed a whopping 560 million times across iOS and Android. That puts the third-party apps’ share of installs at about 1.1 percent of the total. That user base may have been shrinking over the years, too. During the past year, while the top third-party apps were installed half a million times, Twitter’s app was installed 117 million times. This made third-party apps’ share only about 0.4 percent of downloads, giving the official app a 99 percent market share. But third-party app developers and the apps’ users are power users. Zealots, even. Evangelists. Twitter itself credited them with pioneering “product features we all know and love,” like the mute option, pull-to-refresh and more. That means the apps’ continued existence brings more value to Twitter’s service than numbers alone can show. They are part of Twitter’s history. You can even Initially, Twitter only had a typeset version of its name. Then Twitterrific came along and introduced a bird for its logo. Twitter soon followed. which is now standard Twitter lingo. (The company used “twitter-ing.” Can you imagine?) These third-party apps also play a role in retaining users who struggle with the new user experience Twitter has adopted — its algorithmic timeline. Instead, the apps offer a chronological view of tweets, as some continue to prefer. Twitter’s decision to cripple these developers’ apps is shameful. It shows a lack of respect for Twitter’s history, its power user base, its culture of innovation and its very own nature as a platform, not a destination. P.S.: twitterrific |
Incentivai launches to simulate how hackers break blockchains | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | Cryptocurrency projects can crash and burn if developers don’t predict how humans will abuse their blockchains. Once a decentralized digital economy is released into the wild and the coins start to fly, it’s tough to implement fixes to the smart contracts that govern them. That’s why is coming out of stealth today with its artificial intelligence simulations that test not just for security holes, but for how greedy or illogical humans can crater a blockchain community. Crypto developers can use Incentivai’s service to fix their systems before they go live. “There are many ways to check the code of a smart contract, but there’s no way to make sure the economy you’ve created works as expected,” says Incentivai’s solo founder Piotr Grudzień. “I came up with the idea to build a simulation with machine learning agents that behave like humans so you can look into the future and see what your system is likely to behave like.” Incentivai will graduate from Y Combinator next week and already has a few customers. They can either pay Incentivai to audit their project and produce a report, or they can host the AI simulation tool like a software-as-a-service. The first deployments of blockchains it’s checked will go out in a few months, and the startup has released some case studies to prove its worth. “People do theoretical work or logic to prove that under certain conditions, this is the optimal strategy for the user. But users are not rational. There’s lots of unpredictable behavior that’s difficult to model,” Grudzień explains. Incentivai explores those illogical trading strategies so developers don’t have to tear out their hair trying to imagine them. There’s no rewind button in the blockchain world. The immutable and irreversible qualities of this decentralized technology prevent inventors from meddling with it once in use, for better or worse. If developers don’t foresee how users could make false claims and bribe others to approve them, or take other actions to screw over the system, they might not be able to thwart the attack. But given the right open-ended incentives (hence the startup’s name), AI agents will try everything they can to earn the most money, exposing the conceptual flaws in the project’s architecture. “The strategy is the same as what DeepMind does with AlphaGo, testing different strategies,” Grudzień explains. He developed his AI chops earning a masters at Cambridge before working on natural language processing research for Microsoft. Here’s how Incentivai works. First a developer writes the smart contracts they want to test for a product like selling insurance on the blockchain. Incentivai tells its AI agents what to optimize for and lays out all the possible actions they could take. The agents can have different identities, like a hacker trying to grab as much money as they can, a faker filing false claims or a speculator that cares about maximizing coin price while ignoring its functionality. Incentivai then tweaks these agents to make them more or less risk averse, or care more or less about whether they disrupt the blockchain system in its totality. The startup monitors the agents and pulls out insights about how to change the system. For example, Incentivai might learn that uneven token distribution leads to pump and dump schemes, so the developer should more evenly divide tokens and give fewer to early users. Or it might find that an insurance product where users vote on what claims should be approved needs to increase its bond price that voters pay for verifying a false claim so that it’s not profitable for voters to take bribes from fraudsters. Grudzień has done some predictions about his own startup too. He thinks that if the use of decentralized apps rises, there will be a lot of startups trying to copy his approach to security services. He says there are already some doing token engineering audits, incentive design and consultancy, but he hasn’t seen anyone else with a functional simulation product that’s produced case studies. “As the industry matures, hink we’ll see more and more complex economic systems that need this.” |
YC-backed Sterblue aims to enable smarter drone inspections | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | As government regulation for commercial drone usage seems to be trending in a very positive direction for the companies involved, there is an ever-growing opportunity for drone startups to utilize artificial intelligence to deliver insights without requiring much human effort. , a French drone software startup that is launching out of Y Combinator’s latest class of companies, is aiming to get off-the-shelf drones inspecting large outdoor structures up close with automated insights that identify anomalies that need a second look. The startup’s software is specifically focused on enabling drones to easily inspect large power lines or wind turbines with simple automated trajectories that can get a job done much quicker and with less room for human error. The software also allows the drones to get much closer to the large structures they are scanning so the scanned images are as high-quality as possible. Compared to navigating a tight urban environment, Sterblue has the benefit of there being very few airborne anomalies around these structures, so autonomously flying along certain flight paths is as easy as having a CAD structure available and enough wiggle room to correct for things like wind condition. Operators basically just have to connect their drones to the Sterblue cloud platform where they can upload photos and view 3D models of the structures they have scanned while letting the startup’s neural net identify any issues that need further attention. All and all, Sterblue says their software can let drones get within three meters of power lines and wind turbines, which allows their AI systems to easily detect anomalies from the photos being taken. Sterblue says their system can detect defects as small as one millimeter in size. The startup was initially working on their own custom drone hardware but decided that their efforts were best spent supporting off-the-shelf devices from companies like DJI, with their software solution sitting on top. The founding team is composed of former Airbus employees that are focusing early efforts on utility companies, with some of the first customers based in Europe, Africa and Asia. |
Sino-US investment firms are targeting over $4 billion for new funds launched this year | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | As limited partners increasingly demand greater exposure to emerging market opportunities, venture capital firms with a focus on Asia are bulking up their funds and chasing deals in an increasingly competitive race to own stakes in the next generation of local startups with global aspirations. Over the last year, firms, including , , and , have all significantly increased the targets for their new funds. If each firm hits their targets, there’s roughly $4.4 billion in new capital that could be flooding into an already scorching market for investment into Chinese startups, according to SEC filings. The largest of these new funds, by far, is , which has registered a new $1.8 billion fund with the Securities and Exchange Commission. has targeted $900 million for its latest fund, while and are each looking for $750 million for their own new investment vehicles, according to securities filings. Managing partners at the firms did not respond to a request for comment. These four firms are among the last standing from the initial flood of U.S.-based venture capital firms that poured into Asia (and China specifically) in the first decade of the new millennium. While marquee names like Kleiner Perkins, DFJ and others foundered in China, these four firms (along with global venture capital juggernauts like Sequoia Capital and NEA) put down deep roots and notched notable wins with investments in startups like Didi Chuxing, Kuaidi, Meituan-Dianping, Xiaomi and many more. In part, these massive new funds are simply a response to the new world that venture investors find themselves in thanks to the massive amounts of capital raised by SoftBank with its $100 billion Vision Fund, or Sequoia with its $9 billion new investment vehicle. Firms are also under pressure to raise more capital from limited partners, who want to reduce their exposure and consolidate their own investments around venture firms with track records of success and the ability to deploy capital into larger checks. Couple those facts with the (still) low cost of capital given where interest rates are, and the sustained growth of technology companies across emerging market geographies, and you have a more willing pool of investors that want to commit more capital to emerging technology ecosystems (this is happening in Latin America, too). But there are also some contours of China’s competitive environment that are pushing these venture capital firms to raise increasingly larger funds. One is the sheer size of the opportunity that exists for new technology companies in China. As the WeChat messaging service increasingly evolves into a new operating system, there are opportunities to scale quickly with larger infusions of capital to capture the market. Like their peers in the U.S., Chinese companies are also delaying their public offerings and spending more time to build a better outcome with their IPOs. That’s putting pressure on earlier-stage investors to raise capital so they don’t get crowded out in those later-stage rounds. Chinese entrepreneurs are also often putting in their own money to finance companies at the earliest stages, which means startups are more mature when they’re seeking their first round. It’s this phenomenon that leads to the $100 million Series A and B rounds that crop up in the Chinese market more regularly than in the U.S. |
Gillmor Gang: Private Lives | Steve Gillmor | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Michael Markman and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Tuesday, August 7, 2018. Waiting for the midterms, Twitter meets the Constitution, uncommon carriers, straw man superheros. G3: Helping Hands — Elisa Camahort Page, Francine Hardaway, Maria Ogneva and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 3, 2018. @stevegillmor, @fradice, @mickeleh, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=116413120 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302] |
Netflix tests video promos in between episodes, much to viewers’ dislike | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | Netflix is testing video promos that play in between episodes of shows a viewer is streaming, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The promos are full-screen videos, personalized to the user, featuring content Netflix would have otherwise suggested elsewhere in its user interface – like on a row of recommendations, for example. The promos also displace the preview information for the next episode being binged, like the title, description, and thumbnail that previously appeared on the right side of the screen. The test was first spotted by , following . A number of Twitter users are about the change, too. (See below examples.) We understand the introduction of promos in between the episodes is not a feature Netflix is rolling out to its subscribers at this time. Instead, it’s one of the hundreds of tests Netflix runs every year, many of which are focused on how to better promote Netflix’s original programming to its customers. This test is currently live for a small percentage of Netflix’s global audience. And unlike some prior tests, the promos may feature any content in Netflix’s catalog – not just its original programming. There is some misinformation about the way the test works out there because of what may be user error on the part of the original Reddit user, or an undocumented bug. The original Reddit post said these new video promos are “unskippable,” noting there’s a Continue button with a countdown timer on it that looks similar to the one you’d see on a YouTube ad. But we understand that the test in question users to push that Continue button at any time to move forward to the next episode. The promos, in other words, are interruptive, but they are not unskippable. Needless to say, consumer reaction to these promos – which consumers perceive as advertisements – has been fairly critical so far. Netflix is a paid subscription service, not an ad-supported one like Hulu with Limited Commercials. That means customers expect on-demand viewing with no ads. And they think of anything that disrupts their viewing as an advertisement, as a result. But Netflix is always trying to figure out how to better showcase its content for subscribers, in order to help them discover new shows and keep them engaged. It has run many experiments like this over the years, not all of which pan out. For example, , and more recently it began a test that . Only when Netflix sees data that proves a test increases user engagement or another metric it cares about will it roll out the feature to all subscribers. That’s been the case with those , for instance. While , they seem to be doing the job. The company’s longer-term goal is to make its user interface more video-rich and personalized, so it’s not surprising that it’s finding new ways to insert video into that experience. Netflix, reached for comment about the new test, offering the following statement: At Netflix, we conduct hundreds of tests every year so we can better understand what helps members more easily find something great to watch. A couple of years ago, we introduced video previews to the TV experience, because we saw that it significantly cut the time members spend browsing and helped them find something they would enjoy watching even faster. Since then, we have been experimenting even more with video based on personalized recommendations for shows and movies on the service or coming shortly, and continue to learn from our members. In this particular case, we are testing whether surfacing recommendations between episodes helps members discover stories they will enjoy faster. It is important to note that a member is able to skip a video preview at anytime if they are not interested. REALLY just played an ad between episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. Netflix officially ain’t shit. Ads AND they don’t have One Tree Hill? Bye Felicia. That’s it. I’ve had both for a while but has now taken over my household. — Sierra C. Johnson (@si8erra) for the record, this new ad setup that you have between episodes is stupid. It does not make me want to watch more shows, it just irritates me that I can’t read the preview for the next episode. Get rid of this shit! — Starfox51315 (@Starfox51315) . make it stop! Make the ads after a show I watch stop!!! — Frank Remley (@FrankRemley) Hey I can tolerate the ads at the top of my list of shows but between every episode I watch is getting stupid — Lee (@dogmeat707) Wow. added ads for their shows inbetween episodes. — Rowena Slytherin (@SaucySlytherin) did you seriously just hit me with an ad for your trash anime what the fuck — Intergalactic Tham (@Tham1700) , I don't need ads in between episodes. — Stacey (@stascream) I don’t like these ads you’ve started sliding in between my episodes of The Office! I’m well aware of what originals are on Netflix – don’t interrupt my binge watching to shove them down my throat! — Googie (@MaximumGoogie) if you bring ads to your programming, I will have no reason to continue. I pay for your programming to avoid commercials. Just a customers input. — JennyB (@itsgonnabfine) Please don't start forcing me to look at ads in-between episodes. It's bad enough I'm forced to watch a clip of some original show every time I open Netflix. I don't want to watch Orange is the New Black or Insatiable or The Package. — Carol Ann (@hiicatc) Exactly my reaction 🤣😂 Please don't 🙈 via — Chris Giddings (@cgidz89) This is new and I don't like it one bit. you have put drops/ads for content you've produced between episodes of whatever I'm watching. Don't I already pay for your service and see your content first when I load your app? — Matt Postma (@TD_Postie) Hey putting ads for your other shows between episode of something I am watching ruins what makes Netflix good. It makes me want to switch to other services. Please stop. — Adam Cullen (@Fictonia) |
Kiiroo launches an adventure in bi-directional teledildonics | John Biggs | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | In the future everyone will be naked for fifteen minutes. It’s with this novel thought in mind that I connect with a model named who will walk me through the new world of bi-directional teledildonic cam life. I was there to test a new device from Kiiroo called the Kiiroo Launch. This novel sex jar connects with a Flashlight – essentially a masturbator – and can send and receive signals from a remote dildo. When I first explored the three years ago and found it fascinating although, arguably, it was like having sex with a 3D printer. And so I was ready to work with Nazanin. This is going to be NSFW by the way. In the world of cam-based teledildonics the models usually wear some sort of vibrator connected to a tipping system. When the viewer tips them the model’s vibrator vibrates, adding a frisson of interactivity to what is usually a one-way street. This became the norm for most cam sites and the is a popular choice in the current cam world. What Kiiro has done is add that level of interactivity to its offerings. The Launch, for example, can send sensations to other devices including the , the We-Vibe, and the Kiiroo Pearl. You can either vibrate any of these things with tips or, in some cases, send signals from the Launch to the vibrator which sort of mimic your movements in real time. Cam site is the first site to enable this functionality and was also one of the first to enable Kiiroo in general, allowing models to send sensations to viewers using a robotic sex jar. I told you this would be NSFW.
The experience, for the most part, was quite pleasant. The Launch is an excellent device – – and it is far superior to the original Kiiroo Onyx I reviewed a few years ago. The Launch is a massive thing that holds an entirely separate sex toy inside it and it literally looks like a giant black egg sack.
I connected with the model using an app called Feel Connect that uses QR codes to link two phones or devices. In this case I linked to Nazanin’s room directly during a private session. Private sessions on Flirt4Free are paid in credits and you get 1050 credits for $100. Each model sets up their own pricing system – 40 credits per minute, for example – and once you’re in private you can talk, flirt, and show each other your bits. In this case we were testing a device for science so Nazanin and I began a mating dance involving the swapping of QR codes and the preparation of various robotic attachments. The game proceeded apace with my signals reaching her and hers reaching me and I found myself asking fewer and fewer journalistic questions as the interview continued. She said she liked the feelings I was sending and I enjoyed the feelings she sent. It was, in the end, like a Slack room but naked. “Up until now, performers have been using ‘read-only’ interactive devices, which react to the wildly popular tip-by-sound functionality,” said Flirt4Free President Greg Clayman.
“With compatible devices, clients can now play with their device, causing the model’s device to react- and the model can also control their device, resulting in the most realistic, mind-blowing experience ever!” Ultimately I suspect most of us will have something like this in the home. Given the prevalence of masturbation in the human mammal and our lifelong dedication to technology, I can imagine this being just another way for all of us to get off. While it’s not perfect – my battery went dead during the session – nothing really is and I suspect the camaraderie and hearty hail-fellow-well-met nature of video sex will make a few converts over the next few years. Ultimately tech touches everything. The fact that I’m able to send a message – be it an email or a vibration – around the world is fascinating. And as tech enters our lives more and more completely tools like the Launch will become commonplace. We trade a lot for this evolution of pleasure, to be sure, but we gain much as well. Nazanin said she liked it too, which was nice. I told you this was going to be NSFW, didn’t I? |
Tesla shares tumble in early trading after another Elon Musk-powered PR blunder | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | Elon Musk, the embattled chief executive of electric automaker and sustainable energy company Tesla, tried to “set the record straight” about his recent behavior . Instead, it only served to further underscore how out-of-touch the billionaire chief executive seems from the ongoing operations at his company. The fallout has already begun, with shares falling in early trading. His erratic behavior could cost investors billions and potentially destroy a company that has, in fact, revolutionized the automotive industry in America. In the wide-ranging interview, Musk acknowledged the personal and physical toll running Tesla was taking on him and tried to explain away his recent behavior. The latest drama began with a simple midday tweet last week indicating that Musk had secured funding to take Tesla private at a price of $420 per share. Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) The number (which is both within the range of a 20 percent premium of Tesla shares at the time, and a code with special significance for people who smoke marijuana), the timing of the announcement and the medium on which it was issued all raised eyebrows. just spent the past fifteen minutes delivering a rudimentary explanation of financial markets to someone just so i could help them appreciate my “elon musk absolutely did a weed twete today” theory — ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) From there, it has pretty much been all downhill for Musk and Tesla as the company’s executive bounced from one public relations blunder to another. There are the allegations of illegal drug use, which Musk feebly addresses in his interview, saying: “I was not on weed, to be clear,” he said. “Weed is not helpful for productivity. There’s a reason for the word ‘stoned.’ You just sit there like a stone on weed.” Reporting from the Times also contradicts another assertion that Musk made in the interview — which is that Tesla’s board is not seeking someone to take the reins as a chief operating officer at the company. Something which would indubitably help take off of Musk’s shoulders some of the pressures of running the business. The chief executive acknowledged the physical toll that managing Tesla has taken on him, but said that he does not regret any of his recent actions. Given that the Securities and Exchange Commission , that may be another position that is subject to revision. It’s been a long, hot summer for Tesla’s operations, and Musk has only exacerbated problems for the company with his very public complaints about short sellers, , , and others who have openly questioned the company’s viability. There are very real concerns about , alongside that the pressures of meeting deadlines for the new car have led to cutting corners on safety. Throughout all of it, Tesla’s board has remained firmly committed to protecting Musk and preserving his role as chief executive officer. As the board said in a statement it released to the Times: There have been many false and irresponsible rumors in the press about the discussions of the Tesla board. We would like to make clear that Elon’s commitment and dedication to Tesla is obvious. Over the past 15 years, Elon’s leadership of the Tesla team has caused Tesla to grow from a small start-up to having hundreds of thousands of cars on the road that customers love, employing tens of thousands of people around the world, and creating significant shareholder value in the process. Perhaps the best thing the company’s caretakers can do now is ensure that Musk gets some help (in the C-suite — and potentially outside of it). It seems from the interview that Musk is asking for the same thing. “[If] you have anyone who can do a better job, please let me know. They can have the job. Is there someone who can do the job better? They can have the reins right now,” Musk told the Times. |
Google gives its AI the reins over its data center cooling systems | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | The is loud and hot — and keeping servers from overheating is a major factor in the cost of running them. It’s no surprise then that the big players in this space, including Facebook, Microsoft and Google, all look for different ways of saving cooling costs. Facebook uses when possible, Microsoft is experimenting with and Google is being Google and looking to its AI models for some extra savings. , Google, through its DeepMind affiliate, started looking into how it could use machine learning to provide its operators some additional guidance on how to best cool its data centers. At the time, though, the system only made recommendations and the human operators decided whether to implement them. Those humans can now take longer naps during the afternoon, because the team has decided the models are now good enough to give the AI-powered system full control over the cooling system. Operators can still intervene, of course, but as long as the AI doesn’t decide to burn the place down, the system runs autonomously. [gallery ids="1693037,1693038,1693039,1693040"] The new cooling system is now in place in a number of Google’s data centers. Every five minutes, the system polls thousands of sensors inside the data center and chooses the optimal actions based on this information. There are all kinds of checks and balances here, of course, so the chances of one of Google’s data centers going up in flames because of this is low. Like most machine learning models, this one also became better as it gathered more data. It’s now delivering energy savings of 30 percent on average, compared to the data centers’ historical energy usage. One thing that’s worth noting here is that Google is obviously trying to save a few bucks, but in many ways, the company is also looking at this as a way of promoting its own machine learning services. What works in a data center, after all, should also work in a large office building. “In the long term, we think there’s potential to apply this technology in other industrial settings and help tackle climate change on an even grander scale,” DeepMind writes in . |
Google said to be releasing its own smart display this year | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | null |
Google updates Location History language after tracking backlash | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | null |
Facebook’s Kodi box ban is nothing new | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | to recent , Facebook has updated its Commerce Policy to specifically ban the sale of Kodi boxes on its site – that is, devices that come with pre-installed Kodi software, which are often used for illegally streaming digital content. However, the ban is not a new one – Facebook confirms its policy on Kodi box sales hasn’t changed since last summer, and its external Policy Page – the one being cited as evidence of the new ban – was updated in December. It’s true that the changes have flown under the radar until now, though. The policy change was first reported by , and later linked to by and . The original report claims that Facebook added a new rule on its list of “Digital Media and Electronic Devices” under “Prohibited Content,” which specifically calls out Kodi boxes. It says that Facebook posts “may not promote the sale of devices that facilitate or encourage streaming digital content in an authorized manner or interfering with the functionality of electronic devices.” The Policy page lists a few examples of what this means, including wiretapping devices, jamming or descrambling devices, jailbroken or loaded devices, and, then (The only permitted items are “add-on equipment for Kodi devices, such as keyboards and remotes.”) But this ban on Kodi boxes, Facebook says, is not a recently implemented policy. According to a Facebook spokesperson, it launched a new policy last summer that prohibited the sale of electronic devices that facilitate or are intended for unauthorized streaming or access to digital content – including Kodi boxes. This policy has not changed since last summer, but its external Policy Page – – was updated in December 2017 to offer additional illustrative examples and more detailed information on all its policies, including the one related to unauthorized streaming devices. In other words, Facebook has been banning Kodi boxes since it decided to crackdown on unauthorized streaming devices last year. It’s just now being noticed. The ban affects all posts on Marketplace, Buy and Sell Groups, and Shop Sections on Pages. Facebook explains it takes a very strong enforcement approach when “Kodi” is mentioned with a product for sale. As Techdirt , that’s problematic because the Kodi software itself is actually legal. However, device makers like Dragon Box or SetTV have been using the open-source Kodi platform and other add-ons to make copyright infringement easier for consumers. Facebook does seem to understand that Kodi software isn’t illegal, but it knows that when “Kodi” is mentioned in a product (e.g. a device) listing, it’s very often a product designed to circumvent copyright. The company tells us that its intent is not to ban Kodi software altogether, however, and it’s in the process of reviewing its guidelines and these examples to more closely target devices that encourage unauthorized streaming. That could mean it will, at some point, not outright ban a device that includes Kodi software, but focus more on other terms used in the sale, like “fully loaded” or some sort of description of the illegal access the box provides, perhaps. (Facebook didn’t say what might change.) As for Kodi, the company says Facebook’s move doesn’t affect them. “It doesn’t impact us, since we don’t sell devices,” says Keith Herrington, who handles Business Relations at the XBMC Foundation (Kodi). He said his organization would love to talk to someone at Facebook – since they’ve never been in touch – in order to ensure that devices that are in compliance with Kodi’s trademark policy are not banned. Both Amazon and eBay have worked with Kodi on similar policies, he added. “We’ve gotten thousands of devices which were in violation of our trademark policy removed from eBay,” Herrington said. It’s unclear how well-enforced Facebook’s ban really is – I’m in Facebook groups myself where people talk about how to jailbreak “Fire sticks” and include posts from those who sell them pre-jailbroken. (It’s for research purposes. .) Facebook isn’t the only company that’s attempting to crack down on these devices. for facilitating piracy by making it easy for consumers to access illegal streams of movies and TV shows. In January 2018, a U.S. District Court judge against TickBox TV, a Georgia-based set-top box maker that was sued by the major studios, along with streaming services Netflix and Amazon, for profiting from the sale of “Kodi boxes.” Google has the word “kodi” from the autocomplete feature of Search, along with piracy-related terms. And more recently, the It said these boxes often falsely bear the FCC logo to give them the appearance of legitimacy, but are actually used to perpetuate “intellectual property theft and consumer fraud,” the FCC said in to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and eBay CEO Devin Wenig. There’s a reason Kodi devices are so popular, and it’s not just because everyone is being cheap about paying for access to content. For starters, there’s a lack of consequence for consumers who do illegally stream media – it’s not like back in the day when the . While there has been some activity – Comcast several years ago to Kodi users, for example – you can today basically get away with illegal streaming. The copyright holders are currently focused on cutting off piracy at the source – box makers and the platforms that enable their sale – not at the individual level. The rise of cord cutting has also contributed to the issue by creating a highly fragmented streaming ecosystem. Shows that used to be available under a single (if pricey) cable or satellite TV subscription, are now spread out across services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Sling TV, HBO NOW, and others used by cord cutters. Customers are clearly willing to pay for some of these services (largely, Netflix and maybe one or two others), but most can’t afford a subscription for each one. And they definitely don’t want to when all they’re after is access to a single show from a network. That’s another reason they then turn to piracy. Finally, there is the fact that film distributors have forever withheld their movies from streaming services for months, creating a demand for illegal downloads and streams. Though the release window has shrunk some in more recent years, the studios haven’t yet of much smaller windows to cater to the audience who will never go to the theater to watch their movie. And when this audience is cut out the market, they also turn to piracy. Eventually, the record industry adapted to consumers’ desire for streaming, and services like Spotify and Apple Music emerged. Eventually, streaming services may be able to make piracy less attractive, too. Amazon Channels, could become a key player here if it expands to include more add-ons. Today, it’s the only true a la carte TV service available. And that perhaps – not skinny bundles – is what people really want. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 8 | 28 | null |
Klarity uses AI to strip drudgery from contract review | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | , a member of the Y Combinator 2018 Summer class, wants to automate much of the contract review process by applying artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing. Company co-founder and CEO Andrew Antos has experienced the pain of contract reviews first hand. After graduating from Harvard Law, he landed a job spending 16 hours a day reviewing contract language, a process he called mind-numbing. He figured there had to be a way to put technology to bear on the problem and Klarity was born. “A lot of companies are employing internal or external lawyers because their customers, vendors or suppliers are sending them a contract to sign,” Antos explained They have to get somebody to read it, understand it and figure out whether it’s something that they can sign or if it requires specific changes. You may think that this kind of work would be difficult to automate, but Antos said that contracts have fairly standard language and most companies use ‘playbooks.’ “Think of the playbook as a checklist for NDAs, sales agreements and vendor agreements — what they are looking for and specific preferences on what they agree to or what needs to be changed,” Antos explained. Klarity is a subscription cloud service that checks contracts in Microsoft Word documents using NLP. It makes suggestions when it sees something that doesn’t match up with the playbook checklist. The product then generates a document, and a human lawyer reviews and signs off on the suggested changes, reducing the review time from an hour or more to 10 or 15 minutes. Screenshot: Klarity They launched the first iteration of the product last year and have 14 companies using it with 4 paying customers so far including one of the world’s largest private equity funds. These companies signed on because they have to process huge numbers of contracts. Klarity is helping them save time and money, while applying their preferences in a consistent fashion, something that a human reviewer can have trouble doing. He acknowledges the solution could be taking away work from human lawyers, something they think about quite a bit. Ultimately though, they believe that contract reviewing is so tedious, it is freeing up lawyers for work that requires a greater level of intellectual rigor and creativity. Antos met his co-founder and CTO, Nischal Nadhamuni, at an MIT entrepreneurship class in 2016 and the two became fast friends. In fact, he says that they pretty much decided to start a company the first day. “We spent 3 hours walking around Cambridge and decided to work together to solve this real problem people are having.” They applied to Y Combinator two other times before being accepted in this summer’s cohort. The third time was the charm. He says the primary value of being in YC is the community and friendships they have formed and the help they have had in refining their approach. “It’s like having a constant mirror that helps you realize any mistakes or any suboptimal things in your business on a high speed basis,” he said. |
Samsung Galaxy Note 9 review | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | in consumer electronics anymore. Sometimes it’s the fault of flubs and flaws and leakers. Sometimes it’s by design. In the case of the , it’s a little bit of both. The wasn’t the blockbuster Samsung’s shareholders were expecting, so the company understandably primed the pump through a combination of teasers and leaks — some no doubt unintentional and others that seemed suspiciously less so. By the time yesterday’s big event at Brooklyn’s rolled around, we knew just about everything we needed to know about the upcoming handset, and virtually proved accurate. Sure, the company amazingly managed to through in a surprise or two, but the event was all about the Note. And understandably so. The phablet, along with the Galaxy S line, forms the cornerstone of Samsung’s entire consumer approach. It’s a portfolio that expands with each event, to include wearables, productivity, the smart home, automotive, a smart assistant and now the long-awaited smart speaker. None of which would make a lick of sense without the handsets. If the Galaxy S is Samsung’s tentpole device, the Note represents what the company has deemed its “innovation brand,” the uber-premium device that allows the company to push the limits of its mobile hardware. In past generations, that’s meant the Edge display (curving screen), S-Pen, giant screen and dual-camera. That innovation, naturally, comes at a price. Here it’s $1,000. It’s a price that, until a year ago seemed impossibly steep for a smartphone. For the Galaxy Note 9, on the other hand, that’s . Any hopes that the new model might represent a move toward the mainstream for the line in the wake of an underwhelming S9 performance can be put to rest here. The Note is what it’s always been and will likely always continue to be: a device for the diehard. A very good device, mind, but one for those with an arm and or a leg to spare. Most of the good new features will trickle their way down the food chain to the company’s more mainstream device. At $720/$840, the S9 isn’t a budget phone by any stretch of the imagination, but at the very least, keeping it to three digits seems a little more palatable. A good rule of thumb for a hardware review is incorporating the product into one’s own life as much as possible. It’s a pretty easy ask with a device like the Note 9, which has the advantage of great hardware and software design built upon the learnings and missteps of several generations. It’s still not perfect by any means, and the company’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to the line means there are plenty of features that never really made their may into my routine. And while, as the largely unchanged product design suggests — the Note 9 doesn’t represent a hugely significant milestone in the product line — there are enough tweaks throughout the product to maintain its place toward the top of the Android heap. Let’s address the gorilla in the room here. , Galaxy Notes started exploding. Samsung recalled the devices, started selling them, more exploded and they recalled them again, ultimately discontinuing the product. Samsung apologized profusely and agreed to institute more rigorous safety checks. For the next few devices, the company didn’t rock the boat. Battery sizes on Galaxy products stayed mostly the same. It was a combination of pragmatism and optics. The company needed time to ensure that future products wouldn’t suffer the same fate, while demonstrating to the public and shareholders that it was doing due diligence. “What we want to do is a tempered approach to innovation any time,” Samsung’s director of Product Strategy and Marketing told me ahead of launch, “so this was the right time to increase the battery to meet consumer needs.” Given Samsung’s massive business as a component manufacturer, the whole fiasco ultimately didn’t dent the bottom line. In fact, in a strange way, it might ultimately be . Now it can boast about having one of the most rigorous battery testing processes in the business. Now it’s a feature, not a bug. At 4,000mAh, the Note 9 features a 700mAh increase above its predecessor. It’s not an unprecedented number — Huawei’s already hit the 4,000 mark — but it’s the largest ever on a Note device, putting the handset in the top percentile. As far as how that actually translates to real-world usage, Samsung’s not giving a number yet. The company simply says “all day and all night” in its release. I found that to be pretty close to the truth. I unplugged the handset at 100 percent yesterday afternoon. I texted, listened to Spotify, took photos, downloaded and just generally attempted to live my life on the damn thing. Just under 22 hours later, it gave up the ghost and after much notification-based consternation about a critically low battery, the screen went black. Like I said, it’s not crazy battery life, but going most of a full day and night without a charge is a nice little luxury — and the sort of thing all phone makers should strive to achieve on their flagship products. The company also, kindly, included the new . The charging pad is not quite as ambitious as the AirPower, but unlike that product, introduced nearly a year ago by Apple, I have this in my hands right now. So, point: Samsung. Charging the device from zero to 100 percent took three hours on the dot with the $120 “Fast Charge” pad. And it’s nice and toasty now. Okay, about that price. Again, we’re talking $999.99 to start. There’s also a second SKU. That one will run you $1,295.99. Take a moment if you need to. That’s a silly amount of money if you’re not the starting point guard for the Golden State Warriors. So much for the rumors that the company would be working to make its devices more economically accessible. And while the premium hardware has always meant that the Galaxy line is going to remain on the pricey side, I can’t help but point out that a few key decisions could have kept the price down, while maintaining build quality. Storage is arguably the primary culprit. The aforementioned two SKUs give you either 6GB of RAM with 128GB or 8GB of RAM with 512GB. With cloud syncing and the rest, it’s hard to imagine I would come close to that limit in the two or so years until the time comes to upgrade my handset. I’m sure those sorts of crazy media-hoarding power users do, in fact, exist in the world, but they’re undoubtedly a rarity. Besides, as Samsung helpfully pointed out, 512GB SD cards already exist in the world. Sure, that’s another $350 tacked onto the bottom line, but it’s there, if you need it. For most users, it’s hard to see Samsung’s claim of having “the world’s first 1TB-ready smartphone” (512GB+512GB) exists for little more reason than racking up yet another flashy claim for the 1960s Batman utility belt of smartphones. Sure, Samsung no doubt gets a deal on Samsung-built hard drives, but the component has to be a key part in what’s driving costs up. For a company as driven by choice as Samsung, I’m honestly surprised we’re not getting more options up front here in the States. Confession: After testing many Galaxy Note models over the course of many years, I’ve never figured out a great use for the S-Pen. I mean, I’m happy that people like it, and obviously all of the early skepticism about the return of the stylus was quickly put to rest, as the company has continued to go back to the well, year after year. But all of the handwritten note taking and animated GIF drawing just isn’t for me, man. I also recently spoke to an artist friend who told me that the Note doesn’t really cut it for him on the drawing front, either. Again, if you like or love it, more power to you, but it’s just not for me. As silly as the idea of using the control might appear at first glance, however, it’s clear to me that this is the first use of the built-in accessory I could honestly see using on a daily basis. It’s handy once you get beyond the silliness of holding a stylus in your hand while running, and serves as a handy surrogate for those who don’t own a compatible smartwatch. The S-Pen now sports Bluetooth Low Energy, allowing it to control different aspects of phone use. Low Energy or not, that tech requires power, so the stylus now contains a super conductor, which charges it when slotted inside the phone; 40 seconds of charging should get you a healthy 30 minutes of use. Even so, the phone will bug you to remind you that you really ought to dock the thing when not in use. The compatible apps are still fairly limited at launch, but it’s enough to demonstrate how this could be a handy little addition. Of the bunch, I got the most out of music control for Spotify. One click plays/pauses a song, and a double-click extends the track. Sure, it’s limited functionality, but it saved me from having to fiddle with the phone to change songs went I went for my run this morning. You’ll need to be a bit more creative when determining usefulness in some of the other apps. Using it as a shutter button in the camera app, for instance, could be a useful way to take a selfie without having to hold the phone at arms’ length. The entire time, I wondered what one might be able to accomplish with additional buttons (volume/rewind/gameplay)? What about a pedometer to track steps when you’re running on the treadmill without it in the pocket? Or even a beacon to help absent-minded folks like myself find it after we invariably drop it between couch cushions. But yeah, I understand why the company would choose to keep things simple for what remains a sort of secondary functionality. Or, heck, maybe the company just needs to hold some features for the Note 10 (Note X?). Oh, and the Blue and Lavender versions of the phone come in striking yellow and purple S-Pens, with lock-screen ink color to match. So that’s pretty fun. Nowhere is the Note’s cumulative evolution better represented than the camera. Each subsequent Galaxy S and Note release seem to offer new hardware and/or software upgrades, giving the company two distinct opportunities per year to improve imaging for the line. The S9, announced back in February, notably brought improved low-light photography to the line. The dual aperture flips between f/1.5 and f/2.4, to let in more light. It’s a neat trick for a smartphone. Behold, a head to head between the Note 9 (left) and iPhone X (right): Here’s what we’re dealing with on the hardware front: This time out, the improvements are mostly on the software side of things. Two features in particular stand out: Scene Optimizer and . The first should prove familiar to those who’ve been paying attention to the smartphone game of late. LG is probably the most prominent example. Camera hardware is pretty great across the board of most modern smartphone flagships. As such, these new features are designed to eliminate the current weakest link: human error. Scene Optimizer saves amateur photographers from having to futz with more advanced settings like white balance and saturation. The feature uses AI to determine what the camera is seeing, and adjusts settings accordingly. There are 20 different settings, including: Food, Portraits, Flowers, Indoor scenes, Animals, Landscapes, Greenery, Trees, Sky, Mountains, Beaches, Sunrises and sunsets, Watersides, Street scenes, Night scenes, Waterfalls, Snow, Birds, Backlit and Text. Some are pretty general, others are weirdly specific, but it’s a good mix, and I suspect Samsung will continue to add to it through OTA updates. That said, the function itself doesn’t need a cloud connection, doing all of the processing on-board. The feature worked well with most of the flowers and food I threw at it (so to speak), popping up a small icon in the bottom of the screen to let me know that it knows what it’s looking at. It also did well with book text. The success rate of other things, like trees, were, unsurprisingly, dependent on context. Get just the top part and it identifies it as “Greenery.” Flip the phone to portrait mode and get the whole of the trunk and it pops up the “Tree” icon. I did get a few false positives along the way; the Note 9 thought my fingers were food, which is deeply disturbing for any number of reasons. Obviously, it’s not going to be perfect. I found, in the case of flowers that it has the tendency to oversaturate the colors. If you agree, you can disable the feature in settings. However, you have to do this before the shot is taken. There’s no way to manually override the feature to tell it what kind of object you’re shooting. That seems like a bit of a no-brainer addition. Flaw Detection serves a similar role as Scene Optimizer, helping you avoid getting in your own way as an amateur photog. The feature is designed to alert you if a shot is blurry, if there’s a smudge on the screen, if the subject blinked or if backlighting is making everything look crappy. In the case of lens smudging and backlighting, it only bothers with a single alert every 24 hours. The blink detection worked well. Blur detection, on the other hand, was a bit more of a crap shoot for subjects in motion and those that were too close to the lens to get a good focus. The feature could use a bit of work, but I still think it’s one of the more compelling additions on the whole of the device and anticipate a lot of other companies introducing their own versions in the coming year. [gallery ids="1689899,1689901,1689903,1689904,1689932"] The more the Note changes, the more it stays the same, I suppose. As expected, the design language hasn’t changed much, which is no doubt part of what made Samsung CEO DJ Koh think using the device in public ahead of launch. The footprint is virtually the same in spite of the ever-so-slightly larger screen (6.3 > 6.4-inches, same 2,960 x 1,440 resolution) — from 162.5 x 74.8 x 8.6 mm on the 8, to 161.9 x 76.4 x 8.8 mm on the 9. That’s perfectly fine. Samsung’s done an impressive job cramming a lot of screen into a manageable footprint over the past several gens. The only major change (aside from the lovely new blue and purple paint jobs) is the migration of the fingerprint sensor from the side of the camera to underneath it. This was a clear instance of Samsung responding to feedback from users frustrated by all the times they mistook the camera for the fingerprint reader. The new placement helps a bit, though it’s still fairly close to the camera, and the fact that both are similar shapes doesn’t help matters. Thank goodness for that new smudge detector. Oh, and the headphone jack is still present, because of course it is. For Samsung, it’s an important way to distinguish the product and approach from a world gone dongle mad. Oh Bixby, you eternal bastion of unfulfilled potential. A full rundown of new features . Overall, the smart assistant promises to be more conversational, with better concierge features. That said, Samsung’s once again tweaking it until the last moment, so I can’t offer you a full review until closer to the phone’s August 24 street date. So stay tuned for that, I guess. I will say that the setup process can be a bit of a slog for a feature designed to make everything easier. Playing with Bixby voice required me to navigate several pages in order to connect the two. Thankfully, you should only have to deal with that the one time. Samsung’s continuing to tweak the internals to make its device more suitable for gaming. The water-carbon cooling system tweaks the liquid cooling system found on the device since the S7, to help diffuse heat more efficiently. The large, bright screen meanwhile, is well-suited to mobile gaming, and the 6GB model handled Fortnite fairly well. The next smartphone revolution always seems to be a year away. The potential arrival of a Samsung device with makes the notion of carrying a massive device around in one’s pocket almost quaint. For the time being, however, the Note remains one of the best methods for transporting a whole lot of screen around on your person. A lot has changed about the Note in the past seven years, but the core of the device is mostly the same: big screen and stylus coming together to walk the line between productivity and entertainment. It’s big, it’s bold, it’s too expensive for a lot of us. But it remains the phablet to beat. |
Facebook is the recruiting tool of choice for far-right group the Proud Boys | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | Twitter may have and their controversial leader Gavin McInnes, but it was never their platform of choice. The Proud Boys, a self described “Western chauvinist” organization that often flirts with more hard-line groups of the far right, runs an elaborate network of recruiting pages on Facebook to attract and initiate members. While McInnes maintained a presence on many platforms, Facebook is the heart of the group’s operations. It’s there that the Proud Boys boast more than 35 regional and city-specific groups that act as landing pages for vetting thousands of new members and feeding them into local chapters. When it comes to skirting the outer boundaries of social acceptability, McInnes could teach a master class. The Vice founder and Canadian citizen launched his newest project in 2016, capturing a groundswell of public political activity on the far right and launching the Proud Boys, a men’s club allied around the mantra “West is best,” its dedication to Trump and a and . The group makes national headlines for its involvement in violent dust-ups between the far right and far left and has a robust recruitment network centered on initiating members through Facebook groups. As for where it fits into the far right’s many sub-factions, McInnes objects to the term alt-light, sometimes used to describe far right group that oppose some mainstream conservative ideals but don’t openly endorse white nationalism. “Alt Light is a gay term that sounds like a diet soda in bed w Alt Right,” he said on . “We’re “The New Right.” To that end, most regional affiliate pages run a message outlining some ground rules, including a declaration that its members not be racist or homophobic — a useful disclaimer for making the group more palatable than many of its less clever peers. The Proud Boys’ agenda is less explicitly race-based than many groups it has affiliations with, espousing instead a broad sort of antagonism to perceived enemies on the political left and a credo of “western chauvinism.” The language is cleaned up, but it’s one degree removed from less palatable figures, including Unite the Right leader Jason Kessler. on his own talk show just days after Kessler led the Charlottesville rally that left counter-protester . In the segment, McInnes tried to create space between Kessler and the Proud Boys, though it wasn’t Kessler’s first time on the show or his only affiliation with the Proud Boys. The Proud Boys also coordinates with the Vancouver, Washington-based group known as Patriot Prayer, another fairly social media-savvy far right organization that doesn’t openly endorse explicitly white nationalist groups, but still during demonstrations that often turn violent. Like much of the young, internet-fluent alt-right, the Proud Boys intentionally don’t take themselves too seriously, a strategy that conveniently opens the door for them to denounce any kind of controversy that might arise. They show up to protests wearing black and gold Fred Perry polo shirts, have a whole charter’s worth of inside jokes and in general seem a bit more media and internet savvy than hardline white nationalist groups, some of which Facebook has managed to clear out in the last year. Unlike some less strategic and internet-savvy portions of the far right, McInnes and his Proud Boys are careful not to openly encourage preemptive violence. Still, the Proud Boys do encourage retaliatory violence, going so far as to enshrine physical altercations in its organizational hierarchy. To earn their “first degree,” Proud Boys must openly declare their allegiance to the group’s ideals, usually in a Facebook vetting group. To earn the second, they have to get beaten up by other members while naming five breakfast cereals (maybe a to the group’s mantra against masturbation). To earn the third degree they have to get a Proud Boys tattoo. The fourth degree is reserved for members who get in a brawl sufficient for the honor: “You can’t plan getting a fourth degree. Its a consolation prize for engaging in a major conflict for the cause. Being arrested is not encouraged, although those who are immediately become fourth degree because the court has registered a major conflict. Serious physical fights also count and it’s up to each chapter to decide how serious the conflict must be to determine a fourth degree.” That’s where the Proud Boys Facebook network comes in. To get accepted into a local chapter, prospective members join specific vetting groups and are asked to upload a video of them meeting their “first degree” requirements: “Once you are added here, to be properly vetted you must upload and post a video of yourself reciting our First Degree. This is just a quick video of you saying EXACTLY THIS: “My name is [full name], I’m from [city, state], and I am a western chauvinist who refuses to apologize for creating the modern world.” You can add anything else you’d like to your video, as long as you say those words exactly. YouTube is full of first and second degree videos depicting the usually short half-ironic hazing ceremonies. Facebook also hosts pages dedicated to the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights, a new-ish and its paramilitary wing. The Alt-Knights, also known as FOAK, are led by Kyle Chapman, a.k.a. “ ,” a far right figure who grew to fame after beating political enemies with a stick at a 2017 Berkeley protest. The Alt-Knights aren’t always quite as careful to denounce violence. Whether the Proud Boys are in violation of Facebook’s unevenly enforced and or not, the organization is making the most of its time on the platform. Facebook has against organizing harm or credible violence that the Proud Boys’ brawling ethos and alt-knights would seem to run afoul of, but the group stands by the useful mantra “We don’t start fights, we finish them.” TechCrunch reached out to the Proud Boys to get an idea of their membership numbers and will update this story if we receive a reply. An analysis of affiliated pages shows that Proud Boys groups have added hundreds of members in the last 30 days across many chapters. With a second and the ugly reality of more real-life violence organized on social media looming large, platforms are on their toes for once. Facebook has cleaned up some of the rampant racism that stemmed from the extreme right presence on its platform, but savvier, self-censoring groups like the Proud Boys are likely to be the real headache as Facebook, Twitter and Google trudge through an endless minefield of case-by-case terms of service violations, drawing sharp criticism of the political spectrum no matter where they choose to place their feet. |
Hackers on new ‘secure’ phone networks can bill your account for their roaming charges | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | I have good news! The infamous SS7 networks used by mobile operators to interoperate, e.g.
when you’re roaming — which were built on trust, essentially devoid of security, and permitted rampant fraud, SMS hijacking, eavesdropping, password theft, etc. — are being replaced. Slowly. But I have bad news, too! Which is: the new systems still have gaping holes. One such was described at the Def Con hacking convention today by of Nokia Bell Labs. She gave a fascinating-to-geeks-like me summary of how the , which connected five Scandinavian phone systems in 1991, using the secured entirely by mutual trust, has grown into a massive global “private internet” connecting more than 2,000 companies and other entities. It is this private network-of-networks that lets you fly to another country and use your phone there, among many other services. The quote which stood out most starkly from her slides regarding IPX was this: “Security awareness only recently started (2014).” 😮 That’s … awfully late to start thinking about security for a massive semi-secret global network with indirect access to essentially every phones, connected car, and other mobile/SIM-card enabled device on the planet. He understated grimly. Still, better later than never, right? A new protocol, called , is slowly lurching into place, in fits and starts. (Technically the old system used two protocol suites, SS7 and Radius: Diameter is the successor to Radius, but flexible enough that it can and will absorb SS7’s functions too.) Alas, even Diameter has at least one flaw: its so-called “hop-by-hop” routing can be used by an attacker to spoof an endpoint, i.e. to pretend to be a company which they aren’t. This, combined with the ability to harvest a unique ID number (known as the ) from a phone, with a device such as a , and the ability to request a re-assessment of a phone’s quality of service and billing information at any point, ultimately means that a capable hacker could upgrade their phone service at your expense … or downgrade your service to e.g. 2G-only, while roaming, if they were feeling more malicious than greedy. 2G-only! The horror! OK, this is a lot better than the long litany of fundamental flaws to which SS7 was vulnerable, but it’s still sad. Worst of all is the list of countermeasures that Dr. Holtmanns suggested. There are long lists of things that companies and operators on the IPX network can do to fix or mitigate this vulnerability; but if you’re a user? All she can recommend is “check your bill” and “keep an eye on the news.” This is yet another instance of what I call “the trustberg.” When you pick up your phone, because your bank texted you a one-time password, or to text something private, do you even know who you’re trusting to keep your texts and accounts unhacked? The bank itself, and Google or Apple, sure. Whatever Android app handles your texts, maybe. But it turns out this is only the tip of the trustberg. Power generation and distribution; water and sewers; food processors and grocery trucks; industrial control systems; ; microprocessor manufacturers; phone and satellite networks. We assume that somewhere, in some distant room, teams of competent grown-ups are taking care of these systems and making sure they’re safe — right? Which is why coming to hacker conventions (such as infamous Def Con, from which I write this) is always such a sobering, saddening experience. Two days ago I wrote about … mostly because, it turns out, they relied on hard-coded, easily cracked passwords for “security.” Now I’m writing about new, improved security after a decade of catastrophic failures … and it’s still not actually secure. We can hope the even more important infrastructure I listed above is better taken care of … but the more hacker cons I go to, the harder this hope becomes. |
Founder Zain Jaffer may be looking to take back control of Vungle | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | Zain Jaffer may be gearing up for a fight to take back control of , the mobile ad company he founded. Jaffer was last fall following his arrest on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and performing a lewd act on a child. However, The district attorney’s office released a statement offering more context for the dismissal, saying that they did not believe there was any sexual conduct on the evening in question, and that “the injuries were the result of Mr. Jaffer being in a state of unconsciousness caused by prescription medication.” So what’s next for Jaffer and Vungle? There are hints in a recent letter from Jaffer’s attorney, John Pernick, which was sent to current Vungle CEO Rick Tallman. TechCrunch has obtained a copy of the letter, which requests access to Vungle’s records, specifically the names and addresses of company shareholders. Pernick’s letter suggests that this could be a prelude to further action (emphasis added): Mr. Jaffer is considering various options with respect to Vungle and his shares of Vungle. He has considered selling some portion of his Vungle shares. Communicating with Vungle shareholders with respect to their interest in purchasing or selling Vungle stock or in a change in the board of directors is an entirely proper purpose for Mr. Jaffer’s request to inspect the shareholder information that will enable him to make these communications. When TechCrunch contacted Pernick, he confirmed the authenticity of the letter but declined to comment further. A spokesperson for Jaffer also declined to comment, and Vungle did not respond to our inquiries. As you can see in the quote above, the letter indicates that Jaffer is considering multiple courses of action. But if he decides to pursue a leadership change at Vungle, either by winning over existing shareholders or by purchasing a controlling stake in the company, it sounds like there are investors willing to back him — for starters, Jun Hong Heng at Crescent Cove Capital Management confirmed that his firm is working with Jaffer. “We think Zain and Vungle have incredible potential,” Heng said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Zain and giving him the support he needs to help him regain control of his company.” We also reached out to Anne-Marie Roussel, who recently resigned from Vungle’s board of directors. Roussel said via email that “the Vungle controversy is an interesting proxy for a much larger debate: the fuzziness surrounding ethical conduct in the tech industry.” She added, “My personal prediction is that boards of tech companies will be held increasingly accountable for the ethics of the key decisions they make.” As for how that applies to Vungle, she said: How does it reflect on ethical values when a CEO is dismissed based on presumption of guilt? Don’t we live in a democracy where one of the key legal right is “presumption of innocence” (as in a defendant is innocent until proven guilty). Upholding that principle by collaborating with his defense team was what led to my resignation from Vungle’s board. by on Scribd |
Federacy wants to put bug bounty programs in reach of every startup | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | , a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 class, has a mission to make bug bounty programs available to even the smallest startup. Traditionally, bug bounty programs from players like Bugcrowd and HackerOne have been geared toward larger organizations. While these certainly have their place, founders William and James Sulinski, who happen to be twins, felt there was a gap in the marketplace, where smaller organizations were being left out of what they considered to be a crucial service. They wanted to make bug bounty programs and the ability to connect without outside researchers much more accessible, so they built Federacy. “We think that we can make the biggest impact by making the platform free to set up and incredibly simple for even the most resource-strapped startup to extract value. In doing so, we want to expand bug bounties from probably a few hundred companies currently — across Bugcrowd, HackerOne, etc. — to a million or more in the long run,” William Sulinski told TechCrunch. That’s an ambitious long-term goal, but for now, they are just getting started. In fact, the brothers only began building the platform when they arrived at Y Combinator a couple of months ago. Once they built a working product, they started by testing it on the members of their cohort, using knowledgeable friends as security researchers. They made the service public for the first time and report more than 120 sign-ups already. Their goal is 1,000 sign-ups by year’s end, which William claims would make them the largest bug bounty platform by count out there. Screenshot: Federacy For now, they are vetting every researcher they bring on the platform. While they realize this approach probably won’t be sustainable forever, they want to control access at least for the early days while they build the platform. They plan to be especially attentive to the researchers, recognizing the value they bring to the ecosystem. “It’s really important to treat researchers with respect and be attentive. These people are incredibly smart and valuable and are often not treated well. A big thing is just being responsive when they have a report,” Sulinski explained. Screenshot: Federacy As for the future, the brothers hope to keep building out the program and developing the platform. One idea they have is getting a fee should a client build a relationship with a particular researcher and want to contract with that individual. They also plan to take a small percentage of each bounty for revenue. Unlike more typical YC participants, the brothers are a bit older, in their mid-thirties, with more than 20 years of professional experience under their belts. Brother James was director of engineering at MoPub, a mobile ad platform that in 2013. Earlier he helped build infrastructure for drop.io, a file-sharing site that . As for William, he was CEO of AccelGolf and Pistol Lake, and founding member and project lead at Shareaholic. In spite of their broad experience, the brothers have valued the practical advice Y Combinator has provided for them and found the overall atmosphere inspiring. “It’s hard not to be in awe of the incredible things that people have built in this program,” William said. |
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launches to ‘touch the sun’ | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | : NASA’s ambitious mission to go closer to the Sun than ever before is set to launch in the small hours between Friday and Saturday — at 3:53 AM Eastern from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to be precise. The Parker Solar Probe, after a handful of gravity assists and preliminary orbits, will enter a stable orbit around the enormous nuclear fireball that gives us all life and sample its radiation from less than 4 million miles away. Believe me, you don’t want to get much closer than that. If you’re up late tonight (technically tomorrow morning), you can . This is the first mission named after a living researcher, in this case Eugene Parker, who in the ’50s made a number of proposals and theories about the way that stars give off energy. He’s the guy who gave us solar wind, and his research was hugely influential in the study of the sun and other stars — but it’s only now that some of his hypotheses can be tested directly. (Parker himself during its construction, and will be at the launch. No doubt he is immensely proud and excited about this whole situation.) “Directly” means going as close to the sun as technology allows — which leads us to the PSP’s first major innovation: . There’s one good thing to be said for the heat near the sun: it’s a heat. Because there’s no water vapor or gases in space to heat up, find some shade and you’ll be quite comfortable. So the probe is essentially carrying the most heavy-duty parasol ever created. It’s a sort of carbon sandwich, with superheated carbon composite on the outside and a carbon foam core. All together it’s less than a foot thick, but it the probe’s instruments are subjected to from 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit to 85 — actually cooler than it is in much of the U.S. right now. Go on – it’s quite cool. The car-sized Parker will orbit the sun and constantly rotate itself so the heat shield is facing inward and blocking the brunt of the solar radiation. The instruments mostly sit behind it in a big insulated bundle. ! There are three major experiments or instrument sets on the probe. WISPR (Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe) is a pair of wide-field telescopes that will watch and image the structure of the corona and solar wind. This is the kind of observation we’ve made before — but never from up close. We generally are seeing these phenomena from the neighborhood of the Earth, nearly 100 million miles away. You can imagine that cutting out 90 million miles of cosmic dust, interfering radiation and other nuisances will produce an amazingly clear picture. SWEAP (Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons investigation) looks out to the side of the craft to watch the flows of electrons as they are affected by solar wind and other factors. And on the front is the Solar Probe Cup (I suspect this is a reference to the Ray Bradbury story, “Golden Apples of the Sun”), which is exposed to the full strength of the sun’s radiation; a tiny opening allows charged particles in, and by tracking how they pass through a series of charged windows, they can sort them by type and energy. FIELDS is another that gets the full heat of the sun. Its antennas are the ones sticking out from the sides — they need to in order to directly sample the electric field surrounding the craft. A set of “fluxgate magnetometers,” clearly a made-up name, measure the magnetic field at an incredibly high rate: two million samples per second. They’re all powered by solar panels, which seems obvious, but actually it’s a difficult proposition to keep the panels from overloading that close to the sun. They hide behind the shield and just peek out at an oblique angle, so only a fraction of the radiation hits them. Even then, they’ll get so hot that the team needed to implement the first-ever active water cooling system on a spacecraft. Water is pumped through the cells and back behind the shield, where it is cooled by, well, space. The probe’s mission profile is a complicated one. After escaping the clutches of the Earth, it will swing by Venus, not to get a gravity boost, but “almost like doing a little handbrake turn,” as one official described it. It slows it down and sends it closer to the sun — and it’ll do that seven more times, each time bringing it closer and closer to the sun’s surface, ultimately arriving in a stable orbit 3.83 million miles above the surface — that’s 95 percent of the way from the Earth to the sun. On the way it will hit a top speed of 430,000 miles per hour, which will make it the fastest spacecraft ever launched. Parker will make 24 total passes through the corona, and during these times communication with Earth may be interrupted or impractical. If a solar cell is overheating, do you want to wait 20 minutes for a decision from NASA on whether to pull it back? No. This close to the sun even a slight miscalculation results in the reduction of the probe to a cinder, so the team has imbued it with more than the usual autonomy. It’s covered in sensors in addition to its instruments, and an onboard AI will be empowered to make decisions to rectify anomalies. That sounds worryingly like a HAL 9000 situation, but there are no humans on board to kill, so it’s probably okay. The mission is scheduled to last seven years, after which time the fuel used to correct the craft’s orbit and orientation is expected to run out. At that point it will continue as long as it can before drift causes it to break apart and, one rather hopes, become part of the sun’s corona itself. The Parker Solar Probe is scheduled for launch early Saturday morning, and we’ll update this post when it takes off successfully or, as is possible, is delayed until a later date in the launch window. |
Twitch is closing its Communities | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | Say goodbye to Twitch’s Communities. The game-streaming service says it’s soon killing off this still relatively new addition to its site in favor of implementing a tagging system instead. With the changes, users will be able to filter streams by tags within a directory or across different games on the Browse page, in order to better find the sort of streams they want to watch. The closure of Communities and addition of tags is being planned for mid-September, says Twitch. Twitch , with the goal of better catering to users’ unique interests. For example, different types of gaming, like retro, or different activities, like speedrunning, could then have their own community. There are also communities centered around titles like Fortnite Battle Royale, PUBG, League of Legends and others, as well as those focused on creative endeavors like music, drawing, cooking, cosplay and more. But the system has become less helpful as Twitch itself, the number of streamers and the number of communities grew. Today, there’s a lot of overlap between different Communities or between Communities and games, says Twitch. This is attributable, in part, to the open nature of Communities — there are many with similar names, and no good way to tell what makes them different from one another at first glance. “Communities were one solution for giving viewers information to help them decide what to watch, but viewers weren’t able to see that information while browsing within a directory they were interested in,” the company noted in an announcement. It also found that Communities weren’t driving viewers to watch streams — in fact less than 3 percent of Twitch viewership was from users who found streams through the Communities feature. That points to a pretty broad failure of Communities serving as a discovery feature. Twitch now hopes that the implementation of tags will make things better on that front. The company says it will add tags to the site in mid-September, and these will be used to identify a stream across Twitch’s directory pages, the homepage, search, channel pages and everywhere else. The main Directory pages and the Browse page will also be able to be filtered by these tags, some of which will be auto-generated. Twitch says it will automatically add tags like game genres, and some it can auto-detect — another project it now has in the works. But most of the tags will be selected by the streamer — not user-generated, to be clear, but . Streamers will be able to suggest new tags, however. The tags will appear alongside the video thumbnail, stream title and the game or category being streamed. The change is one that speaks to the limitations of portal-like interfaces being used to access a large amount of information — that is, browsing to a particular section to find things you like, then scrolling through those results takes too much time. It isn’t that helpful in the long run. Tagging lets users filter information, paring down, in this case, a large number of Twitch streams to find just those you like. That being said, not all Twitch users are happy about the changes. But some are happy about it and others are cautiously optimistic about tagging. So in case you haven't heard the news, is removing Communities because "they werent being used" which means that The Cookout Community page that we've built up over this past year wont exist a month from now. We will have to come up with new ways to find each other. — The Villain. (@DennyVonDoom) It is with a heavy heart i must share the sad news,That Twitch Communities will be removed,say goodbye to Communities we are being introduced to Tags. Unsure on how this will work out on twitch. I only have but one thing to say, Everything We Do Will Remain The Same — Letseuq [CE] (@Letseuqion) We feel communities gave streamers a sense of self identity that was much needed It is worrisome to see tags implemented instead of more freeform communties as it removes agency from the streamers in how they choose to define their stream and themselves. What are your thoughts? — TwitchKittens (@TwitchKittens) It’s a shame that are removing Communities, but the implementation of tags is a really cool idea, and I look forward to the possibility of seeing a tag. — Lt Zonda [SC] (@LTZONDA) I'm happy with it to be honest, 3 communities is extremely limiting anyway especially when the majority of people have more than 3. I dunno how anyone was supposed to find community pages easily, think more traffic came from external sources and game listings than community pages — OK Sauce (@oksaucedesu) Honesty, I don’t see how this’ll hurt anyone. You can still make communities outside of Twitch. Then you can just use a tag instead. Same idea really. What is a community? A bunch of people using the same tag? I’m still not even part of a community. — Vanilla Bizcotti (@VanBiztheRapper) The interesting thing about rolling out this tags feature is that they're gonna eventually include them on mobile….which they never did for Communities. So how can you accurately measure the usefulness of the Communities feature if not everybody had access to it? — Jae. (@JaeTheTerrible) Everyone is getting up in arms about Twitch removing communities. Believe it or not, communities can be used to push away gamers just as much as bring them together. — Vanilla Bizcotti (@VanBiztheRapper) Twitch says tagging will first launch on the web, and the company will then listen to feedback about missing tags before launching the feature on mobile. The mid-September launch date could change, but is the target for now. |
null | Bobby Franklin | 2,018 | 8 | 17 | null |
New material design stores energy like an eagle | John Biggs | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | Auxetics are materials that store energy internally rather than bulging out. In this way they can store more energy when squeezed or struck and disperse it more regularly. Historically, however, these materials have had sharp corners that could break easily with enough pressure. Now researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University of Cambridge have discovered a way to use auxetics in a more efficient and less fragile way. In this way you can create systems that store energy and release it mechanically multiple thousands of times. “The exciting future of new materials designs is that they can start replacing devices and robots. All the smart functionality is embedded in the material, for example the repeated ability to latch onto objects the way eagles latch onto prey, and keep a vice-like grip without spending any more force or effort,” said Queen Marry University’s Dr. Stoyan Smoukov. For example, a robot using this system can close its hand over and object and keep it closed until its time to let go. There is no need to continue sending power to the claw or hand until it is time to open up and drop the object. “A major problem for materials exposed to harsh conditions, such as high temperature, is their expansion. A material could now be designed so its expansion properties continuously vary to match a gradient of temperature farther and closer to a heat source. This way, it will be able to adjust itself naturally to repeated and severe changes,” said Eesha Khare, an undergrad who worked on the project. The project used 3D printing to make small clips that grab a toothed actuator. To release the energy, you pull on the opposite sides of the object to release the teeth. While the entire thing looks quite simple the fact that this object stores energy without bulging is important. The same technology can be used to “grab” bullets as they strike armor, resulting in better durability. |
Students and mentors: Apply for the all-new TC Include program at Disrupt SF with #BUILTBYGIRLS | Alexandra Ames | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | null |
What the Facebook Crypto team could build | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | the blockchain, but how? Back in May, Facebook to explore the possibilities, and today it removed a roadblock to revealing its secret plans. Former head of Messenger David Marcus, who leads the Facebook Crypto team, today announced he was stepping down from the board of Coinbase, the biggest crypto startup. Marcus was formerly the president of PayPal and helped Facebook Messenger adopt chatbot commerce and peer-to-peer payments, so he was both a natural choice for Coinbase’s board and Facebook’s blockchain skunklabs. Facebook told this was to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, which is exactly what it was. Marcus provided a statement to TechCrunch explaining he was stepping down “because of the new group I’m setting up at Facebook around blockchain,” noting that “ Now Facebook is cleared to start publicly talking about its plans, though it hasn’t yet. “We are still in the very early stages and we are considering a number of different applications for the blockchain. But we don’t have anything else to share at this time,” a Facebook spokesperson tells me. So what could Facebook be building? I see three main consumer-facing opportunities. Facebook could build a cryptocurrency wallet with its own token that people could use to pay for things with partnered businesses or that they discover through Facebook ads. Because blockchain can make transactions free or very cheap, Facebook and its partners could sidestep the typical credit card processing fees. That would potentially allow Facebook to Discounts like this could draw users into Facebook’s cryptocurrency feature. It’s well-positioned to run such a scheme thanks to its extensive connections with more than six million advertisers and 65 million businesses that have Facebook Pages. The social network could eat the costs of running the program, passing the transaction fee savings on to the users, while touting partnerships with Facebook Crypto as ways to boost sales for businesses. That could in turn get clients to spend more money on Facebook ads, as the discounts would enhance conversion rates and drive sales. One thing we know for sure is that Facebook won’t be building on the Stellar protocol. Facebook debunked a report saying it was, telling TechCrunch it was not in talks with Stellar or planning to build on it. Facebook already lets you for free, but only with a connected debit card or PayPal account. Facebook could offer cryptocurrency-based payments between friends to let a wider range of users settle debts for shared dinners or taxis through Messenger. Users might fund their Facebook Crypto wallet once with a payment, possibly with a one-time transaction fee, and then they could send and receive the tokens for free from then on. Blockchain becoming the backbone of peer-to-peer payments could further increase engagement with Messenger for its 1.3 billion users. Meanwhile, Facebook could also potentially use cryptocurrency to let fans send micropayments to their favorite creators, like video stars and game streamers. Facebook recently debuted its own virtual (not crypto) currency, called that users can buy and send to creators, who can then cash them out for one cent each. Facebook takes an undisclosed cut, but gives to the creator the majority of what users spend on Stars. Facebook could potentially undergird this system with cryptocurrency to alleviate transaction fees and let people tip creators smaller amounts of cash for exclusive content or just to show their appreciation. Facebook started with a minimum of $3 tips at a time so that transaction fees wouldn’t be too high of a percentage of the total purchase. A cryptocurrency solution could let users efficiently tip much smaller amounts, which could lure people toward the behavior. The more money Facebook can deliver to internet celebrities, the more popular ones it can recruit to live on its platform and the more content they’ll produce. Facebook Stars. Image via A top problem in the world of decentralized blockchain apps is how you bring your identity with you. Securely connecting your wallet, blockchain-based virtual goods and biographical info to new dApps can be a laborious process. Users typically have to type in long, complicated alphanumeric keys that are tough to remember and annoying to input. User experience design around identity in the blockchain space lags far behind what we’re used to with mainstream social apps like Facebook Connect, which uses a OAuth single sign-on to let you instantly join apps without creating a new username and password, or filling out a profile and uploading a photo. Facebook could use its expertise in operating a popular identity platform to ease login to dApps. While the company has faced plenty of privacy issues and attacks on election integrity, Facebook has a strong record of not being traditionally hacked. It hasn’t suffered a massive user data breach like LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks. Using an overtly centralized identity system to connect with decentralized apps might be counterintuitive, but Facebook could deliver the UX convenience necessary to unlock a new wave of blockchain utility. For now it’s unclear if Facebook will end up directly competing with Coinbase in the exchange and wallet space, or if it might instead partner with the blockchain mainstay to accelerate its efforts. And on the enterprise engineering side, Facebook could build some decentralized storage infrastructure to cut its massive server bills. But with deep pockets, tons of tech talent and ubiquity amongsts social networkers and businesses, Facebook Crypto’s primary limits are its ambitions and the extent of user trust. |
Facebook now requiring Pages with large US audiences to go through additional authorization | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | Facebook today it’s implementing a new measure to secure Facebook Pages with large U.S. followings in order to make it harder for people to administer a Page using a “fake or compromised account.” Beginning with those that have large U.S. followings, some Facebook Pages will now have to go through a “Page Publishing Authorization” process. This will require the Page managers to secure their accounts and verify their location. Facebook says the process only takes a few minutes to complete. If a Page requires this authorization, the Page admins will receive a notice at the top of their News Feed directing them to begin the process. If they choose not to submit to Authorization, they will no longer be able to post to their Pages, the company says. Enforcement will begin this month. When the Page owners click through, a message informs them why this is being done and what steps they have to take. To secure their account, Facebook is asking the Page manager to secure their account using two-factor authentication. This makes it more difficult for their account to be hijacked by a third-party, and is a best practice that all Facebook users – not just Page admins – should follow. Separately, the Facebook Page managers will need to verify their location. This will then be set as the Page’s primary country and display in the . Here, Facebook will also show a list of countries of the people who manage the Page, and how many managers hail from each country in that list. In addition, under Page History, Facebook will show when a Page has merged with another. The company says this new policy will initially roll out to Pages with large U.S. audiences, and Instagram will soon do something similar. Specifically, Instagram will allow people to see more information about accounts with large audiences. “Our goal is to prevent organizations and individuals from creating accounts that mislead people about who they are or what they’re doing,” reads a Facebook about the new process. “These updates are part of our continued efforts to increase authenticity and transparency of Pages on our platform.” The changes follow the recent news that Facebook had on its network, whose goal was to influence the U.S. midterms. The company removed 8 Facebook Pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and 7 Instagram accounts as a result of its findings. New policies to make Facebook Pages that reach a sizable number of Americans more secure, and their management more transparent, seems like a good first step on Facebook’s part. Though it’s still possible that those aiming to disrupt democracy and seed division will eventually find workarounds for these measures at some point in the future. |
Apeel Sciences is combating food waste with plant-derived second peels | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | In a world bursting with abundances like and , you would think that basic needs like sustainable food sourcing and distribution would be a problem of the past. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. , every year roughly a third — 1.3 billion tons — of food grown for consumption is lost or wasted. In industrialized countries like the U.S., this results in a loss of $680 billion per year, and in countries without standardized infrastructure (such as proper cooling systems), this results in a loss of $310 billion per year. Among the billions of tons of food lost per year, the largest percentage is in vital, nutrient-rich foods like fruits and vegetables and roots and tubers (such as potatoes and carrots), each seeing about 45 percent wasted annually. There are many factors responsible for food waste, including dates in the U.S. that tempt fickle customers into wasting otherwise good food, and unreliable or non-existent cooling distribution systems in less-industrialized countries. But an underlying cause of both of these issues, especially for easily spoiled foods, is the inherent shelf life of the food itself. And that’s where Apeel Sciences . The California-based startup is combating food waste by using plant-derived materials from food itself to create an extra protective barrier to prolong its life and stave off spoilage — essentially, creating a second peel. To create it, farmers just add water to Apeel’s protective powder and apply it to produce as a spray or wash. For founder and CEO James Rogers, who was working on a PhD in materials engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara when he was inspired to create Apeel Sciences, the solution to the problem of quickly spoiled food could be found by looking to a problem science had already solved: rust. “Factors that cause spoilage are water loss and oxidation,” Rogers told TechCrunch. “[This] reminded me instantly of my undergraduate days at Carnegie Mellon as a metallurgist studying steel. Steel is perishable as well. It’s perishable because it rusts — it reacts with oxygen in the environment — and [that] limits its use. [But metallurgists] designed a little oxide barrier that would physically protect the surface of that steel, [creating] stainless steel. Rogers says he began to wonder if a similar method could be used to protect produce from spoiling effects as well. “Could we create a thin barrier along the outside of fresh produce and in doing that lower the perishability and perhaps make a dent in the hunger problem?” Apeel was officially founded in 2012 with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for $100,000 to help reduce post-harvest food waste in developing countries that lacked refrigeration infrastructure. To combat this issue, Apeel set up self-service and hybrid distribution systems for farmers in countries like Kenya and Uganda to help protect their produce during its journey from farm to consumer, without the need for refrigeration. While the company still has a foothold in Africa and Southern Asia, it has also started partnerships with farmers in the U.S. as well, and in May and June of this year introduced the first Apeel produce — avocados — to U.S. retailers Costco and Harps Food Stores. Because Apeel produce is not genetically modified (but instead plant-derived), they need no special labeling at grocers, but Rogers said the produce wears its scientific design on its sleeve nevertheless. “We’re not doing anything at the DNA level, there’s no genetic modification, but we want to be really upfront with consumers and actually have them look for the label because by identifying that label they’re going to know that bringing that produce home with them [they’ll have] higher-quality, longer-lasting produce that they’ll be less likely to throw away.” According to Apeel, since its avocados were introduced to Harps Food Stores, the retailer has seen a 65 percent increase in margin and a 10 percent lift in sales across the avocado category. With these successes under its belt, Apeel also announced in July the closing of a $70 million funding round led by Viking Global Investors, with Andreessen Horowitz, Upfront Ventures and S2G Ventures participating. Rogers told TechCrunch that the capital will help the company continue its research and development of new methods to fight food waste, including Apeel sprays for produce like stone fruit and asparagus, and continue to learn from solutions found in nature, “Our [mission] at its core is looking at natural ecosystems to determine and identify what materials it’s using to solve problems and how we might be able to extract and isolate those materials to solve other problems for humanity.” |
Offering a white-labeled lending service in emerging markets, Mines raises $13 million | Jake Bright | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | 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. Emerging markets credit startup has closed a $13 million Series A round led by , the global impact fund formed by private equity giant TPG, and 10 others, including Velocity Capital. Mines provides business to consumer (B2C) “credit-as-a-service” products to large firms. “We’re a technology company that facilitates local institutions — banks, mobile operators, retailers — to offer credit to their customers,” Mines CEO and co-founder Ekechi Nwokah told TechCrunch. Most of Mines’ partnerships entail white-label lending products offered on mobile phones, including non-smart USSD devices. With offices in San Mateo and Lagos, Mines uses big-data (extracted primarily from mobile users) and proprietary risk algorithms “to enable lending decisions,” Nwokah explained. “We combine a strong AI technology with full…deployment services — disbursement…collections, payments, loan management, and regulatory — wrap it up in a box, give it to our partners and then help them run it,” he said. Mines’ typical client is a company “that has a large customer base and wants to avail credit to that customer base,” according to Nwokah. The startup generates revenue from fees and revenue share with partners. Mines started operations in Nigeria and counts payment processor and mobile operator Airtel as current partners. In addition to talent acquisition, the startup plans to use the Series A to expand its credit-as-a-service products into new markets in South America and Southeast Asia “in the next few months,” according to its CEO. Mines sees itself as a “hardcore technology company based in Silicon Valley with a global view,” according to Nwokah. “At the same time, we’re very African,” he said. The startup’s is led by three Nigerians — Nwokah, Chief Scientist Kunle Olukotun and MD Adia Sowho. The company came together after Olukotun (then and still a Stanford professor) and Nwokah (a then-AWS big data specialist) met in Palo Alto in 2014. Looking through the lens of their home country Nigeria, the two identified two problems in emerging markets: low access to credit across large swaths of the population and insufficient tools for big institutions to put together viable consumer lending programs. Due to a number of structural factors in these markets, such as low regulatory support, lack of credit data and tech support, “there’s no incentive for many banks and institutions to take risk on a retail lending business,” according to Nwokah. Nwokah sees Mines’ end user market as “the more than 3 billion adults globally without access to credit,” and its direct client market as big “banks, retailers and mobile operators…who want to power digital credit tailored to these markets.” Mines views itself as different from the U.S.’s controversial payday lenders by serving different consumer needs. “If you live in a country where your salary is not guaranteed every month, where you don’t have a credit card…where you have to pay upfront cash for almost everything you do, you need cash,” he said The most common loan profile for one of Mines’ partners is $30 at 15 percent flat for a couple of weeks. Nwokah wouldn’t name specific countries for the startup’s pending South America and Southeast Asia expansion, but believes “this technology is scalable across geographies.” As part of the Series A, Yemi Lalude from TPG Growth (founder of The Rise Fund) will join Mines’ board of directors. On a call with TechCrunch, Lalude named the company’s ability to “drive financial inclusion within a matter of seconds from mobiles devices,” their “local execution on the ground” and model of “partnering with many large organizations with their own balance sheets” as reasons for the investment commitment. With Mines’ pending Asia and South America move they join Nigerian tech companies and data analytics firm , who have expanded or stated plans to expand internationally this year. |
Grand Seiko is an homage to watchmaking’s past | John Biggs | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | The 1960s were a beautiful time for watches. Horology was in its prime and the great names we know and love today – Rolex, Omega, Cartier – were just one of many watchmakers churning out commodity products to a world that needed to tell the time. Their watches – simple, elegant, and mechanically complex – were the ultimate in mechanical efficiency and design and no one did it quite as well as Seiko. This mechanical golden age ended in the late 1970s with the rise of the quartz watch but Seiko is resurrecting it with their Grand Seiko line of luxury pieces. Grand Seiko is special for a few reasons. First, it’s Seiko’s haute horlogerie skunkworks, allowing the company to experiment with all the fancy materials and techniques that Swiss watchmakers have worked with for years. The watches are made of precious metals and feature Seiko Hi-Beat movements. These watches “vibrate” 36,000 times an hour or ten times a second. This means that the balance wheel inside the watch is moving back and forth far faster than, say, an Omega Co-Axial 8500/1 series which is clocked at 25,200 vibrations per hour. What this means in practice is that the seconds hand moves with an almost uncanny smoothness. The rest of the watch I tested, the euphoniously-named SBGH263G, is based on a piece from 1968 that came from Seiko’s mechanical hey-day. The $6,200 watch has a 39mm case and, according to Seiko, is style for maximum elegance. They write: The dial has elegant and easy-to-see Arabic numeral for the hour mark. The concept color “Shironeri” is a reflection of Japanese tradition. The color and texture of the dial come from the glossy white silk of the outfit worn by the bride in a Japanese wedding. It symbolizes purity and innocence. This watch is a formal piece for wearing, presumably, to your own wedding. That said, it’s also very reminiscent of 1960s style watches. The size, case shape, and polished hands and numerals all hearken back to a simpler time in watchmaking when everything didn’t have to look like a robot’s goiter or a pie plate. It is quite small and if you’re used to Panerais or Nixons you’ll definitely notice a grandpa vibe about this piece. Because it is not very complex – that is it does not have any real complications like a stopwatch – it is very pricey. However, knowing Grand Seiko’s dedication to a very lost art of non-Swiss horology, it’s well worth a look. I’ve been following Grand Seiko for years now and the quality and care the company has been putting into these watches is palpable. This watch is no commodity product. The case is polished to a high sheen and everything – from the screws to the beautiful domed sapphire crystal – is put together with great care. Seiko also makes lower end pieces – my favorite is the – but this is far above that in terms of build quality and price. Pieces like this Grand Seiko remind us that, before Apple Watches and Fitbits, there was an entire universe of truly striking timepieces made for the absolutely sole purpose of telling the time. I love pieces like this one because they are no frills and yet they are full of frills. The watch is as simple as can be – three hands and a date window without any lume or extraneous buttons – and yet it shows amazing technical skill. It is expensive but this is a handmade watch by a storied manufacturer and it’s well worth the price of admission if you’re a lover of the elegantly antiquated. [gallery ids="1689595,1689594,1689593,1689592"] |
Crypto mining giant Bitmain on target for $10B revenue this year | Joyce Yang | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | rush, Silicon Valley’s line is to always invest in picks and shovels instead of mining. Sometimes it pays just to do both. TechCrunch has learned through a company fundraise overview that Beijing-based mining equipment seller hit a quarterly revenue of approximately $2 billion in Q1 of this year. Despite a , the company is on track to become the first blockchain-focused company to achieve $10 billion in annual revenue, assuming that the cryptocurrency market doesn’t drop further. that the company had $1.1 billion in profits in the same quarter, a number in line with these revenue numbers, given a net margin of around 50 percent. |
Grab-Uber deal wins Philippines approval but ‘virtual monopolist’ concern remains | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | in May has been embroiled in regulatory scrutiny, but the ride-hailing firm has some positive news after the Philippines’ regulator gave the deal the all-clear. It did so, however, whilst laying out terms to prevent the company from becoming overly dominant. that competition concerns may see it unwind the deal, which saw Grab pick up and then shutter Uber’s ride-hailing and food delivery business while the U.S. firm got a 27.5 percent stake in its recent. Competition is also a concern in the Philippines, but the Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) ruled today that Grab will submit to “service quality and pricing standards” in order to ensure consumers are treated fairly. Singapore and the Philippines have been the most staunch investigators of the deal, so today’s news is a significant boost for Grab, which and a range of other investors. Despite the okay, the PCC is keeping a firm eye on the situation after it concluded that “Grab operates as a virtual monopolist.” The commission said that, post-Uber, Grab has committed to a series of terms that include more consistent and transparent pricing, the removal of exclusivity deals for drivers, and more. : The PCC said it will appoint a third-party to monitor Grab’s progress in adhering to these terms, which it hopes will hold the company to account in the same way Uber’s competition did. “The PCC’s Commitment Decision holds Grab to a standard as if Uber were present in the market. In effect, while Grab operates as a virtual monopolist, the commitments assure the public that quality and price levels that would prevail are those that had been when they still faced competition from Uber. Moreover, the commitments ensure that the merger will not make it more difficult for new players to enter and grow,” PCC Chairman Arsenio M. Balisacan said in a statement. The pricing component is particularly important. Since Uber’s departure many users, particularly those in the Philippines, have complained about rising prices on Grab since the exit of Uber. The company previously brushed that concern aside, claiming that it hasn’t increased prices but the differences between its costs and Uber’s are down to an alternative pricing model. In Grab’s case, it has “always maintained a competitive per KM fare with 2.0 surge max.” Uber’s surge, it said, could reach 4X. That’s been dismissed by many users but those in the Philippines can at least take hope from the fact that their regulator is pushing the issue. There’s also very legitimate concern that Grab’s position has made it impossible for new entrants to challenge its business. Indonesia’s $5 billion startup Go-Jek is in the process of expanding its business regionally after . . But Go-Jek has had to raise over $1 billion to get its shot, and there’s no guarantee it will replicate its dominance in Indonesia in other countries. The fact remains that other ride-hailing rivals of scale are near-impossible to find in Southeast Asia even though that “there’s still a lot of existing competition.” In most cases, Grab’s stiffest competition is local market taxi firms, many of which have added app-based bookings to bolster their business. Grab said in a statement that it has made the commitments voluntarily and that it supports competition: We are happy that the Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) has recognised the legality of Grab’s deal with Uber in Philippines and accepted Grab’s voluntary commitments. PCC’s pro-innovation approach and forward-looking decision sets a strong example for other regulators examining the Grab-Uber deal, and encourages fair competition and a level playing field that ultimately benefits consumers and drivers. As we move forward to become an everyday app that serves the daily essential needs of people in Southeast Asia, we will continue to stay focused on serving the best interests of our consumers and partners. Aside from its new funding, which takes the company to $6 billion raised to date and gives it a valuation of $11 billion, Grab has been busy expanding its reach. The company widened its GrabFood service across the region thanks in no small part to the UberEats, while that emphasizes its collection of services that include deliveries, payments and ride-hailing. Part of that strategy included the launch of a platform that allows third-parties to tap the Grab platform and bring their services into its app. The launch partner for that was food delivery service HappyFresh, which is . Investment is another area where Grab is stepping up. , a division that will handle strategic investments and manage an accelerator program called ‘Velocity.’ |
Workona helps web workers finally close all those tabs | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | A new startup, , this week launched software designed for those who primarily do their work in a browser. The company’s goal is to become the OS for web work – and to also save web workers from the hell that is a million open tabs. To accomplish this, Workona offers smart browser windows you set up as workspaces, allowing you a place to save your open tabs, as well as collaborate with team members, search across your tabs, and even sync your workspace to different devices. The Palo Alto-based company was founded in fall 2017 by Quinn Morgan (CEO), previously the founding product manager at Lucidpress, and Alma Madsen (CTO), previously the first employee and Director of Engineering at Lucid Software, the makers of Lucidpress. “Last year, Alma and I decided we wanted to build something together again, and initially began working on a different startup idea,” explains Morgan, as to how Workona began. “As a remote team at the time, we were using cloud apps like Google Docs, Asana, Slack, and Zoom to stay connected. Both of us were wearing multiple hats and juggling ten different projects at once.” “One late night, with ten windows open for each project, the idea just struck us: ‘Why doesn’t the browser – the tool that we actually do most of our work in – not have a good way to manage all of our projects, meetings, and workflows?'” Of course, there are already browser add-ons that can help with taming the tab chaos, like OneTab, toby, Session Buddy, The Great Suspender, TooManyTabs and others. But the co-founders didn’t want just another tab manager; they wanted a smart browser window that would save the work you do, automatically. That way, you wouldn’t have to keep all the tabs open all the time, which can make you stressed and less focused. And you wouldn’t have to remember to press a button to save your tabs, either. With Workona, the software guides users to create workspaces for each of the projects, meetings, and workflows they’re currently working on. (Working on…Workona…get it?). You can also take a browser window that represents one project and save it as a workspace. These workspaces function like a folder, but instead of holding a set of files, they can save anything on the web – cloud documents, task lists, open websites, CRM records, Slack sessions, calendars, Trello boards, and more. In each workspace, you can save a set of tabs that should reappear when that workspace is re-opened, as well as set of “saved tabs” you may need to use later. After creating a workspace, you can use Workona to re-open it at any time. What that means is you can close the browser window, and later easily pick up where you left off without losing data. A list of workspaces will also appear in the left-side navigation in the Workona browser tab. Within this tab, you can click to open a workspace, switch between workspaces in the same browser window, search for tabs or workspaces from the included search bar, or open workspaces from their URL. In a shared workspace, you can also collaborate with others on things the team is working on – like everything needed for a project or meeting. “Our vision is to build the missing OS for work on the web and workspaces are just the start,” says Morgan. The company is currently working on making the workspaces and its search features more powerful, he adds. Workona will be sold as a freemium product, with a free tier always available for moderate use. Pro accounts will be in the future, removing the limit of 10 workspaces found in the free version. The company has been beta testing with users from tech companies like Twitter, Salesforce and Amazon, as well as NASA. The company is still pre-seed stage, with funding from K9 Ventures. Traditional OS’s spent a lot of time and effort in designing the ‘desktop experience’ and switching between applications. But in a browser, all we have is tabs,” said K9 Ventures’ Manu Kumar, as to why he invested. “There are tab managers but none of them really solved my problem well enough, and none of them allowed me to maintain a shared context with other people that I’m collaborating with,” he added. Workona is available for Chrome as a plugin you from its website. |
Apple orders a show about a video game studio from the ‘It’s Always Sunny’ gang | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | null |
Google will lose $50 million or more in 2018 from Fortnite bypassing the Play Store | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | When Fortnite Battle Royale launched on Android, it made an unusual choice: it in favor of offering the game directly from Epic Games’ own website. Most apps and games don’t have the luxury of making this choice – the built-in distribution Google Play offers is critical to their business. But Epic Games believes its game is popular enough and has a strong enough draw to bring players to its website for the Android download instead. In the process, As of its Android launch date, Fortnite had grossed over $180 million on iOS devices, where it had been exclusively available since launching as an invite-only beta on March 15th, before later expanding to all App Store customers. from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower, the game has earned Apple more than $54 million thanks to its 30 percent cut of all the in-app spending that takes place on apps distributed in its store. That’s money Epic Games isn’t apparently willing to give up to Google, when there’s another way. Unlike Apple, which only allows apps to be downloaded from its own storefront, Google’s platform is more open. There’s a way to adjust an Android device’s settings to download apps and games from anywhere on the web. Of course, by doing so, , malware infections, and other malicious attacks. For those reasons, security researchers are saying that Epic Games’ decision sets a dangerous precedent by encouraging people to remove the default security protections from their devices. They’re also concerned that users who look for the game on Google Play could be fooled into downloading suspicious copycat apps that may be trying to take advantage of Fortnite’s absence to scam mobile users. Google seems to be worried about that, too. For the first time ever, that a game is available for download. Now, when users search for things like “Fortnite” or “Fortnite Battle Royale,” (One has to wonder if Google’s misspelling of “Royale” as “Royal” in its message was a little to the gamemakers, or just a bit of incompetence.) In any event, it’s an unusual response on Google’s part – and one it was done to serve users as well as protect them from any potential scam apps. However, the message could lead to some pressure on Epic Games, too. It could encourage consumer complaints from those who want to more easily (or more safely) download the game, as well as from those who don’t understand there’s an alternative method or are confused about how that method works. In addition, Google is serving up the also hugely popular PUBG Mobile at the top of Fortnite search results followed by other games. In doing so, it’s sending users to another game that can easily eat up users’ time and attention. For Google, the move by Epic Games is likely troubling, as it could prompt other large games to do the same. While one odd move by Epic Games won’t be a make or break situation for Google Play revenue (which always lags iOS), if it became the norm, Google’s losses could climb. At present, Google is missing out on millions that will now go directly to the game publisher itself. Over the rest of 2018, Sensor Tower believes Fortnite will have gained at least $50 million in revenues that would otherwise have been paid out to Google. The firm expects that when Fortnite rolls out to all supported Android devices, its launch revenue on the platform will closely resemble the first several months of Apple App Store player spending. It may even it, given the game’s popularity continues growing and the standalone download allows it to reach players in countries where Google Play isn’t available. Meanwhile, there have been concerns that the download makes it more difficult on users with older Android devices to access the game, because the process for sideloading apps isn’t as straightforward. But Sensor Tower says this will not have a large enough impact to affect Fortnite’s revenue potential in the long run. |
Hollywood gets its own open-source foundation | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | Open source is everywhere now, so maybe it’s no surprise that the (yes, the organization behind the Oscars) today announced that it has partnered with the to launch the , a new open-source foundation for developers in the motion picture and media space. The founding members include a number of high-powered media and tech companies, including Animal Logic, Blue Sky Studios, Cisco, DreamWorks, Epic Games, Google, Intel, SideFX, Walt Disney Studios and Weta Digital. “Open Source Software has enabled developers and engineers to create the amazing effects and animation that we see every day in the moves, on television and in video games,” said Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin. “With the Academy Software Foundation, we are providing a home for this community of open source developers to collaborate and drive the next wave of innovation across the motion picture and broader media industries.” The Academy Software Foundation’s mission statement notes that it wants to be a neural forum “to coordinate cross-project efforts; to provide a common built and test infrastructure; and to provide individuals and organizations a clear path to participation in advancing out open source ecosystem.” According to a survey by the Academy, 84 percent of the industry uses open-source software already, mostly for animation and visual effects. The group also found that what’s holding back open-source development in the media industry is the siloed nature of the development teams across the different companies in this ecosystem. “The creation of the Academy Software Foundation is an important and exciting step of the motion picture industry,” said Nick Cannon, the chief technology officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios. “By increasing collaboration within our industry, it allows all of us to pool our efforts on common foundation technologies, drive new standards for interoperability and increase the pace of innovation.” The fact that even Hollywood is now embracing open source and its collaborative nature is yet another sign of how the world of software development has changed in recent years. Over the last few years, traditional enterprises realized that whatever technology they developed to run their software infrastructure isn’t what actually delivers value to their customers, so it made sense to collaborate in this area, even with their fiercest competitors — and the same, it seems, now holds true for the Hollywood studios, too (or at least for those that have now joined the new foundation). |
As promised, Netflix’s user reviews are no more | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | Last month, it informed recent users that reviews would be sunset soon. |
Robotics-as-a-service is on the way and inVia Robotics is leading the charge | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | The team at didn’t start out looking to build a business that would create a new kind of model for selling robotics to the masses, but that may be exactly what they’ve done. After their graduation from the University of Southern California’s robotics program, Lior Elazary, Dan Parks and Randolph Voorhies were casting around for ideas that could get traction quickly. “Our goal was to get something up and running that could make economic sense immediately,” Voorhies, the company’s chief technology officer, said in an interview. The key was to learn from the lessons of what the team had seen as the missteps of past robotics manufacturers. Despite the early success of , consumer-facing or collaborative robots that could operate alongside people had yet to gain traction in wider markets. , the legendary company formed by some of the top names in the robotics industry, had shuttered just as Voorhies and his compatriots were graduating, and , another of the biggest names in robotics research, was bought by Google around the same time — capping a six-month buying spree that saw the search giant acquire eight robotics companies. “ So the three co-founders looked for ideas they could take to market quickly. The thought was building a robot that could help with mobility and reaching for objects. “We built a six-degree-of-freedom arm with a mobile base,” Voorhies said. However, the arm was tricky to build, components were expensive and there were too many variables in the environment for things to go wrong with the robot’s operations. Parks then put together a white paper analyzing the different controlled environments where collaborative robots could be most easily deployed. The warehouse was the obvious choice. Back in March of 2012 Amazon had come to the same conclusion and acquired in a that brought Kiva’s army of robots around the world. With the idea in place, the team, which included technologists Voorhies and Parks, and Elazary, a serial entrepreneur who had already exited from two businesses, just needed to get a working prototype together. Most warehouses and shipping facilities that weren’t Amazon were using automated storage and retrieval systems, Voorhies said. These big, automated systems that looked and worked like massive vending machines. But those systems, he said, involved a lot of sunk costs, and weren’t flexible or adaptable. And those old systems weren’t built for random access patterns and multi-use orders, which comprise most of the shipping and packing that are done as e-commerce takes off. With those sunk costs though, warehouses are reluctant to change the model. The innovation that Voorhies and his team came up with was that the logistics providers wouldn’t have to. In the beginning, the team at inVia played with different ways to build the robot. At first there was a robot that could carry several different objects and another that would be responsible for picking. The form factor that the company eventually decided on was a movable puck-shaped base with a scissor lift that can move a platform up and down. Attached to the back of the platform is a robotic arm that can extend forward and backward and has a suction pump attached to its end. The suction pump drags boxes onto a platform that are then taken to a pick-and-pack employee. “ Since bootstrapping that initial robot, inVia has gone on to raise $29 million in financing to support its vision — most recently . “E-commerce industry growth is driving the need for more warehouse automation to fulfill demand, and AI-driven robots can deliver that automation with the flexibility to scale across varied workflows. Our investment in inVia Robotics reflects our conviction in AI as a key enabler for the supply chain industry,” said Daniel Gwak, co-head, AI Investments at , the early-stage investment firm formed by the famed hedge fund manager, Steven Cohen. Given the pressures on shipping and logistics companies, it’s no surprise that robotics and automation are becoming critically important strategic investments, or that venture capital is flooding into the market. In the past two months alone, robotics companies targeting warehouse and retail automation have raised nearly $70 million in new financing. They include the recent for the French startup Exotec Solutions and Bossa Nova’s . Then there are warehouse-focused robotics companies like , which traces its lineage back to Willow Garage and , which is linked to the logistics services company Quiet Logistics. “Funding in robotics has been incredible over the past several years, and for good reason,” said John Santagate, research director for Commercial Service Robotics at research and analysis firm IDC, in a statement. “The growth in funding is a function of a market that has become accepting of the technology, a technology area that has matured to meet market demands, and vision of the future that must include flexible automation technology. Products must move faster and more efficiently through the warehouse today to keep up with consumer demand, and autonomous mobile robots offer a cost-effective way to deploy automation to enable speed, efficiency, and flexibility.” The team at inVia realized it wasn’t enough to sell the robots. To give warehouses a full sense of the potential cost savings they could have with inVia’s robots, they’d need to take a page from the software playbook. Rather than selling the equipment, they’d sell the work the robots were doing as a service. Contracts between inVia and logistics companies are based on the unit of work done, Voorhies said. “We charge on the order line,” says Voorhies. “An order line is a single [stock keeping unit] that somebody would order regardless of quantity… We’re essentially charging them every time a robot has to bring a tote and present it in front of a person. The faster we’re able to do that and the less robots we can use to present an item the better our margins are.” It may not sound like a huge change, but those kinds of efficiencies matter in warehouses, Voorhies said. “If you’re a person pushing a cart in a warehouse, that cart can have 35 pallets on it. With us, that person is standing still, and they’re really not limited to a single cart. They are able to fill 70 orders at the same time rather than 55,” he said. At Rakuten Super Logistics, the deployment of inVia’s robots are already yielding returns, according to Michael Manzione, the chief executive officer of Rakuten. “Really [robotics] being used in a fulfillment center is pretty new,” said Manzione in an interview. “We started looking at the product in late February and went live in late March.” For Manzione, the big selling point was scaling the robots quickly, with no upfront cost. “The bottom line is going to be effective when we see planning around the holiday season,” said Manzione. “We’re not planning on bringing in additional people, versus last year when we doubled our labor.” As Voorhies notes, training a team to work effectively in a warehouse environment isn’t easy. “ * [gallery ids="1695589,1695588,1695586,1695587,1695580,1695582"] |
The Kindle Voyage is no longer available from Amazon | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | null |
A university is outfitting living spaces with thousands of Echo Dots | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | null |
Soon you’ll be able to watch high school football on Twitter | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | null |
Tencent-backed news aggregation app Qutoutiao files for US public offering | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | , a news aggregator app backed by Tencent, has filed for an initial public offering of up to $300 million in the United States. In its , the company, whose name means “fun headlines,” said it is the number two mobile content aggregator in China. Its main rivals are Jinri Toutiao, China’s top news aggregator, Tencent’s Kuaibao and Yidianzixun. Based in Shanghai, Qutoutiao , when it raised a Series B of about $200 million led by Tencent. For Tencent, Qutoutiao and Kuaibao represent opportunities to take market share away from Jinri Toutiao, which is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is reportedly that could value it at over $45 billion. In its SEC filing, Qutoutiao said that since launching in July 2016, it has achieved monthly average users of about 48.8 million and daily average users of about 17.1 million, with the average time users spend on the app each day totaling about 55.6 minutes in July 2018. To compete with Jinri Toutiao and other rivals, Qutoutiao targets users from China’s smaller Tier 3 cities. Despite increasing levels of disposable income, Qutoutiao says Tier 3 cities, many of which are located in the west of China, are still underserved markets. Qutoutiao also said in its filing that its net revenues increased from RMB 58.0 million (about $8.8 million) in 2016 to RMB 517.1 million (about $78.1 million) in 2017, and from RMB 107.3 million (about $16.2 million) in the six months ended June 30, 2017 to RMB 717.8 million (about $108.5 million) in the same period in 2018. The app uses an AI-based content recommendation engine to display articles and videos based on user profiles and plans to use money raised from its IPO to add more content offerings, increase monetization opportunities and look for acquisition and investment opportunities. Qutoutiao plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol QTT. The IPO will be underwritten by Citigroup Global Markets, Deutsche Bank Securities, China Merchants Securities and UBS Securities and KeyBanc Capital Markets. |
Jack Dorsey admits Twitter hasn’t ‘figured out’ approach to fake news | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others……. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) . : Is your job to make sure people are not misinformed on Twitter? Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: “We have not figured this out, but I do think it would be dangerous for a company like ours… to be arbiters of truth.” — CNN (@CNN) |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 8 | 10 | null |
HUD complaint accuses Facebook ads of violating Fair Housing Act | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | null |
Original Content podcast: ‘To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before’ is a charming high school romance | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | While Hollywood’s interest in romantic comedies , Netflix has been picking up some of the slack. Just a few months ago, . And now we’ve got , a high school romance based on the young adult novel by Jenny Han. tells the story of Lara Jean Covey (played by Lana Condor), a teenager who’s written love letters to all of her crushes, but never sent them — until the beginning of the movie, when they mysteriously end up in the hands of the titular boys. Naturally, this leads to intense mortification and embarrassment, particularly when Lara Jean is so desperate to hide her feelings on her sister’s ex Josh (Israel Broussard) that she agrees to pretend to date her former (?) crush Peter (Noah Centineo). On the latest episode of , we’re joined by our colleague Taylor Nakagawa to review the film. Taylor wasn’t entirely won over — after all, you can probably guess most of what happens next based on the bare bones plot description above. But your regular hosts Anthony and Jordan enjoyed it anyway, particularly the movie’s tremendously charming leads. We also discuss , one of the rare Hollywood rom coms to make it onto the big screen, and how . And we cover the week’s streaming news, including and the reports that . You can listen in the player below, or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can . (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!) |
China announces transportation industry reform, days after murder of Didi carpooling passenger | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 8 | 26 | The Chinese government announced it will reform the transportation industry to safeguard passengers, three days after a female passenger was . Provinces and autonomous regions are now tasked with setting up passenger safety committees by the end of this month and ensuring that incidents are investigated promptly. The crime led to the suspension of Hitch, Didi Chuxing’s carpooling service, and the firing of two executives: Hitch’s general manager and Didi’s vice president of customer services. This is not the first time, however, that Didi has been forced pull back on Hitch. Earlier this year, it suspended night operations after a female passenger was allegedly murdered by an unregistered driver who had accessed the service using his father’s account. Nighttime Hitch rides then , including a rule that prohibited drivers from accepting ride requests by passengers of the opposite sex during certain hours. The latest incident took place on Friday in the eastern province of Zhejiang and is especially concerning because the driver had been flagged just one day before the murder by another female passenger who complained that he followed her after she left his vehicle. In a statement, Didi said a safety center representative failed to follow corporate policy and initiate an investigation within two hours. The company also admitted that its customer service procedures has “many deficiencies” and said it will “plead for law enforcement and the public to work with us in developing more efficient and practical collaborative solutions to fight criminals and protect user personal and property safety.” China’s police and transport ministries have already said that Didi . The company has already been accused of being too lax with passenger safety, leaving its users–particularly women–vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault. What stunned me while reporting this was the numbers. According to Southern Weekly, at least 53 women have been raped or sexually harassed by Didi drivers in the past 4 yrs?! Caixin says there are 14 rapes linked to Didi drivers, citing court docs. — Sui-Lee Wee 黄瑞黎 (@suilee) The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the agency that enacts strategies for China’s economic and social development, posted its announcement, online on Monday morning. In it, the NDRC said it will put measures into place to root out untrustworthy and dishonest operators in China’s transportation industry, which has grown dramatically over the past two decades. Provinces and autonomous regions must form committees and procedures to ensure passenger safety by August 31 and share information about violations and offenders with other municipalities. While the NDRC mentioned all transportation sectors, including railways, airplanes and ships, it singled out passenger vehicles, including buses, shuttles and cabs, in one passage and ordered municipalities to investigate offenses in a timely manner. Operators that don’t take action quickly to fix “untrustworthy behavior” risk being placed on a blacklist and having their names published on government websites. |
Update: Mass shooting at Madden Championship Series event in Florida leaves several dead | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 8 | 26 | At least eleven people have been shot and three people were killed in a mass shooting attack at a live-streamed competition for the “ ” game at an arcade in Jacksonville, Fla., . The Jacksonville Sheriff’s office confirmed three people were killed in the attack, including the shooter. “We just finished clearing The Landing of potential witnesses and victims there,” said Sheriff Mike Williams in a statement broadcast on Facebook Live. “We have no outstanding suspects,” Williams said. “We have one suspect in this case. He is deceased at the scene.” According to a , the shooter was a player who had lost during the competition and then shot other attendees at the event before killing himself. The event and there are multiple audio streams that broadcast the sounds of the shooting live. Multiple participants in the event took to Twitter to describe the scene. Me and my gf are ok everyone and out of the Jville area. This is absolutely sickening. Please pray for the madden players right now injured during the shooting. Shit like this really makes you rethink your actions and the way you live. For sure gunna be some changes going forward — x D3liveranc3 x (@mpinter9) The sheriff’s office confirmed via tweet that witnesses to the shooting were hiding in locked areas in the shopping area where the event — and shooting — occurred. We are finding many people hiding in locked areas at The Landing. We ask you to stay calm, stay where you are hiding. SWAT is doing a methodical search inside The Landing. We will get to you. Please don’t come running out. — Jax Sheriff's Office (@JSOPIO) “This is a horrible situation and our deepest sympathies go out to all involved,” said Electronic Arts in a statement about the shooting. This is a horrible situation, and our deepest sympathies go out to all involved. — EA SPORTS Madden NFL (@EAMaddenNFL) In a direct message to The Los Angeles Times, one witness, Steven “Steveyj” Javaruski, said that the gunman had targeted “a few” people and shot at least five before shooting himself. The event was a Madden tournament with about 250 people in attendance. It was intended to be a competition that would select attendees for a final tournament in Las Vegas. |
What the hell is the deal with Tether? | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 8 | 19 | It was a simple concept: a cryptocurrency whose units were always and constantly worth exactly one dollar, because they were backed by dollars held in a bank. Voila: dollars with the powers of crypto, such as the ability to quickly and permissionlessly transfer an arbitrary amount … and, er, a certain lack of pesky regulations. Now there are $2.7 billion worth of Tether in circulation, and they are anything but simple. (Euro Tether also exist but they’re a rounding error.) Who created Tether? The same people behind the exchange BitFinex, with whom Tether a CEO, a CFO, and ( ) a Chief Strategy Officer. That much we can be fairly confident about. But everything else about this money is shrouded in a deep fog of mystery tinged with misconduct. It’s hard to say; you can trade USD for them at a couple of crypto exchanges, notably Kraken in addition to the BitFinex exchange, but I haven’t been able to find any recent public examples of anyone, institution or person, actually buying newly issued Tethers from Bitfinex. So who provides the US dollars which are said to back all newly issued Tether? It’s very hard to say. Well — actually — nobody, despite their ‘s assurances that their reserve holdings are “subject to frequent professional audits” and “ .” But they “ ” their relationship with their first auditors, Friedman LLP, without an audit ever being completed, and the “proof of funds” “ ” so prominent on their home page stresses it “should not be construed as the results of an audit.” Well, yes. The fact their “transparency report” is not an audit makes it very limited, questionable evidence, in my book … but it’s evidence nonetheless. (It’s really quite something that we’re talking about evidence, rather than an actual audit, for the existence of nearly three billion, with a “B,” dollars which are theoretically backing a very widely used asset.) Furthermore they appear to have banking relationships in , and/or with , and the massive growth in total bank deposits in Puerto Rico over the last year or so with the number of Tethers which have been issued in that time. That’s … both hard and easy to answer. I’ve been following the Tether saga with some interest for a full year and I have yet to come across any public example of Tether actually doing this for anyone. Ever. Their most recent public announcement on the subject, from , says “exchanges and other qualified corporate customers can contact Tether directly to arrange for creation and redemption. Sadly, however, we cannot create or redeem tether for any U.S.-based customers at this time.” However! The most interesting thing about Tether is that you don’t to redeem them for dollars. As long as a cryptocurrency exchange believes that one Tether is worth one dollar, you can just use your Tether to buy bitcoin, or ether, or whatevercoin, and then transfer / convert to dollars. It’s those cryptocurrency:Tether exchange rates which actually matter. As long as those are maintained, it’s actually irrelevant to the average user whether Tether is actually backed by dollars … which obviously opens up a lot of space in which shenanigans might occur. I mean. How much time do you have? One passionate critic, known as Bitfinexed, has been writing about this for ; it’s a pretty deep rabbit hole. University of Texas researchers have accused Bitfinex/Tether of (upwards.) The two entities have allegedly been . In possibly (but also possibly not — again, a fog of mystery) related news, the US Justice Department has opened a into cryptocurrency price manipulation, which critics say is . Comparisons are also being with , the digital currency service shut down for money laundering five years ago: Good question. On the one hand, people and even companies are innocent until proven guilty, and the opacity of cryptocurrency companies is at least morally consistent with the industry as a whole. A wildly disproportionate number of crypto people are privacy maximalists and/or really hate and fear governments. (I wish the US government didn’t keep making their “all governments become jackbooted surveillance police states!” attitude seem and .) But on the other … yes, one reason for privacy maximalism is because you fear rubber-hose decryption of your keys, but another, especially when anti-government sentiment is involved, is because you fear the taxman, or the regulator. A third might be that you fear what the invisible hand would do to cryptocurrency prices, if it had full leeway. And it sure doesn’t look good when when at least one of your claims, e.g. that your unaudited reserves are “subject to frequent professional audits,” is awfully hard to interpret as anything other than a baldfaced lie. I see four plausible answers: 1) a serious, competent, trustworthy, professional organization actually performs a full audit; 2) a legal / regulatory / criminal investigation forces Tether to open up their books; 3) a whistleblower tells all; 4) we don’t, ever. In the interim, this misconduct-tinged fog will continue to cover their entire enterprise … and their users won’t care, as long as one Tether buys you exactly as much bitcoin as one dollar, on every cryptocurrency exchange which supports them. |
Gaming community responds to Florida mass shooting | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 8 | 26 | The online gaming community is responding to , as reports identify the shooter involved in the attack and his victims. The shooter was identified by police as a 24-year-old white male, believed to be from Baltimore. According to accounts online, the two victims killed by the shooter were Los Angeles native Elijah Clayton, who went by the handle of True_818, and Taylor Robertson, a husband and father, who was known online as Spotmeplzz. RIP Elijah Clayton. One of my best friends in life. I talked to u almost everyday for the last 5 years. U were one of the most kind and genuine people I’ve ever met. I love u like a brother. I’m gonna miss hearing you laugh everyday and seeing your genuine smile. — Kiv (@young_kiv) Robertson, of Ballard, West Virginia, had played 18 games as part of the Madden community. Trueboy was so young…SpotMe had a wife and kids.. We spent years as a community building relationships on kindness and competitiveness. I'm sick right now… — Josh (@JoshTolliver) In a statement this evening the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Department clarified reports that there were three fatalities of the shooting — including the gunman. There were 11 reported casualties from the shooting who were taken or took themselves to local hospitals and all are reported in stable condition. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families who were all affected by this senseless act of violence here today,” said Chief Kurtis Wilson of the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department. The National Football League responded to the shooting with a statement offering its own condolences to the victims of the attack. OFFICIAL NFL STATEMENT: We are shocked and deeply saddened by the horrific tragedy today in Jacksonville. Our hearts go out to all those affected. (1/2) — NFL (@NFL) Indeed, the entire gaming community has spent coming to terms with in Jacksonville. To anyone ive ever blasted or talked smack to on stream I sincerely apologize. I was always talking to the gamertag in the corner of my screen and never the human being on the other end of the sticks. Things gunna be different going forward. I respect everyone out here doing this — x D3liveranc3 x (@mpinter9) Other eSports platforms also offered their thoughts on the tragedy. We are deeply saddened to hear about a shooting that occurred at a Madden 19 tournament in Jacksonville, Florida this afternoon and we wanted to extend our deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and all those affected by this tragedy. — lolesports (@lolesports) The shooting is at least the seventh mass shooting to occur in the U.S. this year, according to data from Mother Jones. And the second mass-shooting event in Florida in six months, . Today's shooting in Jacksonville is at least the seventh mass shooting of 2018. We've been tracking all such attacks from 1982 to now. See our database here: — Mother Jones (@MotherJones) After news of the shooting, advocates have taken their advocacy positions. NRA pundits are calling for better security and the abolition of public gun free zones in the states where open carry has made such policies necessary. And gun control advocates are pointing out that the creation of more stringent gun laws would obviate the need for either tighter security or gun free zones. Meanwhile, 11 people are recovering in hospitals from wounds inflicted by a 24-year-old who shot them and killed himself over his performance in a video game tournament. And two other people are dead for the same reason. They’re probably not listening to advocates right now. The President, who was briefed on the situation in Jacksonville, has yet to issue a statement. |
Travelstop brings business travel management to SMEs and startups in Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 8 | 26 | is a new startup in Singapore that aims to bring the benefits of business travel management to SMEs and other smaller companies in Southeast Asia. The company its product today after being founded in November 2017 by three entrepreneurs who worked at TravelMob, . Prior to TravelMob, the trio — Prashant Kirtane (CEO), Vijay Aggarwal (CTO) and Altaf Dhamani (CPO) — worked together at Yahoo Southeast Asia. They all moved over to HomeAway, and Travelstop is their first independent venture following that spell. That’s a huge amount of experience for a newly-formed startup in Southeast Asia, and a Kirtane told TechCrunch in an interview that 90 percent of business travel in Asia is unmanaged. That’s surprising since the region accounts for 40 percent of the $1.2 trillion global business travel market. He said that he and his co-founders can also recall the pain of unmanaged or rigid travel and expense systems and are vowing to solve it with Travelstop. The focus is on simplicity — Kirtane said Slack is its role model for design — with features such as clean UI, automated expense reporting, flexible travel policy, and data-based insight to allow business teams to analyze travel and expense costs. The service includes desktop and mobile apps. All of these are still missing in Southeast Asia — at least at the price that can appeal to SMEs and startups — while often global services, such as Concur, aren’t sufficiently localized to cover low-cost airlines or a wider array of hotels. (On this, I can agree!) “Many other tools corporate tools are still rudimentary and haven’t progressed,” Kirtane added. “We’re looking to reach mid-size tech companies first, but the – longer-term proposition is to let employees onboard themselves.” Travelstop is letting early customers use its product for free, but the business model that will arrive soon will be Saas-based. The team is also working to integrate existing systems, including Expensify, and other third-party services to let Travelstop users book travel and claim expenses off-platform. The company has raised $1.2 million to kick things off, and Kirtane said the startup may look to raise more in early 2019 as it begins to expand its engineering and sales teams and launch local offices. The seed round was led by SeedPlus, , and an unnamed travel-focused firm in the U.S. Travelstop said angel participants included Dan Lynn and Vikram Malhi, ex-Expedia senior business leaders and founders of Zuzu Hospitality Solutions, David Ko, who is president and COO of Rally Health, and Jarrod Howe, who is regional operations director at Hyper Island Singapore. |
Rebuilding employee philanthropy from the bottom up | John Chen | 2,018 | 8 | 26 | , it would be easy to assume that the world of high-impact charitable giving is a rich man’s game where deals are inked at exclusive black tie galas over fancy hors d’oeuvre. Both Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff have donated to SF hospitals that now bear their names. Gordon Moore has given away $5B – including $600M to Caltech – which was the largest donation to a university at the time. And of course, Bill Gates has already donated $27B to every cause imaginable (and co-founded The Giving Pledge, a consortium of billionaires pledging to donate most of their net worth to charity by the end of their lifetime.) For Bill, that means he has about $90B left to give. |
Cryptocurrency and blockchain bring Asia funds to the forefront of U.S. tech | Joyce Yang | 2,018 | 8 | 26 | , there’s been a new trend in the U.S. where a number of Asian funds have been actively involved in early-stage crypto investing. Many folks in traditional tech have not heard of them before, but these funds will only be growing more important as cryptocurrency and blockchain solidify their position in the American tech industry. Funds with Asian money, primarily from China, have been in Silicon Valley for a long time. However, in the past, they were rarely heard or seen in the press, mostly because their assets under management (AUM) and investment check sizes were smaller in size and fewer in frequency than their American counterparts on average. These funds were often only found investing in later-stage rounds, since they weren’t able to compete against the top venture funds in the early rounds for highly-coveted startups, as many entrepreneurs weren’t familiar with them. |
Hating the wrong tech people for the right reasons | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 8 | 26 | The slings and arrows aimed at tech’s titans these days are almost too numerous to count. Jeff Bezos: while exploiting warehouse employees. Mark Zuckerberg: complicit in everything from to the . Larry Page and Sergey Brin: in bed with and the . Elon Musk: where even to begin? Tim Cook has mostly escaped the brickbats, but if Steve Jobs were still with us, it seems he’d be the biggest target of all. And the list goes on from there, of course. Let’s not kid ourselves: a lot of this criticism is warranted. Amazon treat its warehouse workers better. Facebook have seen the new form of information warfare coming from further away, recognized it when it was happening, and responded much faster and more decisively. Google have come as close as it did to implementing Project Maven. Tesla … well … should basically be less of a mess. More generally, the tech sector is vastly more important than it used to be, both as a segment of the economy and as an intimate part of people’s lives, and the tech industry’s responsibilities are, accordingly, vastly greater than they were. People should be more critical of us, and more watchful. We should more carefully consider the consequences of our actions and inactions. And yet. It’s hard to shake the sense that a lot of the criticism aimed at tech titans is because they are so visible, not because they are actually responsible. Bezos and Musk get an amazing amount of flak for their efforts at private space exploration. This just seems bizarre. You may not agree that space exploration is an important, and possible critical, field of human endeavor, but surely you can agree that people might believe this in good faith, and that it’s not just — at the most extreme and laughable edge of those criticisms — . Also, it’s hard to ignore the fact that, on a relative shoestring, SpaceX and Blue Origin have been making meaningful advances (such as self-landing reusable boosters, and the cost-per-kilogram-to-orbit of the Falcon Heavy) which NASA has failed to make directly with its $19 billion budget — which in turn, as Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield points out, is less than twice what America spends on Halloween every year. And if people are upset about tech billionaires squandering money, why on earth aren’t they up in arms, in mobs with pitchforks and torches, enraged by the financial industry? The financial industry which consumes . Of course, in exchange for that extra fifth of all profits, it gives us … uh … well, nothing, really; it just takes. Similarly, there are fewer hedge-fund billionaires than there used to be, thankfully, but there are still an astonishing number of these people who are, in essence, very smart parasites who contribute nothing. “ .” Indeed — and, from the same article: Hedge fund managers are different from other rich people in this way: Theirs is extremely liquid wealth. Other billionaires’ holdings are often locked up in assets that cannot be sold as easily, such as real estate or company shares. Because hedge fund managers are essentially in a cash business, these managers are able to buy sports teams and other high-priced toys by writing a check. There’s a reason why there have been no mobs on Wall Street since the Occupy movement dissipated, and it is, I think, sadly, learned helplessness and despair. People don’t protest the parasites of the financial industry, or the military-industrial complex, or the bizarre cost disease that infects the US economy, or other aspects of our economy which are far, far more damaging than even the worst aspects of the tech industry, because they no longer believe that anything can be done about them. It’s sad but understandable. In a way, it speaks well of technology that it attracts such criticism. It means that we’re incompatible with learned helplessness and despair, because for all of our (many) flaws, ours is still essentially an industry of hope, and one which actually builds and contributes thing rather than siphoning value. As mentioned, a lot of the criticisms are merited, and we should absorb them, consider them, and act upon them. But at the same time let’s not pretend that tech is in any way Public Enemy No. 1, or that we represent all that is wrong with the world, or that tech people are uniquely and specially terrible, or that we should be the primary focus of criticism re how the world works, just because we are particularly striking and visible. If you want to deal with the enemies of a better world in order of importance, then I’m afraid you’re going to need to start elsewhere. |
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