title stringlengths 2 283 ⌀ | author stringlengths 4 41 ⌀ | year int64 2.01k 2.02k | month int64 1 12 | day int64 1 31 | content stringlengths 1 111k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mike Moritz and the declining America worker | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 1 | 20 | Storied Sequoia investor Mike Moritz and slothful Silicon Valley engineers. Moritz, a billionaire, clearly needs page views to fund his retirement. The major money quote about Silicon Valley is this: “In recent months, there have been complaints about the political sensibilities of speakers invited to address a corporate audience; debates over the appropriate length of paternity leave or work-life balances; and grumbling about the need for a space for musical jam sessions. These seem like the concerns of a society that is becoming unhinged.” He compares those petit concerns with the work ethic of Chinese workers who “appear about 10am and leave at midnight.” He focuses in on women, “Many of these high-flyers only see their children — who are often raised by a grandmother or nanny — for a few minutes a day.” And he emphasizes the Chinese and their parsimonious ways: “It is also striking to the western eye how frequently a tea bag is reused.” Reaction to the piece was strong, as one can imagine. , saying “Moritz has hit a few balls out of the park, yes. But that doesn’t mean we should take his opinion as gospel. In fact, I would argue that mega-billionaires like Moritz have absolutely no place telling anyone how hard they should be working, in the U.S. or anywhere else.” David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at Basecamp and inventor of the Ruby on Rails programming framework, put it even more bluntly in a tweet: Billionaire Valley VC drools over Chinese workaholism, their absence of time for fitness or seeing their kids, disinterest in debating equality. Calls Western sensibilities to such things “antiquated”. What a fucking toad. — DHH (@dhh) That seems par for the course among hundreds of other commenters online and across Twitter. To me though, Moritz’ comments are reasonably accurate, at least as far as stereotyping a country of 1.38 billion people and a region of a million or more goes. It’s clear that the Chinese work harder in tech on average, and that Chinese workplaces have many less frills than Silicon Valley workplaces. This has been known for years, and is not news. The far more interesting thread in this story is why it was so inflammatory in the first place. Sure, he conflated paternity leave and asking for a musical rehearsal room, and made it seem as if parents shouldn’t see their kids. And he’s a billionaire. I get the hashtag class warfare angle here. However, the post was inflammatory precisely because we are starting to feel the pain of competition again in the American economy. For the first time, white collar workers in the United States are facing what our blue collar brethren have experienced the past three decades: sliding salaries and benefits as their jobs were outsourced, the downsizing of the American dream. America liked the arrangement where clean, high-value design and services stayed in the United States and hard, dirty jobs like manufacturing, heavy industry, and rare earth mining were outsourced to China. Americans did the productive work, the Chinese did the hard work. Americans made the money, the Chinese got paid a couple of yuan. Capitalism was “introduced” in China in 1980 with the opening of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. 37 years later, and the country’s GDP is nearly the same size as the United States. China as a whole has worked extraordinarily hard to get to where it is today. Are we really surprised then that those same industrious Chinese workers suddenly continue working hard in the high-tech industry and start to compete toe-to-toe with American tech giants? In the startup circles in the Valley and New York City that I hang out in, paternity leave has come up on numerous occasions. There are multiple founders in my network that offer unlimited vacation for their startups, and offer free lunches, massages, and other accoutrements on top of dizzying salaries. All at startups. In some cases even before the series A but almost always afterwards. All of those benefits make sense at some level — talent is scarce, and after several decades of research, companies found out that treating humans well is ultimately a win-win for everyone. So why are we worried about China? If our workplace policies are really creating ideal conditions for productivity, aren’t we the ones who are benefitting? The Chinese will work themselves to death, and Americans who are working smarter will reap the rewards. The challenge of course is that it’s just not true. Startups are really, really hard to build. In the early years, they take hundreds of hours a week, and there are only a handful of employees to do those hours. A startup with a 35 hour workweek and unlimited vacation is almost certainly going to lose to a startup working 100 hours a week, even if the former’s workers are better rested and more productive. That’s why Moritz was so inflammatory. He’s clearly wrong on a moral and human level, but, he’s clearly right in a way. The anger we feel is both that we have a billionaire lecturing us about work, and that we also know deep down that he may well be right. If we want to protect the work environment that many have fought hard to create, then it’s time to get back to work. |
Katalyst.Ventures, a new firm led by Susan Choe, has raised $34 million | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 1 | 20 | There aren’t a lot of venture funds that are led by a single general partner who happens to be a woman. Sonja Hoel Perkins is one. The longtime Menlo Ventures managing director founded her two years ago. Another is Cindy Padnos, who spent four years with Outlook Ventures as a director before founding her own firm, , nine years ago. Now Silicon Valley has a new entrant on the micro VC scene. Susan Choe, a longtime investor who previously cofounded four-year-old , has raised at least $34 million for the debut fund of her firm, , according to a new . The filing states that Katalyst has secured the capital commitments from just four investors. Katalyst’s website suggests the firm’s focus is primarily on nascent artificial intelligence startups and teams. Reached in Singapore, Choe declined to comment on her fundraising efforts, citing SEC regulations. (In other words, we should probably expect Katalyst to lock down even more capital.) Asked about its impetus, however, she said that as an operator with a global operations background, she decided that discovering software-led tech teams with global impact across a wide variety of sectors would be a “good way to leverage 20 years of learnings across many I’ve held.” Choe had previously founded a gaming company called Outspark that was sold to Axl Springer for undisclosed terms. Choe is also still a managing director with Visionnaire, though we understand the firm’s current portfolio is being managed out. Visionnaire itself began targeting a $250 million second fund in 2016, according to an , and it never announced a close on that fund. Visionnaire’s chairman, Japanese billionaire Taizo Son, brother to SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, from Tokyo to Singpore where he now heads up Mistletoe, a venture capital firm that’s part accelerator and part incubator. Taizo Son’s multinational family office is among Katalyst’s anchor investors. Another anchor investor is an unnamed sovereign wealth fund. Katalyst is mostly focused on Silicon Valley and U.S. startups more broadly, and it looks to own between 10 and 15 percent of a portfolio company, Choe tells us. The firm makes both seed and Series A stage investments. Seed-stage checks range from $100,000 to $1 million, depending on the size of the company. Series A checks will range from $2 million and $5 million and Choe plans to introduce some of its breakout companies to Katalyst’s deep-pocketed LPs as they need follow-on funding. Choe has already begun investing on behalf of Katalyst, she tells us. As for what she looks for in a nascent startup, Choe says that a clear core mission, a logical product evolution path, and a relevant business model are some of the features that are most important to her. She points to , a global doctor community that she supported as an angel investor and that Katalyst is now backing as a Series A investor, as just one example. It sounds like a couple of other deals are on the verge of closing. Choe also made numerous investments on behalf of Visionnaire, which had closed its debut fund with $80 million. One of those checks went to the drone company , which delivers critical medical supplies in far-flung places. Zipline has raised around $40 million altogether, and Choe sits on the company’s board, along with Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital, among others. Another past deal is Krux, a company that tracked data signatures across multiple devices and that for $340 million in cash in 2016. We hope to learn more about the new outfit in coming months. In the meantime, a new fund led by an operator and investor who is also a woman will undoubtedly be welcome news to many in Silicon Valley. New firms generally have far greater female partner representation than at traditional venture firms. In the last three years, according to , 21 percent of newly launched venture and micro-venture firms had at least one female at the helm. |
Startup fundraising and exits look bullish for bio and health | Joanna Glasner | 2,018 | 1 | 20 |
After nearly a year, venture capitalists nabbed their first U.S. acquisition for more than a billion dollars. And it wasn’t a tech startup. Nor was it a company on the list of . And it had nothing to do with blockchain. No, the award for the first big exit in a really long time goes to , a developer of cancer therapeutics that earlier this month. The transaction was valued at up to $7 billion. The deal, which includes $1.1 billion in cash and up to $5.9 billion in milestone payments, is all the more astounding given that it involved a pretty new startup. Impact launched a little over a year ago after licensing rights to the molecule Fedratinib, used to treat a form of blood cancer, from drug developer Sanofi. Prior to the acquisition, Impact had raised just $22 million from a single firm, healthcare investor , along with debt financing. It was, in the words of Medicxi founder Kevin Johnson, the where “everyone goes home with a balloon.” Yet while the Impact acquisition stands out for its size and speed, it’s by no means the only sizable life science transaction in recent months. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) counts 31 U.S. VC-backed biopharma IPOs in 2017, with median proceeds of $81 million, the highest in five years. Acquisitions, while comparatively slow for both tech and life science startups last year, also delivered some for pharma and healthcare companies. Commonly, the largest deals, like the Impact purchase, include a mix of upfront and milestone-based payments. VCs seem to think it’s still early innings in the current life sciences cycle. Though tech may dominate the headlines in startup-land, it’s bio and healthcare that are seeing record influxes of capital. In the U.S. in 2017, healthcare-focused venture capitalists raised $9.1 billion. That figure was up 26 percent from 2016, per . More dollars also are flowing from venture firms that invest in a mix of tech and life sciences through a single fund. That list includes well-established VCs with plentiful dry powder to invest, including , , and . Startup investment is up, too. Overall, investors put $21 billion to work in biotech and healthcare deals at seed through late-stage globally in 2017, according to Crunchbase data. Of that, $14.5 billion was in U.S.-based startups, tied with 2015 as the highest total in five years. In the chart below, we look at funding trends for the past five years: Another bullish indicator for life science and healthcare funding is the number of prominent venture and seed investors that are scaling up in the space or launching dedicated funds and programs. Last month, one of Silicon Valley’s most recognized VC firms, , raised for its second “bio fund,” which aims to invest at the intersection of biology and engineering. It’s more than twice the size of the firm’s last bio fund. A few weeks later, , the Valley’s best-known incubator, plans for a biotech track, with an initial focus on longevity and treating age-related diseases. And months earlier, Google Ventures’ founder Bill Maris left his post at Alphabet to launch a new VC firm, , that counts life sciences and healthcare as a primary focus. Even Impact backer Medicxi is relatively new to the space, at least as an independent firm. It of Index Ventures in 2016. As to where the money is going, the fight against cancer continues to attract the highest levels of funding, as well as many of the biggest exits. An analysis of Crunchbase data found that, since 2017, more than $3 billion in global venture funding went to biotech and pharma companies focused on cancer therapies, with about two-thirds going to U.S.-based startups. The largest anti-cancer investments, broadly, fall into two categories: oncology drugs and liquid biopsy technology. On the pharma front, investors backed a number of mega-rounds for cancer drug developers. Big rounds in Q4 of 2017, for instance, included in Series A funding for Cullinan Oncology and a Series C round for Arcus Biosciences. Liquid biopsy investment, meanwhile, soared, led by a early-stage funding round for GRAIL, which develops blood tests for early-stage cancer detection. Cancer test provider Guardant Health also secured in a SoftBank-led financing. Other areas that SVB cites as attractive for investors in 2017 include biotech platform companies, neurotech and AI-enabled diagnostics. Tracking exits and investor returns for life sciences can be more complex than tech because of a few factors. For one, life science IPOs are commonly used to raise financing for clinical trials rather than provide near-term exits for early backers. That means early investors may still be hanging on to shares a few years after an IPO, poised to reap big returns in the event of favorable clinical trial results, market adoption or an acquisition. Additionally, the prevalence of milestone payments makes it tough to measure returns until a few years after an acquisition, when it’s possible to see if a therapy’s initial promise pans out. Looking at the record venture-fundraising numbers for biotech and healthcare, however, it’s clear VCs are managing to convince their own backers that the numbers will add up very favorably. |
Women’s March embraces collaborative social app Crunchet | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 20 | Today’s nationwide Women’s March attendees will advocate for voter registration through every conceivable social network, so one of its planning organizations has allied with a new app that lets you combine posts from across apps. will help the and Chicago march create collages of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, Spotify, and uploaded content that can be shared anywhere as a single story. Users can also collaborate, being invited to or asking to become a contributor to someone else’s Crunchet post. “The reason we created this was that we felt like it was lacking on social media” Crunchet co-founder Denise Holzer tells me. The company hoped to bridge the gap between passive social network voyeurism and posting only about yourself. “Crunchet lets you join a story” Holzer says. “The women’s marches were successful because of social media tools” says Katherine Siemionko, one of the leaders of 2017’s march in New York City and the founder of Women’s March Alliance. “Considering youth is our target market, tools like Crunchet may allow us to reach them faster than older tools like Facebook that the youth are moving off of.” Women’s March Alliance’s Katherine Siemionko Now since soft-launching a year ago around the first Women’s March, Crunchet has raised over $1.5 million in seed funding and built a team of 14, plus has ambassadors at 50 colleges. While the app is still a bit buggy, there’s potential in both the ideas of social co-posting and aggregating content from across networks. (Android coming in Spring) lets you log in to all your other apps, then select from your content there, paste in links, or upload imagery. It all gets layed out in swipeable carousels so people don’t have to jump between every app to see all your posts on a certain topic. You can even add a soundtrack to your post through Spotify. Then you take your Crunchet links and share them wherever you want. Crunchet has its own feed, which eskews the Facebook-style algorithmic sorting that can bury posts. You see all the posts of people you follow so you don’t miss updates about important moments like today. One roadblock might be that those algorithms elsewhere might preference native content over links to seeing that stuff and more on Crunchet. Holzer hopes collaborative posts where multiple Crunchet users team up that you can’t get elsewhere will compel click-throughs, and encourage people to cooperate on making meaningful content. Still, the algorithm issue could further complicate Crunchet’s growth ambitions. You could see social media fatigue and the crowded app space as an advantage, giving people a reason to use Crunchet so they don’t have to compose redundant posts on each app. But it might make people think they already have too many ways to share. “The biggest challenge is getting people to try it” Holzer admits, a hurdle few social apps ever overcome, even without the threat of Facebook copying what’s special about them. The company is planning a series A funding round to pull in some more resources for its quest to scale. Beyond today’s and even abroad, Crunchet plans to work with arts, music, fashion, esports, and other festivals as well as protests and rallies. Whether it’s convincing people to enlist in “power to the polls” movements or just helping them discover something beautiful, could make sharing everywhere as easy as sharing anywhere. |
CTRL+T podcast: From Tide Pods to the blockchain | Henry Pickavet | 2,018 | 1 | 20 | Blockchain has become the latest buzzword in the technology industry, but many people are still in the dark about just what exactly it means. Thanks to Raine Revere, we have a bit of a better grasp on what the blockchain entails as well as some of its implications. As Revere so eloquently put it, “blockchain is a technology that allows for peer to peer transactions,” she explained on CTRL+T. With the blockchain, instead of relying on a company, a bank, the government or some other third-party to keep your data safe, you rely on cryptography behinds the scene to transact person-to-person.’ “ Later in the conversation, Revere discusses the need to ensure the blockchain industry is diverse. That’s partly what led her to co-create Maiden, a blockchain education company. But before we dive into the blockchain, we kick off the episode with a couple of stories out of Europe. A hospital in Sweden is that has been approved in Europe as a contraceptive method for 37 unwanted pregnancies — they’ve reported it to Sweden’s Medical Products Agency, which is asking the company questions. Until there’s a clearer picture of whether this is within a standard margin of error or not, the 500,000 of you in about 160 countries who have downloaded it to prevent pregnancy might want to tread carefully. And in what seems like a good common-sense move, the UK is going to that a driver can be logged in to the app at 10. After drivers hit that magic number, they have to take an uninterrupted six-hour break. Seems smart. And finally in the latest , people are popping pods of poison in their mouths. Because that sounds like a great idea! These people have decided that internet infamy is worth a potential trip to the emergency room and have been eating those convenience packets of laundry detergent. We’ve not seen this for ourselves because YouTube has taken down the videos that have been reported. Here we are! America, 2018. — Jonah Freedman (@jonahfreedman)
|
Apple’s enterprise evolution | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 1 | 20 | , Apple’s iconic co-founder Steve Jobs was not entirely enthralled with the enterprise. In fact, Jobs as saying, “What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves.” He added, “They go ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and if enough of them say ‘yes,’ we get to come to work tomorrow. That’s how it works.” That was an accurate enough representation of the way things worked when Jobs made the statement. Back in those days, IT kept tight control over the enterprise, issuing equipment like BlackBerries and ThinkPads (and you could have any color you wanted — as long as it was black). Jobs, , didn’t live long enough to see the “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) and “Consumerization of IT,” two trends that were just hovering on the corporate horizon at the time of his death. I have the feeling he would have quite liked both movements and would have taken great pleasure in the fact that in many ways those trends were driven by his company’s mobile devices, the iPhone and the iPad. People were using those devices at home and they were increasingly bringing them to work. IT had little choice but to begin accommodating them. That movement has helped fuel Apple’s enterprise evolution. Over time, like IBM, SAP and Cisco. It has provided tools for IT to better manage those i-devices, and Macs, too, and it has built the enterprise into a substantial business (to the extent that we can tell). Trying to find data on the size of Apple’s enterprise business is a challenge because it doesn’t often break out enterprise revenue in earnings calls, but to give you a sense of the market, Tim Cook did reveal a number . “We estimate that enterprise markets accounted for about $25 billion in annual Apple revenue in the last 12 months, up 40 percent over the prior year and they represent a major growth vector for the future,” Cook said at the time. , Cook didn’t provide any numbers, but he did call the enterprise, “the mother of all opportunities.” That’s because enterprises tend to buy in bulk, and as they build an Apple support system in-house, it feeds other parts of the enterprise market as companies buy Macs to build custom apps for both internal users and consumers of their products and services. This connection did not escape Cook in the Bloomberg interview. “For most enterprises, iOS is the preferred mobile operating system. IOS is a fantastic platform because of the ease with which you can write apps that are great for helping you run your business efficiently or interface with your customers directly. We see many, many enterprises now writing apps. Well, what do they use to write the apps? They use the Mac. The Mac is the development platform for iOS,” Cook told Bloomberg. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Another way to look at the market is to look at Jamf, an Apple enterprise tool partner that helps companies manage Apple devices in large organizations. The company, which launched in 2002 long before the iPad or the iPhone, has been growing in leaps and bounds. It reports it has 13,000 customers today. To put that into perspective, it took 13 years to reach 6,000 customers and just 2.5 years to more than double to 13,000. “A lot of people say Apple is getting more focused on enterprise, but I believe Apple helped enterprise focus more on users and they’ve had more success,” Jamf CEO Dean Hager told TechCrunch. “It started with Apple creating great products people wanted to bring to work and then they just demanded it,” he said. That organic momentum can’t be underestimated, but once it got in, Apple had to give IT something to work with. IT has always seen its role as hardware and software gatekeeper, keeping the enterprise safe from external security threats. Ultimately the company never set out to build out enterprise-grade devices with the iPhone and iPad. They simply wanted devices that worked better than what was out there at the time. That people liked to use them so much that they brought them to work was an extension of that goal. In fact, Susan Prescott, vice president of markets, apps and services at Apple was at the company when the first iPhone was released, and she was aware of the company’s goals. “With iPhone, we set out to completely rethink mobile, to enable the things we knew that people wanted to do, including at work,” she said. Susan Prescott of Apple. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The notion of apps and the App Store and bringing in developers of all ilks to build them was also attractive to enterprises. When IBM and SAP got involved, they began building apps specifically geared towards enterprise customers. Customers could access these apps from a vetted App Store, which also was appealing to IT. The Cisco deal gave IT faster on-boarding of Apple devices on networks running Cisco equipment (which most enterprises use). At , Jobs was already touting the kinds of features that would appeal to enterprise IT, including mobile device management, wireless app distribution through the App Store and even support for Microsoft Exchange Server, the popular corporate email solution of choice at the time. He may have spoken derisively about the enterprise in a general sense, but he clearly saw the potential of his company’s devices to transform the way people worked by giving them access to tools and technologies that previously were not in reach of the average worker. Apple also was quietly talking to enterprises behind the scenes and figuring out what they needed from the earliest days of the iPhone. “Early on we engaged with businesses and IT to understand their needs, and have added enterprise features with every major software release,” Prescott told TechCrunch. One of the factors driving the change inside organizations was that mobile and cloud were coming together in that 2011 time frame, driving business transformation and empowering workers. If IT wouldn’t give employees the tools they wanted, the App Store and similar constructs gave them the power to do it themselves. That fueled the BYOD and Consumerization of IT movements, but at some point IT still required some semblance of control, even if that didn’t involve the same level they once had. The iPhone and other mobile devices began to create the mobile worker, who worked outside the protection of the firewall. People could suddenly look at their documents while waiting for the train. They could update the CRM tool in-between clients. They could call a car to get to the airport. All of this was made possible by the mobile-cloud connection. It was also causing a profound change inside every business. You simply couldn’t do business the same way anymore. You had to produce quality mobile apps and you had to get them in front of your customers. It was changing the way companies do business. It was certainly something that Capital One saw. They realized they couldn’t remain a “stodgy bank” anymore, and control every aspect of the computing stack. If they wanted to draw talent, they had to open up, and that meant allowing developers to work on the tools they wanted to. According to Scott Totman, head of Mobile, Web, eCommerce, and personal assistants at Capital One, that meant enabling users to use Apple devices for work, whether their own or those issued by the company. Workers at Capital One. Photo: Capital One/Apple. “When I came in [five years ago], the Apple support group was a guy named Travis. We weren’t using Apple [extensively] in the enterprise, [back then],” he says. Today, they have dozens of people supporting more than 40,000 devices. It wasn’t just people inside the company whose needs were changing. Consumer expectations were changing, too, and the customer-facing mobile tools the company created had to meet those expectations. That meant attracting those app developers to the enterprise and giving them an environment where they felt comfortable working. Clearly, Capital One has succeeded in that regard, and they have found ways to accommodate and support that level of Apple product usage throughout the organization. Capital One wasn’t an outlier by any means, but if Apple was, at its core, still a consumer company, it was going to need help to capture the enterprise market and understand the needs of a large organization. That’s why it made a series of moves over the last several years to , forging agreements with IBM, SAP and Cisco, with professional services giants like Accenture and Deloitte and, . That latter gives the company a foothold in the industrial Internet of Things market. Meanwhile, GE has committed to standardizing on the iPhone and iPad for its 300,000+ employees, while also making the Mac an official computer offering. Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, sees partnering as a sound approach for Apple. “Apple knows it’s a consumer company and therefore needs to partner with pure enterprise players to execute its enterprise strategy. Each company adds a different element to the strategy. IBM and SAP are mobile app plays. Cisco is about accelerated networking and edge security. GE is all about IoT software,” Moorhead explained. Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J Gold Associates says, these companies provide a primary entrée into the enterprise for Apple. “They aren’t really a component supplier as much as a solutions provider, and without the partnerships, it would be much harder for them to have an impact. The leveraging of partnerships allows them to compete at the full solutions level rather than have to compete on a component basis,” Gold said. While Apple spent the last decade building up that enterprise business, and the internal and external support components, the partnerships they have built along the way didn’t just give them enterprise street cred, they also often provided a level of coverage that would have been more difficult to provide on their own. “IT is very accustomed to having a good deal of support as an ability to work directly with major suppliers. In Apple’s case, the really big companies can do so, but many have to go through an intermediary. That’s not necessarily bad, but it is a way for Apple to leverage its more limited enterprise resources,” Gold said. Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, sees some challenges for Apple enterprise customers. ”Their challenge with Apple is that companies such as Dell have made it so easy to take care of their devices that Apple would have to replicate that level of service. Being told to go to a Genius Bar isn’t the right answer for most IT shops,” he said. To be fair, , which happens to be run . Prescott says that Apple is working with larger customers to give them what they need. “We work directly with customers to help them integrate and manage Apple devices. We offer technical support through AppleCare, and our Apple at Work website offers IT resources and guides. We strategically partner with world class companies to complement our enterprise efforts and help customers get started, all the way to rethinking business processes with mobile at the core,” she explained. It’s worth noting that a found a strong preference of 79 percent for iPhones among respondents when it came to mobile phones. Source: The survey included 480 executives, managers and IT professionals from small, medium and large organizations from around the world. The numbers suggest that IT has little choice but to support iPhones and other Apple products, and Apple has been finding ways to help them. Apple has clearly made great strides in the enterprise since Steve Jobs made that comment on the enterprise in 2010. With companies like Capital One, Schneider, Lyft and British Airways it has shown it can work with the largest companies around. Indeed, the partnerships with enterprise titans has further helped find its place in the enterprise. |
WTF is GDPR? | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 1 | 20 | proposed a comprehensive update to the bloc’s data protection and privacy rules in 2012. Their aim: To take account of seismic shifts in the handling of information wrought by the rise of the digital economy in the years since the was penned — all the way back in 1995 when Yahoo was the cutting edge of online cool and cookies were still just tasty biscuits. Here’s the EU’s executive body, the Commission, summing up the goal: The objective of this new set of rules is to give citizens back control over of their personal data, and to simplify the regulatory environment for business. The data protection reform is a key enabler of the Digital Single Market which the Commission has prioritised. The reform will allow European citizens and businesses to fully benefit from the digital economy. For an even shorter tl;dr the EC’s theory is that consumer trust is essential to fostering growth in the digital economy. And it thinks trust can be won by giving users of digital services more information and greater control over how their data is used. Which is — frankly speaking — a pretty refreshing idea when you consider the clandestine data brokering that pervades the tech industry. Mass surveillance isn’t just something governments do. The (aka GDPR) was after more than three years of negotiations between the EU’s various institutions. It’s set to apply across the 28-Member State bloc as of May 25, 2018. That means EU countries are busy transposing it into national law via their own legislative updates (such as the UK’s new Data Protection Bill — yes, despite the fact the country is currently in the process of ( ing the EU, the government has nonetheless committed to implementing the regulation because it needs to keep EU-UK data flowing freely in the post-brexit future. Which gives an early indication of the pulling power of GDPR. Meanwhile businesses operating in the EU are being bombarded with ads from a freshly energized cottage industry of ‘privacy consultants’ offering to help them get ready for the new regs — in exchange for a service fee. It’s definitely a good time to be a law firm specializing in data protection. GDPR is a significant piece of legislation whose full impact will clearly take some time to shake out. In the meanwhile, here’s our guide to the major changes incoming and some potential impacts. A major point of note right off the bat is that GDPR does not merely apply to EU businesses; any entities processing the personal data of EU citizens need to comply. Facebook, for example — a US company that handles massive amounts of Europeans’ personal data — is going to have to rework multiple business processes to comply with the new rules. Indeed, it’s been working on this for a long time already. Last year the company told us it had assembled “the largest cross functional team” in the history of its family of companies to support GDPR compliance — specifying this included “senior executives from all product teams, designers and user experience/testing executives, policy executives, legal executives and executives from each of the family of companies”. “Dozens of people at Ireland are working full time on this effort,” it said, noting too that the data protection team at its European HQ (in Dublin, Ireland) would be growing by 250% in 2017. It also said it was in the process of hiring a “top quality data protection officer” — a the company appears to still be taking applications for. The new EU rules require organizations to appoint a data protection officer if they process sensitive data on a large scale (which Facebook very clearly does). Or are collecting info on many consumers — such as by performing online behavioral tracking. But, really, which online businesses aren’t doing that these days? The extra-territorial scope of GDPR casts the European Union as a global pioneer in data protection — and some legal experts suggest the regulation will force privacy standards to rise outside the EU too. Sure, some US companies might prefer to swallow the hassle and expense of fragmenting their data handling processes, and treating personal data obtained from different geographies differently, i.e. rather than streamlining everything under a GDPR compliant process. But doing so means managing multiple data regimes. And at very least runs the risk of bad PR if you’re outed as deliberately offering a lower privacy standard to your home users vs customers abroad. Ultimately, it may be easier (and less risky) for businesses to treat GDPR as the new ‘gold standard’ for how they handle personal data, regardless of where it comes from. And while not every company harvests Facebook levels of personal data, almost every company harvests some personal data. So for those with customers in the EU GDPR cannot be ignored. At very least businesses will need to carry out a data audit to understand their risks and liabilities. Privacy experts suggest that the really big change here is around enforcement. Because while the EU has had long established data protection standards and rules — and treats privacy as a fundamental right — its regulators have lacked the teeth to command compliance. But now, under GDPR, financial penalties for data protection violations step up massively. The maximum fine that organizations can be hit with for the most serious infringements of the regulation is 4% of their global annual turnover (or €20M, whichever is greater). Though data protection agencies will of course be able to impose smaller fines too. And, indeed, there’s a tiered system of fines — with a lower level of penalties of up to 2% of global turnover (or €10M). This really is a massive change. Because while data protection agencies (DPAs) in different EU Member States can impose financial penalties for breaches of existing data laws these fines are — especially set against the revenues of the private sector entities that are getting sanctioned. In the UK, for example, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) can currently impose a maximum fine of just £500,000. Compare that to the annual revenue of tech giant Google (~$90BN) and you can see why a much larger stick is needed to police data processors. It’s not necessarily the case that individual EU Member States are getting stronger privacy laws as a consequence of GDPR (in some instances countries have arguably had higher standards in their domestic law). But the beefing up of enforcement that’s baked into the new regime means there’s a better opportunity for DPAs to start to bark and bite like proper watchdogs. GDPR inflating the financial risks around handling personal data should naturally drive up standards — because privacy laws are suddenly a whole lot more costly to ignore. So what is personal data under GDPR? It’s any information relating to an identified or identifiable person (in regulatorspeak people are known as ‘data subjects’). While ‘processing’ can mean any operation performed on personal data — from storing it to structuring it to feeding it to your AI models. (GDPR also includes some provisions specifically related to decisions generated as a result of automated data processing but more on that below). A new provision concerns children’s personal data — with the regulation setting a 16-year-old age limit on kids’ ability to consent to their data being processed. However individual Member States can choose (and some have) to derogate from this by writing a lower age limit into their laws. GDPR sets a hard cap at 13-years-old — making that the defacto standard for children to be able to sign up to digital services. So the impact on teens’ social media habits seems likely to be relatively limited. The new rules generally expand the definition of personal data — so it can include information such as location data, online identifiers (such as IP addresses) and other metadata. So again, this means businesses really need to conduct an audit to identify all the types of personal data they hold. Ignorance is not compliance. GDPR also encourages the use of pseudonymization — such as, for example, encrypting personal data and storing the encryption key separately and securely — as a pro-privacy, pro-security technique that can help minimize the risks of processing personal data. Although pseudonymized data is likely to still be considered personal data; certainly where a risk of reidentification remains. So it does not get a general pass from requirements under the regulation. Data has to be rendered truly anonymous to be outside the scope of the regulation. (And given how often have been shown to be re-identifiable, relying on any anonymizing process to be robust enough to have zero risk of re-identification seems, well, risky.) To be clear, given GDPR’s running emphasis on data protection via data security it is implicitly encouraging the use of encryption above and beyond a risk reduction technique — i.e. as a way for data controllers to fulfill its wider requirements to use “appropriate technical and organisational measures” vs the risk of the personal data they are processing. The incoming data protection rules apply to both data controllers (i.e. entities that determine the purpose and means of processing personal data) and data processors (entities that are responsible for processing data on behalf of a data controller — aka subcontractors). Indeed, data processors have some direct compliance obligations under GDPR, and can also be held equally responsible for data violations, with individuals able to bring compensation claims directly against them, and DPAs able to hand them fines or other sanctions. So the intent for the regulation is there be no diminishing in responsibility down the chain of data handling subcontractors. GDPR aims to have every link in the processing chain be a robust one. For companies that rely on a lot of subcontractors to handle data operations on their behalf there’s clearly a lot of risk assessment work to be done. As noted above, there is a degree of leeway for EU Member States in how they implement some parts of the regulation (such as with the age of data consent for kids). Consumer protection groups are calling for the UK government to include an optional GDPR provision on to its DP bill, for example — a call the government has so far rebuffed. But the wider aim is for the regulation to harmonize as much as possible data protection rules across all Member States to reduce the regulatory burden on digital businesses trading around the bloc. On data redress, European privacy campaigner Max Schrems — most famous for his legal challenge to US government mass surveillance practices that resulted in a 15-year-old data transfer arrangement between the EU and US being — is currently running a to set up a not-for-profit privacy enforcement organization to take advantage of the new rules and pursue strategic litigation on commercial privacy issues. Schrems argues it’s simply not viable for individuals to take big tech giants to court to try to enforce their privacy rights, so thinks there’s a gap in the regulatory landscape for an expert organization to work on EU citizen’s behalf. Not just pursuing strategic litigation in the public interest but also promoting industry best practice. The proposed data redress body — called ; short for: ‘none of your business’ — is being made possible because GDPR allows for collective enforcement of individuals’ data rights. And that provision could be crucial in spinning up a centre of enforcement gravity around the law. Because despite the position and role of DPAs being strengthened by GDPR, these bodies will still inevitably have limited resources vs the scope of the oversight task at hand. Some may also lack the appetite to take on a fully fanged watchdog role. So campaigning consumer and privacy groups could certainly help pick up any slack. Another major change incoming via GDPR is ‘privacy by design’ no longer being just a nice idea; privacy by design and privacy by default become firm legal requirements. This means there’s a requirement on data controllers to minimize processing of personal data — limiting activity to only what’s necessary for a specific purpose, carrying out privacy impact assessments and maintaining up-to-date records to prove out their compliance. Consent requirements for processing personal data are also considerably strengthened under GDPR — meaning lengthy, inscrutable, pre-ticked T&Cs are likely to be unworkable. (And we’ve sure seen .) The core idea is that consent should be an ongoing, actively managed process; not a one-off rights grab. As the UK’s , consent under GDPR for processing personal data means offering individuals “genuine choice and control” (for sensitive personal data the law requires a higher standard still — of explicit consent). There are other legal bases for processing personal data under GDPR — such as contractual necessity; or compliance with a legal obligation under EU or Member State law; or for tasks carried out in the public interest — so it is not necessary to obtain consent in order to process someone’s personal data. But there must always be an appropriate legal basis for each processing. Transparency is another major obligation under GDPR, which expands the notion that personal data must be lawfully and fairly processed to include a third principle of accountability. Hence the emphasis on data controllers needing to clearly communicate with data subjects — such as by informing them of the specific purpose of the data processing. The obligation on data handlers to maintain scrupulous records of what information they hold, what they are doing with it, and how they are legally processing it, is also about being able to demonstrate compliance with GDPR’s data processing principles. But — on the plus side for data controllers — GDPR removes the requirement to submit notifications to local DPAs about data processing activities. Instead, organizations must maintain detailed internal records — which a supervisory authority can always ask to see. It’s also worth noting that companies processing data across borders in the EU may face scrutiny from DPAs in different Member States if they have users there (and are processing their personal data). Although the GDPR sets out a so-called ‘one-stop-shop’ principle — that there should be a “lead” DPA to co-ordinate supervision between any “concerned” DPAs — this does not mean that, once it applies, a cross-EU-border operator like Facebook is only going to be answerable to the concerns of the Irish DPA. Indeed, Facebook’s tactic of only claiming to be under the jurisdiction of a single EU DPA looks to be . And the one-stop-shop provision in the GDPR seems more about creating a co-operation mechanism to allow multiple DPAs to work together in instances where they have joint concerns, rather than offering a way for multinationals to go ‘forum shopping’ — which the regulation does not permit (per ). Another change: Privacy policies that contain vague phrases like ‘We may use your personal data to develop new services’ or ‘We may use your personal data for research purposes’ will not pass muster under the new regime. So a wholesale rewriting of vague and/or confusingly worded T&Cs is something Europeans can look forward to this year. Add to that, any changes to privacy policies must be clearly communicated to the user on an ongoing basis. Which means no more stale references in the privacy statement telling users to ‘regularly check for changes or updates’ — that just won’t be workable. The onus is firmly on the data controller to keep the data subject fully informed of what is being done with their information. (Which almost implies that good data protection practice could end up tasting a bit like spam, from a user PoV.) The overall intent behind GDPR is to inculcate an industry-wide shift in perspective regarding who ‘owns’ user data — disabusing companies of the notion that other people’s personal information belongs to them just because it happens to be sitting on their servers. “Organizations should acknowledge they don’t exist to process personal data but they process personal data to do business,” is how analyst Gartner research director Bart Willemsen sums this up. “Where there is a reason to process the data, there is no problem. Where the reason ends, the processing should, too.” The data protection officer (DPO) role that GDPR brings in as a requirement for many data handlers is intended to help them ensure compliance. This officer, who must report to the highest level of management, is intended to operate independently within the organization, with warnings to avoid an internal appointment that could generate a conflict of interests. Which types of organizations face the greatest liability risks under GDPR? “Those who deliberately seem to think privacy protection rights is inferior to business interest,” says Willemsen, adding: “A recent example would be Uber, regulated by the FTC and sanctioned to undergo . That may hurt perhaps similar, or even more, than a one-time financial sanction.” “Eventually, the is like a speed limit: There not to make money off of those who speed, but to prevent people from speeding excessively as that prevents (privacy) accidents from happening,” he adds. Under GDPR, people who have consented to their personal data being processed also have a suite of associated rights — including the held about them (a copy of the data must be provided to them free of charge, typically within a month of a request); the of incomplete or inaccurate personal data; the ( so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ — with some exemptions, such as for exercising freedom of expression and freedom of information); the ; the (where relevant, a data subject’s personal data must be provided free of charge and in a structured, commonly used and machine readable form). All these rights make it essential for organizations that process personal data to have systems in place which enable them to identify, access, edit and delete individual user data — and be able to perform these operations quickly, with a general 30 day time-limit for responding to individual rights requests. GDPR also gives people who have consented to their data being processed the . Let that one sink in. Data controllers are also required to inform users about this right — and offer easy ways for them to withdraw consent. So no, you can’t bury a ‘revoke consent’ option in tiny lettering, five sub-menus deep. Nor can WhatsApp offer any more for sharing user data with its parent multinational, Facebook. Users will have the right to change their mind whenever they like. The EU lawmakers’ hope is that this suite of rights for consenting consumers will encourage respectful use of their data — given that, well, if you annoy consumers they can just tell you to sling yer hook and ask for a copy of their data to plug into your rival service to boot. So we’re back to that fostering trust idea. Add in the ability for third party organizations to use GDPR’s provision for collective enforcement of individual data rights and there’s potential for bad actors and bad practice to become the target for some creative PR stunts that harness the power of collective action — like, say, a sudden flood of requests for a company to delete user data. Data rights and privacy issues are certainly going to be in the news a whole lot more. But wait, there’s more! Another major change under GDPR relates to security incidents — aka data breaches (something else we’ve seen an , lot of in recent years) — with the regulation doing what the US still hasn’t been able to: Bringing in a universal standard for data breach disclosures. GDPR requires that data controllers report any security incidents where personal data has been lost, stolen or otherwise accessed by unauthorized third parties to their DPA within 72 hours of them becoming aware of it. Yes, 72 . Not the best part of a year, . If a data breach is likely to result in a “high risk of adversely affecting individuals’ rights and freedoms” the regulation also implies you should ‘fess up even sooner than that — without “undue delay”. Only in instances where a data controller assesses that a breach is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of “natural persons” are they exempt from the breach disclosure requirement (though they still need to document the incident internally, and record their reason for not informing a DPA in a document that DPAs can always ask to see). “You should ensure you have robust breach detection, investigation and internal reporting procedures in place,” is the on this. “This will facilitate decision-making about whether or not you need to notify the relevant supervisory authority and the affected individuals.” The new rules generally put strong emphasis on data security and on the need for data controllers to ensure that personal data is only processed in a manner that ensures it is safeguarded. Here again, GDPR’s requirements are backed up by the risk of supersized fines. So suddenly sloppy security could cost your business big — not only in reputation terms, as now, but on the bottom line too. So it really must be a C-suite concern going forward. Nor is subcontracting a way to shirk your data security obligations. Quite the opposite. Having a written contract in place between a data controller and a data processor was a requirement before GDPR but contract requirements are wider now and there are some specific terms that must be included in the contract, as a minimum. Breach reporting requirements must also be set out in the contract between processor and controller. If a data controller is using a data processor and it’s the processor that suffers a breach, they’re required to inform the controller as soon as they become aware. The controller then has the same disclosure obligations as per usual. Essentially, data controllers remain liable for their own compliance with GDPR. And the ICO warns they must only appoint processors who can provide “sufficient guarantees” that the regulatory requirements will be met and the rights of data subjects protected. tl;dr, be careful who and how you subcontract. Article 22 of GDPR places certain restrictions on entirely automated decisions based on profiling individuals — but only in instances where these human-less acts have a legal or similarly significant effect on the people involved. There are also some exemptions to the restrictions — where automated processing is necessary for entering into (or performance of) a contract between an organization and the individual; or where it’s authorized by law (e.g. for the purposes of detecting fraud or tax evasion); or where an individual has explicitly consented to the processing. In its guidance, the specifies that the restriction only applies where the decision has a “serious negative impact on an individual”. Suggested examples of the types of AI-only decisions that will face restrictions are automatic refusal of an online credit application or an e-recruiting practices without human intervention. Having a provision on automated decisions is not a new right, having been brought over from the 1995 data protection directive. But it has attracted fresh attention — given the rampant rise of machine learning technology — as a potential route for GDPR to place a check on the power of AI blackboxes to determine the trajectory of humankind. The real-world impact will probably be rather more prosaic, though. And experts suggest it does not seem likely that the regulation, as drafted, equates to a right for people to be given detailed explanations of how algorithms work. Though as AI proliferates and touches more and more decisions, and as its impacts on people and society become ever more evident, pressure may well grow for proper regulatory oversight of algorithmic blackboxes. In the meanwhile, what GDPR does in instances where restrictions apply to automated decisions is require data controllers to provide information to individuals about the logic of an automated decision. They are also obliged to take steps to prevent errors, bias and discrimination. So there’s a whiff of algorithmic accountability. Though it may well take court and regulatory judgements to determine how stiff those steps need to be in practice. Individuals do also have a right to challenge and request a (human) review of an automated decision in the restricted class. Here again the intention is to help people understand how their data is being used. And to offer a degree of protection (in the form of a manual review) if a person feels unfairly and harmfully judged by an AI process. The regulation also places some restrictions on the practice of using data to profile individuals if the data itself is sensitive data — e.g. health data, political belief, religious affiliation etc — requiring explicit consent for doing so. Or else that the processing is necessary for substantial public interest reasons (and lies within EU or Member State law). While profiling based on other types of personal data does not require obtaining consent from the individuals concerned, it still needs a legal basis and there is still a transparency requirement — which means service providers will need to inform users they are being profiled, and explain what it means for them. And people also always have the right to object to profiling activity based on their personal data. |
Scammers are cashing in on Telegram’s upcoming ICO | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 20 | Desperate for an opportunity to jump aboard in the next big thing, cryptocurrency owners are losing money by investing blindly in fake Telegram ICO websites. Chat app promises to break records with a target raise of $1.2 billion, which may be extended to $2 billion . The public sale component isn’t scheduled to launch until March, as noted by multiple media including TechCrunch, but that hasn’t stopped unscrupulous individuals seizing the opportunity. News of Telegram Open Network (TON), the Telegram ICO project, first broke in the final weeks of December before . Expectation was palpable. “Telegram is already the de facto communication channel for the global cryptocurrency community, making a natural home to its own coin and Blockchain,” TechCrunch’s Josh Constine and Mike Butcher wrote. At the same time, English and Russian versions of its whitepaper and investor prospectuses, including precise information around the ICO, were widely leaked across the internet. That gave would-be scammers the two conditions they needed — hype and legitimate information — and numerous websites sprang up offering apparent immediate investment opportunities. Gramtoken.io was the most prominent fake. The website, which is now offline, used details extracted from the whitepapers including project roadmap, team members and more. It even posted a copy of the whitepaper — which, again, had been leaked already — to give a sense of authenticity. The site’s tracker purported to have ‘raised’ more than $5 million before it went dark last Wednesday. A number of those who invested in the scam took to Twitter in frustration after it was exposed. TechCrunch hasn’t been able to verify how much Gramtoken.io raised. Gramtoken.io screenshot via It isn’t clear why the site went offline. NameCheap, the company that hosted the Gramtoken.io domain, declined to comment when we asked if it had taken action. If Namecheap didn’t step in, it could be that the people behind Gramtoken.io decided to shut the party down before it drew too much attention. Of the rest of the fakes, , and remain online, Gramtoken.tech is offline, while a number of Facebook Pages, including one for Gramtoken.io, were taken private or removed after being as scams. In addition, that some scammers turned to email to blast out fake Telegram ICO investment opportunities. In the case of one website, Ton-gram.io, more than 70 people have invested over $30,000 in Ethereum, . Another fake SCAM Ad for Telegram ICO . There is NO ICO yet! You will lose your money! GRAMTOKEN.IO is fake! — TheBoyCrypto (@TheBoyCrypto) Gramtoken.io used paid Facebook ads to reach users on felt the need to highlight these sites as investment opportunities while in the same breath cautioning that they may be scams. Perhaps in search of traffic or favorable Google search positioning, a number of ICO tracking sites listed the TON project which added further uncertainty. (Note, there is already a project — Tontine Trust — which offers a ‘TON’ token which is not connected to Telegram nor any of these fake websites.) In an email to TechCrunch, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov acknowledged that Gramtoken.io was not associated with his company. Weeks earlier, when the first reports of Telegram’s TON project surfaced, Durov warned users to rely only on information from Telegram’s broadcast channel but he made no further comment other than to one question on Twitter. Attention: Telegram publishes its official announcements only at . Everything else is most likely scam. — Pavel Durov (@durov) It goes without saying that ICO investments are risky, those thinking of taking part are frequently advised do their homework thoroughly. That includes making sure that the company has actually announced a token sale through official channels. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. “The more hyped the project the more likely are scammers going to resort to phishing sites,” a partner at a crypto-focused investment firm told TechCrunch on condition of anonymity due to sensitivities. “In some cases these sites even show up as top results in search. So it is extremely important that investors carefully verify the details from multiple sources before participating in a token sale.” |
Join the TechCrunch Meetup in Davos #TCDavos | Mike Butcher | 2,018 | 1 | 20 | TechCrunch is holding an informal meetup during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. . The event precedes our TechCrunch Meetup the week after in Zug, Switzerland, the so-called Crypto Valley. You can grab a ticket . The Davos meetup will be co-hosted by , TechCrunch’s Director of Special Projects & Startup Battlefield Editor, and , Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. Investors, angels, startup community leaders, and startup founders can join us to hear about and about our other activities, followed by informal networking. Because of the timing, we’re inviting you to join us at 1pm to first watch the to the WEF Congress, on the big screens, followed by the TechCrunch Meetup. Startup Battlefield is TechCrunch’s renowned startup launch competition. The comprises almost 800 companies that have raised over $8 billion USD, and produced over 100 successful exits and IPOs. You can apply . |
Google inks patent deal with Tencent | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Google has yet more news from China after the U.S. search firm announced a patent cross-licensing agreement with Chinese tech giant Tencent. The terms were not disclosed, but Google said the tie-in with Tencent, which is , covers “a broad range of products and technologies” and is “long-term.” The two firms pledged to work together on future innovation and technology. “We’re pleased to enter into a patent cross-license with Tencent. By working together on agreements such as this, tech companies can focus on building better products and services for their users,” Google’s Head of Patents Mike Lee said in a statement. Google’s core search service remains blocked in China, but this announcement follows a string of developments that have seen the firm ramp up in other areas in the country. In December, it , Google’s first such facility in China, , and . On the other side, the deal is also another meaningful global exercise from Tencent. Long one of China’s most influential tech giants through its hugely profitable gaming business and massively popular WeChat service, Tencent made a series of major global moves last year with investments in , and . |
Varo Money raises $45 million for mobile banking without fees | Katie Roof | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | There are a number of startups looking to disrupt traditional banking. We’ve covered , and , just to name a few. Another one of those is and they’ve raised $45 million led by private equity giant, Warburg Pincus and The Rise Fund, a global impact fund that’s part of another private equity firm, TPG. (That’s the one U2’s Bono is involved with). Investors believe there’s a huge market opportunity to disrupt big banks and build a more cost-effective and consumer-friendly platform that appeals to Millennials. Young people “w Varo offers an FDIC-backed bank account backed by The Bancorp Bank. Varo also Varo provides loans as well. The business uses a “ The startup believes one of its biggest selling points is that it doesn’t have overdraft fees, minimum balance charges or foreign transaction fees. The only fees are for ATMs that aren’t in-network. (The app shows you which partnering machines are nearby.) Maya Chorengel, senior partner with The Rise Fund, said she invested because they’re “confident in Varo’s ability to scale successfully as a business advance the financial health of its customers in the short long-term.” Varo wouldn’t clarify exactly how many people use its product, but Walsh says it has “tens of thousands of customers.” It just launched last June. He plans to use the funding for marketing and to “lay |
SEC cools traders’ hot plans for cryptocurrency-based exchange traded funds | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has serious concerns about the securities industry’s plans to create exchange traded funds around cryptocurrency. In to the heads of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the Investment Company Institute, the director of the division of investment management, Dalia Blass said that there were “significant outstanding questions” around how funds that held large amounts of cryptocurrencies (and related products) would satisfy the necessary regulatory requirements. In the letter Blass identified a number of areas of concern for the regulatory agency including the valuation of underlying cryptocurrency assets held by mutual funds or exchange traded funds; the actual liquidity of the assets that these funds would hold; the institutions that would provide custodial oversight for the assets; and the exposure of the assets to both market manipulation and trading arbitrage. Blass writes: Until the questions identified above can be addressed satisfactorily, we do not believe that it is appropriate for fund sponsors to initiate registration of funds that intend to invest substantially in cryptocurrency and related products, and we have asked sponsors that have registration statements filed for such products to withdraw them. The underscore the regulator’s point about the currency’s volatility, and the about the potential for market manipulation of currencies earlier this year. Indeed, that the spike in the price of bitcoin from $150 up to $1000 in late 2013 was likely due to manipulation by major holders of the cryptocurrency, according to a report in the And the shenanigans at Bitconnect, can’t have helped the industry’s case. This isn’t the first time the SEC has halted plans for exchange traded funds based on cryptocurrencies. Back in March of last year, the commission blocked an application put forward by the Winkelvoss twins, At the time, the commission said that bitcoin was not regulated tightly enough and there wasn’t enough clarity into the operations of the various exchanges that traded bitcoin to grant approval. While the SEC has ruled out exchange traded funds that hold cryptocurrencies, regulators have not barred all types of exposure to cryptocurrencies through exchange traded funds. Indeed two funds just launched which are pitching investments in companies that have exposure to cryptocurrency (I’m not linking to them because at this point, that have jumped on the crypto — and blockchain — bandwagon). |
AI voice assistant developer Rokid raises $100M Series B extension to build its US presence | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Rokid founder and CEO Mingming Zhu , a Chinese startup that makes an AI voice assistant and smart devices, just raised a Series B extension round led by Temasek Holdings, with participation from Credit Suisse, IDG Capital and CDIB Capital. The size of the round was not released, but a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that it is $100 million. The company’s , which was announced in November 2016. Founder and chief executive officer Mingming Zhu says Rokid raised a Series B+ instead of a C round because the company, which is based in Hangzhou, China with research centers in Beijing and San Francisco that develop its proprietary natural language processing, image processing, face recognition and robotics technology, is still in its early stages. Rokid wants to focus on gathering more resources and bringing in strategic investors like Temasek Holdings before moving on to a Series C. An investment holding company owned by the Singaporean government, Temasek Holdings counts artificial intelligence and robotics among its main investment areas and its other portfolio companies include Magic Leap. Rokid Glass The company’s product lineup already includes smart speakers called Rokid Pebble and Alien, which are currently sold in China. During CES, Rokid debuted its newest offering, Rokid Glass, augmented glasses created specifically for consumer use, as well as an open-source platform, called the Rokid Full Stack Open Platform. Created , the platform gives third-party hardware developers who use Rokid’s voice assistant access to free resources, including software blueprints and content for IoT devices. Rokid hopes that both will help build its name recognition and presence in the United States. Reynold Wu, Rokid’s director of product management, describes the Full Stack Open Platform as a turnkey solution that not only gives developers access to Rokid’s AI technology, but also hardware solutions and services. Released with Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing business, the cloud platform opened to third-party developers in China earlier this year, and will launch in the U.S. soon. Rokid wants the platform to serve as a bridge between the two countries by giving U.S. developers an easy way to enter the Chinese market and also encouraging the development of more content for devices running Rokid’s technology, which founder and chief executive officer Mingming Zhu says is vital to attracting consumers. “AI products are born to be global, not just for local market,” explains Zhu. “The only issue for Rokid is that we’re not ready for the U.S. market because the most important thing is content and we are not ready if there is only local content or services.” The Pebble and Alien will be up against Google Home and Amazon Echo, which have become almost synonymous with “smart speaker” in the minds of many consumers, while Rokid Glass will inevitably be compared to Google Glass. The success of the Pebble and Alien hinge not only on how well users think Rokid’s voice assistant compares to Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, but also the library of content and apps that the startup is able to build for its smart speakers. While Google Glass flopped among consumers, but . Rokid hopes its smart glasses, which run on its proprietary AI voice and imaging algorithms, will be able to succeed where Google Glass wasn’t because it was designed specifically for consumer applications. Early reviews from CES say the Rokid Glass is promising and , but said . Once it goes on sale, the Rokid Glass will compete with smart glasses from Vuxiz, Sony and Epson. Its price hasn’t been revealed yet, but Zhu says it will be sold at a consumer-friendlier price point than its competitors (many augmented reality smart glasses from Rokid’s rivals ). “I think we are the only product that is really consumer-centric in not only design and weight, but also energy use,” says Wu. “A lot of players design for the enterprise market first and then try consumer opportunities, but we have developed consumer products over the past three years. All of them have entered the market successfully and we have users because of that, so we have confidence in our consumer products.” |
Apple revamps web design for App Store | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Apple has updated the look of its web-based App Store, . It definitely has the feel of the iOS 11 App Store, which Apple completely redesigned and . But, unlike iOS 11, there’s no focus on app discovery. The functionality is about the same as before, but what it comes down to is the clean design that feels simpler — perhaps due to the increased amount of white space. There’s also a bit more of an emphasis on reviews. If the app is optimized for iPhone X, Apple now shows iPhone X screenshots rather than screenshots from older phone models. Oh, and now Apple reminds you that its apps are only available on the App Store for iOS devices. Let’s check it out. |
Tile lays off dozens after a disappointing holiday | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | , one of the best known item-tracking gadgets out there, has laid off some 30 people and reportedly stopped the potential hires of another 10, TechCrunch has learned. This comes less than a year after the company raised a $25 million B round last May. The layoffs are reportedly due to disappointing sales over the holidays. When reached for comment, Tile offered the following statement: As part of our 2018 planning process, the Tile leadership team determined that a recalibration of our priorities was necessary so that the company can focus on the development of our Tile Platform business and core hardware products. Unfortunately, this means that we had to say goodbye to roughly 30 Tile colleagues. Tile remains the leader in smart location, and we will continue creating a world where everyone can find everything that matters. The roughly 30 employees being recalibrated weren’t solely from any one area, according to information provided to TechCrunch, so it seems as the company says to be a general cost saving measure. A Tile representative pointed out that a hiring freeze was not announced, so the 10 hires that were reportedly prevented from taking place are still a bit of a question mark. Tile late last summer, improving range and adding two new “Pro” units: a sporty one for active types and a fancy white-and-gold “Tile Style.” Perhaps it was too little, too late, or perhaps Tile has become too popular for its own good and everyone already has all the Tiles they need. At CES, it that will integrate Tile tech into their products. This is reportedly the new focus of the company — being a platform-first rather than a hardware-first company. No doubt the devices will still be made and sold, of course, but it won’t be the totality of the Tile offering. Here’s hoping it works and these layoffs are the last we hear of. |
Crunch Report | Amazon reveals 20 finalists for second HQ | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Diverse teams are still *really* good for business, McKinsey says | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Diversity is good for business — not just from the ethical standpoint, but from the perspective of a company’s bottom line, according to McKinsey & Company. As a follow-up to its “Why Diversity Matters” study in 2015, McKinsey analyzed more than 1,000 companies across 12 countries, looking at their respective profits and value creation. Companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity at the executive level are 33 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the bottom quartile, according to McKinsey’s report, “Delivering through Diversity.” And essentially the same goes for gender diversity, with companies in the top quartile for gender diversity being 21 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the bottom quartile. In the top quartile, financial services are overrepresented for gender diversity, while telecom, media and technology companies are disproportionately represented in the lowest quartile. TMT companies in this sample, which are mostly tech firms, also have seen the biggest decline in diversity since McKinsey’s 2015 report. Diversity of different types also matters. McKinsey found a statistically significant correlation between a more diverse leadership team and financial outperformance. “That this relationship continues to be strong suggests that inclusion of highly diverse individuals – and the myriad ways in which diversity exists beyond gender (e.g., LGBTQ+, age/generation, international experience) – can be a key differentiator among companies,” the report states. Meanwhile, the least diverse companies — the ones in the bottom percentiles for both gender and ethnicity — are 29 percent less likely to outperform in profitability. [gallery ids="1588270,1588388,1588389"] For those who want to make the outdated argument that it’s a pipeline problem, McKinsey notes how women received 35 percent and 33 percent of bachelor and masters degrees, respectively, yet make up just 17 percent of executives at TMT companies. Meanwhile, people of color received 30 percent of the bachelor degrees in science, technology, engineering and math since 2000, yet just 12 percent of executives in McKinsey’s sample are people of color. McKinsey points to Salesforce as an example of a company that delivers on diversity and inclusion, noting its decision to create a C-suite role of chief equality officer and its work to close the gender pay gap. “Crafting a truly effective inclusion and diversity strategy is no small effort, and requires strong and sustained and inclusive leadership,” the report states. “But we, and many of the companies we studied in depth, believe the potential benefits of stronger business performance are well worth it.” |
Snap Inc. lays off at least two dozen amid slowed user growth and engagement | Sarah Buhr | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Snap Inc. has laid off at least two dozen people across several divisions within the company, according to The and which first reported the news. Snap has since confirmed these layoffs, which largely affect those on the content teams in the New York and London offices. More than half of the two dozen employees laid off today were part of the content team. Snap tells TechCrunch that what’s left of the content division will now move to the company’s Venice, California location and that it will continue to hire on the content team. According to Snap, this is just part of finding the right people for the job. These layoffs also may not have been unexpected, as they are part of a reorganization effort to cut costs due to the lackluster growth at the six-year-old company. Investors have been pressuring Snap to grow its user base, but so far the company has fumbled in key areas such as hardware and a much anticipated app redesign, which has had a delayed rollout to the United States. This redesign has worried some publishers as it may affect their traffic. Thought Snap didn’t want to comment on when that redesign may arrive in the U.S., other reports pin it at the end of Q1 this year. Snap has gone through several layoffs in the last year, letting go several dozen employees over a couple of rounds in the hardware division and in recruiting in late 2017. At the time, founder Evan Spiegel in a letter that the company would be slowing hiring efforts in 2018 and that managers would be asked to make “hard decisions” about teams that weren’t performing well in order to get the company back on track. It remains to be seen how the new redesign will affect growth and revenue, but Snap seems committed to its content goals. |
CES sucked this year | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | null |
Casually prep for nuclear war with this Minecraft tour of the Russian and American fallout bunkers | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Virtual tourism is a little heavy in 2018. Sure, you’ve seen the Minecraft Eiffel Tower and beamed aboard the Minecraft USS Enterprise, but have you considered where you might wait out the end of days? Well, not you exactly, but people more important than you. To draw attention to the escalating threat of global nuclear annihilation, the , which works to “prevent catastrophic attacks with weapons of mass destruction and disruption—nuclear, biological, radiological, chemical and cyber,” has partnered with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies to of the nuclear fallout facilities that Russian and/or American leadership will be whisked into in the event of nuclear war. The team has really outdone itself with the -esque teaser video. As NTI explains: Nothing better illustrates the continuing absurdity of plans to fight a nuclear war than the massive complex of underground bunkers that the United States and Russia have built to survive and fight on even after both societies have collapsed. To help explain the scale of these facilities, we have reconstructed two, Site R in rural Pennsylvania (also known as Raven Rock) and the Kosvinsky underground command facility in Russia, roughly to scale using the popular immersive gaming platform Minecraft. For anyone with the game, you can fire up a multiplayer instance of Minecraft, select “direct connect” and put in server address 185.38.151.31:25566 to , the underground makeshift Pentagon located near Camp David, or 185.38.151.2:25566 to , “a survivable command post” that serves as Russia’s equivalent. NTI cautions that it only lets zombies out on the weekends. For anyone without Minecraft, you can take an in-browser about the project, which is also chock full of interesting nuclear bunker facts that put the existence of such underground facilities in an appropriately dark context. The tour is much clunkier outside the game, but the Minecraft experience actually looks pretty cool in that eerie we-definitely-won’t-survive-but-these-people-probably-will way. |
Facebook won’t retreat from Stories as it adds desktop posting | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | feel redundant because 300 million people use its other Snapchat clones on Instagram and WhatsApp. But Facebook is convinced that the narrative, ephemeral, camera-first format is the future of sharing… and advertising. So despite criticism and a slow start for traction, Facebook is doubling down on Stories by testing the ability to create them from desktop, and a much more prominent placement for viewing Stories atop the News Feed instead of in the sidebar. “We are always working to ensure people can easily navigate and enjoy Facebook, regardless of how they connect,” a Facebook spokesperson tells me. “We are testing the option to create and share Stories from Facebook on desktop and are also testing moving the Stories tray from the top right corner to above News Feed, just like on mobile.” Previously you could only consume Stories on web that had to be created on mobile. For now, a small percentage of users will see this new posting ability and design. Brands, Event promoters, and Group admins who manage their Facebook presence from desktop might embrace Stories more now that they can post from there, too. , where Group members and Event attendees can all contribute, are one of the most exciting opportunities for Facebook Stories. But the company has to be careful that brands don’t drown out friends’ Stories, but that’s one of the advantages of algorithmically filtering the slideshows that disappear in 24 hours. Expect Facebook not to make the same mistake it made allowing professional publishers to overwhelm the News Feed, which it’s now . Advertisers might also be more comfortable getting aboard Stories thanks to desktop access. Facebook is building an augmented reality team in London to help it pitch sponsored AR filters to advertisers, similar to how Snapchat monetizes beyond injecting traditional display ads between Stories as Facebook does on Instagram. Facebook users will be able to upload photos or videos, or shoot them with their webcam to post from desktop. That could attract the monologue-style YouTube vloggers who have trained themselves to talk into their computer. By showing Stories above the News Feed instead of to the side, Facebook clearly thinks the content deserves more attention, and is even willing to push down its status update composer and News Feed posts to make room. That’s a bold shift, considering Facebook hesitated until after their and . CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that while eyeglass computers might be the future of augmented reality, Facebook won’t wait for it, and the smartphone is already a capable AR device. But for Facebook to have a functioning AR strategy — whether for keeping people coming back to play with AR face masks, watch friends jazz up their lives or giving advertisers creative tools — it has to get people watching Stories en masse. That’s why it started so posts on one show up in both. It’s why it’s allowing people to syndicate their . It’s why it’s for Story-tellers. And it’s why Facebook’s desktop site is now fully adopting Stories. Whether users warm up to them is another question. Facebook’s social graph has bloated to include distant acquaintances and family you might not want to be able to see a raw view into your day-to-day adventures. That’s the advantage of Snapchat’s closer-friends network, and something Facebook may need a better privacy solution for to get people to share. But remember that people protested the News Feed when it first arrived on Facebook. And the younger generation that’s addicted to Snapchat shows how users can pour a half hour a day into sending, posting and watching camera-based content. If that’s any portent, Facebook might just be early to delivering mainstream users the shift from text to Stories. And if you give people a prominent space to show off for friends, vanity and narcissism may eventually compel them to fill that space with snippets of their lives. |
Turo car-sharing marketplace launches in Germany | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Peer-to-peer car-sharing platform is expanding to Germany officially, starting today, after acquiring last September Daimler’s Croove in-house product for providing essentially the same service. Turo also received a significant strategic investment from Daimler at the same time, as it acquired the automaker’s car-sharing experiment, and it now operates peer-to-peer rental services in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. in addition to Germany. Turo claims more than 200,000 vehicles listed on its service across its combined active markets, and more than 5 million total users registered on the platform. It’s also temporarily foregoing its commission on rentals during an introductory promotion period through July 2018 to celebrate bringing the service to Germany, something it hopes to help it lead the market in the country by the end of the year. In Germany, Turo is teaming with Allianz to insure vehicles on its platform against costs related to accidents and damages, on both the owner and the renter side. The company touts its ability to provide specific makes and models of cars at lower costs versus traditional rentals as key advantages to how it operates for consumers. On the car owner side, Turo says its platform provides people with a way to defray the cost of buying and operating a vehicle. In some cases, Turo has shown that owners can completely cover the cost of their lease agreements by making their vehicle available on the platform for as few as nine days per month. As automakers look to alternatives to individual ownership, or to incentives for people to keep buying, something like Turo makes a lot of sense to back and promote. Mobility service models in the future will combine multiple approaches, including things like car sharing, and Turo’s platform and offerings like it could figure prominently in how the industry evolves over time. |
IBM’s year-over-year revenue didn’t decline in the last quarter | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Here’s a surprise: After 22 quarters of consecutive year-over-year revenue declines, IBM today that its revenue increased from Q4 2016 to Q4 2017. The company reported revenue of $22.5 billion for the last quarter, up from $21.77 billion a year ago. Earnings per share came in at $5.18. Analysts expected revenue of about $22.06 billion and earnings per share of $5.17. What’s the reason for this unexpected turnaround? IBM’s executives argue that the company’s turnaround plans are starting to make a dent in their bottom line. “Our strategic imperatives revenue again grew at a double-digit rate and now represents 46 percent of our total revenue, and we are pleased with our overall revenue growth in the quarter,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer in today’s announcement. “During 2017, we strengthened our position as the leading enterprise cloud provider and established IBM as the blockchain leader for business. Looking ahead, we are uniquely positioned to help clients use data and AI to build smarter businesses.” Whether this is a sign of a long-term return to growth at IBM remains to be seen, but it’s surely a hopeful sign for the company.
Virtually all IBM business units reported increased revenues, including 32 percent growth in the “Systems” unit, which includes hardware and operating systems software — and which interestingly was an area where IBM definitely struggled in the past, though its z Systems and storage line is showing some clear growth now. IBM’s hybrid cloud services, as well as security and mobile service, which fall under the “Technology Services & Cloud Platforms” segment, saw 15 percent growth in the last quarter, even as the overall segment saw a 1 percent drop in revenue, to $9.2 billion. The company also notes that it took a $5.5 billion charge because of the enactment of the U.S.’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. IBM’s GAAP tax rate, including this one-time charge, was 124 percent for Q4 and 49 percent for the full year. That’s , but it may hurt the company as it’s looking to grow its revenue over the next few quarters. |
ARM’s CEO Simon Segars on Spectre/Meltdown, IoT security and more | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | This year’s CES happened in the shadow of the and virtually every conversation at the show turned to this topic at some point. Because this was CES, we had the ability to talk to quite a few people who are close to this issue, including ARM CEO Simon Segars, who stopped by our booth to talk about security and these recent disclosures and their mitigations. In addition to that, we talked about the next big business opportunities for his company, including IoT and AI. For a company whose designs are already in more than 120 billions of devices, those next frontiers open up lots of new opportunities, after all. “With the growth of IoT, we are talking billions — essentially a trillion connected devices,” Segars told us. As for Spectre and Meltdown, Segars noted that the attacks have raised the awareness of how many microprocessors there are in the world today, though he also stressed that this attack exploits the features of high-performance chips — and only 5 percent of the chips that ARM’s licensees have sold in the past are susceptible to the attack. One thing Segars couldn’t tell us just yet is if the patches that the hardware and software vendors are now releasing will incur any performance penalties on the ARM side. “It’s a bit early to tell, to be honest,” Segars said. “It’s going to be highly use-case dependent — highly application dependent.” He does believe, though, that for some high-performance uses cases, there will be a penalty. “For most cases, you know — surfing the web, browsing, email, a lot of the use cases certainly in a mobile device, you are not going to notice any difference.” You can watch the full interview below. |
Why you should care about the warrantless surveillance bill on its way to Trump’s desk | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | After debate ended in a close cloture , the Senate has voted to pass a bill that will renew for another six years one of the NSA’s most controversial practices. The bill, known as the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017 or , provides for an extension of the U.S. government’s practice of collecting the private communications of American citizens when they are communicating with a foreign target. The six-year renewal passed in a 65-34 vote. Over the course of its , the bill faced vocal opposition from privacy advocates. Many argue that Section 702 violates the Fourth Amendment’s provision forbidding unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant. The contend that it is “one of the U.S. government’s most important counterterrorism and counterintelligence tools” — and Congress appears to agree. Last year, in a rare win for anti-surveillance activists, the NSA announced that it would end of the already very controversial practice — the one that allowed it to surveil Americans who even mentioned foreign targets (this is known as “about” collection). These are the 65 senators that just voted to expand the government's warrantless spying powers. Now the bill goes to President Trump—who should veto it. Take action: — Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) Unlike many controversial laws, the Section 702 debate didn’t break down neatly along party lines. The Senate’s main opposition movement was bipartisan, led by Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Ron Wyden. Every way-too-early rumored Senate candidate for the 2020 Democratic primary — Harris, Booker, Warren, Gillibrand, Sanders — voted against renewing Sec. 702 spying without reforms. Will be interesting to see if/how it plays politically. — Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) While the evidence backing up Section 702’s counterterrorism success isn’t particularly sound, it’s also beside the point. The key issue is that the law allows the NSA to surveil foreign spying targets, picking up messages to and from Americans who weren’t the initial focus of an investigation in the process. (That’s the bit that would normally necessitate a warrant.) As the explains: Section 702 is supposed to do exactly what its name promises: collection of foreign intelligence from non-Americans located outside the United States. As the law is written, the intelligence community cannot use Section 702 programs to target Americans, who are protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But the law gives the intelligence community space to target foreign intelligence in ways that inherently and intentionally sweep in Americans’ communications. If you’d like to read the case Section 702, the House Intelligence Committee’s homepage from its Republican majority, albeit one that’s intentionally misleading about how Section 702 incidentally sweeps up domestic communications. The House Intel page also largely glosses over the core question of constitutionality. Privacy organizations who view that question as a central one spoke out against the bill as it made its way to the president’s desk on Thursday. Robyn Greene, policy counsel and government affairs lead at New America’s Open Technology Institute: It’s shocking that at a time when our government is singling out communities for increased scrutiny based on their country of origin, faith, or race, the Senate would vote to expand Section 702 surveillance, and to empower the government to warrantlessly search through 702 data for Americans’ communications. Those who supported this bill did a disservice to the American people and to our democratic values. Neema Singh Guliani, ACLU legislative counsel: Congress abdicated its responsibility to ensure that our intelligence agencies respect the Fourth Amendment. Instead of instituting much needed reforms, lawmakers voted to give the Trump administration broad powers to spy on Americans and foreigners at home and abroad without a warrant. No president should have this power, much less one who has endorsed policies designed to unfairly target critics, immigrants, and minority communities… The ACLU is currently challenging warrantless surveillance under Section 702 and will continue to fight this unlawful surveillance in the courts. We will use every tool at our disposal to stop the continued abuse of these spying powers. 65 Senators just voted to expand an unconstitutional law permitting Trump to spy on communications with one leg in the US–without a warrant. For the next six years, any unencrypted internet request that even touches a US border will be "ingested" (intercepted) and parsed by NSA. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) Republican Senator Rand Paul: I rise in opposition to the government listening to your phone calls, reading your emails, or reading your text messages without a warrant. It doesn’t mean the government will never do this, but it means they would have to ask a judge. They would have to ask a judge if they have probable cause that you have committed a crime. They would have to name you. They would have to name the information they want. It’s called the Fourth Amendment. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden on S. 139: It is worse than business-as-usual: It explicitly authorizes warrantless searches of law-abiding Americans, us, and allows for the collection of communications entirely among innocent Americans who reference the wrong foreigner, and gives the attorney general unchecked power to decide when the government can use what it finds against us, to pick just three of its many troubling provisions. But I’ve been in this fight for a long time. And while today’s vote is a disappointment, the battle to protect Americans from unnecessary government spying isn’t over. Americans across the political spectrum have made clear that liberty and security are not mutually exclusive. Americans won’t stop fighting to end this abuse of power, and neither will I. Now, only a signature from President Trump stands between American citizens and six more years of Section 702. |
Amazon cancels three original series developed under ousted studio head Roy Price | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | Amazon may have recently of its comedic superhero series , but it’s also cleaning house of other original programming that, presumably, hasn’t been doing as well. According to reports from and – the latter confirmed by an “Amazon insider” – the company is now cancelling three other comedies, including Tig Notaro’s , Jill Soloway’s and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Notably, Soloway’s debut effort with Amazon, , brought the company multiple Golden Globes, but her newer show led by Kevin Bacon didn’t connect with audiences, Deadline says. Soloway, however, has an overall deal with Amazon so may come back with other series in the future. Meanwhile, Notaro’s had a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes for its latest season, but it’s also unclear to what extent the C.K. Louis scandal came into play here, given that Louis was titled as an exec producer on the show. He was , but the association may have remained in viewers’ minds. (Besides, if the show had viewership numbers to match its good reviews, Amazon probably would have found a way to keep it around.) As for the satire series Amazon cancelled it a month after release. That didn’t really give it enough time to find an audience, but perhaps Amazon trusted its numbers – and its gut? – on that one. The cancellations come just a few months after Amazon’s studio head after being suspended from the job in the wake of sexual harassment allegations. Since then, Amazon has passing on many of his projects, including , in addition to these three new cancellations. According to both Deadline’s sources and , the cancelled series represent a larger shift in Amazon’s content strategy. Reportedly, Jeff Bezos wants the company to focus on bigger series that can attract a mainstream audience, rather than the niche (and critically appealing) fare it developed in the past. In other words, Amazon is looking for its own . ? |
FCC report keeps faster definition of broadband and separates mobile from fixed connections | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | The FCC’s yearly report of broadband deployment keeps some crucial definitions in place that some feared would be changed or eliminated to ease the responsibilities of internet service providers. The threat of a lowered speed standard and the merging of mobile and fixed broadband services will not be carried out, it seems. Broadband will continue to be defined as a connection with speeds of 25 megabits down and 3 megabits up. Another proposed definition of 10 down and 1 up was decried by critics as unrealistic for several reasons; not only is it insufficient for many ordinary internet applications, but it would let providers off the hook, because they would be counted as having deployed broadband if it met this lowered standard. Fortunately, that isn’t the case, and the 25/3 standard remains in place. The other worry was the potential decision to merge mobile with fixed broadband when measuring the quality of internet connections available to people throughout the country. Had the two been merged, an area might have been considered well-served if it was, for example, in range of an LTE tower (giving decent mobile speeds) but only served by sub-1-megabit DSL. Since it was being considered that only one was required, that underserved area would be considered adequately connected. But the FCC clearly saw the lack of logic in equating mobile connections and fixed broadband: they’re used, tracked, billed and deployed very differently. : Both fixed and mobile services can enable access to information, entertainment, and employment options, but there are salient differences between the two. Beyond the most obvious distinction that mobile services permit user mobility, there are clear variations in consumer preferences and demands for fixed and mobile services. Any analysis that only looked at the progress in deploying fixed broadband service or only looked at the progress in deploying mobile broadband service would be incomplete. Therefore, the draft report takes a holistic view of the market and examines whether we are both making progress in deploying fixed broadband service and making progress in deploying mobile broadband service. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel commended this decision but criticized others in a separate statement, saying “I’m glad that the FCC has backed away from its crazy idea to lower the broadband speed standard. But it defies logic to conclude that broadband is being reasonably and timely deployed across this country when over 24 million Americans still lack access.” The fact sheet and Chairman Pai’s commentary also get a few hits in regarding the recent decision to roll back the 2015 net neutrality rules, but they aren’t very substantial. (Commissioner Clyburn writes: “How can this agency now claim that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion? Only by repeating the majority’s tired and debunked claims that broadband investment and innovation screeched to a halt in 2015.”) Pai has, however, proposed a $500 million project to expand rural broadband, the details of which are still forthcoming; I’ve asked his office for more information on it. The full draft report, when it becomes public, will no doubt contain more interesting information ripe for interpretation, and other commissioners may also weigh in on its successes and shortcomings. In the meantime, it’s reassuring that the main worries leading up to it have been addressed. |
No, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t buy a giant yacht | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | A spokesperson for Mark Zuckerberg offered a pretty flat-out denial of reports saying that the Facebook founder had purchased a $150 million ultra-luxury super yacht in Monaco this past September, “The reports related to Mark purchasing a yacht are completely inaccurate as he did not purchase a yacht.” A report from the had detailed that Zuckerberg had purchased the giant ship. Turns out, that report was inaccurate. The vessel at hand, an expedition yacht named “Ulysses,” is 107 meters long, includes dozens of rooms and is primed for journeys as long as 8,500 nautical miles. The report had details that Zuckerberg bought the yacht “in secret” from another self-made billionaire, Graeme Hart. It was purchased late last year by an unknown buyer. |
Elon Musk’s Boring Co. flamethrower is real, $500 and up for pre-order | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | So that flamethrower that Elon Musk teased The Boring Company would start selling after it ran out of its 50,000 hats? Yeah, it’s real – and you can . Musk revealed the flamethrower on Saturday, after some digging tipped its existence late last week. The Boring Company Flamethrower is functional, too, as you can see from this Instagram featuring some Boring Co. staff, presumably well safety trained, firing off two of the things IRL. A post shared by (@elonmusk) on Marketing copy for the flamethrower includes a “guarantee” that it will “liven up any party,” and a proclamation that it’s the “world’s safest flamethrower” in case you were concerned (you probably are not if you’re ordering a flamethrower on the internet). The $500 fee doesn’t include taxes and shipping, which are added at checkout, and the initial shipments will come out in spring. There’s also a disclaimer about international shipping incurring extra fees (and maybe seizure at the border?) plus, buyers will be required to review and accept a terms and conditions document prior to getting their flamethrower in the mail. https://www.instagram.com/p/BeeTFQ7AYhy/?taken-by=elonmusk The Boring Co. also sells a fire extinguisher, because they know how to make an upsell with specific relevance, and it’s $30, which they fully admit is more than you’d pay elsewhere. But it has a sticker. There’s not even a picture, so it probably doesn’t look all that impressive. Musk’s Boring Company is literally a company focused on tunnel boring, but it seems like it’ll be a while before it has revenue or significant results (even if it’s already digging test tunnels). To fund the project until then, selling weird stuff with the company’s logo to Muskheads everywhere seems like a decent plan. Even if it contributes negatively to the sum total of working flamethrowers existing in the world. A post shared by (@elonmusk) on |
Enzyme.com wants to make FDA compliance easier for startups | Sarah Buhr | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | The Food and Drug Administration approval process can be like navigating a minefield for health startups hoping to get through regulations and begin selling to the American public. YC company hopes to help these small businesses by automating the process for them. Biomedical engineer Jared Seehafer came up with the idea through his own experience consulting with health companies like Genentech. He found going through all the paperwork to get into compliance wasn’t just tedious but also a big part of what’s holding back small companies. “You find you spend almost as much time documenting the work as you do doing the work,” Seehafer told TechCrunch. “This is a multitrillion-dollar industry and I thought ‘why isn’t there software to automate the process?’ ” Compliance is the second biggest problem after raising capital for founders in the health space, according to Seehafer. So he rolled up his sleeves, brought in co-founder and regulations expert Jake Graham and launched Enzyme out of beta last summer to provide an automated software system companies can use to integrate with platforms like Jira, Trello and GitHub. Alternatives exist to help with compliance, but they often involve an expertise in the field and a hodgepodge of different software systems. With Enzyme, Seehafer says startups don’t need a background understanding in regulatory issues and don’t have to duplicate the paperwork, either. They can just plug it in and have it ready to go when the FDA comes knocking. So far Enzyme has raised $1.85 million from Refactor Capital, Data Collective, Soma Capital and Rock Health and various angels like Elizabeth Iorns from Science Exchange. The startup is currently working with about 10 companies, and Seehafer says he has an aggressive growth target for 2018, with a particular focus on targeting early funded digital health companies in need of this sort of service. He’s also going after partnerships with accelerators and VC firms to help him get in front of these companies. Of course, a company could go it on their own and try to follow guidelines placed on the . However, Seehafer says many end up hiring consultants, full-time compliance officers or spending exorbitant amounts of money to get them to the next phase, even with the guidelines clearly in place. “There are disincentives to making it clear [on how to get in compliance] and there’s different levels of approval for different stages,” he said. Seehafer hopes Enzyme helps founders not only navigate the process more smoothly but also educates the community so those with an idea can concentrate on innovating more and dealing with paperwork less. Would something like Enzyme have helped Theranos navigate the process? Seehafer laughed, adding the beleaguered blood testing company “didn’t follow FDA compliance 101.” |
Sphero’s CEO discusses the company’s shift from Star Wars to schools | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | ware is hard, robotics are next to impossible. Even so, Sphero managed an impressive feat over its first five years, growing from a small Colorado startup with a glowing, smartphone-controlled ball into the maker of the most talked about piece of merchandise for cinema’s biggest blockbuster franchise. |
SpaceX sets historic first Falcon Heavy launch for February 6 | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | SpaceX has set February 6 as the target for its Falcon Heavy launch, the first ever test flight of the new, high-capacity rocket that the company is building to allow it to send nearly three times as much payload per mission into orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted the target date on Saturday, adding that there will be plenty of viewing opportunity for the public from the nearby causeway. The launch will take place from launchpad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, which SpaceX has refurbished and modified for its big rocket – and which previously played host to the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs for NASA. Aiming for first flight of Falcon Heavy on Feb 6 from Apollo launchpad 39A at Cape Kennedy. Easy viewing from the public causeway. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) The February 6 date was rumored late this past week, and SpaceX had previously said they were aiming to have the launch take place roughly a week after their successful static test fire of the rocket, which took place on January 24. But Musk’s confirmation gives us something to look forward to that’s far more specific. SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy flight will be about testing it in real-world flight. The company has done a lot of preparation and simulation, but you can’t know how a rocket’s going to behave in the air until it actually launches. Musk has previously suggested this could end with the rocket exploding post-launch and pre-orbit, but that would still be a major step forward for SpaceX’s heavy booster. The cargo on board for this mission is a cherry red original model Tesla Roadster – and if things go very well, it’ll be put into a long looping Mars orbit, a nod to everything Musk’s ventures have accomplished thus far, and also what they hope to achieve in the future. |
Elon Musk’s new Tesla pay plan encourages him to shoot for the stars — but what if he misses? | Betsy Atkins | 2,018 | 1 | 27 |
Elon Musk, a charismatic entrepreneur, is nothing if not audacious. Over the past decade, he’s worked to serially reinvent the online payments, aerospace and solar power industries, and has been compared to Marvel’s Iron Man genius/zillionaire Tony Stark. As CEO of Tesla Industries, he’s now deeply involved in creating an electric car manufacturing model that bypasses the industry’s old iron-and-gasoline roots. You’d expect the board of Tesla Industries to shape a CEO compensation plan that suits its outsized leader, and boy, did they ever. But a look at reveals many elements that should cause shareholders to raise their eyebrows and pause. At first glance, the Tesla plan rewards the CEO the way most early-stage tech founders are rewarded. Compared to automotive CEOs, such plans are based on three to five major metrics. Musk’s comp plan is based on, and heavily weighted toward, achieving a high stock price/market cap, tied to operational metrics of revenue and profit. Unlike some CEO pay plans, it would be tough to manipulate the numbers to boost short-term payouts. The chair of the Tesla board’s compensation committee, Ira Ehrenpreis, notes the terms are a good bet for shareholders — “heads you win, tails you don’t lose.” What’s not to love? First, the growth levels required under Musk’s pay plan are even more otherworldly that his SpaceX goals. Market value growth for Tesla is targeted in $50 billion increments over the next decade, reaching $650 billion — more than 10 times its current value. Musk’s payout for this insane growth would be an insane level of equity in the company. He already holds 22 percent equity ownership in Tesla, and would have an opportunity to earn an additional 12 percent over the coming decade (even if he is not the CEO). Twenty-two percent plus 12 percent is an extraordinary amount of equity ownership for a founder. Worse, 12 percent additional equity is an enormous level of dilution, and hardly shareholder-friendly. If Musk hits the goals he will receive $55 billion of equity value! There is great shareholder risk in a comp plan heavily dependent on share price/market cap (and a company so far based more on buzz than meeting production targets). Because the stock is currently trading at a remarkably high multiple, it could easily catch a cold. If bad news like a safety, regulatory or production issue hits, Tesla stock values could plunge like bitcoins. This could incentivize company management to minimize any negative disclosures. This “risk” matter, stoked by equity-driven incentives, is the second big problem. A bug in a software program can lead to unhappy customers, and maybe lost money. A bug in a high-tech automobile can get someone killed. Ultimately, Tesla is an automotive company that has to produce a reliable, safe product that gets you from one point to another. What happens when its comp plan incentivizes and rewards what might be very risky behavior over time? Musk’s pay package heavily weights stock price/market cap, and an enormous quantity of equity could have that very effect. Contrast this with the old-line automotive companies like GM, Ford and Fiat. They may not be as flashy as Tesla, but their CEO comp plans are more nuanced, and weigh additional metrics, such as market share/production, safety and quality. As an experienced public company compensation chair, my recommendation would be for the Tesla board to add such automotive peer company metrics. Tesla has already experienced significant production issues and is unable to fulfill orders. What happens when it tries to boost production (and incentivizes it through pay) tenfold? Wouldn’t it make sense to include “meeting commitments” as one of the metrics to measure? Keeping an inspirational CEO and leader is important, but there must be balance with the shareholders’ (and public’s) interests. Outrageous goals fueled by outrageous pay potential have historically driven outrageously high risks. I suggest that a company losing money with a share price built on future aspirations needs a balanced reward system. Take into consideration not only how early-stage tech companies reward founders, but how other public companies, including automotive, reward their leaders for the long-term interest of their shareholders. A software crash is a far different thing from one with an auto. |
Move slow and break nothing | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | Facebook Messenger was down for me for about an hour earlier this week. My MacBook Pro randomly kernel panics overnight and restarts. , and , and . A little more than a year ago, , throwing the DNS layer of the internet into a tailspin. Practically every chip made by Intel . . Tokyo-based Coincheck due to hackers. If , then that might explain why everything seems so ridiculously broken these days. It’s easy to just blame companies, or hackers, or software engineers, and it’s just as easy to just give up and believe that nothing is going to get better and revert to a pre-agrarian society. What we have is a real crisis in reliability, not just across software, but across our entire society. . What’s going on is that we have greatly increased the magnitude of complexity of our society’s systems, even as we couple them more tightly together. Charles Perrow, a sociology professor at Yale, described the combination of these two as “ ” in an eponymous book. It’s an oxymoronic term for a very intelligent observation: that what we think of as “accidents” or crashes or bugs are really quite common and indeed, inevitable, given the design of systems that we rely on. Complex systems are ones in which changes, even small ones, can have disproportionate effects on the outcome of a system. Take last year’s downtime of S3, Amazon’s storage layer. : “an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.” Amazon has fixed the issue and put in new safeguards to make sure such a change can’t happen again. That’s fantastic, and Amazon should be lauded for writing up and disclosing a comprehensive report on the error. But this was a “normal accident” — the sheer complexity of Amazon’s services means that the surface area of things that can go wrong is practically infinite. On top of complexity, tight coupling means that various independent parts of a system are designed to work closely together. When S3 went down, it knocked out a bunch of major websites, because websites had no backup or redundancy in the event that Amazon’s services were not working. That is, except for Netflix, which to ensure that the failure of any individual component would not bring down the entire system. Everything about our modern world has increased complexity and how tightly coupled our systems are. Take software development itself. The (usually) clearly designed APIs and libraries of the host operating system have been replaced by a ghastly and constantly evolving collection of libraries and web frameworks, a palimpsest of code and hope. Even the supposedly stable parts of the stack can be our undoing. The was a gaping hole in every single secure transaction that happened on the web. It just so happened that at the time, , and that the OpenSSL Software Foundation had annual donations of $2,000. This starts to get at the rot that is happening. Everything requires maintenance, practically all the time. It doesn’t have to be millions of man-hours, but it is also certainly not going to be zero either. Yet, coding libraries are abandoned all the time. Many popular libraries are down to a single maintainer, who keeps the library alive but can hardly be expected to guarantee its performance. And yet, we laud innovators who build new software libraries even while the edifice of our progress disintegrates. Academics are of how society views maintainers (hint: not well). Ultimately though, we are all responsible for these outcomes, and we all need to take the opportunity to reduce complexity and increase reliability for any system we are a part of, whether software or not. Can we do sensitivity analysis on each component of the system to ask what would happen if one system — or a combination of systems — would fail? Can we run simulations to prepare everyone from software engineers to CEOs how to handle a data breach, or a database failure, or a power outage? Can we build up more resilience by ensuring that there are carefully-designed redundancies in our most critical systems? Reliable systems do exist. The United States has , and on a domestic carrier since 2009. There were . Clearly highly-redundant and reliable systems can be produced if we want them to and build the right culture of maintenance, safety, and reliability. For everyone, but particularly software engineers: let’s get back to basics. It’s better to have more reliable but less features than more features that are breaking every other day. Let’s move slow and break nothing. Reliability and resilience may just be the next major wave of technology we are waiting for, and for those of us who rely on our systems day in and day out, we are ready for this stable world. |
These startup exits delivered the biggest bang for the buck | Joanna Glasner | 2,018 | 1 | 27 |
Big IPOs by the best-known brands tend to dominate attention in startup circles. Last year, for instance, it was hard to about Snap’s monumental market debut. But when it comes to delivering significant returns on invested capital, it’s often lower-profile companies that come out on top. Startups like personalized fashion provider and cancer therapy developer generated multi-billion-dollar valuations after raising a few tens of millions of dollars. They’re not the only companies that generated a lot of bang for each investor buck. A analysis of post-exit valuations for the past year’s crop of newly public and acquired later-stage startups showed that quite a few managed to amass valuations totaling impressive multiples of capital raised. Startups that stood out for their capital efficiency hailed from both tech and life science sectors. We measured them using a valuation to invested capital (VIC) ratio, which is a metric equal to the post-exit valuation divided by the amount of venture and seed funding prior to exit. Below, we look at some of the top-returning large exits, first for tech and Internet companies, and then for life sciences. In tech, there’s no single winning sector or strategy for generating a high valuation relative to invested capital. Instead, top performers come from a broad variety of sub-sectors, from fashion ecommerce to streaming media to identity management. On the fashion front, the aforementioned Stitch Fix stands out as a leader across all tech and internet categories, based on its strong post-IPO performance. Shares of the San Francisco-based company are currently trading up about 50 percent from the October IPO price, with a market cap around $2 billion. Having raised just $42 million in venture funding before going public, Stitch Fix now has a VIC ratio of a whopping 47. To boot, the seven-year-old company is modestly profitable and seeing growing demand for its service, which matches online customers with personal stylists who select clothes for them. Stitch Fix isn’t the only consumer-facing company to deliver a big bang for the buck. Roku, the developer of a popular streaming device and platform, has also performed extraordinarily well. Granted, Roku raised a lot more venture funding. Since its founding in 2001, the Silicon Valley company took in about $209 million in early through late-stage rounds. Investors’ risk-taking appears to have been rewarded following the company’s September IPO, however, with Roku now sustaining a market cap around $4.2 billion. That gives it a VIC ratio of around 20. In the chart below, we compare the metrics for Stitch Fix, Roku and the three other members of our top-five list: Venture-backed life science companies generally pursue IPOs at a higher rate and earlier stage of development than their tech counterparts. That’s in part because public markets are a popular source of financing for clinical trials, and investors have historically been willing to buy shares of pre-revenue companies in the space. This past year, with major stock indexes on a tear, going public proved a particularly lucrative strategy for several VC-funded biotechs, which saw shares rise dramatically post-IPO. Big acquisitions were less common but still delivered some large outcomes, including our top-returning company across all sectors: Impact Biomedicines. Four of the five top performers in our life sciences list are working on therapies or diagnostics for cancer patients, and Impact is no exception. The company, which spun out of drug developer Sanofi a little over a year ago with a promising blood cancer treatment, sold to Celgene earlier this month for $1.1 billion upfront and up to $5.9 billion in milestone-based payments. That gives Impact a VIC ratio of at least 50 and as high as 318. Second on our list is AnaptysBio, which has seen its shares soar more than 600 percent following its market debut in January 2017. The San Diego company has clinical-stage drugs to treat ailments including severe adult peanut allergy and asthma. In the chart below, we compare the metrics for Impact, AnaptysBio and the three other members of our top-five list: It’s worth noting that the VIC ratio is not a measure of investor returns, as it does not specify the size stake in a startup that backers obtained in return for their investment. Companies that relied on bootstrapping for much of their early development, for instance, may post high multiples without delivering commensurate returns to investors, who likely bought in at higher entry-level valuations. Ditto for startups that spun out of corporate parents with relatively mature technologies. That said, capital efficiency does matter as a yardstick for the startup value creation. We see plenty of companies that raised copious sums of financing go on to be worth less than invested capital. One prominent 2017 example was storage technology provider Tintri, which raised about $245 million in private funding rounds before going public in June. It’s now valued at less than $200 million. More commonly, however, companies that do go public are worth more than what they raised privately. Even newly public companies that traded below prior private valuations, like Cloudera and Blue Apron, are still worth several times invested capital. But in a startup environment where investors continue to chase unicorns and mega-rounds, it’s worth noting that the largest returns don’t always go to the most predictable candidates. |
Social media is giving us trypophobia | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | in the state of technology. But amid all the hand-wringing over fake news, the cries of election deforming Kremlin disinformation plots, the calls from political podia for tech giants to locate a social conscience, a knottier realization is taking shape. Fake news and disinformation are just a few of the symptoms of what’s wrong and what’s rotten. The problem with platform giants is something far more fundamental. The problem is these vastly powerful algorithmic engines are blackboxes. And, at the business end of the operation, each individual user only sees what each individual user sees. The great lie of social media has been to claim it shows us the world. And their follow-on deception: That their technology products bring us closer together. In truth, social media is not a telescopic lens — as the telephone actually was — but an opinion-fracturing prism that shatters social cohesion by replacing a shared public sphere and its dynamically overlapping discourse with a wall of increasingly concentrated filter bubbles. Social media is not connective tissue but engineered segmentation that treats each pair of human eyeballs as a discrete unit to be plucked out and separated off from its fellows. Think about it, it’s a trypophobic’s nightmare. Or the panopticon in reverse — each user bricked into an individual cell that’s surveilled from the platform controller’s tinted glass tower. Little wonder lies spread and inflate so quickly via products that are not only hyper-accelerating the rate at which information can travel but deliberately pickling people inside a stew of their own prejudices. First it panders then it polarizes then it pushes us apart. We aren’t so much seeing through a lens darkly when we log onto Facebook or peer at personalized search results on Google, we’re being individually strapped into a custom-moulded headset that’s continuously screening a bespoke movie — in the dark, in a single-seater theatre, without any windows or doors. Are you feeling claustrophobic yet? It’s a movie that the algorithmic engine believes you’ll like. Because it’s figured out your favorite actors. It knows what genre you skew to. The nightmares that keep you up at night. The first thing you think about in the morning. It knows your politics, who your friends are, where you go. It watches you ceaselessly and packages this intelligence into a bespoke, tailor-made, ever-iterating, emotion-tugging product just for you. Its secret recipe is an infinite blend of your personal likes and dislikes, scraped off the Internet where you unwittingly scatter them. (Your offline habits aren’t safe from its harvest either — it pays data brokers to snitch on those too.) No one else will ever get to see this movie. Or even know it exists. There are no adverts announcing it’s screening. Why bother putting up billboards for a movie made just for you? Anyway, the personalized content is all but guaranteed to strap you in your seat. If social media platforms were sausage factories we could at least intercept the delivery lorry on its way out of the gate to probe the chemistry of the flesh-colored substance inside each packet — and find out if it’s really as palatable as they claim. Of course we’d still have to do that thousands of times to get meaningful data on what was being piped inside each custom sachet. But it could be done. Alas, platforms involve no such physical product, and leave no such physical trace for us to investigate. Understanding platforms’ information-shaping processes would require access to their algorithmic blackboxes. But those are locked up inside corporate HQs — behind big signs marked: ‘Proprietary! No visitors! Commercially sensitive IP!’ Only engineers and owners get to peer in. And even they don’t necessarily always understand the decisions their machines are making. But how sustainable is this asymmetry? If we, the wider society — on whom platforms depend for data, eyeballs, content and revenue; we their business model — can’t see how we are being divided by what they individually drip-feed us, how can we judge what the technology is doing to us, one and all? And figure out how it’s systemizing and reshaping society? How can we hope to measure its impact? Except when and where we feel its harms. Without access to meaningful data how can we tell whether time spent here or there or on any of these prejudice-pandering advertiser platforms can ever be said to be “ “? What does it tell us about the attention-sucking power that tech giants hold over us when — just one example — a train station has to put up signs warning parents to stop looking at their smartphones and point their eyes at their children instead? Is there a new idiot wind blowing through society of a sudden? Or are we been unfairly robbed of our attention? What should we think when tech CEOs confess they don’t want kids in their family anywhere near the products they’re pushing on everyone else? It sure sounds like even they think . External researchers have been trying their best to map and analyze flows of online opinion and influence in an attempt to quantify platform giants’ societal impacts. Yet Twitter, for one, actively degrades these efforts by playing pick and choose from its gatekeeper position — rubbishing any studies with results it doesn’t like by claiming the picture is flawed because it’s incomplete. Why? Because external researchers don’t have access to all its information flows. Why? Because they can’t see how data is shaped by Twitter’s algorithms, or how each individual Twitter user might (or might not) have flipped a content suppression switch which can also — says Twitter — mould the sausage and determine who consumes it. Why not? Because Twitter doesn’t give outsiders that kind of access. Sorry, didn’t you see the sign? And when politicians press the company to provide the full picture — based on the data that only Twitter can see — they just get fed shaped by Twitter’s corporate self-interest. (This particular game of ‘whack an awkward question’ / ‘hide the unsightly mole’ could run and run and run. Yet it also doesn’t seem, long term, to be a very politically sustainable one — however much quiz games might be suddenly back in fashion.) And how can we trust Facebook to create robust and rigorous disclosure systems around political advertising when the company has been shown ? Mark Zuckerberg wants us to believe we can trust him to do the right thing. Yet he is also the powerful tech CEO who studiously ignored concerns that malicious disinformation was running rampant on his platform. Who even ignored specific warnings that fake news could impact democracy — from some pretty knowledgeable and too. Before fake news became an existential crisis for Facebook’s business, Zuckerberg’s standard line of defense to any raised content concern was deflection — that infamous claim ‘we’re not a media company; we’re a tech company’. Turns out maybe he was right to say that. Because maybe big tech platforms really do require a new type of bespoke regulation. One that reflects the uniquely hypertargeted nature of the individualized product their factories are churning out at — — 4BN+ eyeball scale. In recent years there have been calls for regulators to have access to algorithmic blackboxes to lift the lids on engines that act on us yet which we (the product) are prevented from seeing (and thus overseeing). Rising use of AI certainly makes that case stronger, with the risk of prejudices scaling as fast and far as tech platforms if they get blindbaked into commercially privileged blackboxes. Do we think it’s right and fair to automate disadvantage? At least until the complaints get loud enough and egregious enough that someone somewhere with enough influence notices and cries foul? Algorithmic accountability should not mean that a critical mass of human suffering is needed to reverse engineer a technological failure. We should absolutely demand proper processes and meaningful accountability. Whatever it takes to get there. And if powerful platforms are perceived to be footdragging and truth-shaping every time they’re asked to provide answers to questions that scale far beyond their own commercial interests — answers, let me stress it again, that they hold — then calls to crack open their blackboxes will become a clamor because they will have fulsome public support. Lawmakers are already alert to the phrase algorithmic accountability. It’s on their lips and in their rhetoric. Risks are being articulated. Extant harms are being weighed. Algorithmic blackboxes are losing their deflective public sheen — a decade+ into platform giant’s huge hyperpersonalization experiment. No one would now doubt these platforms impact and shape the public discourse. But, arguably, in recent years, they’ve made the public street coarser, angrier, more outrage-prone, less constructive, as algorithms have rewarded trolls and provocateurs who best played their games. So all it would take is for enough people — enough ‘users’ — to join the dots and realize what it is that’s been making them feel so uneasy and queasy online — and these products will wither on the vine, as others . There’s no engineering workaround for that either. Even if generative AIs get so good at dreaming up content that they could substitute a significant chunk of humanity’s sweating toil, they’d still never possess the biological eyeballs required to blink forth the ad dollars the tech giants depend on. (The phrase ‘user generated content platform’ should really be bookended with the unmentioned yet entirely salient point: ‘and user consumed’.) This week the UK prime minister, Theresa May, used a Davos podium World Economic Forum speech to for failing to operate with a social conscience. And after laying into the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google — for, as she tells it, facilitating , and spreading and — she pointed to a Edelman showing a global erosion of trust in social media (and a simultaneous leap in trust for journalism). Her subtext was clear: Where tech giants are concerned, world leaders now feel both willing and able to sharpen the knives. Nor was she the only either. “Facebook and Google have grown into ever more powerful monopolies, they have become obstacles to innovation, and they have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware,” said billionaire US philanthropist George Soros, calling — out-and-out — for regulatory action to break the hold platforms have built over us. And while politicians (and journalists — and most probably Soros too) are used to being roundly hated, tech firms most certainly are not. These companies have basked in the halo that’s perma-attached to the word “innovation” for years. ‘Mainstream backlash’ isn’t in their lexicon. Just like ‘social responsibility’ wasn’t until very recently. You only have to look at the worry lines etched on Zuckerberg’s face to see how ill-prepared Silicon Valley’s boy kings are to deal with roiling public anger. The opacity of big tech platforms has another harmful and dehumanizing impact — not just for their data-mined users but for their content creators too. A platform like YouTube, which depends on a volunteer army of makers to keep content flowing across the countless screens that pull the billions of streams off of its platform (and stream the billions of ad dollars into Google’s coffers), nonetheless operates with an opaque screen pulled down between itself and its creators. YouTube has a set of content policies which it says its content uploaders must abide by. But Google has not consistently enforced these policies. And a media scandal or an advertiser boycott can trigger sudden spurts of enforcement action that leave creators scrambling not to be shut out in the cold. One creator, who originally got in touch with TechCrunch because she was given a safety strike on a satirical video about the , describes being managed by YouTube’s heavily automated systems as an “omnipresent headache” and a dehumanizing guessing game. “Most of my issues on YouTube are the result of automated ratings, anonymous flags (which are abused) and anonymous, vague help from anonymous email support with limited corrective powers,” Aimee Davison told us. “It will take direct human interaction and negotiation to improve partner relations on YouTube and clear, explicit notice of consistent guidelines.” “YouTube needs to grade its content adequately without engaging in excessive artistic censorship — and they need to humanize our account management,” she added. Yet YouTube has been doing a good job of . Aka its ‘YouTube stars’. But where does the blame really lie when ‘star’ YouTube creator Logan Paul — an erstwhile Preferred Partner on Google’s ad platform — uploads a video of himself making jokes beside the dead body of a suicide victim? Paul must manage his own conscience. But blame must also scale beyond any one individual who is being algorithmically managed (read: manipulated) on a platform to produce content that literally enriches Google because people are being guided by its reward system. In Paul’s case YouTube staff had also . So even when YouTube claims it has human eyeballs reviewing content those eyeballs don’t appear to have adequate time and tools to be able to do the work. And no wonder, given how massive the task is. Google has said it will increase headcount of staff who carry out moderation and other enforcement duties to . Yet that number is as nothing vs the amount of content being uploaded to YouTube. (According to , 400 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every as of July 2015; it could easily have risen to 600 or 700 hours per minute by now.) The sheer size of YouTube’s free-to-upload content platform all but makes it impossible to meaningfully moderate. And that’s an existential problem when the platform’s massive size, pervasive tracking and individualized targeting technology also gives it the power to influence and shape society at large. The company itself its 1BN+ users constitute one-third of the entire Internet. Throw in Google’s preference for hands-off (read: lower cost) algorithmic management of content and some of the societal impacts flowing from the decisions its machines are making are questionable — to put it politely. Indeed, YouTube’s algorithms have been . The platform has also been accused of essentially automating online radicalization — by pushing viewers towards increasingly extreme and hateful views. Click on a video about a populist right wing pundit and end up — via algorithmic suggestion — pushed towards a neo-nazi hate group. And the company’s suggested fix for this AI extremism problem? Yet more AI… Yet it’s AI-powered platforms that have been caught amplifying fakes and accelerating hates and incentivizing sociopathy. And it’s AI-powered moderation systems that are too stupid to judge context and understand nuance like humans do. (Or at least when they’re given enough time to think.) Zuckerberg himself said as much , as the scale of the existential crisis facing his company was beginning to become clear. “It’s worth noting that major advances in AI are required to understand text, photos and videos to judge whether they contain hate speech, graphic violence, sexually explicit content, and more,” he wrote then. “At our current pace of research, we hope to begin handling some of these cases in 2017, but others will not be possible for many years.” ‘Many years’ is tech CEO speak for ‘actually we might not EVER be able to engineer that’. And if you’re talking about the very hard, very editorial problem of content moderation, identifying terrorism is actually a relatively narrow challenge. Understanding satire — or even just knowing whether a piece of content has any kind of intrinsic value at all vs been ? Frankly speaking, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the robot that can do that. Especially not when — across the spectrum — people are crying out for tech firms to show more humanity. And tech firms are still trying to force-feed us more AI. |
Scout networks are latest VC salvo in war for founders | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | Founders are extraordinarily busy, even for their own investors. A decade ago, they might have had relationships with a handful of VC partners as they scaled their businesses and raised additional rounds of capital. Today, it is hardly rare to see as many as fifteen or twenty investment firms and angels listed on the cap table following a seed round. If you add up all the partners at those funds, a first-time founder can have investment connections to literally dozens of VCs in just the first year or two of the company. That number can easily approach three digits as a startup grows. For VCs looking to build deeper partnerships with their portfolio, that’s an incredible battle for founder attention, and it is only getting more keen. All the while, founders today increasingly want to receive investments from other founders — people who have been in their shoes and can speak to the challenges that they are facing. VC firms are trying to quickly adapt to the changing terrain, and so we are seeing the rise of “working networks” that blur the lines between founder, investor, and advisor. Networking may be the bread and butter of venture investing, but the “VC firm as network” seems to be hitting a zenith. The clearest example of this is , a joint initiative of Accomplice and AngelList. The program, whose , seeks founders who are interested in becoming part-time angel investors. Each participant will receive $200,000 and potentially up to $1 million on behalf of the two funds to invest in startups, all the while receiving training on how to think and make decisions like a venture capitalist. Spearhead is hardly the only program engaging founders and advisors. Sequoia’s formally stealthy scout program has been announced earlier this month. The fund includes more than 100 scouts sourcing deals for the firm. On top of that, First Round’s and General Catalyst’s together have dozens of student partners who have sourced hundreds of deals on college campuses since their inceptions. First Round also has a network of product thinkers called which invests angel capital in a scout-like way. , founded by ProductHunt first employee Erik Tokenberg and others, is based on the adage that “Village is not a traditional VC. We’re a network.” Why are these programs suddenly in vogue? It isn’t that VCs can’t keep up with the volume of new startups. Contrary to media excitement, , particularly at the seed stage. Fully-staffed partnerships shouldn’t have an issue sourcing and processing startups for investment these days. Instead, the motivating force here is competition for founder attention. Scout programs, advisor networks, and similar initiatives are designed to create a centripetal force for a venture firm, to keep your friends closer to the center lest they walk down the street to work with a competing venture firm. Networks offer a way to stay engaged with founders, and they clearly love the attention. Spearhead, for instance, has already received around 750 applications as of yesterday. What’s even more interesting in their data though is that roughly half of the applications come from multi-time entrepreneurs. Even founders who have dozens of venture connections are interested in applying to become an angel investor with a set of firms whom they may have never met before. That’s the power of these working networks — Accomplice and AngelList are not just building relationships with a dozen or two dozen engaged founders, they are also empowering a new group of angel investors who may well be sourcing deals and sharing them with their VC friends in a couple of years. There are certainly benefits to the networked VC firm beyond winning the competition for attention. Diversifying the startup ecosystem and venture capital in particular is easier when the amounts of capital start at $200,000 rather than $20 million. Scout programs in particular can provide novice angel investors with an early track record that can make raising a VC fund easier, as well as offer peer support from other investors learning the trade. In addition, as founders have increasingly wrested power away from VCs, they increasingly demand that the people on the other side of the table share their operational experience. Some firms have , but others are taking advantage of networks to surround themselves with similar talent in the hopes of engaging with founders on a more even level. Finally, and perhaps the secret to many of these programs, is that they can ameliorate some of the questions around succession planning that have increasingly been aired by LPs in recent years. VC is a weird business in which every trend seems to constantly change, but the people running the venture firms seem to be as stagnant as the Soviet politburo. Networks allow for more dynamism and fresh faces to surround a venture firm without knocking anyone out of their perch. Now, networks can have their downsides. One concern that has been raised by several VCs I have spoken to about this subject over the past few weeks is what might be called the “multitask” concern. The thinking goes that founders and advisors are increasingly burdened with more and more of these sorts of side projects, and that they are potentially shirking their primary duties. That logic though ignores just how important networks are for executives as well. Raising capital used to mean heading to Sand Hill and talking with a dozen venture firms. Now, the typical seed-stage founder I talk to who has successfully raised a venture round might have talked to a hundred venture capitalists or more before securing their round. The more connections, and the deeper those connections, the better it is for the future of their companies. The other criticism, which is usually voiced by experienced venture capitalists, is that the rush to give a bunch of newcomers checkbooks is harming the quality of venture capital dealmaking. Grousing yes, but there is some truth to this as well. Building an investment track record too early may hinder a venture career rather than help it, and certainly some founders and advisors may lack the skill to make wise investments. Ultimately though, these networks are here to stay. Every VC learned the trade at some point, and the sort of win-win-win situation that networks offer is extraordinarily valuable in the otherwise cutthroat venture industry. Founders have limited attention, and the firms that engage them early and repeatedly through networks are going to reap dividends as those founders source and invest into the next generation of companies. |
CTRL+T podcast: Artificial intelligence may become a human rights issue | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | Welcome back to another glorious episode of CTRL+T. This week, Henry Pickavet and I explore that promise no waiting in line — except to get in — and . Later in the episode, I rage with Safiya Umoja Noble, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.” Full disclosure, I went to USC but Noble was not a professor there at the time. Additional disclosure, I wish I could have had her as a teacher because she’s smart as hell. Final disclosure, Henry applied to USC but was rejected. In her book, Noble discusses the ways in which algorithms are biased and perpetuate racism. She calls this data discrimination. Noble’s book came out just this month, but she’s already working on her next research-driven project. Noble is currently exploring artificial intelligence and its potential negative effects. Specifically, Noble is “ In this century, Noble is betting artificial intelligence will become a human rights issue. Check out the rest of the interview on CTRL+T. Be sure to , rate this sheezy five stars, and help us keep the lights on and the content rolling. |
The FCC looks back on a disastrous year through rose-tinted glasses | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | engulfing the FCC this last year you might think that the agency had accomplished little but appalling privacy advocates and dancing for its patrons, the telecoms. But as is so often the case in government, much was done to little fanfare, only to be overshadowed by more controversial items. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has such as they are, which serves to remind us of the many thankless items taking up the bulk of the agency’s time (and requiring a great deal of hard work by its many employees), but also of the malign agenda that has since the election. With such a dire-sounding introduction, I should be fair and note that the Chairman’s stated priority of closing the broadband divide has been pursued with some vigor. The first items listed in Pai’s report (indeed among the first passed) are the Mobility and Connect America funds, which will disburse hundreds of millions (eventually billions) with the specific goal of establishing high-speed wireless coverage and fixed broadband in underserved areas. $170 million is already earmarked for upstate New York. This earnest action is countered by several things. Most recently, we’ve learned that the Broadband Deployment Action Committee, ostensibly a wide-ranging mix of folks assembled for that eponymous purpose, is so dominated by telecoms and consequently ineffective that the mayor of San Jose left it in disgust. “It has become abundantly clear that despite the good intentions of several participants, the industry-heavy makeup of BDAC will simply relegate the body to being a vehicle for advancing the interests of the telecommunications industry over those of the public,” he wrote in his . Broadband deployment also narrowly avoided a major setback in the proposal that mobile data service should count as being served with broadband, for the purposes of finding out who has sufficient connectivity and who doesn’t. Of course, this proposal was incredibly illogical and would have led to, for instance, inner city neighborhoods served by LTE but expensive to deploy decent fixed broadband to, being classified as adequately served. Fortunately this ill-advised idea was rejected after months of public outcry. And of course there’s the push to trim the corners off the Lifeline program, which helps the poor and isolated to pay for mobile service and internet. No one wants fraud, which the program deals with as a consequence of its scale and multitude of subcontractors, but the changes to the program “will do little more than consign too many communities to the wrong side of the digital divide,” as Commissioner Rosenworcel put it. Commissioner Rosenworcel at her confirmation hearing. To continue down the Chairman’s list, an effort to expand telemedicine infrastructure noted by Pai is of course laudable, as connectivity is growing to be more critical in effective and accessible treatment. But while we can applaud the program itself, it’s hard to forget that telemedicine was treated disingenuously in the net neutrality debate; proponents of the repeal argued that net neutrality would somehow interfere with medical data transfer by putting it on the same level, internet architecture-wise, as cat videos. This easily disproven FUD was characteristic of the misleading nature of many other arguments. Pai boasts of his 20 trips relating to broadband deployment, and of course it’s good to have boots on the ground when it comes to local issues like this. But as the dissenting Commissioners pointed out at the vote in December, he made exactly zero of these trips to ask ordinary people what they thought of the proposal to eliminate net neutrality. A town hall or two might have been a sobering experience, and might have even improved people’s ideas of the new rule. Puzzlingly, Pai also happily recalls that he: “Ended a 2016 investigation into wireless carriers’ free-data offerings. These free-data plans have proven to be popular among consumers, particularly low-income Americans, and have enhanced competition in the wireless marketplace.” For one thing, who would congratulate the agency for abandoning an investigation ( ) that is its duty to perform? Especially when the plans in question have been deliberately misrepresented? The popularity of the plans is hardly relevant, considering they are opt-out, not opt-in. Many consumers likely don’t know they’re even using one. Not only that, but these zero-rating practices sound innocuous . The decision to gets a prominent mention, of course, with the usual talking points. . Under the heading “protecting consumers,” Pai mentions some effective measures taken against robocalls and misleading billing — something millions of people nationwide experience regularly. Curiously, the FCC-Congress joint effort to didn’t make the Chairman’s list. Perhaps he forgot about that one. Americans with disabilities were not forgotten, and efforts were made to improve regulations relating to hearing aids and promote the quality and availability of video relay services used primarily by the deaf, as well as video-described content for the blind. But little attention was given to the ongoing ugliness around prison calling and the rackets established around that lucrative business. FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 Notably, all these were all priorities of Commissioner Clyburn (above), who offered the following statement when I asked her for her own opinion on the first year of this administration’s FCC: During the first year of this Administration, I was pleased that the Chairman moved forward with several of my priorities including Mobility Fund Phase II, Connect2Health and increasing the amount of video described program available to those who are blind or visually impaired. At the same time, make no mistake, the FCC majority under the leadership of this Chairman, has given the green light to more than a dozen actions that are a direct attack on consumers and small businesses, including repealing net neutrality, dismantling broadband privacy protections and eliminating key media ownership rules. It is these anti-consumer actions that are most telling of the direction this agency is headed. The Chairman is proud to have established a rule whereby items to be voted on are made available to the public three weeks before that vote. This is definitely an improvement, though it can when edits are made during and after that time. But increased transparency on this level looks trivial next to the choice to obscure far more important things, like the nature of the cyberattack suffered during the Restoring Internet Freedom comment period, or the preponderance of fake comments filed. Fortunately, Congress and nearly two dozen attorney generals . And again, transparency is something best experienced in person, which when it came to the net neutrality rule, was something its proposers avoided. Pai makes much of the FCC’s response to the ongoing widespread outage of connectivity in Puerto Rico following an unusually intense hurricane season. And indeed, it did eventually visit the island and set aside $77 million — for carriers — to help restore service there and in the U.S. Virgin Islands. But few would say that the FCC has been successful or even met its duties. I’ve spoken with recovery personnel and there, and they had mostly given up hope of timely federal assistance. The President’s many gaffes and diplomatic missteps aside, the FCC’s response left much to be desired, with over half the population still disconnected several weeks after the disaster. With infrastructure fixes slow to come, some PR residents turned to mesh networks This can’t be put entirely on the FCC’s plate, of course, but it seems disingenuous to highlight a too little, too late response as an “accomplishment.” Meanwhile, the agency courted major cable and broadband providers with a series of decisions that are masqueraded here as “modernizing outdated regulations.” In a time of unprecedented consolidation of media properties and the many obvious and subtle risks that brings, the FCC has decided that it should relax rules governing ownership of multiple news properties and the extent of a media company’s national reach. As usual, the rule’s age is cited and Pai finds it has “outlived its usefulness.” Commissioner Rosenworcel disagrees rather vehemently: Instead of engaging in thoughtful reform—which we should do—this agency sets its most basic values on fire. They are gone. As a result of this decision, wherever you live the FCC is giving the green light for a single company to own the newspaper and multiple television and radio stations in your community. I am hard pressed to see any commitment to diversity, localism, or competition in that result. It’s gotten to the point where members of Congress are plainly asking whether the FCC is working to , at great cost to locally owned media and of course consumers. This article is by no means a complete list of what the FCC has done, both well and poorly, in good faith and bad, during the last year. I mean to illustrate that the year has been one where many small accomplishments were indeed recorded — but not only were more major efforts and trends anti-consumer, but the public’s faith in the agency has been eroded substantially. Before 2015, few Americans knew much about the FCC or considered it as having much of an effect on their daily lives (though it did even then). But net neutrality put it on the map in a big way — and a good way, except of course among allies of the telecommunications industry. In 2017 the FCC reduced that presence to a blight, with millions of Americans feeling ignored or actively worked against, and an agency once known for quietly fulfilling its purpose transformed into a stalking-horse for partisan and corporate interests. |
Gillmor Gang: Body Language | Steve Gillmor | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 26, 2018. G3: White Roses — Halley Suitt Tucker, Francine Hardaway, Maria Ogneva, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 26, 2018. @stevegillmor, @dsearls, @ekolsky, @kteare, @DenisPombriant Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=112279793 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302] |
Tech startups want to go inside your mouth | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 27 | be costly and hard to access, especially if you live in a rural community or a third-world country. and change how we access dental care. Another startup is , which virtually connects patients with local orthodontists and then enables those orthodontists to prescribe direct-to-consumer aligners. Similar to Uniform Teeth, Orthly requires an initial in-person visit. Unlike Uniform Teeth, though, Orthly does not have its own orthodontists. Instead, Orthly connects patients with orthodontists in your area. “As the pioneer and leader in clear aligner technology – and a major developer of digital innovation – Align needed to participate in and help shape the evolving Doctor Directed model which is extending the market to more people,” an Align Technology spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email. “This new model also creates new opportunities to connect Invisalign providers with potential patients who would not otherwise have seek in-office treatment. There are millions of consumers who could benefit from minor tooth straightening, and many are looking for convenience and affordability of treatment that they don’t associate with a doctor’s office.” Align also noted that, in the event SmileDirectClub cannot take a patient, the startup refers the patients to an Invisalign provider for in-office treatment. |
GM and Cruise reveal their fourth-generation, steering wheel-free Cruise AV | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | GM and Cruise are making progress on their plan to deploy autonomous vehicles on roads for the public: Today, it’s showing off its fourth-generation Cruise Autonomous Vehicle (AV), which comes just a few short months after it first revealed its third-generation vehicle. The fourth generation car is production-ready, according to GM’s Dan Ammann, who discussed the new vehicle on a press call announcing the news today. This version is really remarkable, though, because it lacks brake and gas pedals, and any kind of manual steering wheel. Cruise isn’t just showing this of as a concept of what’s to come – the company is submitting a petition to the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration to be able to actually deploy it in 2019, the year when GM and Cruise revealed they wanted to start operating their commercial service late last year. GM is asking for exceptions to rules around cars on roads that are specific to having humans at the wheel, and detailing their workarounds and safety measures. The exception they’re asking for would allow them to operate up to 2,600 vehicles in 2019, if granted. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvP82IsGqNc&w=680&h=383] Based on the Bolt EV platform, the latest Cruise AV is an all-electric vehicle, and the new Cruise car can close its own doors, too, if the passenger doesn’t when leaving the autonomous vehicle during a ride. GM explained that it knew it needed the ability to open and close its own doors automatically in order to avoid an interruption of service should a passenger fail to close their own door while the vehicle’s out going about its service day. GM and Cruise also released a safety report that provides a lot of detail about what measures they’ve put in place to keep the vehicle safe on streets. These include a range of redundant systems, rear seat airbags and much, much more. GM wouldn’t elaborate any further on its deployment plans beyond reconfirming that it’s aiming for sometime in 2019. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt also said we likely won’t see this new Cruise AV on streets even in a test capacity before next year. Asked about other potential non-Bolt-based designs, Ammann declined to comment specifically on future models, but did hint at potential variation. “You can safely assume that the fourth generation won’t be the last generation,” Ammann said, suggesting that other future iterations might use different base platforms or designs to accommodate other types of passenger and cargo loadouts. |
Snapchat’s big redesign bashed in 83% of user reviews | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | Confusingly jamming Stories in between private messages has sparked backlash amongst the first users of . In the few countries including the U.K., Australia, and Canada where the redesign is widely available, 83 percent of App Store reviews (1,941) for the update are negative with one or two stars, according to data provided to TechCrunch by mobile analytics firm . Just 17 percent, or 391 of the reviews, give it three to five stars. The most referenced keywords in the negative reviews include “new update”, “Stories”, and “please fix”. Meanwhile, Snapchat’s Support Twitter account has been and are asking to uninstall it, noting “It’s not possible to revert to a previous version of Snapchat”, and trying to explain where Stories are to confused users. It’s not possible to revert to a previous version of Snapchat, but we are happy to help with any questions you may have about the new layout. — Snapchat Support (@snapchatsupport) Hopes were that the redesign could boost Snapchat’s soggy revenue, which fell short of Wall Street earnings expectations in Q3 and led to a loss of $443 million. The redesign mixes Stories, where Snapchat shows ads but which have seen stagnation in sharing rates amidst competition from Instagram Stories, into the more popular messaging inbox, where Snapchat’s ephemeral messaging is more differentiated and entrenched. Screenshots of Snapchats redesign A recent leak of Snapchat’s user stats shows that from late-April to mid-September, . That’s compared to the roughly 7 percent growth in the app’s total user base, which was already seen as disappointing for what’s supposed to be the hot teen social app. Daily Snaps sent grew much faster with users sending an average of 34 Snaps per day, which is much more promising. But it’s hard to monetize messages with ads without feeling interruptive, so Snap’s strategy appears to be mixing ad-laden Stories into the inbox. And users are rebelling. Story sharing has stopped growing… …But users keep sending more messages so Snap started mixing them all together Snapchat smartly began algorithmically sorting Stories to show ones from your favorite people and closest friends first, instead of ranking them purely reverse chronologically. , as a similar move proved to significantly boost engagement for Twitter and Instagram by making it easier to quickly get value out of opening the app. But what seems to annoying users is that Stories from friends who follow you back are now scattered through the inbox with message threads in between, rather than all laid out together. Snapchat also pulled out Stories from social media stars, brands, and other people who don’t follow you back and pushed them into the other side of the app alongside professional Discover content. For users who enjoy a more voyeuristic experience, or aren’t popular at their school, that could make it difficult to know who has posted a Story in the last 24 hours. Sorry to hear you feel this way. If you have any questions about the new design let us know! — Snapchat Support (@snapchatsupport) We are sorry you feel that way Tahlia! We are here to help with questions if you have any. — Snapchat Support (@snapchatsupport) Hi! It’s not possible to revert to a previous version of Snapchat, but let us know if you need help with something specific in the new layout. — Snapchat Support (@snapchatsupport) Snapchat’s redesign also prevents users from auto-advancing to lay back and watch lots of people’s Stories in a row. Instead it forces users to tap a preview of the next person’s Story before it’s shown. While that might ensure you don’t watch anyone’s Story you don’t care about and end up in their view list, it also makes the app much less relaxing to watch for long periods like you can with Instagram’s auto-advancing Stories. Perhaps Snapchat wanted to ensure you were still looking so it can sell advertisers on the concept of undivided attention. But it’s further pissing off users. Snaps, Chats, and Stories from friends who’ve added you back are on the Friends screen. To get there, swipe right from the Camera screen. A circular preview shows up next to Stories with new Snaps to view 👀 Tap one, and once you're finish it will auto-advance to the next 😊 — Snapchat Support (@snapchatsupport) We are sorry you feel this way! Can we help answer any questions about the new layout? — Snapchat Support (@snapchatsupport) Sorry to hear you feel this way. If you have any question regarding the new design we're happy to help! — Snapchat Support (@snapchatsupport) Snapchat’s response regarding the negative reviews is that “Updates as big as this one can take a little getting use to, but we hope the community will enjoy it once they settle in.” Change can certainly elicit emotional responses, as we saw with users protesting the launch of Facebook’s News Feed in 2006…before it became one of the most popular and well-used products in the world. But the reaction to Snapchat’s redesign seems more warranted because it doesn’t add new functionality they just need time to grow accustomed to. It jumbles existing functionality in a way that seems driven more by Snapchat’s intent to increase Story usage by piggybacking it on messaging as a reaction to increased competition from Facebook. An algorithmic Stories list? Great. Grouping all professional content creators together? Okay. Muddying its core use case with an upsell to money-making Stories? A risky bet when dealing with fickle teenagers. |
null | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 18 | null |
Source: Verizon to sharpen content strategy with OTT video service, IoT platform | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | At CES, the big consumer electronics show underway this week in Las Vegas (when the lights are ), TechCrunch has learned that Verizon is working away on a couple of new services that will see the carrier once again trying to grow its business beyond basic broadband and mobile connectivity, as it gears up to compete with the likes of Amazon and other tech companies, as well as other OTT players like Hulu and Netflix, and stave off the threat of becoming a “dumb pipe.” A source inside the company (which owns TechCrunch by way of Oath, the combined business of AOL and Yahoo, but maintains a hands-off policy editorially) confirmed to us that the carrier is planning an ‘over the top’ content offering. It’s also working on a connected home product, a platform for residential customers to help managed things like smart lights, heating and alarm systems. It is not clear when these products might be launched, nor what kind of pricing they might have. Verizon declined to comment for this article. There have been earlier of Verizon working on a new video service: those reports say it has been delayed in part because of executive changes at the company, and in part because of ongoing negotiations around the content. From what we understand, the service will see Verizon focus on packaging video content in “channels” that could take the form of standalone apps, which would be distributed beyond the company’s FiOS broadband service. The channels would be designed around themes like news, sports and entertainment and will bring together content already owned by Oath (which includes TechCruch, but also Engadget, Huffington Post, and many other online properties), with premium content from third party sources. It’s not clear if the service would be a paid offering or ad-supported. This new video service is distinct from , a free, ad-supported OTT video effort that Verizon has been running since 2015 aimed at millennial audiences that has had mixed success so far. Each channel of the new service would feature “marquee” content, our source said, which would help drive subscribers and viewers and help differentiate the content from a sea of video competitors. As one example, the sports channel might leverage some of the NFL content that Verizon recently . At the CES event, Oath’s CEO Tim Armstrong talked a little about the high cost of content — something that could be offset were the material leveraged in more strategic ways. “It was a lot of money for the NFL…it’s real money,” he admitted in an interview on stage at CES. “That being said, look at the size of the everyday transactions that are happening in the content space. Look at the size of the valuations of the digital companies overall. I would argue a five-year deal for the NFL is money well spent to drive Verizon’s sports strategies.” In all, Verizon has invested between $4 billion and $5 billion in content deals, our source estimated, and as those are getting renegotiated, it’s working in a digital component in order to include it in this new OTT service. In many cases, we understand, those content deals are being renegotiated with the digital component getting added in at little or no extra cost. The OTT product would be an interesting plot twist for Verizon, which stands to be a of Net Neutrality getting killed. Many have decried how large carriers could potentially use the regulatory changes to push preferred content (and their own) ahead of that of would-be competitors. But going ahead with an OTT offering underscores how a lot of consumers are, in fact, opting to use a range of channels when looking for online entertainment these days. Verizon may be hoping to capitalise in both cases: on-net, it can offer zero-rated content to its existing subscribers; off-net, it can market to the many who are not already subscribing to one of its carrier services, but might still be among the 1 billion who are connected to other services owned by the company, such as Yahoo Mail, or loyal readers of one of its media properties. “There’s a commoditization potential with a lot of brands based on just being pure platform [play],” said Armstrong in his interview. “I think from a consumer standpoint and from a business standpoint, our strategy is differentiated for two main reasons: it’s all built around mobile, and we also have enough traffic [across our properties] — a billion users — to have platform scale.” OTT video that can be consumed on mobile devices, or on broadband networks — Verizon’s own or those of others — represents a big opportunity for Verizon, in that it currently does not have a signficant holding in this area as of yet. Verizon is the largest wireless operator in the US, with around 149 million subscribers. It has a significantly smaller number of users paying it for FiOS video services — just 4.65 million according to its most recent quarterly earnings, with numbers currently on the decline. Video is not the only product where Verizon hopes it can expand its services business. TechCrunch also learned that Verizon is also working on a connected home strategy. This would see the carrier offering its subscribers the option of taking an additional service to help manage and monitor connected devices — be they phones or “smart” home gadgets and electrics, tapping into the fact that people are gradually migrating to more of these devices in the home and will want the option of controlling them from a single hub. This is also an area where other broadband providers are hoping to make a mark: this week, both and announced connected home platforms for its users, giving them a free service to connect and manage a range of devices like smart thermostats and security systems. The company later this year will start to roll out a residential 5G broadband service — essentially an alternative to fixed broadband — and launching a residential IoT business, adding connected devices within your home, would be a logical extension of that. To date Verizon has made a number of acquisitions in the area of IoT, and while much of this appeared aimed at the company’s enterprise business, it seems that there could be a residential application here, too. |
Nuheara’s voice amplifying earbuds offer customizable hearing profiles | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | null |
This ring lets you bend musical notes on a keyboard with a wave of your hand | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | We saw a small mountain of cool stuff at , but this one is still on my mind a few days later. It’s a ring you wear while playing a MIDI keyboard. By wavering your hand or sliding your fingers up the keys, you can change the vibrato or intensity of your notes. It’s an effect perhaps best demonstrated on video: https://youtu.be/Yyx01fjD9co Note the way his hand gestures impact the sound. It reminds me a bit of ROLI’s Seaboard, but with a standard MIDI keyboard. Built by a small team out of France called , the ring has nine integrated sensors that pick up your gestures and send them back to a hub plugged into your keyboard. The prototype they had on display was wired, but the Enhancia team says it should be fully wireless by the time it ships. The Enhancia team says they expect to show up on Kickstarter by March… alas, they haven’t figured out the pricing just yet. |
Blocks hopes to court enterprise customers with its modular smartwatch | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | null |
Sensel is shopping around its Morph trackpad tech for use in other devices | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | null |
Mercedes-Benz’s new MBUX in-car assistant and smart UI rocks | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | It’s rare that I pay much attention to automaker infotainment and multimedia system updates at CES – usually there’s too much going on with autonomy, electrification and mobility services to give it much thought. This year, however, Mercedes-Benz had one of the most interesting announcements at the show with its new MBUX smart multimedia system and in-car voice activated assistant. MBUX is not the underpowered, underwhelming voice input system carmakers have been pushing on consumers for around a decade now. Instead, it’s a learning, smart and connected platform built upon Nvidia’s powerful GPU technology. For maybe the first time, using an in-car infotainment system felt to me like an actual pleasure, rather than doing something that ranges from ‘bad’ to ‘adequate’ on the user experience scale. Part of that is just the fact that the computers powering the system are capable enough to drive high framerate visuals, on screens with a high resolution that doesn’t leave things pixelated. For too long, infotainment systems in cars have relied on underpowered, cheap local chips to power their output, leaving software developers working at automakers with the unenviable challenge of shoehorning their work onto silicon that really shouldn’t be running an alarm clock, let alone vital apps and information displays you use while driving. [gallery ids="1586262,1586263,1586264,1586265,1586266,1586267,1586268,1586269,1586270,1586271,1586272,1586273,1586274,1586275,1586276,1586277,1586278,1586279,1586281"] Scrolling and animations on the MBUX system’s two dash mounted displays (one in the center, and another behind the steering wheel) are silky smooth, and feel as responsive as an iPhone to touch input, which is a major achievement relative to typical first-party car touchscreen performance. MBUX also focuses on simplicity when it comes to interaction: Even though it offers a lot of options and features, many of the things you want to do can be accessed directly from the top level main screen, including navigating to your home, playing a favorite music station, checking the weather and more. Even when you do want to drill down to be more specific, there are shortcuts built in, thanks to the way MBUX learns your preferences and presents them through a “Suggestions” shortcut that’s just a tap away form the main screen. These will offer suggested destinations, music, cabin comfort settings and more based on what it learns about your habits, your schedule, and your preferences. They also follow the driver around, and are attached to their profile – which can even follow you from vehicle to vehicle if you’re switching between Mercedes cars equipped with MBUX. Of course, there’s also the voice powered element, which you can trigger by saying “Hey Mercedes” at any time, or by pressing a button on the steering wheel. This allows you to issue voice commands in natural language, like saying “I’m cold” in order to have it increase the heat by two degrees, or asking it if you can wear flip flops next week to retrieve a local weather forecast. In practice, the voice commands worked well, though Las Vegas cellular service wasn’t always cooperating. Mercedes-Benz built its speech assistant with occasional connectivity in mind, however, so there’s a lot you can do even when you’re not connected to the cloud, including modifying cabin lighting and asking it to play specific songs from an attached USB drive, for instance. Its capabilities are also designed to grow over time; the smart assistant is built using AI technology powered by Nvidia, and can improve both locally, and via software and feature updates pushed from the cloud. Mercedes-Benz also plans to issue significant feature additions to the system over the lifetime of the vehicle, and using Nvidia GPUs to power it mean they’ve actually got a lot of additional computing power to spare to support those updates. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explained in an interview that his company has been working with Daimler directly for two years to bring this to fruition, with a dedicated engineering team set up for the purpose. Daimler VP of Digital Vehicle & Mobility Sajjad Khan also added that working with Nvidia was key to helping the company achieve something that was performant now, but also had plenty of room to grow. In the end, MBUX is that rarest of beasts: A first-party infotainment system that’s exciting, powerful and extremely well-crafted from a technology perspective. If you’d have told me a week ago that one of my favorite things from CES would be an automaker’s infotainment software, I’d have laughed, but here we are. MBUX will arrive first on the all-new A-Class when it arrives later this year, but it will also roll out to other new Mercedes vehicles after that. |
Facebook feed change sacrifices time spent and news outlets for ‘well-being’ | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | a huge change to its News Feed algorithm to prioritize friends and posts that spark comments between them at the expense of public content, news outlets and, importantly, the total time spent and ads you see on the social network. CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook today, “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri tells TechCrunch, “I expect that the amount of distribution for publishers will go down because a lot of publisher content is just passively consumed and not talked about. Overall time on Facebook will decrease, but we think this is the right thing to do.” The winners in this change will be users and their sense of community, as they should find Facebook more rewarding and less of a black hole of wasted time viewing mindless video clips and guilty-pleasure articles. And long-term, it should preserve Facebook’s business and ensure it still has a platform to provide referral traffic for news publishers and marketers, albeit less than before. The biggest losers will be publishers who’ve shifted resources to invest in eye-catching pre-recorded social videos, because, Mosseri says, “video is such a passive experience.” He admits that he expects publishers to react with “a certain amount of scrutiny and anxiety,” but didn’t have many concrete answers about how publishers should scramble to react beyond “experimenting … and seeing … what content gets more comments, more likes, more reshares.” This video from Facebook examines the upcoming changes, rolling out over “the next few months”:
As TechCrunch detailed in our deep dive on well-being last month called research increasingly shows that isolated feed scrolling can be harmful to people’s health, while private chatting with friends and back-and-forth discussion of content can boost positive sentiments. On Facebook’s Q3 earnings call, Zuckerberg said that “Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits,” and today wrote that “We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being.” Now Facebook is putting its money, and its News Feed, where its mouth is. Zuckerberg writes, “Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.” In a blog post detailing the algorithm change, Mosseri writes Facebook will prioritize “p In our conversation, he cited Oprah’s recent Golden Globes speech as content that would fare better in the revamped feed. Live videos generating discussion, star social media creators, celebrities, Groups posts, local business events and trusted news sources are other types of content that should get a boost. On the other hand, “Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease.” He tells me that Facebook needs to “react to the way the world has changed around us, especially the explosion in video.” Publishers will be forced to change strategies, and potentially lay off video staffers and those who produce quick-hit, low-quality content. Do we need more friends or news? The biggest point of contention about this change is likely that some media pundits and users will argue that seeing more news, even if it generates fewer comments than friends’ photos or celebrity ephemera, is what will actually bring the world closer together. Filter bubbles could potentially be strengthened by showing more posts to friends, further polarizing a politically divided world. Zuckerberg’s counter-argument also aligns with Facebook doubling down on what only its service, and not Twitter or news websites, can offer. “Video and other public content have exploded on Facebook in the past couple of years,” Zuckerberg writes. “Since there’s more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what’s in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do — help us connect with each other.” Facebook’s hope is surely that the most important news still makes it into the feed because your friends actively discuss it, though that may be giving people too much credit. Plenty of users would rather gab about their social lives than net neutrality or the tax plan. Over time, Facebook’s algorithm change may be necessary to promote social cohesion and make the internet less exploitative and more meaningful. The specifics of how it moves in this direction may injure publishers who’ve built up businesses overly reliant on Facebook. But it’s rare to see a public company announce it will immediately weaken its own business to give its customers a healthier lifestyle. You can read Zuckerberg’s post in its entirety below:
|
Next INpact launches a browser extension to see who is tracking you online | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | French tech media company just an interesting project today. is a simple browser extension that lets you see how your favorite website is tracking you and selling your privacy. The upcoming and regulations in Europe have been a wake-up call in many ways. Arguably, bitcoin-mining scripts and Spectre JavaScript examples also have made people realize that you’re not in control of what your browser is loading. Browsing the web feels like writing a blank check every time you load a page. Maybe you just want to read an article. And yet, many big websites embed dozens of third-party JavaScript calls (and unfortunately TechCrunch is one of them). Ad servers as well as big tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, can track your browsing habits and serve code that hasn’t been reviewed in any way. Those companies can then build comprehensive profiles about you and leverage cookies to read and store personal data. That’s why many people install ad-blocking extensions or disable JavaScript altogether. Some extensions, such as or , show you a list of all the scripts from third-party domains that got blocked. But Kimetrak isn’t an ad blocker. The extension wants to educate people about trackers on the web. If you use an ad blocker, you’re obviously not going to see much information. But if you disable your ad blocker and browse some of your favorite websites, you’re going to be astonished with Kimetrak’s information. And if you’re running a popular website, you can also use Kimetrak to easily review all your third-party JavaScript embeds. For now, Kimetrak’s data stays on your computer and isn’t shared in any way with Next INpact. It’s an so you can check for yourself. Eventually, Next INpact wants to build a general-purpose database of trackers and popular websites. Kimetrak is available on the . |
CES should move to an innovative city | John Biggs | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | , the yearly bacchanal of tech and innovation, has outgrown its shell. Las Vegas has been home to the event since the late 1970s and, for better or worse, the city has survived and served the influx of technologists who flock to the event each year to see the latest and greatest. But two things are happening simultaneously that make Las Vegas the last place to find innovation. First, Vegas infrastructure, while seemingly resilient to massive influxes of conference-goers, is having trouble keeping up with CES. Massive crowds in the many halls were greeted by — an ironic scene for a tech event. Million-dollar booths ended up in the dark and a Google booth flooded as rain came into event halls ill-prepared for actual weather. The shuttle system simply can’t keep up with the crush of people and the anemic monorail — an affront to public transit — is useless during the daytime rush. Add in multiple massive venues and a taxi system that can’t handle the crush of countless non-locals trying to get from point A to point Z and you’ve got a mess. Second, the reason for big shows like CES is changing. Why does everyone need to be in one place when most business is done electronically, even algorithmically. While it’s nice to spend a week in a casino, perhaps it’s time for a smaller, more focused show or no show it all? Perhaps, in the end, it’s time to move CES to a modern city? While I have no specific answer as to where to send conference-goers — Denver? San Francisco? LA? Dubai? Berlin? — perhaps the real answer is for Las Vegas to fix its very real and very difficult transport, electrical and data problems so innovation can thrive in this strange desert oasis. As it stands, the city that wants to play host to thousands of technologists isn’t very technological, and its amenities — aimed more at bachelorette parties than LAN parties — are insufficient and even dangerously lacking. Perhaps the next big event will not be physical. After all, the reason for having a yearly tech festival has changed. CES used to be forward-looking: products that launched there in January appeared on shelves months later. The current model is flipped: the coolest stuff launches online a year before and is shown in the flesh at CES. Crowdfunded projects that finished in April appear at CES in January as a sort of coming-out party. But do people really care anymore? Crowdfunders care about shipping product, not about spending thousands on a booth in a hostile city. A lot has to change to make CES amazing again. Perhaps it’s too late. But Las Vegas does the world no favors and actively harms its image when it can’t keep up with the future. |
Google is shutting down Chrome’s parental control features, replacement to launch later this year | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | Google is preparing to launch a new set of parental control features for users of its Chrome browser. The announcement was made in an email sent this week to users of its current system for parental controls and other restrictions called “Chrome Supervised Users,” which is soon shutting down. Chrome Supervised Users was first into beta back in 2013. The feature allowed a parent to lock down the Chrome browser on a device, including by blocking access to certain websites, enabling SafeSearch for filtering Google Search results and keeping a history of websites visited. This feature set will now be deprecated, said Google’s email shared with the program’s users. “Since we launched Chrome Supervised Users in beta preview over four years ago, Chrome and the way we use computing devices have evolved significantly,” the email explained. “We’ve learned a lot in these four years, and heard feedback about how we can improve the experience for you and your children. Based on this feedback, we are working on a new set of Chrome OS supervision features specifically for the needs of families to launch later this year,” it said. Starting on Friday, January 12, 2018, users will no longer be able to create or re-import supervised users. However, users will still be able to use their existing Chrome Supervised Users on Chromebooks, Windows, Mac and Linux. Then, on January 15, 2018, remote supervision available at will no longer be available. That means parents will no longer be able to change browsing restrictions for existing supervised users (i.e. their kids). The email additionally points users to , which launched to the public in September. This service allows parents to create Google Accounts for their children, then manage their browsing history in Chrome for Android. However, this solution today only addresses mobile devices, while Chrome Supervised Users was meant for desktop users. It seems likely that the new parental control features coming to Chrome later in 2018 will be an extension of Family Link to the desktop, but the email didn’t specify this. |
Y Combinator is launching a biotech track | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | Y Combinator is pulling the curtains off of a new experiment, YC Bio. The idea is to fund early-stage life-sciences companies that are still in the lab phase, . YC Bio’s first area of focus will be on healthspan and age-related disease. “We think there’s an enormous opportunity to help people live healthier for longer, and that it could be one of the best ways to address our healthcare crisis,” Altman wrote. For those unfamiliar with the idea of healthspan, it’s the amount of time someone is healthy rather than the amount of time they’re alive and potentially in bad health. Similar to , companies in the YC Bio track will participate in YC’s traditional batch. But instead of taking 7 percent ownership in exchange for $120,000 in investment, YC will offer the biotech companies between $500,000 and $1 million for 10 to 20 percent ownership. Because these companies will all still be in the lab phase, YC will offer them free lab space in partnership with a to-be-determined entity. YC Bio also will offer companies “a number of other special deals” and access to experts in the field. YC backed its first biotech company in 2014, when Gingko Bioworks participated in the accelerator. At the time, : “upcoming hyper growth, costs coming down to series-A scale, and cycle time coming down to something reasonable for a startup.” |
Kuzzle is building the backend for the Internet of Things | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | Meet , an all-in-one backend solution for connected devices and beyond. The French startup is giving you a scalable solution so you don’t have to develop everything from scratch yourself. Think about it as but for different use cases. Before Kuzzle, the French company had been working on all sorts of web and digital projects since 2001. They realized that they kept developing the same backend infrastructure again and again. Last year, the company shifted focus to work on the Kuzzle development platform. Kuzzle works on Linux or Docker-compatible servers, so it’s compatible with all major cloud vendors, from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. While you can use Kuzzle for web services and mobile apps, Kuzzle can also be quite useful for the Internet of Things, and that’s what we talked about more specifically when I met the company at CES. For instance, Kuzzle lets you handle geofencing events, real-time notifications, data synchronization and more. has been using Kuzzle for connected bikes with a GPS chip. And Kuzzle plans to partner with organizations working on smart cities. Each client has a different use case. But you don’t have to replace your entire backend with Kuzzle. You can just use it to handle a specific brick in your infrastructure. Crédit Agricole has been using Kuzzle for the on-boarding process for its new product, and manages its users thanks to Kuzzle to complement its CMS. Kuzzle is open source, but also has with more features and premium support — subscriptions cost thousands of dollars per month. And it looks like there are quite a few people already following the project . |
How to build a business-focused ‘cloud-commerce’ marketplace for the less-sexy economy | Ben Johnston | 2,018 | 1 | 11 |
For consumers, huge new internet marketplaces have upended industries ranging from taxis (Uber) to hotels (Airbnb) and even some types of consumer loans (LendingClub). Now, new types of online marketplaces — we call them “cloud-commerce” companies — are popping up to serve businesses. We think they have the potential to radically remake sectors like construction, real estate, procurement and finance, and generate plenty of behind-the-scenes value in the process. These B2B companies are definitely not as sexy as marketplaces for vacation condos or online dates. But like their consumer counterparts, cloud-commerce companies exist mainly to connect buyers and sellers online. One big difference, though: They also leverage cloud-based software for business users. A good example is Zenefits, which offers a marketplace of benefits plans for HR managers but also gives them tools to help with tasks like payroll and employee onboarding. It’s important for these companies to offer software tools because transactions between businesses are often more complicated than ordering a cab or renting a house. Cloud-commerce businesses throw off traditional marketplace “network effects,” meaning they become more valuable the more people use them. But they are also extremely “sticky,” meaning customers wind up using them for so many daily tasks, and to keep track of so many supplier or vendor relationships, that switching to a competitor is often extremely difficult. So how do you actually get one of these businesses off the ground? The bottom line is that it’s complicated, given the complexities of these markets. But as cloud commerce becomes an even-hotter sector for entrepreneurs and investors, we humbly offer a few tips in terms of market dynamics that entrepreneurs should look out for as they’re figuring out their business models. Once you’ve figured out which market you’re addressing — whether it’s health plans or office supplies or real estate — you need to figure out which customers are most likely to use your software. Specifically, do you target the buyer or the seller? In the Zenefits example, are you targeting the company that buys health plans, or the insurance companies that sell them? Zenefits focuses on the buyer — that overworked and overburdened HR exec who has to sort through hundreds of complex health plans to find the right ones for his or her company’s employees. This is a demand-constrained market, as there are plenty of health plans out there, but it’s tough to sort through them all and pick the right one. In addition, these HR executives need technology to manage hiring, onboarding and payroll. Solving their workflow challenges (largely for free) was a brilliant strategy by Zenefits. It allowed the company to aggregate buyers in a cheap way, and then make money by offering a marketplace that made finding benefits plans simple. Sometimes, though, markets have a shortage of suppliers. This is the case in the restaurant market, where there are many more eateries than vendors to supply food to them. An average restaurant might work with 10 vendors to supply their food, whereas each vendor works 200 restaurants. This is therefore a supply-constrained market — and our advice here would be to focus on the harried food vendors, which must manage hundreds of relationships, invoices and payments and are likely to be highly receptive to new technology that could help ease their pain. In each of these cases, focusing on the side of the market that is the most constrained and experiences the most friction/difficulty in the transaction process is, in our view, the best way to jumpstart a new marketplace. Each cloud-commerce business marketplace will have a different set of power dynamics. Certain stakeholders always hold more market power and influence than others. So when you’re getting a new company off the ground, solving challenges for the most powerful participant in the marketplace is usually a good strategy. E-procurement giant Ariba, for example, started by offering software to procurement professionals who would push their requests-for-proposals out to vendors, who would then join the network. Starting with the all-powerful buyers meant that vendors — people who sold office supplies, chairs, snacks, etc. — were forced to join the Ariba platform if they wanted to bid on business. In a way, the buyers forced the vendors onto the network because they held all the power. Another key to getting a cloud-commerce business off the ground successfully is finding the party in your market that is the most connected, and will help onboard the most people onto your platform. This helps the marketplace grow virally and builds networks effects quickly. In the construction market, for instance, the company BuildingConnected is attempting to build a LinkedIn-type platform for general contractors (GCs) and subcontractors (subs). The company started by offering bid-management software to GCs to help them evaluate bids from subs. This led to exponential growth in BuildingConnected’s network, as a typical subcontractor might work with five to 10 GCs, but a GC usually works with dozens, if not hundreds of subs. By onboarding GCs with free bid-management tools, the BuildingConnected network has grown exponentially. Fellow venture capitalist Chris Dixon, another fan of online marketplaces, coined the term, “ ” to describe the power of consumer marketplaces. But on the B2B web, we believe the best cloud-commerce companies will focus on both software tools powerful networks from the very beginning. Robust software platforms will create stickiness, drive ROI and lead buyers to the best suppliers — creating a virtuous cycle of revenue creation for cloud-commerce companies that approach their businesses smartly. |
XPRIZE finalist Cloud DX’s Vitaliti is a serious health wearable | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | null |
Here’s what it’s like to ride in Byton’s new Concept SUV | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | car wowed at CES, and for good reason. It’s not the only display in the vehicle, either — there’s a tablet set in the steering wheel itself, which remains in a fixed orientation even as the wheel turns around it. There are two displays in the front-seat headrests, too, giving passengers access to a range of entertainment, cabin control and infotainment options. And there are even slots in the armrests for your smartphone, which then become an extension of the car’s software system using a Byton app. I got to ride along in the Byton Concept SUV and experience the innovative digital information system firsthand, and it’s unlike anything put forward by an automaker before. There are familiar elements, including maps and navigation, as well as streaming music services, but there also are a host of other, less expected apps and features — like health services, including fitness tracking for the car’s driver, a movie store, extensive office and calendar integration and much more. All of this is accessible through a central hub that takes the shape of an oddly angled geometric shape, which you can twist and turn using hand gestures thanks to the dash-mounted camera motion input system. You also can use gestures to dive deeper through menus, control playback and even arrange elements on the 49-inch screen, allowing you or a passenger to set up your driving desktop however you prefer. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxhc9l-evPw] If it all sounds a little distracting, that’s because it is — there’s a lot going on across that display, and it definitely seems to have the potential to draw the driver’s attention away from what they’re supposed to be doing. But Byton says it’s all about offering up smart features that work as expected so as to keep focus on the road, and many of these infotainment offerings are meant for passenger use, not the driver’s — and for a future time in which autonomous driving features mean even when behind the wheel you could indulge in a bit of movie watching or catching up on your health and wellness stats. The Byton’s front seats also swivel toward the center of the car, giving you a better angle for chatting to passengers in the comfy, spacious rear cabin. Again, this is something intended to help future-proof the car’s design for when autonomy is available, rather than something Byton expects people to be able to take advantage of when they can first buy the car. The rear displays feature a simplified version of the front screen’s interface, and are plenty big enough to give passengers a great viewing experience for watching TV shows and movies. The integrated armrest smartphone docks are intelligently designed and a clever way to incorporate the powerful devices people have with them all the time with Byton’s built-in technology. [gallery ids="1586086,1586087,1586088,1586089,1586090,1586091,1586092,1586093,1586094,1586095,1586096,1586097,1586098,1586099,1586100,1586101,1586102,1586103,1586104,1586105,1586106,1586107,1586108,1586109,1586110,1586111,1586112,1586113,1586114,1586115,1586116,1586117,1586118,1586119,1586120,1586121,1586122"] As mentioned, there’s plenty of room in the back seat, and the luxurious seating really wraps you up. Everything from cabin lighting, to accents, to the massive overhead panoramic glass window feels top-notch and luxurious, even though this particular demo car was built from scratch in basically eight months. The drive experience itself is also impressive — the demo driver behind the wheel wasn’t afraid to push the accelerator even though there wasn’t much length to the track at its longest point. Instant acceleration made possible by the electric motor makes it feel terrific to take off from a full stop, and it’s got a lot of power throughout its speed range, with excellent handling based on the short course we were able to experience it on. This car still has a long way to go before it’s actually being sold — even though Byton is aiming to ship it by 2019, they currently only have $240 million in funding and it’ll take a lot more than that to produce an EV at scale, especially as Byton hopes to build 100,000 electric cars per year. Byton’s uniqueness as a new entrant isn’t limited to its ambitious rollout plan, or to its unique cockpit design. It’s also a blend of German executive leadership, Silicon Valley software design and engineering and Chinese manufacturing, which could be a very powerful combination — or an odd brew that makes things more challenging than they have to be. For now, based on my first impressions, this seems like a pretty strong start for Byton, and one that took a lot of people by surprise. Now, it’ll have to press that early strong showing and deliver on its big plans. |
Google claims its Spectre and Meltdown mitigation results in no performance degradation | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | It’s been a long week since we first learned about the now infamous . One of the issues with mitigating the danger these vulnerabilities pose is that they could result in . In , Google claimed their solutions resulted in no performance degradation across the different mitigation techniques they have developed. The company’s last year as it outlined . As Google explained it, there are three variants here. . The spooky nicknames just add to the drama of this entire event. Every chip has a protected area which prevents one application from seeing what another is doing. This is by design to protect critical security information like usernames, passwords and encryption keys. These vulnerabilities have the potential to leave this information exposed if exploited correctly. As Google so aptly pointed out, these vulnerabilities have been in place inside modern chips for 20 years. It’s worth noting that there hasn’t been a documented case of anyone exploiting these issues, but security experts point out, it would be difficult to track if it had happened. With its head start on this issue — , by the way — the company was able to come up with solutions for Variants 1 and 3 as far back as September. With a large testbed of data, it reports neither customers nor internal users are experiencing any kind of perceptible performance degradation using Google’s platform or software services. Of course, if your OS, browser or some other piece of the stack is causing slow-downs, it may not be attributable to Google or any cloud vendor, but it could slow you down just the same. Still, in their words, “No GCP customer or internal team has reported any performance degradation.” You don’t get much clearer than that. Variant 2 proved to be much more challenging for the Google engineering team. For a time, the team believed the only way to protect against this exploit was to shut down speculative execution, the chip technique that was responsible for the problem. Finally, an engineer named Paul Turner from the Technical Infrastructure Group came up with a solution that came to be known as “ .” As Google describes this, “With Retpoline, we could protect our infrastructure at compile-time, with no source-code modifications. Furthermore, testing this feature, particularly when combined with optimizations such as software branch prediction hints, demonstrated that this protection came with almost no performance loss.” To its credit, the company has shared all of its research and solutions publicly, even going so far as . Earlier today, after implementing its own mitigation solutions at the chip level. The tests were run on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and the performance issues depended on which chip and which type of job you were running. Intel’s stock has taken a big hit since the announcement, in spite of the fact these issues affect almost all modern chips. Google claims that they have had no performance complaints since implementing these solutions, a big win for customers. The fact they shared the solution publicly could be a big win for the industry at large. |
This AR headset won’t win any style points, but it fills the world with fish | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | Hong Kong-based came to CES with an augmented reality headset they want to get on to everyone’s faces. The prototype is a little rough around the edges, but it fills more of the world with digital images than any AR device I’ve ever seen. The prototype bests the field-of-view on just about every AR headset. While Microsoft’s HoloLens is stuck with a field-of-view estimated to be less than 40 degrees, RealMax is building something that fills more than 100 degrees of your vision. The prototype’s optics aren’t utilizing the most advanced technologies and definitely could be a crisper resolution, but when it comes to supplying a wide field-of-view on a system that is all-in-one powered, the RealMax is definitely capable. I demoed the headset for several minutes and was plunged into an underwater environment with mermaids and an almost overwhelming amount of fish swimming all around me. For a home device, having something sleek isn’t the biggest priority. Despite having advanced optics tech, Magic Leap is still pretty bulky and unlikely to see much use outdoors. The field-of-view really does add a lot to the experience; it’s nearly the scope of what you see when you’re inside an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. The headset integrates positional tracking, and this prototype featured a Leap Motion sensor for bringing a user’s hand interactions into the experience. The company notably has an uphill battle as it looks to also push its own development platform for bringing content to the headset. The startup is gearing up to launch a developer kit later this year for $1,500, but when it’s ready for consumers, the company hopes to price the headset for less than a high-end smartphone. |
Lishtot’s TestDrop tells you whether water is safe to drink without even touching it | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | Consistent access to clean water is something billions lack, and part of that is the inability to check whether one’s water is clean or not. could help change this with a tiny device that instantly determines if water is safe to drink just by analyzing the electric field around it — no strips, no microfluidics, no toxic chemicals. It honestly sounds too good to be true, but as far as I can tell it’s the real thing. I talked with Lishtot (Hebrew for “drink”) CEO Netanel Raisch at CES, where he demonstrated the simplicity and effectiveness of the TestDrop device. He had with him two plastic cups of water, to one of which had been added a contaminant. Pressing the test button, he moved the TestDrop toward one cup — blue light, clean. Do the same for the other — red light, contaminated. It’s that simple to operate; I did it myself successfully after one or two tries. It’s simple, in fact, that I was suspicious. I thought it might be some kind of spectroscopy, but where was the emitter? Why did you have to move it, if not to create some kind of doppler effect? Turns out that the whole thing is based on the electromagnetic fields that surround everything. Water creates its own local field, which is measured by moving the TestDrop through it, and it turns out that clean water emits a slightly different field than water with lead or chlorine in it, water with E. coli, water with dissolved animal matter and so on. The device has been subjected to third-party testing, two reports from which I read; the thing really works. It detected even tiny amounts of lead and protein instantly and with 100 percent accuracy and no false positives or negatives. The replaceable watch battery should last for years even if you’re using the device 10 or 20 times a day. Several of these known readings are built-in (it’s calibrated around half a plastic cup of water, as the plastic doesn’t interfere with the fields) and the TestDrop doesn’t need to check its data against the cloud in order to give a drink/don’t drink response. If, however, you do want to bring in the smartphone and app part, there’s a service that Lishtot is running that tracks tests done with its devices, if users choose to submit them. Raisch hopes this will become a useful database both for ordinary users (who can find clean water sources if necessary) and governments or companies (who can tap in and watch for trends). You’ll be able to report problems directly to the utility, as well. Lishtot has more water purity-related technology on the way, but for now the TestDrop is its main product. The devices cost $50 each, or — but my guess is they’re more likely to spread when bought in bulk by NGOs, utilities and other organizations, which will then distribute them where they’re most needed. |
Strava says it will simplify privacy settings and review app features after exposing military bases | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Fitness app Strava has said it will review its privacy settings and features after by releasing user activity data. The Strava activity heatmap was supposed to be a fun and informative look at how the world works out. It ended up, however, putting Washington on alert after a student noticed flashes of activity in certain countries made it possible to identify military bases and other facilities operated by countries, including the U.S., in locations such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Syria. its own rules around how armed forces personnel can use wireless devices and apps, and now Strava itself confirmed it will rethink its privacy data options, which were actually fairly confusing, and other features. , CEO James Quarles said the company would review “features that were originally designed for athlete motivation and inspiration to ensure they cannot be compromised by people with bad intent.” Quarles said Strava will place more emphasis on privacy and user data safety. He said the app would simplify those features inside the Strava to ensure that users were fully aware and able to control their data. Finally, he said his company is “committed to working with military and government officials to address potentially sensitive data.” Despite all of that, as before. This isn’t the first time that the company has fielded complaints for its handling of user data, . The sheer amount of personal information sucked up has made , while users themselves have more granular control of public/private information in the app. |
Waymo orders thousands of Pacificas for 2018 self-driving fleet rollout | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Waymo has ordered thousands of new Chrysler Pacifica minivans from FCA to help populate its autonomous ride-hailing fleet, which it will open to the public in 2018, the company says. The public launch of its Pacifica-based self-driving ride hailing service is set to occur sometime later this year, after Waymo starts testing its minivans without anyone behind the wheel, achieving true Level 4 autonomy for their designated bounded test area in Arizona. The total size of the vehicle commitment isn’t exactly known as of yet, but FCA has already supplied Waymo with 500 vehicles in total at least, and now that number will cross into the “thousands” as Waymo prepares for its public launch, and for the expansion of said service beyond its initial target launch market of Phoenix, where Waymo has been conducing its first pilot trial involving members of the public as passengers and customers. The delivery of the new vehicles will begin late in the year, and the new additions to the autonomous fleet will be rolled out “across multiple U.S. cities,” according to Waymo. Waymo worked directly with FCA engineers to build its autonomous driving tech into the Pacifica, a minivan with plenty of cabin comforts for rear seat passengers already built in. The van platform from Chrysler is also “ideal” for accommodating Waymo’s autonomy tech in terms of its electrical, powertrain, and structural systems, as well as its chassis design, according to the self-driving tech provider. The plan for deployment for Waymo’s self-driving services is to focus on ensuring absolute safety and reliability in strictly defined areas, and the expand the boundaries of said service over time. Waymo isn’t the only one hoping to launch autonomous driving services in some capacity soon, however; GM’s Cruise is looking to deploy “at scale” in 2019, and Uber says it’ll have limited commercial availability of its service in around 18 months. |
Google completes its $1.1B deal to buy a chunk of HTC’s smartphone division | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Google has the completion of its $1.1 billion deal to buy a large slice of HTC’s hardware business. but now it has passed the requisite approvals and is finalized. Beyond the transfer of over 2,000 engineers from HTC — that’s around one-fifth of HTC’s engineering team — Google will also receive a non-exclusive license for HTC’s intellectual property. HTC is retaining its Vive VR division and it will continue to make its own smartphones, . Most obviously, the deal boosts Google’s hardware game significantly by handing a portion of HTC’s own smartphone development team, many of whom worked on Google’s Pixel hardware (which was outsourced to HTC) and other HTC devices which, while much lauded, didn’t sell in huge volumes. Secondly, it gives Google a vast new engineering base in Taipei, Taiwan, where HTC is located. That makes the location the largest engineering site for Google in Asia Pacific, and it is likely to be the source of new products from the company going forward. “I’m delighted that we’ve officially closed our deal with HTC, and are welcoming an incredibly talented team to work on even better and more innovative products in the years to come,” Rick Osterloh, Google’s senior VP of hardware, wrote in a blog post. “These new colleagues bring decades of experience achieving a series of “firsts” particularly in the smartphone industry—including bringing to market the first 3G smartphone in 2005, the first touch-centric phone in 2007, and the first all-metal unibody phone in 2013,” Osterloh added. The closure of the deal marks another notable development for Google’s business in Asia in recent months. The company , its first such location in China, while , the Chinese city seen as the world’s ‘Silicon Valley of hardware.’ Google has also turned investor, , , which uses AI and machine learning to help design drugs, and . It has also struck a key alliance with Tencent, the $500 billion Chinese giant making moves in the U.S. and other global markets, after the duo . That’s a relationship to watch as Google advances its hardware and Asia business play. |
Crunch Report | Elon Musk’s flamethrowers bring in $5 million so far | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Instagram won’t comment on rumored video calling feature | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Instagram copied the ‘Snap’ and now it might be going after the ‘chat’. A video calling feature was spotted in a non-public version of Instagram by WhatsApp industry blog . It would let users who’ve begun an Instagram Direct message thread to video chat with each other. That could let people spend even more time in the app, but by actively communicating, rather than passively browsing which Facebook has come to admit . For now, though, Instagram is refusing to comment. When asked about the feature, a spokesperson told TechCrunch “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation”. That’s different than its more affirmative boilerplate statement given when it does confirm tests of forthcoming features, “we’re always testing new experiences for the Instagram community.” That’s what the company told us earlier this month when we reported …which launched a week later. So this video calling feature might never launch. But Instagram already lets people like they’re on a TV talk show, and send short ephemeral video clips over Direct. It recently launched a . And video calling has become one of the most popular features of Instagram parent Facebook’s Messenger app — with occurring in 2017, up 2X from 2016. So given that Instagram has the capability, interest, and infrastructure to add video calling, why wouldn’t it? WABetaInfo spotted the video call button in the top right of the chat screen, with it only available when messaging with people who’ve already accepted your Direct request. Leaked usage data from outed how , in part because of competition from Instagram Stories, but users are still addicted to Snapchat’s chat feature. Snapchat offers audio and video calling as well as photo, audio clip, video clip, and text messaging, effectively making it an alternative to one’s phone itself. Messaging is the center of the mobile experience, generating the most device opens and time spent. As Facebook tries to , doubling down on messaging is a clear path. And Facebook’s apps are always hungry for younger users who might not have phone numbers or bountiful mobile plans, and therefore might especially benefit from this new feature. Now we’ll have to wait and see whether soon you’ll be calling friends on the Insta-phone. Or is it the Phonogram? |
Uber’s India rival Ola is expanding to Australia in first overseas move | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | 2018 is the year for ride-hailing expansions. and , Ola in India is taking the first steps to move into the Australian market which expands its rivalry with Uber. Ola — — today that it has started recruiting drivers in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in what will be its first expansion outside of India. Founded in 2011, Ola claims over 125 million registered users and more than one million drivers across 110 cities in India. The company — — said it is working to gain the necessary approvals to launch its service in Australia, initially in those three cities. TechCrunch understands that there will be further information in the coming weeks. Ola’s initial plan is to launch private hire vehicles in Australia. linked the company with launches in Australia and New Zealand, while there have also been suggestions that it will move into Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Ola isn’t commenting on those expansions at this point, but sources close to the company told TechCrunch that there is “an appetite for international expansion.” Australia itself is dominated by Uber, Ola’s foe in India, which operates in over 20 cities across the country and New Zealand. Ola isn’t the only new arrival, though. Europe’s Taxify — — moved into Australia via a Sydney launch in November. It has since expanded to Melbourne. “We are very excited about launching Ola in Australia and see immense potential for the ride-sharing ecosystem which embraces new technology and innovation,” said Ola co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal. “With a strong focus on driver-partners and the community at large, we aim to create a high-quality and affordable travel experience for citizens and look forward to contributing to a healthy mobility ecosystem in Australia,” he added. Ola and Uber share two investors in common — Didi and SoftBank. The Chinese firm took equity in Uber following , while . Now we can add a new battleground to the tangled relationship between the two companies. |
There’s no way the government is building its own 5G network | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | A this weekend by Axios cited documents from within the National Security Council describing the possibility — nay, inevitability — of a 5G network built and operated by the U.S. government. Officials have since poured cold water on this idea, and really, it was never feasible. In brief, the report cited by Axios suggested that the only way to truly secure the next generation of wireless networks, on which critical infrastructure like self-driving cars will rely, against snooping by China and others, would be for the government to build that network itself. There are several things wrong with this idea. You probably thought of a couple before you even got to this sentence. Perhaps the most obvious problem is that the government would probably have to contract or at least work closely alongside the very companies it would effectively replace, such as AT&T and Verizon, in order to build a new 5G network. They are, of course, the ones who know how to do it. (Disclosure: Verizon owns Oath, which owns TechCrunch.) That would be awkward, since those companies, along with others around the world, are well into the process of testing and deploying 5G networks. The idea of a government network operating separately but in concert with the commercial networks doesn’t hold water (we’ve considered it before). Even if it was attempted, there’s just no way that the U.S. government, even at its best and most efficient, and if it started bipartisan work on this tomorrow, could be in any way competitive in the timing and scale of such a deployment. It takes billions of dollars and years of work to lay the foundation for something like this, and others have a huge head start. And let us not forget that we are experiencing one of an endless series of budget crises, which would not be alleviated by the proposal of this kind of massive undertaking. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai was unsparing in his spite for this proposal, which is as expected from someone who favors free market forces over government involvement: I oppose any proposal for the federal government to build and operate a nationwide 5G network. The main lesson to draw from the wireless sector’s development over the past three decades—including American leadership in 4G—is that the market, not government, is best positioned to drive innovation and investment. What government can and should do is to push spectrum into the commercial marketplace and set rules that encourage the private sector to develop and deploy next-generation infrastructure. Any federal effort to construct a nationalized 5G network would be a costly and counterproductive distraction from the policies we need to help the United States win the 5G future. Commissioner Clyburn was similarly unfriendly to the idea: The United States’ leadership in the deployment of 5G is critical and must be done right. Localities have a central role to play; the technical expertise possessed by industry should be utilized; and cybersecurity must be a core consideration. A network built by the federal government, I fear, does not leverage the best approach needed for our nation to win the 5G race. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) joined the chorus, adding a little dig of his own: While I’m glad that the Trump Administration recognizes that maintaining American leadership in the information age requires a significant investment commitment, I’m concerned that constructing a nationalized 5G network would be both expensive and duplicative, particularly at a time when the Administration is proposing to slash critical federal investments in R&D and broadband support for unserved areas. The Trump administration itself that the document Axios saw was dated, and that it wasn’t a seriously considered proposition. The National Security Council doesn’t oversee broadband deployment, and there’s no way this would get past the FCC, which as you can see above would likely be united in opposition to such a strategy. And although the NSC clearly has national security in mind when it suggests this path, I frankly would not trust the government to build a secure network of kind, let alone one this big. There would also be considerable irony in a government attempting to secure its internet infrastructure while simultaneously attempting to undermine effective encryption. The U.S. government may very well use part of the 5G network being built for its own purposes, and it of course subsidizes the rollout of the tech so it can use it itself — first responder networks, military stuff, that kind of thing. But the idea that it would, or could, build a competitive 5G network in the manner suggested has no basis in reality. |
GV leads $25M investment in Hover, a computer vision startup that digitizes your home | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | As more and more startups aim to 3D-scan the world, the question of what consumers will actually care about enough to bring into the digital world is a tough one to answer. For most people, a home will be the biggest investment they make in their lives, so SF-based Hover is theorizing that’s the place to start. is a computer vision startup that allows consumers to easily create 3D models of their homes so they can easily deal with getting quotes from contractors on their next big project. The startup announced today that it has raised a $25 million Series B led by GV, Home Depot and Standard Industries. Hover has raised north of $56 million in funding to date. Hover doesn’t rely on people buying any specialized hardware or learning the ins-and-outs of 3D scanning; users are simply prompted to snap some external shots of their home (no drone required) and feed the photos into Hover’s app, which uses its computer vision tech to digest and later spit out a 3D model of your home. From there the benefits are twofold, giving you a cute little miniature model of your home that you can customize to take a look at what it might look like with new siding or windows, while Hover also connects you to contractors who now have access to accurate measurements that can help them more easily quote your project. The company’s Hover Connect product basically focuses on getting contractors to evangelize the product by letting them reach out directly to leads and request that they set up a model. From there the contractors will be able to see whether the homeowners received the invites and how far along they are in the process. You can download the app and make a free 3D model of your home . |
DJI Mavic Air review | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | is a minor engineering marvel. The first time you set up DJI’s new drone it’s like trying to solve a puzzle box. You flip, you twist, you unfold. The metal joysticks are safely nestled inside the flip-out arms of the controller, the landing gear safely nestled in the propeller arms. Not a millimeter is wasted, not even in the packaging. It’s the culmination of a dozen years of drone making experience — but really, it’s built directly on top of the company’s recent push to make the perfect consumer quadcopter. More than anything, the Air feels like a refinement of the company’s first two folding drones, the Mavic Pro and Spark. It slots somewhere between its predecessors in terms of both sizing and price. But the device has the benefit of six additional months of hardware and software advancements, in some ways even besting the pricier Pro. Like the Pro and Spark, the Air is another strong step toward a truly mainstream drone. But between the $799 starting price and some still idiosyncratic artifacts in the hardware and software design, it’s still a ways from the sort of plug and play setup the company is ultimately aiming for. But hey, unlike and , this time things didn’t end too badly for either the reviewer or reviewee — so that certainly marks a positive step toward that ultimate goal. There are plenty of lessons one can draw from . Chief among them is the fact that drones are hard. When the action-camera maker opted to go it alone on its own folding drone, it clearly didn’t know what lay ahead. Shortly after hitting the market, the Karma drone began falling from the skies. GoPro ultimately worked out the issue, but the product appears to have become something of an albatross around its neck, with the company pulling out of the space altogether late last year. By its own accounts, on the other hand, DJI had a hit with the Mavic Pro. During its press conference it touted it as the “best selling drone of all-time” — a bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but company clearly had enough confidence in the product to make the Pro the template for its future consumer products. Introduced in May of last year, the $399 Spark was positioned as the drone for everyone, complete with gesture-based controls and special selfie-focused flight modes. Ultimately, I think, the company did itself a bit of a disservice with videos of people enjoying the Spark as though it was as easy to use out of the box as an iPhone. It’s just not. Among other things, there’s too much uncertainty when flying a tiny quadcopter through the air, even with the latest technological advancements on-board. DJI insisted on giving us a quick crash course (so to speak) on drone operations before taking the Air out into the real world, and honestly, I’m glad they did. I’m not really an experienced pilot — so in some ways, I’m probably the target demographic here. The training consisted of walking through setup, learning the gesture controls and taking taking it through a quick demo in the company’s (thankfully) high-ceilinged New York office. It’s a lot to take in — and quite frankly, I wasn’t sure I was ready to take it out into the world after 10 minutes or so of flight time. But DJI sent us on our way, along with a note to reach out when, invariably, we ran into an issue — which, of course, we did. The main reason I’m not generally the person who tests out drones here at TechCrunch is one of geography. Frankly, it’s a pain in the ass trying to find a spot in New York where it’s okay to test the things out. I’m glad. Sometimes I think about a future where everyone is flying around a personal drone around Manhattan, and it begins to resemble a sort of dystopian hellscape. On DJI’s recommendation, we found a spot about an hour and a half north of the city. We rented a car, with TechCrunch video producer Veanne behind the wheel and her dog Henri on my lap in the passenger seat. We made it through the tangled maze of cars through Queens and the Bronx, finally making it out to the Moodna Viaduct, a large, grassy space suitable for piloting small crafts. So, a couple of things before we get started here. First: if you do end up buying the Mavic Air, I highly recommend splurging a bit and going in for the aptly named Fly More Combo. For a limited time at least, it’s an additional $200. That price includes additional propellers, a carrying case, a charging hub and, most notably, two extra batteries. That last bit is key. That the company has managed to get around 21 minutes of flight time on a charge is impressive for a drone of this size, but that doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly frustrating every time to get down to around a quarter of a tank and the emergency alarms go off, strongly suggesting you think about landing the thing soon. With three batteries, we were still only able to spend a fraction of our travel time in flight, but it didn’t feel like a loss. Twenty-one minutes total would have been unspeakably frustrating. Speaking of, when we did finally get to the field and unfold the drone, open the controller and slot in my iPhone, the system wouldn’t let me fly due to a “Compass Error.” It’s not what you want to see, standing in 30-degree weather and high winds after an hour and a half in the car. DJI sent the following instructions: Thankfully, it worked, and we were up and running — but it was a friendly reminder of just how many things can go wrong. Naturally, the first thing I did was land it in a tree. I will say this: The Mavic Air is a rugged little bugger. I conveniently skipped the bit earlier where I attempted to fly the drone in my small New York City apartment and poor lighting caused it to slowly hover toward the wall, until one of the propellers winged the side and the whole thing sputtered to the ground. My point being, the Air was able to handle two minor collisions and was no worse for wear, besides a few dings on its propellers. Take off, like much of the controls, is performed on the mobile app, accessed by plugging an iPhone or Android handset directly into the folding remote. You tap one icon and slide another to the right — an extra precaution to avoid accidental lift-offs. The on-board system will alert you if the drone isn’t level or if there’s an obstacle in the way. I found that the system actually did pretty well essentially weedwacking tall grass out of its way as it warmed up. The two-joystick control scheme takes a little getting used to if you don’t have much flight time under your belt — another reason you’ll want some spare batteries, particularly the first few times you take flight. You’ll also want plenty of space. Sure, the drone is pint-sized, but I highly recommend you should give yourself a fairly wide berth for maneuvering the thing as you learn the control scheme. It also took me a bit of time to get used to the idea of navigating through the on-board camera, rather than simply using line of sight. But with a 2.5-mile maximum distance, you’re going to have to get used to it sooner or later. The drone is zippy and responsive and managed to stay aloft quite well, in spite of some fairly strong winds on a cold winter day. Oh, and make sure to bring those spare controller sticks with you. I had one pop off the remote during testing and lost it forever in the tall grass. I didn’t really have much use for the gesture controls once we finally made it outside. The features make sense with the Spark, where selfies are among the key uses, but when you get outside with the drone, you really want to fly the thing around. Responsiveness has been improved since the last generation, though like the joystick it takes some getting used to. It also takes takes a bit of moving around to get the system to recognize your face and hands. Once it does, you can move the drone around with the wave of a hand, land it and get it to take photos and videos. It’s an impressive feature, but honestly, in the majority of cases, it’s probably little more than a novelty. As these devices continue to get smaller, cheaper and more user-friendly, however, it’s easy to see how gesture controls could ultimately become a handy feature. The Quickshot flight modes are really the most impressive piece of the whole package. There are six in all, representing the ideal cross section of usability and output. You tap one (Asteroid, Boomerang, Rocket, Circle, Dronie or Helix), draw a rectangle around the subject you’d like to be the focal point, tap it and the drone sets out on a pre-programmed path. The app automatically stitches together a scene into an impressive clip, complete with music. The two new modes, Asteroid and Boomerang, are the most impressive of the lot. Boomerang creates an ovular flight path, hooting round from the subject and returning to the same spot. Asteroid, meanwhile, creates a large spherical shot, mimicking the Earth as it shoots high up into the air. There are a bunch of other notable new features on board as well, including slow motion video shots, pulled from 1080p video at 120 FPS and HDR shots for uneven lighting. There are old favorites on board as well, including ActiveTrack, which does a pretty solid job following moving subjects once you’ve locked them in. That was one of the big notable omissions from GoPro’s Karma — a pretty important feature for an action drone. The app is pretty user-friendly after playing around with it for a few minutes and does a solid job outputting sharable videos. You also can just pull the raw MP4s from the 8GB of on-board memory or microSD. Don’t let the ads fool you — these drones aren’t as user-friendly as a smartphone. And they’re certainly not idiot proof — take it from this idiot who landed the Air in a tree pretty much straight out of the box. Still, the latest DJI drone is an impressive combination of hardware and software in the company’s most accessible to date. The Air is about as close as the market has to offer to a true entry-level drone that’s capable of capturing excellent video. It’s a worthy little gadget for photographers and videographers looking to add another tool to their arsenal. It’s also a fun little gadget, once you get the hang of the navigation system — but at $799 (or, really, $999, let’s be honest), it’s still a pretty pricey tech toy. |
Facebook nabs Google’s AR product director | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Facebook has stolen away Google’s director of Product for AR Nikhil Chandhok, who will be joining FB to lead product management of the Camera team working on augmented reality. Chandhok worked on Google’s ARCore smartphone augmented reality platform as well as its Daydream VR platform in his position there. Previously, Chandhok had co-founded AI startup Bento Labs, which raised $2 million from GV and First Round Capital, among others. “…As I join the Camera/AR team at Facebook, I’m looking forward to building upon a platform that allows for the creation and discovery of global AR experiences everywhere. I’m especially interested in building more conversation and momentum in cross-platform camera services,” Chandhok wrote in a . Today is my 1st day at Facebook! There are massive opportunities ahead for AR & I look fwd to joining Facebook as we bring more AR experiences to life – for more people! — Nikhil Chandhok (@chandhok) Both Google nor Facebook have staked out AR as a major platform for the companies’ future growth. They both have some projects that they’ve had very high-profile reveals for, but much of the onus has been on developers to figure out what the hell to actually do with the platforms. Everyone seems to easily theorize what they might do in a world with AR glasses, but it’s the current world where a lot of companies are having a tough time visualizing what will make a user raise their smartphone up to see an augmented view of the world. Google’s ARCore platform has been a wide open world for developers to find out what to do with positional tracking on horizontal planes (on select devices). Meanwhile, Facebook’s Camera Effects has been a more straightforward entrance into the world of selfie filters, but lives inside Facebook Camera, which you may be surprised to learn exists in your FB app. Long story short, it’s early days, so getting the right talent to define your product vision is obviously key. Facebook has the long game of AR being mapped out on the hardware side with Oculus Research eyeing wild displays, but getting more people focused on the use cases of tomorrow — even if they just look like updated camera features rather than dedicated quote-unquote AR features — is a different challenge altogether. |
The Grammys gave CBS All Access its second-biggest day for signups yet | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Sunday night’s airing of the 60th Annual Grammy Awards turned out to be a big boost for CBS’ streaming service, CBS All Access, which offered a live stream of the event on its service. According to the network, its subscription video on demand and live streaming service hit new records in terms of subscriber sign-ups and unique viewers for the awards show specifically, and was the second biggest day for subscriber sign-ups ever. The biggest day for subscriber sign-ups was the premiere date for CBS’ anticipated, streaming-only series “Star Trek: Discovery,” not surprisingly. CBS declined to share how many sign-ups in total could be attributed to the Grammys, but did note that unique viewers of the live stream were up more than 40 percent over last year’s telecast, and it saw record traffic across CBS’ digital platforms for Grammy day. The live stream of the telecast was only available behind the paywall on desktop, web, mobile, and TV apps, CBS says. Nielsen also noted the awards show was the most social TV even this year so far – but, of course, it’s only January, so that’s not necessarily a major milestone. However, CBS had said last year it was on track to reach over 4 million subscribers by the end of 2017 for CBS All Access and Showtime combined, and was on track to have 8 million by 2020. Reached for comment today, CBS told TechCrunch it now has “over 2 million” subscribers. In part, that could be because CBS All Access is not the only way for cord cutters to watch CBS’ programming these days. The network is available to be streamed (in some markets) on a variety of live TV services including DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, Sling TV, YouTube TV, Fubo TV, and Hulu Live TV, for example. While CBS won’t say how many new users came to CBS All Access for the Grammys, there are some other ways to measure the award show’s impact on the streaming service. One way is by looking at the mobile app’s ranking in the app store. Before Grammy day, the app’s average Monday ranking among all free iPhone apps in the U.S. on the preceding four Mondays was around No. 325 on the charts, according to data from Sensor Tower. And the app hadn’t ranked above No. 100 on this chart since back in September 2017. After the awards show, the app jumped up significantly, and is now ranked No. 89 among all free iPhone apps in the U.S. To give you some general sense of what that ranking means in terms of downloads, one fairly close comparison by ranking number is Tinder, at No. 82. On Saturday, January 27th, the No. 82-ranked app saw approximately 24,000 iPhone downloads that day. (At No. 89, CBS All Access would fall under that, of course, but you can get a sense.) The app’s highest ranking before Grammy day wasn’t actually the day the new “Star Trek” premiered, we should note. It was three days prior – apparently, folks were getting ready in advance. The iPhone app had then achieved a rank of No. 69 on that day. That the Grammys didn’t break a new record for CBS All Access sign-ups (compared to “Star Trek”) isn’t necessarily the biggest concern. It’s a one-time-per-year event, after all – meaning, it can only go so far in terms of convincing new users to give the streaming service a try. What CBS All Access really needs is more programming that has the draw of “Star Trek,” – or something even better. |
Microsoft buys gaming services startup PlayFab to bolster its Azure platform | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | In the latest chapter of GAFAM’s continuing bid to conquer online gaming, Microsoft has acquired , which helps game developers launch their titles online more quickly with simplified back-end services. The startup will be integrated into Microsoft’s Azure gaming group. The Seattle-based startup had raised around $13 million in funding from investors. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. “Together, Azure and PlayFab will further unlock the power of the intelligent cloud for the gaming industry, enabling game developers and delighting gamers around the world,” Kareem Choudhry, Microsoft’s corporate VP of gaming, said in a . PlayFab offered game developers a platform to host and operate online games and the analytics tools to help understand and monetize users. The startup helped game developers cut down on the work needed to launch a title widely with infrastructure that could handle a global player base. While this pitch is one that obviously appeals largely to indie developers, the startup also boasted much larger customers, including Disney, NBCUniversal, Rovio and Capcom. There are 1,200 “live games” currently operating on PlayFab’s platform and the group says that they’re currently processing more than 1.5 billion transactions per day. In a announcing the deal, CEO James Gwertzman noted how the rapid changes in the gaming industry had made way for a company like PlayFab: Matt and I launched PlayFab four years ago to solve a burning need. Games were rapidly shifting from packaged goods, sold in boxes, to “always on” digital services, requiring sophisticated server-based infrastructure to host and operate. Built well, these backend systems enabled games to engage, retain, and monetize players like never before, with longevity in the top grossing charts measured in years. Built poorly, they crashed and burned on launch day. As major tech giants have wised up to the fact that there’s much more to the gaming market than mobile, there’s been an increasing amount of attention paid to the backbone technologies enabling game development and monetization. Microsoft has been more in tune with this than most as they have focused on the company’s Xbox division and its latest console hardware and services. The company has also been active in more consumer-facing gaming acquisitions like the interactive streaming service just over a year ago and the social virtual reality app this past fall. |
Facebook will start prioritizing local news in user feeds | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Our next update on our 2018 focus to make sure Facebook isn't just fun but also good for your well-being and for… Posted by on That last bit also comes as a sort of consolation to publishers, who have grown concern how their own social reach will be impact by sweeping changes made to . Google, meanwhile, has been testing its own take on local news recently, with the addition of the , an effort to crowdsource local news reporting. |
SuperPhone is building a Salesforce for texting | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | The address book is the last, worst default app you rely on. It’s time it got as smart as the rest of our phones. That’s the idea behind . Email isn’t how you build relationships anymore. Yet most business software sanctifies the spammy inbox when it’s the immediacy of text messaging that keeps people in touch today. Musician Ryan Leslie learned that when he earned $2 million by building a custom text management product to track, talk to and transact with his fans. Now he’s turning SuperPhone into a full-fledged CRM for SMS with a new app and round of funding. Designed for entrepreneurs, entertainers and anyone juggling clients or sales contacts, SuperPhone tells you who you’re forgetting to connect with. Its Never Lose Touch feature can automatically ping lapsed contacts to keep the conversation and collaboration alive. You can monitor how your address book is growing, and sort people by location, title or how much they’ve spent with you. Next it’s adding analytics to show who messages who more and other communication health signals. “SuperPhone is the first foray into personal relationship management,” says co-founder and CEO Ryan Leslie. The Grammy-nominated R&B singer and producer made 2006’s top-five hit “M & U” for pop star Cassie, plus has created tracks for Usher and Britney Spears. But then on Codecademy, realizing that the imploding record industry would turn being a successful celebrity into a game of who had the best tools for connecting with fans. The result was — and Leslie giving all his listeners his phone number. The app let him see who had spent the most on his music and merch, and speak with them directly to keep them loyal. While other artists were counting their meager streaming royalty pennies, Leslie was finding out who would pay $1,700 for tickets to a private New Year’s Eve concert. SuperPhone turned his modest fame into massive revenue. Hip-hop super fan and VC super star alongside Betaworks and a slew of angels. Atlantic Records became SuperPhone’s top enterprise client, managing half a million conversations with fans of its artists, from Cardi B to Matchbox 20. Now the company has 22 employees and grander visions than equipping musicians. The original product was centered around driving and tabulating purchases. The new SuperPhone ( and coming to Android soon) focuses on the most common address book problem: connecting with someone important then drifting apart. Whether they’re buried by additional contacts, lost due to forgetfulness, or things just get weird because so much time has passed, accidental disconnection erodes the networks professionals try hard to build. With SuperPhone’s patent-pending Never Lose Touch, you choose a time interval and create several custom reconnection messages. Anyone you haven’t talked to during that time receives one of the notes. That could be something simple and organic-seeming like “Sorry I disappeared. What have you been up to?” or more specific like “Hey, it’s Josh Constine. You have 10 minutes this week so I can get your thoughts on some tech trends and hear what you’re working on?” SuperPhone costs about $0.10 per active conversation per month, so $20 for 200 or $100 for 1,000, that also comes with a Shopify e-commerce integration. That could be workable for small-business owners and professionals communicating with clients that make them significant revenue each. But at $1.20 per contact per year, SuperPhone might be too expensive for influencers or artists trying to stay in touch with a big audience. It will have to compete with other mass-texting tools and CRM systems that have expanded into mobile, including Hustle, Zipwhip, Teckst and Zingle. New investors are betting on the idea of a Salesforce for the instant messaging era, putting another $2.5 million into SuperPhone to bring it to $4.7 million in total funding. Runway Venture Partners’ Marc Michel led the round, with participation from FYRFLY Venture Partners, Yard Ventures and Transmedia Capital. SuperPhone’s progress signing up customers hasn’t been stellar, though, so the raise is considered a “seed prime” round with only a slightly higher valuation than the 2016 seed. The cash will go toward building out an API for connecting with traditional CRM software and the business texting tools mentioned above. That could bridge the gap between its pro-sumer product and true enterprise sales. The company has also struck a deal with a top phone manufacturer to develop its conversation health analytics. That could give teens a free or subsidized way to access SuperPhone’s forthcoming conversation metrics. “When we sat down with young people and said ‘would you like to know who messages who more in a relationship?,’ we’ve been met with overwhelmingly positive results,” says Leslie. The risk of the product is that some users or their contacts might find it inauthentic or disingenuous to send pre-scripted reengagement messages. If it gets you legitimately talking, maybe that’s OK. And some people accept that it’s just business and it’s tough to keep up with everyone. I suggested SuperPhone send you a list of people with whom you’ve lapsed you might want to ping directly. Leslie says tests showed people just dismissed those reminders, so sending messages on users’ behalf worked better, but he’s still open to a less aggressive implementation. Between all our notifications, emails, and message threads, there’s just too much for people to balance in their heads. We’re battling to break past Dunbar’s Number, a theory that says you can only maintain relationships with about 150 people at a time. Technology obviously should extend our potential for connectivity, but designing it to feel natural rather than an arduous chore is the real challenge. The address book is one of the last manufacturer-made default apps we still depend on, yet the experience is reliably awful. Beyond searchability, it’s no smarter than pen and paper. Whether it’s reminding you to call mom, butter up that sales prospect, or coax a hiring candidate to leave their job, SuperPhone could become what our phones should have always been. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 1 | 11 | null |
US military reviewing tech use after Strava privacy snafu | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | The U.S. military has responded to privacy concerns over a heatmap feature in the Strava app which displays users’ fitness activity — and has been shown — by saying it’s reviewing the rules around usage of wireless devices and apps by its personnel. At the weekend, Australian student that trails from Strava users in certain countries made it possible to identify military bases and other facilities operated by countries, including the U.S., in locations such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Syria. A U.S. military press office has now told that existing rules on privacy settings relating to apps and devices are being “refined” as a result of the privacy snafu, and that commanders at its bases are being urged to enforce existing rules. Alarm quickly flared when it became apparent how precisely Strava’s heatmaps were highlighting the existence of active military bases — literally by lighting up the activity levels of personnel using its app in and around the facilities — and even potentially also of serving military personnel. “The Coalition is in the process of implementing refined guidance on privacy settings for wireless technologies and applications, and such technologies are forbidden at certain Coalition sites and during certain activities,” a spokesperson for the Central Command press office in Kuwait told the newspaper, speaking for the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State. “We will not divulge specific tactics, techniques and procedures. However, we have confidence in our commanders’ abilities to enforce established policies that enhance force protection and operational security with the least impact to our personnel.” “The rapid development of new and innovative information technologies enhances the quality of our lives but also poses potential challenges to operational security and force protection. We constantly refine policies and procedures to address such challenges,” the spokesperson added. Strava has long been criticized for the confusing structure of its privacy settings — though it’s hardly alone on that front where technology services are concerned — and for how, as a consequence, its service can . In this case even users who had applied an “enhanced privacy” option were apparently still having their activity data fed into public heatmaps. We reached out to Strava for comment but at the time of writing the company had not responded. “We are committed to helping people better understand our settings to give them control over what they share,” earlier. When the company launched the latest version of its global heatmap feature last year it the feature included more than 27 billion kilometers of data — “overlapping to show the most frequented spots for sport on the globe.” Apparently not realizing that less-frequented locations for sports on the globe could result in some massively sensitive privacy leaks — largely as a consequence of Strava opting users into the heatmaps (without them necessarily realizing it had, thanks to confusing settings). If you want a textbook example of why privacy needs to be the default, not a hard-to-find opt-out, and what privacy-hostile design looks like, well, it’s pretty tough to beat this. So we can at least thank Strava for illustrating the problem so beautifully. |
Why the Dell rumors might have substance | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | By now you’ve probably heard that the to figure out how it might reorganize itself to deal with the mountain of debt it took on when . The rumors began on Friday and involved a couple of possible scenarios including Dell going public or Dell buying the remainder of VMware (which I’m not sure solves the debt problem). Today CNBC reported a third option, that the company could be considering a reverse merger . VMware stock price spiked a bit last week on rumors that Dell would buy them out. For what it’s worth, I contacted Dell on Friday and was told, as you would expect, that Dell doesn’t respond to rumors, but one industry insider I contacted did say, the company is actually considering all options, but hasn’t decided anything yet. The company still reportedly has $46 billion in debt left over from the EMC merger, and that amounts to $2 billion in interest payments. Under the new tax law, they will need to pay substantially more because they lose part of the interest write-off. The interest figure looming in the future is probably what is precipitating this discussion by the Dell board now. All of this sounds to me like finding some clever bookkeeping games to shuffle some of that debt around, but Jack Gold, principal at Gold and Associates, , it could be a case of Dell trying to take advantage of the new tax laws, the overheated stock market or some combination of the two. “With the stock market at record levels, and the future not necessarily as bright, it [would be] opportunistic of them to try and cash out a bit before the downturn (which always comes eventually). Tax reform probably also helps with the math,” Gold wrote on Twitter. When in 2016, the question was how the company would deal with all of that debt. The thinking at the time was that . It did in July 2016 for $2 billion to Francisco Partners and Elliott Management. , the content management company back in 2003 for $1.7 billion, selling off to rival OpenText for an undisclosed price in January 2017. Surprisingly, it has kept much of the EMC federation intact. One thought at the time was that Dell, which owns an 80 percent stake in VMware, would sell part of those holdings, while still maintaining more than 50 percent of the stock. It’s worth noting that VMware is sold on the stock market as an independent company. That never happened and now we find Dell may in fact want to buy out the rest, or have itself swallowed up by VMware, which is a smaller company. The whole thing comes back to why Dell felt compelled to buy EMC in the first place. While some questioned the wisdom of a deal that large, Oracle chairman . His only regret was that his billions were otherwise occupied with his company’s transition to the cloud. Those data centers do tend to be costly. It’s important to temper all of this because these are just rumors right now. Dell may in the end decide to stand pat, but Michael Dell and his financial backers at Silver Lake Partners have shown that they are not afraid of making bold moves. The debt could be the impetus for making such a move. So don’t be surprised if the company ends up executing on one of these options, or something else that hasn’t reached the rumor mill yet. |
Microsoft’s Slack competitor, Teams, gets its biggest update with new app integrations and app store | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Microsoft’s Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, since the software’s last year, the company says. The focus of the new set of features is allowing users to better work with apps – something Microsoft Teams accomplishes via integrations, new search and discovery features, commands, and more. Some of the features are, in fact, quite Slack-like. For example, Microsoft Teams now offers a way to search for apps from the new app store where you can browse by category or search by name, category or integration type – like Project Management or BI. Slack, of course, also has which has allowed it to highlight all the work tools that currently work with its team collaboration resource – a move that helped it gain traction in the workplace. In Microsoft’s case, however, there’s a bit more emphasis on the apps your organization has added and assigned to you, as well as those you regularly work with. A new “personal space” displays all the items that you’ve been assigned across your apps, like your tasks in Planner or issues in Jira Cloud, plus those from apps you’ve recently accessed, like OneNote notebooks or videos from Microsoft Stream. Microsoft even added its own new app called Who, powered by Microsoft Graph. This lets you search across your organization for people by name or topic. The updated version of Teams also makes it easier to launch apps. It’s adding the ability to query or command an app from the command box to speed up the process of using the apps. That way, you can search for information from an app, then add a result right into your chat in a single workflow. This process will be improved in time, Microsoft says, and will eventually allow you to do more complex tasks, like creating a new task in your PM app or starting a build in Visual Studio Team Services. Plus, adding information from an app to a chat has been improved – as you can now add an interactive card from apps into a chat or channel with just a click, instead of having to screenshot the data then post it. Teams added slash commands with this update, too. Similar to Slack, the slash command ( / ) lets you perform tasks or navigate Teams. But you can also use slash commands to do things like setting your status to “Away,” adding users to team, or calling a coworker, the company says. This new set of features is rolling out starting today, says Microsoft, which means you may not see them immediately, but should soon. [gallery ids="1592042,1592043,1592045,1592041,1592044,1592039"] |
Voicelabs launches Alpine to bring retailers to the voice shopping ecosystem | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | , a company that has been experimenting in the voice computing market for some time with initiatives in advertising and analytics, is now pivoting its business again – this time, to voice-enabled commerce. The company is today launching its latest product out of stealth: , a solution that builds voice shopping apps for retailers by importing their catalog, then layering AI technology on top to better answer consumers’ voice queries, and ultimately convert those queries to purchases. While this is the third product Voicelabs has developed over the past couple of years, this level of experimentation is to be expected in the nascent voice ecosystem. (And “labs” is even in the startup’s name, we should note.) Initially, Voicelabs believed dabbled with third-party advertising. It allowed advertisers to reach a large smart speaker customer base by aggregating voice app developers into a network whose reach could be sold to advertisers en masse. But Amazon, sensitive to the way ads could disrupt the consumer experience, . The company then shifted to voice analytics, a more competitive market with a number of existing players. From here, the idea for Alpine AI grew. While Voicelabs counted over 3,500 analytics customers, it found that some percentage of those had interest in e-commerce. But voice shopping apps weren’t yet available on either Google Assistant’s or Amazon Alexa’s platforms, outside of the first-party shopping experience both provide. Of course, in Amazon’s case in particular, that may be because it’s hoping that voice devices in the home will eventually become a key way consumers shop for products from Amazon.com, and not necessarily from retailers directly. Google, meanwhile, is more open to working with partners in the e-commerce space through services like Google Express, for example, where it has teamed up with big retailers, and last year. But retailers don’t necessarily want to hand off the entire voice Q&A process, including answers about their products, recommendation and discovery, and, ultimately conversions, to Amazon or Google entirely. That’s where Alpine comes in. In a matter of days, Alpine can digest the retailer’s website and CMS, then automatically create a voice app using that data. The app is then enhanced by machine learning technology, which learns from incoming consumer queries how to best respond to questions. Some of these improvements are done before the app is even live. For instance, Voicelabs sent out an employee to document what sort of questions shoppers were asking about one of its client’s products in the retail store itself. “Consumers – we started to see about six months ago – they’re asking about products,” explains Voicelabs co-founder and CEO Adam Marchick. “They’re asking ‘should I buy this or that?’ Or, ‘tell me about this mascara.’ Or, ‘tell me what’s new,'” he says . “We saw this happening both in third-party apps and on the platform itself.” The AI technology comes into play as customers introduce new queries and to better refine the voice app’s responses. For example, a customer may ask a beauty product retailer for a “long-lasting mascara,” of which several dozen products are available. The AI may know, based on earlier interactions, that the best way to narrow down that selection is by price. Later, if another customer asks for a long-lasting mascara that lasts for more than 12 hours, the system has to adapt to this new query. Machine learning aids in building out a new custom path for the app’s response here, too, again based on this existing data. While today’s retailers are taking note of the voice assistance space, it’s unclear to what extent the platform makers themselves will allow other retailers to enable their own voice shopping experiences. But Alpine could work around whatever restrictions are in place by offering a simpler discovery experience that later follows up with a customer email, for example. Or it could tie into the voice shopping experience the platforms offer – like allowing customers to complete the purchase on Amazon.com, if that’s an option for the given retailer. However, Marchick believes the platforms be welcoming to retailers’ developing their own voice shopping apps. “We’re in great communication with both of them. Both platforms know about Alpine, and that’s as far as I can go,” he says, somewhat cagily, referring to Google and Amazon. “Here, we’re much more confident in Alpine being embraced by the platforms [compared with the earlier ad product], because it’s 100 percent in line with their goals and policies. The platform with the best consumer experiences is the one that wins,” Marchick says. “And Alpine will be powering the best path-to-purchase experiences.” The company isn’t permitted to talk about its clients yet, but does have customers from the e-commerce 100. Alpine is sold as a Software-as-a-Service solution with custom pricing, based on the retailer’s goals and e-commerce volume. The company also closed its seed round a few months ago, in advance of Alpine’s launch. It’s now backed by investors including the Chernin Group, Javelin Venture Partners, Betaworks, as well as angels Tim Tully (Splunk CTO), Jon Brelig (InfoScout CTO, acquired), Scott Cannon (Mailbox CTO, acquired by Dropbox), and John Kobs, CEO of ApartmentList.com. The size of the round is not being disclosed, beyond Marchick’s claim that Voicelabs is now “well-funded.” Voicelabs’ analytics product will be live until March 29, 2018, to give existing customers time to migrate. Alpine, meanwhile, is open for business today, |
Boeing HorizonX invests in Berkeley aerospace battery tech startup | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Boeing’s HorizonX is the aerospace company’s vehicle for making investments in promising next-generation startups and technology, and it just placed its latest bet: funding in Cuberg, a Berkeley-based battery tech startup that has a founding team including Stanford University researchers. Battery tech is still one of the most frustrating roadblocks any company encounters when trying to build electric vehicles and other battery-powered technology and transportation. For Boeing, there are plenty of potential upsides to building out batteries that can last significantly longer than those available via today’s tech. Cuberg’s work focuses on batteries with especially high energy density, while retaining thermal safety. That basically means they hope to be able to build a new type of battery cell that can hold a lot more power for vehicles to use, while also not catching fire. That’s not all, however: Cuberg’s approach would result in a manufacturing process that could be used in exiting large-scale battery factories. The end result is a relatively smooth transition process from existing manufacturing to building next-gen cells, which obviously means a lot less upfront investment when it comes to taking the new manufacturing process to scale. Cuberg was originally founded in 2015, and this market the first time Boeing HorizonX has invested in any energy storage companies since its inception last year. The funding, which is described as a “second seed” round, should help Cuberg grow its team and its facilities in preparation for fully automated manufacturing. |
Uber steps up to fight human trafficking | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | Uber has partnered with Polaris, which aims to fight human trafficking at the global level, to empower its drivers to combat this form of modern-day slavery. Worldwide, there are an estimated 20.9 million victims of human trafficking, . will help educate Uber drivers about some signs of human trafficking and empower them to report any suspected cases of human trafficking to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. One effort is to provide drivers with the Polaris hotline phone number and educational information about human trafficking via the Uber app. Uber “drivers are uniquely positioned to help identify and ultimately prevent human trafficking,” Uber Safety Communications Lead Tracey Breeden said in a press release. “Working together with our national partners, we will utilize our innovation and technology along with the scope and scale of our global community to commit to helping prevent and raise awareness and empower community heroes. Together we can help disrupt and end human trafficking in the cities we serve.” Uber has also partnered with organization Thorn to support its work in building technology to protect children from sexual abuse. “Our recent Survivor Insights report found that of child sex trafficking survivors never knew help resources were available to them during their abuse,” Thorn CEO Julie Cordua said in a statement. “Partnering with Uber is an opportunity to ensure that we are attacking this issue from all sides, and today we are empowering drivers to provide help to those in crisis. When we work together we can build a world where every child can be a kid.” |
Hike unbundles its messaging app to reach India’s next wave of smartphone users | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | How do you compete with the world’s largest chat app in its strongest market? , the Indian messaging app valued at more than $1 billion, is taking a unique approach to battling WhatsApp which involves dismantling its service, layering it on budget Android phones and offering free connectivity. The company, , today unveiled ‘Total, built by Hike’ — a new service aimed at reaching novice smartphone owners and first-time internet users in India. Hike is in the unenviable position of competing squarely with WhatsApp, the world’s most popular chat app, which counts India as its largest single market with over 200 million active users. For perspective: that’s two-thirds of India’s internet using public. By contrast, Hike said it had collected 100 million registered users in January 2016, but there’s been no further update since then. CEO Kavin Bharti Mittal plays down the competition — WhatsApp “doesn’t have to lose” for Hike to succeed, he said — but with Total, Hike is being more nimble that its Facebook-owned rival and redesigning itself to offer a different kind of experience to reach new internet users before WhatsApp gets them. The most notable part of Total is that it runs without a data connection. That’s important, Bharti Mittal told TechCrunch, because Hike has noticed a general slowdown in internet adoption growth in India. Last year’s launch of Reliance Jio, which offered free data packages for a time, took the number of Indians online to around 300 million, but Bharti Mittal believes the number is “stuck” due to factors like price and the challenge of just setting up a phone. “It’s a 15-20 step process [to step up a smartphone] and that’s complicated for a first time mobile user,” he explained in an interview. “Combined with pricing, that makes it very scary.” Total, then, is Hike’s effort to make things easier. The startup teamed up with mobile carriers and OEMs for Total, with device makers bundling a tweaked version of Android that makes Hike the default text/call app and loads features like Hike’s wallet, cricket news and horoscopes. The registration process is now down to under five steps, too. The piece de resistance is ‘data without data.’ Owners of Total-powered devices can get online without a data plan thanks to an adaptation of , a technology that is typically used to send basic information to devices like balance checking. Hike said it developed a proprietary system that, with approval from carriers, allows USSD to be used for basic internet access. Supplied for free, it allows a range of Hike services to operate on a device when it is offline. Total unbundles and pre-installs eight Hike services that operate without a data connection It isn’t fast — TechCrunch was shown a demo during a video conference call — but it’s enough to operate Hike messaging, Hike wallet and the unbundled features like real-time cricket scores. Like Internet.org, Facebook’s free internet system that was deemed unconstitutional in India, Hike gives a taste of internet to users in the hope that they will want more. Internet.org — later renamed Facebook Basics — but Hike isn’t altering Google Play, so any apps, including WhatsApp, can be installed. There are some limits around usage though. Specific features — such as sending or receiving photos in chat — require a data package, and Hike has negotiated with carriers to offer tariffs as low as 1 INR (less than $0.02). The payment is made over the device’s Hike Wallet, which connects to a bank account using the Indian government’s UPI tech. “Our goal is still to bring one billion people online. The Total connection is pretty good but it is not the internet, we want people to come on to rich services,” Bharti Mittal explained. Initial partners include operators Total. Airtel, Aircel and BSNL — which cover around 40 percent of India’s market — while four smartphones from Indian OEMs Intex and Karbonn due to launch March 1. They will be priced from 3,500 INR ($55), Bharti Mittal said. “These are starting partners and our hope is that, as we make more progress, we can get more partners,” the Hike CEO said. Financially, Hike is paying the OEMs to pre-bundle Total. Bharti Mittal didn’t comment on its agreement with carriers but you’d imagine there is a revenue-share agreement for each data pack or upgrade sold. No doubt, Hike’s proposition is seen as a low-risk opportunity for India’s carriers, who are still reeling from the emergence of Reliance Jio, which is funded by India’s richest man. The upstart telco is said to have picked up 140 million subscribers by standing out. It launched its own-brand phones and such is its determination to disrupt the status quo in India’s telecoms market. Hike isn’t just looking at India for Total, however. Bharti Mittal estimated that the program has a two-year window of potential domestically, but, as Indian consumers become tech-savvy and increasingly use data plans, it will look at overseas opportunities. “There are many markets out in the world where this technology could be equally as prevalent,” he said, hinting that Africa and neighboring countries could be expansion targets. Hike isn’t alone at addressing India’s future internet users. Google has released a range of data-friendly apps for those on spotty connections and limited smartphones, while its public WiFi program — which covers national train stations — . |
Revolut launches geolocation-powered travel insurance | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | Fintech startup is launching international medical and dental insurance. You can subscribe using the company’s app for £1 per day or more depending on the options. But the best part is that you can set it up and forget about it as Revolut uses your device’s location data to automatically turn insurance coverage on and off. By default, insurance coverage costs £1 per day for medical and dental insurance. You can add an option for winter sports and you can also cover your friends and family. But if you’re always on the road and tend to spend weeks or even months abroad, Revolut is going to cap its travel insurance after a certain amount of time. You can also pay a fixed upfront price for an annual policy. Revolut isn’t becoming an insurance company. Just like with its , the startup is working with third-party insurance companies. This time, Thomas Cook Money is in charge of the travel insurance product. It’s also worth noting that includes travel insurance. It’s still unclear if Revolut is going to regularly request your location when the app is in the background or if Revolut is just going to get your location when you open the app. Revolut is slowly building an insurance hub to control all your insurance needs from the company’s app. And this is smart as Revolut just has to take a bit of money from your Revolut balance. It like you’re not spending any money because you don’t need to enter your card number. The startup has been releasing new features at an impressive pace. The service is now much more than a simple prepaid MasterCard with a foreign exchange feature. You can now trade in the Revolut app, receive money on , ask for a and more. It’s becoming a serious banking alternative. |
YouTube tightens the rules around creator monetization and partnerships | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | In an effort to regain advertisers’ trust, Google is what it says are “tough but necessary” changes to YouTube monetization. For one thing, it’s setting a higher bar for the YouTube Partner Program, which is what allows publishers to make money through advertising. Previously, they needed 10,000 total views to join the program. Starting today, channels also need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of view time in the past year. (For now, those are just requirements to join the program, but Google says it will also start applying them to current partners on February 20.) This might assure marketers that their ads are less likely to run on random, fly-by-night channels, but as Google’s Paul Muret , “Of course, size alone is not enough to determine whether a channel is suitable for advertising.” So in addition, he said: We will closely monitor signals like community strikes, spam, and other abuse flags to ensure they comply with our policies. Both new and existing YPP channels will be automatically evaluated under this strict criteria and if we find a channel repeatedly or egregiously violates our community guidelines, we will remove that channel from YPP. As always, if the account has been issued three community guidelines strikes, we will remove that user’s accounts and channels from YouTube. Muret also described changes planned for the more exclusive Google Preferred program, which is supposed to be limited to the best and most popular content. Vlogger Logan Paul was part of Google Preferred until the controversy over his “suicide forest” video got him — a story that suggests some of the limitations to Google’s approach. Moving forward, Muret said the program will offer “not only … the most popular content on YouTube, but also the most vetted.” That means everything in Google Preferred should be manually curated, with ads only running “on videos that have been verified to meet our ad-friendly guidelines.” (Looks like will be busy.) Lastly, Muret said YouTube will be introducing a new “three-tier suitability system” in the next few months, aimed at giving marketers more control over the trade-off between running ads in safer environments versus reaching more viewers. |
Google moves into Shenzhen in latest China expansion | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | , Google is expanding again through a move into Shenzhen. The U.S. tech giant has opened an office in the Chinese city, which borders Hong Kong and known for being a global hardware hub, according to an internal email obtained by TechCrunch. This isn’t a fully-blown Google campus, instead the company has taken up space within a serviced office starting this week. “We have many important clients and partners in Shenzhen. We’re setting up this e-suite office to be able to communicate and work with them better,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement confirming the news. Here’s the short email that was sent to staff: Hello China Googlers, I hope your 2018 is off to a great start! I want to give you all a heads up about a new workspace we’ve opened in Shenzhen. As you may know, we have a number of Googlers in China who travel to the Shenzhen area for business on a regular basis. We’ve heard a lot of feedback that there was a need for a space to work from while in the area—so, after a few months of scouting, we recently signed a lease for a serviced office in Shenzhen. The space opened this week and is now up and running. We’re hopeful this will provide Googlers with a comfortable base to work from in the area. Shenzhen is home to Tencent, , and mobile giants Huawei and ZTE, while the likes of Alibaba and Baidu are also present. The city has a thriving maker community, which includes global hardware accelerator program . Google currently has offices in Shanghai and Beijing. There’s much to dig into around the search giant’s upcoming China-based AI lab, which taps into China’s growing AI talent pool and could signal a move to developing China-focused products. That, plus last year, gave fuel to the idea that the firm is ‘back’ in China. The Shenzhen presence is a more subtle development, a nod to the importance of the city for Google’s business. The Shenzhen office is likely to be used by a number of teams that already spend a lot of time in the city. Google decided that something more permanent was preferable to working out of hotels or public spaces. The firm’s China-based sales team, its hardware team and those in logistics, sourcing, supply are most likely to make use of it. Further down the line it seems possible that Google might opt for an office space that is more permanent — and more — but for now we understand that there’s no timeline for that. The Shenzhen base also reflects Google’s position following to acquire a large chunk of HTC’s smartphone business. , Google has also ramped up its hardware efforts in China. Its headcount for its Shanghai-based hardware engineering jumped to more than 100 from just 20 one year ago, the publication said. “I expect Google to make its Home products and more in Shenzhen. No doubt they have staff visiting frequently,” , General Partner at HAX, told TechCrunch. “Considering the push they had at CES and the fact that they are expanding the product line there will probably be more Googlers to join the ranks of Apple, Amazon and other companies’ staff in the watering holes and eateries of Shenzhen, in Nanshan or Futian,” he added. |
Bitconnect, which has been accused of running a Ponzi scheme, shuts down | Fitz Tepper | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | Bitconnect, the lending and exchange platform that was long suspected by many in the crypto community of being a Ponzi scheme, has . In the platform said the shutdown is attributed to “continuous bad press” surrounding the platform, two cease and desist letters from both Texas and North Carolina’s securities boards, and continuous DDoS attacks on the platform. While the platform says they’re refunding all outstanding loans at a rate of $363.62 USD (an average of the token’s price over the last 15 days), the Bitconnect token is currently trading down ~80% and worth less than $40, so while users may have been made whole on a BCC-equivlent, many are certainly suffering severe financial losses in terms of USD or Bitcoin (which is how they made their original investment). Many in the cryptocurrency community have openly accused Bitconnnect of running a Ponzi scheme, . The platform was powered by a token called BCC (not to be confused with ), which is essentially useless now that the trading platform has shut down. In the last The token has plummeted more than 80% to about $37, down from over $200 just a few hours ago. If you aren’t familiar with the platform, Bitconnect was an anonymously-run site where users could loan their cryptocurrency to the company in exchange for outsized returns depending on how long the loan was for. For example, a $10,000 loan for 180 days would purportedly give you ~40% returns each month, with a .20% daily bonus. Bitconnect also had a thriving multi-level referral feature, which also made it somewhat akin to a pyramid scheme with thousands of social media users trying to drive signups using their referral code. The platform said it generated returns for users using Bitconnnect’s trading bot and “volatility trading software”, which usually averaged around 1% per day. Of course profiting from market fluctuations and volatility is a legitimate trading strategy, and one used by many hedge funds and institutional traders. But Bitconnect’s promise (and payment) of outsized and guaranteed returns led many to believe it was a ponzi scheme that was paying out existing loan interest with newly pledged loans. Below is the chart that would determine how much users would make the using the platform. All Bitconnect loans were denominated in U.S dollars but had to be made in BCC, the platform’s native cryptocurrency. So in order to make a loan users would have to deposit bitcoin into the platform then exchange it for BCC at whatever the market rate was. And loan interest and principal was also only paid out only in BCC, meaning users would have to convert it back to bitcoin (and then if desired, USD) after the loan term was finished. The requirement of having BCC to participate in the lending program led to a natural spike in demand (and price) of BCC. In less than a year the currency went from being worth less than a dollar (with a market cap in the millions) to a all-time high of ~$430.00 with a market cap above $2.6B. But now with no other uses for the token, it’s likely that the price will continue to plummet. The company did say that the and that trading for the BCC token will continue there. |
TWiT is suing Twitter, alleging breach of contract and trademark infringement | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | TWiT, officially known as This Week in Tech, is suing Twitter. The audio and video media platform alleges breach of written contract, breach of oral agreement, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage and trademark infringement. As the story goes, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams had previously told Leo Laporte Twitter was simply a text-based microblogging service, the lawsuit states. “Williams also acknowledged that Twitter was aware of the conflict” between the TWITTER and TWiT mark, the lawsuit alleges. “At that time Williams, on behalf of Twitter, acknowledged the confusion which likely would arise from the use of TWITTER in the marketplace, as well as instances of actual confusion which already had arisen.” Because Twitter and TWiT were relatively different, Laporte and Williams agreed to allow the trademarks to coexist, “conditioned on each company continuing its own unique distribution platform,” TWiT writes in its suit. As the lawsuit alleges, what happened on Twitter — short, 140-character bursts of text — was very different from the audio and video TWiT produced on its platform. In 2009, however, Laporte felt concerned that Twitter was going to move in on TWiT’s audio and video, the lawsuit states. That’s when Laporte allegedly reached out to Williams, who told Laporte “we’re not expanding to audio or video under the Twitter brand,” the lawsuit states. In May 2017, however, . In July, TWiT’s attorneys demanded that Twitter stop expanding the use of the Twitter trademark. “Since that time, the parties have engaged in communications with the goal of informally resolving this dispute,” the lawsuit states. “These efforts have not resolved the dispute, and Twitter continues its expansion into TWiT’s business in breach of its agreement with Plaintiffs, refuting its representations and promises made, and infringing on Plaintiffs’ intellectual property rights, all to Plaintiffs’ injury.” TWiT is seeking a relief including a preliminary and permanent injunction that orders Twitter to stop using the mark in connection with the distribution of audio and video content, and “any and all profits derived from the unlawful acts.” Neither TWiT nor Twitter were immediately available for comment. [scribd id=369311229 key=key-x51FCdKYzvtC7l83Pi6s mode=scroll] |
In a close vote, the Senate ends debate on warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | On Tuesday, the Senate undertook a cloture vote to end debate on a bill that would renew a controversial legal loophole that provides U.S. intelligence agencies with a means for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. With 60 for and 38 against, the Senate voted in favor of cloture, a considerable blow to privacy advocates who have long pushed for reform. A two-thirds majority cloture vote of 60 is necessary to end a Senate filibuster. The vote ran for over an hour, slowing down considerably as the final votes trickled in and eventually slowing to a halt at 58-38. The bill in question is known as S. 139 or the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017, a six-year reauthorization of The bill, which renews an NSA surveillance program, with little resistance last week in a 256-164 vote before making its way in front of the Senate. Following the House vote, Senators Rand Paul and Ron Wyden vowed to filibuster the Section 702 bill when it reached their chamber. I’m heading to the floor to vote NO on cutting off debate on a bill that would allow the government to conduct warrantless searches of your private communications. — Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) Leading into the vote, Wyden and Paul rejecting the FISA bill as an “end-run on the Constitution.” “To be clear, FISA’s purpose is to collect foreign intelligence, but without additional meaningful constraints, Congress is allowing the government to use information collected without a warrant against Americans in domestic court proceedings,” four Senators wrote. Tuesday’s cloture vote was an attempt to sidestep the promised filibuster, which had five participants — three Democrats and two Republicans — on the day of the vote. Critics of the bill have urged support for the , a surveillance reform-oriented alternative to the straight renewal of Section 702. Remarkable scene playing out on the Senate floor as Kennedy (not voted yet) migrates from a huddle of privacy hawks to huddling with GOP leadership over ending debate on FISA as vote stuck at 58. — Tal Kopan (@TalKopan) The Senate vote tightened in the evening hours, as the Senate’s privacy hawks worked to drum up support for further debate around the surveillance bill, opening the door for amendments that could limit the government’s ability to use the loophole to surveil American citizens without first obtaining a warrant. Unfortunately for privacy reformers and anti-surveillance lawmakers, the Senate just voted to close that door, moving a bill forward to extend Section 702 surveillance for six more years. A full vote on the bill, which is widely expected to pass, could happen as soon as mid-week. |
The Awl is shutting down | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | , the hard-to-classify site that published compelling , and much more, at the end of January, along with . The site was founded in 2009 by Gawker alums Choire Sicha and Alex Balk, and while you could definitely hear echoes of the Gawker style, it soon established itself as a home for a much wider range of writing. The Awl in 2016, then back to WordPress last year, with editor Silvia Killingsworth , “The move to Medium was a cool experiment, in my opinion, but the year is up and personally I missed the ads.” As for the impending shutdown, the official announcement begins: It is with a mixture of disappointment and relief that we are announcing the cessation of editorial operations on The Awl at the end of this month. For nearly a decade we followed a dream of building a better Internet, and though we did not manage to do that every day we tried very hard and we hope you don’t blame us for how things ultimately turned out. |
DJI teases its latest device ahead of next week’s reveal | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | null |
Curve, the fintech that connects all your cards to a single card and app, gets full consumer launch | Steve O'Hear | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | , the London fintech startup that offers a platform that lets you consolidate all your bank cards into a single Curve card and app to make it easier to manage your spending, is finally launching to U.K. consumers. Up until now, the service remained in beta and was only officially available to business users. In a call with Curve founder and CEO Shachar Bialick, he described the consumer launch as a major milestone for the company, noting that 50,000 people have signed up to its waitlist, in addition to the 100,000 or so users who joined Curve in its beta phase. Users on the waiting list will begin being activated as of today, with the usual viral loop built in that means if you invite a friend, you can skip the queue. It’s free to join, although a premium version of the Curve card is also available for £50 that offers additional perks. : Like a plethora of fintech startups, Curve is building an app that essentially turns your mobile phone into a financial control center to help you manage “all things money.” But rather than building, say, a new current account or a personal financial manager that scrapes data from your existing bank accounts — as is the case with the challenger banks such as and Starling, or chatbots and , respectively — the startup’s “attack vector” (as Monzo’s Tom Blomfield calls ) is a card and app that lets you connect all your other debit and credit cards so you only ever have to carry a single card. Once you’ve added your cards to Curve, you use the Curve app to switch which underlying debit or credit cards you wish the Curve MasterCard to spend from, and track and see a single and consolidated view of your spending regardless of which card was charged. Additional functionality includes being able to lock your Curve card at a touch of a button, instant spend notifications, cheaper FX fees than your bank typically charges when spending abroad or in a foreign currency and the ability to switch payment sources retroactively. The latter is dubbed “Go Back in Time” and means if you make a purchase via Curve that gets charged to a card other than you intended, you have two weeks to change your mind ( to see why this is clever and useful). More broadly, Bialick says Curve’s consumer launch represents a further step toward the startup’s vision for fintech convergence. The bet that the Curve founder made when he started the company in 2015 was that whenever there’s disruption — in this case, following technological and regulatory changes, a plethora of new fintech companies are unbundling various parts of the banking sector — this inevitably leads to fragmentation. What then eventually follows is convergence. Curve, like other fintechs, is seeking to fill that void with a platform that re-bundles various financial products but in a way that puts the consumer in control. We can already see evidence of how this is playing out with Curve’s single view of your spending and the way the platform is entirely agnostic to where your money is stored. Bialick is pretty fond of saying that banks do a good job of looking after your money (just as well, — more on that below) and that nobody needs to become a bank in order to provide a financial control center and nobody needs to switch banks to access one. He also believes that by offering a Curve MasterCard (a standard that is pretty much accepted everywhere and supports contactless, chip and PIN, magstripe and ATM withdrawals) that re-routes all of your spending through Curve, it has other advantages over being asked to switch banks. That’s because, argues Bialick, a sprawling fintech and financial services landscape means that we have more bank accounts and cards than ever, and while account aggregation isn’t new or unique (indeed, lets you pull in transaction data from external bank accounts), on its own it doesn’t solve fragmentation at the point of payment. For example, I have two current accounts with incumbent banks, a credit card, and more recently TransferWise’s multi-currency account and debit card. Three of those are already plugged into my Curve card and there is nothing stopping me from adding the likes of Revolut, Monzo, Starling or Tandem’s credit card, too. (Noteworthy, both TransferWise founder Taavet Hinrikus and Tandem founder Ricky Knox ). Bialick also tells me that Curve, like just about every other fintech, plans to take advantage of Open Banking/PSD2, recent legislation in the U.K./Europe that makes it a requirement for banks to let third-party apps access a customer’s transaction data and make payments on their behalf (with permission, of course). Once this is added, probably much later in the year, Curve will be able to track all your spending, not just card transactions, giving it a much fuller picture of your financial life. The plan then is to put that spending data to better use on your behalf through , a kind of curated app store for financial and other related products. The idea is that Curve will connect to the best financial services, including fintechs, but also from major banks, to help you get more from your money. It’s similar, in varying degrees, to the vision of , Monzo’s upcoming curated partnerships or . Then there are a long list of Personal Finance Manager apps, chatbots or even fintech startups like Bud, offer their own fintech marketplaces powered by your transaction data. And that’s before the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple or Facebook make their first move into Open Banking, as much as any fintech. To that end, Bialick says that, although being able to see all of your spending in a single place is useful, many people actually find viewing their transactions and balance quite stressful. What they really want are better tools that put them in control and help with the management of their money, meaning that they need to worry about their finances less. Meanwhile, I’m hearing that Curve is working on a partnership with multinational bank Santander (which, as noted, is a backer of Curve through Santander Ventures). This, if my sources are correct, will see a co-branded version of Curve offered to Santander customers within a couple of the regions it operates. I also understand the startup is gearing up for further fundraising in the form of a sizeable Series B later this year. |
Diversis Capital acquires Marketron, maker of monetization software for radio and TV | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | , a company whose software helps radio and TV broadcasters manage their advertising, has a new owner and a new CEO. The company that it has been acquired by private equity firm Diversis Capital. (The previous owner, BlackRock Capital, will remain an investor.) It also announced that Michael Collins, previously the CEO of mobile ad startup Adelphic, is taking over from Jeff Haley as CEO. Marketron serves traditional broadcasters (more than 7,000 radio and TV stations) and was founded back in 1969, so it might not seem like the obvious next move for Collins, who left Adelphic last year following . Collins explained that he first worked on the deal as a partner at Diversis — then the firm suggested “jumping over to the CEO role” at Marketron, a move that ended his “brief flirtation with private equity.” As for why he took the role, Collins noted that — and when he’s talking about radio, he means traditional, terrestrial radio stations, where digital streaming remains “a small part” of overall revenue. “It’s our job to future-proof their business,” Collins said. That might include doing more with streaming, but he said it also means exploring programmatic ad-buying. And he suggested that radio stations will do better with advertisers as they focus less on a “channel-based approach,” and more on an “audience-based approach” — in other words, on the fact that they give advertisers access to a local audience. “Local market advertising is a big — I don’t want to say untapped, but certainly not fully-tapped opportunity,” he added. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Collins said that Marketron was profitable at the time of the acquisition, and that Diversis is making a sizable investment in the company: “They’re not just funding losses — the investment they’re putting in is funding growth.” |
The nanny of former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski has filed an excruciatingly detailed lawsuit | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | Former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski, who has been accused of stealing trade secrets from former employer Waymo, might have thought things couldn’t get much worse. But a new lawsuit filed by Levandowski’s former nanny suggests that the exact opposite is true. In fact, much of the nanny’s lawsuit — filed by a personal injury attorney in Fair Oaks, Calif., and rife with complaints, including of a retaliatory and hostile work environment, age discrimination, failure to pay wages, and other labor and health code violations — reads rather like a concerted attempt to ruin Levandowski, given what are arguably a lot of extraneous details. For example, the suit cites with little certainty the names and jobs of people who were discussed during family dinner conversations in an effort to paint a picture of Levandowski’s work life, which the nanny appeared to be trying to document closely, beginning last February. It also attempts to document who visited Levandowski’s home throughout the nanny’s employment with Levandowski’s family, which began in late 2016 and ended roughly six months later. Other, perhaps more applicable observations of the former nanny, Erika Wong, include her unhappiness with Levandowski’s requests that she let his sons cry themselves to sleep on occasion, and recollections certain to embarrass him, including the “various sized flesh colored dildos” along with “nipple clamps, black with torture adjustable settings,” found by one of his children after he opened a dresser drawer in Levandowski’s bedroom. Wong — who, according to her lawsuit, worked briefly for a law firm that specialized in workers compensation — also took copious notes about Lewandowski’s comings and goings and what he was bringing into his home. Here’s one scene outlined in the filing that allegedly took place the evening of February 23, 2017: Wong arrived in the early evening and Levandowski was on the phone. Wong was speaking to an attorney, she alleges was Ehrlich for several hours. She noticed Levandowski was profusely sweating and walking around in circles in the living room. Wong sat at the dining table, close to Levandowski. Levandowski screamed “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” all evening. He stated, “How could they do this to me?” “Miles, what about the clause, you and Abby said this would work!! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! “What do I do with the discs? What do the contracts say?? Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” What about Ognen, John, Izzy, and Rich Bender? All of you said all said this would work!!! Shit! Shit! Shit!” It’s all mine, the money, the deals, it’s all mine. What about ‘the shit?’ These are all my fucking deals!!! All of you fucking attorneys and Randy said this would work!” Wong further describes in her lawsuit Levandowski coming home with former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, his then boss, at which point she says Levandowski brought into his home: . . .A copper wiring device made up of roughly 60 intertwined individual copper wirings, wrapped in thick yellow rubber that had a serial number on it. There was also a large flat lid that had holes on all the edges, a large steel screw, and hexagonal steel washer (heavy, palm size). Wong alleges the washer and screw are similar to those used on circuit boards, to keep from coming loose from “vibrations.” Her suit also notes that Levandowski also brought home: . . . a white bucket that contained circuit boards, items related to circuit boards and various reflective lenses. Wired was and several outlets covering the lawsuit suggest that Wong’s claims raise new questions about Levandowski’s business conduct. We don’t have a horse in this race, but we think that’s probably giving it too much credit given the quality of suit, which, notably, is seeking damages of more than $6 million. (The Register has similarly called the filing a “ ” that reads “like a stream of consciousness or a series of hastily scribbled notes typed out one after the other.”) Either way, the salacious details are likely the last thing that Levandowski needs right now. The former Uber engineer is already at the center of a now yearlong battle between Uber and Levandowski’s former employer, Waymo. In fact, the two sides will meet at long last in a courtroom to duke it out. As those following the drama well know already, a year ago, Waymo, the autonomous car company once known as Google’s self-driving car outfit, announced it was suing Uber for trade-secret theft. More specifically, Waymo accused Levandowski of downloading 14,000 secret documents as he was leaving the company in order to launch his own self-driving truck startup, Otto, in early 2016. Nine months later, Uber for a reported $680 million, and Waymo believes that Uber was complicit from the outset in what it claims is trade theft. Levandowski has denied any wrongdoing. Uber has also denied any wrongdoing, despite that a former manager on the company’s corporate surveillance team told federal prosecutors of a secret messaging system designed to “destroy communications that might be considered sensitive.” You can check out Wong’s lawsuit below. by on Scribd
|
2018 could bring the IPOs that tech has been promised for years | Alex Wilhelm | 2,018 | 1 | 16 |
After years of drought and parched conditions, the U.S. tech IPO market could see a number of well-known players push forward with their debuts in 2018. That sentiment is grounded in the number of companies currently rumored to have filed or started preparation for a public debut. However, the wave may not manifest. In the past few years, there has been a surprising dearth of IPO activity. That lack of tech IPOs matters for the technology industry as liquidity is often the stuff that drives reinvestment. Notably, raising capital hasn’t been a problem for venture capitalists. But are distorting the tech ecosystem’s makeup. It may be . That said, it may be . Hell, even due to the market’s current oddities. But venture capitalists are, to some degree, raising on borrowed time. Paper returns must become real at some point. And given the , there is quite a lot of defrosting to get to. Therefore, 2018’s IPO market matters quite a lot. With that in mind, let’s peek at the state of unicorns looking to go public. The American stock market is on a historic tear, regularly setting all-time highs while the president trumpets each new threshold the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaks. The Nasdaq is now thousands of points higher than the high watermark it set in the dot-com boom. Times are good, but the IPO cadence is not, as we alluded to above. Last December, some data about the recent IPO market that was succinct: As for tech [in 2017], there were 37 IPOs that raised $9.9 billion. Again, that’s a solid increase from the 21 IPOs in 2016 that raised a paltry $2.9 billion. But it’s still considerably below the 56 IPOs in 2014 that raised $32.9 billion. That data, covering the U.S. market, shows the massive gaps in liquidity over the years. Why the data isn’t stronger when it comes to the number of IPOs that we see in the domestic market, especially in light of 2017’s ebullient stock market, isn’t clear. Put another way: So markets are up, and IPOs may finally follow suit. Who is crashing through? Let’s find out. Partially summing the 2018 IPO narrative this morning was He noted that a number of famous unicorns are pushing toward public debuts: Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has picked banks for an upcoming IPO that could value the company at $100 billion, . This comes on top of the confidential filing for Dropbox, Spotify’s direct listing plan and continuing talk of a first-half Lyft float. We’ve covered , and . Xiaomi is a firm that we’ve yet to really hit on from a financial angle, which we’ll fix. But the list is large enough to warrant attention as-is. Add in , and the list starts to look impressive. Indeed, the amount of market value that could go public is huge: Dropbox’s ; Spotify is ; Pinterest ; and Lyft is . According to , Xiaomi could be looking for a $100 billion valuation in its flotation. If all those IPOs actually happen this year, it would pump quite a lot of cash-on-cash returns through the VC ecosystem ahead of an inevitable correction. If that happens, perhaps VCs can raise again before summer turns to winter. Autumn may persist, however, as these prior warnings from , and show. Even we . Happily for unicorn IPO bulls, there is more than mere IPO rumor to suggest that many big names will go public in 2018. Barrett Daniels, an , and , told Crunchbase News that he too has heard that IPOs are looking solid for the current year: “Literally everyone I know in the IPO world, and I am talking about some really smart people that are very much in the know when it comes to IPOs, think 2018 is going to be a monster year,” Daniels explained “That said, guessing how the IPO market is going to play out in a given year is an impossible exercise and one that often makes people look silly.” That last quip, about looking silly, is quite fair. So before we leave with our hopes high for an active cycle, let’s caveat. Even though market conditions look good, and there are companies long-incubated that are ready to go, don’t be too certain that we will indeed finally see the IPO wave that has long been expected. In the past, we have seen a wide range of results from IPO-ready companies. Box tried to go out but had to try again. AppDynamics nearly got out but got bought. Good Technology thought that it was going to go public, as well. It was wrong. So just because there are a number of companies pointing in the direction of an IPO does not guarantee that such an exit will happen. 2018 may finally be the year that 2017, 2016 and 2015 just couldn’t be. However, it could be a repeat. But today, the omens look positive. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 29 | null |
Marijuana-friendly states ask Congress to make banking legal for the weed industry | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | Recreational marijuana might be having its moment, but that doesn’t mean that all the kinks are worked out. Because of laws that still classify it as an illicit substance on the federal level, the banking industry has yet to warm up to the burgeoning weed business for fear of criminal liability. To alleviate those fears, a bipartisan group of 18 attorneys general from states with recreational and medical marijuana wants to bring the industry’s financial side out of the shadows, and they’re asking Congress for help in a The grey market makes it more difficult to track revenues for taxation purposes, contributes to a public safety threat as cash intensive businesses are often targets for criminal activity, and prevents proper tracking of large swaths of finances across the nation. To address these challenges, we are requesting legislation that would provide a safe harbor for depository institutions that provide a financial product or service to a covered business in a state that has implemented laws and regulations that ensure accountability in the marijuana industry such as the SAFE Banking Act (S. 1152 and H.R. 2215) or similar legislation. This would bring billions of dollars into the banking sector, and give law enforcement the ability to monitor these transactions. The weed industry still largely relies on cash — every dispensary has an ATM in the corner — but a few creative solutions exist. One, a company heralds itself as the “first legitimate debit payment solution for the cannabis industry,” offering consumers an app-based debit account linked to their regular banking accounts that circumvents the laws that discourage banks from working with marijuana retailers. In a statement, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra cited the Trump administration’s increased pressure on states with legal marijuana as a significant obstacle to an industry that is already generating hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue across states that enacted legalization. “Congress has the power to protect a growing $6.7 billion industry and the public safety of our communities,” Becerra said in a statement today. “My team at the Department of Justice is committed to implementing and enforcing the law in California in a way that most effectively protects the health and safety of our people.” The industry was shaken recently by Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to rescind Obama-era Justice Department guidance around state and federal tension around the issue, informally known as the “ .” That guidance acknowledged that while marijuana remained illegal on the national level, federal prosecutors could deprioritize enforcement on the issue, leaving the states to handle legality for themselves. “There is still a lot we don’t know about what enforcement priorities the Justice Department will implement,” Colorado Attorney General Cynthia H. Coffman said in a statement at the time. “I expect, however, that the federal government will continue to focus their enforcement efforts and resources on combatting the gray and black markets and diversion, and not target marijuana businesses who abide by our state’s laws.” While some state leaders aren’t nervous yet, the shift has made skittish some marijuana-focused businesses and states that are enjoying the tax benefits. Without protective legislation from Congress, a working relationship with the banking industry is out of reach and increased scrutiny from the Justice Department seems imminent. You can read the full letter, embedded below. [scribd id=369299318 key=key-0k5XpwsXprB0rCWmHI8X mode=scroll] |
Lawsuit filed by 22 state attorneys general seeks to block net neutrality repeal | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | A by the attorneys general of 22 states seeks to block the Federal Communications Commission’s recent controversial vote to repeal Obama era Net Neutrality regulations. The filing is led by New York State Attorney General Schneiderman, who called rollback a potential “disaster for New York consumers and businesses, and for everyone who cares about a free and open internet.” The letter, which was filed in the United States District Court of Appeals in Washington, is cosigned by AGs from California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Washington DC “An open internet – and the free exchange of ideas it allows – is critical to our democratic process,” Schneiderman added in . “The repeal of net neutrality would turn internet service providers into gatekeepers – allowing them to put profits over consumers while controlling what we see, what we do, and what we say online.” This isn’t the first major joint effort to shoot down the ruling — the suit comes as 49 Democratic Senators and one Republican for the dubiously named Restoring Internet Freedom ruling. D.C.-based non-profit public interest group Public Knowledge also issued a protective petition today, asking the D.C. Court of appeals to . Immediately following the FCC’s vote, advocacy group Free Press to sue the FCC, citing, “Chairman Pai’s deeply flawed legal reasoning on several points.” You can add Mozilla to the list of organizations filing a petition in federal court this week. As the Firefox maker notes , “the FCC decision made it clear that suits should be filed 10 days after it is published in the Federal Register, which has not yet occurred. However, federal law is more ambiguous. Due to the importance of this issue, even though we believe the filing date should be later, we filed in the event a court determines the appropriate date is today.” |
Expanding into new markets, Namely adds former Box exec, Graham Younger, as president | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | Graham Younger, a former executive vice president of Box and longtime enterprise software executive, is joining the human resources services provider as its new president. The New York-based company, which provides human resources management software for mid-sized companies, is growing, and has plans to expand its geographic footprint with offices in Los Angeles and Atlanta. And Younger is seen as key to that effort, and the company’s march toward an eventual public offering. Younger’s addition to the Namely organization, where he will handle operations from Los Angeles, indicates the city’s growing strength in a traditionally under-represented aspect of its startup technology landscape — enterprise software. Graham Younger, the new president of Namely Younger held roles at SAP SuccessFactors and Oracle before landing at Box. His work there brought him to the attention of Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks Animation’s software subsidiary Nova, where he worked until the company was sold in 2016 and the Nova project wound down. “I’ve been impressed by Namely’s ability to give companies insight into their biggest investment: human capital. We’re in the midst of a talent war, and companies that are able to better serve and understand their talent will win,” says Younger in a statement. With more than $150 million raised from True Ventures, Matrix Partners and Sequoia Capital, Namely is certainly in a position to prep for a public offering — something Younger had experience with at Box, where he increased revenue by roughly $200 million. The bull run in the current public markets seem to be encouraging a slew of technology to go public, and although Younger declined to discuss specific plans for a public offering, the company is clearly prepping to give its investors some liquidity. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.