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‘Everything Sucks!’ 90s kid nostalgia-fest arrives on Netflix February 16 | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuG2uAWVlP4&w=680&h=383] I know this trailer is meant to evoke a connection with all the dumb shit I remember from elementary and high school, and it does. But it’s also just depressing. The show could be good though (we’ll find out when all episodes arrive streaming on February 16), and maybe you’re happier to indulge than I am so ymmv. |
China’s Chery will use Nvidia-powered ZF ProAI for Level 3 autonomous cars | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | Chinese automaker Chery will be building cars with Level 3 autonomous features powered by supplier ZF’s ProAI platform, which itself uses Nvidia GPUs for its driving intelligence. The partnership was announced at the North American International Auto Show today in Detroit, and follows announcements from CES where Nvidia announced further collaboration with . Baidu is also a key contributor to ZF’s ProAI. Chery is one of China’s largest automakers, and having it on board as a partner is a way to ensure not only that Level 3 features will indeed make it to market, but also that it should be available at a relatively affordable price point. Chery’s cars typically pack tech into lower-priced vehicles, and based on the press release announcing this news, it sounds like that’s the plan here, too. Level 3 autonomy is a subject of some debate regarding inclusion in consumer vehicles. Some automakers and critics have expressed concern that Level 3, which still requires a driver to be able to take over manual control of the vehicle. The worry is that it could result in drivers growing too accustomed to the automated features and not being in the proper state of mind to handle driving when required by the system to take over. There’s still no timeline on when Chery plans to bring these ZF-powered vehicles to market, however, so we can expect there’s work yet to be done ensuring it’s ready and road-safe. |
With all 49 Democrats on board, Senate leaders sound off on plan to restore net neutrality | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | Democrats in the Senate have achieved unanimous party support of the plan to undo the FCC’s recently passed order gutting net neutrality. All 49 Democratic Senators and one Republican are ready and willing to officially disapprove the Restoring Internet Freedom rule, requiring only one more vote to send this bill to… on the floor of the House or at best the desk of the president. But don’t worry, there’s more to this plan. First, though, let’s hear the leaders of this bill speak winged words in recommendation and admonition. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), who leads the bill: There is a tsunami of Congressional and grassroots support to overturn the FCC’s partisan and misguided decision on net neutrality. Republicans now have a clear choice — be on the right side of history and stand with the American people who support a free and open internet, or hold hands with the special interests who want to control the internet for their own profit. Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY): When we force a vote on this bill, Republicans in Congress will — for the first time — have the opportunity to right the administration’s wrong and show the American people whose side they’re on: big ISPs and major corporations or consumers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI): Every member of Congress is going to say they support an open internet, but now it’s time to put up or shut up. I hope that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle will do the right thing. Otherwise, this is just a huge giveaway to the ISPs. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND): This isn’t a partisan issue — the vast majority of North Dakotans who have called and written to my office about this issue support strong net neutrality rules, and the FCC’s decision should be reversed. Now back to reality. , the path of using the Congressional Review Act to undo the FCC’s rule is one that is unfortunately doomed from the start. The House is very unlikely to allow the bill past it, and even if it did, the notion of the president signing off on something undermining his own administration’s efforts is laughable. Everyone in D.C. knows this. But actually overturning the FCC decision isn’t the point; it’s making net neutrality into an issue that can be addressed concretely in the midterm elections. “We want every member of Congress to have to go on the record and say whether or not they agree with what the commission just did,” Senator Schatz told me recently. Forcing a vote means in the Senate has to officially weigh in on this issue, and that makes it a very simple matter, come election season, to say whether they support net neutrality or not. Sure, they can blow smoke and attempt to obfuscate the issue, but ultimately people understand that the new rule vastly reduces the protections they have, and to support it is to support that reduction. It’s not going to be a popular decision. If it gets into the House, the same thing happens there — so that’s a good reason to root for its success in the Senate, even if it doesn’t really get it any closer to becoming law. As you read in the Senators’ statements above, they’re putting the ball squarely in the Republicans’ court. That’s not an accident, it’s a statement of fact. This is the utility of forcing a bill and the Republicans are going to be forced to take a position one way or the other. As Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has shown with her support, there’s nothing stopping a Republican from taking the better position here, though it may be risky in terms of internal party dealings. My prediction is that her choice will serve her well in the 2018 election. Those who make the other choice may find the opposite. |
MirraViz is a startup that wants to change split-screen gaming | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | wants to bring an end to gamers screen-peeking. The startup’s display technology lets different people watch different things on the same projector screen depending on where they’re sitting. The best part of this is that only you can see what’s happening on your screen. The technology is definitely still in its early stages, but it’s so, so exciting already. The highly reflective projector screens send light directly back to the projector being used so anybody within a foot or two of it can see the image, but it shows up blank to everyone else. You can do with this multiple projectors on the same screen. There are a lot of theoretical use cases for the technology, but for consumers today it’s a bit murkier. Right now, the startup is looking heavily at the gamer market where split-screen gameplay is a source of constant consternation for those convinced that their friends are cheaters. Whether this problem is severe enough to justify buying a pair of projectors and the custom screen for $1,499 is certainly a worthy question, though you also can use existing projectors and just buy the screen, which starts at $499. Where this technology could go with face-tracking or — looking even further in the future — drone-mounted projectors could enable a world of fully custom entertainment. The world of Blade Runner or Minority Report, where every ad is custom-tailored, could exist with this tech, but for now, MirraViz focused on showcasing the less dystopian, more fun use cases at CES last week. Check out the video above for more details on the technology from MirraViz CEO Michael Wang. |
Fitness app Strava exposes the location of military bases | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 28 | Strava, the popular app for tracking running, cycling and swimming, is not the most obvious go-to for exposing national secrets, but of activity from users has been found to unearth the locations of U.S. military bases worldwide. The company’s review of 2017 showed all routes taken by its users across the world. , but it came to the fore this weekend when Australian student that trails from Strava users in certain countries made it possible to identify military from the U.S. and other nations. While many major cities and regions are brightly colored due to huge amounts of activity, military locations stand out as hubs of activity in quieter areas, such as Syria, Afghanistan or Somalia. That’s exacerbated by the fact that the app is more popular in the West than places like the Middle East or Africa. If soldiers use the app like normal people do, by turning it on tracking when they go to do exercise, it could be especially dangerous. This particular track looks like it logs a regular jogging route. I shouldn't be able to establish any Pattern of life info from this far away — Nathan Ruser (@Nrg8000) Some heavy jogging activity on the beach around what looks like the reported CIA annex at Mogadishu airport — Adam Rawnsley (@arawnsley) Strava allows its users to record their exercise via GPS using a phone or wearable devices like Fitbit, . In most cases, the public data can be useful. It can help find new trails to run, find routes in new places or even identify other runners to exercise with or compete against. With over one billion activities logged in the heat map, it provides an interesting look at how many people in the world exercise. The service does offer a private mode which doesn’t share information outside of the app. The company said its heatmap is based on public data only. It would appear, then, that military personnel are sharing their information publicly, perhaps without knowing it or realizing the implication. The heatmap doesn’t include user information, but, as others on Twitter demonstrated, it is possible to visit the service and look up users based on the routes they have run publicly. That could potentially expose the identification of servicemen and women. “Our global heatmap represents an aggregated and anonymized view of over a billion activities uploaded to our platform. It excludes activities that have been marked as private and user-defined privacy zones. We are committed to helping people better understand our settings to give them control over what they share,” . A U.S. military spokesperson told the paper it is looking into the issue. |
Google confirms investment in Indonesia’s ride-hailing leader Go-Jek | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 28 | , the hail-railing service that rivals Uber and Grab in Indonesia. earlier this month, which was made alongside China’s Meituan-Dianping and Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek. The trio were part of a final tranche of a $1.2 billion round that , with . The terms value Go-Jek at around $4 billion. This deal marks the first direct investment from the U.S. tech giant in Indonesia, coming right after in December 2017. Go-Jek offers motorbikes and taxis on demand, as well as local services like grocery delivery and mobile payments. It is widely thought to be ahead of Grab and Uber in Indonesia, which is the largest economy in Southeast Asia, a region with more than 600 million consumers and rising internet adoption. More widely, Grab appears to have taken the lead across Southeast Asia as a whole. “Go-Jek is led by a strong Indonesian management team and has a proven track record of using technology to make life more convenient for Indonesians across the country. This investment lets us partner with a great local champion in Indonesia’s flourishing startup ecosystem, while also deepening our commitment to Indonesia’s internet economy,” wrote Caesar Sengupta, VP of Google’s Next Billion team which focuses in emerging markets. , but the region is tipped to see huge growth. Ride-hailing in the region is predicted to become a $20.1 billion per year industry by 2025 up from $5.1 billion in 2017, . Indonesia is likely to account for the majority of that — at more than 40 percent. Go-Jek remains active in Indonesia only, but it has previously been public on plans to expand to other markets using its Go-Pay mobile payment service. |
Bank-based blockchain projects are going to transform the financial services industry | Hugh Harsono | 2,018 | 1 | 28 |
Cryptocurrencies are constantly evolving, with popular currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum maintaining their popularity despite recent market corrections. At the core of both technologies is the cryptographically secure digital ledger known as the blockchain. It’s a digital ledger where cryptocurrency transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly. Indeed, as the popularity of cryptocurrencies has grown, so has the banking industry’s interest in blockchain for fintech, with an increased and focused push on bank-backed blockchain projects. Some of the largest projects underway include the -backed , the , and ’s blockchain consortium, signifying a growing acceptance in institutional policy to support blockchain growth Currently, banks transact with each other by creating agreements, as one would when purchasing an item from a store. A common example would be a bank agreeing to purchase a specific amount of stock for a specific cash price from another. This process, often cumbersome and slow, takes up to several days and incurs the risk that one party may default or renege on the agreement. This period of time, known as , is such an issue that an report identified it as costing the financial industry anywhere from a year. Blockchain projects have the potential to reduce, and possibly eliminate, settlement times due to their digital nature, ensuring the timely and secure processing of these operations. Other uses for bank-backed blockchain projects would include secured global currency exchange rate speeds and increased transaction security, among other benefits, eventually allowing for an overhaul of the banking industry, replacing traditional back-office clearinghouses and other outdated mediums that exist between asset sellers and buyers. The -backed is a trade finance platform aimed at international payments utilizing blockchain, with seven of its largest supporters including Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Societe Generale and Unicredit. IBM’s blockchain platform will run through the , allowing for interconnectivity between all parties in a particular secure transaction. This project is designed to be highly scalable, allowing for multiple entrants to easily integrate into the entire financial supply chain process through the secure blockchain, allowing for an unprecedented amount of transaction transparency. In mid-October, IBM revealed a with blockchain startup , spreading the influence of the Hyperledger Fabric project to global levels unseen before. Six of the world’s largest banks, Barclays, CIBC, Credit Suisse, HSBC, MUFG, and State Street, have announced backing of the and -spearheaded , joining other industry heavyweights who have already pledged their support for the project, including BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, and Santander. The UTC specifically tackles the use of blockchain technologies by traditional banks, utilizing it as a tool for more efficient transactions. Additionally, the UTC addresses the issue of currency backing, with the UTC being backed by cash at a central bank, preventing default and credit risk. These safeguards play a huge role in why the UTC has so much pledged interest, allowing banks to take part in the relatively young digital currency ecosystem. The UTC is definitely a sign of fintech adoption in the banking industry, ensuring the eventual wide-scale use of blockchain technologies on a standardized level across the globe. Blockchain consortium is another player in the bank-based blockchain space, raising in May, with four of its backers being , SBI Group, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Intel, with further support pledged from industry heavyweights such as Wells Fargo and ING. One of R3’s primary projects has been the development of their , with future plans for an infrastructure network specifically geared toward financial institutions to build their own ledger-based applications and services, implying that these banks currently have and will grow their own teams of blockchain developers. R3 is also focused on governmental acceptance of blockchain, with buy-in from these institutions signifying a drastic shift in terms of governmental compliance and usage of such fintech. By presenting credible potential resolutions of current-day issues, these projects represent large-scale efforts by the banking industry to fully embrace and integrate blockchain into their current infrastructures. Industry consumers and participants alike should be excited to see how the industry develops in the next coming months. |
Oxford University spin-out Bodle scores £6M Series A for its low-powered ‘reflective’ display tech | Steve O'Hear | 2,018 | 1 | 28 | The battery life of wearables, IoT devices, and smartphones remains one of the tech industry’s biggest challenges and often a significant barrier to mainstream adoption. (I, for one, can’t think of anything more tedious than having to charge a watch every night). There are various ways to tackle this problem, from better power management software and more efficient chips, to incremental advances in battery life. But actually, considering that the biggest drain on battery life is usually a power hungry screen, why not tackle the problem at source? Enter , a startup spun out of Oxford University, that is developing a new type of ‘reflective’ display technology that promises to use a lot less power. In fact, in some states the screen tech may require almost no power at all. To help scale the nascent company and get to the prototype stage, Bodle has raised £6 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Parkwalk Advisors, with participation from Woodford Patient Capital Trust, and returning backers Oxford Sciences Innovation and the Oxford Technology and Innovations EIS Fund (OTIF). The company has previously received investment from the University of Oxford Innovation Fund, which is also managed by Parkwalk Advisors and was set up with the explicit aim to help commercialise viable IP developed by students and faculty at Oxford. To that end, Bodle says its reflective display technology could have applications that include wearables, Internet-of-Things (IoT) displays and eReaders. In addition, should its development continue on the current trajectory, the technology could turn static printed materials, such as posters and packaging, into low-cost dynamic displays. Here’s how the startup explains the “solid-state reflective display” (SRD) tech, which was by Professor Harish Bhaskaran and postdoctoral researcher Dr Peiman Hosseini at Oxford University’s Department of Materials: Capable of use in both flexible and on-glass displays, the technology’s pixels simply reflect light, drastically reducing the power required to project an image and eliminating power requirements for a static image altogether. Colour in the image comes from a structural interference effect, whilst switching the refractive index of an ultrathin layer of phase change material generates the dynamic colour display. The materials are capable of a high enough refresh rate to deliver video. The technology has the additional benefits of being paper-thin, cost- effective, with strong performance in outdoor conditions and easier on the eyes compared to LCD and OLED-style screens. The key aspect of a solid-state reflective display is that it isn’t back-lit. Instead, it’s a solid state screen that uses other sources of light (be it sun, electric room lighting, etc) to illuminate the screen. As it stands, the Bodle team are confident of a high enough resolution to display a HD video, while the main advantage is power usage: if you don’t need to backlight the screen, your battery lasts longer, meanwhile the drain from mains is minimal. The bigger sell — and Bodle is still some way off to a commercial product — is that by drastically reducing the cost and power required, you can have screens of all shapes and sizes just about anywhere. So, for example, it might be possible to put an SRD film over a mirror or a window to create a smart window/mirror. Applications for real-world display advertising are even more obvious. Or perhaps SRD could be used to add a second screen to a smartphone or its case that lets you use certain functions of your phone, such as reading (an idea that with eInk technology). |
How publishers will survive Facebook’s newsfeed change | Michael Rucker | 2,018 | 1 | 28 |
Facebook that it would change its News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family over public content. Say goodbye to never-ending sponsored posts from Tasty, CNN, and other brands that have embraced the platform. Time to say hello to more personal posts featuring commenting and sharing from your friends. Sounds like the original version of Facebook, no? Facebook’s News Feed change pushes hard to create a better user experience for its users by focusing on meaningful interactions between people. This is critical for its business as the tech giant seeks to move back to its core mission of not just connecting people, but connecting people In a year that was rife with Russian interference, public trust issues, and content policing concerns (… ), Facebook is now focused on reassuring the public by rebuilding its brand and delivering an amazing user experience. But this leaves media professionals that have increasingly leveraged Facebook for content distribution and monetization in a pickle. Publishers in particular are seriously worried. But should they be? Facebook’s user base is formidable. With ~2B worldwide monthly active users, Facebook is a critical tool for publishers who seek to grow their audience. Through the social media giant, publishers found an easy platform with incomparable traffic by which to distribute content. Facebook made it easy by cultivating publisher relationships in an effort to make Facebook a destination for more than just wall posts and photos of your friends babies. However, for Facebook, this strategy has turned the platform into a destination where users passively scroll. Time spent on the platform has lost its luster as a key metric for Facebook, says Mark Zuckerberg. Even as Daily Active Users with an average growth rate of 4.5% over the past two years. “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.” Active use of the platform, where user behavior is deeply social and emotional in nature, is far more valuable to Facebook, whose survival depends on an active, engaged user base. This new value equation has created a more relevant time-based metric for Facebook, with Zuckerberg reporting in Facebook’s 2017 Q3 earnings call that “time spent is not a goal by itself here; what we really want to go for is time well spent”. This quote sounds all too familiar to a at YouTube in 2012 to focus on watch time instead of views. YouTube had been focused on growing viewership and the video platform’s publisher monetization was specifically tied to views. More views equals more ads. More ads equals more money. However, YouTube realized that bad views were not good for the platform in the long term and were creating a new form of publisher whose sole goal was to create view, no drive meaningful time on the platform. Time spent engaged with better quality content would be more valuable. In the short term, some publishers would lose money and others would be put out of business. The thumbnails and titles that encouraged clicks and views would go away. Overtime, the good content that kept people engaged meaningfully would win. For publishers, passive scrolling through sponsored content was a blessing. Facebook enabled more eyeballs to discover their content in a world where competition for user attention is fierce. Publishers began to rely on social media channels like Facebook for increased traffic, which worked when public content was easily discoverable and prioritized on the News Feed. Now however, publishers cannot proceed with the same content distribution and monetization strategy, expecting the same outcomes. We’ve seen before how Facebook can greatly impact a the business outcome for a publisher and how necessary it is to adapt one’s growth strategy accordingly. Consider Zynga, the mobile gaming company behind the FarmVille craze (I know you have fallen prey to those crops). Zynga launched its games as Facebook apps and based on the company’s popularity on the social network (by the end of 2009, of Facebook users were playing FarmVille). The company then went public in 2011. However, the dependence on Facebook ultimately hurt its business. When Facebook that hurt Zynga’s method of reaching players and making money (removing third party ability to push notifications and make requests and taking 30% of revenue), Zynga had a choice: part ways with Facebook and focus hard on a standalone owned-and-operated destination or reconfigure a Facebook partnership. Zynga leadership before shifting to a stronger O&O and mobile strategy and the results were disastrous: To win in a shifting social media environment, publishers will seek to mitigate their dependence on Facebook to generate audience traffic, since that traffic will now decrease. While some publishers that have taken advantage of clickbait images and titles may fail to succeed in this transition, those publishers that are truly creating good content with a good user experience will pull through. This initial dip in traffic will no doubt taper over time, since users will still seek a solution to discover and consume publisher content, even if Facebook is not it. Audiences always desire (more) content from their favorite outlets and from brands that they trust. Winning publishers can provide this solution by focusing their content distribution and monetization outside of the Facebook News Feed. Publishers will buckle down on their owned-and-operated properties and ensure that they are creating the best user experience on the destinations they can actually control. Consider HuffPost’s property. Dedicated to featuring provocative cover story content. Highline also has impeccable site design. By investing in this O&O property’s content and its UX, HuffPost positions Highline as a user-friendly content discovery destination, and a daily habit for its users. Highline’s landing page is design friendly When it comes to content monetization, publishers must innovate their advertising strategies as well. By moving beyond ‘boring banner ads’ and tapping into the shifting audience preferences for higher quality and more engaging content, publishers will increasingly look to offer advertising solutions that better actively engage users. It’s no surprise that the ‘active engagement’ trend influencing Facebook’s News Feed decision equally applies to advertising content. Publishers have already recognized their need to differentiate themselves from simply being a place for eyeballs. is an example of how publishers have invested in branded content creation (a big part of Buzzfeed’s strategy over the past couple of years). With the landscape questioning viewability and impcat of programmatic platforms, more publishers are offering massive takeovers / high profile premium ad placements. Additionally, publishers are beginning to reposition themselves as technology companies (the Washington Post now!). We have seen publishers like The New York Times invest heavily in new emerging technologies like Virtual Reality . And I have seen how publishers ability to offer unique content, formats and distribution that have for brands has opened up new revenue streams. Those publishers that lean in to more emerging forms of content and storytelling will not only win audiences, but more ad dollars that will be shifting away from Facebook with these recent changes. |
Intel reportedly notified Chinese companies of chip security flaw before the U.S. government | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 1 | 28 | Intel is not having that great of year thus far in the face of a slew of information about security flaws in it hardware coming out — and you can add another new report from today, which suggests that , to that list. is reporting that Intel notified some of its customers of the security flaws in its processors, dubbed Spectre and Meltdown, but left out the U.S. government as part of that. Some of the companies Intel notified included Chinese technology companies, though the report suggests there is no evidence that any information was misused. An Intel spokesperson told that the company wasn’t able to tell everyone it planned because the news was made public earlier than expected. The latter part of that is probably going to sting a little harder because it would seem that Intel was going to give the U.S. government little lead time ahead of disclosure of the flaw, as : This is grade A crap. Several people told me Meltdown/Spectre's planned disclosure was set for Jan. 9 but was revealed on Jan. 3 after a PoC came out. Based on WSJ, Intel was going to tell the US gov. only a week before disclosure?! It knew since June! — Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) “The Google Project Zero team and impacted vendors, including Intel, followed best practices of responsible and coordinated disclosure,” an Intel spokesperson said. “Standard and well-established practice on initial disclosure is to work with industry participants to develop solutions and deploy fixes ahead of publication. In this case, news of the exploit was reported ahead of the industry coalition’s intended public disclosure date at which point Intel immediately engaged the US government and others.” Intel has had to scramble to respond to the news, which came out nearly a week earlier than expected. Companies can notify some major customers and parties of flaws before they’re publicly disclosed so fixes and patches can come out and contain as much of the fallout as possible. The Meltdown and Specter flaws were particularly hazardous because they theoretically can and the end result is a massive cleanup effort to make sure everything gets patched. But because of the scale of the issue, and Intel’s very precarious position of having to ensure as limited impact to its customers as possible, it’s a very tricky situation to figure out who to inform and when in order to ensure everything gets resolved without the information becoming widespread and a source of additional risk for those customers. Intel reported its fourth-quarter earnings last week, after which the stock jumped nearly 10% despite the news about Meltdown and Spectre continuing to trickle in. “While we’ve made progress, I am acutely aware that we have more to do,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said on the call to discuss its fourth quarter results. “We’ve committed to being transparent, keeping our customers and owners appraised of our progress and, through our actions, building trust. Security is a top priority for Intel, foundational to our products, and it’s critical to the success of our data-centric strategy. Our near-term focus is on delivering high-quality mitigations to protect our customers’ infrastructure on these exploits. We’re working to incorporate silicon-based changes to future products that will directly address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware, and those products will begin appearing later this year. However, these circumstances are highly dynamic, and we updated our risk factors to reflect both the evolving nature of these specific threats and mitigations as well as the security challenges more broadly.” |
How visual effects studio Mr. X helped create ‘The Shape of Water’ and its lovable merman | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 1 | 28 | At first, I wasn’t impressed by ‘s visual effects. That might seem like a strange thing to say about a movie whose effects have been nominated for (though not an Oscar, despite the film’s ). What I mean is this: When I was watching, I never wondered about the technology behind the merman — the sometimes-monstrous, sometimes-beautiful aquatic character inspired by the . I knew that Doug Jones (who has of playing monsters for director Guillermo del Toro) had the role, and whenever I saw the merman, I assumed Jones was really there on set, wearing the costume as his character was tortured in a government lab by Michael Shannon’s Col. Strickland, or as he formed a relationship with the kind, mute janitor Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins. It turns out that Jones’ impressive costume and makeup (and his equally impressive performance) only account for part of what we see on-screen. Trey Harrell, CG supervisor at visual effects house , told me, “Every single shot of the film where you see the creature is a visual effects shot.” After all, Harrell said that while “Doug is an amazing actor,” his face was also hidden under “ a half inch of foam latex.” So at the very least, Mr. X had to create the merman’s eye and face movements. In other instances, like when the merman was viewed swimming inside the lab’s capsule, Mr. X was responsible for the entire creature. Mr. X’s work may have been less noticeable because Harrell said he “wanted people to believe” that it was all a combination of Jones’ performance and practical effects, rather than CG. “We weren’t going for a hyperreal, CG creature,” he said. “We wanted it to be something that plausibly looked like foam latex and silicon prosthetics, a performance that could plausibly be shot on the day.” That meant being careful about how the merman moved. In fact, Harrell said his team performed “hundreds of scans” of Jones, creating a “Doug Jones animation rig” — so whenever they designed a CG motion for the merman, they could use the rig to see if the motion felt believable for an actor in costume. Harrell, who’s also worked on del Toro projects and , said it’s part of the director’s style to “capture as much as possible in camera,” rather than relying on green screen and CG. “You know, those of us who are a certain age, our eyes are more attuned to that,” he added. “We just find that style a little more aesthetically pleasing.” That doesn’t mean Harrell is always in favor of practical, or practical-looking, effects: “You’re starting to see smaller, more personal projects take the best of both worlds. I personally don’t think it’s a binary argument. I’ve also got a background in practical prosthetics and makeup. I’m a fan of having a big toolbox.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8GwtzmoP0Y] Besides augmenting the merman, Harrell said other effects challenges included creating water effects for the opening sequence and other scenes that were shot “ ” (in other words, they weren’t actually underwater), and adding damage to a classic car. Mr. X was the only visual effects house that worked on the film — maybe a necessity with ‘s relatively small, budget, but Harrell said he “loved the hell” out of working on the film because it meant “not having a corporate infrastructure between you and the director.” “I like smaller films that make me feel stuff,” he added. |
Five myths of pre-seed investing | Anamitra Banerji | 2,018 | 1 | 28 |
Pre-seed has in prominence in recent months due to the growing gap between what founders are seeking at the seed stage and what the market is , yet conversations around pre-seed come with preconceived notions and false assumptions about the companies and investors who care about early stage funding. To break down these misconceptions, we’ve assembled a list of 5 common myths about pre-seed and share what’s behind our passion for feeding the ideas of tomorrow’s next great companies. The term pre-seed investing brings to mind a simple transaction: the founder with a great resume has an idea, the investor writes a check, and it’s no big deal if things don’t work out because it’s just an experiment. The misconception is that because companies don’t have traction data, pre-seed investors don’t have much to investigate and thus can’t evaluate deeply. This kind of zombie-like trade is far from reality. Institutional pre-seed funds such as Afore believe that pre-seed is just like any other kind of investing, with risks inherent to its stage that can be successfully mitigated. Beyond assessing founder authenticity and market opportunity, we focus on two specific areas: product and distribution. We care about unique product insights and novel distribution approaches and want to know how both will work in the short-term. We’ll learn about what experiments the founders have run to-date to validate their hypotheses, and we keep probing until we hear “I don’t know.” While pre-seeds may not have traction in data, there’s plenty of traction in thought. It’s assumed that companies seeking pre-seed investment simply aren’t good enough to raise a seed round, and must pare down their pitches and expectations in order to raise a smaller round. This misconception discourages investors from pre-seed opportunities, delivering the wrong message that there’s adverse selection at play because the company knows it’s not good enough to seek a bigger round. Raising pre-seed funding helps build and distribute the product, providing early traction with the least amount of capital. Founders are increasingly realizing that seed investors do not write the first check––with . Afore is part of a new class of pre-seed investors funding pre-product/market fit companies. Startups that lack product/market fit and the ability to scale aren’t ready for seed capital. These investors supplement the friends and family round, providing institutional capital previously available much later. Pre-seed founders should raise $500K because it’s better than bootstrapping, and eliminates the potential for the high valuations and dilution inherent with raising large seed rounds. Another myth is that backers in these earliest-stage companies are casual investors who don’t actually know what they’re doing or care about their investments. Similar to an option bet, the idea is that investors have little to lose by placing money across a multitude of opportunities. No founder likes to be an option bet or should choose an investor who doesn’t make them a priority. Funds like Afore are active investors exclusively focused on pre-seed who live and die by the success of their portfolios. Pre-seed investment isn’t an option bet to preempt the seed or Series A; it’s their bread and butter. Pre-seed is a burgeoning segment comprised of deeply thoughtful, committed institutional investors that includes pre-seed capital firms like Bee Partners, K9, Pear, Precursor, Notation, Wonder, and many others. Further highlighting marketplace need, PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association revealed that funding for companies of $1M or less is at its lowest point since 2011. Rumblings persist that pre-seed investing is a flash in the pan that will collapse into standard seed investing soon enough. This is an idea based on the inaccurate belief that pre-seed only cropped up due to a bullish investing market. Pre-seed stage companies look very different from seed stage companies in that they don’t have much traction, revenue, or product/market fit. And seed investors are uncomfortable with that level of risk. It’s hard to invest in companies without traction or revenue when compared with companies that possess cohort analysis, accurate LTV/CAC ratios and a strong grasp of their sales funnel. In this apples-to-oranges comparison, seed investors cannot also invest in pre-seed. Another factor is the increasing size of seed funds. As fund sizes scaled, seed investors were forced to write bigger checks, pushing seed rounds closer to $5M. Given that the Partner time does not scale with fund size (that is until Elon Musk invents the 30-hour day!), there is no easy way for seed funds to write pre-seed sized checks for $500K then dedicate the time and attention they deserve. As long as institutional investors have the appetite, experience and ability to take the “first check risk” well ahead of product/market fit, there will always be a need for the pre-seed round. Misconceptions about VC funds that focus on the pre-seed stage are also numerous. You may hear: pre-seed firms brand themselves that way because they can’t raise larger funds; they’d actually like to raise seed and series A funding but haven’t been successful; or it was never their true intention to invest in such early stage companies. Experience tells us otherwise. Our peer GPs all saw the venture trends early as well as the emerging gap in early stage funding and, being entrepreneurs, they took advantage. |
The legacy of Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, who passed today at 91 | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 1 | 28 | One of the great entrepreneurs of the 20th century, Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, passed away today. , Kamprad created a store — as a teenager mind you — that today has more than 400 locations, revenues of $62 billion, and a cultural ubiquity that very few consumer products could ever hope to attain. Having read the IKEA story over the years and in various forms, there are just so many lessons to take from the one-time startup turned corporate behemoth. The biggest innovation that Kamprad discovered was that consumer inconvenience could be massively lucrative. As Youngme Moon, a business professor at Harvard Business School, wrote in her book ( ): “Most global brands build their reputations around a set of positives—the good things they do for their customers. What’s intriguing about IKEA is that it has consciously built its reputation around a set of negatives—the service elements it has deliberately chosen to withhold from its customers.” IKEA is quite literally the antithesis of the view that the consumer is always right. Kamprad realized that furniture could be “flat-packed” to massively reduce the cost of shipping and transportation, which at the time were among the product’s largest cost drivers. Table legs are unwieldy, so why not just take them off? Except, now every consumer buying furniture would have to assemble it. In the case of complicated furniture items like armoires, there can easily be fifty or more steps involved in the construction of the piece, with an instruction guide that remains as confusing as ever at all the key steps. Yet consumers love it, so much so that researchers have actually studied the effect of consumers investing their own labor into a product as . What researchers have found is that consumers love products far more when they complete the assembly themselves, because the labor we invest makes it seem as though the product is ours. Irrational, yes, but that predictable love ensured that consumers repeatedly flocked to IKEA stores. Indeed, that investment of labor is so key to the brand that IKEA has crew à la Geek Squad to continue to force customers to build their furniture (or at least switch to TaskRabbit). Flat-packing was hardly the only inconvenience that IKEA created though. It purposely built big-box warehouses to sell its products on the outskirts of cities near major ports or transportation hubs — improving logistics while cutting costs due to cheaper rents and larger scale. Kamprad and his team knew that with the right price and product mix, consumers would drive to IKEA as a destination shopping experience — they had to bring their cars anyway of course to bring their purchases home. The team also understood that unlike a grocery store, furniture shopping is not a daily or weekly occurrence, and so people tended to invest significant time at the store when they finally did make the trip. That’s one of the reasons that IKEA has restaurants serving those scrumptious Swedish meatballs. The more time consumers spent in the store, the more they spent with their wallets. And when they did open their wallets, they were able to buy more and more furniture over the years as the company grew in scale. IKEA’s product lines rarely shift, and so the company can fine-tune the production of each product to minimize cost. , the Poäng chair’s price has decreased from $300 at its launch in the late 1980s to just $79 today, . Finally, and not to be underestimated, Kamprad understood that furniture didn’t have to be like a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation. He might have just gotten the timing right, but the latter half of the 20th century saw some of the first evidence that workers would actively move between cities to seek the best employment. IKEA wasn’t furniture you shipped across the country, it was furniture you dumped and bought new again. Environmentally devastating perhaps, but efficient and convenient for newly mobile young people. There is more to the story of IKEA of course, and Kamprad has received his fair share of criticism around early youth activities as and his . What’s a shame though is how many founders have never learned the stories and the lessons of the company and its success. Kamprad is hardly a household name, anymore than James Sinegal (founder of Costco) or John Mackey (founder of Whole Foods, who might be a bit more familiar to Austin-based entrepreneurs). At times in the tech startup world, we can be so narrow in our definition of a startup and of entrepreneurship, that these sorts of founders who have done things in other industries or just in very different ways don’t even register on our scopes. Yes, Larry and Sergey, Steve, and Elon are all important in the annals of our industry. But ultimately we are in the debt of hundreds of of founders who have been brilliant in their own ways. In Ingvar Kamprad’s passing, let’s try to expand our vernacular to encompass more startups, and celebrate the kind of original thinking that has completely reshaped our world. |
Here’s how to live stream the Grammys tonight | Sarah Buhr | 2,018 | 1 | 28 | Don’t have a TV or just want to watch Kesha, Cardi B and Lady Gaga walk the red carpet from the comfort of your laptop? Thanks to modern tech, that’s possible tonight. James Corden kicks off the 60th annual Grammy awards this evening, Sunday, January 28, at 7:30 pm EST/4:30 pm PST, which is set to run for three and a half hours (though, fair warning, these types of awards shows often go overtime). Plenty of top artists are up for awards this year, including the Biebs summer breakout hit “Despicito” for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. SZA, Alessia Cara, Khalid, Lil Uzi Vert and Julia Michaels are all up for Best New Artist and be sure to watch for performances from Childish Gambino, Kesha, Lady Gaga, SZA, and more. *Bonus for those with an iPhone: Siri is now capable of updating you on Grammy nominees and playing their music from Apple Music playlists. Just say things like “Hey Siri, play this year’s Grammy nominees” or “Hey Siri, who is nominated for record of the year?” Or you can check out the full list of nominees . |
The insight-industrial complex | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 1 | 28 | I don’t like tech conferences. I mean, of course I don’t, they’re not meant for people like me. I’m an introvert, so I find them exhausting, and am (presumably) less likely than an extrovert to meet interesting or contributory people. I read much faster than people talk, so they’re not a good way for me to learn things. But there’s more to my dislike than that. I find that the actual goal of conferences often seems to be quite distinct from the notional goal. The notional goal is for people to come together to learn about the field in question: some detailed specifics, some new announcements, and an overall general view of the state of the art, all under one roof. Maybe, if all goes well, to even find people to collaborate with in the future. To the extent that conferences do those things, they’re great. But at too many conferences, those intentions often seem to be incidental to the goal, which is to reify the importance and social status of the conference organizers and speakers, while in practice all else is secondary. Obviously this wouldn’t be true, or at least wouldn’t matter, if people were actually getting their money’s worth from the pearls of wisdom their “VIP” speakers drop on stage. But are they really? Speaking as an occasional alleged pearl-of-wisdom dropper myself, let me assure you: I have serious doubts. There seems to be a widespread mindset that all you really need to succeed is . That you just need to learn a little more, to integrate one more dose of perspicacity from some billionaire or guru, and then you too will have assembled enough of an arsenal of wisdom to overcome any of life’s or business’s obstacles. That what separates success from failure is a sufficiency of sage advice. This seems to be especially common among those who revere academia, or their idea of academia. The problem is this: it’s not true. Very few pearls or even paragraphs of wisdom ever actually translate into any kind of actionable plan. What’s more, if you look hard you can probably find unimpeachable wisdom arguing all sides of any given situation. Meanwhile, if you’re doing something genuinely interesting, then nobody really knows what the hell is going to work or not yet; and if you aren’t, then a dozen others are doing it too, and execution, rather than a little extra abstruse understanding is going to make the difference. Either way, pearls of wisdom seem pretty extraneous. What help is learning from others’ , when and only when the context of those mistakes is comparable to yours … but it’s rare for conferences to invite speakers to talk about their mistakes. Rather, “VIP” speakers talk about “how they made it,” and while doing so are incentivized by basic human nature to overstate their own contributions to their success, and understate those of external forces — meaning the wisdom they’re doling out is almost always heavily skewed by (frequently unconscious) self-serving bias. Far better than listening to pearls of wisdom is hearing people being challenged professionally. Again, that’s rare — although it does happen. It’s why I like TechCrunch’s conferences. (I know, I know, you’re thinking “of course he’d say that,” but it’s actually true. I vote with my feet; I can get into most tech conferences for free, and almost never do, but I always attend Disrupt.) This is because of the Battlefield format, in which a clutch of startups get to introduce themselves, which is mildly interesting … and then get grilled by skeptical industry experts live on-stage, which is the good bit. I also like “unconferences,” where you’re more likely to hear war stories and learn from others’ mistakes, rather than be expected to sit at the feet of lionized gurus and feed on what crusts of wisdom they might choose to drop. All too many formal, paid conferences, though, are part of what I call the “insight-industrial complex”: people flock to them to hear quasi-famous people rattle off pseudo-wise sound bites devoid of any actual value. This applies very much to social media, too, of course. Twitter is clearly the grassroots of the insight-industrial complex. Being insightful is not actually that important. No, really. Here’s an even more heretical thought: even being is not actually that important, whether you measure importance by success, happiness, or influence. What matters most is often — usually — execution, not wisdom; attention to detail, not vision. I’m aware of the irony that most of this essay, as with most of my TC columns, is itself structured to consist of sound bites that are arguably sort of striving in at least a vaguely insightful direction. But bear in mind you’re reading this for free, while conferences cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. By all means, go to them to network, to get an overview of your field, to witness people being challenged, and to learn from others’ mistakes. But don’t go because they feature speakers from the insight-industrial complex. |
Trucking logistics company NEXT Trucking takes in a $21 million haul | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 28 | As e-commerce and on-demand services capture increasingly larger shares of consumer spending, the methods of how things move around the world are getting their moment in the sun. Long a backwater of technology adoption, thanks to the fragmented nature of the shipping and logistics business, the advent of low-cost sensors, cheap smart phones and increasingly robust wireless networks are transforming into a sector where investors are cutting big checks at massive valuations. Newly minted billion dollar logistics companies have cropped up around the globe in the past year — from in the U.S. to , , and in China. And Now is looking to join the fray. The company has created an online marketplace for that links up shippers and carriers and raised $21 million led by the marquee Silicon Valley firm And it’s no wonder that there’s so much interest, given that the market reached $818 billion in 2015 and reaching $1.5 trillion by 2023. Founded by serial entrepreneur Lydia Yan and her husband Elton Chung, NEXT Trucking was born from Yan’s own needs to find a solution for the trucking problem her warehouse business in the U.S. faced. Yan, who’s moved between China and the U.S. over the years, started her entrepreneurial journey in Shanghai as the founder of 9luxe.com — one of China’s first fashion flash sale companies. The company was profitable in its first six months, but faced such stiff competition that Yan decided to shut it down. Moving to the U.S., Yan worked in the family business operating a string of warehouses in California. “I was more fascinated by the technology aspect,” of the business, Yan tells me. The business that Yan was running was a brokerage and warehousing business for electronics goods getting shipped from Asia. “We talked to a lot of drivers and there was no technology,” Yan says. “Truckers spend hours and hours negotiating what loads they want to take.” So Yan and her husband built a marketplace to make things more efficient. The issue was that the industry is so fragmented. Big operators only account for roughly 16% of the market, Yan says. The other 84% is run by small truckers who are trying to determine how they travel and what loads they want to take. “Our ultimate goal is to control the fleet management,” says Yan. There’s no fee for the truckers to list their services on the NEXT trucking marketplace, instead, Yan says that the company will charge shippers for the ability to book quality carriers, with real time tracking and real time proof of delivery. It’s a model that’s already brought NEXT Trucking to profitability. The company focuses on ports and freight trucking rather than long-haul trips and charges somewhere between 20% and 25% as a commission. Yan says that the company will use the money to expand to different states and for technology development. “Instead of letting the rapid decline of qualified carriers continue to and potentially destabilize our supply chain, and economy in general, we need to overhaul the way the industry works and empower the truckers,” said Lidia Yan, chief executive of NEXT Trucking in a statement. “We couldn’t watch this happen from the side of the road, so NEXT Trucking developed the first online marketplace that mitigates the negatives by building a strong, transparent community.” The company already works with customers like Pioneer, Hisense, Jinko Solar, Jakks Pacific and steamship lines, including Mistui OSK Lines, according to a statement. “Logistics is at the very core of our economy, yet it faces some real challenges. NEXT Trucking has created a marketplace powered by sophisticated technology that resolves many of the critical imbalances that exist between the shipper’s needs and driver’s availability,” Omar Hamoui, partner at Sequoia, and the newest director on the NEXT Trucking board said in a statement. “The team has tripled revenue year over year, and earned extremely high satisfaction and retention numbers on both sides of their marketplace.” |
Google is investing in Indonesia-based Uber rival Go-Jek | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | Google is back investing in ride-hailing companies. The U.S. search firm and China’s Meituan-Dianping are among the tech giants set to invest in , the Indonesia-based rival to Grab and Uber, a source with knowledge of discussions told TechCrunch. We understand a deal could be completed as soon as next week, though whether Go-Jek announces it is unclear since it has history of not disclosing new investments. that round is worth $1.2 billion, and we’re hearing that is accurate but with a caveat. These new investors are part of a follow-on to an investment made last year, according to our source. Funding rounds are often complicated and not as clean as they may appear once announced. In Go-Jek’s case, last year as an initial tranche of a planned $1.2 billion raise. Existing investors including KKR, Warburg Pincus, Sequoia Capital, Northstar Group, DST Global and NSI Ventures agreed to follow on and later in the year, too, but an allocation was left open. Now that is full and the round is complete with commitments from Google, Temasek and Meituan-Dianping. We don’t have confirmed numbers for those stakes but, as latecomers to the party, they are likely to be fairly small and strategic in nature. We understand the investment gives Go-Jek a valuation that is a touch above the $3 billion that Tencent agreed to invest at last year. Google declined to comment. Representatives from Go-Jek, Temasek and Meituan-Dianping did not respond to requests for comment. so this is a big jump, but the competition has also increased its rounds by significant multiples. Singapore-based Grab has raised more than $4 billion to date, including at a $6 billion valuation. Uber remains the world’s highest funded private tech startup with over $20 billion from investors, including . Interestingly, our source confirmed that Google itself is investing directly rather than its Google Ventures unit. Just one month ago, Google made its first direct investment in India when . That, combined with the Go-Jek investment, indicates an increased interest in India and Indonesia, two of the world’s most promising emerging markets for tech and consumer internet services, beyond the product work it is doing in both regions. It also adds another wrinkle to the complicated relationship of ride-hailing companies worldwide. Google Ventures invested in Uber in 2013 and, after , . Meituan-Dianping, meanwhile, may not be well known in the west but it is another significant addition. The company was formed through and is valued at $30 billion. Beyond providing a platform that lets physical retail stores tap the internet for business, where it hopes to rival Didi thanks to . A foray into Southeast Asia through Go-Jek makes sense in that context, but Meituan-Dianping may also look to work with Go-Jek to expand its core service — known as offline-to-online — in Indonesia, which is the world’s fourth most populous country with over 250 million people. , but the region — which is home to 600 million consumers — is tipped to see huge growth. Ride-hailing in the region is predicted to become a $20.1 billion per year industry by 2025 up from $5.1 billion in 2017, . With Southeast Asia’s largest economy, Indonesia is likely to account for the majority of that — at more than 40 percent. (You can’t accuse Google of not doing its homework.) Go-Jek itself was founded in 2011 and it began to make a name for itself a few years ago through its core motorbike tax on-demand service. Bike taxis already exist in many of Southeast Asia’s largest cities where they are popular options for cutting through congested streets and getting from A to B faster than four wheels. Go-Jek has since expanded to offer regular taxis, services and shopping on-demand and a mobile payment service, . Its core office is in Jakarta but it has an engineering presence in India. The company is widely thought to be ahead of Grab and Uber in Indonesia, which remains its only market. Uber and Grab both offer similar motorbike taxi options in parts of Southeast Asia, while Grab has also ventured into the mobile payment space. Yesterday, to boost its GrabPay service. |
Coinbase acqui-hires Memo.AI technical team management tool | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | , the white-hot cryptocurrency exchange, is bringing on more engineering talent to help it continue to capitalize on the crypto boom. The company has announced that it’s bringing on the engineering team from , a two-year-old startup that built a Slackbot for helping technical teams manage notes and instructions. Excited to announce the team is joining Coinbase! Welcome — Coinbase (@coinbase) The small SF startup announced yesterday that it will be shutting down its service on March 16 and that it won’t be accepting any sign-ups in the meantime. In a , co-founder Mircea Pașoi admitted that the company failed to “succeed in finding product/market fit and building a sustainable business.” Users will have until the service shuts down to export their data while active paying teams will be refunded. “We decided to join Coinbase because we’re super excited about the company’s mission of building an open financial system,” Pașoi wrote. SV Angel, Bloomberg Beta, Version One Ventures and Instagram Product Head Kevin Weil were among the startup’s . Memo.AI’s co-founders previously started Summify, a social network summation tool which was acquired by Twitter in 2012. While the engineer team will be headed to Coinbase, the startup’s design co-founder Liana Dumitru will be joining Dropbox. For Coinbase, the acquisition comes at a time where the team is rapidly scaling its engineering efforts to account for the sudden boom in cryptocurrency investments. The acquihire of the Memo.AI team brings on much-needed additional engineers and ones that have experience with creating pipelines to help technical teams run. |
Crunch Report | Apple pledges $350 billion investment in U.S. economy | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Tim Cook says you’ll soon be able to turn off the system that slows iPhones as the battery gets older | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | As we learned , Apple has been limiting the maximum performance of iPhones as the batteries within get older. The goal, , is to prevent random device shutdowns as time goes on and the battery’s output starts to wane. But that’s something they ought to have explained better from Day 1 of the software change; most users would never expect that swapping a battery could impact a phone’s speed. It’s a misstep that has since resulted in , , and the rollout of a new battery replacement program. And soon, it seems, you’ll be able to turn off the battery/performance balancing system all together. Tim Cook mentions the coming change in an interview with ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis: “We will tell somebody we’re slightly reducing, or we’re reducing your performance by some amount in order to not have an unexpected restart. If you don’t want it? You can turn it off. Now, we don’t recommend it, because we think people’s iPhones are really important to them, and you never can tell when something is so urgent…” You can see the relevant bit for yourself at just after the 4:00 mark: Apple had previously promised an update that would provide better insight about the life of your battery and its impact on your device, but this is the first time I’ve heard them mention allowing the user to turn off battery/performance management overall. Cook mentions that these changes, as with most things Apple rolls out, will ship to developers first (sometime next month) before arriving for all. We’ve reached out to Apple for more details. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 16 | null |
YouTube partners with Kevin Durant to expand original sports programming | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | null |
Apple rerouting employee shuttles after highway attacks shatter windows on buses during commutes | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | In the past week, five Apple commuter shuttles carrying employees to and from the company’s Cupertino offices have been attacked, several sources tell us. Windows on the buses were shattered by what employees are suspecting was a gun being fired at the vehicles. All five incidents took place off Highway 280 near Woodside, Calif. The first attack took place Friday evening, with an additional three buses targeted during yesterday morning’s commute and another one later that evening. A source tells us that due to the nature of how the windows were impacted, some suspect the weapon being used could be a BB or pellet gun. A report in today theorized that the issue could also have been caused by someone throwing rocks. In response, we’ve learned that Apple has rerouted the bus routes for employees living in San Francisco, adding 30-45 minutes of commute time each way, as the company works with authorities to see what exactly is going on. Apple has submitted a police report with a description of the suspect to local authorities. We have reached out to Apple for comment. We also have reached out to other tech companies in the area, inquiring about whether similar shuttle attacks have taken place. Facebook told TechCrunch that there had not been attacks on their shuttles. |
Nintendo’s bringing DIY robots and more to the Switch using cardboard | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | https://youtu.be/P3Bd3HUMkyU Nintendo’s big new surprise interactive experience for the Switch is now official, and it’s basically a maker kit for the portable console that uses cardboard component pieces to allow people to build a range of different creations and play with them using the console to power games that interact with the DIY components. is like a next-level LEGO, with kits that let you do things like build working pianos that interact directly with Switch software, and even make your own robots. Nintendo shows off an interactive fishing game with a real, build-it-yourself cardboard fishing rod you can use to catch stuff in-game, and a rolling bot you can remote-control with the Switch’s touchscreen, as just a couple of examples. It actually looks super fun, and there’s a variety kit and a robot kit coming out on April 20, 2018, with pricing starting at $69.99, which seems like a deal for the level of interactivity and creativity that’s available with these things. The Labo kits include all the cardboard pieces you need to build the projects they contain, as well as the Switch software necessary to run the interactive digital elements. Nintendo is also selling Labo customization kits for $10 that will ship at the same time, and provide stencils, stickers and tape that allow you to customize the creations so your cardboard robot backpack looks different from everyone else’s cardboard robot backpack. Kudos to Nintendo for once again ignoring the well-trod ground of putting more silicon and tech behind their gaming console ambitions, and instead striking out into the unknown of the weird and wacky. This looks like a really good time, and one that won’t necessarily result in a huge new source of waste plastic after people move on to the next thing. |
Watch a thought race across the surface of the brain | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | Although neuroscientists have a general idea of what parts of the brain do what, catching them in the act is a difficult proposition. But UC Berkeley researchers , visualizing based on direct measurement the path of a single thought (or at least thread) through the brain. I should mention here that as someone who studied this stuff (a long time back, but still) and is extremely skeptical about the state of brain-computer interfaces, I’m usually the guy at TechCrunch who rains on parades like this. But this is the real thing, and you can tell because not only is it not flashy, but it was accomplished only through unusually gory means. Just want to see the thought go? Watch below. But continue reading if you want to hear why this is so cool. Normal scalp-based electroencephalography (EEG) is easy to do, but it really can only get a very blurry picture of brain activity near the surface, because it has to detect all that through your hair, skin, skull, etc. What if you could take all that stuff out of the way and put the electrodes right on the brain? That’d be great, except who would volunteer for such an invasive procedure? Turns out, a handful of folks who were already getting open-brain surgery did. Sixteen epilepsy patients whose brains needed to be examined closely to determine the source of seizures took part in this experiment. Hundreds of electrodes were attached directly to the brain’s surface in a technique called electrocorticography, and the people were asked to do one of several tasks while their brains were being closely monitored. In the video (and gif) above, the patient was asked to repeat the word “humid.” You can see that first active is a part of the brain responsible for perceiving the word (the yellow dots, in one of the language centers); then, almost immediately afterwards a bit of cortex lights up (in blue) corresponding to planning the response, before that response is even fully ready; meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex does a bit of processing on the word (in red) in order to inform that response. It’s all slowed down a bit; the whole thing takes place in less than a second. Essentially you’re watching a single thought process — “hear and repeat this word” — form and execute. Sure, it’s just colored dots, but really, most science is dots — what were you expecting, lightning bolts zooming along axons on camera? In a more complex example (above), the person was asked to come up with the opposite of the word they hear. In this case, as you see below, considerably longer is spent by the prefrontal cortex in processing the word and formulating a response, since it must presumably consult memory and so on before sending that information to the motor regions for execution. “We are trying to look at that little window of time between when things happen in the environment and us behaving in response to it,” explained lead author Avgusta Shestyuk in the Berkeley news release. “This is the first step in looking at how people think and how people come up with different decisions; how people basically behave.” Ultimately the research was about characterizing the role of the prefrontal cortex in planning and coordinating brain activity, and it appears to have been successful in doing so — but the neuro-inclined among our readership will surely have already intuited this and will want to seek out the paper for details. . |
Chariot expands to Columbus, Ohio with JPMorgan Chase commuter shuttle | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | Ford’s Chariot shared commuter shuttle service is expanding to its latest new market: Columbus, Ohio. The Columbus launch is in partnership with JPMorgan Chase, and initial service in the area will be specifically a shuttle for the company’s 400 Corporate Center employees located within the city. Chariot will operate daily shuttles for these employees starting on January 22, and they’ll provide both morning and evening commute options using Wi-Fi equipped, 14-seat Ford Transit vans. The vans will have service between 6 AM and 10 AM daily, and also between 4 PM and 8 PM, which is a big range for both getting in and leaving the office. It’ll offer six different routes to cover different residential areas for employees. This is specifically part of the growing Enterprise segment of Chariot’s business, which serves corporate customers with employee transit. That business has increased considerably from its inception, going from just 10 routes at the start of last year to now 80 in total. Overall, Chariot operates 108 daily routes across all of its markets, the company says, which is the first time it’s revealed the full scope of its operation. Chariot’s Columbus operation is also part of Ohio’s “Smart Columbus” program, which won the Department of Transportation’s $40 million two years ago. The program is intended to demonstrate how integrated technologies, including connected infrastructure, autonomous cars, smart mobility services and more can work together to build a better transportation network. Chariot, which was acquired by Ford in September 2016, now operates in five cities in total, including San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Austin and now Columbus. The company started out providing shared on-demand first/last mile transit solutions in SF, and has since experimented with a number of different other commuter services models, including . Ford recently announced a commitment to build an open smart city platform for connecting various transportation services, and it’s also working on its autonomous vehicle platform, which will make its self-driving cars available to partners, including Lyft, Postmates and more. Clearly, the automaker is interested in exploring a macro approach to solving the problem of getting around increasingly busy cities, and Chariot and its various commuter service incarnations is part of that, too. |
Nomad’s new wireless charging hub is a traveler’s best friend | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | If you spend any meaningful amount of time in hotels, you’ll know that many of them are still living in the age of the 30-pin adapter, even though most of us have already moved on to Lightning, wireless charging and USB-C. So it’s essential to pack charging equipment to handle any need that might arise — and usually that means a lot of dongles. Nomad’s really cuts down on clutter, and makes it easy to charge what you need to charge, when you need to charge it. The hub looks a bit like a sleek bag burger designed by someone who makes luxury car interiors for a living. It sounds like a weird description, but it’s not a bad thing — the black puck is basically at home in any decor, so it’s a good bedside companion for home as well as away. On top, the hub has a wireless charging pad with a 7.5W max output (the max supported input the iPhone X, iPhone 8 and 8 Plus can accept). Inside, however, there’s plenty more in the way of charging options, including one USB-C port capable of 3A output, a high-speed 2.4A USB-A port for charging up an iPad or the like and two 1A USB outputs for stuff like AirPods. Each has its own LED indicator (which are faint enough that they won’t disturb even the most sensitive sleeper), and there’s built-in cable management to keep obvious desktop clutter to a minimum. A single 1.2 meter power cable is included and connects to the wall plug to give the hub its combined 30W max output, and rubberized footing gives it a stable stickiness on almost any surface. There’s a matte rubber ring on top, too, which is great for the iPhone X and 8, which can slide gradually off even other non-stick surfaces, even if they’re seemingly lying perfectly flat. In terms of how it works in practice, I used the Nomad Wireless Charging Hub all throughout my recent trip to Las Vegas for the annual CES gigantic crazy consumer tech shitshow and it performed very, very well — in fact, after a colleague took off with my only Lightning cable, it was the only way I could reliably make sure my iPhone was topped up for the next grueling day of slogging through gadget booths. You can definitely get sleeker, smaller wireless chargers, but at $80, Nomad’s option is only really twice as expensive as a lot of the good options out there, and yet it also packs a lot of additional charging versatility for when you need it. If you’re looking for an all-in-one travel charging companion, this is definitely a top choice. |
Volumetric photogrammetry — big words, bigger impact on VR | Ben Bloch | 2,018 | 1 | 17 |
Virtual reality: By this point, most people have at least a rudimentary understanding of what the term means. Once enjoyed and developed for niche techie and gaming audiences, brands have quickly realized VR’s limitless potential, and, as a result, every interest group from to to is jumping on the immersive content bandwagon. For consumers, VR generally means strapping on a head-mounted display (HMD), stepping into a new world and enjoying the experience. The enveloping nature of VR allows people to explore environments in 360 degrees, but for most, how these immersive worlds are created is a mystery. Though VR is still in its infancy, “traditional” methods of capturing and transforming footage have emerged. Typically, to shoot 360-degree VR content, a cameraperson employs several cameras rigged in a spherical formation to capture the scene. According to Alicia Millane’s blog entry on , “Each camera is mounted at a specific angle so the camera’s field of view will overlap portions of the surrounding cameras’ field of view.” With the overlap, editors should be able to get more seamless footage, without any gaps. Alternatively, professional 360-degree cameras can be purchased, but more or less look and function the same as hand-rigged apparatuses. Once filming is completed, editors stitch together the footage, creating a unified, continuous experience. In addition to camera formation, camera placement also plays a major role in the end result of a particular piece of immersive content. Depending on what the content creator wants the consumer to experience, camera placement will vary. Are consumers meant to be participants or spectators? Is the scene set low to the ground or up high? Should the rig be set up in the middle of the action or off to the side? Though the creative direction will ultimately determine placement, it is important to note that even with several rigs placed throughout a set, this method creates a more static outcome. Enter volumetric photogrammetry. A mouthful, for sure, but this method of creating virtual environments could possibly hold the key to the future of VR. Unlike the method mentioned above, there are no takes or shots in volumetric VR that are later edited in post-production. This allows for a much more fluid experience, as the consumer frames the scene and chooses his or her own perspective. Using the volumetric capture method, footage of a real person is recorded from various viewpoints, after which software analyzes, compresses and recreates all the viewpoints of a fully volumetric 3D human. With volumetric VR explained, photogrammetry’s defining characteristic is the principle of triangulation. As explained in a blog post on , triangulation involves taking photographs from at least two locations to form lines of sight. “These lines of sight are then mathematically intersected to produce the 3-dimensional coordinates of the points of interest.” This method is used extensively in video games. Case in point, “Star Wars: Battlefront.” As explained by the game’s lead environment artist�� , “Photogrammetry is essentially the technique of processing still images to produce a high resolution 3D mesh. There are a number approaches to this, but they all involve taking photos of a subject in real-life and running it through photogrammetry software.” Once the images are captured, the software then produces reference points, more or less connecting the dots, resulting in an intricate framework that can be used to construct lower-resolution game-ready environments. From 8-bit graphics to increasingly realistic interactive worlds, cutting-edge technology has always had a place in video games — but what about other industries? The entertainment world, for example, which serves as a transportive medium, has recently taken note of how employing advanced capture techniques can enhance the viewer experience. , a virtual reality software company focused on volumetric human capture, showcased its documentary, “ ” at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016, generating a maelstrom of interest, and helping cast a light on other projects at the forefront of 3D volumetric capture. “ ,” a short VR film set in an active war zone and shot with , was shown at the festival just this year, confirming interest in the medium and cementing its staying power. Musicians have also heeded the impact of volumetric capture, as evidenced by Maya Payne’s video for the song . Created by New Zealand’s , the video boasts a world’s first superlative and offers viewers true VR cinematography, or, what might be better known as 6 degrees of movement. In the art world, , a Los Angeles-based company archiving works of art in true VR, has bridged that gap. , explores the celebrated artist’s retrospective exhibition, “Mastry,” and was created utilizing volumetric photogrammetry to capture the air between the walls at MOCA’s Grand Avenue location so viewers could have proper perspective and dimensions. Immersive experiences utilizing volumetric photogrammetry may convey a much more authentic and realistic environment to the end user. Per VRt Ventures founder, Jacob Koo, “If virtual reality has the chance to reach its full potential, then consumers must feel like they are actually somewhere they cannot be physically. That perception takes VR technology out of the novelty category and makes it something actually useful.” |
Google is rolling out a fix for those Home-related Wi-Fi issues | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | In the latest of a recent spate of bugs plaguing Google’s most recent hardware offerings, a number of Home and Chromecast users around their devices’ Wi-Fi connectivity this week. Google has on its support page, noting that “In certain situations, a bug in the Cast software on Android phones may incorrectly send a large amount of network traffic which can slow down or temporarily impact Wi-Fi networks. The specific impact to the network will vary depending on the router.” The company will be offering a fix for the issue, which is set to start rolling out to its devices via a Play services update starting tomorrow. Initial reports appeared to center around TP-Link’s popular line of routers, and the networking company has since along with a stop gap, telling users to reboot their router or “try disabling the ‘Cast’ feature on your Android device to help mitigate the issue until an update is released to permanently fix this issue on the device itself.” The issue appears to be even more widespread, however, impacting other popular wireless names like Netgear and Linksys. Google, similarly, is suggesting users try to reboot their handsets and check for a router firmware upgrade in the meantime. The bug appears to be a minor one, but it’s the latest in that have been hitting a number of Google-branded hardware devices, including the Pixel 2, Home Mini and Pixel Buds. |
Apple greenlights new Reese Witherspoon-backed comedy series starring Kristen Wiig | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | Apple has landed its first half-hour comedy series, according to a new report from out this afternoon. The series, which will be exec-produced by and star SNL vet Kristen Wiig, hails from Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. This is the third project from Hello Sunshine that Apple has picked up to aid in its streaming TV ambitions. Others include , focused on a fictional version of the morning TV show world, and which will delve into America’s love affair with true crime podcasts. Apple also recently greenlit a documentary series , exec-produced by Steven Spielberg and Ronald D. Moore, called “See.” According to THR’s report, Apple beat out multiple outlets for the 10-episode comedy, which is “inspired by” Curtis Sittenfeld’s upcoming short-story collection “You Think It, I’ll Say It.” Wiig and Witherspoon will exec-produce the new show, along with Hello Sunshine’s Lauren Neustadter and show runner/series creator Colleen McGuinness. Sittenfeld will consult. Wiig represents yet another high-profile win for Apple in terms of talent. The actress was Emmy nominated three times for her work on SNL, and was Oscar nominated for co-writing “Bridesmaids,” a film in which she also starred. More recently, she’s appeared in films including “Ghostbusters,” “Downsizing” and Netflix’s “Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later.” THR notes this new series will be Apple’s fifth scripted show, and more may be on the way. Apple is currently bidding against HBO for J.J. Abrams’ first script since “Fringe.” |
The Last Mile is launching its coding program at a women’s prison in Indiana | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | , a coding program that first launched inside , has expanded to its first out-of-state prison. Yesterday, The Last Mile announced its plans to launch at the Indiana Women’s Prison with support from Governor Eric J. Holcomb. Gov. Holcomb envisions The Last Mile transforming the lives of incarcerated women and helping to fill jobs in the state’s tech sector, he said in a press release. The plan, Redlitz says, is to launch no later than April. In Indiana, there is initially space for 24 inmates. Depending on the interest and success of the program, the prison is prepared to open more classrooms. The Last Mile, which first opened its doors in 2012, is live in five prisons throughout California, including two women’s prisons — one in Chino and one in Folsom. The Last Mile teaches incarcerated individuals entrepreneurial skills, how to code and the elements of web design. Within the next five years, The Last Mile aims to expand to 50 prisons. “So this really is a test for us,” Redlitz said. “If it works, I think we can more rapidly expand. We just want to make sure we don’t diminish the quality of what we’re producing and the quality of work people are getting out of it.” |
Study shows software used to predict repeat offenders is no better at it than untrained humans | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | COMPAS, a piece of software commonly used in the justice system to predict which offenders will find themselves behind bars again, is no better than soliciting random people on Mechanical Turk to determine the same thing, a new study has found. Oh, and they’re both racially biased. Julia Dressel and Hany Farid of Dartmouth college amid growing skepticism that automated systems like (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) can accurately predict something as complex as recidivism rates. To test this, they recruited people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to review an offender’s sex, age and criminal record (minus, of course, whether the person did eventually recidivate, or reoffend). The people were then asked to provide a positive (will recidivate) or negative (will not recidivate) prediction; evaluations of the same offender were pooled and the prediction determined by majority rule. The same offenders were also processed in COMPAS’s recidivism prediction engine. As it turns out, the untrained humans and the complex, expensive software achieved nearly the same exact level of accuracy — low, to be precise. Humans correctly predicted reoffenders about 67 percent of the time, while COMPAS got it about 65 percent of the time. And the two groups only agreed on about 70 percent of the offenders. Now, if the point of this software was to correctly replicate unskilled randos being paid next to nothing to do something they’ve never done before, it almost succeeds. That doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, the researchers also found that they could replicate the success rate of COMPAS by only using two data points: age and number of previous convictions. “Claims that secretive and seemingly sophisticated data tools are more accurate and fair than humans are simply not supported by our research findings,” said Dressel. “The use of such software may be doing nothing to help people who could be denied a second chance by black-box algorithms.” Example of a manual decision tree for classifying offenders. As if all that wasn’t enough, it was further found that both the human groups and the COMPAS classifier show a rather mysterious form of racial bias. Both tended toward false positives for black people (i.e. they were predicted to reoffend but in reality did not) and false negatives for white people (vice versa). Yet this bias appeared whether or not race was included in the data by which offenders were evaluated. Black offenders do have higher recidivism rates than white offenders in the data set used (for reasons too numerous and complex to get into here), but the evaluations don’t reflect that. Black people, regardless of whether the evaluators knew their race, were predicted to reoffend more than they did, and white people predicted to reoffend less than did. Given that this data may be used to determine which offenders receive especial police attention, it may be that these biases are self-perpetuating. Yet it’s still unclear what metrics are operating as surrogate race indicators. Unfortunately the question of fairness must remain unanswered for now, as this study was not geared toward finding an answer to it, just to finding the overall accuracy of the system. And now that we know that accuracy is remarkably low, one may consider all COMPAS’s predictions questionable, not just those likely to be biased one way or another. Even that, however, is not necessarily new: a 2015 study of recidivism and found that eight of them were inaccurate. Equivant, the company that makes COMPAS, to the study. Only six factors, it writes, are actually used in the recidivism prediction, not the 137 mentioned in the study (those data are used for other determinations; the software does more than this one task). And a 70 percent accuracy rate (which it almost reached) is good enough by some standards, it argues. In that case, perhaps those standards should be revisited! It’s not for nothing that cities like New York are implementing official programs to look into algorithmic bias in systems like this, whether they’re for predicting crimes, identifying repeat offenders or convicting suspects. Independent reviews of these often private and proprietary systems, like the one published today, are an essential step in keeping the companies honest and their products effective — if they ever were. |
Giphy builds transparent GIF library for Instagram Stories | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | Instagram now lets users slap background-less GIFs sourced from Giphy onto their Instagram Stories. Rolling out with a partnership with Giphy, the new GIF sticker engine could further differentiate Instagram Stories from Snapchat, which has yet to embrace the animation GIF trend. Giphy worked with Instagram to create a special search engine for a library of GIFs designed to be overlaid over photos and videos rather than being shared by themselves. The backgrounds and transparent bits of these GIFs have been cut out so they mesh into your imagery. [Update 1/23/18: Instagram , officially launching GIF stickers with Giphy six days after we originally reported on January 17th that the feature was coming. You can see what’s trending on Giphy or search through hundreds of thousands of overlay-optimized GIFs. Also, in the next few weeks Instagram will start allowing uploads of square and landscape photos and videos to Stories beyond its default portrait orientation. Rather than cutting off the edges or zooming in, Instagram will fill the edges with a custom frosted glass-style color gradient based on the colors of your image. We’ve updated this story to reflect the launch.] Instagram’s new transparent GIF search engine, powered by Giphy Facebook and Giphy have been working more closely recently on custom GIF databases, as the two built a child-safe, hand-picked set of animations to offer in the . Previously, Giphy helped Facebook launch a . Instagram’s initial tests of GIF sharing were first reported by in November, but details were scarce and the product didn’t have a “Giphy” logo in the search bar. Now users all over the world are getting access after the feature was tested in Brazil and the Philippines. The screenshots above come from Brazilian social media consultant . Instagram was abnormally cagey about discussing the feature when we asked on January 17th, which we now know was because a partnered announcement with Giphy was looming. After an initial “no comment” though, an Instagram spokesperson told me “we’re always testing new experiences for the Instagram community.” Giphy didn’t respond to a request for comment before press time. But now you can read the full details . Meanwhile, the ability to upload photos and videos of any size could give Stories even more flexibility for documenting your life. You don’t have to live in Instagram’s Stories camera, and can instead use your phone’s default camera in any orientation without worrying about losing the edges. It’s another reason people might fall back to Instagram instead of using Snapchat Stories. Instagram has become a hub for home-made animation sharing thanks to its popular Boomerang feature that started as a standalone app before getting baked into Stories. Recently, Instagram added some savvy stabilization, which makes your back-and-forth image loops much less shaky. And Facebook But now Instagram is opening up to outside GIF engines to expand its sticker library. Instagram already offers a few props like sunglasses and mustaches, seasonal imagery, standard emoji, location and weather overlays, time stamps, selfie stickers and augmented reality face masks. If it wants Stories to stay interesting, though, it has to keep equipping users with new ways to jazz up their posts. Working with a third-party like Giphy that in turn aggregates content from user submissions delivers an endless parade of adornments to Instagram Stories. While Snapchat offers animated filters, augmented reality World Lenses, and Bitmoji, it still doesn’t offer a GIF or Boomerang-like sharing experience for Stories. You might say that keeps its Stories authentic, but for kids around the world sitting in their unexciting bedrooms, it might leave what they share looking a bit boring. Snapchat recently added its own , but they come as pretty limited rotating sets rather than a big, third-party powered library. Back in April we wrote that . By December, it finally relaxed its iron grip over the experience by starting to , though Snap won’t help promote them unless they pay. Facebook’s and culture of working with outside developers could help keep its products fresh at a time when it’s desperate to encourage sharing. The company announced a retreat from public publisher content in the News Feed in hopes of between friends instead of passive consumption. One way to fuel that drive is by giving people ways to creatively communicate visually without having to paint a masterpiece by themselves. |
Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin exits COO role, now filled by former Pandora COO Sara Clemens | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | Twitch today announced its co-founder Kevin Lin will be stepping down from the COO role at the company, amid a series of new executive hires. Lin will continue to work at Twitch in a newly developed, and still unnamed, role leading “Culture, Strategy & Innovation,” which reports directly to Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. Replacing Lin as COO is former Pandora COO , who has joined Twitch alongside two other new exec hires: , who joins from Rubicon Project to become SVP, Head of Platforms & Services at Twitch; and , VP of Developer Experience, who joins from Slack. Clemens as Pandora COO back in December 2016, after more than two years with the streaming service. Her exit had come around the time that buyout rumors were flying about, pegging SiriusXM as a potential acquirer. (SiriusXM later $480 million into Pandora instead.) While at Pandora, Clemens contributed to the business’s international growth operations, its live events and Ticketfly ventures, and its Artist Marketing Platform, the company had said at the time of her departure. These efforts led her to becoming one of “Most Powerful Women in Music” in both 2015 and 2016. She also oversaw Pandora’s purchases of data company Next Big Sound, and the $450 million acquisition of Ticketfly. Prior to Pandora, Clemens was on the executive team at LinkedIn, responsible for corporate development and new ventures, and specifically helped the company enter the Chinese market. As to whether she could do the same for Twitch is far less certain — Twitch is in China, where it would otherwise have to compete with local rivals like and . However, even without a means of entry in China, Clemens’ range of expertise can still aid Twitch in a number of ways. Before Pandora and LinkedIn, Clemens led product and partnerships at Xbox and was a founding member of the team that created Microsoft’s AR headset, HoloLens. “Brands with a creator-first ideology have the greatest potential for success because they are
driven by the customer, not competitors,” said Clemens, in a prepared statement. “Twitch is a
uniquely creator-centric company as demonstrated by the level of social engagement on the
service. My goal is to apply my global experience from the technology, gaming and
entertainment industries to optimize how the teams at Twitch work together to further the
brand’s mission of enabling creators to connect with fans and build amazing real-time
experiences,” she added. Clemens is one of three new hires Twitch is announcing today. Also new is Mark Weiler, now Twitch’s head of Platforms & Services. Weiler was previously SVP Head of Engineering at ad infrastructure company Rubicon Project, and, before that, worked at social ad platform Ampush. He began his career at Microsoft, where he worked on email and networking products. At Twitch, he will be responsible for product development, infrastructure and information security. Amir Shevat, now VP of Developer Experience at Twitch, is joining from Slack, where he was head of Developer Relations. At Slack, he helped the company build out its ecosystem through partnerships — something that could come into play given Twitch’s more recent of its where it’s courting developers to build for its platform. Before Slack, Shevat worked at Google across a number of roles, including the global Startup Outreach lead at Google Play, leading Google’s scalable developer relations programs, and managing other programs like Google LaunchPad and Developer Experts. He also co-founded Google Campus in Tel Aviv, and, before that, helped build the developer ecosystem at Microsoft Israel. Twitch’s current developer program lead, Kathy Astromoff, is remaining at Twitch as VP Developer Relations, and will be reporting to Shevat. |
Amazon’s Echo, Alexa and Music Unlimited are hitting Australia and New Zealand next month | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | null |
Apple pledges $350 billion investment in US economy over next five years | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | is about to give the U.S. economy a huge boost in the form of a $350 billion five-year investment. As part of that, it will commit $55 billion this year alone and plans on adding 20,000 new jobs over that time frame. Following in the footsteps of Amazon, it also plans to add a new campus somewhere in the U.S. this year. There is a lot of news here. Let’s start with the big-picture investment of $350 billion, which Apple says does not include ongoing tax payments, the tax revenues generated from employees’ wages or the sale of Apple products. It will, however, involve taxes on repatriation of some of Apple’s cash reserves, which are currently . It anticipates $38 billion coming from repatriation taxes, but much of it will be capital expenditures on the part of the company. For starters, there will be $30 billion, which will help fund a number of projects, including building the aforementioned new campus. The plan is for this to initially house technical support for customers. Apple says it will announce the location of this new facility later this year, with a plan to make the building run on 100 percent renewable energy sources. But wait, it’s not done yet. It will also invest $10 billion of that money in new data centers in the U.S., adding to the seven already in operation or planned. There is a new one coming in Iowa and they broke ground on one in Reno just today, in addition to data centers already in operation in North Carolina, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona. (This number includes co-location facilities not owned and operated by Apple.) The company also plans to expand the advanced manufacturing fund it started last spring, from $1 billion to $5 billion. The idea is to bring advanced manufacturing jobs to the heartland and it is already funding projects in Kentucky and rural Texas. Finally, Apple plans to expand its coding initiatives, helping students and teachers from K-12 and at community colleges across the country learn valuable coding skills. While there is clearly a large public relations element to this announcement, the amount of money and investment involved from a private company here is just staggering, and should help create new jobs, stimulate local economies and help educate students for the next generation of jobs. Hard not to like that. |
Siri’s podcast-promoting ‘Give me the News’ feature is now out of beta | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 17 | HomePod will arrive to a crowded market when it finally does drop, following a CES that was utterly dominated by assistant-powered devices. |
Sodexo acquires majority stake in French online restaurant FoodChéri | Steve O'Hear | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | Sodexo, a French publicly listed food services and facilities management company, has acquired a majority stake in Paris-based online restaurant and food delivery startup . Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, though François Paulus of Breega Capital, which backed , tells me he is “happy with the return”. Founded in 2015 and operating an online only restaurant along the lines of or Munchery’s original model in the U.S., FoodChéri lets you order fresh chef-prepared meals that are chilled and ready to reheat and consume upon delivery. It’s a model that avoids some of the pitfalls faced by restaurant delivery services, such as UberEATs and Deliveroo, in that orders can be pooled for delivery as food doesn’t need to be delivered hot. In terms of customer base, FoodChéri targets both individuals and, increasingly, companies who don’t have their own kitchens but want to provide meals for employees. This is where Sodexo’s acquisition fits in. “Sodexo [is a] world leader in corporate catering and will help FoodChéri consolidate its positioning as a virtual cafeteria/canteen for small and medium-sized businesses,” FoodChéri co-founder and CEO Patrick Asdaghi says. The SME market is currently one that players like Sodexo don’t currently address with their “physical” on-site model. Investment from Sodexo will also be used to help FoodChéri expand nationally beyond Paris and its surrounding suburbs over the next two years. With 70 staff, the startup currently delivers over 12,000 fresh meals prepared by its professional chefs every week, including serving 200 businesses. In addition, it plans to invest in a new 20,000 square foot production facility. I’m also told that post-acquisition FoodChéri will continue to be run autonomously by the startup’s co-founders. |
Crunch Report | Jimmy Iovine is not leaving Apple | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Tito Hamze TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Tech executives join more than 100 business leaders calling on Congress to move quickly on DACA | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | Many of tech’s most prominent executives, including the CEOs of Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google, have joined more than 100 American business leaders in signing asking Congress to take action on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program before it expires on March 5. Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai are among the executives who want Congress to pass legislation ensuring that Dreamers, or undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children and were granted approval by the program, can continue to live and work in the country without risk of deportation. Failure to do so will not only result in upheaval, but may also potentially cost the U.S. economy $215 billion, they said. Tech companies since the Trump administration . Other tech leaders who put their names on the letter, which was sent to Congressional leaders and will also run as a full-page newspaper ad on Thursday paid for by the Coalition for the American Dream (a PDF is at the bottom of this article), include IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer of Microsoft; Hewlett-Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman; and CEOs or other leading executives of AT&T, Dropbox, Upwork, Cisco Systems, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Intel, Warby Parker, Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Box, Twitter, PayPal, Code.org, Lyft, Etsy, AdRoll, eBay, StitchCrew, SurveyMonkey, DoorDash, Oath and Verizon*. Addressed to House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, the open letter calls on Congress to vote on extending DACA by January 19 in order to give the Department of Homeland Security time to implement changes before March 5. That timing would also make sure new legislation is passed before if Democrats and Republicans can’t reach a compromise on government spending. The letter says “In addition to causing a tremendous upheaval in the lives of DACA employees, failure to act in time will lead to businesses losing valuable talent, cause disruptions in the workforce and will result in significant costs. Studies by economists across the ideological spectrum have also determined that if Congress fails to act our economy could lose $215 billion in GDP.” DACA was implemented in June 2012 by the Obama administration after the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have given Dreamers a way to apply for permanent residency, failed to pass Congress. DACA grants Dreamers two years of deferred action from deportation and also makes them eligible for a work permit. The Trump administration revoked the DACA program in September, but delayed its cancellation by six months so Congress would have time to protected under DACA. President Donald Trump has , but he also insisted this week that he would not back a DACA bill unless it that he says will stop illegal immigration. *Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Oath (formerly AOL), which is in turn owned by Verizon. [scribd id=368890571 key=key-8r9J2xzPh3KEL5irx7Iv mode=scroll] |
Automotive Grade Linux gets support from Toyota and Amazon as it eyes autonomous driving | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | Open-source software was once something that large businesses shied away from, but over the course of the last few years, it’s made inroads into virtually every enterprise company. With (AGL), the Linux Foundation hosts a project that aims to bring open source to the car industry. As the AGL group announced at CES in Las Vegas today, Toyota is now using AGL in production and Amazon has signed up to support the project. Toyota is Amazon opted to support the project at the silver level. You may have seen mashup today, which is probably no coincidence. With this, Toyota joins other car manufacturers like Ford, Mazda, Honda, Subaru and Suzuki, as well as suppliers like Denso, Panasonic, LG and chip industry giants like Nvidia, Intel and ARM. Overall, the foundation now has 110 member companies. With NTT Data, the organization has also recently brought on a major telecom company. “We’re also in discussion with a lot of the big telecom equipment providers,” AGL executive director Dan Cauchy told me. “You know, the Ciscos of the world and the Ericssons of the world. All of them have some kind of connected car group and they are all interested.” Until now, though, the AGL mostly focused on the infotainment stack in the car. There, it has made large strides over the last year or so and recently launched version 5.0 of the actual AGL distribution. Toyota joining gives the product another degree of validation, and Cauchy noted that this also means that the company will evangelize AGL to its suppliers. “We’ve reached a point where AGL is going to be around for a long time,” said Cauchy. “We’ll be around for a couple of decades — I would think so — if not longer. Because once we’re in these cards, it’s hard to come out.” What’s maybe even more interesting, though, is that the AGL is now looking to expand its horizon beyond infotainment. The hot topic in automotive is autonomous driving, of course — and for this, the foundational pieces inside the Linux Foundation and AGL are now coming together. “Just like we did on the infotainment side, I think there’s a need for a common platform on the autonomous side,” said Cauchy. “Because why reinvent the wheel. My thought is we’re going to combine several things that the Linux Foundation is working on.” The main piece here is real-time Linux, which will soon become a compile-time option for the Linux kernel. But the AGL has also worked on the security of its systems (because you can’t really have a hacker break into your autonomous car), as well as telematics solutions and a mapping project that will allow car manufacturers to openly share the mapping data they generate from their autonomous cars. It’s the functional safety platform the group is working on, though, that’s at the very heart of this project. “The platform that I’m envisioning is a platform that has the certified, safety-critical Linux, all the LIDAR, radar, sensor, camera — all of the device drivers for all of the common, biggest manufacturers of those things. And then add a couple of industry standards like OpenCV, which is used for visualization and then get some contributions for some of the OEMs.” What still remains to be decided is where the API boundaries will be. The group may devise its own autonomous driving system or provide the APIs for allowing manufacturers to bring their own AIs. What is clear, though, is that after successfully bringing open source to the infotainment stack of your future car, it has now set its sights on autonomous driving and the ecosystem that is developing around that. |
Dell is making jewelry with reclaimed gold from recycled computer guts | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | null |
YouTube drops Logan Paul from Google Preferred and puts his Originals on hold | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | YouTube has taken further action against social media star Logan Paul, dropping the vlogger from its Google Preferred program, which is meant to be a mark of trust to signal to advertisers they can rely on these media creators to generate higher-quality content. After Paul posted a video of a dead body he filmed hanging from a tree in Japan’s colloquially titled “suicide forest,” it’s no surprise that YouTube and Google would want him out of its Preferred program. Paul isn’t cut off from all advertising benefits on YouTube, however, and can still use the YouTube Partner Program to monetize videos. The consequences of Paul’s grievous error in judgement don’t end there, however: the YouTuber won’t be featured in the fourth season of the YouTube Red scripted original “Foursome,” the company said, and any of his other upcoming Originals projects are on hold for the time being, with their ultimate fate still to be determined. YouTube’s prior action against Paul following his transgression include receiving a strike for his violation of its posted community guidelines, as well as releasing a statement about how its decision to pull the video was in keeping with its policies. Paul announced following the controversy that he was taking some time away from his practice of posting daily vlogs, and his last video on YouTube was his apology post to viewers, which was published a week ago. |
Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage is looking to raise up to $50 million for its newest fund | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | , a seed and early-stage venture outfit, is looking to raise up to $50 million for its third fund, shows a new . It’s of interest in large part because of co-founder Howard Lindzon, a kind of internet celebrity and serial entrepreneur known for creating WallStrip, an online video show that took a satirical approach to financial news and was by CBS in 2007, and later , a venture-backed social network for traders and investors. Social Leverage dates back roughly a decade. As Lindzon in 2015, he’d started the firm with Tom Peterson, a classmate of his at Arizona State University. He explained at the time that “[o]riginally, back in 2008, we started a holding company inspired by Betaworks that would invest in and operate startups, but we learned that we’re best-suited for just investing, using social leverage as a means for accelerating startups.” At the beginning of 2015, the firm added a third general partner: Gary Benitt, who’d earlier his company, Assistly, to Salesforce. It isn’t clear how much money Social Leverage is currently managing altogether. Lindzon never announced the size of Social Leverage’s second fund, which the team was out marketing in 2015. According to a regulatory filing at the time, it was targeting $30 million. That the team is seeking slightly more capital isn’t surprising either way. Firms have generally begun raising larger and larger funds, as a wider variety of limited partners look to plug money into tech startups. Deal sizes also have grown larger, driving many VCs to lock down more in capital commitments if they can. Lindzon hasn’t responded yet for a request for comment, but Social Leverage’s says that it targets fintech, enterprise SaaS and consumer startups — which doesn’t rule out much. Some of its more recent investments include , a four-year-old, LA-based company that provides financing to farmers of perishable goods; , a four-year-old, Scottsdale, AZ-based commercial real estate lending marketplace; and , a two-year-old, New York-based customer relationship platform. Social Leverage is itself based in San Diego. |
Another macOS password prompt can be bypassed with any password | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | MacRumors a that affects the current version of macOS High Sierra. In System Preferences, you can unlock the App Store preference pane by typing password. Apple has reportedly already fixed the bug in beta versions of the next macOS High Sierra update. While this bug is nowhere as serious as the infamous , as John Gruber , this one is quite embarrassing. What’s wrong with password prompts and macOS? If you want to test this bug at home, I was able to reproduce it quite easily. Open System Preferences, go to the App Store settings and look at the padlock icon. If it’s unlocked, lock it first and then try unlocking it with any password. Ta-da! You can enable or disable automatic downloads and installation of app and operating system updates using this preference pane. This doesn’t represent an immediate security risk. But if someone already has access to your computer, they could disable automatic security updates and take advantage of vulnerabilities that are regularly patched. By default, App Store settings are unlocked for admin users. But if you’re a bit paranoid about security, chances are you locked down all your system settings to make sure nobody is playing with them. More importantly than the bug itself, Apple should reconsider their quality assurance processes. It’s time to stop shipping updates with embarrassing bugs. |
Overstock and Coinbase briefly mixed up Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash | John Biggs | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | A glitch on Overstock’s website allowed users to send amounts of Bitcoin Cash to Overstock when the system was expecting Bitcoin, leading to drastic discounts on many items. Given that BTC is about $14,000 and Bitcoin Cash is $2,400, the mistake could have been quite costly. Originally reported by , the exploit allowed you to send the required amount of BTC in Bitcoin Cash. Then, when you asked for a refund, the system would refund you in Bitcoin. This meant you could send, say, .048 ($135.91) in Bitcoin Cash on a .048 ($700) Bitcoin item, cancel the order, and receive .045 BTC back. Wrote Krebs: Logging into Coinbase, I took the bitcoin address and pasted that into the “pay to:” field, and then told Coinbase to send 0.00475574 in bitcoin cash instead of bitcoin. The site responded that the payment was complete. Within a few seconds I received an email from Overstock congratulating me on my purchase and stating that the items would be shipped shortly. I had just made a $78 purchase by sending approximately USD $12 worth of bitcoin cash. Crypto-currency alchemy at last! Krebs noted that this scam could have netted quite a profit. If a user had paid the BTC equivalent of a in Bitcoin Cash they could have sent over $15,000 and, after a refund, gotten $100,000 of Bitcoin. It’s a funny — and scary — glitch that Coinbase has since fixed. |
Dell’s new app brings mobile notifications to the desktop | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | null |
Optimizely launches new tools to help companies manage thousands of web experiments | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | helps businesses test out different ways to make their websites or apps more effective — but, as vice president of Product Management Claire Vo put it, how do you go from “five experiments per week to hundreds and thousands of experiments per week”? Vo said companies face real challenges as they try to increase their experiment “velocity” — the issue isn’t in the “core technology of experimentation,” but rather in how teams prioritize and collaborate on these tests. That’s why Optimizely is launching a new suite of tools called Program Management. This is basically the Optimizely version of products built by Experiment Engine, a startup where Vo was founder and CEO, and which . Vo said that since then, a team has been working to rebuild Experiment Engine with deeper integration into Optimizely’s core technology. Program Management is the result. So the Program Management dashboard allows users to bring up a list of all experiments and experiment ideas — each experiment should include the documentation needed for different team members to understand what’s being tested and why. It also allows everyone to weigh in on which tests should be prioritized, because they vote on each experiment’s likely impact and required effort (managers, of course, will decide for themselves whether to follow the voting). Once an experiment actually starts, the Program Management listing will be updated with the results. Optimizely also is building integration with other project management tools, starting with Asana. And Program Management isn’t just for keeping track of individual tests. It also can help managers see how their experimentation programs are going overall, because it aggregates data about things like how many experiments are being conducted, plus how many of them are “winning” and resulting in real product changes. Dan Siroker, , said that without these tools, companies find themselves relying on Post-It notes and Excel spreadsheets to manage the process, so this should dramatically “accelerate [their] current pace.” Vo added that companies don’t need to be running hundreds of experiments to use these new tools. “When you’re starting, you want to have a repeatable process, a framework for managing experimentation,” she said. “All of our customers may not be at a 100- or 1,000-experiment velocity, but they tend to have ambition to be there.” The BBC is one of the customers that’s already using Program Management, and Optimizely shared this statement from BBC Experimentation Lead Olivier Tatard: The high-level view that we see through Optimizely’s new Program Management dashboard provides us with invaluable insights into experimentation at the BBC and across our products. Furthermore, Program Management allows us to consolidate what were previously multiple tools into a single, slick environment, drastically improving the efficiency of our end-to-end workflow. |
YouTube’s in-app messaging and Community tab may make their way to YouTube TV, YouTube Music | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | YouTube may bring its set of social features, including and , to its wider suite of apps. Specifically, the company is interested in porting those features to its YouTube TV app aimed at cord cutters, as well as its Music app. The company won’t confirm a timeline in terms of if or when these features would launch, but it’s something that’s clearly being thought about by YouTube product strategy. The move could help further differentiate YouTube’s over-the-top streaming service, YouTube TV, from competitors like Sling TV, Hulu Live TV, PlayStation Vue and others. And it would allow the company to leverage its strengths in social features to build out a larger platform that spans both web and mobile properties in order create a large, combined user base of people who stream media content on their devices. “People think about YouTube as this place where you play your favorite video content — and of course it is. But really what it is underneath is this kind of community that exists underneath between content creators and fans; and fans and fans,” said YouTube Chief Product Officer, Neal Mohan, in a conversation at CES where he talked about how he sees the potential for adding social features to more YouTube products. “We think that magic of YouTube that exists in the main experience can apply to YouTube TV experience as well,” he said. For example, YouTube’s in-app video sharing and messaging feature, back in summer 2017, offers a way for friends to share videos and their reactions without having to leave the YouTube app to use another mobile messaging service. Mohan says this is the sort of feature that would make sense to bring to YouTube TV — or even YouTube’s Music app — in the future. When added to YouTube TV, the messaging feature would basically look the same as it does today in YouTube’s mobile app. “I don’t want to create any additional cognitive load for users — every user of the YouTube TV app is probably also a YouTube user. It should feel familiar. Their friends are the same,” said Mohan. He added that the idea of porting social features from YouTube to YouTube TV makes sense for the community features YouTube has been building, as well, such as the new Community tab where creators can interact with fans. “That’s where content creators are posting not just video, but images, text, and polls and just interacting with their community. I think that’s a concept that can apply regardless of the type of content,” Mohan said. In practice, this could mean that TV content creators would have their own tab to engage their fan base directly in the app where you’re consuming their content. This isn’t something only YouTube is planning, of course. that it was also developing social features to better highlight what friends are watching and recommending, as well as those that could offer a co-viewing experience. (YouTube, meanwhile, has been testing co-watching in an app called , developed within Google’s internal R&D division, Area 120.) Philo, a new low-cost, sports-free streaming service, also that it plans to launch this year. In other words, adding a social layer to the TV watching experience may not be a differentiator for YouTube long-term, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have an advantage in this space. “YouTube is well-positioned to deliver those types of really interesting use cases to our consumers,” said Mohan. That is, YouTube has always been a social community of sorts — it’s just that, now, that community is being better surfaced through features like the new tab for creator-to-fan interaction and in-app messaging. |
Comcast Ventures is betting on blockchain technologies in 2018 | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | “In 2018 we’re doubling down on blockchain,” says Gil Beyda, managing director of , the investment arm of one of the world’s largest media and telecom companies. For the venture capital arm of Comcast, an investment in blockchain isn’t opportunistic, Beyda insists. “Just to be clear, if bitcoin were at $15 instead of $15,000 we would still be committing to this,” he said. Comcast Ventures has been looking at blockchain technology for months, driven by Comcast and NBCUniversal’s long-standing interest in applications across several of the company’s business units. In fact, internal experiments are already underway around advanced advertising alongside Disney and Cox Communications that will be used to match data sets without sharing consumer data. Other experiments are underway looking at applications around royalty tracking and energy, Beyda says. “A lot of folks are trying to figure out how do you apply this consensus-driven immutable decentralized infrastructure and decentralized distributed applications,” Beyda says. “We have real-world applications inside Comcast where folks are trying to solve real-world problems with blockchain.” Earlier this month, the company announced a commitment to MState Growth Lab, an accelerator program focused on enterprise blockchain startups that’s also being funded by IBM and Galvanize, an accelerator, investment fund and bootcamp. “In 2018, we will see a growing number of enterprise blockchain use cases go mainstream from healthcare applications to government, supply chain and retail to the real estate and transportation industries. But for most of these use cases to succeed, blockchain startups need to be able to engage well with enterprise customers. Our growth lab is going to help make that happen,” said MState co-founder and CEO Rob Bailey. Bailey is chief executive of MState program, which will be managed with assistance from the partners at . The $250,000 commitment that Comcast Ventures made to MState is only one in a series of experiments that the fund is trying as it wraps its head around the potential of blockchain for its businesses and as a startup investment opportunity. The firm also has committed a few million dollars to a blockchain-focused fund as a fund-of-fund investment. And one of the firm’s portfolio companies, YouNow, is following the . Beyda says that Comcast Ventures is even discussing whether it will hold tokens or cryptocurrencies itself. “As part of our move into blockchain technologies, we understand it’s going to disrupt many different types of businesses and it may even disrupt traditional venture businesses, and we want to get in there and understand that,” Beyda says. Comcast Ventures invests across different classes, committing anywhere from $500,000 to $20 million in the companies it backs… and with its corporate parent, it can accelerate technologies and add scale to some of the blockchain applications that are currently in development, Beyda says. Specifically for Comcast, blockchain technologies around royalty tracking, identity and digital rights management all sound appealing. Other entertainment companies have already seen the value in blockchain startups. Last May, to solve its music attribution problem. The value of these applications are completely independent of the price of various cryptocurrencies, says Beyda. “Irrespective of what’s happening in cryptocurrency we think that this technology — like database technology and internet technology were transformational — this technology will also have a high area of growth and adoption,” Beyda says. While the company intends to make blockchain a priority, it’s not going to be overly aggressive in its experiments with the technology. “We’re going to take a staged approach,” says Beyda. “We’re going to first try to make equity investment in these technologies and evaluate what our token position would be moving forward. We’re just trying to understand what are the implications in regard to governance and other issues.” |
Prototype Capital launches to take pre-seed student investing out of the Ivy League | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | The two founders of believe that pre-seed investment focused on student entrepreneurs needs to change. While existing micro-investment funds focused on young entrepreneurs spend their time at Ivy League schools and elite private institutions, Prototype Capital’s founders are betting on great opportunities coming from the same places that have driven Steve Case’s “Rise of the Rest” investment thesis (and his new fund). Founded in 2015 by Rajat Bhageria, the former chief executive of ThirdEye, and Nandeet Mehta, the chief executive of Pyur Solutions, to create a network of student entrepreneurs and pre-seed investment scouts, the small fund is formalizing its activities this year with a tiny war chest (roughly $5 million for the next 18 months). Prototype Capital co-founder Rajat Bhageria “We at Prototype feel that the world is changing,” Bhageria tells me. “The next great innovation may not be from the typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur.” Rather than focus on graduates and students enrolled in Ivy League or private schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Stanford, Bhageria and Mehta are looking at students in universities like Penn State, the University of California at Davis, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Texas at Austin; and young entrepreneurs in cities including Ann Arbor, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. “Right now VCs in the young entrepreneur ecosystem are looking at startups from schools like MIT, Penn and Stanford,” says Bhageria. “But a great agriculture technology company may come out of UC Davis rather than Stanford.” Investors, according to Bhageria, are completely unprepared for this change. For Prototype, Bhageria and Mehta reached out to their own network of entrepreneurs located in these far-flung places and offered them finders fees for companies that manage to raise capital from the firm. The cash for Prototype has been fronted by an undisclosed Los Angeles-based venture capital firm, Bhageria said. Prototype plans to invest between $25,000 and $50,000 to start, and increase its commitments to $50,000 to $100,000 after the first six months. Beyond its focus outside of traditional geographies, Prototype thinks it has another advantage in the relationships it’s building with corporations. Corporate partnerships, Bhageria says, are key to the next phase of venture capital investment. Prototype co-founder Nandeet Mehta “It’s not going to be the next Snapchat that matters, it’s going to be changing and transforming these entrenched industries. You need domain expertise and you need data … you really need to work with governments and corporations.” That’s why the firm is planning to host quarterly corporate demo days where seven Fortune 500 companies will be on-hand to hear pitches. Neither the focus on early entrepreneurs and pre-seed investment nor the push to bring corporate partners on board is all that novel. Bhageria acknowledges that Techstars and Plug and Play have both leveraged corporate partners and sponsorships to provide more weight to their early-stage programs. And Dorm Room Fund (affiliated with First Round Capital) and Rough Draft Ventures (which works with General Catalyst) are both leveraging networks of alumni to find early-stage investments. Still, the combination of both theses — along with Prototype’s emphasis on schools outside of the traditional venture networks — could give the firm a leg up. Notably, other investors are considering a similar approach to tapping networks of entrepreneurial talent as investors. to pursue a similar (and better capitalized) thesis. |
Argo AI self-driving test car hit in Pittsburgh as truck runs red light | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | One of the test cars operates in its Pittsburgh fleet was involved in an accident on Wednesday, with two people sent to hospital (in stable condition) with injuries as a result of the accident. The incident appears to have been caused by a light box truck driving through a red light, rather than by Argo’s test vehicle, based on an early traffic report. The self-driving car was T-boned by the truck, and two of the Argo car’s four occupants were the ones who ended up in hospital. Ford provided the following statement regarding the accident when contacted by TechCrunch: We’re aware that an Argo AI test vehicle was involved in an accident. We’re gathering all the information. Our initial focus is on making sure that everyone involved is safe. It’s never good news when an automobile is involved in an accident, obviously, but in this case since it appears to clearly be the result of human error, it’s better news than it might otherwise have been given the circumstances. Autonomous vehicles still have a long way to go to earn human trust, after all. |
We go lips on with the PicoStill’s ‘delightful’ gin | John Biggs | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | When PicoBrew announced its , a $249 distilling add-on to its Pico C brewing system, I was nonplussed. How could you produce good whiskey or gin in a compact system? Well you can. Since then I’ve tried PicoBrew’s beer system and was very impressed — and now, after a solid taste of the PicoStill’s gin, I’m a convert. The $549 PicoBrew is a Keurig for beer. You purchase a self-contained pod of ingredients that fits inside the PicoBrew’s brewing belly. Then you fill another tank with distilled water and the PicoBrew boils, brews and flavors your beer. I made a few beers and both were very nice. The PicoStill adds another wrinkle to the process by pulling out the alcohol using a low heat distillation system. Interestingly, the PicoStill can separate out the heads and tails of the distillation process automatically, ensuring you get only the tastiest part of the distillation. This also means the PicoStill keeps you safe and headache free, as many of the problems with home distilling involve capturing the wrong chemicals like acetone, acetate and acetaldehyde. A separate chamber drains off the nastier parts of the brew. “By developing technology that automatically separates the methanol from the heads, we have significantly reduced the dangers inherent in distilling spirits,” said CEO Dr. Bill Mitchell. “The PicoStill provides commercial distillers a versatile, safe, and easy to use small batch distilling solution.” So how does it taste? Two of our intrepid reporters tried a gin made with the still and pronounced it tasty and drinkable. Our own Matt Burns called it “delightful” and smooth with gentle floral notes reminiscent of Bombay Sapphire. While it won’t have all the polish of a bottled spirit, you can definitely have fun turning wine, beer and other mashes into a tasty tipple or oil essences and, in the end, that’s all that matters. [gallery ids="1585647,1585646,1585645"] |
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Nvidia’s AutoSIM is the ‘Inception’ of self-driving car simulators | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | Nvidia is unveiling plenty of new stuff at CES, and most of it centers around cars. One of its most interesting announcements is AutoSIM, the virtualized testing environment it uses to drive more hours in simulation than anyone ever could using real cars on real roads. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described AutoSIM as a kind of “ ” of virtual environments at a press Q&A, referring to the movie about dreams within dreams. The layers of Nvidia’s AutoSIM, however, aren’t dreams — but are instead virtualized AI agents operating within larger virtual environments, and running virtualized augmented reality software, too. AutoSIM is essentially a huge virtual world running on extremely powerful Nvidia DGX GPU-based super computers. Within, there are multiple virtual cities, and virtual cars driving around virtual roads within those cities, sharing the generated urban environments with virtualized pedestrians, cyclists, animals and more. “We’re essentially going to have thousands of virtual universes where all of these virtual cars are driving around,” Huang said, adding that using things like the Vive head-mounted VR display, we can now also “wormhole” into these kinds of simulations to observe and test things like Nvidia’s new Drive AR in-car augmented reality platform. The really mind-blowing part of AutoSIM? Those virtualized cars running in those virtualized cities on virtualized roads are all running virtualized versions of Nvidia’s Drive in-car autonomous supercomputer platform — in other words, androids really do dream of electric sheep, but each of those sheep are self-driving cars. |
Segway Robotics’ Loomo wants to be your little buddy | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | Everyone needs a robotic friend and the might be the best yet. Part pack mule, part Segway, part voice assistant, the Loomo packs a lot of goods into its self-balancing frame. The device is from Segway Robotics, which is backed by Intel and Xiaomi. Intel’s RealSense provides sensors to make it safe to use indoors and out and the Segway platform lets it self-balance and travel at up to 11 mph. The device is loaded with features to the point where it seems the company is having a hard time defining the target market. The company says object and activity recognition lets it be the ideal security device. The cargo carrying and follow capability lets it be a robotic companion. Either way, even without a clear target market, it’s a solid device. Segway Robotics stopped by TechCrunch’s CES 2018 booth for a quick demo. The robot easily performed as advertised and carried my bag for me. And as a Segway, it worked well, too, able to scoot people around the show floor. But without a clear sales message it will be hard to sell the device when it hits the market in early 2018. [gallery ids="1585033,1585032,1585031,1585030,1585029"] |
A tour of Google’s reopened CES booth | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | For the first time ever, Google has a big presence at CES. You can’t look out of a window and not see a Google logo somewhere. But the one thing that didn’t work out so well for the company was its massive booth in the parking lot in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Yesterday, it rained a bit more than usual in Las Vegas and the booth leaked, so Google had to . Today, however, the booth is open again, so we sent Tito to check it out, slide down the Google slide, eat a doughnut and take a nap. It’s hard to underestimate how big a deal CES is for Google this time around. The company announced a number of new partnerships, including its with the likes of Lenovo, LG, Sony and JBL. It also announced updates to and dozens of new Assistant partnerships with headphone and TV manufacturers. |
Alpine’s new CarPlay receiver lets you put a big touchscreen in a single DIN slot | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 1 | 10 | Aftermarket touchscreens for your car aren’t new by any means, but this one is pretty clever. It lets you put a touchscreen in cars where one otherwise wouldn’t fit. Alpine’s new head unit floats the display slightly of the unit itself, allowing you to pack a 9” touchscreen into a single DIN slot. Once installed, the screen can be slid in or out to make sure it’s in just the right spot, or tipped up or down by up to 45 degrees to help with glare. It works with CarPlay and Android Auto, and has Bluetooth, SiriusXM, and HD Radio — but no CD slot, as there’s not really anywhere for one to go. It’s got the standard USB/AUX ports you’d expect, and, if you feel like getting fancy with further customizations, there’s an HDMI port for adding whatever your heart desires. It won’t work perfectly all single DIN cars, of course; depending on where your AC controls are, for example, a big touchscreen might block things you need to reach regularly. But in cars where it’ll fit, it seems like quite the upgrade from your standard single DIN deck. Alpine says the units should start shipping in February, and will cost $1,100 |
Crunch Report | Google and Tencent ink patent agreement | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Chris Gates TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Twitter updates total of Russia-linked election bots to 50,000 | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Twitter has on its investigation into Russian election interference on its platform in 2016. Its identification of more than 13,000 more Russian-linked bots that made election-related tweets puts the total over 50,000. In addition, about 3,800 (up 1,000 from Twitter’s data ) were associated with the now-notorious Internet Research Agency. Still, Twitter denied that these accounts were a significant problem: The results of this supplemental analysis are consistent with the results of our previous work: automated election-related content associated with Russian signals represented a very small fraction of the overall activity on Twitter in the ten-week period preceding the 2016 election. As if to demonstrate the different scales at work here, the Twitter blog post then changed topics to its efforts to block bots and suspicious activity platform-wide. For reference, those 3,800 IRA bots tweeted about 176,000 times during that 10-week period, of which less than 15,000 were election-related. And 677,775 people saw, followed or retweeted one of these accounts during that same period, and are being notified. Example of some of the IRA-bot-promoted content on Twitter. But in a way that’s just a drop in the bucket. “In December 2017, our systems identified and challenged more than 6.4 million suspicious accounts globally per week,” the company wrote. “Since June 2017, we’ve removed more than 220,000 applications in violation of our rules, collectively responsible for more than 2.2 billion low-quality Tweets.” It’s not exactly apples to apples, but it is a good reminder that this was more of an experiment in influence, not a full-scale push. If simple spammers can create and promote bots by the tens of thousands, Russian intelligence could easily have brought more to bear here. Of course, the numbers are much higher on Facebook — are estimated to have been reached by troll accounts there. Lastly, Twitter explains some concrete steps it’s taking to make the 2018 elections a bit less susceptible to this type of interference, which, while not actually too grand in scale, was certainly more widespread than expected. Specifically, the company is working on verifying all candidates, escalating issues of impersonation or hijacking, and monitoring election-related conversations closely for evidence of manipulation or bot participation. |
Yes, cities should indeed fight for tech jobs | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Few events have jolted the urban planning crowd quite like Amazon’s process for selecting the company’s new second headquarters (dubbed HQ2). The company put up , and then proceeded to demand proposals from cities across North America ( ). Perhaps unsurprisingly, , and . Apple is also getting in the game now, announcing this week that , at least initially. While it hasn’t announced a request for proposals yet, it did say the decision on location “will be announced later in the year.” While city officials are rushing to put together proposals, urban thinkers are aghast at these so-called reverse RFPs. Amy Liu, who runs Brookings Institution’s prominent and , said that “It’s created a major distraction from what the real day-to-day economic development activity should be.” Which, apparently, is not job creation. More ominously, staff columnist Danny Westneat that “Amazon is about to detonate a prosperity bomb in your town.” A prosperity bomb! Maybe Hawaii can . What all these critics are missing though is that the economy has changed dramatically over the past thirty years. Everyone is competing for better jobs and better income, be they workers and citizens or cities, states, and even national governments. from the United States in just the same way that through a payroll tax recapture strategy. Here’s what I see with the Amazon process: 238 cities across North America, , managed to each put together their own proposals on what they would offer to bring the company to their area. Boston has , but managed to in just a matter of weeks. Now that’s government speed I can start to like. This approach to government is starting to become the only way to get things done. , as the over the past two years. But when cities compete for jobs or investment, they seem to be able to make decisions almost instantly. Critics too often focus on the tax incentives while ignoring the fact that these economic development proposals are often lifelines for infrastructure projects that will otherwise never see the light of day. Take Boston’s bid for GE’s new headquarters. Yes, , but GE’s move also pushed the state to fund a variety of infrastructure improvements, and new bike lanes. That bridge adds a critical path for vehicles and pedestrians in Boston’s central business district, yet has gone unfunded for years. Ideally, governments could debate, vote, and then fund these sorts of infrastructure projects and community improvements. The reality is that without a time-sensitive forcing function like a reverse RFP process, there is little hope that cities and states will make progress on these sorts of projects. The debates can literally go on forever in American democracy. So if you are a mayor or economic planning official, use these processes as tools to get stuff done. Use the allure of new jobs and tax revenues to spur infrastructure spending and get a rezoning through a recalcitrant city council. Use that “prosperity bomb” to upgrade old parts of the urban landscape and prepare the city for the future. A healthier, more humane city can be just around the corner. Now, there are a lot of critics of these reverse RFPs, and they have valid points. They could be non-democratic, in the sense that the infrastructure built or the incentives offered might ultimately be valuable to the company and not the citizens of a community. This is relatively unlikely in the case of Amazon and other tech companies, given that their technical workforces are highly-mobile and choose cities with quality urban amenities. If Amazon showed up and said “cut the taxes and eliminate mass transit,” they would be undercutting the very talent they were hoping to reach. In other words, there are market limits here, and Amazon’s urban goals are in many ways aligned with urban dwellers. The second criticism is around the tax incentives themselves. There are valid questions on whether governments should subsidize companies to switch borders, particularly when companies are leveraging cities off each other. Even so, corporate subsidies are nothing new, nor is the controversy they stoke. , a watchdog non-profit that has monitored corporate subsidies for years, . The reality is that these programs have been going on for years, and while there are some egregious case studies, there are also success stories of cities effectively using economy development subsidies as well. Finally, there is the “prosperity bomb” crowd, otherwise known as the anti-growth crowd. The challenges that cities have faced in attracting businesses goes back to these people, who oppose new construction, who oppose new housing, and who desperately cling to a past of a “residentialist” city rather than seizing the moment to grow the next global city. To whom I say: go right ahead and vote. No one has to be left behind in these projects. It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. But cities can no longer act as if workers and companies have no choice on location and are forced to accept suboptimal cities as a result. The reality is that the market will work, and those cities with slim ambitions are going to be dwarfed by cities with the vision and thought to boldly build for the 21st century. Ultimately, that choice lies with the cities and not with Amazon. |
Spend a week fielding sensitive HR complaints in ‘Grayscale’ web game | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | If you’re looking for a way to close out your week that’s entertaining, edifying and looks like you’re doing real work, check out , a game where you act as an HR person dealing with everyday office problems via email. Okay, maybe it doesn’t sound that exciting, but there’s more to it than that. As the game’s creator, MIT CSAIL’s D. Fox Harrell, , the game is more about identifying and navigating the subtleties of sexism. The messages from other employees have embedded within them evidence of different types of sexism from the Fiske and Glick social-science model. We chose this particular model of sexism because it addresses this notion of ambivalent sexism, which includes both hostile sexism — which is the very overt sexism that we know well and could include everything from heinous assaults to gender discrimination — and what they call “benevolent sexism.” It’s not benevolent in the sense that it’s anything good; it’s oppressive too. Fixing a woman’s computer for her under the assumption she cannot do it herself, these researchers would say, is “protective paternalism.” The problems sent to you, the new HR hire, range all over, and your responses (it’s a kind of choose your own adventure thing) embody responses that may or may not acknowledge the dynamics at play. This one was kind of a no-brainer, especially since your own notes make a point of watching out for Stan. Unfortunately, we’ve all met Stan. There’s no big pay-off; the game takes perhaps 10 or 15 minutes to play through, and you don’t get like a certificate of non-sexism at the end or anything. But there are different outcomes depending on how you handle some situations, so you might want to play through more than once. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting (if brief and necessarily basic) look at some of the conflicts and tensions that exist in an office and the variety of responses people and the company they work for might decide on. If nothing else it may serve as a reminder that HR reps are people too. |
Google CEO: ‘I don’t regret’ firing James Damore | Katie Roof | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Google CEO Sundar Pichai says he still believes that it was appropriate to fire “I don’t regret it,” said Pichai, in an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “It was the right decision,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, echoed onstage. It’s been almost six months since the company dismissed the engineer, who authored a controversial memo about purported gender differences. In a 10-page rant, Damore made a series of claims arguing against Google’s diversity initiatives, The decision to oust Damore received a lot of praise — and also a lot of condemnation. And now, Damore is alleging discrimination against what he labels as conservative views. (As a corporation, Google is within its legal rights to fire an “ employee for just about anything, as long as they aren’t discriminating against a “ Wojcicki echoed that “ said Damore’s writing struck a chord because she has devoted her career to technology and has encouraged other women to follow suit. His remarks “ |
These high-speed ‘nano-cranes’ could form molecular assembly lines | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Things aren’t going well down at the ol’ nano-factory. They’re having trouble getting all those tiny workers to synchronize and move quickly together. But leave it to the Germans to get things running smoothly! All it took was a careful application of that newfangled technology “electricity.” Tiny nano-scale machines formed from DNA could be the future of manufacturing things at small scale but great volume: drugs, tiny chip components and, of course, more nanomachines. But moving simple, reusable machines like a little arm half a micrometer long is more difficult than at human scale. Wires for signals aren’t possible at that scale, and if you want to move it with a second arm, how do you move that arm? For a while chemical signals have been used; wash a certain solution over a nanobot and it changes its orientation, closes its grasping tip or what have you. But that’s slow and inexact. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich were looking at ways to improve this situation of controlling machines at the molecular scale. They were working with “nano-cranes,” which are essentially a custom 400-nanometer strand of DNA sticking up out of a substrate, with a flexible base (literally — it’s made of unpaired bases) that lets it rotate in any direction. It’s more like a tiny robotic finger, but let’s not split hairs (or base pairs). , or rather realized the potential of, was that DNA molecules and therefore these nano-cranes have a negative charge. So theoretically, they should move in response to electric fields. And that’s just what they did. They attached tiny fluorescent pigment molecules to the tips of the cranes so they could see what they were doing in real time, then observed the cranes as the electric field surrounding them was carefully changed. To their great delight, the cranes moved exactly as planned, switching from side to side, spinning in a circle, and so on. These movements are accomplished, the researchers say, at a hundred thousand times the speed they would have been using chemicals. A microscopic image of the nano-crane’s range of motion, with the blue and red indicating selected stop points. “We came up with the idea of dropping biochemical nanomachine switching completely in favor of the interactions between DNA structures and electric fields,” said Simmel in a TUM news release. “The experiment demonstrated that molecular machines can be moved, and thus also driven electrically… We can now initiate movements on a millisecond time scale and are thus 100,000 times faster than with previously used biochemical approaches.” And because the field provides the energy, this movement can be used to push other molecules around — though that hasn’t been demonstrated just yet. But it’s not hard to imagine millions of these little machines working in vast (to them) fields, pushing component molecules toward or away from each other in complex processes or rolling products along, “not unlike an assembly line,” as Simmel put it. The team’s work, which like most great research seems obvious in retrospect, . |
Sundance doc ‘Our New President’ presents psychedelic vision of US election through a fake news lens | Matthew Panzarino | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | If the feeling at the fairly liberal leaning Sundance Film Festival — held last year after Trump’s election but before the inauguration —was one of impending doom, this year it’s all about prophecy fulfilled. From asides about how terrible last year was by program directors before screenings to a slate peppered with documentaries and other programs that explore the impact of social media and the changing nature of news on society, the President is a presence. One such doc was ‘Our New President’, by Maxim Pozdorovkin. Assembled completely out of either amateur or Russian television news footage that the director hoped would compose “ For the film, Pozdorovkin assembled a bunch of Russian news footage, mostly from RT and NTV, which are both government controlled now. The footage contains statements designed to craft an image of Hillary Clinton as an ailing, insane, inept leader and Donald Trump as a conquering hero that respects and loves Russia. It also paints all Russian citizens with a broad brush as unable to make up their own mind because they are brainwashed by falsehoods pounded into the shape of truth by state media. None of those things are true, but the power of repetition with authority to warp minds is sort of the point of the film. There are two major themes. One is a straightforward through a mirror darkly vision of the US election through Russian media machine eyes. Some of the statements in the news clips in the film made the audience laugh out loud (the “ha ha, we know better” reaction) and some made them gasp in horror (“who would believe such an outlandish thing?”) Nothing here is all that fresh. If you’ve spent any time on the Internet, regardless of whether you’re a Trump supporter or horror-struck at his governance, the topic of Russian media, hacking to support (or later discredit when necessary) Trump’s presidency and whether news is ‘fake’ or ‘real’ has been at the top of every family meal discussion list. Many of these clips have been widely circulated before, especially the one of now-indicted Trump advisor Michael Flynn at a dinner with Russian President Vladimir Putin. flat-out tells a group of journalists at RT being transitioned into government control that if the media says something that is not fact-based, but supports the government agenda, then that’s truth enough. It’s this constant pounding and cross-referencing of falsehoods as truth or, even more sinister, the 1-to-1 alignment of truth and opinion as equal and equivalent, that threatens to break through the relatively rapid fire and context-free clip assembly job of ‘Our New President’. It’s too bad I didn’t like it more. Much of the impact of the whole thing is unfortunately blunted by the fact that RT and NTV are state-run media and are therefore expected to exert their power to present a “truth” that supports the state agenda. I would have watched the heck out of a doc like this that assembles a narrative from both Fox News clips and liberal media in the US and presents them as a juxtaposition. ‘Our New President’ is content to stand at arm’s length. It’s the documentary equivalent of a late-night substance altered YouTube crawl through Russian propo clips where you say “wow, isn’t this crazy” before passing out with a Doritos bag on your chest. The lack of context, the clumsy framing of the story as a curse put on Clinton by a Russian mummy that itself turns out to be fake and the lack of willingness to say something beyond “look at this” reduces the impact of the themes above, ones that are well worth investigating. Mainly, I think it’s just too long. When I was going into the screening I mis-read the running time and thought that it was going to be 15 minutes long. It is not, it is instead 77 minutes of clips strung together. By the 40th minute I couldn’t wait for the 78th minute. In fact, this is an extended version of a 15-minute short that Pozdorovkin made last year. I haven’t seen that version but I imagine that it was probably a lot better by nature of having to get in and get out and make its point. |
Facebook’s latest News Feed update will prioritize trustworthy publishers | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Facebook is gearing up to prioritize news content by publishers a group of Facebook users have deemed trustworthy. Facebook head of News Feed Adam Mosseri said the company surveyed “a diverse and representative sample” of U.S.-based people about their familiarity and trust in various sources of news, . That data, Mosseri said, will serve to inform News Feed rankings. The plan is to first do this in the U.S. before rolling it out internationally. That means, starting next week, “publications deemed trustworthy by people using Facebook may see an increase in their distribution,” Mosseri wrote. “Publications that do not score highly as trusted by the community may see a decrease.” As part of Facebook’s ongoing quality surveys, Facebook will now ask people if they’re familiar with a news source and if they trust it. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided a bit more detail about the thinking behind it in a post: “The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly,” Zuckerberg wrote. “(We eliminate from the sample those who aren’t familiar with a source, so the output is a ratio of those who trust the source to those who are familiar with it.)” Prioritizing news from trusted publishers is part of Facebook’s broader effort to revamp the News Feed and “encourage meaningful social interactions with family and friends over passive consumption,” Zuckerberg wrote. Last week, , which entails less public content, like news and nonsense from brands. Facebook also now expects news make up four percent, instead of about five percent, of content in the News Feed, But Zuckerberg also says the update “will not change the amount of news you see.” “It will only shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community,” Zuckerberg wrote. “My hope is that this update about trusted news and last week’s update about meaningful interactions will help make time on Facebook time well spent: where we’re strengthening our relationships, engaging in active conversations rather than passive consumption, and, when we read news, making sure it’s from high quality and trusted sources.” |
Inside Oculus and Black Eyed Peas’ VR comic book | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | VR, it’s an over-sensory experience like ‘What the fuck?!’ ” will.i.am says, wildly spinning his head around as you can see in the GIF below. That was the Black Eyed Peas’ frontman’s inspiration for creating a 90-minute VR comic book that moves at your pace and lets emotion sink in instead of battering you with visuals. Today, “Masters of the Sun” debuts at Sundance Film Festival, with the backing of Oculus, and becomes . While , Oculus has traded the heavy-handed control for a lighter touch, funding unique products it couldn’t conceive itself. Masters of the Sun is part Marvel, part Dolemite, brought from into VR with voices like Queen Latifah, a score by Hans Zimmer and the guidance of Stan Lee. It tells the story of regular people turned into super heroes as they try to save their community from drug-ravaged zombies… and the world from an angry alien god the Egyptians abandoned. But what’s special is that Masters of the Sun isn’t a video game; will.i.am insisted you not be able to shoot the zombies. And it’s not a movie, racing forward no matter what direction you’re looking before you’ve processed the last scene. It’s purposefully built as a comic book, where gazing at familiar text bubbles nudges the story forward. That way if you want to let the action or romance linger under your observation, you’re in control. “Working with people like Hans Zimmer, we had to invent music for it,” will.i.am tells me. “We had to have the music breathe and extend and be elastic at the speed at which the person experiences it. We had to invent new ways of composing.” The concept is sure to become a building block for future VR where you control the tempo. As for the visuals, they’re far from polished, looking more like a PlayStation 1 title than today’s console or silver screen blockbusters. And the script haphazardly oscillates between silly and melodramatic. But the core message that love and peace can repair the world — the same message that winds through Black Eyed Peas’ music — is deeply woven into Masters of the Sun. “There’s a parallel from the story to reality,” says BEP’s apl.de.ap. “All of us came from poverty, and now we have the voice and the means to help out other kids like us.” And because Masters of the Sun is longer than almost any piece of VR content available, akin to a feature film, you walk away feeling like you had a techno-spiritual meal, not a five-minute demo. We’ve evolved beyond the “train pulling into the station” phase of merely testing the potential of VR hardware. The narratives of stories like Masters of the Sun or are starting to shine through. But for VR to develop into an artistic medium that compels people to buy headsets even if they’re not gamers, there’s more experimentation to be done. Oculus’ willingness to fund big external creative projects that stray from the family friendly features like Lost, Dear Angelica and Emmy-winner Henry it’s produced in past years could accelerate the ecosystem in ways its in-house Story Studio couldn’t. It’s fully embracing the idea that what’s good for VR is good for Oculus. It has offered up the resources of a giant company like Facebook to pioneering developers like Fable and eccentric artists like will.i.am, without the regressive oversight that can reign in their vision. Masters of the Sun was basically finished when Oculus came in. “We were just there to remove obstacles wherever we could,” says Oculus’ head of experiences, Colum Slevin. The moment the Black Eyed Peas knew they’d really made something successful was when the creator of most of Marvel’s super heroes, Stan Lee, enjoyed it. “It was the equivalent of creating an amusement park and having Walt Disney come and say ‘this is amazing,’ ” BEP rapper Taboo tells me. Rather than VR being just a temporary dalliance for Black Eyed Peas, work has already begun on part 2 of Masters of the Sun, as well as another property called Wizards and Robots. “I think this is the ultimate art form for the next 100 years,” will.i.am concludes, calling it “the jump off for a whole new way of telling stories, engaging people and giving them an escape.” |
MoviePass says it will start acquiring movies, too | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | On the heels of hitting a and bringing on , the subscription service for watching movies in theaters, , today it’s going to start buying movies, too. The company says it will begin to invest in films so it can share in their success beyond the box office, including on other platforms like streaming, DVD, and on-demand. At present, MoviePass is seeing rapid growth thanks to to its subscription pricing, rolled out last year. Essentially, the company is subsidizing the cost of its subscription with the it from data firm Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. (HMNY), now its majority owner. The idea is that MoviePass will operate in the red while growing its subscriber base, and then hit some sort of break even point in terms of revenue before the funding runs out. (Or perhaps HMNY is willing to until that point arrives.) HMNY believes it will eventually be able to sell the data and insights gained from a large subscriber base to studios, who could then do targeted marketing for their films to the most active movie-goers. The model, of course, is risky. And theater owners like AMC have already against the service claiming its low-cost tickets are devaluing the movie-going experience. But maybe MoviePass just found a sweet spot in terms of what a large number of consumers are willing to pay to actually go to the movies? After all, movie ticket prices have risen over the years, but is hitting record lows. With all the other options to watch movies these days – not to mention the ushered in by the streaming era – these “in-the-theater-movies” face tough competition for consumers’ time and money. Still, MoviePass believes it has the power to boost theater attendance, so it may as well share in the upside of the films to which it sends all of these customers; and that includes when those films start streaming across other platforms beyond the silver screen. The company today claimed it can boost theater attendance on demand, in fact. It says it currently buys about 3 percent of the domestic box office, but when it tweaked some things in its app – things it only described as “a series of levers within its app and marketing-based platform” (uh-huh) – it could move the needle even further. It said it did this for , and MoviePass says it impacted 10 percent of box office performance for these movies. We should note the company didn’t share specific data that would allow these figures to be fact-checked more thoroughly. MoviePass is now at Sundance making the pitch that it’s ready to invest in films itself. It will do so via MoviePass Ventures, a wholly-owned subsidiary founded to co-acquire films with film distributors. Basically, the idea here is that since it can (maybe!) boost the performance of a movie in the theatrical window, that will impact the movie’s ability to generate revenue downstream – like when the digital version goes on sale, or when it starts streaming. And MoviePass wants a cut. “We aren’t here at Sundance to compete with distributors, but rather to put skin in the game alongside them and to bring great films to the big screen across the country for our subscribers,” said Ted Farnsworth, CEO of Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc., in a statement. “We’re open for business. We’re here at Sundance – and SXSW is next.” |
With ‘Wolves in the Walls,’ the ex-Oculus team at Fable Studio makes its debut | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | directed by Pete Billington and premiering today at Sundance, is the unique product of a tight, scrappy team of pioneering creatives, with most of them sharing a common element of their past, as they were laid off from Facebook last year when the company’s VR original content arm Oculus Story Studio . The team is back, under the name , a new startup dedicated to pushing storytelling forward in immersive mediums like AR and VR. For Fable, based on the work of Neil Gaiman, is an opportunity to experiment as heavily as possible, given that Oculus is still footing the bill for this project from the young startup. They were admittedly already doing some wild stuff (partnering with an immersive theater group for one, working heavily with motion capture tech was another) before Story Studio was shuttered. At Sundance, the team is showcasing just the first chapter of . Serialized content is admittedly a bit of a letdown in VR, given that it takes so long to buy into a VR world that it’s a shame when it ends without the payoff of a story’s conclusion. Unlike , which Oculus Story Studio , Chapter 1 (the first of three) of gave me enough that I was curious of the world being built, but like so much of what I see in VR, I was left feeling like I’d just watched a demo. The real area of promise seemed to be with the story’s pint-sized guide through the world, Lucy. Creating an emotional bond with the main character who is aiming to convince the world that there are “wolves in the walls” of her house really seems to be the team’s major creative goal with . They do this in interesting ways, using some AI tech to create moments for you to bond together that go beyond her giving you eye contact. At one point, you’re given a Polaroid camera to snap shots of the titular wolves in the wolves, as you examine the photo and drop it to the ground, Lucy will eventually walk to the photo, pick it up and say something to you about what you photographed. These moments aren’t meant to knock you over the head, but it takes the agency present in video games and creates a sort of trivially branching narrative that is just custom enough that it touches you before returning to the story the author is building up to. Co-founder Edward Saatchi wants to avoid things that feel like mini-games, and focus on “as much interactivity as makes you connect with Lucy.” The world they’re creating signals a direction change that Saatchi believes could represent the future of the industry. Rather than storytellers and artists crafting stories VR and AR users passively sit through, he wants storytellers to be creating virtual storytellers, characters that walk you through their own “life experiences.” Think, what if Siri or Alexa had backstories they could tell you or life experiences that they shared in-between you asking them the weather? It’s not quite Samantha from but it’s an intriguing interface for a platform’s that’s goal is to make the digital indistinguishable from the real. Saatchi acknowledges these AI-fueled goals are lofty and that Fable has some more ground-level things to prove in the meantime regarding VR filmmaking’s staying power. Money is a big one. Viability is really a significant question here; enough VR game publishers have had a very rough time breaking even, doing that for a VR or AR film is a very tall order. Saatchi says that reaching break-even is his goal for Fable in 2018, but the “only way to get there right now is to create content less expensively,” and that the team is relying on “made in VR” pipelines that allow creators to build inside the medium more efficiently. He wants to cut down teams of 40 to teams of 4 or 5. On the pricing side, he’s a major proponent of the idea that consumers are generally willing to spend $1 for 10 minutes of entertainment. Regardless, these projects are likely going to have to strike a very significant percentage of total VR users in order to reach that sum. Whether a team of virtual reality filmmakers divorced from Facebook’s war chests can become a profitable business in an industry filled with so many daunting challenges is a worthy question, but the team at Fable is filled with some of the most creative minds out there tackling challenges that don’t even exist in the physical world, only virtual reality. |
Yahoo Finance launches social savings app Tanda, an alternative to credit cards | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Yahoo Finance today launched a new app called that allows small groups of either five or nine people to save money together for short-term goals. The app uses the concept of a “money pool” – that is, everyone participating in one Tanda’s collaborative savings circles will pay a fixed amount to the group’s savings pot every month. And every month, one member gets to take home the full pot. But Tanda is not a gambling app. That is, users are not contributing in the hopes of “winning” the pot of money – everyone in the savings circle gets a chance to take home the full pot at some point. The app is based on the age-old “rotating savings and credit associations” ( ) concept, which pushes people to save through the use of collective pressure. In other words, while it’s true that you just set aside a set a fixed amount of money on your own, Tanda’s makes saving a more collaborative and social construct. The other difference between saving in Tanda and saving on your own is how the app handles payouts. The first two people to receive their money pay a fee, but the last payout position receives a 2 percent cash bonus. This rewards users who are willing to wait to receive their turn at the pot, though some will want higher positions in order to get the large payout sooner. A higher position is obviously more desirable if you have a more immediate need for the funds – like buying books for school or replacing a dead laptop, for example. Of course, you still have to pay into Tanda to take money out, so it’s not a direct replacement for a credit card. But, with some planning, it could used as an alternative to charging larger purchases. [gallery ids="1588800,1588801,1588802,1588803,1588799,1588798"] As a user participates in Tanda by making contributions, their “Tanda score” increases. With higher scores, the user gains access to higher value savings circles and earlier payout positions. These savings circles can reach up to $2,000. And if someone drops out, Tanda will step in to cover their positions. Tanda is also working with its partner Dwolla to vet users before they can begin saving, the company says. Users will be required to submit a valid ID and have a U.S. bank account. Yahoo says that the app is designed to help individuals achieve their financial goals without racking up more debt. The company hopes this will allow Tanda to attract a millennial audience, which is already drawn to social apps in the finance space, like Venmo. In addition, this younger demographic is facing a variety of financial struggles, like higher costs of living, difficulties in finding work, and they often struggle to save on their own. “Thirteen months ago, a national outlet reported 46 percent of our nation can’t come up with a $400 emergency expense,” Simon Khalaf, Head of Media Business & Products, told TechCrunch, when explaining why the company wanted to develop this app. (The figure he’s citing comes from this of more than 5,000 Americans about their financial situation. According to its findings, approximately 46 percent of Americans said they would not be able to come up with $400 in an emergency situation.) “This inspired us to start building Tanda, a mobile world version of a centuries old
community savings tool that we hope provides a solution to many,” Khalaf explained. The new app is being released under the Yahoo Finance brand. Yahoo, like (disclosure!) TechCrunch parent company AOL, combined to form Oath, which is now owned by Verizon. But Yahoo continues to maintain its own app store presence through apps like Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Newsroom, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Fantasy Football, Yahoo Mail, and many others. Tanda is available today in both English and Spanish on , and will arrive on within the next few days. |
Moritz sabotages Sequoia, again | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Michael Moritz is legendary for many of the investments he has led throughout his long career with the venture firm Sequoia Capital. Among his biggest hits: PayPal, Zappos and Google. Moritz stepped away from managing the firm some time ago (partners Roelof Botha, Doug Leone, Neil Shen are now its ). But he continues to invest in startups and serve as a director, including at Instacart, Klarna and Stripe. Sequoia’s limited partners must be exceedingly happy, too, that Moritz continues to play an active role in the firm, which is considered among the most successful in Silicon Valley. His mere presence on a board is a signaling event. Still, we’re beginning to wonder if Sequoia’s investment team might wish Moritz would also just keep his mouth shut. Two years ago, Moritz attracted unwanted attention to Sequoia during a Bloomberg interview in which he was asked why Sequoia’s U.S. partnership hadn’t yet hired a female partner. Moritz told interviewer Emily Chang that the firm was looking for the right candidate but that it didn’t want to “ ” simply to satisfy outsiders unhappy with its all-male team of investors. The answer quickly created a shit storm of negative criticism; smartly, , the firm announced its first female U.S. investing partner, Jess Lee. Now Moritz, a skilled former journalist for Time who clearly still enjoys writing, has placed a target on Sequoia’s back once again by publishing a controversial in the Financial Times, comparing Silicon Valley unfavorably to China. (That China is a de facto dictatorship doesn’t come up in his editorial.) To say it is extreme is an understatement. While Silicon Valley technology companies increasingly complain about striking the right work-life balance, Moritz notes approvingly that in China, top managers show up for work at 8 a.m. and frequently don’t leave until 10 p.m., sometimes seven days a week. In fact, he writes that it is “quite usual for the management of 10 and 15-year-old [China-based] companies to have working dinners followed by two or three meetings. If a Chinese company schedules tasks for the weekend, nobody complains about missing a Little League game or skipping a basketball outing with friends. Little wonder it is a common sight at a Chinese company to see many people with their heads resting on their desks taking a nap in the early afternoon.” Moritz (alas) continues on: “Many of these high-flyers only see their children — who are often raised by a grandmother or nanny — for a few minutes a day. There are even examples of husbands, eager to spend time with their wives, who travel with them on business trips as a way to maintain contact.” “There is also a deep-rooted sense of frugality,” he later adds. “You don’t see $700 office chairs or large flat panel computer screens at most of the leading technology companies. Instead, the furniture tends to be spartan and everyone works on laptop.” The title of the piece is, “Silicon Valley would be wise to follow China’s lead.” While I agree that Silicon Valley is changing in ways that are concerning (I’m particularly worried that people can no longer here), Moritz’s disdain for U.S. tech workers is not only shocking but impossibly out of touch. I’m sure my colleagues and many of you reading know of high numbers of U.S. startup employees who work their brains out, answering calls at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night, routinely taking two weeks of vacation or less, and receiving a large portion of their pay in the form of equity that will never be worth anything. They are living hand to mouth, often with more roommates than they would like, simply to be within commuting distance of the companies where they work. When was the last time Moritz spent 12 hours coding? How many family dinners did he have to miss? How many weekends did he have to give up to work on a new product release? As for those expensive chairs and flat-screen computer monitors, it might be worth acknowledging that long hours in front of a computer can cause both back and vision problems. Maybe Silicon Valley companies have figured out something that China-based companies will discover soon enough: it’s worth taking care of your employees if you want to keep them alive and well and in service to you. 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. This is especially true if they’ve spent most of their careers not as operators but as venture capitalists — a plum job if ever there was one. Sequoia has been actively investing in China for years. If Moritz wants to win points with China-based companies to keep its winning streak there alive, fine. But he has done his partners at Sequoia a disservice by so publicly dismissing today’s employees in Silicon Valley, where many companies have made him an exceptionally wealthy man — and will likely continue to do so. |
Tesla’s Model 3 is coming to some of its East Coast showrooms | Darrell Etherington | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Tesla is bringing its newest production vehicle to its showrooms in some East Coast locations for the first time, so that potential (and many actual) customers will be able to check it out in person. The carmaker will have Model 3 demo units on display at showrooms in New York, Boston and Miami starting this week, . The Model 3 will be on display in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district showroom and the Tesla location on Boston’s Boylston street, per CNBC, as well as in its Miami customer facility. The car, which starts at $35,000 without incentives, is also at Tesla’s LA and Palo Alto galleries, but it’s still not shipping at the rates that Tesla was hoping it would by this time. The carmaker’s most recent shipment numbers show that it had made under 3,000 vehicles in total as of January 1, way behind its anticipated 5,000 per week target. It’s been improving the speed at which it can make the cars, however, and claims to expect to be able to churn out 2,500 per week by the end of the first quarter of 2018. If Tesla can spare a car or two to put in showrooms around the country, that’s a good sign that it’s catching up on its production queue. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said previously a few times that the company was essentially anti-advertising the car in the past, simply because it had so many pre-orders in the books already and no clear path to general inventory availability for buyers not in the queue. |
Apple has hired tech team from data science startup SVDS | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Apple has made a quiet but interesting move in its longer-term strategy around courting more business from enterprises. The company has hired the tech team — at least 18 people, including at least two co-founders, one of whom is the CEO — from (SVDS), a startup based out of Mountain View that provides business transformation consulting to enterprises and other organizations using data science- and engineering-based solutions. SVDS the startup is not part of the deal: we had tip that Apple acquired the company but Apple responded to our queries to confirm it had not acquired the company, without elaborating further (we’d originally been tipped off on the via deal an anonymous tip). We also reached out many other people connected with the company, including investors, founders and other employees. “I’m sworn to secrecy at the moment,” one person connected with the company told me when I contacted him. “I’d prefer not to comment,” another said. “Everything is confidential,” a third response said. “Apple acquired the tech team to support product dev ambitions. Can’t say more.” It’s not clear what is going on with SVDS itself. Its website is still up, but the SVDS social accounts on and have not been updated since November, although it did come online to on December 28, with a short, upbeat message wishing readers a happy holiday. The 18 or so people who have updated their LinkedIn profiles to now working for Apple appear to have made up between one-half and one-third of the company. They include Sanjay Mathur, who was a co-founder and CEO of SVDS, who now describes himself as a strategy and analytics leader at Apple on . Another one of the company’s founders and its CTO, John Akred, now lists his current job as “algorithms at Apple” on his . SVDS’s principal architect, Serena Cheng, as engineering product manager at Apple. And Scott Kurth, who had been VP of client solutions at SVDS, also a strategy and analytics leader at Apple. In a way, SVDS is not your traditional Silicon Valley tech startup: it is focused more on consultancy around existing technology than building the tech itself, although those who have worked on enterprise IT implementations and problems know that often some of the more interesting solutions are created to fill a need, and sometimes the basis for products in their own right. SVDS itself was founded by Jim McLean, Akred and Mathur, who respectively cut their teeth at big investment and consultancy firms (McLean at 3i and Crosslink; Akred and Mathur at Accenture) in previous roles. The team, which at the beginning of this month numbered around 30 according to LinkedIn, also counts a number of data scientists and other engineers as well as consultants in its ranks with years of cumulative experience between them. SVDS has around $3 million in funding from a notable group of investors that include Crosslink, GSV Capital, Cendana Capital and the well-known tech investor Frank Quattrone. It’s not always completely clear what Apple intends to do with its acquisitions — human or otherwise — but it’s notable that the company has been steadily ramping up its focus on working with large and small enterprises in recent times. Apple last broke out how much it made from its enterprise business in , when CEO Tim Cook said the company made $25 billion in the 12 months to June 2015, accounting for 14 percent of its revenues in that period. “This is not a hobby. This is a real business,” he said at the time. It’s a sentiment from which he has definitely not retreated: “Enterprise is like the mother of all opportunities,” he said last year, in an interview with . While Apple has not broken out enterprise revenues, you can do rough calculations to guesstimate what the value for it might be today. Using its fiscal year 2017 revenues of just over $229 billion, 14 percent of that would work out to about $32 billion in FY 2017. As with Apple’s other business, a large part of its enterprise sales will be attributable to the purchase of hardware like iPhones, iPads and Macs. But these days, the company is no stranger to the fact that when it comes to corporate buyers, they often make device choices that are tied in with larger IT projects that include the building of business solutions that could include apps and much more — a shift from its previous positioning and reputation. Apple technology isn't in Star Trek because they couldn't integrate into existing Enterprise systems. — SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) Starting in July 2014, Apple started to ink deals with the likes of , , , and most recently to help make the case to enterprises for Apple-based answers to their business needs, building iOS productivity apps, business transformation services, legacy IT migrations, IoT-based services and more. Interestingly, these are all areas where SVDS happens to have on in the past, both directly with clients as well as part of R&D projects that it devises to expand people’s skillsets. (The latter list has included a large project to predict their arrivals; a visual representation of the ; and trying to put a figure on the .) At least one of these partnerships, with , co-locates Apple employees within Accenture teams. One guess I’ve had is that SVDS could have been acquired by one of these partners and is continuing to work with its tech team, which has now moved over to Apple. Again, we’re not totally certain where this team is working; this is just an educated guess, which highlights things that both Apple and SVDS were already doing, and could be doing more, now in collaboration. We’ll update this story as we learn more. |
Amazon brings voice control to its Alexa app for Android, with iOS coming soon | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | The company has confirmed that the Alexa app in its current form does not support wake word functionality. |
Education technology is a global opportunity | Emmanuel Nataf | 2,018 | 1 | 19 |
$8.15 billion. That’s the amount staked in edtech companies in the first 10 months of 2017. Education used to be simple: there was a blackboard, a teacher and desks in a classroom. Today, a student can practice English online, upload homework through a portal and learn chemistry through 3D immersion — such is the rise of educational technologies. And nowhere is the advent of edtech climbing more quickly than in Asia. In 2016, global investments in Chinese edtech companies rose to , according to Goldman Sachs — to put that into perspective, that’s more than triple the amount raised in 2014 and . Going forward, the is expected to grow 20 percent annually, while a released by Google and KPMG estimates that India’s online education market will rise more than 6x to $1.96 billion over the next four years. The is projected to represent 54 percent of the global edtech market by 2020. Of course, you . But the underlying fundamentals are compelling — and they’re playing a major role in driving the acceleration of edtech in Asia. It could come down to a numbers game. The Asian education system is the : more than 600 million students are enrolled in K-12 schools in Asia, a figure that positively eclipses that of the U.S. by a magnitude of 10. There are more young people in Asia than anywhere else in the world. Indonesia’s 67 million youths (ages 10-24) is third-biggest in the world — incidentally, standing behind only China’s 269 million and India’s (drum roll, please) population of 356 million young people. This sheer potential is compounded by the way Asia’s population places a premium on education. services. As , co-founder of EdTechXEurope 2016, notes, the desire to invest in children’s futures and pressure to get into prestigious universities in Asia is resulting in a willingness to spend on educational services. projects that after-school tutoring in China will grow from $50 billion to $90 billion by 2020. Then there’s Singapore, where , almost double the global average. In this education-fixated atmosphere, Asian massive open online courses (MOOCs) in particular have enjoyed immense success. Asia also is becoming more global-thinking, and nowhere is this more apparent than in China. English language-learning education platforms are on the rise: there are . Taiwan-based , the biggest English-learning education platform in the world, boasts a that could place it alongside UC Berkeley and the University of Georgia. Meanwhile, provides video English tutoring sessions for students between the age of five and 12, concentrating on the early-childhood education market (which, thanks to the implementation of China’s new two-child policy, is also poised to break out). The Chinese government has a goal: Its aims to modernize China’s education system entirely. One of the primary emphases is on the growth of online education, which means that policies have been favorable, to say the least. The Chinese government invested a . It has announced that it will invest an overall $30 billion in edtech by 2020 (though not specifically in startups) and to provide all K-12 schools with resources and create an overall student to computer ratio of 6:1 in the next three years. In India, the future education policy is heavily emphasizing digital, as the government has implemented programs such as Digital India and Skill India to spread digital access. Malaysia also announced in 2016 that primary schools will start teaching coding, while a co-authored by Ernst & Young notes that Southeast Asia’s government regulations in the private sector are particularly friendly and geared toward boosting foreign investment. Sure, Asia might have the advantage when it comes to the sheer size of its population, but it means precious little if many of them can’t access one of tech’s catalysts: the internet. But that’s fast transforming. China recently crossed the 50 percent threshold; more precisely, 53.1 percent of its population is now online, which equates to 731 million Chinese internet users. As notes, that’s almost on par with the entire population of Europe. And it’s set to jump further in the coming years. Then a big shout-out is due to Southeast Asia: a co-authored by Google projects 480 million people in Southeast Asia to have internet access by 2020. This is welcome news as Asian edtech innovates and with hot tech industries such as gaming, VR and AR in the future. , a huge Chinese mobile and game developer, is one of the companies making a move into the Asian edtech market to “gamify” education, acquiring global edtech company Promethean World and JumpStart, a provider of K-12 educational products. This promise of education and technology’s successful intersection is ripe with possibility. For instance, , the charity organization with which Reedsy partnered for our campaign, is now working with Google.org to launch a platform that promotes literacy in Indonesia by increasing access to Bahasa children’s stories through digital platforms. “Over the next five years, more and more teachers will be able to access valuable online resources through their mobile devices to enhance teaching and learning in the classroom, as well as their own professional development,” says Joel Bacha, Room to Read’s director of strategic expansion. “In addition, more will be learned about how to further break down the digital divide and by introducing ways to utilize technology in offline environments, which will still be very much a reality in many parts of the world.” It should come as no surprise that major investors are paying close attention to the developments in Asian edtech — and taking action. Key foreign players are coming into the market and funneling capital into the region to support edtech, from Goldman Sachs to Times Internet. Mark Zuckerberg’s investment fund, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), for instance, is making edtech one of its priorities. CZI wants to help digitalize education worldwide — and one of the first startups that it backed in Asia was Byju’s, an Indian MOOC that seeks to “Disney-fy” education, in its founder’s . Chinese tech giants from Xiami to Baidu also have sought to get involved in the changing edtech landscape. Tencent invested heavily in , Yuanfudao, while Alibaba Group was one of TutorGroup’s backers in a . Now that the edtech industry in China in particular has shown capable of minting unicorns, we can expect to see investor interest grow. According to Metaari, 16 companies that raised more than $100 million in the first 10 months of 2017, . It isn’t exactly going to be smooth sailing from here. Long sale cycles set edtech apart; it could take years to test, sell and improve a product that changes students’ education for the better. Localization also presents a challenge to Asian startups expanding into multiple markets, as a product that helps education in a certain country might not necessarily be useful beyond the border. But with continued capital inflows and a population that increasingly embraces edtech, it’s hard not to see the trend ticking up for Asian edtech. |
Spotify accidentally showed ads to paying subscribers when testing new ways to promote originals | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Spotify says advertisements that recently appeared to paying subscribers of its music streaming service were loaded by mistake. Over the past few days, a number of Spotify customers complained their music listening experience was interrupted with ads inserted into their playlists. To be clear, the ads being weren’t those from third-parties, but were rather in-house promotions for Spotify’s own content. However, this detail didn’t matter much to the upset users who felt they had paid for an ad-free experience, which didn’t include promotions of any kind. In this week, one user said they recently opened the “This Is: Hans Zimmer” official Spotify playlist, only to discover the first “song” on the playlist was actually an ad for the Spotify podcast, “Showstopper.” The podcast was first last year as part of Spotify’s ongoing push into original content. Yesterday, the company a new multimedia format, Spotlight, that adds visual elements to podcasts along with a handful of media partners. However, this appears to be unrelated to the accidental ad push. The ad for “Showstopper” wasn’t the only odd interruption to afflict Spotify customers. Another subscriber, Kelly Lincoln, told TechCrunch she saw the Showstopper ad, and had Spotify’s top music playlist RapCaviar interrupted with videos. In this case, she saw a video called “Scenes from Atlanta” among others. (See screenshots below). The videos she saw inserted into the music playlist come from the , which includes content made for RapCaviar – like scenes and visual from a city along with music from those cities. (Spotify says these are not ads. It didn’t explain why they were showing in the user’s RapCaviar music playlist, though.) “As someone with attention issues and a traumatic brain injury, having a video interrupt my focus while working is for me unacceptable,” Lincoln told us, as to to Spotify for hopes of a resolution. Another user had also chimed in on her Twitter thread to ask about the ads, too. Seeing the same in mine. can you please clarify why there are adverts in an album on my premium account please? — Hamit (@hamitx) Spotify didn’t respond to the users’ inquiries, so we reached out in hopes of clarifying the situation further. The company told us this was all a mistake. “This was a promo for a Spotify podcast called ‘Showstoppers.’ We were testing new ways to promote this in the Spotify client around relevant playlists,” a company spokesperson said. “It should not have appeared for Premium users,” they added. Of course, even if it been meant for Premium subscribers, Spotify wouldn’t have been the first streaming service to force paying users to watch in-house ads. Netflix, for example, has trialed a variety of ad formats to push its content over the years, including , , and even . Amazon has pre-roll as well. And HBO has been running promos for its own shows for some time. For Spotify, the test indicates the company is thinking about how to make its non-music content more discoverable within its user interface – something that could impact its bottom line, if done right. While the company’s official playlists are shaping today’s music industry, it’s had with its original content, like podcasts and video. If the company is able to grow these non-music verticals, it could sell ads against content that’s not as expensive to acquire, compared with music rights, and in turn, boost its profitability. Given that the company , growing its user base for its podcasts and videos is likely a significant focus at this time. |
TPG Growth and CAA’s investment firm Evolution Media buy into Africa’s music business | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | Private equity and media giants from the U.S. are starting to pay attention to Africa’s burgeoning online media and culture scene. , the middle market and growth equity investment arm of private equity giant TPG, and , the investment and advisory services firm created by and TPG, have acquired a majority stake in the South African multimedia entertainment company, . With 200 million viewers and listeners across 160 countries, TRACE has created a media empire in sub-Saharan Africa. The company owns and operates 30 digital and mobile services, 21 pay TV channels and seven FM radio stations. Through more than 400 concerts, web simulcasts and talent search competitions, the company’s programming reaches viewers on the continent and throughout the world. As part of the transaction, Millennium Technology Group, which had previously owned the company, will be selling its stake — subject to regulatory approval. TRACE properties includes its subscription streaming service, TRACE Play, which offers live TV, radio and on-demand programming on desktop, mobile and through OTT services like Roku and Amazon Fire. The company also operates a mobile virtual network in South Africa called TRACE Mobile and, finally, TRACE has targeted television channels across Eastern and Western Africa. “By partnering with TPG Growth, a global investor known for its ability to grow and scale businesses, we are well-positioned to build on our success and accelerate our transformation into the leading global afro-urban digital entertainment group,” said Olivier Laouchez, co-founder, chairman and CEO of TRACE. Last year was, by most measures, one where the sub-Saharan African startup market . The world’s largest technology firms have their sights set squarely on the African market with Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg both stressing the importance of the continent to the long-term plans of their companies. TPG itself is beginning to commit more money to Africa. Through its growth fund the firm has backed five investments across Africa, including, Gro Intelligence, a global agricultural data business; Frontier Car Group, which manages Cars45.com; and Ecoles Yassamine, a private school network in Morocco.
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OnePlus confirms up to 40,000 customers were impacted by credit card hack | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | “Only a small subset of our customers is affected,” a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch. Card payments are currently still disabled on the site. OnePlus credits its tight knit community in helping bring the issue to light. “We cannot apologize enough for letting something like this happen,” the spokesperson writes. “We are eternally grateful to have such a vigilant and informed community, and it pains us to let you down.” |
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Crunch Report | MoviePass pulls out of 10 AMC theaters | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107 |
Japanese exchange says hackers stole over $400M in cryptocurrency | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | A Japanese cryptocurrency exchange has claimed it lost more than $400 million in tokens following an alleged hack on its service. Coincheck said Friday that some 500 million tokens of NEM, worth around $400 million at the time of writing, . , the tenth largest cryptocurrency based on total coin market cap, is a distributed ledger platform primarily aimed at enabling payments and other financial services. The apparent heist is larger than — in U.S. dollar value — but its impact is unlikely to be as significant given the sheer number of cryptocurrencies in the market today and the increased value of bitcoin. Nonetheless, the incident is yet another reminder of the risk of leaving tokens inside an exchange rather than a more secure option such as a personal wallet or hardware-based option. It’s the latest in a string of recent incidents. Back in November, while . Coincheck said it isn’t aware of how its service was compromised. . Japan is the first country to license crypto exchanges, with . Coincheck had applied for a license but it is currently waiting for a decision. That makes the situation somewhat unclear, although Bloomberg reported that an official said its operations fall under the supervision of the agency. his organization is doing “everything we can to help.” Speculation bubbled up on Friday when from its exchange. Coincheck later confirmed the losses and held a press conference to provide more details. コインチェック会見続報「不正アクセスのあった口座アカウントは現在確認中」 — 日経ヴェリタス (@nikkei_veritas) The price of NEM dipped from a high of $1.01 on Friday to reach $0.83 at the time of writing, . |
HQ Trivia gets rid of the $20 minimum to collect your winnings | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | HQ Trivia, the No. 1 trivia app in the Apple App Store, has removed the minimum $20 balance to cash out. The company . Because the prize money is divvied out among sometimes hundreds of winners, people don’t often walk away with much money from a single game. Up until now, that has meant people were left with less than $20 in their total winnings, and therefore could not cash out. HQ Trivia requires people to collect their winnings within 90 days. 💰 It's payday, baby! We've removed the minimum balance required to cash out your HQ winnings. Put that money in the bank today! — HQ Trivia (@hqtrivia) HQ hosts live games every day at 6pm PT, as well as every weekday at 12pm PT. The game is pretty simple. It asks you 12 multiple-choice questions and if you get all of them right, you win or split a predetermined amount of money. Last month, from $1,000 to $2,000 and launched for Android in beta. HQ Trivia became publicly available for Android this month. |
Facebook staff reportedly interviewed in Mueller investigation | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | At least one Facebook employee has been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into potential Russian interference with the 2016 election, . But don’t put on your conspiracy hats just yet. Wired’s source indicated that the Facebook staffer was associated with the Trump campaign, which could mean just about anything. For a major spender on social media, which that campaign certainly was, it is common for Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other properties selling ads to have a liaison with the client. Since Facebook is also up to its eyes on , it makes perfect sense that someone acting as go-between or advisor for the company and the campaign would be interviewed as a matter of course. Certainly no wrongdoing is implied. The Facebook staffer would be the primary source for any information relating to Trump campaign spending, including whether or not there was any knowledge of or involvement in the Russian side of things — again, not to imply anything, just to say if there’s anything to know, that person would know it. As Facebook was more strongly targeted by Russian during the election than its rivals, it makes sense that it would be pulled in like this, but don’t be surprised if others have a chance to chat with the special counsel’s team as well. I’ve asked Facebook for comment. |
A young startup with a timely offer: fighting propaganda campaigns online | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | The prevalence of so-called fake news is far worse than we imagined even a few months ago. Just last week, Twitter admitted there were more than Russian bots trying to confuse American voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election. It isn’t just elections that should concern us, though. So argues Jonathon Morgan, the co-founder and CEO of , a two-and-a-half-year-old, Austin-based cybersecurity company that’s gathering up clients looking to fight online disinformation. (Worth noting: The 15-person outfit has also quietly gathered up $1.9 million in seed funding led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from JM: I’ve spent my career in digital media, including as a [product manager] at AOL when magazines were moving onto the internet. Over time, my career moved into machine-learning and data science. During the early days of the application-focused web, there wasn’t a lot of engineering talent available, as it wasn’t seen as sophisticated enough. People like me who didn’t have an engineering background but who were willing to spend a weekend learning JavaScript and could produce code fast enough didn’t really need much of a pedigree or experience. TC: When ISIS was to jam conversations into social media, conversations that were elevated in the American press, we started trying to figure out how they were pushing their message. I did a for the Brookings Institution, which led to some work as a data science advisor to the State Department — developing counterterrorism strategies and understanding what public discourse looks like online and the difference between mainstream communication and what that looks like when it’s been hijacked. JM: The same mechanics and tactics used by ISIS are now being used by much more sophisticated actors, from hostile governments to kids who are coordinating activity on the internet to undermine things they don’t like for cultural reasons. They’ll take Black Lives activists and immigration-focused conservatives and amplify their discord, for example. We’ve also seen alt-right supporters on 4chan . These kinds of digital insurgencies are being used by a growing number of actors to manipulate the way that the public has conversations online. We realized we could use the same ideas and tech to defend companies that are vulnerable to these attacks. Energy companies, financial institutions, other companies managing critical infrastructure — they’re all equally vulnerable. Election manipulation is just the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the degradation of our discourse. JM: Yes, it’s enterprise software. Our tech analyzes conversations across multiple platforms — social media and otherwise — and looks for signs that it’s being tampered with, identifies who is doing the tampering and what messaging they are using to manipulate the conversation. With that information, our [customer] can decide how to respond. Sometimes it’s to work with the press. Sometimes it’s to work with social media companies to say, “These are disingenuous and even fraudulent.” We then work with the companies to remediate the threat. JM: There’s a strong appetite for fixing the problem at all the media companies we talk with. Facebook and Google have addressed this publicly, but there’s action taking place between friends behind closed doors. A lot of individuals at these companies think there are problems that need to be solved, and they are amendable to [working with us]. The challenge for them is that I’m not sure they have a sense for who is responsible for [disinformation much of they time]. That’s why they’ve been slow to address the problem. We think we add value as a partner because we’re focused on this at a much smaller scale. Whereas Facebook is thinking about billions of users, we’re focused on tens of thousands of accounts and conversations, which is still a meaningful number and can impact public perception of a brand. JM: We [aren’t authorized to name them but] we sell to companies in the entertainment and energy and finance industries. We’ve also worked with public interest organizations, including the . JM: Both. Either we discover something or we’ll be approached and do an initial threat assessment to understand the landscape and who might be targeting an organization and from there, [we’ll decide with the potential client] whether there’s value in them in engaging with us in an ongoing way. JM: Unfortunately, online disinformation is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Advances in AI mean that it will soon be possible to manufacture images, audio and even video at unprecedented scale. Automated accounts that seem almost human will be able to engage directly with millions of users, just like your real friends on Facebook, Twitter or the next social media platform. New technologies like blockchain that give us robust ways to establish trust will be a part of the solution, if they’re not a magic bullet. |
Madden NFL 18 esports are coming to Disney XD and ESPN | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | With the Super Bowl just a few weeks away, the world of football has some relatively unexpected news. Madden NFL, one of the most popular gaming titles in the world, is going even more mainstream. ESPN2 and Disney XD will broadcast Madden e-sports tournaments thanks to inked by EA, Disney, and the NFL. Madden NFL 18 is one of the top ten best-selling games in the last 12 months, and the franchise has sold well over since its inception in 1988. Thanks to a deal with the NFL, the game is one of the most realistic representations of an actual NFL game, complete with the broadcast commentary. The top sixteen Madden NFL 18 players in the world will , which will run from February 2 through April 28. The winner will compete in the Madden Bowl live from the 2018 NFL Draft on ESPN2. Here’s what Todd Sitrin, SVP and GM of the Competitive Gaming Division at EA, had to say: Through this collaboration with ESPN and Disney XD, we’ll provide ongoing coverage for fans worldwide across a variety of ESPN and Disney platforms, but also digitally through our own Madden streaming and social channels. This is yet another example of esports moving into the mainstream. This year marks the first year of the , which boasts team owners from the world of traditional sports. For example, Robert Kraft, CEO and owner of the New England Patriots, owns the Boston team, and Jeff Wilpon, COO of the New York Mets, owns the New York team. At the same time, the Madden NFL 18 broadcast should boost ratings on Disney XD, which skews towards teens and preteens. |
Twitter now lets advertisers sponsor publishers’ Moments | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | Twitter has added a new advertising product to its lineup. The company today it’s offering brands the ability to sponsor Moments – the “Stories”-like feature that includes a series of tweets, often including images, GIFs and video – from select publishers. The first Sponsored Moment is already live, Twitter says, and the feature is now broadly available to all publishers who participate in In-Stream Sponsorships worldwide. Currently, about Davos is being sponsored by Bank of America – the first to publicly launch. However, Twitter says it had been testing the feature before today with select partners. Sponsored Moments give the advertiser the ability to add a branded cover image to the Moment in question, as well as insert their own brand’s tweets into the Moment’s round-up. As with other In-Stream Sponsorships, the Moment can also be promoted and targeted towards a specific audience using Twitter’s advertising tools. Like In-Stream Sponsorships, the goal with the new program is to connect brands one-on-one with partner content in a customized fashion, where there’s “tight alignment” between the advertiser and that content, Twitter says. “We know that decision-makers and influencers are turning to Twitter to keep up with what’s happening at Davos. Sponsored Moments gives us a great new way to seamlessly join that conversation as it is happening,” said Meredith Verdone, chief marketing officer at Bank of America, said in a statement. “Working with Bloomberg and Twitter helps us bring high-quality, relevant content to an engaged global audience. We’re excited to debut Moments as a key part of our #WEF programming.” The publisher partners available for Sponsored Moments include those with substantial audiences, like TV networks, sports leagues, and digital publishers. Pricing details and the split were not immediately available, but we’ll update when we have more. (Twitter, to be fair, .) Update: The costs to sponsor a Moment will vary depending on the client, event, industry or audience, and the revenue share will also be custom to the deal at hand. |
Strix Leviathan wants to build a better enterprise platform for crypto trading | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | We are still in the early days of cryptocurrency — or at least that’s what all of the startups that are jumping into this space NOW hope. And when there’s a gold rush, there’s plenty of money to be made by selling shovels (or ASIC rigs) to miners. It’s no surprise, then, that we are now seeing the emergence of a new class of B2B startups in crypto, too (think Trading Technologies and TradeDesk). Among the newest entries in this business is Seattle-based , which is building a crypto-trading platform for large entities like hedge funds, banks and traditional enterprise companies that don’t want to have to build their own trading infrastructure. Strix Leviathan was founded by Jesse Proudman, who previously founded Blue Box in 2003, a cloud computing company that focused on private cloud deployment, which he then sold to IBM in 2015. Proudman tells me he started tracking the cryptocurrency markets a while ago, but that it was only last summer, when he took an entrepreneur in residence position at IBM, that he started focusing on this. “This set of technologies reminds me of being at my startup in 1997 — at the start of the internet,” he told me. He argues that what we have today is a set of technologies that have been deployed in the real world and that provide a large enough ecosystem, yet there is a huge user experience problem because it takes months of learning to actually understand these systems. The project started because Proudman wanted to build his own algorithmic trading platform for cryptocurrencies, something that looks like a timely idea, given that the days of simply seem to be coming to an end. In this process, though, he also learned about the intricacies and oddities of many of the major exchanges. “We’re in an immature time in the marketplace where many of the exchanges have API issues,” he told me. That means an exchange may never confirm if a trade went through or if a request timed out, for example. With Strix Leviathan, Proudman and his team are now building a trading engine that’s pluggable and that can handle both support for new exchanges as they come online and the idiosyncrasies of the platforms. In its current incarnation, Strix Leviathan (that name doesn’t really roll off the tongue, does it?) consists of two parts: a data ingestion engine that pulls in historic data about the value of various cryptocurrencies and related data to allow the company to build its automatic trading algorithms, and a trade execution engine. The focus right now seems to be on the execution engine, which Proudman believes may even be of interest to existing crypto companies that aren’t satisfied with their current trading infrastructure. The platform currently supports all the major exchanges, including GDAX, Bitfinex, Binance, etc. As for the automated trading side of the business, the team is still trying to determine how to proceed with that and how to bring it to market. The project is currently self-funded, but given Proudman’s track record, we’ll likely see a funding round soon. |
Facebook lets you tip game live streamers $3+ | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | Facebook Live is launching monetization for video gameplay streamers, allowing users to tip creators a minimum of $3 via the desktop site. Right now, the contributor of the tips doesn’t get any special call-out or privileges, though Facebook tells me it’s considering different options for creators and gamers. For instance, it could have a special emoji Reaction float across the stream as a way to thank the fan who gave money. The amount Facebook will keep from these tips that it calls “fan support” isn’t clear yet, but the company tells me that it’s safe to assume there will be a revenue share. Apparently it’s too early to lock any percentage in, though Facebook has taken a 30 percent cut from game developers in the past, and currently takes a 45 percent share of ad revenue from people who place ad breaks in the videos, so it could be in that ballpark.
The monetization opportunity comes as part of Facebook’s new , that tomorrow will start admitting a slew of influencers with high follower counts. Goals of the program include helping gamers of all fame levels grow meaningful and engaged communities of followers across Facebook, Instagram and Oculus, plus providing monetization tools. Gamers who want to join the program and gain access to tipping on their streams can . There’s also a big site full of who want to grow their audience amidst Facebook’s ever-changing News Feed algorithm. Facebook hopes to pull game streamers away from YouTube and Twitch where they have ad revenue, tipping and subscription options to monetize. For reference, YouTube takes a 30 percent rake from its and payments options, while Twitch also takes 30 percent from its Cheering tipping option. The push aligns with Facebook’s recent overhaul of its News Feed with a focus on well-being and active interaction over passive media consumption. Game streams often see viewers chiming in about what they want the creator to do next while debating tactics and joking around with fellow viewers. That gives people a better sense of connection than just watching random eye-catching throwaway videos in the feed. It’s the same reason Facebook just exclusive deals to stream big esports tournaments, like CS:GO. If Facebook can lure creators with its 2 billion-plus user audience and virality, plus its new payment system, it could develop a wide array of video content for video game enthusiasts to watch. It’s a highly monetizable demographic that watches a ton of video, so Facebook could use gaming as a way to pull them into its wider content ecosystem. |
Up close with Apple’s HomePod | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | smaller than I remember. I hadn’t seen one since June, when the company announced the speaker . |
MoviePass pulls out of AMC’s top theaters as negotiations fail | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | , the monthly subscription service for seeing movies in theaters, has pulled out of 10 high-traffic AMC theaters, as a negotiating tactic with the theater chain. AMC, so far, has shown no interest in working with MoviePass or sharing revenue with the service for the foot traffic it brings to theaters. For instance, in a , AMC’s chief executive Adam Aron said that while the theater chain appreciated MoviePass customers’ business, “AMC has absolutely no intention — I repeat, no intention — of sharing any — I repeat, any — of our admissions revenue or our concessions revenue.” AMC had also previously legal action against the service, which it said devalued the movie-going experience. Now MoviePass is fighting back by pulling its service from some of AMC’s most-visited theaters, including, per : The AMC Century City 15 in Los Angeles; AMC Mercado 20 in Santa Clara, Calif.; AMC Disney Springs 24 in Orlando, Fl.: AMC Loews Boston Common 19 in Boston; AMC River East 21 in Chicago; AMC Mission Valley 20 in San Diego; AMC Tysons Corner 16 in McLean, Va.; AMC Veterans 24 in Tampa; AMC Loews Alderwood Mall 16 in Lynwood, Wash. The theaters weren’t losing money due to MoviePass, to be clear – if anything, they were seeing increased visits. The service, which now sports 1.5 million subscribers and is majority-owned by Helios & Matheson (HMNY), basically subsidizes the cost of the movie ticket thanks to HMNY’s investment. That means theaters get the full ticket price and MoviePass subscribers only pay $9.95 per month. Obviously, that’s not enough for MoviePass to survive on, unless it finds another way to generate revenue in the near-term. It’s burning through cash fast. HMNY’s hope is that it will eventually be able to sell the data it collects to studios, or monetize the service in other ways when it reaches critical mass. But considering HMNY has been willing to in MoviePass as needed, it’s unclear if or when they’ll give up on these plans and call it a loss. ( reports that some studios are already “shuffling marketing dollars” towards MoviePass, indicating the service is pursuing a number of ways to increase its revenue beyond customer subscriptions. Most recently, those efforts have included to films, as it just did with ) MoviePass had wanted a $3 cut on AMC tickets and 20 percent of concessions, said. It has deals with nearly 1,000 indie cinemas already for a $3 cut and/or 25 percent of concessions, the report noted. But AMC didn’t want to negotiate. According to MoviePass’s statement, released by HMNY CEO and Chairman Ted Farnsworth, the service is responsible for a hefty amount of AMC’s operating income. It claims: We know that we currently represent approximately 62% of AMC’s operating income, assuming that AMC is flat year over year. This equates to $34.4 million of gross profits to AMC in the upcoming quarter. On an annualized run rate basis, that’s over $135 million to AMC’s gross profits – which doesn’t include concession sales from MoviePass subscribers. In publicly disclosed 2017 financial documents, AMC claimed each customer spends $4.88 on concessions each visit – meaning MoviePass subscribers could bring an additional $17.1 million in AMC concession revenues for Q1 of 2018, which on an annual run rate means $68.4 million more — an annualized run rate going forward of over $203.4 million revenue from MoviePass subscribers. In addition, Farnsworth pointed out to AMC that it’s going to lose business as a result of its unwillingness to strike a deal: We’ve pulled 10 AMC theaters — less than 2% of theaters. We already know in past testing that MoviePass subscribers are not theater-loyal; they’re happy to drive by a theater that may be closer to a theater that will accept MoviePass -because of the MoviePass value. This tactic may not be limited to AMC going forward, either. For any theater that refuses to deal, MoviePass may consider pulling them from the list of supported venues, noted MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe. “As we continue to strive for mutually-beneficial relationships with theaters, the list of theaters we work with is subject to change,” he said. “We advise customers to always double-check the MoviePass app for the most up-to-date list of participating theaters.” Of course, AMC may just be willing to wait this one out. After all, if MoviePass is burning that much on AMC alone, that means it’s spending hundreds of millions on ticket sales per year. If HMNY can’t strike enough deals, and soon (and doesn’t want to keep throwing millions towards the service), MoviePass could fail. And AMC would be just fine with that, it seems. Some of our guests say MoviePass may be blocking the use of their service at a handful of AMC locations. AMC has not restricted MoviePass acceptance at our theatres, nor have we heard from MoviePass about this. MoviePass customers should contact MoviePass for clarification. — AMC Guest Services (@AMCHelps) |
Original Content podcast: We revisit the crime scene of Netflix’s ‘Ozark’ | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 1 | 26 |
launched on Netflix back in July — before we’d even started , our podcast covering the latest streaming news, shows and movies. However, TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook was a big fan, so at her urging, we all checked out the series, which stars Jason Bateman as a financial advisor who moves to the Ozarks with his family (including his wife, played by Laura Linney) after finding himself in over his head with a Mexican drug cartel. In this episode, Darrell Etherington, Anthony Ha and Jordan discuss how compares to past crime dramas like . This leads to a long explanation of why Darrell hates most crime shows, including some of the greatest TV series of all time. And we cover , Amazon’s renewal of and , controversial YouTube star and . You can listen in the player above, or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can |
null | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 1 | 19 | null |
Hoodline is trying to fix local news deserts with a new automated news wire | Matthew Panzarino | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | Local news is kind of a mess. While the global platforms have been exploding, making it easier to follow events at a world wide level, local news sources have atrophied. Those two things are, obviously, intertwined. As the news moved online, the revenue sources that powered local papers and news stations have taken a hit, resulting in smaller news rooms and outlet closures. What this adds up to is that while it may be easier than ever to figure out what the hell happened in the world today, it’s become much, much harder for me to tell what it was that happened in my neighborhood yesterday. has been attempting to bring some granularity to local and neighborhood news since it was founded as a blog about the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco. Now they’re rolling out their first product that helps other news rooms get a boost by fleshing out local coverage that they lack the resources to tackle. Hoodline’s current Editor-in-Chief, Eric Eldon, used to co-edit this blog. He left to join Hoodline to figure out how to improve local news and it was . So as not to bury the lede too deeply here, the product is an automated wire service that packages data and editorial content together for local newsrooms about local topics. Think less pure breaking news and more data-driven trend pieces that highlight things that you’d only care about if you live vs. anywhere else. Hoodline’s local API will serve up these stories ready made to local news organizations. Think top seafood places in your area or hot new neighborhoods for new homeowners. Primary data sources include Yelp, Zumper and others that Hoodline crunches through its platform to come up with items of value to truly local audiences. This grew out of Hoodline’s initial thesis that it could use public data sets put out by .govs to break stories. Those data sets have their own problems though, largely stemming from the fact that they’re in many cases obligatory and taped together by hacks and personally motivated parties. Ask anyone who has ever built a transit or transport app using city data and they’ll tell you it’s typically a mess. So Hoodline expanded to company partnerships that gave them access to private data stores that are maintained by people with a solid motivation: they make more money when the data is clean and relevant. The data comes from places like Yelp, Zumper, Groupon, Apartment List and ZipRecruiter. Now, it’s rolling out its first product that uses that data to make something it can offer to other organizations. Hoodline’s been in the and working with ABC to pipe these stories out to their news teams, as well as other local news conglomerates like Digital First Media and Hearst. If you live in a bigger city, a lot of this may sound like: so what? If you live in Fresno, one of the pilot areas for Hoodline’s news pieces by the way, then it makes a lot of sense. I live here and I can tell you that it usually takes a murder, a chance encounter between a great burrito and a local reporter or a paid partnership to get coverage of a local food place here. This isn’t for purely cynical reasons. The local orgs are hurting for person-power, big time, and simply don’t have the resources to dedicate to crunching the data to figure out which new local joints (or old standards) are surging in popularity or on the brink of becoming so. Hoodline could theoretically use one of its news templates to create a hot new restaurants piece that would get packaged and sent to a local news org as a ready-to-ship article. The local org can then choose to put it out as received or to add on-site video coverage or supplement it with additional reporting. Hoodline CEO Razmig Hovaghimian says that there are basically two halves to Hoodline’s business when it comes to this first ‘news wire’ product and other products that it will ship based on the data platform it has built. First, the data sets coming in and their ability to turn them into usable news stories, and then the second side which is taking it to market with various endpoints that could include things like this wire service as well as direct integrations with tech companies. Currently, the wire service is in 40 cities, and COO Jes Wolfe says that there has been solid response so far, with click-through rates that hover in the 15 percent range, proving that there is solid perceived value in the stories for local readers. Multiple streams of revenue like advertising, monetized links and more can be woven in, as well. The advantage to the partners is of course deep links directly to the content sources, providing traffic and driving growth back to the source. This, says Hovaghimian, is high-intent traffic that is more valuable than a generic search-based visit. Higher quality leads means better conversions and more time on site for the local news org and the data provider. In a city like Fresno, Eldon says, Hoodline will be immediately providing things like business coverage where there is a long tail of uncovered local establishments, as well as real-estate coverage. Robot-written news stories are already, as they say, . The AP has been shipping these for a while via Automated Insights. But pairing these kinds of automatically crunched news stories with granular local data is a new spin on it that Hoodline has been working on for a while. Participation in the Disney Accelerator last year gave it access to an ABC partnership that allowed it to test its theses and launch a location data platform that applies geofencing to local data sources, grouping them at the neighborhood level. The wire service is only the first major product to launch off of that, but it has already been adapted for other cases like presenting more relevant local search results. Just going to go ahead and recommend Twitter buy this since it’s been dragging ass on local. You’re welcome — Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) The platform is especially interesting in that there are large tech companies with huge data sets like Twitter and Facebook that have struggled incredibly with local content. Either it’s too bland or not relevant or they just plain ignore it and then fart out a half-assed attempt at local (unless you’re an advertiser). The challenge with this whole thing will be to provide attractive enough economics for local news orgs that are already hurting for budget. The proof will be in demonstrable returns in the form of raw traffic or revenue based on affiliate programs or conversions to subscriptions. I’m also interested in how far Hoodline can take the reciprocity factor of its data gathering. Hovaghimian says that Hoodline is looking to hire two data scientists for every editor that works on its platform, which seems like a good ratio. Once the spice begins to flow between the platform, hyperlocal sites and the data platform partners, this could begin to form a pool of data that is unique among all three. And unique data sets are valuable. Just ask Foursquare, which has finally begun to realize the power of its data pool beyond finding you a great taco in Temecula. |
More startup lawyers are accepting cryptocurrencies as payment | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | A growing number of law firms working with startups are beginning to accept their payment in cryptocurrencies, according to a by the trade-focused outlet Law.com. The lawyers suggest that they increasingly have no choice. In order to land the growing number of businesses launched by cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, they have to show that they’re invested in what their clients are building. Often, too, the founders’ wealth has been accumulated in bitcoin, which makes it unavoidable. It’s an interesting shift, and one that’s very reminiscent of service providers who were paid in equity during the go-go dot.com days of the late ’90s — a move that paid off hugely for some and far less profitably for others. A practitioner who was paid last year in Bitcoin, for example, would have seen the value of that payment bounce all over the place in recent months if they didn’t cash out of it immediately. It isn’t just solo practitioners accepting cryptocurrencies, says the report. The international law firm has apparently been accepting bitcoin payments since 2013. Other firms to accept cryptocurrency include and . Some of the attorneys surveyed in the story say they’re perfectly happy with the development. Others worry about the cryptocurrencies’ volatility — among other things. For example, as the story notes, accepting bitcoin can involve having to trace it to ensure it hasn’t come from illegal activity. “I like the anonymity of it,” criminal defense attorney tells Law.com. “But at the same time, I had to decline to represent people who wanted to do it because I don’t want to be investigated by anyone.” The story, which involves interviews with a number of attorneys about a spectrum of related issues, is in its entirety. (Note that it’s for subscribers only, but we believe Law.com offers trial memberships, too.) |
LittleBits’ Droid Inventor kit is the first STEM toy that works | John Biggs | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | I’ve been watching STEAM and/or STEAM toys with great interest and great skepticism. While many parents and teachers report great success with programming toys like and whatever , I’ve found that kids (and parents) I know find many STEM toys to be sterile, boring, and just no fun. The same held true for the notoriously fiddly LittleBits kits. These kits had little snap-together electronic parts that allowed you to create circuits and connect chips in order to build various projects. You could make synthesizers, Arduino gadgets, and robots and the like but, ultimately, nothing sparked with anyone I knew. Now, I’m pleased to report, LittleBits has finally pulled off STEM magic with the Droid Inventor kit and other manufacturers would do well to emulate them. The kit is deceptively simple. It includes just a few components including a driving and steering motor as well as a proximity sensor and a wireless unit that connects to your phone. The kit comes with a plastic R2D2 body including removable legs and head along with stickers that let you choose between red or blue R2 units and even white stickers that let your kids color their own robot. Assembling the project is easy and the included mounting box makes it easy to lay out your circuit and connect to to power without worrying about pinched wires or short-circuits. Once your droid is assembled you follow a set of instructions on the mobile app to teach your robot to follow you, simulate force pushes, and other cute games. Why is this product so good? It’s a compelling and fun kit that is connected to a very popular franchise that acts as both a learning experience and a toy. While the robot is currently in pieces on my kids’ floor, they have played with the Droid Inventor kit far more than any other STEM kit I’ve seen, including the classic that is far more complete but also far more complex than any LittleBits kit. While I know anecdotal evidence is shaky a best, I believe that LittleBits has finally gotten the STEM formula right. This $99 toy/gadget/kit is easy to build, fun, and potentially educational. It’s essentially like a really simple Star Wars Lego kit with far smarter tech. Will this toy make your kid a little genius? No, but they will get a rudimentary understanding of circuits and understand that small components can do cool stuff. Again, I don’t believe toys like these will make kids smarter but at least they expose them to concepts, tools, and ideas that could lead to a career in tech. And all it took was to add a popular whimsical beeping robot into the STEM mix. |
Microsoft’s Mixer follows Twitch with addition of direct tipping and game sales | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | , Microsoft’s answer to Twitch, will soon allow its streamers to start selling games and other downloadable content via its service, and will introduce tipping, the company this week in its year-end wrap-up. The game sales will be made possible through the new Mixer Direct Purchase program, which is now in testing ahead of a broad, public launch, Microsoft says. Initially, the program will support all the games in Microsoft’s digital store, including 5,000 games across Xbox and Windows 10. In the future, it will expand to include other content, as well. Gamers will earn a percentage of the purchases they made through their stream, but Microsoft didn’t disclose what that percentage will be. The move is meant to give gamers the ability to further monetize their channels on Mixer, which today falls in terms of monthly active streamers, concurrent streamers and viewers. Gamers on Mixer simply don’t have the potential for the sizable audience that they do elsewhere, which is why more monetization tools are needed. Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, has and later rolled out a way for them to , too, through an Amazon Affiliate-like channel extension, “Gear on Amazon.” Mixer’s other big news is the introduction of a direct tipping feature. Microsoft says that streamers can continue to use external tipping services if they choose, but soon, Mixer will add a way for fans to tip directly in Mixer itself, without having to leave the platform. Tipping is also a standard way that livestreaming services help streamers make money – tipping is supported across a variety of sites today, including Twitch, YouTube and even Twitter’s Periscope. Mixer also said the ability to subscribe to specific channels will soon be added to the Mixer Xbox app, similar to how this feature works on web and mobile. The post detailed other changes and developments to Mixer’s platform that took place over 2017, including the launch of the Mixer Create app for streamers; a new Mixer app for viewing; plus expanded language support; and the recent introduction of a new, dedicated channel for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, . Microsoft also revealed a Mixer milestone, noting that 2017 was the year where Mixer exceeded 10 million active users for the first time. |
Intel does its best to tamp down impact of Spectre and Meltdown in earnings call | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | Intel CEO Brian Krzanich was delighted to report that Intel had a record year in the company’s yesterday. Of course, he also had to acknowledge revealed in perhaps the ultimate good news-bad news moment. Like any good salesman, Krzanich led with the good news. “2017 was a record year for Intel and fourth quarter results were outstanding. Well ahead of the forecast we outlined in October, based on the strength on both our PC-centric and data-centric businesses.” Then came the not-so good news on Spectre and Meltdown, which he valiantly tried to sweep aside in his opening remarks. “We’ve been around the clock with our customers and partners to address the security vulnerability know as Spectre and Meltdown. While we made progress, I’m acutely aware that we have more to do, we’ve committed to being transparent keeping our customers and owners appraised of our progress and through our actions, building trust,” he said. He added that the company is working on a more permanent solution for later this year. “We’re working to incorporate silicon-based changed to future products that will directly address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware. And those products will begin appearing later this year,” he said. For those of you not aware of Spectre and Meltdown, they are a series of serious chip vulnerabilities that affect many modern chips including Intel and its competitors. They could allow hackers to access the chip kernel, the area that is supposed to protect the most sensitive information like passwords and encryption keys. What’s more, the fixes to resolve, which have come in bunches from every corner of the tech world in recent weeks, could cause some significant . It didn’t help Intel’s case that their first attempts at patching the issues . Nor did the fact that Google revealed that it had months before it leaked out . In addition, Krzanich in November, and filed the intent to sell long after he knew about the issue. Even though it was all legal, . In spite of all this, the fact is that with revenue of $16.35 billion exceeding analyst’s predictions, but that was for the period that ended 12/31/2017. The Spectre and Meltdown story broke on January 3rd. Surprisingly only one analyst asked about the impact of Spectre and Meltdown on the company moving forward. Vivek Arya from Bank of America asked a question without mentioning the vulnerabilities by name. “For [the] first one, Brian, I’m curious. Are you baking in any effect on sales of cost of pricing for many resolution on the processor security issues?” Krzanich responded, “From a cost standpoint, we’ve baked in and we’ve talked about that we don’t expect any material impact of this security exploit on our spending or product cost or any of that. So that’s how we baked that in.” It’s worth noting that against Intel over the chip issues. Krzanich addressed that in his remarks. “However, these circumstances are highly dynamic and we updated our risk factors to reflect both the evolving nature of these specific threats and litigation as well as the security challenge more broadly.” While acknowledging the obvious issues ahead, the company surprisingly doesn’t see any substantial impact from the security problems. And in spite of all the negative news in recent weeks, the up $6.71 and was up slightly over that after the opening bell. Whether Intel can escape from this unscathed financially remains to be seen, but at least for now Wall Street is not punishing the company for its transgressions, perhaps believing that Intel can resolve the chip security issues satisfactorily in the coming year. Intel stock price over the last month. Spectre and Meltdown were revealed on January 3rd. The stock price surged in after hours trading yesterday. |
Google experiments in local news with an app called Bulletin | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | Google is testing a tool called that would allow anyone to publish local news stories and events, according to a report from , which Google later confirmed. The company described Bulletin as a way for others to communicate information of local interest, like bookstore readings, high school sporting events, or information about street closures, for example. Slate found a for creating Bulletin posts was already up-and-running, but was still in “early access mode.” The service is currently being piloted in Nashville and in Oakland, Calif., the webpage states. On the site, Google explains that Bulletin is a lightweight app for telling stories, capturing photos and videoclips from your phone, and then publishing them straight to the web – without having to create a blog or build a website yourself. “If you are comfortable taking photos or sending messages, you can create a Bulletin story!,” the website reads. At a launch in Nashville, a Google spokesperson also said that Google wanted to work with local news organizations to help them find and publish some of the stories posted to Bulletin, while giving the author credit, according to Slate. The move to delve into local news would have Google competing with other services where people already share news about what’s happening locally. Specifically, people tend to tweet or live stream when news is breaking – like if they witness an accident, a fire, a fight, a police chase, or something else of a more urgent and distressing nature. Meanwhile, if they’re trying to promote a local event – like a book signing, to use Google’s example – it’s likely that they’ll post that to the business’s Facebook Page, where it can then be discovered through the Page’s fans and surfaced in Facebook’s Local app. And if Google aims to more directly compete with local news resources like small-town print or online publishers or , it could have a tougher road. Hyperlocal news has been difficult to monetize, and those who have made it work aren’t likely interested in shifting their limited time and energy elsewhere. If anything, Bulletin sounds like another attempt from Google to establish itself in the social space, albeit with a more boring focus on “news and information.” But if Google wants a piece of this kind of action, it should have just Twitter years ago. |
Ford files a patent for an autonomous police car | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 1 | 26 | If the fourth season of Black Mirror didn’t thoroughly freak you out, buckle up! Ford has filed for a on an autonomous police car. While patent filings don’t always come to fruition, the mere fact that this idea is in development is mildly unnerving. The patent, first spotted by , describes an autonomous police vehicle that would be able to detect infractions performed by another vehicle, either on its own or in conjunction with surveillance cameras and/or road-side sensors. The AI-powered police car could then remotely issue citations or pursue the vehicle. Or (and this is where it gets really creepy), “the method may further involve the processor remotely executing one or more actions with respect to the first vehicle,” according to the patent. In other words, the autonomous police car could wirelessly connect to the original car to communicate with the passenger, verify identity, and issue a citation. In fact, Ford’s patent filing describes a machine learning algorithm that would be able to determine whether or not a vehicle breaking the law warrants a warning as opposed to a citation, and relay that decision to the driver. The patent also describes a method by which police offers within the autonomous police car could manually take over control of the vehicle or use its wireless connection to various databases to gain more information on those breaking the law. Again, a patent does not a forthcoming product make. We’re many years from potentially being pulled over by a robot car. That said, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that patrol police fall victim to the age of automation. |
Grab is adding bike-sharing to its ride-hailing service in Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 1 | 21 | Grab, Uber’s chief rival across Southeast Asia, appears to be getting into bike-sharing after plans for a joint service with oBike surfaced in Singapore. Last week, an eagle-eyed resident in Singapore shared photos of Grab Cycle bikes — which show an oBike logo, too — being loaded into a van. Grab declined to comment when we asked about an integration, but it wouldn’t be a huge surprise since it is an investor in oBike, , and you’d expect there to be a strategic element to that relationship. The companies did, however, announce today that oBike will integrate GrabPay, Grab’s mobile payment service, into its app. There was also a heavy hint at other imminent collaborations. “The two tech companies are also working closely together with more joint initiatives in the pipeline to improve the on-demand transport infrastructure in Singapore. Details of these initiatives will be revealed in the coming weeks,” oBike said in a statement. Grab, in a statement released later, added its own not-quite-confirmation of the impending bike-sharing partnership: We’re extending the use of GrabPay beyond transport and now have over 1,000 merchants in Singapore who accept GrabPay for other services like F&B or retail. We’ll keep providing more places where our customers can use GrabPay, and are open to all partnerships. We always explore new mobility options and are today the only player with a real multiple transport service proposition – one that caters to consumers with different travelling preferences and price points. While launching a new service is still preliminary, we look forward to exploring collaborations with all transport providers in the industry. It looks like the integration will happen first in Singapore, based on what we’ve seen, but oBike is present in other markets in Southeast Asia so there’s potential for a wider rollout. oBike has raised over $50 million from investors and it claims 10 million users. Impressive though those numbers are, they pale in comparison when compared with Chinese unicorns Ofo and Mobike, which have raised close to $2 billion collectively and expanded to 200 cities worldwide each. Grab’s tie-in with oBike follows a trend of ride-hailing companies embracing bikes, and it is interesting on a few levels. For one, oBike competes with Ofo and Mobike, while Ofo itself is backed by Didi Chuxing… which is an investor in Grab, too. The Didi-Ofo relationship hasn’t worked out too well, with aimed at containing the threat that Ofo poses to its ride-hailing service, but Grab will hope for better. Secondly, there’s an ICO angle. oBike is pushing ahead with a planned token sale through an alliance with controversial crypto project Tron. Tron saw its TRX digital currency surge over 500 percent in a week to reach a total market cap of $16 billion earlier this month, becoming a top 10 cryptocurrency in the process, despite little to no evidence of an actual product. The value of TRX — which is purportedly a platform for the entertainment industry — slide from around $0.24 to $0.072 as of today after it emerged that ICO project FileCoin and Ethereum to develop its whitepaper and tech. It’s unclear whether Grab, and other oBike investors, are supportive of the ICO, which TechCrunch understands is scheduled to take place sometime in Q1 2017. Uber doesn’t currently offer bike-sharing but last year that it is looking into options in the space. |
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